Literary Rogues by Andrew Shaffer

Author:Andrew Shaffer [Shaffer, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

17

Junky

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

—WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

William 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.

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