Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  The table left the floor and the glasses crashed. Billy Hines remained seated, looking blankly at the spot where his glass had been. Christopher Hitch rose uncertainly. Joe Bane jumped up and ran away.

  “By God!” said the Colonel. “I’m not surprised!”

  Also at a table in the bar sat Philip Bradshinkel, investment banker; his wife, Joan Bradshinkel; Branch Morton, a St. Louis politician; and Morton’s wife, Mary Morton. The explosion knocked their table over.

  Joan raised her eyebrows in an expression of sour annoyance. She looked at her husband and sighed.

  “I’m sorry this happened, dear,” said her husband. “Whatever it is, I mean.”

  Mary Morton said, “Well, I declare!”

  Branch Morton stood up, pushing back his chair with a large red hand. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll find out.”

  Mrs. Norris pushed through a crowd on C Deck. She rang the elevator bell and waited. She rang again and waited. After five minutes she walked up to A Deck.

  The Negro orchestra, high on marijuana, remained seated after the explosion. Branch Morton walked over to the orchestra leader.

  “Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” he ordered.

  The orchestra leader looked at him.

  “What you say?” he asked.

  “You black baboon, play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ on your horn!”

  “Contract don’t say nothing ‘bout no Star-Spangled Banner,” said a thin Negro in spectacles.

  “This old boat am swinging on down!” someone in the orchestra yelled, and the musicians jumped down off the platform and scattered among the passengers.

  Branch Morton walked over to a jukebox in a corner of the saloon. He saw “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Fats Waller. He put in a handful of quarters. The machine clicked and buzzed and began to play:

  “OH SAY CAN YOU? YES YES”

  Joe Bane fell against the door of his stateroom and plunged in. He threw himself on the bed and drew his knees up to his chin. He began to sob.

  His wife sat on the bed and talked to him in a gentle hypnotic voice. “You can’t stay here, Joey. This bed is going underwater. You can’t stay here.”

  Gradually the sobbing stopped and Bane sat up. She helped him put on a life belt. “Come along,” she said.

  “Yes, honey face,” he said, and followed her out the door.

  “AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE”

  Mrs. Norris found the door to the captain’s cabin ajar. She pushed it open and stepped in, knocking on the open door. A tall, thin, red-haired man with horn-rimmed glasses was sitting at a desk littered with maps. He glanced up without speaking.

  “Oh Captain, is the ship sinking? Someone set off a bomb, they said. I’m Mrs. Norris—you know, Mr. Norris, shipping business. Oh the ship is sinking! I know, or you’d say something. Captain, you will take care of us? My maid and me?” She put out a hand to touch the captain’s arm. The ship listed suddenly, throwing her heavily against the desk. Her wig slipped.

  The captain stood up. He snatched the wig off her head and put it on.

  “Give me that kimono!” he ordered.

  Mrs. Norris screamed. She started for the door. The captain took three long, springy strides and blocked her way. Mrs. Norris rushed for a window, screaming. The captain took a revolver from his side pocket. He aimed at her bald pate outlined in the window, and fired.

  “You Goddamned old fool,” he said. “Give me that kimono!”

  Philip Bradshinkel walked up to a sailor with his affable smile.

  “Room for the ladies on this one?” he asked, indicating a lifeboat.

  The sailor looked at him sourly.

  “No!” said the sailor. He turned away and went on working on the launching davit.

  “Now wait a minute,” said Bradshinkel. “You can’t mean that. Women and children first, you know.”

  “Nobody goes on this lifeboat but the crew,” said the sailor.

  “Oh, I understand,” said Bradshinkel, pulling out a wad of bills.

  The sailor snatched the money.

  “I thought so,” said Bradshinkel. He took his wife by the arm and started to help her into the lifeboat.

  “Get that old meat outa here!” screamed the sailor.

  “But you made a bargain! You took my money!”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes,” said the sailor. “I just took your dough so it wouldn’t get wet!”

  “But my wife is a woman!”

  Suddenly the sailor became very gentle.

  “All my life,” he said, “all my life I been a sucker for a classy dame. I seen ’em in the Sunday papers laying on the beach. Soft messy tits. They just lay there and smile dirty. Jesus they heat my pants!”

