And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks

by William S. Burroughs

  I said to Ryko, “Did you see those pictures in Life of the lion that killed his brother over a piece of steak? It shows first the steak thrown into the cage, then one lion grabs it in his teeth and starts dragging it away toward a corner, then the other lion rushes over and tries to grab the steak, and the first lion clouts him one alongside the head—broke his neck. Last scene you see the lion rolled over on his back with his legs up in the air,” and I stuck my hands up in the air and waved them to show how dead the lion was.

  Ryko said, “Yeah? Must have been good.”

  I now decided I’d better get into the lion game if I was to get my steak, so I began to growl and snarl and ripped off a piece of steak. Everybody but Helen was growling, and I think Phillip growled the best.

  The steak was gone, so I brought out the cheese. I’d had enough of the lion stuff by now. We ate the cheese and Italian bread and the apples, which is a marvelous combination. Then we sat back and lit cigarettes and finished up most of the Dubonnet.

  Helen was sitting on my lap and I began to get a hard-on. Ryko kept looking at her legs from across the room.

  “You’re a sweet kid,” I said in her ear.

  We sat around a while longer, and then finally Helen got up and said she had to go back to Queens, pulling her dress down and twisting it around and smoothing it out.

  “Leave the door open,” Al said. “We need some air in here.”

  In the hall I asked Helen if she would meet me in Chumley’s on Monday night, and she said, “Yes, if you’re alone,” and went down the stairs.

  I went back into the room and started walking around. I had on my old seersucker coat that had a hole in the elbow, no bigger than a dime. Phillip suddenly stuck a forefinger in the hole and ripped down. The whole sleeve came off from the elbow down. So then Al leaped in like a jackal and began ripping the coat off my back. The coat was so old it tore like paper. Soon it was hanging on me in shreds.

  So then I took off what was left of the coat and sat down and began tying the pieces together in a long rope. Phillip helped me and then Al began to do it, too. We made one long rope out of the whole coat and strung it around the room like a festoon. The four of us sat there looking at it.

  After a while Phillip wanted to go out and drink in a bar. I decided not to go along, because I knew that the expense would fall on me. Ryko said he wanted to go to a whorehouse and Phillip said, “Yes, Dennison, why don’t you treat us to a whorehouse?”

  I said, “What’s the matter with you young fellows, can’t you get women for yourselves?—all those Washington Square college girls over there walking around with the juice dripping down their legs. Why, when I was your age, I was like a young bull. If I had a mind to it, I could tell you stories that’d make your cock stand.” I limped over like an old man and dug Phillip in the ribs and cackled.

  Then I straightened up and dropped the old-man act and said to him, “Why don’t you lay Barbara?”

  “I don’t know. She’s a virgin.”

  Al said, “Well, Phillip, I don’t think you want to lay her.”

  Phillip looked at Al. “It’s not that. She doesn’t know what she wants. She’s all mixed up.”

  Ryko said from across the room, “You’ve been necking with her for months. Why don’t you just up and fuck her?”

  Al ignored this remark and looked at Phillip seriously. “I don’t see why you always have to get in these complicated emotional entanglements with women. Why can’t you develop a simple attitude toward them?”

  Yeah, I said to myself, why can’t we do away with women altogether.

  Aloud I said, “Al’s right, my boy.” I assumed a Lionel Barrymore tone of voice. “Women, Phillip, are the root of all evil.”

  We heard some tittering out in the hall, and a dollar bill all crumpled up sailed into the room and bounced on the floor at Ryko’s feet.

  “Whorehouse money,” a girl’s voice said.

  Ryko said, “It’s Janie.” He jumped up on his feet. “And Barbara too.” He started toward the door and we heard feet running down the stairs. “Where are you going?” Ryko yelled. “Hey!”

  Phillip and Al were on their feet. Al was looking at Phillip indecisively. Ryko was out in the hall and a moment later we heard him yell, “Hey Phil, come on before they skip. They’re running out on the street.”

  Phillip went out the door and Al hurried after him. I got up and strolled out to the head of the stairs.

