His Cuban wife, Lucia, is an occultist who reads coffee grounds and tarot cards, so he asks her to interpret his dreams, she tells him,
be careful darling, dreams of dirty laundry mean you have a health problem you need to take care of. Gambling dreams are a warning to stop taking risks and change your lifestyle, but the good news is you can move on because the damage is already done.
Lucia's explanations of his dreams are unsettling. The phone rings, Henry picks up the handset, it’s the editor of HEADBANGER Magazine, Dave Spleen,
hello,
Lucowski baby, Big Apple readers loved your stories— Level 5 or Worse and Rednecks Love a Freak Show, you seem to be gaining steam. Anyway, how bout a bit on William Burroughs? Cheers my man, gotta go, gotta deadline to meet.
The tribe’s on the front porch of their Key West bungalow enjoying Formosas and Eggs Florentine. The Chihuahuas Che y Mia beg for food as Pedro the woodpecker munches watermelon seeds with diced fruit. It upsets Pedro if the girls shell his watermelon seeds, and he lets them know it by stomping back and forth on the porch, protesting their thoughtlessness.
Over the past few years, Lucia and Summer Wynd have become gourmet cooks, they read cookbooks, cooked at home every day, and loved things culinary.
They were cooking more vegetarian meals as well, Henry would eat what was served and had no opinion on vegetarianism.
This morning the girls used English muffin-sized slices of breaded fried eggplant instead of Candian bacon, which they considered toxic. Also, adding fresh boiled rosemary in place of spinach in the hollandaise sauce.
The tribe gave up eating pork and beef after seeing pictures of devasted pigs with desolate looks on their faces in Whole Earth Magazine. The poor creatures lived awful lives, they're intelligent, more intelligent than dogs.
Henry, Lucia, and Summer Wyng weren't vegetarian, they ate free-range chicken, seafood, or eggs occasionally. And, they had a gut feeling that processed cheese was nasty stuff, so they didn't eat it.
Yes, they were eating healthier but they continued to suck down booze like the earth was going to be hit by a meteor at any moment, pummelling out of its atmosphere, falling into the troposphere in flames as all aboard perish.
Henry had recently read William S. Burroughs’s book, Junky. A book that would have been published a decade later without the help of Allen Ginsberg, who helped William edit the novel and pounded the pavement with the Junky manuscript in hand, hitting up dozens of Big Apple publishing houses.
Summing up Burroughs’s writing style was knotty for Henry. Junky is a story about William's life as an addict in the late 30s. The book is comparable to a Beethoven Concerto— as powerful today as it was when it was published decades ago.
Allan Ginsberg writes in the forward of the 1976 edition of Junky about his experience showing the manuscript to the Doubleday Publishing editor, Jason Epstein, who commented,
Allen, if the book was written by Winston Churchill it might be interesting, but, Burroughs's prose is undistinguished.
William's prose style wasn’t in your face, but he could airbrush a mental picture of a scene better than anybody in the business.
Publishing houses in the early 50s were spooked by the Junky manuscript— at the time there was boo koo paranoia in the air thanks to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, so much that if you were overheard by a narc on a bus talking about ganja, or tea as they called it then, you could be taken to jail.
Finally, Ace Books, a pulp fiction outfit that primarily published science fiction, printed Junkyin 1953. William Burroughs received an 800 dollar advance on the 1st edition, 100,000 copies. The publishing house packaged the novel in a shabby paperback manner, a garish 50s cover illustration of a man holding his wife and slapping her because she threw away his heroin, looking like a panel of an Archie comic book.
In that dope was a radical topic in the early 50s, a number of legal disclaimers were printed in the preface of the 1st edition of Junky, disassociating Burroughs with Ace Books because the novel was an out and out admittance that he was involved in criminal activities.
Allen Ginsberg ends his 1976 forward writing—
The Junky text was printed and read over the next decade by a million cognoscenti—who did appreciate the intelligent face, the clear perception, precise bare language, direct syntax, and mind pictures— as well as the enormous socio-logic grasp, cultural-revolutionary attitude toward bureaucracy and law, and the stoic cold-humor’d eye on crime.
This spot-on description of Burroughs prose style is by far more penetrating than anything Henry could come up with— of course, Allen Ginsburg is posthumously on the list of the greatest poets of the 20th Century.
More than a few of Henry’s pals, freelance writers who contributed to HEADBANGER Magazine, felt his writing style and the writers he admired were out of the ark.
He read piles of books by authors and poets of the 20th and 21st century, mostly realistic fiction. He enjoyed variations on the genre as well, notably, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magic realism style.
Or, Pablo Neruda and W. B. Yates, a Latino, and a Brit, threw romantic poetry out the window in favor of modernism— an unromantic, poetic scrutinization of the state of British society after WW1, and the politics of The Bolshevik Revolution.
Henry couldn’t wrap his head around horror, spy, mystery, or romance novels.
Now here’s the rub, his contemporaries figured contemporary readers thirsted for horror, spy, mystery, and romance novels— writers such as J.K Rowling, John le Clarre, Anne Rice, Mickey Spillane, and the living embodiment of Edgar Allen Poe, Steven King.
