Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader
Page 38
And Intolerable I&I’s “errand boys” and “strikebreakers” are copping out right left and center:
“Mr. Martin, and you board members, vulgar stupid Americans, you will regret calling in the Mayan Aztec Gods with your synthetic mushrooms. Remember we keep exact junk measure of the pain inflicted and that pain must be paid in full. Is that clear enough Mr. Intolerable Martin, or shall I make it even clearer? Allow me to introduce myself: The Mayan God of Pain And Fear from the white hot plains of Venus which does not mean a God of vulgarity, cowardice, ugliness and stupidity. There is a cool spot on the surface of Venus three hundred degrees cooler than the surrounding area. I have held that spot against all contestants for five hundred thousand years. Now you expect to use me as your ‘errand boy’ and ‘strikebreaker’ summoned up by an IBM machine and a handful of virus crystals? How long could you hold that spot, you ‘board members’? About thirty seconds I think with all your guard dogs. And you thought to channel my energies for ‘operation total disposal’? Your ‘operations’ there or here this or that come and go and are no more. Give my name back. That name must be paid for. You have not paid. My name is not yours to use. Henceforth I think about thirty seconds is written.”
And you can see the marks are wising up, standing around in sullen groups and that mutter gets louder and louder. Any minute now fifty million adolescent gooks will hit the street with switch blades, bicycle chains and cobblestones.
“Street gangs, Uranian born of nova conditions, get out and fight for your streets. Call in the Chinese and any random factors. Cut all tape. Shift cut tangle magpie voice lines of the earth. Know about The Board’s ‘Green Deal’? They plan to board the first life boat in drag and leave ‘their human dogs’ under the white hot skies of Venus. ‘Operation Sky Switch’ also known as ‘Operation Total Disposal.’ All right you Board bastards, we’ll by God show you ‘Operation Total Exposure.’ For all to see. In Times Square. In Piccadilly.”
SO PACK YOUR ERMINES
“So pack your ermines, Mary—We are getting out of here right now—I’ve seen this happen before—The marks are coming up on us—And the heat is moving in—Recollect when I was traveling with Limestone John on The Carbonic Caper—It worked like this: He rents an amphitheater with marble walls he is a stone painter you dig can create a frieze while you wait—So he puts on a diving suit like the old Surrealist Lark and I am up on a high pedestal pumping the air to him—Well, he starts painting on the limestone walls with hydrochloric acid and jetting himself around with air blasts he can cover the wall in ten seconds, carbon dioxide settling down on the marks begin to cough and loosen their collars.”
“But what is he painting?”
“Why it’s arrg a theater full of people suffocating—”
So we turn the flops over and move on—If you keep it practical they can’t hang a nova rap on you—Well, we hit this town and right away I don’t like it.
“Something here, John—Something wrong—I can feel it—”
But he says I just have the copper jitters since the nova heat moved in—Besides we are cool, just rolling flops is all, three thousand years in show business—So he sets up his amphitheater in a quarry and begins lining up the women clubs and poets and window dressers and organizes this “Culture Fest” he calls it and I am up in the cabin of a crane pumping the air to him—Well the marks are packing in, the old dolls covered with ice and sapphires and emeralds all really magnificent—So I think maybe I was wrong and everything is cool when I see like fifty young punks have showed in aqualungs carrying fish spears and without thinking I yell out from the crane:
“Izzy The Push—Sammy The Butcher—Hey Rube!”
Meanwhile I have forgotten the air pump and The Carbonic Kid is turning blue and trying to say something—I rush and pump some air to him and he yells:
“No! No! No!”
I see other marks are coming on with static and camera guns, Sammy and the boys are not making it—These kids have pulled the reverse switch—At this point The Blue Dinosaur himself charged out to discover what the beef is and starts throwing his magnetic spirals at the rubes—They just moved back ahead of him until he runs out of charge and stops. Next thing the nova heat slipped antibiotic handcuffs on all of us.