  Phillip was hollering to Ryko, who was now down at the street door, “Do you see them?”

  Ryko yelled back, “No, I can’t see them. They’ve gone toward Seventh Avenue.”

  Al said, “Well, if they’re gone, I guess we’d better forget about it.”

  Phillip turned irritably. “Go to hell, you old fairy,” he said and started running down the stairs.

  Al hesitated a moment without looking at me, then ran down after them in long jumps over the steps.

  I went back into the room and went to the window. Ryko was standing on the corner below, yelling at Phillip to hurry up. Then they disappeared around the corner, and I saw Al following swiftly, in his long, bounding walk.

  I finished the last half inch of Dubonnet, closed the door, and sat down in the chair to smoke. I was thinking it was about time to brush my teeth when the buzzer rang. It was Phillip and Al.

  Phillip said, “How about loaning me five dollars?”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “I gotta get a taxi and follow those wenches.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m sorry Phillip, but you catch me at a bad time.” The whole thing seemed silly to me and I didn’t like his tone, which was rather peremptory.

  He said, “You’ve got it. Come on, let me have it.”

  I said, “I’m sorry,” cold and dry.

  He saw I meant it and got up. “Well, if you won’t lend it to me, I guess I’ll have to get it from somewhere else.”

  I said, “Very likely.”

  Al had been sitting there all the time without saying anything. Phillip walked out, and Al said good night to me at the door.

  12

  MIKE RYKO

  PHILLIP AND AL CAME BACK FROM DENNISON’S AND Phillip said he couldn’t borrow any money from him. I was sitting on Betty-Lou’s bed, talking to her and admiring her Oriental-looking nightgown. I had been telling her how unhappy with Janie I was, and every now and then I’d take her hand.

  “Well,” I said, “let’s go back to George’s. They may be there.”

  “Who are you trying to find?” Betty-Lou asked.

  “Some friends,” I said and got up off the bed.

  Al started talking to Betty-Lou, and she was just about ready to climb out of bed and play the hostess when Phillip walked out the door and Al and I followed.

  We found Barbara wandering up Seventh Avenue.

  “Where’s Janie?” Phillip said. “What are you doing?”

  Barbara was a little drunk and she said “George’s,” so we all went to George’s and there was Janie, with a sailor buying her scotch and sodas. Both Barbara and Janie were dressed in their best, and both of them were a little drunk.

  “You bastard,” was the first thing Janie said to me, and then we had a few drinks and decided to run down to Minetta’s.

  The sailor was still standing around. He was looking at me. “What’s the story?” he said.

  “She’s my wife,” I said, and we all left.

  On the way to Minetta’s Al had to walk a few feet behind everyone because Janie and Barbara wouldn’t let him walk with us. So he just followed in his long, loping stride, like a shadow.

  We got to Minetta’s and sat down at two different tables. Janie wouldn’t let Al sit with her, and Barbara was sitting at Joe Gould’s table with five or six other Minetta characters, so Al sat down at a table by himself.

  Phillip was sitting next to Barbara and occasionally leaning his head on her shoulder. Then he suddenly got bored with the conversation there and walked to the b
ar alone, leaving Barbara with Joe Gould and the others. Al was right at Phillip’s side and ordered two drinks.

  Janie and I were sitting in a sort of sullen silence. I was sore at her because she wouldn’t let Al sit with us. “The goddamned queer,” she kept saying, and I kept saying, “So what, he’s a good guy,” and she kept answering to that, “Shut up, queer.”

  Then Phillip came over from the bar with a glass in his hand and sat down with Janie and me. Al hovered nearby and I smiled encouragingly to him. He edged over slowly and began pulling up a chair next to Phillip.

  “Go away, you,” Janie said, and Al backed off and went over to the bar. But in a minute he was back, hovering around our table like an anxious waiter.

  Nobody said much of anything, except Barbara, who seemed to be having a good time listening to Joe Gould and basking in the suggestive dialogue around her.

