TEXAS
1947-1948
NEW WAVERLY WAS A town five blocks long, forty miles north of Houston, with a gas station, a diner, and a post office. From the highway you took a pitted blacktop road for twelve miles, past weather-beaten cabins with elderly blacks sitting on front porches, and then an old logging road back into the pine woods, twisting down to the bayou, with an occasional old cedar dripping Spanish moss, until you came to a ramshackle clapboard house with a porch, in the middle of nowhere. There was a cistern, and a vine-covered old barn about ready to collapse. It was a setting out of Tobacco Road, for the house had no electricity, no hot water or bathtub, and the only heat came from a potbellied stove in the kitchen.
In this secluded spot, part of a depressed area called Pine Valley, where you could not see your neighbor’s roof, Burroughs planned to grow marijuana, which according to Texas law was a felony with an automatic two-year sentence. But he would not be “like the poor cat i’ the adage,” in Shakespeare’s words, who wanted fish but was afraid to wet its paws. His first priority was to obtain seeds, and he and Joan agreed that it would be a good idea to invite Huncke, recently released from the Bronx jail, to join them on their rural estate. He could bring some seeds, provide companionship, and score Benzedrine for Joan in Houston. On January 9, 1947, Joan wrote Allen Ginsberg:
“Bill really should write this but it would never be started if I left it to him. Julie and I made it down here all right and after some confusion managed to connect with Bill. This week we’re staying at a tourist camp. . . . We have a Jeep, which while it bounces almost intolerably, is an incredible blessing as it actually navigates over our road, flooded as it is by five days of steady rain. So now we can carry loads in, things are looking up. Bill is enclosing fifty dollars. Would you, the goat as always, buy Huncke a train ticket as soon as possible. . . . It leaves N.Y. about 4:30 P.M. daily—train no. 11—The Southerner, Texas-Mexico section. . . . On top of all the rest, if you could spare the time to see Herbert safely on the train, it might be a sound idea. Not offensively, you understand. . . .”
Huncke thought it over. He was preparing to sail as second cook on a ship bound for Shanghai, but figured, they’re probably surrounded by redneck Texans and will be glad to see a friendly face. He ended up taking the bus rather than the train, so out of his skull on various drugs that he forgot the mason jar of pot seeds he was supposed to bring. By the time they hit the Gulf of Mexico he was going through withdrawal, but fortunately Burroughs met him in Houston with some pantapon, a form of opium which Bill Garver had sent from New York.
Disappointed that he hadn’t brought the seeds, Burroughs sent Huncke into Houston with some money to buy some. With a dowser’s instinct on where to score, Huncke headed straight for the Brayos Hotel, an old-fashioned Southern-style place with wicker chairs and two-bladed ceiling fans. Around the corner was a stand with black shoeshine boys who made the shine rag snap. Huncke started rapping with one of them and said he was interested in buying some grass. “What I really want are some seeds,” he said. “I’m visiting some friends here in Texas. We’ve got a big spot and we’d like to plant some grass. If I could get just a jar, it’s worth twenty dollars to me.”
“Well, man, I just might be able to do you some good,” the shoeshine boy said. “Listen, I can’t knock off here until a little later in the day, but if you want to we’ll meet. I have a taxicab and we’ll drive out to a couple of spots I know. I’ll turn you on to a stick and you can decide if you want some or not. When they clean up, I’ll tell them to save the seeds.”
Mission accomplished, Huncke started back, but remembered that he had also promised to find Joan some inhalers. With the same unerring instinct, he hit on a drugstore that offered him as many as he wanted. He bought them by the dozen, and became such a good customer that the druggist gave him a discount. After that, Huncke did all the scoring for Burroughs, who didn’t want to draw attention by patronizing the drugstore in the New Waverly area. Huncke also picked up liquor in Houston, because New Waverly was in a dry county.
Aside from scoring, Huncke was kept busy fixing the house. When he thought about it, he couldn’t remember ever working so hard. He got yards of screening to enclose the old porch. He dug holes for fence posts. Since there was no well, he carried a water tank in a wheelbarrow down to the stream every day and filled it with a bucket. Now he realized why they’d invited him down: They needed a day laborer and water carrier.
Heeding Huncke’s complaints, Burroughs brought in a dowser or water-witch to find a well—no one in that part of Texas would have dreamed of digging a well without one. This old fellow wearing baggy pants held up by one suspender and leading a one-eared mule came by and walked up and down with his wand until it dipped, and sure enough they found water there. Four-year-old Julie came up and said, “Hey, Bull, what’s goin’ on?” She couldn’t pronounce “Bill,” so she said “Bull.” Burroughs would tell her stories about the gnomes that lived in the cistern—in fact, he had to keep a strainer on the cistern so the frogs didn’t get in.