SHIFT COORDINATE POINTS
K9 was in combat with the alien mind screen—Magnetic claws feeling for virus punch cards—pulling him into vertiginous spins—
“Back—Stay out of those claws—Shift coordinate points—” By Town Hall Square long stop for the red light—A boy stood in front of the hot dog stand and blew water from his face—Pieces of grey vapor drifted back across wine gas and brown hair as hotel faded photo showed a brass bed—Unknown mornings blew rain in cobwebs—Summer evenings feel to a room with rose wallpaper—Sick dawn whisper of clock hands and brown hair—Morning blew rain on copper roofs in a slow haze of apples—Summer light on rose wallpaper—Iron mesas lit by a pink volcano—Snow slopes under the Northern shirt—Unknown street stirring sick dawn whispers of junk—Flutes of Ramadan in the distance—St. Louis lights wet cobblestones of future life—Fell through the urinal and the bicycle races—On the bar wall the clock hands—My death across his face faded through the soccer scores—smell of dust on the surplus army blankets—Stiff jeans against one wall—And KiKi went away like a cat—Some clean shirt and walked out—He is gone through unknown morning blew—“No good—No bueno—Hustling myself—” Such wisdom in gusts—
K9 moved back into the combat area—Standing now in the Chinese youth sent the resistance message jolting clicking tilting through the pinball machine—Enemy plans exploded in a burst of rapid calculations—Clicking in punch cards of redirected orders—Crackling shortwave static—Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeep—Sound of thinking metal—
“Calling partisans of all nations—Word falling—Photo falling—Break through in Grey Room—Pinball led streets—Free doorways—Shift coordinate points—”
“The ticket that exploded posed little time so I’ll say ‘good night’—Pieces of grey Spanish Flu wouldn’t photo—Light the wind in green neon—You at the dog—The street blew rain—If you wanted a cup of tea with rose wallpaper—The dog turns—So many and sooo—”
“In progress I am mapping a photo—Light verse of wounded galaxies at the dog I did—The street blew rain—The dog turns—Warring head intersected Powers—Word falling—Photo falling—Break through in Grey Room—”
He is gone away through invisible mornings leaving a million tape recorders of his voice behind fading into the cold spring air pose a colorless question?
“The silence fell heavy and blue in mountain villages—Pulsing mineral silence as word dust falls from demagnetized patterns—Walked through an old blue calendar in Weimar youth—Faded photo on rose wallpaper under a copper roof—In the silent dawn little grey men played in his block house and went away through an invisible door—Click St. Louis under drifting soot of old newspapers—”
“‘Daddy Longlegs’ looked like Uncle Sam on stilts and he ran this osteopath clinic outside East St. Louis and took in a few junky patients. For two notes a week they could stay on the nod in green lawn chairs and look at the oaks and grass stretching down to a little lake in the sun and the nurse moved around the lawn with her silver trays feeding the junk in—We called her ‘Mother’—Wouldn’t you?—Doc Benway and me was holed up there after a rumble in Dallas involving this aphrodisiac ointment and Doc goofed on ether and mixed in too much Spanish Fly and burned the prick off the Police Commissioner straight away—So we come to ‘Daddy Longlegs’ to cool off and found him cool and casual in a dark room with potted rubber plants and a silver tray on the table where he liked to see a week in advance—The nurse showed us to a room with rose wallpaper and we had this bell any hour of the day or night ring and the nurse charged in with a loaded hypo—Well one day we were sitting out in the lawn chairs with lap robes it was a fall day trees turning and the sun cold on the lake—Doc picks up a piece of grass—
“Junk turns you on vegetable—It’s green, see?—A green fix should last a long time.”
We checked out of the clinic and rented a house and Doc starts cooking up this green junk and the basement was full of tanks smelled like a compost heap of junkies—So finally he draws off this heavy green fluid and loads it into a hypo big as a bicycle pump—
“Now we must find a worthy vessel,” he said and we flush out this old goof ball artist and told him it was pure Chinese H from The Ling Dynasty and Doc shoots the whole pint of green right into the main line and the Yellow Jacket turns fibrous grey green and withered up like an old turnip and I said: “I’m getting out of here, me,” and Doc said: “An unworthy vessel obviously—So I have now decided that junk is not green but blue.”
