JUNK
1945-1946
THE LIBERTINE CIRCLE WAS not destroyed, as Allen had predicted, but for the moment it disbanded. Kammerer was dead, Lucien was in jail, Burroughs was visiting his parents in St. Louis, and Joan Vollmer took her daughter upstate to stay with her parents. Jack Kerouac arranged with Edie that if she put up the $100 in bail money they would get married, which they did on August 22, 1944, at City Hall. Celine Young was the maid of honor.
On September 1, Jack wrote Edie’s mother that “the tragic events of the last few weeks catapulted us into a badly timed union.” He and Edie were arriving in Grosse Pointe “under circumstances highly embarrassing to me.” “At any rate,” he went on, “in a world where death is rampant, as today, marriage is the least evil—that much is certain.”
Edie agreed. She had what she wanted, which was Jack, who was so handsome and smelled so good, like the deep woods of Lowell. He had high body heat, and slept on his stomach with an arm above his head, so there wasn’t much room for spreadoutski, as she put it. Edie’s father found Jack a job as an inspector in the Fruehoff trailer factory, but Jack didn’t take to Grosse Pointe, or to Edie’s mother asking him, when she saw him writing in notebooks, “Will you ever be as good as Pearl Buck?” Edie felt that to please Jack she should be well-read, and she wrote Allen asking for a book list, in exchange for which she promised to keep their “secret”—which was that one night at 118th Street, Allen had jumped into her bed naked, in a state of arousal. But he was “a wet kisser” and she pushed him away.
Jack lasted about a month in Grosse Pointe, and the one thing he managed to accomplish there was to catch the mumps, which affected both of his testicles. They shriveled up to the size of filberts, so that he became convinced that he was sterile, though not impotent. Later, when his second wife gave birth to a daughter, he was sure the child was not his.
In October, he left for New York and shipped out as an able-bodied seaman, but jumped ship in Norfolk to escape the advances of a hulking bosun who called him “Pretty Boy” and “Baby Face.” Back in New York, and thinking of himself as being like one of Balzac’s provincials observing the big evil city, Jack got in touch with Allen, who was still at Columbia. Hearing that Burroughs was back, in an apartment on Riverside Drive, they decided to go see him. “We were like ambassadors to the Chinese emperor,” Allen recalled, “making a delegation of ourselves to inquire into the nature of his soul. Quite literally and directly. Who is Burroughs? Why is he so intelligent? Will he be friendly or unfriendly?”
Burroughs was friendly, and loaned them books from his library: Kafka, Blake, Cocteau’s Opium, the cyclical historians Vico and Pareto, Hart Crane’s Collected Works. Allen had never heard of Hart Crane, and thought of Burroughs as an essential supplement to the education he was getting at Columbia. For his part, Burroughs was gratified to find two young disciples so eager to learn. He pointed out a passage in the preface of Spengler’s Decline of the West, which said that with the culture declining, “therefore, young man, take to the slide rule rather than the pen, take to the microscope rather than the brush.”
Soon Allen and Jack were making regular visits, and Burroughs suggested that since he was back in analysis, and was familiar with the methods, he might try analyzing them for an hour a day. Flattered that he would take the time, they agreed. This went on for some months, and Allen, trusting Burroughs, revealed himself, dropping his defenses completely. One day he broke down sobbing and repeating, “Nobody loves me, nobody loves me, nobody loves me.” Burroughs felt that the outburst did not ring true, it was sheer histrionics. He wanted to say, but held his tongue, “Why should anyone love you?”
Jack talked about his father, who had developed cancer of the spleen, and his mother, who was overbearing and critical of his friends. During one of their sessions, in the spring of 1945, Burroughs said: “Trouble with you Jack is you’re too hung up on your mother’s apron strings. You’re going around in circles. Are you man enough to break away?”
Jack was shaken. This was one of the first character critiques he had ever gotten, and it scared him a little. He went over to Hamilton Hall to tell Allen what Burroughs had said. Allen agreed with Burroughs, since Jack’s mother didn’t like him. They kept talking until 2:00 A.M., and Jack stayed the night in Allen’s room, for Allen’s roommate, Bill Lancaster, whose father was chairman of the National City Bank, was away.
Now it happened that on the previous day, to draw the attention of the Irish cleaning woman to the fact that his windows were dirty, Allen had scrawled in the grime “Butler has no balls” (referring to Nicholas Murray Butler, the formidably stuffy president of Columbia), over a cock and balls, and “Fuck the Jews,” over a skull and crossbones. Instead of erasing the graffiti with a shrug, the cleaning woman had reported Allen to the dean’s office.
The next morning, Allen was in his room with Jack when Dean Ralph Furey, the director of student-faculty relations, barged in and saw the offending messages on the windowpane. “Wipe that off,” he ordered Allen in a cop voice. Then he spotted Jack, whom he already disliked for quitting the football team when Furey was an assistant coach. Jack had been banned from the Columbia campus and officially designated “an unwholesome influence on the students” as a result of being a material witness in the Carr case. But the only result of Jack’s being there was that Allen was charged $2.63 for having an overnight guest.
Allen was sent in to see Dean Nicholas McKnight, known to the students as Woodrow Wilson, who said, “Mr. Ginsberg, I hope you realize the enormity of what you have done.” He was told that he would have to take a leave of absence, and that he must not return until he could show a psychiatrist’s letter stating that he was in a proper frame of mind to take on academic responsibilities.
The incident was a turning point for Ginsberg. He was a model student, with a busy curriculum, getting “A’s,” editing the humor magazine, The Jester, running the Philolexion (literary) Society, active on the debating team (he had lost to West Point on “Should armies and navies be permanently abandoned?”), and now he was suspended for what was basically a harmless undergraduate prank. That the university chose to make a big deal out of it only underlined the hidebound and narrow-minded nature of the academic community. The university was more and more an annex of government, with the V-12s and their special course in naval history, with the G.I. Bill, which amounted to open admissions and eroded standards, and with government grants ushering in an era of increasing interference—build us this, build us that, build us a nuclear reactor. Military funding was gobbling up university research. These so-called distinguished academics had done nothing to help Lucien when he was arrested, and now they were on Allen’s case for some small thing. They were merely an arm of the establishment, enforcers of the status quo, part of the whole syndrome of shutdown. Even the best of them were conventional, thought Allen. Mark Van Doren was a fine teacher, but his verse was boring. He would write a line like “time’s tooth devours,” and never worry about a new way of expressing it, and he seemed not to have heard of Walt Whitman or Hart Crane. As for Lionel Trilling, he wanted to shape the best students for academic careers, to turn them into copies of himself.