All in all, thought Huncke, it wasn’t a bad life. He suspected that even Burroughs enjoyed it. With spring coming, the foliage was turning lushly verdant. The oak and persimmon trees were draped in Spanish moss, and everywhere there were armadillos and rosy-throated chameleons. There were also, in multitudes, scorpions, tarantulas, ticks, chiggers, and centipedes. Burroughs fixed a razor blade to the end of a stick to destroy scorpions, and sliced one in three pieces—each piece ran off in a different direction. “That’s the ugliest thing I ever saw,” Huncke said. Burroughs kept a scorpion count—his record was ten in one day. The house was overrun with rats as big as possums—one was so fat he got wedged in his hole, and Burroughs shot him. He had a .22 target pistol, and would set up cans and bottles to fire at.
Joan was pregnant and wore loose dresses. There were wild berry thickets near the house, and one afternoon Huncke saw Joan with a big crockery bowl in her arms, and Julie trotting along beside her, the two of them picking blackberries, and Joan was wearing a loose blouse that fell off her shoulders—she was really something to see.
One morning, Huncke heard some mewing under the house, and Julie called him and said, “Hunk Hunk Hunk, cat cat cat.” Sure enough, there was a tiny white cat, which came out when Huncke put a saucer of milk out. It was covered with ticks, which he pulled off with tweezers, and it became Huncke’s cat—the only creature he had ever found that would obey him. If Julie wandered away from the yard, the cat would meow up a storm.
There was always plenty to do around the house, aside from shopping trips to Houston. In the evening they smoked grass and listened to music on Burroughs’ scratchy old phonograph. Huncke wanted to play Billie Holiday records, but Burroughs asked for Viennese waltzes. “Aw man,” Huncke would say, “you don’t want to hear that,” and Burroughs would reply, “Oh, but I do.” Huncke was reading Tales of the South Pacific by a new writer, James Michener, which made him laugh out loud. “You know, Bill,” he said, “this book’s on the bestseller list. You ought to write something like this, you old fart.”
But Burroughs had no thought of writing. He was bent on bringing in his marijuana crop, which was speedily growing. One day his neighbor, a grizzled farmer named Arch Ellisor, dropped by and admired the tall cannabis plants. “That’s a mighty fine stand, whatever it is,” he said. “Oh,” explained Joan, “it’s some new kind of animal feed.” Surrounding the cannabis was a cover crop of tomatoes. Ellisor told his wife: “They’re growing ’maters over there. Don’t they know you can’t grow ’maters in that soil?”
Joan described Ellisor as the man with the Orphan Annie eyes, two little empty circles. He would arrive on horseback and say, “Well, how is everything today,” waiting to be invited in for a whiskey. His grandmother was dying of cancer, and he provided graphic reports on her condition. “The old woman’s about ready to go. Her breast is just literally eaten away,” he said, making a scooping gesture in front of his chest. “There ain’t nothin’ left, poor old girl.” A while later, he reported, “She’s so bad she’s crawlin’ around on all fours.” When she died, he invited Burroughs and Huncke and Joan to the funeral.
The other neighbor, Mr. Gilley, would come by just as often, through the piney woods where armadillos frolicked, pale blue eyes under a black Stetson. “Lawd, lawd, have you seen my brindle-faced cow?” he would ask. “Guess I’m takin’ up too much of your time. Must be busy doin’ somethin’, feller says. Good stand you got, whatever it is. Maybe I’m asking too many questions. Talking too much. You wouldn’t have a rope, would you? A hemp rope. Don’t know how I’d hold that old brindlefaced cow without a rope if I did come on her.” At one point, when Burroughs had a Jeep and a car, Gilley said, “Well, I see the rich man has got hisself another car—might give that Jeep to a poor man.”
The strangest thing about the setup to Huncke was Burroughs’ apparent indifference to Joan. He never expressed affection. They slept in separate rooms, and there seemed to be no physical contact between them. One night when he was trying to sleep he heard Joan knock on Burroughs’ door. When the door opened, Huncke heard her say, “All I want is to lie in your arms a little while.”
Huncke didn’t think Burroughs was cruel or without feeling. But he found Burroughs’ coldness toward Joan hard to take. Once they were walking in the woods and Joan was tiring from carrying Julie and Huncke said, “Why don’t you fuckin’ help her,” and Burroughs responded that the Spartans knew how to deal with the excess baggage of female infants by throwing them off cliffs.
That kind of sardonic humor was Burroughs’ way of coping with emotions, but Huncke never got used to it. You could never be completely sure whether he was kidding or not. Once, they came on a big hole in a clump of cedars and Burroughs dropped a rock down, saying, “Let’s see how deep it is.” They waited a long time until they heard it hit, and Burroughs said, “If only we had Kay White here we could shove her right down.”
