Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  This inspired me to write some crime stories . . . “‘Here’s to crime!’ he shouted and raised a glass of champagne, but he crumpled like a pricked balloon as the heavy hand of Detective Sergeant Murphy fell on his shoulder.”. . . “Joe Maguire regarded the flushed face of the dealer with disfavor. ‘A coke bird,’ he decided. ‘Better cut him off the payroll; get coked up and shoot a good client.’”

  I did a short story too, with a trick ending about this gangster who goes to a fortune-teller . . .” ‘This man is a criminal,’ she thought shrewdly, ‘a gangster, perhaps . . . he must have made enemies.’ ‘I see danger,’ she said. The man’s face twitched—he needed to snow. ‘I see a man approaching . . . he has a gun . . . he lifts the gun . . . he—’ With an inarticulate cry the man leapt to his feet and whipped out an automatic, spitting death at the fortune-teller . . . blood on the crystal ball, and on the table, a severed human hand.”

  After reading Eugene Aram’s Dream—which I committed to memory and recited to the class in sepulchral tones—I wrote a series about murderers who all died of brain fever in a screaming delirium of remorse, and one character in the desert who murdered all his companions—sitting there looking at the dead bodies and wondering why he did it. When the vultures came and ate them he got so much relief he called them “the vultures of gold” and that was the title of my story, The Vultures of Gold, which closed this rather nauseous period.

  At fifteen I was sent to the Los Alamos Ranch School for my health, where they later made the first atom bomb. It seemed so right somehow, like the school song . . .

  Far away and high on the mesa’s crest

  Here’s the life that all of us love best

  Los Allll-amos.

  Far away and high on the mesa’s crest I was forced to become a Boy Scout, eat everything on my plate, exercise before breakfast, sleep on a porch in zero weather, stay outside all afternoon, ride a sullen, spiteful, recalcitrant horse twice a week and all day on Saturday. We all had to become Boy Scouts and do three hours a week of something called C.W.—Community Work—which was always something vaguely unpleasant and quite useless too, but A.J. said it was each boy’s cooperative contribution to the welfare and maintenance of the community. We had to stay outdoors, no matter what, all afternoon—they even timed you in the John. I was always cold, and hated my horse, a sulky strawberry roan. And the C.W. was always hanging over you. There were crewleaders, you understand, many of them drunk with power—who made life hell for the crew.

  This man had conjured up a whole city there. The school was entirely self-sufficient, raised all the food, etcetera. There was a store, a post office, and one of the teachers was even a magistrate. I remember once he got a case which involved shooting a deer out of season and he made the most of it, went on for days. He had founded the school after he quit the Forest Service because some inspirational woman told him “Young man, there is a great constructive job waiting for you and if you don’t do it now you will only have to do it later under much more difficult circumstances.” So he rubbed a magic lamp of contributions . . . “I know what’s best for boys,” he said, and those Texas oilmen kicked in.

  What I liked to do was get in my room against the radiator and play records and read the Little Blue Books put out by Haldeman-Julius, free-thinker and benevolent agnostic . . . Remy de Gourmont . . . Baudelaire . . . Guy de Maupassant . . . Anatole France . . . and I started writing allegories put in a vaguely Oriental setting, with dapper jewel thieves over the wine, engaged in philosophical discussions I prefer not to remember.

  “To observe one’s actions with detachment while making them as amusing as possible seems to me . . .”

  “Very interesting,” said the imperturbable detective popping up from behind a potted rubber plant. “You are all under arrest.”

  I had a bad rep with the other boys . . . “burns incense in his room . . . reading French books . . .” Later at Harvard during summer trips to Europe I started satirical novels about the people I met; one of them begins “‘But you see I don’t know much about love,’ she said coyly, twisting an old-fashioned.”

  Then I had an English period, gentlemen adventurers and all that. . .

  “My god, that poor old chief!” He broke down sobbing.

  The other looked at him coldly and raised an eyebrow: “Well after all, Reggie, you didn’t expect him to give us the emeralds, did you?”

  “I don’t know what I expected, but not that piranha fish!”

  “It was much the easiest and most convenient method.”

  “I can’t stick it, Humphreys. Give me my share. I’m clearing off.”

  “Why certainly.” He took seven magnificent emeralds from the side pocket of his yellow silk suit and placed them on the table. With a quiet smile he pushed four stones to Reggie.

  Reggie was touched. “I mean, hang it all, it was your idea, Humphreys, and you did most of the work.”

  “Yes Reggie, you funked it.”

  “Then why?”

  “I am thinking of Jane.”

  Reggie made a hasty exit, “I can’t thank you enough” over his shoulder. Humphreys leaned forward, looking at the three emeralds quizzically.

  “You’ll be missing your mates, won’t you now? . . . Ali!”

  “Yes master.”

  “A white man has just left. He is carrying four green stones. I want those stones, do you understand Ali?”

  “Yes master I understand.”

  Exit Ali, fingering his kris.

