McNally wrote that Kammerer "was a Doppelgänger whose sexual desires Lucien would not gratify; their connection was an intertwined mass of frustration that hinted ominously of trouble." Carr's University of Chicago career abruptly ended after he put his head into a gas oven. He explained away this act as a "work of art," but the apparent suicide attempt, which Carr's family believed was catalyzed by Kammerer, led to a two-week stay in the psychiatric ward at Cook County hospital. Carr's mother, who had moved to New York City, brought her son there and enrolled him at Columbia University, close to her home. If Marion Carr had sought to distance her son from David Kammerer, she did not succeed. He soon quit his job and followed Carr to New York, moving into an apartment on Morton Street in the West Village, one block from William Burroughs' residence; the two older men remained friends. Columbia and the Beats As a freshman at Columbia, Carr was recognized as an exceptional student with a quick, roving mind. A fellow student from Lionel Trilling's humanities class described him as "stunningly brilliant. ... It seemed as if he and Trilling were having a private conversation." He joined the campus literary and debate group, the Philolexian Society. It was also at Columbia that Carr befriended Allen Ginsberg in the Union Theological Seminary dormitory on West 122nd Street (an overflow residence for Columbia at the time), when Ginsberg knocked on the door to find out who was playing a recording of a Brahms trio. Soon after, a young woman Carr had befriended, Edie Parker, introduced Carr to her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac, then twenty-two and nearing the end of his short career as a sailor. Carr, in turn, introduced Ginsberg and Kerouac to one another – and both of them to his older friend with more first-hand experience at decadence: William Burroughs. The core of the New York Beat scene had formed, with Carr at the center. As Ginsberg put it, "Lou was the glue." Carr, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs explored New York's grimier underbelly together. It was at this time that they fell in with Herbert Huncke, an underworld character and later writer and poet. Carr had a taste for provocative behavior, for bawdy songs and for coarse antics aimed at shocking those with staid middle-class values. According to Kerouac, Carr once convinced him to get into an