In Allen’s treatment by the powers at Columbia, in his friendship with two other troublemakers, Burroughs and Kerouac, there was the germ of an anti-Establishment, counterculture program. He was beginning to divide the world into “Us” and “Them.” But for the moment, Allen went to Sheepshead Bay and enrolled in the Maritime Service Training Center to become a merchant seaman. From the center that July, he wrote Burroughs, to whom in the hours of analysis he had admitted his homosexuality, “I feel more guilty and inferior for reasons of faggishness that intellectualization will admit is proper.” “Mountains of homosexuality, Matterhorns of cock, Grand Canyons of asshole” were “a weight on my melancholy head.”
By that time, Burroughs was also trying to get into the merchant marine. He still wanted to take an active part in the war and thought that being a seaman would be glamorous and exciting. He wrote Jack on July 24, 1945, to congratulate him on returning to the sea, “maker and mother of men.” He had to go to St. Louis to get his army medical survey from the Office of Demobilized Personnel, but by the time he got it the war was over.
On August 6, just before 8:00 A.M., the Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” from 32,000 feet and turned Hiroshima into an earthwork. On August 9, the Flying Fortress Bock’s Car dropped “Big Boy” over Nagasaki. On August 10, Japan sued for peace, and on August 14, President Truman proclaimed V-J Day. The Sheepshead Bay training center was closed down, and Burroughs never did get his papers.
Burroughs was back in New York on V-J Day, and he and Jack went out to celebrate what Jack called “surrender night.” There was much drinking and madness. Thousands of servicemen roamed the streets, parlaying military victory into sexual conquest. Burroughs and Kerouac went to Times Square to pick up women but had no luck. It was Burroughs’ appearance, Jack thought; he looked like Lucifer’s emissary, chargé d’affaires de l’Enfer, and perhaps women caught a flash of red lining inside his coat.
What was certain was that after “Little Boy” and “Big Boy,” nothing would ever be the same. It seemed to Burroughs that the end of classical culture, predicted by Spengler and Korzybski, had now come about, the end of culture and religion and the traditional values of society. After Hiroshima, the human species existed in a world where everything was permitted. Where was that bearded and verifiable divinity who is filled with wrath at man’s transgressions? He was not in strict attendance. Like the servicemen on V-J Day, He was off on a bat Himself.
That June, Joan was back in town with Julie and found a big apartment at 419 West 115th Street. Replying to a gloomy letter from Edie, whom Jack had abandoned in Grosse Pointe, Joan wrote on June 8: “You sound . . . almost as bad as me in Albany. Haven’t you met any cocksmen out there yet? . . .” Joan had asked her husband for a divorce, and he had written back and “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.”
The “libertine circle” began to reform in Joan’s apartment. Allen, still suspended from Columbia, moved in, and so did Jack and Hal Chase, who to Allen represented “the hero of the snowy West.” Hal had served in the ski troops and had trained in the Rockies and had reorganized the Indian artifacts in the Denver Museum. Allen admired his subtle, snaky-headed mind, and was strongly attracted, but Hal did not reciprocate.
Jack in the meantime was after Celine, whom he described as “ineffable, beautiful, self-corroding, doomed, a bit mad,” but Celine said she loved him like a brother. Then Edie turned up and moved in with her long-absent husband. Edie got a job in the Zanzibar night club as a cigarette girl and would feed Jack and the others steak sandwiches from the kitchen when they came around. But eventually she was fired when she nestled a five-dollar tip a sailor had given her in the bra of her little red costume—the tips went to the house.
Joan was introduced by Jack to Benzedrine, which you could buy over the counter as inhalers at drugstores, removing the accordion-folded paper strips inside. One strip in a cup of coffee could send you spinning for the rest of the day. She and Jack were zonked out a lot of the time. Burroughs was a frequent visitor at 115th Street—at that time he had a small apartment near Columbus Circle—and it was easy to see that Joan liked him. She invited him to dinner and they talked about books. They liked the same stories, such as Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.” Jack and Allen thought Joan and Bill would make a great match, and Jack asked Burroughs, “Why don’t you move in with that college widow?” On September 10, Joan wrote Edie, who was in Asbury Park with her grandparents, that “Jack and Burroughs came up. We had dinner, met Ginsberg, and spent the evening in fruity men’s bars in the Village.”
The group fell into its former ways, with endless verbalizing and “Dostoevskian confrontations.” They were together constantly. It was like a marathon encounter session. As Hal Chase put it, “you could dip into the set at any point and stay with it for days on end.”
It was only a matter of weeks after Joan had taken the apartment that her soldier husband Paul Adams showed up, fresh from the German front, and walked in to find a group of people high on bennies, piled on Joan’s vast double bed in sybaritic disarray. Disgusted, he asked, “This is what I fought for?” “Why don’t you get down from your character heights,” mumbled Joan through her Benzedrine haze. Adams left and filed for divorce.
Jack’s father, who had moved to Queens, was dying, and Burroughs went out to Ozone Park with him in November to visit. The frail old man was lying in bed, hardly able to speak, and Mrs. Kerouac was doing all the talking, sticking out her tongue and saying, “Pretty soon I’m going to be saying ya ya ya to you and you’ll be six feet under ground.” She struck Burroughs as a tough French peasant, mean and superstitious. She was always trying to separate Jack from his friends, and told him that Burroughs and Ginsberg were followed everywhere by the F.B.I. Jack’s reaction was to drink another bottle of beer and refuse to face the situation. That was basic to his character—avoid the issue. He was uneasy in the presence of anything approaching an emotional scene.
Jack was writing and drinking and taking Benzedrine. He was a member of the 52–20 club—twenty dollars a week for fifty-two weeks for the unemployed. On Benzedrine, Jack could stay awake and talk continuously for thirty-five hours. But it caught up with him, and one day around Christmastime 1945 when he and Allen and Hal were coming back from a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge, and Allen was humming a Bach toccata, suddenly Jack’s legs buckled, and the others had to carry him into a cab. He was hospitalized for thrombophlebitis, which was produced by a combination of Benzedrine and drinking.
