The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead

by William S. Burroughs

  A dim religious light burns all night in the dormitory. The patients sleep on their backs under a thin blanket. Erections are sanctioned with a sharp ruler tap from the night sister.

  And so the years passed. Sometimes as a special treat there were nature walks in the garden, Bob there with three snarling Alsatians on a lead. The patients could watch a praying mantis eat her mate.

  Daily confessions were heard by the Green Nun on a lie detector that could also give a very nasty shock in the nasty places while the Green Nun intoned slowly “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”

  These confessions she wrote out in green ink keeping a separate ledger book for each patient. Once after a particularly degraded confession she levitated to the ceiling in the presence of an awed young nun. Every night she put on Christ drag with a shimmering halo and visited some young nun in her cell. She liked to think of herself as the nun in a poem by Sara Teasdale.

  “Infinite tenderness infinite irony is hidden forever in her closed eyes.

  Who must have learned too well in her long loneliness how empty wisdom is even to the wise.”

  She was an inveterate hypochondriac and dosed herself liberally with laudanum. As a result she suffered from constipation which could put a comely young nun on high colonic duty. This honor was invariably followed by a nocturnal visit from Christ with a strap-on. In her youth the Green Nun had toyed with the idea of ordering Bob to raid a sperm bank. Then she could claim the Christ child. She put aside these ambitious thoughts. Her work in the kindergarten was more important than worldly glamor, her picture on the cover of Life.

  You learn not to have a thought you will be ashamed to tell the Green Nun and never to do anything you would be ashamed to do in front of her. And sooner or later you join the Quarter G Club. Converted patients are allowed a quarter grain of morphine every night before lights out, a privilege which is withdrawn for any trespass.

  “Now you know that dream about flying is WRONG don’t you? For that you go to bed without your medicine.”

  Shivering with junk sickness in the icy ward room all next day he has to look bright and happy as he busies himself with crayons and plasticene. He has learned to draw pictures of the Virgin Mary and Saint Teresa with an unmistakable resemblance to the Green Nun. Crosses are always safe in plasticene. Soon after his commitment he made the error of molding a naked Greek statue. That day sister’s ruler slashed down on his thin blue wrist and he was forced to write out i am a filthy little beast ten thousand times in many places.

  Dizzy dance of rooms and faces, murmur of many voices smell of human nights … St. Louis backdrop of redbrick houses, slate roofs, back yards and ash pits … As a child he had an English governess with references so impeccable that Audrey later suspected they had been forged by a Fleet Street hack in a shabby pub near Earl’s Court.

  “You can’t put in too many Lords and Lydies I always sy.”

  Listening back with a writer’s crystal set he picked up mutters of the servant underworld … the pimping blackmailing chauffeur … “You don’t get rid of me that easy Lord Brambletie.”

  Overdose of morphine in a Kensington nursing home … “She said that Mrs. Charrington was sleeping and could not be disturbed.”

  The governess left quite suddenly after receiving a letter from England.

  Then there was an old Irish crone who taught him to call the toads. She could go out into the back yard and croon a toad out from under a stone and Audrey learned to do it too. He had his familiar toad that lived under a rock by the goldfish pool and came when he called it. And she taught him a curse to bring “the blinding worm” from rotten bread.

  Audrey went to a progressive grade school where the children were encouraged to express themselves, model in clay, beat out copper ash trays and make stone axes. A sensitive inspirational teacher is writing the school play out on the blackboard as the class makes suggestions:

  ACT 1

  SCENE ONE: Two women at the water hole.

  Woman 1: “I hear the tiger ate Bast’s baby last night.”

  Woman 2: “Yes. All they found was the child’s toy soldier.”

  Woman 1: “One doesn’t feel safe with that tiger about.” (She looks around nervously.) “Its getting dark Sextet and I’m going home.”

  One of the truly great bores of St Louis was Colonel Greenfield. He had dinner jokes that took half an hour to tell during which no one was expected to eat. Audrey sits there watching his turkey go cold with half a mind to put the “blinding worm” on him. It seems this old black Jew has crashed the Palace Hotel in Palm Beach. At that very moment the night clerk, a new man just in from a Texas hotel school, withers in Major Brady’s cold glare.

  “Did you check in Mr. Rogers nee Kike?”

  “Why, yes sir, I did. He had a reservation.”

  “No, he didn’t. There was a mistake you dumb hick.

