COUNTERCULTURE CASUALTY.(Main)

Byline: Phil Brown Staff writer

W illiam S. Burroughs, after downing several drinks, shot his wife through the forehead with a .38-caliber pistol in Mexico City the night of Sept. 6, 1951.

It's part of the Burroughs legend that, playing William Tell, he was aiming at a glass she had placed jauntily on her head.

David Cronenberg's new movie, "Naked Lunch," portrays this macabre scene, though it skews all the details. The movie does get this much right: The homicide transformed Burroughs into a writer - one of the best around, in some people's estimation.

"I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing," he wrote in 1985.

But this is not a story about William Burroughs, the dark sage of the Beat Generation. It's a story about his wife, a young woman from Loudonville who lived and died ahead of her time. ***

Joan Vollmer grew up in a Tudor house in Loudon Heights, a secluded street of stately homes. Her father, David Vollmer, was a chemist and manager at Rensselaer's General Aniline, a predecessor of BASF Corp.

She attended St. Agnes School, an Episcopalian school for girls, which later merged with Kenwood School to become the Doane Stuart School.

Vollmer graduated cum laude in 1939. A Times Union story reported she won the gold medal "for the senior having the highest standing" among the 25 alumnae.

She rebelled soon enough against her suburban upbringing.

In New York City in the 1940s, she hung out with the original …