Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  “The original statement of the Academy as simply an institution or series of institutions where knowledge skills and techniques methods of training, physical and spiritual, Scientology, Karate, Aikido were coordinated and taught is simply a strategical move to drive the enemy into the open with nothing to declare but their bad intentions. Here it is possible in terms of present day techniques. Why isn’t it being done? Why are all knowledge and skills kept from the youth of the world? These questions were aided by the Academy program. Since then of course we have gone underground to prepare for all-out resistance. We select and train our personnel in a number of locations. You have been selected for training. You ask, who is the enemy we are preparing to resist. There are several basic formulas that have held this planet in ignorance and slavery. The first is the concept of a nation or country. Draw a line around a piece of land and call it a country. That means police, customs, barriers, armies and trouble with other stone-age tribes on the other side of the line. The concept of a country must be eliminated. Countries are an extension from another formula, the formula of the family. Parents are allowed to bring up helpless children in any form of nonsense they have themselves been infected with. The family in turn derives from the whole unsanitary system of reproduction in operation here. It is now possible to create living beings. Not bacteria and viruses in a test tube, but human or at least humanoid beings who have not been crippled by the traumas of birth and death. The two beings who brought you here are preliminary experiments. The womb is now obsolete. The enemy is those beings and forces who have devised and enforced these basic formulas, and now threatened by the loss of their human slaves will do anything to keep these formulas in operation.

  “The secret of flesh is in the lost Mayan books. All the forces of suppression have now converged on Mexico to find these books and keep this secret from being used to create a new race of beings on this planet.”

  from roosevelt after inauguration and other atrocities

  WHEN DID I STOP WANTING TO BE PRESIDENT?

  At birth certainly and perhaps before. In this life or any previous incarnations I have been able to check out, I never wanted to be president. This innate decision was confirmed when I became literate and saw the president pawing babies and spouting bullshit. I attended Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb, and bombs bursting in air over Hiroshima gave proof through the night that our flag was already there. Then came the Teapot Dome scandal under President Harding, and I remember the unspeakable Gaston Means, infamous private eye and go-between in this miasma of graft, walking into a hotel room full of bourbon-drinking cigar-smoking lobbyists and fixers, with a laundry hamper he would put in the middle of the floor:

  “Fill it up boys and we talk business.”

  I do not mean to imply that my youthful idealism was repelled by this spectacle. I had by then learned to take a broad general view of things. My political ambitions were simply of a humbler and less conspicuous caliber. I hoped at one time to become Commissioner of Sewers for St. Louis County—three hundred dollars a month, with every possibility of getting one’s shitty paws deep into a slush fund—and to this end I attended a softball game where such sinecures were assigned to the deserving and the fortunate. Everybody I met said “Now I’m old So-and-so, running for such and such, and anything you do for me I’ll appreciate.”

  My boyish dreams fanned by this heady atmosphere and three mint juleps, I saw myself already in possession of the coveted post, which called for a token appearance twice a week to sign a few letters at the Old Court House; while I’m there might as well put it on the sheriff for some mary juana he has confiscated and he’d better play ball or I will route a sewer through his front yard. . . . And then across the street to the Court House Café for a coffee with some other lazy worthless bastards in the same line of business, and we wallow in corruption like contented alligators.

  I never wanted to be a front man like Harding or Nixon—taking the rap, shaking hands and making speeches all day, family reunions once a year. Who in his right mind would want a job like that? As Commissioner of Sewers I would not be called upon to pet babies, make speeches, shake hands, have lunch with the Queen; in fact, the fewer voters who knew of my existence, the better. Let kings and Presidents keep the limelight. I prefer a whiff of coal gas as the sewers rupture for miles—I have made a deal on the piping which has bought me a $30,000 home and there is talk in the press of sex cults and drug orgies carried out in the stink of what made them possible. Fluttering from the roof of my ranch-style house, over my mint and marijuana, Old Glory floats lazily in the tainted breeze.

