Chapter Eighteen

She was an extraordinary person, one of the more perceptive and intelligent people I’ve known.¹

1. The Low Shot

Burroughs returned to Mexico City deeply depressed at the failure of his attempt to gain Marker’s love. Joan, we assume, did not let his two-month jaunt go by without suitably scathing comment, so we can assume a certain amount of rancor between them; she knew just how to prick his ego. In addition, the weather was terrible; it was pouring with rain, the aftermath of Hurricane Dog, which had already inundated large parts of the city in the famous “Flood of ’51.” The neighborhood just south of Bill and Joan’s apartment, the Colonia Roma Sur, was under a meter of water and five thousand workers were trying to clear the flooding in the old part of the city. There was an angry sky, with fierce gusts of wind and intermittent squalls of rain.²

Marker was living at 122 Monterrey, above the Bounty bar. John Healy and Luis Carpio, co-owners of the Bounty, together with an American couple, Glenn and Betty Jones, lived in apartment 10 on the third floor, a six-room apartment on the northwest side of the building. Marker’s childhood friend from Jacksonville, Edwin John “Eddie” Woods, who had arrived in Mexico City in mid-August, was also living there. Betty Jones appears in Queer as “Mary” and was the cause of much jealousy on the part of Burroughs, who could see that Marker was very attracted to her; in the book they spend a lot of time playing chess together and were possibly having an affair. She was thirty-five in 1951 and reportedly she and Glenn had something of an open marriage. Bill’s jealousy was more in the form of frustration; he had nothing against Betty herself, whom he liked, describing her as a “good-looking young woman. She was stacked and she was sexy-looking, she was a blonde. She had a long affair with Marker. She was a nice woman, I liked her, she was easy to get along with.”³

Healy’s room had a bed at one end and a living room and dining room at the other with a sofa, armchairs, and tables used by all the residents, divided by two wall partitions that jutted several feet into the room on either side. Joan liked Healy and would often join him at the Bounty. Healy explained, “I used to drink with her a lot, she would come over for a drinking partner. She didn’t like to drink alone. […] She was an alcoholic. When she came in, she would give me the high-sign and I would sit down and talk to her, and she liked that. She was as smart as a whip, she was no dummy, but she was just wearing out, she didn’t look healthy at all. […] She used to put [Bill] down.”4

The story is that Bill had arranged to meet Bob Addison in Healy’s apartment on the evening of Thursday, September 6, 1951. According to Eddie Woods, Marker had told him that Burroughs was short of cash and wanted to sell some guns to someone, but didn’t want to do it at his place. He wanted Marker and Eddie to be there in case there was a problem; he also didn’t want the man to know where he lived. Woods, who had only been living in the apartment for about three weeks, didn’t feel he could object. But Bob Addison was a friend, who lived in the building and presumably knew perfectly well where Burroughs lived. Burroughs, however, used this story of wanting to sell the gun himself in later interviews. Also, he could not possibly have squandered all the money from the sale of the Texas land on two months’ traveling in Ecuador with Marker. They had stayed in cheap hotels and traveled largely by bus. In fact Burroughs said that he was able to pay his lawyer several thousand dollars from the money he had from the land sale. Marker, with his background in military intelligence, may have been trying to impress his friend by building Burroughs up as a mysterious, sinister character.

Joan arrived at the Bounty before Burroughs, at either 1:00 p.m. or 3:00 p.m.—eyewitness reports differ. She ordered a ginebra, the cheap gin, and limonada, a carbonated limeade, which she took upstairs to Healy’s apartment. Marker and Betty Jones were already there with Eddie Woods.

