Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  By mid-April he had stabilized on a three-cocktail-a-day schedule. Joan, who had seen it all before, appears not to have been particularly sympathetic. Hal Chase, the Wolfean roommate from 115th Street days, who was now living in Mexico City studying the Zapotecan language at MCC, told Ted Morgan, “Joan was such a castrator. Bill was constantly being disarmed. The Mexicans were armed, and he went to Mexican bars and got into arguments with these políticos with great pistoles and cartridge belts, and in the course of these altercations he would get his gun taken from him. And Joan would say, ‘So they took your gun away from you, did they?’ […] She loved to see Bill get embarrassed. Bill had to posture before the whole world, but he didn’t have to in front of her.”30 Although Joan had abandoned her divorce petition, she clearly no longer had the worshipful attitude toward Burroughs that she began with. Joan was twenty-six, a bout of untreated polio in Algiers had left her limping and using a cane, and she was an alcoholic. She did her best with the children, and had decided to give the relationship another chance, though Burroughs as a permanent drunk was almost as bad as Burroughs the junkie. He gives a very disparaging description of himself in Junky that is probably very accurate:

  I had deteriorated shockingly. My clothes were spotted and stiff from the drinks I had spilled all over myself. I never bathed. I had lost weight, my hands shook, I was always spilling things, knocking over chairs, and falling down. But I seemed to have unlimited energy and a capacity for liquor I never had before.31

  Burroughs writes about this entire period in Junky with remarkable candor; he is unsparing in his recounting of embarrassing scenes and reveals surprisingly intimate details about his life that are often overlooked because of the book’s superficially hard-boiled style: “My emotions spilled out everywhere. I was uncontrollably sociable and would talk to anybody I could pin down. I forced distastefully intimate confidences on perfect strangers. Several times I made the crudest sexual propositions to people who had given no hint of reciprocity.” Kells Elvins grew concerned for his well-being, and there is a scene in Junky where Elvins—called “Rollins” in the book—remonstrates with him for his behavior: “You’re going to get your head blown off carrying that gun. […] Everyone is fed up with the way you’ve been acting lately. If there’s one thing I don’t want to be around, and I think no one else particularly wants to be around, it’s a drunk with a gun.”

  Bill’s favorite bar at that time was the Bounty at Monterrey 122 at the northeast corner of Chihuahua, which had opened that February 1950, just five blocks from his apartment. It is known as the Ship Ahoy in both Junky and Queer. It was in a five-floor building largely inhabited by gringos studying at Mexico City College or who worked in the city. Clientele included American and Mexican students from the School of Plastic Arts and the medical school, but it was basically a gringo college hangout. The decor was nautical, with a mural featuring odd-looking fish running around the walls and chair backs spoked like the wheel of a ship that poked you in the back if you leaned back to relax. There were colored lights strung around the walls and over the bar. Bill and Joan quickly adopted the Bounty as their own. They would arrive just after five o’clock in the afternoon and take seats near the door so that they could watch Julie and Billy play in the street. Bill would drink vodka or tequila, and Joan was already far gone on tequila. If they didn’t finish a bottle of tequila, they would put their name on it for the next day. But while Bill was drinking his way through the cure, this never happened.

  The Bounty was owned by three Americans, Luis Carpio, John Healy, and Marvin Apt. Luis was born in Mexico, which enabled the U.S. citizens’ ownership, but he had been brought up in North America. Burroughs got on well with him. Marvin Apt was a Jew from Miami who had come in with Healy as a business venture. John Healy lived above the bar in apartment 10 and had at one time been the lover of Juanita Peñaloza, the manager of the building. He was Irish American, “a good Irish drunk” according to Burroughs, who had worked all over the States and had been in the air force without achieving much. One day in Minneapolis he went to the bus station and asked how far south he could get on the money he had. He was told “Mexico City.” Once there he met the former Chinese consul to Mexico, who invited him to run a restaurant called the Good Ship Bounty. The Chinese businessman left the picture somehow, and other partners appeared. Bill regarded Healy as a “Johnson” and they became good friends.

