Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  So leave us throw aside the drained crankcase of Brubeck and proceed to unleaven the yeast bread of cunt and unfurl the jolly condom. . . . I walk up to this chick, flash a condom on her like a piecea tin, you dig, and I say, “Come with me.”

  “Fresh,” she say and slap me hard, the way I know it is this impersonator is a insult. I insinuate a clap up her ass without so much as by-your-leave.

  So I says, “I thought you was McCoy. You look so nice and female to an old cowhand.”

  “Oh go impersonate a purple-assed baboon, you stupid old character. I’d resist you to the last bitch in any sex.”

  I stand on the Fifth Amendment, will not answer question of the senator from Wisconsin. “Are you or have you ever been a member of the male sex?” They can’t make Dicky whimper on the boys. Know how I take care of crooners, don’t you? Just listen to them. A word to the wise guy. I mean you gotta be careful of politics these days, some old department get physical kick him right in his Coordinator. Well, that’s the hole story, and I guess I oughta know after all these years. Wellcome and Burroughs to the family party, a member in hrumph good standing we hope.

  Castrates, Don’t Let The Son Set On You Here—precocious little prick could get it by ass mosses. (Seaweed in a dark green grotto.)

  The Philosophic Doctor sits on his rattan-ass Maugham veranda drinking pink gin fades to a Manhattan analyst looking over a stack of notes.

  “So our murderer was, it seems, the bitten Brubeck, who has since recovered and spread his hideous progeny from the wards of Seattle in the parishes of New Orleans, nameless blubby things crawl out of ash pits all covered with shitty sheets, walk around gibber like dead geese.”

  This refers to a nightmare of the subject’s childhood in which he found himself threatened by two figures covered with soiled sheets—poison juices, Goddammit! Dream occur after the subject’s collaborating father read him “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” where, as you will doubtless recall, one woman got her head cut clean off and rammed up the chimney. So, Brubeck, you know what you can do with your Liz bitch; and if you don’t, my orangutan friend will show you.

  “I have frequently observed in the course of my practices, hrumph, I mean practice, that homosexuals often express a willingness to, humph, copulate with headless women—a consummation devoutly to be wished. As one subject expressed it, ‘Now I read where this chicken live a week without a head. They feed it through this tube stick out so the neck don’t heal over and close up the way a cunt would heal over she didn’t open it up every month with an apple corer, to let the old blood out. I mean a broad don’t need that head anyhoo.’ And recall that it was Medusa’s head turned the boys to stone. I suggest that the perilous part of a woman is her hypothalamus, sending solid female static fuck up a man’s synapses and leave him paralyzed from the waist down.”

  So I am prepared to state that the above is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, so help me God or any other outfit when my dignity and sovereignty be threatened by brutal short-arm aggression. Sworn before me, Harry Q. T. Burford on this day.

  “We must have a long talk, son. You see there are men and there are, well, women; and women are different from men.”

  “In precisely what way, Father?” said young Cesspoll incisively.

  “Well, they’re, well, they’re different, that’s all. You’ll understand when you’re older; and, hurumph, that’s what I want to talk to you about. When you do get older.”

  “Come see me tonight in my apartment under the school privy. Show you something interesting,” said the janitor, drooling green coca juice.

  Women seethe with hot poison juices eat it off in a twink. Laws of hospitality be fucked. Take your recalcitrant ass to your own trap. No drones in my dormitories.

  “I’m no one’s live one,” sneered the corpse to the necrophile. “Go back to your own people, you frantic old character.”

  “Oh be careful. There they go again,” says the old queen as his string break, spilling his balls across the floor. “Stop them, will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don’t just stand there and let the master’s balls roll into the coal bin.”

  “Is them my peeled balls those kids play marbles with? Why shit sure. Boy, who give you the right to play with my balls?”

  “They revert to the public domain after not being claimed forty year, mister.”

  Well, the wind-up is the fag marries the transvestite Liz disguised as a boy in drag, former heartthrob of Greg hang him for kicks and retire to a locker in Grand Central, subsisting on suitcase and shoe leather. So many tasty ways to prepare it, girls—simmered in saddle soap, singe-broiled in brilliantine, smoked over smoldering ashtrays.

  We are in a long white corridor of leaves lit by sunlight.

  The Old West dies slow on Hungarian gallows, so while he is fixing (can’t hit the hypothalamus anymore) we will shake down the trap for hidden miles and tragic flaws hang a golden lad with his own windblown hair.

  When is a boy not a boy? When he is buoyed up by the wind, and the sailplane falls silent as erection.

  The blind vet is on the way over to fuck me in the Grand Canal bent over the Academy Bridge. Someone take a picture and cops the film fest for a big brass bidet.

  The lamprey seeks a silver fish in the green lagoon.

  It would be better off dead. Broken leg. Told by an idiot broken down there you must hear. It is out of the woodpile and into the fire that monkey, and Denmark is rotten with a funeral pyre of bullshit.

  “Look into my eyes, baby, mirror of the mad come.”

  “I can see inside the blue flames running on these long white nerves burn the spine in a slow squeeeeeeeeze.”

  Mouths leap forward on flesh tubes, clamp and twist.