  But there were sullen mutters of revolt from the peasantry; “My teenage daughters is cunt deep in shit. Is this the American way of life?” I thought so and I didn’t want it changed, sitting there in my garden, smoking the sheriff’s reefers, coal gas on the wind sweet in my nostrils as the smell of oil to an oil man or the smell of bullshit to a cattle baron. I sure did a sweet thing with those pipes and I’m covered too. What I got on the Governor wouldn’t look good on the front page, would it now? And I have my special police to deal with vandalism and sabotage, all of them handsome youths, languid and vicious as reptiles, described in the press as no more than minions, lackeys, and bodyguards to His Majesty the Sultan of Sewers.

  The thoughts of youth are long long thoughts. Then I met the gubernatorial candidate, and he looked at me as if trying to focus my image through a telescope and said “Anything I do for you I’ll depreciate.” And I felt the dream slipping away from me, receding into the past dim jerky far away—the discreet gold letters on a glass door: William S. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sanitation. Somehow I had not intersected. I was not one of them. Perhaps I was simply the wrong shape. Some of my classmates, plump cynical unathletic boys with narrow shoulders and broad hips, made the grade and went on to banner headlines concerning $200,000 of the taxpayers’ money and a nonexistent bridge or highway, I forget which. It was a long time ago. I have never aspired to political office since. The Sultan of Sewers lies buried in a distant 1930s softball game.

  ROOSEVELT AFTER INAUGURATION: A NEW INTRODUCTION

  I remember Cambridge Massachusetts in 1938, the year of the hurricane. A heap of folks was drowned and washed up by the tidal wave, and one woman got her throat cut when the wind blew out a window in her face. Kells Elvins and your reporter, there to cover the hurricane, were writing a shipwreck story based on the Titanic, in which the captain, in the garb of an old lady, is helped into the first lifeboat by an Eagle Scout. This image—of conduct so outrageous it elicits laughter rather than censure—captured my imagination. I could see the heroic anti-hero often running more risk than Hercules or John Wayne. When the roll is called up yonder they’ll be there.

  The ship’s captain who rushes into the first lifeboat was based on the actual case of an Italian steward who managed to escape from the sinking Titanic in this way—and found himself discovered by the wives and daughters of those who were even at that moment going down with the ship, singing “Nearer My God to Thee.” How did he escape with his life? It would seem that there is a majesty in utter vileness that disarmed the savage breasts.

  And then there was the pilot who bailed out of a burning plane, leaving the passengers to crash. He was placed in some danger when he inadvisedly attended a mass funeral for the inextricably intermingled passengers. Fortunately, he had a plane revved up in the cemetery.

  Or the Mexican bus driver, smoking a cigarette with a leaky can of gasoline beside him and singing idiot mambo: “M’importe nu y nu y nu—y nada mas que nuuuuuuuu—” I am concerned for numero uno, and nothing else but Nuuuu—Looking down, he saw that the gasoline had ignited and without interrupting his song he jumped out. The bus crashed into a ravine and everyone inside was burned to death. Thirty peons with machetes riding on the roof jumped clear. They looked at the driver, who scrambled off with the agility of a rat or an evil spirit, out-distanced thirty machetes and has never been seen since
.

  There is, about all these anti-heroes, a purity of motive, a halo of dazzling shameless innocence. They are imbued with the primeval wisdom of children and animals. They know that the name of the game is SURVIVAL. If the bus driver had put on the brakes, the burning gasoline would have sloshed all over him, and that wouldn’t have helped anyone would it now? Now, I want to say to the surviving relatives of those unfortunate travelers, I guess it was just the curse of the Pharoahs—in any case, how could I share one parachute with 23 slob pasajeros? I ain’t mad at nobody, besides which I have a deep reverence for life. And I’d like to see any stinking passengers beat me into the first lifeboat. We talked the third mate into going down with the ship.

