And argue they did, for Kerouac and Ginsberg had their differences. Kerouac, the loner and watcher, the “spy in someone else’s body,” thirsted for personal salvation. Ginsberg, on the other hand, had dedicated himself to a kind of saintly, poetic communism. What they had in common was their feverish belief in their vision. In strikingly similar language, Kerouac and Ginsberg celebrated the fire. “The only people for me are the mad ones,” Kerouac would write in perhaps the most famous passage in On the Road, “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles like spiders across the stars.” In the great opening lines of his poem “Howl,” Ginsberg describes, in strikingly similar language, “the best minds of my generation” as “angelheaded hipsters, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” Maybe it was out of sheer madness, but Burroughs aspired to the rigorous analysis of logic, which is a product of cool.
Burroughs and Vollmer were into each other, united in their sardonicism and their attempts to dissect the earth’s tortured soul in the last bloody year of the war. He introduced her to Benzedrine inhalers, which in those days could be had over the counter at the drugstore. By removing just one tube’s accordion-folded paper strips and soaking them in a cup of coffee, one could get off for an entire day. Thus fueled, William and Joan spent hours sitting on Joan’s bed, gobbling speed and talking. “We had all these really deep conversations about very fundamental things,” Burroughs remembered. “Her intuition was amazing.” And though Burroughs always considered himself to be homosexual, he claimed that Vollmer told him, “You’re supposed to be a faggot, but you’re as good as a pimp in bed.” They never legally married, but by the end of 1946, Vollmer was referring to herself as Mrs. William S. Burroughs.
The apartment on 115th Street was Burroughs’s first personal glimpse of a Johnson world. Everybody shared the eighty dollars’ monthly rent and the food bills, Joan cooked, and Kerouac and Ginsberg studied at Burroughs’s feet. He gave them reading lists that included Cocteau, Blake, Kafka, and especially Spengler and Céline, admonishing them, “EEE-di-fy your mind, my boy, with the grand actuality of Fact.”
Kerouac and Ginsberg even allowed Burroughs to psychoanalyze them, an incredible expression of trust considering their own fragile psychological situations. Ginsberg was living through the mental and emotional deterioration of his mother, which was exacting a terrible price, while Kerouac was only a couple of years removed from earning an honorable discharge “with indifferent character” from the navy after running naked across the parade ground at the Newport training station, screaming “Geronimo!” After months of saying little but taking copious notes, Burroughs suddenly warned Kerouac that he was going to strangle in his mother’s apron strings. “That’s your fate. That’s your Faustian destiny.”
Kerouac, aghast, went over to Ginsberg’s dorm room to discuss Burroughs’s prophecy. After talking all night, he fell into Ginsberg’s willing arms. They were discovered the next morning by Kerouac’s former freshman football coach. When as a result Ginsberg was suspended from school, he, too, moved in to 115th Street. Kerouac remembered this period of his life as his “Season in Hell,” a “year of low, evil decadence” as he describes it in his novel Vanity of Duluoz, which ended with him in the hospital suffering from blood clots in his legs probably brought on by doing too much Benzedrine.
In the same book, Kerouac describes roaming Times Square with Burroughs on the night of August 14, 1945—V-J Day—celebrating Japan’s unconditional surrender and the end of the war, eight days after the Enola Gay had dropped “Little Boy,” the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima. It was a night of drunken madness with thousands of uniformed servicemen roaming the Square kissing every woman they could get their hands on. In the fireworks’ fierce apocalyptic glow, Kerouac says that Burroughs looked like “Lucifer’s emissary,” he who is the furthest thing from cool.
When you think about how much space a human being actually takes up in this world, Room 828 at the Chelsea Hotel isn’t much—two steps from the bed to the old schoolroom map of the United States on the opposite wall, six or seven feet from the narrow window with its view across the midnight rooftops of Chelsea to the steel-clad door. Beyond the door are the Chelsea’s dark, narrow, twisted halls. The radio plays softly: Cannonball Adderley with Brew Moore. Everything in the room seems like it came from the street—including Herbert Huncke, the man who lives here.
On top of a rickety dresser, a snapshot of a seedily attractive photographer named Louis Cartwright grins out from a cheap picture frame. Before Cartwright had become his lover, Huncke notes with a touch of pride, Cartwright had slept with William Burroughs and Jean Genet. In 1996 Cartwright was stabbed to death during a robbery outside the Kiev, a Russian restaurant on Second Avenue. From the way Huncke talks about him, it’s plain that he really loved the guy.
When I phoned Huncke to ask for an interview, he quickly steered the conversation around to his fee. “At my age, do you expect me to go out and steal?” he snorted contemptuously into the horn. At eighty-two, Huncke appears to be draped in shadow, as if he were hugging the darkness to keep him warm. When he shakes hands, his body is cool. When he speaks, his words are like flotsam drifting upward from a vanished hipster underworld. “We didn’t become ace-boon-coons or anything like that,” he says of someone who never became a close friend.
Huncke is slight, even in his worn-out cowboy boots. His doelike eyes are liquid, ready to retreat, flatter, or con. In his autobiography, Guilty of Everything, Huncke writes, “Nobody deliberately sets out to be wrong. There may be some that do, perhaps, but basically, people are shooting to do whatever they think is the best thing they can do. They play it by ear.” Whether in or out of jail, Huncke always tried to play it by ear, play it cool when “playing it cool” meant keeping out of the line of fire. For Huncke, being cool was just a matter of survival, as it is for a raccoon or a coyote. Around the Sixteenth Precinct, Huncke was known as “the Creep,” an individual so disgusting that the cops periodically ran him out of Times Square. Huncke was Ginsberg and Kerouac’s guide to the underworld. Huncke turned Burroughs on to heroin; after that, Burroughs was cool. Herbert Huncke was cool when cool and beat were one.
I hand Huncke his fee, five twenty-dollar bills from a cash machine. He offers me a cigarette and a beer, then says he’ll be right back. He stops at the door on his way out, turns back, and generously suggests that if I need to, I can pee in his sink. A lifetime of telling hard luck stories has made Huncke a brilliant storyteller. When he comes back a little while later, he’s stoned, and the story of his life unfolds.