“Stay with Bozoe and her television set,” Sis growled.
“It’s not her television set. It’s mine, Sis. Why don’t you sit down? Sit on the couch over there.”
“The apartment belongs to both of you, and so does the set. I know what kind of a couple you are. The whole world knows it. I could put you in jail if I wanted to. I could put you and Bozoe both in jail.”
In spite of these words she stumbled over to the couch and sat down. “Whiskey,” she demanded. “The world loves drunks but it despises perverts. Athletes and boxers drink when they’re not in training. All the time.”
Janet went over to her and served her a glass of whiskey with very little ice. Let’s hope she’ll pass out, she said to herself. She couldn’t see Sis managing the steps up to her room in the insurance building, and in any case she didn’t want her to leave. She’s such a relief after Bozoe, she thought. Alive and full of fighting spirit. She’s much more my type, coming down to facts. She thought it unwise to go near Sis, and was careful to pour the fresh drink quickly and return to her own seat. She would have preferred to sit next to Sis, in spite of her mention of jail, but she did not relish being punched or smacked in the face. It’s all Bozoe’s fault, she said to herself. That’s what she gets for thinking she’s God. Her holy words can fill a happy peaceful room with poison from twenty-five miles away.
“I love my country,” said Sis, for no apparent reason. “I love it to death!”
“Sure you do, Hon,” said Janet. “I could murder Bozoe for upsetting you with her loony talk. You were so peaceful until she came in.”
“Read that letter,” said Sister. After a moment she repeated, as if from a distance: “Read the letter.”
Janet was perplexed. Obviously food was not going to distract Sis, and she had nothing left to suggest, in any case, but some Gorton’s Codfish made into cakes, and she did not dare to offer her these.
What a rumpus that would raise, she said to herself. And if I suggest turning on the television she’ll raise the roof. Stay off television and codfish cakes until she’s normal again. Working at a lunch counter is no joke.
There was nothing she could do but do as Sis told her and hope that she might fall asleep while she was reading her the letter. “Damn Bozoe anyway,” she muttered audibly.
“Don’t put on any acts,” said Sis, clearly awake. “I hate liars and I always smell an act. Even though I didn’t go to college. I have no respect for college.”
“I didn’t go to college,” Janet began, hoping Sis might be led on to a new discussion. “I went to commercial school.”
“Shut up, God damn you! Nobody ever tried to make a commercial school sound like an interesting topic except you. Nobody! You’re out of your mind. Read the letter.”
“Just a second,” said Janet, knowing there was no hope for her. “Let me put my glasses on and find my place. Doing accounts at the garage year in and year out has ruined my eyes. My eyes used to be perfect.” She added this weakly, without hope of arousing either sympathy or interest.
Sis did not deign to answer.
“Well, here it is again,” she began apologetically. “Here it is in all its glory.” She poured a neat drink to give herself courage. “As I believe I just wrote you, I have been down to the bar and brought a drink back with me. (One more defeat for me, a defeat which is of course a daily occurrence, and I daresay I should not bother to mention in this letter.) In any case I could certainly not face being without one after the strain of actually boarding the bus, even if I did get off without having the courage to stick on it until I got where I was going. However, please keep in mind the second reason I had for stopping short of my destination. Please read it over carefully so that you will not have only contempt for me. The part about the responsibility I feel toward you. The room here over Larry’s Bar and Grill is dismal. It is one of several rented out by Larry’s sister whom we met a year ago when we stopped here for a meal. You remember. It was the day we took Stretch for a ride and let him out of the car to run in the woods, that scanty patch of woods you found just as the sun was setting, and you kept picking up branches that were stuck together with wet leaves and dirt.…”
Harold Norse
Horns
For Lawrence Ferlinghetti
On the Chinatown corner of Broadway and Grant
an old man in skins and furs
with occult ornaments and symbols
is shaking a large cowbell.
In his other hand a brown lacquered staff ends in a two-pronged fork.
