Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  “We’ll be sailing in three days” time . . . New York, Charleston, Jamaica, Veracruz. Two months down, more or less, and two months back. . . . I pay ten pounds a month for deckhands.”

  Noah Blake tries to look unimpressed. This is twice as much as any other captain has offered.

  “Well, sir, I’ll have to discuss it with my father.”

  “To be sure, lad. You can sign the Articles tomorrow if you’re so minded . . . all five of you.”

  Noah can hardly wait to tell his father. “I mean that’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Aye, son. Perhaps a little too good. Captain Jones’s name is not so white as his ship. He’s known as Opium Jones in the trade. He’ll be carrying opium, guns, powder, shot, and tools. And he’s not too particular who he trades with . . .”

  “Anything wrong with that, Father?”

  “No. He’s no better and no worse than most of the others. Only thing I can’t figure is why he’s paying double wages for his deckhands.”

  “Maybe he’d rather have five good hands than ten waterfront drunks.”

  “Maybe. . . . Well, go if you like. But keep your eyes open.”

  THE PRIVATE ASSHOLE

  The name is Clem Williamson Snide. I am a private asshole.

  As a private investigator I run into more death than the law allows. I mean the law of averages. There I am outside the hotel room waiting for the correspondent to reach a crescendo of amorous noises. I always find that if you walk in just as he goes off he won’t have time to disengage himself and take a swing at you. When me and the house dick open the door with a passkey, the smell of shit and bitter almonds blows us back into the hall. Seems they both took a cyanide capsule and fucked until the capsules dissolved. A real messy love death.

  Another time I am working on a routine case of industrial sabotage when the factory burns down killing twenty-three people. These things happen. I am a man of the world. Going to and fro and walking up and down in it.

  Death smells. I mean it has a special smell, over and above the smell of cyanide, carrion, blood, cordite or burnt flesh. It’s like opium. Once you smell it you never forget. I can walk down a street and get a whiff of opium smoke and I know someone is kicking the gong around.

  I got a whiff of death as soon as Mr. Green walked into my office. You can’t always tell whose death it is. Could be Green, his wife, or the missing son he wants me to find. Last letter from the island of Spetsai two months ago. After a month with no word the family made inquiries by long-distance phone.

  “The embassy wasn’t at all helpful,” said Mr. Green.

  I nodded. I knew just how unhelpful they could be.

  “They referred us to the Greek police. Fortunately, we found a man there who speaks English.”

  “That would be Colonel Dimitri.”

  “Yes. You know him?”

  I nodded, waiting for him to continue.

  “He checked and could find no record that Jerry had left the country, and no hotel records after Spetsai.”

  “He could be visiting someone.”

  “I’m sure he would write.”

  “You feel then that this is not just an instance of neglect on his part, or perhaps a lost letter? . . . That happens in the Greek islands . . .”

  “Both Mrs. Green and I are convinced that something is wrong.”

  “Very well, Mr. Green, there is the question of my fee: a hundred dollars a day plus expenses and a thousand dollar retainer. If I work on a case two days and spend two hundred dollars, I refund six hundred to the client. If I have to leave the country, the retainer is two thousand. Are these terms satisfactory?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good. I’ll start right here in New York. Sometimes I have been able to provide the client with the missing person’s address after a few hours’ work. He may have written to a friend.”

  “That’s easy. He left his address book. Asked me to mail it to him care of American Express in Athens.” He passed me the book.

  “Excellent.”

  Now, on a missing-person case I want to know everything the client can tell me about the missing person, no matter how seemingly unimportant and irrelevant. I want to know preferences in food, clothes, colors, reading, entertainment, use of drugs and alcohol, what cigarette brand he smokes, medical history. I have a questionnaire printed with five pages of questions. I got it out of the filing cabinet and passed it to him.

  “Will you please fill out this questionnaire and bring it back here day after tomorrow. That will give me time to check out the local addresses.”

  “I’ve called most of them,” he said curtly, expecting me to take the next plane for Athens.

