Interzone

by William S. Burroughs

  “You don’t have to slug me with it,” the man says. “But I never heard of Bill or Jim.”

  “Oh, let him stay,” the woman says.

  Five minutes later there is a knock. The man opens the door.

  “Hello,” he says. “You wouldn’t be Jim, by any chance?”

  “Yes, I’m Jim. I’m looking for Polly.”

  “Polly doesn’t live here anymore.” The man sings it.

  Jim sees me. “Hello, Bill,” he says. He smiles and cancels all the reproaches I had stored up.

  “Let’s go, Jim,” I say, standing up. I turn to the man and woman. “Thanks for your trouble.”

  “Anytime, old thing,” the man says. He is about to say something more.

  “That’s okay, boys,” the woman cuts in.

  We walk out together. “I need a drink,” Jim says. We find a bar and sit down in a booth. There is no one else in the place. Jim is beautiful but has the kind of face that shows every day that much older. There are circles under his eyes, like bruises. He drinks five double Scotches. He is sweet and gentle when drunk. I help him out of the bar. We go to my room and sleep there.

  Next morning I throw the few things I have—mostly photos and manuscripts—into a plastic bag, and we leave.

  Jim has a place on a roof. You unlock a metal door and climb four flights of rusty, precarious stairs. One room with a mattress, a table and a chair. Metal walls. A toilet in one corner, a gas stove in another. A tap dripping into a sink.

  Jim is trembling convulsively. “I’m scared, Bill,” he says over and over.

  I hold him, and stroke his head, and undress him.

  We sleep together until twelve that night. We wake up and dress and Jim makes coffee. We take turns drinking from a tin can.

  We start out looking for Polly. Jim gives me an extra key to his place, before we leave the room.

  The City is honeycombed with nightclubs and bars. Many of them change locations every night. The nightclubs are underground, hanging from cables, and built on perilous balconies a thousand feet over the rubbish and rusty metal of the City.

  We make the rounds, and we find Polly in Cliff’s place. The room shifts from time to time, with a creak of metal. It is built in a rusty tower that sways in the wind. “This place is too good to last, kids,” Cliff says, laughing.

  Polly is a dark Jewish girl. She looks like that picture of Allen Ginsberg on the beach when he was three years old. Jim is talking to some people at the bar. I put the key in her hand and press it there. She kisses me lightly on the lips and then on the ear, murmuring, “Billy Boy …”

  I find a car and ride down to the waterfront. I see a light. A man is standing in a doorway.

  “You open?” I ask.

  “Why not?”

  I go in. The place is empty. I sit at a table. He brings me a soft drink without asking what I want, and sits down at the table opposite me. A gentle, thuggish face, broken nose, battered but calm and kind.

  “Where you live at?” he asks me.

  “No place now.”

  “Want to shack up here?”

  “Why not?” I finish my drink and he leads the way to a round metal door that opens soundlessly on oiled bearings. He motions for me to go in. His hand rests on my shoulder, and slides down my ass with a gentle forward pat.

  Ginsberg Notes

  Lee woke again. The room was light now. He could hear the clock ticking, but he did not want to look at it, to locate himself definitely in time, to be completely awake. He arranged the covers to shade his eyes, pushing them away from his mouth so he could breathe comfortably. A shiver ran through his body. He closed his eyes, remembering his dream, clinging to sleep.

  He had been dreaming about marshmallows. He had four or five marshmallows, and he was preparing to toast them in little wooden boxes which had wicks running around the edges like a kerosene stove. The dream had a tone of furtive, but overpowering, sexuality.

  What’s sexy about marshmallows? he thought, irritably. He felt aware of his sexual organs, but not in the normal manner of sexual excitement. It was as if he could feel inside the whole genitourinary apparatus, the intolerable, febrile sexuality of junk sickness.

  Marshmallows, boxes … cunts, of course. Mary, the English governess … dreams of something sticky in his mouth, like chewing gum. The memory he never could reoccupy, even under deep narcoanalysis. Whenever he got close to it, excitation tore through him, suppressed below the level of emotional coloring, a neutral energy like electricity. The memory itself never actually seen or reexperienced, only delineated by refusals, disgusts, negation. He knew, of course, what it must be, but the knowledge was of the brain only.

