Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  The razor inside the filing cabinet. Categories that delineate a name. Biological revolution and see San Francisco dispersed. AIDS loss of outline loud and clear. Death bones of cold cigarette butts. Its secret name is Handle. Cut the lines. Nothing is my name. Like it? I declare biologic homeless despair. A picture city. Grain elevator just so. Where is a snapshot is my name. My purpose can see the room. Risk it!

  So I jolt to an end in my Model T which boils. End of the line. Nothing more to say. Here we are. Look around at the 1920s, the 1930s. Look around. Nothing here. Look at Bradshaw, Texas, a ghost town. Dust and emptiness. The quick-draw is dead. The Old West is dead. Quick and dead.

  A writer’s will is the winds of dead calm in the Western Lands. Point way out he can start stirring of the sail. Writer, where are you going? To write. Here we are in texts already written on the sky. Where he doesn’t need to write anymore. A slight seismic with the cat book. Always remember, the work is the mainsail to reach the Western Lands. The texts sing. Everything is grass and bushes, a desert or a maze of texts. Here you are . . . never use the same door twice. Sky in all directions . . . on the word for word. The word for word is word. The western sail stirs candles on 1920 country club table. Each page is a door to everything is permited. The fragile lifeboat between this and that. Your words are the sails.

  Someone has come into a room where I am.

  “Mort! Mort!”

  As a child I was afraid to be alone and was always relieved when Mort came home and I knew there was now somebody in the room with me. But this is not Mort. It is a stranger, rather fat, in a black overcoat, who moves with a strange gliding motion, not walking but sliding. I am paralyzed with fear, and can’t get the top off a tear gas device.

  Kiki has taken cough syrup with chloral hydrate. We go out to swim. A large lake or lagoon somewhat like the reservoir at Nederland, Colorado. Blue water reflects a red sun. I say it is too cold to swim—that is, the air is too cold. Kiki goes in the water and sinks out of sight. There is a deep spot a few feet from shore. He then surfaces. What he has stepped into is a huge shoe about six feet in length under the water. There is also various debris that would make swimming dangerous on this side of the lake.

  In Madrid with Kiki. How can I get away without money? I will wire home but it will take several days. Want to make it with Kiki. I find a large four-poster bed with green sheets, rather dirty. Still, the bed will do. I hate Madrid and the thought of being stuck there. It was in Madrid that Kiki was stabbed to death by his jealous keeper who found him in bed with a girl. The jealous lover, who ran a band in which Kiki worked as a drummer, burst into the room with a butcher knife and killed Kiki. Then killed himself.

  It seems that we—James, Michael, Bill Rich, George—a few of us have indeed taken over the planet by default, occupying an empty space that no one else was able or willing to occupy. I am lying on a cot in a room with one wall missing. I say: “I will be the Sheriff.”

  Same dream continued another day. Like I say, we are in control, but I point out that this is precisely the most dangerous moment, since we can expect massive counterattacks from many quarters . . . CIA, KGB, Mafia, Vatican, Islam, Corporate Capitalism, the English, the Moral Majority. I propose myself as Director of Police and Counterintelligence, which will operate under one central command . . . no splitting into criminal, espionage, all that cross-purpose and confusion.

  Met some aliens in the street and one of them gave me a pair of glasses. I am now in what looks like an optometrist’s store, with mirrors and glass shelves, and find I can see everything quite clearly. The aliens form a group in Paris, and I am eating with them in a restaurant. They are not obvious aliens at first glance, but all rather outlandishly dressed in some sort of costumes, and one of them has a huge face, a foot across, on a normal-sized body. They seem to be well disposed. There are both men and women in the group. Now the bill comes, and I put in an amount that seems fair to me in some currency unknown to me. Large grey notes on parchment paper.

  I think it was before Toronto, why do I keep saying Seattle? I am standing in the usual dream set of a large dirty grey loft and a messenger in a slovenly dirty blue uniform with peaked blue cap has a message for me which is diverted by someone else claiming to be me and taking the message. Then another messenger arrives . . . old, with wrinkled yellow parchment skin like a mask showing under his cap, and this time the message is a visiting card with my name on it, all smudged and dirty . . . no dodging this one. The Postman Always Kings Twice. Yes, it was just before leaving for Toronto and not precisely an auspicious omen.

