It’s summer, 1986 in Miami, Florida, and Boulder, Colorado.
Henry’s sitting in the office of his Key West bungalow, finishing a call with the editor of HEADBANGER Magazine, Dave Spleen. The Jonah’s lowdown was hardly reassuring,
my friend, your last story, My Peculiar Uncle didn’t go over well. The bit was toxic and it put readers off.
Hearing news of stories gone wrong depressed Henry, feeling blank he tells Dave,
I was high on the story, I thought it would skyrocket, I’m surprised it was a dud. All I can do is move forward and keep writing.
I write what I feel and flatly refuse to kowtow to readers. Dave didn’t appreciate the answer saying,
readership is the engine that moves ads and want ads, producing capital. Without it, our magazine is dead in the water.
Feeling lousy he agrees with Dave, not wanting to talk about it and saying,
OK, I’ve got a pie in the oven that needs attention. I’ll do a water fast so next week's story will be toxin-free. Thanks for calling, later man.
Henry hangs up on Dave, the hoodoo seeping through the seams of the conversation was depressing.
As for the pie, he lied to get off the hook. Occasionally he cooked scrambled eggs or put a Hungry Man TV dinner in the oven. Often times burning one or the other.
Lucia his Cuban wife, and Summer Wynd the couple's lover only let him in the kitchen to eat or wash dishes.
Henry’s busy working on a literary nonfiction story on William S. Burroughs’s son, Billy Burroughs entitled—
Billy Burroughs, Born Amped.
William Seward Burroughs Jr. was born in Texas on July 21, 1947.
He was named after his famous Father William S. Burroughs— one of the founders of the Beat movement and the author of groundbreaking books such as
William Jr. was nicknamed Billy by his mother Joan Vollmer, who had a Ph.D. in literature from Vassar College, was a writer, as well as a patron and muse of the Beat movement.
Billy’s father William was queer, his relationship with Joan was platonic, built on the couple's mutual love of literature and writing. Consequently, Billy’s birth was an unplanned mistake.
Joan also had a daughter, Julie from a previous marriage who lived with the on the edge bohemian family in their Greenwich Village apartment.
In 1949 William Burroughs met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who were students at Colombia University. They were in awe of William, who was older, more educated, and a more highly evolved writer.
At the time the 3 were experimenting with Benzedrine and marijuana, Alan and Jack wanted to try shooting junk, feeling it would be a boon while listening to jazz and writing.
William had experimented with morphine earlier, scoring ready to shoot syrettes from dockworkers that were being shipped on supply ships to the European front during WW2.
They go to Times Square, by happenstance meeting Herbert Huncke, a junky who sold smack to support his habit, offering him money to come to Allen's apartment in Brooklyn and fix them.
When they get to Allen’s place Huncke boosts all 3. Allen and Kerouac didn’t take to smack, but Burroughs was already deep into opium, addicted— writing while tweaking, engendering new waves of literary fiction, and continuing to use smack into his 70s.
By 1950 the Junk Scene in New York became a burden for Burroughs. One night in his East Village apartment he and Herbert Huncke were shooting up and smoking weed. Herbert comes up with an idea to travel to Louisiana and grow pot. Radical for the 50s, because booze was the drug of choice in white bread America.
He gets a loan from his brother Edward who lived in Kansas City and was running Burroughs Adding Machine Corporation at the time. The money would bankroll the pot venture.
William buys a V8 Plymouth Station wagon and the Gypsy freak show hits the road— A queer junky writer, his manic depressive wife, 3-year-old Billy who cried constantly, addicted to speed while in the womb, 5-year-old Julie, and Herbert Huncke a Times Square hustler.
William had a Harvard pal in Clayton, Louisiana named Harvey Pillman, he was the local Doctor. Harvey had a vacant summer cottage on 15 acres at the edge of a swamp. It was a perfect location to grow pot, down a gravel road surrounded by thick bush and out of sight.
The Beat crew moves into Dr. Pillman’s cottage and he agrees to write morphine scripts for William and Herbert because they told the doctor they were trying to kick gradually, which was a lie.
