Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Burroughs intended to study at Mexico City College. Most foreign students got one-year student immigrant visas that could easily be renewed, and the college even provided a student registration service, but Burroughs preferred to use Jurado in case the U.S. authorities attempted to extradite him. Jurado immediately filed a petition for Mexican citizenship even though an immigrant must normally live in Mexico for five years before becoming eligible for actual citizenship, and must have an “immigrant” rather than “tourist” visa. In fact Burroughs did not need Jurado’s services immediately, because though his lawyer in New Orleans said, “Frankly, I wouldn’t advise you to come back,” he also told Bill that the U.S. authorities had no intention of extraditing him. No papers were ever filed. Burroughs told Allen, “Mexico is my place. I want to live here and bring up the children here. I would not go back to the U.S. under any circumstances. This is basically an oriental culture (80% Indian) where everyone has mastered the art of minding his own business. If a man wants to wear a monocle or carry a cane he does not hesitate to do it and no one gives him a second glance. Boys and young men walk down the street arm in arm and no one pays them any mind. It is not that people here don’t care what others think. It simply would not occur to a Mexican to expect criticism from a stranger, nor would it occur to anyone to criticize the behavior of others.”6

  On November 21, 1949, Burroughs enrolled in the Mexico City College School of Higher Studies in the department of anthropology and archaeology, specializing in Mexican archaeology. He was on the GI Bill; the U.S. government paid for his books and tuition, and gave him a seventy-five-dollar-a-month living allowance. He was formally admitted on January 2, 1950, and the next day he began his courses in Spanish language, the Mayan language, and the Codices. At this time, about 70 percent of the college’s eight hundred-plus students were Americans on the GI Bill, though many were there just for the bursary to supplement their income and attended few lectures. Although Burroughs had a genuine interest in Aztec and Mayan culture, it was the money that interested him most. As he told Kerouac, “I always say keep your snout in the public trough.”7 Burroughs studied the Mayan Codices under Robert Hayward Barlow, the chairman of the distinguished Anthropology Department. Barlow committed suicide in January 1951 with an overdose of goofballs after a disgruntled student outed him as being gay. Burroughs joined the Sahagun Anthropology Club and went on field visits with them, including one in July 1950 led by Barlow and Professor Pedro Armillas to the Temple of Quetzalcoatl in Teotihuacan. Burroughs had studied a copy of the Mayan Codices in Algiers; now he examined them in depth and they became one of the topics that he and Joan discussed. From the things Bill told her, Joan suggested that the Mayan priests must have had some sort of telepathic control over the population, which started Burroughs thinking in that direction. Burroughs sometimes quoted her thoughts on the Mayans as a good example of her intelligence. Clearly, despite their other problems, theirs was a true meeting of minds. For her part, Joan finally convinced Burroughs of her theory that atomic explosions had polluted the atmosphere and were causing a mild radiation sickness worldwide.

  2. Back on Junk

  One day, after being in Mexico City for several months, Bill went to see Bernabé Jurado and found the office closed. A shabby, short, middle-aged man was waiting outside who said Jurado hadn’t arrived yet. Burroughs immediately identified him as an old-time junkie, and the man obviously could tell that Burroughs was the same. After they had both conducted their business with Jurado, Burroughs asked David Tesorero8—“Old Ike” in Junky—to join him for supper. At a restaurant on San Juande Letràn, Tesorero flipped back his coat lapel and showed Bill the spike stuck on the underside. “I’ve been on junk for 28 years,” he told Bill. “Do you want to score?”9

  Dave Tesorero was scoring through María Dolores Estévez Zuleta, the powerful, obese boss of the Mexico City trade from the twenties until the end of the fifties. Burroughs based his character Lola la Chata directly upon her: “There is only one pusher in Mexico City, and that is Lupita.”10 She began dealing marijuana, morphine, and heroin from a fried-pork-skin and coffee-with-a-shot stall in La Merced for her mother in 1919 when she was only thirteen years old. At nights she would cruise the colonia, where she earned her own money. She quickly became adept at figures but never learned to read or write. She established her headquarters on calle San Simón and began bribing officials in the Office of Narcotics and the higher-ranking police. At Lent she always bought a truckload of fish to distribute to the people of her neighborhood, La Merced, where they loved and respected her. Each year she took some of them on a pilgrimage to the Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos, all expenses paid.