A person is thrown into the water to sink or swim, so he learns something about the water. He learns that when you hit bottom, you are on the way up. Herbert Huncke was born in 1916 in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where his father worked for the Greenfield Tap and Die Company. His father was a German Jew who hated Jews and joined the Bund to establish his Aryan background. His mother was the daughter of a Wyoming cattleman who had a ranch in Laramie. The family moved to Chicago, where Herbert’s parents separated. At the age of twelve, since his mother was unable to handle him, his father said, “Send him to me.” His mother gave him a dime to take the trolley, and he rode it to South Chicago, which became Gary, Indiana, and he hitchhiked all the way to Geneva, New York, where police picked him up and sent him home.
Having had his first taste of the road, Huncke vowed that he would never again be trapped by school and family. He hung around Rush Street and Chicago Avenue, picking up odd jobs and running errands for whores. At fifteen, he started smoking pot, and a year later he tried heroin. At first he was needle-shy—the idea of sticking a needle into his arm was terrifying. But over the years, after shooting up thousands of times, he viewed his veins with a friendly detachment, talking about them as if they were old familiars. “That one is a roller,” he would say of a vein that slipped the needle. And of a small vein he couldn’t hit, he would say, “I’ll get you yet, you little bastard.”
Huncke spent six years just floating around the country. A sparrow-like man with bright hazel eyes and sallow skin, there was something furtive and unthreatening about him. He seemed as harmless and ingratiating as a puppy, although his voice had a ring of false plausibility that would put an alert person on guard. He knew how to get by, staying here a week and there a week, alive to small opportunities. In Albuquerque, he helped out a fellow who was promoting a TB sanitarium for Greeks. In Miami he worked as a bellhop in a little hotel whose customers bet the horses. Everywhere he looked for junk. Everywhere he traveled alone, often carrying no more than a cigar-box toilet kit, often riding the freight trains, the soot ingrained in his skin.
Huncke hit New York around 1940, and started hanging around the Times Square area, where a community of hustlers gathered. Times Square in those days was picturesque without being sleazy. Instead of porn movie houses, it had art houses like the Apollo that showed French films such as Pepe le Moko and Le Jour se Lève. Horn & Hardart, where you could get a little pot of baked beans with a strip of bacon over it for a nickel, was open all night, and there were also Chase’s and Bickford’s and the Dixie Hotel with its arcade.
Huncke became a part of the community of homos, dips, paperhangers, and pimps. He didn’t mind being known as a hustler, but he didn’t want to be known as an open faggot, because faggots were everyone’s property. Huncke presided at a table at Bickford’s and was known as the Mayor. Occasionally he did a little breaking and entering, mainly into cars. When an opportunity arose, he took it. Once in Penn Station, a sailor asked him to watch his duffle while he took a shit, and Huncke walked off with it.
Arrested for breaking into a car, he did six months on Hart’s Island, and fought not to be pegged as a broad. He learned the cliques and classifications of prison life, the nuances of getting along with his fellow inmates. “I’ve jacked off other inmates under circumstances you wouldn’t believe possible,” he recalled, “like across two feet of concrete between cell doors.”
A year after his first bust he was arrested again while filling a forged prescription, having used the same drugstore too many times. There was a custody battle between plainclothesmen and uniformed cops at the scene. Arguing about who should get the collar, they asked Huncke to arbitrate. “Look, who got here first?” asked a detective. “You guys did,” Huncke said, trying to be fair. “Well, that’s all there is to it,” the detective said. The uniformed cop got mad and said, “You little bastard, I’ll get you.”
Huncke became a “chippy junky,” turning on two or three days, then switching to liquor and Benzedrine, living from hand to mouth, hustling johns, breaking into cars. He met a young Italian named André, who was sharing an apartment on Henry Street with a big slob known as Bozo. Having tried and failed to make the grade in vaudeville, Bozo was now an attendant at the Creedmore sanitarium. André invited Huncke, who was always hard-pressed for a place to stay, to come to Henry Street, but Bozo didn’t approve and moved out. Bozo was a sort of martyr type, the kind who wants to tell you that he never gets credit for the trouble he takes—he later O.D.’d on Nembutal, of which he had an ample supply through Creedmore. André then took up with a gorgeous Titian-haired hooker known as Vickie Russell, though her real name was Priscilla Arminger and she was the daughter of a judge in Detroit. Vickie was tall and willowy, with finesse and class—a real knockout. Then André walked out after a fight with Vickie, leaving Huncke alone in the apartment with her, until two other underworld characters turned up—Phil White and Bernie Barker (name changed).
Phil White, a tall and rawboned Tennessean, made Huncke think of a traveling preacher on a mule. He was a professional pickpocket and something of a thief. Beneath the con man smile he was cold-blooded, thought Huncke, and only interested in people to the extent that he could use them.
Phil had a habit. He also had a wife, an older woman named Kay, who worked as an editor at McGraw-Hill. A bitch on wheels, thought Huncke, bowing to the Almighty Dollar—which was his verdict on anyone who held a steady job. Kay was always trying to get Phil to quit drugs, and would say to Huncke: “You’ve got to do something about Phil. He’s been taking this . . . junk, you know, and he can’t do any good now, and a woman’s got to have her tail.”
Bernie Barker was a rather dashing fellow from Cleveland, not handsome, but slim and dapper and energetic. His brother Don was active in the N.M.U., but Bernie’s ambition was to become a first-class gangster. In the meantime, he was working as a soda jerk up around Columbia—he could handle a busy soda fountain.
Huncke and Phil White both had seamen’s papers through Barker’s brother and decided to go to sea in September 1945. It would be a good way to kick their respective habits, and Kay White was all for it. They grabbed a tanker that was carrying high-octane gas to Honolulu and was short two messmen, but instead of kicking their habits they got worse habits. They made friends with the seaman in charge of the infirmary, who gave them all the morphine they wanted. So through the Panama Canal and on to Honolulu and back, Phil White and Huncke were in a morphine glow. Now Huncke really had a monkey, of whom he was fond because the monkey was even more irresponsible than he was, and he could lecture the monkey.
They were back on Henry Street and desperate for junk, when one day in January 1946 Bernie Barker dropped by and said, “Jesus, good to see you. Man, I’ve got a guy lined up, going to be down tonight, I want you to tell me what you think of him. He approached me the other day. He’s been coming into the drugstore quite regularly, and he’s been talking about capers of one sort and another. He just told me that he has a sawed-off tommy gun with an automatic pistol cartridge and some morphine Syrettes that he wants to get rid of.” That sounded good to Phil and Herbert. Morphine Syrettes, the kind that are like little toothpaste tubes with a needle sticking out, were what they’d been using on the ship.
