Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  “Let’s get off,” I said again. I could feel fear stirring in my stomach. “He’s going to wake up.”

  “No. Let’s go again. . . . Now! . . . What in hell is wrong with you? Just let yourself flop against him hard.”

  “Roy,” I said, “for Chris’ sake let’s get off! He’s going to wake up.”

  I started to get up, but Roy held me down. Suddenly he gave me a sharp push, and I fell heavily against the mooch.

  “Got it that time,” Roy said.

  “The poke?”

  “No, I got the coat out of the way.”

  We were out of the underground now and on the elevated. I was nauseated with fear, every muscle rigid with the effort of control. The mooch was only half asleep. I expected him to jump up and yell at any minute.

  Finally I heard Roy say, “I got it.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  “No, what I got is a loose roll. He’s got a poke somewhere and I’m going to find it. He’s got to have a poke.”

  “I’m getting off.”

  “No. Wait.” I could feel him fumbling across my back so openly that it seemed incredible that the man could go on sleeping.

  It was the end of the line. Roy stood up. “Cover me,” he said. I stood in front of him with the paper shielding him as much as possible from the other passengers. There were only three left, but they were in different ends of the car. Roy went through the man’s pockets openly and crudely. “Let’s go outside,” he said. We went out on the platform.

  The mooch woke up and put his hand in his pocket. Then he came out on the platform and walked up to Roy.

  “All right, Jack,” he said. “Give me my money.”

  Roy shrugged and turned his hands out, palm up. “What money? What are you talking about?”

  “You know Goddamned well what I’m talking about! You had your hand in my pocket.”

  Roy held his hands out again in a gesture of puzzlement and deprecation. “Aw, what are you talking about? I don’t know anything about your money.”

  “I’ve seen you on this line every night. This is your regular route.” He turned and pointed to me. “And there’s your partner right there. Now, are you going to give me my dough?”

  “What dough?”

  “Okay. Just stay put. We’re taking a ride back to town and this had better be good.” Suddenly, the man put both hands in Roy’s coat pockets. “You sonofabitch!” he yelled. “Give me my dough!”

  Roy hit him in the face and knocked him down. “Why you—” said Roy, dropping abruptly his conciliatory and puzzled manner. “Keep your hands off me!”

  The conductor, seeing a fight in progress, was holding up the train so that no one would fall on the tracks.

  “Let’s cut,” I said. We started down the platform. The man got up and ran after us. He threw his arms around Roy, holding on stubbornly. Roy couldn’t break loose. He was pretty well winded.

  “Get this mooch off me!” Roy yelled.

  I hit the man twice in the face. His grip loosened and he fell to his knees.

  “Kick his head off,” said Roy.

  I kicked the man in the side and felt a rib snap. The man put his hand to his side. “Help!” he shouted. He did not try to get up.

  “Let’s cut,” I said. At the far end of the platform, I heard a police whistle. The man was still lying there on the platform holding his side and yelling “Help!” at regular intervals.

  There was a slight drizzle of rain falling. When I hit the street, I slipped and skidded on the wet sidewalk. We were standing by a closed filling station, looking back at the elevated.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “They’ll see us.”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  We started to walk. I noticed that my mouth was bone dry. Roy took two goofballs from his shirt pocket.

  “Mouth’s too dry,” he said. “I can’t swallow them.”

  We went on walking.

  “There’s sure to be an alarm out for us,” Roy said. “Keep a lookout for cars. We’ll duck in the bushes if any come along. They’ll be figuring us to get back on the subway, so the best thing we can do is keep walking.”

  The drizzle continued. Dogs barked at us as we walked.

  “Remember our story if we get nailed,” Roy said. “We fell asleep and woke up at the end of the line. This guy accused us of taking his money. We were scared, so we knocked him down and ran. They’ll beat the shit out of us. You have to expect that.”

  “Here comes a car,” I said. “Yellow lights, too.”

  We crawled into the bushes at the side of the road and crouched down behind a signboard. The car drove slowly by. We started walking again. I was getting sick and wondered if I would get home to the morphine sulphate I had stashed in my apartment.

  “When we get closer in we better split up,” Roy said. “Out here we might be able to do each other some good. If we run into a cop on the beat we’ll tell him we’ve been with some girls and we’re looking for the subway. This rain is a break. The cops will all be in some all-night joint drinking coffee. For chris’ sake!” he said irritably. “Don’t round like that!”

  I had turned around and looked over my shoulder. “It’s natural to turn around,” I said.

  “Natural for thieves!”

  We finally ran into the BMT line and rode back to Manhattan.

  Roy said, “I don’t think I’m just speaking for myself when I say I was scared. Oh. Here’s your cut.”

  He handed me three dollars.

  Next day I told him I was through as a lush-worker.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “But you got a wrong impression. You’re bound to get some good breaks if you stick around long enough.”

  Eventually, I got to Texas and stayed off junk for about four months. Then I went to New Orleans. New Orleans presents a stratified series of ruins. Along Bourbon Street are ruins of the 1920s. Down where the French Quarter blends into Skid Row are ruins of an earlier stratum: chili joints, decaying hotels, oldtime saloons with mahogany bars, spittoons, and crystal chandeliers. The ruins of 1900.

