Chapter Twelve

She was in all probability one of the most charming and intelligent women I’ve ever met.

—HERBERT HUNCKE

1. Joan

Joan Vollmer returned to New York with her daughter, Julie, early in September 1944 looking rested and having lost fifteen pounds. Within three weeks she found a place to live: apartment 35 at 419 West 115th Street between Morningside Drive and Amsterdam Avenue, a huge, old-fashioned apartment with six big rooms and a sun-filled living room. She signed the lease for $150 a month under her married name of Mrs. Paul Adams and gave as her cosignees Mr. and Mrs. Jack Kerouac. Edie had given up the old apartment when she went to Grosse Pointe after marrying Kerouac but had followed her errant husband back to New York and was living with him in his cramped room at Warren Hall. She arranged to share the place with Joan but then broke up with Jack again and returned to Grosse Pointe, so Joan needed to find more flatmates to share the rent. Her old friend Ruth Clark spent a few months there but became pregnant and soon went to join her marine husband where he was stationed. An advertisement in the Columbia Spectator student paper found Hal Chase, who took the first room by the door. Haldon Chase was from Denver and was studying anthropology at Columbia, specializing in American Indian culture. He had been in the ski troops but was already discharged and was on a somewhat different wavelength from Joan, Edie, and Jack, but he fitted in well enough. Ginsberg described him as a “brash innocent mountaineering Denver boy, ‘Child of the Rainbow’ with pretty golden blond hair and good physique, an all-Indian hawk nose and American boy State Fair fresh manners.” His role in the Beat Generation saga was to introduce them all to his hometown friend Neal Cassady, but in the meantime he began seeing Celine Young.

On arrival in New York Joan began an affair with Bruce Mazlish, later the celebrated psychohistorian. Through Mazlish she met John Kingsland, a nineteen-year-old Columbia student who was in Ginsberg’s year and had originally been on the same floor of the Union Theological Seminary as Allen and Lucien. He was thrown out of the seminary in January 1945 for being drunk and having once taken Joan to his room. He and Joan got together and he moved into 115th Street. Despite their age difference, Kingsland assumed it was a serious, long-term relationship and that this disparity would diminish in time. He arranged to have his classes in the afternoon so he could watch over Julie in the mornings while Joan worked in a nursery school. Then he would go to class and work evenings at the library. Joan often wrote his class papers for him, and there was one term paper on Dryden and eighteenth-century English literature that she wrote in the style of Dryden that his professor, Joseph Wood Krutch, admired so much that Kingsland was concerned he would be found out. Joan was very well read: her bookshelves were filled with the works of Goethe, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Karl Marx, and she was clearly a good writer.

Allen Ginsberg, meanwhile, had been having a difficult time. Johnny the bartender—presumably a paid informant—had reported to Dean McKnight’s office at Columbia that Allen had been drinking with Kerouac at the West End Bar and the dean summoned Allen’s father; Louis left the dean’s office in tears. Allen studied hard and had straight-A grades, but Columbia wanted complete control over their scholarship students and the West End was out of bounds. Allen had to leave Warren Hall and move to Livingston Hall, on campus, where he shared with Bill Lancaster, whose father was a banker and a director of the Foreign Policy Association.

On March 16, in the course of one of their long discussions, Burroughs told Jack bluntly that he would never free himself from his mother’s pernicious influence unless he made a proper break with her instead of running home every time he had a problem. Bill said, “The trouble with you is you’re just tied to your mother’s apron strings and you are going in a wide circle around her now, but it’s going to get a narrower and narrower circle and sooner or later you are going to be right in there, unable to move away from your mother. That’s your fate, that’s your Faustian destiny.”¹

Appalled by Burroughs’s prophecy, Jack went straight to Livingston Hall to discuss it with Allen. Ever since Edie had returned to her mother in December, Jack had been spending at least half of his time in Ozone Park, Queens, where his father was dying. Jack had not connected his separation from Edie, and his inability to commit himself to their relationship, with his mother’s strenuous efforts to be the only woman in his life. Jack recognized that Burroughs was right: he had internalized many of his mother’s ideas and was too closely tied to her. It got so late that Jack stayed over with Allen. Jack was aware of Allen’s erotic feelings for him, but they slept chastely in their underwear.

Allen suspected that the Irish woman who cleaned his room harbored anti-Semitic feelings, and had used this to draw her attention to the dirty window that she never cleaned. He had written “Butler has no balls” (a reference to Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University), followed by an eye-catching “Fuck the Jews” with a skull and crossbones beneath it. But instead of a clean window, Allen’s graffiti resulted in a report to Dean Furman. At 8:00 a.m., after Bill Lancaster had already gone to class, Furman, the assistant dean of student-faculty relationships, burst into Allen’s room. Jack leapt from the bed and ran to Lancaster’s empty bed in the next room, pulling the covers up over his face. Allen was made to wipe the offending words from the window, but he knew that Furman was thinking the worst. Allen later found two notes in his box. One charged him $2.35 for entertaining an unauthorized guest overnight, and the other, from Dean McKnight, informed him that he was suspended and suggested that he spend the weekend with his father, “since the privilege of residence at Livingston has been withdrawn from you.” McKnight wrote to Allen’s father saying that he had been suspended for obscene writings on his window and giving overnight housing to a person who was not a member of the college and whose presence on the campus was unwelcome. Kerouac had been branded as “an unwholesome influence on the students” ever since he was charged as a material witness in the Kammerer case.

