by Barry Miles
His reasons for selling in Pharr were largely financial rather than lack of orgones. He and Kells were gentleman farmers and had never won the respect of the local farmers. They were always having problems with their field hands; the border patrol kept returning their wetbacks to Mexico. Other farmers had an arrangement with the border patrol. The patrol would arrive and say they were under pressure to deport a certain number of Mexicans and then they would discuss how many would go and would take them to the border and deport them, but always with the understanding that they would be back in time for work the next morning. Trucks would be waiting at the riverbank to collect them as they swam or waded over. The quotas would be met and everyone was happy. Bill and Kells never colluded enough, or else they were unaware of such arrangements, so they were sometimes left shorthanded.
Burroughs went along with the views of the local landowners, claiming they were all on the verge of bankruptcy and that if they paid the higher minimum wage demanded by government bureaucrats they would not make any profit and go out of business. But these farmers were very wealthy, and farmers in the rest of the United States managed to make a profit without employing illegal labor. This became the subject of an intense correspondence with Allen Ginsberg, who had originally enrolled at Columbia in order to become a labor lawyer. He accused Bill of complicity in preserving a corrupt system and paying what amounted to slave wages. Bill disagreed, saying that he provided medical care, clothing, and food for his laborers, who were on an hourly rate, and that he had devised a system of profit sharing, though it is hard to know how he would have known who to include as sometimes he and Kells had more than two hundred field hands, hired and paid by agents, not by themselves.
At first Bill housed his family in a dilapidated motel in McAllen at Ash and 10th Street. Julie was dirty, barefoot, and wore no underpants. Joan also eschewed underclothes and wore button-front dresses that gaped revealingly. Whether this was intentionally provocative or not, Bill’s friends had to try hard to avert their eyes. She still ate the strips from two Benzedrine inhalers a day and yet hardly said a word. Bill appears to have spent most evenings on the front porch, drinking and carousing with Kells or else visiting the boys in Reynosa. Joan, presumably, stayed home with the kids and her Benzedrine.
After the motel they moved to a run-down house located on the north side of Kells’s orange groves on South Jackson Street. Bill spent some time doing it up. Bill’s idée fixe that American manufacturers were intentionally making second-rate goods, designed to wear out and fall apart in just a few years, was still foremost in his mind. He thought that there was a conspiracy against the American consumer. A concrete house could be made to last a thousand years but American houses barely lasted for twenty-five; R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1933 Dymaxion car was fast and energy-efficient but was blocked by Chrysler. There were light bulbs that lasted a lifetime but the patents were bought up by the Phoebus cartel and purposely shelved. The same with everlasting car tires; all had been bought up by big business and shelved. Doing his bit to counteract this trend, Bill constructed for the house sturdy side tables and a dining table of huge railroad ties bolted together with rebar. When they had fixed up the house, Joan gave a dinner party for all their friends. In the middle of dinner, Bill jumped up onto the table, scattering food and dishes, and stamped his foot on its indestructible surface. “Now, by God, this is functional!” he assured them.
Bill was of course armed, and continued to practice by shooting Joan’s empty inhaler cases off a wall. Ted Marak told Rob Johnson that one of their games consisted of Bill getting him or Kells to throw oranges or grapefruit into the air. Bill would aim and hit them in the air almost every time. Marak was a qualified marksman from his time in the U.S. Army cavalry and said that Bill was an expert shot. Marak also told Johnson that Bill would sometimes put a grapefruit or other fruit on Joan’s head and shoot it off in a reenactment of the William Tell story. This is in direct contradiction to Burroughs’s later story that they had never played the William Tell game before, but there is no reason to doubt Marak’s recollection of that time.
