Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Jack off phantoms whisper hot into the bone ear. . . .

  Shoot your way to freedom.

  “Christ?” sneers the vicious, fruity old Saint applying pancake from an alabaster bowl. . . . “That cheap ham! You think I’d demean myself to commit a miracle? . . . That one should have stood in carny. . . .

  “‘Step right up, Marquesses and Marks, and bring the little Marks too. Good for young and old, man and beast. . . . The one and only legit Son of Man will cure a young boy’s clap with one hand—by contact alone, folks—create marijuana with the other, whilst walking on water and squirting wine out his ass. . . . Now keep your distance, folks, you is subject to be irradiated by the sheer charge of this character.’

  “And I knew him when, dearie. . . . I recall we was doing an Impersonation Act—very high class too—in Sodom, and that is one cheap town. . . . Strictly from hunger. . . . Well, this citizen, this fucking Philistine wandered in from Podunk Baal or some place, called me a fuckin fruit right on the floor. And I said to him: ‘Three thousand years in show business and I always keep my nose clean. Besides I don’t hafta take any shit off any uncircumcised cocksucker.’ . . . Later he come to my dressing room and made an apology. . . . Turns out he is a big physician. And he was a lovely fellah, too. . . .

  “Buddha? A notorious metabolic junky. . . . Makes his own you dig. In India, where they got no sense of time, The Man is often a month late. . . . ‘Now let me see, is that the second or the third monsoon? I got like a meet in Ketchupore about more or less.’

  “And all them junkies sitting around in the lotus posture spitting on the ground and waiting on The Man.

  “So Buddha says: ‘I don’t hafta take this sound. I’ll by God metabolize my own junk.’

  “‘Man, you can’t do that. The Revenooers will swarm all over you.’

  “‘Over me they won’t swarm. I gotta gimmick, see? I’m a fuckin Holy Man as of right now.’

  “‘Jeez boss, what an angle.’

  “‘Now some citizens really wig when they make with the New Religion. These frantic individuals do not know how to come on. No class to them. . . . Besides, they is subject to be lynched like who wants somebody hanging around being better’n other folks? “What you trying to do, Jack, give people a bad time? . . .” So we gotta play it cool, you dig, cool. . . . We don’t shove anything up your soul, unlike certain cheap characters who shall be nameless and are nowhere. Clear the cave for action. I’m gonna metabolize a speed ball and make with the Fire Sermon.’

  “Mohammed? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce. An Egyptian ad man on the skids from the sauce write the continuity.

  “‘I’ll have one more, Gus. Then, by Allah, I will go home and receive a Surah. . . . Wait’ll the morning edition hits the souks. I am blasting Amalgamated Images wide open.’

  “The bartender looks up from his racing form. ‘Yeah. And theirs will be a painful doom.’

  “‘Oh . . . uh . . . quite. Now, Gus, I’ll write you a check.’

  “‘You are only being the most notorious paper hanger in Greater Mecca. I am not a wall, Mr. Mohammed.’

  “‘Well, Gus, I got like two types of publicity, favorable and otherwise. You want some otherwise already? I am subject to receive a Surah concerning bartenders who extendeth not credit to those in a needy way.’

  “‘And theirs will be a painful doom. Sold Arabia.’ He vaults over the bar. ‘I’m not taking any more, Ahmed. Pick up thy Surahs and walk. In fact, I’ll help you. And stay out.’

  “‘I’ll fix your wagon good, you unbelieving cocksucker. I’ll close you up tight and dry as a junky’s asshole. I’ll by Allah dry up the Peninsula.’

  “‘It’s a continent already. . . .’

  “Leave what Confucius say stand with Little Audrey and the shaggy dogs. Lao-Tze? They scratch him already. . . . And enough of these gooey saints with a look of pathic dismay as if they getting fucked up the ass and try not to pay it any mind. And why should we let some old brokendown ham tell us what wisdom is? ‘Three thousand years in show business and I always keep my nose clean. . . .’

  “First, every Fact is incarcerate along with the male hustlers and those who desecrate the gods of commerce by playing ball in the streets, and some old white-haired fuck staggers out to give us the benefits of his ripe idiocy. Are we never to be free of this grey-beard loon lurking on every mountain top in Tibet, subject to drag himself out of a hut in the Amazon, waylay one in the Bowery? ‘I’ve been expecting you, my son,’ and he make with a silo full of corn. ‘Life is a school where every pupil must learn a different lesson. And now I will unlock my Word Hoard. . . .’

