Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  One night I got lushed and bought some paregoric and he kept saying over and over, “I knew you’d come home with paregoric. I knew it. You’ll be a junkie all the rest of your life” and looking at me with his little cat smile. Junk is a cause with him.

  I checked into the hospital junk sick and spent four days there. They would only give me three shots of morphine and I couldn’t sleep from pain and heat and deprivation besides which there was a Panamanian hernia case in the same room with me and his friends came and stayed all day and half the night—one of them did in fact stay until midnight.

  Recall walking by some American women in the corridor who looked like officers’ wives. One of them was saying, “I don’t know why but I just can’t eat sweets.”

  “You got diabetes lady,” I said. They all whirled around and gave me an outraged stare.

  After checking out of the hospital, I stopped off at the U.S. Embassy. In front of the Embassy is a vacant lot with weeds and trees where boys undress to swim in the polluted waters of the bay—home of a small venomous sea snake. Smell of excrement and sea water and young male lust. No letters. I stopped again to buy two ounces of paregoric. Same old Panama. Whores and pimps and hustlers.

  “Want nice girl?”

  “Naked lady dance?”

  “See me fuck my sister?”

  No wonder food prices are high. They can’t keep them down on the farm. They all want to come in the big city and be pimps.

  I had a magazine article with me describing a joint outside Panama City called the Blue Goose. “This is anything-goes joint. Dope peddlers lurk in the men’s room with a hypo loaded and ready to go. Sometimes they dart out of a toilet and stick it in your arm without waiting for consent. Homosexuals run riot.”

  The Blue Goose looks like a Prohibition-era road house. A long one-story building run down and covered with vines. I could hear frogs croaking from the woods and swamps around it. Outside a few parked cars, inside a dim bluish light. I remembered a prohibition-era road house of my adolescence and the taste of gin rickeys in a midwest summer. (Oh my God! And the August moon in a violet sky and Billy Bradshinkel’s cock. How sloppy can you get?)

  Immediately two old whores sat down at my table without being asked and ordered drinks. The bill for one round was $6.90. The only thing lurking in the men’s room was an insolent demanding lavatory attendant. I may add that far from running riot in Panama I never scored for one boy there. I wonder what a Panamanian boy would be like. Probably cut. When they say anything goes they are referring to the joint not the customers.

  I ran into my old friend Jones the cab driver, and bought some C off him that was cut to hell and back. I nearly suffocated myself trying to sniff enough of this crap to get a lift. That’s Panama. Wouldn’t surprise me if they cut the whores with sponge rubber.

  The Panamanians are about the crummiest people in the Hemisphere—I understand the Venezuelans offer competition—but I have never encountered any group of citizens that brings me down like the Canal Zone Civil Service. You can not contact a civil servant on the level of intuition and empathy. He just does not have a receiving set, and he gives out like a dead battery. There must be a special low frequency civil service brain wave.

  The Service men don’t seem young. They have no enthusiasm and no conversation. In fact they shun the company of civilians. The only element in Panama I contact are the hip spades and they are all on the hustle.

  Love,

  Bill

  P.S. Billy Bradshinkel got to be such a nuisance I finally had to kill him:

  The first time was in my model A after the spring prom. Billy with his pants down to his ankles and his tuxedo shirt still on, and jissom all over the car seat. Later I was holding his arm while he vomited in the car headlights, looking young and petulant with his blond hair mussed standing there in the warm spring wind. Then we got back in the car and turned the lights off and I said, “Let’s again.”

  And he said, “No we shouldn’t.”

  And I said, “Why not?” and by then he was excited too so we did it again, and I ran my hands over his back under his tuxedo shirt and held him against me and felt the long baby hairs of his smooth cheek against mine and he went to sleep there and it was getting light when we drove home.

  After that in the car several times and one time his family was away and we took off all our clothes and afterwards I watched him sleeping like a baby with his mouth a little open.

