Joan

“Ex-junkie gun loving novelist, pensive in a black bow-tie gazes at his clasped hands. He looks like a church deacon, a riverboat gambler, a soft palmed widow strangling con-artist.”

Adrian Searle, describing a photograph of William. S. Burroughs by Robert Mapplethorpe.

In a long room in Philadelphia, there are photographs on the wall. The silver makes the blacks blacker and the whites whiter. When I was sixteen, I was given a worn copy of a book and I read it and it changed me, one molecule at a time, and made me into something different. I can’t exactly put my finger on how it happened or why but maybe that book made me into who I wanted to be after I read it. The person that I wanted to be at the time?

And somehow that Changed Me makes it to Philadelphia in the winter and I stop in front of this particular picture.

In the photographs of him that I’d seen before, he always looked like an old man. It was at odds with the life that I know that he led, but maybe Old Bill cheated…where Dorian Grey had a picture of him that aged, maybe, somewhere, there was a photograph of William Burroughs in an attic that lived a good and quiet life for him in his absence?

Yeah, maybe.

It’s cold in the city but in here it’s too warm and I sway quietly on the balls of your feet while I look at the photograph and don’t think a lot of anything at all. I let my mind go blank. I didn’t hear her come up behind me because, if I’m listening to anything at all it’s the distant murmur of my friends’ talking because the last thing that I want is to be left here, in this strange gallery and this strange city. I’m chewing on the blue plastic chip that they gave me so that I could eventually claim your coat, which I’ll need. It’s cold.

“That’s a bad habit.”

I look at her like it’s none of her business, but I take the chip, the piece of blue plastic, out of my mouth too. It’s damp and you hold it in my hand.

“Sorry.”

She’s a little woman, lumpen, black coat, black hair. She’s one of those women who seem possessed of a huge and ancient sadness, a sadness that centres as an absence in the eyes. I feel like I might have seen her before; I don’t know her, but there’s that sort of glancing familiarity that comes with brushing past someone in a crowded corridor at roughly the same time every day for a week or so.

“He looks so peaceful.” I hate small talk. I’m not good at it.

“He looks old,” she says. “And sad.”

I am twenty two years old. At this age, anything older than your parents is a flat line, but you’ll learn.

“He was young once,” she says, her dark eyes pinpricks, fixed on Bill’s white hands. “We were young together. It was Allen’s fault, though.”

And now I remember where I saw her. Tucked into a reader which I took out of the library once, little more than an appendix, a footnote, a blurry photograph of a woman in her twenties, the same age as I am now, but looking much older, her pockets full of papers, her eyes closed against the sun. The picture was blurred by the shake of someone’s hand. She’s blurred now by how quickly I look away and then look back again.

“I know who you are.” I can’t help it. I blurt it out, and then it’s said and can’t be taken back. She doesn’t look at me, so I stare, for a moment. Either I’ve finally gone out of my mind, or something miraculous is happening. It’s always difficult to tell in these situations. Either she’s a ghost, or a figment, or she’s really there. Her name, I know now, is Joan.

“I read Junky when I was sixteen,” I say, trying to act as though nothing out of the ordinary has happened. “It made me want to be a writer, sort of.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. She looks older than twenty, but she did in the photograph too. It’s difficult to tell if she’s actually got older since 1951.

“For what?”

“Writers. They’re flawed…and they tell lies.”

I look at her. The first time I read about her death I was in the grip of hero worship and I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to believe that, at a party, Bill rested a glass on the top of her head and shot at it and missed, but did not miss her head. I didn’t want to believe that he was capable of doing that and walking away.

“You could have stopped it.” There I go, blurting things out again. “You could have. It was a stupid game. You didn’t have to…”

“You’re a baby,” she says, house mother of that sprawling slum, more important to them, for a while at least, than Joyce or Edie. “How can you possibly know how much things can hurt?”

I want to tell her, then…want to set her straight. I want to tell her about all of the things that have happened to me, and all of the things that can hurt and how, at twenty two, I am just now coming to the conclusion that sometimes your life can have too much life in it, but I’ve never been good at talking about those things, so I don’t.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” That’s all I say. That’s all I can say.

We stand there for a moment, her and me, me and the woman who held her own for a little while in that circle jerk, that boy’s club that, fifty years later, I’d still be trying to get into. It doesn’t really matter if she’s there or not.

“Don’t you think he looks sorry?” Personally, I would like to think that Bill was sorry for what he did. For a long time before a hopeless Californian stole my head in a way in which, maybe, it would never be stolen again, Bill was my favourite in the world. I want to think well of him.

“I don’t know,” she says and squints her empty eyes at him. “Well, Bill? Are ya?”

Bill doesn’t say anything. I almost expected that he might. I remember reading somewhere that, afterwards, Joan’s death kept him constantly terrified.

No way but to write myself out.

“His books changed my life.”

“He isn’t sorry,” she says, and shakes her head, once. “He isn’t sorry and I love him anyway.”

She’s silent then except for a barely breathed goddamnit. I want to put your arms around her or at least my hands on her, somewhere. I want to be a comfort but I’ve never been good at that, either. I’ve never had to be anybody’s mother. Unlike Joan in that photograph, I’ve had the luxury of never having to grow old before my time.

“He loved me,” she says. “But not hard enough and not for long. I lost him in a…” she moves her hands like I do when I can’t remember the exact words for what I want to say, “…Benzedrine dream, and I saw double, and, by the time I blinked and saw right again, the real him was already gone.”

Joan bends down in her black coat with it’s full pockets, slightly blurry, and sets something on the gently sloping floor, off-centre under the photograph, which is perfectly aligned. From the door, I’m being called and I have to go – there’s a dinner and beer and a train to catch. This is a journey which I had to promise yourself. Sometimes, I’m just dying to move.

“He said that it was an accident,” I say.

Joan smiles, and it’s not the tight lipped smile that she’s showing in that one photograph I’ve seen of her. It’s broad, wide open, and she looks, if not twenty two, then no older than thirty-seven.

“In the magical universe, there are no coincidences and there are no accidents…” she says.

“Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen,” I say. And I think that I understand.

And then she’s gone, as these things are.

And the glass doesn’t break this time either.