Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  I will go to Bogotá, have my tourist card reassembled and return here. Travel in Colombia is difficult even with the soundest credentials. I have never seen such ubiquitous and annoying police. You are supposed to register with the police wherever you go. This is unpardonable stupidity. If I was an active Liberal what could I do in Puerto Assis aside from taking the place over at gun point?

  As Ever, William

  April 15

  Hotel Nuevo Regis, Bogotá

  Dear Al:

  Back in Bogotá. I have a crate of yagé. I have taken it and know more or less how it is prepared. By the way you may see my picture in Exposure. I met a reporter going in as I was going out. Queer to be sure but about as appetizing as a hamper of dirty laundry. Not even after two months in the brush, my dear. This character is shaking down the South American continent for free food and transport, and discounts on everything he buys with a “We-got-like-two-kinds-of-publicity-favorable-and-unfavorable-which-do-you-want,-Jack?” routine. What a shameless mooch. But who am I to talk?

  Flashback: Retraced my journey through Cali, Popayan and Pasto to Macoa. I was interested to note that Mocoa dragged Schindler and the two Englishmen as much as it did me.

  This trip I was treated like visiting royalty under the misapprehension I was a representative of the Texas Oil Company travelling incognito. (Free boat rides, free plane rides, free chow; eating in officers’ mess, sleeping in the governor’s house.)

  The Texas Oil company surveyed the area a few years ago, found no oil and pulled out. But everyone in the Putumayo believes the Texas Company will return. Like the second coming of Christ. The governor told me the Texas Company had taken two samples of oil eighty miles apart and it was the same oil, so there was a pool of the stuff eighty miles across under Mocoa. I heard this same story in a backwater area of East Texas where the oil company made a survey and found no oil and pulled out. Only in Texas the pool was one thousand miles across. The beat town psyche is joined the world over like the oil pool. You take a sample anywhere and it’s the same shit. And the governor thinks they are about to build a railroad from Pasto to Mocoa, and an airport. As a matter of fact the whole of Putumayo region is on the down grade. The rubber business is shot, the cocoa is eaten up with broom rot, no price on rotenone since the war, land is poor and there is no way to get produce out. The dawdling schizophrenia of small town boosters. Like I should think someday soon boys will start climbing in through the transom and tunneling under the door.

  Several times when I was drunk I told someone, “Look. There is no oil here. That’s why Texas pulled out. They won’t ever come back. Understand?” But they couldn’t believe it.

  We went out to visit a German who owned a finca near Mocoa. The British went looking for wild coca with an Indian guide. I asked the German about yagé.

  “Sure,” he said, “my Indians all use it.” A half hour later I had twenty pounds of yagé vine. No trek through virgin jungle and some old white haired character saying, “I have been expecting you my son.” A nice German ten minutes from Macoa.

  The German also made a date for me to take yagé with the local brujo (at that time I had no idea how to prepare it).

  The medicine man was around seventy with a baby smooth face. There was a sly gentleness about him like an old time junkie. It was getting dark when I arrived at this dirt floor thatch shack for my yagé appointment. First thing he asked did I have a bottle. I brought a quart of aguardiente out of my knapsack and handed it to him. He took a long drink and passed the bottle to his assistant. I didn’t take any as I wanted straight yagé kicks. The brujo put the bottle beside him and squatted down by a bowl set on a tripod. Behind the bowl was a wood shrine with a picture of the Virgin, a crucifix, a wood idol, feathers and little packages tied with ribbons. The brujo sat there a long time without moving. He took another long swig on the bottle. The women retired behind a bamboo partition and were not seen again. The brujo began crooning over the bowl. I caught “Yagé pintar” repeated over and over. He shook a little broom over a bowl and made a swishing noise. This is to whisk away evil spirits who might slip in the yagé. He took a drink and wiped his mouth and went on crooning. You can’t hurry a brujo. Finally he uncovered the bowl and dipped about an ounce more or less of black liquid which he handed me in a dirty red plastic cup. The liquid was oily and phosphorescent. I drank it straight down. Bitter foretaste of nausea. I handed the cup back and the medicine man and the assistant took a drink.