  That summer Billy caught typhoid and I went to see him every day and his mother gave me lemonade and once his father gave me a bottle of beer and a cigarette. When Billy was better we used to drive out to Creve Coeur Lake and rent a boat and go fishing and lie on the bottom of the boat with our arms around each other’s shoulders not doing anything. One Saturday we explored an old quarry and found a cave and took our pants off in the musty darkness.

  I remember the last time I saw Billy was in October of that year. One of those sparkling blue days you get in the Ozarks in autumn. We had driven out into the country to hunt squirrels with my .22 single shot, and walked through the autumn woods without seeing anything to shoot at and Billy was silent and sullen and we sat on a log and Billy looked at his shoes and finally told me he couldn’t see me again (notice I am sparing you the falling leaves).

  “But why Billy? Why?”

  “Well if you don’t know I can’t explain it to you. Let’s go back to the car.”

  We drove back in silence and when we came to his house he opened the door and got out. He looked at me for a second as if he was going to say something then turned abruptly and walked up the flagstone path to his house. I sat there for a minute looking at the closed door. Then I drove home feeling numb. When the car was stopped in the garage I put my head down on the wheel sobbing and rubbing my cheek against the steel spokes. Finally Mother called to me from an upstairs window was anything wrong and why didn’t I come in the house. So I wiped the tears off my face and went in and said I was sick and went upstairs to bed. Mother brought me a bowl of milk toast on a tray but I couldn’t eat any and cried all night.

  After that I called Billy several times on the phone but he always hung up when he heard my voice. And I wrote him a long letter which he never answered.

  Three months later when I read in the paper he had been killed in a car wreck and Mother said, “Oh that’s the Bradshinkel boy. You used to be such good friends didn’t you?”

  I said, “Yes Mother” not feeling anything at all.

  And I got a silo full of queer corn where that come from. Another routine: A man who manufactures memories to order. Any kind you want and he guarantees you’ll believe they happened just that way—(As a matter of fact I have just about sold myself Billy Bradshinkel). A line from the Japanese Sandman provides theme song of story, “Just an old second hand man trading new dreams for old.” Ah what the Hell! Give it to Truman Capote.

  Another bit of reminiscence but genuine. Every Sunday at lunch my grandmother would disinter her dead brother killed 50 years ago when he dragged his shotgun through a fence and blew his lungs out.

  “I always remember my brother such a lovely boy. I hate to see boys with guns.”

  So every Sunday at lunch there was the boy lying by the wood fence and blood on the frozen red Georgia clay seeping into the winter stubble.

  And poor old Mrs. Collins waiting for the cataracts to ripen so they can operate on her eye. Oh God! Sunday lunch in Cincinnati!

  February 28, 1953

  Hotel Niza, Pasto

  Dear Allen:

  On my way back to Bogotá with nothing accomplished. I have been conned by medicine men (the most inveterate drunk, liar and loafer in the village is invariably the medicine man), incarcerated by the law, rolled by a local hustler (I thought I was getting that innocent backwoods ass, but the kid had been to bed with six American oilmen, a Swedish botanist, a Dutch ethnographer, a Capuchin father known locally as the Mother Superior, a Bolivian Trotskyite on the lam, and jointly fucked by
the Cocoa Commission and Point Four). Finally I was prostrated by malaria. I will relate events more or less chronologically.

  I took a bus to Mocoa which is the capital of the Putumayo and end of the road. From there on you go by mule or canoe. For some reason these end of road towns are always God awful. Anyone expecting to outfit himself there will find they have nothing he needs in the stores. Not even citronella—and no one in these end of the road towns knows anything about the jungle.

  I arrived in Mocoa late at night and consumed a ghastly Colombian soft drink under the dubious eyes of a national cop who could not make up his mind whether to question me or not. Finally he got up and left and I went to bed. The night was cool, about like Puyo, another awful end of the road town.

  When I woke up next morning I began to get bum kicks still in bed. I looked out the window. Cobblestone, muddy streets, one-story buildings mostly shops. Nothing out of the ordinary but in all my experience as a traveler—and I have seen more God awful places—no place ever brought me down like Mocoa. And I don’t know exactly why.