  “‘I do fear it much.’

  “‘Nay, nothing shall stem the rising tide.’

  “‘I can’t stem him, boys. Sauve qui peut.’

  “‘I tell you when I leave the Wise Man I don’t even feel like a human. He converting my live orgones into dead bullshit.’

  “So I got an exclusive, why don’t I make with the live word? The word cannot be expressed direct. . . . It can perhaps be indicated by mosaic of juxtaposition like articles abandoned in a hotel drawer, defined by negatives and absence. . . .

  “Think I’ll have my stomach tucked. . . . I may be old, but I’m still desirable.”

  (The Stomach Tuck is surgical intervention to remove stomach fat at the same time making a tuck in the abdominal wall, thus creating a Flesh Corset, which is, however, subject to break and spurt your horrible old guts across the floor. . . . The slim and shapely F.C. models are, of course, the most dangerous. In fact, some extreme models are known as O.N.S.—One Night Stands—in the industry.

  Doctor “Doodles” Rindfest states bluntly: “Bed is the most dangerous place for an F.C. man.”

  The F.C. theme song is “Believe Me If All These Endearing Young Charms.” An F.C. partner is indeed subject to “fleet from your arms like fairy gifts fading away.”)

  from ORDINARY MEN AND WOMEN:

  THE TALKING ASSHOLE

  BENWAY: “Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.

  “This ass talk had a sort of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

  “This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called ‘The Better ‘Ole’ that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, ‘Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?’

  “‘Nah! I had to go relieve myself.’

  “After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

  “Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: ‘It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don’t need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.’

  “After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline j
elly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontaneous—(did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?)—except for the eyes you dig. That’s one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eye on the end of a stalk.

  “That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there’s always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out globs of that un-D.T. to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate cancerous life-form, reproducing a hideous random image. Some would be entirely made of penis-like erectile tissue, others viscera barely covered over with skin, clusters of three and four eyes together, criss-cross of mouth and assholes, human parts shaken around and poured out any way they fell.

  “The end results of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to the complete parasitism of a virus.

  “(It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another—the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.)

  “Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapses. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existences as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.

  “In Timbuctu I once saw an Arab boy who could play a flute with his ass, and the fairies told me he was really an individual in bed. He could play a tune up and down the organ hitting the most erogenously sensitive spots, which are different on everyone, of course. Every lover had his special theme song which was perfect for him and rose to his climax. The boy was a great artist when it came to improving new combines and special climaxes, some of them notes in the unknown, tie-ups of seeming discords that would suddenly break through each other and crash together with a stunning, hot sweet impact.”

  ATROPHIED PREFACE

  Wouldn’t You

  Why all this waste paper getting The People from one place to another? Perhaps to spare The Reader stress of sudden space shifts and keep him Gentle? And so a ticket is bought, a taxi called, a plane boarded. We are allowed a glimpse into the warm peach-lined cave as She (the airline hostess, of course) leans over us to murmur of chewing gum, dramamine, even nembutal.

  “Talk paregoric, Sweet Thing, and I will hear.”

  I am not American Express. . . . If one of my people is seen in New York walking around in citizen clothes and next sentence Timbuctu putting down lad talk on a gazelle-eyed youth, we may assume that he (the party nonresident of Timbuctu) transported himself there by the usual methods of communication. . . .

  Lee The Agent (a double-four-eight-sixteen) is taking the junk cure . . . space time trip portentously familiar as junk meet corners to the addict . . . cures past and future shuttle pictures through his spectral substance vibrating in silent winds of accelerated Time. . . . Pick a shot. . . . Any Shot. . . .

  Formal knuckle biting, floor rolling shots in a precinct cell. . . . “Feel like a shot of Heroin, Bill? Haw Haw Haw.”

  Tentative half impressions that dissolve in light. . . pockets of rotten ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning.

  Old violet brown photos that curl and crack like mud in the sun: Panama City . . . Bill Gains putting down the paregoric con on a Chinese druggist.

  “I’ve got these racing dogs . . . pedigree greyhounds. . . . All sick with the dysentery . . . tropical climate . . . the shits . . . you sabe shit? . . . My Whippets Are Dying. . . .” He screamed. . . . His eyes lit up with blue fire. . . . The flame went out . . . smell of burning metal. . . . “Administer with an eye dropper. . . . Wouldn’t you? . . . Menstrual cramps . . . my wife . . . Kotex . . . Aged mother. . . Piles . . . raw. . . bleeding. . . .” He nodded out against the counter. . . . The druggist took a toothpick out of his mouth and looked at the end of it and shook his head. . . .