On Monday morning, Dean McKnight glared at Allen across the desk and said, “Mr. Ginsberg. I hope you understand the enormity of what you have done!”

Allen remembered the lines in Céline on dealing with madmen and knew that the only way out was to humor him. “Oh I do, sir! I do! I do!” he said. “If you can only tell me what I can do to make up for this…” McKnight decreed that Allen could not return to Columbia until he had worked at a job for a year and had a psychiatric report to confirm that he was now mature enough to be a responsible member of the academic community. Allen was out and the purity of Columbia was assured. With nowhere to live, Allen moved into West 115th Street with Joan, Julie, and Hal Chase.

Jack and Allen got it into their heads that Burroughs should meet Joan Vollmer because, in Ginsberg’s words, “Joan was a very intelligent woman, somewhat sardonic, curious-minded, learned, and an intellectual lady with a very fine mind and a high noble brow and wittier than any lady I’d ever met. So Kerouac and I thought, ‘Gee, we should introduce her to Burroughs ’cause she’s real smart and Burroughs would appreciate her humor.’ ”² Joan had been in Albany from the beginning of 1944 and missed the chaos and excitement surrounding the death of Kammerer, and Bill had been away until December, so they had not had much opportunity to meet thus far. Jack and Allen did not know at that time that Bill was gay, so there was a degree of matchmaking going on as well as a genuine feeling that they would get on. They invited him over to 115th Street and he and Joan hit it off. Their humor clicked and they clearly enjoyed each other’s company. Burroughs said, “She was a very extraordinary woman and we got talking, exchanging ideas, she was the smartest person around.” He compared her to Allen, saying that she was in many ways smarter because she didn’t have any limits to her thinking, whereas Allen did. “That was the basis of the attraction, an intellectual, not the usual talks about nothing. She had a sense of humor. It was more humor my style. She had an immediate insight into anyone’s character. Just one look and she knew.”³

This was a trait that Bill felt she shared with his mother, who could also tell someone’s character with just one glance and knew instantly if someone was lying. Bill said, “Joan was exactly the same. For example, on Kerouac’s character she said, ‘He has a natural inborn fear of authority and if the cops questioned him his mouth would open and out would come the information.’ She had a great deal of insight.”⁴ Clearly the shared attributes with his mother were part of her appeal. They became good friends and Bill often visited her. His relationship with Joan did not become physical until later. They often ate out together, though this was becoming more difficult in New York as the war effort finally started to have an impact on the general population. In January 1945, Mayor La Guardia had instituted meatless Tuesdays and Fridays; no butchers could sell meat on those days and all restaurant meals had to be meatless. Hot dog stands were exempt. Then in February the federal government introduced a midnight curfew on all restaurants and bars and nightclubs, which hit Manhattan hard as so many people worked in late-night bars and clubs. Only places that were traditionally open twenty-four hours were exempt; night workers had to eat somewhere.

Jack brought Vickie Russell around to 115th Street and, inspired by Joan’s bathing habits, she began taking a perfumed bubble bath in the kitchen bathtub at Henry Street, her hair piled high on her head like Nefertiti’s crown, the men lunging forward, attempting to blow away the bubbles, avoiding her slaps. For her part, Vickie quickly introduced Benzedrine to the group. Joan had a huge bed with an oriental rug draped across it, and soon Allen, Jack, and Joan, often accompanied by Vickie, were spending evenings high on amphetamine, sprawled over the bed as little Julie slept in the corner of the room.

On V-E Day, May 8, 1945, Bill and Jack went to join the crowds in Times Square to celebrate; they tried to pick up women but failed. Bill later thought that Jack’s heart wasn’t really in it; Jack thought that Bill scared them off. Later that month, around Memorial Day, people began to drift away for the summer. Joan went with Julie to her parents; Hal Chase went back to Denver; Allen eventually signed up for training at the U.S. Maritime Service in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, an idea that Bill had several times toyed with because that was the fastest route to the coveted Seamen’s Union card. Bill returned to St. Louis to spend the summer with his parents. In July he made a trip to Chicago, “on business,” probably to buy drugs, and was back in New York by the end of August. He had given up the West 60th Street place when he left for the summer and moved into a $4.50-a-night hotel on Park Avenue. Joan was still in need of flatmates, and so around Labor Day, Bill moved into 115th Street.

