LOS ALAMOS
1929-1932
ASHLEY POND WAS A Detroit businessman with a love of the strenuous life. He joined Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders but never got to the war, having contracted an almost fatal case of typhoid at the training base in Florida. He went to New Mexico to recover his health in the early 1900s, and fell in love with the clean beauty of the place, the deep ravines and furrowed mesas, the reddish cliffs of tufa, the forests of ponderosa pine, the pasque flowers among the pine needles in April, the Indian paintbrush in June. With its dry air and sunshine, it was, he felt, a setting that could not be equaled anywhere on earth.
Ashley Pond conceived the idea of a school that would turn boys into men by stressing the outdoor life and rugged activities. He noted that the Pueblo Indians segregated the boys of the tribe until they reached manhood. In the same manner, pampered boys from the East would become men when they were separated from oversolicitous mothers and placed on the back of a horse, and taught to camp in the mountains, and to hunt and fish and trap animals. There was no point in boys spending their days with their noses in books. It was an anti-intellectual, survival-of-the-fittest approach to education, designed to prepare the boys for the rough strategies of our laissez-faire system.
In 1915, Ashley Pond bought a 900-acre ranch about forty miles north of Santa Fe. The ranch sat on top of a mesa called the Pajarito (“little bird”) that rose 7,300 feet above the Rio Grande Valley. To the east stood the Sangre de Cristo mountains, which at sunset glowed with a ruddy light that had once inspired the Spanish padres to compare them to the Redeemer’s blood; to the south, the stubbier crests of the Jemez range. The ranch was planted with pine and juniper and cottonwood, the latter tree providing Pond with a name for his school: Los Alamos.
In 1917, Ashley Pond went looking for a school director, someone he could trust with the day-to-day business of running things, and found a man who fit the bill right in his backyard. This was A. J. Connell, a red-haired, florid-faced, blue-eyed Irishman, thirty-five years of age, who was serving as a ranger in the Panchuela District of the Santa Fe National Forest, and was also active as scoutmaster of the Santa Fe Boy Scout troop. Thus he combined the qualities of outdoorsman and experience with boys that Pond was seeking, even though he had never been to college, which didn’t matter much to Pond, who thought most college boys were sissies.
A. J. Connell was another of those extravagant characters who periodically entered Burroughs’ life, along the lines of Politte Elvins. Originally from New York City, he had worked for Tiffany’s in some decorating capacity, but had gone west for his phlebitis, New Mexico being known as “get well” country. As a forest ranger, he packed a Luger and was known to have gotten the best of some pretty tough hombres. Bossy and short-tempered, his normal manner of speech was to make pronouncements, such as: “Of course there’s no such thing as a man-eating shark. As for crocodiles, maybe they take a few pickaninnies, say 20,000 a year.”
Connell gave the impression of toughness and decisiveness, but at the same time he had an oddly feminine side. His room at the Ranch School had so much magenta damask in it that it looked like the madam’s parlor in a bordello, and he burned incense and constantly played Ravel’s “Bolero” on his Victrola. His motto was “I know what’s best for boys.” Usually he referred to the boys as “gibbons” or “tailless apes,” and showed a keen interest in their adolescent sexuality. There were no locks on the doors of the rooms, and it was Connell’s habit to burst in on the boys to catch them masturbating. “I’ve caught ’em at it,” he could be heard muttering under his breath, “CAUGHT ’EM AT IT!”
“Did you ever play with it till it went off way down deep?” was another of Connell’s pet phrases. Arthur Chase, a brawny Harvard man who taught English at the school, also had the duty of measuring the boys six times a year to keep track of their physical improvement. They would line up naked as Chase read the numbers out for their necks, chests, and thighs. On these occasions Connell would appear and start feeling the boys’ muscles, turning them around and showing a great deal of interest, which the boys called “gibboning.” “It used to bother me,” Chase recalled. “I always preferred it when he wasn’t there.”
In any case, under Connell’s energetic administration, the school began to flourish. Pond’s first brochure declared that “studying from books is absolutely unnecessary,” but that noble principle had to be amended. A headmaster was hired, a curriculum was instituted (including such courses as “Animals and Their Habits”), and Connell recruited as teachers graduating students of Yale and Harvard, but not of Princeton, whom for some reason he regarded as unreliable wimps.
