Literary Rogues (20 page)

He dropped out of college but continued to live in New York City. He briefly joined the Marines in 1942 and the Navy in 1943 before being honorably discharged on psychiatric grounds after just eight days of active duty. “
I just can't stand it
,” he told the military medical examiner. “I like to be by myself.”

Kerouac married his girlfriend, Edie Parker, in 1944; they divorced just two months later. As he said, he liked to be by himself.

Back in New York City after his military discharge and divorce, he met the trio of Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. “
What a great city New York is
!” he wrote to his parents in 1947. “We are living at just the right time—[poet Samuel] Johnson and his London, Balzac and his Paris, Socrates and his Athens—the same thing again.”

Kerouac left New York for Denver in 1947 and traveled the country for the next four years working on his debut novel,
The Town and the City
. After that book's publication in 1950, he finally settled down with Joan Haverty, his second wife, whom he had proposed to after knowing only a few days.

The newlywed Kerouac sat down at his typewriter. Fueled by coffee and pea soup (according to his wife), Kerouac pounded out
On the Road
in a three-week offensive, reportedly using journals from his journeys for reference and typing on a 120-foot scroll of tracing paper.

In addition to all that pea soup and coffee, however, Kerouac was powered by something much stronger: amphetamines. First synthesized in Japan in 1919, amphetamines mimicked the stimulating effects of cocaine, increasing energy and decreasing appetite in users. Unfortunately, like cocaine, so-called “speed” was also prone to abuse.

The Smith, Kline & French pharmaceutical company introduced one of the most popular amphetamines in 1928: Benzedrine. Although it was available only as an inhaler for the purposes of dilating nasal and bronchial passages, users caught on quickly to its stimulating properties. They cracked open Benzedrine inhalers and swallowed the paper strips inside. Not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, Smith, Kline & French introduced Benzedrine in tablet form. Doctors began prescribing the drug as an appetite suppressant and miracle cure for fatigue. The FDA was well aware of the recreational abuse of “bennies” and other amphetamines, finally taking steps to control their usage in the 1950s.

Biographer Ann Charters believed Kerouac took Benzedrine to intensify his awareness and make him feel cleverer. “
Each of Kerouac's books
was written on something and each of the books has some of the feel of what he was on most as he wrote it.
On the Road
has a nervous, tense and Benzedrine feel,” she wrote. It's not hard to see why Kerouac and other writers would fall in love with a drug like Benzedrine: when one is paid for creative output, and not for time, the pressure is on the author to put words on paper as quickly as possible.

On the Road
was a freewheeling road map for a new generation who rejected their parents' suburban values, featuring taboo topics such as bisexuality, interracial love, and group sex. Publishers initially rejected the book as obscene, slapdash, and unpublishable.

Kerouac's wife left him later in the year and gave birth to his only child, a girl, in February 1952. Kerouac continued to write and travel, but he fell into bouts of depression, intensified by heavy drug and alcohol abuse. Kerouac was eternally angry, and the drugs and alcohol didn't do much to take the edge off. One time at Ginsberg's apartment, Kerouac agreed to test psilocybin (a hallucinogenic drug), administered by drug guru Timothy Leary. Instead of mellowing out, as Leary expected, Kerouac confronted a critic in person and threatened to toss the man out of a window over a negative review.

In 1953, Kerouac sat back down at the typewriter for another marathon session of word-banging. He completed
The Subterraneans
in just three days—with the help of Uncle Benny, of course. “
Benny has made me see a lot
,” he once said.

Ginsberg, a mellow pothead for the most part, disapproved of Kerouac's amphetamine abuse. “
I saw the best minds
of my generation destroyed by madness,” Ginsberg famously wrote in his epic poem “Howl.” Ginsberg and others recognized that there was a terrible downside to speed. “
The period of euphoria
is followed by a horrible depression,” Burroughs wrote.

Viking Press finally published Kerouac's
On the Road
in September 1957. The
New York Times
proclaimed Kerouac the voice of a new generation: “
Just as, more than any other novel
of the Twenties, Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
came to be regarded as the testament of the ‘Lost Generation,' so it seems certain that
On the Road
will come to be known as that of the ‘Beat Generation.'”

Fame was a double-edged sword for Kerouac. On the one hand, he was able to usher many of his old manuscripts into print; on the other, he was a celebrity and didn't feel safe leaving his house. “
He didn't object to being famous
, but he realized he wasn't famous—he was notorious,” John Clellon Holmes said. According to Joyce Johnson, “
People knew him all over the Village
. It was exhausting to go out with him. Women wanted him to make love to them. One woman said to me at a party, ‘I have to fuck him now!' ”

One night in New York City, three men assaulted Kerouac outside the San Remo Bar on Bleecker Street. His friend Cassady was arrested for selling marijuana, possibly as a result of his association with
On the Road
. Critics attacked Kerouac's subsequent “Duluoz Legend” books,
Big Sur
and
Desolation Angels
, more for Kerouac's personality than the books' content. In a letter to Ginsberg, he wrote, “
I hitchhiked and starved
, for art, and that makes me the Fool of the Beatniks with a crown of shit. Thanks, America.” Kerouac wrote to another friend that it was “
no wonder Hemingway
went to Cuba.”

