Jack was over by the door, Neal was driving, and I was in the middle. I was leaning toward Jack, and Jack had his arm around me, and he was saying in this low, mystery-story voice: “And, after he stabbed him, Lucien looked at the bloody knife…” And he went through the whole thing, one gory detail after the next. I mean, he really did it vividly! He had me sitting there on the edge of my seat, and of course he knew it. And Neal was giggling with him—like a conspirator with him. They were acting like they were gonna do just those very things to me—or like somebody was gonna jump up behind me at any second. That’s just exactly how I felt. Trees were overhanging the road, and it was black night all around us. It was really a scary scene, and listening to him and knowing that it was all true made me even more frightened. He was talking in this silly low voice: “And then… And then!”—building up to bigger and bigger crescendos. He was doing his best to torture me, but I loved every minute of it.
It was a fantastic trip down to New Orleans; and on that last part of the trip, it was just Neal, Jack, and me. Al had only come part of the way with us out of New York. We had gotten stopped by police when Al was speeding, somewhere in Virginia. Al offered to spend a night in jail, to keep Neal from having to pay the fine, but the cops made Neal pay it. We were lucky we all didn’t end up in jail. We were carrying a little pot, but I had stuffed it down my pants, and everything would have been fine, except that when the police questioned us, Neal’s story didn’t match mine. I was eighteen at the time, but I looked very young, younger than eighteen. It was this small Southern town, and you know how they are, when they sense something that might possibly be “immoral.” They decided they would question me by myself, away from the others. They asked me what my name was and what I was doing and where we were going, and I told them automatically I was Neal’s wife.
Well, in the meantime, Neal had gotten out of the car because he was furious that they had pulled us over. These kind of things—anything like that, that interrupted the trip—used to just make Neal insane! He was outside the car, just screaming and ranting. Well, when they asked him what he was doing, he tells them that he’s going back to California to his wife—meaning Carolyn. To his wife! Which he thought sounded better, because there were two other men in the car. I could have been with one of them. Well, you know, the stories didn’t jibe, and then I had to go through the whole thing of explaining how I’m not his wife now, but I used to be his wife—we just got an annulment a few months ago, and blah blah blah blah!
So we all set out together again, but in Florida we needed money, so Al set to work washing dishes. For some reason, Al must have chosen to stay over there for a night. Al joined us a day later at Burroughs’s place, where he was supposed to meet up with Helen.
William Burroughs and Alan Ansen acting out a routine, Tangier, 1957. (Photo by Allen Ginsberg; courtesy of Allen Ginsberg Estate.)
People have talked about how weird Burroughs’s household was, with him shooting lizards and Benzedrine inhalers for target practice, and so on, but it didn’t seem particularly weird to me. Bill, for the most part, just sat in one spot. I never saw him hardly when he wasn’t sitting in his rocking chair with a newspaper in front of him. I mean, I don’t care whether if you got up at four in the morning, or it was eight o’clock in the morning or eight o’clock at night, there he sat! He’d sit there hunched over, as if he was absorbed in his newspaper. He presented the image of a quiet, thoughtful sort of person. He didn’t seem unusual to me. Because, to be honest with you, by this time I had met a lot of strange people! And when you grow up meeting different sorts of people like I had, you don’t really find people that strange anymore—especially as you’re growing older. I mean, probably if I had met someone besides Neal when I was fifteen, and my life had gone a whole different way, things like that might have shocked the hell out of me. A lot of the different things that happened to me might have seemed shocking to another person. But, let me tell you, meeting Neal at such a young age was an education in itself!
Neal, of course, has been portrayed as a complete outlaw. And yet at the same time, Neal had really strict rules for himself. For example, with Carolyn, when he got her pregnant, he felt he had to marry her. The same thing happened a year later with Diana Hansen, whom he also married. When he got them pregnant, he felt he couldn’t just leave them. No one would ever have believed that Neal had such a moral code—that he would feel that kind of responsibility to a woman—because he gave such an impression of not caring about anything like that. He really and truly cared a great deal about everyone.