Los Alamos became known as a health school, where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens. Each spring Connell went on a six-week promotional tour, concentrating on the Midwest, to convince parents of the Ranch School’s benefits. The idea, he would explain, was to take city boys and have them regain their American heritage of outdoor wisdom. They would go on cattle drives, and lead an active robust life on the range, which promoted deep breathing and a strong pulse.
In 1929 he came to the Burroughs home on Price Road. He was already on friendly terms with Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs, Billy and Mort having spent several summers at the Los Alamos camp, and was invited to spend the night. “Mother and Dad went out that evening,” Burroughs recalls, “and I was left in Connell’s rather dubious company.” They were in the living room listening to Connell’s Victrola records when he suddenly said to fifteen-year-old Billy, “I want to see this gibbon stripped.” Awed by such a figure of authority, Billy obediently complied. “Are you playin’ with it, gibbon?” Connell asked, and Billy shook his head. “Have you ever done it with other boys?” Connell persisted. Billy hadn’t, but he had thought about it—boys seemed to him the most exciting thing—and he found himself physically responding to Connell’s suggestion in an embarrassing manner, so he quickly put his clothes back on. Billy was put off by Connell’s manner, but at the same time saw that his own desires had been aroused, so he never mentioned the incident to his parents, for he was in a sense an accomplice. Some of the parents, however, did know about Connell’s inclinations, and a Texas oilman told his son, “If he ever messes with you, you smack him one.”
In September 1929, Billy left for New Mexico aboard the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, which in fact stopped at Lamy, twenty miles short of Santa Fe; he took a bus the rest of the way. On both sides of the yellow gravel road there were pasturelands and clusters of barns and outbuildings and workers’ cottages, and two large log buildings. One of these was the Big House, where the boys had rooms for studying, but slept on an unheated screen porch, even in winter, in flannel sheets and army blankets. On nights when the snow whipped through the screens, they were given striped canvas bedcovers. The other was Fuller Lodge, with its big-beamed ceiling, where the boys took their meals at tables of six. “At Los Alamos,” Connell said, “everybody eats his share of everything,” and that applied to strange dishes like calves’ brains, unfamiliar fish from the Rio Grande, and baked bananas. The buildings were done in the style of the Southwest, with Indian rugs, rustic furniture, and flagstone floors.
At $2,400 a year ($24,000 in today’s dollars), Los Alamos was one of the most expensive schools in the country, and those whose families could afford it included the son of General Wood, chairman of Sears, Roebuck, and the Marsden boys, whose father owned Humble Oil in Texas. But the year that Billy arrived was the year of the crash, and some of the families were wiped out in midterm (like the head of Chicago’s Board of Trade), and had to be given full scholarships.
Billy had arrived in a largely self-sustaining community of 200 in a clearing on the edge of a ponderosa pine forest, with about forty students, a staff of twenty, and the rest consisting of ranch employees and their families. The school had its own water, pumped from a stream in a canyon, and Connell ran a black flag up a pole when the water got scarce. It had its own cows and dairy, run by a Methodist dairyman who pieced out his income with a little preaching. It had 400 acres of crops planted, beans and corn for the boys, and oats and alfalfa for the sixty-five horses. Adolfo Montoya, the head gardener, grew magnificent vegetables in the volcanic soil, and kept chickens. A trading post, which also operated as a post office, sold the necessities of life, such as candy and cartridges. One of the teachers was a magistrate and once tried a case—it was someone who had shot a deer out of season, for Los Alamos was a game refuge, abounding in deer and wild turkey, and it was said that the ratio of skunks to boys was about three to one.
Upon arrival, each boy was weighed and measured and assigned according to size to one of four patrols, from the small piñon to juniper, fir, and the tall spruce. Billy didn’t like the regimentation, and didn’t like the silly uniforms: short pants (khaki or flannel, depending on the season), khaki shirts, bandannas, Dakota Stetsons, and leather chaps for riding. Riding was a must, and Billy hated his horse, a sullen strawberry roan.
To Billy, the whole place was like a prison . . . Big House indeed! he thought. My God, they timed you on the john. He was always cold, and the school song began to take on ominous overtones:
Far away and high on the mesa’s crest,
Here’s the life that all of us love the best—
Los Alamos!
Winter days as we skim o’er the ice and snow,
Summer days when the balsam breezes blow—
Los Alamos!
Balsam breezes, shit, thought Billy. You fuckin’ froze!