At about three o’clock in the afternoon, three days after he got back from Ecuador, Burroughs heard the familiar whistle of the knife sharpener in the street: a simple glissando up and down the scale on an Andean pan pipe. He took a clasp knife that he had bought in Quito and took it to be sharpened. He was depressed, a feeling of loss and sadness, and had a sense that that day something awful was going to happen, so much so that he could hardly breathe. As he walked toward the knife sharpener’s cart he felt a dampness and, brushing his hand across his face, felt tears streaming down his cheeks. He thought, “What in hell is the matter? What in hell is wrong with you?”⁵ Burroughs, interviewed for Howard Brookner’s 1980 documentary, said:

You see, I’ve always felt myself to be controlled at some times by this completely malevolent force, which Brion [Gysin] describes as the Ugly Spirit. My walking down the street, and tears streaming down my face, meant that I knew that the Ugly Spirit—which is always the worst part of everyone’s character—would take over, and that something awful would happen. […] I went back to the apartment where we were all meeting, with this terrible sense of depression. And foolishly, of course, in order to relieve the depression, I started tossing down the drinks.

Then I said to Joan, “It’s about time for our William Tell act.” And she put a glass on her head.

I had this piece of .380 junk. I fired the shot. The glass hadn’t been touched. Joan starts sliding down towards the floor. Then Marker said—[he] walked over and took one look at her—he said, “Bill, your bullet has hit her forehead.”

I said, “Oh my God…”6

Burroughs had arrived at Healy’s about twenty minutes after Joan, after leaving off his knife. He had with him a Czech-made Star .380 automatic in a holster in a small overnight bag. It was a cheap gun and he knew that it fired low. Healy was not present; he had presumably gone downstairs to work at the bar. Marker and Eddie Woods were there—though there is some dispute over whether or not Betty Jones was also there. Eddie Woods’s recollection is that Joan’s drink was the only drink he saw all afternoon, but the likelihood of either Joan or Burroughs socializing for four or five hours straight without a drink is extremely remote. Also, we have Burroughs’s consistent recollection that he began throwing back drinks immediately after he felt the tears on his face, so we can assume that he was very drunk by the early evening. For her part, Joan was a maintenance drinker; she took small sips regularly, and got through between one and two bottles of tequila or gin a day. By 7:15 in the evening she would have been drinking for twelve hours straight. Bob Addison and his seventeen-year-old Mexican girlfriend stopped by briefly early on but he did not buy the gun, if the sale was ever even mooted. Addison’s friends discount the idea, saying he was always broke.

Marker and Eddie Woods were sitting on the sofa. Burroughs was sitting in the dining room, separated from Woods by an arm’s length by the room division. Joan was sitting across from him with her drink at her side. Although Burroughs was not addicted at that time, the conversation appears to have turned to the subject of how to get through a cure when there are so many ways of getting junk to threaten the addict’s resolve. One idea Burroughs discussed was to retreat to an island that was reachable only by summer tides, and that there would be no way to leave until the water was once again high enough, by which time he would be long cured. There were apparently such places in the Amazon and the Orinoco. Bill said they would survive by eating wild hogs. Joan dismissed the idea, saying, “We’d starve to death! Because you won’t be able to shoot, you’d be so shaky if you try to come off it, you’ll shake, you won’t be able to shoot anything.”7

“Nonsense,” Burroughs said. Provoked by Joan’s remarks, he said he didn’t get the shakes, and was still a good shot. It was then that he said, “Put that glass on your head, Joanie, let me show the boys what a great shot old Bill is.”⁸ According to Eddie Woods:

That’s exactly what happened, so she did, and she said with a giggle—and she turned her head, she is balancing the glass on her head, and she said, “I can’t watch this, you know I can’t stand the sight of blood.”

I remember this vividly, and that’s exactly what she said. And then it dawned on me, he was actually going to pull the trigger. […] So I started to reach for the gun, as he actually aimed it, and then I thought, “You’d better not, because if it goes off just when you reach it, and it hits her—” […]

So I didn’t grab it, and then bang!—the noise, that’s the first impression I had, was the noise. Next thing I knew, the next impression I had was that glass was on the floor, […] rolling around in concentric circles on the floor. […]

Then I looked at her, and her head was over to one side. Well, I thought “She’s kidding,” you know. That’s the first thing you think, and then I heard Marker say: “Bill, I think you hit her.”

And then [Bill] said, “No!” And he started towards her, you know, and Marker got there first, and I got over there, too, and then I saw the hole in her temple, a little blue hole, and Burroughs jumped on her lap and he said, “Joan! Joan! Joan!”

