CHICAGO CALLING: WILLIAM S BURROUGHS IN THE WINDY CITY (PART 2)

MURPHY’S LAWLESS

“I first read You Can’t Win in 1926, in an edition bound in red cardboard. Stultified and confined by middle class St. Louis mores, I was fascinated by this glimpse into an underworld of seedy rooming-houses, pool parlors, cat houses and opium dens, of bull pens and cat burglars and hobo jungles. I learned about the Johnson Family of good bums and thieves, with a code of conduct that made more sense to me than the arbitrary, hypocritical rules that were taken for granted a being “right” by my peers.”

The above William S Burroughs quote, from an introduction he did for a reprint of You Can’t Win by Jack Black, a 1926 book about the criminal classes, shows why the trip the man made in 1942 to Chicago, the second of his two formative experiences there, was so important to him. After his very early reading of the Good Red Book (as he refers to it in the intro, giving an idea of its Biblical significance to him), Burroughs lived by its hoodlum dictums for the rest of his life, splitting the world into ‘Johnsons’ (i.e. good people, quite unlike the aforementioned child-speech-mangling Wendell A Johnson) and ‘shits’ (i.e. – well, you get the idea). You can understand how a book about lowlife-jive dive-living would appeal to a dreamy affected disaffected boy from a cloistered, stuffy unemotional environment like the one Burroughs came from; after all, other societal stations always look better than the ones we’re at, and the ones on top want to vicariously live through and be like the ones on bottom want to be vicariously like the ones on top, at least money-wise.

Chicago was Burroughs’ first deliberate attempt to live outside his past privileged position. Upon being discharged from the army in September 1942, he moved back to the place that had already deeply branded itself on his impressionable brain to allow it to expand his mental and life horizons even more. He stayed at Mrs. Hattie Murphy’s rooming house at 4144 N. Kenmore and lived amongst a drunken osteopath on the spirits, drifters and grifters and gamblers and thieves and young war veterans, rolling like a pig in working class shit and slumming it with ‘Johnson’ bum-scum. His view of the lower classes was, of course, incredibly naïve and somewhat condescending, ascribing an impure purity to them that of course they do not possess.     

But hey, it certainly beat being a deliveryman for mater and pater.

On Saturday, April 11, 2009, I put on my RE/Search Burroughs tee-shirt and took a trip to the N. Kenmore area to photograph Burroughs’ old digs. To get the address I went to the Harold Washington Library’s microfiche section a few weeks before and waded through old scratchy sometimes-barely-legible phone books. By a process of elimination I found, under ‘furnished rooms,’ the above name and address and later had it independently confirmed by top Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris. So it was definitely the right place. Though I couldn’t find a classified ad for this exact address, other buildings in the same street show rooms as being $4 a week at this time period, or $5 with a private bathroom.

I have to say, though, that the place must have moved up in the world since El Hombre Invisible stayed there 67 years ago, because the quiet middle class residential area I found (oddly a single street across from a place I had given a reading of my own stuff at the night before, not knowing I would be back that way far sooner than I ever expected) was pretty far from seedy and sleazy and edgy. N. Kenmore (pictured here) is now a mishmash of old and new tenement buildings, tree-lined, speedbump-landmined, and quiet as the graveyard round the corner. And as for 4144 N. Kenmore itself, well…

I was all excited when I pulled up to the 40s-looking building I assumed was it, but on closer inspection the numbers only went up to 4142. They then jumped to 4150, also pictured here, a brand new construction of 23 (that number Burroughs hated and had a superstitious fear of) 2-and-3-bedroom expensive condos.

At first I assumed I had made a mistake and went round the back of El-train-backed 4142 to see if I could maybe find a smaller hidden building round the back or something to account for the numerical gap. No such luck. I hesitantly climbed a set of wooden stairs a couple of floors on hearing voices above me, hoping to find the desired address somehow. I knocked on a door and a pleasant young couple told me that 4142 was nowhere round here. The woman told me she was on the board for the building and that the new building next door, 4150, had been constructed on a lot with no foundation on it, so there couldn’t have been a building there before. But this didn’t make much sense, because why would the numbering jump like that, and why would there be such an awkward juxtaposing of old and new construction? The only conclusion I could unfortunately construct was that, unless there was a typo in the old phone book I had used to locate it, 4144 N. Kenmore, Burroughs’ old Chicago flophouse haunt…

      …quite simply no longer exists anymore, having unfortunately been torn down and built over.

