Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Kells’s land was in Hidalgo County about sixty miles from Brownsville just off U.S. 83, a three-lane highway that straggled through a series of towns and communities named after the men who settled the area in the early part of the twentieth century. Kells had fields all over the area, from the Redlands, north of Edinburg, right down to the “lower lift,” the lowest of the irrigation pumping stations on the Rio Grande. In the center was Pharr, just south of Edinburg, where he had property on the city line between Pharr and McAllen on Morningside Drive (now César Chávez Road). Bill bought fifty acres at Monte Cristo and Morningside Drive, in Edinburg.

  He first went to see it late in June 1946. Kells was already out there. Kells and his girlfriend, Obie Dobbs,5 and his friend Ted Marak and Ted’s date for that night were all drunk and lying naked on the veranda in front of Kells’s house on South Jackson Road at the corner of Kelly, looking out at a real Texas gullywasher. Kells told his friends that he had a friend coming that day, and fifteen minutes later a pair of car headlights showed through the pouring rain. A GI surplus jeep pulled up, driven by Bill wearing a fedora and his usual suit and tie. He was so wet from driving the open jeep that his tie hung down between his legs. Kells didn’t stir, just called out, “Come on in, Billy.” Bill pushed open the screen door and stood with water pouring off of him. “You better get out of those wet clothes,” Kells told him. Bill stripped naked and carefully placed his wet clothes in a pile before joining them for a drink.6

  Neither Burroughs nor Elvins knew anything about farming. They had a farm manager to organize everything. He hired the farmhands, bought the plants, organized the trucking, and received a monthly wage and a percentage of the profit. Burroughs explained in Junky:

  The farmer did all the actual work. [Kells] and I would drive around every few days to see how the cotton was looking. It took us about an hour to look at all our cotton because the fields were scattered around from Edinburg to the lower lift, almost on the river. There was no particular point in looking at the cotton since neither of us knew the first thing about it.7

  They all did very well out of it. There was more profit to be made in vegetables, but if you hit a bad year you could be wiped out; a drought or a hailstorm could do it. Kells had a citrus orchard of about twenty acres of ruby red grapefruit, a hybrid from Barbados, then quite rare in the United States. He also grew limes and had ten acres of citrus—grapefruit, oranges, and lemons—that he bought for $5,000. Bill grew carrots, peas, lettuce, and cotton and appears to have had some sort of land-sharing arrangement with Kells, possibly determined by which plots had support allotments on them. Allotments were usually for half or a percentage of your land and the rest would be given over to fruit or vegetables.

  When Bill got there his land was planted with tomatoes. They were huge, beautiful to look at, but tasteless; no one wanted them, so they plowed them in. Bill and Kells intended to plant cotton on the land and the tomatoes made good fertilizer. One bale an acre is a good yield for cotton, but Bill’s land was so good it made two bales at $300 an acre. He and Kells had 150 acres in cotton between them. A good cotton picker could pick five hundred pounds in a twelve-hour day of exhausting, backbreaking work, and some could double that, but most managed between three hundred and four hundred pounds. Children could only manage a hundred pounds a day. If the cotton was picked—the fluffy cotton pulled off the bolls—then eight hundred to fifteen hundred pounds was needed to gin a five-hundred-pound bale. If it was pulled—the bolls were pulled off because they were too tight to pick the cotton off—then it took sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred pounds to make a bale. Sacks varied from three or four feet long for children to a maximum of twelve to fifteen feet for experienced pickers. Most were about nine feet, as they were heavy to drag around when almost full. Ginning cost three to five dollars a bale, and white farm laborers in Texas received a maximum of five dollars a day, but most refused to do it, preferring to seek factory work instead. Bill and Kells, like all the farmers in the region, relied on “wetback” labor, paying two dollars or less for a twelve-hour day. During the picking season, Bill and Kells employed up to two hundred laborers. They had one bad setback when their tractor driver killed their best worker, hitting him over the head with a tire iron. The driver got five years.

