Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Ryko said, “I saw a guy eat razor blades in Chicago. Razor blades, glass, and light globes. He finally ate a porcelain plate.”

  By this time everyone was drunk except Agnes and me. Al was sitting at Phillip’s feet looking up at him with a goofy expression on his face. I began to wish that everybody would go home.

  Then Phillip got up swaying a little bit and said, “Let’s go up on the roof.” And Al said, “All right,” jumping up like he never heard such a wonderful suggestion. I said, “No don’t. You’ll wake up the landlady. There’s nothing up there anyway.”

  Al said, “To hell with you Dennison,” sore that I should try to block an idea coming from Phillip. So they lurched out the door and started up the stairs. The landlady and her family occupy the floor above me, and above them is the roof.

  I sat down and poured myself some more Canadian Club. Agnes didn’t want any more and said she was going home. Ryko was now dozing on the couch, so I poured the rest in my own glass, and Agnes got up to go.

  I could hear some sort of commotion on the roof and then I heard some glass break in the street. We walked over to the window and Agnes said, “They must have thrown a glass down on the street.” This seemed logical to me so I stuck my head out cautiously and there was a woman looking up and swearing. It was getting grey in the street.

  “You crazy bastards,” she was saying, “what you wanta do, kill somebody?”

  Now I am a firm believer in the counter-attack, so I said, “Shut up. You’re waking everybody up. Beat it or I’ll call a cop,” and I shut off the lights as though I had gotten up out of bed and gone back again. After a few minutes she walked away still swearing, and I was swearing myself, only silently, as I remembered all the trouble those two had caused me in the past. I remembered how they had piled up my car in Newark and got me thrown out of a hotel in Washington, D.C. when Phillip pissed out the window. And there was plenty more of the same. I mean Joe College stuff about 1910 style. This happened whenever they were together. Alone they were all right.

  I turned on the lights and Agnes left. Everything was quiet on the roof. “I hope they don’t get the idea to jump off,” I said to myself because Ryko was asleep. “Well they can roost up there all night if they want to. I’m going to bed,” and I undressed and got into bed leaving Ryko sleeping on the couch.

  A HARD-BOILED REPORTER

  a hard-boiled reporter

  by james grauerholz

  By the fall of 1945, William Burroughs and Joan Vollmer were involved with a frenetic Benzedrine-fueled scene around Times Square and the Village, in the course of which Vollmer began to exhibit disturbing symptoms of dissociation and hallucination. Her husband, Paul Adams, came home on leave from the service and, disgusted by her condition, divorced her. Kerouac was hospitalized with phlebitis in his legs, aggravated by the “speed” and his long hours at the typewriter. But the drug that would change Burroughs’ life first appeared in the hands of Jack Anderson, in January 1946: Anderson asked him to fence a hot Thompson submachine gun and sixteen boxes of morphine tartrate syrettes, stolen from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. From his very first experience with junk, Burroughs knew he had found his Rheingold.

  An acquaintance of Burroughs’, Bob Brandenburg, took him to meet a potential buyer for the drugs: a petty thief named Phil White. With White, Burroughs met Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler and thief from Chicago, with a rap sheet as long as the needle tracks on his arm. Huncke’s ancestry and childhood were reminiscent of Jack Black territory: a Midwestern underworld of broken lives and hustlers on the edge. Huncke had a quasiliterary charm to his conversation, and he appeared to Burroughs and his friends as the supreme examplar of underground cool and “beatness.”

  Burroughs was now living with Joan Vollmer and scoring for morphine on the Upper West Side. His new tutors—Huncke and White—introduced him to the fine art of “hitting a croaker”: persuading a physician to prescribe narcotics, usually by faking symptoms. Burroughs was also in training to become a “lush roller”; he apprenticed himself to Phil White, robbing sleeping drunks on the subway. But things eventually went wrong: one of their victims woke up and became violent, and Burroughs had to kick the man, breaking his ribs. This episode awakened Burroughs to the real danger and horror of this way of life, which he then abandoned. In April 1946, Burroughs was arrested for obtaining narcotics with a forged prescription. Joan Vollmer asked his erstwhile psychiatrist, Dr. Wolberg, to sign a surety bond for his release. While awaiting trial, Burroughs took up dealing heroin in the Village with a friend of Huncke’s named Bill Garver, a junky and overcoat thief with a Philadelphia Main Line background, about Burroughs’ age.