  I sat there waiting for results and almost immediately had the impulse to say, “That wasn’t enough. I need more.” I have noticed this inexplicable impulse on the two occasions when I got an overdose of junk. Both times before the shot took effect. I said, “This wasn’t enough. I need more.”

  Roy told me about a man who came out of jail clean and nearly died in Roy’s room. “He took the shot and right away said, ‘That wasn’t enough’ and fell on his face out cold. I dragged him out in the hall and called an ambulance. He lived.”

  In two minutes a wave of dizziness swept over me and the hut began spinning. It was like going under ether, or when you are very drunk and lie down and the bed spins. Blue flashes passed in front of my eyes. The hut took on an archaic far Pacific look with Easter Island heads carved in the support posts. The assistant was outside lurking there with the obvious intent to kill me. I was hit by violent, sudden nausea and rushed for the door hitting my shoulder against the door post. I felt the shock but no pain. I could hardly walk. No coordination. My feet were like blocks of wood. I vomited violently leaning against a tree and fell down on the ground in helpless misery. I felt numb as if I was covered with layers of cotton. I kept trying to break out of this numb dizziness. I was saying over and over, “All I want is out of here.” An uncontrollable mechanical silliness took possession of me. Hebephrenic meaningless repetitions. Larval beings passed before my eyes in a blue haze, each one giving an obscene, mocking squawk (I later identified this squawking as the croaking of frogs)—I must have vomited six times. I was on all fours convulsed with spasms of nausea. I could hear retching and groaning as if I was someone else. I was lying by a rock. Hours must have passed. The medicine man was standing over me. I looked at him for a long time before I believed he was really there saying, “Do you want to come into the house?” I said, “No,” and he shrugged and went back inside.

  My arms and legs began to twitch uncontrollably. I reached for my nembutals with numb wooden fingers. It must have taken me ten minutes to open the bottle and pour out five capsules. Mouth was dry and I chewed the nembutals down somehow. The twitching spasms subsided slowly and I felt a little better and went into the hut. The blue flashes still in front of my eyes. Lay down and covered myself with a blanket. I had a chill like malaria. Suddenly very drowsy. Next morning I was all right except for a feeling of lassitude and a slight backlog nausea. I paid off the brujo and walked back to town.

  We all went down to Puerto Assis that day. Schindler kept complaining the Putumayo had deteriorated since he was there ten years ago. “I never made a botanical expedition like this before,” he said. “All these farms and people. You have to walk miles to get to the jungle.”

  Schindler had two assistants to carry his luggage, cut down trees, and press specimens. One of them was an Indian from the Vaupes region where the method of preparing yagé is different from the Putumayo Kofan method. In Putumayo the Indians cut the vines into eight-inch pieces using about five sections to a person. The pieces of vine are crushed with a rock and boiled with a double handful of leaves from another plant—tentatively identified as ololiuqui—the mixture is boiled all day with a small amount of water and reduced to about two ounces of liquid.

  In the Vaupes the bark is scraped off about three feet of vine to form a large double handful of shavings. The bark is soaked in a liter of cold water for several hours, and the liquid strained off and taken over a period of an hour. No other plant is added.

  I decided to try some yagé prepared Vaupes met
hod. The Indian and I started scraping off bark with machetes (the inner bark is the most active). This is white and sappy at first but almost immediately turns red on exposure to air. The landlady’s daughters watched us pointing and giggling. This is strictly against Putumayo protocol for the preparation of yagé. The brujo of Macoa told me if a woman witnesses the preparation the yagé spoils on the spot and will poison anyone who drinks it or at least drive him insane. The old women-are-dirty-and-under-certain-circumstances-poisonous routine. I figured this was a chance to test the woman pollution myth once and for all with seven female creatures breathing down my neck, poking sticks in the mixture fingering the yagé and giggling.

