by Barry Miles
Kerouac did what he usually did when he was broke and had overstayed his welcome; on July 1 he went home to his mother, who was now living with Jack’s sister in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. On July 13, Bill wrote to Allen, complaining that he had heard nothing from Jack, who had borrowed his last twenty dollars of rent money, which he had promised to pay back immediately on arrival in the United States. “To be blunt, I have never had a more inconsiderate and selfish guest under my roof.”18 Bill told Allen that he could no longer get along with Jack and unless he underwent some radical transformation he did not want him to visit again. Burroughs wrote Allen, “He needs analysis. He is so paranoid he thinks everyone else is plotting to take advantage of him so he has to act first in self-defense. For example, when we were out of money and food, I could always rely on him to eat all the food there was if he got the chance. If there were two rolls left, he would always eat both of them. Once he flew into a rage because I had eaten my half of the remaining butter. If anyone asks him to do his part or to share on an equal basis, he thinks they are taking advantage of him. This is insane.”19 By August 20, Bill had still not heard from Jack or been paid, and was so exercised by Jack’s behavior that he devoted a whole other letter to his misdeeds. “Recall I was picking up the tab in toto. After the first week he was flat and did not put out centavo one. During the brief time he had $ it was like pulling an impacted molar to get any money out of him. I may add that at least 50% of the time his manner was surly and ill-tempered […] selfish, inconsiderate and downright insufferable behavior and he doesn’t drop me a line.”20
In July, Bill received the first quarter of his eight-hundred-dollar advance from Ace Books for Junkie, less Ginsberg’s 10 percent for acting as agent. Allen had found New York publishers particularly reluctant to publish the book, given its subject matter and its neutral—to them—position toward addictive drugs. Even so, the deal was a particularly poor one at a time when Gold Medal, a rival mass-market paperback company, was attracting authors with royalties based on print runs rather than actual sales: a $2,000 advance on an initial print run of 200,000 copies; $3,000 on a run of 300,000. Ace printed 150,000-plus copies of Junkie when it was finally published in 1953.21 Years later Burroughs called them to account and collected over $2,000 in overdue royalties.
Early in July, Bill Garver, the overcoat thief and junkie with whom Bill once sold heroin in New York, arrived in Mexico City, acting on Burroughs’s recommendation as to the availability of junk and cheapness of living. His father had died and he inherited an income of $400 a month, enough to live in considerable comfort in Mexico City. He came off the plane with blood all over his pants where he had given himself a fix using a safety pin in his leg.22 Bill got him a cheap room, which Garver made extra secure by padlocking the door. He sat, hunchbacked and thin, with his white hair combed sleekly back with water like a teenager. His room was filled with books of classical history, volumes of poetry including Rimbaud and Mallarmé. His walls were covered with reproductions of the work of José Clemente Orozco, one of the leaders, along with Diego Rivera, of the Mexican Mural Renaissance, that he had cut from magazines. Every day he had to go upstairs to empty his chamber pot. Each week he bought Time and U.S. News & World Report from Sears Roebuck and read them from cover to cover, nodding off after every few pages. In September, Bernabé Jurado bought an ounce of cocaine that he didn’t like the look of and thought might be heroin. He offered it to Burroughs. It was gray and metallic-looking, so Bill passed and offered the deal to Garver, who paid Jurado five hundred dollars for it. Garver took some. At seven in the morning he came into Bill’s room and asked, “Are you just gonna lay in your bed with all these shipments coming in?” Bill said, “Shipments? What is this, a fucking farm? I’m getting up at 6:30?” Garver said, “Pure drugstore in.” Burroughs recalled that “he had on his overcoat and he had a strange look in his eye. And then he got into bed with me. I said, ‘What’s the matter, are you, crazy?’ He says, ‘Hee-hee-hee-hee!’ I edged out of bed and got on my clothes, and Dave and I got him back to his room.”23 Old Dave and Bill were concerned that the drug was poisoned and that Garver was going to die. Just in case he did, they searched his room for the five hundred dollars that he had not yet paid Jurado rather than leave it for the Mexican police to steal, but they couldn’t find it. However, the next day Garver was fine; his money was still there but he threw away the bad stuff. According to Alan Ansen, when Garver died as the result of junk in Mexico City in 1957, Bill was taken aback and didn’t want to believe it. His romantic notions about junk and junkies did not include death.
