Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  1. Burroughs in East Texas

  Burroughs bought ninety-nine acres outside Huntsville in Walker County, East Texas, in November 1946, for $2,000. The nearest community was New Waverly, a town of a few hundred people, Conroe was the nearest town of any size, and Houston was sixty miles away. The farm was at the end of a logging road cut through the woods and lacked both electricity and running water. There was a weathered silver-gray single-story cabin that had two enormous rooms, subdivided into four, with a porch taking up the long side and several vine-covered tumbledown barns, all surrounded by wild berry thickets. Huncke once described the structure as having an open passage through the middle; this would have been a traditional Texas “dog trot” designed to cause a breeze and cool the building in the summer. A black potbellied stove in the kitchen provided the only heat. They instigated repairs on the house then drove to New York ten days before Christmas, where they stayed for a few days before Bill went to see his family and Joan went to Loudonville to collect Julie and take her to her new home on January 2.

  The house needed work and they obviously needed help. Before they even moved in they decided to invite Herbert Huncke to come and help fix the place up, and he agreed, having just come out of the Bronx jail with nowhere to live and no source of income. Bill sent fifty dollars for a train ticket and meals on board, but Huncke dipped into the money and finished up taking the bus, which took much longer. He started out high and forgot the marijuana seeds that he was supposed to bring; by the time he reached Texas he was in withdrawal. Fortunately Bill had been receiving supplies of powdered pantopon from Garver and was able to fix him up.

  Bill, Joan, and Julie were staying at a tourist camp while slowly hauling provisions into the farm. Joan told Allen, “We have a Jeep, which while it bounces intolerably, is an incredible blessing as it actually navigates our road, flooded as it is by five days of steady rain. So now we can carry loads in, things are looking up.”1 The priority was to provide water. Bill installed a seven-hundred-gallon water cistern on a wooden stand to collect all the rainwater that fell on the corrugated iron roof and a filter system to strain out any bugs. Next he investigated the possibility of a well. Nobody in that part of Texas would ever dig for water without having the “water witch,” so Bill hired one to come and dowse the land. The water witch walked around until his wand dipped. He told Bill, “Go down there so many feet and there’s the water.” The amount the wand dipped indicated where the water was and how deep down it was. This ability apparently ran in families; Bill tried using the wand and felt nothing. The water was exactly where the water witch said it would be. The well was dug by a tethered mule, walking in an endless circle, digging out the earth, and was lined with concrete tubes that fitted onto each other. In the house the porch had to be screened to keep out bugs, and the roof leaked. It was several months before the plumbing worked properly.

  As usual, Burroughs got a few routines out if it. In the “County Clerk” section of The Naked Lunch, possibly one of the funniest as well as the most powerful indictments of Texas small-town racism, anti-Semitism, and prejudice ever written, Arch, the County Clerk, rambles on about the local good ol’ boys: “Feller name of Hump Clarence used to witch out wells on the side… Good ol’ boy too, not a finer man in this Zone than Hump Clarence.”2

  The land sloped away from the house down to a bayou filled with frogs, toads, crawfish, and catfish, surrounded by semitropical undergrowth and swampland and home to all manner of chiggers and mites, mosquitoes and tics, scorpions and water snakes. Armadillos wandered across the paths in the woods and chameleons would mate in the trees, their rose-colored throats blowing up like huge bubbles. The dirt road leading in was so narrow at times that you could reach out and touch the trees on either side. There was a rickety plank bridge over a stream. Bill fenced part of the land to keep out deer and planted tomatoes as a cover crop to divert attention from the marijuana plants and opium poppies hidden among persimmon trees and oaks draped in Spanish moss. The tomatoes must have been planted by hired hands, but he would not have trusted anyone else to plant pot seeds for him, so the notion of Bill’s pot farm is most certainly incorrect. It is unlikely that any more than a quarter acre of his ninety-seven acres could have been planted with cannabis; hardly a “pot farm.”3