Around his belly a pair of bull’s horns,
his fur-crowned head slowly swaying
from left to right
as in some ancient shamanistic ritual,
ceremonies out of the past.
Near him a Chinese boy locked in a deep throaty kiss with a dumpy blonde.
A white boy shoves the mouth end of a long horn
in rhythmic movements
up the Chinese boy’s ass,
then blows the horn and inserts it again.
When the kiss breaks up the Chinese boy drunkenly thanks the white
boy
who disappears with the still-dazed girl. The white boy’s hand
grazes in quick succession four big erections
as a group of tall youths pushes drunkenly by in the tight-wedged mass.
I’m pressed like a piece of paper in the mob,
like a page in a book.
Bodies pass through me and I through them.
Everyone wants to burst out of their clothes,
press flesh into flesh.
The streets are lined with blow-ups of naked women in topless
bottomless shows.
The barkers scream: COME IN AND GET DRUNK AND HORNY!
and the madness of crowds
is the madness of unreleased energy.
I go home with images of bodies.
I go home with the imprint of smiles.
I go home with the dry taste
and feel of untouched skin.
I go home with the flank of the cavalry horse
and the horseman’s boot grazing my cheek.
I go home with the stench of the cossack’s horse
lifting its tail, letting go on the crowd.
I go home with the guns from the rooftops,
the deadly control of the State.
I go home sloshing towards others,
love flooding the curbs in waves.
I go home with the iron of separation
embedded in my life.
San Francisco, 2.1.75
William Burroughs
from The Place of Dead Roads
Sunset through black clouds…red glow on naked bodies. Kim carefully wraps his revolver in a towel and places it under some weeds at the water’s edge. He puts his foot in the water and gasps. At this moment Tom streaks by him, floating above the ground in a series of still pictures, the muscles of his thigh and buttock outlined like an anatomical drawing as he runs straight into the water, silver drops fanning out from his legs.
Kim follows, holding his breath, then swimming rapidly up and down. He treads water, breathing in gasps as the sky darkens and the water stretches black and sinister as if some monster might rise from its depths… In knee-deep water, soaping themselves and looking at each other serene as dogs, their genitals crinkled from the icy water… drying themselves on a sandbank, wiping the sand from his feet… following Tom’s lean red buttocks back to the wagon. He stations Kim at the end of the wagon.… “Stand right there,” facing the setting sun. Tom pulls a black cloth out of the air with a flourish, bowing to an audience. He stands behind the camera with the black cloth over his head.… “Look at the camera… hands at your sides.”
Kim could feel the phantom touch of the lens on his body, light as a breath of wind. Tom is standing naked behind the camera.
“I want to bottle you, mate,” Tom says. Kim has never heard this expression but he immediately un
derstands it. And he glimpses a hidden meaning, a forgotten language, sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay that send the blood racing to his crotch and singing in his ears as his penis stretches, sways, and stiffens and naked lust surfaces in his face from the dark depths of human origins.
Tom is getting hard too. The shaft is pink and smooth, no veins protruding. Now fully erect, the tip almost touches the delineated muscles of his lean red-brown stomach. At the crown of his cock, on top, is an indentation, as if the creator had left his thumbprint there in damp clay. Held in a film medium, like soft glass, they are both motionless except for the throbbing of tumescent flesh…
“Hold it!”… CLICK… For six seconds the sun seems to stand still in the sky.
Paul Bowles
Pages from Cold Point
[Critic Leslie Fiedler dubbed Paul Bowles “the pornographer of terror.” This alone would have attracted William Burroughs, who was inspired to move to Tangier after reading Bowles. Because his friendship with Burroughs and the others dates from the mid-1950s—too late in their careers for much stylistic influence—Bowles is not truly one of the Beats. But their shared interests in drugs, magic, and local boys made for engaging conversation and some crossfertilization in later years. Much of Bowles’s work has homoerotic content, but he was famously silent about his private life. Burroughs joked that his autobiography, Without Stopping, should be retitled Without Telling. Incidentally, the last meeting of Bowles, Burroughs, and Ginsberg (also John Giorno) was captured in Rachel Baichwal’s documentary on Bowles, Let It Come Down (1999). Bowles wrote “Pages from Cold Point” en route to Tangier with his wife, Jane, in 1947.—ed.]
Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go. Perhaps some day another form of life will come along. Either way, it is of no consequence. At the same time, I am still a part of life, and I am bound by this to protect myself to whatever extent I am able. And so I am here. Here in the Islands vegetation still has the upper hand, and man has to fight even to make his presence seen at all. It is beautiful here, the trade winds blow all year, and I suspect that bombs are extremely unlikely to be wasted on this unfrequented side of the island, if indeed on any part of it.
I was loath to give up the house after Hope’s death. But it was the obvious move to make. My university career always having been an utter farce (since I believe no reason inducing a man to “teach” can possibly be a valid one), I was elated by the idea of resigning, and as soon as her affairs had been settled and the money properly invested, I lost no time in doing so.
I think that week was the first time since childhood that I had managed to recapture the feeling of there being a content in existence. I went from one pleasant house to the next, making my adieux to the English quacks, the Philosophy fakirs, and so on—even to those colleagues with whom I was merely on speaking terms. I watched the envy on their faces when I announced my departure by Pan American on Saturday morning ; and the greatest pleasure I felt in all this was in being able to answer, “Nothing,” when I was asked, as invariably I was, what I intended to do.
When I was a boy people used to refer to Charles as “Big Brother C.,” although he is only a scant year older than I. To me now he is merely “Fat Brother C.,” a successful lawyer. His thick, red face and hands, his back-slapping joviality, and his fathomless hypocritical prudery, these are the qualities which make him truly repulsive to me. There is also the fact that he once looked not unlike the way Racky does now. And after all, he still is my big brother, and disapproves openly of everything I do. The loathing that I feel for him is so strong that for years I have not been able to swallow a morsel of food or a drop of liquid in his presence without making a prodigious effort. No one knows this but me—certainly not Charles, who would be the last one I would tell about it. He came up on the late train two nights before I left. He got quickly to the point—as soon as he was settled with a highball.
“So you’re off for the wilds,” he said, sitting forward in his chair like a salesman.
“If you can call it the wilds,” I replied. “Certainly it’s not wild like Mitichi.” (He has a lodge in northern Quebec.) “I consider it really civilized.”
He drank and smacked his lips together stiffly, bringing the glass down hard on his knee.
“And Racky. You’re taking him along?”
“Of course.”
“Out of school. Away. So he’ll see nobody but you. You think that’s good.”
I looked at him. “I do,” I said.
“By God, if I could stop you legally, I would!” he cried, jumping up and putting his glass on the mantel. I was trembling inwardly with excitement, but I merely sat and watched him. He went on. “You’re not fit to have custody of the kid!” he shouted. He shot a stern glance at me over his spectacles.
“You think not?” I said gently.
Again he looked at me sharply. “D’ye think I’ve forgotten?”
I was understandably eager to get him out of the house as soon as I could. As I piled and sorted letters and magazines on the desk, I said: “Is that all you came to tell me? I have a good deal to do tomorrow and I must get some sleep. I probably shan’t see you at breakfast. Agnes’ll see that you eat in time to make the early train.”
All he said was: “God! Wake up! Get wise to yourself! You’re not fooling anybody, you know.”
That kind of talk is typical of Charles. His mind is slow and obtuse; he constantly imagines that everyone he meets is playing some private game of deception with him. He is so utterly incapable of following the functioning of even a moderately evolved intellect that he finds the will to secretiveness and duplicity everywhere.
“I haven’t time to listen to that sort of nonsense,” I said, preparing to leave the room.