  Don’t you know a black Jew when you see one?”

  Meanwhile the old black Jew has called room service … “Will you please send up a little pepper.”

  “I’m sorry sir the kitchen is closed. Why it’s three in the morning.”

  “I don’t care is the kitchen closed. I don’t care is it three in the morning. I want a little pepper.”

  “I’m sorry sir.”

  “I vant to talk with the manager plis” … (The dialect gets heavier as the Colonel warms up.)

  Call from the night manager to Major Brady’s office …

  “That old black Jew in 23 wants pepper of all things at this hour.”

  “All right. We run a first-class hotel here. Open the kitchen and give him anything he wants … Brought his own carp most likely.”

  So the night manager calls the old black Jew. “All right sir what kind of pepper do you want? Red pepper? White pepper? Black pepper?”

  “I don’t vant red pepper. I don’t vant white pepper. I don’t vant black pepper. All I vant is a little toilet pepper.”

  eye in needle needle in eye

  The Colonel burned down St Louis. One day when Audrey reluctantly visited Colonel Greenfield’s house to deliver a message he found the Colonel telling his interminable anecdotes to the Negro butler.

  “Now on the old Greenfield plantation we had house niggers and field niggers and the field niggers never came into the house.”

  “No sir the field niggers never came into the house.”

  “The house niggers saw to that didn’t they George?”

  “Yes sir. The house niggers saw to that sir.”

  “Now wherever I go I always get out the telephone book and look up anybody who bears the name of Greenfield. There are so few of them and they are all so distinguished. Well some years ago in Buffalo New York I had written down the address of Abraham L. Greenfield and showed it to a nigra cab driver.”

  “I think you got the wrong number boss.”

  “The address is correct driver.”

  “I still think you got the wrong number boss.”

  “Shut your black face and take me where I want to go.”

  “Yahsuh boss. Here you are boss. Niggertown boss.”

  “And that’s where we were right in Niggertown.”

  “Yes sir. Right in Niggertown sir.”

  “So I get out and knock on the door and an old coon comes to the door with his hat in his hands.”

  “With his hat in his hands sir.”

  “Good evening Massa and God bless you” he says.

  “Is your name Greenfield?” I ask him.

  “Yahsuh boss. Abraham Lincoln Greenfield.”

  “Well it turns out he was one of our old house niggers.”

  “One of your old house niggers sir.”

  “He invited me in and served me a cup of coffee with homemade caramel cake. He wouldn’t sit down just stood there nodding and smiling … The right kind of darky.”

  “The right kind of darky sir.”

  And Bury the Bread Deep in a Sty

  Audrey was a thin pale boy his face sca
rred by festering spiritual wounds. “He looks like a sheep-killing dog,” said a St Louis aristocrat. There was something rotten and unclean about Audrey, an odor of the walking dead. Doormen stopped him when he visited his rich friends. Shopkeepers pushed his change back without a thank you. He spent sleepless nights weeping into his pillow from impotent rage. He read adventure stories and saw himself as a gentleman adventurer like the “Major” … sun helmet, khakis, Webley at the belt a faithful Zulu servant at his side. A dim sad child breathing old pulp magazines. At sixteen he attended an exclusive high school known as The Poindexter Academy where he felt rather like a precarious house nigger. Still he was invited to most of the parties and Mrs Kind-heart made a point of being nice to him.

  At the opening of the academy in September a new boy appeared. Aloof and mysterious where he came from nobody knew. There were rumors of Paris, London, a school in Switzerland. His name was John Hamlin and he stayed with relatives in Portland Place. He drove a magnificent Dusenberg. Audrey, who drove a battered Moon, studied this vast artifact with openmouthed awe, the luxurious leather upholstery, the brass fittings, the wickerwork doors, the huge spotlight with a pistol-grip handle. Audrey wrote: “Clearly he has come a long way travel stained and even the stains unfamiliar, cuff links of a dull metal that seems to absorb light, his red hair touched with gold, large green eyes well apart.”

  The new boy took a liking to Audrey while he turned aside with polished deftness invitations from sons of the rich. This did not endear Audrey to important boys and he found his stories coldly rejected by the school magazine.

  “Morbid” the editor told him. “We want stories that make you go to bed feeling good.”