  Burroughs’ sentencing came up in June, and a condition of his suspended sentence was that he return to St. Louis—again. This time, he was reunited with Kells Elvins, who was home from Texas. They hatched a plan to raise ruby-red grapefruit and vegetables near the Rio Grande River town of Pharr, Texas. Burroughs’ separation from the “bad influence” of his New York friends was favored by his parents, who had endured several years of their son’s catastrophes. Elvins made a good impression on them, though, and with their help, Burroughs bought land in Texas and lived with Elvins in a house near Pharr. Around this time, they made a car trip to Mexico, where Burroughs finally got a Mexican divorce from Ilse Klapper, and they found a practicante to inject them with the “Bogomolets serum”: a supposedly rejuvenating and life-prolonging substance developed by a Russian doctor.

  Within a few months, Vollmer suffered a breakdown and was picked up in Times Square, incoherent from her benzedrine use. She was hospitalized in Bellevue, and Burroughs responded at once, going to New York to gain her release. Now he asked her to marry him, and although the marriage was never formalized, Burroughs always believed that their only child was conceived in a New York hotel room that October. Burroughs brought Vollmer and her daughter back with him to Pharr, and after a Christmas visit to his parents in St. Louis, the young couple began to look for a remote area in eastern Texas where Burroughs could grow a cash crop of marijuana. They finally settled near New Waverly, north of Houston and not far from Huntsville, where Elvins had worked in the state prison. Vollmer promptly sent word to New York for Huncke to come down and be their “farmhand.”

  While Vollmer carried her child and Burroughs shot dope in his orgone accumulator and read Wilhelm Reich and Mayan anthropology, Huncke visited Houston for drugs and cultivated their pot patch. He brought back cases of Benzedrine inhalers for Vollmer, and despite her pregnancy, she used them eagerly. In New York she had hallucinated violent scenes in an adjacent apartment; Huncke later wrote a vignette of Vollmer at the farm, late at night under a full moon, distractedly scraping the little skinks and lizards off the trees by the house. On July 21,1947, William Seward Burroughs Jr. (III) was born in a hospital in nearby Conroe, Texas. The new grandparents paid a visit: Mote and Laura came down from St. Louis to see little Billy and the family, but their visit was brief. This was for the best, for if they had stayed, they might have realized that the “neighbor” was a New York street hustler, their daughter-in-law was strung out on speed, and their son was a heroin-addicted marijuana farmer.

  In late August, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg arrived for a visit. Cassady was the new paragon on the scene, and his intensity had already captivated Ginsberg and Kerouac. Cassady was bisexual, and Ginsberg was in love with him. Burroughs was less impressed, and in any case, the Ginsberg-Cassady romance quickly fizzled, and Ginsberg shipped out on a merchant liner in early September. Cassady drove Burroughs to New York in a rickety old Jeep, carrying the pot harvest, which proved unsalable. Back in New York, Burroughs acquired a new habit, and in January 1948 he went to Lexington, Kentucky, for a cure at the federal hospital there. Traveling between New Waverly and Pharv, Burroughs was arrested in Beeville, Texas, while having sex with his wife in their car on the side of the road. This incident, and his marijuana crop failure, contributed to his sudden decision to sell his land and
move the family to New Orleans. Huncke returned to New York and resumed stealing.

  The Burroughs family lived in Louisiana for a little more than a year, most of that time in a “shotgun shack” at 509 Wagner Street in Algiers, just across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter. Burroughs was soon readdicted, and he fell into a circle of junkies around Lee Circle and Dupont Street. Having learned from Bill Garver how to deal heroin in New York, he now began to deal in New Orleans, with a new partner, Joe Ricks. In January 1949, Burroughs was visited by Kerouac and Cassady (who again failed to impress him) on a cross-country run that Kerouac describes in On the Road. Then in April, Herbert Huncke’s larceny, out of Ginsberg’s apartment in New York, came to a head with a car chase and arrest that landed Huncke back in jail and Ginsberg in Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute, where he met Carl Solomon—to whom he would dedicate his 1955 breakthrough poem, Howl.