  The Bounty and the apartments above were like a stage set, the kind of bar that Bill loved, with people wandering in and out, having dinner in each other’s rooms with whoever happened to be there. The Beat Hotel in Paris, the Empress in London, and the Café Central in Tangier that all featured in Bill’s later life were just such places. Among the regulars at the Bounty was Eddie Woods, a thin young crew-cutted blond American who was at MCC. Bill saw him at the Bounty almost every day and often at Juanita’s, a nearby hole-in-the wall beer joint that people used in the daytime. Another regular Bill saw there was Bill Dobson, an ex–army officer on a disability pension; one arm was practically incapacitated. He was an ex-Mormon, completely irreligious at this time, and could be a difficult drunk. “Dobson was a very ambivalent person. At a certain stage of drinking he would become very insulting. He pulled it on everybody. Not a fight, just verbal abuse. I didn’t respond.”32 Burroughs was not the only drinker in the Bounty who was armed. Arnold Copland carried a .25 automatic in his belt and was always starting trouble with Mexicans, staring at them, trying to provoke them. Bill enjoyed his company. “He always had these recurrent things he said, ‘We will die like dogs! I tell you we will all die like dogs!’ and his marvelous imitation of the Mexicans looking up at the heart being cut out: ‘You know when the heart is cut out, the rising sun says it’s still, uuuughhh!!!’ He did this horrible impersonation. Oh man, he was something.”33

  Bill’s friends were amused by his obsession with guns, which was seen as a macho attempt to counter any effeminacy he felt might be associated with his homosexuality. One time John Healy was organizing a farewell party for Marvin Apt, who had decided to return to Miami, and met Burroughs in the street. Healy and Apt invited him to the party but asked him not to bring any weapons. “Not even a little one?” Burroughs asked. At the party the next day Healy noticed that Burroughs was still wearing a small automatic pistol under his belt. Sometimes they encouraged him as a joke. The busboy at the Bounty had caught a mouse. He tied a string to the mouse’s tail and held it out at arm’s length against the wall. Bill pulled his .22 and shot it, blowing its head off.34

  During the month he was drunk all the time he propositioned Hal Chase. Chase turned him down, loudly and in front of a witness. Burroughs told Kerouac, “Hal Chase is down in Salina Cruz allegedly building a boat that is going to have golden sails to match his hair. Enough to make a man spew. So far as I am concerned the sooner he sails off into the sunset the better, from which you may conclude that I don’t like him no more.”35 Burroughs excused his behavior to Allen, saying that he was both drunk and junk-sick and adding, “After all, how could anyone expect me to act any way but crummy, me having all these traumas and complexes? Well, drunk or sober I acted like a fool.”36 Ginsberg was delighted by these revelations, and others in this important letter, commenting to Neal Cassady, “Heaven, heaven, things I’ve been waiting and wondering about for years.”37 Burroughs continued to write, carrying on from Junky into Queer and now dealing with Ginsberg, who had taken over from Lucien Carr as his agent.

  As a result of allowing Huncke to use his apartment to store stolen goods, and then getting busted, Ginsberg, in a deal brokered by Columbia University, had inadvertently found himself in the Columbia Psychiatric Institute instead of facing a possible jail term. He shared with Burroughs his lengthy discussions with the psychiatric staff about his sexuality, resulting in a long exchange of views. Unfortunately, up until the seventies Burroughs threw away his correspondence, so we only have his side of it. A letter from May 1951 discusses Burroughs’s attitudes to homose
xuality and his relationship with Joan in some detail:

  I have been laying women for the past 15 years and haven’t heard any complaints from the women either.*1 What does that prove except I was hard up at the time? Laying a woman, so far as I am concerned, is O.K. if I can’t score for a boy. But laying one woman or a thousand merely emphasizes the fact that a woman is not what I want. Better than nothing, of course, like a tortilla is better than no food. But no matter how many tortillas I eat, I still want a steak.*238

  Footnotes were added by Joan, who commented:

  *1—Correct!