  “Of course. But friends of an M.P.—missing person—are not always honest with the family. Besides, I daresay some of them have moved or had their phones disconnected. Right?” He nodded. I put my hands on the questionnaire. “Some of these questions may seem irrelevant but they all add up. I found a missing person once from knowing that he could wriggle his ears. I’ve noticed that you are left-handed. Is your son also left-handed?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “You can skip that question. Do you have a picture of him with you?”

  He handed me a photo. Jerry was a beautiful kid. Slender, red hair, green eyes far apart, a wide mouth. Sexy and kinky-looking.

  “Mr. Green, I want all the photos of him you can find. If I use any I’ll have copies made and return the originals. If he did any painting, sketching, or writing I’d like to see that too. If he sang or played an instrument I want recordings. In fact, any recordings of his voice. And please bring if possible some article of clothing that hasn’t been dry-cleaned since he wore it.”

  “It’s true then that you use uh psychic methods?”

  “I use any methods that help me to find the missing person. If I can locate him in my own mind that makes it easier to locate him outside it.”

  “My wife is into psychic things. That’s why I came to you. She has an intuition that something has happened to him and she says only a psychic can find him.”

  That makes two of us, I thought.

  He wrote me a check for a thousand dollars. We shook hands.

  I went right to work. Jim, my assistant, was out of town on an industrial-espionage case—he specializes in electronics. So I was on my own. Ordinarily I don’t carry iron on an M.P. case, but this one smelled of danger. I put on my snub-nosed .38, in a shoulder holster. Then I unlocked a drawer and put three joints of the best Colombian, laced with hash, into my pocket. Nothing like a joint to break the ice and stir the memory. I also took a deck of heroin. It buys more than money sometimes.

  Most of the addresses were in the SoHo area. That meant lofts, and that often means the front door is locked. So I started with an address on Sixth Street.

  She opened the door right away, but she kept the chain on. Her pupils were dilated, her eyes running, and she was snuffling, waiting for the Man. She looked at me with hatred.

  I smiled. “Expecting someone else?”

  “You a cop?”

  “No. I’m a private investigator hired by the family to find Jerry Green. You knew him.”

  “Look, I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “No, you don’t have to. But you might want to.” I showed her the deck of heroin. She undid the chain.

  The place was filthy—dishes stacked in a sink, cockroaches running over them. The bathtub was in the kitchen and hadn’t been used for a long time. I sat down gingerly in a chair with the springs showing. I held the deck in my hand where she could see it. “You got any pictures of him?”

  She looked at me and she looked at the heroin. She rummaged in a drawer, and tossed two pictures onto a coffee table that wobbled. “Those should be worth something.”

  They were. One showed Jerry in drag, and he made a beautiful girl. The other showed him standing up naked with a hard-on. “Was he gay?”

  “Sure. He liked getting fucked by Puerto Ricans and havin
g his picture took.”

  “He pay you?”

  “Sure, twenty bucks. He kept most of the pictures.”

  “Where’d he get the money?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was lying. I went into my regular spiel. “Now look, I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator paid by his family. I’m paid to find him, that’s all. He’s been missing for two months.” I started to put the heroin back into my pocket and that did it.

  “He was pushing C.”

  I tossed the deck onto the coffee table. She locked the door behind me.

  Later that evening, over a joint, I interviewed a nice young gay couple, who simply adored Jerry.

  “Such a sweet boy . . .”

  “So understanding . . .”

  “Understanding?”

  “About gay people. He even marched with us . . .”

  “And look at the postcard he sent us from Athens.”

  It was a museum postcard showing a statue of a nude youth found at Kouros.

  “Wasn’t that cute of him?”

  Very cute, I thought.

  I interviewed his steady girlfriend, who told me he was all mixed up.

  “He had to get away from his mother’s influence and find himself. We talked it all over.”

