Chapter Four

Far away and high on the mesa’s crest. Here’s the life that all of us love the best. Los Al-amos.

—LOS ALAMOS RANCH SCHOOL SONG

1. “I Know What’s Best for Boys!”

“Boys become men more easily when separated from oversolicitous mothers” was the motto of Ashley Pond, who founded the Los Alamos Ranch School in 1917. Pond believed that the rough outdoor life was just what the pampered children of the rich needed. He was succeeded by Albert James Connell, known to everyone as “the Boss,” who recognized that these boys were not destined to be farmhands but to run the large prestigious corporations that their fathers owned, and that consequently the school should prepare them for the top universities. The boys stopped doing all the manual labor and staff was brought in to do it. Lawrence Hitchcock ran the academic program and Connell took care of business, recruitment, discipline, and field expeditions such as the overnight excursions to the high valleys and full-day Saturday trips. Connell discouraged married teachers—he wanted an all-male society—however, Pond’s daughter Peggy and her husband, the science teacher Fermor Church, lived there with their three children. Half the day was taken up by studies and the other half by scouting activities. Many of Connell’s ideas were taken on board by Burroughs, such as that there was no such thing as an accident: if something went wrong, it was someone’s fault, probably yours. As an adult Burroughs found amusement in Connell’s frequently used line, “I know what’s best for boys!”

Every month all the boys were subject to naked physical examinations in the nurse’s office by two of the teachers. They were weighed and measured to see how much they had grown and to check their muscle tone. Connell took a close personal interest in this and was almost always there to supervise, touching their arms, chests, and buttocks though never anywhere else. His sexual interest in boys was generally recognized by the staff and boys, and many of the masters were concerned by it.1 “A closet queer, not so goddamn closet either. A. J. Connell. Confirmed bachelor my dear, confirmed. He had decided that this was all wrong. But he was very superior for having these tendencies and not giving in to them,”² Burroughs opined.

When they arrived at Lamy, New Mexico, the boys were met by the school station wagon and driven across the arroyo and up the switchback turns of the bumpy dirt road cut into the solid tuff of the canyon, emerging eventually on the Los Alamos mesa like something in a western movie. Los Alamos is named after the few cottonwood trees that manage to grow on the Pajarito Plateau (it translates as “little bird”), part of the volcanic Jemez mountain range. Gore Vidal, who attended Los Alamos ten years after Burroughs, wrote, “As they approached the top of the mesa, the road became narrow and rocky. Tall juniper bushes on every side and the air sage-scented.”³ The station wagon bumped across the desert, finally arriving at the Big House, a large three-story pine-log structure with a high roof and a veranda supported by smooth round wooden columns. In the distance the Sangre de Cristo Mountains glowed red in the lowering sun.

New arrivals were weighed and inspected by Connell, who assigned them by size and physical development to one of the four patrols, Piñon, Juniper, Fir, and Spruce (older boys); forty-four boys altogether in khaki Boy Scout shirts and short shorts. There were three sleeping verandas on the top floor of the Big House, unheated roofless terraces where the boys slept all year round, with removable awnings that could be lowered in case of rain or snow and screens around them to stop wind. The nights were cool in summer but freezing in winter. There were shower stalls on the ground and third floor, but the boys dressed as soon as they got up and showered later, usually after being outside all day. There was just one toilet on each floor. Connell, Hitchcock, and a number of the other masters had rooms on the second floor of Fuller Lodge, but an unmarried master usually slept on each of the three porches with the boys. He did, however, have an adjoining room to retreat to if he required privacy. Bill had a room that he shared with another boy in Spruce cottage with a sleeping porch attached, but sometimes up to eight boys could be sleeping on the porch.

Lessons were held on the ground floor of the Big House. The ground floor of Fuller Lodge housed the kitchen and large dining room, one end of which had a stage for theatrical productions. Once a year they performed a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, which called for considerable rehearsal and stage work. Burroughs played the lead role of A. E. Scott-Fortescue, “the Toff,” in A Night at an Inn by Lord Dunsany. He particularly enjoyed it because he had to flourish his .32 revolver and act the hard man. Occasionally the room was cleared and the girls from Santa Fe’s Brownmoor School for Girls or from Bishop’s Lodge were invited up for a dance. There was a trading post that sold clothes, ammo, toiletries, and candy: Milky Way, Baby Ruth, Oh Henry!, Hershey Bars and Mars Bars and Denver Maid, chocolate with a pink crème center. O’Connell ordered Life Savers for the whole school by mail.