  Burroughs was also arrested, the same month, after a car chase through New Orleans, and charged with possession of illegal guns and drugs. He was jailed—a disaster, because he was heavily addicted and went into withdrawal in his cell. With Joan’s and his lawyer’s help, Burroughs was moved from jail to a hospital, where he spent a few weeks and came out clean. But as his case progressed through the courts, Burroughs began to realize that eventual prison time was a very possible outcome. He remembered Mexico, from his trip three years earlier with Elvins, and his lawyer winked encouragingly at Burroughs’ “vacation” plans.

  Burroughs went to Mexico City in September 1949. He found an apartment on Cerrada de Medellín in the Colonia Roma neighborhood, registered for classes at the English-language Mexico City College (using his G.I. Bill educational benefits), and returned to Algiers, Louisiana, to relocate his family. A lot of the other American students in Mexico were recently discharged G.I.s in their late teens and early twenties, many of them more intrigued by the climate, the booze, and the women than by any particular studies; their “headquarters” was the Bounty Bar, co-owned by two Americans and a Mexican. Burroughs found a lawyer, Bernabé Jurado, to help him apply for Mexican citizenship, and in Jurado’s office, toward the end of 1949, he first encountered David Tesorero—“Old Dave” (or “Old Ike,” as he is called in Junky).

  Dave was a junky of many years’ standing, and he tutored Burroughs in the ways of the Mexican dope underworld. One woman had gained monopoly over the heroin trade in Mexico City, by graft and blackmail, and she maintained her franchise with an iron hand. “Lola la Chata,” they called her. There was little opportunity for Burroughs and Tesorero to go into business dealing, and they were dissatisfied with the quality and cost of Lola’s product. But miraculously, Old Dave was able to register as an addict and obtain a legitimate government medical prescription for fifteen grams of morphine sulfate per month, at wholesale prices: cheap, legal, and pure.

  This precipitated Burroughs’ worst drug habit to date, and led to strains in his relationship with Vollmer. In September 1950—after a visit to Mexico City the previous month by Lucien Carr and his girlfriend, Liz Lehrman—Vollmer and Burroughs went to Cuernavaca and there filed for divorce. The next month, Kells Elvins and his new wife arrived in Mexico City. Burroughs and Vollmer were soon reconciled, and they began to spend time with the Elvinses.

  Burroughs and Ginsberg stayed in contact through letters. Ginsberg was in his literary-agent phase, seeking publishers in New York for his friends. He urged Burroughs to write a first-person account of his life as a drug addict, for the potboiler market. By late 1950, Burroughs was working on a manuscript. He wrote in longhand on lined paper tablets, and his work was typed up by Alice Jeffreys, the wife of an American friend from the Bounty scene. Elvins was now seeing Burroughs fairly often, and, as before, encouraging him to go on with his writing. But Burroughs was disappointed with Jeffreys’ work on the manuscripts he called Junk, which he felt she had overcorrected, so he bought a typewriter and learned to type, with four fingers: the index and middle finger of each hand.

  Burroughs’ citizenship papers were still not straightened out, and he was subjected to various police shakedowns, in the course of which his formerly rosy view of Mexico as a “haven of non-interference” soured considerably. In midwinter he resolved to quit junk, and after an agonizing, slow-withdrawal “cure,” he managed to do so. But with the departure of junk came the return of libido, and after six years with Vollmer—who was visibly disintegrating under the accumulated damage of the Benzedrine and now the all-day tequila, and suffering a recurrence of her childhood poliomyelitis—Burroughs was hungering to connect with a young American boy. There were plenty of those, at Mexico City College and at the Bounty Bar. In the spring of 1951, Burroughs began to pursue several of them.

  Off junk, and after a bad period of drinking heavily, Burroughs settled into a routine of writing at home with Vollmer, while the neighbor women looked after Billy and Julie, and going out to the Bounty to drink and troll for young Americans. In June, around the time he moved his family to a now-demolished building at 210 Orizaba, he turned his attentions to a twenty-one-year-old named Lewis Marker, from Jacksonville, Florida. Marker had served in the Army CIC, and was a student at Mexico City College. He was by no means homosexual, nor was he immediately drawn to Burroughs—who now laid siege on Marker, following his movements, setting up meetings with him, and focusing his powers of imagination and performance upon the boy. He was competing with an American woman, Betty Jones (“Mary” in Queer), for Marker’s attention.

