Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Sooner or later The Vigilante, The Rube, Lee The Agent, A.J., Clem and Jody The Ergot Twins, Hassan O’Leary the After Birth Tycoon, The Sailor, The Exterminator, Andrew Keif, “Fats” Terminal, Doc Benway, “Fingers” Schafer are subject to say the same thing in the same words to occupy, at that intersection point, the same position in space-time. Using a common vocal apparatus complete with all metabolic appliances—that is, to be the same person—a most inaccurate way of expressing Recognition: The junky naked in sunlight. . .

  The writer sees himself reading to the mirror as always. . . . He must check now and again to reassure himself that The Crime Of Separate Action has not, is not, cannot occur. . . .

  Anyone who has ever looked into a mirror knows what this crime is and what it means in terms of lost control when the reflection no longer obeys. . . . Too late to dial Police. . . .

  I personally wish to terminate my services as of now in that I cannot continue to sell the raw materials of death. . . . Yours, sir, is a hopeless case and a noisome one. . . .

  “Defense is meaningless in the present state of our knowledge,” said The Defense looking up from an electron microscope. . . .

  Take your business to Walgreen’s

  We are not responsible

  Steal anything in sight

  I don’t know how to return it to the white reader

  You can write or yell or croon about it . . . paint about it . . . act about it . . . shit it out in mobiles. . . . So long as you don’t go and do it. . . .

  Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen. . . . Death for dope fiends, death for sex queens (I mean fiends) death for the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe movement. . . .

  The black wind sock of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve. . . .

  Population blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide. . . . Any number can play. . . .

  The Liberal Press and The Press Not So Liberal and The Press Reactionary scream approval: “Above all the myth of other-level experience must be eradicated. . . .” And speak darkly of certain harsh realities . . . cows with the aftosa . . . prophylaxis. . . .

  Power groups of the world frantically cut lines of connection. . . .

  The Planet drifts to random insect doom. . . .

  Thermodynamics has won at a crawl. . . . Orgone balked at the post. . . . Christ bled. . . . Time ran out. . . .

  You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point. . . . I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous like the little toe amputates in a West African disease confined to the Negro race and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a manicured toe bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and laid at her feet by her Afghan Hound. . . .

  Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book. . . . Black insect lusts open into vast, other-planet landscapes. . . . Abstract concepts, bare as algebra, narrow down to a black turd or a pair of aging cojones. . . .

  How-To extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall. . . . Doors that only open in Silence. . . . Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse. . . .

  Robert Christie knew The Answering Service. . . . Kill the old cunts . . . keep pubic hairs in his locket. . . wouldn’t You?

  Robert Christie, mass strangler of women—sounds like a daisy chain—hanged in 1953.

  Jack The Ripper, Literal Swordsman of the 1890s and never caught with his pants down . . . wrote a letter to The Press.

  “Next time I’ll send along an ear just for jolly. . . . Wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh be careful! There they go again!” said the old queen as his string broke, spilling his balls over 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!”

  Window dressers scream through the station, beat the cashiers with the Fairy Hyp.

  Dilaudid deliver poor me (Dilaudid is souped-up, dehydrate morphine).

  The sheriff in black vest types out a death warrant: “Gotta make it legal and exempt narcotic. . . .”

  Violation Public Health Law 334 . . . Procuring an orgasm by the use of fraud. . . .

  Johnny on all fours and Mary sucking him and running her fingers down the thigh backs and light over the outfields of the ball park. . . .

  Over the broken chair and out through the tool-house window whitewash whipping in a cold Spring wind on a limestone cliff over the river . . . piece of moon smoke hangs in China blue sky . . . out on a long line of jissom across the dusty floor. . . .

  Motel. . . Motel. . . Motel. . . broken neon arabesque . . . loneliness moans across the continent like fog horns over still, oily water of tidal rivers. . . .

  Ball squeezed dry lemon rindpest rims the ass with a knife cut off a piece of hash for the water pipe—bubble bubble—indicate what used to be me. . . .

  “The river is served, sir.”

  Dead leaves fill the fountain and geraniums run wild with mint, spill a vending machine route across the lawn. . . .

  The aging playboy dons his 1920 autograph slicker, feeds his screaming wife down the garbage-disposal unit. . . . Hair, shit and blood spurt out 1963 on the wall. . . . “Yes sir, boys, the shit really hit the fan in ‘63,” said the tiresome old prophet can bore the piss out of you in any space-time direction. . . .

  “Now I happen to remember because it was just two years before that a strain of human aftosa developed in a Bolivian lavatory got loose through the medium of a Chinchilla coat fixed an income tax case in Kansas City. . . . And a Liz claimed Immaculate Conception and give birth to a six-ounce spider monkey through the navel. . . . They say the croaker was party to that caper had the monkey on his back all the time. . . .”

  I, William Seward, captain of this lushed up hash-head subway, will quell the Loch Ness monster with rotenone and cowboy the white whale. I will reduce Satan to Automatic Obedience, and sublimate subsidiary fiends. I will banish the candiru from your swimming pools—I will issue a bull on Immaculate Birth Control. . . .

