Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  For Helen the Burroughs household was astonishing. First of all she told Bill how dreadful Neal was because he smoked pot. Bill demurred and gave her the 1944 La Guardia Committee Report on marijuana to read, which contradicted government claims that pot was addictive, resulted in insanity and mental health problems, and led to criminal behavior. Then she was co-opted into buying an inhaler tube for Joan each day when she was out sightseeing; when a pharmacist offered to let her have a dozen because he could see she wouldn’t “misuse” them, she still only bought one. Joan showed her what she used them for. Helen found Joan’s behavior most peculiar. Joan washed the kitchen walls and mopped and scrubbed the kids’ room to hospital standards and yet the children themselves were filthy; they were never washed. “You bathed that little girl, and you could tell she hadn’t been washed in ages. That little girl—she bit her arm all the time. She had great, terrible scars on her arm.”12 The children were allowed to use Joan’s Revere Ware pots instead of the toilet, and the same pots were used for cooking in the evening. Joan never slept; she would be out in the yard at 4:00 a.m., sweeping lizards off the dead tree in the yard where they lived, the moon reflecting in her oval face, high on amphetamine. Helen described Joan to Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, saying she was very quiet and “looked like an overworked, dreary housewife. Straight hair tied back with wisps hanging. She never wore a bra. There was something naked about her. I don’t think she ever wore shoes or hose. She looked rather childlike.” Kerouac, when he finally arrived with Neal and Hinkle, said, “Her face, once plump and Germanic and pretty, had become stony and red and gaunt. She had caught polio in New Orleans and limped a little.”13

  Helen also found Burroughs peculiar. He and Joan had thirteen cats and Bill liked to tease and torture them, tying them up with string and holding them over a bath of water so they screamed and tried to bite him. One day the white cat was sick and lay under the kitchen table. It died in the night. At breakfast of boiled eggs the next morning, Bill put his foot under the table and the cat was stiff and cold. In order not to traumatize the children, Bill spelled it out for Joan. “The white cat is D-E-A-D.” Julie looked at the dead cat blankly and said, “Take him outside because he stinks.”14 Bill wore a gun in a holster and would line up a row of Joan’s empty inhaler tubes and sit on the couch and shoot them, often with baby Billy asleep on his lap. At least they always ate good, well-balanced meals. Burroughs always enjoyed his food and ate heartily.

  After Neal stole two dollars from Lucien Carr and began beating up Lu Anne, it seemed that the New York party was over, and on January 19, 1949, as the sun set over the New Jersey swamps, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Lu Anne Henderson, and Al Hinkle set out for New Orleans. Ever since Helen arrived to stay, Burroughs had fulminated against Cassady, telling her all the things he was going to say to him, blaming him entirely for the pointless trip. But when they did arrive, to Helen’s surprise, “he didn’t say a damned thing.” However, Bill was very good at letting his feelings be known, and Neal kept a wary distance throughout their stay. As Lu Anne Henderson put it, “I got the definite impression that Burroughs wasn’t all that pleased about seeing Neal.”15 Bill did, however, give Jack the benefit of his views. Lu Anne wrote that she felt Jack change when he reached Algiers. “He was doing a lot of talking alone with Bill, and there was a lot of stuff being discussed between them that they didn’t share with us. I got the impression when we were there that Bill was very unhappy with Neal. Bill didn’t show it in any way, or say anything particular to us. […] It was something I felt more than he expressed directly. […] I perceived something subtle change inside Jack. Jack was still excited about the trip, and clearly happy being on this trip, but I felt something had begun to trouble him […] maybe Bill putting Neal in a little bit different light for him. […] He was no longer quite as exuberant over the whole trip.”16 Bill was trying to get Jack to leave the trip and stay with them and get to know New Orleans. On their arrival Helen Hinkle led her wayward husband firmly into her back bedroom to give him a piece of her mind. Lu Anne followed, sat on one of the twig benches, and asked, “Aren’t you going to screw? I’d like to watch.” Helen’s opinion of her husband’s friends sank even lower.

  Kerouac in On the Road recalled getting up one morning to find Burroughs and Neal Cassady yanking hundreds of rusty nails from a large wooden beam. Bill told him, “When I get all these nails out of this I’m going to build me a shelf that’ll last a thousand years.”17 Warming to his subject, he told him there were plastics by which they could build houses that last forever, there were everlasting tires, everlasting fabrics, and even a certain gum that if you chew as a child you will never get cavities. These were ideas that he was still chasing in the seventies and eighties.

