Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Allen’s physical demands of Neal were just as off-putting as his emotional ones. Neal told Kerouac, “I got so I couldn’t stand Allen to even touch me, you know, see, only touch me. It was terrible. And man, I’d never been that way, you know, but, man, he was all opening up and I was all…” But despite all this evidence of Neal’s real feelings, Allen wrote quite seriously in his journal, “I am wondering what will happen to Neal if I really withdraw my active queer love and leave him alone emotionally.” Neal insisted that they split up, and Allen decided to ship out from Houston to make some money, whereas Neal would stay on and help with the marijuana harvest and then drive Bill back to New York. Bill had decided that the family would be better off spending the winter in the city.

  Joan and the children, accompanied by a load of baggage, went ahead by train while Bill, Huncke, and Neal Cassady drove the Jeep to New York, the back loaded with Mason jars of pot wrapped in duffel bags to sell in the city. The Jeep was not made for highway driving and when pushed beyond forty-five miles per hour everything burned out. By the time they reached New York on October 2 the car was a wreck. Burroughs said that nobody but Neal could have driven it and that he was a marvelous driver. The trip sounds a strange one. Cassady was obviously intimidated by Burroughs and his long, contemplative silences. Burroughs said, “Jack makes out Neal as a compulsive talker, but actually I’ve driven with him for eight hours and neither of us said a word. Going back to New York to sell the pot.”20 Bill never liked Cassady; he thought he was a cheap con man and didn’t see the sexual attraction that Allen felt. Relations, however, remained cordial.

  Bill had arranged to meet Joan at a railroad station in New York, but they were so late that the police picked her up and took her to Bellevue for observation, thinking that she was planning to abandon her children. When Bill arrived, all it took was for him to give his address as the University Club for her to be released with apologies.

  2. Texas Justice

  Bill and Neal had only brought a few kilos of pot to New York; the majority of the harvest remained in Texas. The pot had not been properly cured: it was green and tasted sour, so no one was very enthusiastic about buying it. Eventually, with Huncke’s help, Bill found a buyer and made about $100. There were a few complaints that it was green, but a few hours in a low oven would have fixed it.

  Bill’s parents came to see the baby at Christmas and set Bill and the family up in a beach club in Atlantic Beach on Long Beach Barrier Island, across the strait from Far Rockaway. It was an affluent summer resort and, being winter and off-season, they could get a large, comfortable room very cheaply. Bill met up with Garver and almost immediately got a new habit. He spent much of his time in the city hanging out with Garver and scoring heroin, usually with Joan in tow. One night, visiting an Italian friend of Huncke’s in Yonkers, he overdosed and passed out. Joan managed to revive him, gave him coffee, and walked him around the room until he was fully recovered.

  In the spring of 1948, disappointed at his own lack of willpower in getting hooked again, Bill tried to kick using the reduction cure while driving back down to Texas from New York with Joan, but it naturally did not work. He had a sixteenth of an ounce of heroin in solution with him and a bottle of distilled water. The plan was that each day for twelve days he would take his shot and replace the same amount of junk with distilled water. After twelve days he would be shooting pure water. But it never works that way, each shot calls for an exception for some reason, and after only four days they had reached Cincinnati and he was out of junk and suffering from withdrawal symptoms. He and Joan continued to St. Louis, where Laura Burroughs tried to get him to go to “a private nut house.” Instead he opted to take the straightforward withdrawal cure again at the U.S. Narcotic Farm in Kentucky. Laura described Joan as “like a tiger” in her insistence that Bill not go to a private clinic; presumably she thought he was more likely to be cured in Lexington. He put the car in storage and took the train. He already knew the routine. Afterward he wrote to Allen from New Waverly, “Back here for several weeks and feeling O.K. at last. I had to go to Lexington for the cure. Stayed 2 weeks and was sick 3 weeks more after I got out.”21 This is the cure he describes in such acute detail in Junky.