  Vollmer’s condition, meanwhile, was worsening. She felt abandoned, and her tequila intake climbed. For a long time she had tolerated Burroughs’ pursuit of boys, and he had never made any secret of his essential homosexuality. But she was visibly declining, her hair falling out, her slight limp becoming more pronounced, her wistful features swelling with alcohol; she could scarcely care for the children. Out of her own despair, or her mounting disappointment with Burroughs, she had begun to mock him in front of their friends, deliberately humiliating and verbally emasculating him when he would launch into one of his grandiose tales.

  Before long Burroughs and his “routines” had captivated Marker, who must have had some affection for this man of thirty-seven, because in June 1951 he agreed to accompany him on a trip to Ecuador, in search of yagé a hallucinogenic vine that was said to convey telepathic powers. Their sexual relationship was unequal, with Burroughs very much the pursuer, and the strains of traveling together in the Third World—combined with the failure of Burroughs’ quest for the spirit-vine—resulted in the breakdown of their connection, even before the end of the trip.

  Exhausted by hard travel and disappointed by their failure to find any yagé, Burroughs and Marker split up and returned separately to Mexico City in early September, after six weeks in each other’s constant company. Forsaken by Marker and traveling home alone, Burroughs must have dreamed of a further escape from the wreckage of his and Vollmer’s lives in Mexico—to South America, where they and their children would dwell in deep jungle, living by basic human skills. Eleven years earlier, Burroughs had been desperate enough to cut off part of a finger over his unrequited love; now his desolation was even greater.

  Joan Vollmer was in her own extremity: while Burroughs was in Ecuador in mid-August, Lucien Carr and Allen Ginsberg visited her in Mexico City. They were surprised to find Burroughs gone, and no one knew when he might return. But the three old Columbia friends spent a week on a wild, drunk-driving carouse, which enamored Carr with Vollmer and terrified Ginsberg and the two children. They survived their trip to Guadalajara and the volcano of Paricutín, and just before Burroughs returned, Ginsberg and Carr left Mexico.

  On September 6,1951, Burroughs had made arrangements to meet someone about selling a gun at the apartment of John Healy, an American who was a part owner of the Bounty. Vollmer was already at the apartment, and Healy was at work downstairs, in the bar. Burroughs may have been surprised to find Marker staying in Healy’s apartment—or he may have staged
the visit precisely because he knew he might find Marker there. But Marker was not alone: his childhood friend and fellow ex-serviceman, Eddie Woods, had just arrived from Florida, and they were drinking heavily in the early evening. It was probably the first time Burroughs and Marker had seen each other since they’d parted, in Ecuador, a few days before.

  The gun was on the table, and Burroughs was boasting for the benefit of the two boys, perhaps to show Marker that he didn’t care—or, perhaps, to show how much he did. He told them about his plan to move his family to South America to live off the land, killing and eating the plentiful wild boars. Joan said that if Bill was their hunter, they’d starve to death. Burroughs took the bait, and dared her to “show the boys what kind of a shot old Bill is”—to put her gin glass on her head, for him to shoot it off, à la William Tell. She put the glass on her head, turned a little sideways, giggled and smiled, and said: “I can’t look; you know I can’t stand the sight of blood. . . .”

  Time stood still for the two drunken boys as they watched the skinny older man raise his pistol, too proud or too ashamed to back down, and aim at the glass on his wife’s head. He fired before they could raise any protest—but he missed, and Vollmer’s head jerked back, then slowly tilted forward onto her chest, bright red cranial blood oozing from the wound. In the ensuing silence, Marker said, “I think your bullet has hit her, Bill,” and Burroughs moved to his wife’s chair and took her in his arms, calling her name disconsolately. Her drinking glass lay unbroken on the floor.

  Joan Vollmer breathed her last at the nearby Red Cross station in Colonia Roma, while Burroughs waited outside. He was taken into custody and jailed, then transferred the next day to another jail. Allen Ginsberg, awaiting car repairs in Galveston, Texas, read of the shooting in a local newspaper. In Mexico City the event was front-page news for three days, but it was soon superseded by other killings and scandals. And now Burroughs’ many legal fees and attendances upon Bernabé Jurado came to his rescue: Jurado took the case, made a great fuss, greased some palms, and got his client out of Lecumberri Prison in record time, just thirteen days. The Mexican press at first sensationalized the “gringo killer,” but when his story kept changing, the articles took on a scoffing, scandalized tone, and by the time of his release on bail, his case was little noted.