The guy with the sawed-off shotgun and the morphine Syrettes was William Burroughs. Increasingly, he felt like an exile in his own country, belonging nowhere. He once dreamed that he was being drafted into the English army. He could not find his passport to prove that he was American. They were checking through, saying, “No, sir, I don’t see any passport here, sir.” In his search for a viable identity, Burroughs deliberately sought out a criminal life. A community of outlaws, such as he had read about in Jack Black’s You Can’t Win, was perhaps the only place where a misfit such as he could belong.
The incongruity of his choice was what made Burroughs unique. He was the grandson of the inventor of the adding machine and belonged to a good St. Louis family. He had gone to Harvard and was a member of the University Club. He was a bourgeois bourgeoisphobe, retaining some of the attributes of his class. He wore conservative vested suits and snap-brim hats and looked like a junior executive in a brokerage house. His manner was courteous and reserved. His speech, despite its nasal Missouri twang, revealed him as a man of education and intellect. He seemed to have ingested all of Western thought and literature, which he regurgitated willingly. A more unlikely colleague of Huncke’s dim-witted junky band would be hard to imagine.
Jack Anderson, the boyfriend who had crashed his car, with whom Burroughs had kept up, had a friend named Norman who worked in the Navy Yard. Norman stole a tommy gun, carrying it out piece by piece, and sixteen yellow boxes of morphine tartrate Syrettes. Burroughs bought them as a means of entrée into the criminal world. He had met Bernie Barker, who had done some serious stealing—he was part of a gang that had robbed a company in Delaware of a $180,000 payroll. Bernie was not modest about his exploits—in fact, he loved to talk about them, and about the gun he used: “Give me a .38 every time.” About how he had cracked some guy’s jaw with a roll of nickels in his fist: “No one can hang anything on you for carrying U.S. currency.” Barker was the real thing, thought Burroughs, a professional criminal, a tough hombre. “Bernie doesn’t mess around,” he told Hal Chase. “He decides to do something and he does it. He goes to the West End and orders a drink at the bar and drinks it and turns on his heels and walks out—never a wasted moment.” In imitation of Barker, Burroughs started wearing a trench coat, with his hat brim down low over his forehead, walking briskly forward the way Bernie walked.
Barker suggested that Burroughs meet him at the Henry Street apartment, where some friends of his might be interested in the Syrettes. Huncke in the meantime had done quite a decorating job on the railroad flat, the kind with a bathtub in the kitchen. He had painted the walls black, with yellow panels, and the ceiling red, with a wheel filled with different-colored little squares and triangles. Black-and-yellow floor-length drapes covered the windows, and the place looked like a cross between a Chinese opium den and Ali Baba’s cave.
The evening that Burroughs showed up on Henry Street, Huncke saw a tall thin man in the doorway wearing a chesterfield coat and a gray snap-brim hat, gloves clutched in one hand. He thought Burroughs was the police. He asked Barker to step into the bedroom and said, “Who is this guy, he looks like trouble.” Bernie vouched for him, and when they came back into the kitchen, Burroughs and Phil White were discussing the Syrettes. But Huncke was still suspicious and said, “I don’t think I want to bother, really.” Phil, however, was interested and said he would be in touch.
A few days later, Burroughs used one of the Syrettes and had his first experience with junk. He wanted to see what it was like, as he had done with the chloral hydrate at Los Alamos, in a spirit of general inquiry. Also, it seemed to be the thing to do as far as being a criminal was concerned. Using junk made him part of the group, it was a sort of rite of passage. Finally, there was in Burroughs the spirit of the self-mutilating scientist that the opium addict-writer Thomas De Quincey described in his Confessions: “I have conducted my experiments on this subject with a sort of galvanic battery and have, for the general benefit of the world, inoculated myself with the poison of 800 drops of laudanum a day (just for the same reason that a French surgeon inoculated himself lately with cancer, an English one twenty years ago with plague, and a third, I know not of what nation, with hydrophobia).” Burroughs would never say that he was taking junk for the general benefit of the world, but a spirit of scientific curiosity, with the risk of possible harm, was not absent from his experimentation.
Morphine was like nothing Burroughs had previously known. He had the feeling of moving off the ground at great speed. He seemed to be floating, as a wave of pleasure spread through his tissues. This was followed by a feeling of fear and the vision of a neon-lit cocktail lounge, and a waitress coming in with a skull on a tray. “I don’t want your fuckin’ skull,” Burroughs found himself saying. “Take it back!”
A few days later, when Phil White came to buy, at four dollars a box, Burroughs laid out ten boxes of Syrettes and kept two, saying, “These are for me.” Phil looked up, surprised: “You use it?” “Now and then,” Burroughs said. “It’s bad stuff,” Phil said, shaking his head. “The worst thing that can happen to a man.”
Soon, Burroughs was buying Syrettes from Phil, but at a higher price. Often, they would shoot up together. Phil would hit a vein in his leg and shoot the morphine in with an air bubble. “If air bubbles could kill you,” he said, “there wouldn’t be a junky alive.”
Phil introduced Burroughs to a doctor on 102nd Street off Broadway, who would fill junk prescriptions. Burroughs also started hanging out at the Angler Bar on Eighth Avenue near Forty-second Street, where Huncke was often to be found. Overcoming his suspicion, Huncke permitted Burroughs to buy him drinks and meals—he still had him pinned for a mark. Huncke took him back to Henry Street to meet Vickie, who explained her philosophy on how to treat johns. “Always build a john up,” she said. “If he has any sort of body at all, say, ‘Oh, don’t ever hurt me.’ You give him what he pays for. When you’re with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself, too. If you really want to bring a man down, light a cigarette in the middle of intercourse.”
One afternoon in Chase’s, a girl carrying some books came over to Huncke’s table and asked if she could sit down. “There’s someone who wants to meet you,” she said, “a Professor Kinsey. He’s at Indiana University and he’s doing research on sex. He’s looking for people to tell about their sex lives, to be as honest about it as possible.”