The days were tightly organized, which he didn’t like either. At 6:30 A.M. the bell on a pole outside the kitchen rang and each boy had to drink two glasses of cold water. Then they went out in all kinds of weather, even if there was snow on the ground, and did fifteen minutes of calisthenics—three push-ups and waddle like a duck, and then “draw yourself up to your full height.” Breakfast was at seven, then room-cleaning and classes until one fifteen. In the afternoon they sometimes did community work, which he particularly disliked, considering it arbitrary and pointless. You had to roll the tennis court, or build a trail, or weed Connell’s garden, while some crew leader drunk with power was hanging over you.
Los Alamos was pretty isolated. There were rare trips to Santa Fe, and that was it. The mail arrived on the Denver and Rio Grande Western, which, since it sometimes took two weeks, was known as the Dangerous and Rapidly Growing Worse. There was no way to escape Connell and his Reader’s Digest homilies, which Billy viewed with skepticism, such as “What is the safest place in America? Where you are.” In civics class, Billy had the audacity to say he did not believe in capital punishment and was told, “Why shouldn’t the law take its course?” The civics teacher kept repeating that if a thing was worth doing it was worth doing well, whereas Billy believed that if a thing was worth doing it was worth doing badly—you didn’t have to be a Grand Master to enjoy a game of chess, or Annie Oakley to go target shooting. The civics teacher did not appreciate Burroughs’ independence of mind, and for the remainder of the year addressed him as “our esteemed woodsman and scout.” Burroughs learned that when young people are told to think, it means “think like we do.” If your thinking is different, you’re in trouble. He gradually lost interest in doing well, and in the yearbook put down as his ambition “traveling and loafing.”
Billy thought of Connell as a dictator, which in some ways he was, since he had a terror of anything going wrong, and would say, “Accidents don’t happen, they’re caused.” Connell was a mass of opposites. He later became a New Deal Democrat, furious that the stand-pat Republican parents of the boys criticized FDR, and yet he much admired Mussolini. He was courtly and charming with the boys’ mothers, and yet he was a confirmed misogynist who never married and was convinced that women were the destroyers of boys, by making them soft and sorry for themselves. He didn’t want women around, although he did have his sad-eyed spinster sister there teaching the piano. If a boy used his fork in a certain way, Connell said, “Don’t be an old lady.” If a boy was in the infirmary, and one of his friends asked how he was, Connell would say: “What are you, an old woman? Around here, we don’t ask whether we’re getting well.”
That was another of his peculiarities: He could not abide any reference to illness or death. You had to be positive at all times. When a boy’s mother brought lilies, Connell came in and said: “Who brought those in? Throw ’em out, I can’t stand lilies.” And when a group of boys was singing “My Grandfather’s Clock,” he stormed in on the line “when the old man died” and told them to stop at once.
Much later, Burroughs had a dream about Connell in which someone said, “He was a very minor prison official.” Disliking the school, Billy adopted a “contra” stance. He did only fair in his studies the first year, dropping algebra, failing his French exam, and failing his English exam after leaving early, “which indicates either neglect or carelessness,” said his report card.
There was a great emphasis on achievement, and grades were put in every week, and the boys were also ranked in terms of leadership ability. “The faculty looked at who was able to take charge,” Arthur Chase recalled, “who could lead a patrol back to civilization and not into the ravine, and you can imagine that Billy was never ranked very high, because we figured if he was leading a patrol he might lead them into some mining camp and we wouldn’t see them again for a couple of months.”
The rule was that you had to stay outdoors between two thirty and four thirty every afternoon, and Chase remembers one afternoon when it was raining hard, seeing Billy standing in a doorway, this frail, wet, unhappy boy, just standing there waiting for four thirty to come around so he could go indoors.
There were a few things Billy did like about Los Alamos. He liked the rifle range and became a good marksman, further developing his lifelong fascination with guns. He spent hours throwing knives into posts and trees. You could see him walking down the corral as if he were Pat Garrett, with his arms at his sides and his shoulders hunched up, and suddenly he’d spin on his heels and fling his knife into a tree. He got pretty good at it. One time he hit one of Adolfo Montoya’s hens and killed it, which got him further demoted in rank.