Marker returned to Mexico City but did not contact Bill for five days. Bill was hurt and made something of a scene. Marker told him, “Why can’t we just be friends with no sex?” but Bill said the strain would be intolerable and put so much pressure on him that he finally agreed to have sex once or twice a month. Bill told Allen, “The strain is still considerable, but since he is here I can’t help but see him even if it is ruining my digestion, sleep and nerves” (as well as his bank balance).24 But the strain was too much for Marker, and in October he left once more, without writing Bill as much as a card. In a final attempt to reestablish the relationship—such as it was—Burroughs flew up to Jacksonville and managed to persuade Marker to accompany him back to Mexico City. Bill told Allen, “He likes me well enough in his way. I know how far his way is from my way,” then crossed out in the original letter, “[we] have sex even if he doesn’t like it, and does it just to oblige once in a while.”25
Fourteen months had passed since Joan’s death. The court case was still pending, the dates constantly being moved; Ace was dithering over publishing Junkie, demanding extra sections, wanting to see his latest writing about Mexico; Jack had shown him a complete lack of consideration, and had not supported him as a friend; he was despondent over his failed affair with Marker, which was obviously not going to work long-term; he was off junk and not drinking but his health was clearly not good—he couldn’t hold down anything solid, only milk, and he had to force that down. He was marking time. His letters from this period suggest that he was severely depressed, perhaps buffeted by gusts of memory, plagued by nightmare feelings of remorse. He just wanted out. He constantly speaks of moving to Panama, of making his fortune as a farmer, of achieving the good life. In his letters to Ginsberg he tries to harden himself, saying he wants to make a lot of money and he is not choosy how he makes it: “Most people simply aren’t human so far as I am concerned. I don’t care what happens to them. I have not learned any lessons of charity.”26 Even Garver “bores me to death.”
Things suddenly came to a head when on November 13, 1952, Bernabé Jurado had just parked his brand-new Buick Roadmaster outside his apartment on avenida México when he was sideswiped by a car full of drunken teenagers. Outraged, he let off a few shots at the departing car, hitting seventeen-year-old Mario Saldaña Cervantes in the leg. The injury was not immediately fatal, but septicemia set in and the boy died on November 29. His family moved in high political circles, and even the newly elected president, Ávila Camacho, got involved. Jurado went into hiding, first to Brazil, then the United States, and on to Europe, where he stayed for several years. Jurado’s legal partners immediately demanded more money from Burroughs, saying that everything had changed, and Bill realized he was no longer protected. Less than two weeks later, Burroughs was safely ensconced in the bosom of his family in Palm Beach.
Kerouac arrived in Mexico City at the beginning of December, a few days before Bill left. He had been laid off by the railroad where he had been working in San Francisco and was driven down by Neal Cassady, who went straight back to the States. Burroughs was in no mood to host Kerouac again, so Jack took a little two-room apartment on the roof of his building. Kerouac wrote to Neal complaining that twelve dollars a month was a high rent, even though he could have lived in a cheaper neighborhood, then went on to say how he had bought three dozen oysters to cook in butter, imported Chianti, and French brea
d. He told Neal he started each day with steak and eggs, so he was clearly in funds. He reported that Burroughs left Mexico City on December 8, after closing down the apartment, telling John Clellon Holmes, “I saw him pack in his moldy room where he shot M all this time—Sad moldy leather cases—old holsters, old daggers—a snapshot of Huncke—a Derringer pistol, which he gave to old dying Garver—medicine, drugs—the last of Joan’s spices, marjoram, new mould since she died and stopped cooking—little Willie’s shoe—& Julie’s moldy school case […] throwing in his bag, at last, picture of Lucien & Allen—Smiled, & left.”27
Chapter Twenty
I was travelling because I was a man trying to escape from himself. I felt guilty about my wife’s death in a shooting accident in Mexico. We had both been under the influence of drugs. I was acquitted by the Mexican authorities but I hadn’t acquitted myself in my own mind. From Mexico I went on to Colombia and Peru.1
1. Yagé Found
Bill’s parents had moved from St. Louis to Palm Beach in the spring of 1952, ostensibly to avoid the harsh St. Louis winters. But they were also no doubt embarrassed by the extensive coverage given in the St. Louis papers of Burroughs’s murder trial, which had severed their little remaining connection to St. Louis society, already strained by Bill’s role in the Kammerer murder. Burroughs had thought he might feel differently about the United States on revisiting it after a three-year absence—apart from a brief trip to collect Marker—but he didn’t. He told Allen, “I don’t like it here. I don’t dislike it. I feel that my home is South of the Rio Grande.”2 He determined to stay a few weeks, spend time with his parents and little Billy. Early in January 1953 he set off on his long-mooted trip to Panama. He was to spend eight months, essentially alone, in search of yagé in the jungles of South America, an exploration that would take him to Panama, Colombia, Peru, and briefly back to Mexico City. He was thirty-nine years old.