So he buys a lot of tubes and globes and they are flickering in the basement this battery of tubes metal vapor and quicksilver and pulsing blue spheres and a smell of ozone and a little hi-fi blue note fixed you right to metal this junk note tinkling through your crystals and a heavy blue silence fell klunk—and all the words turned to cold liquid metal and ran off you man just fixed there in a cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes—We found out later that the metal junkies were all radioactive and subject to explode if two of them came into contact—At this point in our researches we intersected The Nova Police—
COORDINATE POINTS
The case I have just related will show you something of our methods and the people with whom we are called upon to deal.
“I doubt if any of you on this copy planet have ever seen a nova criminal—(they take considerable pains to mask their operations) and I am sure none of you have ever seen a nova police officer—When disorder on any planet reaches a certain point the regulating instance scans POLICE—Otherwise—SPUT—Another planet bites the cosmic dust—I will now explain something of the mechanisms and techniques of nova which are always deliberately manipulated—I am quite well aware that no one on any planet likes to see a police officer so let me emphasize in passing that the nova police have no intention of remaining after their work is done—That is, when the danger of nova is removed from this planet we will move on to other assignments—We do our work and go—The difference between this department and the parasitic excrescence that often travels under the name ‘Police’ can be expressed in metabolic terms: The distinction between morphine and apomorphine. ‘Apomorphine is made by boiling morphine with hydrochloric acid. This alters chemical formulae and physiological effects. Apomorphine has no sedative narcotic or addicting properties. It is a metabolic regulator that need not be continued when its work is done.” I quote from Anxiety and Its Treatment by Doctor John Dent of London: ‘Apomorphine acts on the back brain stimulating the regulating centers in such a way as to normalize the metabolism.’ It has been used in the treatment of alcoholics and drug addicts and normalizes metabolism in such a way as to remove the need for any narcotic substance. Apomorphine cuts drug lines from the brain. Poison of dead sun fading in smoke—”
The Nova Police can be compared to apomorphine, a regulating instance that need not continue and has no intention of continuing after its work is done. Any man who is doing a job is working to make himself obsolete and that goes double for police.
Now look at the parasitic police of morphine. First they create a narcotic problem then they say that a permanent narcotics police is now necessary to deal with the problem of addiction. Addiction can be controlled by apomorphine and reduced to a minor health problem. The narcotics police know this and that is why they do not want to see apomorphine used in the treatment of drug addicts:
PLAN DRUG ADDICTION
Now you are asking me whether I want to perpetuate a narcotics problem and I say: “Protect the disease. Must be made criminal protecting society from the disease.”
The problem scheduled in the United States the use of jail, former narcotics plan, addiction and crime for many years—Broad front “Care” of welfare agencies—Narcotics which antedate the use of drugs—The fact is noteworthy—48 stages—prisoner was delayed—has been separated—was required—
Addiction in some form is the basis—must be wholly addicts—Any voluntary capacity subversion of The Will Capital And Treasury Bank—Infection dedicated to traffic in exchange narcotics demonstrated a Typhoid Mary who will spread narcotics problem to the United Kingdom—Finally in view of the cure—cure of the social problem and as such dangerous to society—
Maintaining addict cancers to our profit—pernicious personal contact—Market increase—Release The Prosecutor to try any holes—Cut Up Fighting Drug Addiction by Malcolm Monroe Former Prosecutor, in Western World, October 1959.