  Bradshinkel nudged his wife. “Smile at him.” He winked at the sailor. “What do you say?”

  “Naw,” said the sailor, “I ain’t got time to lay her now.”

  “Later,” said Bradshinkel.

  “Later’s no good. Besides she’s special built for you. She can’t give me no kids and she drinks alla time. Like I say, I just seen her in the Sunday papers and wanted her like a dog wants rotten meat.”

  “Let me talk to this man,” said Branch Morton. He worked his fingers over the fleshy shoulder of his wife and pulled her under his armpit.

  “This little woman is a mother,” he said. The sailor blew his nose on the deck. Morton grabbed the sailor by the biceps.

  “In Clayton, Missouri, seven kids whisper her name through their thumbs before they go to sleep.”

  The sailor pulled his arm free. Morton dropped both hands to his sides, palms facing forward.

  “As man to man,” he was pleading. “As man to man.”

  Two Negro musicians, their eyes gleaming, came up behind the two wives. One took Mrs. Morton by the arm, the other took Mrs. Bradshinkel.

  “Can we have dis dance witchu?”

  “THAT OUR FLAG WAS STILL THERE”

  Captain Kramer, wearing Mrs. Norris’s kimono and wig, his face heavily smeared with cold cream, and carrying a small suitcase, walked down to C Deck, the kimono billowing out behind him. He opened the side door to the purser’s office with a pass key. A thin-shouldered man in a purser’s uniform was stuffing currency and jewels into a suitcase in front of an open safe.

  The captain’s revolver swung free of his brassiere and he fired twice.

  “SO GALLANTLY STREAMING”

  Finch, the radio operator, washed down bicarbonate of soda and belched into his hand. He put the glass down and went on tapping out S.O.S.

  “S.O.S. . . . S.S. America. . . S.O.S. . . . off Jersey coast. . . S.O.S. . . . son-of-a-bitching set. . . S.O.S. . . . might smell us . . . S.O.S. . . . son-of-a-bitching crew . . . S.O.S. . . . Comrade Finch . . . comrade in a pig’s ass . . . S.O.S. . . . Goddamned captain’s a brown artist. . . S.O.S. . . . S.S. America . . . S.O.S. . . . S.S. Crapbox . . .”

  Lifting his kimono with his left hand, the captain stepped in behind the radio operator. He fired one shot into the back of Finch’s head. He shoved the small body aside and smashed the radio with a chair.

  “O’ER THE RAMPARTS WE WATCH”

  Dr. Benway, carrying his satchel, pushed through the passengers crowded around Lifeboat No. 1.

  “Are you all right?” he shouted, seating himself among the women. “I’m the doctor.”

  “BY THE ROCKETS’ RED GLARE”

  When the captain reached Lifeboat No. 1 there were two seats left. Some of the passengers were blocking each other as they tried to force their way in, others were pushing forward a wife, a mother, or a child. The captain shoved them all out of his way, leapt into the boat and sat down. A boy pushed through the crowd in the captain’s wake.

  “Please,” he said. “I’m only thirteen.”

  “Yes yes,” said the captain, “you can sit by me.”

  The boat started jerkily toward the water, lowered by four male passengers. A woman handed her baby to the captain.

  “Take care of
my baby, for God’s sake!”

  Joe Bane landed in the boat and slithered noisily under a thwart. Dr. Benway cast off the ropes. The doctor and the boy started to row. The captain looked back at the ship.

  “OH SAY CAN YOU SEE”

  A third-year divinity student named Titman heard Perkins in his stateroom, yelling for his attendant. He opened the door and looked in.

  “What do you want, thicken thit?” said Perkins.

  “I want to help you,” said Titman.

  “Thtick it up and thwitht it!” said Perkins.

  “Easy does it,” said Titman, walking over toward the broken wheelchair. “Everything is going to be okey-dokey.”

  “Thneaked off!” Perkins put a hand on one hip and jerked the elbow forward in a grotesque indication of dancing. “Danthing with floothies!”

  “We’ll find him,” said Titman, lifting Perkins out of the wheelchair. He carried the withered body in his arms like a child. As Titman walked out of the stateroom, Perkins snatched up a butcher knife used by his attendant to make sandwiches.

