They sat down at a table. Somebody had stolen Guidry’s radio, his riding boots and wrist watch. “The trouble with me is,” said Guidry, “I like the type that robs me.”
“Where you make your mistake is bringing them to your apartment,” Lee said. “That’s what hotels are for.”
“You’re right there. But half the time I don’t have money for a hotel. Besides, I like someone around to cook breakfast and sweep the place out.”
“Clean the place out.”
“I don’t mind the watch and the radio, but it really hurt, losing those boots. They were a thing of beauty and a joy forever.” Guidry leaned forward, and glanced at Allerton. “I don’t know whether I ought to say things like this in front of Junior here. No offense, kid.”
“Go ahead,” said Allerton.
“Did I tell you how I made the cop on the beat? He’s the vigilante, the watchman out where I live. Every time he sees the light on in my room, he comes in for a shot of rum. Well, about five nights ago he caught me when I was drunk and horny, and one thing led to another and I ended up showing him how the cow ate the cabbage . . .
“So the night after I make him I was walking by the beer joint on the corner and he comes out borracho and says, ‘Have a drink.’ I said, ‘I don’t want a drink.’ So he takes out his pistola and says, ‘Have a drink.’ I proceeded to take his pistola away from him, and he goes into the beer joint to phone for reinforcements. So I had to go in and rip the phone off the wall. Now they’re billing me for the phone. When I got back to my room, which is on the ground floor, he had written ‘El Puto Gringo’ on the window with soap. So, instead of wiping it off, I left it there. It pays to advertise.”
The drinks kept coming. Allerton went to the W.C. and got in a conversation at the bar when he returned. Guidry was accusing Hyman of being queer and pretending not to be. Lee was trying to explain to Guidry that Hyman wasn’t really queer, and Guidry said to him, “He’s queer and you aren’t, Lee. You just go around pretending you’re queer to get in on the act.”
“Who wants to get in on your tired old act?” Lee said. He saw Allerton at the bar talking to John Dumé. Dumé belonged to a small clique of queers who made their headquarters in a beer joint on Campeche called The Green Lantern. Dumé himself was not an obvious queer, but the other Green Lantern boys were screaming fags who would not have been welcome at the Ship Ahoy.
Lee walked over to the bar and started talking to the bartender. He thought, “I hope Dumé tells him about me.” Lee felt uncomfortable in dramatic “something-I-have-to-tell-you” routines and he knew, from unnerving experience, the difficulties of a casual come-on: “I’m queer, you know, by the way.” Sometimes they don’t hear right and yell, “What?” Or you toss in: “If you were as queer as I am.” The other yawns and changes the subject, and you don’t know whether he understood or not.
The bartender was saying, “She asks me why I drink. What can I tell her? I don’t know why. Why did you have the monkey on your back? Do you know why? There isn’t any why, but try to explain that to someone like Jerri. Try to explain that to any woman.” Lee nodded sympathetically. “She says to me, why don’t you get more sleep and eat better? She don’t understand and I can’t explain it. Nobody can explain it.”
The bartender moved away to wait on some customers. Dumé came over to Lee. “How do you like this character?” he said, indicating Allerton with a wave of his beer bottle. Allerton was across the room talking to Mary and a chess player from Peru. “He comes to me and says, ‘I thought you were one of the Green Lantern boys.’ So I said, ‘Well, I am.’ He wants me to take him around to some of the gay places here.”
* * *
Lee and Allerton went to a Russian restaurant for dinner. Lee looked through the menu. “By the way,” he said, “the law was in putting the bite on the Ship Ahoy again. Vice squad. Two hundred pesos. I can see them in the station house after a hard day shaking down citizens of the Federal District. One cop says, ‘Ah, Gonzalez, you should see what I got today. Oh la la, such a bite!’
“‘Aah, you shook down a puto queer for two pesetas in a bus station crapper. We know you, Hernandez, and your cheap tricks. You’re the cheapest cop inna Federal District.’”
