In 1934, at the age of twelve, Huncke ran away from his Chicago home for the first time. “I worked up a beef against my parents right away,” he laughs. In Guilty of Everything, he tells what happened next. A hundred miles out of town, a guy gave him ten dollars for a blow job, and Huncke knew what to do. Later, he found himself standing beside an onion field near Geneva, New York, and he took a deep breath. “I thought ‘this is the smell of real freedom.’ I never dreamed it could smell so penetrating, so physical.”
During the Depression, everything he owned fit in a cigar box, and he rode so many freight trains that the locomotive cinders turned his skin gray. “I had been aiming for New York since I was twelve years of age,” he writes in his autobiography, and in 1940, he made it. “I was flat broke,” he remembers with a dreamy smile. But “I’d learned a lot of little tricks along the way.” When Huncke hit New York, he headed straight for Times Square—“where every young person ended up, because that was where the action was.”
For Huncke, Times Square was home, a place where “you could hustle from one end of the street to the other.” If he had the money, Huncke would “fall by” the local Horn and Hardart Automat, where he could get a little pot of baked beans with a strip of bacon draped across it for a nickel. He spent so much time over coffee at Bickford’s that the help started calling him “the Mayor.”
Huncke had a friend, a would-be hoodlum named Bob Brandenberg, who was temporarily employed as a soda jerk at a drugstore near Columbia University. One day in January 1946, a customer asked Brandenberg if he knew where he could unload a sawed-off shotgun and several boxes of stolen Syrettes—needle-tipped morphine tubes. The customer was William Burroughs, and Brandenberg invited him down to meet his friends on the Lower East Side: Vicki Russell, Phil White, and Herbert Huncke.
Burroughs and Huncke’s relationship was symbiotic. Huncke introduced Burroughs to real criminals like Bill Garver, a spectral junkie whose specialty was stealing overcoats off of cafeteria coat racks. Burroughs and Garver began pushing heroin around the Village in a small way, though they were mostly skeezing up the product. Forced to feed his first habit, Burroughs teamed with Phil White “working the hole,” rolling lushes as a team in all-but-deserted subway cars. Burroughs would screen the victim from the prying eyes of other passengers holding up a newspaper as if reading, while the Sailor rummaged for the drunk’s wallet.
For his part, Huncke, who’d always harbored a vague desire to be a writer, started coming around to 115th Street, intrigued by this new world of artists and intellectuals, some of whom seemed to have money. He brought his usual baggage of stolen property, unregistered weapons, and drug paraphernalia, as well as his usual crowd of mooches, grifters, drug addicts, and fuck-ups—who were soon followed by the police. Hal Chase, for one, sensed things spinning of control and bailed out of the beat generation entirely, not to resurface until the 1970s, when he popped up as the guru of a clan of hippie fishermen and boat builders along the Northwest Pacific coast.
Unlike Chase, Burroughs hung around, and in fact got drawn deeper into Huncke’s world—one day, the Sailor went nuts and shot and killed a furrier using Burroughs’s gun. MAD DOG NOONDAY KILLER blared the headline in the New York Journal-American. Huncke helped White dismantle the weapon and dispose of it in various places around Brooklyn. Junk was eating all Burroughs’s money now. His days of playing at cool, his time of studied detachments, had come to an end. Junk gave Burroughs a reason to get up in the morning and become a predator: he was cool at last. “A junky does not want to be warm,” Burroughs would later explain in Naked Lunch. “He wants to be cool-cooler-COLD. But he wants The Cold like he wants His Junk—NOT OUTSIDE where it does him no good but INSIDE so he can sit around with a spine like a frozen hypodermic.” Burroughs was cool, but Burroughs was living in an uncool world, and he could feel the heat closing in.
In April 1946, somebody fingered Huncke and he got busted for possession of heroin in a fifteen dollar-a-month apartment Burroughs was renting on Henry Street. The next thing Burroughs knew, two cops were slapping cuffs on him and taking him downtown to the Tombs, where he was forced to kick his habit cold turkey. Joan, who was on Benzedrine and not making much sense, managed to bail him out. To do so, however, she had to ask Burroughs’s psychiatrist, Dr. Wolberg, to sign Burroughs’s surety bond. Wolberg, in turn, promptly notified Burroughs’s parents that their son had been arrested for “hitting up croakers”—forging drug prescriptions. It was the first that Burroughs’s family knew of their son using drugs.
As soon as his parents bailed him out, Burroughs started dealing. As a condition of his suspended sentence, Burroughs had to go back to St. Louis and live with his parents. There, Burroughs ran into his old friend Kells Elvins, just back from the war in the Pacific. Elvins had ten acres of citrus groves in the Rio Grande valley of Texas, and he and Burroughs hatched a plan to grow ruby-red grapefruit together. Burroughs persuaded his family, which was anxious to put some distance between their boy and his New York friends, to buy him fifty acres near Elvins. He and Elvins rented a house together near Pharr, Texas, and began farming.