Burroughs ends Junky with the lines, “Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke. Yage may be the final fix.”3 After his period of stasis in Mexico City following the death of Joan, he was searching for something other than yet another high: Burroughs was almost taking Rimbaud as his textbook, as Lucien Carr and the others had done so long ago in the West End Bar, embarking on a “long, intimidating, immense and rational derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one must be strong.”4 He was searching for something that would kick him bodily out of his present condition into a new place, with new potentials and new possibilities. His first visit with Marker was basically an excuse to get Marker alone in the jungle. The second visit was more like Burroughs’s dark night of the soul. The trip was as much an exploration of himself as of the South American jungle, a controlled midlife crisis, to find what led to his addictions, his alcoholism, his love lack, the irrational behavior that led to the killing of Joan. To do so he searched out the most powerful mind-altering drug known to man, yagé, hoping it would cut through the layers of ego, of prejudice, of received behavior and thought, cut through all illusions, to reach the very core of his being. It was an arduous trip, but a necessary one. He was not traveling for “material,” but out of it came a book—The Yage Letters—and a series of characters and sets that informed his writing for the rest of his life.
The Hotel Colón in Panama was built in 1915 to house Panama Canal workers. It had an ornate Moorish tiled lobby, a hand-operated Otis elevator, and a pleasant terrace overlooking the bay. Bill was junk-sick and trying to kick, and wasn’t helped by Bill Garver, also in Panama, who kept nagging him to get back on, “once a junkie always a junkie.” One night when Bill got drunk and bought some paregoric, Garver was delighted. Bill reported that “he kept saying over and over, ‘I knew you’d come home with paregoric. I knew it. You’ll be a junkie all the rest of your life’ and looking at me with his little cat smile. Junk is a cause with him.” Eventually Garver said something untoward about Joan and Bill stopped seeing him.
Bill checked into a hospital to have an operation for hemorrhoids. He told Allen that “my skivvies disappeared in surgery, a sinister conjuncture of circumstance.”5 He was there four days and still in withdrawal, but they only gave him three shots of morphine so he couldn’t sleep for the pain, the heat, and junk sickness. Why he did not have the operation in Florida, where the hospital conditions were likely to have been better, is not known. Burroughs did not like Panama, telling Allen, “The Panamanians are the crummiest people in the western Hemisphere and the U.S. Civil Service and Armed Forces stationed here are the ultimate shit.”6 He took a room on the beach near Panama to recuperate until he was in fit condition to travel on to Colombia. Panama was a classic Burroughs set, with albatrosses and vultures roosting on the buildings. There was a vacant lot filled with weeds and trees across from the American embassy where boys undressed and swam in the polluted waters of the bay, which was home to a small venomous sea snake. “Smell of excrement and sea water and young male lust. […] Same old Panama. Whores and pimps and hustlers.”7
Burroughs arrived in Bogotá on January 20, and put up at the Hotel Mulvo Regis. The city was cold and wet, “a damp chill that gets inside you like the inner cold of junk sickness. There is no heat anywhere and you are never warm.”8 This was caused by its elevation, high in the Andes at 8,600 feet (2,620 meters), with mountains as a constant backdrop; the nearby Cerro de Montserrat is 10,000 feet (3,030 meters). The altitude is well known to have a mildly unpleasant effect, creating gas known as “Bogotá belly” and a general feeling of anxiety.9 Bill found Bogotá to be gloomy and somber, weighed down by its Spanish heritage. His hotel room was a windowless cubicle with walls made from green composite board and the bed too short. He wrote, “For a long time I sat there on the bed paralyzed with bum kicks.”10
