Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  By late 1971, Burroughs Sr. had been living alone for a year and a half. In October he accepted an invitation to join the faculty at the experimental University of the New World in Haute Nendaz, Switzerland. Burroughs’ three months at high altitude were uncomfortable and disorienting; he was ill most of the time, and he ended up readdicted to the legal codeine pills known as Codethyline Houdé, which he affectionately called “pinkies.” In December he returned to London, feeling that the situation in Haute Nendaz had become a dead end.

  Then Terry Southern showed up with a new adventure: in April 1972, he took Burroughs on a whirlwind trip to Hollywood, trying to sell the movie rights to Naked Lunch to a Hollywood game-show producer. They were unsuccessful, but the whole episode was wonderful comic relief, and added to Burroughs’ stock of Hollywood tropes. Back in London, he was working on a new book called Port of Saints, a sequel to The Wild Boys. He also assembled a collection of short pieces that he called Exterminator! for Viking Press; his former Grove editor, Richard Seaver, published the book in August 1972.

  With Balch, Burroughs continued to meet street hustlers, and in the fall of 1972 one of these, an Irish lad named John Brady, became Burroughs’ lover. Johnny was reminiscent of Jack Anderson in his bisexuality, his lack of intellectual development, and his predilection for violence. He brought women back to the Duke Street flat for sex, and he menaced Burroughs if he met with any complaint. Burroughs was off junk at this time, but he was drinking heavily and finding it difficult to make artistic or financial progress. His self-esteem as a writer, and as a “sugar daddy,” were at low ebb, and he tolerated this humiliating situation.

  Gysin had introduced Burroughs to Sanche de Gramont, a journalist and author from an aristocratic French family. When Burroughs was invited by Oui magazine in late 1972 to visit the Moroccan hill country of Joujouka, home of the Master Musicians, de Gramont and Gysin joined the expedition, and Burroughs took John Brady along. Brian Jones, of the Rolling Stones, had followed Gysin’s lead to Joujouka, and he recorded an album with the Master Musicians. The music writer Robert Palmer also first befriended Burroughs and Gysin in Joujouka, and his critical writings later reified this nexus of three worlds: rock ‘n’ roll, avant-garde literature, and ancient North African trance music.

  Back in London in spring 1973, Burroughs was collaborating on new projects with some young English artists he had met. With Robert Gale, he wrote an illustrated short text called The Book of Breeething, exploring the liberative possibilities of ancient glyph-based languages like Egyptian or Mayan. And with Malcolm McNeill, Burroughs was writing Ah Pook Is Here, a tale about “Mr. Hart,” the ugly-hearted tycoon (based on William Randolph Hearst) who goes to the Mayan temples in Yucatán to recover “the Books” and to challenge death but who is, in the end, no match for “Ah Pook, the Destroyer.” The Ah Pook illustrated-book concept was ahead of its time; McNeill’s detailed color drawings, incorporating Burroughs’ text, were too expensive for publication. A few years later, the magazines Metal Hurlant and Heavy Metal finally made the comics/graphic-novel breakthrough, taking their names from one of Burroughs’ cut-up trilogy characters, “The Heavy Metal Kid”—a phrase also adopted by a genre of rock music.

  With Barry Miles—a writer, editor, and bookseller whom they knew from Miles’ cultural activities in London in the mid-sixties, such as the Indica Gallery and Bookshop and the underground paper International Times—Burroughs and Gysin assembled a large collection of their archival materials, which they sold in 1973. The proceeds from this sale rescued both of them from insolvency. Burroughs took Johnny Brady on a holiday trip to the Greek island of Spetsai in September; echoes of their experiences there can be found in the “Clem Snide” passages in Cities of the Red Night. This trip parallels Burroughs’ expedition with Lewis Marker to Ecuador in some ways, although any semblance of an emotional connection was overcast by alcohol and resentment after their return to London, where once again Brady had the upper hand.

  When Allen Ginsberg visited Burroughs in London that fall, he felt that his old friend was stagnating badly: drinking too much, writing too little, and unable to move forward from the London position he had maintained for seven years. Brady was openly insolent and threatening, and Ginsberg resolved to intervene somehow. He went back to New York and arranged for the English Department of the City College of New York to offer Burroughs a well-paid teaching residency in the spring of 1974. Although Burroughs had enough money to stay where he was, he welcomed the change of scene.