I mean he was out of it, in shock that this happened. Again, to me, that’s evidence it was absolutely an accident. He was shocked that he had hit her, and he was trying to wake her up. This guy was out of it.⁹

Marker got to her first and saw the red trickle of blood. He rushed to the roof, where a Mexican medical student lived, but he wasn’t in, so they found Juanita Peñaloza, the building manager, and told her. Marker knew that Bernabé Jurado was Burroughs’s lawyer, so Peñaloza called him first, who said he would be right over. Next she called the Cruz Roja (Red Cross) hospital just four blocks north at Durango and Monterrey, and finally called the nearest police headquarters at the Octava Delegación (Eighth Delegation). She told Marker that Jurado’s advice to him and Woods, as the eyewitnesses, was to lay low, move to a hotel, and call him that evening when he would tell them what to do.

The Red Cross received the phone call at about 7:30 p.m. and ambulance No. 4, manned by Lieutenant Tomás Arias, was dispatched to 122 Monterrey, where the emergency personnel found Joan slumped in an easy chair with a wound in her forehead flowing with blood. She was unconscious but still breathing. Her cane was on the floor to the right of the chair. The medics took her straight to the hospital, where she was given a blood transfusion, serum, and oxygen. The type-O blood was taken from twenty-year-old Manuel Mejía, the porter at 122 Monterrey, who had run to see what was happening when the police and ambulance arrived. He had accompanied Burroughs on foot to the hospital along with the reporters, and after the transfusion he asked the Red Cross how much his blood was worth. Later, when Burroughs was out of jail, Mejía told Burroughs that he owed him money for the blood, and a month or so later, Burroughs gave him 250 pesos.10 It is unclear how long Joan survived at the Red Cross hospital: some reports say an hour, others just a few minutes.

In addition to the ambulance, the police arrived accompanied by a number of reporters whom they had presumably tipped off. Burroughs reached the hospital on foot shortly after Joan, followed by a pushing, jostling group of reporters. In his confused state he was interviewed by Lieutenant Luis Hurtado, in front of the reporters in the courtyard of the hospital, giving them a more or less accurate account of what happened. This was later contradicted by Jurado. The report in El Nacional, on September 8, 1951 read:

At first the killer declared that in the said gathering, after there had been a great consumption of gin, he tried to demonstrate his magnificent marksmanship, emulating William Tell, and to that end he placed a glass of liquor upon the head of his wife, and aiming over the glass, at a distance of two meters, he fired, but as a consequence and result of the state of drunkenness in which he found himself, he missed the shot lamentably and injured the forehead of his wife with a bullet.¹¹

While Burroughs was being interviewed by Lieutenant Hurtado, a message came from the doctors that the wounded woman had died. Excelsior reported that at that moment Burroughs “cried bitterly, tearing out his hair in desperation.”¹²

Just as Burroughs finished giving his account of what happened to Lieutenant Hurtado, Bernabé Jurado arrived and told Burroughs, in front of all the reporters, that he would not be saying that before the authorities, only that the pistol had fired accidentally—and if he didn’t, he would surely go to jail: “Don’t say anything Bill, this is a shooting accident!”13 The newspapers reported the entire proceedings. La Prensa wrote:

Minutes later he changed his mind, as the result of a chat that he had with a lawyer. He stated to the journalists that this professional told him: “Don’t be stupid; don’t say you wanted to make a target [of the glass]. Testify that you were examining the pistol, very drunk, and then the shot went off, that penetrated the forehead of Joan.”

From that moment on, William changed his first testimony, but not without first arguing, “But how am I going to say that the shot went off [that way], when several people saw the facts?” […] Then, on the way to the scene of the crime, Bernabé Jurado himself went on saying to the reporters that he, in his capacity as the killer’s defender, was obliged to do everything possible so that the punishment would be the least possible for his client.