  Bill was delighted to see Jack. He had been starved for intelligent company, and apart from Joan, he’d had no serious discussions since he got to New Orleans. He would sit in his rocking chair in his corner where the shades were always drawn, a copy of the Mayan Codices and an air gun at his side, little Billy on his lap, while the others sat around his feet and listened as he discussed literature—directing most of his conversation to Jack—and pontificated upon his other current concerns. Lu Anne said Jack was “in need of Burroughs at the time. The fact that we were going down by Burroughs really meant a great deal to Jack. When we would talk or anything, Burroughs was very much a part of him, like a teacher.”18

  Jack was clearly fascinated by Bill, and in On the Road he gave several pages to Bill’s biography, leading to many inaccurate presumptions about him, but he also described Bill and Joan’s relationship in some detail:

  His relation with his wife was one of the strangest: they talked till late at night; Bull19 liked to hold the floor, he went right on in his dreary monotonous voice, she tried to break in, she never could; at dawn he got tired and then Jane talked and he listened, snuffing and going thfump down his nose. She loved that man madly, but in a delirious way of some kind; there was never any mooching and mincing around, just talk and a very deep companionship that none of us would ever be able to fathom. Something curiously unsympathetic and cold between them was really a form of humor by which they communicated their own set of subtle vibrations. Love is all; Jane was never more than ten feet away from Bull and never missed a word he said, and he spoke in a very low voice, too.20

  Bill and Allen had been engaged in a lively correspondence ever since Bill left New York, and now Ginsberg introduced the touchy subject of Bill’s sexual relationship with Joan. He clearly suggested that Burroughs was “living a lie” with Joan, because of his preference for boys, which provoked a vigorous response from Burroughs:

  I never made any pretensions of permanent heterosexual orientation. What lie are you talking about? Like I say I never promised or even implied anything. How could I promise something that it is not in my power to give? I am not responsible for Joan’s sexual life, never was, never pretended to be. Nor are we in any particular mess. There is, of course, as there was from the beginning, an impasse and cross purposes that are, in all likelihood, not amenable to any solution.21

  Allen had questioned the validity of Neal’s cross-country trip, but Burroughs expressed his feelings more forcefully, comparing the trip, for its sheer compulsive pointlessness, to the mass migrations of the Mayans. He told Allen in no uncertain terms his low opinion of Neal: “He is the Mover, compulsive, dedicated, ready to sacrifice family, friends, even the very car itself to the necessity of moving from one place to another. Wife and child may starve, friends exist only to exploit for gas money. […] Neal must move. […] Then he arrives here and has the unmitigated gall to expect me to advance $ for the continuation of this wretched trip. […] I would not have contributed one cent, if I were wallowing in $s.”22 When Neal realized that Bill was not going to be conned, his friendly attitude toward him cooled considerably. As Bill put it to Allen, obviously quoting Allen’s words, “He didn’t unlock and ‘charm’ or ‘graceful human nature’ around her
e.”23 But Jack managed to get twenty-five dollars from his mother, so they were soon off again, this time to Tucson, where they hoped to borrow money from Alan Harrington. Al and Helen decided to stay in New Orleans, and Bill and Joan had grown to like Helen so much that they suggested doing up the chicken house in the yard as an apartment for them to live in.

  When Joan did finally go to sleep she was out to the world. Burroughs, who was a very light sleeper, recalled one occasion in a New Orleans rooming house when Joan had been smoking in bed and fallen asleep, dropping her cigarette, setting her mattress on fire. It was Bill who was immediately wide awake. It took four metal wastebaskets of water to stop the smoldering and the mattress was ruined.24 Bill paid the landlady fifty dollars.

  On April 5, 1949, Bill found he was broke and took a pistol into town to pawn. He visited Joe Ricks at his hotel room and made a deal with one of Joe’s visitors to exchange two ounces of pot for four caps. They all piled into Bill’s Chevrolet and with Ricks driving went to get the pot, then set out to score the heroin. Around Lee Circle a cop recognized Joe in the car as a junkie well known to them and began following them. Bill told them to throw out the pot, which they did, but when the cops boxed them in on Calliope Street, one of the other passengers still had a joint in his pocket. That was enough to get Bill’s car confiscated. They also found a gun in the glove compartment. There had been a law passed recently in New Orleans that in effect made it illegal to be a junkie. Bill had a needle welt on his arm. “All right, let’s see your arms”—Burroughs remembered their command forty years later in “A Thanksgiving Prayer.”25 They were all taken to the Second Precinct and locked in a cell together.

