by Barry Miles
[Lee] could see that Allerton was a little excited.
Allerton said, “Maybe it would be better now. You know I like to sleep alone.”
“Yes, I know. Too bad. If I had my way we’d sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.”
Lee was taking off his clothes. He lay down beside Allerton. “Wouldn’t it be booful if we should juth run together into one gweat big blob?” he said in baby talk. “Am I giving you the horrors?”
“Indeed you are.”
[After having sex, Lee to Allerton:]
“But you do enjoy it sometimes? The whole deal, I mean?”
“Oh, yes.”44
Burroughs and Marker continued their trip along the coast, first to Playas, which they hated, then to Salinas, which was more to their taste, being more upmarket with better food. They spent most of their days relaxing on the beach; the sea, however, was too cold to swim: the Humboldt current cools the water in the summer months. Burroughs returned to Quito for five days to gather information on yagé. He found that the Indians also called it ayahuasca, and that its scientific name was Banisteriopsis caapi. It was a vine that grew in the high jungle on the Amazon side of the Andes. They had to go to the center of the country to Puyo, on the Puyo River, a tributary of the Pastaza River, which itself eventually leads to the Amazon.
This was a proper jungle expedition. First they took a riverboat from Guayaquil up the Guayas River, then the Daule River to Babahoyo. On deck they lay in their hammocks watching the jungle slide by. Palms leaned out over the water beneath huge canopy trees often over two hundred feet high, kapok, gum, fig, and capironas, draped with lianas and vines. They passed clear tumbling mountain streams and the occasional clearing in the thick jungle with raised bamboo and straw huts. Babahoyo was only three years old, having been founded by legislative decree in September 1948. Previously it had been on the opposite side of the river.
From Babahoyo they took a fourteen-hour bus ride in a converted flatbed truck, up over the Andes to San Juan de Ambato. At the pass, high above the tree line, the bus stopped for a snack of chickpeas and brandy. They passed the 20,700-foot peak of Mount Chimborazo in the cold moonlight and pulled their blankets tighter around them. The high mountain wind cut through their clothes. Ambato, on the banks of the Ambato River, surrounded by high mountains, was still recovering from the huge earthquake of August 1949, which had almost completely leveled the cathedral and the town.
The road from Ambato to Puyo wound along the edge of a thousand-foot gorge. It was wild jungle country with waterfalls and streams washing over the roadbed from the cliffs above. Several times the driver stopped to push aside large fallen stones blocking the road. They passed the abandoned buildings of Shell Oil, which spent $20 million in two years there but found no oil and pulled out. It was late at night when they arrived in Puyo. They found a room in a decrepit hotel near the general store and fell asleep at once, too exhausted to speak.
The name Puyo means “cloudy” in the local Kichwa language. Puyo is often overcast and there is heavy rain every day. The hotel was damp and cold and the houses across the street from the hotel were blurred by torrential rain splashing up from the cobblestones. Burroughs met a Dutch farmer who told him there was an American botanist named Dr. Fuller living in the jungle a few hours from Puyo. Bill packed supplies to visit the man: a small frying pan, tea and flour packed in cans and sealed with tape, two quarts of Puro alcohol, his .22 automatic, and some cartridges wrapped in oiled silk. Next morning they set off, Bill carrying the supplies in a rubberized sack, Marker wielding a new machete from the market.
The trail through the jungle was laid with wood, but covered with a film of mud that made walking treacherous. They cut walking canes to help them. High jungle and hardwood forests impinged from both sides, with very little undergrowth. Rivers, streams, and springs of cold clear water ran everywhere. Each time they encountered a house they asked the way, and were always told “about three hours.” They walked all day and it was dark when they surprised Dr. Fuller in his house. Bill explained he was interested in medicinal drugs, and tried to draw Dr. Fuller out, but the doctor was suspicious and clearly did not like this unexpected intrusion.