  Johnny on all fours and Marv sucking him and running his fingers down the thigh backs and light over the ass and outfields of the ball park. Johnny’s body begins to hump in the middle, each hump a little longer and squeezier like oily fingers inside squeeze your balls soft as pink down, squeeze those sweet marshmallows slow slow slow.

  He throws his head back with a great wolf howl.

  Call the coroner; my skill naught avail.

  Mine it out of your limestone bones, those fossil messages of arthritis; read the metastasis with blind fingers.

  Where else you gonna look? Into the atrophied nuts of the priest, coyote of death? (A coyote is character hangs around the halls of the immigration department in Mexico, D.F., engage to help you for a fee with his inside connections.)

  “I can get you straight in to the District Supervisor. Got an in. Of course, it cost. I don’t want much—all go pay off my tremendous connections.” His voice breaks in a pathic scream.

  “Didja get a stand-on?” said the vulgar old queen to the virginal boy, trembling in white flame of contempt. “Land sakes,” said the queen, “so young so cold so fair—I love it.” (Silver statue in the moonlight.)

  The swindler enters Heaven in a blast of bullshit. Here’s a man hang self opening night of the Met. Cut throat of entire staff, take over the stage, single-handed scene-stealer. Prance out in Isolde drag, sing the “Liebestod” in a hideous falsetto, ending in burlesque striptease. “Take it off! Take it off!” chant his stooges, as pink step-ins, stiff with ass blood, fly out over the audience, she spring the trap. Blood burn in neon pink light through his spine spasms and grinding bone grins. Flesh turn to black shit and flake off—wind and rain and bones on moldy beach. The queen is a hard-faced boy, patch over one eye, parrot on shoulder, say, “Dead men tell no tales—or do they?” He prods the skull with a cutlass, and a crab scuttles out. The boy reaches down and pick up a scroll.

  “The Map! The Map!”

  The map turns to shitty toilet paper in his hands, blow across a vacant lot in East St. Louis, catch on clean barbed wire and burn with a blue flame.

  The boy pulls off the patch, parrot flies into the jungle, cutlass turns to machete. He is studying the Map and swatting sand flies.

 
; American queens shriek and howl in revolting paroxysms of self-pity. They declare a nausea contest. The most abject queen of them all gathers his rotting protoplasms for an all-out effort. . . .

  “My power’s coming! . . . My power’s coming!” he screeches.

  Orchestra strikes up, and female impersonator prances out in hillbilly drag with hairy knobby knees showing.

  “She’ll be swishing round the mountain when she comes. . . .”

  The queen’s familiar spirits are gathering, larval whimpering entities. The queen writhes in a dozen embraces, accommodating the passionate exigencies of invisible partners, now sucking noisily, now throwing his legs over his head with a loud “Whoopeee!” He sidles across the floor with his legs spread, reaches up and caresses one of the judges with a claw . . . he has turned himself into a monster crab with a human body from the waist down. Beneath the skin liquid protoplasm quivers like jellied consommé as he offers up his ass.

  The judges start back, appalled.

  “He liquefy himself already!”

  “Deplorable!”

  Other contestants jealously throw off their clothes to reveal an impressive variety of unattractive physiques.

  “Look at me!”

  “Feast your eyes on my ugliness!”

  One queen pulls the falsie top off his pinhead and begins cackling like a chicken: “I don’t need that old head anyhoo!”

  We are not at all innarested to find a prick crawl up the back stairs, make time in the broom closet, remember? and spurt all over the white sheet in the hung-over Sunday dawn. . . . We goin’ to home it over the silver plate into the golden toilet and jack out our balls on the mosaic floor into the carp pool, keeps them healthy, fat and sluggish.

  Assassin of geraniums! Murderer of the lilies!

  Over the bridge to Brighton Rock, place of terrible pleasures and danger, where predatory brainwashers stalk the passers by in black Daimlers. Clients check Molotov cocktails and flamethrowers with the beautiful diseases hatcheck person of indeterminate sex. . . . And the government falls at least once a day.

  Set wades in blood up to her cunt, cuts down the blasphemers of Ra with her sick hell of junk.

  The snake’s venom is paid for with coins of the realm of night. No hiding place . . .

  Wooden steps wind up a vast slope, scattered stone huts. Greg licks the black rim of the world in a cave of rusty limestone. Across the hills to Idaho, under the pine trees, boys hang a horse with a broken leg. One plays “I’m Leavin’ Cheyenne” on his harmonica, they pass around an onion and cry. They stand up and swing off through the branches with Tarzan cries.

  We is all out on a long silver bail.

  It was a day like any other when I walk down the Main Line to the Sargasso, pass faces set a thousand years in matrix of evil, faces with eerie innocence of old people, faces vacant of intent. Sit down in the green chair provided for me by other men occupy all the others. Convey my order with usual repetitions—at one time I was threatened by rum and Cinzano, whereas I order mint tea. I sit back and make this scene, mosaic of juxtapositions, strange golden chains of Negro substance seeped up from the Unborn South. So I do not at once dig the deformed child—I call it that for want of a better name: actually it look between unsuccessful baboon and bloated lemur, with a sort of moldy sour bestial look in the eyes—that was sitting to all intents and purposes on the back of my chair.