  Mocoa has about two thousand inhabitants and sixty national cops. One of them rides around all day through the four streets of the town on a motor bicycle. You can hear him from any place in town. Radios with extra loud speakers in every cantina make a horrible discordant noise (there are no jukeboxes in Mocoa where you can play what you want to hear). The police have a brass band they bang around three or four times a day starting in the early morning. I never saw any signs of disorder in this town which is well out of the war zone. But there is an air of unresolved and unsoluble tension about Mocoa, the agencies of control out in force to put down uprising which does not occur. Mocoa is The End Of The Road. A final stalemate with the cop riding around and around on his motor bicycle for all eternity.

  I went on to Puerto Limón which is about thirty miles from Mocoa. This town can be reached by truck. Here I located an intelligent Indian and ten minutes later I had a yagé vine. But the Indian would not prepare it since this is the monopoly of the brujo (medicine man).

  This old drunken fraud was crooning over a man evidently down with malaria. (Maybe he was chasing the evil spirit out of his patient and into the gringo. Anyway I came down with malaria two weeks to the day later.) The brujo told me he had to be half lushed up to work his witchcraft and cure people. The high cost of liquor was working a hardship on the sick, he was only hitting two cylinders on a short count of lush. I bought him a pint of aguardiente and he agreed to prepare the yagé for another quart. He did in fact prepare a pint of cold water infusion after misappropriating half the vine so that I did not notice any effect.

  That night I had a vivid dream in color of the green jungle and a red sunset I had seen during the afternoon. A composite city familiar to me but I could not quite place it. Part New York, part Mexico City and part Lima which I had not seen at this time. I was standing on a corner by a wide street with cars going by and a vast open park down the street in the distance. I cannot say whether these dreams had any connection with yagé. Incidentally you are supposed to see a city when you take yagé.

  I spent a day in the jungle with an Indian guide to dig the jungle and collect some yoka, a vine the Indians use to prevent hunger and fatigue during long trips in the jungle. In fact, some of them use it because they are too lazy to eat.

  The Upper Amazon jungle has fewer disagreeable features than the midwest stateside woods in the summer. Sand flies and jungle mosquitoes are the only outstanding pests and you can keep them off with insect repellent. I didn’t have any at this time. I never got any ticks or chiggers in the Putumayo. The trees are tremendous, some of them two hundred feet tall. Walking under these trees I felt a special silence, a vibrating soundless hum. We waded through clear streams of water (who started this story you can’t drink jungle water? Why not?).

  Yoka grows on high ground and it took us four hours to get there. The Indian cut a yoka vine and shaved off a handful of the inner bark with a machete. He soaked the bark in a little cold water, squeezed the water out of the bark and handed me the infusion in a palm leaf cup. It was faintly bitter but not unpleasant. In 10 minutes I felt a tingling in my hands and a nice lift somewhat like benzedrine but not so tight. I walked the four hours back over jungle trail without stopping and could have walked twice that far.

  After a week in Puerto Limón I went to Puerto Umbria by truck and down to Puerto Assis by canoe. These canoes are about thirty feet long with an outboard motor. This is standard method of travel on the Putumayo. The motors are out of commission about half the time. This is because people take them apart and leave out the pieces they consider nonessential. Also they economize on grease so the motors burn out.

  I arrived in Puerto Assis at ten P.M. and as soon as I stepped out of the canoe a federal cop wanted to see my papers. There is more check on papers in the quiet zones like Putumayo than in Villavicencio which is edge of the war zone. In the Putumayo you won’t be five minutes whistle stop before they check your papers. They expect trouble to come from outside in the form of a foreigner—god knows why.

  Next day the governor, who looked like a degenerate strain of monkey, found an error in my tourist card. The consul in Panama had put down 52 instead of 53 in the date. I tried to explain this was an error, clear enough in view of the dates on my plane tickets, passport, receipts, but the man was bone stupid. I don’t think he understands yet. So the cop gave my luggage a shake missing the gun but decided to impound the medicine gun and all. The sanitary inspector put in his two cents suggesting they go through the medicines.