On the other hand, if anyone criticized Joan, Burroughs came to her defense. When Huncke said that she was a little extravagant in her shopping, Burroughs said, “Well, after all, she wants to see that we’re fed properly.” He never said anything about her Benzedrine habit, which was worse despite her pregnancy. Huncke kept right up with her, and they would spend evenings giggling and having strange conversations. Both of them, in their Benzedrine hallucination, began to see small white filaments coming out of their skin, living organisms, like tiny worms. This to Joan was connected to the post-atomic bomb fear of radiation, which was one of her main obsessions, so that the white filaments took on the relevance of a universal planetary disease, in the sense that atomic contamination was spreading everywhere. Fearing contamination, she took to examining her skin with a hand-held mirror, in the light of a kerosene lamp. Amphetamine, reflected Huncke, could lift you into some very strange states of mind. He had seen people dig things out of cracks in the floor, and imagine they were seeing microbes.
While Burroughs was working out his version of the American pastoral idyll, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in New York found a fresh heroic figure to replace him in Neal Cassady. Here was the Western hipster, a child of the streets like Huncke, but with a manic drive and a genuine lyric dimension. He had grown up on Denver’s skid row with a wino father, and began stealing cars at the age of fourteen. By the time he was eighteen, he’d already been arrested ten times. But he wasn’t a victim like Huncke; he was more of an irrepressible natural force. A creature of Bunyanesque excess, Cassady claimed that he could throw a football seventy yards, run a hundred yards in under ten seconds, and broad-jump twenty-three feet.
As a child he had been a classroom show-off, skipping third grade by going up to his teacher and spouting facts at her. She was impressed by his fluency, and he found his true calling—the inspired rap. Largely self-taught, he had absorbed a vast number of unrelated facts, from the amount of coffee grown in Brazil to the weight of Trotsky’s brain. He had grandiose visions where he saw himself confounding senators with his wisdom, and in the meantime used his big talk on the ladies. Basically, what he wanted was for everyone to say, “Neal is great.”
Cassady was a friend of Hal Chase, who described him as “this unbelievable crazy quixotic man.” Hal went to see Lionel Trilling and said that Cassady was a bright street kid who had done a lot of unconnected reading, a sort of valuable savage who should be given the chance to attend Columbia. Trilling agreed to set up a special admittance exam for him, but on the appointed day, Neal didn’t show. Hal thought he had lost his nerve. For once Columbia was willing to try the unorthodox, but Neal copped out.
In any case, at the start of 1947, twenty-year-old Neal was in New York with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend LuAnne Sanderson, a sort of teenage Betty Grable, the daughter of a Denver cop. Jack and Allen took to Neal at once. He fit right into their cast of characters, as a creature of appetite and instinct who hungered after experience and was ready to try anything. Neal was a perpetual motion machine, investing every moment with his own brand of manic intensity. He explained to Allen that the reason for his manic side was that he was conditioned to dealing with people who had to be driven on by his assuming an urgent tone. Words like “crude” and “vulgar” didn’t seem to apply to Neal, who could get away with describing “the heightened sensibility one experiences after a good bomber.”
Allen could speak about literature as easily as Neal could speak about football. He admired Allen for that. Allen could put things so well that Neal found it hard to formulate. He could certainly profit from Allen’s company. There was one slight hitch, which was that Allen was forcing himself on Neal physically, and even when Neal gave in, so as not to interrupt the flow of conviviality, he didn’t enjoy it much.
Thus in February, in a letter to Burroughs, Allen disclosed his “liaison” with Neal, but soon after that Neal went back to Denver and wrote Allen that “I don’t really know how much I can be satisfied to love you, I mean bodily, you know I, somehow, dislike pricks & men . . . I’m not sure whether with you . . . I was forcing a desire for you bodily as a compensation to you for all you were giving me.”
Allen also informed Burroughs that he was seeing a psychiatrist but had no faith in the treatment. Burroughs, who had gone through half a dozen psychiatrists and was disappointed in all of them, replied that he was not surprised: “These jerks feel that anyone who is with it at all belongs in a nuthouse. What they want is some beat clerk who feels with some reason that other people don’t like him. In short someone so scared and whipped down he would never venture to do anything that might disturb the analyst. I think you would do better with the Reichians who sound a good deal more hip.”
In this letter was Burroughs’ first use of the word that would later be used to qualify a generation—the word “beat,” which he had picked up from Huncke, who used it to signify down and out or pathetic. It was used as well by Joan in a March twenty-third letter to Allen in which she said, “If you feel like seeing the beatest state in the union for a while during the summer, we’d all be awfully glad to see you.”
The reference to Reich was an indication of the new field of psychic investigation that Burroughs was engaged in. He had been very impressed by Reich’s book The Cancer Biopathy, in which cancer was seen as the result of sexual repression in a sick society. The connection Reich made between individual illness and the social order was one that fitted Burroughs’ own sense of alienation and sexual blockage. He was conditioned by his own experiences to accept the idea that a life-denying, repressive society could produce that alienation and blockage.