Lee waved to the waiter. “Hey, Jack. Dos martinis, much dry. Seco. And dos plates Sheeshka Babe. Sabe?”
The waiter nodded. “That’s two dry martinis and two orders of shish kebab. Right, gentlemen?”
“Solid, Pops. . . . So how was your evening with Dumé?”
“We went to several bars full of queers. One place a character asked me to dance and propositioned me.”
“Take him up?”
“No.”
“Dumé is a nice fellow.”
Allerton smiled. “Yes, but he is not a person I would confide too much in. That is, anything I wanted to keep private.”
“You refer to a specific indiscretion?”
“Frankly, yes.”
“I see.” Lee thought, Dumé never misses.
The waiter put two martinis on the table. Lee held his martini up to the candle, looking at it with distaste. “The inevitable watery martini with a decomposing olive,” he said.
Lee bought a lottery ticket from a boy of ten or so, who had rushed in when the waiter went to the kitchen. The boy was working the last-ticket routine. Lee paid him expansively, like a drunk American. “Go buy yourself some marijuana, son,” he said. The boy smiled and turned to leave. “Come back in five years and make an easy ten pesos,” Lee called after him.
Allerton smiled. Thank god, Lee thought. I won’t have to contend with middle-class morality.
“Here you are, sir,” said the waiter, placing the shish kebab on the table.
Lee ordered two glasses of red wine. “So Dumé told you about my, uh, proclivities?” he said abruptly.
“Yes,” said Allerton, his mouth full.
“A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands—the lymph glands that is, of course—when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman beings? I walked the streets in a daze, like a man with a slight concussion—just a minute, Doctor Kildare, this isn’t your script. I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen—Bobo, we called her—who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink . . .
“Poor Bobo came to a sticky end. He was riding in the Duc de Ventre’s Hispano-Suiza when his falling piles blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe-skin upholstery. Even the eyes and the brain went, with a horrible shlupping sound. The Duc says he will carry that ghastly shlup with him to his mausoleum . . .
“Then I knew the meaning of loneliness. But Bobo’s words came back to me from the tomb, the sibilants cracking gently. ‘No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.’ The difficulty is to convince someone else he is really part of you, so what the hell? Us parts ought to work together. Reet?”
Lee paused, looking at Allerton speculatively. Just where do I stand with the kid? he wondered. He had listened politely, smiling at intervals. “What I mean is, Allerton, we are all parts of a tremendous whole. No use fighting it.” Lee was getting tired of the routine. He looked around restlessly for some place to put it down. “Don’t these gay bars depress you? Of course, the queer bars here aren’t to compare with Stateside queer joints.”
“I wouldn’t know,
” said Allerton. “I’ve never been in any queer joints except those Dumé took me to. I guess there’s kicks and kicks.”
“You haven’t, really?”
“No, never.”
Lee paid the bill and they walked out into the cool night. A crescent moon was clear and green in the sky. They walked aimlessly.
“Shall we go to my place for a drink? I have some Napoleon brandy.”
“All right,” said Allerton.
“This is a completely unpretentious little brandy, you understand, none of this tourist treacle with obvious effects of flavoring, appealing to the mass tongue. My brandy has no need of shoddy devices to shock and coerce the palate. Come along.” Lee hailed a cab.
“Three pesos to Insurgentes and Monterrey,” Lee said to the driver in his atrocious Spanish. The driver said four. Lee waved him on. The driver muttered something, and opened the door.
Inside, Lee turned to Allerton. “The man plainly harbors subversive thoughts. You know, when I was at Princeton, Communism was the thing. To come out flat for private property and a class society, you marked yourself a stupid lout or suspect to be a High Episcopalian pederast. But I held out against the infection—of Communism I mean, of course.”
“Aquí.” Lee handed three pesos to the driver, who muttered some more and started the car with a vicious clash of gears.
“Sometimes I think they don’t like us,” said Allerton.