Huncke called Kinsey and asked what he was interested in. “All I want you to do is to tell me about your sex life, what experiences you’ve had, what your interest is, whether you’ve masturbated, how often, have you had any homosexual experiences, heterosexual. Just a complete record as far back as you can remember.”
Huncke was willing, for a price. “I don’t want to sound crude,” he said, “but I think it’s only fair to tell you, I do need money.” Kinsey promised ten dollars, and Huncke went to his hotel and unburdened himself of a sexual history that must have stood out for its rich variety, from his first experience at the age of nine. Then Kinsey wanted to measure the size of his penis. He had a card with a phallus drawn on it and said he would mark the length when soft and when erect on the card. “Well, why not,” Huncke thought.
As he left, Kinsey said, “Now, if there’s anyone else that you know that you think might be interested in being interviewed by all means send them up. In fact, I’ll tell you what. For every person you send me from Forty-second Street, I’ll give you two dollars. I know you can use the money.”
An enterprising recruiter, Huncke sent everyone he could think of up to see Kinsey, including Vickie and Burroughs, who may be the only writer of renown to have his sexual history on file, including his penis size soft and erect, at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, in Bloomington, Indiana. Unfortunately for the biographer, the file is closed.
Burroughs was the link between the uptown Columbia group and the Times Square Huncke group, between the students and the thieves, between the book-smart and the street-smart. He took Jack and Allen downtown to meet Huncke. To Allen, coming as he did from the campus, Times Square seemed like a heroic place. It was marvelous, with a dimension he’d never seen, a whole community, raunchy but not degrading. It was a world with its own charm and character, a more realistic society than Paterson or Lowell or St. Louis. In Paterson, “they didn’t know nuttin’ about nuttin’,” thought Allen. His parents and their socialist friends were naïve and academic and newspaper-oriented. And here before him was a world that high school teachers didn’t have a glimmer about. Allen wanted direct experience, he wanted to get away from the theoretical, like saying he planned to be a labor lawyer when he had never met a working man. Burroughs was offering the chance for a psychosocial exploration of a new world that seemed forbidden and strange. “I’m a seeker after cities and souls,” Burroughs said.
Huncke was a crucial figure, a sort of Virgilian guide to the lower depths, taking them into a world that provided an alternative to the right-thinking banality of Columbia and its so-called teachers. Huncke was the first hipster, who had been on the street since age twelve, and who was basically the victim of police persecution, in and out of jail for drug possession. Huncke was an antihero pointing the way to an embryonic counterculture, which would arise from this Times Square world of hustlers and hat-check girls.
Allen skin-popped morphine Syrettes and felt he was a part of something intensely real. He also tried Benzedrine but it tangled up his brain—it was like a spider weaving a web that was very dense on one side but missing filaments on the other. Jack tried morphine, too, but said he was allergic to it, and threw up. He would stick to liquor.
At this point, in early 1946, Burroughs moved into Joan’s apartment, and they became lovers. Although primarily homosexual and professing a caustic misogyny, Burroughs didn’t mind having sex with women, and he must have been proficient at it, because Joan, a woman of wide experience at twenty-two, gave him high marks, saying, “You make love like a pimp.” Primarily, however, their relationship was one between two remarkable intellects. Burroughs saw Joan as a woman of unusual insight. She was the smartest member of the group, he thought, certainly as smart as Allen, in many ways smarter, because there were limits to Allen’s thinking, but none to Joan’s. She started Burroughs thinking in new directions, got him interested in the Mayans, suggested that Mayan priests must have had some sort of telepathic control. She had an odd and original way of looking at things, and a great insight into character. For instance, she said about Jack that he had a natural inborn fear of authority and that if the cops ever questioned him his mouth would fall open and out would come the name they wanted.
Jack and Allen were delighted with their matchmaking. Burroughs would be lying on the couch in shirtsleeves, and Joan with her arms around him would exclaim, “Oh, Bill!” when he said something outrageous, while admiring the inventiveness of his mind. Joan was subdued and content when Burroughs was around, and waited on him hand and foot.
She was, however, taking more and more Benzedrine, and started hallucinating. She said she could hear this old couple downstairs who were calling her a whore and saying she ran a whorehouse. Then one day they got into a fight, she said, and it sounded like someone was being murdered, so Allen went down and knocked on the door but there was no one home.
Now that Burroughs was living with Joan, her juvenile lover, John Kingsland, abdicated the position while remaining a friend. He was intrigued by Burroughs, whom he saw shooting up in the bathroom and spending his days trying to score from writing doctors. On one occasion he accompanied Burroughs to the University Club, where Burroughs tried to kick his habit by swimming in the pool. Another time, they went to the Hotel Biltmore and sat in steam cabinets for hours. Burroughs also recruited Kingsland to score heroin for him, which got the eighteen-year-old into hot water. Burroughs sent him to 103rd Street with some money, but the people he was trying to buy from beat him up, thinking he was a rival pusher trying to muscle in. Then the campus police arrested him and took him down to Forty-second Street and sat him in the window of Bickford’s to see if any users would come in and make a buy. Kingsland was suspended from Columbia, but a petition from his teachers got him reinstated on a parole basis, and he was able to graduate that June of 1946 (in three years), and said farewell to “the libertine circle.”
Things began to go a little haywire on 115th Street. Huncke was breaking into cars and leaving the stuff he stole at the apartment. Once he was so stoned he stole the car as well and parked it outside. Burroughs was shooting in the main line and having trouble filling scrips. Every day he would meet Phil White to plan the day’s junk program. He would have to go through these elaborate scenarios: “I’m just in from Detroit, doctor, and I’ve got a bad back . . .” Joan was on Benzedrine all the time and not making much sense.
Hal Chase, thinking the situation was out of control, moved out. He didn’t see petty thievery and drug addiction as a valid form of rebellion in postwar America. Burroughs had a real talent for finding things to do that he wasn’t suited for. Ginsberg and Kerouac wanted experiences they could write about, but Hal was an anthropologist, not a writer, and he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of having experiences and then marketing them. Also, Hal was fed up with the Ginsberg game of “let’s find your hidden homosexuality.” Allen was a social homosexual, Hal thought. He had come out and said that he was becoming homosexual in order to succeed as a poet. Hal had the “post A-bomb feeling that so much of the world was dead and why weren’t we dead,” but what Burroughs and the others were doing did not seem like remedies, so he split.