More specifically, Reich singled out drug addiction as a “biopathic phenomenon,” writing that “addicts are always orgastically impotent . . . they attempt to get rid of their excitations artificially, but they are never completely successful. Usually, they are sadistic, mystical, vain, homosexual, and are tortured by consuming anxiety, which they attempt to work off by brutal behavior.”
When Burroughs read Reich, he recognized his own predicament, and became a convert. But Wilhelm Reich was in fact a textbook case of the healer who cannot heal himself, of the reformer whose own life is a mess. He seemed to seek out conflict and difficulty, as though compulsively reenacting a scenario in which he, the holder of the flame, is banished by the established powers. He seemed to go around with a storm cloud over his head.
A student of Freud’s in Vienna, Reich was repudiated by the master for seeing the cause of neurosis in blocked sexual energy. He developed a theory of sexual politics in which he saw the ills of society re-created in each individual, and joined the German Communist Party. But soon the party expelled him because he tended to substitute sexual blockage for the class struggle. He moved to Denmark and was expelled again, from the Danish Communist Party, and to Norway, where he was again the focus of controversy. In 1939 he came to the United States, in the hope that in a young, dynamic land, still in the midst of its own social experiment, his ideas might find, if not acceptance, at least tolerance.
Having dropped Communism, Reich developed the idea of a specific kind of energy he called orgone energy, which was present in all living matter. The blocking of this “good” orgone energy was a single-cause explanation for the devastations of human history and the emotional and physical ailments of individuals. Orgone energy was the life force, in contrast to such negative and destructive forms as nuclear energy.
Reich designed and built an Orgone Energy Accumulator, a box-shaped cubicle made of alternate layers of metallic and nonmetallic materials where a person could sit and absorb the healthful orgone energy. His proof that the device worked was that he measured different temperatures inside and outside the orgone box.
In 1941, Reich sent an orgone box to Einstein, who determined that the differences in temperature were caused by convection currents of air around the box, and wrote Reich off as a crackpot, thus making him the only man to have been rejected by the three great thinkers of his age—Marx (via the Communist parties), Freud, and Einstein.
The more he was dismissed, the more stridently Reich insisted on the correctness of his views. He claimed that the orgone box was an “indispensable weapon” in the treatment of cancer, which he connected with bad sex: “Cancer is living putrefaction of the tissues due to the pleasure starvation of the organism.” He bought 280 acres near Rangeley, Maine, and set up a research institute called Orgonon, where he treated cancer patients.
The year that Burroughs took an interest in Reich, 1947, was also the year that Reich came to the attention of the Food and Drug Administration, which was mandated to protect the public against false medical claims. Reich was renting orgone boxes for ten dollars a month and putting out an Orgone Energy Bulletin that made various claims about its benefits.
There was a lengthy F.D.A. investigation, which was dropped and then resumed, and it was not until 1954 that the attorney general of the state of Maine filed an injunction at the request of the F.D.A. against the interstate shipment of orgone boxes. Reich went on trial in April 1956 for violating the injunction and was found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail, a victim less of government persecution than of his own willful mishandling of his case, never having been told that a man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client. He died in prison that November, of heart failure, which he had always insisted was a biophysical manifestation of an emotionally heartbreaking experience.
During the time of his investigation and trial, Reich grew increasingly irrational. He refused to appear in court on the grounds that his appearance would lead to “possibly national disaster.” He threatened to disrupt the weather on the Maine coast with orgone energy, to prove that it worked. He told his associates at Orgonon to carry firearms against the HIGs (Hoodlums in Government). He identified UFOs as spaceships powered by negative energy. At a hearing for the reduction of his sentence he argued that to imprison him would “lead to the downfall of the United States as a self-governing society at the hands of a few conniving masterminds,” because only he knew the equations concerning space and negative gravity, which he carried in his head.
The moral of this dismal tale was that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first drive mad, except that in Reich’s case it was not the gods but his own demons.
Burroughs in any case did not feel much sympathy for Reich at the time of his downfall. He thought Reich was “a goddamn fool” who could have stayed out of jail if he’d had any sense. He was, however, interested in some of Reich’s ideas, while admitting that in the most charitable view they hovered in a twilight zone between cultist dogma and verifiable scientific truth.
But he thought there was something in the idea of pleasurable and unpleasurable orgasms, and of cancer as a disease of sexual decline. Someone with a satisfactory sex life, he thought, would be less likely to get cancer. He was sold on the orgone box, and over the years built them and used them in various places. He usually stayed in the box about twenty minutes, reporting an accumulation of energy as manifested in a tingling sensation on the skin. When he came out he felt invigorated, and on several occasions he achieved a spontaneous orgasm—“Look, no hands.” Part of this may have been that what you got out of the box depended on your degree of receptivity. In any case, it could do no harm to go and sit in a metal-and-plywood box for twenty minutes, and come out feeling that it was keeping you healthy.