His pals insisted horror, spy, mystery, and romance novels are the future and the genres are where the money is. Saying realistic fiction, the Beats, Hemingway, and such, are dead, festering in a bygone era. Telling Henry his mania for realistic fiction was comparable to— trying to push water uphill.
As he manically pushes water uphill in the face of the horror, spy, mystery, and romance novels of the world. Henry rages heathen like, why, he’d cut off an ear like Van Gogh, or in the fashion of William Burroughs, sever the end joint of his little finger— self-mutilating proof of his foaming mouth passion for realistic fiction.
Junky is a living canvas about the hard-boiled lives of the dopeheads living in 1930's junkdom, the action revolves around Burroughs grim life as an addict.
The meat of the book's text is as close as William could get to his actual experience as a heroin addict.
He created a fictional conception of himself in Junky known as William Lee. 4 years later, he was a character in Jack Kerouac's breakthrough book On the Road, Old Bull Lee.
While Burroughs was living in Tangiers in the late 50s, his sense of self became shadow-like, he began seeing himself as a fictional construct as he was in Junky and On the Road, signing letters— El Hombre Invisible.
Throughout his book Junky, William references his wife Joan Vollmor without mentioning her by name, cooling labeling her my wife as though she was an unworn overcoat in his closet.
2 decades after Junky was published Burroughs became a poster boy for misogyny. Of course, there are those who consider misogyny a queer trait, but Burroughs seemed to be singled out. Most likely, because he unwittingly murdered Joan Vollmor while attempting to shoot a glass off her head during a night of drunken rivalry in their Mexico City bungalow.
The couple's marriage was built on literary zeal and convenience because William was openly homosexual.
Junky like The Catcher in the Rye is a 20th Century parable of alienation in the modern world. William’s depicts junkies existing from fix to fix in heroin zones as,
invisible, dematerialized and boneless—
as he lives in a soulless body going through the motions of being alive.
William Burroughs never recovered from heroin addiction, he was physically dependent on Methadone at the time of his death in Lawrence, Kansas, while living with his beloved cat and his personal secretary, biographer, and literary executor, James Grauerholz.
Henry, Lucia, and Summer Wynd are apolitical, they didn’t know who the governor of their home state is and couldn't care. Lucia was in the process of getting a green card. She loved America because of McDonalds and Disneyland, because of the overabundance of food goods available in supermarkets, and she felt free in the US.
Henry and Summer Wynd had never voted, figuring, the politicians who won would work hard to enrich themselves and their cronies and the lives of out of the loop Americans would stay the same.
During the Viet Nam war, he pulled a high number in the draft lottery, 358, luckily spared from the ordeal of having to go to war.
He wasn’t anti-American, but when it came to patriotism he couldn’t feel it— similar to the emptiness he felt during times he was supposed to be loving.
He’d seen awful images of physically disfigured soldiers in veteran hospitals on PBS documentaries which spooked him. 18-year-old boys charging full tilt, throwing their bodies in harm's way, ground up like hamburger meat because they bought into the party line—
save the world from the Communist expansion.
After fighting for 15 years the NVA knocked the giant Lockheed C-18 bombers out of the sky with sticks and stones. The pint-sized cannon fodder in black PJs won alright and Viet Nam was united under Communism.
Decades after the war, Viet Nam is as capitalistic as America. And, the logjam of human suffering and waste on both sides of the war is water under the bridge. Pale death has moved on to the middle east, so there’s another cause to save the world from, Islamic terrorism, the new Hitler.
Bigger people than Henry were in place to decide the right or wrong of war, and only history knows the truth.
But, there are few positive quotes out there on war, even celebrated generals didn’t care for it much. Hitler liked war though, describing it as—
The greatest of all experiences.
Of course, Hitler’s love affair with war ate him alive. By 1945 he was a cocaine and goofball addicted 50 yr old who shook uncontrollably, looking like an 80-year-old shadow.
Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman said this—
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
Hunter S. Thompson points out at the essence of war—
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At war now & with somebody & and we will stay at war with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
Henry’s personal favorite is William S. Burroughs’s thoughts on war—
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us— the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers
America has been at war 239 years out of the 299 years of its existence, and the 40 peaceful years are marked by saber-rattling and covert bushfire warfare.
The US budget is primarily divided into two categories— mandatory and discretionary. The mandatory category is aligned with butter while discretionary includes defense and is associated with guns.
Guns and butter— In America, fatty edibles and pistols are big business.
Americans who care or have an itch have been spewing gobbledygook in a political Chinese fire drill since 1776. The mind-fuck session swings pendulum-like from left to right to center, and back again. The debate never stops and is never resolved.
Dourness aside, Henry was wonderstruck by America, he saw the kinetic open all night neon light peninsula as a dazzling and maverick happening, the promised land— the rough and tumble home of the creative elite of cinema, art, fashion, music and computer technology.
America, it's a fountainhead of— hula hoops, muscle cars, cars with fins, Disneyland, Las Vegas, Harleys, Winnebagos, million-dollar lottery winners, infomercials, Ron Popeil's spray-on hair, homemade pies, George Foreman selling everything in the book on TV, fast food served posthaste, egg rolls, Mohamed Ali, Liberace, Elvis, Ray Charles, Evel Knievel, and Malcolm X, why, it's all this and more, an ongoing show, it's America the colossal.