Bill enjoyed being with his best friend Kells. There were weekend trips to Corpus Christi and South Padre Island on the coast, then still undeveloped, and long evenings drinking and smoking on Kells’s porch or at his own house. Kells loved to feed Bill stories just to see what he would make of them. He told Bill about his friend the Texas oilman Clint Murchison, and how he would sit around with his cronies and ask, “Hey Clem, when are you gonna get yourself cured?” Kells explained this meant get rich, properly rich, not the two or three million that Clem already had. He always said he would help Kells if he asked him, so Kells was well disposed toward him. Kells also respected the “second sight” that Bill and his mother supposedly possessed. He asked Bill, “Tell me about the man, Burroughs, tell me about his hands.” Bill concentrated on Murchison: “And I could see his hands were twisted, he had terrible arthritis. And with second sight I saw, I said, ‘His hands are twisted. Being down there with all that shale.’ And Kells says, ‘Yes, the man’s got arthritis, that’s right, Burroughs.’ ”9
In between his drinking and farm management, Kells was also trying to write the Great American Novel, but he never devoted enough time or attention to it. In later years he did have a short story published in Esquire and another in Dude, but most of his writing remains unpublished. Burroughs recalled, “He didn’t write all that much. He always encouraged me. Kells felt, in a way, that without my influence he would never have realized anything, that’s the idea, that I turned him on to possibilities beyond that he wouldn’t have realized unless he had known me: a less conventional life, less conventional ways of thinking, and his whole interest in writing came from the work that we had done together.”10 Kells kept all of Burroughs’s letters, which he considered the most fantastic writing he had ever seen.
In September, Bill made a trip to Mexico City with Kells and rented an apartment at río Lerma 26, preparatory to moving there with his family. His lawyer had warned him that there was every indication of an unfavorable outcome in his drug case, and he had decided to skip the country. He was delighted by Mexico City, telling Kerouac that a single man could live well on two dollars a day, liquor included. “Fabulous whore houses and restaurants. A large foreign colony. Cock fights, bull fights, every conceivable diversion.”11 He told Allen that he wanted to live in Mexico City, “and don’t see how I can afford to live anywhere else.”12 Bill told Kerouac that he thought he would be in Mexico for some time as the statute of limitations was five years.13 By October 1949 they were there. With the exception of relatively short visits, Burroughs would live outside the United States from then until 1974.
Chapter Seventeen
Nothin a junkey likes better
Than sittin quietly with a new shot
And knows tomorrow’s plenty more
—JACK KEROUAC, MEXICO CITY BLUES1
Many hundred years ago, the Valley of Mexico, an oval seven thousand feet above the seas, walled and sheltered by porphyry and immense volcanic rock, was a valley of great lakes and flowering tropical forests. Here on fifty islands and the shore of Lake Taxcuoco rose the city. Waterways fronted by low-roofed palaces of pink stone, plazas at anchor, floating gardens: Tenochtitlán, waterbound, canal-crossed, bridge-linked, ablaze with flowers… And amid the soft magic, a huge temple, a pyramid, squat, vast, solid. […] Then the Spaniards came and changed everything. They couldn’t have been more thorough. After four years the city is destroyed and rebuilt, the lakes drained, the waterways filled in, the canals dry, the forests decimated.
—SYBILLE BEDFORD2
1. Mexico City
After the Mexican Revolution virtually anything was permitted under the first civilian president, Miguel Alemán. American corporations flooded across the border, eager to make money, Ford and General Motors, Kodak and RCA, Singer sewing machines, American comic books, Quaker Oats, Walt Disney, and Hollywood movies. Corruption was rife; these wer
e the years when the mordida was at its height. Burroughs rented a place for his family at paseo de la Reforma 210, house 8, in Colonia Cuauhtémoc, a fashionable residential suburb to the west of the historic center of the city, close to the Angel of Independence monument. He still retained his bachelor apartment on nearby río Lerma. The family apartment was not far from Chapultepec Park, said to date back to Montezuma, with its huge old trees, over two hundred feet tall and forty-five feet in circumference, hanging with Spanish moss. There was a castle on the rock above and little boats on the lake.