“I will prove that it was an accident,” said Jurado. “The point is, William has not testified before the authorities [yet], and before he does, he will know perfectly what he has to say.”¹⁴

Lieutenant Hurtado then arrested Burroughs for murder and he was taken to the Eighth Delegation police headquarters, where he was questioned by investigative agent Lieutenant Robert Higuera Gil. The police also arrested John Healy and John Herrmann, who had walked in on the scene later. Joan may have gone to Healy’s that day to visit with Herrmann; Herrmann was an older writer, born in 1900, and had been part of the expat scene in Paris in the twenties. Herrmann and his wife knew Joan and he told the police he had visited with her both in Mexico City and Guadalajara. Joan probably visited him in Guadalajara, where he lived, when she went there with Allen and Lucien. He appears to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he was not held for long, as it soon become known that he wasn’t a witness to the shooting, nor did he know Burroughs.

As the police were interrogating John Healy, they set up the apartment ready for the news photographers, making it look as though much more of a party had been going on. There were thirty empty bottles in the cupboard, evidence of a party some days before, and some of these, bottles of Glorias de Cuba rum, were put on the tables, ashtrays tipped over, and dirty glasses placed around the room. Then the reporters were let in. Healy was released that night.

Late that night, with the aid of Bernabé Jurado, Burroughs worked on a written statement, which he read aloud to Lieutenant Higuera Gil, in front of a group of news reporters. La Prensa reported his statement verbatim. His revised statement read:

I am 37 years old. Three days ago I arrived in Mexico, accompanied by my wife, with whom I have been married for five years. We installed ourselves in 210 Orizaba, Colonia Roma.

At 3:00 P.M. I went to apartment 10 in 122 Monterrey to visit my friend John Healy. Hours later, we were all drunk.

I took my pistol from a valise and put it on the table; then I picked it up again, to demonstrate to those present how to handle it, and while I was playing with it the shot was produced that killed my wife, who was seated before me.

She fell to the floor and I thought she was playing a trick, but one of my friends informed me that she was hit. Then I lifted her up and seated her on an easy chair.

All my friends left. After that, my wife was taken by persons from the Red Cross. I went to that institution to find out her condition.

Later, from a friend of mine, I knew that Joan had died.

Joan’s body was formally identified by Juanita Peñaloza and John Bensmiller Rogerson, a student who lived at 122 Monterrey, who knew Joan from the Bounty but was not a close friend. The next day, Joan’s body was transferred from the Red Cross Hospital to the old Juarez Hospital for the legally required autopsy. It was found that she died from a bullet that entered her brain 4.5 centimeters to the left of the middle line of her forehead. There was no exit wound, consistent with a short-load shell. At some time after her death, someone had placed a religious medal at her throat as a blessing for the dead.

That same day Burroughs was transferred from the police station, where he had spent the night, to the infamous Black Palace of Lecumberri, on the avenida Eduardo Molina. He was admitted to Cellblock H, the remand wing, detained as being “presumed responsible for the crime of homicide.” Meanwhile, Bernabé Jurado swung into cocaine-fueled action. On September 8, Burroughs was questioned in his first formal hearing. He testified from behind a wire cage as his lawyers and the prosecution, led by Mexican novelist Rogelio Barriga Rivas, augmented by translators, argued it out. He was questioned first by Judge Eduardo Urzaíz, the juez instructor, and then by Lieutenant Barriga Rivas. Barriga Rivas was an old friend of Bernabé Jurado from law school. The whole procedure was new to Burroughs, who recalled, “The judge has his office there in the prison. He and Bernabé Juarado would be pushing each other away from the typewriter. He’d say, ‘Well,’ Bernabé would say, ‘Strike that out.’ And the judge would say, ‘Leave it in,’ and they would sort of tussle at the typewriter to get something in or out. The prosecuting attorney said nothing, it was really so strange a procedure.”15 It was at this hearing that it was revealed that Bill and Joan had filed for divorce in Cuernavaca the previous year on the grounds that “they were tired of each other,” with two newspapers reporting “continual arguments” and Burroughs’s drunkenness as the reason. But it was also noted that they had reconciled and dropped the formal proceedings.