  Burroughs arrived in New York City in mid-January and took up residence in a sublet loft at 452 Broadway, just before his sixtieth birthday. He began to make the early-morning subway commute to his classes at CCNY, and he looked up old friends: Ginsberg, Giorno, Budd, Prentice. On February 12, Burroughs opened the metal door of his loft at cocktail time to find a tall, bespectacled blond boy of twenty-one, who had just arrived in New York from the university town of Lawrence, in his home state of Kansas. Within two weeks, Burroughs had invited the boy from Kansas to live with him in the Broadway loft—and that was the beginning of my twenty-three years with William.

  from the wild boys

  AND BURY THE BREAD DEEP IN A STY

  Audrey was a thin pale boy, his face scarred by festering spiritual wounds. “He looks like a sheep-killing dog,” said a St. Louis aristocrat. There was something rotten and unclean about Audrey, an odor of the walking dead. Doormen stopped him when he visited his rich friends. Shopkeepers pushed his change back without a thank you. He spent sleepless nights weeping into his pillow from impotent rage. He read adventure stories and saw himself as a gentleman adventurer like the “Major” . . . sun helmet, khakis, Webley at the belt, a faithful Zulu servant at his side. A dim sad child breathing old pulp magazines. At sixteen he attended an exclusive high school known as The Poindexter Academy where he felt rather like a precarious house nigger. Still he was invited to most of the parties and Mrs. Kindheart made a point of being nice to him.

  At the opening of the academy in September a new boy appeared. Aloof and mysterious, where he came from nobody knew. There were rumors of Paris, London, a school in Switzerland. His name was John Hamlin and he stayed with relatives in Portland Place. He drove a magnificent Duesenberg. Audrey, who drove a battered Moon, studied this vast artifact with openmouthed awe: the luxurious leather upholstery, the brass fittings, the wickerwork doors, the huge spotlight with a pistol-grip handle. Audrey wrote: “Clearly he has come a long way, travel stained and even the stains unfamiliar, cuff links of a dull metal that seems to absorb light, his red hair touched with gold, large green eyes well apart.”

  The new boy took a liking to Audrey, while he turned aside with polished deftness invitations from sons of the rich. This did not endear Audrey to important boys, and he found his stories coldly rejected by the school magazine.

  “Morbid” the editor told him. “We want stories that make you go to bed feeling good.”

  It was Friday, October 23,1929, a bright blue day, leaves falling, half-moon in the sky. Audrey Carsons walked up Pershing Avenue . . . “Simon, aime tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?” . . . He had read that in one of E. Haldeman Julius’s Little Blue Books and meant to use it in the story he was writing. Of course his hero spoke French. At the corner of Pershing and Walton he stopped to watch a squirrel. A dead leaf caught for a moment in Audrey’s ruffled brown hair.

  “Hello Audrey. Like to go for a ride?”

  It was John Hamlin at the wheel of his Duesenberg. He opened the door without waiting for an answer. Hamlin made a wide U-turn and headed west . . . left on Euclid, right on Lindell . . . Skinker Boulevard, City Limits . . . Clayton . . . Hamlin looked at his wristwatch.

  “We could make St. Joseph for lunch . . . nice riverside restaurant there, serves wine.”

  Audrey is thrilled of course. The autumn countryside flashes by . . . long straight stretch of road ahead.

  “Now I’ll show you what this job can do.”

&nb
sp; Hamlin presses the accelerator slowly to the floor . . . 60 . . . 70 . . . 80 . . . 85 . . . 90 . . . Audrey leans forward, lips parted, eyes shining.

  At Tent City a top-level conference is in progress, involving top-level executives in the CONTROL GAME. The Conference has been called by a Texas billionaire who contributes heavily to MRA and maintains a stable of evangelists. This conference is taking place outside St. Louis Missouri because the Green Nun flatly refuses to leave her kindergarten. The high teacup queens thought it would be fun to do a tent city like a 1917 Army camp. The conferents are discussing Operation W.O.G. (Wrath of God).

  At the top level people get cynical after a few drinks. The young man from the news magazine has discovered a good-looking Fulbright scholar and they are witty in a corner over martinis. A drunken American Sergeant reels to his feet. He has the close-cropped iron-grey hair and ruddy complexion of the Regular Army man.