Things went along smoothly in the cottage until spring.When it came time to sow the pot seeds William looks at Huncke asking,
Herbert where are the seeds? He answers,
what seeds man?
Huncke, Joan, and the kids would make daily runs into town for dope and groceries while William stayed home writing.
During the 50s country towns in Louisana were teeming with good old boys, some of whom were in the Clan. Herbert and Joan stood out in Clayton like a Zebra at a horse race.
Dr. Pillman began hearing gossip in town about New York Jews and northern liberals. Afraid the freak crew might be a target of the Clan, he advises them to pack up the Plymouth and move on.
With the help of another Harvard alumnus, William gains access to a farm in the countryside of Sweetwater, Texas.
After a Benzedrine fueled drive in their Plymouth wagon, resonating with jazz and crying kids on Highway 20, the Beat family settles into a shabby 2 bedroom ranch house on 100 acres of land. Herbert tells William,
I can take a bus to Brownsville, walk over the border to Juarez, and score seeds.
As time passed on the marijuana farm, Joan’s incessant use of speed changed her, and she began ignoring Billy and Julie. Consequently, Herbert fed and clothed them, and when Allen Ginsberg visited the pot farm, he'd take care of the kids.
Since Huncke was busy with chores in the pot field, Billie and Julie lived like 2 motherless monkeys, running wildly around the house, bathing and eating when they wanted, and going for days without a change of clothes. William contributed nothing to the scene because he was embroiled in writing and boosting.
History has shown that the Beats were lousy parents. They were detached from the well-orientated reality of traditional families, free from the chains of office cubicles, mortgages, traditional values, and on a day to day search for cosmic vision
Surprisingly, the Beat farmers did bring in a ganja crop, although Huncke did all the work. William who wasn’t the least bit physical, detested manual labor and the Sun, stayed indoors with the curtains drawn writing every day.
With the money Huncke made from selling 6 large sacks of dried ganja to dealers in Houston, William, Joan, and the kids moved to Mexico City. Herbert for unknown reasons didn’t go, driving the Plymouth wagon back to New York instead.
The beat family rents a bungalow outside of Mexico City, where it was easy for William to score morphine at out of the way pharmacies.
Many Beats traveled to visit him including, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassidy the freewheeling lead character of Kerouac’s book
On the night of September 6, 1951, William was in the living room of their bungalow with Joan, Billy, and Julie, drinking mescal with his friend Pepe Riveraz, a lawyer.
William had a life long obsession with guns, there was a loaded Colt 45 on the coffee table in front of him. He considered himself a sharpshooter saying to Pepe,
I've become quite a competent shot over the years, Pepe!
Vollmer's long time speed addiction had caused her to behave blank mindedly and zombie-like. William tells her,
Joan, pick up a glass, walk 6 meters and face me, then put the glass on your head and by all means keep still.
His friend Pepe didn’t take William’s actions seriously, thinking he was just playing, but Burroughs was no practical joker.
William picks up the Colt 45, aiming it at the glass balancing on Joan's head, enacting the famous archers tale from the book
The vibrations in the living room were odious. Sadly Joan Vollmer has a bored look on her face, showing no reaction. One can only guess what Joan was feeling and thinking at the time— was she wondering if William was kidding? Was she loaded and unaware? Or was her risky compliance with Williams' demands a deathwish?
Tragically, he fires and hits her on the side of her forehead and she drops dead on the spot.
Throughout the heart-rendering scene, Billing and Julie were playing on the living room floor. How much of the bloody scenario did 3-year-old Billy apprehend? Perhaps he felt a dark bolt of energy rush through the room and his body, then understanding that something bad happened to his Mother.
William Burroughs escaped the hard-edged arm of justice because he was in Mexico and his friend Pepe Rivera arranged for him to pay the judges off. Billy was sent to live with his rich grandparents in Kansas City.
Mortimer and Laura Lee Burroughs had made a fortune in the adding machine business in Kansas City, retiring and moving to a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, where they sent Billy to private school.
His Grandparents were kind and functional people and Billy’s years with them where happy.
In 1961 he was 14, living alone in Palm Beach with Laura Lee after Mortimer died from a stroke.