“I don’t mind people disliking me,” Lee said. “The question is, what are they in a position to do about it? Apparently nothing, at present. They don’t have the green light. This driver, for example, hates gringos. But if he kills someone—and very possibly he will—it will not be an American. It will be another Mexican. Maybe his good friend. Friends are less frightening than strangers.”
Lee opened the door of his apartment and turned on the light. The apartment was pervaded by seemingly hopeless disorder. Here and there, ineffectual attempts had been made to arrange things in piles. There were no lived-in touches. No pictures, no decorations. Clearly, none of the furniture was his. But Lee’s presence permeated the apartment. A coat over the back of a chair and a hat on the table were immediately recognizable as belonging to Lee.
“I’ll fix you a drink.” Lee got two water glasses from the kitchen and poured two inches of Mexican brandy in each glass.
Allerton tasted the brandy. “Good Lord,” he said. “Napoleon must have pissed in this one.”
“I was afraid of that. An untutored palate. Your generation has never learned the pleasures that a trained palate confers on the disciplined few.”
Lee took a long drink of the brandy. He attempted an ecstatic “aah,” inhaled some of the brandy, and began to cough. “It is god-awful,” he said when he could talk. “Still, better than California brandy. It has a suggestion of cognac taste.”
There was a long silence. Allerton was sitting with his head leaning back against the couch. His eyes were half closed.
“Can I show you over the house?” said Lee, standing up. “In here we have the bedroom.”
Allerton got to his feet slowly. They went into the bedroom, and Allerton lay down on the bed and lit a cigarette. Lee sat in the only chair.
“More brandy?” Lee asked. Allerton nodded. Lee sat down on the edge of the bed, and filled his glass and handed it to him. Lee touched his sweater. “Sweet stuff, dearie,” he said. “That wasn’t made in Mexico.”
“I bought it in Scotland,” he said. He began to hiccough violently, and got up and rushed for the bathroom.
Lee stood in the doorway. “Too bad,” he said. “What could be the matter? You didn’t drink much.” He filled a glass with water and handed it to Allerton. “You all right now?” he asked.
“Yes, I think so.” Allerton lay down on the bed again.
Lee reached out a hand and touched Allerton’s ear, and caressed the side of his face. Allerton reached up and covered one of Lee’s hands and squeezed it.
“Let’s get this sweater off.”
“O.K.,” said Allerton. He took off the sweater and then lay down again. Lee took off his own shoes and shirt. He opened Allerton’s shirt and ran his hand down Allerton’s ribs and stomach, which contracted beneath his fingers. “God, you’re skinny,” he said.
“I’m pretty small.”
Lee took off Allerton’s shoes and socks. He loosened Allerton’s belt and unbuttoned his trousers. Allerton arched his body, and Lee pulled the trousers and drawers off. He dropped his own trousers and shorts and lay down beside him. Allerton responded without hostility or disgust, but in his eyes Lee saw a curious detachment, the impersonal calm of an animal or a child.
Later, when they lay side by side smoking, Lee said, “Oh, by the way, you said you had a camera in pawn you were about to lose?” It occurred to Lee that to bring the matter up at this time was not tactful, but he decided the other was not the type to take offense.
“Yes. In for four hundred pesos. The ticket runs out next Wednesday.”
“Well, let’s go down tomorrow and get it out.”
Allerton raised one bare shoulder off the sheet. “O.K.,” he said.
Thursday Lee went to the races, on the recommendation of Tom Weston. Weston was an amateur astrologer, and he assured Lee the signs were right. Lee lost five races, and took a taxi back to the Ship Ahoy.
Mary and Allerton were sitting at a table with the Peruvian chess player. Allerton asked Lee to come over and sit down at the table.
“Where’s that phony whore caster?” Lee said, looking around.
“Tom give you a bum steer?” asked Allerton.
“He did that.”
Mary left with the Peruvian. Lee finished his third drink and turned to Allerton. “I figure to go down to South America soon,” he said. “Why don’t you come along? Won’t cost you a cent.”
“Perhaps not in money.”