  “Danthing with floothies!”

  “BY THE DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT!”

  A crowd of passengers was fighting around Lifeboat No.7. It was the last boat that could be launched. They were using bottles, broken deck chairs and fire axes. Titman, carrying Perkins in his arms, made his way through the fighting unnoticed. He placed Perkins in a seat at the stern.

  “There you are,” said Titman. “All set.”

  Perkins said nothing. He sat there, chin drawn back, eyes shining, the butcher knife clutched rigidly in one hand.

  A hysterical crowd from second class began pushing from behind. A big-faced shoe clerk with long yellow teeth grabbed Mrs. Bane and shoved her forward. “Ladies first!” he yelled.

  A wedge of men formed behind him and pushed. A shot sounded and Mrs. Bane fell forward, hitting the lifeboat. The wedge broke, rolling and scrambling. A man in an ROTC uniform with a .45 automatic in his hand stood by the lifeboat. He covered the sailor at the launching davit.

  “Let this thing down!” he ordered.

  As the lifeboat slid down toward the water, a cry went up from the passengers on deck. Some of them jumped into the water, others were pushed by the people behind.

  “Let ’er go, God damn it, let ’er go!” yelled Perkins.

  “Throw him out!”

  A hand rose out of the water and closed on the side of the boat. Springlike, Perkins brought the knife down. The fingers fell into the boat and the bloody stump of hand slipped back into the water.

  The man with the gun was standing in the stern. “Get going!” he ordered. The sailors pulled hard on the oars.

  Perkins worked feverishly, chopping on all sides. “Bathtardth, thontha-bitheth!” The swimmers screamed and fell away from the boat.

  “That a boy.”

  “Don’t let ‘em swamp us.”

  “Atta boy, Comrade.”

  “Bathtardth, thonthabitheth! Bathtardth, thonthabitheth!”

  “OH SAY DO DAT STAR-SPANGLED BANNER YET WAVE”

  The Evening News

  Barbara Cannon showed your reporter her souvenirs of the disaster: a life belt autographed by the crew, and a severed human finger.

  “I don’t know,” said Miss Cannon. “I feel sorta bad about this old finger.”

  “O’ER THE LAND OF THE FREE”

  and the hippos were boiled in their tanks

  unpublished manuscript written in 1945 by “William Lee and John Kerouac;” Will Dennison chapters written by William Burroughs, Mike Ryko chapters by Jack Kerouac

  CHAPTER ONE

  WILL DENNISON:

  The bars close at three A.M. on Saturday nights so I got home about 3:45 after eating breakfast at Riker’s on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue. I dropped the News and Mirror on the couch and peeled off my seersucker coat and dropped it on top of them. I was going straight to bed. At this point, the buzzer rang. It’s a loud buzzer that goes through you so I ran over quick to push the button and release the outside door. Then I took my coat off the couch and hung it over a chair so no one would sit on it, and I put the papers in a drawer. I wanted to be sure they would be there when I woke up in the morning. Then I went over and opened the door. I timed it just right so that they didn’t get a chance to knock.

  Four people came into the room. Now I’ll tell you in a general way who these people were and what they looked like, since the story is mostly about two of them. Phillip Tourian is seventeen years old, half-Turkish and half-American. He has a choice of several names but prefers Tourian. His father goes under the name of Rogers. Curly black hair falls over his forehead, his skin is very pale, and he has green eyes. He was sitting down in the most comfortable chair with his leg over the arm before the others were all in the room. This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, “Oh raven-haired Grecian lad . . .” He was wearing a pair of very dirty slacks and a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up showing hard muscular forearms.

  Ramsay Allen is an impressive-looking grey-haired man of forty or so, tall and a little flabby. He looks like a down-at-heels actor, or someone who used to be somebody. Also he is a Southerner and claims to be of a good family, like all Southerners. He is a very intelligent guy but you wouldn’t know it to see him now. He is so stuck on Phillip he is hovering over him like a shy vulture, with a foolish sloppy grin on his face. Al is one of the best guys I know and you couldn’t find better company. And Phillip is all right too. But when they get together, something happens, and they form a combination which gets on everybody’s nerves.