  Cotton picking began on July 4 and was over by September 1. It was perfect cotton weather, but Bill still only broke a little better than even. He reckoned it was costing him $700 a month to live in the Valley, without a maid or a car, which took most of his profit.8 This mysterious figure suggests an enormously profligate lifestyle: at a time when the average yearly salary was $2,900, Burroughs was spending three times that. Where did it all go? Bill’s overheads were negligible. He first lived with Kells and his girlfriend, Obie, at South Jackson Road, then house-sat for Walter Benson at his house at 321 Kelly Street in Pharr, followed by house-sitting for someone named Philip; only then did he rent a small house on Kells’s land. He was not on drugs at the time, boys in nearby Reynosa cost three pesos, or forty cents, and they were making their own alcohol. A good life was cheap; Burroughs did co-own some equipment with Kells, which probably accounts for the difference—a tractor, for instance, cost $19,000—that or he must have been paying large increments of his loan back to his parents.

  Whatever social life there was happened on Kells Elvins’s front porch: Kells and Obie, Ted Marak, Walter Benson, Gene Terry, and T. L. Reed. Obie, from nearby Mission, was renowned for her outstanding beauty and apparently finished up in Hollywood; she was with Kells because he was rich and handsome and they both liked a lot of sex. Ted Marak had been a dealer in a Las Vegas casino, where he also worked the cage, overseeing the count. He had been framed by a con man whom he had caught skimming the take, but the owner believed the con man and Ted felt it prudent to leave town as fast as possible. He was laying low in Texas. Eugene “Gene” Terry was a popular, excitable, and unpredictable young man who had been thrown out of the University of Texas for too much partying. He drove a 1936 black Ford pickup nicknamed the Black Death and once screeched to a halt in it, leapt out, and did a tightrope balancing act on the top strand of a barbed-wire fence to entertain his friends. A sharp dresser, he had first used junk in the army, raiding first his own, then other people’s morphine kits, so he and Bill had common interests. Walter Benson had a brilliant brain but was described as a “Jekyll and Hyde alcoholic.”9 The immaculately dressed T. L. Reed had previously been a pimp in New Orleans.

  During the day, Bill and Kells drove around inspecting the land just to pass the time until 5:00 p.m., when they started drinking. Burroughs wrote, “There were five or six regulars who gathered every afternoon at [Kells’s] house. Exactly at five, someone would bang a tin pan and yell ‘Drinking time!’ and the others would jump up like fighters coming out at the bell.”10 They made their own gin from Mexican alcohol as an economy measure. Kells would send his headman over the border to buy five gallons of sugarcane alcohol that they would dilute, half and half, with Ozark water to make ten gallons of gin. It tasted terrible so Bill made his own drink by adding sugar, limes, seltzer, and a tiny pinch of quinine to make an approximation of gin and tonic. No one in the Valley had ever heard of quinine water. In addition they broke open inhalers for the Benzedrine, sometimes staying up forty-eight hours, and smoked powerful “red dirt” marijuana grown by Kells in a tin barn on his property even though he himself didn’t use it because it made him paranoid; he was strictly an alcohol man. They ate hallucinogenic mushrooms, except Marak, who didn’t care for them. They tried hard not to be stoned or drunk during working hours and established a set of working rules: a turn-on time of 5:00 p.m. and a turn-off time of 4:00 a.m. except for Saturday and Sunday when they had to stop imbibing at 6:00 a.m.11 They indulged in a variety of mad schemes. These ranged from a cockroach farm to “provide food on the hoof for chickens” to growing a test plot of Egyptian ramie, which they had Burlington Mills turn into five to ten yards of “indestructible” fabric. They made a shir
t from it that was so “indestructible” it would not even burn. According to Marak, DuPont heard of the potential for ramie and quickly buried it by using their political influence to get the plant banned from the United States. Ramie received a brief mention in the “International Zone” section of The Adding Machine, and a longer one in Interzone: “hardest fabric known, beat ramie hands down and cocks up.”12