  *2—Around the 20th of the month, things get a bit tight and he lives on tortillas.

  Bill’s conviction that Mexicans believed in minding their own business was overturned when Bill and Joan’s neighbors complained to the police about Bill’s drug taking, their late-night drinking, and their loud parties. An arrangement was made and Bill had to bribe the immigration inspector two hundred dollars because his papers were suddenly not in order. He looked for somewhere else to live. John Healy suggested he speak to Juanita Peñaloza Gonzalez, the manager of the building where the Bounty was located, who lived with her niece Eva in one of the apartments above the bar. She was single, a mestiza (Mexican-Spanish) about forty years old. She had been Trotsky’s maid and had worked in Europe for five years, where she learned English, French, and Italian. On returning to Mexico she used her savings to lease entire apartment blocks, which she sublet as furnished apartments. She was short, single, and good-natured, always willing to help people. Burroughs calls her “Jerri” in Queer. In addition to the block housing the Bounty, she also leased a courtyard apartment block two blocks from the Bounty at 210 Orizaba. Juanita offered Burroughs a place there. In June 1951 they moved in.

  Apartment 8 was in a little courtyard. Julie and Billy spent the day playing with the local children, all running barefoot around the flat roof, which was fenced in by a wire cage. Doña Marina Sotelo, who lived on the top floor, said, “They passed the whole day sleeping, and all the nights they drank—they slept all day—the children […] spent the whole day playing here on the rooftop terrace, but they didn’t go downstairs.” They ran around in little pajamas, around the roof, up and down the stairs. “Who gives them breakfast? Who gives them anything?” she asked. “And for the most part, they ate up here, because those others were hungover from their sprees that they did every night, and the children more or less lived up here.”39 Joan paid Sotelo and the other women in the building to do her laundry—she never did it herself—and it is assumed she must have paid her neighbors for Billy’s and Julie’s food. Both Joan and Julie had learned Spanish very rapidly, so they could communicate with the neighbors; Burroughs just got by. When Bill and Joan went out, they left the children in the charge of the lady porter. We get the occasional glimpse of Burroughs’s family life and his concern for the children. For instance in My Education he wrote, “The quake in Mexico City: I am on the bed with Billy beside me and I notice the light shade on a cord from the ceiling is shaking and I think one more quake and I’d better take Billy out to the Sears Roebuck parking lot half a block away.”40

  Burroughs’s money from the Texas land sale came through in June 1951, finally giving him the cash needed to buy a farm. But his first move was not to explore the agricultural possibilities of Panama, but to go in search of yagé (“ya-hay”), a hallucinogenic vine used by the local Indians, with his new paramour, Lewis Marker. Throughout his life, his modus operandi when receiving a cash injection was to go on a trip with a boy.

  Lewis Adelberg Marker, called “Eugene Allerton”41 in Queer, was from a “good” family in Jacksonville, Florida. He was twenty-one when he met Burroughs, who was then thirty-seven. Marker was studying, in a dissolute way, at MCC on the GI Bill, having left military counterintelligence in postwar Germany with a pension. Most people did not find him attractive, but Burroughs did. He described him to Ted Morgan as having “a slim youthful look, actually the sort of helpless look of a baby bird about him, this innocent slightly surprised look. His eyebrows were like pencil lines and black whereas his hair was almost blond. His eyes were almost brown, thin nose, small face. He was six feet tall and weighed about 125 pounds, but very healthy and surprisingly confident physically.”42 Marker had been given training in unarmed combat, and his friend Eddie Woods from the Bounty told Burroughs of a time when he and Marker were in Jacksonville and a barroom drunk started an argument with Woods and began getting aggressive. Marker pretended to drunkenly stumble against this man, who yelled, “Hey, get away from me, skinny!” Marker hooked his finger in the man’s belt, holding him down, and brought the heel of his hand up under his chin, dropping him to the floor. Marker then stepped on his face. Burroughs said, “He had that innocent very American look, but something really cold and fishy behind it. Very cold person, a real agent type. He was receptive to a point, he was unshockable.”43 Queer is the story, in great detail, of Burroughs’s doomed love affair with him. Burroughs regarded him as likable, loyal, interesting, and very intelligent. He was very competent, good at making arrangements, probably as a result of his Intelligence Corps training. He drank a lot but never before the late afternoon. He seemed to be adrift. According to Burroughs he didn’t have any particular talents or interests. His stated ambition was to “get rich, sleep till noon, and fuck ’em all!”