As we have seen image is junk—When a patient loses a leg what has been damaged?—Obviously his image of himself—So he needs a shot of cooked down image—The hallucinogen drugs shift the scanning pattern of “reality” so that we see a different “reality”—There is no true or real “reality”—“Reality” is simply a more or less constant scanning pattern—The scanning pattern we accept as “reality” has been imposed by the controlling power on this planet, a power primarily oriented towards total control—In order to retain control they have moved to monopolize and deactivate the hallucinogen drugs by effecting noxious alterations on a molecular level—
The basic nova mechanism is very simple: Always create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts—This is done by dumping life forms with incompatible conditions of existence on the same planet—There is of course nothing “wrong” about any given life form since “wrong” only has reference to conflicts with other life forms—The point is these forms should not be on the same planet—Their conditions of life are basically incompatible in present time form and it is precisely the work of the Nova Mob to see that they remain in present time form, to create and aggravate the conflicts that lead to the explosion of a planet that is to nova—At any given time recording devices fix the nature of absolute need and dictate the use of total weapons—Like this: Take two opposed pressure groups—Record the most violent and threatening statements of group one with regard to group two and play back to group two—Record the answer and take it back to group one—Back and forth between opposed pressure groups—This process is known as “feed back”—You can see it operating in any bar room quarrel—In any quarrel for that matter—Manipulated on a global scale feeds back nuclear war and nova—These conflicts are deliberately created and aggravated by nova criminals—The Nova Mob: “Sammy The Butcher,” “Green Tony,” “Iron Claws,” “The Brown Artist,” “Jacky Blue Note,” “Limestone John,” “Izzy The Push,” “Hamburger Mary,” “Paddy The Sting,” “The Subliminal Kid,” “The Blue Dinosaur,” and “Mr. & Mrs. D,” also known as “Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin” also known as “The Ugly Spirit” thought to be the leader of the mob—The Nova Mob—In all my experience as a police officer I have never seen such total fear and degradation on any planet—We intend to arrest these criminals and turn them over to the Biological Department for the indicated alterations—
Now you may well ask whether we can straighten out this mess to the satisfaction of any life forms involved and my answer is this—Your earth case must be processed by the Biologic Courts—admittedly in a deplorable condition at this time—No sooner set up than immediately corrupted so that they convene every day in a different location like floating dice games, constantly swept away by stampeding forms all idiotically glorifying their stupid ways of life—(most of them quite unworkable of course) attempting to seduce the judges into Venusian sex practices, drug the court officials, and intimidate the entire audience chambers with the threat of nova—In all my experience as a police officer I have never seen such total fear of the indicated alterations on any planet—A thankless job you see and we only do it so it won’t have to be done some place else under even more difficult circumstances—
The success of the nova mob depended on a blockade of the planet that allowed them to operate with impunity—This blockad
e was broken by partisan activity directed from the planet Saturn that cut the control lines of word and image laid down by the nova mob—So we moved in our agents and started to work keeping always in close touch with the partisans—The selection of local personnel posed a most difficult problem—Frankly we found that most existing police agencies were hopelessly corrupt—the nova mob had seen to that—Paradoxically some of our best agents were recruited from the ranks of those who are called criminals on this planet—In many instances we had to use agents inexperienced in police work—There were of course casualties and fuck ups—You must understand that an undercover agent witnesses the most execrable cruelties while he waits helpless to intervene—sometimes for many years—before he can make a definitive arrest—So it is no wonder that green officers occasionally slip control when they finally do move in for the arrest—This condition, known as “arrest fever,” can upset an entire operation—In one recent case, our man in Tangier suffered an attack of “arrest fever” and detained everyone on his view screen including some of our own undercover men—He was transferred to paper work in another area—
Let me explain how we make an arrest—Nova criminals are not three-dimensional organisms—(though they are quite definite organisms as we shall see) but they need three-dimensional human agents to operate—The point at which the criminal controller intersects a three-dimensional human agent is known as “a coordinate point”—And if there is one thing that carries over from one human host to another and establishes identity of the controller it is habit: idiosyncrasies, vices, food preferences—(we were able to trace Hamburger Mary through her fondness for peanut butter) a gesture, a certain smile, a special look, that is to say the style of the controller—A chain smoker will always operate through chain smokers, an addict through addicts—Now a single controller can operate through thousands of human agents, but he must have a line of coordinate points—Some move on junk lines through addicts of the earth, others move on lines of certain sexual practices and so forth—It is only when we can block the controller out of all coordinate points available to him and flush him out from host cover that we can make a definitive arrest—Otherwise the criminal escapes to other coordinates—