Chapter Nineteen

And I’ll direct thee how thou shalt escape

By sudden flight: come, dally not, be gone.

—SHAKESPEARE, HENRY VI, PART 1, ACT 4, SCENE 5

1. Marker Comes Through

Many people thought Marker was dull. He was the butt of jokes and unable to really instigate a conversation. Healy thought he was a “moocher.” However, despite the disastrous trip to Ecuador, Marker proved to be a good friend. He testified on Bill’s behalf in court and ran errands and helped out when Bill was in jail. When Burroughs moved to apartment 5, Marker moved in as his flatmate. Burroughs said, “Any actual affair with Marker was mostly all after Joan’s death. Naturally sex with a straight guy is doomed to failure, of course it is. I think, ‘What in the hell was the matter with you? What nonsense was here?’ But he always said that himself, Marker always said that love is a bunch of bullshit and I would agree with him in that sense.”¹

In December Marker came down with hepatitis, almost certainly caught during their trip to Ecuador, so Burroughs had to nurse him. This must have helped turn his thoughts away from Joan’s death. At some point Bill gave Marker an injection of penicillin and then used the same needle to shoot up morphine. He came down himself with hepatitis about a month later, so they had overlapping illnesses. To recuperate, they went to Veracruz, where they stayed in a hotel where, instead of mattresses, they had only canvas stretched tight over a wooden frame. It was very uncomfortable.

It might have been expected that after killing Joan, Burroughs would have got over his puerile infatuation with guns, but this was not the case. He had with him in Veracruz an 1896 German Mauser, an early semiautomatic that fired a high-velocity 7.63-millimeter bullet. They hired a boat and went upriver with it and used it to shoot melons, “And boy that thing would tear a melon apart.”²

As relations between them had evidently improved, Burroughs still nursed his ambition of a jungle expedition with Marker but this time proposed taking four-year-old Billy with them. Marker went home to Jacksonville, Florida, for Christmas, having made arrangements to meet up with Bill in Ecuador in a month’s time. Burroughs continued working on Junk, as the book was still called, sending revised sections to Allen. He no longer saw Dave Tesorero, who had mysteriously disappeared around October, but this did not matter too much as Burroughs got off junk just before he and Marker went to Ecuador. In March he told Allen, “I chippy around but haven’t been hooked in a year now.”3 A month later he was hooked, claiming it was for his health: in order to cure his hepatitis he wanted to stop drinking completely for a few months. He heard nothing from Marker.

In March 1952, Bill told Allen that he had begun work on a new novel that could be seen as part two of Junk or read complete in itself. He said Dennison was still the main character but he had shifted to third-person narrative. It was about his relationship with Marker, known in the book as Allerton. He passed the time by writing and attending bullfights and cockfights. “I like my spectacles brutal, bloody and degrading.”⁴ In April, Allen Ginsberg finally persuaded Carl Solomon to publish Junk as an Ace paperback original for an eight-hundred-dollar advance; it was to be called Junkie, since the publishers thought Junk might be taken as a value judgment on the text. In 1977, Burroughs changed the spelling of the revised edition to Junky, which it has remained ever since. Now began months of prevarication and stalling on the part of Ace, who demanded to see the new material Burroughs was writing and to incorporate it into Junkie.⁵ One complication came over Solomon’s suggestion that part two of the book be called Fag. Burroughs told Allen he did not mind being called queer: “T.E. Lawrence and all manner of right Joes (boy can I turn a phrase) was queer. But I’ll see him castrated before I’ll be called a Fag. […] That’s just what I been trying to put down uh I mean over, is the distinction between us strong, manly, noble types and the leaping, jumping, window dressing cocksucker. Furthechrissakes a girl’s gotta draw the line somewheres.”⁶

As usual Bill had plans for buying houses in Panama, farming, and traveling. The one thing he was sure of was that he did not want to return to the United States. He told Kerouac, “I have been happier down here than I ever was before in my life. I feel like I took off a strait jacket. You don’t realize how much the U.S. is dragging you until you are out of it and feel the difference.”⁷ He was still suffering from hepatitis and had no energy and no appetite. He told Allen, “I do get hungry but I can’t bring myself to sit down alone in a restaurant and eat through a meal, so break two eggs in milk and that is dinner. How I miss Joan!”8