“I’m not a difficult man to get along with. We could reach a satisfactory arrangement. What you got to lose?”
“Independence.”
“So who’s going to cut in on your independence? You can lay all the women in South America if you want to. All I ask is be nice to Papa, say twice a week. That isn’t excessive, is it? Besides, I will buy you a round-trip ticket so you can leave at your discretion.”
Allerton shrugged. “I’ll think it over,” he said. “This job runs ten days more. I’ll give you a definite answer when the job folds.”
“Your job. . . .” Lee was about to say, “I’ll give you ten days’ salary.” He said, “All right.”
Allerton’s newspaper job was temporary, and he was too lazy to hold a job in any case. Consequently his answer meant “No.” Lee figured to talk him over in ten days. “Better not force the issue now,” he thought.
* * *
They left by bus a few days later, and by the time they reached Panama City, Allerton was already complaining that Lee was too demanding in his desires. Otherwise, they got on very well. Now that Lee could spend days and nights with the object of his attentions, he felt relieved of the gnawing emptiness and fear. And Allerton was a good traveling companion, sensible and calm.
From Manta they flew on to Guayaquil. The road was flooded, so the only way to get there was by plane or boat.
Guayaquil is built along a river, a city with many parks and squares and statues. The parks are full of tropical trees and shrubs and vines. A tree that fans out like an umbrella, as wide as it is tall, shades the stone benches. The people do a great deal of sitting.
The city, like all Ecuador, produced a curiously baffling impression. Lee felt there was something going on here, some undercurrent of life that was hidden from him. This was the area of the ancient Chimu pottery, where salt shakers and water pitchers were nameless obscenities: two men on all fours engaged in sodomy formed the handle for the top of a kitchen pot.
What happens when there is no limit? What is the fate of The Land Where Anything Goes? Men changing into huge centipedes . . . centipede
s besieging the houses . . . a man tied to a couch and a centipede ten feet long rearing up over him. Is this literal? Did some hideous metamorphosis occur? What is the meaning of the centipede symbol?
Lee got on a bus and rode to the end of the line. He took another bus. He rode out to the river and drank a soda, and watched some boys swimming in the dirty river. The river looked as if nameless monsters might rise from the green-brown water. Lee saw a lizard two feet long run up the opposite bank.
He walked back towards town. He passed a group of boys on a corner. One of the boys was so beautiful that the image cut Lee’s senses like a wire whip. A slight involuntary sound of pain escaped from Lee’s lips. He turned around, as though looking at the street name. The boy was laughing at some joke, a high-pitched laugh, happy and gay. Lee walked on.
Six or seven boys, aged twelve to fourteen, were playing in a heap of rubbish on the waterfront. One of the boys was urinating against a post and smiling at the other boys. The boys noticed Lee. Now their play was overtly sexual, with an undercurrent of mockery. They looked at Lee and whispered and laughed. Lee looked at them openly, a cold, hard stare of naked lust. He felt the tearing ache of limitless desire.
He focused on one boy, the image sharp and clear, as if seen through a telescope with the other boys and the waterfront blacked out. The boy vibrated with life like a young animal. A wide grin showed sharp, white teeth. Under the torn shirt Lee glimpsed the thin body.
He could feel himself in the body of the boy. Fragmentary memories . . . the smell of cocoa beans drying in the sun, bamboo tenements, the warm dirty river, the swamps and rubbish heaps on the outskirts of the town. He was with the other boys, sitting on the stone floor of a deserted house. The roof was gone. The stone walls were falling down. Weeds and vines grew over the walls and stretched across the floor.
The boys were taking down their torn pants. Lee lifted his thin buttocks to slip down his pants. He could feel the stone floor. He had his pants down to his ankles. His knees were clasped together, and the other boys were trying to pull them apart. He gave in, and they held his knees open. He looked at them and smiled, and slipped his hand down over his stomach. Another boy who was standing up dropped his pants and stood there with his hands on his hips, looking down at his erect organ.
Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader Page 15