I know what became of Joan Vollmer. In 1944 and ‘45, her apartment on 115th Street was an early prototype of what a later generation called a pad — a psychic way station between the Village and Times Square, or between Morningside Heights and the Lower Depths, in the mental geography of those who came together there, lived there sporadically, made love, wrote, suffered, experimented with drugs, in those six big rooms where Joan had lived alone with a newborn baby until Edie introduced her to Jack. And Jack — seeing an affinity between Joan’s sharp, glittering wittiness and Bill Burroughs’s —
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