  Hers was a risky profession and she spent seven terms in jail. In 1945 she was arrested and transported to las Islas Marías, making it impossible to visit her. Using her connections she was able to build a hotel and a landing strip suitable for small planes on the islands so that her two daughters could visit, but soon managed to get herself relocated to Lecumberri in Mexico City and was set free. Her drugs were hidden in religious paper medals, plastic yo-yos, and other ingenious places, and distributed by a team of salesmen to locations like her husband’s auto repair shop. She never took drugs herself; it was María who gave Burroughs the line, “dealing is more of a habit than using.”11 When Burroughs was in Mexico City she ruled the drug scene. She had spies in many of the police stations feeding her information, and all the top court officials and police were on her books.12

  Burroughs never met her, always scoring through Tesorero. He wrote, “I had been off junk three months at this time. It took me just three days to get back on.”13 Joan was horrified. It may be that they had a deal where she would get off Benzedrine in Mexico and Burroughs would get off junk; she had gone through a painful withdrawal and now he was using again.

  Buying junk through María was more expensive than it was in the United States. Her papers cost fifteen pesos each—about two dollars—and they were half the strength of a two-dollar wrap in New York. Bill needed two papers to fix and four to get really high. Bill and Dave tried getting scripts, but doctors were only allowed to prescribe two and a half grains maximum each time, but that was cheaper than María so they made the rounds of doctors. They found several who would write scripts for five pesos, but it was a problem to get them filled. Sometimes the pharmacist would give them distilled water, and sometimes, if they were out of stock of morphine, they would use anything that came to hand. “Could have killed myself trying to shoot this crap,” Burroughs wrote.14 Then one of the doctors suggested that Dave apply for a government permit. This entitled the bearer to a fixed quantity of morphine each month at wholesale prices. For one hundred pesos the doctor said he would put in an application. Bill gave him the money. To their astonishment, in fifteen days they had a government permit to buy fifteen grams of morphine every month, at about two dollars a gram. Burroughs wrote, “Like a junkie’s dream. I had never seen so much morphine before at once.” Bill put up the money and he and Dave split it. Seven grams a month allowed Bill about three grains a day, more than he had ever had in the States, and all for thirty dollars a month.

  Now that they had a regular supply of junk, they began getting prescriptions for cocaine, but they were even harder to fill. There is no medicinal use for cocaine except as administered by a doctor and a lot of pharmacists threw them back at him. “No prestamos servicio a los viciosos!” It was a yellow prescription, like a dishonorable discharge from the army. They used coke to make speedballs, a mixture of cocaine and heroin. Burroughs remembered, “Of course your veins wear out. Dave was very good at hitting a vein, he could find a vein in a mummy. Sometimes I couldn’t. Your veins retreat and you can’t hit ’em.”15 He and Dave became friends, or at least comrades. When Tesorero got fifteen days in jail for vagrancy, Bill visited him there, knowing he would be junk-sick. Dave hadn’t taken a shot in seventy-two hours and was in bad shape. Bill gave him an orange that had been injected with morphine and
also managed to transfer a piece of opium to him that he had smuggled into jail under his tongue, wrapped in cellophane.

  Bill decided to accompany Dave on his annual visit to Our Lady of Chalma, the saint of thieves and drug addicts. The small pilgrimage town of Chalma is about a hundred kilometers from Mexico City, a few kilometers from the Malinalco ruins. It was a pre-Columbian pilgrimage site where Indians worshipped their gods in a cave. It was no surprise then that an image of the Virgin Mary appeared in the cave in 1539, two years after the Augustinian fathers arrived. It became so popular that in 1550 a chapel was built and the image was moved to it. It attracted huge crowds on Sundays and religious holidays. It took Bill and Dave two days to get there, partly on foot. Naturally, with a target clientele, Dave took along twenty bags of morphine to sell. All along the track there were beggars slithering along on boards, holding out their withered hands for alms. Bill enjoyed himself immensely.

