Call Me Burroughs

by Barry Miles

  Bill and Mort had never been close as adults, and Mort clearly resented that Bill was his mother’s favorite. But the unusual nature of the situation, its gravity and otherworldliness, caused a breakdown in their usual reserve, and apparently, when Bill was released, the two brothers had an emotional, highly alcoholic rapprochement before both passing out on Mort’s bed in his hotel. Bill was staying with him temporarily, rather than go back to the empty apartment.

  Bill remained at 201 Orizaba, but Juanita Peñaloza arranged for him to move downstairs to apartment 5, in the rear on the ground floor, to escape the memories of living with Joan. However, she was clearly concerned about this gringo, and whenever she saw him she impressed upon him, “We can’t have another scandal, we can’t have another scandal.” One can only imagine Burroughs’s feelings, faced with the arduous task of sorting through Joan’s clothes and possessions and disposing of them in order to move to another apartment. Mort left for St. Louis, taking both children with him. Joan’s parents came to collect Julie from there. It was a strained, unpleasant interview. Joan’s mother told Bill’s parents, “I hope that Bill Burroughs goes to Hell and stays there.” The children never saw each other again.

  There has been much comment and speculation about Joan Vollmer Burroughs’s death, ranging from the obvious—killed by a dangerous drunk with a gun—through a jealousy angle, Burroughs’s claim of being in a state of possession by “the Ugly Spirit,” to the notion that Joan had a death wish. That she was killed by a drunk with a gun seems the most obvious explanation and the one the court accepted. As Burroughs said, “Of course I was drunk. It was an utterly and completely insane thing to do. I mean quite apart from the fact, if I’d hit the glass, it would have been terribly dangerous for the two people sitting there! Glass splinters would have been flying everywhere. So it was literally an insane thing to do.”21

  According to Burroughs, the jealousy angle was first spread by John Herrmann, Joan’s friend from Guadalajara. Joan knew both Herrmann and his wife, and for purely logistical reasons, if no other, it is unlikely that anything had occurred recently between Herrmann and Joan. The only suggestion that Joan had seen someone else was identified by James Grauerholz in a passage in The Naked Lunch; the first-draft typescript used Joan’s real name. Grauerholz said that when he asked Burroughs about it in August 1991, Burroughs had asserted, “not very convincingly,” that the scene was entirely fictional. It now reads:

  In Cuernavaca or was it Taxco? Jane meets a pimp trombone player and disappears in a cloud of tea smoke. The pimp is one of these vibration and dietary artists—which is a means [by which] he degrades the female sex by forcing his chicks to swallow all this shit. He was continually enlarging his theories… he would quiz a chick and threaten to walk out if she hadn’t memorized every nuance of his latest assault on logic and the human image.

  Joan may have had a brief fling with Lucien Carr when he and Allen Ginsberg visited, and may have told Burroughs in the course of an argument when he finally returned from Ecuador with Marker; it would have been one way to hurt Burroughs. But Burroughs had always maintained a no-jealousy rule with his boyfriends such as Ian Sommerville, and if Joan did see anyone else he could hardly blame her, and in any case, it is extremely unlikely to have provoked such a strong reaction, even unconsciously. James Grauerholz proposes that of “Joan’s possible extramarital liaisons, the only scenario that would have elicited Burroughs’ jealousy is the least likely: Joan having sex with Marker. Burroughs could demonstrably be possessive of Marker—but probably not of Joan.”22 Again, this is extremely unlikely.

  The “Ugly Spirit” idea was not mooted until Burroughs was conducting occult experiments with Brion Gysin at the Beat Hotel some years later. In his much-quoted introduction to the 1985 edition of Queer, Burroughs wrote:

  Brion Gysin said to me in Paris: “For ugly spirit shot Joan because…” A bit of mediumistic message that was not completed—or was it? It doesn’t need to be completed, if you read it: “Ugly spirit shot Joan to be cause”—that is, to maintain a hateful parasitic occupation. […] I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