  There are people in New Orleans who have never been outside the city limits. The New Orleans accent is exactly similar to the accent of Brooklyn. The French Quarter is always crowded. Tourists, servicemen, merchant seamen, gamblers, perverts, drifters, and lamsters from every State in the Union. People wander around, unrelated, purposeless, most of them looking vaguely sullen and hostile. This is a place where you enjoy yourself. Even the criminals have come here to cool off and relax.

  But a complex pattern of tensions, like the electrical mazes devised by psychologists to unhinge the nervous systems of white rats and guinea pigs, keeps the unhappy pleasure-seekers in a condition of unconsummated alertness. For one thing, New Orleans is inordinately noisy. The drivers orient themselves largely by the use of their horns, like bats. The residents are surly. The transient population is completely miscellaneous and unrelated, so that you never know what sort of behavior to expect from anybody.

  New Orleans was a strange town to me and I had no way of making a junk connection. Walking around the city, I spotted several junk neighborhoods: St. Charles and Poydras, the area around and above Lee Circle, Canal and Exchange Place. I don’t spot junk neighborhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by which a dowser locates hidden water. I am walking along and suddenly the junk in my cells moves and twitches like the dowser’s wand: “Junk here!”

  I didn’t see anybody around, and besides I wanted to stay off, or at least I thought I wanted to stay off.

  In the French Quarter there are several queer bars so full every night the fags spill out on to the sidewalk. A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. Fags are ventriloqui
sts’ dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist. The dummy sits in a queer bar nursing his beer, and uncontrollably yapping out of a rigid doll face.

  Occasionally, you find intact personalities in a queer bar, but fags set the tone of these joints, and it always brings me down to go into a queer bar. The bring-down piles up. After my first week in a new town I have had about all I can take of these joints, so my bar business goes somewhere else, generally to a bar in or near Skid Row.

  But I backslide now and then. One night, I got lobotomized drunk in Frank’s and went to a queer bar. I must have had more drinks in the queer joint, because there was a lapse of time. It was getting light outside when the bar hit one of those sudden pockets of quiet. Quiet is something that does not often happen in a queer joint. I guess most of the fags had left. I was leaning against the bar with a beer I didn’t want in front of me. The noise cleared like smoke and I saw a red-haired kid was looking straight at me and standing about three feet away.

  He didn’t come on faggish, so I said, “Howyou making it?” or something like that.

  He said: “Do you want to go to bed with me?”

  I said, “O.K. Let’s go.”

  As we walked out, he grabbed my bottle of beer off the bar and stuck it under his coat. Outside, it was daylight with the sun just coming up. We staggered through the French Quarter passing the beer bottle back and forth. He was leading the way in the direction of his hotel, so he said. I could feel my stomach knot up like I was about to take a shot after being off the junk a long time. I should have been more alert, of course, but I never could mix vigilance and sex. All this time he was talking on in a sexy Southern voice which was not a New Orleans voice, and in the daylight he still looked good.

  We got to a hotel and he put me down some routine why he should go in first alone. I pulled some bills out of my pocket. He looked at them and said, “Better give me the ten.”

  I gave it to him. He went in the hotel and came right out.

  “No rooms there,” he said. “We’ll try the Savoy.”

  The Savoy was right across the street.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  I waited about an hour and by then it occurred to me what was wrong with the first hotel. It’d had no back or side door he could walk out of. I went back to my apartment and got my gun. I waited around the Savoy and looked for the kid through the French Quarter. About noon, I got hungry and ate a plate of oysters with a glass of beer, and suddenly felt so tired that when I walked out of the restaurant my legs were folding under me as if someone was clipping me behind the knees.

  I took a cab home and fell across the bed without taking off my shoes. I woke up around six in the evening and went to Frank’s. After three quick beers I felt better.

  There was a man standing by the jukebox and I caught his eye several times. He looked at me with a special recognition, like one queer looks at another. He looked like one of those terra-cotta heads that you plant grass in. A peasant face, with peasant intuition, stupidity, shrewdness and malice.

  The jukebox wasn’t working. I walked over and asked him what was wrong with it. He said he didn’t know. I asked him to have a drink and he ordered Coke. He told me his name was Pat. I told him I had come up recently from the Mexican border.

  He said, “I’d like to get down that way, me. Bring some stuff in from Mexico.”

  “The border is pretty hot,” I said.

  “I hope you won’t take offense at what I say,” he began, “but you look like you use stuff yourself.”

  “Sure I use.”

  “Do you want to score?” he asked. “I’m due to score in a few minutes. I’ve been trying to hustle the dough. If you buy me a cap, I can score for you.”

  I said, “O.K.”

  We walked around the corner past the NMU hall.

  “Wait here a minute,” he said, disappearing into a bar. I half-expected to get beat for my four dollars, but he was back in a few minutes. “O.K.,” he said, “I got it.”

  I asked him to come back to my apartment to take a shot. We went back to my room, and I got out my outfit that hadn’t been used in five months.

  “If you don’t have a habit, you’d better go slow with this stuff,” he cautioned me. “It’s pretty strong.”