Trouble was approaching, not as single spies but in battalions. Huncke was involved in various capers. He and Barker cracked a dress shop in Jamaica, and Phil White and Burroughs took one of the hot dresses to give to a doctor’s wife in exchange for a scrip. Then Bernie was caught robbing a safe in a theater and was sent away. He had dropped a matchbook with an address on it that the police traced to the Henry Street apartment, and Huncke had to pack up and clear out in a hurry. At that time, Burroughs was keeping a one-room dump, also on Henry Street, which he let Huncke use. “Of course it never occurred to him to pay the rent,” Burroughs said, which Huncke thought was a nasty crack, since he was down and out, whereas Burroughs had a stipend from his family. Huncke was coming uptown almost daily to deposit his stolen goods in Joan’s apartment, even though he didn’t feel comfortable around all these college people.
Then Huncke, fingered by someone he’d done drugs with, was arrested in Burroughs’ Henry Street apartment, and Burroughs figured it wouldn’t be long before they came after him. Phil White had talked him into forging the signature of a Dr. Greco on some blank prescriptions he had lifted from the doctor’s office, and an inspector spotted the difference in the handwriting. He was easy to catch because he used his real name on the prescription.
A state inspector swore out a warrant charging Burroughs with violation of Public Health Law 334, for obtaining narcotics through the use of fraud, and one day in April 1946 two detectives came to the apartment on 115th Street to arrest him. He was taken to the Tombs and mugged and fingerprinted, and was locked up in his cell in a painful state of drug withdrawal, bathed in sweat, too weak to move, hearing voices drifting back and forth from cell to cell: “Forty years! Man, I can’t do no forty years.”
That night, Joan bailed him out and gave him some goofballs to tide him over. But she had to call his psychiatrist, Dr. Wolberg, to sign his surety bond, and Wolberg promptly notified Burroughs’ parents, which led to a good deal of unpleasantness. It was the first they knew that he was taking drugs, and they were shocked. It seemed like only yesterday that Mortimer Burroughs had bailed his son out as a material witness in the Carr case, and now he had to pay for bail again.
While waiting for his case to come up, Burroughs had to finance his heroin habit. Three caps a day at three dollars each, bought from various connections, was more than he could afford, so he began “working the hole” with Phil White. They would ride the subways at night looking for drunks asleep in stations. Phil would spot a “flop” sleeping on a bench and they would get off and Burroughs would stand in front of the bench covering Phil with an open newspaper as Phil went through the drunk’s pockets looking for his “poke.” One time a lush woke up and started fighting, and Burroughs and Phil had to make a run for it. The experience was enough to convince Burroughs that working lushes was not his line.
In the meantime, Huncke was in Riker’s Island for three months, in a dormitory with hundreds of beds and a pair of lockers between each bed. It was his first experience in the dorm, and he knew he had to watch himself because he was small and appealing. The first night he had to knock a guy over the head with a work shoe. He had learned never to accept anything. If a guy offered you a cigarette, “thanks anyway.” Huncke was loaded down with blankets and sheets and a pillow and was looking for his bed, and here on the bed next to his was this tall, cadaverous-looking man with good features and a receding hairline, who introduced himself as Bill Garver—William Maynard Garver, of the Philadelphia Garvers.
Garver seemed like an interesting, unthreatening fellow, in his forties, too old to bother him sexually, and he and Huncke became friendly. He came from a good family—his father was a banker—and had been expelled from Annapolis for drunkenness. His skeletal though not undistinguished appearance came from being a junky, which he had been all his adult life. “Junk is the only thing in my life,” he said. During the war he had worked as an orderly in a mental hospital, stealing the morphine and substituting milk sugar. Patients in pain were given milk sugar tablets. “After all, they’re crazy anyway, they don’t know the difference,” Garver said. After getting away with it for two years, he was caught by one of the doctors, who said, “There’s something wrong here, I think you know what I mean.”
To finance his habit, Garver was now stealing overcoats, which he called “boosting bennies.” He would walk into a place for a cup of coffee and walk out with someone’s overcoat, which he would pawn for ten or twelve dollars. He had a record of ten arrests, all for petty larceny. Huncke told Garver to look up Burroughs when he got out, which he did. Still waiting for his case to come up, Burroughs went into pushing heroin with Garver, who introduced him to his contacts in the Village. Garver, thought Burroughs, didn’t have the nerve to be a real thief so he stuck to overcoats. He knew the coatroom of every restaurant in New York, a rare if penny-ante field of expertise. “Fifteen apparitions have I seen / The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger,” in the words of W. B. Yeats.
Every day, Burroughs had to sell enough caps to buy his next quarter ounce, and he was never more than a few dollars ahead, having to contend with unreliable and untrustworthy customers. “What a crowd,” he thought. “Mooches, fags, four-flushers, stool pigeons, bums—unwilling to work, unable to steal, always short of money, always whining for credit.” Burroughs was a conscientious pusher, punctual and honest. He delivered right to your door, and had a good roster of steady clients. One of these, Mel the waiter, always unshaved and dirty-looking, lived in a roominghouse on Jane Street. One time, Burroughs gave him a cap and he shot up as Burroughs looked out the window—he didn’t like to watch junkies probing for veins—and when he turned around Mel had passed out; the dropper was hanging in his arm full of blood. His friend Ritchie pulled the dropper out and slapped his face with a wet towel. Mel came around partly and muttered something. He lay there on the unmade bed, his limp arm stretched out, a drop of blood forming at the elbow.
As they walked downstairs, Ritchie said that Mel had been after him for Burroughs’ address. “Listen,” Burroughs said, “if you give it to him, you can find yourself a new connection. One thing I don’t need is somebody dying in my apartment.”
With all the hassle, Burroughs was barely scraping by, what with short counts from wholesalers, the constant nibble of credit, customers coming up short, and his own habit, which he had to sustain daily. Garver said it was his own fault, he ought to cut the stuff more. “You’re giving a better cap than anybody in New York City,” he said. “Nobody sells sixteen percent stuff on the street. If your customers don’t like it, they can take their business to Walgreen’s.”
Garver lived in a cheap roominghouse in the forties, where Burroughs would sometimes shoot up with him. Once he rummaged around in a bureau and brought out a worn manila envelope, which contained a discharge from Annapolis “for the good of the service,” a faded letter from “my friend, the captain,” and membership cards in the Masons and the Knights of Columbus. His claims to reality, Burroughs thought. “Every little bit helps,” Garver said. He sat silent and reflective for a few minutes, then added, “Just a victim of circumstances.” He handed Burroughs two overcoats and said: “I’ve about burned down all the pawnshops in New York. You don’t mind pawning these coats for me, do you?”