  And then I read Oscar Wilde. Dorian Gray and Lord Henry gave birth to Lord Cheshire, one of the most unsavory characters in fiction, a mawkishly sentimental Lord Henry . . . Seven English gentlemen there in the club, planning an expedition to the Pole:

  “But which pole, Bradford?”

  “Oh hang it all, who cares?”

  “Why Reggie, you’re as excited as a child!”

  “I am, and I glory in it—let’s forget we were ever gentlemen!”

  “You seem to have done that already,” said Lord Cheshire acidly.

  But it seems the cynical Lord Cheshire had more kindness in him than all the others put together when the supplies gave out . . . “Poor Reggie there, rotten with scurvy, I can’t bear to look at him, and Stanford is cracking, and there have been rumors about Cuthbert . . . Morgan drinks all day, and James is hitting the pipe . . .” So I leave him there on an ice floe, rotten with scurvy, giving his last lime juice to Reggie and lying bravely about it.

  “Have you had yours?” the boy said softly.

  “Yes,” said Lord Cheshire, “I’ve had mine.”

  And I wrote a story for True Confessions, about a decent young man who gets on the dope. He was grieving the loss of a favorite dog, sitting on a park bench looking at the lake, smell of burning leaves . . .

  “‘Hello kid, mind if I sit down?’ The man was thin and grey with pinpoint eyes, the prison shadow in them like something dead. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you look down in the dumps about something.’”

  In a burst of confidence the young man told him about the dog. “. . . he went back inside the burning house. You see, he thought I was in there.”

  “Kid, I got a pinch of something here make you forget about that old dead dog. . .”

  That’s how it started. Then he fell into the hands of a sinister hypnotist who plied him with injections of marijuana.

  “Kill, kill, kill.” The words turned relentlessly in his brain, and he walked up to a young cop and said “If you don’t lock me up I shall kill you.” The cop sapped him without a word. But a wise old detective in the precinct takes a like to the boy, sets him straight and gets him off the snow. It was a hard fight but he made it. He now works in a hardware store in Ottawa, Illinois . . . the porch noise, home from work . . . “And if any kind stranger ever offers me some pills that will drive all my blues away, I will simply call a policeman.”

  A story about four jolly murderers was conceived in the Hotel La Fonda on a rare trip to Sant
a Fe when I was feeling guilty about masturbating twice in one day. A middle-aged couple, very brash and jolly; the man says “Sure and I’d kill my own grandmother for just a little kale . . .”

  “We have regular rates of course,” the woman observed tartly.

  I formed a romantic attachment for one of the boys at Los Alamos and kept a diary of this affair that was to put me off writing for many years. Even now I blush to remember its contents. During the Easter vacation of my second year I persuaded my family to let me stay in St. Louis, so my things were packed and sent to me from the school and I used to turn cold thinking maybe the boys are reading it aloud to each other.

  When the box finally arrived I pried it open and threw everything out until I found the diary and destroyed it forthwith, without a glance at the appalling pages. This still happens from time to time. I will write something I think is good at the time and looking at it later I say, my God, tear it into very small pieces and put it into somebody else’s garbage can. I wonder how many writers have had similar experiences. An anthology of such writing would be interesting.

  Fact is, I had gotten a real sickener—as Paul Lund, an English gangster I knew in Tangier, would put it . . . “A young thief thinks he has a license to steal and then he gets a real sickener like five years maybe.”

  This lasted longer. The act of writing had become embarrassing, disgusting, and above all false. It was not the sex in the diary that embarrassed me, it was the terrible falsity of the emotions expressed. I guess Lord Cheshire and Reggie were too much for me—for years after that, the sight of my words written on a page hit me like the sharp smell of carrion when you turn over a dead dog with a stick, and this continued until 1938. I had written myself an eight-year sentence.

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1938 . . . I was doing graduate work in anthropology at Harvard and at the same time Kells Elvins, an old school friend from John Burroughs, was doing graduate work in psychology. We shared a small frame house on a quiet tree-lined street beyond the Commodore Hotel. We had many talks about writing and started a detective story in the Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler line. This picture of a ship captain putting on women’s clothes and rushing into the first lifeboat was suddenly there for both of us. We read all the material we could find in Widener’s Library on the Titanic, and a book based on the Morro Castle disaster called The Left-handed Passenger.

  On a screened porch we started work on a story called Twilight’s Last Gleamings which was later used almost verbatim in Nova Express. I was trying to contact Kells to see if he had the original manuscript and to tell him that I was using the story under both our names when his mother wrote me that he had died in 1961.

  I see now that the curse of the diary was broken temporarily by the act of collaboration. We acted out every scene and often got on laughing jags. I hadn’t laughed like that since my first tea-high at eighteen when I rolled around the floor and pissed all over myself. I remember the rejection note from Esquire: “Too screwy and not effectively so for us.”

  I liked to feel that manuscript in my hands and read it over with slow shameless chuckles. The words seemed to come through us, not out of us. I have a recurrent writer’s dream of picking up a book and starting to read. I can never bring back more than a few sentences; still, I know that one day the book itself will hover over the typewriter as I copy the words already written there.