After Marker left for Florida, Bill formed a relationship with Angelo—he used his real name in Junky—with whom he began a fourteen-month casual affair, seeing him twice a week unless he was on junk, and always paying him twenty pesos. They went at first to hotels until Burroughs trusted him enough not to steal from the apartment, as pickups were prone to do, then he brought him back to 201 Orizaba, where he “insisted on sweeping the apartment out whenever he spent the night there.”⁹ Angelo was not queer, he was doing it for the money. He conformed to a romantic stereotype “boy” in Bill’s mind that he later applied to boys in South America, Tangier, and Paris. In Junky he describes Angelo as having an Oriental face, “Japanese-looking except for his copper skin.”¹⁰ Burroughs was not promiscuous; once he found a suitable boy he stuck with him. “I always tended to do that. Get one that was satisfactory, I saw no necessity to change. His name was Angelo and he was of very good character. I’m not one of these people who likes to be exploited, or taken or used in any way. He had a very good character, he was a good person.”¹¹ Bill fervently hoped that Marker would return, or that they would meet in Ecuador, but even though he wrote him numerous letters, “with fantasies and routines in my best vein,”¹² and sent him books and presents, he received no reply.

Jack Kerouac arrived at the end of April. In an enormously long letter to Allen, Kerouac wrote, “Bill was like a mad genius in littered rooms when I walked in. He was writing. He looked wild but his eyes innocent and blue and beautiful. We are the greatest of friends at last.” Their days were spent working on their respective books, with each of them having a high regard for the other. Kerouac was on a creative roll: he had completed On the Road—the version now called Visions of Cody—and had just started work on Doctor Sax. Burroughs, meanwhile, was working each day on Queer. The apartment resounded to the clacking of typewriters. Bill wrote Allen, “I’m very impressed by ON THE ROAD. He has developed unbelievably. He really has tremendous talent. No doubt about it.”¹³ At the same time, Kerouac wrote Allen saying, “His ‘Queer’ is greater than ‘Junk’… Bill is great. Greater than he ever was.”¹⁴ It was a mutual admiration society, but rightly so.

In the course of his long correspondence with Ginsberg concerning the publication of Junkie, Burroughs explained the genesis of the two main “routines” that appear in Queer, which Ginsberg was also trying to sell. This form of extended, wildly exaggerated extrapolation of a simple story was to become Burroughs’s trademark form. He told Allen, “The Oil-Man and Slave Trader routines are not intended as inverted parody sketches […] but as a means to make contact with Allerton and to interest him. The Slave Trader routine came to me like dictated. It was the turning point where my partial success was assured. If I had not achieved the reckless gaiety that charges this fantasy, Marker would have refused to go with me to S.A. The point is these fantasies are a vital part of the whole set-up.”15

In May, Bill and Jack went on a weekend trip to the mountains to Tenancingo to attend a fiesta with Dave Tesorero and his young girlfriend, Esperanza Villanueva, who was to become the subject of Kerouac’s novel Tristessa in 1956. Bill and Dave were friends again, even though Tesorero had stolen three hundred pesos from him before disappearing. They did some shooting while they were there. Kerouac told Allen that Burroughs “misses Joan terribly. Joan made him great, lives on in him like mad, vibrating.”¹⁶ They went to bullfights, Burroughs making sure that Kerouac wore a straw hat to deflect the bottles the crowd liked to throw at gringos in the lower seats. They also visited the pyramids of Teotihuacán. Kerouac recalled, “The last time I was in Teotihuacan, [Burroughs] said to me ‘Wanna see a scorpion, boy?’ and lifted up a rock—There sat a female scorpion beside the skeleton of its mate, which it had eaten—Yelling ‘Yaaaah!’ [Burroughs] lifted a huge rock and smashed it down on the whole scene.”¹⁷

Kerouac, always parsimonious, delighted at how cheap everything was: filet mignon sixty cents a pound, hamburger eighteen cents a pound, cigarettes six cents a pack, and teenage girls just one peso—twelve cents—at the whorehouses on Organo. By the beginning of June he had already written forty-five thousand words of Doctor Sax. They met a gang of young American hipsters who persuaded them to take peyote with them. Bill had a miserable time of it and stopped himself from vomiting only by recounting a long, depressing story about a penal colony in a town not unlike Quito in the high Andes.