  Marker was not homosexual, so Burroughs had to seduce him with amusing stories, the promise of adventure and distractions, and financial gain. Queer is filled with routines. Some, like “Corn Hole Gus’s Used-Slave Lot,” are quite long, and presumably they are the ones he told Marker to amuse him, making a clear connection between the book and The Naked Lunch. With his Texas land-sale money, at the end of June or early in July, Burroughs was able to invite Marker to accompany him on a trip to Ecuador in search of yagé, a new interest stemming from his experiments in telepathy. Yagé was supposed to increase telepathic sensitivity. Burroughs had read—no doubt in one of the fringe-science magazines he loved—that the Russians were using yagé in experiments on slave labor to induce states of automatic obedience. Rather than research the project before leaving, Burroughs was confident that he would find a scientist in Ecuador who could point him in the right direction.

  4. In Search of Yagé

  Marker had never been enthusiastic about the sexual aspect of their relationship, but he enjoyed the company of older men and he found Bill’s exaggerated humor funny. They had made an agreement that Bill would pay all expenses in return for sex twice a week. No more. All along Burroughs knew the relationship was doomed. He described it in Queer: “Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee’s affection irritated him.” First they took a bus to Panama, where they headed for El Ganso Azul—the Blue Goose—a cabaret that Argosy magazine said was supposed to be the center of drug traffic. It naturally proved to be nothing more than a sleazy bar, and if there ever were any drugs there, they would have been long gone after a mention in a mass-market magazine like Argosy, but throughout his life Burroughs often took tabloid reports seriously, particularly if they were of a pseudoscientific nature. He remained tremendously naïve in that way.

  According to Queer they flew on to Quito, Ecuador, in a tiny plane. There Burroughs fell ill, possibly from altitude sickness: at 2,850 meters Quito is the highest capital city in the world. They shared a room there but not a bed. Quito is a town of steep narrow streets set against the high Andes and overlooked by Pichincha, an active volcano. Trash blew through the main square and lines of Indians sat against the dirty walls, wrapped tightly in blankets in the cold sunlight. From Quito they flew on to Manta, a port, where they stayed at the Hotel Continental, a rickety establishment made from rough boards and split bamboo. Bill plugged the knotholes in the wall, not wanting the neighbors to witness anything untoward. All the houses along the shore were made from split bamboo on wooden frames, elevated six feet above the ground. The streets were mud. Thousands of vultures roosted on the ro
ofs and hopped about the litter-strewn streets, pecking at offal, squawking and flapping their wings in disagreements over choice items. It was a classic Burroughs set, of the sort that recur in virtually all of his books. The sea was warm and he and Marker swam for an hour, helping to dispel Bill’s residue of junk sickness.

  From Manta they flew on to Guayaquil, on the west bank of the Guayas River estuary. The waterfront had Spanish-style buildings, built out over the sidewalks to form arcades, mostly wooden, with louvred shutters. A formal promenade, broken by statues and gardens filled with shade trees, followed part of the shoreline. Stone benches were shaded by umbrella pines and huge banana palms and the squares were filled with palms, tropical trees, shrubs, and vines. Small boats were stranded on the mud banks when the tide was out. Chimborazo volcano could be seen on a clear day. Marker had been irritated by Bill’s pressure for sex even before they reached Panama. A revealing dialogue from their time in Guayaquil gives a good indication of Marker’s ambivalence in the face of Burroughs’s pleading:

  “Oh, go away.”

  “But, Gene… I am due, you know.”

  “Yes, I suppose you are.” […]