  The cold water infusion is a light red color. That night I drank a quart of infusion over a period of one hour. Except for blue flashes and slight nausea—though not to the point of vomiting—the effect was similar to weed. Vividness of mental imagery, aphrodisiac results, silliness and giggling. In this dosage there was no fear, no hallucinations or loss of control. I figure this dose as about one third the dose that brujo gave me.

  Next day we went on down to Puerto Espina where the governor put us up in his house. That is we slung our hammocks in empty rooms on the top floor. A coolness arose between the Colombians and the British because the Colombians refused to get up for an early start, and the British complained the Cocoa Commission was being sabotaged by a couple of “lazy spies.”

  Every day we plan to get an early start for the jungle. About eleven o’clock the Colombians finish breakfast (the rest of us waiting around since eight) and begin looking for an incompetent guide, preferably someone with a finca near town. About one we arrive at the finca and spend another hour eating lunch. Then the Colombians say, “They tell us the jungle is far. About three hours. We don’t have time to make it today.” So we start back to town, the Colombians collecting a mess of plants along the way. “So long as they can collect any old weed they don’t give a ruddy fuck,” one of the Englishmen said to me after an expedition to the nearest finca.

  There was supposed to be plane service out of Puerto Espina. Schindler and I were ready to go back to Bogotá at this point, so there we sit in Puerto Espina waiting on this plane and the agent doesn’t have a radio or any way of finding out when the plane gets there if it gets there and he says, “Sure as shit boys one of these days you’ll look up and see the Catalina coming in over the river flashing in the sun like a silver fish.”

  So I says to Doc Schindler, “We could grow old and simple-minded sitting around playing dominoes before any sonofabitching plane sets down here and the river getting higher every day and how to get back up it with every motor in Puerto Espina broke?”

  (The citizens who own these motors spend all the time fiddling with their motors and taking the motors apart and leaving out pieces they consider nonessential so the motors never run. The boat owners do have a certain Rube Goldberg ingenuity in patching up the stricken motor for one more last spurt—but this was a question of going up the river. Going down river you will get there eventually motor or no, but coming up river you gotta have some means of propulsion.)

  Sure you think it’s romantic at first but wait til you sit there five days onna sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and some hunka nameless meat like the smoked pancreas of a two-toed sloth and all night you hear them fiddle-fucking with the motor—they got it bolted to the porch—“buuuuurt spluuu . . . . ut . . . . spluuuu . . . . ut,” and you can’t sleep hearing the motor start and die all night and then it starts to rain. Tomorrow the river will be higher.

  So I says to Schindler, “Doc, I’ll float down to the Atlantic before I start back up that fuckin river.”

  And he says, “Bill, I haven’t been fifteen years in this sonofabitch country and lost all my teeth in the service without picking up a few angles. Now down yonder in Puerto Leguisomo—they got like military planes and I happen to know the Commandante is Latah.” (Latah is a condition occurring in South East Asia. Otherwise normal, the Latah cannot help doing whatever anyone tells him to do once his attention has been attracted by touching him or calling his name.)

  So Schindler went on down to Puerto Leguisomo while I stayed in Puerto Espina waiting to hitch a ride with the Cocoa Commission. Every day I saw that plane agent and he came on with the same bullshit. He showed me a horrible-looking scar on the back of his neck. “Machete,” he said. No doubt some exasperated citizen who went berserk waiting on one of his planes.

  The Colombians and the Cocoa Commission went up the San Miguel and I was alone in Puerto Espina eating in the Commandante’s house. God awful greasy food. Rice and fried platano cakes three times a day. I began slipping the platanos in my pocket and throwing them away later. The Commandante kept telling me how much Schindler liked his food—(Schindler is an old South American hand. He can really put down the bullshit)—did I like it? I would say, “Magnificent,” my voice cracking. Not enough I have to eat his greasy food. I have to say I like it.

  The Commandante knew from Schindler I had written a book on “marijuana.” From time to time I saw suspicion seep into his dull liverish eyes.

  “Marijuana degenerates the nervous system,” he said looking up from a plate of platanos.

  I told him he should take vitamin B1 and he looked at me as if I had advocated the use of a narcotic.