After a few weeks staying with Burroughs, Kerouac ran short of money and grew surly and petulant when Burroughs declined to support him indefinitely in food and board: Burroughs had been paying the rent, buying the food, the drink, and the drugs. Their biggest arguments were over drugs: Burroughs had to live an exemplary life in Mexico City and give the authorities no excuse to return him to jail. He even stopped wearing a gun when he went out. He also kept his rooms free of drugs and hid his stash outside, away from the apartment, and told Jack to do the same except for what he was using. Bill did not want a whole big bag of it there because, as he put it: (1) he was out on bail; (2) it was his apartment, Jack paid no rent; and (3) Bill had a habit and did not want to spend time in a police cell after a shakedown. He might have added that the pot was also bought by him. But Jack secretly asked Dave Tesorero to bring the bag to him so that he could hide it somewhere in the apartment without telling Bill. Fortunately Dave told Bill of Jack’s request. Kerouac ignored Bill’s entreaties and not only filled the place with clouds of pot smoke that could be detected outside, but continued to store his marijuana and a supply of peyote there. Burroughs was outraged that Kerouac would endanger his freedom and behave in such a selfish and careless manner. His thoughtless action could have resulted in Burroughs serving a long jail sentence.

Kerouac did what he usually did when he was broke and had overstayed his welcome; on July 1 he went home to his mother, who was now living with Jack’s sister in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. On July 13, Bill wrote to Allen, complaining that he had heard nothing from Jack, who had borrowed his last twenty dollars of rent money, which he had promised to pay back immediately on arrival in the United States. “To be blunt, I have never had a more inconsiderate and selfish guest under my roof.”18 Bill told Allen that he could no longer get along with Jack and unless he underwent some radical transformation he did not want him to visit again. Burroughs wrote Allen, “He needs analysis. He is so paranoid he thinks everyone else is plotting to take advantage of him so he has to act first in self-defense. For example, when we were out of money and food, I could always rely on him to eat all the food there was if he got the chance. If there were two rolls left, he would always eat both of them. Once he flew into a rage because I had eaten my half of the remaining butter. If anyone asks him to do his part or to share on an equal basis, he thinks they are taking advantage of him. This is insane.”¹⁹ By August 20, Bill had still not heard from Jack or been paid, and was so exercised by Jack’s behavior that he devoted a whole other letter to his misdeeds. “Recall I was picking up the tab in toto. After the first week he was flat and did not put out centavo one. During the brief time he had $ it was like pulling an impacted molar to get any money out of him. I may add that at least 50% of the time his manner was surly and ill-tempered […] selfish, inconsiderate and downright insufferable behavior and he doesn’t drop me a line.”²⁰

In July, Bill received the first quarter of his eight-hundred-dollar advance from Ace Books for Junkie, less Ginsberg’s 10 percent for acting as agent. Allen had found New York publishers particularly reluctant to publish the book, given its subject matter and its neutral—to them—position toward addictive drugs. Even so, the deal was a particularly poor one at a time when Gold Medal, a rival mass-market paperback company, was attracting authors with royalties based on print runs rather than actual sales: a $2,000 advance on an initial print run of 200,000 copies; $3,000 on a run of 300,000. Ace printed 150,000-plus copies of Junkie when it was finally published in 1953.21 Years later Burroughs called them to account and collected over $2,000 in overdue royalties.

Early in July, Bill Garver, the overcoat thief and junkie with whom Bill once sold heroin in New York, arrived in Mexico City, acting on Burroughs’s recommendation as to the availability of junk and cheapness of living. His father had died and he inherited an income of $400 a month, enough to live in considerable comfort in Mexico City. He came off the plane with blood all over his pants where he had given himself a fix using a safety pin in his leg.²² Bill got him a cheap room, which Garver made extra secure by padlocking the door. He sat, hunchbacked and thin, with his white hair combed sleekly back with water like a teenager. His room was filled with books of classical history, volumes of poetry including Rimbaud and Mallarmé. His walls were covered with reproductions of the work of José Clemente Orozco, one of the leaders, along with Diego Rivera, of the Mexican Mural Renaissance, that he had cut from magazines. Every day he had to go upstairs to empty his chamber pot. Each week he bought Time and U.S. News & World Report from Sears Roebuck and read them from cover to cover, nodding off after every few pages. In September, Bernabé Jurado bought an ounce of cocaine that he didn’t like the look of and thought might be heroin. He offered it to Burroughs. It was gray and metallic-looking, so Bill passed and offered the deal to Garver, who paid Jurado five hundred dollars for it. Garver took some. At seven in the morning he came into Bill’s room and asked, “Are you just gonna lay in your bed with all these shipments coming in?” Bill said, “Shipments? What is this, a fucking farm? I’m getting up at 6:30?” Garver said, “Pure drugstore in.” Burroughs recalled that “he had on his overcoat and he had a strange look in his eye. And then he got into bed with me. I said, ‘What’s the matter, are you, crazy?’ He says, ‘Hee-hee-hee-hee!’ I edged out of bed and got on my clothes, and Dave and I got him back to his room.”²³ Old Dave and Bill were concerned that the drug was poisoned and that Garver was going to die. Just in case he did, they searched his room for the five hundred dollars that he had not yet paid Jurado rather than leave it for the Mexican police to steal, but they couldn’t find it. However, the next day Garver was fine; his money was still there but he threw away the bad stuff. According to Alan Ansen, when Garver died as the result of junk in Mexico City in 1957, Bill was taken aback and didn’t want to believe it. His romantic notions about junk and junkies did not include death.