Mexico City had an inescapable physical impact on the senses: noise, smell, color, movement, altitude, and sun. Mexico City is in the oval Valley of Mexico. It is in the tierra fría, the cold zone, which is anywhere in Mexico above seven thousand feet. At 7,350 feet above sea level, the air was thin, and any quick movement caused dizziness until acclimatization. Vultures circled in a sky so blue it hurt to look at it. Three active volcanoes surrounded the city, Popocatépetl, Iztaccíhuatl, and Xinantécatl, with three curls of smoke rising into the air. There was also Peñón, a small hill, which according to geologists will one day erupt and destroy the entire city. Bill and his family arrived in the rainy season, which runs from the end of May until October. The sky is always clear, except for the swirling El Greco clouds that build up to the day’s rain at 4:00 p.m. It is always warm, never hot, never cold except at night. Business begins again around eight o’clock after the noisy early evening rain. Darkness comes suddenly. Dinner was at ten.
Burroughs, not normally interested in art, architecture, or history, was keen to see the Aztec and Mayan artifacts. In the plaza Mayor, the great Aztec pyramid, the only building the Spanish were unable to destroy, lies belowground. With the ecological destruction of the city by the Spanish, the ground became boggy and by its own great weight, after a few years, the great pyramid sank out of sight. The Spanish built a garish cathedral on top of it, the oldest Christian structure in the New World. The greatest treasure of the National Museum of Anthropology was the Aztec Calendar Stone, the Stone of the Sun, discovered when Mexico City Cathedral was being repaired. Across the square, the enormous edifice of the National Theater, El Teatro Nacionál, on Alameda had slowly sunk five feet into the subsoil.
Bill and Joan looked around the university quarter, with its high dark stone streets like the Left Bank of Paris. Everywhere were tramways and new American hotels. Many baroque churches and convents had been converted into warehouses, libraries, garages, newspaper offices after the government closed down 480 Catholic churches and establishments in the 1931–36 antireligious clampdown. It was a society in rapid transition. In 1949, the population was less than two million, one-tenth of today’s total, but travelers give us a picture of an enormously busy, vibrant, exciting city. The pavements were narrow and crowded: people carrying basins of glowing charcoal, women with water in small earthenware vessels strapped to their backs, a peasant with a tethered chicken slung casually over one shoulder, mules carrying clay jars wrapped in straw, a baby mule born in the street, a chain of mules carrying boulders in panniers, men weaving a cage of twigs for a waiting parrot, parrots shrieking from upper windows, everyone pushing and shoving. Beggars displaying deformities, waving stumps and crutches, lottery tickets thrust in the face, sellers of puppies and straw hats, flowers, hot chestnuts and candies; fruit sellers covered the pavement with piles of mangoes, plums, avocados, pineapples, and papayas. Overflowing trams dominated the streets, and peasants with donkey carts jostled with mules, goats both live and dead, huge American automobiles, and pedestrians. Grubby babies with faces like an Aztec carving grasped at passersby. The all-pervading smell of confectionery drifted down the avenida Juárez.
The shops were, then as now, filled with tourist junk, hideous elaborate silver filigree, bad serapes, gourds, dead fleas dressed up as people inside walnut shells, skeleton figures in sombreros. It was a city of bookshops filled with Spanish editions of the classics from Emily Brontë to Sigmund Freud, but a quarter of the people were illiterate, and another quarter had considerable difficulty in reading, despite a new law that anyone who was literate must teach at least one person to read.
Joan adjusted to the new situation with her usual equanimity and told Allen, “I shan’t attempt to describe my sufferings for 3 weeks after the Benzedrine gave out, but with thyroid tablets, Reich and faith, I made it.” She told him that she was “somewhat drunk from 8 am on. Evil people here sell tequila for 40c (U.S.) a quart,” and that she tended to “hit the lush rather hard.”3 She also told him, “The boys are lovely, easy and cheap (3 pesos—40c) down here, but my patience is infinite.”4 Clearly Burroughs was making no effort to hide his boys from her. Shortly after arriving in Mexico City, Burroughs began to frequent a particular queer bar, named in Junky as “the Chimu Bar,” most likely the Linterna Verde—the Green Lantern—on Monterrey not far from Mexico City College. It was here he later met Angelo, his long-term Mexican boy, but in the meantime he had no particular favorite. Burroughs did not bring them into the family home, but initially retained his small apartment at río Lerma 26, and later used hotels.