  “The oftener a thing happens the more uniquely wonderful it is,” said the pretentious young Nordic on the trapeze studying his Masonic homework.

  “The Jews don’t believe in Christ, Clem. . . . All they want to do is doodle a Christian girl. . . .”

  Adolescent angels sing on shithouse walls of the world.

  “Come and jack off. . .” 1929.

  “Gimpy push milk sugar shit. . .” Johnny Hung Lately 1952

  (Decayed corseted tenor sings Danny Deever in drag. . . .)

  Mules don’t foal in this decent county and no hooded dead gibber in the ash pits. . . . Violation Public Health Law 334.

  So where is the statuary and the percentage? Who can say? I don’t have The Word. . . . Home in my douche bag. . . . The King is loose with a flame thrower and the king killer, tortured in effigy of a thousand bums, slides down skid row to shit in the limestone ball court.

  Young Dillinger walked straight out of the house and never looked back. . . .

  “Don’t ever look back, kid. . . . You turn into some old cow’s salt lick.”

  Police bullet in the alley . . . Broken wings of Icarus, screams of a burning boy inhaled by the old junky . . . eyes empty as a vast plain . . . (vulture wings husk in the dry air).

  The Crab, aged Dean Of Lush Workers, puts on his crustacean suit to prowl the graveyard shift . . . with steel claws pulls the gold teeth and crowns of any flop sleep with his mouth open. . . . If the flop comes up on him The Crab rears back claws snapping to offer dubious battle on the plains of Queens.

  The Boy Burglar, fucked in the long jail term, ousted from the cemetery for the non-payment, comes gibbering into the queer bar with a moldy pawn ticket to pick up the back balls of Tent City where castrate salesmen sing
the IBM song.

  Crabs frolicked through his forest. . . wresting with the angel hard-on all night, thrown in the homo fall of valor, take a back road to the rusty limestone cave.

  Black Yen ejaculates over the salt marshes where nothing grows not even a mandrake. . . .

  Law of averages . . . A few chickens . . . Only way to live. . . .

  “Hello, Cash.”

  “You sure it’s here?”

  “Of course I’m sure. . . . Go in with you.”

  Night train to Chi . . . Meet a girl in the hall and I see she is on and ask where is a score?

  “Come in sonny.”

  I mean not a young chick but built. . . . “How about a fix first?”

  “Ixnay, you wouldn’t be inna condition.”

  Three times around . . . wake up shivering sick in warm Spring wind through the window, water burns the eyes like acid. . . .

  She gets out of bed naked. . . . Stash in the Cobra lamp. . . . Cooks up. . . .

  “Turn over. . . . I’ll give it to you in the ass.”

  She slides the needle in deep, pulls it out and massages the cheek. . . .

  She licks a drop of blood off her finger.

  He rolls over with a hard-on dissolving in the grey ooze of junk.

  In a vale of cocaine and innocence sad-eyed youths yodel for a lost Danny Boy. . . .

  We sniffed all night and made it four times . . . fingers down the black board . . . scrape the white bone. Home is the heroin home from the sea and the hustler home from The Bill. . . .

  The Pitchman stirs uneasily: “Take over here will you, kid? Gotta see a man about a monkey.”

  The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth, in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement. This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes and the slamming steel shutters of commerce, screams of pain and pathos and screams plain pathic, copulating cats and outraged squawk of the displaced bull head, prophetic mutterings of brujo in nutmeg trances, snapping necks and screaming mandrakes, sigh of orgasm, heroin silent as dawn in the thirsty cells, Radio Cairo screaming like a berserk tobacco auction, and flutes of Ramadan fanning the sick junky like a gentle lush worker in the grey subway dawn feeling with delicate fingers for the green folding crackle. . . .

  This is Revelation and Prophecy of what I can pick up without FM on my 1920 crystal set with antennae of jissom. . . . Gentle reader, we see God through our assholes in the flash bulb of orgasm. . . . Through these orifices transmute your body. . . . The Way OUT is the way IN. . . .

  Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word horde. . . . My Viking heart fares over the great brown river where motors put put put in jungle twilight and whole trees float with huge snakes in the branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore, across the Missouri field (The Boy finds a pink arrowhead) out along distant train whistles, comes back to me hungry as a street boy don’t know to peddle the ass God gave him. . . .

  Gentle Reader, The Word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and toes like an opportunist land crab, it will hang you and catch your jissom like a scrutable dog, it will coil round your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of rancid ectoplasm. . . . And why a scrutable dog?

  The other day I am returning from the long lunch thread from mouth to ass all the days of our years, when I see an Arab boy have this little black and white dog know how to walk on his hind legs. . . . And a big yaller dog come on the boy for affection and the boy shove it away, and the yaller dog growl and snap at the little toddler, snarling if he had but human gift of tongues: “A crime against nature right there.”

  So I dub the yaller dog Scrutable. . . . And let me say in passing, and I am always passing like a sincere Spade, that the Inscrutable East need a heap of salt to get it down. . . . Your Reporter bang thirty grains of M a day and sit eight hours inscrutable as a turd.

  “What are you thinking?” says the squirming American Tourist. . . .