  Grauerholz suggests that Burroughs might be being a little devious here and wrote, “Other commentators have taken Burroughs’ statements in the Queer introduction as a sort of ‘key’ to the writer’s oeuvre, again taking his words at face value: to redeem himself of the sin of murder, William Burroughs dedicated his life to writing. But this apologia may be just a bit disingenuous, because Burroughs had already written a nearly-complete draft of Junkie by December 1950, eight months before Joan’s death.”23

  Burroughs was aware that the Ugly Spirit would not wash with many people, that it would be seen as a way of blaming someone else, something else, for something he had done. He wrote in a late journal entry on December 2, 1996, “Tell any feminist I shot Joan in a state of possession, and she will scream: ‘Nonsense! No such thing. HE did it.’ ”24

  Though it in no way redeems Burroughs’s culpability, the idea that Joan was feeling suicidal was widely felt. Allen Ginsberg’s impression of Joan’s state, from his visit with Lucien Carr shortly before her death, was “that there was something scary about her—suicidal. […] Just as she had said to Lucien, ‘How fast can this heap go?’ I think she said to Bill, ‘shoot that off my head.’ I always thought that she had kind of challenged him into it—that it was sort of like using him to […] that she was, in a sense, using him to get her off the earth, because I think she was in a great deal of pain.”25 Ginsberg would always do his utmost to defend and excuse his friends, but his view was shared by a number of people who saw her at the time.

  Lucien Carr felt the same way: “After Joan was killed, I remember thinking that she was much more the Sender than Bill was… that the shooting was really her doing.”26

  Hal Chase, who basically disliked Burroughs and had been very close to Joan, told Ted Morgan, “She wanted to die, and she offered Bill a chance to kill somebody. That William Tell stuff was a sham. [Her] death was a put-up thing to release Bill, to let him commit ‘the ultimate crime’—he was childish about things like that. […] Joan gave her life for Bill.”

  Burroughs rejected all this: “Allen was always making it out as a suicide on her part, that she was taunting me to do this, and I do not accept that cop-out. Not at all. Not at all.”27 Burroughs said he thought of Joan every day of his life; she was a permanent presence in his life. He took full responsibility for her death: “That is to say, if everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.”28 Almost forty years later, Burroughs explored the terrible idea that there might have been an unconscious desire to kill her. In The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, an opera written by Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, and William Burroughs in 1990, Burroughs wrote, “Now a man figures it’s his bullets, so it will hit what he wants to hit. But it don’t always work out that way. You see some bullets is special for a single aim. A certain stag, or a certain person. And no matter where you aim, that’s where the bullet will end up. And in the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser’s wand, and points where the bullet wants to go.”29

  Chapter Nineteen

  And I’ll direct thee how thou shalt escape

  By sudden flight: come, dally not, be gone.

  —SHAKESPEARE, HENRY VI, PART 1, ACT 4, SCENE 5

  1. Marker Comes Through

  Many people thought Marker was dull. He was the butt of jokes and unable to really instigate a conversation. Healy thought he was a “moocher.” However, despite the
disastrous trip to Ecuador, Marker proved to be a good friend. He testified on Bill’s behalf in court and ran errands and helped out when Bill was in jail. When Burroughs moved to apartment 5, Marker moved in as his flatmate. Burroughs said, “Any actual affair with Marker was mostly all after Joan’s death. Naturally sex with a straight guy is doomed to failure, of course it is. I think, ‘What in the hell was the matter with you? What nonsense was here?’ But he always said that himself, Marker always said that love is a bunch of bullshit and I would agree with him in that sense.”1

  In December Marker came down with hepatitis, almost certainly caught during their trip to Ecuador, so Burroughs had to nurse him. This must have helped turn his thoughts away from Joan’s death. At some point Bill gave Marker an injection of penicillin and then used the same needle to shoot up morphine. He came down himself with hepatitis about a month later, so they had overlapping illnesses. To recuperate, they went to Veracruz, where they stayed in a hotel where, instead of mattresses, they had only canvas stretched tight over a wooden frame. It was very uncomfortable.