The Big House and Fuller Lodge were surrounded by ground staff quarters for the forty or more workers at the school, a huge barn, a guesthouse, huts and storage sheds, and the corrals that stabled the sixty riding and ten workhorses that served the ranch. Each boy had a horse assigned to him. On riding days they had to catch their horse—Bill had a strawberry roan—saddle it up, and curry it down afterward. Burroughs often rode bareback “just for laziness. […] I could stay on, riding along, galloping, trying to hang on to the horse. I fell off a couple of times.”4 There was a ski lift and in the winter months they did ski-oring, towed behind a horse like waterskiing except on snow. Bill liked that.

The school day began at 6:30 a.m.,⁵ and at 6:45 sharp the boys did calisthenics on the exercise field outside, push-ups and jumps; if it had been snowing Connell always made sure the field was shoveled clear. If you wanted to get up earlier and work that was permitted. Breakfast was at 7:00 a.m., then beds were made according to Connell’s strict regulations. Classes were from 7:40 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. Study hall was at 5:00 p.m., followed by dinner at 6:00, more study, and early to bed. Sometimes movies were shown in the Big House after dinner. A priest would come and talk to them on Sundays in the main lodge. The school library was equipped with the complete Yale Shakespeare, one volume for each play, and all the standard classics.

English, French, Latin, history, mathematics, and chemistry were taught at a number of different levels, and each of the forty-six boys had an individually determined timetable according to his age and ability. Lawrence Hitchcock taught Latin; he was a traditionalist who believed that Latin was essential for speaking and writing English. Fermor Church taught algebra; he was a good teacher but Bill had a blind spot against it. Someone named Waring taught French, but didn’t really know the language. The English teachers changed frequently; one named Mr. Chase taught Browning, Shakespeare, David Hume, and the classics. “I was very into it.” Bill would escape to his room, light incense, lean against the radiator, play records, and read the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books: Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, Remy de Gourmont, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, and others. Periodically Connell would come around and confiscate some of them as being unfit to read. “Insufferable man!”6

Lunch at 1:00 p.m. was the main meal, followed by a half-hour siesta. The food was homegrown and extremely healthy; they had a big vegetable garden and Bill particularly liked a cornmeal cereal made from blue corn. They kept chickens to eat and for their eggs and there was a dairy that provided both milk and fresh beef. They kept their own pigs. Bill recalled throwing them a dead rabbit, of which they ate every morsel. On Monday afternoon the boys mostly did maintenance work, “community service,” rolling the tennis courts, weeding the garden. The boys had to do one hundred hours during their time there, which Burroughs thought was pointless. He thought the Mexican staff should do the jobs. The other weekday afternoons were spent on horseback riding and athletics, sports such as boxing or tennis. Or the boys could go to the range and shoot. Bill arranged shooting expeditions. He had a .32 Smith & Wesson with a four-inch barrel that he bought secondhand from a mail-order catalog for fifteen dollars when he was fifteen. Anyone could order guns through the mail. Other boys had .25 automatics, .22 Woodsmans, and one boy had a .38 Colt Long. There was not a lot of interest in shooting, but Bill was usually able to get a group of four or five boys to go out. The guns were kept in a locked drawer in the counselor’s room but ammo could be bought from the trading post.

On Saturday the whole school went on an all-day horseback excursion starting at 8:00 a.m. When they reached their destination they cooked their meals in groups of two or three, usually steak and baked potatoes with blueberry jam and bread. Connell had his methods, and if anyone used anything other than glowing coals and got soot on their mess tins from an open flame there was trouble. They were taught to toast marshmallows to a golden brown but never let them catch fire.⁷

The trips were sometimes extended to an overnight camping expedition to Camp May, up near the Jemez crest, the men and boys leading a trail of ranch hands with a mule train of tents and supplies. Connell ran around screaming and hollering at the boys as they attempted to erect their tents, hindering more than helping. At night, seated around a roaring campfire, Connell would lead the storytelling and singing. In the mountains there were deer, black bear, coyote, raccoons, skunks, and gophers, and a few mountain lions and rattlesnakes. Bill used a box trap to catch animals, and had several chipmunks for pets. Sometimes there were swimming parties to hot springs and to the nearby Rio Grande, but the boys generally resisted such trips because Connell liked to share a bed with the prettiest boy and had been known to make advances to them.

