Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  So glad to have you aboard, reader, but remember there is only one captain of this shit, and back-street drivers will be summarily covered with jissom and exposed to faggots in San Marco. Do not thrust your cock out the train or beckon lewdly with thy piles, nor flush thy beat Benny down the toilet. (Benny is overcoat in antiquated Times Square argot.) It is forbidden to use the signal rope for frivolous hangings, or to burn Nigras in the washroom before the other passengers have made their toilet. Show Your Culture. Rusty loads subject to carrying charges, plenty of room in the rear, folks, move back into the saloon.

  Bloody Mary’s First-Aid Manual for Boys: . . . Erections: Apply tight tourniquet at once, open the urethra with a rusty razor blade a whore shave her cunt with it and trim her rag. Inject hot carbolic acid into the scrotum and administer antivenin shot of saltpeter directly into the hypothalamus. If you are caught short without your erection kit, feed a candiru up it to suck out the poison. In stubborn and relapsing cases pelvectomy is indicated.

  The candiru woman with steel-wool pubic hairs receives clients in her little black hut across the river. . . .

  The Child Molester has lured a little changling into a vacant lot. “Now open your mouth and close your eyes and I’ll give you a big old hairy surprise.”

  “And I’ve news for thee, uncle,” she say, soul kissing a candiru up his joint.

  A cunt undulates out of a snake charmer’s basket. Tourist: “He’s pulled the teeth of course.”

  Do I hear a paretic heckler mutter, “Cathtrathon Complekth God damn it?” Well I’d rather be safe than sorry. Almost anything can lurk up a woman’s snatch. Why, a Da is subject to be castrated by his unborn daughter, piranha fingerlings with transparent teeth sharp as glass slivers leave you without a cunt to piss in. Safest way to avoid these horrid perils is come over her and shack up with Scylla, treat you right, kid, candy and cigarettes.

  The vibrating chair receives the yellow cop killer, burns his piles white as a dead leech.

  Death dressed as an admiral hang Billy Budd with his own hands and Judge Lynch sneer, “Dead suns can’t witness.” But the witness will rise from the concrete of Hudson with a fossil prick to point out the innocent wise guy.

  And when the graves start yielding up the dead—Goddammit I pay rent in perpetuity for the old gash, now she rise like Christ in drag.

  It’s the final gadget, the last of the big-time gimmicks—wires straight into the hypothalamus orgasm center! White nerves spilling out at ear and winking lewdly from corner of the eye, the queen twitch his switch and pant, “Gawd you heat my synapses! Turn me on DaddyOOOOOOOOOOH!!”

  “You cheap bitch! You nausea artist! I wouldn’t demean myself to connect your horrible old synapses.” So the queen has slink a slug in the pay toilet and blew her top off with an overcharge.

  Now the thoughtful reader may have observed certain tendencies in the author might be termed unwholesome. In fact some of you may be taken aback by the practices of this character. The analyst say: “Mr. Lee have you not consider, to thread thy cock on a lifelong oyster string of pearly cunts and get with normal suburban kicks is chic as Cecil Beaton’s ass this season in Hell?”

  I call in my friends and we spend whole evenings listen to the Bendix sing “Sweet and Low,” “The Wash Machine Boogie”; and the sinister cream separator, a living fossil, bitter as rancid yak butter, seeks the bellowing Hoover with a leopard’s grunt. Suburbia hath horrors to sate a thousand castrates and stem the topless cocks of Israel.

  Going my way, brother? The hitchhiker walks home through gathering mushroom clouds, and we meet in the Dead Ass Café, to break glass ashtrays over our foreheads pulsing in code . . . slip with a broken neck to the ground-floor mezzanine and put sickness up the cunt of Mary, yearly wounded with a frightened girl.

  Brothers, the limit is not yet. I will blow my fuse and blast my brains with a black short-circuit of arteries, but I will not be silent nor hold longer back the enema of my word hoard, been dissolving all the shit up there man and boy forty-three years and who ever held an enema longer? I claim the record, folks, and any Johnny-Come-Late think he can out-nausea the Maestro, let him shove his ass forward and do a temple dance with his piles.

  “Not bad, young man, not bad. But you must learn the meaning of discipline. Now you will observe in my production every word got some kinda awful function fit into mosaic on the shithouse wall of the world. That’s discipline, son. Always at all times know thy wants and demand same like a thousand junkies storm the crystal spine clinics cook down the Grey Ladies.”