Bill produced his gifts and they all had a drink. The doctor’s wife, a large, powerful red-haired woman, made some cinnamon tea to cut the kerosene taste of the pure alcohol. Bill got drunk on three drinks and began talking hipster, junkie slang, which made the doctor even more suspicious. The doctor gave them a cot on the porch made from bamboo slats and rigged up a mosquito net against vampire bats. When Bill attempted to snuggle up to Marker he pushed Bill’s arm away, saying, “Slack off will you, and go to sleep.” Burroughs wrote in Queer, “Lee drew his arm back. His whole body contracted with the shock. Slowly he put his hand under his cheek. He felt a deep hurt, as though he were bleeding inside. Tears ran down his face.”45 That night Bill dreamed that he was standing in front of the Bounty and heard someone crying. He saw his son, Billy, and knelt down and took the child in his arms. The sound of crying came closer and he felt a wave of sadness. He began crying and pulled little Billy close to his chest. A group of people dressed in convict suits stood watching him. He awoke still feeling a deep sadness. Was Burroughs feeling guilt for abandoning his wife and children for Marker? It was not Billy Jr. who was crying; possibly it was Joan. The dream was memorable enough to go into Queer.46
Fuller kept two small monkeys and a two-toed sloth. The house was guarded by a five-foot viper. He was attempting to extract curare from the poison that the Indians used to tip their arrows and use it as a muscle relaxant. He told Burroughs a lot of jungle lore: about the yellow catfish with extremely poisonous spines and how the area was so deficient in calcium that people lost their teeth, their bones were brittle, and chickens were unable to make shells to lay eggs. Both Fuller and his wife were toothless. Burroughs listened, his antenna out. All these details, along with the jungle settings, appeared in later books. Fuller was civil but ultimately unhelpful about ayahuasca. After three days, it was apparent they could get no more from Fuller and they had overstayed what slight welcome they had received. The visit had not produced any yagé, but it had brought home to Burroughs the futility of his pursuit of Marker. Nonetheless, he kept trying. They had been away for two months; now they returned quickly to Mexico City, arriving at the beginning of September 1951.
While Burroughs sought yagé, Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr, accompanied by Lucien’s dog, Pasky, made a surprise visit to Mexico City. Lucien had wanted to attend the wedding of a friend from UPI. Kerouac had pulled out at the last minute, so Lucien simply drove around to where Allen was living and told him, “Al, it’s time to take a couple of weeks off and go to Mexico.” Allen said, “Fine, I’ll have to pick up a sweater.” Allen didn’t drive, so it was down to Lucien, fueled by alcohol, to get them there. They only stopped to sleep in the car and grab quick meals. The top of the Chevrolet’s thermometer blew off as they drove through a Texas heat wave. They were disappointed to find that Bill was not there, but gathered up Joan and took her to the wedding. Lucien remembered, “Joan and I immediately paired off in a sort of protracted drinking contest, or whatever.”47 Lucien drove the bride and groom to the airport and was so drunk he got out on the tarmac and tried to direct the plane in with his arms. This naturally attracted the attention of the police, who followed him to his car. He bumped a few parked cars trying to leave and was arrested. He might have got off as a gringo had not one of the party, a Mexican general’s daughter, started telling the cops how important she was and what would happen to them. The cops were not impressed. Lucien quickly gave all his money, driver’s license, and papers to Allen before he was whisked off to the cells to spend the night. Sure enough, his drunken Indian cellmate went through all his pockets in the middle of the night as Lucien pretended to sleep.
Joan wanted to go to Guadalajara because she had a pot contact there she wanted to see. Lucien’s driving appears to have been as reckl
ess as Neal Cassady’s. “We were so drunk, Joan and I, we were driving these mountain roads. I was much too drunk to drive and so was she but she could at least steer. She had this polio-shriveled leg so that she couldn’t work both the gas pedal and the brake, so I was lying on the floor of the front seat pushing down on the gas pedal and she had her one good leg on the brake and we would scream round the corners.” They were drinking ginebra out of the bottle. Joan was yelling, “How fast can this heap go?” while in the backseat Allen cowered on the floor with Billy and Julie, absolutely terrified.