  After that I lost interest again and the years from 1938 to 1943 were almost entirely unproductive. In 1943 I met Kerouac and Ginsberg. Kerouac and I collaborated on a novel based on the Carr-Kammerer case, which we decided not to publish, and again I lost interest in writing.

  I can remember only one attempt between 1943 and 1949. I was living in Algiers, Louisiana, across the river from New Orleans. I was on heroin at the time and went over to New Orleans every day to score. One day I woke up sick and went across the river, and when I got back I tried to recapture the painful over-sensitivity of junk sickness, the oil slick on the river, the hastily-parked car.

  personal magnetism

  “Are you bashful? Shy? Nervous? Embarrassed? If so, send me two dollars and I will show you how to control others at a glance; how to make your face appear twenty years younger; how to use certain Oriental secrets and dozens of other vital topics.”

  I am none of these things, but I would like to know how to control others at a glance (especially my Latin teacher). So I clipped the coupon, beginning to feel more magnetic every minute.

  In a week, I received an impressive red volume with magnetic rays all over the cover. I opened the book and hopefully began to read. Alas! The book was a mass of scientific drivel cunningly designed to befuddle the reader, and keep him from realizing what a fake it was.

  I learned that every time one yawns, a quart of magnetism escapes, that it takes four months to recuperate from a cigarette. And as for a cocktail! Words fail me. Another common exit of magnetism is light literature of any kind, movies, and such unmagnetic foods as cucumbers and eggs. I never realized that a cucumber was so potent. They always impressed me as watery and tasteless.

  And how is magnetism acquired? So far as I can make out, one must sit perfectly still for hours reading the dictionary or something equally uninteresting, then, laden with magnetism, one should arise with tensed eye (whatever that is) and with slow, steady steps, bear down on one’s quarry like a steam roller.

  Did I find out how to control others at a glance? I certainly did, but never had the nerve to try it. Here is how it is done: I must look my victim squarely in the eye, say in a low, severe voice, “I am talking and you must listen,” then, intensify my gaze and say, “You cannot escape me.” My victim completely subdued, I was to say, “I am stronger than my enemies.” Get thee behind me Satan. Imagine me trying that on Mr. Baker!

  I think the book was right in saying that by following its instructions I could make myself the center of interest at every party. Interest is putting it mildly!

  twilight’s last gleamings

  (with Kells Elvins)

  PLEASE IMAGINE AN EXPLOSION ON A SHIP

  A paretic named Perkins sat askew on his broken wheelchair. He arranged his lips.

  “You pithyathed thon of a bidth!” he shouted.

  Barbara Cannon, a second-class passenger, lay naked in a first-class bridal suite with Stewart Lindy Adams. Lindy got out of bed and walked over to a window and looked out.

  “Put on your clothes, honey,” he said. “There’s been an accident.”

  A first-class passenger named Mrs. Norris was thrown out of bed by the explosion. She lay there shrieking until her maid came and helped her up.

  “Bring me my wig and my kimono,” she told the maid. “I’m going to see the captain.”

  Dr. Benway, ship’s doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four-inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel.

  “There was a little scar, Doctor,” said the nurse, who was peering over his shoulder. “Perhaps the appendix is already out.”

  “The appendix out!” the doctor shouted. “I’m taking the appendix out! What do you think I’m doing here?”

  “Perhaps the appendix is on the left side,” said the nurse. “That happens sometimes, you know.”

  “Can’t you be quiet?” said the doctor. “I’m coming to that!” He threw back his elbows in a movement of exasperation. “Stop breathing down my neck!” he yelled. He thrust a red fist at her. “And get me another scalpel. This one has no edge to it.”

  He lifted the abdominal wall and searched along the incision. “I know where an appendix is. I studied appendectomy in 1904 at Harvard.”

  The floor tilted from the force of the explosion. The doctor reeled back and hit the wall.

  “Sew her up!” he said, peeling off his gloves. “I can’t be expected to work under such conditions!”

  * * *

  At a table in the bar sat Christopher Hitch, a rich liberal; Colonel Merrick, retired; Billy Hines of Newport; and Joe Bane, writer.

  “In
all my experience as a traveler,” the Colonel was saying, “I have never encountered such service.”

  Billy Hines twisted his glass, watching ice cubes. “Frightful service,” he said, his face contorted by a suppressed yawn.

  “Do you think the captain controls this ship?” said the Colonel, fixing Christopher Hitch with a bloodshot blue eye. “Unions!” shouted the Colonel. “Unions control this ship!”

  Hitch gave out with a laugh that was supposed to be placating but ended up oily. “Things aren’t so bad, really,” he said, patting at the Colonel’s arm. He didn’t land the pat, because the Colonel drew his arm out of reach. “Things will adjust themselves.”

  Joe Bane looked up from his drink of straight rye. “It’s like I say, Colonel,” he said. “A man—”