Interzone

by William S. Burroughs

  Junk is a key, a prototype of life. If anyone fully understood junk, he would have some of the secrets of life, the final answers.

  I have mentioned the increased sensitivity to dreamlike feelings of nostalgia that always accompany light junk sickness. This morning when I woke up without junk, I closed my eyes and saw cliffs on the outskirts of a town, with houses on top of them, and china-blue sky, and white linen snapping in a cold spring wind.

  The pure pleasure of cold Whistle on a hot summer afternoon of my childhood. In the 1920s the United States, even the Midwest, was a place of glittering possibilities. You could be a gangster, a hard-drinking reporter, a jittery stockbroker, an expatriate, a successful writer. The possibilities spilled out in front of you like a rich display of merchandise. Sitting on the back steps drinking Whistle at twilight on a summer evening, hearing the streetcars clang past on Euclid Avenue, I felt the excitement and nostalgia of the twenties tingling in my groin.

  Interesting that out of morphine has been made the perfect antidote for morphine, and that it creates its exact antidote in the body. And from junk sickness comes a heightened sensitivity to impressions and sensation on the level of dream, myth, symbol. On the penis there might be bits of flesh half-putrescent and half-larval, separating from the host and degenerating to less specific tissue, a sort of life jelly that will take root and grow anywhere.

  Seemed to see West St. Louis, the moving headlights on Lindell Boulevard. Very vivid for a moment. I was in a study with soft lights, an apartment probably. Horrible feeling of desolation. Imagine being old, paralyzed or blind, and forced to accept the charity of some St. Louis relation. I continue writing, but publication is hopeless. The book market is saturated. It is all done now by staff writers and is as much a job as working in an advertising agency. Not even anyone I can read it to, so that when I know it is good I feel more sad because then the loneliness is sharper.

  Would it be possible to write a novel based on the actual facts of Interzone or anyplace?

  Marv and Mohamed—this “friendship,” as Sam calls it:

  “Once he brought me a dead sparrow.”

  Marv’s grating, continual laugh, his angular, graceless movements. They could not be called clumsy. Quick, not fumbling, he moves in galvanized, pathic jerks, never sliding into fluid grace, or off the other edge into actual tic.

  And Mohamed—sulky, stupid, whore to the bone. He is a favorite among the Arabs because of his chunky, fat ass. A fat ass is considered highly desirable by the Arabs. How Oriental and dull at the same time, like a carryover from camel trading.

  So Marv says all the time: “I don’t mind him going with Arabs, you understand, but just don’t let me catch him with another American or a European. Better not let me catch either of them. You have to fight for what you want in this world.”

  I wonder if Mohamed has any desires that are really his, that is, starting from inside out and seeking the projection of his desire? But they don’t function that way. They are excited by situation, not by fantasy. This is partly due to the immediate availability of sex to the Arab, which is difficult for an American—accustomed to frustration, certainly to delay, expense, buildup—to realize. The Arab achieves immediate satisfaction because he is willing to accept homosexual contact.

  As Marv puts it: “It’s three in the morning, so Ali meets Ahmed and says to him: ‘Do you want to?’ That’s the standard phrase. The whole deal takes five minutes.” It’s expected the one who makes the proposition should give something to the other. A few pesetas, some cigarettes. Anything. A matter of form. So perhaps an Arab has no type he is looking for, no specialized desires at all. Man or woman, it’s all sex to him. Like eating. Something you do every day.

  No one I really want to see here. So far as friendship goes, I can’t live off the country. So few people I want to see anywhere. KiKi is ten minutes’ perfunctory talk or sex, and I am completely unable most of the time on accounta the family jewels is in hock to the Chinaman. Must cut down or kick. The price is going up to where I can’t pay. Since that fucking German had to come here and commit suicide, you have to buy a script every time. Why couldn’t he have done it someplace else? Or some other way? Waited all day until eight at night for two boxes.

  A novel that consists of the facts as I see and feel them. How can it have a beginning or an end? It just runs along for a while and then stops, like Arab music.