But he shouted, “You don’t want to listen! No! Of course not! You just want to do what you want to do. You just want to go on off down there and live as you’ve a mind to, and to hell with the consequences!” At this point I heard Racky coming downstairs. C. obviously heard nothing and he raved on. “But just remember, I’ve got your number all right, and if there’s any trouble with the boy I’ll know who’s to blame.”
I hurried across the room and opened the door so he could see that Racky was there in the hallway. That stopped his tirade. It was hard to know whether Racky had heard any of it or not. Although he is not a quiet young person, he is the soul of discretion, and it is almost never possible to know any more about what goes on inside his head than he intends one to know.
I was annoyed that C. should have been bellowing at me in my own house. To be sure, he is the only one from whom I would accept such behavior, but then, no father likes to have his son see him take criticism meekly. Racky simply stood there in his bathrobe, his angelic face quite devoid of expression, saying: “Tell Uncle Charley goodnight for me, will you? I forgot.”
I said I would, and quickly shut the door. When I thought Racky was back upstairs in his room, I bade Charles good night. I have never been able to get out of his presence fast enough. The effect he has on me dates from an early period in our lives, from days I dislike to recall.
Racky is a wonderful boy. After we arrived, when we found it impossible to secure a proper house near any town where he might have the company of English boys and girls his own age, he showed no signs of chagrin, although he must have been disappointed. Instead, as we went out of the renting office into the glare of the street, he grinned and said: “Well, I guess we’ll have to get bikes, that’s all.”
The few available houses near what Charles would have called “civilization” turned out to be so ugly and so impossibly confining in atmosphere that we decided immediately on Cold Point, even though it was across the island and quite isolated on its seaside cliff.
It was beyond a doubt one of the most desirable properties on the island, and Racky was as enthusiastic about its splendors as I.
“You’ll get tired of being alone out there, just with me,” I said to him as we walked back to the hotel.
“Aw, I’ll get along all right. When do we look for the bikes?”
At his insistence we bought two the next morning. I was sure I should not make much use of mine, but I reflected that an extra bicycle might be convenient to have around the house. It turned out that the servants all had their own bicycles, without which they would not have been able to get to and from the village of Orange Walk, eight miles down the shore. So for a while I was forced to get astride mine each morning before breakfast and pedal madly along beside Racky for a half hour. We would ride through the cool early air, under the towering silkcotton trees near the house, and out to the great curve in the shoreline where the waving palms bend landward in the stiff breeze that always blows there. Then we would make a wide turn and race back to the house, loudly discussing the degrees of our desires for various items of breakfast we knew were awaiting us there on the terrace. Back home we would eat in the wind, looking out over the Caribbean, and talk about the news in yesterday’s local paper, brought to us by Isiah each morning from Orange Walk. Then Racky would disappear for the whole morning on his bicycle, riding furiously along the road in one direction or the other until he had discovered an unfamiliar strip of sand along the shore that he could consider a new beach. At lunch he would describe it in detail to me, along with a recounting of all the physical hazards involved in hiding the bicycle in among the trees, so that natives passing along the road on foot would not spot it, or in climbing down unscalable cliffs that turned out to be much higher than they had appeared at first sight, or in measuring the depth of the water preparatory to diving from the rocks, or in judging the efficacy of the reef in barring sharks and barracuda. There is never an element of bragadoccio in Racky’s relating of his exploits—only the joyous excitement he derives from telling how he satisfies his inexhaustible curiosity. And his mind shows its alertness in all directions at once. I do not mean to say that I expect him to be an “intellectual.” That is no affair of mine, nor do I have any particular interest in whether he turns out to be a thinking man or not. I know he will always have a certain boldness of manner and a great purity of spirit in judging values. The former will prevent his becoming what I call a “victim”: he never will be brutalized by realities. And his unerring sense of balance in ethical considerations will shield him from the paralyzing effects of present-day materialism.
Queer Beats Page 14