Joan and Julie had one room; Hal Chase had another. Allen Ginsberg had his things there, but as he was away for three and a half months’ training he had stored them all in Hal’s room. Bill took over the spare bedroom and installed his library and few other belongings. By now it was obvious that Joan was very attracted to Bill, but it would be a little while before he reciprocated. He had, however, already told her—and Jack and Allen—that he was homosexual. Edie was back in New York and working for an agency that supplied cigarette girls, selling Chesterfields at “21,” the Kit Kat, Zanzibar, and the Stork Club. Jack was unemployed so he lived off her wages, dividing his time about equally between 115th Street and Ozone Park looking after his father, who was dying of stomach cancer. With Edie away each night until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., Jack was free to run around town seeing other girls. According to Ginsberg, who was prone to exaggerate these things, Kerouac was also seeing men. He was certainly bisexual, and Allen claimed to have had sex with him as many as fifty or sixty times:

Mostly I blew him. He blew me once. […] Mainly he was interested in getting blown, with men and women! That was probably his main sex life with girls was getting blown too. It became a burden in our sexual relationship because I wanted more response. […] Except I really loved him so I was happy to [go along]. […] It was a very ambivalent relationship with him sort of denying interest but allowing it so it was sort of, a little bit in the pattern of John Rechy… in the sense of Rechy’s feelings of triumph, if he could get somebody to blow him. But refusing to blow anybody. [Kerouac and Burroughs] were in bed a couple of times. […] I think Burroughs would get desperate and say, “Oh, c’mon Jack,” and Jack’d say, “How about blowing me?” and Burroughs’d say, “No, c’mon Jack.” The thing was so funny it wasn’t even homosexuality.⁵

In September Bill took Jack to a homosexual orgy, but Jack’s Catholic guilt was so great that he canceled a meeting with Bill the next day. He wrote to Allen, who was still training for the merchant marine at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, telling him:

Since then, I’ve been facing my nature full in the face and the result is a purge. […] Remember that the earlier part of my life has always been spent in an atmosphere vigorously and directly opposed to this sort of atmosphere. It automatically repels me, thereby causing a great deal of remorse, and disgust. […] As to the physical aspects, which as you know, disgust me consciously, I cannot be too sure […] whatever’s in my subconscious is there.⁶

Kerouac’s notebooks were filled with drawings of crucifixes and references to God and Jesus; he never left the faith, and his homosexual flings filled him with remorse. However, shortly after the orgy, Jack, Bill, and Allen spent a night at the notorious Everard Baths at 28 West 28th Street where Jack disappeared into the Turkish baths with a group of French sailors who gave him a blow job. Allen commented, “I think he just dug the idea of a bunch of French sailors. He was quite sociable and happy […] he was very gay about it.”⁷

As the end of 1945 approached, the little band at Henry Street had dispersed and Huncke had moved into Bill’s Henry Street apartment, which he had kept on because it was so cheap. The idea was that Huncke would pay half the rent and look after the place, but naturally that never happened. Ever since he first met Phil White, Bill had been slowly developing a habit until he was now shooting every day. Phil White and his girlfriend, Kay, moved into an apartment in the same building, and every morning after breakfast they would meet to plan how to get that day’s supply of junk. Bill, now short of money from his habit but still looking respectable, began touring doctors recommended by Phil as being likely to write a script. Burroughs often said that Junky is extremely accurate concerning events around this time, and it spells out in meticulous detail his inexorable slide into addiction. He wrote, “As the habit takes hold, other interests lose importance to the user. Life telescopes down to junk, one fix and looking forward to the next.”⁸

2. The Wolfeans and the Non-Wolfeans

Joan was still married to Paul Adams, but had written saying she no longer wanted to be with him. He clearly still had feelings for her, as Joan revealed in a letter to Edie: “I got two letters from Paul this morning—quite nice ones. First I’d heard from him since I wrote. Didn’t seem too upset, and asked what I wanted to do. Don’t know quite what to answer. He didn’t suggest divorce, but said we might separate and ‘begin courting again.’ Poor little soul. But honestly I think he might be just a little relieved.”⁹ Their relationship was finally terminated one night in September 1945, when Paul came striding down the hall of 115th Street in his big army boots, fresh home from the front. He was appalled to find six people, all high on Benzedrine, cross-legged and sprawled across the bed, surrounded by overflowing ashtrays, discussing skepticism and decadence. He stared at them in horror and exclaimed, “Is this what I fought for?” Joan just looked up and told him to come down from his “character heights.”¹⁰ He filed for divorce shortly afterward.