  I interviewed everyone I could find in the address book. I talked to waiters and bartenders all over the SoHo area: Jerry was a nice boy. . . polite . . . poised . . . a bit reserved. None of them had an inkling of his double life as a coke pusher and homosexual transvestite. I see I am going to need some more heroin on this one. That’s easy. I know some narco boys who owe me a favor. It takes an ounce and a ticket to San Francisco to buy some names from the junky chick.

  Seek and you shall find. I nearly found an ice pick in my stomach. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Often it wasn’t opened unto me. But I finally found the somebody who: a twenty-year-old Puerto Rican kid named Kiki, very handsome and quite fond of Jerry in his way. Psychic too, and into Mocambo magic. He told me Jerry had the mark of death on him.

  “What was his source for the coke?”

  His face closed over. “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t blame you for not knowing. May I suggest to you that his source was a federal narc?”

  His deadpan went deader. “I didn’t tell you anything.”

  “Did he hear voices? Voices giving him orders?”

  “I guess he did. He was controlled by something.”

  I gave him my card. “If you ever need anything let me know.”

  Mr. Green showed up the next morning with a stack of photos. The questionnaire I had given him had been neatly filled out on a typewriter. He also brought a folio of sketches and a green knitted scarf. The scarf reeked of death.

  I glanced at the questionnaire. Born April 18, 1951, in Little America, Wyoming. “Admiral Byrd welcomes you aboard the Deep Freeze Special.” I looked through the photos: Jerry as a baby . . . Jerry on a horse . . . Jerry with a wide sunlit grin holding up a string of trout. . . graduation pictures . . . Jerry as “the Toff” in the high school play, A Night at an Inn. They all looked exactly as they should look. Like he was playing the part expected of him. There were about fifty recent photos, all looking like Jerry.

  Take fifty photos of anyone. There will be some photos where the face is so different you can hardly recognize the subject. I mean most people have many faces. Jerry had one. Don Juan says anyone who always looks like the same person isn’t a person. He is a person impersonator.

  I looked at Jerry’s sketches. Good drawing, no talent. Empty and banal as sunlight. There were also a few poems, so bad I couldn’t read them. Needless to say, I didn’t tell Mr. Green what I had found out about Jerry’s sex and drug habits. I just told him that no one I had talked to had heard from Jerry since his disappearance, and that I was ready to leave for Athens at once if he still wanted to retain me. Money changed hands.

  from LETTRE DE MARQUE

  Feb. 28, 1702: Today we were captured by pirates. At five o’clock in the afternoon a heavily armed ship came abreast of us flying the Dutch flag, which was then lowered and the black pirate flag raised. We were carrying no cannon, so resistance was out of the question and Captain Jones immediately gave the order to raise the flag of truce. We all gathered on deck, including the de Fuentes twins, who were impassive as always, scanning the pirate ship critically as if to assess its worth.

  Shortly thereafter a boat was lowered and it rowed towards us. Standing in the stern was a slim blond youth, his gold-braided coat glittering in the sun. Beside him was a youth in short grey pants and shirt with a red scarf around his neck. The boat was rowed by what appeared to be a crew of women, singing as they rowed and turning towards us to leer and wink with their painted faces.

  The companionway was lowered and the “women” scrambled aboard with the agility of monkeys and posted themselves about the deck with muskets and cutlasses. I perceived that they were, in fact, handsome youths in women’s garb, their costumes being Oriental, of colored silks and brocade. The two youths then stepped on board, the one with his gold-braided coat open at the waist to show his slender brown chest and stomach, a brace of pistols inlaid with silver, and a cutlass at his belt. He was a striking figure: blond hair tied in a knot at the back of his head, aristocratic and well-formed features, possessing a most lordly bearing and grace of manner.

  Captain Jones stepped forward. “I am Captain Jones, master of The Great White.”

  “And I am Captain Strobe, second in command on The Siren,” said the youth.

  They shook hands most amiably and if I am any judge are not strangers to each other. I was immediately convinced that the “capture” had been prearranged between them. Strobe then received the keys to the armory. Turning to us, he assured us that we had nothing to fear for our lives. He would take over the conduct of the ship and set its course, his men acting under the orders of Mr. Kelley, the quartermaster. He indicated the youth in grey shorts, who was leaning against the rail immobile as a statue, his face without expression, his pale grey eyes turned up towards the rigging. We would continue to act under the orders of Mr. Thomas.