  The bartender has kick the Sellubi, his foot sink in the ass and the Sellubi comes across the dusty floor. The bartender braces himself against the brass rail, put other foot in the Sellubi’s back and pops him off into the street.

  “Step right up ladies and gents to see this character at the risk of all his appendages and extremities and appurtenances will positively shoot himself out of a monster asshole. . .” An outhouse is carried in on the shoulders of Southern Negroes in dungarees, singing spirituals.

  “And the walls come tumbling down.”

  The outhouse falls in a cloud of powdered wood and termites, and the Human Projectile stands there in his black shit suit. A giant rubber asshole in a limestone cliff clicks open and sucks the Human Projectile in like spaghetti. Noise of distant thunder and the Projectile pops out with a great fart, flies a hundred feet through the air into a net supported by four gliders. His shit suit splits and a round worm emerges and does a belly dance. The worm suit peels off like a condom and the Aztec Youth stands naked with a hard-on in the rising sun, ejaculates bloody crystals with a scream of agony. The crowd moans and whimpers and writhes. They snatch up the stones dissolve in red and crystal light. . . . The boy has gone away through an invisible door.

  Nimun with sullen cat eyes look for a scrap of advantage, he snap it up and carry it away to the secret place where he lives and no one can find the way to his place. Old queens claw wildly at his bronze body, scream, “Show me your secret place, Nimun. I’ll give you all my hoard of rotten ectoplasm.”

  “What place? You dreaming, mister? I live in the Mills Hotel.”

  “But WHERE YOU BEEN??????????”

  The Skip Tracer has come to disconnect your hypothalamus for the nonpayment of orgones:

  “I got a fact process here, Jack. You haven’t paid your orgone bill since you was born already and used to squeak out of the womb, ‘Don’t pay it Ma. Think of your unborn child. You wanta get the best for me,’ like a concealed rat. Know this, Operators, Black and Grey Marketeers, Pimps and White Slavers, Paper Hangers of the world: no man can con the Skip Tracer when he knocks on your door with a fact process. He who gives out no orgones will be disconnected from life for the nonpayment.”

  “But give me time. I’m caught short. . . .”

  “Time ran out in the 5th at Tropical. . . . Disconnect him boys.”

  “Lost my shoe up him,” grumbles the bartender. “My feet are killing me, I got this condition of bunions you wouldn’t believe it. Turn on the ventilator, Mike. When a man live on other people’s shit he can fart out a stink won’t quit. I knew this one Sellubi could fart out smoke rings, and they is bad to shoplift with their prehensile piles. . . .”

  “Order in the court! You are accused of soliciting with prehensile piles. What have you got to say in your defense?”

  “Just cooling them off, Judge. Raw and bleeding . . . wouldn’t you?”

  Judge: “That’s beside the point. . . . What do you recommend, Doctor?”

  Dr. Burger: “I recommend hypothalamectomy.”

  The Sellubi turns white as a dead leech and shits his blood out in one solid clot. Warm spring rain washes shit off a limestone statue of a life-size boy hitchhiking with his cock. “GOING MY WAY?” in dead neon on a red-brick dais overlook a deserted park in East St. Louis.

  The Hoover bellows retreat and the Business Man says to his honey-face, “I’m tired, sweet thing, and got the rag on.”
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br />   The team hangs Brad in the locker room. Ceremonial dress of shoulder pads and jockstrap. His friend will pull the jockstrap down, let the cock spurt free and break his neck with a stiff arm. He is buried under the school outhouse where black widows lurk is bad to bite young boy ass.

  Fearless boy angels fly through the locker room jacking off, “Whooooo-oooooooooo”—they jet away in white wake of jissom, leave a crystal laugh hang in the air.

  Greg sits in the school toilet. Clean sharp turds fall out his tight young ass (turds like yellow clay washed clean in summer rain covered with crystal snail tracks in the morning sun lights the green flame of grass).

  The man with black Japanese mustache, each hair frozen in white grease. (Black branches with the white ice cover catch the morning sun over a frozen lake when we get back from the hunting trip.)

  Ambivalent alcoholic hangs himself with a great Bronx cheer, blasting out all his teeth, and tears at the noose. (Shivering dog breaks his teeth on the steel trap under a cold white moon.)