  “To put it country simple for a lay audience . . . you don’t even know what buttons to push . . . we take a bunch of longhair boys fucking each other while they puff reefers, spit cocaine on the Bible, and wipe their asses with Old Glory. We show this film to decent, church-going, Bible Belt do-rights. We take the reaction. One religious sheriff with seven nigger notches on his gun melted the camera lens. He turned out to be quite an old character and the boys from Life did a spread on him—seems it had always been in the family, a power put there by God to smite the unrighteous: his grandmother struck a whore dead in the street with it.

  “When we showed the picture to a fat Southern senator his eyes popped out throwing fluid all over your photographer. Well I’ve been asparagrassed in Paris, kneed in the groin by the Sea Org in Tunis, maced in Chicago and pelted with scorpions in Marrakech, so a face full of frog eggs is all in the day’s work. What the Narco boys call ‘society’s disapproval’ reflected and concentrated, twenty million I HATE YOU pictures in one blast. When you want the job done, come to the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. AND WE CAN TURN IT IN ANY DIRECTION. You Limey leftovers. . . .”

  He points to a battery of old grey men in club chairs, frozen in stony disapproval of this vulgar drunken American. When will the club steward arrive to eject the bounder so a gentleman can read his Times?

  “YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A BANANA REPUBLIC. AND REMEMBER WE’VE GOT YOUR PICTURES.”

  “And we’ve got yours too, Yank,” they clip icily.

  “MINE ARE UGLIER THAN YOURS.”

  The English cough and look away, fading into their spectral clubs, yellowing tusks of the beast killed by the improbable hyphenated name.

  OLD SARGE screams after them . . . “WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS A BEAUTY CONTEST? You Fabian Socialist vegetable peoples go back to your garden in Hampstead and release a hot-air balloon in defiance of a local ordinance . . . ‘Delightful encounter with the bobby in the morning. Mums wrote it all up in her diary and read it to us at tea.’ WE GOT ALL YOUR PANSY PICTURES AT ETON. YOU WANTA JACK OFF IN FRONT OF THE QUEEN WITH A CANDLE UP YOUR ASS?”

  “You can’t talk like that in front of decent women,” drawled the Texas billionaire flanked by his Rangers.

  “You decorticated cactus. I suppose you think this conference was your idea? Compliments of SID in the Sudden Inspiration Department. . . . And you lousy yacking fink queens, my photographers wouldn’t take your pictures. You are nothing but tape recorders. With just a flick of my finger frozen forever over that martini. All right get snide and snippy about that HUH? . . .

  “And you” . . . He points to the Green Nun . . . “Write out ten thousand times underwater in indelible ink: ‘OLD SARGE HAS MY CHRIST PICTURES.’ SHALL I SHOW THEM TO THE POPE?

  “And now, in the name of all good tech sergeants everywhere . . .”

  A gawky young sergeant is reading Amazing Stories. He flicks a switch . . . Audrey and Hamlin on screen. Wind ruffles Audrey’s hair as the Duesenberg gathers speed.

  “Light Years calling Bicarbonate . . . Operation Little Audrey on target. . . eight seconds to count down . . . tracking . . .”

  A thin dyspeptic technician mixes a bicarbonate of soda.

  “URP calling Fox Trot . . . six seconds to count down . . .”

  English computer programmer is rolling a joint.

  “Spot Light calling Accent . . . four seconds to count down . . .”

  Computers hum, lights flash, lines converge.

  Red-haired boy chews gum and looks at a muscle magazine.

  “Red Dot calling Pin Point . . . two seconds to count down . . .”

  The Duesenberg zooms over a rise and leaves the ground. Just ahead is a wooden barrier, steamroller, piles of gravel, phantom tents. DETOUR sign points sharp left to a red clay road where pieces of flint glitter in the sunlight.

  “OLD SARGE IS TAKING OVER.”

  He looks around and the crockery flies off every table, spattering the conferents with martinis, bourbon, whipped cream, maraschino cherries, gravy and vichysoisse, frozen forever in a 1920 slapstick.

  “COUNTDOWN.”

  End over end, a flaming pinwheel of jagged metal slices through the conferents. The Green Nun is decapitated by a twisted fender. The Texas billionaire is sloshed with gasoline like a burning nigger. The broken spotlight trailing white-hot wires like a jellyfish hits the British delegate in the face. The Duesenberg explodes, throwing white-hot chunks of jagged metal, boiling acid, burning gasoline in all directions.

  Wearing the uniforms of World War I, Audrey and Old Sarge lean out of a battered Moon in the morning sky and smile. Old Sarge is at the wheel.