Things improved the next day when he met Dr. Richard Evans Schultes—known as Dr. Schindler in The Yage Letters—who worked out of the Botanical Institute, an office building filled with crates of stuffed animals and specimens, with people constantly shifting things around like a scene from The Naked Lunch. Schultes received his doctorate from Harvard in 1937 for research into peyote, the year after Burroughs graduated. He was an ethnobotanist, a specialist in the hallucinogenic drugs of South America, and was connected to the U.S. Agricultural Commission. He showed Bill dried specimens of yagé vine and said when he tried it he saw colors but had no visions. He gave him its scientific name, Banisteriopsis caapi, but said there were various Indian names for it, including ayahuasca in the Quechua language and yagé in Tucanoan. The active ingredient is in the inner bark of the vine, which has to be scraped out. Every Indian tribe had a different way of making it, mixing the yagé with other vines and drugs, some making an infusion, others spending a whole day cooking it up.
Schultes said he liked to smoke opium and had chewed cocaine and experimented with various hallucinogenic drugs. He was very much opposed to all attempts to regulate cocaine, which he said was nonsense; he advocated its free sale. He told Bill that the Putumayo region was the most readily accessible area where he might find yagé and explained exactly what he would need for his expedition: medicines; snakebite serum, penicillin, enterovioform, Aralen (chloroquine) to counteract malaria, a hammock, a blanket, mess tin, tea, a canteen, and a primus stove so that he could cook anywhere, and finally a waterproof rubber bag known as a tula to carry it all in.
After five days Bill left Bogotá for Pasto, en route for the Putumayo, first taking the bus to Cali because the autoferro was booked solid for days. Colombia was in the grip of a civil war between the ruling Conservatives and the popular Liberals. The bus was stopped several times by the Policía Nacional, the palace guard of the Conservative Party, and the bus and everyone in it searched. Burroughs had a gun in his baggage, hidden beneath his medicines, but they only searched his person at the stops. Burroughs quickly took sides in the war, he told Allen: “This [the PN] is the most unanimously hideous body of young men I ever laid eyes on, my dear. They look like the
end result of atomic radiation. There are thousands of these strange loutish young men in Colombia and I only saw one I would consider eligible and he looked ill at ease in his office. If there is anything to say for the Conservatives I didn’t hear it. They are an unpopular minority of ugly looking shits.”11 The bus passed through the Tolima region, close to a war zone, and the numbers of PN increased. In the late afternoon Burroughs bought a bottle of brandy at a coffee stop and got drunk with the bus driver. He spent the night in Armenia and continued to Cali the next day on the autoferro, a colorful tram/train that ran on rails and was considerably more comfortable.
Burroughs liked Cali; it had a pleasant climate and semitropical vegetation with bamboo, banana palms, and papayas. Next day he took the autoferro to Popayán, a quiet university town with beautiful, distinctly Spanish colonial architecture. Bill walked out of the town to see the country: rolling meadows, very green, grazed by sheep and cattle. He saw some propaganda movies celebrating the Conservative Party; the audience sat in dead silence. The next day he took the bus to Pasto, a high Andean town 8,290 feet (2,527 meters) at the foot of the Galeras volcano, the most active in Colombia. Pasto’s other claim to fame was as the leprosy capital of Colombia. In Pasto he lodged at the Hotel Niza.
Bill wrote Allen, “Driving in the place hit me in the stomach with a physical impact of depression and horror. High mountains all around. High thin air. The inhabitants peering out of sod roofed huts, their eyes red with smoke. The hotel was Swiss run and excellent. I walked around the town. Ugly crummy looking populace. The higher you got the uglier the citizens.”12 He went into a cantina, played mountain music on the jukebox, and drank anise-flavored aguardiente (literally “fire water”), the local version being made from sugarcane.
