A/N: This is a story I wrote for my Literature class following our discussion of On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It attempts to utilize stylistic elements similar to Kerouac's and creates the narrative of a character who is not explored within the novel: Joan Adams, the wife of Bill Burroughs. I used the original scroll text as my source, so if you've read the book, you might recognize her instead as Jane, the wife of Old Bull Lee.
Journey into Worlds
The Joan Adams Story
I first met Bill not long after I turned eighteen and started living in the thick of the city, amidst all the artists and drug traffickers and actresses and so-called entrepreneurs. Not the American city though but the city of Europe, the city of desire, love, the romantic dreams of the aspiring writer: Paris.
I spent two years—an eternity—waiting on the French middle-class in their soft dresses and soft gazes, serving delicate flakes of dough filled with smooth colored creams to elicit the most inaudible of sighs from the flowery women sitting straight-spined in the dainty wrought-iron chairs of the sidewalk café—the kind you only see on a brochure for French travel agencies.
And one day, Bill came. He was wearing the most conspicuous of American attire consisting of hole-riddled denims and a red and black plaid shirt short of sleeves and the biggest smile I had ever seen on such a small face as his. He plopped himself down on one of the spindly chairs, grinning widely at his blatant interruption of the blandly constant sidewalk scenery. Not knowing why, I felt somehow drawn towards him, towards the energy that he exuded. We talked, at first in brief, flirtatious etudes beginning with "bonjour" and ending with "au revoir."
He came every week, then every day, hardly ever ordered anything but the occasional coffee and croissant. I got the impression that he didn't have much money, and the money he did have he blew nightly on liquor and drugs. At the time, I wasn't one for the night life of Paris, or New York, or any place, really. Instead I stayed in my apartment and devoured books. I said au revoir to Bill every evening at 5, leaving him still grinning, tilting backwards and making the goofiest picture in the spindly black chair on the sidewalk.
Not until a month after we first met did he ask me to come out with him at night. I wonder why he waited so long (knowing now what sort of things he does in the dark) but I think it's the energy I gave off, so opposite to his, that made him play his game a little differently than before. "Hé," he said—I had taught him the French word for "hey"—"I'm gonna take you somewhere tonight." "Where?" "Just come with me." I went.
We got in a car with one of his Parisian friends, a dark man named Jean with a thin curly mustache who had a thick Catalan accent and insisted on calling Bill "Guillaume". He drove wildly through the downtown streets, swerving around taxis and crossing the white line that ran along the right tire, jabbering without pause about something that had happened to him that day, I'm not sure what, I never did find out. After hurtling through the city for a solid five minutes, we stopped outside a nightclub called Le Caveau de la Huchette. Jean threw us out of the car and sped off to pick up others, probably girls, to bring back.
Bill took me inside to a low-lit room where couples were swaying ass to balls against each other and everyone else while an American jazz group played on stage. Of course, I thought. I'm in France at a French jazz club and they bring in Americans to play the music. But Bill didn't seem to care. His eyes were closed and he swayed by himself, the music seeping into his pores and flowing through his veins. When he looked at me, I could see something within in the depths of his eyes staring underneath the glazed expression. He pulled my body flush against his and it was like my skin was covered with a million pinpricks of light and I was breathing him into myself, inhaling his soul and exhaling mine.
When the music stopped, I found myself blinking into reality, and I cried for a return to transcendence within the saxophone's mellow voice. Bill took out a tiny plastic tube, about as long as his pinky finger and took a whiff. He offered me some, saying it would help until the music started again. Starving to find that feeling again, I inhaled through the tube, and the stars came back. Bill opened up the tube and took out a strip of paper covered in powder, crumpled it into a ball, and ate it.
I didn't find this strange, or anything, for that matter, because I knew that anything that could bring back that sensation of floating outside your body and plunging deep inside another one, it would be worth anything.
I took him back to my apartment (I didn't know where he lived, didn't know if he lived anywhere, didn't want to know) and we made love through the night. Every night after that, we went through our same routines: I worked at the café, he leaned back in his spindly black chair on the sidewalk, and at 5PM, we hopped around the jazz clubs of Paris and soared through the universes, each night ending in my bed.
Soon, I stopped going to work, never wanting to put an end to the euphoria of the night. It wasn't long before a whiff wasn't enough for me, the universe wasn't as big as they used to be anymore, and I took more. Bill did other things, had other little bottles and big bottles, smoking and drinking anything under the moon, but I only wanted the stars. I started taking the little strips of paper out of the tubes and eating them when I couldn't inhale the benzedrine fast enough.
When Bill first asked me for money, I gave it without asking. I had no idea where he got any money from, he didn't work, never did anything during the day but sit at the café before and now lie in bed in a euphoric stupor with me, talking about nothing and everything, speaking worlds into being. I listened to see the shifts in reality before my eyes with every word but couldn't interject, couldn't physically push any of my possessions into the nonexistent crevices of his web of sensations spreading thin like the surface of a soap bubble surrounding the cosmos and reflecting spectra of thought colors across the iridescent film.
And when he finally got tired, only then could I open my mouth and pour forth my own seas and lands and stars and skies, and it was my own but at the same time, it was his too. But drugs cost money, and when I ran out, so would our illusive reality.
When we ran out and couldn't get anymore, my body slowly woke up from its stupor, as if each particle were the sharp end of a pencil that had been dulled down to the wood, only we didn't have a sharpener and so I was flat and scratched across the paper without making a mark. And at the same time, a dull ache rose inside me, inside my core, that place you can't reach without closing your eyes and listening to it, that place where you can't lie to yourself. I started to ache from the inside, like a woman on her monthly, walking around doubled over and groaning, hearing Bill scream fuck with every spasmodic convulsion.
So we ran away. Traveled to Spain to North Africa to Yugoslavia to Berlin to Algiers to Athens to Istanbul to England to Chicago to New York to New Orleans. Everything was different, but at the same time, it wasn't. Bill and I stayed in the same spot while the scenery changed around us, as though we were standing in the middle of a carousel that had all the bouncing bejeweled horses going round and round and round so that it feels like you're moving but really everything's just whirling on around you. And when the carousel stopped, I got off dizzy, married with two kids in a swamp in Louisiana.