  Then Phillip wanted to go elsewhere, and Janie wanted to go home, although I wanted to stay and drink up the whole place. Janie had a lot of money with her, she had just cashed a trust-fund check. We finally started to get up, but then Phillip sat down again, so I ran over to the bar and ordered some drinks.

  At this point, a bunch of Minetta characters had run out on Minetta Lane and started to conduct a ballet in front of the place. Phillip went out and sat down to watch, cross-legged in the middle of the little street. Al sat down beside him in the same fashion to watch also, turning occasionally and commenting to Phillip.

  Meanwhile, Janie and I did some more drinking, and then a guy came up and started to talk to Janie about his art. He found a receptive listener, because Janie herself did a little painting, and pretty soon he was inviting her up to his studio to see his cubist work. She agreed to this. Then the artist got pretty bewildered because Janie told Phillip, Barbara, and myself to come along and see this guy’s studio.

  So we all trooped out with Al shadowing us and went down the street. A bunch of other people had somehow joined forces with us, and by the time we got into the artist’s studio there were at least ten of us, including Joe Gould and his cane.

  First somebody turned on the radio, and some dancing started. Janie and I went into a bedroom and started to neck on a bed, and then she said we might as well copulate. But I didn’t want to, because everybody was walking through the room on their way to and from another room. Then a lot of beer showed up in carton containers, and Janie and I went out into the studio room proper and took two quart containers apiece.

  We went back to the bedroom and started to drink the beer. I began acting silly and climbing out the window, and the first thing I knew there was Al climbing in from outside, through the window. He had been out to find Phillip and couldn’t get back in, because the door was locked downstairs.

  “Where is Phillip?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” he said.

  I stuck my head out the window to see how Al had managed it: the studio was just over the Swing Rendezvous nightclub, and Al had hauled himself up over the marquee.

  Meanwhile, Barbara was in the other room necking with the artist while Joe Gould sat on a bed with a dark-haired girl in slacks. He was talking to her with his chin resting on the handle of his cane. Finally Barbara came out of the room looking all disheveled and went to a mirror. “He just asked for it,” she said to Janie, “and he got it.”

  The artist was glaring at Barbara, then he came over to me and said, “There stands a young lady who came very close to being laid.”

  I registered appropriate awe, and then went out to the studio room to look at this guy’s work. Al was opening doors all over the place, looking for Phillip. He even opened closet doors and poked his head inside.

  All along the wall of the studio were hung paintings that the artist had done. They were done in vivid colors set in rigid forms, like cubes and squares and circles.

  “How do you like them?” I asked Janie, and she said the colors were nice.

  Then Phillip somehow reappeared and we all decided to go back to Minetta’s. The artist, meanwhile, was getting very nasty with everybody, and finally he went and opened the door for everybody to get out.

  We all started to file out, and as we passed, the artist made insult after insult. He referred to Barbara’s close shave, called Al a queer, and finally turned around to pick up a cat that was passing in the hallway. He took it by the tail and flung it down the stairs, but the cat landed on its feet and scampered away. I went up to the artist and said, “I’m going to k-norck you one for that,” but he didn’t hear my remark, so I let it go at that.

  We went back to Minetta’s, which was so crowded you couldn’t elbow your way around, and stood in the middle of the crowd hollering for drinks. I finally appropriated four beers from the bartender. Cathcart and a few other NYU students had by this time showed up, and I began to get sick and tired of all the noise and pushing, so I decided to go home.

  On my way to Apartment 32, I reeled to one side and fell on top of some ash barrels that were empty. I rolled on top of one of them and got deposited into the gutter. Then I got up and walked on home, feeling dizzy and limping from the bump on my shin.

  When I got to Apartment 32 Phil and Barbara were on the bed in Janie’s bedroom, so I undressed and fell down on the couch. I lay there for a while, riding an imaginary bicycle in an attempt to catch up with the room. A minute later the doorbell rang, and I heard Phil yell from the bedroom, “What a hell of a time!”

  First thing I knew he was up and running around Apartment 32 naked and cursing and pacing the carpet, while the doorbell kept ringing. So I had to get up and open the door.