It was around this time that one of the set-piece Beat Generation events occurred, later known as “The Night of the Wolfeans and the Non-Wolfeans.” Kerouac was enormously influenced by Thomas Wolfe and talked constantly about his overlong celebrations of American provincial life. In the Benzedrine-fueled discussions at 115th Street this evolved into a split in the household between the Wolfeans and the non-Wolfeans. The Wolfeans were the heterosexual all-American boys, Kerouac and Hal Chase, and on the other side were Burroughs and Ginsberg, characterized by Allen as “the sinister European fairies, me and Burroughs, fairy-Jew-communists non-Wolfean cynics who didn’t believe in the wide-open dewy-eyed lyrical America that they did and who were always trying to make it with the Wolfean boys.”¹¹

On the night in question, they wound up talking all night, Bill in bed with Kerouac and Allen in bed with Hal Chase, speeding their heads off. Allen got very upset with the way the conversation was going; he felt as if a huge cellophane curtain had come down between them, and protested vehemently, “It’s not fair to be divided like this.” He felt the non-Wolfeans were being discriminated against. “Homosexuality was one of the attributes of non-Wolfeans, and among other things, intellectuality and fear of the body and manipulativeness and Jewishness. International concern rather than appreciation of America and homeyness and family and normal values.”¹² That night became a reference point between them for many years. Ginsberg said, “If I had been the only non-Wolfean I would have felt like a jerk, but with Burroughs as one of us, I felt there was some dignity and possibility in the situation despite our deficiency in earthiness.”¹³ In many ways, the roles and relationships defined by them that night determined how they saw each other for the rest of their lives. These roles were reinforced in games of charades where the Wolfean and non-Wolfean roles were acted out.

Ginsberg played “The Well-Groomed Hungarian” with an atelier full of worthless paintings. Burroughs would play his shill, wearing one of Joan’s skirts and a wig. Kerouac borrowed his father’s straw hat and played the wide-eyed, innocent American in Paris. Allen would rub his hands together and affect a thick Middle European accent: “Ah, my young man, you vant to buy some culture? I haff these masterpieces that we brought with us when we flee the Nazis.”

Jack would cross his legs and step from one foot to the other, clutching his hat: “Aw gee, fellers. I cain’t. I got a girl. I have a date with my girl at one of those coffee houses you got out here.”

At this, Burroughs rather broke role, saying, “You want to stay away from those, Jack. Those ladies got poison juices. Your cock falls off and sometimes they got teeth up there!”¹⁴ Bill later remembered his role. “I was playing, er-hum, an Edith Sitwell part. I got in drag and looked like some sinister old lesbian.”¹⁵

This was at the height of Burroughs’s analysis with Dr. Wolberg, and Bill was reading a great deal about hypnoanalysis, narcoanalysis, and Freud. He attempted to put his ideas into practice by analyzing Allen, beginning in August 1945. Ginsberg claimed that he and Kerouac spent a year, an hour a day, five or six days a week free-associating while Burroughs acted as a psychiatrist, sitting in a straight-backed chair while they in turn lay on the couch.¹⁶

Burroughs challenged this, telling Ted Morgan that “perhaps there were ten sessions in all. He unburdened himself to me to no purpose at all. There were various traumatic events, but on the whole nothing of much significance. ‘Nobody loves me, nobody loves me, nobody loves me!’ Now I felt, even at the time, that this was sheer histrionics. It just didn’t ring true and it didn’t mean anything. Now I’d say, ‘Why should anyone love you? And why do you want anyone to love you? That’s the most important question. Why do you want to be loved, why do you need to be loved?’ ”

Ginsberg, however, felt that the analysis was something of a success. “Mine came to a conclusion when there was some kind of breakthrough of feeling and I finally burst into tears and said, ‘Nobody loves me!’ which I think was what was bothering me at the time. And when I finally came out with it and wept Burroughs sat there, sort of impersonally, friendly, listening, commentating, welcoming. So it was kind of a breakthrough for me, a realization of my actual feelings.” As Ginsberg was just nineteen, and somewhat adrift, Burroughs does seem to have helped him.

With all the talk of analysis, and the acting out of “routines,” Bill next attempted to act out the different layers of his own alter ego that his narcoanalysis with Dr. Wolberg had identified. The top personality was easy, that of the distinguished scion of the respectable St. Louis family, so he went straight on to the nervous, possibly lesbian English governess, which once again involved getting up in drag. Ginsberg said that this “was more or less what Burroughs was like naked, when he was in bed making out; that is, kind of prissy, self-conscious, simpering, middle-aged feminine.” As the English governess he was very prim, serving tea, shrieking in a high voice, “My dear, you’re just in time for tea,” and rapping people on the knuckles if they said something untoward: “Don’t say those dirty words in front of everyone.”

Bill loved acting out the old tobacco farmer, sittin’ on his front porch on the banks of the river watching the catfish go by. He would slowly build his monologue while people held their breath in anticipation. “See that catfish comin’ down the river? Well it’s just like one catfish after another going down. Comes down from there and goes right down here, and I jest sit and watch ’em all day long. Once in a while I get out my fishing tackle and I catch me a catfish. EVER GUT A CATFISH?” And he’d leap up and go completely mad with psychopathic bloodlust with his capping line while everyone roared with laughter.

Beneath all the personality layers was a silent, starving, skull-headed, yellow-skinned Chinese, crouched on the banks of the muddy Yangtze; a character with no hope, no ideals, no beliefs, and no words, that Bill felt might be his ultimate persona.