  To which I reply: “Morphine have depressed my hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion, and since the front brain acts only at second hand with back-brain titillation, being a vicarious type citizen can only get his kicks from behind, I must report virtual absence of cerebral event. I am aware of your presence, but since it has for me no affective connotation, my affect having been disconnect by the junk man for the non-payment, I am not innarested in your doings. . . . Go or come, shit or fuck yourself with a rasp or an asp—‘tis well done and fitting for a queen—but The Dead and The Junky don’t care. . . .” They are Inscrutable.

  “Which is the way down the aisle to the water closet?” I asked the blonde usherette.

  “Right through here, sir. . . . Room for one more inside.”

  “Have you seen Pantopon Rose?” said the old junky in the black overcoat.

  The Texas sheriff has killed his complicit Vet, Browbeck The Unsteady, involved in horse heroin racket. . . . A horse down with the aftosa need a sight of heroin to ease his pain and maybe some of that heroin take off across the lonesome prairie and whinny in Washington Square. . . . Junkies rush up yelling: “Heigh oOO Silver.”

  “But where is the statuary?” This arch type bit of pathos screeched out in tea-room cocktail lounge with bamboo decorations, Calle Juarez, Mexico, D.F. . . . Lost back there with a meatball rape rap . . . a cunt claw your pants down and you up for rape that’s statutory, brother. . . .

  Chicago calling . . . come in please . . . Chicago calling . . . come in please. . . . What you think I got the rubber on for, galoshes in Puyo? A mighty wet place, reader. . . .

  “Take it off! Take it off!”

  The old queen meets himself coming round the other way in burlesque of adolescence, gets the knee from his phantom of the Old Old Howard . . . down skid row to Market Street Museum shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse . . . young boys need it special. . . .

  They was ripe for the plucking forgot way back yonder in the corn hole . . . lost in little scraps of delight and burning scrolls. . . .

  Read the metastasis with blind fingers.

  Fossil message of arthritis . . .

  “Selling is more of a habit than using.”—Lola La Chata, Mexico, D.F.

  Sucking terror from needle scars, underwater scream mouthing numb nerve warnings of the yen to come, throbbing bite site of rabies . . .

  “If God made anything better He kept it for himself,” the Sailor used to say, his transmission slowed down with twenty goofballs.

  (Pieces of murder fall slow as opal chips through glycerine.)

  Watching you and humming over and over “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair.”

  Pushing in a small way to keep up our habit. . . .

  “And use that alcohol,” I say slamming a spirit lamp down on the table.

  “You fucking can’t-wait hungry junkies all the time black up my spoons with matches. . . . That’s all I need for Pen Indef the heat rumbles a black spoon in the trap. . . .”

  “I thought you was quitting. . . . Wouldn’t feel right fucking up your cure.”

  “Takes a lot of guts to kick a habit, kid.”

  Looking for veins in the thawing flesh. Hour-Glass of junk spills its last black grains into the kidneys. . . .

  “Heavily infected area,” he muttered, shifting the tie-up.

  “Death was their Culture Hero,” said my Old Lady, looking up from the Mayan Codices. . . . “They got fire and speech and the corn seed from death. . . . Death turns into a maize seed.”

  The Ouab Days are upon us

  raw peeled winds of hate and mischance

  blew the shot.

  “Get those fucking dirty pictures out of here,” I told her.

  The Old Time Schmecker supported himself on a chair back, juiced and goof-balled . . . a disgrace to his blood.

  “What are you one of these goofba
ll artists?”

  Yellow smells of skid row sherry and occluding liver drifted out of his clothes when he made the junky gesture throwing the hand out palm up to cop . . .

  smell of chili houses and dank overcoats and atrophied testicles. . . .

  He looked at me through the tentative, ectoplasmic flesh of cure . . . thirty pounds materialized in a month when you kick . . . soft pink putty that fades at the first silent touch of junk. . . . I saw it happen . . . ten pounds lost in ten minutes . . . standing there with the syringe in one hand . . . holding his pants up with the other

  sharp reek of diseased metal.

  Walking in a rubbish heap to the sky . . . scattered gasoline fires . . . smoke hangs black and solid as excrement in the motionless air . . . smudging the white film of noon heat. . . D.L. walks beside me . . . a reflection of my toothless gums and hairless skull. . . flesh smeared over the rotting phosphorescent bones consumed by slow cold fires. . . . He carries an open can of gasoline and the smell of gasoline envelopes him. . . . Coming over a hill of rusty iron we meet a group of Natives . . . flat two-dimension faces of scavenger fish. . . .

  “Throw the gasoline on them and light it. . . .”

  QUICK . . .

  white flash . . . mangled insect screams . . .

  I woke up with the taste of metal in my mouth back from the dead

  trailing the colorless death smell

  afterbirth of a withered grey monkey

  phantom twinges of amputation . . .

  “Taxi boys waiting for a pickup,” Eduardo said and died of an overdose in Madrid. . . .

  Powder trains burn back through pink convolutions of tumescent flesh . . . set off flash bulbs of orgasm . . . pin-point photos of arrested motion . . . smooth brown side twisted to light a cigarette. . . .