Despite the school’s location, Native American history was not on the syllabus. In front of Fuller Lodge were the visible remains of an eight-hundred-year-old Pueblo Indian ruin, but it was not excavated until after Burroughs’s time there. Sometimes the Indians from San Ysidro were invited to the ranch to perform their traditional dances, dressed in their totemic eagle costumes, but the school did not include their story in their history studies. Burroughs always thought it was a missed opportunity that the school did not teach the Spanish language or Mexican cooking, as the ground staff would have made good teachers and the chefs were all Latinos.

In February, not long after his seventeenth birthday, his mother came to visit and took Bill and a school friend into Santa Fe for a day’s outing. In his avid study of gangster books Bill had come across knockout drops—chloral hydrate—and managed to slip, undetected, into a drugstore and buy some. A few days later he took an almost lethal dose and finished up in the school infirmary. His explanation was simply that he wanted to see how it worked. It was his first investigation of mind-altering drugs, albeit a very crude one.

There was one strange episode where Bill hanged one of the teachers in effigy. Henry Bosworth was the algebra teacher, a heavyset sergeant type with very intense, hypnotic brown eyes. He hated Bill on sight even though Bill was not in his class. It manifested in many small ways. On a mountain walk they disturbed a yellowjackets’ nest and Bill was stung four times on his back. Bosworth had medicine for insect stings in his backpack but would not help him. Once at shooting practice, Bill hit the target and Bosworth didn’t. Bosworth was always insulting Bill, calling him a “worthless little punk.” Bill hung a two-foot-high plaster-of-Paris figure of a Boy Scout by a noose over the fireplace with a sign saying, “Bozzy bitch goddamn him!” Before Bill’s guilt was detected, Bosworth was dismissed: he had been fooling around with three brothers, and they reported him to Connell. Bill once saw his cock sticking out of his pajamas when he was roughhousing with another boy. He had to go. Connell finally found out that the effigy was by Bill and summoned him to the office. He said it might have been grounds for expulsion, but queried, “Why did you have to make it so vulgar?”

Twice a week Connell made trips to Santa Fe and the specially chosen would accompany him, usually the older children of the richest parents, who could act as drivers. They would stay at the Hotel La Fonda, the adobe-style inn on the plaza. During one of these trips Bill wrote a pulp fiction story on hotel notepaper. It concerned four jolly murderers:

A middle aged couple very brash and jolly…

“Sure on I’d kill my own grandmother just for a little kale.”

“We have regular rates of course…” the woman observed tartly.

A soft plump pearl gray man stands there with a sickly smile. He is flanked by a skull face Mexican also smiling.8

The Mexican reappeared years later as Tio Mate in The Wild Boys. Other characters were developed: there was a vicious old tycoon who kept pretending to die and listening to what people said about him, then leaping up out of bed and cutting people out of his will. The old tycoon later became Mr. Hart in Ah Puch Is Here. Bill read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and “soon languid young aristocrats were making epigrams on my pages.”⁹

Bill had a crush on one of the other boys, William Russell Fawcett: “you align yourselves to people you feel attracted to in some way or another. He was [nice-looking] he had pimples, I find pimples quite attractive. […] we did actually jack off together under the sheets with flashlights on. […] Then he said that he thought that this was all wrong. He said ‘I think you are going to be the sort of person that will be revolted by a naked woman.’ He finally got to hating me completely. […] You see with boys like Kells and Russell Fawcett when I was attracted to them, I became extremely subservient and actually made myself an object of contempt to the boy. For being so much more interested in him than he was in me. Abject. It was horrid! It was horrible, I don’t blame them.”¹⁰

In the end it was Fawcett who was the cause of Burroughs leaving the school. Bill had known he was homosexual since he was thirteen, but didn’t know how to do anything about it as he seemed attracted to heterosexual boys. Burroughs wrote that he “formed a romantic attachment for one of the boys at Los Alamos and kept a diary of this affair that was to put me off writing for many years. Even now I blush to remember its contents.”¹¹ Home for the Easter vacation in 1931, he convinced his family that his feet were giving him pain. They were unusually long, and later when he lived in London he had shoes specially made to fit him. He managed to persuade his parents to let him stay home. He then told his mother that he felt miserable because he had a fixation on a boy at school and the boy had become “very hostile.” He was very unhappy there and just wanted to leave. His mother was terribly upset and traveled to New Mexico with Bill to talk to Connell about it. Connell agreed that it would be best if Bill withdrew from the school. He left two months early, after staying on long enough to appear in a dramatic production he had rehearsed.