There was no question, though, thought his English teacher Arthur Chase, that Billy was the most original boy in his class. Already at fifteen, he had a fine sense of irony. His themes were a little macabre, although that was not so unusual—there’s not much happy writing in that age group. But he wondered about Billy’s ability to sustain anything for very long. “Billy,” he would say, “I asked for 150 words and you gave me seventy-five, and this little story about a child playing with his brothers and sisters and rolling their skulls around, it has great possibilities, but it has to be built up.”
Rogers Scudder, a St. Louis friend who went to the Ranch School with Billy, also remembers him as wry and sardonic, with a macabre side. He and Billy used to go dig in an old Pueblo Indian ruin, which for Scudder was the start of his interest in archeology. Billy found an anthill in the ruin and poured gasoline over it and lit it and started dancing a sort of parody of an Indian war dance with maniacal whooping as ants by the thousands fled the pyre, and Scudder was glad they were alone and that no one else had seen him.
Then, in March 1930, when he had just turned sixteen, Billy got into serious trouble. His mother came to visit, and took him and Rogers Scudder into Santa Fe. Billy and Rogers were wandering about, and Billy said, “I want to go into the drugstore and get some chloral hydrate.” Rogers asked why and Billy said, “I want to see what it’s like,” so they went into the Capitol Pharmacy and Billy asked for some, and the druggist asked why he wanted knockout drops, and Billy, in a sepulchral voice, said, “to commit suicide.” Glowering, the druggist thrust the bottle into his hand.
A few days later, Rogers Scudder was doing calisthenics with the other boys in the early morning chill when he looked up and saw a tottering Billy being half carried across the field by the school nurse. He had taken an almost lethal dose of chloral hydrate. Connell got after Rogers Scudder, saying: “Goddamn it, you had no right not to tell me about this . . . you should have known he would do something mad. The trouble with that boy is that his mother’s made him think he’s a genius and he’s just a gibbon.”
Of course, Connell had to inform Billy’s father, writing him on March 22, 1930:
“Bill did a foolish thing last Sunday night. One day when he was in town with his mother he went to a drugstore and bought some chloral hydrate. He took a dose of it Sunday night and was unable to navigate Monday morning, so that I kept him in the infirmary. He claims that he just wanted to see how it worked. I believe he realizes now that it was a fool thing to do and I doubt if he will try anything like it again. I feel that Bill’s greatest drawback is that he is not willing to recognize his responsibilities to others. It is very difficult to convince him that an act like that is simply anything more than his own affair. My anxiety, the unnecessary extra work occasioned the staff, or the effect on the other boys in the school, he never takes into consideration. I hope that this is the last of his foolishness.”
The chloral hydrate episode is worth pausing over for several reasons. It was the first example of Burroughs purchasing a substance that would alter consciousness. It showed him once again, as in his essay “Personal Magnetism,” in the role of psychic explorer—he wanted to see what chloral hydrate was like, at the risk of harming himself. It was the first time he did something that seriously embarrassed his parents, causing his father to receive a stern letter from the school director. Finally, Connell’s words, “I doubt if he will ever try anything like it again” must rank as a classic in the “famous last words” department, for Burroughs would spend the rest of his life trying the same thing, with different substances, over and over.
Burroughs has always felt that he has the ability to arouse instant enmity in certain people. They meet him and hate him on sight. At Los Alamos, one of his teachers, Henry Bosworth, seemed to have it in for him. Bosworth, a stocky World War I veteran with penetrating brown eyes, taught mathematics and boxing. Billy was small and thin and didn’t like to box, and Bosworth viewed him as a malingerer. Billy liked to go in his room and sit against the radiator and read the Blue Books put out by that curious figure in publishing, E. Haldeman Julius, free-thinker and benevolent agnostic. In cheap editions not much bigger than playing cards, he published “risqué” writers like Anatole France and Guy de Maupassant, whom Billy devoured. Connell came around periodically to confiscate them, since at Los Alamos being bookish was a sign of decadence.
Bosworth was known for playing favorites. Some boys he liked a great deal, others he couldn’t stand, and Billy was among the latter. Once when Billy was in charge on the sleeping porch, there was a commotion, and Bosworth came in and said, “All of you shut up. As for you, Billy, you worthless little pup, you’re going to get yours.” Then another time they went on a hike, and coming down a hill they disturbed a nest of yellowjackets and Billy was bitten four times. He knew that Bosworth carried a first-aid kit with something for insect bites, but when he complained that it hurt, Bosworth just looked at him blankly and did not offer to help.