Kerouac moved back to his home state of Massachusetts, where he was able to avoid the spotlight. He withdrew from daily life, sedating himself with alcohol. His once-handsome face bloated nearly beyond recognition. At his local watering hole, Mello's Bar, Kerouac was just another drunk. He loved to enter the bar and proclaim, “
I'm Jack Kerouac
!”

The bartender would playfully chide him by saying, “How much do you make a year?”

“About as much as you do,” Kerouac replied.

“That's nothing,” the bartender would say. “If you've published all them books you told me about, how come you don't make more?”

Kerouac's decline was in sharp contrast to the romantic image of the drunken writer that was pervasive in the 1950s. In a time when alcohol and cigarette use was de rigueur, a bottle of whiskey was as important as a typewriter for aspiring writers.

Still,
Time
praised Kerouac's 1968 novel
Vanity of Duluoz
as his best work.
Atlantic Monthly
paid tribute with an unpublished section of the novel. The media seemed to have turned a corner in its antagonistic relationship with Kerouac. But just days after the novel's publication, Kerouac learned that Cassady had been found dead in Mexico, his body lying beside a railroad track.

Kerouac refused to believe the news. “
Guys like Neal
just don't do things like that,” he told his friend Charles E. Jarvis, a literature professor.

“You mean like dying?” Jarvis said.

“That's right. I mean, not at this point. Neal is in his prime,” Kerouac said. (Cassady was forty-one.) “Any day now, I'll get a letter from Neal wanting to know if I'm wearing a black band around my arm!”

Unfortunately, no letter was forthcoming.

Kerouac's own end was not far off. While he's frequently misquoted as saying, “
I'm Catholic and I can't
commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death,” that's not far from the truth. Kerouac died from internal bleeding in 1969, a result of years of alcohol abuse. He was forty-seven. Despite writing thirty books, only three were still in print.

At the funeral, Eric Ehrmann asked Sterling Lord, Kerouac's agent, why he never tried to intervene and put an end to his client's drinking. “
Jack liked his scotch
” was all Lord could say.

“I
learned one of the unwritten rules
of the writing profession,” Ehrmann wrote. “When somebody wants to check out, friends honor boundaries and rarely intervene. Nobody stopped Ernest Hemingway from pulling the trigger. Nobody stopped Jerzy Kosi
ski from doing himself in. Or Tennessee Williams from guzzling the booze and pills. And nobody stopped Jack.”

“
Artists, to my mind
, are the real architects of change.”

—
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

W
illiam S. Burroughs
(1914–1997) first shot morphine in 1944. As he wrote in
Junky
, “
Morphine hits the backs of the legs
first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous.”

While an addiction to needle drugs like morphine carries a greater stigma than, say, alcoholism, the Harvard-educated Burroughs knew that it was all just a different shade of the same color. “
The needle is not important
. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction,” he wrote.

In 1944, Burroughs moved into an apartment with his girlfriend, Joan Vollmer, and her daughter. Vollmer was married to a GI serving overseas in World War II. When her husband returned home to find his wife addicted to amphetamines and sleeping with a drug-dealing morphine addict, he quickly divorced her. Astonishingly, Vollmer kept custody of her daughter.

Burroughs and Vollmer became common-law husband and wife, and had a child of their own. Burroughs, however, ran into legal problems as a result of his drug dealings, and he crisscrossed the United States with his new family in search of sanctuary. After stops in St. Louis, Texas, and New Orleans, they finally settled in Mexico, where Burroughs hoped to stay for at least five years to escape Louisiana's statute of limitations.

In the world of awful career moves, becoming a junkie is only a close second to committing homicide, but that's just what Burroughs did. In September 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed Vollmer while entertaining some friends at their home in Mexico.

Tired of her husband's constant bragging about his marksmanship, Vollmer balanced a highball glass of gin on her head and dared Burroughs to take a shot. They were both drunk.

“
I can't watch this
—you know I can't stand the sight of blood,” Vollmer said, giggling as she closed her eyes.

Burroughs took aim at his wife with his .38 caliber pistol and fired. The bullet missed the glass and hit Vollmer squarely in the head. She died instantly.

Burroughs received a two-year suspended sentence but fled Mexico anyway. “
I am forced to the appalling conclusion
that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death,” Burroughs wrote in the preface to his 1984 novel,
Queer
. “The death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.”

Remarkably, Burroughs didn't stop playing with guns. He collected and fired them his entire life, going so far as to sleep with a loaded gun under his pillow. He later added a sword cane to his weapons cache. “
He shot like he wrote
—with extreme precision and no fear,” according to Hunter S. Thompson, who shot with Burroughs on occasion.