In addition to his experiments in lay analysis, for many months Bill attempted to hypnotize Ginsberg, with no success. They conducted experiments in telepathy, marking crosses and circles and squares on sheets of paper at predetermined times. Ginsberg remembered that “there was a whole year we did that for fun. We would not see each other and match them every two days.”¹⁷ This was something that Bill and Joan would do together for many years to come.

It was inevitable that the other residents of 115th Street would get to know Huncke. Burroughs first took him around in October 1945, thinking that his stories might amuse them. They did, and Huncke made enormous efforts to ingratiate himself into their society, knowing they were all from solid middle-class backgrounds, like himself, and that there was money there. Huncke recalled, “I used to visit there constantly. Sometimes I’d stay overnight. Sometimes I’d cut out, stoned out of my gourd, at the crack of dawn, walk downtown, down to forty-second Street.”¹⁸ Jack was particularly intrigued by him, seeing material for his writing: “Then there was Herbert Huncke—he’s the greatest story teller I’ve ever known. I don’t like his ideas about mugging and all that stuff, but he doesn’t do the mugging himself. He’s just a little guy.”¹⁹

Huncke recognized that he had to sing for his supper. “I guess I represented the underworld. They were curious about the underworld and I was certainly much closer to the underworld than they were at that point, such as it was. Well, one thing they all had in common is that they wanted to write. They talked about writing and they knew of writers and so forth. They were very thoroughly trained academically.”²⁰

Bill also brought round Phil “the Sailor” White, whom he was seeing on a regular basis to get morphine. The Sailor also had a good line in stories, and to the 115th Street group these were romantic, outsider figures, free from the normal constraints of society. In fact they were just self-serving criminals with no thought for other people who would do anything as long as it was to their advantage. Shortly before Burroughs met them, Huncke and Phil White were on board ship; both had merchant marine papers. They stole all the morphine syrettes from the medical supplies in the lifeboats—identical to the ones Burroughs sold them, and probably from the same source—and shot them up. Had the ship been torpedoed and injured men taken to the lifeboats, there would have been no morphine to ease their pain, but no one made a moral judgment about them. They were characters.

There was a diverting interlude in late 1945 when Huncke was approached by a researcher in Times Square and asked to participate in Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s study on sexual behavior. Huncke immediately asked to be paid and after the usual wrangling was given ten dollars. He was also offered fifty cents for every new subject he could get to do it. Huncke knew an enormous number of people who would be willing, mostly junkies and thieves, and Kinsey and his assistant, Wardell Pomeroy, were thrown out of one hotel because the manager didn’t like the line of seedy-looking people visiting their rooms, suspecting them of dealing drugs. The questionnaire had 521 items, but depending on the subject’s particular experiences, usually only about three hundred questions were asked. Tape recorders did not yet exist and so the answers were taken down by hand. The questions were extremely detailed and the whole thing took about an hour. Bill, Jack, and Allen all agreed to do it. Bill was very interested in the project and was introduced to Dr. Kinsey, but it was Pomeroy who asked the questions. Bill was paid five dollars. After fifty-three hundred men had been interviewed, the findings were published in 1948 as Sexual Behavior in the Human Male²¹—something of a generalization, as all the participants were white and American.

Joan and Bill spent hours in Joan’s room, lying on the bed talking. “We had all these really deep conversations about very fundamental things,” Burroughs recalled later, “her intuition was absolutely amazing.”²² Ginsberg had fond memories of spending long hours in Joan’s room talking, with Bill lying on the bed, propped up with pillows, and Joan at his side with her arm around him. Because Bill was so involved with it, Joan tried morphine (she didn’t shoot it), but she hated it. She said it was just awful, she hated the sensation and couldn’t understand how anyone could take it. She had a complete intolerance for opiates. However, as Burroughs drifted deeper into addiction, so Joan took more and more Benzedrine. By Christmas 1945, she was using an entire tube a day. Bill used to line up the empties and shoot them with an air pistol.

Joan claimed to have very acute hearing and told the others what the Irish couple living in the apartment below were saying. She reported quarrels over the old man’s sexual demands and petty squabbles. Several times they debated whether Joan was a whore, and whether they should report them all to the police as drug addicts. Then one evening she heard a bad quarrel going on and said the man was threatening to stab his wife. She insisted that Jack and Allen, the only ones there, do something. They ran downstairs and pounded on the door. There was no one home. For the past five months Joan had been having auditory hallucinations caused by the amphetamine.²³

Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Joan and Huncke, who was also a heavy user of Benzedrine at that time, had been talking about the effects of atomic radiation and believed (correctly) that radiation caused mutation and skin cancers. They spent hours discussing the radioactive spores that they saw emerging from their flesh and believed that the effects of radiation could be most clearly seen among the nighttime inhabitants of Times Square where the diseased skin and cellular breakdown was illuminated in the brightly lit all-night cafeterias.