  THE PENNY ARCADE PEEP SHOW

  Unexpected rising of the curtain can begin with a Duesenberg moving slowly along a 1920 detour. Just ahead, Audrey sees booths and fountains and ferris wheels against a yellow sky. A boy steps in front of the car and holds up his hand. He is naked except for a rainbow-colored jock strap and sandals. Under one arm he carries a Mauser pistol clipped onto a rifle stock. He steps to the side of the car. Audrey has never seen anyone so cool and disengaged. He looks at Audrey and he looks at John. He nods.

  “We leave the car here,” John says. Audrey gets out. Six boys now stand there watching him serenely. They carry long knives sheathed at their belts, which are studded wtih amethyst crystals. They all wear rainbow-colored jock straps, like souvenir postcards of Niagara Falls.

  Audrey follows John through a square where acts are in progress, surrounded by circles of adolescent onlookers eating colored ices and chewing gum. Most of the boys wear the rainbow jock straps and a few of them seem to be completely naked. Audrey can’t be sure, trying to keep up with John. The fair reminds Audrey of 1890 prints. Sepia ferris wheels turn in yellow light. Gliders launched from a wooden ramp soar over the fairground, legs of the pilots dangling in air. A colored hot-air balloon is released to applause of the onlookers.

  Around the fairground are boardwalks, lodging houses, restaurants and baths. Boys lounge in doorways. Audrey glimpses scenes that quicken his breath and send the blood pounding to his groin. He catches sight of John far ahead, outlined in the dying sunlight. Audrey calls after him, but his voice is blurred and muffled. Then darkness falls as if someone has turned out the sky.

  Some distance ahead and to the left he sees PENNY ARCADE spelled out in light globes. Perhaps John has gone in there. Audrey pushes aside a red curtain and enters the arcade. Chandeliers, gilt walls, red curtains, mirrors, windows stretch away into the distance. He cannot see the end of it in either direction from the entrance. It is a long narrow building like a ship cabin or a train. Boys are standing in front of peep shows, some wearing the rainbow jock straps, others in prep school clothes, loincloths and jellabas. He notices shows with seats in front of them and some in curtained booths. As he passes a booth he glimpses through parted curtains two boys sitting on a silk sofa, both of them naked. Shifting his eyes, he sees a boy slip his jock strap down and step out of it without taking his eyes from the peep show. Moving with a precision and ease he sometimes knew in flying dreams, Audrey slides
onto a steel chair that reminds him of Doctor Moor’s Surgery in the Lister Building, afternoon light through green blinds. In front of him is a luminous screen. Smell of old pain, ether, bandages, sick fear in the waiting room, yes this is Doctor Moor’s Surgery in the Lister Building.

  The doctor was a Southern gentleman of the old school. Rather like John Banymore in appearance and manner, he fancied himself as a witty raconteur, which at times he was. The doctor had charm, which Audrey so sadly lacked. No doorman would ever stop him, no shopkeeper forget his thank you, under eyes that could suddenly go cold as ice. It was impossible for the doctor to like Audrey. “He looks like a homosexual sheep-killing dog” he thought, but he did not say this. He looked up from his paper in his dim gloomy drawing room and pontificated: “the child is not wholesome.”

  His wife went further: “It is a walking corpse,” she said. Audrey was inclined to agree with her, but he didn’t know whose corpse he was. And he was painfully aware of being unwholesome.

  There is a screen directly in front of him, a screen to his left, a screen to his right, and a screen in back of his head. He can see all four screens from a point above his head.

  Later Audrey wrote these notes:

  “The scenes presented and the manner of presentation varies according to an underlying pattern.

  “1. Objects and scenes move away and come in with a slow hydraulic movement always at the same speed. The screens are three-dimensional visual sections punctuated by flashing lights. I once saw the Great Thurston who could make an elephant disappear do an act with a screen on stage. He shoots a man in the film. The actor clutches his ketchup to his tuxedo shirt and falls then Thurston steps into the screen as a detective to investigate the murder, steps back outside to commit more murders, busts in as a brash young tabloid reporter, moves out to make a phone call that will collapse the market, back in as ruined broker. I am pulled into the film in a stream of yellow light and I can pull people out of the film withdrawal shots pulling the flesh off naked boys. Sequences are linked by the presence of some arbitrary object: a pinwheel, a Christmas-tree ornament, a pyramid, an Easter egg, a copper coil going away and coming in always in the same numerical order. Movement in and out of the screen can be very painful like acid in the face and electric sex tingles.