  The image of outrage was again evoked in 1953, in a less heroic mold, by a particularly sloppy Colombian gunboat on the Putumayo River, and I wrote to Allen Ginsberg: “It wouldn’t surprise me to see someone shit on the deck and wipe his ass with the flag.” The routine which followed, enumerating various scandalous acts allegedly perpetrated by Roosevelt’s retinue, was deleted from The Yagé Lettersby the English printers. “Roosevelt after Inauguration” was first published in Floating Bear #9, by Le Roi Jones. That issue was seized and an obscenity case brought against it when copies were sent to someone in a penal institution. Subsequently the piece appeared in a mimeo edition from Ed Sanders’s Fuck You Press, and has been in a couple of small literary magazines.

  I feel that “Roosevelt after Inauguration” is, in a sense, prophetic of Watergate—and yet few of the Watergate defendants exhibited this degree of pure glittering shamelessness. So let us all scan the horizons for new frontiers of depravity. This is the Space Age; we are here to go. We can float out of here on a foam runway of sheer vileness.

  from the adding machine

  A WORD TO THE WISE GUY

  After teaching a class in Creative Writing a few years back, my own creative powers fell to an all-time low. I really had a case of writer’s block, and my idealistic young assistant complained that I simply sat around the loft doing absolutely nothing—which was true. This gave me to think (as the French say): Can creative writing be taught? And am I being punished by the Muses for impiety and gross indiscretion in revealing the secrets to a totally unreceptive audience—like you start giving away hundred-dollar bills and nobody wants them. . . . I also discovered that the image of “William Burroughs” in my students’ minds had little relation to the facts. They were disappointed because I wore a coat and tie to class; they had expected me to appear stark naked with a strap-on, I presume. In all, a disheartening experience.

  “Creative Writing”—what does that mean? I would have liked to put them all off the career of writing. Be a plumber instead—(I felt like screaming)—and have your fucking king-size fridge full of Vienna sausages, chilled aquavit and Malvern spring water, and look at your color TV with remote-control switch and cuddle a .30-.30 on your lap, waiting for the deer season when all sensible citizens will be in their cellars with sandbags stacked around them. Or be a doctor for chrissakes—once you make the big-time as the best asshole doctor what can be got, you don’t have to worry like next year there won’t be no assholes to operate on. But next year maybe no assholes will buy my books. . . .

  All right, maybe two, three people in the class can’t be dissuaded. My advice is get a good agent and a good tax accountant if you ever make any money, and remember, you can’t eat fame. And you can’t write unless you want to write, and you can’t want to unless you feel like it. Say you’re a doctor with a nice practice. You don’t feel so well today—family troubles and other things you can’t quite put a name to—and you just feel fucking terrible, as you slip a chlorophyll tablet in your mouth to cover three quick drinks—(that old bitch would spread it all over Palm Beach, “My dear he was drunk. . .”) Well you can still carry on and what the hell, quarter-grain of morphine for each patient; no matter what is wrong with them, they will feel better immediately and prize me as the best of croakers. And if I get any sass from the Nares, I’ll just tell ‘em, “Well I’m off to work in the Bahrein Islands so you take over my practice and shove it up your ass.” I mean, even if you don’t feel like practicing medicine, you can still do it. Same way with law; you don’t feel like trying a case, all you gotta do is get a continuance and lay up smoking weed in Martha’s Vineyard for a month.

  In these other professions you can always cover for not feeling like doing it, but writing you didn’t feel like doing ain’t worth shit. The profession has many advantages; sure, you can ride out on a white shark to a villa in the Bahamas, or you can spend twenty years teaching English in the Berlitz School, writing the Great Book that nobody can read. James Joyce wrote some of the greatest prose in the language—The Dead, Dubliners—but could he stop there and write exquisite stories about unhappy Irish Catholics from then on out? If so, they would have rewarded him with the Nobel Prize. Now nobody ever tells a doctor, “Lissen Doc, your ass operations is the greatest, many grateful queens is getting fucked again, but you gotta do something new—“Of course he doesn’t have to; it’s the same old ass. But a writer has to do something new, or he has to standardize a product—one or the other. Like I could standardize the queer Peter-Pan wild-boy product, and put it out year after year like the Tarzan series; or I could write a Finnegans Wake. So, I get this idea about a private eye and the Cities of the Red Night. . . Quien sabe?