To Billy, that was a declaration of war, except that there wasn’t much he could do to retaliate. One morning, however, when the boys came in to breakfast, hilarity and consternation spread through the ranks. Hanging over the fireplace was the two-foot-high plaster-of-Paris Boy Scout figure that usually stood in the foyer of Fuller Lodge, and on the figure’s uniform was pinned a sign that said, “Bozzy-bitch, goddamn him.”
The identity of the boy who had hanged Henry Bosworth in effigy did not long remain secret, and Billy was summoned to Connell’s office. “If it had been another boy,” Connell said, “this might have been cause for dismissal. But why did you have to make it so vulgar?” The reason Billy was not more severely punished was that Bosworth himself was under a cloud. He had made improper advances to one of the boys, who had reported it to Connell, and it had been arranged that he would finish out the year and then leave the school. Connell could not, of course, allow a teacher who picked favorites and then propositioned them to remain.
But Connell was also losing patience with Billy, who was in one scrape after another. That October he was placed on probation as the result of an incident that landed him in the Santa Fe jail. The boys were allowed occasionally to go in supervised groups to Santa Fe for the weekend, staying at the La Fonda Hotel, and in mid-October Billy was part of such a group. On Saturday night, he sneaked out of the hotel through a fire-door to buy some liquor and bring it back to his room. This was during Prohibition, but firewater was available if you knew where to look for it. Billy didn’t know, but got into a conversation with a Mexican woman who said she might be helpful. As he was walking down the street with the woman, a policeman, attracted by the oddity of the couple, stopped Billy and questioned him, finally arresting him for vagrancy. When he didn’t return to the hotel, his roommate alerted the teacher in charge of the group, Tom Waring, who spent the rest of the night vainly searching for him. The next morning, Billy was able to convince the cops that he was a student at Los Alamos, and they notified Waring, who was sick at the thought of facing Connell with a boy missing.
This led, on October 21, to another letter from Connell to Mortimer Burroughs: “I hope that the measures that I have had to take [general probation for an indefinite period] will bring Billy a little more to his senses, and that there will be no more violations of our rules; of course he will not have the opportunity again for another of this nature.”
Actually, in spite of his errant ways, Connell was fond of Billy, and occasionally picked him to drive into Santa Fe with him on his twice-a-week excursions, an honor that was highly prized. They stayed at the La Fonda, where all the rooms opened on a patio, and a band played at dinnertime. On one of these occasions, Billy went to his room and at once masturbated. Later they went down to dinner—the band was playing “El Chocolate”—and after dinner he went into the bathroom and masturbated again. Ashamed of having masturbated twice in the same day, he decided to start a novel, establishing a curious connection between the sexual and the creative urges, one being used to atone for the excesses of the other. The novel, of which a page or two were completed on hotel stationary, had to do with someone who contacts four assassins to have an enemy killed. One was a woman and one was an elderly British gentlemen with a hawklike face. Some of the dialogue went like this:
“He told me you would take care of it for a price.”
“Of course we have our regular rates.”
What do you do when you’re sixteen years old and you wake up every morning with a hard-on and it takes an event of major proportions, like a flood or a final exam, to get your mind off sex? Billy didn’t know why it was boys instead of girls; boys just seemed to click somehow. In his second year at Los Alamos he became enamored of a boy named Danny Franklin (this name has been changed), and fell into his self-defeating subservient mode. He knew he was doing it and yet he could not help making himself adoring and submissive to the point that he became an object of contempt to the boy.
Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage. Why do you spill things? Why do you drop something? You have the equipment there not to drop something. Why isn’t that capacity being used? Something is preventing it. And you come down to some sort of basic dualism. There isn’t one person out there, but two. Acting against each other.
A couple of times, Billy got Danny Franklin to jack off with him under the sheets with a flashlight, but then Danny told him it was all wrong, and said, “I think you’re going to be the sort of person who will be revolted by a naked woman.” The more Danny Franklin ignored him, the more Billy made himself abject. Danny Franklin was cruel as only teenage boys can be, mocking Billy in front of his friends, whispering something to another boy as he walked by, finding small ways to humiliate him. Billy was in torment. His only relief was to confide his feelings to a diary.
His letters home were so forlorn that on March 30, 1931, his alarmed mother sent a telegram to Connell: “Billy’s last two letters have sounded very blue and depressed. Do you know if anything special is worrying him? . . . If he does not soon feel better we have considered withdrawing him at Easter vacation.” She planned to come out and see for herself what was wrong.
