"His relation with his wife was one of the strangest: they talked till late at night; Bull (really Burroughs) liked to to hold the floor, he went right on in his dreary, monotonous voice, she tried to break in, she never could; at dawn he got tired and and then Jane (really Joan) talked and he listened, snuffing and going thfump down his nose. She loved the man madly, but in a delirious way of some kind; there was never any mooching or mincing around, just talk and a very deep companionship that none of us would ever be able to fathom. Something curiously unsympathetic and cold between them was really a form of humor by which they communicated their own set of subtle vibrations. Love is all. Jane was never more than ten feet away from Bull and never missed a word he said." -Kerouac (From On The Road)
Joan Vollmer was an attractive, cynical, and daring young woman in her early twenties, from upstate New York. With a little matchmaking form Ginsberg and perhaps Kerouac, Vollmer and Burroughs had become intellectually and emotionally linked,,a dn their relationship graduated to sex by the spring of 1945. Eyewitnesses speak of the uncanny contact of their two "keen intelligence"; when Burroughs and Vollmer experimented with telepathic games, the results were eerie. The affair with Joan may also have been the first time Burroughs could feel self-assured with a woman.
By the summer of 1945, Burroughs was living with Vollmer and her one-year-old daughter, Julie, in their apartment on West 115th Street.
By the fall of 1945, William Burroughs and Joan Vollmer were involved with a frenetic Benzedrine-fueled sene around Times Square and the Village, in the course of which Vollmer began to exhibit sidturbing symptoms of dissociati9on and hallucination. Her husband, Paul Adams, came home on leave from the service and, disgusted by her condition, divorced her.
Burroughs was now living with Joan Vollmer and scoring for morphine on the Upper West Side. In April 1946, Burroughs was arrested for obtaining narcotics with a forged prescription. Joan Vollmer asked his erstwhile psychiatrist, Dr. ?Wolberg, to signa surety bond for his release.
Around this time [Burrough and Kells Elvins] made a car trip to Mexico, where Burroughs finally got a Mexican divorce from Illse Klapper.
Within a few months, Vollmer suffered a breakdown and was picked up by the police as she sat on the sidewalk, incoherent, her little daughter Julie next to her. She was hospitalized in Bellevue, and Burroughs responded at once, going to New York to gain her release. Now he asked her to marry him, and althought he marriage was never formalized, Burroughs always believed taht their only child was concieved in a New York hotel room that October. Burroughs brought Vollmer and her daughter back with him to Pharr, and after a Christmas visit to his parents in St. Louis, the young couple began to look for a remote area in eastern Texas where Burroughs could grow a cash crop of marijuana. They finally settled in New Waverly, near Houston and not far from Huntswille, where Elvins had worked in the state prison. Vollmer promptly sent word to New York for Huncke to come down and be their "farmhand."
While Vollmer carried her child and Burroughs shot dope in his orgone accumulator and read Wilhelm Reich and Mayan anthropology, Huncke visited Houston for drugsand cultivated their pot patch. He brought back cases of Benzedrine inhalers for Vollmer, and despite her pregnancy, she used them eagerly. In New York she had hallucinated violent scenes in an adjacent apartment; Huncke later wrote a vignette of Vollmer at the farm, late at night under a full moon, distractedly scraping the little skinks and lizards off the tres by the house.
But with the departure of junk came the return of libido,a dn after six years with Vollmer--who was visibily disintegrating under the accumulated damage of Benzedrine and now the all-day tequila, and suffering a recurrence of her childhood poliomyelitis--Burroughs was hungering to connect with a young American boy.
Vollmer's condition, meanwhile, as worsening. She felt abandoned, and her tequila intake climbed. For a long time hsehad tolerated Burroughs' pursuit of boys, ad he had never made any secret of his essential homosexuality. But she was visibly declining, her hair falling out, her sllight limp becoming more pronounced, her wistful features swelling with alcohol; she could scarcely care for the children. Out of her own despair, or her mounting disappoinment with Burroughs, she had begun to mock him in front of their friends, deliberately humiliating and verbally emasculating him when he would launch into one of his grandoise tales.
On September 6, 1951, Burroughs had made arrangements to meet someone about selling a gun at the apartment of John Healy, an American who was part of the Bounty. Vollmer was with Burroughs, and Healy was at work downstairs, in the bar. [Burroughs] told them about his plan to move his family to South America to live off the land, killing and eating the plentiful wild boars. Joan said that if Bill was their hunter, they'd starve to death. Burroughs took the bait, and dared her to "show the boys what kind of a shot old Bill is"--to put a glass on her head, for him to shoot it off, a la William Tell. She put the glass on her head, turned a little sideways, giggled and smiled, and said, "I can't look; you know I can't stand the sight of blood...."
Time stood still for the two drunken boys as the watched the skinny older man rause his pistol, too proud or too ashamed to back down, and aim at the glass on his wife's head. He fired before they sould raise any protest--but he missed, and Vollmer's head jerked back, then slowly tilted forward onto her chest, bright red cranial blood oozing from the wound. In the ensuing silence, Marker said, "I think your bullet has hit her, Bill," and Burroughs moved to his wife's chair and took her in his arms, calling her name disconsolately. Her drinking glass lay unbroken on the floor.
Joan Vollmer Burroughs breathed her last at the nearby Red Cross station in Colonia Roma, while Burroughs waited outside.
A drunken night in my house with a
boy, San Francisco: I lay asleep.
darkness:
I went back to Mexico City
and saw Joan Burroughs leaning
forward in a garden chair, arms
on her knees. She studied me with
clear eyes and downcast smile, her
face restored to a fine beauty
tequila and salt had made strange
before the bullet in her brow.
We talked of life since then.
Well, what's Burroughs doing now?
Bill on Earth, he's in North Africa.
Oh, and Kerouac still jumps
with the same beat genius as before,
notebooks filled with Buddha.
I hope he makes it, she laughed.
Is Huncke still in the can? No,
last time I saw him on Times Square.
And how is Kenney? Married, drunk
and golden in the East. You? New
loves in the West-
Then I knew
she was a dream: and questioned her
--Joan, what kind of knowledge have
the dead? can you still love
your mortal acquaintances?
What do you remember of us?
She faded in front of me--The next instant
I saw her rain-stained tombstone
rear an illegible epitaph
under the gnarled branch of a small
tree in the wild grass
of an unvisited garden in Mexico.
-Allen Ginsberg