Anyway. While WSB was living at the now-nonexistent residence, he undertook a series of jobs far beneath his stately station – guess he didn’t have a problem lowering himself if there was no chance he would be a grunt bearing the bullet-brunt raw end of the war on some European battlefront somewhere. He took a job in a factory as a bolt-mover, but couldn’t hack more than three brain-deadening days of that bollocks and bolted. Classified ads for factory workers during late 1942 give an idea why. The wages I saw offered during research varied from 45c-60c and hour (working for 50c, Burroughs would have had to work for more than two full inflation-adjusted-price weeks to pay for his Korzybski seminar series of 1939), with companies looking for ‘coloreds’ (there is an offensive and darkly humorous racial element to the ads that wouldn’t be tolerated for a second these days), ‘elderly’ and ‘draft exempt’ – at a stretch I would guess that William fit into the latter category of these seemingly frowned-upon elements of the early 1940s Chicago employment market.

He also signed on with Merritt Inc., a store detective agency that caught employees with their fingers in the till. Assuming the name is correct, I could find no mention of this company in the microfiche in the library or in online Chicago newspaper archives, but other store detective ads from the period say that ‘experience is necessary’ and lists of previous employers must be provided. With these criteria, I can only assume that Merritt thought that Burroughs seemed so upper crust that he would do a good job. Or maybe he greased a palm or two. Or maybe they were just desperate for workers. We’ll probably never know.

What we will and do know, however, is that the man’s next job after binning his defective detective one would resonate through his life and fiction eternally thereafter.

THE WORLD’S MOST LITERATE BUGKILLER

After his first few abortive real-life employment attempts in Chicago, William S Burroughs got  a job with A.J. Cohen, Exterminator, for $50 a week. This is, unfortunately, impossible to verify. I looked through the microfiche from the 1942 phone books, and searched online newspaper archives, but couldn’t turn up an exterminator company with this name. The only real clues I had were the supposed name of the company, and the bit at the start of the short story “Exterminator!” (from the 1973 short piece collection of the same name) which reads: “During the war I worked for A.J. Cohen Exterminators ground floor office dead-end street by the river. An old Jew with cold grey fish eyes and a cigar was the oldest of four brothers. Marv was the youngest wore windbreakers had three kids.” Not much to go on, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

There is no way to know if ‘A.J. Cohen’ was genuinely the name of the owner and business, though Burroughs does introduce a ‘Mrs. Murphy’ in the short story as a customer of the exterminator, so he obviously did use real names upon occasion. ‘A.J./AJ’ and ‘Marv’ may have been stock names he had (they both turn up in Naked Lunch and other works, though ‘international playboy and harmless practical joker’ AJ in NL agitates for the destruction of Israel, hardly something a Jew is wont to want to do), or maybe they genuinely were names he got from the exterminators he worked for. A.J. may also have been named after A.J. Connell, the founder of the Los Alamos Ranch School Burroughs attended from 1929-1932 as a precocious youth.

I tried contacting the Chicago Board of Health to see if they held any records, but was told that they had nothing on their computer database and that they had lost a lot of records in a bad flood in the 80s. I even tried sending out a spam email to a few Chicago exterminators asking if they could somehow shot-in-the-dark help, but received no replies; hadn’t really expected to anyway. Only thing I got was a return piece of spam email from one of the companies I contacted, so a big hearty heapin’ helpin’ of fuck you to –

Yeah right, like I’m going to give them free advertising.

So what it boils down to is I guess we’ll never know much more about the could-be Cohen exterminator (an uncomfortable Jewish-based irony is that searching for this word in early 1940s online newspaper archives brings up some horrible stories, for obvious reasons) brothers and their north Chicago-based cockroach-cooling company. But what we do know, however, is that Burroughs worked at the job for eight months, longer than any other employment he ever held, a cold middle class vermin terminator prowling the potholed tarmac of his north Chicago beat in a black Ford V-8, a model which puts in a cameo appearance at the start of Naked Lunch as an ‘oil-burner.'

(Contemporary note: a few years after my piece here was originally published, James Grauerholz, the executor of the Burroughs literary estate, sent me a PDF of a talk he had given on WSB in Chicago, unbeknownst to me, years before. He knew who Cohen was, so there is far more information available about the subject matter than I knew. I was just going by my own research, and am republishing this the way it was written in 2009)

The texterminator went round Chicago packing arsenic and fluoride and kerosene spray and pyrethrum powder and phosphorus paste, a narrow-eyed pest-death-drug-dealer. When he wasn’t wiping out rats and cockroaches and bedbugs and waterbugs, the literary wannabe-outlaw liked hanging around with the rodents in the hoodlum-slum-hood N. Kenmore, far under the frowning St. Louis radar of his disapproving headshaker parents. The bugdrug boogeyman image would become a central part of the Burroughs mythos in later decades, the narrow-eyed word-murderer killing old dead concepts and word meanings with his avant-garde literary exterminator examinations and experimentations.