Beyond the orgone box, Burroughs saw that Reich’s vision of society was not scientific but literary, and that he could adapt it to his own purposes. Reich’s rejection of ideologies, his ambivalence toward authority, his view of politicians as parasites, were seeds falling on fertile ground. The notion of a stifling bureaucratic structure, of a life-denying social structure, of neurotic symptoms showing up on a national and global scale, would all show up in Burroughs’ writing, and in this sense he was “Reichian.” Indeed, in Naked Lunch there are a number of references to orgone energy, as though Burroughs was giving Reich a tip of the hat—“they wanta suck my orgones,” “the invisible blue blowtorch of orgones,” and the clientele of the Meet Café, including “sellers of orgone tanks.”
For Huncke, life in New Waverly was a pleasant interlude, away from the dangers and temptations of New York. The situation, he wrote Allen on March 26, was “quite satisfactory. . . . As you know, some absorbing interest exists for Joan, Bill, and Julie. I like them. The house and its location: pine trees and moss-draped oaks and dead trees. Bayou and swamp and semitropical growth. Heavy heat and damp, chilling cold on and off during spring. Summer will be hot steadily, with terrific beating rain. . . . Bill is a good friend. He is exceedingly interested in guns. He has allowed me to shoot and I find them much less awe-inspiring. Bill is quite a guy. Joan is splendid. She is amazingly energetic and ingenious. Incidentally, I can do things, too, and Julie is growing rapidly and is beyond the average by far with self-reliance.”
Spring warmed into summer, lush and green, and at two in the morning on July 21, Huncke was awakened by the sound of Joan knocking on Burroughs’ door and saying, “Bill, I think it’s time.” “All right, just a few minutes,” he said. As he got his clothes on, Joan turned to Huncke and said, “Well, I’m going to have my baby.” They had made no arrangements, but there was a hospital in Conroe, about fifteen miles south of New Waverly, where Burroughs drove her. He returned the next morning, laconic as always, and said: “Joan’s had her baby. It’s a boy.” The day after that, she was back, and the boy was named William Burroughs III. Huncke was surprised at how little fuss they made, treating the birth as an event like any other. Life went on as usual, with Bill seeming completely indifferent to Joan’s comfort. Joan did not breastfeed the baby, because her system was loaded with amphetamines.
Soon after the baby’s birth, Burroughs’ parents came for a rare visit, to take a look at their new grandson and to check up on their son, who was supposed to be leading a healthy, drug-free life. Huncke thought Mortimer Burroughs looked very distinguished, and Laura was the gushing grandmother, hovering over the baby. She had bought boxes of clothing for Joan and the new arrival. Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs were steered away from the marijuana field in back, and Bill told them he wasn’t using any drugs, which was their primary concern—not using any more than what he could get ahold of, thought Huncke, who had to wear a Stetson and pretend to be a local, to hide his New York drug scene origins.
Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs left New Waverly thinking that their son had made great progress, and was living a productive life on the farm as a model family man, with his wife and child and talkative little Texas friend. Their visit was followed by the arrival of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Allen, still pursuing Neal, had gone to Denver, fantasizing about all the different things he would try with him sexually, but Neal wasn’t interested, and Allen wrote in his diary, “I can’t keep giving and not getting in return.”
Allen wanted Neal to meet Burroughs, hoping he would see the quality in him, which was not readily apparent to everyone, and they hitchhiked to Texas, arriving in New Waverly on August 29. It was a bad time, because Burroughs was low on funds, waiting for his monthly check, and they were barely able to buy food. Joan and Huncke were scraping by on two tubes of Benzedrine a day. In addition, there was a great deal of sexual tension between Neal and Allen, with his “petitionary masochistic lust,” as he called it. Huncke tried to play Cupid by turning over his room to the guests and proposing that they take some canvas from an old army cot and stretch it between the two sideboards of his bed to make a double bed, but the effort was a failure, and they ended up sleeping on the floor. With the collapse of the double-bed idea Allen’s hopes also collapsed, and he resolved to stop making advances that were impossible to gratify, go to Houston, and find a freighter to ship out on.
On September 3, Allen went to the union hall and found a messman’s job on a freighter leaving for France. September 5 was his last night before shipping out, and Neal promised to spend it with him in a Houston hotel, which Allen would pay for with money borrowed from Burroughs. They went in that afternoon with Huncke, who could get a suite for the price of a room in the hotel where he usually stayed, and that evening they hit some black music joints and got high on grass. Then Cassady drove them back to the hotel and took off in the Jeep, saying he would meet them later. He managed to pick up a girl and bring her back to the hotel, but when Allen saw her he protested that Neal had promised to spend the night with him. Neal told the girl to go into the next room while he took care of Allen. At this point, Huncke, who had been out making a connection, came in and saw Neal fucking Allen in the mouth with a kind of vehemence that seemed decidedly unpleasant—it was not for pleasure, he thought, but for humiliation. When he was finished, he went in and fucked the girl, after which he passed out. An infuriated Allen threw the girl out and struggled in vain with Neal’s lifeless body. Huncke was annoyed. He had a good reputation at the hotel, they had a certain amount of respect for him as a paying customer, and now here was this wild-eyed maniac dragging in this piece of jailbait and having her wait her turn while he did it to Allen first—it was a bit too much.