Now it was Connell’s turn to be alarmed, for Billy, then seventeen, was due to graduate in June, and it would be a grave mistake for him to leave two months short of finishing. He had a talk with Billy, but could not find out anything definite that was troubling him. It was just the fact that he allowed things to accumulate, thought Connell. On March 31, Connell wired back: “Billy is coming out of his blues. Had a satisfactory talk with him this morning. He has selected April ninth as best time for your visit. I would advise going slowly about withdrawing. Believe would be a great mistake. . . .”
To Billy it was clear. He could not stay at the school, where he had laid himself open to the taunts of his classmates and the rejection of the boy he had so guilelessly admitted caring for. When his mother arrived on April 9, he insisted on returning to St. Louis with her. When she pressed him for a reason, he was forced to admit the truth. Homosexuality was a shocking thing in those days, it was still the love that dares not speak its name, and his mother was terribly upset.
They left in such a hurry that Billy didn’t even have a chance to pack his things, which would be forwarded to him. Once in St. Louis, it was conveniently discovered that Billy’s feet were bothering him, and on April 27 his mother wired Connell: “Have just been to hospital and received final report on Billy’s foot. Doctors wish to give him treatments three times a week so all chance of sending him back this year is gone. We are sorry for him not to finish his term. Both feet in bad condition but left much worse. Regards to all. Am sorry. . . .”
Billy never returned to Los Alamos, from which he was honorably dismissed. His final report said: “He has good understanding but not much sense. His interest is in things morbid and abnormal, affects his sense of proportion in his work, making spotty and uneven results. His brain power, if rightly used, seems sufficient to get him to college, but there is doubt about his ability to direct himself.” His mother sent him to an elderly psychiatrist named Dr. Schwab, who talked to him a bit about the Greeks, and assured Laura Burroughs that it was a phase he would soon grow out of.
When his box arrived from school, he hunted for his diary, turning cold at the thought that his classmates had somehow got hold of it and had read it aloud to one another. He found that the sight of his written words made him physically ill. The diary was so maudlin, so trite, the emotions expressed seemed so false. He could not bear to look at it, and destroyed it. He hoped that with the burning pages would also disappear the other self that revealed his feelings and made him a victim. The act of writing became to Burroughs embarrassing, shameful, false. It was an act he was incapable of attempting again until 1938, when his friend Kells Elvins started him writing once more.
Billy left Los Alamos thinking that the only thing he had learned was a hatred of horses. “Horses are a dying artifact,” he still likes to say. “They will never make a comeback.” Stressing leadership qualities amid surroundings that recaptured frontier days, Los Alamos was designed to turn out captains of industry, which it did: Roy Chapin, president of American Motors; John S. Reed of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe; Arthur Wood, general counsel of Sears, Roebuck. It also turned out a leader of the counterculture, William S. Burroughs. And it might be argued that the same qualities that brought the captains of industry to their paneled offices brought Burroughs to his underground eminence—those qualities being in the main ambition and Emersonian self-reliance. Except that in the case of Burroughs, who was anti-everything at Los Alamos, those qualities were used not to rise within the system but to rise in opposition to it.
Also, Connell’s sour views on women reinforced Billy’s distrust of them, and some of Connell’s misogyny may have rubbed off on him. In Connell, Billy had the example of a repressed homosexual who was tough and macho rather than an effeminate dandy in the Oscar Wilde mold. Connell was a homosexual and a frontiersman, a combination that would later appear in Burroughs’ fiction.
For Burroughs, however, the true significance of his stay at Los Alamos had to do with the school’s destiny. For after Pearl Harbor, when President Roosevelt had approved work on the atom bomb, the Army Corps of Engineers began looking for an isolated site to build the secret laboratory where the bomb would be made. It happened that J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project, as it was called, had taken a pack trip to Los Alamos as a teenager in 1922, and had been struck by the beauty of the place, a beauty he was about to destroy. For he suggested Los Alamos to General Leslie R. Groves, military director of the project, and they visited the school on November 16, 1942, in an unmarked car. It was cold, and a light snow was falling, but the boys and masters were out on the playing field in shorts, and paid scant attention to the two men huddled over maps. Los Alamos had definite possibilities. It was in the middle of a national forest, sixty miles from the nearest train station, and yet it had its own water and electricity. There were enough buildings to house the team of scientists, who could work on the bomb without fear of snoopers.