  After Lexington he managed to stay off junk for about four months. Bill tried to cut down on expenses at the farm by growing some of their own food. He contemplated buying his own chickens, and in February 1948 Arch gave him two female pigs, telling him, “You keep feedin’ ’em and they’ll be worth a heap of money.” Bill fed them on garbage. The pigs loved it and they hollered and squealed for more. “More! More! More!” They didn’t have enough garbage so they had to start buying feed at three dollars a bag. The more they fed them, the more they wanted. Finally Bill told Arch, “Look Arch, we’ve carried these fuckers as far as we can. Take ’em back!” By this time they weighed about 150 pounds. Bill said, “It got so once a week we had to buy three dollars’ worth of feed to feed these fuckers. Otherwise they’d squeal, you’ve never heard such squeals. So Arch came and took ’em back.”22 Bill enjoyed Arch’s company and went with him to the livestock market with five acorn-fed hogs in the truck. Arch would call his hogs once a day and they would come running.

  On April 27, 1948, Bill, Joan, and little Billy were driving the four hundred miles south from New Waverly to Pharr, where Bill was intent on buying more land. Bill was driving and was really drunk. Staying off junk for so many months clearly had a potent effect upon his libido, because at one point, between San Antonio and Corpus Christi, they stopped the car and he and Joan got out to fuck by the side of the road, leaving Billy in the car. Someone drove past and reported them to the police, and the next thing Burroughs knew Sheriff Vail Ennis and his deputy were on the scene. They put Bill in the prowl car and took him to the Beeville jail. Bill was in overnight, and the next day Sheriff Ennis told the local magistrate, “This here feller was disturbin’ the peace while tryin’ to get a piece.” He was charged with drunken driving and public indecency, fined $173, and lost his driver’s license. Bill quickly telegrammed his parents: “For Godsakes send the money or I will be here in Beeville jail.” He was anxious to get out of there because he had fallen into the hands of one of the most vicious, brutal lawmen in the whole of Texas.

  Sheriff Ennis had killed eight people, mostly Mexican American or African American, and singled out Mexican Americans for abuse: beatings, pistol-whippings, torture. Burroughs knew of him from a recent Time magazine article describing how Ennis had arrested two men for forgery and manacled them together. As he was telephoning for reinforcements one of the men pulled a concealed weapon and shot Ennis four times in the gut. Time reported, “Bleeding but upright, Vail turned from the phone, pulling his Colt from his hip holster; he pumped six shots into his manacled prisoners. Deliberately, he reloaded and pumped six more. When the smoke cleared away, both men were dead.” Ennis survived and was not charged.

  He was guilty of an even more outrageous murder. On July 7, 1945, Ennis drove to the farm of Geronimo Rodriguez to serve a child custody order for not returning his children to their mother after a weekend visit. The family refused to give Ennis the children until Rodriguez returned from the fields and gave his consent. They ordered Ennis off the property. He returned with a Texas Ranger and a civilian he had deputized on the spot. He was carrying a Thompson .45 submachine gun, which he set up on a tripod outside the farm before calling to the inhabitants to come out. Felix Rodriguez, the grandfather, opened the door to see what the problem was and Ennis opened fire on him, throwing him back into the house. Felix’s two brothers, Domingo and Antonio, heard the gunfire and ran around the side of the house, only to be mowed down by Ennis. Felix’s terrified twelve-year-old granddaughter ran from the house and Ennis tried to kill her as well, but his bullets hit the water cistern. Ranger Frank Probst then threw a tear gas grenade into the house. When the gas cleared the three lawmen entered the farmhouse, finding only unarmed men, women, and children gathered around the grandfa
ther’s body. Ennis kicked and beat them, fracturing one man’s skull with a rifle butt. In court he claimed self-defense and got off. Such was law and order in Texas in 1945. No wonder that Kells Elvins, when he heard that Bill had been arrested by Ennis, feared for his life.