  He shivered again, feeling the discordant twang of unfamiliar visceral sensations, the light fever of sickness. The Spanish word escalofríos came to him, then the English “chills and fever,” hot and cold. Every moment he felt more intolerably conscious. He looked at the clock: eight-thirty. It was always slow—it was nearer to nine.

  Soon the drugstores will open. If only the methadone comes through today. If only I could get my money so I can get to England and take the cure.

  If only his body had never known junk. How could he ever unknow it? He decided he would settle for a cure and then a place to live where it is never cold.

  No use trying to sleep any longer. He pushed the covers aside and sat up. Immediately he began to shiver. He crossed the room and lit a small kerosene stove, with trembling hands. He reached into an open drawer and took out a small syringe filled with colorless liquid.

  He held the syringe poised, and looked down at his blue hands, coldly, impersonally. No use trying to hit there, he decided. He felt along the side of his bare foot. There’s one I might be able to hit. He pushed the needle in his foot at the ankle, feeling, probing for a vein. Pain swept through his sensitized flesh. A thin column of blood climbed sluggishly into the syringe. He pressed the plunger. The liquid went in very slowly. Every now and then his foot twitched involuntarily away from the needle, which was embedded almost to the point where it joined the syringe.

  The last of the liquid drained in. He pulled out the needle and stopped the blood with a piece of cotton. He sat listening down into his viscera, waiting for the effect.

  Lee had discovered that he got his best ideas while lying in bed with a young boy after the fact. At first he thought this was coincidence. God damn it, every time I get ideas for writing, I am occupied with a boy. Or maybe it’s the other way around … hmm. Weel, I’m in the right place.

  He embarked on a three-thousand-page sexology, as he called it. One after the other his boys were drained of their orgones and cast aside, dragging themselves about like terminal hookworm-malaria-malnutrition cases.

  “I don’t know why, but I just feel sorta tired after I make it with that writing feller.”

  “You can say that again, Pepe. And in all my experience man and boy as a grade-A five-star hustler—A.J. gives me five stars in his Sex and Drug Guide—I never yet see a citizen type and get fucked at the same time. You shoulda seen me before I met Lee. I was a good-looking kid, had all my hair and teeth. I’m only twenty-four—well, twenty-nine. Shucks, we’re in the same line…. I can afford to let my hair down a bit, that is, if I had any….”

  I figure it will require the orgones of ten thousand boys to finish my sexology. I assume the frightful responsibility of the creative artist.

  A group of rich queens formed a corporation and offered a reward of one million dollars to any assassin who would dispose of “this shameless liquefactionist, who is debauching and decanting our boys—oh, uh, I mean the youth of the world.”

  There are two middle-aged, ugly, fattish men in a club like the University Club or the Harvard Club. The two are on cordial but by no means familiar terms.

  Scene is the club sitting-room. The other members are annoyed, you understand, by anyone even talking there, as they want to sit and think about their money and doze and digest. We will call them Jack a
nd Robert.

  Jack: “Let’s rekindle the embers!”

  Robert: “Huh? The embers of precisely what?”

  Jack: “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten our nights on the sandbanks of the Putumayo with the piranha fish jumping out there in the soft tropic darkness. All around us the brooding jungle of the Amazon, like a great carnivorous plant. It was Auca country, but we were drunk with youth and love. We laughed at danger and perhaps the Auca laughed with us and lowered their poison arrows and stole away into the jungle. And the moon so clear you could read by it—why, I can see you now, lying there with your beautiful mouth a little open, clad only in youth and innocence.”

  Robert: “I’m damned if you can! For one thing, I’ve never been within a thousand miles of the Amazon!”

