Author: Unknown
Published on: 05/01/2025 | 00:00:00
AI Summary:
William S Burroughs evaded gun and drug charges in the United States by bringing his family to Mexico where he planned to study while waiting out the statute of limitations on his crimes. Two years later, he was once again deep in the grip of heroin and prone to violent, pistol-waving outbursts. His wife, Joan Vollmer, was lost in depression, illness and alcoholism, driven to deterioration by her own demons and the rigours of her Burroughs and Vollmer arrived in the Roma district of Mexico City in 1949. The colonia was much as it is today: an upscale neighbourhood popular among visitors and expats. In fact, he drank constantly, relapsed into the heroin habit he had been grappling with for a decade. Vollmer and Burroughs had struck up their relationship four years earlier in New York City. Vollmer was known for her sharp intellect and rhetorical skill, and helped to hone the Beats’ conceptual framework via long nights of Benzedrine-fueled conversation and art critique. Burroughs and Vollmer were on the lam from their drug and gun possession charges in New Orleans with children in tow. By the time they arrived in Mexico, they had kicked drugs in favour of a relentless drinking habit. They wasted much of their time in the notorious boozing hub of Bounty Bar. One witness reported that Vollmer was very drunk on ginebre and limonada. Then he extracted from his travel bag a Czech-made “Star”.380 pistol. “Let me show the boys what a great shot old Bill is.” “So she did,” Woods said. A hole appeared in Vollmer’s temple and she slumped over. Authorities buried Vollmer in a cemetery called Panteon Americano on the edge of town. In 1990, a posted notice called for her family to pay the long overdue fees associated with her internment, to no avail. So in 1993, Vollmer’s remains were exhumed and placed among the unmarked funerary nichos (display boxes) for the indigent. Vollmer’s shooting and the writing were, for Burroughs at least, two sides of a coin. It wasn’t always his intention to fuse the death to his work. There were those, like Hal Chase, who distance themselves from Vollmer. American tradition Like many Americans, Burroughs’ gun fixation was prompted by a combined sense of obligation and paranoia. Today the vast majority of American gun owners arm themselves for purported personal protection. In Mexico, thousands of femicides occur each year, impunity rates for violence against women are frighteningly high. Opioid addiction has now reached endemic proportions in the US. In the 1990s, heroin and its junk derivatives were primarily an underground scene with limited reach and effect. Since OxyContin mainstreamed opioids around the turn of the millennium, overdose deaths have skyrocketed to more than 80,000 per year. But that would never happen because “they don’t want anyone to kick” Burroughs’ work is widely appreciated for its hallucinatory prose and revolutionary form. It is easy to read Naked Lunch and enjoy losing oneself in its madness. But when one visits Panteon Americano and sees Joan Vollmer’s lone name amid dozens of unmarked stones.
Original: 2931 words
Summary: 542 words
Percent reduction: 81.51%
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