With Burroughs gone and Huncke’s crowd oozing into the 115th Street apartment, Joan Vollmer started to fall apart. Within a few months of Burroughs’s departure, she suffered a breakdown and was taken to Bellevue after being found squatting on a Times Square sidewalk with her daughter Julie at her side. When Burroughs heard the news, he immediately drove to New York to rescue her.
On that trip in October 1946, William and Joan’s son, William S. Burroughs, Jr., was conceived in a Times Square hotel. Burroughs brought Joan and her daughter back to the Rio Grande Valley, but the citrus ranch failed. By Christmas that year, with the help of his parents, they were combing the backroads and piney woods of East Texas for a quiet secluded place where people would leave them alone so that they could grow a marijuana crop.
Texas never quite lived up to the Burroughses’ expectations. In January 1947, they landed a broken-down ninety-nine-acre farm at the place where an old logging road dead-ended at a swamp. It was twelve miles outside of New Waverly, Texas, not far from the State Penitentiary at Huntsville, where Kells Elvins had taken a job as a prison psychologist. There was no running water and no electricity, just a vine-covered barn that was about to cave in and plenty of tarantulas, centipedes, and scorpions—Burroughs would sometimes kill as many as ten scorpions a day. Burroughs decided to bring Huncke, fresh out of the Bronx jail, to Texas to be their farmhand.
As vultures circled over cypress stumps and black water, Joan, pregnant with William Jr., struggled with Benzedrine psychosis and let her daughter, Julie, run wild. Emerging from his room every morning in a coat and tie, Burroughs would drive into New Waverly to pick up the mail or dispatch Huncke to Houston to buy more drugs. In the evening’s cool, they tended the marijuana. At night, they all sat around on the front porch and got high by the light of a kerosene lamp, listening to Billie Holiday on a scratchy Victrola. Huncke remembers it as a good time. “I used to enjoy staying up nights, high on Benzedrine, just talking to Joan.” On July 21, 1947, William S. Burroughs Jr. was born. With his heart-shaped face, “Billy” was a dead ringer for his mother. He was just as hooked on speed, too.
Two weeks later, Allen Ginsberg showed up with a friend named Neal Cassady. A trim-hipped, muscular, semiliterate con man, Cassady had first hooked up with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac the previous winter in New York, when he’d come to town on the Greyhound with his seventeen-year-old bride, LuAnn, to visit Hal Chase. When school was out the next spring, Ginsberg, dreaming of a romantic idyll, took off for Denver to visit Cassady, only to be caught up in Cassady’s frenzied sexual drama, which also included LuAnn—Mrs. Cassady number one—and Carolyn Robinson, a college drama major who would soon become Mrs. Cassady number two. Cassady, who was primarily heterosexual, promised Ginsberg he’d sleep with him when they got to Burroughs’s place.
When Cassady and Ginsberg arrived, Huncke built them a bed, which on their first night collapsed beneath them faster than Ginsberg’s fervid dreams. Smarting, Ginsberg went to Houston and shipped out on a freighter for France. Burroughs decided that the family would depart immediately for New York, with Cassady at the wheel of Burroughs’s old jeep and Huncke (who was suffering through Benzedrine withdrawal) in back alongside several duffel bags full of mason jars stuffed with pot.
The weed, as it turned out, was whack; and they ended up having to unload it in New York for a hundred dollars. Burroughs was soon strung out again. One winter midnight in Yonkers, he overdosed, and Vollmer had to walk him around all night, pouring coffee down his throat, to revive him. Burroughs checked himself into the federal narcotics farm in Lexington, Kentucky. While he was gone, Vollmer was picked up wandering around Grand Central Station and went back to Bellevue, where Burroughs had to rescue her again. Their search for visionary kicks had become a nightmare.
By February 1948, the Burroughses were back in New Waverly. Despite a welcome-home gift of two baby pigs from their nearest neighbor, the Burroughses wouldn’t stay long. In May, William and Joan were arrested for having sex in their car outside of Beeville, Texas, and fined $173 for drunken driving and public indecency. “Find things very uncool in Texas,” William wrote to Kerouac and Ginsberg that June, announcing his family’s imminent relocation to New Orleans, where he hoped to blend in, cool out, and feed the family habits in the French Quarter.
With the money he got selling the New Waverly place, Burroughs bought a dilapidated house with a screened front porch at the foot of a levee in Algiers, a swampy suburb of New Orleans reachable only by ferry. On November 30, 1948, he wrote to Kerouac, declaring, “I am so disgusted with conditions I may leave the U.S.A. altogether.” He was running out of places to hide.
You can read about the year 1949 in On the Road: “The only thing to do was go.” Just before Christmas 1948, Neal Cassady quit his job as a Southern Pacific switchman. Leaving his new wife, Carolyn, and their infant in California, he bundled his ex-wife LuAnn, fellow S.P. brakeman Al Hinkle, and Hinkle’s wife Helen into a smoked-silver 1949 Hudson and blasted across the U.S. to pick up Kerouac and his mother in North Carolina, stopping on the way east to drop off Helen Hinckle at the Burroughses’. After depositing Kerouac’s mother and her furniture in Ozone Park, New York, Cassady pointed the Hudson toward California.