Laura was very understanding about it, but to her homosexuality was a terrible, frightening illness. She said, “We’ll send you to a doctor who will fix this up. We’ll spend every penny if necessary!” They got back to St. Louis and she sent Bill to a psychiatrist friend of theirs, Dr. Sidney Schwab, for a psychiatric evaluation. “We talked a little bit about the Greeks and decided that it wasn’t to be taken too seriously, and he assured my mother that it was a phase and that I would grow out of it. He was a nice enough old man.”12

This first encounter with the official opprobrium toward homosexuality from school, family, and the object of his affection unnerved Burroughs and contributed to his future secrecy about his sexual inclinations: the development of his persona as el hombre invisible was all to do with his fear of exposure and his horror of being the object of contempt and ridicule. The school packed his things, including the incriminating diary, and sent them to him. “I used to turn cold thinking that maybe the boys are reading it aloud to each other. When the box finally arrived I pried it open and threw everything out until I found the diary and destroyed it forthwith without a glance at the appalling pages. […] The act of writing had become embarrassing, disgusting, and above all, false. It was not the sex in the diary that embarrassed me it was the terrible falsity of the emotions expressed. The sight of my words on a page sickened me and this continued until 1938. I had written myself an eight year sentence.”¹³

Bill’s two years at Los Alamos made a huge impression upon him, featuring in many of his utopian fantasies about all-male societies, particularly in The Wild Boys. After Bill left the school, Connell visited St. Louis and they had dinner. Some years later Bill drove out to Santa Fe and spent several days on the ranch; old boys were always welcome. The school came to an abrupt end, however. One spring morning in 1942 a small reconnaissance aircraft circled around and around the ranch. Connell knew something was up, as only the military could afford to use that much aircraft fuel in wartime. Then they received two visitors: Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves carrying a set of plans. The school was requisitioned, sentries were posted all around, and a team of scientists moved in. It was at Los Alamos that the atomic bomb was invented. “It seemed so right somehow,” wrote Burroughs.¹⁴

Back in St. Louis Bill spent two months at the Evans Tutoring school. That summer he went on a fishing holiday with his father and older brother, which he assumed was intended to make him more “manly.” In fact, this was an activity Burroughs loved, and not just on vacation. He would sometimes tag along with a group of rabbit hunters often including his brother, Mort. Max Putzel, one of the group, remembered, “One evening, we drove down to an estate in the Ozarks in an ancient Cadillac town car likewise belonging to a prosperous St. Louis attorney, the father of our host. Avid for sport, we were armed not only with shotguns but with assorted target pistols and drove merrily down the mud highways, stopping from time to time to drink from a large tea kettle of sour wine known as ‘Dago red.’ We pulled up at a tavern near Kimmswick, unaware that it had been the scene of a hold-up a few days earlier. Unwilling to leave our weapons in the car, we toted them along—five boys with guns, puzzled at the hostility of the host and customers at the bar. The only game we encountered that weekend were two miserable possums treed the next night and happily presented to a tenant farmer partial to fatty meat. The shotguns accounted for one rattlesnake and, I believe, a copperhead cornered near the entrance to a cave.”15

In the fall of 1931 Burroughs started at the Taylor School. Edgar Curtis “Joe” Taylor was a faculty member of Washington University in St. Louis and saw the need for a small private school for boys that would parallel the East Coast preparatory schools. In 1930 he opened the Taylor School in a fourteen-room house on North Central Avenue to teach grades six through twelve. At its maximum capacity the school had fifty students, and gave individual tuition with classes limited to four or five students per class. It had only been open a year when Burroughs joined. He was not impressed by Taylor. “He was a Rhodes scholar, real bumptious. I didn’t like him at all, he was a hustler. But the school was alright, he got some good teachers in.” Taylor employed staff from Washington University, including an excellent English teacher called Jellinek who had a deep understanding of literature and was able to communicate it to Burroughs. Thanks to him Burroughs was able to quote at length from Milton, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare throughout his life. “He was a terrifically good teacher. He told me once, ‘I know you despise Joe Taylor, I can see it in your face,’ but he said, ‘Don’t despise him, he’s hooked, he’s got a wife and kids, don’t you understand?’ ”¹⁶ Bill got good grades on the college board and graduated in the spring of 1932 and was able to go on to Harvard.