Jack, too, used so much Benzedrine that his health deteriorated. He started to have hallucinations, his hair began to fall out, and one day he looked so deathly pale that Vickie Russell slapped makeup on his face before she would go on the subway with him. Finally, in December, he collapsed with thrombophlebitis, painful swelling of the veins caused by blood clots, and was admitted to Queens General Hospital on the VA program, where he had to lie with his legs up on pillows swathed in hot compresses for several weeks.

Jack was released to the care of his mother, who was already looking after her husband, Leo. Burroughs went to visit him for dinner; he had been out to Ozone Park before and Mrs. Kerouac had always been civil to him, even though he could tell that she hated him. Allen was forbidden to visit because he was a Jew, and Jack went along with that. Leo’s face was a lifeless gray color and his stomach was purple and swollen hard like a watermelon; every two or three weeks the doctor would come and drain it into a bucket. As soon as Bill entered the room Leo began an anti-Semitic, antiblack diatribe. Bill was appalled: “He was just a horrible mess of a Catholic consciousness.” Back at 115th Street, Jack told Bill and Joan that his mother had put a curse on his father strong enough to kill him. He said that as he lay there dying she would taunt him: “Pretty soon I’m going to be saying, ‘Ya ya ya’ to you, six feet underground!”²⁴ He lived another month after Bill’s visit.

After his father died, Kerouac turned up at 115th Street with a distant, spaced-out look on his face and said, “You know, Joan, I realize that my mother is the most marvelous woman in the world!” As far as Burroughs was concerned, he was running scared. His mother had killed his father and he was next if he stepped out of line. She wanted him all to herself; she did her best to undermine every relationship he ever had with a woman, including his wives, and tried hard to separate Jack from the pernicious influence of Bill and Allen. As far as Bill was concerned she was a stupid, superstitious, vindictive, hateful Breton peasant: “They know what they want and by God they’re going to get it. They’re just there like a real hunk of hard evil shit.”²⁵ Bill did not disguise his opinion of her. “Jack was under her thumb. A real mama’s boy.”²⁶

Kerouac was going through a very hard time. His father had made him swear that he would look after his mother after his death, an oath that potentially meant that Jack would have to get a job instead of pursuing his career as a writer and living off her earnings from the shoe factory until he had finished his book and was able to live off his writing. But fortunately she agreed to support him, at least until his book was published, recognizing the power that gave her over him. In fact, Leo’s death focused Jack’s energy and precipitated him into a writing frenzy. Once more using Benzedrine, though in more moderation this time, he began writing a massive Wolfean bildungsroman, The Town and the City, about Lowell and New York, which occupied him until September 1948. Supported by his mother, he prayed each day to Jesus, placed his Bible next to his typewriter, and began a long work session. The final manuscript was indeed Wolfean, with over twelve hundred manuscript pages and more than 300,000 words. It was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1950. He had always known he was a writer, and he had achieved his aim.

Meanwhile Bill’s addiction had reached the stage where his monthly allowance did not cover the cost of his drugs. He concentrated instead on getting scripts from doctors, and when that got difficult, he began forging them. Edie’s grandmother had put someone named Morris Martin through medical school, and when he died, he left her some property in Brooklyn. She never threw anything away that might be useful, such as the dead doctor’s prescription pads, which Edie was now using for grocery lists. Phil White talked Bill into forging prescriptions and Bill spent ages practicing a signature in an illegible hand. They used the prescriptions to get junk, but then the others began using Dr. Martin’s pads as well. Then Bill misspelled “Dilaudid,” using two l’s, attracting the attention of the pharmacist. As Edie put it, “some druggist checked and found out that the croaker had croaked.” The inspectors examined the scripts and found they were in different handwriting.

Bill was not surprised when two detectives, Shein and O’Grady, arrived at 115th Street, as Huncke had already been arrested. Bill was charged with violation of Public Health Law 334, giving the wrong name on a prescription. He remembered in Last Words, “(When you see a Jew can an Irishman be far behind?) Just cops. Trying to be as nice as they aren’t. No push. No slap. Just a few snarls from Shein.”²⁷ Bill used them as the models for Hauser and O’Brien in The Naked Lunch. He was taken to the Tombs, fingerprinted, and his mug shot was taken. Bail was set at $1,000. Joan arrived accompanied by Dr. Wolberg; she didn’t have any money, but as a physician, Dr. Wolberg could sign a bond. Bill’s parents were notified and his father flew to New York. Joan told Edie, “The only way I could get him out on bail was to call his psychiatrist and he promptly informed Bill’s family which led to a good deal of unpleasantness.”²⁸ They were very upset. They had not seen Bill for six months and had no idea that he was using drugs. Mote didn’t lecture him, he just said, “It’s a terrible habit.” He got Bill a lawyer, who advised them to get a doctor to say he was under treatment for this “affliction,” as he put it. They secured Dr. Milton Feltenstein, who later almost killed Dylan Thomas with the wrong drugs. He gave Bill a prescription for Demerol but that was all. He was only hired to say he was treating him. Bill was busted in April 1946, but his case would not reach magistrate’s court for two months.