Whether Joan was allowed, or insisted upon, the same sexual freedom we do not know. Bill had his boys and, at least initially, thought he was living in a free and easy society where everyone minded their own business. This he pontificated upon to both Allen and Kerouac at some length: “It really is possible to relax here where nobody tries to mind your business for you, and a man can walk the streets without being molested by some insolent cop swollen with the unwarranted authority bestowed upon him by our stupid and hysterical law-making bodies. Here a cop is on the level of a street-car conductor. He knows his place and stays there.”5 Inevitably Bill’s early impressions were rose-tinted, but his initial reaction to Mexico was positive and he talked of opening a bar near the U.S. border, of farming in the south, and of becoming a Mexican citizen. One of his first moves was to build an orgone accumulator to aid Joan in her Benzedrine withdrawal. Benzedrine was easily available in Mexico City—Burroughs speaks of using it himself in Queer—so Joan must have decided to kick the habit, though it sounds as if she thought that she would not be able to get any: “Benzedrine gave out.”
They settled into an approximation of normal family life. Neighbors were hired as child-minders and to do the laundry, and Joan cooked: American food early in the month, Mexican food later. Burroughs was not keen on Mexican food. The Aztec diet of frijoles and tortillas, black beans, hand-ground corn cakes, and chili pepper was something they resorted to only when his parents’ allowance ran low. The Aztecs had no cattle and therefore no dairy products. It took four hours to grind the corn for one person’s daily tortillas. Staff were paid one or two pesos a day. Traditional Mexican restaurant fare was also not to his taste, particularly the service, where, after a lengthy wait, all the courses appeared in quick succession, long before the previous one had been eaten, until the table was full and the coffee waiting, getting cold, at the end of a line of as yet uneaten courses. There was a very good Viennese restaurant and several French ones that they patronized when they could afford it.
Burroughs was still under indictment in New Orleans for possession of narcotics, and having jumped bail his first move was to find a lawyer to block any possibility of being extradited. He was using the pay phone at the Reforma Hotel, asking someone at the American embassy if they could recommend an English-speaking lawyer, when he was overheard by a flashily dressed, husky Italian American with a big diamond ring on his finger, a stereotype mafioso named Tony, who said, “Pardon me, I couldn’t help overhearing what you said. The man for you to see is Bernabé Jurado.” Then he asked Bill, “What’s your trouble? Embezzlement?” Bill told him it was narcotics. “Oh,” he said. “Well, he’s your man.”
Bernabé Jurado had his office in the most fashionable business quarter, at calle de Madero 17, but often saw his clients at a bar, La Opera, at the corner of Cinco de Mayo and Filomeno Mata, famous for its celebrities and
politicians. Jurado was a big, confident middle-aged man, very well dressed, with black greased hair, a mustache, and a piercing gaze. As a child he had witnessed the execution of his father by Pancho Villa, who seized the family hacienda. He worked in a mine until he was twelve, when he moved with his mother and sister to Mexico City. He studied accounting, medicine, and law and specialized in labor law, defending striking workers. He was the essence of machismo and was reputed to have married fourteen times, twice to one woman. He liked cocaine, alcohol, and cantinas. He was a formidable lawyer and would do anything to win a case: buy off judges, alter documents, challenge his opponents to a duel, and on one memorable occasion he asked the judge to show him the proof against his client. The judge passed him a bounced check and Bernabé popped it in his mouth and ate it. His client got off for lack of evidence. He was clearly perfect material for Burroughs, who used him as a character in a number of books, including Junky, The Naked Lunch, Cities of the Red Night, and The Place of Dead Roads.