Billy receives a letter from his Father William, who’s living in Tangier, Morocco, inviting him to spend the summer there.
In the 60s Tangiers had a reputation as a pirate's paradise where anything goes. You cold score hash in the open market, smoke it openly in cafes. Morphine and cocaine could easily be bought from pharmacies. It was a place to open your mind and experiment. Some well-known names who visited during this period were— Jim Morrison, Bryan Jones, Kieth Richards, Paul Bowles, and most the original Beats at the behest of William Burroughs.
Billy had seen his father only a few times in the 10 yrs since the shooting death of his mother.
When Billy shows in Tangier, William is cold and distant, which was his way, spending all his time with fellow authors, particularly Paul Bowles, who wrote
One afternoon, William turns 14-year-old Billy onto hash for the 1st time. It was his way to bridge the gap with his son. Billy reminisces in his novel
the experiences in Tangier with my Father influenced me for the rest of my life. Turning on for the first time opened my mind.
Home again in Palm Beach after his vacation in Tangiers, Billy was cutting high school classes with his reprobate pals, going to Miami, and getting wasted on beer.
It could be argued that Billy didn’t need to go to high school, because he was already writing
Certainly, he inherited William and Joans' literary brilliance. But, what Billy didn’t get from his old man was coolness under fire when it came to using drugs. William never flipped out on dope, he knew how to use it and not let it use him.
Billy didn’t handle dope or booze well, his underlying current of inner pain disturbed his using. Maybe he needed something on the order of a primal scream to release his subconscious torment. Without the release, he turned diamonds into turds.
He finally quits high school because writing and dope became his life. During the day he would go to vacant beaches, hanging out and getting high with his pals. When he came home in the evening he'd tell his Grandmother he had been at school, and go tho his room and write.
Eventually, because he didn’t like lying to Laura Lee, he tells her he quit school. She was going senile and was unable to control Billy anyway.
By 17 Billy was on his own and addicted to speed, his grandmother was put in a nursing home so he went to New York with a friend. His addictions grew there and he began living on the street by choice, but if he needed a place to stay Allen Ginsberg's apartment in the Brooklyn was always available.
His daily life was consumed with scoring, but like his old man, he found a way to write through it and about it. Billy’s book
By the mid-60s there was still little tolerance for drug use. Billy ended up in county jail when he was busted by an undercover narc, facing a lengthy prison term.
The raven-haired Beat angel, Allen Ginsberg, who was always facilitating and helping people, paid his bail springing him from the joint. So, Billy skips town, traveling to Florida.
He spends 5 days jazzed on speed hitchhiking to Miami. He was such a sweet kid that he got rides from all kinds of people—red necks, Black folks, families on vacation, and traveling salesmen. And, every one of them fell for him because of his quiet and self-effacing manner.
One traveling salesman liked him so much that he asked him to work with him, but Billy was going through withdrawal and had the shacks.
Billy was living on the bum sleeping on Miami streets and beaches. His appetite for dope was expanding from amphetamines to opiates.
He looked like any bum who came to Miami to escape northern winters, wearing— a thin raincoat with no shirt, dirty chinos, and black Kung Fu shoes with no socks. People he ran into had no idea he was from a wealthy family or that his Father was a lionized author.
Billy had a small income from a trust fund set up by his deceased grandfather Mortimer. Williams’ brother Edward was the trustee, he sent Billy 250 dollars a month, knowing the junk at large would shoot most the money up his arm.
He was running a scam, printing up bogus Demerol, and oxycodone scripts, it worked well for a while.
Then, he got busted for passing a phony Demerol script. So, Edward contacts William who’s in London with Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso, experimenting with the cut-up method of writing— a technique where an author cuts up typed pages, juxtaposing the pieces and pasting them back on a fresh page. Resulting in a new storyline birthed from the subconscious.
William, who most saw as being stoney hearted, flies from London to Miami to help his son— getting a lawyer for Billy and going to court on his behalf.
In that, he was a minor he got off easy, 4 years probation and an unspecified term at the
The junk farm treated addicts by continuing dozes of morphine, reducing the amounts until patients could kick.