The next morning when Neal woke up, Allen wanted to discuss matters, and kept postponing his departure, while Huncke warned him that if he didn’t hurry up he would lose the job—which was exactly what happened: He lost the job and was in dutch with the union. Dejected, they went back to New Waverly and a highly displeased Burroughs. But the next day, Neal drove Allen into Houston for the last time, dropping him off at the union hall, and left him reading Henry James and musing on his fate. At least, thought Allen, it was an end to his state of sexual supplication.
“Incidentally,” Cassady wrote Jack Kerouac in an account of his Texas visit, “the girl I’d had that night is now in the nuthouse, she was picked up babbling on the street the next morning. Too bad her beautiful body was matched by an idiotic mind.”
Allen found a boat but Neal stayed on, much to Huncke’s annoyance. As much of a hustler as he knew himself to be, he always considered the other person with some respect, and now here came Neal who didn’t give a damn, who was a burden but unconscious of being one, who just sat on his ass reading Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues—Huncke could sense that Burroughs wanted him out, too, particularly when he said about Mezz Mezzrow, “Sure a nigger-lover, ain’t he?” On top of everything, Huncke fumed, Neal was coming on to Joan, which he was sure Bill sensed—Neal couldn’t help himself when there was a woman around. My God, he was even coming on to four-year-old Julie, and saying that she was already hep to many, many things, and that he would keep an eye on her and check her out when she was eight or nine to see how far she’d gone.
Neal, however, thought he was making himself useful. While Huncke went into Houston to get bennies for Joan and paregoric (tincture of opium) for Bill, who had a slight habit again, and who got up at ten thirty and started reading the paper and making comments—“Well, I see Peaches Browning got another divorce here”—he, Neal, was building a fence, laying a cement floor in the garage, and damming up the creek with cement. When he had some time to himself he went to Huntsville to a football game.
Then it dawned on Huncke why Burroughs was letting Neal freeload. Winter was coming, the pot had grown and been harvested, and he wanted to take it to New York and sell it, and needed Neal to help him drive the Jeep. Joan also wanted out, she had a baby to take care of, and Billy wasn’t a quiet baby, he squalled constantly. Huncke felt he could have done some of the driving, but he knew he made Bill nervous. Bill, trying not to hurt his feelings, said, “Well, Herbert, you know the car is not in the best of condition.”
The Jeep, in fact, was too small to carry them all, so it was decided that Joan and the children would take the train and wait for them in Grand Central Terminal. There was some talk of making Huncke hitchhike, since he wasn’t needed for driving and there wasn’t enough money for his train ticket, but in the end, he squeezed into the backseat of the Jeep, surrounded by duffle bags filled with mason jars of pot.
They left on September 30 and covered the 1,860 miles to New York in three days, driving nonstop. Neal did most of the driving, because Burroughs’ sight was poor, and at night, if another car was coming, he’d pull over to the side of the road—just like an old woman, thought Neal. They barely stopped for food—someone would run into a diner and pick up coffee and hamburgers. Once they pulled in off the road and Huncke looked up and saw a state trooper with his visored cap right in Bill’s face. “All he wanted was a shot of whiskey,” Burroughs said. Huncke couldn’t help thinking that they had enough pot back there to land them in jail for a couple of years. Also, he was out of Benzedrine and going through withdrawal, but Bill wouldn’t even stop at a drugstore—wait till we get to New York, he said.
When they checked Grand Central, Joan wasn’t there. She had been waiting so long that the police had picked her up and taken her to Belle-vue for observation. For some reason, they thought she was planning to abandon her children. Burroughs went to Bellevue and explained the situation, adding that he was a member of the University Club, and Joan was released.
The next item on the agenda was the marijuana, which turned out to be something of a problem, because it wasn’t properly cured. All they had done was cut the plants and hang them upside down in the barn until they dried. They knew nothing about male and female plants, about separating the potent parts or about manicuring, so that when Huncke gave a sample to a hotel bellhop, he made a face and said, “Hey, man, that’s awful, that’s green tea . . . Jesus, it’s terrible shit, it’s not even cured.”