  Each morning, at about 10:30, Bill would appear on the porch from his room, dressed in his suit and tie. He would take the Jeep into New Waverly to collect the mail and buy the local newspapers and then sit on the porch in his rocking chair and read. Huncke, not surprisingly, was not much good as a field hand, so his job was to collect kindling and firewood from the woods for the outdoor grill and to cook the steaks in the evening. He was also in charge of the wind-up Victrola, changing the needle from time to time. Joan built a pinewood cabinet to amplify the sound. They sometimes argued over the records, Bill preferring Viennese waltzes and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, whereas Huncke and Joan liked Stan Kenton and Lester Young, Josh White’s version of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” Hoagy Carmichael’s “Baltimore Oriole,” Coleman Hawkins’s “Low Flame,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “Night in Tunisia.” The music was absorbed into the trees as they sat on the porch by the light of the kerosene lamps, the records accompanied by cicadas, night birds, and strange cries of animals in the forest.

  The idea of Huncke, the skinny, sallow-faced Times Square hustler, working as a farmhand is as extraordinary as Burroughs’s idea that he could hide away in the woods without everyone in a hundred-mile radius knowing about it. Huncke was incompetent at most things but does seem to have made himself useful. Bill remembered, “He got on my nerves to some extent. He gets on anyone’s nerves, but not to an overwhelming extent because he’s a minor irritation.” In fact Huncke settled in surprisingly well. He wrote to Allen, “Bill is a good friend. He is exceedingly interested in guns. He has allowed me to shoot and I find them much less awe inspiring. Bill is quite a guy.”4 Bill was using a .22 target pistol. He stood in back of the cabin and aimed at the barn. The sound echoed through the woods. One time Huncke and Joan got talking to the pharmacist in a small town some distance away and the man said, “You guys must be the fellows I hear through the woods. We thought you were shooting off machine guns over there.” Huncke reported, “That just tickled the shit out of Burroughs. Such strutting was never known.”5 It had been Joan’s suggestion that Huncke should come to the farm; she wanted the Benzedrine company.

  Naturally Bill’s neighbors were very curious to know what brought this Harvard-educated gentleman to live as a subsistence farmer in East Texas, and Bill soon got to know them. Arch Ellisor was very friendly indeed. He loved whiskey and Bill would invite him onto the porch, get out a bottle, and encourage him to tell stories. Arch’s grandmother was dying of cancer and Arch would tell Bill, “Her breast is all eaten away.” He hoped that she would die soon. Arch Ellisor is a character, under his own name, in The Place of Dead Roads, where his old grandmother gets swept away by a tornado. “Everybody was glad to see the last of her, she’d been clear out of her mind the past five years, her breasts all eated away with the cancer and Arch kept buying morphine to finish her off but she had such a strength for it no amount would kill her and Arch said it was like buying feed for a hawg.”6 The day she died Arch came over to tell Bill and they celebrated with a big slug of whiskey. The Ellisor family also make an appearance in Cities of the Red Night. “Only two families hereabouts, the Bradfords and the Ellisors.”7 Steve Ellisor comes to help clean and repair a riverside shack that seems to have arrived in the novel from a future book. The title of the section perhaps gives a clue: “I can take the hut set anywhere.” It does not appear again.

  Bill had another neighbor, Mr. Gilley, who was always coming onto Bill’s property looking for his “brindle-faced cow.” One time he encountered Bill when he was out with his axe in the pot plantation. Bill immediately steered him to the house, offering him some whiskey. Gilley knew something suspicious was going on but didn’t know what. He said, “W
ell, pretty good stand of it you got there, whatever it is.” Gilley was very much a rural mooch. When Bill bought a second car, as well as his Jeep, Gilley opined, “A rich man who got himself another car, I figure he’d just about give that Jeep to a poor man.”

  Judging by his letters to Ginsberg, Burroughs seemed to be enjoying himself. On March 11, he boasted to Allen, “It is practically summer down here, and king size scorpions, Tarantulas, Ticks, chiggers and mosquitoes are emerging in droves. I killed 10 scorpions yesterday. The house is overrun with huge rats as big as possums.”8 Bill shot one that was so fat it got wedged in its hole. He said he was contemplating the purchase of a ferret. It was a worthy challenge for an experienced exterminator like Burroughs. Joan wrote Allen, “Already we’re being attacked by hordes of all sorts of dreadful bugs, including scorpions, to which William has taken quite a fancy.”9

  In the summer the fields were ablaze with flowers, hibiscus bushes, huge blossoms, everything lush and fecund. There was a large pond not far from the cabin where some previous occupants had built out a spit of sand into the water. Joan liked to sit down on the sand with the water up to her belly and play with Julie. It was her favorite place during the heat of the summer and sometimes she and Huncke would take a lunch basket with them and spend all day there. Two-year-old Julie followed her everywhere she went, barefoot, hair matted, chewing on her arm, a nervous habit she had developed that left a large scar in the crook of her arm.