  Jack: “And remember that waterfall back in the virgin jungle of the upper Shipibo? We’d been walking all day since sun-up, hacking our way through with machetes. And you said it was my fault we’d missed the way, and sulked for ten hours. You always looked beautiful when you were sulky. And then we broke through the jungle to a crystal-clear river and a waterfall so high the top was lost in mist, and we stripped off our clothes and played under the waterfall until the sun went down and the mosquitoes came out with the moon.”

  Robert: “What are you talking about?”

  Jack: “Let’s go up to my room and play touchies!”

  Robert: “Play what!”

  Jack: “Touchies! Our little game!”

  Robert: “Listen. I’ve had just about enough of your silly games, and since you lead me to say so, Throckmorton, I strongly advise you to see an able psychiatrist without delay.”

  Jack: “Ah well, perhaps it wasn’t in the Amazon … come to think of it. We were just kids, fourteen, fifteen. It was in a deserted house down by the railroad tracks. We made a great thing of breaking into the house, and you looked at me solemnly and said: ‘Do you realize we’re burglars?’ And there was an old mattress on the floor in a dark room with the shutters nailed down, and we dragged the mattress into the middle of the room and wrestled on it, and you won, as you always did, and I lay there looking up at you and a train whistled in the distance and we took off our clothes in the musty darkness. It was like the pure blue flame of a welder’s torch: sudden, hot, intense in both of us…. Later we walked home at twilight along the tracks, a beautiful clear Indian summer day, and we were so happy we didn’t say anything all the way home, with our arms around each other’s necks, so young it never occurred to either of us anyone would think anything about it. And when we got back to the main road it was dark, with a full moon rising red over the smokestacks of the city and the smell of burning leaves in the air….”

  Robert: “You obviously have me confused with someone else. Now if you will excuse me.”

  Jack: “Wait a minute! It all comes back now…. I had a little studio apartment on Jane Street in the Village. It was my first time really away from home and on my own. I was young, I had a secondhand Remington, I was going to write the Great American Novel. So what difference did it make if the bed was lumpy, and the windowpane vibrated in a raw winter wind, and the radiator gave off more noise than heat, and a black dust seeped into the room and covered my manuscripts, my clothes, my pillow, and got in my hair and ears so I always looked a little dirty? I was happy, and deadly serious about my writing, and I believed in my talent.

  “But I was desperately lonely. I had read Oscar Wilde and Gide and Proust and Havelock Ellis. I knew that I was destined to love my own sex as long as I lived. I accepted this. After all, so many great writers had been like that. I used to go out after writing all day, every night to a different bar, always hoping to meet someone who would understand what I was trying to say on paper, who would share my lumpy bed, and we would wake up in the cold, gray dawn, warm with each other’s bodies.

  “Then one night I happened into a strange, equivocal place on Twelfth Street at Second Avenue. It was called The Clock Bar. The Clock had no regular crowd. It was not bohemian or tough or Bowery. It was a place where anyone could happen in. The place was empty—except for you….”

  Take it up from the next page. You can carry this second-rate-novel kick too far. I just got writing and couldn’t stop.

  When a depressed psychotic begins to recover, that is, when recovery becomes possible, the illness makes a final all-out attack, and this is the point of maximum suicide danger. You might say the human race is now at this point, in a position for the first time, by virtue of knowledge which may destroy us, to step free of self-imposed restrictions and see all life as a fact. When you see the world direct, everything is a delight, and boredom or unhappiness is impossible.

  The forces of negation and death are now making their all-out suicidal effort. The citizens of the world are helpless in a paranoid panic. First one thing and then another is seen as the enemy, while the real enemy hesitates—perhaps because it looks too easy, like an ambush. Among the Arabs and the East in general, the West (especially America), or domination by foreigners, is seen as the enemy. In the West: communism, queers, drug addicts.

  Queers have been worked over by female Senders. They are a reminder of what the Senders can and will do unless they are stopped. Also many of them have sold out their bodies to Death, Inc. Their souls wouldn’t buy a paper of milk sugar shit. But the enemy needs bodies to get around.