  For God’s sake, I thought, go inspect an outhouse.

  They informed me I was under town arrest pending a decision from Mocoa. So I was stuck in Puerto Assis with nothing to do but sit around all day and get drunk every night. I had planned to take a canoe trip up the Rio Quaymes to contact the Kofan Indians who are known yagé artists, but the governor would not let me leave Puerto Assis.

  Puerto Assis is a typical Putumayo River town. A mud street along the river, a few shops, one cantina, a mission where Capuchin fathers lead the life of Riley, a hotel called the Putumayo where I was housed.

  The hotel was run by a whorish-looking landlady. Her husband was a man of about forty, powerful and vigorous, but there was a beat look in his eyes. They had seven daughters and you could tell by looking at him that he would never have a son. At least not by that woman. This giggling brood of daughters kept coming into my room (there was no door, only a thin curtain) to watch me dress and shave and brush my teeth. It was a bum kick. And I was the victim of idiotic pilfering—a catheter tube from my medical kit, a jock strap, vitamin B tablets.

  There was a boy in town who had once acted as a guide to an American naturalist. This boy was the local Mister Specialist. You find one of these pests all over South America. They can say, “Hello Joe” or “O.K.” or “Fucky fucky.” Many of them refuse to speak Spanish thus limiting conversation to sign language.

  I was sitting on a worn-out inverted canoe that serves as a bench in the main drag of Puerto Assis. The boy came and sat with me and began talking about the Mister who collected animals. “He collected spiders, and scorpions and snakes.” I was half asleep lulled by this litany when I heard, “And he was going to take me back to the States with him,” and woke up. Oh God, I thought, that old line.

  The boy smiled at me showing gaps in his front teeth. He moved a little closer on the bench. I could feel my stomach tighten.

  “I have a good canoe,” he said. “Why don’t you let me take you up the Quaymes? I know all the Indians up there.”

  He looked like the most inefficient guide in the Upper Amazon but I said, “Yes.”

  That night I saw the boy in front of the cantina. He put his arms around my shoulders and said, “Come in and have a drink, Mister,” letting his hand slip down my back and off my ass.

  We went in and got drunk under the weary wise eyes of the bartender and took a walk out along the jungle trail. We sat
down in the moonlight by the side of the trail and he let his elbow fall into my crotch and said, “Mister,” next thing I heard was, “How much you gonna give me?”

  He wanted $30 evidently figuring he was a rare commodity in the Upper Amazon. I beat him down to $10 bargaining under increasingly disadvantageous conditions. Somehow he managed to roll me for $20 and my underwear shorts (when he told me to take my underwear all the way off I thought, a passionate type, my dear, but it was only a maneuver to steal my skivvies).

  After five days in Puerto Assis I was well on the way to establish myself as a citizen in the capacity of village wastrel. Meanwhile sepulchral telegrams issued periodically from Mocoa. “The case of the foreigner from Ohio will be resolved.” And finally, “Let the foreigner from Ohio be returned to Mocoa.”

  So I went back up the river with the cop (I was technically under arrest). In Puerto Umbria I came down with chills and fever. Arriving in Mocoa on a Sunday, the Commandante was not there so the second-in-command had me locked up in a wood cubicle without even a bucket to piss in. They put all my gear unsearched in with me. A typical South American touch. I could have had a machine gun concealed in my luggage. I took some aralen and lay down shivering under the blanket. The man in the next cell was confined for lack of some document. I never did understand the details of his case. Next morning the Commandante showed up and I was summoned to his office. He shook hands pleasantly, looked at my papers, and listened to my explanation.

  “Clearly an error,” he said. “This man is free.” What a pleasure it is to encounter an intelligent man in such circumstances.

  I went back to the hotel and went to bed and called a doctor. He took my temperature and said, “Caramba!” and gave me an injection of quinine and liver extract to offset secondary anemia. I continued the aralen. I had some codeine tablets to control malaria headache so I lay there sleeping most of the time for three days.