They came to a river where the bridge was washed out. It was night, but fortunately somebody had put a bush in the road; otherwise they would have driven into the water. They managed to find a Mexican to help them push the car back on the road. Lucien remembered, “Allen took his pants off and got out to push. And suddenly, out of nowhere, appeared a lot of Mexicans to help push, and as they were helping to push, they stole Allen’s pants, along with all his money and whatever he had in there.”48
They eventually reached Guadalajara and Joan met her connection. On the way back they decided to visit Paricutín, the new volcano in Uruapan that had lowered the level of Lake Taluca by twelve feet. Paricutín came up in a farmer’s cornfield in 1943, and within a week was eight hundred feet high and had buried the land and homes of fifteen thousand people in fire and ash and lava. By the time Joan and party were there only the tops of the church spires could be seen. Lucien and Joan fortified themselves with more ginebra and drove out onto the lava field at night. “I can remember the car falling into crevices, and having to get it out with the jack and Joan saying, ‘Go on! Go on! Let’s get to the volcano,’ ”49 Lucien remembered. Finally they got within a mile of the eruption, but molten lava and rocks landing all around them and hitting the car roof forced them to turn back.
Lucien was very fond of Joan; in fact it seems very likely that they spent the night together while in the hotel in Guadalajara. Lucien said, “Joan and I were close, and as a matter of fact, we were so close that little Willie at one point bit me in the leg for paying too much attention to his mother. Little Willie didn’t like it.
“I remember how sad Joan was when we left because there she was, stuck in Mexico, not much money and a hell of a liquor habit, two kids to keep an eye on and Bill off in South America. And we were driving away and leaving her […] she really was the most mournful, sad-looking woman that I’ve ever seen. I was really of half a mind not to leave. But unfortunately I’d gotten engaged before I left, so I had to go back.”50 Lucien clearly had regrets about leaving her. “There was something, in a wistful way, there was something tremendously compelling about Joan. She was very very bright and very exciting and very much in command of the various tight situations she got into. She was sort of in command of everything but herself, you know. She was quite a woman.”51
Ginsberg said they were so moved by her state that they invited her to return to New York with them, but she declined. Burroughs had been away for two months and she was expecting him back in a few days. Hal Chase reported to Ted Morgan that he met her in the street around this time and was shocked at her deterioration. He said that he put his arms around her because she looked so awful. He said she had lost some of her hair and carried herself a little awkwardly, swinging one arm more than the other. She said that she had an incurable blood disease. She had open running sores, and told Chase she knew she was dying. “I’m not going to make it,” she said. It should be noted that Burroughs disputed many of Chase’s recollections to Morgan and this may also be exaggerated.
Chapter Eighteen
She was an extraordinary person, one of the more perceptive and intelligent people I’ve known.1
1. The Low Shot
Burroughs returned to Mexico City deeply depressed at the failure of his attempt to gain Marker’s love. Joan, we assume, did not let his two-month jaunt go by without suitably scathing comment, so we can assume a certain amount of rancor between them; she knew just how to prick his ego. In addition, the weather was terrible; it was pouring with rain, the aftermath of Hurricane Dog, which had already inundated large parts of the city in the famous “Flood of ’51.” The neighborhood just south of Bill and Joan’s apartment, the Colonia Roma Sur, was under a meter of water and five thousand workers were trying to clear the flooding in the old part of the city. There was an angry sky, with fierce gusts of wind and intermittent squalls of rain.2
Marker was living at 122 Monterrey, above the Bounty bar. John Healy and Luis Carpio, co-owners of the Bounty, together with an American couple, Glenn and Betty Jones, lived in apartment 10 on the third floor, a six-room apartment on the northwest side of the building. Marker’s childhood friend from Jacksonville, Edwin John “Eddie” Woods, who had arrived in Mexico City in mid-August, was also living there. Betty Jones appears in Queer as “Mary” and was the cause of much jealousy on the part of Burroughs, who could see that Marker was very attracted to her; in the book they spend a lot of time playing chess together and were possibly having an affair. She was thirty-five in 1951 and reportedly she and Glenn had something of an open marriage. Bill’s jealousy was more in the form of frustration; he had nothing against Betty herself, whom he liked, describing her as a “good-looking young woman. She was stacked and she was sexy-looking, she was a blonde. She had a long affair with Marker. She was a nice woman, I liked her, she was easy to get along with.”3