  Bill absorbed all the stories about the local wheeler-dealers, con men, and wildcat oilmen, such as David “Dry Hole” Byrd, who emerged as Dry Hole Dutton in Queer. The Valley is in fact completely flat, being the floodplain of the Rio Grande, but land speculators in the twenties coined the name as part of their sales pitch when they brought potential investors to the Valley and let them pick grapefruit straight off the trees and eat them. There was one promoter who constructed an artificial lake and sold plots of land all around it, telling his clients that “the lake will sub-irrigate your crops.” As soon as the last plot sold he turned off the water and disappeared, as did the lake, leaving the investors sitting in the desert. Bill stored all these characters and stories away for future use. That one did not reemerge for forty years, when he used it in The Western Lands: “the area is infected with every variety of faker and swindler selling spurious Western Lands plots and villas and condominiums. There you are in your beautiful villa, straight out of Disneyland, on a clear blue lake that drains away, while you sit, with a last derisive gurgle… ‘suuuuuugggger.’ ”13

  Kells was a member of the McAllen Country Club, and Bill sometimes did a round of golf with him or swam in their pool. The country club was very puritanical and had a rule that ladies had to wear one-piece bathing suits, so Kells went with Obie to San Antonio and had a body stocking made for her from the new synthetic materials that were just appearing on the market. It was the same color as her skin, and several times, after they had been up forty-eight hours on Benzedrine and were completely drunk, they showed up at the country club with Obie in her body stocking so that she looked completely naked. They also caused controversy by putting her on the back of the fire department truck in her body stocking for the Fourth of July parade in McAllen.14

  But the real action was across the border in Reynosa’s Zona Rosa, about eight miles away, where Kells, Obie, and Burroughs often went to drink. It was usual to bar hop, but the most favored spot was Joe’s Place, at Miguel Alemán and Paseo de los Virreyes, an enormous establishment that featured a revolving bar, a large patio, a bandstand, and a dance floor. There were two huge fireplaces, tall enough to stand up in, where they would build fires and roast potatoes when the weather was cold. Whole families would attend the ten o’clock show, which was suitable entertainment for kids. The midnight show ended with a stripper, the two o’clock show was more risqué, and the 4:00 a.m. show included drag acts and nakedness. The cook, Berto Guajardo, told author Rob Johnson that the place was wide open. No one cared if you took off your clothes and danced on the tables and did whatever you wanted.15 José “Joe” Ortega was always looking for a new attraction to pull in the customers. He loved animals and had peacocks and coyotes there. Behind the bar he kept a brown bear that drank scotch. Plenty of people fell for the idea that they could outdrink the bear. Sometimes Joe would walk through the restaurant with a fully grown lion on a chain. There was a lion pit in the patio that sometimes had as many as five lions in it, a mother and her fully grown cubs.

  One time Gene Terry got drunk and went into the lion’s cage to pet them. One leapt up and clawed his back, leaving some nasty scars. José and the waiters were always warning Terry to stay away from the lions, but he was fascinated by them and wouldn’t listen. On the night of November 9, 1950, Terry boasted to two friends how he would “pet the lions” over in Reynosa, but they didn’t believe him, never having been to Joe’s. They drove over the border, went to a few bars, and finished up at Joe’s around 1:30 a.m., where Terry showed them the lion cage. The waiters warned him to stay away, but they were busy and Terry eluded them. He lifted the large wooden bar that secured the door and dragged his terrified friends inside. His flashlight startled the lioness and she attacked him. His friends rushed to safety, but the door slammed behind them. He scrambled up the door, but the lioness slashed open the main artery in his leg, then dragged him down by his neck. His horrific screams brought the staff running. They pushed the door open and several of them went in, throwing bottles and glasses at the lioness. She dropped Terry and Roberto Perez, the lions’ trainer, held her back with a chair as he leveled his .45 and fired, hitting her in the chest, killing her. Burroughs was living in Mexico City by this time and no doubt got the story from Kells, who knew how much Bill would love it. Burroughs was intrigued not only by the bizarre nature of the story but also the fact that Terry drove himself to his death in a car named Death, thus the reference to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness at the end of the quote when he used it in “The Word”:

  Young friend of mine name of Terry have this 1936 Ford he call the Black Death. One night he get in the Black Death and cross the Rio Grande to Reynosa. Where a mangy old lioness stood in Joe’s patio. So Terry goes in the cage, throw a flashlight in the lioness’ face, who leaps on him and break his neck, and the bartender vault over the bar with a forty-five blast the lioness. But Mr. Terry, he dead.16

  Five years later Bill wrote a short story about it that he sent to Allen Ginsberg, who was trying to sell Bill’s work to magazines, telling him, “I enclose the story I wrote about Terry who was killed by the lion. I don’t like it too much. I am not cut out to write anything so separate from myself.”17 The story has unfortunately been lost, but it shows Burroughs searching for a commercial subject with popular appeal. But as he wasn’t there, he couldn’t get his imagination working on it, even though he had known Terry. However, the incident became one of Bill’s favorite set pieces for dinner parties.

  It was in Reynosa that Bill found his boys; it would have caused too many problems to have approached any of the field hands, and none of Kells’s friends were anything other than straight. In Reynosa, however, Bill was known as “Willy El Puto” or Willy the Queer, outed by a cabdriver named Carlos El Pelacuas who got to know Bill pretty well from the times he drove him the eight miles back to Pharr when he was dead drunk. Carlos liked to talk with his fares, and Bill may have asked where to get boys or even made a drunken pass at him. When they saw him in Reynosa the cabdrivers would call out to him, “Hello Willy! Hello Willy!” and Bill would quicken his pace to get away from them; he was sometimes called Patas Largas—long legs—because of this. They would tell the street kids, “If he takes to running he’s going to catch you,” and the kids would circle around him, taunting him. Bill would make perfunctory lunges at them, cursing them in English and Spanish: “Cabrón, chinga tu madre.”18 He tried to pretend it was a game, to show that he could join in, but according to Ernesto Garza, another Reynosa cabdriver interviewed by Rob Johnson, Burroughs “would try his best to ignore them but you could see he would get rigid—and red as a fire truck. You would think his blood was going to pop out of his ears he got so red. You could see his jaw clenched and grinding.”19 This was a nightmare scenario for Burroughs, who did his best to always keep as low a profile as possible. To be taunted in the streets by children for being homosexual must have been excruciatingly embarrassing for him.

  Early in October 1946, Bill heard the disturbing news from Allen that Joan had been admitted to Bellevue suffering from amphetamine psychosis. They had been living together in a sexual relationship at 115th Street but Burroughs does not appear to have regarded it as a particularly ongoing affair or else he would have made more effort to contact her in the ensuing months. He immediately sent her some money and told her that he would be in New York later in the month. He was just off to St. Louis to formally divorce Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, whom he had married nine years before, and to obtain financial backing from his parents for more land.

  At Bellevue they cured Joan of her Benzedrine psychosis within a few days, but bec
ause she kept telling the doctors about “junk neighborhoods,” they thought she was still hallucinating. Eventually they called in Shein and O’Grady, the detectives who had arrested Bill for forging a script, and they confirmed, “Sure, there’s a junk scene at 103rd and Broadway.” Joan told Bill she had never been so relieved as to see these two decent people slouch in instead of the idiot psychiatrists who thought that everybody was nuts except themselves. With no basis for their diagnosis they were forced to discharge her. She was met by Burroughs, who, after spending a few days in New York, took her to Pharr on October 31, to begin a new life in Texas.

  They stayed at the magnificent Casa de Palmas hotel, on Main Street in McAllen, not far from Kells’s house on the Pharr-McAllen city line. In Pharr, the local people thought Joan was “nice” but were dismayed at her neglect of Julie. But they were not around for long. Shortly after arriving with Joan, Bill set off to buy land to grow pot. The Valley was too flat, too visible, and filled with far too many people who all knew each other’s business for him to even contemplate such a project there. Instead he looked for a remote, thickly forested area where there were few neighbors and the ones who were there minded their own business. Bill had visited Kells in Huntsville, Texas, in 1939, and remembered that the land around there was ideal for his purpose.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sometimes you get, sometimes you get got.

  —OLD TEXAN SAYING