  Bill accompanied three detectives to his house and allowed them to search it without a warrant. They seized half a dozen firearms, a Mason jar of pot, as well as letters to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, both containing references to drugs. It was a state matter, not federal, but the law provided a sentence of twenty months to five years in the notorious Angola State Prison if convicted. It was fortunate that Bill was not carrying when he was arrested, also fortunate that the house was searched illegally and his statement obtained through coercion. Bill had a very good lawyer named Robert S. Link who managed to get Bill’s bail set before he was even charged—most irregular—and who quickly found a group of witnesses to give evidence of coercion; that Bill was in a bad state of heroin withdrawal at the time and was not in his right mind. Bill’s father put up the bail of $1,500 and Link put Bill in the De Paul Sanatarium to get cured. He was in his third day of withdrawal and not in good shape. More importantly, Link arranged with the DA that Bill could leave the state for an indefinite period before the case came to trial on October 27. Bill, in hospital, was almost clear within eight days.

  Three days after Bill’s arrest, papers were drawn up to sell the Burgundy Street property to Mote, suggesting an emergency substitution of Bill’s father for himself, and on July 11, 1949, the purchase was complete. Two weeks later the Algiers house was sold back to the Eureka Homestead Society, the people he first bought it from. Bill defaulted on the swampland in Kenner where he was intending to build a house and it was put up for sheriff’s sale and repurchased by the original developers.26 James Grauerholz threw an interesting new light on Burroughs’s real estate ventures when he uncovered Joan’s answers to questions posed by an interviewer named Joyce Adams, who took a social history from her when Burroughs was admitted to the De Paul Sanatarium. She said that Bill’s parents meant well but attempted to arrange things for him and always got him out of trouble, which caused the patient to violently oppose them as he would rather deal with his problems himself. They phoned frequently and the father frequently sent substantial checks. “Recently, the parents came to New Orleans—visited the patient at his home in Algiers, were not fond of the house, and purchased a new one for patient in the city at Burgundy Street. They had purchased the Algiers home for [the] couple when patient and his wife came to New Orleans about a year ago.” All of which rather contradicts the impression that Burroughs had been giving Kerouac and Ginsberg in his letters of himself as a tough businessman. Burroughs was playacting, perhaps unconsciously, acting out a role-playing game as the rapacious landlord, and before that as the cotton farmer, just as he acted out character roles back at 115th Street with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Chase. It was all inauthentic. He was trying to be the adult, the grown-up that his parents so desperately wanted him to be.

  Burroughs often compared Joan with his mother, saying they had many of the same characteristics: “[Joan] had an immediate insight to anyone’s character. Just one look and she knew. My mother had that. Just glance at someone and say, ‘He’s a crook, he’s no good’ ”;27 “Like Joan there are no conventional words or categories to describe either one of ’em. My mother was this very intelligent person, very psychic. Quite a lot like Joan”;28 “[Joan] had just a complete intolerance for opiates. My mother did too.”29 There was even an instance where a calico cat in the room, “very delicate, very special and completely unaggressive,” reminded Burroughs of Jane Bowles, “also mother, and Joan. All three in Calico. Same quality of ethereal delicacy.”30 Bill’s relationship with Joan was more than intellectual compatibility and friendship; she was also a mother figure to him. The assessment of Dr. John W. Bick at the sanatorium was that “the patient […] gives me the impression of being grossly immature, lacking all adult sense of responsibility, and being grossly dependent on his wife, who seemed to enjoy taking care of the serious problem which he represented.” Dr. Bick tried to persuade Joan that a long period of hospitalization should be considered, but she did not agree and Bill was discharged into her care on April 15, 1949, against hospital advice.31

  Bill’s relationship with his mother was infantile and narcissistic. He entwined his life with hers, took her name, Lee, for his own, and later even delivered her a son to bring up. He liked whores because they were “motherly.” He relied on his parents to get him out of trouble—legal and financial—for fifty years. There never was a trust fund, their money was all earned. Bill had incest dreams32 and felt guilty about not visiting, yet Laura always adored him. He remained her favorite son. Bill was a mama’s boy, always whining and complaining about the conditions and service. Many people filled this role later in his life, to a greater or lesser extent: Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Ian Sommerville, James Grauerholz, and numerous others supported him and helped him to organize his life, just as Laura Burroughs had done, but in Joan’s case she was actually a woman.