Two weeks later, on December 1, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote Connell the letter that meant the end of the Los Alamos Ranch School: “You are advised that it has been determined necessary to the interests of the United States and the prosecution of the war that the property of Los Alamos Ranch School be acquired for military purposes. Therefore . . . a condemnation proceeding will be instituted . . . to acquire all the school lands and buildings, together with all personal property owned by the school and used in connection with the operation.”
The school was closed in February 1943, even as bulldozers were tearing up the frozen ground between the Big House and the Trading Post, and the last diplomas went out that June. Connell, who had known something was up since October, when low-flying planes had surveyed the mesa, had no choice but to comply. There was no appealing a decision made under the War Powers Act. Also, as a patriotic American, he was glad to be of help in the prosecution of the war. Indeed, the prospect of tons of bombs being dropped on thousands of Japanese civilians was one he approved of, saying: “We always said on the frontier, it’s better to kill one bitch wolf than ten male wolves.”
And yet the school had been Connell’s whole life. He did not have any friends or outside interests. His one all-encompassing interest was his “gibbons.” He did not have the heart to rebuild the school somewhere else. It wouldn’t be the same. The Ranch School didn’t travel, it could only work in its Los Alamos location. Connell outlived the school by exactly one year, for in February 1944 he died of pneumonia, at the age of sixty-two.
Once the school was closed the gibbons were replaced by eggheads—in fact, as General Groves put it, “the greatest collection of eggheads ever,” notably Enrico Fermi, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938 for his work with neutrons, and the German-Jewish scientists just off the boat, courtesy of Hitler. They worked on the mesa top in splendid isolation, with assumed names—Fermi was “Eugene Farmer”—and had the same complaints as the boys: The houses were underheated, there weren’t enough bathrooms, they were overworked.
Through his attendance at the Los Alamos Ranch School, Burroughs felt personally connected to the dropping of the Bomb. Connell’s eviction was a parable for the age. The idyllic Ranch School, an outpost of the pastoral dream, which trained boys in the values of capitalist leadership, was commandeered by a government agency for a team of foreign-born scientists who gave away their secrets of mass destruction to the generals and the politicians, wrecking the America the school had represented.
For Burroughs, the Bomb and not the birth of Christ was the dividing line of history. The Bomb stole the relevance from all that had preceded it, and from its ramifications Burroughs constructed a worldview. It had all begun in the year of his birth, 1914, when Berlin Avenue had been changed to Pershing, and it culminated with the explosion of the Bomb. Burroughs was a “litmus person,” in whom the horrors and perplexities of the age found a personal expression. As the great movements of history unfolded, they were acted out, on a small and private scale, in his own life.
T. S. Eliot, another “litmus person,” was a pre-Bomb writer, who shored up fragments of culture against an eventual catastrophe. The Waste Land reads like an inventory of mementos buried in a time capsule so that future generations might know us. As a post-Bomb writer, Burroughs saw that America had made a Faustian pact, selling its soul for power, and losing its innocence. For America Before the Bomb, he felt a crushing nostalgia. Before the Bomb, America had been a safe and protected place, going its own way, pursuing its own dream. The way America was then comes up regularly in Burroughs’ writing and conversation. In a New York restaurant once, when asked what he wanted to order, he replied, “A bass fished in Lake Huron in 1920.”
After the Bomb, Burroughs had a sense of everything going wrong. He had visions of world death and death-in-life. He saw the survivors envying the dead, which was in the culture, a sixties rock group having called itself the Grateful Dead. His post-Bomb humor also entered the culture, as in this bit of graffiti on a New York wall: “If the Bomb falls, go up on the roof and get the best suntan of your life.” The themes of his work were the themes of the post-Bomb age: the individual’s powerlessness against state control, the feeling of being manipulated by unknown forces, with tormented characters fearing unidentified dangers, the need to connect sex and violence, the sense of doom relieved by gallows humor, the shattering of conventional narrative—what you might call a nuclear style. His books transcribed the prevailing fear of the second half of the twentieth century, when no one really knew whether he would reach the year 2000, the balance of terror practiced by the superpowers having seeped into our daily lives.
It was no accident that I went to the Los Alamos Ranch School where they couldn’t wait to make the atom bomb and drop it on the Yellow Peril.