  Prompted by his brush with Ennis and Texas justice, Bill decided that he had had enough of Texas, and on June 5 he wrote to Allen from New Orleans to say that he and Joan were moving there. He sold the farm on June 23, 1948, for $2,000, exactly the amount he paid for it. By then the Burroughs family was living in a rooming house at 111 Transcontinental Drive in New Orleans, and on August 2 Bill bought a house at 509 Wagner Street in Algiers, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi from the French Quarter.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I’d just go across the river to score, just go across and come back, that’s all.1

  1. The Big Easy

  The house on Wagner Street cost $3,800 and was a single-story white clapboard Greek Revival ranch house with a sagging porch on two adjacent sides. There was a collapsing old barn in back, weeping willows, and waist-high uncut grass in the yard. It was a few blocks of swampy fields from the Mississippi levee and a short drive from the ferry across to Canal Street and the French Quarter. Burroughs took his responsibilities as a father seriously, and his first priority had been to find a place to “stash these brats.”2 He also began looking around for cheap land near New Orleans, intending to grow enough pot for his own use with enough left to sell, and on October 14, 1948, he bought a tract of land in the Woodland Acres subdivision in Kenner, west of New Orleans, and told Kerouac, “I am buying a small tract of land in a swamp near N.O., where I will build a house.”3

  Bill’s parents came down to visit and took a dislike to the Wagner Street property, which was very run-down and in an insalubrious area. Bill and his father looked around the French Quarter for something more suitable to buy. They found a house they liked but it was occupied by a black family and Bill’s lawyer told him it would take an act of Congress to get them out. They settled on two houses and a patio at 1128–1130 Burgundy Street in the French Quarter, the plan being to live in one and rent out the other. The tenants who were already renting were, not surprisingly, upset at their potential eviction and refused to move without a fight. Burroughs told Kerouac, “I am having tenant trouble already. Two insufferable fruits live in the back house on my new property, and I find to my surprise and indignation that I cannot evict them without removing the premises from the rental market. I tell you we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism.”4 He told Allen, “I am now a landlord body and soul. Scrap rent controls, I say. […] To dictate to a man what he can and can’t do with his own property is Un-American Socialism. Such insidious measures leave the back door of the Ship of State ajar so that cur of Communism can slink in and plunder the American ice-box. My tenants are fat and sassy now, but come March 31 at midnight RCED Day (Rent Control End Day)—and I’ll be waiting up with a stop watch to raise the rent or out they go.”5 This diatribe borders on becoming a routine, so it is hard to know just how much it reflects Burroughs’s real viewpoint, and how much he was posturing for Ginsberg’s benefit. Bill and his family never did get to live on Burgundy Street.

  Bill had been getting awfully bored by Texas, but on arrival in New Orleans he had his usual period of disillusionment, telling Allen, “I am very dissatisfied with living conditions here. There seems to be no-one of interest around, or if such people exist, I can not find them.”6 This was a pattern repeated in many cities around the world, including Tangier and London: Burroughs would arrive in town, find it difficult to meet people, and cure his loneliness by lapsing into junk. He was in New Orleans during the great early days of rhythm and blues, but clearly did not visit any of the famous music clubs. When Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady came to visit he insisted, “The bars are insufferably dreary,”7 and claimed that it was against the law to go into the colored section of town. Bill’s New Orleans was not Mardi Gras, red beans and rice, and fish fries. He was not interested.

  Inevitably, soon after he moved to New Orleans, Burroughs returned to his old ways. He quickly became readdicted and began picking up boys. Junk was just too easy to get, and the French Quarter had “several queer bars so full every night the fags spill out onto the sidewalk.”8 Just walking around New Orleans, Bill identified junk neighborhoods: St. Charles and Poydras; the area around and above Lee Circle; Canal and Exchange Place. In a bar off Exchange Place he ran into a junkie named Joe Ricks—called “Pat” in Junky—who offered to score for him if Bill would buy him a cap. If Junky is accurate, Bill appears to have had an apartment in town as well as the house for his wife and kids. He and Joe went to his place, and despite Joe’s warning that it was strong stuff, Bill measured himself two-thirds of a cap. He overdosed and passed out. When he came to he was lying on the bed with his collar loosened. He stood up and fell over. Ten dollars was missing from his wallet; Ricks had assumed he wouldn’t be needing it. When Bill ran into him a few days later, Ricks said he had thought Bill was dying; he had rubbed ice on his neck but he turned all blue. A week later and Bill was hooked. He fell into his boring junkie routine, shooting up three times a day and pottering around the house, fixing things up in a desultory way, hardly ever going out except to score. He and Joe began pushing in a small way, just enough to pay for their habits, and Junky goes into exhaustive descriptions of their clients: Lonny the Pimp, Seltzer Willy, and Old Sam.