  I measured out about two-thirds of a cap.

  “Half is plenty,” he said. “I tell you it’s strong.”

  “This will be all right,” I said. But as soon as I took the needle out of the vein, I knew it wasn’t all right. I felt a soft blow in the heart. Pat’s face began to get black around the edges, the blackness spreading to cover his face. I could feel my eyes roll back in their sockets.

  I came to several hours later. Pat was gone. I was lying on the bed with my collar loosened. I stood up and fell to my knees. I was dizzy and my head ached. Ten dollars were missing from my watch-pocket. I guess he figured I wasn’t going to need it any more.

  Several days later I met Pat in the same bar.

  “Holy Jesus,” he said, “I thought you was dying! I loosened your collar and rubbed ice on your neck. You turned all blue. So I says, ‘Holy Jesus, this man is dying! I’m going to get out of here, me!’”

  A week later, I was hooked. I asked Pat about the possibilities of pushing in New Orleans.

  “The town is et up with pigeons,” he said. “It’s really tough.”

  One day I was broke and I wrapped up a pistol to take it in town and pawn it. When I got to Pat’s room there were two people there. One was Red McKinney, a shriveled-up, crippled junkie; the other was a young merchant seaman named Cole. Cole did not have a habit at this time and he wanted to connect for some weed. He was a real tea head. He told me he could not enjoy himself without weed. I have seen people like that. For them, tea occupies the place usually filled by liquor. They don’t have to have it in any physical sense, but they cannot have a really good time without it.

  As it happened I had several ounces of weed in my house. Cole agreed to buy four caps in exchange for two ounces of weed. We went out to my place, Cole tried the weed and said it was good. So we started out to score.

  Red said he knew a connection on Julia Street. “We should be able to find him there now.”

  Pat was sitting at the wheel of my car on the nod. We were on the ferry, crossing from Algiers, where I lived, to New Orleans. Suddenly Pat looked up and opened his bloodshot eyes.

  “That neighborhood is too hot,” he said loudly.

  “Where else can we score?” said McKinney. “Old Sam is up that way, too.”

  “I tell you that neighborhood is too hot,” Pat repeated. He looked around resentfully, as though what he saw was unfamiliar and distasteful.

  There was, in fact, no place else to score. Without a word, Pat started driving in the direction of Lee Circle. When we came to Julia Street, McKinney said to Cole, “Give me the money because we are subject to see him any time. He walks around this block. A walking connection.”

  Cole gave McKinney fifteen dollars. We circled the block three times slowly, but McKinney did not see “the Man.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to try Old Sam,” McKinney said.

  We began looking for Old Sam above Lee Circle. Old Sam was not in the old frame rooming house where he lived. We drove around slowly. Every now and then Pat would see someone he knew and stop the car. No one had seen Old Sam. Some of the characters Pat called to just shrugged in a disagreeable way and kept walking.

  “Those guys wouldn’t tell you nothing,” Pat said. “It hurts ’em to do any-body a favor.”

  We parked the car near Old Sam’s rooming house, and McKinney walked down to the corner to buy a package of cigarettes. He came back limping fast and got in the car.

  “The law,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We started away from the curb and a prowl car passed us. I saw the cop at the wheel turn around and do a doubletake when he saw Pat.

  “They’ve made us, Pat,” I said. “Get going!”r />
  It was five in the afternoon when we left the hospital and took a cab to Canal Street. I went into a bar and drank four whiskey sodas and got a good lush kick. I was cured.

  As I walked across the porch of my house and opened the door, I had the feel of returning after a long absence. I was coming back to the point in time I left a year ago when I took that first “joy bang” with Pat.

  After a junk cure is complete, you generally feel fine for a few days. You can drink, you can feel real hunger and pleasure in food, and your sex desire comes back to you. Everything looks different, sharper. Then you hit a sag. It is an effort to dress, get out of a car, pick up a fork. You don’t want to do anything or go anywhere. You don’t even want junk. The junk craving is gone, but there isn’t anything else. You have to sit this period out. Or work it out. Farm work is the best cure.

  Pat came around as soon as he heard I was out. Did I want to “pick up”? Just one wouldn’t hurt any. He could get a good price on ten or more. I said no. You don’t need will power to say no to junk when you are off. You don’t want it.

  Besides, I was charged in State, and State junk raps pile up like any other felony. Two junk raps can draw you seven years, or you can be charged in State on one and Federal on the other so that when you walk out of the State joint the Federals meet you at the door. If you do your Federal time first, then the State is waiting for you at the door of the Federal joint.

  I knew the law was out to hang another on me because they had messed up the deal by coming on like Federals and by searching the house without a warrant. I had a free hand to arrange my account of what happened since there was no statement with my signature on it to tie me down. The State could not introduce the statement I had signed for the Federals without bringing up the deal I had made with that fair-play artist, the fat captain. But if they could hang another charge on me, they would have a sure thing.

  Usually, a junky makes straight for a connection as soon as he leaves any place of confinement. The law would expect me to do this and they would be watching Pat. So I told Pat I was staying off until the case was settled. He borrowed two dollars and went away.