  Several of the boys descended to the boat and began passing up seabags containing apparently the personal effects of the boarding crew. When the boat was cleared, Strobe conducted Captain Jones and the de Fuentes twins to the companionway and two boys rowed them back to The Siren. Captain Strobe then opened a small keg of rum and the boys produced tankards from their bags. Approaching us in a purposeful and insinuating manner, wriggling their buttocks, they passed around little clay pipes.

  “Hashish. Very good.”

  When it came my turn to smoke it caused me to cough greatly but soon I felt a lifting of my spirits and a vividness of pictures in my mind—together with a prickling in my groin and buttocks. Drums and flutes appeared and the boys began to dance and as they danced stripped off their clothes until they were dancing stark naked on the brightly colored silk scarves and dresses strewn about the deck. Captain Strobe stood on the poop deck playing a silver flute, the notes seeming to fall from a distant star. Only Mr. Thomas, at Strobe’s side, seemed totally unconcerned, and for a second his bulky form was transparent before my eyes—probably an illusion produced by the drug.

  Mr. Thomas was watching The Siren through his telescope. Finally, having received a signal that their sails were set, he gave the order to hoist sail on The Great White. Surprisingly enough we were able to carry out the order with no difficulty, the effect of hashish being such that one can shift easily from one activity to another. Kelley gave the same order in an unknown tongue to the dancing boys, who now acted in a seamanlike manner—some naked, some with scarfs twisted around their hips—as they went about their duties singing strange songs. So sails were speedily set and we got under way, for where I did not know.

  Some of the boys have hammocks and sleep on deck, but we are often two to a bunk in the forecastle. Since we now have a double crew, there is m
uch time with nothing to do, and I have been able to acquaint myself to some extent with the strange history of these transvestite boys.

  Some of them are dancing boys from Morocco, others from Tripoli, Madagascar, and Central Africa. There are a few from India and the East Indies who have served on pirate vessels in the Red Sea, where they preyed on merchant vessels and other pirates alike, the method of operation being this: some would join the crew of a ship, selling their favors and insinuating themselves into key positions. Then the crew sights an apparently unarmed vessel carrying a cargo of beautiful women all singing and dancing lewdly and promising the mariners their bodies. Once on board the “women” pull out hidden pistols and cutlasses, while their accomplices on shipboard do the same, and The Siren now uncovers its cannons—so that the ship would often be taken without the loss of a single life. Often the boys would sign on as cooks—at which trade they all excel—and then drug the entire crew. However, word of their operations spread rapidly and they are now fleeing from pirates and naval patrols alike, having as the French say, brûlé,—burnt down—the Red Sea area.

  Kelley told me his story. He started his career as a merchant seaman. In the course of an argument he killed the quartermaster, for which he was tried and sentenced to hang. His ship at that time was in the harbor of Tangier. The sentence was carried out in the marketplace, but some pirates who were present cut him down, carried him to their ship, and revived him. It was thought that a man who had been hanged and brought back to life would not only bring luck to their venture but also ensure protection against the fate from which he had been rescued. While he was still insensible the pirates rubbed red ink into the hemp marks, so that he seemed to have a red rope always around his neck.

  The pirate ship was commanded by Skipper Nordenholz, a renegade from the Dutch Navy who was still able to pass his ship as an honest merchant vessel flying the Dutch flag. Strobe was second in command. Barely had they left Tangier headed for the Red Sea via the Cape of Good Hope when a mutiny broke out. The crew was in disagreement as to the destination, being minded to head for the West Indies. They had also conceived a contempt for Strobe as an effeminate dandy. After he had killed five of the ringleaders they were forced to revise this opinion. The mutinous crew was then put ashore and a crew of acrobats and dancing boys taken on, since Nordenholz had already devised a way in which they could be put to use.