In 1929, at fifteen, Burroughs was sent off, against his will, to the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, because his mother was worried about his sinus condition. He hated Los Alamos, with its Boy Scout attitudes, its relentlessly positive thinking, its push-ups in the snow. Located on a remote mesa overlooking the Rio Grande, forty miles of dirt road northwest of Santa Fe, Los Alamos was so isolated the United States War Department took over the school in 1943 for its top-secret Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb.
At sixteen, Burroughs altered his mind with drugs for the first time, ingesting a near-lethal dose of chloral hydrate that sent him wobbling in to see the school nurse. Trapped in a Boy Scout world, he aspired to decadence, burning incense in his room and reading Baudelaire and the Comte de Lautréamont, who once walked a lobster on a velvet leash down the Champs-Elysée. Utterly powerless himself, Burroughs felt a visceral link to the gangster’s ability to smash and grab, to effect the most basic power over life and death. Burroughs wanted badly to be cool, hard, remorseless.
Two months before he was scheduled to graduate, Burroughs convinced his mother to let him drop out of school by admitting to her his first brief dormitory homosexual experience. She had him out of there so fast he didn’t have time to pack a bag.
In 1932, Burroughs enrolled at Harvard, because that was what young men of his social position did in those days. In Cambridge, he was known for keeping a live ferret in his room and as a collector of “sleazy characters,” as Richard Stern, a gay friend of Burroughs from Kansas City, recalls. Burroughs graduated in 1936 with a degree in American literature. There’s a blank rectangle where his yearbook photo was supposed to be. It’s not unlikely that on the day they took yearbook pictures, Burroughs was in New York, prowling Greenwich Village and Times Square with Stern.
In the mid-1930s, Times Square was the epicenter of the American news and entertainment businesses. Mainstream newspapers like the New York Times, the tabloid Mirror, and the Daily News, trend-setting culture magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and show-biz bibles Variety and Billboard were all headquartered there. Shubert Alley, the center of the American theater, was just off the square. Restaurants like Astor’s and Sardi’s, clubs like the Friars and the Lambs all catered to a theatrical crowd. The sporting types, the fun-loving criminals immortalized by Damon Runyon, went to prizefights at Madison Square Garden, which at that time was at Broadway and Fiftieth Street.
In the 1930s, the Fifties east of the square had been speakeasy streets, organized crime–dominated islands of glamour in the sea of depression. While thousands squatted in wretched Hoovervilles like the one on Central Park’s Great Lawn, a few blocks away at the Stork Club on East Fifty-third Street, Oklahoma bootlegger Sherman Billingsley was introducing the first champagne cocktail at America’s first contoured bar.
With Prohibition came Cafe Society, where an intoxicating mixture of upper crust glamour and lower class bravado created a new, national, egalitarian theater at places like Jack and Charlie’s ‘21,’ and The Stork Club, “New York’s New Yorkiest Place,” where “Broadway’s Boswell,” Walter Winchell, the New York Mirror’s all-powerful syndicated columnist, held court.
In the mid-1930s when William Burroughs was prowling Times Square, it was the breeding ground of a new national “slanguage,” to use Winchell’s term, a confluence of argots from theater, journalism, sports, and the underworld employed by Winchell as he broadcast over the NBC Blue radio network to millions of people from coast to coast every Sunday night. Burroughs was fascinated by the “drug lingo and jive talk,” writes Ann Douglas in her introduction to Word Virus, a Burroughs compendium. “He was fascinated by their mutability, their fugitive quality, the result of the pressure their speakers were under to dodge authority and leave no records behind.” It was a subversive tongue, a language that only an insider could decode. As Neal Gabler writes in his biography of Walter Winchell, “to know which words were in vogue, to know what ‘scram’ meant, and ‘palooka’ and ‘belly laughs’ and ‘lotta baloney’ and ‘push-over,’ was like being part of a secret society.”
Times Square looking south, 1954.