  It was Friday October 23, 1929 a bright blue day leaves falling, half-moon in the sky. Audrey Carsons walked up Pershing Avenue … “Simon, aime tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes?” … He had read that on one of E. Holdeman Julius’s little Blue Books and meant to use it in the story he was writing. Of course his hero spoke French. At the corner of Pershing and Walton he stopped to watch a squirrel. A dead leaf caught for a moment in Audrey’s ruffled brown hair.

  “Hello Audrey. Like to go for a ride?”

  It was John Hamlin at the wheel of his Dusenberg. He opened the door without waiting for an answer. Hamlin made a wide U-turn and headed West … left on Euclid right on Lindell … Skinker Boulevard City Limits … Clayton … Hamlin looked at his wrist watch.

  “We could make St Joseph for lunch … nice riverside restaurant there serves wine.”

  Audrey is thrilled of course. The autumn countryside flashes by … long straight stretch of road ahead.

  “Now I’ll show you what this job can do.”

  Hamlin presses the accelerator slowly to the floor … 60 … 70 … 80 … 85 … 90 … Audrey leans forward lips parted eyes shining.

  At Tent City a top-level conference is in progress involving top level executives in the CONTROL GAME. The Conference has been called by a Texas billionaire who contributes heavily to MRA and maintains a stable of evangelists. This conference is taking place outside St Louis Missouri because the Green Nun flatly refuses to leave her kindergarten. The high teacup queens thought it would be fun to do a tent city like a 1917 Army camp. The conferents are discussing Operation W.O.G. (Wrath of God).

  At the top level people get cynical after a few drinks. The young man from the news magazine has discovered a good-looking Fulbright scholar and they are witty in a corner over Martinis. A drunken American Sergeant reels to his feet. He has the close-cropped iron-grey hair and ruddy complexion of the Regular Army man.

  “To put it country simple for a lay audience … you don’t even know what buttons to push … we take a bunch of longhair boys fucking each other while they puff reefers, spit cocaine on the Bible, and wipe their asses with Old Glory. We show this film to decent, church-going, Bible Belt do-rights. We take the reaction. One religious sheriff with seven nigger notches on his gun melted the camera lens. He turned out to be quite an old character and the boys from Life did a spread on him—seems it had always been in the family, a power put there by God to smite the unrighteous: his grandmother struck a whore dead in the street with it. When we showed the picture to a fat Southern senator his eyes popped out throwing fluid all over your photographer. Well I’ve been asparagrassed in Paris, kneed in the groin by the Sea Org in Tunis, maced in Chicago and pelted with scorpions in Marrakech so a face full of frog eggs is all in the day’s work. What the Narco boys call ‘society’s disapproval’ reflected and concentrated twenty million I HATE YOU pictures in one blast. When you want the job done come to the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. AND WE CAN TURN IT IN ANY DIRECTION. You Limey leftovers …” He points to a battery of old grey men in club chairs frozen in stony disapproval of this vulgar drunken American. When will the club steward arrive to eject the bounder so a gentleman can read his Times?

  “YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A BANANA REPUBLIC. AND REMEMBER WE’VE GOT YOUR PICTURES.”

  “And we’ve got yours too Yank,” they clip icily.

  “MINE ARE UGLIER THAN YOURS.”

  The English cough and look away fading into their spectral clubs, yellowing tusks of the beast killed by the improbable hyphenated name, OLD SARGE screams after them … “WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS A BEAUTY CONTEST? You Fabian Socialist vegetable peoples go back to your garden in Hampstead and release a hot-air balloon in defiance of a local ordinance delightful encounter with the bobby in the morning. Mums wrote it all up in her diary and read it to us at tea. WE GOT ALL YOUR PANSY PICTURES AT ETON. YOU WANTA JACK OFF IN FRONT OF THE QUEEN WITH A CANDLE UP YOUR ASS?”

  “You can’t talk like that in front of decent women,” drawled the Texas billionaire flanked by his rangers.

  “You decorticated cactus. I suppose you think this conference was your idea? Compliments of SID in the Sudden Inspiration Department … And you lousy yacking fink queens my photographers wouldn’t take your pictures. You are nothing but tape recorders. With just a flick of my finger frozen forever over that Martini. All right get snide and snippy about that HUH? … And you” … He points to the Green Nun … “Write out ten thousand times under water in indelible ink OLD SARGE HAS MY CHRIST PICTURES. SHALL I SHOW THEM TO THE POPE?