  Then a dream, first night in Toronto at the Sutton Place Hotel in my luxurious suite. I am at a station and the train comes by and stops only a few seconds, no time to get on, and they are open at the sides like cattle cars. I finally board one and it stops at ARMY POST and everyone gets off. It’s the end of the line. I find a macadam road leading down and ask someone if this road will take me to St. Louis. He says yes. How far? “About six miles.” I figure I can make it in an hour, being all downhill. Some sections of the road are like a market, with vegetables and fruits and people milling around.

  Several terrific attacks during the five days I passed in Toronto. Excruciating pain, radiating down the left arm and up to the jaw. Popping nitro pills like peanuts. It comes in waves and nails you down. No way to detach yourself since there is no place to detach yourself to. Bill Rich met me in K.C. and saw me through. Back through a hailstorm (tornado warning), Tuesday late afternoon. Hail like golf balls. The insurance companies had to pay out millions for dented cars and fractured roofs.

  Saw Dr. Hiebert on Thursday after Toronto and straight to the hospital. Dye x-rays showed major artery ninety-eight percent blocked. Angioplasty Monday morning. Left St. Francis Hospital in Topeka on Tuesday afternoon. A very close thing. Dr. Hiebert said he should not have allowed the Toronto trip. I had no idea just how serious the situation was. Another three or four days and . . . massive heart attack.

  I think a lake in Nevada. I could see boats out a window. Last night a Visitor dream. Heard people talking in front room. Mort was there. Then I, Snubbie in hand, stepped out of bedroom and there were two men standing in the doorway to the front room. I went into the front room. Bedstead gone. A man in a red costume was lying on the floor and said something insulting. I said: “I could never shoot anyone without reason.” There was a woman who was formed from white porcelain from the waist up. She is cavorting around. A man who announced himself without saying anything as a Visitor and leader of the group said: “You are causing trouble. You have too many irons in the fire.” His face is grey and anonymous. His upper lip does not move when he talks but I can see grey teeth. Fletch, who is on my bed, says something enigmatic. There is a reference to Ted Morgan and a filter cigarette, half smoked in ashtray.

  It often happens in a dream that two or more narrative lines are happening at the same time, but one intends to impose sequential structure so that one follows the other.

  I am on a train. Allerton passes me going towards the back of the car in the other direction. He looks very young and handsome dressed in a light-brown suit. I call out: “Allerton!” but he doesn’t hear me because of the train noise. So I get up and start after him. Into the next car, but I don’t see him, and the car ends in a seat that runs all the way across. So I turn around and start back.

  I am on a train going back to St. Louis. I have been drafted into the Army as a private and I am in uniform. I feel very disgruntled. How can they draft a man of seventy-two? The doctor has made a mistake. It is ridiculous. I have a feeling of having come full circle, back to this dreaded point. The train stops and I get out, walking under an arcade. I realize now that I don’t have my passport with me.

  I walk out of the station. There is a square in front of me and the mountains in the background. Looks like Colorado Springs. Just back from my search for Marker. There are long bunks along both sides of the car at the top. There are young boys in the bunks, al
l returning from school somewhere.

  I walk into a large room like a gymnasium behind the train. The room is empty. I see some canes in one corner but when I go to look at them, they are gone. There is a closet or locker and a pair of high shoes.

  Back on the train. There is a long ride and absolutely nothing to do. How can I endure the time? A feeling that there is nothing outside the train gives me a terrible sense of being enclosed in nothingness.

  Back in the room, which opens into another room. “An overwhelming feeling of universal damage and loss.” Just the shoes he used to wear. Dust and mold, and nothing outside the room.

  I am groaning with grief and desolation.

  “Oh my God. Nothing here. Nobody here. Just the empty shoes.”

  Whose empty shoes?

  Well, let us contact the Muse. Come in, please . . .