At the end of the day, Jurado told Judge Urzaíz that he was going to petition for Burroughs’s release from prison, because “he only committed a crime in a manner mostly accidental, or through imprudence.” But the judge did not agree and ordered Burroughs to be bound over for more hearings and also issued subpoenas for Marker and Woods to appear for questioning. Marker and Woods were coached by Jurado in what to say, and they made two or more visits to his apartment, where they were followed, rather obviously, by plainclothes policemen when they left. Mexican law required that the exact charges against the prisoner must be determined within seventy-two hours of his arrest. At the hearing on September 10, Eddie Woods, Lewis Marker, Betty Jones, and John Healy testified, in that order, all sticking to the same story; that Burroughs had been handling a gun that fell onto the table and discharged. At the end of the hearing Judge Urzaíz determined that, all things considered, Burroughs could rightfully be held for formal prisión, saying, “In the opinion of the undersigned, the investigation lays out enough facts to make possible the legal guilt of the detainee William Seward Burroughs in the crime of murder that is imputed to him, for he himself confesses that the shot that wounded and caused the death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs was produced by the pistol that, in the event, he had in his hands.” Burroughs was charged with homicidio—murder.

In the event, Burroughs spent only two weeks in the Black Palace of Lecumberri. Jurado obtained his release and he walked free on September 21. His release on bail may have been granted by the director of the penitentiary, who had no legal necessity to consult Judge Urzaíz, who had intended him to be held until trial. It is possible that his release may have been assisted with a bribe. It is possible, also, that Jurado’s petition cast enough doubt on the case to free him on bail. There is certainly no evidence that the two presiding judges, Judges Urzaíz and the first judge of the Distrito Federal for penal matters, Lieutenant Antonio Fernández Vera, were in any way corrupt. They made every effort to uncover the facts of the case in the face of an ever-changing story.¹⁶ Burroughs put up a bond of $2,312 and paid Jurado a fee of $2,000 plus $300 “to bribe the four ballistics experts appointed by the court,” though there is no evidence that any such experts were in fact appointed.¹⁷

Burroughs was eventually sentenced, in absentia, to two years in jail—suspended. He was ordered to report each Monday, before 8:00 a.m., to the Lecumberri prison until his case was settled. If he was only a minute late he could have been put right back in jail. He could get permission not to sign in, or to sign twice to go on a vacation, but otherwise he had to be there. His two weeks in jail do not appear to have been arduous, and his experience changed his previously derogatory views about Mexican police. He told Jack Kerouac, “While sojourning in the box I was greatly impressed by the kindness and decency of the Mexican people. Can you imagine during my preliminary interrogation at the precinct the cops were telling me what to say: ‘You must deny that. You must say this.’ And in prison a man gave me one of his 2 blankets, and believe me it is cold in there at night sleeping on a slab of tin.”18

Meanwhile, the children had been looked after by Doña Marina Sotelo and the other women who had previously cared for them when Bill and Joan were asleep all morning or too out of it to feed them. Billy Jr. claimed to have been present at the shooting, but he was not. When Bill was in the Lecumberri, John Healy and Marker, at Burroughs’s request, went to his apartment and cleaned out anything that might be incriminating. They had to climb up the back and get in through the window because there were squad cars patrolling the area all the time. They found a pipe and a couple of syringes, which they took away. Mort had reluctantly flown down on September 9, the third day of his brother’s incarceration, sent by his parents to see what he could do to help. His first action, on the day he arrived, was to make arrangements with the Tangassi funeral parlor for Joan’s body to be interred that day at Panteón Americano. Her body was placed in fosa 1018 in Section A/New, where it remained for seven years for a fee of 320 pesos. The cemetery had no way of contacting Burroughs subsequently, and in August 1990 they published an official notice in the Diario Oficial de México asking the family to renew the interment arrangements as more than thirty years of back rent were due.¹⁹ When no one came forward, her remains were moved to a nicho marked only with a chalked reference number: Number 82, Class R, Section PR. Burroughs was eventually made aware of the situation, and in January 1996 paid for a stone covering to be made, inscribed with the words:

Joan Vollmer Burroughs

Loudonville, New York

1923

México, D.F.

Sept. 1951

In August 2000, on a visit to the grave, James Grauerholz paid for gold leaf to be rubbed into the lettering.