  I can hear some Arabs singing in the next house. This music goes on and on, up and down. Why don’t they get bored with it and shut up? It says nothing, goes nowhere. There is no lift in it, no emotion. Sounds like a chorus of boys singing out lottery numbers, or a tobacco auction. Apparently they are beating a tambourine, dancing and singing. Every now and then they reach a meaningless climax and everybody lets out shrill yipes. Then they stop for a while, presumably resting for another period of the same routine. Is it sad, happy, sinister, sweet? Does it express any deep human emotions? If so, I don’t feel it.

  I have wondered if it would be possible to find a note of music that would produce orgasm in the listener, that would reach into the spinal column and touch a long white nerve. Tension grows in the abdomen and breaks in long waves through the body, colonic undulations rising to a sudden crescendo. Arab music sounds like that. An orgasm produced mechanically without emotion, a twanging on the nerves, a beating on the viscera.

  After a shot I went up to the Bagdad and met Leif and Marv. The manager is an unsuccessful artist named Algren. If he has a first name, I never heard it. Tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, with a cold, imperious manner. When I first came to Interzone he was exhibiting some of his paintings. Not distinguished work. Vistas of the Sahara, the best of them recalling the bare, haunted rock and desert of Dalí’s dream landscapes. There is skill, he can draw but he has no real reason to do so. I found he was as niggardly in putting out in personal relation as in painting. I could make no contact with him. He lives with a young Arab painter, a phony primitive. As a fashionable restaurateur, Algren is superb, just the correct frequency of glacial geniality. He expects the joint to become world-famous.

  “Last night the coatroom was stacked with mink. There’s a lot of money in Interzone,” he says. Maybe, but it is a bit out of the way. A rich old woman put up the loot. Algren doesn’t have dime one, but he’s a character who will get rich by acting like he is rich already. And Algren is crazy in a way that will help. He has a paranoid conceit. He is a man who never has one good word to say for anybody, and that’s the way a man should be to run a fashionable night spot. Everyone will want to be the exception, the one person he really likes.

  He has some Arab musicians from the Rif, a three-man combo, and a little boy who dances and sings. The kid is about fourteen and small for his age, like all Arabs. There is no stir of adolescence in his face, no ferment, nothing there to awaken. The face of an old child, doll-like with a monkey’s acquisitiveness. He puts the money you give him in his turban so it hangs down on his forehead. What does he do with the money? His voice is very loud, the up and down of Arab music bellowed out by this grasping, whirling doll. He twitches his hips not only sideways but up and over in a peculiar, double-jointed movement. His sexual and acquisitive drives are completely merged. It would never occur to him to go to bed with anyone for a reason other than money. There is about him a complete lack of youngness, of all the sweetness and uncertainty and shyness of youth. He is hard and brassy as an old whore, and to me about as interesting as a sexual object.

  There is a nightmare feeling in Interzone with its glut of nylon shirts, cameras, watches, sex and opiates sold across the counter. Something profoundly menacing in complete laissez-faire. And the new police chief up there on the Hill, accumulating dossiers—I suspect him of unspeakable fetishistic practices with his files.

  When the druggist sells me my daily ration of Eukodal, he smirks like I have picked up the bait to a trap. The whole Zone is a trap, and someday it will close. Not snap shut, but close slowly. We will see it cl
osing, but there will be no escape, no place to go.

  Speaking of the new chief of police reminds me, when I first got here KiKi’s mother beefed about me to the fuzz I was debauching her only child, or so the story went. I was living in Matty’s place, and Matty swore it was true, and claimed there was a detective prowling around outside the door—it turned out he wasn’t a detective at all but an old queen who had his eye on KiKi, and the whole story was just Interzone bullshit. At the same time Antonio, the mooching Portuguese, starts a rumor there is junk heat on me. He hopes I will lam out of the Zone.

  Matty is a pimp who loves his work, a fat, middle-aged, queer Cupid. He kept casting reproachful glances at me in the hall: “Ach, fifteen years in the Zone, and never before do I have such a thing in my house. Now is here since two weeks an English gentleman. With him I could make good business except my house is so watched at.”

  Bedroom farce of police and terrible mother coming in the front door. I try to push KiKi into Marv’s room and he says: “Dump your hot kids someplace else, Lee.” A handkerchief with come on it is extremely damning evidence. The best thing is to swallow it.