As you would expect everything about the junk farm was institutional— hallways varnished with thick glossy grey paint, reheated frozen food laced with saltpeter adorning plastic prison trays, and a hard-edged medical staff.
Billy adapted well, maintaining a low profile and spending his free time writing
He stayed a year from 1964 to 1965, getting clean. After being released he traveled to Miami, enrolling in an experimental academy called
When Billy showed at seminary outside of Miami
He bonded immediately with the Reverend George Van Hilshiemer, a faculty advisor and the school pastor. The Reverend became his good friend and father figure and they stayed close throughout Billy's life.
The Green Valley School
One afternoon he was meditating in a sanctuary and he met his future wife, Karen Perry. They continued to talk every day at the same spot under a large banyan tree.
Karen was impressed by Billy’s eclectic mind and the stories of his life. At the end of the school year in 1968, the couple moves to Boulder, Colorado, and gets married.
Billy applied for a job teaching at the
While in Boulder Allen Ginsberg lectured at Naropa and worked with Billy editing his books—
In 1972
The 250 dollars from his trust fund and the money from Karens' part-time job waitressing was hardly enough to get by, so they lived in Zen-like simplicity.
He never got the job at
Hitchhiking to Denver to score heroin or prescription opiates, and not having enough money to boost contributed to Billy's decision to stop doping and just booze.
Which he did, but he couldn't handle booze, and in no time he was drinking every waking hour, behaving so outrageously that his wife Karen left him in 1971.
Soon he was living on the streets of Boulder, spending his trust fund drinking.
He meets another lady, a full-blooded Sioux Indian whose name is Deer Woman. She was homeless and alcoholic. Deer Woman was the daughter of Crow Dog, a widely known medicine man who lived on
They would drink beer and shots all day into the night on his dime, then pass out in a park or up in the mountains.
One night in the
Eventually, 2 of the beer-bellied Bucks jumped him. Billy was thin and wiry, so he manages to escape the Skins grasp, running out the door and hiding behind a dumpster in an alley.
The following day he goes back to the
what happened last night? The bartender says,
you’re Billy Burroughs, I've read
I heard her telling her Indian brothers you beat her, which provoked them so they laid into you.
Billy wasn't a violent person and he never saw Deer Woman again. Later he heard on the street she'd returned to
By 1977, 6 years of heavy daily drinking, combined with Billys' previous years of speed and opiate abuse caught up with him and he suffered a liver collapse. He was only 32 years old.
While on dialysis he was in the hospital for a month and finally he was provided with a liver that matched his blood type.
In the early 70s liver transplants were a new procedure. Billy endured a lengthy operation first removing all of his liver and then transplanting the donated liver. The operation took 5 hours, and there was no assurance the new liver would adapt to his system. During recovery, he was relatively pain-free, given liters of fentanyl intravenously. To his credit, he didn't ask for morphine, not wanting to get re-addicted to opiates. Giving opiates to recovering liver transplant patients is questionable in the medical community.
Without the behind the scenes efforts of the Beat saints who loved him, he would never have been a liver recipient. In that, Colorado General Hospital would have judged him a bad candidate for a transplant on the grounds he was an unrepentant addict and wasn’t sober 6 months prior to the operation.
Billy’s new liver was adapting to his system well, so he started drinking again— a poor, suicidal choice.
Anne Waldman and the Naropa family bankrolled a room for Billy in the
In 1981 Billys’ transplanted liver was beginning to fail, and he traveled to Florida to be with his mentor the Reverend George Von Hilsheimer.
While Billy was a guest at Reverend Georges’ home, he reflected on his life spending time sitting and thinking at the serene grounds of The Green Valley School. He resolved that his Father William murdered both he and his mother Joan Vollmer with one shot on the cataclysmic night in Mexico City.
To be fair, William often helped Billy in times of need, because he loved him, not because of pangs of conscience for the muddled shooting of Joan Vollmer. Which he never spoke or wrote about the rest of his life.
William Seward Burroughs Jr. died on March 3, 1981, of liver failure in Florida. He was only 35.