  Or take the entertainment business; today you may be the Top of the Pops, the rage of the café society . . . like Dwight Fisk, who did those horrible double-entendre numbers back in the thirties—“That’s the man who pinched me in the Astor, just below the mezzanine, and for several days your mother wasn’t seen; so now my little heart you know where you got your start, from a pinch just below the mezzanine”—who in the fuck wants to hear that noise anymore? But you won’t see any doctor, lawyer, engineer, architect who’s got to be world champion at his profession or else stand on a corner selling ties with his brains knocked out. No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he’s got the fridge full of sausages and spring water, just like the plumber. Nothing can happen to him; grants, scholarships, a rainbow to his grave and a tombstone that glows in the dark.

  Artists do however have a degree of freedom. A writer has little power, but he does have freedom, at least in the West, Mr. Yevtushenko. Think very carefully about this. Do you want to be merely the spokesman for accomplished power movers? The more power, the less freedom. A politician has almost no freedom at all. I am frequently asked, “What would you do if you were President? What would you do if you were the dictator of America? What would you do if you had a billion dollars?” In the words of my friend Ahmed Jacoubi, “This question is not personal opinion.” A prior question must be asked: “How did you get to be the President, a dictator, a billionaire?” The answers to these questions will condition what you will do. For one is not magically teleported into these positions; one gets there by a series of discrete steps, each step hedged with conditions and prices.

  To take a microcosmic example: my humble ambition to be Commissioner of Sewers for St. Louis, and my boyish dread of what I would do when I occupied this position. These dreams were outlined in an essay I wrote for Harper’s in response to the question, “When did you stop wanting to be President?” I imagined a soft sinecure, crooked sewer-piping deals, my house full of languid vicious young men described in the press as “no more than lackeys to his majesty the Sultan of Sewers.” I supposed my position would be secured by the dirt I had on the Governor, and that I’d spend my afternoons in wild orgies or sitting around smoking the Sheriff’s reefer and luxuriating in the stink from ruptured sewage lines for miles around.

  But why should I have been appointed Commissioner of Sewers in the first place? The duties are nominal; no skill is required. I am not appointed on my knowledge of sewers or my ability to do the job. Why, then? Well, perhaps I have worked for the Party for a number of years; I
am due for a payoff. However, I must also have something to give in return. Perhaps I can sway some votes, which action on my part is contingent on my receiving some payoff? Or perhaps they expect me to take the rap for the piping deal. If so I will have to watch my step and the use of my signature. Perhaps they expect a contribution to the campaign fund, which I am in a position to swing, having access to people of wealth. One thing is sure—they expect something from me in return.

  Now, an under-the-counter deal in cheap piping involves contractors, auditors, and a whole battery of fixes, fixers, and cover-ups, all of which have to be paid in favors and cash. So my house is not full of languid vicious young men—it is full of cigar-smoking bourbon-swilling fat-assed politicians and fixers. I have something on the Governor? I’d better be very damn careful he doesn’t have something on me. The Commissioner, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion; certainly above the suspicion of sex orgies and drug use. I would have been out of my mind to compromise myself with the Sheriff. Sure, I can call on him to fix a parking ticket, but I’d better keep my hands off his confiscated marijuana unless others in higher positions are also involved. And even if I could wangle a few special police to guard the sewers against communistic sabotage, they would not be handsome youths. More likely I would be stuck with the Sheriff’s retarded brother-in-law who can’t make the grade as a night watchman, and with two or three other wash-outs from police and guard positions.

  So if I can’t do what I want as Commissioner of Sewers, still less can I do what I want as President of the United States. I will disband the Army and the Navy and channel the entire Defense budget into setting up sexual adjustment centers, will I? I’ll legalize marijuana? Annul the Oriental Exclusion Act? Abolish income tax for artists and put the burden of taxation onto the very rich? I should live so long.