  It appears that his latest addiction was a tipping point for Joan. In Junky he wrote:

  When my wife saw I was getting the habit again, she did something she had never done before. I was cooking up a shot two days after I’d connected with Old Ike. My wife grabbed the spoon and threw the junk on the floor. I slapped her twice across the face and she threw herself on the bed, sobbing, then turned around and said to me: “Don’t you want to do anything at all? You know how bored you get when you have a habit. It’s like all the lights went out. Oh well, do what you want. I guess you have some stashed anyway.”

  I did have some stashed.16

  That summer, the On the Road gang turned up again. Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, and Frank Jeffries crossed into Mexico at Laredo driving a clapped-out 1937 Ford sedan. Neal wanted to get a quick Mexican divorce and Jack was keen to visit Bill and Joan. They arrived in Mexico City on June 24, 1950, and celebrated with a wild night on the town, but Jack immediately came down with dysentery and a fever that confined him to bed for several days. By this time Bill and Joan were living at Cerrada de Medellín 37,17 a third-floor flat at the rear of a run-down white apartment building in a small dead-end passage in Colonia Roma, behind the Sears Roebuck building. Jack and Neal rented a cheap two-bedroom apartment next door in the same building, but as soon as Neal got his divorce he shot off to New York to marry for the third time. Jack gave up the room and moved in with Bill and Joan for two months, drinking and smoking pot alone in his room every day, trying to revise his first draft of On the Road and writing nothing new. He was depressed because his first novel, The Town and the City, had received a lukewarm reception; poor sales left one-third of the first printing unbound. After working four years on the book he had naively expected to be welcomed into the literary community, but little had happened except that a few editors had tried to seduce him. He had never before indulged in so much pot and also began to experiment with morphine with Burroughs. Bill spent so much time taking drugs with Kerouac that his coursework suffered and he was forced to temporarily withdraw from MCC. After Kerouac left in October to stay with his mother, Bill, who would not normally attempt to influence the behavior of his friends, wrote him a tactful letter suggesting that he cut down on the pot and morphine, saying, “You are a young healthy man with no habits, and I can not understand why you are not more active.”18

  That August Lucien Carr and his girlfriend, Liz Lehrman, came for a brief visit. While they were there, Lucien witnessed Bill and Joan playing their telepathy game. They would sit in opposite corners of the room, each take a pencil, and draw a square divided into nine equal-sized squares on a piece of paper, and in each of the squares they would draw nine images, to be compared at the end. According to Lucien the results were astonishing, with more than half of the images the same. Lucien thought that there existed a very special and profound level of communication between them, caused by the power that Joan had over Bill. Joan was the sender and Bill the receiver.19

  Lucien loved to hear Bill recount his experiences with Huncke and Phil White and suggested that the stories would make a very commercial book. They discussed the idea, and as soon as Lucien and Liz left, Bill set to work. Bill employed a young woman named Alice Hartman to type his manuscript. She was enrolled in the Writing Center at MCC and had married Jack and Neal’s friend Frank Jeffries. The manuscript was written by hand, but Bill complained that she insisted on making editorial changes. Every time he wrote “junk” she would change it to “opiates,” and according to Hal Chase, Bill would whine, “But I want to use the word ‘junk,’ I don’t want to call it ‘opiates.’ ” Burroughs worked diligently so that by January 1, 1951, he was able to tell Allen that he had sent the completed manuscript to Lucien and asked him to try and sell it to a New York publisher for a $1,000 advance. “Very likely it won’t sell at all. But you never know.”20 He had been writing Junk—as the book was then called—largely for money because, as he told Allen, “Of course, being responsible not only for myself, but also for Joan and the children, I have an absolute duty to place their welfare high on the priority list.”21 He had also to pay for his junk and cocaine. Burroughs on junk was very boring to be around, and not long after Lucien and Liz returned to the States, Joan went to Cuernavaca and filed for divorce. She’d had enough. They owned joint property and were technically man and wife in a common-law marriage.

