Reporter
Looking for Bill
Half a century ago, cult writer William S. Burroughs called Texas home. I wanted to know where—and why.
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From there we returned to Pharr, where Johnson had used a 1939 telephone directory to locate an abandoned frame house where Elvins' father may have once lived. The house is described in Kerouac's On the Road and served as a resting spot for Burroughs. It sat on the edge of a sorghum field, its sagging pine porch and leaky roof having seen better days. We peeked through its shutters, then tromped through the overgrown weeds out back, past an old cistern and several pecan trees that shaded our path. Lizards scattered, while all other traces of life lay silent in the afternoon heat. Grauerholz walked ahead of us, lost in thought. Later he explained that the place had brought on a rush of emotions: "I got goosebumps, wondering, 'Bill, is this it?'"
Burroughs divided his time in Texas between the Valley, where he maintained a legitimate business operation, and East Texas, where he grew marijuana on a secluded 99-acre farm. Possession was a felony and a risky proposition in San Jacinto County, but the damp climate was ideal, and there was no better cash crop. In 1947 Burroughs persuaded Joan Vollmer, a young divorcée he had dated in New York, to join him in the venture. Vollmer in turn asked Times Square hustler Herbert Huncke, a mutual friend, to be their farmhand. This peculiar trio of hipsters settled in the Piney Woods southeast of Huntsville, between the towns of New Waverly and Coldspring, and tried to maintain a low profile. Their cabin lay at the end of a rutted dirt road and was lit with kerosene lamps, lacking any sense of cosmopolitan elegance. "The house is overrun with huge rats as big as possums," Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg. "I shot one who was too fat and got wedged in his hole, but the survivors are legion and gun shy."
William S. Burroughs, Jr., was born to Vollmer on July 21, 1947, in a Conroe hospital. The following month, Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, the real-life protagonist of On the Road, came to visit the Burroughs homestead, and Cassady stayed on into the fall. Despite the arrival of new occupants, life at the cabin proceeded at its own leisurely pace: Each morning, Burroughs would put on his customary dress shirt and tie and drive into New Waverly to collect his mail. Huncke would tend to the cannabis plants, which were disguised with a cover crop of tomatoes, and make occasional forays to Houston to procure alcohol and any narcotics he and his friends desired. At night they would all sit out on the porch, listening to Burroughs' favorite Viennese waltzes on an old phonograph. Locals mostly kept their distance, perhaps because of Burroughs' penchant for firing his .22-caliber target pistol for sport. As Huncke wrote in his memoir, Guilty of Everything, there was so much gunfire that locals began to suspect that gangsters lived there.
The cash crop would turn out to be a bust, though. Burroughs discovered this only after driving back to New York with Cassady, Huncke, and a carload of green marijuana. Burroughs didn't have any idea how to properly dry or cure the stuff; even after he baked it to make it look more authentic, he still had no buyers. Though he had hoped to reap thousands of dollars, he didn't come close to breaking even, and in the spring of 1948, he put the farm up for sale. His luck grew worse that May when he and Vollmer, while driving to Pharr, pulled over near Beeville for a roadside tryst. The imposing figure of Sheriff Vail Eenis was soon on the scene, arresting Burroughs on charges of public indecency and driving while intoxicated. Burroughs stood little chance of finding a sympathetic jury in Beeville; he pleaded guilty, spent the night in jail, and was bailed out with money his parents wired to Vollmer. Disgusted with the whole affair, he moved to New Orleans. "Find things very uncool in Texas," he wrote to Ginsberg.
East Texas is featured less prominently in Burroughs' work than the Valley, though it makes an unsentimental appearance in Naked Lunch, in which he describes an East Texas town he dubs Pigeon Hole. ("The inhabitants of this town and the surrounding area of swamps and heavy timber are people of . . . great stupidity and barbarous practices.") Around New Waverly and Coldspring, the locals' view of Burroughs is no less withering. His books cannot be found in any library, his residency is not recorded in any local histories, and old-timers deny any knowledge of the man. "No one I've talked to knew William Burroughs," said New Waverly city secretary Sara Bartee with a wry smile. "No one who will admit to it, at least."