  The governor regarded me with cold disfavor because one of the gasoline drums belonging to the Cocoa Commission had leaked on his porch. I was expecting momentarily to be evicted from the governmental mansion.

  The Cocoa Commission and the Colombians came back from the San Miguel in a condition of final estrangement. It seems the Colombians had found a finca and spent three days there lolling about in their pajamas. In the absence of Schindler I was the only buffer between the two factions and suspect by both parties of secretly belonging to the other (I had borrowed a shotgun from one of the Colombians and was riding in the Cocoa Commission boat).

  We went on down the river to Puerto Leguisomo where the Commandante put us up in a gun boat anchored in the Putumayo. There were no guns on it actually. I think it was the hospital ship.

  The ship was dirty and rusty. The water system did not function and the W.C. was in unspeakable condition. The Colombians run a mighty loose ship. It wouldn’t surprise me to see someone shit on the deck and wipe his ass with the flag. (This derives from a dream that came to me in seventeenth-century English. “The English and French delegates did shit on the floor, and tearing the Treaty of Seville into strips with such merriment did wipe their backsides with it, seeing which the Spanish delegate withdrew from the conference.”)

  Puerto Leguisomo is named for a soldier who distinguished himself in the Peruvian War in 1940. I asked one of the Colombians about it and he nodded, “Yes, Leguisomo was a soldier who did something in the war.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Well, he did something”

  The place looks like it was left over from a receding flood. Rusty abandoned machinery scattered here and there. Swamps in the middle of town. Unlighted streets you sink up to your knees in.

  There are five whores in town sitting out in front of blue walled cantinas. The young kids of Puerto Leguisomo cluster around the whores with the immobile concentration of tom cats. The whores sit there in the muggy night under one naked electric bulb in the blare of jukebox music, waiting.

  Inquiring in the environs of Puerto Leguisomo I found the use of yagé common among both Indians and whites. Most everybody grows it in his backyard.

  After a week in Leguisomo I got a plane to Villavencenio, and from there back to Bogotá by bus.

  So here I am back in Bogotá. No money waiting for me (check apparently stolen), I am reduced to the shoddy expedient of stealing my drinking alcohol from the university laboratory placed at disposal of the visiting scientist.

  Extracting yagé alkaloids from the vine, a relatively simple process according to directions provided by the Institute. My experiments with extract
ed yagé have not been conclusive. I do not get blue flashes or any pronounced sharpening of mental imagery. Have noticed aphrodisiac effects. The extract makes me sleepy whereas the fresh vine is a stimulant and in overdose convulsive poison.

  Every night I go into a café and order a bottle of Pepsi Cola and pour in my lab alcohol. The population of Bogotá lives in cafés. There are any number of these and always full. Standard dress for Bogotá café society is a gabardine trench coat and of course suit and tie. A South American’s ass may be sticking out his pants but he will still have a tie.

  Bogotá is essentially a small town, everybody worrying about his clothes and looking as if he would describe his job as “responsible.” I was sitting in one of these white-collar cafés when a boy in a filthy light grey suit, but still clinging to a frayed tie, asked me if I spoke English.

  I said, “Fluently,” and he sat down at the table. A former employee of the Texas Company. Obviously queer, blond, German-looking, European manner. We went to several cafés. He pointed people out to me saying, “He doesn’t want to know me anymore now that I am without work.”

  These people, correctly dressed and careful in manner, did in fact look away and in some cases call for the bill and leave. I don’t know how the boy could have looked any less queer in a $200 suit.

  One night I was sitting in a Liberal café when three civilian Conservative gun men came in yelling “Viva los Conservadores!,” hoping to provoke somebody so they could shoot him. There was a middle-aged man of the type who features a loud mouth. The others sat back and let him do the yelling. The other two were youngish, ward heelers, corner boys, borderline hoodlums. Narrow shoulders, ferret faces and smooth, tight, red skin, bad teeth. It was almost too pat. The two hoodlums looked a little hangdog and ashamed of themselves, like the young man in the limerick who said, “I’ll admit I’m a bit of a shit.”