  3. The Mexican Dream Unravels

  Burroughs had by now begun to encounter Mexican bureaucracy and corruption. Foreigners were not permitted to own land in Mexico, which meant farming was out, nor were they allowed to own businesses unless one of the partners was Mexican, which ruled out the bar idea. He decided to look farther south, to Panama or Central America, telling Allen, “I prefer to settle in a country where they want Americans to come in and farm,”22 and told Jack at Christmas 1950, “It looks like I will abandon Mexico very soon.”23 In early January, Kells Elvins paid a visit. It turned out that it had been prescient of Burroughs to sell his land in Texas, because 1950 and 1951 saw the worst freezes in the Valley for fifty years, decimating Kells’s citrus groves and almost putting him out of business. He had always told Burroughs, “I want to make a lot of money. I think that’s a good solid clean thing to do.” He had sold his land and, using the tips given him by Clint Murchison, invested wisely in oil enough to provide himself with an income of more than six hundred dollars a month. He arrived with his new wife, Marianne, who took an instant dislike to Burroughs, and Burroughs to her. The couple rented a new apartment on the boulevard Ávila Camacho out on the road to Guadalajara near the golf course. Some years earlier Elvins had been in Cuernavaca studying with Erich Fromm; he had some Spanish and now wanted to continue his studies. He enrolled in Fromm’s psychology course at the medical school of UNAM, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

  In addition to writing for money, Bill was still toying with the idea of drug dealing again, telling Allen he had bought a quantity of opium at forty dollars a pound that he expected to have off his hands in a matter of days. He had sold the land in Texas, but was unable to move on farther south to buy land because the buyer was unable to pay him all at once. He told Allen that he was not intending to leave Mexico until he had enough capital to buy a ranch, and until he had kicked his habit. His fantasies about how life was going to be in Central America knew no bounds. “You live like a king on a ranch while you are making the $. Hunting and fishing and a hacienda full of servants for about nothing a year in expenses.”24

  Perhaps in an effort to reconcile his relationship with Joan and hold together his family, Burroughs made a superhuman effort to get off junk in the new year. He used the reduction method, and managed to kick junk in two months. By the end of February 1951 he was clean. It was made more difficult because he was kicking on the street, where junk was readily available at any time, tempting him to get back on. He joked to Allen, “Doctors came to the house and waved their prescription pads under my nose. People were pushing junk through the transom and shelling it under the door. Now I am completely off, I couldn’t get back o
n the junk even if I wanted to. […] If you kick of your own choice you can’t go back.”25 Strong, confident words that were true at the time. He was, of course, still smoking opium twice a week, but in Burroughs’s view, “You can hit the pipe that often with no risk of habit.”26

  During the course of the cure he was drunk for a month, lost two guns to the law, and almost died from uremic poisoning. The incident with the guns could have resulted in his getting shot had it occurred in the United States. He was drunk at the Ku Ku bar on the corner of Coahuila and Insurgentes, got into an argument with a fellow drinker, and pulled a gun on him. A policeman standing next to him grabbed his arm and Burroughs turned and pushed the gun into his stomach. “I was flabbergasted by this insolence and asked him what he was putting his two cents in for.”27 Fortunately the bartender reached across the bar and twisted Bill’s arm, with the gun, across the counter. Burroughs wrote in Junky, “The cop stolidly hauled out his battered .45 automatic, placing it firmly against my body. I could feel the coldness of the muzzle through my thin cotton shirt. […] I relaxed my hold on the gun and felt it leave my hand. I half-raised my hands, palm out in a gesture of surrender.”28 The bartender took the gun and commented, “Esta cargado”—“It’s loaded.” The cop took Bill by the arm and told him, “Vámonos, señor,” and walked him to the bus stop. The cop kept the gun.29 On another occasion a cop took his gun away, unloaded it, and gave it back to him.