  “Candy, I Call My Sugar Candy.” Hanged boy descends on a rope of toffee, comes in the mouth of a fourteen-year-old girl eats toffee and taps out “Candy” on the neon-lighted table—outside, the blight of Oklahoma beaten by the calm young eyes.

  The boy has found the vibrator in his mother’s closet. They won’t be back before five . . . plenty of time. Drops pants to ankles, cock springs up hard and free with that lovely flip make old queen bones stir with root nerves and ligaments. He grease the tip, and it turns into a vulgar cock given to Bronx cheers at moment of orgasm and other shocking departures from good taste. (Emily Post is writing a million-word P.S. to Etiquette, entitled The Cock in Our House.) He stands front mirror, stick it slow up his ass to the glad gland give a little fart of pleasure. Bubble filled with fart gas hang in the air heavy as ectoplasm dispersed by the winds of morning sweep the dust out with slow old man hands coughing and spitting in the white blast of dawn. Sperm splash the mirror, turn black and go out in a short circuit with ozone smell of burning iron.

  Greg has come up behind Brad in the park, goose him and his hand sink in.

  “Hello, Brad.” He pulls his hand out with a resounding fart and rubs ambergris over his body, poses for Health and Strength in faggot-skin jockstrap.

  So there he stand on top of the filing cabinet naked as a prick hang out in the muted blue incense of the lesbian temple. (Cold-eyed nuns rustle by, metallic purity leaves a whiff of ozone.) Funny how a man comes back to something he left behind in a Peoria hotel drawer 1932.

  You are nearing the frontier where all the pitchmen and street peddlers, three-card-monte quick-con artists of the world spread out their goods. Old pushers, embittered by years of failure, mutter through the endless grey lanes of junk amok with a joint (i.e., a syringe), shooting the passersby. The tourist is torn in pieces by Soul Short-Change hypes fight over pieces. (Piranha fish tear each other to great ribbons of black-market beef. White bone glistens through, covered with iridescent ligaments.)

  Neon tubes glow in the blood of the world. Everyone see his neighbor clear as an old message on the shithouse wall stand out in white flames of a burning city.

  Greg turns away with a cry of defeat. Bone ache for the Marble God smiling into park covered with weeds.

  Fish thrown to the seal by naked boy grin for ooze in verdigris: KEEP THE CHANGE.

  Smile sweet as a blast of ozone from a June subway, teeth tinkle like little porcelain balls.

  Hold your tight nuts frozen in limestone convolutions.

  “I’ll be right over stick a greased peccary up her Hairy Ear.” Albanian argot for cunt.

  Sea of frozen shit in the morning sun and maggots twelve feet long stir underneath, the crust breaks here and there. Asshole farts up sulfur gases and black boiling mud.

  Crisp green lettuce heads glitter with frost under a tinkling crystal moon.

  “We’ll make a heap of money, Clem, if the price is right.” He plucks a boy’s balls, look over careful for lettuce blight, probing veins and ligaments with gentle old-woman fingers, feel soft for the vein in the pink dawn light; and the young boy wake naked out of wet dream, watch his cock spurt into the morning.

  The boy flies screaming in a jet of black blood, turns a red tube in the air, ineffable throbbing pink, rains soft pink cushions on your ass in a soft slow come.

  The boy has cut off his limestone balls and tossed them to you with a grin—light on water. Now the body sinks with a slow Bronx cheer to a torn pink balloon hang on rusty nail in the barn. Pink and purple lights play over it from a great black crane swing over rubbish heap go back to stone and trees.

  His neck has grown around the rope like a tree. (Vine root in old stone wall. Voice fade to decay, loose a soundless puff of dust, fall slow through the sunlight.)

  The boy has eaten a pat of butter, turns into middle-aged cardiac. “That’s the way I like to see them,” says Doctor Dodo Rindfest—known as Doodles to his many friends. “Them old cardiac rams alia time die up a reluctant ewe.”

  The old queen wallows in bathtub of boy balls. Others jack off over him jitterbugging, walking through the Piney Woods with a .22 in the summer dawn (chiggers pinpoint the boy’s groin in red dots), hanging on the back of freight trains careen down the three-mile grade into a cowboy ballad bellowed out by idiot cows through the honky-tonks of Panhandle.

  Screaming round the roller coaster in a stolen car, play chicken with a bronze scorpion big as a trailer truck on route 666 between Lynchburg and Danville.