Burroughs returned to South Texas in 1949 after yet another arrest, this one in New Orleans. Charged with possession of narcotics—following a high-speed car chase with the police, no less—he waited in Pharr while his attorney tried to have the case dismissed. This time, the charges were serious. Burroughs was facing a possible five-year sentence in the Angola State Prison, one of the most formidable prisons in the country, and his return to a place with easy access to Mexico was no doubt by design. He viewed the Valley with bitterness, since his venture had been an abject failure. He had lost crops in severe freezes and paid dearly for equipment and labor. "He tried to make an honest living in the Valley," said Johnson. "Failing at it convinced him of its futility."
The lasting impression Burroughs gives of the Valley in his fiction—particularly in Junky—is of a place populated by con artists and suckers, where "the very rich are getting richer and all the others are going broke." He relates the story of a twenties scam in which South Texas land promoters persuaded prospective farmers to buy plots around an artificial lake, only to drain the lake when the sale closed, leaving the buyers high and dry in the desert. This sort of deeply cynical view of Texas echoes throughout Burroughs' own writing. South Texas farmers, he wrote, "are always tampering with the past like the two-dollar bettor on the return train from the track: 'I should have hung on to that hundred acres on the lower lift; I should have took up them oil leases; I should have planted cotton instead of tomatoes.' A nasal whine goes up from the Valley, a vast muttering of banal regret and despair."
For Burroughs, Texas "reinforced his conviction that conventional morality was a hoax," in the words of biographer Ted Morgan. Johnson expands this idea in a paper published in this spring's Southwestern American Literature, arguing that Texas taught him "the limits of freedom in America." Johnson finds particular significance in a letter Burroughs wrote to Ginsberg in 1948 railing against the criminality of "respectable" farmwork: "We farmers in the Rio Grande Valley depend entirely on Mexican laborers who enter the country illegally with our aid and connivance. The 'civil liberties' of these workers are violated repeatedly. They are often kept on the job at the point of gun . . . Workers who try to leave the field are shot. (I know of several instances.) In short my ethical position, now that I am a respectable farmer, is probably shakier than when I was pushing junk. Now, as then, I violate the law, but my present violations are condoned by a corrupt government."
Burroughs left Texas behind in October 1949 when his attorney informed him that his case was going to trial and agreed that his taking a "vacation" in Mexico wasn't such a bad idea. Burroughs would not reside again in the United States until 1974. "There's a quality of exhaustion when he leaves the U.S.," said Grauerholz. "It's one disaster after another." In Mexico City, where Burroughs took Vollmer, he flirted with the idea of opening a bar, then settled on writing his first novel at the urging of Elvins. On the evening of September 6, 1951, Burroughs and Vollmer were drinking with friends when he suggested that she put a gin glass on her head. Intending to shoot it off, he took aim with his Star .380 automatic pistol. Ginsberg would learn the following day in Galveston—where he was having his car repaired on the way back from Mexico City—that Burroughs had missed. "Heir's Pistol Kills His Wife" read one Associated Press headline. The article described Burroughs, not yet a known writer, as a "wealthy cotton planter from Pharr, Tex."
There are, of course, no historical markers commemorating Burroughs' time in Texas—no statues or bronze plaques remembering the man whom Norman Mailer once called "the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." Having himself scorned anything as conventional—and unreliable—as recorded history, Burroughs most likely would have wanted it that way. There is talk of having a symposium, "The Beats and Mexico," in the Rio Grande Valley, which Johnson would organize. But for now, Burroughs will live on in Texas as he always has, through rumor and perhaps less-than-benign neglect.
The tour at last brought us to Burroughs' old farm, a few miles northeast of McAllen. The fields looked, from a distance, as they must have half a century ago, with neat rows of purple cabbage stretching toward the Rio Grande. As we drove nearer, the sky darkened and it began to rain. Raindrops drummed on the car while we looked and tried to imagine how it had once been. "I can picture Burroughs standing here and surveying this place, hands on his hips, saying, 'Pretty good piece of land,'" observed Grauerholz with a grin. "Then he probably checked his watch and said, 'Is it drinking time yet?'"
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