Healy’s room had a bed at one end and a living room and dining room at the other with a sofa, armchairs, and tables used by all the residents, divided by two wall partitions that jutted several feet into the room on either side. Joan liked Healy and would often join him at the Bounty. Healy explained, “I used to drink with her a lot, she would come over for a drinking partner. She didn’t like to drink alone. […] She was an alcoholic. When she came in, she would give me the high-sign and I would sit down and talk to her, and she liked that. She was as smart as a whip, she was no dummy, but she was just wearing out, she didn’t look healthy at all. […] She used to put [Bill] down.”4
The story is that Bill had arranged to meet Bob Addison in Healy’s apartment on the evening of Thursday, September 6, 1951. According to Eddie Woods, Marker had told him that Burroughs was short of cash and wanted to sell some guns to someone, but didn’t want to do it at his place. He wanted Marker and Eddie to be there in case there was a problem; he also didn’t want the man to know where he lived. Woods, who had only been living in the apartment for about three weeks, didn’t feel he could object. But Bob Addison was a friend, who lived in the building and presumably knew perfectly well where Burroughs lived. Burroughs, however, used this story of wanting to sell the gun himself in later interviews. Also, he could not possibly have squandered all the money from the sale of the Texas land on two months’ traveling in Ecuador with Marker. They had stayed in cheap hotels and traveled largely by bus. In fact Burroughs said that he was able to pay his lawyer several thousand dollars from the money he had from the land sale. Marker, with his background in military intelligence, may have been trying to impress his friend by building Burroughs up as a mysterious, sinister character.
Joan arrived at the Bounty before Burroughs, at either 1:00 p.m. or 3:00 p.m.—eyewitness reports differ. She ordered a ginebra, the cheap gin, and limonada, a carbonated limeade, which she took upstairs to Healy’s apartment. Marker and Betty Jones were already there with Eddie Woods.
At about three o’clock in the afternoon, three days after he got back from Ecuador, Burroughs heard the familiar whistle of the knife sharpener in the street: a simple glissando up and down the scale on an Andean pan pipe. He took a clasp knife that he had bought in Quito and took it to be sharpened. He was depressed, a feeling of loss and sadness, and had a sense that that day something awful was going to happen, so much so that he could hardly breathe. As he walked toward the knife sharpener’s cart he felt a dampness and, brushing his hand across his face, felt tears streaming down his cheeks. He thought, “What in hell is
the matter? What in hell is wrong with you?”5 Burroughs, interviewed for Howard Brookner’s 1980 documentary, said:
You see, I’ve always felt myself to be controlled at some times by this completely malevolent force, which Brion [Gysin] describes as the Ugly Spirit. My walking down the street, and tears streaming down my face, meant that I knew that the Ugly Spirit—which is always the worst part of everyone’s character—would take over, and that something awful would happen. […] I went back to the apartment where we were all meeting, with this terrible sense of depression. And foolishly, of course, in order to relieve the depression, I started tossing down the drinks.
Then I said to Joan, “It’s about time for our William Tell act.” And she put a glass on her head.
I had this piece of .380 junk. I fired the shot. The glass hadn’t been touched. Joan starts sliding down towards the floor. Then Marker said—[he] walked over and took one look at her—he said, “Bill, your bullet has hit her forehead.”
I said, “Oh my God…”6
Burroughs had arrived at Healy’s about twenty minutes after Joan, after leaving off his knife. He had with him a Czech-made Star .380 automatic in a holster in a small overnight bag. It was a cheap gun and he knew that it fired low. Healy was not present; he had presumably gone downstairs to work at the bar. Marker and Eddie Woods were there—though there is some dispute over whether or not Betty Jones was also there. Eddie Woods’s recollection is that Joan’s drink was the only drink he saw all afternoon, but the likelihood of either Joan or Burroughs socializing for four or five hours straight without a drink is extremely remote. Also, we have Burroughs’s consistent recollection that he began throwing back drinks immediately after he felt the tears on his face, so we can assume that he was very drunk by the early evening. For her part, Joan was a maintenance drinker; she took small sips regularly, and got through between one and two bottles of tequila or gin a day. By 7:15 in the evening she would have been drinking for twelve hours straight. Bob Addison and his seventeen-year-old Mexican girlfriend stopped by briefly early on but he did not buy the gun, if the sale was ever even mooted. Addison’s friends discount the idea, saying he was always broke.