  Egypt. What am I doing here? It’s terrible. I can’t stand to be living in lodging houses with hostile innkeepers. They all hate me on sight, as do all dogs. I have to get out of this nightmare. But how? We will go upriver to Memphis to find the old Gods—terrible old frauds most of them, but some did have some items of value. Here is an amulet from Bast the Cat Goddess. There is also a male cat-God amulet. All dogs hate and fear it, for it brings the ancient hate into the open. What is a master of ten enraged cats?

  He had achieved a modicum of serenity in Alexandria, but the dogs made his life a hell. Then he got two bodyguards with heavy clubs, but even this was not enough and they frequently had to use their short swords. Finally he captured a wild cat. He nurtured it and it became his cat. It rubbed itself against him and jumped into his lap.

  Now it is time. He releases the cat and points to the dog. The cat streaks towards the target and leaps on the dog and tears its guts out.

  The boys set up a guerrilla unit with the young Maize God. Traveling in time on the sacred books, they pick up allies: Tío Mate, an old assassin with eight deer on his gun, followed by El Mono, his adolescent Ka. Wild boys with eighteen-inch Bowie knives, head hunters and bandits, Castro and Chinese guerrillas, Black Panthers and hippies.

  The priests have not been idle. They have opened negotiations with the United Fruit Company to arrange for a landing of Marines. They send in an agent to infiltrate the guerrillas.

  The agent shows up at a guerrilla encampment:

  “Shucks fellers, you got a reefer?”

  “Who is this mother?”

  A Black Panther with a submachine gun and a headhunter with a spear cover the stranger.

  “You here to report to the head shrinker for a security check?”

  The Security Department is divided down the middle into two sets. On one side is a brisk Scientology auditor with an E-Meter set up on a card table.

  “Will you pick up the cans please. Thank you.”

  On the other side is a grass hut with shrunken heads on shelves. The head-hunter takes up a stand facing the agent with his spear raised. Seated on a high chair is a Death Dwarf with larval flesh and skeleton face. He reaches forward and takes the agent’s other hand with dry electric fingers.

  “Do you know any CIA men personally?”

  The agent looks wildly around at the shrunken heads of his predecessors.

  “That reads . . . What do you consider that could mean?”

  “The whole idea is repugnant to me. I’d as soon make a friend of a cobra.”

  “LIE. LIE. LIE,” screams the Death Dwarf.

  “Why, I’ve always been a Commie.”

  “That reads . . . What do you consider this could mean?”

  “LIE. LIE. LIE.”

  “Do you have any unkind thoughts about M.O.B.? . . . That reads . . . What do you consider this could mean?”

  “Why, all I ever wanted to do was mind my own business and smoke reefers”

  “There’s another read here.”

  “LIE. LIE. LIE.”

  “Are you connected to the CIA? Are you a CIA agent?”

  “You got me wrong. I swear to you on my Scout’s honor . . .”

  “LIE. LIE. LIE.”

  “That ROCKSLAMS. What do you consider this could mean?”

  The agent’s head shrinks to the size of a fist and takes its place on the shelf.

  With Alex Trocchi and Kafka. Kafka had cancer. We took a cab to the country club. Moroccan Ginger was the doorman and he said that Kafka could not come in. Inside, the members were eating at a cafeteria table. Walked around trying to find our way back out of the club. A sort of maze that ended up in a swimming pool and a Turkish bath. Finally found an exit and started down the road. Alex joined me with some firewood.

  My analysis. Many years, a lot of money—one would be tempted to say complete waste of time and money, but no experience is ever lost on a writer. I would prefer not to discuss my horrible old condition at the beginning of a long period of analyses and psychotherapy, but on the other hand, I could get around, hold down jobs. Well, something happened and some little key was turned . . . perhaps so that I went on to do what I have done. Maybe no connection. It’s like the one percent of penicillin in old Chinese prescriptions. They didn’t know what the one percent was or more accurately where. And my gut feeling is that all there was in all this is a couch. This is the reason I am not buying a new couch, to save money. Anyhoo. There was a time . . . oh well . . . Dr. Federn, who killed himself. Nice old gentleman.

  Did I seriously consider this any proof of telepathy?

  I replied: “My dear shrink, I do not consider anything proof of anything, in any case, not involved in proving anything.”