  Bill had a minor run-in with his Italian neighbors. They lived farther down the block, but their children liked to hang around and taunt Billy, who often ran around the yard naked—“Little Beast,” Bill called him. One day they threw a rock and hit Billy on the head so Bill went round to see them. Their father was at work but their mother was at home. Bill told her to keep her kids off his goddamn property. She told him her husband would come over and beat him up. Bill produced his gun and told her, “Well, if he does, he won’t walk home.” Nothing ever came of it.

  Around the new year of 1949, the Burroughs household got swept up in one of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady’s trips across the States that were eventually compressed into On the Road. Ten days before Christmas 1948, Jack Kerouac had received a telephone call from Neal Cassady in San Francisco to say that he had just bought a new 1949 Hudson and wanted to drive it to New York to “break it in.” Al Hinkle, a fellow railroad brakeman, was coming along for the ride as he had never been to New York. The only problem—apart from the fact that Neal had a three-month-old child and had just spent his wife’s savings, leaving them both destitute in San Francisco—was that Neal was broke. Jack said he would send him ten dollars and asked to be picked up at his sister’s house in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where he and his mother were spending Christmas. The next person to be conned was Al Hinkle’s girlfriend, Helen, who was asked along on the trip because they thought she had money. But Helen refused to travel with Al unless they were married, so the trip was delayed until a quick marriage could be arranged. Then, to Neal and Al’s dismay, it turned out that she wasn’t rich after all.

  They set off, but Helen, who was so innocent that she had not been permitted to wear lipstick or see a movie until she was twenty-one, objected to Neal smoking marijuana in the car. She also wanted to stop to use the bathroom, whereas Neal crudely told her to piss out the window. She wanted to spend the nights in motels; it was, after all, her honeymoon. But Neal was manic and wanted to drive all night, stopping only for gas and food. Helen thought that Neal was “the devil incarnate,” and when they reached Tucson, Arizona, she insisted on leaving the car. It was arranged that Al would continue with Neal and see New York, then they would drive back in a week’s time and collect her from New Orleans. Al gave her his railroad pass to get there. Neal gave her Burroughs’s phone number and address as she knew no one in New Orleans.

  Helen booked herself into a hotel, but was unable to stay there indefinitely because it was Sugar Bowl week and fully booked. Someone eventually go
t her a room in a brothel. Though she had never met him, Helen was so desperate that she called Burroughs. “I told him my plight and he replied with a long, long speech on prefabricated housing.”9 Bill met Helen at a Chinese restaurant and invited her to come and stay.

  Meanwhile, Neal had detoured to Denver, where he picked up Lu Anne Henderson, his previous wife, to join in the trip. Jack was collected en route, and on arrival in New York, Neal and Lu Anne stayed with Allen Ginsberg at his apartment on York Avenue. Allen was working the night shift at the Associated Press, so they used his bed while he was out, and he would crawl in with them both when he returned home. Leading up to the new year, life was a continuous round of parties, except for Lu Anne, whom Neal sent out to work while the men sat around stoned. The Beats may have been revolutionary in some areas, but they were irremediably backward in their attitude toward women.

  A series of increasingly irritated letters and telegrams arrived at York Avenue from Burroughs demanding to know when the party were coming to collect Helen. He told Allen, “Mrs. Hinkle is here for the past week. ‘Gathering her brows like the gathering Storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.’ Tam O’Shanter—Robert Burns. Can’t say as I blame her much.” Bill said he did not object to her staying there as she was a most considerate guest, but “I seriously consider this kind of irresponsible behavior intolerable.”10 After another letter and a cable, he wrote again, “Does this Hinkle character expect to billet his wife on me indefinitely? His performance is an all-time record for sheer gall and irresponsibility.”11 However, he noted again that she had been a perfect guest and was very conscientious about helping out and paying her way as far as she was able. Bill knew that Neal never had any intention of picking her up in a week’s time; he had conned her as he conned everyone.