Even then Burroughs saw beyond the surface of things, and sensed the dread beneath the veneer. Years later he wrote, “When I lived in St. Louis and drove home past the bare clay of subdivided lots, here and there houses set down on platforms of concrete in the mud, play-houses of children who look happy and healthy but empty horror and panic in clear gray-blue eyes, and when I drove by the subdivisions always felt impact in stomach of final loneliness and despair.”¹⁷

2. Billy Bradshinkel

After a summer in Majorca with the family, where Bill enjoyed some serious swimming and diving, he went up to Harvard. Prohibition was still in force when Bill arrived, and he and his friends used to make bathtub gin. Grain alcohol was not hard to get and you just bought flavorings to add to it, usually “gin” (juniper berry juice) or “whiskey,” and added water. The results were terrible, but drinkable if you added plenty of soda or quinine water or mixed it with fruit juice. Prohibition was repealed on December 5, 1933, with the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment. There had been plenty of speakeasies in St. Louis, one of which held special memories for Bill: “I remembered a prohibition era road house of my adolescence and the taste of gin rickeys in a mid west summer. (Oh my God! And the August moon in a violet sky and Billy Bradshinkel’s cock. How sloppy can you get?) […] P.S. Billy Bradshinkel got to be such a nuisance I finally had to kill him.”¹⁸

James Grauerholz has provided persuasive proof that Billy Bradshinkel was in reality Prynne Hoxie, Bill’s first cousin, neighbor, and his best friend at John Burroughs School.¹⁹ The dates fit, as does Burroughs’s use of the material. It is a convincing portrait of eighteen-year-old Burroughs’s confused emotional state as he grows into manhood and prepares for Harvard.

The first time was in my model A after the Spring prom. Billy with his pants down to his ankles and his tuxedo shirt still on, and jissom all over the car seat. Later I was holding his arm while he vomited in the car headlights, looking young and petulant with his blond hair mussed standing there in the warm Spring wind. Then we got back in the car and turned the lights off and I said, “Let’s again.”

And he said, “No we shouldn’t.”

And I said, “Why not?” and by then he was excited too so we did it again, and I ran my hands over his back under his tuxedo shirt and held him against me and felt the long baby hairs of his smooth cheek against mine and he went to sleep there and it was getting light when we drove home.

After that in the car several times and one time his family was away and we took off all our clothes and afterwards I watched him sleeping like a baby with his mouth a little open.

[…]

I remember the last time I saw Billy was in October of that year. One of those sparkling blue days you get in the Ozarks in Autumn. We had driven out into the country to hunt squirrels with my .22 single shot, and walked through the autumn woods without seeing anything to shoot at and Billy was silent and sullen and we sat on a log and Billy looked at his shoes and finally told me he couldn’t see me again (notice I am sparing you the falling leaves).

“But why Billy? Why?”

“Well if you don’t know I can’t explain it to you. Let’s go back to the car.”

We drove back in silence and when we came to his house he opened the door and got out. He looked at me for a second as if he was going to say something then turned abruptly and walked up the flagstone path to his house. I sat there for a minute looking at the closed door. Then I drove home feeling numb. When the car was stopped in the garage I put my head down on the wheel sobbing and rubbing my cheek against the steel spokes. Finally Mother called to me from an upstairs window was anything wrong and why didn’t I come in the house. So I wiped the tears off my face and went in and said I was sick and went upstairs to bed. Mother brought me a bowl of milk toast on a tray but I couldn’t eat any and cried all night.

After that I called Billy several times on the phone but he always hung up when he heard my voice. And I wrote him a long letter which he never answered. Three months later when I read in the paper he had been killed in a car wreck and Mother said, “Oh that’s the Bradshinkel boy. You used to be such good friends didn’t you?”

I said, “Yes Mother” not feeling anything at all.

Prynne had been killed in the early hours of Monday, December 17, in New York City when the car he was in swerved to avoid wet trolley tracks and struck a pillar. There were four other Princeton students in the car. Later that day, Bill’s father cabled Harvard to ask that his son be excused from classes for three days, December 19–21, to attend Prynne’s funeral in St. Louis on Thursday, December 20, 1934.

Homosexuality was so forbidden that many people, like Bill’s grandmother, had never even heard of it. His sense of alienation and being different put him into a mental turmoil. He didn’t know “why I couldn’t go out and get boys, which I didn’t at all… I just somehow didn’t know how to do it! It wasn’t a question of being forbidden. I was scared of everything, practically, and no wonder.”20