By this time, Huncke was out of Riker’s Island and was crashing at Phil White’s place in Washington Heights. Phil’s wife, Kay, had cracked down and refused to give him any more money to support his habit. Phil had borrowed a .32 from Burroughs and one morning he woke up junk-sick and took some goofballs. High as a kite, he told Huncke: “Come on, I’m going to take this fucking gun out. I won’t use it but I’ll stick somebody up.”
“Oh, no,” said Huncke, “I’m not going out with you with a gun, Phil.”
“Then fuck you, I’m not going to share with you.”
“Well, that’s your business entirely,” Huncke said.
Phil went out and came back at about one-thirty that afternoon, looking like he’d been dragged out from beneath a rock. “Oh, man, I shot a guy,” he said, “a furrier, the son of a bitch didn’t have any money and he started to scream, and I let him have it.”
Huncke didn’t know whether to believe him, but that evening in the late edition of the Journal-American there was a banner headline that said, MAD DOG NOONDAY KILLER. Well, thought Huncke, that wasn’t Phil, that was Phil on goofballs.
Out of consideration for Burroughs, Huncke helped Phil get rid of the gun, taking it apart and wandering over the wilds of Brooklyn, throwing a piece here and a piece there.
In June 1946, Burroughs’ case came up in Special Sessions. Since he was a first offender, the charge was a misdemeanor. Burroughs’ father was there to provide backup, and the judge gave him a four-month suspended sentence, saying: “Young man, I am going to inflict a terrible punishment on you. I am going to send you home to St. Louis for the summer.” The judge could not have known that having to go home and be in the custody of his parents like a misbehaving child was a terrible punishment for Burroughs.
He had a pleasant surprise when he arrived in St. Louis, however, for his old friend Kells Elvins was there, after having gone through some of the island battles in the Pacific as a captain in the marines. A Jap shell had exploded close enough to make him deaf in one ear, and he had also contracted malaria.
Burroughs and Kells dreamed up various moneymaking schemes, one of which was a home dry cleaning machine. Like the Alec Guinness character who invents a white suit that never gets dirty or wears out, therefore confounding the makers of deliberately inferior clothing, Burroughs now saw himself as a crusader for “white suit”–type products that would put the others out of business—concrete houses that would last forever, fluoride mouthwashes that would do away with cavities. He was reverting, in his imagination at least, to the ambitions of his paternal grandfather, and wrote Allen Ginsberg that he was planning to market “Death County Bill’s Tooth and Gum Tablets, from the county without a toothache,” but was being hassled by the Pure Food and Drug Department.
Kells’s son, Peter, was assigned to type up the patent for the home dry cleaner, and Burroughs teased him on his slowness: “Well, Peter, you’re supposed to have a little more skill at the typewriter.” Noticing that the tip of one of Burroughs’ fingers was missing, Peter asked him what had happened. “Oh, it’s more beautiful that way,” Burroughs said. Kells asked his mother if they could use her washing machine to try out their formula, but Mrs. Elvins wanted nothing to do with it, which frustrated the two inventors: what, this dull and unimaginative woman obstructing the brilliant experiments of two young Tom Edisons!
Kells, however, had a much better deal going than a dry cleaning machine. He had bought ten acres of citrus groves for $5,000 in the Rio Grande Valley, sixty miles of the richest farmland in America, in East Texas near the Mexican border, and grew Ruby Reds, Foster Pinks, blood oranges, lemons, and limes. He also had 100 acres of cotton. There was a support price for cotton, and if you had an allotment you couldn’t lose. It all seemed like easy money, and Burroughs convinced his parents to advance the funds to buy fifty acres of Rio Grande cottonland. He had washed out as a criminal—he might as well try farming. In late June he went down to Pharr, Texas, with Kells and rented a house. Every day they drove out past the flimsy houses and the Bide-A-Wee tourist courts to look at their cotton, which was being picked by wetbacks in perfect weather—hot and dry. There was no particular reason for them to look, since neither of them knew the first thing about it. They just did it to pass the time until 5:00 P.M., when Kells would bang a tin pail in front of his house and yell, “Drinking time!” and the neighbors would come in and make martinis with homemade gin. Kells, who cultivated a macho, anti-intellectual manner, liked the farmers and the good ol’ boys.
Burroughs soon learned that the economics of farming were not that simple. By the time your crop came in you were up to your ears in debt, because you’d borrowed money on your tractor, which cost thousands of dollars, and there wasn’t much left over. If you hit a bad year—a hailstorm or a drought—you were wiped out. The big money was in vegetables, if you hit it right. Everybody read the bulletins the way you’d read a racing sheet, to find out what they were growing in the other winter vegetable areas, which were Louisiana, California, and Florida. Of course, a freeze in Florida was money in the bank in Texas. One year in the Rio Grande they hit it big on onions. The next year, you couldn’t give onions away. One year Kells was going to clean up on peas, and another year on tomatoes, but something always went wrong. Everybody was always talking “should”: “I should have hung on to that 100 acres on the lower lift; I should have took up them oil leases; I should have planted cotton instead of tomatoes.” Burroughs wasn’t into the vegetable gambit; he put all his land into cotton. He had an allotment, and the land was so good he made two bales an acre, whereas one bale an acre was considered a good yield, and the support price was $150 a bale.
Kells also made some oil investments. He was friends with Sid Murchison, who gave him tips. Murchison’s favorite expression was “When are ya gonna get yourself cured?” Being cured meant being rich. “Hey, Clem, you’ve only got a couple of million, when are ya gonna get yourself cured?”
“Tell me about the man, Burroughs, tell me about Murchison’s hands,” Kells said. “The man’s hands are twisted,” Burroughs said, “from being in all that shale.” “That’s right,” Kells said, “the man’s got arthritis.”