  I am writing this in a hospital where I am taking the cure again. A typical Interzone setup. Jewish hospital, Spanish-run, with Catholic sisters as nurses. Like everything Spanish it is run in a sloppy, lackadaisical manner, thank God! No nurse walking in at the crack of dawn to slop tepid water all over you. No good explaining to some Swedish nurse from North Dakota how a junky can’t stand the feel of water on his skin. I been here ten days and haven’t had a bath. It is 8 A.M. and the day shift comes on sometime in the next half hour. In the room next to me someone is groaning. A horrible, inhuman sound, pushed out from the stomach. Why don’t they give him a shot and shut him up? It’s a drag. I hate to hear people groan, not because of pity but because it is a very irritating sound.

  That reminds me of a skit I once wrote about a junky whose mother was dying of cancer, and he takes her morphine, substituting codeine. To substitute codeine was worse than stealing the morphine outright and substituting milk-sugar placebo. A placebo, by the shock, the gap between the pain-torn tissues straining for the relief of morphine, and the sheer nothingness in the placebo, might galvanize the body into a miracle, an immaculate fix. But codeine would blunt the edge of pain so that it would liquefy and spread, filling the cells like a gray fog, solid, impossible to dislodge.

  “Better now?” The groaning had stopped.

  “Much better, thank you,” she said dryly.

  She knows, he thought. I could never fool her.

  Perhaps one would feel better in an out-and-out police state like Russia or satellite countries. The worst has happened. The outer world realizes your deepest fears—or desires? You don’t get bends of the spirit from sudden changes of pressure. Inner and outer pressure are equalized.

  So I wrote a story about a man who gets the wrong passport in a Turkish bath in the Russian Zone of Vienna, and he can’t get back through the Iron Curtain. Incomplete, of course. What you think I am, a hack?

  The sky over Vienna was a light, hard, china blue, and a cold spring wind whipped Martin’s loose gabardine topcoat around his thin body. He felt the ache of desire in his loins, like a toothache when the pain is light and different from any other pain. He turned a corner; the Danube stabbed his eyes with a thousand points of light, and he felt the full force of the wind and had to lean forward to maintain balance.

  If there’s no guard at the line there can’t be too much danger, he thought. They could hardly accuse me of spying in a Turkish bath. He saw a café and went in. A huge room, almost empty. Green upholstered seats like old Pullman cars. A sullen waiter with a round pimply face and white eyelashes took his order for a double brandy. He swallowed the brandy straight. For a moment he gagged, then his stomach smoothed out in waves of warmth and euphoria. He ordered another brandy. The waiter was smiling now.

  What the hell, he thought. All they could do is kick me out of the Russian Zone.

  He sat back anticipating the warm embrace of steam, letting go, liquefying like an amoeba, dissolving in warmth and comfort and desire.

  Why draw the line anywhere? What a man wants to do he will do sooner or later, in thought or in fact…. But nobody is giving you an argument. The third brandy was anesthetizing the centers of caution. I’m hard up and I want a boy, and I’m going to the Roman Baths, Russian Zone or no. Too bad we didn’t have a queer representative when they split up Vienna. We’d have gone to the barricades before Russia got the Roman Baths.

  He saw a legion of embattled queens behind a barricade of Swedish-modern furniture. They staggered and died with great histrionic gestures and pathic screams. They were all tall, thin, ungainly queens in Levi’s and lumberjack shirts, with long yellow hair and insane blue eyes, all screaming, screaming. He shuddered. Perhaps I’d better just go back to the hotel and … no, by God!

  The streetcar was crowded and he had to stand. The people looked gray, hostile, suspicious, avoiding his glance. They were passing the Prater. He was in the Russian Zone. He remembered the Prater before the war, a huge park always full of people and plenty of pickups. Now it was an expanse of rubble with one vast Ferris wheel, bleak and menacing against the cold blue sky. He got off the streetcar. The conductor stood leaning out of the back platform watching Martin until the streetcar turned the corner. Martin pretended to look for a cigarette.

  Yes, there were the Roman Baths, looking much the same. The street was empty. Perhaps there would be no boys. But a youth sidled up to him and asked for a light. Not too good, he decided. I’ll find better inside.