And he still needed money for drugs. He began working as the Sailor’s accomplice as a lush worker, rolling drunks on the subway, known as “working the hole.” The first line of the revised edition of The Soft Machine reads, “I was working the hole with the Sailor and we did not do bad.” He acted as a shill and stand-up man for Phil, respectable in his suit and tie, holding his New York Times open, spread wide, while Phil reached behind Bill, his fingers feeling for the inside breast pocket, looking for the man’s wallet, or “poke,” as Phil called it. They would never wait for more than three trains to pass before moving on to another station, but when they found someone slumped, asleep or dead drunk on a bench, they would home in on them. If the drunk opened his eyes, he could see that Bill had both hands on the newspaper and his suspicions were allayed. Huncke wrote, “Somehow there was something ludicrous about a man of Bill’s obvious educational background becoming a business partner with knock-around, knock-down, hard hustling Phil.”²⁹

The partnership did not last long. Bill did not have the stomach for the violence involved. One time the drunk woke up and grabbed them. “Okay you guys, ya been in my pockets, we’re going downtown.” Burroughs remembered, “The Sailor hit him and he fell down, but he was still hanging on to the Sailor and the Sailor said, ‘Get this mooch off of me.’ So I hit him once in the jaw and kicked him once in the ribs. Well, the rib smashed. I had to get outa that, man. I hadda get out of that situation.”³⁰ The next day Bill told Phil he was retiring as a lush worker. “I don’t blame you,” he said.³¹

Bill’s next move was to go into pushing heroin with Bill Garver, another of Huncke’s criminal friends. William Maynard Garver, known as Bill Gains in Junky and as Old Bull Gaines in Kerouac’s Desolation Angels and Tristessa, was yet another thief from a “good family”: his father was a bank president in Philadelphia. Garver was a tall, thin, distinguished-looking man, with a gaunt face, thinning hair that was turning gray, and a very elegant manner of speech. Burroughs described him as having “a malicious childlike smile that formed a shocking contrast to his eyes which were pale blue, lifeless and old.”³²

He had been thrown out of Annapolis Military Academy for drunkenness and received a hundred dollars a month from his father to stay away from the family, the result of some reprehensible occurrence in his youth. Unfortunately this was not quite enough to maintain his drug habit, so he supplemented it by stealing overcoats from the coatracks in restaurants and coffee shops, which he then pawned. He could get ten to fourteen dollars for a good hundred-dollar overcoat, but he had to travel to the farthest reaches of the city to pawn them, otherwise the pawnbrokers would have turned him in. He recruited all his friends and acquaintances to help out, giving them a percentage of the deal. Allen Ginsberg liked to watch him in action and even sold one of the pawn tickets to Eugene, his lawyer brother. Garver first met Huncke when he was allocated a bed next to his in the dormitory of Rikers Island jail where Huncke was doing three months for robbery. Huncke suggested that he look up Burroughs when he got out, as they were of similar background and interests.

Garver had a ten-dollar-a-week room on the fifth floor of Hotel Globe, a theatrical hotel at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, very convenient for Bickford’s and Horn & Hardart on 42nd Street where he scored his heroin. He had the same utter callousness as Huncke: when he worked as a medical orderly in a mental hospital during the war he substituted milk sugar for the morphine given to help patients in pain. He saw nothing wrong in it: “After all, they’re crazy anyway. They don’t know the difference.”³³ In fact, he delighted in schadenfreude, getting pleasure from others’ misfortune. Burroughs wrote that Garver “was one of the few junkies who really took a special pleasure in seeing non-users get a habit. […] [He] liked to invite young kids up to his room and give them a shot […] and then watch the effects, smiling his little smile.” Burroughs liked him nonetheless.

Garver had an Italian connection on the Lower East Side who sold them a quarter ounce for ninety dollars. They cut it one-third with milk sugar and put it in one-grain caps that they sold for two dollars each, retail. They were offering the best deal on the street as their caps were about 16 percent pure. They got about eighty caps out of a quarter ounce because their connection constantly gave them a short count. Burroughs now spent hours at a time in cafeterias and bars, waiting, watching, until his customers found him. It was all used later, to great effect, in The Soft Machine, where his powers of observation, his delight in the underworld characters of his acquaintance, and their names and parlance outweigh the harrowing descriptions of junk sickness and kicking:

There is a boy sitting at the counter thin-faced kid his eyes all pupil. I see he is hooked and sick. Familiar face maybe from the pool hall where I scored for tea sometime. Somewhere in grey strata of subways all-night cafeterias rooming house flesh. His eyes flickered the question. I nodded toward my booth. He carried his coffee over and sat down opposite me.³⁴