  Also there is no doubt some drugs condition one to receive, that is, soften one up for the Senders. Junk is not such a drug, but it is a prototype of invasion. That is, junk replaces the user cell by cell until he is junk, so the Sender will invade and replace until separate life is destroyed. Nothing but fact can save us, and Einstein is the first prophet of fact. Anyone is free, of course, to deliberately choose insanity and say that the universe is square or heart-shaped, but it is, as a matter of fact, curved.

  Similar facts: morality (at this point an unqualified evil), ethics, philosophy, religion, can no longer maintain an existence separate from facts of physiology, bodily chemistry, LSD, electronics, physics. Psychology no longer exists, since a science of mind has no meaning. Sociology and all the so-called social sciences are suspect to be purveyors of pretentious gibberish.

  The next set of facts of similar import will most likely come from present research on schizophrenia, the electronics of hallucination and the metabolism of insanity, cancer, the behavior and nature of viruses—and possibly drug addiction as a microcosm of life, pleasure and human purpose. It is also from such research that the greatest danger to the human race will come—probably has already come—a danger greater than the atom bomb, because more likely to be misunderstood.

  I am taking another junk cure—is this my tenth or eleventh cure? I forget—in the Hassan Hospital of Interzone. They are curing me slow, and why not? Stateside croakers are mostly puritan sadists, who feel a junky should suffer taking the cure. Here they look at it differently.

  I could never have been a doctor. I did right to quit. My heart is too soft and too hard, too quickly moved to love, anger, or indifference. I would care too much for some patients and nothing for others: Like I mess a case up and kill some jerk, so I say: “It’s all in the day’s work. Get this stiff outa here. I’m waiting on another patient.”

  People talk about “the hospital smell.” You never had it till you sniff a Spanish hospital. All the old standbys: ether, carbolic, alcohol, the antiseptic, ozone smell of bandages plus piss and shit and dirty babies, cunts with the rag on, never-washed pricks, sweat and garlic, saffron and olive oil, afterbirths, gangrene, keif and death.

  I used to be in room 10 and they moved me upstairs. Just passed my old room, where they had a maternity case, looks like. Terrible mess and bedpans full of blood and Kotex and nameless female substances enough to pollute a continent. Just thought, suppose somebody comes to visit me in my old room, they will think I give birth to a monster, and the State Department is trying to hush it up.

  Dave Dunlop just came in, and I was telling him about th
e eels. It was a Dane found out about them. Gave his whole life to the eels—it would be a Dane, somehow. When the adult eels reach the Sargasso Sea, which is actually a place in the Atlantic, they go down into it and disappear. It is assumed they mate and die down there—nobody has seen them doing either—but sure as shit an eel doesn’t come all that distance and lose his ass in the service for no purpose.

  Often pain and death leave me untouched. I have seen hundreds of bullfights. I feel nothing for the bull. The old man who died a few days ago just annoyed me with his groans. He had the stupid, blunted look of a sick cow. Some people would call me callous, but I am not so. It is simply that I divide people into those who matter and those who do not, and I have no concern with quantitative criteria. If I do feel someone else’s pain, I feel it with my whole being. It shatters me. I just heard a child screaming downstairs, and tears came to my eyes. I can’t stand the pain of children. No, I could never have been a doctor. I would be crying over some child while people I didn’t like died in the hall.

  More trouble with the Evil Night Nurse. I caught her in flagrante cutting my shot in half with water. I don’t say nothing. Later she doesn’t even bother to cut it. Just brings me a shot of two ampules, instead of four like she’s supposed.

  I say: “That’s two centimeters.”

  She say: “No, it’s four. The syringe is bigger.”

  I say: “Look, señorita” (she’s no more señorita than I am. Brazen old junky cunt)—“I got eyes. I want four centimeters.”

  “I can’t give you any more.”

  “All right, señorita. I’ll be having a little talk with the croaker mañana.”

  See what I mean? I give her a chance to come up right. If she told me straight, “I got a habit. You know how it is,” I would say, “All right. All right. Just fuck up somebody else’s shot.”

  But she gives me a snow job. Well, I’m going to fix her wagon good.