Pushing the pot was a headache. It was so bulky, thought Burroughs, that if the cops came around it would be like being caught with a bale of alfalfa. Through Huncke’s friend Vickie, who was back in town after a stint with a Philadelphia madam, Burroughs was introduced to a tough lesbian jazz pianist who agreed to keep the pot in her apartment until it was sold. But then Vickie told her she was crazy to take the risk, and the next time Burroughs and Huncke came around, she told them to take the stuff and get out, adding, “You’re both mother-fuckers.”
Burroughs tried baking it until it achieved the desirable greenish-brown look, but still there were no takers, even though he and Huncke roamed the metropolitan area from the Bronx to Newark. He had been talking about making thousands from his crop, but finally had to wholesale it to some Italians for $100, resolving never to push pot again.
By this time he was back on junk, thanks to the good offices of Bill Garver, the overcoat thief. One night in Yonkers he had too much and passed out, as he had seen his customers do when he was pushing: His eyes rolled back and showed the whites. Joan made coffee and walked him around the room to revive him. His parents, unaware that he was back on drugs, came to New York and set them up in a resort hotel in Atlantic Beach, where the off-season rates were reasonable. Joan stayed in her room with the children while Burroughs was out scoring with Garver.
Burroughs tried to kick with a reduction schedule, adding distilled water to the junk in increasing amounts, but that didn’t work, so he decided in January 1948 to commit himself to the Federal Narcotics Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. The routine involved seven days of medication on dolophine, a synthetic morphine, and seven days of rest, after which they put you to work on the farm or in the cannery. The doctor who examined Burroughs assessed him this way: “Patient seems secure and states his reason for seeking cure is necessity of providing for his family.”
By February, Burroughs was back in New Waverly with Joan and the children. Arch Ellisor, as a neighborly gesture, gave him two young pigs, saying, “You keep feedin’ ’em and they’ll be worth a heap of money.” But Burroughs found that every time he fed them they squealed for more. He didn’t have enough garbage so he had to start buying great bags of feed to shut them up. Finally he called Ellisor over and said, “Look, Arch, we’ve carried the fuckers as far as we can. Take ’em back!”
Fed up with farming, Burroughs put the New Waverly place up for sale. He still had his cotton land in Pharr, which he periodically visited. That May, while driving down to the Rio Grande Valley, he was drinking in the car with Joan when they got the itch, and decided to stop outside the town of Beeville and make love by the side of the road. Someone driving by reported this activity to the sheriff’s office, and the next thing Burroughs knew flashing lights were shining in his face and handcuffs were snapping on his wrists. He was placed under arrest for drunken driving and public indecency.
As it happened, Vail Eenis, the Beeville sheriff who had arrested Burroughs, was a famous Texas lawman in the tradition of Buckshot Frank Leslie and Whispering Tom Mayfield, one of those relics of the Old West around whom legends gather. Tall and thin, with cold gray-blue eyes, Eenis was storied in the state of Texas, and revered in Beeville County. Once he arrested two men for robbery, handcuffed them together, and went into a phone booth to call his office. One of the men drew a concealed .38 revolver and shot Eenis four times in the gut. Eenis drew his horn-handled, double-action, .44 Colt, put six bullets in one of the men, calmly reloaded, and put six bullets in the other. “With a look of faint disapproval on his face,” commented Joan when she heard the tale.
Although he didn’t mind shooting people in the line of duty, and was credited with killing at least nine, Eenis disapproved of drinking and fornicating in public. Actually, Eenis was quite cordial when he brought Burroughs before the judge. “He saw at once,” Burroughs recalls, “that I was not a member of what Graham Greene calls the torturable classes.” “You should be ashamed of yourself, pullin’ a trick like that,” he told Burroughs.
Eenis even managed a bon mot before the judge: “This here feller was disturbin’ the peace while tryin’ to get a piece.” The district attorney asked Burroughs, “Do you do this sort of thing at home?” Burroughs said he did not, and the D.A. said: “So you come down here to do it, is that it?” Burroughs pleaded guilty, and the D.A. said, “If you are inclined to let this man off with a fine, your honor, I suggest that it be a substantial one.”
Burroughs was fined $173 and had his license suspended for six months. He could not pay the fine, and spent the night in jail; Joan wired his parents for funds. When Eenis locked him up, he told Burroughs: “Listen, you did the smart thing. If you’d taken that in front of a jury, you’d be in here for six months.” He also explained that they would have had to support his wife while he was in jail, so that they much preferred a guilty plea. Later that night, Eenis brought in a kid with blood all over his face, and explained that he was charged with robbery and assault. “If I hadn’t a known his pappy I’d a killed this little fuck,” he said. “Oh, I didn’t do nuthin’,” he mimed. “Well, it’s no good takin’ what somebody makes honest. So I drove him round the block three times and by the third time he was ready to pick out the money he took.”
The next morning Burroughs’ money order arrived and he paid his fine and was released. “How can I drive out of here with my license suspended?” he asked Eenis. “If anyone stops you, just refer them to me,” Eenis said. He really was a little tin god, Burroughs reflected, and a mean son of a bitch to boot, but there was a certain fairness and integrity about him.