Bill’s case came before the magistrate early in June 1946. Bill was there with his lawyer and Dr. Feltenstein, but the doctor wasn’t even called. It was a first offense, a misdemeanor; obtaining narcotics by the use of fraud. The judge made a joke of it, and said he was going to inflict a terrible punishment on him. “I’m going to sentence you to go back to St. Louis for the summer. Which is terrible.” To make a disposition of the case, he said Bill was on general probation, but there was no suspended sentence. Bill walked free. He went straight to the U.S. Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, to take the cure. They gave him a reduction cure, using Dolophine, a brand of methadone, but he only stayed ten days, so he was not completely cured. Joan was pleased for him and wrote Edie, “That was pretty good of course, but it left me in rather a spot, emotionally as well as financially.”³⁵

Even before Burroughs was sent to St. Louis, the apartment at 115th Street had been going downhill. Now it took a turn for the worse. Hal Chase left to spend the summer in Denver, intending to room in Livingston Hall on campus when he returned, leaving just Allen and Joan to share the rent. Huncke moved into Hal’s room. He and Phil White began using the place to stash weapons and stolen goods. A gum machine was brought up and broken open, so they all had free gum for a week. They borrowed Bill’s blackjack and his gun to use in robberies, and hid their own “piece” there. After Bill left for St. Louis, things got worse and worse. Fritz the elevator man told Huncke, “It’s all right you steal the stuff in the cars, but don’t bring the car here and leave it in front of the building!” As Burroughs said, “It wasn’t very smart. No wonder Huncke did so much time. One time they’d made a good haul, they’d gotten away clean, then the other guy says, ‘Huncke, we missed some stuff, let’s go back.’ He went back for five years. Imagine anyone being as stupid as that? Huncke said, ‘I didn’t want to go back,’ but he let the other guy talk him into it. It’s completely stupid. The basic stupidity of the criminal mind.”³⁶

Then one time, Phil got very high on goofballs—a pentobarbital sold under the brand name of Nembutal—took Bill’s .32, and set out to hold up a store. He asked Huncke if he was coming, but Huncke could see the deranged state he was in and wisely declined. Phil burst into a furrier’s showroom, pulled his gun, and demanded money. Phil shot the furrier in the stomach, killing him in cold blood. The New York Journal-American headline read, “Mad Dog Noonday Killer.” He and Huncke dismantled the gun and scattered bits of it all over Brooklyn. Years later, in May 1951, Phil was picked up on a junk offense, and in order to reduce his sentence he squealed on a pusher. While in the Tombs, awaiting transfer to another jail, he hanged himself. He knew what happened to informers. He would be beaten, tortured, and possibly even killed when he reached a regular prison. Unable to face years of fear and violence, he killed himself. Bill wrote Allen, “I was sincerely shocked to hear about Phil. He was so uncompromising and Puritanical about stool pigeons. He used to say: ‘I can’t understand how a pigeon can live with himself.’ I guess Phil couldn’t after what he did.”³⁷ He told Allen, “It was quite a shock to me as I always thought a lot of him.”³⁸

Huncke introduced Joan to a friend of his, known as Whitey because of his white-blond hair, and she began living with him, “that sweet but stupid character with whom I was having a light affair at the time,” as she described him to Edie.³⁹ Jack stopped by one day to see how she was and found her “out of her mind” on Benzedrine. She came in and immediately stripped off her clothes. Jack said, “Joan, what are you doing?” Joan said, “Who are you, strange man, get out of this house.” Confused, Kerouac pleaded with her, “I’m not a strange man, Joan, I’m Jack!” She started yelling at Huncke, “Jack is trying to rape me!” but Huncke just lay in bed, saying, “Well ba-by, I don’t know what to do,” and “I’m all hung up baby, I…” In the end Joan went into Huncke’s room to discuss it and shut the door. Jack fled.⁴⁰ Allen, meanwhile, was engrossed in a ten-page, amphetamine-driven introduction to his enormous poem “Death in Violence,” as the apartment disintegrated around him.

Joan wrote Edie, “After a while we began taking in a few desperate characters as boarders and before long I was running quite a pad. Everything in the damn place was hot, as were of course, a couple of cars parked out front. Inevitably people kept going to jail.”⁴¹ When the police arrived at 115th Street with the victim of a suitcase crime, he identified Huncke, who was promptly arrested because he had in his pocket the keys to a stolen car parked right outside. He soon found himself in the Bronx jail. Joan was evicted for nonpayment of rent and she and Julie and Whitey began living in a series of sleazy hotels; there were no apartments available in the city. Then Whitey was arrested, caught trying to crack the safe at a Howard Johnson’s, leaving Joan alone and broke. He got five to ten years in Sing Sing. A gay black friend of Huncke’s named William “Spence” Spencer took her in at his apartment at 250 West 47th Street. It was a nice place with a huge record collection, but the neighbors took up a petition against him and got him evicted for too much traffic to his apartment. Joan was almost at the end of her tether. Kingsland ran into her that October and wrote to Edie Parker, “I saw Joan last weekend. She seemed to be losing her mind. It’s a shame, don’t you think?” Shortly afterward Joan cracked up completely and was picked up wandering around Times Square. She was admitted to Bellevue Hospital suffering from acute amphetamine psychosis—the first female case on record—and they kept her there for ten days. Her father came from Loudonville to get Julie.