From his room in the Reforma Hotel, Mort dealt with Jurado and his partners and also had the uncomfortable task of confronting Joan’s parents, who had flown down from Albany. They remained in Mexico City long enough to have a meeting with Burroughs himself when he was released on bail. Burroughs never forgot this excruciatingly painful confrontation. It was arranged that Mort would take the children to St. Louis, where Bill’s parents had offered to raise them both, but in the end the Vollmers decided to take Julie to Albany and raise her themselves. Mort was also present in court when Eddie Woods and the other eyewitnesses testified, and he was able to visit Bill in jail, where the visiting rules were very lenient. Burroughs had not seen Mort for about three years, not since Bill passed through St. Louis on his way to the Lexington Narcotic Farm in 1948. Mort was under a lot of stress in Mexico City, a city he did not know, dealing with a foreign bureaucracy in an unfamiliar language, and was, by all accounts, drunk much of the time. Burroughs’s friends were not impressed by him.

On one occasion, on Jurado’s instruction, Mort, John Healy, Lewis Marker, Betty Jones, and Eddie Woods went again to Burroughs’s flat to make sure that nothing had been overlooked, because the police had a reputation for entering and planting evidence, as well as taking away anything that they fancied. Eddie Woods said, “He made a very ungraceful direct pass at Betty Jones, who was also a little drunk, and I felt insulted on behalf of my friend, Glenn, the absent husband, and said something to that effect to Mortimer—and Mortimer referred to her as ‘just another cheap broad,’ or something like that.”20 Mostly they found him to be arrogant and a whiner, denigrating Bill and complaining that Bill got all the breaks and was the favorite. Woods remembered him griping, “But I had to go to night school and get my degree, and I’ve always worked […] and that son of a bitch has never worked.” No doubt these were very real complaints, but this was not the occasion, with Bill in jail possibly facing a long prison term, to air them.

Bill and Mort had never been close as adults, and Mort clearly resented that Bill was his mother’s favorite. But the unusual nature of the situation, its gravity and otherworldliness, caused a breakdown in their usual reserve, and apparently, when Bill was released, the two brothers had an emotional, highly alcoholic rapprochement before both passing out on Mort’s bed in his hotel. Bill was staying with him temporarily, rather than go back to the empty apartment.

Bill remained at 201 Orizaba, but Juanita Peñaloza arranged for him to move downstairs to apartment 5, in the rear on the ground floor, to escape the memories of living with Joan. However, she was clearly concerned about this gringo, and whenever she saw him she impressed upon him, “We can’t have another scandal, we can’t have another scandal.” One can only imagine Burroughs’s feelings, faced with the arduous task of sorting through Joan’s clothes and possessions and disposing of them in order to move to another apartment. Mort left for St. Louis, taking both children with him. Joan’s parents came to collect Julie from there. It was a strained, unpleasant interview. Joan’s mother told Bill’s parents, “I hope that Bill Burroughs goes to Hell and stays there.” The children never saw each other again.

There has been much comment and speculation about Joan Vollmer Burroughs’s death, ranging from the obvious—killed by a dangerous drunk with a gun—through a jealousy angle, Burroughs’s claim of being in a state of possession by “the Ugly Spirit,” to the notion that Joan had a death wish. That she was killed by a drunk with a gun seems the most obvious explanation and the one the court accepted. As Burroughs said, “Of course I was drunk. It was an utterly and completely insane thing to do. I mean quite apart from the fact, if I’d hit the glass, it would have been terribly dangerous for the two people sitting there! Glass splinters would have been flying everywhere. So it was literally an insane thing to do.”21

According to Burroughs, the jealousy angle was first spread by John Herrmann, Joan’s friend from Guadalajara. Joan knew both Herrmann and his wife, and for purely logistical reasons, if no other, it is unlikely that anything had occurred recently between Herrmann and Joan. The only suggestion that Joan had seen someone else was identified by James Grauerholz in a passage in The Naked Lunch; the first-draft typescript used Joan’s real name. Grauerholz said that when he asked Burroughs about it in August 1991, Burroughs had asserted, “not very convincingly,” that the scene was entirely fictional. It now reads:

In Cuernavaca or was it Taxco? Jane meets a pimp trombone player and disappears in a cloud of tea smoke. The pimp is one of these vibration and dietary artists—which is a means [by which] he degrades the female sex by forcing his chicks to swallow all this shit. He was continually enlarging his theories… he would quiz a chick and threaten to walk out if she hadn’t memorized every nuance of his latest assault on logic and the human image.