  He paid for a room, leaving his wallet and passport in a deposit box.

  (This is after he has got the wrong passport, been arrested and deported to Budapest, or somewhere far behind the Iron Curtain.)

  He learned a new kind of freedom, the freedom of living in continual tension and fear to the limit of his inner fear and tension so the pressure was at least equalized, and for the first time in his adult life he knew the meaning of complete relaxation, complete pleasure in the moment. He felt alive with his whole being. The forces that were intended to crush his dignity and existence as an individual delineated him so that he had never felt surer of his own worth and dignity.

  And he was not alone. Slowly he discovered a vast, dreamlike underground: a cop examining his papers would suddenly turn into a friend. And he learned the meaning of the hostile, averted faces on the streetcar in Vienna, learned to distrust the friendship too quickly offered.

  Martin had lost fifteen pounds since leaving the West. His hand rested now on his stomach, feeling the muscle hard and alive with an animal alertness. Steps on the stairs. Two men, strangers. He knew the step of everyone in the One World pension. He slid off the bed. Moving with economy and precision, he shoved a heavy wardrobe in front of the door. He crossed the room, opened the window and stepped out onto the fire escape, closing the window behind him. He climbed a shaky iron ladder to the roof. He heard the wardrobe crash to the floor. Seven feet to the next roof. He looked around. No plank, nothing. He heard the window open.

  I’ll have to jump, he decided.

  (To be continued)

  Went to bed with KiKi. He said he couldn’t come because he is all wore out from wet dreams about me the night before. That really takes the rag offen the bush.

  Developed routine during dinner with Kells Elvins. We kidnap the Sacred Black Stone out of Mecca and hold it for ransom. We swoop down in a helicopter, throw the Stone in and take off with it like a great roc, the Arabs following the ’copter across the square, reaching up at it and shouting imprecations. (Maybe the Stone is too big to move?)

  Lee sat with the syringe poised in his left hand, pondering the mystery of blood. Certain veins he could hit at two-thirty in the afternoon. Others were night veins, veins that appeared and disappeared at random. Lee found his hunches were seldom wrong. If he reached for the syringe with his right hand, it meant try the left arm. His
body knew what vein could be hit. He let the body take over, as in automatic writing, when he was preparing to pick up.

  There was a single candle burning in a brass stick on the bed table. KiKi and Lee lay side by side in bed, a sheet thrown across their bodies waist high. They passed a keif cigarette back and forth, inhaling deeply and holding the inhale. KiKi had a case of benign shingles, and there was a great hive on his back and swelling in the glands under his arms. Lee ran gentle fingers over the inflamed area, asked questions, nodded gravely from time to time. The candle light and smoke, the low voices, imparted a quality of ritual to the scene….

  Following is a story of a young man in Spain sentenced to be hanged by a council of war (the military handles capital cases in Spain):

  Antonio sat down on the iron shelf covered with old newspapers that was his bed. He lay down on his side and pulled his knees up to his chest, hands pressed against his genitals.

  A council of war! he thought. That completes the picture of a barbarous, obscene ritual like an Indian tribe’s. They’ve been trying to get me like this ever since they found out I’d been born alive. But I had an animal’s feel for traps—until they found the right bait. It was a clumsy snare, and I could have seen the noose under the leaves that first night in Tío Pepe’s. That is, I could have seen it if I hadn’t been looking someplace else….

  Fade out … Flash back … Music (obviously I have an eye on TV and Hollywood):

  It was early for Tío Pepe’s, which is a late place that gets going when the bars close down, after one o’clock. No one at the bar. I ordered a cognac. There was a boy standing in front of the jukebox. He had on one of those summer shirts with holes in it, a white shirt hanging outside his pants. Through the shirt, in a halo of hideous man-made colors, chlorophyll greens, reds and oranges of synthetic soft drinks, the purples of a fluorescent-lighted cocktail lounge, the ghastly light pinks and blues of religious objects, I could see the lean young body alive with an animal alertness. He was leaning against the jukebox, his hip thrown to one side, his face bent over, reading the song titles, all the awkwardness and grace and sweetness of adolescence in his stance, those terrible colors playing over him.