  Shellac red-brick houses, black doors shine like ice in the winter sun. Lawn down to the lake, old people sit in green chairs, huddle in lap robes.

  We are on the way over with a bolt of hot steel wool to limn your toilet with spangled orgones. Conspicuous consumption is rampant in the porticoes slippery with Koch spit, bloody smears on the cryptic mosaic—frozen cream cone and a broken dropper. As when a junky long dead woke with a junk-sick hard-on, hears the radiator thump and bellow like an anxious dinosaur of herbivorous tendencies—treeless plain stretch to the sky, vultures have miss the Big Meat. . . .

  Will he fight? is the question at issue.

  “Yes,” snarls President Ra look up from a crab hunt, charge the Jockey Club with his terrible member. “Fuck my sewage canal, will you? Don’t like you and don’t know you. Some Coptic cocksucker vitiate the pure morning joy of hieroglyph.”

  “At least we have saved the bread knife,” he said.

  “The message is not clear,” said García, when they brought him the brujo rapt in nutmeg.

  Priest whips a yipping Sellubi down the limestone stairs with a gold chain.

  “Unlawful flight to prevent consummation,” lisps the toothless bailiff. The trembling defendant—survivor of the Coconut Grove fire—stands with a naked hard-on.

  “Death by Fire in Truck,” farts the Judge in code.

  “Appeal is meaningless in the present state of our knowledge,” says the defense, looking up from electron microscope.

  “You have your warning,” says the President.

  “The monkey is not dead but sleepeth,” brays Harry the Horse, with inflexible authority.

  The centipede nuzzles the iron door rusted to thin black paper with urine of a million fairies. Red centipede in the green weeds and broken stelae. Inside the cell crouch prisoners of the Colonia. Mugwump sits naked on a rusty bidet, turns a crystal cylinder etched with cuneiforms. Iron panel falls in dust, red specks in the sunlight.

  A vast Moslem muttering rises from the stone square where brass statues suffocate.

  from naked lunch

  I CAN FEEL THE HEAT CLOSING IN

  I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train. . . . Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, call the counterman in Nedick’s by his first name. A real asshole. And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (imagine tailing somebody in a white trench coat—trying to pass as a fag I guess) hit the platform. I can hear the way he would say it holding my outfit in his left hand, right hand on his piece: “I think you dropped something, fella.”

  But the subway is moving.

  “So long flatfoot!” I yell, giving the fruit his B production. I look into the fruit’s eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the two hundred dollar sharkskin suit, the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and carrying The News as a prop. “Only thing I read is Little Abner.”

  A square wants to come on hip. . . . Talks about “pod,” and smoke it now and then, and keeps some around to offer the fast Hollywood types.

  “Thanks, kid,” I say, “I can see you’re one of our own.” His face lights up like a pinball machine, with stupid, pink effect.

  “Grassed on me he did,” I said morosely. (Note: Grass is English thief slang for inform.) I drew closer and laid my dirty junky fingers on his sharkskin sleeve. “And us blood brothers in the same dirty needle. I can tell you in confidence he is due for a hot shot.” (Note: This is a cap of poison junk sold to addict for liquidation purposes. Often given to informers. Usually the hot shot is strychnine since it tastes and looks like junk.)

  “Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don’t if the shot is right. That’s the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit—Kid, it was tasty. . . .

  “Recollect when I am travelling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi. . . . We is working the fags in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigilante turns up for work in cowboy boots and a black vest with a hunka tin on it and a lariat slung over his shoulder.

  “So I sa
ys: ‘What’s with you? You wig already?’

  “He just looks at me and says: ‘Fill your hand stranger’ and hauls out an old rusty six shooter and I take off across Lincoln Park, bullets cutting all around me. And he hangs three fags before the fuzz nail him. I mean the Vigilante earned his moniker. . . .

  “Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con men? Like ‘raise,’ letting someone know you are in the same line?

  “‘Get her!’

  “‘Get the Paregoric Kid giving that mark the build up!’

  “‘Eager Beaver wooing him much too fast.’

  “The Shoe Store Kid (he got that moniker shaking down fetishists in shoe stores) say: ‘Give it to a mark with K.Y. and he will come back moaning for more.’ And when the Kid spots a mark he begin to breathe heavy. His face swells and his lips turn purple like an Eskimo in heat. Then slow, slow he comes on the mark, feeling for him, palpating him with fingers of rotten ectoplasm.

  “The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. That one stepped right off a Saturday Evening Post cover with a string of bullheads, and preserved himself in junk. His marks never beef and the Bunko people are really carrying a needle for the Rube. One day Little Boy Blue starts to slip, and what crawls out would make an ambulance attendant puke. The Rube flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: ‘Come back, kid!! Come back!!’ and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded flat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts.”

  And the fruit is thinking: “What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark’s about this one.” He’s a character collector, would stand still for Joe Gould’s seagull act. So I put it on him for a sawski and make a meet to sell him some “pod” as he calls it, thinking, “I’ll catnip the jerk.” (Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or uninstructed.)