  It might have been expected that after killing Joan, Burroughs would have got over his puerile infatuation with guns, but this was not the case. He had with him in Veracruz an 1896 German Mauser, an early semiautomatic that fired a high-velocity 7.63-millimeter bullet. They hired a boat and went upriver with it and used it to shoot melons, “And boy that thing would tear a melon apart.”2

  As relations between them had evidently improved, Burroughs still nursed his ambition of a jungle expedition with Marker but this time proposed taking four-year-old Billy with them. Marker went home to Jacksonville, Florida, for Christmas, having made arrangements to meet up with Bill in Ecuador in a month’s time. Burroughs continued working on Junk, as the book was still called, sending revised sections to Allen. He no longer saw Dave Tesorero, who had mysteriously disappeared around October, but this did not matter too much as Burroughs got off junk just before he and Marker went to Ecuador. In March he told Allen, “I chippy around but haven’t been hooked in a year now.”3 A month later he was hooked, claiming it was for his health: in order to cure his hepatitis he wanted to stop drinking completely for a few months. He heard nothing from Marker.

  In March 1952, Bill told Allen that he had begun work on a new novel that could be seen as part two of Junk or read complete in itself. He said Dennison was still the main character but he had shifted to third-person narrative. It was about his relationship with Marker, known in the book as Allerton. He passed the time by writing and attending bullfights and cockfights. “I like my spectacles brutal, bloody and degrading.”4 In April, Allen Ginsberg finally persuaded Carl Solomon to publish Junk as an Ace paperback original for an eight-hundred-dollar advance; it was to be called Junkie, since the publishers thought Junk might be taken as a value judgment on the text. In 1977, Burroughs changed the spelling of the revised edition to Junky, which it has remained ever since. Now began months of prevarication and stalling on the part of Ace, who demanded to see the new material Burroughs was writing and to incorporate it into Junkie.5 One complication came over Solomon’s suggestion that part two of the book be called Fag. Burroughs told Allen he did not mind being called queer: “T.E. Lawrence and all manner of right Joes (boy can I turn a phrase) was queer. But I’ll see him castrated before I’ll be called a Fag. […] That’s just what I been trying to put down uh I mean over, is the distinction between us strong, manly, noble types and the leaping, jumping, window dressing cocksucker. Furthechrissakes a girl’s gotta draw the line somewheres.”6

  As usual Bill had plans for buying houses in Panama, farming, and traveling. The one thing he was sure of was that he did not want to return to the United States. He told Kerouac, “I have been happier down here than I ever was before in my life. I feel like I took off a strait jacket. You don’t realize how much the U.S. is dragging you until you are out of it and feel the difference.”7 He was still suffering from hepatitis and had no energy and no appetite. He told Allen, “I do get hungry but I can’t bring myself to sit down alone in a restaurant and eat through a meal, so break two eggs in milk and that is dinner. How I miss Joan!”8

  After Marker left for Florida, Bill formed a relationship with Angelo—he used his real name in Junky—with whom he began a fourteen-month casual affair, seeing him twice a week unless he was on junk, and always paying him twenty pesos. They went at first to hotels until Burroughs trusted him enough not to steal from the apartment, as pickups were prone to do, then he brought him back to 201 Orizaba, where he “insisted on sweeping the apartment out whenever he spent the night there.”9 Angelo was not queer, he was doing it for the money. He conformed to a romantic stereotype “boy” in Bill’s mind that he later applied to boys in South America, Tangier, and Paris. In Junky he describes Angelo as having an Oriental face, “Japanese-looking except for his copper skin.”10 Burroughs was not promiscuous; once he found a suitable boy he stuck with him. “I always tended to do that. Get one that was satisfactory, I saw no necessity to change. His name was Angelo and he was of very good character. I’m not one of these people who likes to be exploited, or taken or used in any way. He had a very good character, he was a good person.”11 Bill fervently hoped that Marker would return, or that they would meet in Ecuador, but even though he wrote him numerous letters, “with fantasies and routines in my best vein,”12 and sent him books and presents, he received no reply.