Marker returned to Mexico City but did not contact Bill for five days. Bill was hurt and made something of a scene. Marker told him, “Why can’t we just be friends with no sex?” but Bill said the strain would be intolerable and put so much pressure on him that he finally agreed to have sex once or twice a month. Bill told Allen, “The strain is still considerable, but since he is here I can’t help but see him even if it is ruining my digestion, sleep and nerves” (as well as his bank balance).24 But the strain was too much for Marker, and in October he left once more, without writing Bill as much as a card. In a final attempt to reestablish the relationship—such as it was—Burroughs flew up to Jacksonville and managed to persuade Marker to accompany him back to Mexico City. Bill told Allen, “He likes me well enough in his way. I know how far his way is from my way,” then crossed out in the original letter, “[we] have sex even if he doesn’t like it, and does it just to oblige once in a while.”²⁵

Fourteen months had passed since Joan’s death. The court case was still pending, the dates constantly being moved; Ace was dithering over publishing Junkie, demanding extra sections, wanting to see his latest writing about Mexico; Jack had shown him a complete lack of consideration, and had not supported him as a friend; he was despondent over his failed affair with Marker, which was obviously not going to work long-term; he was off junk and not drinking but his health was clearly not good—he couldn’t hold down anything solid, only milk, and he had to force that down. He was marking time. His letters from this period suggest that he was severely depressed, perhaps buffeted by gusts of memory, plagued by nightmare feelings of remorse. He just wanted out. He constantly speaks of moving to Panama, of making his fortune as a farmer, of achieving the good life. In his letters to Ginsberg he tries to harden himself, saying he wants to make a lot of money and he is not choosy how he makes it: “Most people simply aren’t human so far as I am concerned. I don’t care what happens to them. I have not learned any lessons of charity.”²⁶ Even Garver “bores me to death.”

Things suddenly came to a head when on November 13, 1952, Bernabé Jurado had just parked his brand-new Buick Roadmaster outside his apartment on avenida México when he was sideswiped by a car full of drunken teenagers. Outraged, he let off a few shots at the departing car, hitting seventeen-year-old Mario Saldaña Cervantes in the leg. The injury was not immediately fatal, but septicemia set in and the boy died on November 29. His family moved in high political circles, and even the newly elected president, Ávila Camacho, got involved. Jurado went into hiding, first to Brazil, then the United States, and on to Europe, where he stayed for several years. Jurado’s legal partners immediately demanded more money from Burroughs, saying that everything had changed, and Bill realized he was no longer protected. Less than two weeks later, Burroughs was safely ensconced in the bosom of his family in Palm Beach.

Kerouac arrived in Mexico City at the beginning of December, a few days before Bill left. He had been laid off by the railroad where he had been working in San Francisco and was driven down by Neal Cassady, who went straight back to the States. Burroughs was in no mood to host Kerouac again, so Jack took a little two-room apartment on the roof of his building. Kerouac wrote to Neal complaining that twelve dollars a month was a high rent, even though he could have lived in a cheaper neighborhood, then went on to say how he had bought three dozen oysters to cook in butter, imported Chianti, and French bread. He told Neal he started each day with steak and eggs, so he was clearly in funds. He reported that Burroughs left Mexico City on December 8, after closing down the apartment, telling John Clellon Holmes, “I saw him pack in his moldy room where he shot M all this time—Sad moldy leather cases—old holsters, old daggers—a snapshot of Huncke—a Derringer pistol, which he gave to old dying Garver—medicine, drugs—the last of Joan’s spices, marjoram, new mould since she died and stopped cooking—little Willie’s shoe—& Julie’s moldy school case […] throwing in his bag, at last, picture of Lucien & Allen—Smiled, & left.”27