  “And now in the name of all good tech sergeants everywhere …”

  A gawky young sergeant is reading Amazing Stories. He flicks a switch … Audrey and Hamlin on screen. Wind ruffles Audrey’s hair as the Dusenberg gathers speed.

  “Light Years calling Bicarbonate … Operation Little Audrey on target … eight seconds to count down … tracking …”

  A thin dyspeptic technician mixes a bicarbonate of soda.

  “URP calling Fox Trot … six seconds to count down …”

  English computer programer is rolling a joint.

  “Spot Light calling Accent … four seconds to count down …”

  Computers hum, lights flash, lines converge.

  Red-haired boy chews gum and looks at a muscle magazine.

  “Red Dot calling Pin Point … two seconds to count down …“.

  The Dusenberg zooms over a rise and leaves the ground. Just ahead is a wooden barrier, steamroller, piles of gravel, phantom tents. DETOUR sign points sharp left to a red clay road where pieces of flint glitter in the sunlight.

  “OLD SARGE IS TAKING OVER.”

  He looks around and the crockery flies off every table spattering the conferents with Martinis, bourbon, whipped cream, maraschino cherries, gravy and vichysoisse frozen forever in a 1920 slapstick.

  “COUNT DOWN.”

  End over end a flaming pin wheel of jagged metal slices through the conferents. The Green Nun is decapitated by a twisted fender. The Texas billionaire is sloshed with gasoline like a burning nigger. The broken spotlight trailing white-hot wires like a jellyfish hits the British delegate in the face. The Dusenberg explodes throwing white-hot chunks of jagged metal, boiling acid, burning gasoline in all directions.

  Wearing the uniforms
of World War I Audrey and Old Sarge lean out of a battered Moon in the morning sky and smile. Old Sarge is at the wheel.

  The Penny Arcade Peep Show

  Unexpected rising of the curtain can begin with a Dusenberg moving slowly along a 1920 detour. Just ahead Audrey sees booths and fountains and ferris wheels against a yellow sky. A boy steps in front of the car and holds up his hand. He is naked except for a rainbow colored jock strap and sandals. Under one arm he carries a Mauser pistol clipped onto a rifle stock. He steps to the side of the car. Audrey has never seen anyone so cool and disengaged. He looks at Audrey and he looks at John. He nods.

  “We leave the car here,” John says. Audrey gets out. Six boys now stand there watching him serenely. They carry long knives sheathed at their belts which are studded with amethyst crystals. They all wear rainbow-colored jock straps like souvenir post cards of Niagara Falls. Audrey follows John through a square where acts are in progress surrounded by circles of adolescent onlookers eating colored ices and chewing gum. Most of the boys wear the rainbow jock straps and a few of them seem to be completely naked. Audrey can’t be sure trying to keep up with John. The fair reminds Audrey of 1890 prints. Sepia ferris wheels turn in yellow light. Gliders launched from a wooden ramp soar over the fair ground legs of the pilots dangling in air. A colored hot-air balloon is released to applause of the onlookers. Around the fair ground are boardwalks, lodging houses, restaurants and baths. Boys lounge in doorways. Audrey glimpses scenes that quicken his breath and send the blood pounding to his groin. He catches sight of John far ahead outlined in the dying sunlight. Audrey calls after him but his voice is blurred and muffled. Then darkness falls as if someone has turned out the sky. Some distance ahead and to the left he sees PENNY ARCADE spelled out in light globes. Perhaps John has gone in there. Audrey pushes aside a red curtain and enters the arcade. Chandeliers, gilt walls, red curtains, mirrors, windows stretch away into the distance. He cannot see the end of it in either direction from the entrance. It is a long narrow building like a ship cabin or a train. Boys are standing in front of peep shows some wearing the rainbow jock straps others in prep school clothes loincloths and jellabas. He notices shows with seats in front of them and some in curtained booths. As he passes a booth he glimpses through parted curtains two boys sitting on a silk sofa both of them naked. Shifting his eyes he sees a boy slip his jock strap down and step out of it without taking his eyes from the peep show. Moving with a precision and ease he sometimes knew in flying dreams Audrey slides onto a steel chair that reminds him of Doctor Moor’s Surgery in the Lister Building afternoon light through green blinds. In front of him is a luminous screen. Smell of old pain, ether, bandages, sick fear in the waiting room, yes this is Doctor Moor’s Surgery in the Lister Building.