MÉXICO CITY MONTHLY 2006 ... - American Apparel

mcm_may 4/25/06 5:08 PM Page 7
on the recent trip– and a young gringo
friend of his, Eddie Woods.
Bill and Joan observed that the living
room was full of empty gin, rum and
soda pop bottles, but that everyone
was sober. As it turned out, a party
had taken place the previous evening
with the American grantees of Mexico
City College who had just received
their monthly stipend and had spent
the night getting drunk at the apartment.
Joan and Burroughs served
themselves a gin with lemonade and
Healy left to attend to another matter.
They continued drinking.
Two and a half hours later –which
means that neither Burroughs nor Joan
were roaring drunk– the potential
buyer had not arrived. Burroughs took
out his Star 380 pistol, put it on the
table and said he wanted to go live
somewhere in South America and
survive by hunting animals. Joan told
him he would never dare shoot
at anybody. Burroughs, who was
an easy prey to female provocation,
told her that in order to prove her
wrong she should be kind enough
to get up and put a glass half full
of gin and lemonade on her head
in order to perform their renowned
William Tell act (it seems this was
not the first time they had done it).
Joan got up instantly, put the glass
on top of her head and closing her
eyes pronounced her last words:
“I do not dare look, I cannot stand
to see blood”.
Burroughs got up as well, stood
three meters away from her, extended
his arm and shot.
Joan fell to the floor like a punching
bag detached from its hook. The bewildered
spectators thought it was joke.
Moments later, as they saw the red
stream flowing on the floor and heard
the strange noises coming out of Joan’s
half-open mouth, they finally understood
what had happened.
Marker ran out of the apartment
to look for the medical student who
lived next door, and Burroughs knelt
next to Joan’s body and yelled:
"Speak to me! Speak to me!"
Woods left Burroughs screaming and
went to look for the concierge, who
called an ambulance, the police and
Burroughs's attorney, Bernabé Jurado.
The ambulance arrived at the apartment
at 7:30 p.m. and took the body
of dying Joan; Burroughs accompanied
her to the Red Cross at Durango and
Sonora Streets. Joan died an hour
later. When Burroughs was told,
he cried, heartbroken, pulling his hair
in impotence. His famous,and skillful
gangster-lawyer, Bernabé Jurado,
immediately reached him at the hospital
together with the police, who took
Burroughs first to the Eighth District
(Cuauhtémoc Avenue at Obrero
Mundial) and later to Lecumberri
Prison, known as the Black Palace.
In his first declaration to the police,
Burroughs was faithful to the actual
events: he and Joan had decided
to play William Tell, and instead
of hitting the glass, the bullet pierced
Joan’s temple. It was an accident,
he affirmed. But when Bernabé Jurado
met Burroughs later on, he asked him
to change his declaration and say that
his pistol went off by mistake when
it fell on the floor, and stop mentioning
the William Tell act. Burroughs obeyed.
Jurado then started to pull some
strings and bribed the investigators
with Mortimer Burroughs’s money
–William’s brother who immediately
came to Mexico–. Jurado told Burroughs
exactly what to do and say and after
13 days the famous writer left jail
on bail. Burroughs blessed the
corrupt Mexican courts.
All the police sections of the newspapers
back then repeated the story
of William Tell, publishing lies,
sensationalism and false declarations.
Burroughs’s elder brother Mortimer
buried Joan at the American Cemetery
in Tacuba and the children, who had
stayed several days at Orizaba #210
with the terrified neighbors, who did
not know what to do with them,
returned to the United States to live
with their grandparents. Burroughs’s
stay in Lecumberri Prison was brief
and not terrible at all. The inmates
treated him well and even gave him
blankets so he would not be cold at night.
Once freed on bail, Burroughs was
obliged to stay in Mexico until his
case was closed. But since the notoriously
incompetent Mexican authorities
did not solve anything after a year
and three months, Burroughs easily
foiled them and escaped illegally from
Mexico, never to return.
He went to South America again,
where he finally tried yagé, which
revealed, according to him, great
truths. Later, he traveled to Tangier,
Morocco, where he lived for six years,
and after experiencing a sort of hell
due to his opiate addiction, he wrote
the book that would make him
famous: Naked Lunch.
After a 25-year silence, Burroughs
decided to talk about Joan’s death.
In 1985, he wrote that on that fateful
afternoon in 1951, an evil spirit
possessed him and ordered him
to kill Joan. From then on, the only
way he could resist it was by writing.
Becoming a writer was, according
to him, the only safe-conduct that
allowed him, since then, to neutralize
and calm the evil force that killed
his wife.
JACK KEROUAC IN THE HOT LAND
OF DESERT RATS AND TEQUILA.
When Burroughs had just arrived
in Mexico City, in September 1949 he
sent a letter to a friend eight years his
junior, telling him of the marvels of the
place: "Mexico is very cheap, there are
fabulous brothels and restaurants.
Cockfights, bullfights, all kinds
of entertainments; you must visit me".
Seduced by such praise, a few
months later, in June 1950, Jack
Kerouac, his hero-friend Neal Cassady
and Frank Jeffries, another friend, took
off in Neal’s 1937 Ford and drove
straight from Denver, Colorado to Laredo,
Texas. They crossed the Mexican-
American border and when they arrived
in Gregoria, Tamaulipas, they immediately
smoked some marihuana and
went into a joint where they went on
to spend an awesome night with
northern whores, gallons of alcohol
and mambo dancing.