 During a short period from 1942-1943, WSB was analyzed by Dr. Kurt Eissler. He recalls it briefly in Last Words:

      “Recall Doctor Kurt Eissler, M.D., now and again said something meant something. He said:

      “These intellectual Jews can do anything.”

      Which I was thinking at the time.

      He even said he thought I might be a Saint.

      “If you could enter into a warm human relationship with the therapist.”

      He’s got it. $10 an hour.

      Not fair. But what is fair?

      No, I do not shrink from the Jew shrink.

      It’s just –

      “He wasn’t able to help me.”

      Was he an observing Jew? And what was he observing?

      “How can this so-called ‘warm thing’ be manifest, when I talk and you don’t? Tell me your dreams, doctor.”

Eissler was born in Vienna in 1908 and knew Freud personally. He was Jewish, which may have explained his elevated view of intellectual Yiddish achievement, and moved to Chicago in 1938 to escape the Nazis. By 1942 he would have been 34 years old, only six years older than his celebrity-to-be patient himself. He had a special understanding of creativity, genius, and trauma, writing books on Freud (he founded the Freud Archives and was an ardent defender of the psychiatrist’s), Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Goethe, amongst others and other topics. He would have seemed almost uniquely qualified to read Burroughs’ confused young head, and the conversations they had would probably been fascinating, at least in places (wonder if Eissler ever remembered his young homosexual patient in later years and had any of his writings inspired by their encounters). Burroughs had studied medicine briefly in Vienna in the 1930s, so there would have been that point of intersection, and this may have been what initially attracted him to Eissler for analysis.

In 1993 records turned up from Burroughs’ month-long 1940 psychiatric experiences in the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York. These records then seemingly disappeared along with the writer who discovered them, but made references to hypno-and-narco-analysis (he did a fair bit of freelance narco analysis himself in later life) in which the young scribe would do ‘routines’ (maybe having fun at the shrink’s expense) and become a Chinese peasant on the Yangtze River (JG Ballard would have been interested in that delusion; WSB may have gotten this place in his mind from when his mother had visited there in 1940 to accept a flower arranging award for her Coca-Cola volumes), or a redneck farmer in Texas (a precursor of his time there in 1946-1949), or a Hungarian dowager duchess. Might have thought being the Queen of Hungary might have been a more appropriate royal assignation, as Burroughs visited that country and had fun in a homosexual hotel called the King of Hungary in Budapest in the late 1930s, but that hardly matters. What these records may do is give us a clue as to what Eissler and his patient may have discussed.

Probably inspired by the illegal activities of his new playmates Burroughs, who kept a gun in a sock in his closet, concocted some Boy’s Own-style wackjob-jackpot crackpot schemes and scams to get some cash and elevate (well, lower) him into the criminal underclass. He wanted to blow up a Brink’s truck over a manhole (very Freudian!) with a bomb. Then he got the idea of holding up a Turkish bath he frequented (maybe it was the idea all those naked men at gunpoint that got him hot), but threw a few back in a bar to get Dutch courage for his robbery on the day and ended up turning up after the days takings had been taken away (maybe by the Brink’s truck he failed to blow up – we can but hope).

You can’t win. 

Just ask Jack Black. 

But underneath it all, Burroughs sadly knew he was a soft wee middle class boy playing at being a hard man. As he ruefully truthfully noted decades later in the 1995 volume My Education: A Book of Dreams: “My criminal activities (minimal to be sure) were as hopelessly inept as my efforts to hold a job in an advertising agency or any other regular job.” Interesting that he equated being a criminal with work (he had no affinity for). He knew he was fated to be an Eternal Outsider, not fitting in with the seedy underworld any more than he fit in with the St. Louis WASP elites he was alienated from and hated so much. As he said in the same volume: “I have never felt close to any cause or people, so I envy from a distance of incomprehension those who speak of ‘my people.’”

Two friends visited Burroughs in Chicago in the fall of 1942 from St. Louis, 17-year-old Lucien Carr and 31-year-old David Kammerer. The latter, of course, would be murdered by the former in a bizarre unrequited homosexual love feud in 1944, forming the basis for the writing of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. The jokey high-spirited duo got Burroughs kicked out of Mrs. Murphy’s dive-digs in 1943 for pissing out the window and tearing up a Gideon Bible (which would not have gone down well with the landlady if she was a good Catholic, as many Irish are). After a failed suicide attempt (or an attempt to get 4-F draft exemption), Carr was taken by his mother back to New York, with Burroughs and Kammerer soon following. It was an inglorious end to an informative formative time in Burroughs’ life, in a city he never forgot as a place that gave embryonic form to several recurring threads and themes – possession, Egyptology, multiple word meanings – he would carry with him for the rest of his life, for better or for worse or perverse.

END