Joan may have had a brief fling with Lucien Carr when he and Allen Ginsberg visited, and may have told Burroughs in the course of an argument when he finally returned from Ecuador with Marker; it would have been one way to hurt Burroughs. But Burroughs had always maintained a no-jealousy rule with his boyfriends such as Ian Sommerville, and if Joan did see anyone else he could hardly blame her, and in any case, it is extremely unlikely to have provoked such a strong reaction, even unconsciously. James Grauerholz proposes that of “Joan’s possible extramarital liaisons, the only scenario that would have elicited Burroughs’ jealousy is the least likely: Joan having sex with Marker. Burroughs could demonstrably be possessive of Marker—but probably not of Joan.”22 Again, this is extremely unlikely.

The “Ugly Spirit” idea was not mooted until Burroughs was conducting occult experiments with Brion Gysin at the Beat Hotel some years later. In his much-quoted introduction to the 1985 edition of Queer, Burroughs wrote:

Brion Gysin said to me in Paris: “For ugly spirit shot Joan because…” A bit of mediumistic message that was not completed—or was it? It doesn’t need to be completed, if you read it: “Ugly spirit shot Joan to be cause”—that is, to maintain a hateful parasitic occupation. […] I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

Grauerholz suggests that Burroughs might be being a little devious here and wrote, “Other commentators have taken Burroughs’ statements in the Queer introduction as a sort of ‘key’ to the writer’s oeuvre, again taking his words at face value: to redeem himself of the sin of murder, William Burroughs dedicated his life to writing. But this apologia may be just a bit disingenuous, because Burroughs had already written a nearly-complete draft of Junkie by December 1950, eight months before Joan’s death.”²³

Burroughs was aware that the Ugly Spirit would not wash with many people, that it would be seen as a way of blaming someone else, something else, for something he had done. He wrote in a late journal entry on December 2, 1996, “Tell any feminist I shot Joan in a state of possession, and she will scream: ‘Nonsense! No such thing. HE did it.’ ”²⁴

Though it in no way redeems Burroughs’s culpability, the idea that Joan was feeling suicidal was widely felt. Allen Ginsberg’s impression of Joan’s state, from his visit with Lucien Carr shortly before her death, was “that there was something scary about her—suicidal. […] Just as she had said to Lucien, ‘How fast can this heap go?’ I think she said to Bill, ‘shoot that off my head.’ I always thought that she had kind of challenged him into it—that it was sort of like using him to […] that she was, in a sense, using him to get her off the earth, because I think she was in a great deal of pain.”25 Ginsberg would always do his utmost to defend and excuse his friends, but his view was shared by a number of people who saw her at the time.

Lucien Carr felt the same way: “After Joan was killed, I remember thinking that she was much more the Sender than Bill was… that the shooting was really her doing.”²⁶

Hal Chase, who basically disliked Burroughs and had been very close to Joan, told Ted Morgan, “She wanted to die, and she offered Bill a chance to kill somebody. That William Tell stuff was a sham. [Her] death was a put-up thing to release Bill, to let him commit ‘the ultimate crime’—he was childish about things like that. […] Joan gave her life for Bill.”

Burroughs rejected all this: “Allen was always making it out as a suicide on her part, that she was taunting me to do this, and I do not accept that cop-out. Not at all. Not at all.”²⁷ Burroughs said he thought of Joan every day of his life; she was a permanent presence in his life. He took full responsibility for her death: “That is to say, if everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.”²⁸ Almost forty years later, Burroughs explored the terrible idea that there might have been an unconscious desire to kill her. In The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, an opera written by Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, and William Burroughs in 1990, Burroughs wrote, “Now a man figures it’s his bullets, so it will hit what he wants to hit. But it don’t always work out that way. You see some bullets is special for a single aim. A certain stag, or a certain person. And no matter where you aim, that’s where the bullet will end up. And in the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser’s wand, and points where the bullet wants to go.”²⁹