The next day, Kerouac and friends,
with Neal at the steering wheel,
entered Mexico City, immediately
visiting Burroughs at his house
in Colonia Roma. Neal and Frank
soon went back to the States and Jack
was left alone with Burroughs, who
took him out to bars and restaurants
in Colonia Roma and occasionally
partook in smoking pot with him
–Jack preferred alcohol and cannabis
to opiates. One day they both went
to the bullfights at Plaza Mexico, and
while Burroughs enjoyed the “bloody
show”, Jack was horrified. Besides
that, Kerouac, unlike Burroughs,
frequented prostitutes at Órgano Street
in Peralvillo, the city's official red light
district. Three months later, Kerouac
went back to New York.
IN LOVE WITH A MEXICAN JUNKIE
Four years later, in 1955, Kerouac, still
an unknown writer, went to Mexico
City once more and arrived at the tiny
building at Orizaba #210 in Colonia
Roma, Burroughs’s last address. There
lived an American junkie friend of
theirs by the name of Bill Garver;
all day, he would inject into his veins
any opium derivative he could find.
In that place, Jack wrote one of his
most recognized books of poetry,
México City Blues. He also met a drugfriend
of Garver’s, a 25-year-old
morphine addicted prostitute by the
William Burroughs en la prisión del palacio de Lecumberri. Ciudad de México, 1951.
William Burroughs in Lecumberri’s Palace prision. Mexico City, 1951.
name of Esperanza Villanueva, with
whom he fell in love and who served
as the model for his only completely
Mexican Beat novel, Tristessa.
For Kerouac, who considered himself
a Buddhist at the time, Esperanza-
Tristessa, a faithful believer in the
Virgin of Guadalupe, who never
missed the Sunday mass, was a kind
of saint who augmented her religious
aura by prostituting and drugging
herself. With her, he got to know
Mexico City’s lowlife, Garibaldi and
the outskirts of downtown. He ate
greasy tidbits from street carts at late
hours, saw hotels swarming with prostitutes
and drug addicts, met scumbags
who robbed him of his poetry
notebooks and humiliated him,
and did not defend himself or respond
at all (whereas Burroughs would
have scared them with bullets).
Esperanza did not return the affection
that Jack felt for her. She preferred
getting stoned to falling in love, and
rejected the gringo poet’s advances.
He was probably more interested
in her as a fascinating subject for
his novel than as a desirable mate;
nonetheless, he continued to help
Garver and Esperanza get drugs from
Chinese laundries and corrupt drugstores.
Once, when they had no drugs,
Esperanza started raging, breaking,
slamming and throwing all types
of things onto the floor in Garver’s
apartment, then she threw herself
on the floor and started shaking,
kicking and shouting outrageously.
She accused Jack of being a repulsive
drug addict and threw a bottle
in his face.
Another time when Jack again
declared his love to her in a taxi,
Esperanza turned away indifferently
and did not answer. When they arrived
at Garver’s house, he told Jack: "If you
put Grace Kelly on one chair and dirty
morphine on the other, my dear Jack,
I would choose the morphine."
Esperanza, who was listening,
said: “I also do not want love”.
Kerouac understood the message
and did not see her again.
A year later, in October 1956, while
Jack was writing the last part of
Tristessa, two of the most important
and recognized Beat poets, Allen
Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, came
to visit him, accompanied by Peter
Orlowsky, Ginsberg’s lover. Kerouac
took them to the Pyramids of
Teotihuacán and when they reached
the top of the Sun Pyramid, they
smoked a joint in order to connect
with the mystic energy of the site.
On another occasion, they went
to the Bombay club (which still exists)
in Garibaldi, "the slum's slummiest
hole agitating mud from our lips."
They left the place and went to a street
corner full of prostitutes "standing
ranked against pockholed walls full
of bedbugs and cockroaches." Peter
and Jack decided to take a whore
to bed, Ginsberg waited outside and
Corso, disgusted, went home. Kerouac
chose a girl of 14 and Orlowsky a fat
middle-aged woman. The minor turned
out to be "so small you can't find her
for at least a minute of probing."
Peter finished with the fat lady, who
apart from pleasure gave him gonorrhea,
which he cured with penicillin.
The last thing they did before returning
to the States was to go up to the top of
the bell tower of the Metropolitan
Cathedral and sound the bells as if
“to call the Mexican people to a poetic
insurrection”. Nobody paid any attention.
Jack Kerouac visited Mexico twice
again. Once in 1957, just when the
FEATURE ■ MCM
great earthquake brought the Angel
of Independence to the ground.
He was in his hotel at the moment
and wrote: "The hotel room is rocking
like a ship and I’m under the bed
to protect myself against falling ceilings.
The entire apartment building across
the street from the post office on
Obregón Street is falling and killing
everybody".The truth is that the earthquake
only killed 70 people.
The last time Kerouac visited Mexico,
now as an important and famous writer,
was in June 1961; and as on his first
visit, eleven years earlier, he arrived
at the apartment on Cerrada de Medellín
35, closing the circle of his travels
to the southern country. The only thing
that happened to him on that trip, apart
from writing a few texts, was that
several young Mexicans from Colonia
Roma, who clearly did not know
he was a writer, invited him for a few
drinks at their house, then stole his razor
blade, his Buddhist rosary, his flashlight,
his bag, and when they were about to
take his overcoat, Jack implored them
to leave it since it was a present from
his mother. The guys just laughed and
took it all. Jack never returned to
“the hot land of desert rats and tequila”,
as he called Mexico. He died of alcohol
congestion eight years later. He was
47 years old and already an icon of
the counterculture youth of the Sixties.
El autor y William Burroughs practican su puntería en Lawrence, Kansas, EEUU.
The author and William Burroughs target-shooting in Lawrence, Kansas, USA.
Siete