  But this sylvan idyll was flawed. Joan was still seriously strung out and, if anything, her Benzedrine habit increased. She looked after Julie and shared the cooking with Huncke, sometimes shopping with him, but much of her time was spent obsessively cleaning, first the cabin and porch, then in sweeping lizards off the tree in the yard. The moment she turned away, they would climb back. In New Waverly Joan and Huncke continued the same speed-freak discussions about white filaments that they could see coming out of their skin that they’d had at 115th Street; typical amphetamine hallucinations. Joan had an animated vision, similar to her audio hallucinations. She would look down the sidewalk and see everyone moving as a unit, like a shoal of fish, then she would say, “Next thing you’ll see them going down that side,” and to her they’d be going the other way. Bill never paid much heed to it, recognizing it for what it was, Benzedrine psychosis.

  Joan’s two-inhaler-a-day Benzedrine habit meant that they soon cleaned out the nearby pharmacies, and it was Huncke’s job to make runs into Houston every two or three weeks, where he had found a drugstore that would supply inhalers by the gross and paregoric by the half gallon. He also scored for pot and shopped for liquor. They were living in a dry county and had bought all the rum, tequila, and gin in the nearby towns, so had to drive the twenty-five miles to the big liquor store in Conroe to stock up. Unfortunately Houston proved an enormous attraction to Huncke, and sometimes he would not return to the Jeep at the appointed time. Once they waited so long for him that the ice, which they had come to town to buy, had all melted. Another time he scored and disappeared for days.

  Huncke had grown very close to Joan in New York and had initially been surprised to find that she and Bill had a physical relationship. Living with them in Texas enabled him to further observe them together, and in his memoirs he wrote:

  I believe he did respect her, as she was very intelligent and could match him wit for wit. But as far as love—in the accepted sense of the word—I’m sure he had little or no deep affection for her. She was interesting to him in some way, that was all. He did not like to be annoyed by her too much, though she demanded he give her a little attention each night. Just before we’d all go to sleep she would spend maybe an hour with him in his room and they’d talk. She’d leave and go into the front of the cabin, which she used as her room.10

  One night Huncke heard Joan tap on Burroughs’s door. The door opened and he heard her tell Bill, “All I want is to lie in your arms a little while.” There was never any outward sign of affection between them. Bill for his part said, “Joan was a very extraordinary person. We got along very well. I wouldn’t say I was in love. It was a very close relationship.”11 When they did have sex, it was apparently very good sex. Joan had said that though he claimed to be a faggot “you’re as good as a pimp in bed.” Burroughs revealed this in Howard Brookner’s documentary about him and afterward regretted it. “I’m terribly embarrassed about that bit about being as good as a pimp in bed, that sounds awful! I thought it was awful. I was a pretty good lay in those days, I had all my teeth, well anyway…”12 Still later he thought, “Goddamn it, I was a fuckin’ good lay even if I was a queer. Believe me, I could satisfy a woman! Nothing wrong with that. I’m thinking it over, I thought, ‘What the hell was I talking about?’ ”13

  After Joan left Bellevue, she and Bill had stayed in a cheap hotel near Times Square, which was where Billy Jr. was conceived. Burroughs said, “They say women always know when they conceive, well I knew too. That was it.”14 When Joan confirmed that she was pregnant she asked Bill if they should get an abortion, but he said that he would not consider it under any circumstances. “I certainly would never have consented to an abortion. I’m against abortion, absolutely. I think it’s murder.”15 Despite such high-minded views about termination, he made little or no effort to get Joan to restrict her consumption of amphetamine, alcohol, and pot, even though it was obvious that they posed a considerable danger to the developing fetus. It was so against his principles to interfere in anyone else’s life that he would have regarded it as impertinence to criticize her behavior. As a consequence, Billy Jr. was born an amphetamine addict and went straight into withdrawal, crying all the time and very distressed. Joan was unable to breast-feed him because of her addiction.