  Agnes O’Rourke has an ugly Irish face, close-cropped black hair, and she always wears pants. She is straightforward, manly, and reliable. Mike Ryko is a nineteen-year-old red-haired Finn, a sort of merchant seaman, dressed in dirty khaki.

  Well, that’s all there were, the four of them, and Agnes held up a bottle. “Ah, Canadian Club,” I said. “Come right in and sit down,” which they all had anyway by this time, and I got out some cocktail glasses and everyone poured himself a straight shot. Agnes asked me for some water which I got for her.

  Phillip had some philosophical idea he had evidently been developing in the course of the evening and now I was going to hear about it.

  He said, “I’ve figured out a whole philosophy on the idea of waste as evil and creation as good. So long as you are creating something it is good. The only sin is waste of your potentialities.”

  That sounded pretty silly to me so I said, “Well of course I’m just a befuddled bartender, but what about Lifebuoy Soap ads, they’re creations all right.”

  And he said, “Yeah, but you see that’s what you call wasteful creation. It’s all dichotomized. Then there’s creative waste, such as talking to you now.”

  So I said, “Yeah, well but where are your criteria to tell waste from creation? Anybody can say that what he’s doing is creation whereas what everybody else is doing is waste. The thing is so general it don’t mean a thing.”

  Well, that seemed to hit him right between the eyes. I guess he hadn’t been getting much opposition. At any rate he dropped the philosophy and I was glad to see it go because such ideas belong in the “I don’t want to hear about it” department as far as I’m concerned.

  Phillip then asked me if I had any marijuana and I told him not much, but he insisted he wanted to smoke some, so I got it out of the desk drawer and we lit a cigarette and passed it around. It was very poor stuff and the one stick had no effect on anyone.

  Ryko, who had been sitting on the couch all this time without saying anything, said, “I smoked six sticks in Port Arthur Texas and I don’t remember a thing about Port Arthur Texas.”

  I said, “Marijuana is very hard to get now, and I don’t know where I’ll get any more after this is gone,” but Phillip grabbed up another cigarette and started smoking it. So I filled my glass with Canadian Club.

  Right then it struck me as strange, since thes
e guys never have any money, where this Canadian Club came from, so I asked them.

  Al said, “Agnes lifted it out of a bar.” It seems Al and Agnes were standing at the end of the bar in the Pied Piper having a beer, when Agnes suddenly said to Al, “Pick up your change and follow me, I’ve got a bottle of Canadian Club under my coat.” Al followed her out more scared than she was. He hadn’t even seen her take it. This took place earlier in the evening and the fifth was now about half gone.

  I congratulated Agnes and she smiled complacently. “It was easy,” she said. “I’m going to do it again.”

  Not when you’re with me, I said to myself.

  Then there was a lull in the conversation and I was too sleepy to say anything. There was some talk I didn’t hear and then I looked up just in time to see Phillip bite a large piece of glass out of his cocktail glass and begin chewing it up, which made a noise you could hear across the room. Agnes and Ryko made faces like someone was scratching fingernails on a blackboard.

  Phillip chewed up the glass fine and washed it down with Agnes’ water. So then Al ate a piece too and I got him a glass of water to wash it down with.

  Agnes asked if I thought they would die, and I said no, there was no danger if you chewed it up fine, it was like eating a little sand. All this talk about people dying from ground glass was hooey. Right then I got an idea for a gag, and I said, “I am neglecting my duties as a host. Is anyone hungry? I have something very special I just got today.”

  At this point Phillip and Al were picking stray pieces of glass out from between their teeth. Al had gone into the bathroom to look at his gums in the mirror, and they were bleeding. “Yes,” said Al from the bathroom. Phillip said he’d worked up an appetite on the glass. Al asked me if it was another package of food from my old lady and I said, “As a matter of fact, yes, something real good.”

  So I went into the closet and fooled around for a while and came out with a lot of old razor blades on a plate with a jar of mustard.

  Phillip said, “You bastard I’m really hungry,” and I felt pretty good about it and said, “Some gag, hey?”