  Like a young thief thinks he has a license to steal, a young writer thinks he has a license to write. You know what I mean right enough: riding along on it, it’s coming faster than you can get it down and you know it’s the real thing, you can’t fake it, the writer has to have been there and make it back. Then it hits you, cold and heavy, like a cop’s blackjack on a winter night: Writer’s Block. Oh yes, he tried to warn me, the old hand, “You write too much, Bill. . . .” I wouldn’t listen.

  Then it slugs you in the guts. For a whole year I couldn’t remember my dreams. Tried going without pot and everything. It was like some grey bureaucrat wiped away the dream before my eyes as I tried to grasp one detail that would bring the dream back, the outlines: dead. James complained I sat for hours in my chair at the end of the loft, doing absolutely nothing. Stagnating without tranquillity. The pages and pages with nothing in them: the writer has been nowhere and brought nothing back. The false starts, the brief enthusiasm. Books that died for the lack of any reason to stay alive after ten pages.

  Then you get it back. It’s there. You know. You can feel it, like the opening character . . . I was there on that mesa with Kim. Kim, my spacecraft for travels in the nineteenth century. I could see it from where I was, the arrowhead there in my hand. The dizzy awe, as if you could flash back through the millions or so years to the beginning, the caves, the hunger. Kim knew he had always been gay, making sex magic in front of the paintings to activate them, covered with animal skins he whines and growls and whimpers off, his sperm drips down the animals’ flanks. Kim adored these animal impersonations. He was turning into the animals and found he had much more in common with the predators than the herbivores. You can see what a dog or cat is thinking, but the mind of a deer is a strange place, a strange green place. It’s hard to get in there. The men swaying about with antlers on their heads are trying to get into it, mindless and beautiful.

  Don’t want to write this. Have said no honest autobiography has ever been attempted, much less written, and no one could bear to read it. At this point I guess the reader thinks I am about to confess some juicy sex practices. Hardly. Guess I was twenty-four, working in the shop at Cobble Stone Gardens, which I hate to remember, when this Jew woman sent me around to the servants’ entrance and I drove away clashing the gears and saying: “Hitler is perfectly right!” So you want it honest? You vant? You vant? You vant?

  One afternoon, Kamm
erer was there, and you could say about him, as Toots Shor said about Jimmy Walker at Walker’s coffin: “Jimmy, when you walked in you brightened up the joint.”

  And I said: “Since I’ve had this job, my voice is changing.”

  And Dave says something about “the Catlins, you know them.”

  “I’m acquainted with the family,” I said in my obsequious manner, and we had a laugh.

  Stalling. Don’t want to go on.

  This context, one night in the house at Price Road. Went down to the icebox. (I was wretchedly unhappy. No sex. No work that meant anything—nothing.) Dad was there eating something. It’s a suburban custom, raiding the icebox. “Hello, Bill.” It was a little-boy voice pleading for love, and I looked at him with cold hate. I could see him wither under my eyes as I muttered, “Hello.”

  Looking back now, I feel an ache in the chest where the Ba lives. I reach out to him: Dad! Dad! Dad!

  Too late. Over from Cobble Stone Gardens.

  When Mother was in Chastains Nursing Home in St. Louis the last four years of her life, I never went to see her. Just sent mawkish cards from London on Mother’s Day, and occasionally postcards from here and there. Remember years ago—fifty? don’t remember—she once said to me: “Suppose I was very sick. Would you come to see me? Look after me? Care for me? I’m counting on that being true.”

  It wasn’t. The telegram from Mort. I had gotten out of bed. For a moment I put it aside. “Mother dead.” No feeling at all. Then it hit, like a kick in the stomach.

  L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, says that the secret of life has at last been discovered—by him. The secret of life is to survive. The rightest right a man could be would be to live infinitely long. And I venture to suggest that the wrongest wrong a man could be might well be the means whereby such relative immortality was obtained. To survive what, exactly? Enemy attack, what else?

  We have now come full circle, from nineteenth-century crude literalism through behaviorism, the conditioned reflex, back to the magical universe, where nothing happens unless some force, being, or power wills it to happen. He was killed by a snake? Who murdered him? He dies of a fever? Who put the fever curse on him?