Kells was an advocate of the prolongation of life, and took Burroughs over the border into Mexico to take the Bogomoletz serum, which was illegal in the United States. The theory was that aging was caused by the deterioration of the connective tissue, which the serum could correct. You could tell how old your tissue was by pinching it and seeing if it snapped right back. They went to the Mexican doctor who had the franchise. In his office was a photograph of Bogomoletz at the age of eighty-six, with coal-black hair and a pretty girl on each arm. In his racket, thought Burroughs, you’ve got to be your own best advertisement. He took the serum and his arm swelled up alarmingly. Oh, well, he thought, a Mexican doctor will shoot anything into you if you pay him. The stuff was supposed to make you live to the age of 125, which Bogomoletz said was man’s natural life span. Burroughs also took advantage of his visit to get a Mexican divorce from Ilse Klapper Burroughs.
Back in New York, in the summer of 1946, the “libertine circle” had once again disintegrated. Hal Chase was gone, Burroughs was gone, Ginsberg had shipped out, Edie Parker was in Grosse Pointe, and Kerouac had no fixed address. Without boarders, Joan had trouble raising the rent. She missed Burroughs, and relieved her unhappiness with Benzedrine.
Huncke, who had no place to stay, offered to move in with her, and helped out by robbing parked cars for luggage. Huncke was fond of Joan, but he knew he couldn’t make her happy physically. She was much too strong and sexual, and nothing turned Huncke off faster than a woman who wanted to get fucked. Huncke thought of himself as Joan’s protector in Burroughs’ absence. When he took her down to Times Square, amid all these guys who were basically pimps at heart, he said she was his old lady. But that only annoyed Joan, who said: “Don’t be telling people I’m your old lady. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.” Huncke inwardly laughed. He knew those guys; they’d have her turning tricks in no time.
Huncke brought around a fellow thief named Whitey, a good-looking blond, well-built, street-smart and virile, and he developed a crush on Joan, and soon they were having what she referred to as “a light affair.” Whitey and Huncke brought their loot to 115th Street, and Joan complained that everything in the apartment was hot.
Huncke was egalitarian in his larcency, stealing from friends as well as strangers. He took Allen Ginsberg’s phonograph and pawned it, and then wrote Allen a letter, apologizing for “overstepping the bounds of good fellowship.” He advised Allen not to speak of his pilfering to others, “as it will place you in the role of being the proverbial sucker—if you forgive and continue allowing me parasitical advantages from my contact with you.” Such was Huncke—advising his victims on the correct reaction to his stealing while hoping to remain on friendly terms with them.
He was in more trouble in August, when a valise disappeared from an after-hours joint in the Bronx where he was hanging out, and the consensus was that he was the culprit. One day two policemen showed up at Joan’s apartment with the owner of the valise. Joan was terrified because of all the stolen goods on the premises. Huncke was arrested when it developed that he had upon his person the keys to a stolen car parked downstairs, and soon found himself in the Bronx jail at 153rd Street and River Avenue. On September 25 he wrote Allen pleading for a little cash: “Seriously, if you can—please, please bring over four or five dollars. I need it. Thus far—I am forced to bum fellow inmates for stationery—cigs—soap and other almost essentials. It becomes slightly rough on all concerned.”
Joan owed for back rent and couldn’t pay, so she and Whitey and Julie were evicted and bounced around from one hotel to another. Then Whitey, who was sweet but stupid, tried to crack a safe in a Howard Johnson’s and was immediately arrested. That left Joan alone and broke. She left Julie with an aunt in Long Island and found a place to stay with a black friend of Huncke’s called Spence, on West Forty-seventh Street.
Jack Kerouac went to see her and found her “out of her fuckin’ mind on Benzedrine.” When he came in, she immediately stripped. “Joan, what are you doing?” Jack asked. “Who are you, strange man?” she said. “Get out of this house.” “I’m not a strange man, Joan, I’m Jack,” he said. When she started shouting, “Jack is trying to rape me,” he left.
Joan was in bad shape. John Kingsland, who saw her in October, wrote Edie Parker: “I saw Joan last weekend. She seemed to be losing her mind. It’s a shame, don’t you think?” One day, wandering around Times Square, she was picked up and taken to the Bellevue psycho ward. Four years earlier, she had faked a psychotic episode in order to bring her husband to New York. In retrospect, that was a dress rehearsal for the real thing. While she was in Bellevue, Whitey’s trial came up, and she later learned that he had been sentenced to five to ten years in Sing-Sing. Her father, David Vollmer, came down from Loudonville to get Julie. It took Joan ten days to convince the doctors that she wasn’t crazy. When she talked about junkies congregating on 103rd Street, they thought she was hallucinating. But she asked the doctors to call in the two detectives who had arrested Burroughs, who confirmed what she was saying.
When Burroughs heard, via Allen Ginsberg in October, that Joan was in Bellevue, he came to New York to get her. It was a rescue operation. It was not easy to be Burroughs’ friend, but once he accepted you, he tried not to let you down. In his criminal persona, he liked the idea of having an “old lady,” so he could talk to the others about “my old lady this” and “my old lady that.” Also, he and Joan were companionable; they had the same interests, from drugs to the Mayan codices.
Joan agreed to go to Texas with him. They would find a little spread of their own and grow the best cash crop of all, marijuana. In November, they went to stay with Kells in the Rio Grande Valley while they looked for an isolated place. Finally, they found a broken-down, ninety-nine-acre farm about forty miles north of Houston. Burroughs kept his cotton land in the Rio Grande, which Kells would manage for him. They stayed in their new place the last week of November, starting repairs on the house, then drove to New York for a few days, where they saw Allen, who had been readmitted to Columbia and had a crush on a fellow student named Heaze. “Why you can’t even get a Heazard-on,” Burroughs joked. Giggling, Joan added, “It’s his innate sense of delicacy.” On December 8, they went to the Museum of Natural History to look at the Mayan codices, taking the recently sprung Huncke along. For six nights running, Allen took heroin with Burroughs, and felt no habit and no anxiety when he quit.
Burroughs went to St. Louis to spend Christmas with his parents, and Joan went to Londonville to get Julie. She and Julie took the train to Houston on January 2, 1947. Joan wrote Edie: “Although we’re not married, Bill got a divorce, but I haven’t yet. Let me have your news. Make it Mrs. W. S. Burroughs, New Waverly, Texas.” When Joan and Julie got to Houston, Burroughs was there to greet them, and Joan announced that she was pregnant. Burroughs was not surprised. He knew exactly the night that the baby had been conceived, in a Times Square hotel room. They say women always know . . . well, I know too . . . that was it . . . I just knew. Joan asked him if he wanted her to get an abortion. Certainly not, Burroughs said, it was out of the question—abortion was a form of murder.