  Gains and Lee burned down the Republic of Panama from David to Darien on paregoric. . . . They flew apart with a shlupping sound. . . . Junkies tend to run together into one body. . . . You have to be careful especially in hot places. . . . Gains back to Mexico City. . . . Desperate skeleton grin of chronic junk lack glazed over with codeine and goofballs . . . cigarette holes in his bathrobe . . . coffee stains on the floor . . . smoky kerosene stove . . . rusty orange flame . . .

  The Embassy would give no details other than place of burial in the American Cemetery. . . .

  And Lee back to sex and pain and time and yagé, bitter Soul Vine of the Amazon. . . .

  I recall once after an overdose of majoun (this is cannabis dried and finely powdered to consistency of green powdered sugar and mixed with some confection or other usually tasting like gritty plum pudding, but the choice of confection is arbitrary, I am returning from The Lulu or Johnny or Little Boy’s Room (stink of atrophied infancy and toilet training) look across the living room of that villa outside Tangier and suddenly don’t know where I am. Perhaps I have opened the wrong door and at any moment The Man In Possession, The Owner Who Got There First will rush in and scream:

  “What Are You Doing Here? Who Are You?”

  And I don’t know what I am doing there nor who I am. I decide to play it cool and maybe I will get the orientation before the Owner shows. . . . So instead of yelling “Where Am I?” cool it and look around you will find out approximately. . . . You were not there for The Beginning. You will not be there for The End. . . . Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative. . . . What do I know of this yellow blighted young junky face subsisting on raw opium? I tried to tell him: “Some morning you will wake up with your liver in your lap” and how to process raw opium so it is not plain poison. But his eyes glaze over and he didn’t want to know. Junkies are like that most of them they don’t want to know . . . and you can’t tell them anything. . . . A smoker doesn’t want to know anything but smoke. . . . And a heroin junky same way. . . . Strictly the spike and any other route is Farina. . . .

  So I guess he is still sitting there in his 1920 Spanish villa outside Tangier eating that raw opium full of shit and stones and straw . . . the whole lot for fear he might lose something. . . .

  There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. . . . I am a recording instrument. . . . I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity.” . . . Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function. . . . I am not an entertainer. . . .

  “Possession” they call it. . . . Sometimes an entity jumps in the body—outlines waver in yellow orange jelly—and hands move to disembowel the passing whore or strangle the nabor c
hild in hope of alleviating a chronic housing shortage. As if I was usually there but subject to goof now and again. . . . Wrong! I am never here. . . . Never that is fully in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill-advised moves. . . . Patrolling is, in fact, my principal occupation. . . . No matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this strait-jacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection. . . .

  Writers talk about the sweet-sick smell of death whereas any junky can tell you that death has no smell. . . at the same time a smell that shuts off breath and stops blood . . . colorless no-smell of death . . . no one can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions and black blood filters of flesh . . . the death smell is unmistakably a smell and complete absence of smell. . . smell absence hits the nose first because all organic life has smell. . . stopping of smell is felt like darkness to the eyes, silence to the ears, stress and weightlessness to the balance and location sense. . . .

  You always smell it and give it out for others to smell during junk withdrawal. . . . A kicking junky can make a whole apartment unlivable with his death smell . . . but a good airing will stink the place up again so a body can breathe. . . . You also smell it during one of those oil burner habits that suddenly starts jumping geometric like a topping forest fire. . . .

  Cure is always: Let go! Jump!

  A friend of mine found himself naked in a Marrakech hotel room second floor. . . . (He is after processing by a Texas mother who dressed him in girls’ clothes as a child. . . . Crude but effective against infant protoplasm. . . .) The other occupants are Arabs, three Arabs . . . knives in hand . . . watching him . . . glint of metal and points of light in dark eyes . . . pieces of murder falling slow as opal chips through glycerine. . . . Slower animal reactions allow him a full second to decide: Straight through the window and down into the crowded street like a falling star his wake of glass glittering in the sun . . . sustained a broken ankle and a chipped shoulder . . . clad in a diaphanous pink curtain, with a curtain-rod staff, hobbled away to the Commissariat de Police. . . .