Having had enough of frontier justice and marijuana farming, Burroughs sold the New Waverly property and tried to think of the nearest place where there might be a drug scene and a gay scene. He decided on New Orleans, and moved his family there in June 1948. Off he went again, the Wandering WASP, at home nowhere, who somehow managed to get the law on his tail wherever he landed.
With the money from the sale, Burroughs bought a house at 509 Wagner Street in Algiers, a suburb across the Mississippi from New Orleans, reached by ferry. The house was dilapidated but there was a screened front porch and a big yard with several good-sized trees, where the children could play.
While Joan set up house once again and found druggists who would sell her inhalers, Burroughs was hoping to make a killing in winter vegetables. He had combined his holdings in Pharr with Kells Elvins. They had bought equipment together and hired a manager and planted peas, lettuce, and carrots, aside from cotton and Elvins’s citrus grove. “If all my crops come in on schedule,” he wrote Jack Kerouac, “I will be rolling in $ by cotton-picking time.” At the same time, he was worried that “the government will put the snatch on a big hunk of what we sons of the soil wring out of the earth.”
Burroughs’ experience as a farmer in the Rio Grande Valley reinforced his conviction that conventional morality was a hoax, and that the line between the criminal and the law-abiding citizen was blurred. As a farmer, he violated the law every day, but his violations were condoned by a corrupt government. The Rio Grande Valley was only a few miles from the Mexican border, and the Border Patrol looked the other way when the illegal aliens arrived, providing cheap labor. The whole deal was handled by labor brokers who contracted to find the workers and get the crops picked. The broker simply backed a truck up to the river and rounded up the wetbacks who had waded or swum across. They worked a twelve-hour day for two dollars, and were sometimes kept on the job at the point of a gun. Some brokers went in for rough stuff, and shot workers who tried to leave the field. You might say that their civil rights had been violated, but no one did anything about it. Anyone wanting to sacrifice himself for a noble cause had only to try and organize farm labor in Texas. “In short,” Burroughs wrote Allen Ginsberg, “my ethical position now that I am a respectable farmer is probably shakier than when I was pushing junk.”
In a society where life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes, moral attitudes were pointless, and Burroughs determined to adopt a philosophy which he called “factualism.” “All arguments, all nonsensical condemnations as to what people ‘should do,’” he wrote, “are irrelevant. Ultimately, there is only fact on all levels, and the more one argues, verbalizes, moralizes, the less he will see and feel of fact.” Or, as he put it to Kerouac, “The only possible ethic is to do what one wants to do.”
Kerouac was in New York, trying to place his first novel with a publisher, and renewing his friendship with Lucien Carr, who had been released from the Elmira Reformatory and had a job with a news agency. One day in September, after staying up all night listening to Lennie Tristano records, they went for a walk down Sixth Avenue, and Jack reflected on intention—did we really understand what we were doing, or was all of life a mystery never to be resolved? They stopped in a bar and drank Pernod in iced glasses. There was the Cézanne-like light of day, thought Jack, and the light of Lucien’s intelligence, and the Pernod brought in another light. Lucien ribbed Jack about being a “disreputable writer,” and urged him to enter the economic system as he had done, and it seemed to Jack that they were communicating on the surface only, and that this lack of depth was in some manner similar to bad writing, and that if only people could feel love for each other without deviation, if only they could break through the shields and screens . . . the hours drifted by and soon the sun was sinking, and the sky was reddening, and they wandered into Washington Square, and saw a little girl fall down on her skates and scrape her knee, and stamp up and down because she was hurt, and Lucien said, “It’s so wonderful the way children express their pain.” He went over and patted the little girl on the head and told her she would be all right, and she pouted and blushed and turned away. Lucien was talking about his days at Elmira, and all the hopes he had nurtured there, and, tripping along on the edge of the fountain he said, “And you know, Jack, it gets more and more joyous all the time.” And it occurred to Jack that Lucien was someone who by losing everything had been saved, and that Burroughs was the same way, he had thrown all his earthly possessions and pride away, and in a deeper sense, had been saved. Jack repeated the words inwardly: “It gets more and more joyous all the time . . . spoken in the reddening sun of Washington Square in the early fall of 1948.” It all tied in with his writing, in which he was delving into the consciousness of his generation—there was a kind of furtiveness, as though they had an inner knowledge it was pointless to flaunt, a weariness with the conventions society had handed them. Later, they went back to Lucien’s place on Twelfth Street, and his girlfriend Barbara was in bed and said, “What’s the big idea of getting Lucien drunk the minute my back is turned?” “Be serious, Barbara,” Jack said, as Lucien started dancing with a frying pan, and hitting himself with it softly, bing-bong, bing-bong.