  For Bill and Joan, the biggest problem was where to go next. A second felony in New Orleans would draw seven years in the state penitentiary and he could be pulled over at any time under the new drug laws. In Texas a second conviction for drunken driving would be almost as bad. Bill’s family was prepared to use their financial clout to prevent him from returning to New York. Joan told Allen, “It makes things rather difficult for Bill, as for me, I don’t care where I live, so long as it’s with him.”33 They thought of a cruise, to get Bill completely away from drugs, but in the end Bill decided that he would first return to Texas to oversee the sale of his farming interests and spend more time with Kells; he had missed good conversation in Algiers. He had already decided to move on to Central or South America.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was down in Texas that I made an orgone box with Kells Elvins.1

  1. Return to the Valley

  Bill, Joan, and the children moved to the Valley in April 1949 to sell Bill’s landholdings there. He and Kells had earlier combined their operation and Bill owned a share of the farm equipment as well as land. In May he sold his original fifty acres to Kells, but the family stayed on in Pharr until October, waiting to see how Bill’s trial was shaping up. Bill hated it there. “All the worst features of America have drained down to the Valley and concentrated there. In the whole area, there is not one good restaurant. The food situation could only be tolerated by people who do not taste what they eat.”2 He felt that the Val
ley was plagued by DOR, Wilhelm Reich’s “Deadly Orgone Radiation,” a negative debilitating energy that brought on depression and lack of vitality. “Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move in. Whatever it is—orgones, life force—that we all have to score for all the time, there is not much of it in the Valley. Your food rots before you can get it home. Milk sours before you can finish the meal. The Valley is the place where the new anti-life force is breaking through. Death hangs over the Valley like an invisible smog. […] The dying cell gravitates to the Valley.”3

  The notion of orgones came from Wilhelm Reich’s recently published The Cancer Biopathy,4 in which he argues that cancer is caused by an inability to discharge sexual energy. Reich calls it orgone energy, natural energy, the life force, cosmic energy, what Henri Bergson called élan vital, which exists everywhere in the atmosphere and in all living and dead matter. It can be concentrated and used to help relieve a stasis of energy in the body, and Reich manufactured a simple device known as an orgone accumulator in which the patient sat and absorbed life energy. Burroughs thought that anything that energized the body would be good for the after-effects of junk sickness. His approach to the orgone was essentially that of Bergson’s notion that “life is essentially a current sent through matter.”5 Bill wanted to keep himself charged up.

  Reich’s ideas on the role of the orgasm in healthy functioning, a natural extension of Freud’s theories, were seriously taken on board by New York intellectuals (and elsewhere). Reich was a long-standing member of the Freud seminar in Vienna, and his book Character Analysis on psychoanalytic technique was a standard work, so his ideas were carefully considered. Reich’s books were then extremely popular and people were hiring orgone accumulators from Reich’s institute or building their own. Burroughs took exception to the amount of paperwork attached to renting an orgone accumulator, so in June he built his own in the yard behind Kells’s house. The principle was very simple. Orgones are absorbed and retained by organic matter but pass freely through metal. A metal box with organic material on the outside will have a higher concentration of orgones inside than out because the layer of organic material will retard the escape of orgones from the box. The more layers of metal and organic material, the higher the concentration of orgones. Bill ordered sheet metal, wood, and a roll of rock wool. He told James Grauerholz, “Kells and I made it, and it was a sloppy job too. […] We had some kind of jerry built hut to start with and sloppily nailed sheet iron inside that. Then inside that we had another orgone box made out of an old icebox which you lowered down over yourself, and then we had a little accumulator made out of one of those jerry cans, we just covered that over in burlap and various stuff—we were getting three levels.”6 He felt it did him good: “My skin prickled and I experienced an aphrodisiac effect similar to good strong weed. No doubt about it, orgones are as definite a force as electricity. After using the accumulator for several days my energy came back to normal.”7 Kells and Bill’s accumulator was a popular new toy for the front porch set. Bill wrote Kerouac, “The gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he’s a fucking genius.”8 From then on, whenever he was settled somewhere, Burroughs usually built himself an orgone accumulator. He had them in Tangier, London, New York, and Lawrence, Kansas.