Queens Plaza
“Stay away from Queens Plaza, son…. Evil spot haunted by dicks scream for dope fiend lover…. Too many levels…. Heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia… like burning lions…”
The New York of Naked Lunch is, like the homegrown films of Woody Allen, a Manhattanized vision of the city. In addition to Manhattan, there are in fact four other boroughs that make up New York City. Staten Island doesn’t appear in Naked Lunch at all. The Bronx appears not as a place but as a “noise signifying derision,” which is how the dictionary describes the spitty sound of a Bronx cheer. Brooklyn makes several casual appearances in Burroughs’ masterwork — “bestial American sailors in Brooklyn” kick out the teeth of Leif the Unlucky, and Salvador Hassan O’Leary travels “with a character known to the Brooklyn police as Blubber Wilson, who hustled his goof ball money shaking down fetishists in shoe stores.” The final borough, Queens, is where Jack Kerouac lived with his mother from 1943 to 1954. Surely Burroughs visited a few times, but in Naked Lunch the area appears as a place to stay away from — advice still heeded by most tourists for the simple reason that there are comparatively few attractions there.
Just across the river from Manhattan, Queens Plaza hardly lies in the heart of Queens. However, it is undeniably one of the nerve centers of the borough, a place where highways, bus lines, and half a dozen subways intersect. Like many transit hubs, it is an area visibly down at the heels. Though some corporations and art galleries have made attempts at gentrification, Queens Plaza is still dominated by noisy roadways, rusty elevated train tracks, dingy warehouses, empty lots, donut shops, the occasional strip bar, and the nearby Rikers Island jail. Not long ago the New York Times wrote
Queens Plaza feels tired, and for decades it seemed defeated. Prostitutes, pimps and gangs roamed freely. Crime was so out of control that some people living nearby hated even to walk to the subway. If the view of Manhattan from the Queensboro Bridge, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, seemed to promise “all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” the view of Queens Plaza from that vantage point offered neither.
Before becoming a writer, Burroughs made minor contributions to the petty crime rampant in Queens Plaza. To support the first heroin habit that he had developed in January 1946, Burroughs apprenticed himself to a smalltime lawbreaker named Phil White. Their shtick was to “roll a lush” — thief argot defined by the 1953 American Thesaurus of Slang as “to rob an intoxicated person” — who had fallen asleep in the subway system. In Junky, White (aka Roy, aka The Sailor) invites William Lee to “take a run out to Queens Plaza.” Roy explains to Lee that the station is monitored by a private police force — an advantage, as it turns out, because company cops can’t carry guns. From one of the “Atrophied Preface” outtakes collected in the “restored” edition of Naked Lunch:
Once over in QP — that’s a bad station, too many levels — they nailed the Fag and me, so I bit the heat’s hand — I had my teeth in those days — so I bit him and cut, and he keeps yelling after me: “Stop or I’ll shoot” and I knew he didn’t have with what to shoot, so I keep cutting…
Queens Plaza, New York, 2008 (Photograph by NakedLunch.org)
This apparent advantage was negated, however, by the layout of the station itself. After setting out with Roy, Lee notes that “Queens Plaza is another dangerous station where it is impossible to cover yourself from every angle. You just have to take a chance.” In Naked Lunch, Burroughs repeats the warning. “Queens Plaza is a bad spot for lush workers…. Too many levels and lurking places for subway heat, and impossible to cover when you put the hand out…. ” Even today you can see the difficulty in trying to rob someone inside the station. Underground, a long corridor runs above and alongside the subway platform. Between the two there is no floor or ceiling except a grid of iron beams. If you stand in the corridor, you can look down through the beams at the comings and goings — and robbings — on the platform. In a practical sense, Queens Plaza really does have “too many levels” for the prospective pickpocket.
As for “lurking places” where “dicks” (detectives) or “heat” (police) can hide, it is hard to see that Queens Plaza offers more broom closets than any other station. In the “WORD” section that Burroughs decided not to include in Naked Lunch, he writes of clandestine sex in a Queens Plaza restroom:
Dead bird, quail in the slipper, money in the bank. Fossil cunts of predated chicks bounce around us in Queens Plaza. Lay them in the crapper — just shove it in, vibration does the rest.
Predated chicks? That’s an ongoing misprint or a bad ornithological pun on predated check. Evidently it’s a matter of taking old hookers into the bathroom (”crapper”) at the station. This suggests that in the 1940s Queens Plaza may have offered more lurking places, because nowadays there are hardly any restrooms in the New York City subway system.
Though New York recedes from view in works following Naked Lunch, Burroughs invoked Queens Plaza once again in 1979’s Blade Runner. Describing a New York of the near future (2014), Burroughs writes of the King of Subways, “a mysterious personage” who “has his headquarters in Queens Plaza — a dazzling construction of subway cars, change booths, turnstiles, so that part of the structure is always in motion.” The description clearly echoes “too many levels and lurking places” as well as the vision of the Composite City elaborated in Naked Lunch. In that sense, if the Composite City serves as a metaphor of the complexity of Naked Lunch itself, perhaps Queens Plaza serves a similar function in miniature. The book also has its levels and its lurking places — but just as William Lee ignores the advice to stay away, so too does the reader.
(Text: Supervert)