  It was Janie and Cathcart, and both of them were pie-eyed. They stumbled in and actually fell at my feet, while Phil, mad as hell, rushed into my den and slammed the door after him.

  I grabbed Janie and threw her on the couch. Then out from the bedroom came Barbara draped in a bed-sheet and went over to Cathcart, who was sitting drunkenly on the other couch, and dropped on his lap with a simple grin on her face. She started kissing him violently and he looked a little bewildered.

  Meanwhile Janie kept hitting me over the head with her shoe, and just as Phil came rushing out again from the den to run back into the bedroom and slam the door after him, I leapt up and put out the light so Janie wouldn’t aim so well.

  After that there were all kinds of door slammings and noises and mutterings and floor creakings, as if Apartment 32 were the very Whore House of Hell itself.

  13

  MIKE RYKO

  PHILLIP AND I WOKE UP AT NOON THE NEXT DAY. We were already four hours late reporting to our ship, so we each took a cold shower, drank a whole can of tomato juice from the icebox, picked up our sea bags, and ran out of the apartment, leaving Barbara and Janie asleep. It was a very hot noon outside.

  We took the subway up to 42nd Street and hurried around the corner to a bus terminal, where we just made the Hoboken bus.

  When we got to Hoboken, the city was all covered over with a pall of hot gray smoke from a fire on the waterfront. Every now and then a piece of soot dropped down, like black snow in an ash-colored oven-hot sky.

  We had to take another bus to get to our pier. When we got there the smoke was even thicker and our eyes were smarting. We crossed the street to the guardhouse at the gate of the pier and dropped our bags with a bang. A uniformed guard sauntered up.

  “The Harvey West,” I said, showing my job slip and Coast Guard pass.

  “Harvey West?” the guard said. “Wait a minute.” He went inside the guardhouse and made a phone call. Then he came back and said, “The Harvey West shifted docks this morning at seven. She’s now at the foot of Montague Street, Pier 4, Brooklyn.”

  I turned to Phil and showed him the palm of my hand.

  “Well,” he said, “if she’s in Brooklyn, let’s go to Brooklyn.”

  So we picked up our bags and shuffled away.

  “Goddamn it,” I was saying. “They tell us it’s in Hoboken and she shifts to Bro
oklyn. When we get to Brooklyn, she’ll be in Manhattan. Nothing but chaos everywhere. Let’s have a glass of beer.”

  “We haven’t got enough money,” Phil said, “and there’s no time to lose.”

  We asked directions for getting back to New York the fastest way and were told to take the ferry.

  We dropped our bags at our feet and leaned on the rail of the ferry. It moved away from the slip and headed for Manhattan, shimmering across the river. Over to our left we saw what was causing all the smoke in Hoboken: a big warehouse and a merchant ship flying the Norwegian flag were on fire. Heavy clouds of pale gray smoke were spewing out of the warehouse, and black smoke was coming out of the freighter. The firemen were all over the place with their little toy hoses and squirts of water. I was wondering how the fire had started.

  Gradually we approached Manhattan. There was a cool breeze that smelled of the sea, blowing from the southern end of the river. The ferry eased into the slip, rubbed sides with the timbers until they groaned, and churned water to nose up to the gangway.

  We picked up our bags and walked east toward mid-town, stopping at a garage on Tenth Avenue for a drink of water. There was nobody around the garage and we couldn’t find a men’s room, so I undid a hose used to wash cars with from a large faucet and we let the water spill into our mouths and over our faces. There was still nobody around and I said to Phil, “Some garage. We ought to take a couple of wrenches.”

  Then we walked to Eighth Avenue and spent our last dime on the subway down to Brooklyn. We got off at Borough Hall, only on the wrong side, so that we had to walk through a lot of clanging traffic with our sea bags on our shoulders while the sun pressed down like a hot flatiron. We finally found Montague Street and started toward the waterfront.

  At the foot of Montague Street there is a stone arch that overspans the street at the point where it dips down to the piers. We passed under this like a couple of Foreign Legionnaires just in sight of the fort after a long march.