  They had made no arrangements for the birth. At 3:00 a.m. on July 21, 1947, Joan tapped on Bill’s door and told him it was time to go. They climbed into the Jeep and drove the eighteen miles to the hospital in Conroe. Instead of waiting around, biting his nails in the hospital, Bill returned to the Jeep, where he had a bottle. Someone had left a puppy on the seat. It was whining and barking. Billy was born at 4:10 a.m. and the next day Bill drove Joan back with their baby.

  Bill’s parents paid a visit to the farm shortly after Billy was born, bringing with them all manner of baby clothes and equipment, including a cradle, delighted that Bill had produced a grandchild for them. Burroughs had been worrying about the visit but it went well, and he was able to tell Allen, “No complications arose from the parental visitation, on the contrary a shower of benefits.”16 Huncke was made to wear a cowboy hat and pretend to be a local, and Joan must have somehow hidden her amphetamine use from them.

  We get a good, though possibly exaggerated, picture of Burroughs’s attitude to the new child from an interview with Joan conducted two years later at the New Orleans sanatorium, where Bill was detoxing. She was reported as saying that Burroughs was “a good father, and absolutely devoted to his young son. He is good to his stepchild, also, but ‘adores’ his own son, and seems almost as if he is seeking to be both mother and father to the child—has assumed most of the responsibility for feeding, washing and walking baby. […] Informant states that the patient ‘wasn’t aware’ that he wanted the child until it arrived, and now devotes himself to it almost completely.”17

  On hearing of the birth of Billy Burroughs Jr., Allen Ginsberg set out to write a birthday ode. It took him six days, working late at night on Benzedrine. Like much of his work in this period, it was an epic work consisting of many sections, written in highly artificial rhymed verse and almost unintelligible. The section on bebop began, “The saxophone thy mind had guessed / He knows the Devil hides in thee; / Fly hence, I warn thee, Stranger, lest / The saxophone shall injure thee.”

  Allen arranged to visit Bill and Joan that summer, bringing with him Neal Cassady, with whom he had been having an unsatisfactory love affair in Denver. Neal, a compulsive womanizer, ran between several women and very occasionally spent time in Allen’s bed. Using his
considerable powers of persuasion, Allen managed to convince Cassady to accompany him on a visit to Burroughs’s farm, and they set out to hitchhike there. Rides were hard to get, but they finally arrived on August 30, 1947. Allen wrote, “When we got here, I expecting this happy holiday of God given sexuality, where was the royal couch?” There was no couch; in fact there was no bed at all. Huncke was still trying to build it. Huncke normally slept on the screened porch, so he thought that Allen and Neal might like to have his room, but his bed was not big enough for two people. Huncke explained that there were some army cots and wooden planks in one of the barns, and “I conceived of getting these sideboards together in some kind of bed situation. The only place to work was dead in front of the cabin, everybody could see me working with that fucking bed. […] I did work on it because I figured I had a practical idea. Unfortunately while I was working on it, they arrived.”18

  Neal, who was never very keen on the prospect of sleeping with Allen, refused to help, so Huncke and Allen struggled with the beds. Huncke had managed to get the headboard off one and together they eventually got the other headboard off, which at least made the bed level on the ground, but it sagged in the middle and was very uncomfortable. It was also dangerous, as scorpions could reach it. “I was absolutely outraged with Burroughs for not having the sense to get a decent bed or make provision,” Ginsberg remembered. “We didn’t make out much, and that was the whole point of it. We were gonna go down there and I was finally gonna get satisfied for the first time.”19 Two days after they arrived, Allen finally accepted that Neal was not interested in men. He wrote in his journal, “The sacramental honeymoon is over. I have a drag against turning my mind to a practical, non-romantic set of arrangements a propos Cassady. Since it has at last penetrated my mind and become obvious to me that, without angling, he means what he says when he says he can’t make use of me sexually, it requires turn of mind.”