She picked me up one autumn evening in the Wien Reference Room of Columbia’s Butler Library. The year was 1940. I was beavering away at an essay for which, after a momentary glance at what I’d done (not much), she provided the thesis statement that was eluding me, succinctly formulated, even a little provocative, ready to be placed at the head of my shaky introduction, which she then revised with my pen. I asked her if she’d tutor me and she made me her lover.
“She” was Joan Adams Vollmer, a sophomore at Barnard College and future common-law wife of William S. Burroughs, killed by his .38 caliber during a drunken game of William Tell eleven years later. “I” was a Columbia freshman teetering on the cusp of a world hitherto only imagined while reading naughty pulp novels from my father’s basement stash in leafy Brooklyn Heights.
Joan looked nothing like the ideal of womanhood pictured in my post-adolescent mind’s eye, which I later realized had been assembled from the lingerie sections of store catalogues. Her face was heart-shaped, narrowing to a delicately-clefted chin, though the Benzedrine would later take its toll. Her body was nothing special, by which I mean not Lana Turner special, but, combined with everything else, it was still pretty nice, especially to a kid like me, raised on puritanism and expedience.
“Why me?” I asked later at a diner on Amsterdam Avenue.
“I read your mind. What do you know about the Mayans?”
“Were they, like, ancient Mexicans?”
“Pre-Columbian.”
“Oh?”
“The Mayans were telepathic. At least, their high priests were. If they could do it, why not us?”
“Because we’re not pre-Columbian?”
“Oh, we’re not even pre-med, but why not us?”
Mayan telepathy was only one of her interests, which included Proust, Wilhelm Reich, especially the sex stuff, and the Daily News. Maybe it was just her eyes, but I could never rid myself of the notion that maybe she really was telepathic.
“Are you reading my mind right now?”
“Of course. Maybe he is too,” she said, nodding towards a nearby table.
The he in question was a dandyish young-old sort who, nattily dressed in three-piece suit and tie, hair brilliantined to a fault under a gray fedora, sat facing away from us.
I was at a loss, but decided to play along, as is my wont when confused, “Who’s he?”
“A future development named Bill.”
She had a distinct air of prerogative about her, as if laying claim to whatever happened to fall under her calm, deliberate gaze. Even sitting in that diner on Amsterdam Avenue, nursing my root-beer float and receiving God knows what telepathic signals from this Mayan goddess in a cardigan and scarf, I yearned to be hers.
“Was he at the Butler too?” I asked.
“Of course.”
Then I did something I thought very clever. I got up and walked right past him to the cash register and took some mints. Then I walked back to our table, giving Mr. Bill a quick once over. He was taller than average, slim of build and patrician in his air, if somewhat dead in the eyes. Yet he had the look of a man with a very full inner life, his dead eyes never leaving me as I stomped by like some clodhopper from Campbell’s Corners.
All the while, she was regarding me with droll amusement. Egos being what they are, it was awhile before I could acknowledge that it was for this very quality of ineptitude that she kept me around, like one of those idiotically charming cats who are always misjudging their leaps.
“What’s your take, Mr. Private Eye,” she said as I pulled out my chair with a loud scraping honk and sat down as heavily as a fall-down drunk.
When I said he seemed like a very troubled individual she laughed in my face, but I thought I sensed the merest reaction in him, vibrating about that emphatically averted profile like summer heat on blacktop.
“Now you’ve got him agitated.”
“How would you even know?”
“I just do.”
Which was approximately where we’d begun this conversation, so in the spirit of circularity I said, “Are you reading his mind too?”
“Oh no. He’s an enigma wrapped in a fedora.”
This was strange new country for me. I felt as if I could slip at any moment on my swinging rope bridge and plunge into the raging equatorial river below. Then, out of the goodness of her heart, she said, “Tell me about yourself.”
So I went over the main points. A mostly idyllic upbringing in leafy Brooklyn Heights and the basement cache of naughty pulp novels. My father an upstanding citizen, my mother his wife. I even told her about my glory days in the high-school drama club and my bohemian aspirations.
“I guess you’ll want me to take you through the Village,” she said.
“Would you?”
“Oh sure, but Times Square is where you want to be when you hit rock bottom.”
“Lead me to it.”
She would get this certain expression on her face when she was amused, her cupid’s-bow lips slightly open, her eyes imparting wonder, except it was never clear what she was thinking, just that she was amused. I’ll take it, I thought.
On our way out, she made sure to pay the tab herself and I was just relieved that Dr. Caligari’s Cabinet over there hadn’t sprung for it. Her room-mate, a striking brunette named Edie who dressed like a dock worker, ignored us as we silently passed her in the hallway of a nearby apartment they shared in Morningside Heights. What followed was the culmination of years of manual preparation.
Afterwards, as Joan slept, I stood at the window by her bed, gazing down at the dark street below. And there he was, a future development named Bill, looking up under a streetlamp with an expression of pure kismet.
Jim Mulvihill is a Canadian citizen and former academic, with interests ranging from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf—and, of course, the Beats. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.