  The boy rise in sea-green marble to jack off on the stones of Venice invisible to the ravening castrates of the world, fill the canals with miasmic mist of whimpering halitosis can’t get close enough to offend.

  The boy has hit you with soft snowballs burst in light burn you soft and pink and cold as cocaine.

  Don’t walk out on a poor old queen leave her paralyzed come to an empty house. Spurt into the cold spring wind whip the white wash in Chicago, into the sizzling white desert, into the limestone quarry, into the old swimming hole, bait a boy’s hook for a throbbing sunfish burn the black water with light.

  The wind sighs through the silk stocking hang in clear blue of Mexico clear against the mountain a wind sock of sweet life. (Sweet smell of boy balls and rusty iron cool in the mouth.)

  Attic under the round window eye. Summer dawn the two young bodies glow incandescent pink copulations, cock sink into the brown pink asshole up the pearly prostate, sing out along the white nerves. First soft licks of rimming tighten balls off like a winch up the ass. Rim on, MacDuff, till the pool be drained and fill with dead brown leaves, dirty snow drift across my body frozen in the kiss wakes the soft purple flower of shit.

  The boy burglar fucked in the long jail with the Porter Tuck—a bullfighter of my acquaintance recently gored in the right lung—in the lungs risk the Great Divide, ousted from the cemetery for the nonpayment come gibbering into the queer bar with a mouldy pawn ticket to pick up the back balls of Tent City, where castrate salesmen sing the IBM song in quavering falsetto.

  Balls on the window ledge fall like a broken flowerpot onto the pavement of arson yearly wounded to the sea.

  Slow cunt tease refuse until the conversion of the Jew to Diesel go around raping decent cars with a nasty old Diesel Conversion Unit cancerous, so red the rosette, on earth as in heaven this day our breadfruit of cunt.

  Crabs frolic through his forest, wrestling with the angle hard-on all night thrown in the home full of valor by adolescent rustler, hide in the capacious skirts of home on the range and the hunter come home from the Venus Hill take the back road to the rusty limestone cave.

  Rock and roll around the floor scream for junk fix the Black Yen ejaculate over the salt marshes where nothing grow, not even a mandrake. (Year of the rindpest. Everything died, even the hyenas had to bite a man’s balls and run like smash and grab.)

  Talk long enough say something. It’s the law of averages . . . a few chickens . . . only way to live.

/>   Don’t neglect the fire extinguisher and stand by with the Kotex in case one of these Southern belles get hot and burst into flame. (Bronx cheer of a fire-eater.)

  Cleave fast to mayhem and let not arson be far from thee and clamp murder to thy breast with WHOOOOOOOOPS of seal leap at your throat in Ralph’s. Not a bit alarmed about that. Think of something else.

  We are prepared to divulge all and to state that on a Thursday in the month of September 1917, we did, in the garage of the latter, at his solicitations and connivance, endeavor to suck the cock of one George Brune Brubeck, the Bear’s Ass, which act disgust me like I try to bite it off and he slap me and curse and blaspheme like Christopher Marlowe with the shiv through his eye the way it wasn’t fitting a larval fag should hear any old nameless asshole unlock his rusty word hoard.

  The blame for this atrociously incomplete act rest solidly on the basement of Brubeck, my own innocence of any but the most pure reflex move of self-defense and -respect to eliminate this strange serpent thrust so into my face at risk of my Man Life, so I, not being armed (unfortunately) with a blunderbuss, had recourse to nature’s little white soldiers—our brave defenders by land—and bite his ugly old cock in a laudable attempt to circumcise him thereby reduce to a sanitary condition. He, not understanding the purity of my motives, did inopportunely resist my well-meaning would-be surgical intervention, which occasioned to him light contusions of a frivolous nature. Whereupon he did loose upon my innocent head a blast of blasphemies like burning lions or unsuccessful horse abortionists cooked in slow Lux to prevent the shrinkage of their worm.

  We are not unaware of the needs of our constituents. Never out of our mind, and you may rest assured that we will leave no turd interred to elucidate these rancid oil scandals. We will not be intimidated by lesbians armed with hog castrators and fly the Jolly Roger of bloody Kotex, nor succumb to the blandishments of a veteran queen in drag of Liz in riding pants. Even the Terrible Mother will be touched by the grace of process.