  Jack Kerouac arrived at the end of April. In an enormously long letter to Allen, Kerouac wrote, “Bill was like a mad genius in littered rooms when I walked in. He was writing. He looked wild but his eyes innocent and blue and beautiful. We are the greatest of friends at last.” Their days were spent working on their respective books, with each of them having a high regard for the other. Kerouac was on a creative roll: he had completed On the Road—the version now called Visions of Cody—and had just started work on Doctor Sax. Burroughs, meanwhile, was working each day on Queer. The apartment resounded to the clacking of typewriters. Bill wrote Allen, “I’m very impressed by ON THE ROAD. He has developed unbelievably. He really has tremendous talent. No doubt about it.”13 At the same time, Kerouac wrote Allen saying, “His ‘Queer’ is greater than ‘Junk’… Bill is great. Greater than he ever was.”14 It was a mutual admiration society, but rightly so.

  In the course of his long correspondence with Ginsberg concerning the publication of Junkie, Burroughs explained the genesis of the two main “routines” that appear in Queer, which Ginsberg was also trying to sell. This form of extended, wildly exaggerated extrapolation of a simple story was to become Burroughs’s trademark form. He told Allen, “The Oil-Man and Slave Trader routines are not intended as inverted parody sketches […] but as a means to make contact with Allerton and to interest him. The Slave Trader routine came to me like dictated. It was the turning point where my partial success was assured. If I had not achieved the reckless gaiety that charges this fantasy, Marker would have refused to go with me to S.A. The point is these fantasies are a vital part of the whole set-up.”15

  In May, Bill and Jack went on a weekend trip to the mountains to Tenancingo to attend a fiesta with Dave Tesorero and his young girlfriend, Esperanza Villanueva, who was to become the subject of Kerouac’s novel Tristessa in 1956. Bill and Dave were friends again, even though Tesorero had stolen three hundred pesos from him before disappearing. They did some shooting while they were there. Kerouac told Allen that Burroughs “misses Joan terribly. Joan made him great, lives on in him like mad, vibrating.”16 They went to bullfights, Burroughs making sure that Kerouac wore a straw hat to deflect the bottles the crowd liked to throw at gringos in the lower seats. They also visited the pyramids of Teotihuacán. Kerouac recalled, “The last time I was in Teotihuacan, [Burroughs] said to me ‘Wanna see a scorpion, boy?’ and lifted up a rock—There sat a female scorpion beside the skeleton of its mate, which it had eaten—Yelling ‘Yaaaah!’ [Burroughs] lifted a huge rock and smashed it down on the whole scene.”17

 
Kerouac, always parsimonious, delighted at how cheap everything was: filet mignon sixty cents a pound, hamburger eighteen cents a pound, cigarettes six cents a pack, and teenage girls just one peso—twelve cents—at the whorehouses on Organo. By the beginning of June he had already written forty-five thousand words of Doctor Sax. They met a gang of young American hipsters who persuaded them to take peyote with them. Bill had a miserable time of it and stopped himself from vomiting only by recounting a long, depressing story about a penal colony in a town not unlike Quito in the high Andes.

  After a few weeks staying with Burroughs, Kerouac ran short of money and grew surly and petulant when Burroughs declined to support him indefinitely in food and board: Burroughs had been paying the rent, buying the food, the drink, and the drugs. Their biggest arguments were over drugs: Burroughs had to live an exemplary life in Mexico City and give the authorities no excuse to return him to jail. He even stopped wearing a gun when he went out. He also kept his rooms free of drugs and hid his stash outside, away from the apartment, and told Jack to do the same except for what he was using. Bill did not want a whole big bag of it there because, as he put it: (1) he was out on bail; (2) it was his apartment, Jack paid no rent; and (3) Bill had a habit and did not want to spend time in a police cell after a shakedown. He might have added that the pot was also bought by him. But Jack secretly asked Dave Tesorero to bring the bag to him so that he could hide it somewhere in the apartment without telling Bill. Fortunately Dave told Bill of Jack’s request. Kerouac ignored Bill’s entreaties and not only filled the place with clouds of pot smoke that could be detected outside, but continued to store his marijuana and a supply of peyote there. Burroughs was outraged that Kerouac would endanger his freedom and behave in such a selfish and careless manner. His thoughtless action could have resulted in Burroughs serving a long jail sentence.