Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  At dawn we set out through the ruined suburbs, no signs of life, the air windless and dead. From time to time the boy would stop, sniffing like a dog.

  “This way Meester.”

  We were walking down a long avenue littered with palm branches. Suddenly the air was full of robins, thousands of them, settling in the ruined gardens, perching on the empty houses, splashing in bird baths full of rain water. A boy on a red bicycle flashed past. He made a wide U-turn and pulled in to the curb beside us. He was naked except for a red jockstrap, belt and flexible black shoes, his flesh red as terra cotta, smooth poreless skin tight over the cheekbones, deep-set black eyes and a casque of black hair. At his belt was an eighteen-inch bowie knife with knuckle-duster handle. He said no word of greeting. He sat there, one foot on the curb, looking at the Dib. His ears which stuck out from the head trembled slightly and his eyes glistened. He licked his lips and said one word in a language unknown to me. The Dib nodded matter-of-factly. He turned to me.

  “He very hot. Been riding three days. Fuck now talk later.”

  The boy propped his bicycle against the curb. He took off his belt and knife and dropped them on a bench. He sat down on the bench and shoved his jockstrap down over his shoes. His red cock flipped out stiff and lubricating. The boy stood up. Beneath thin red ribs his heart throbbed and pounded. The Dib peeled off his jockstrap scraping erection. He stepped out of the strap and tossed the boy a tin of Vaseline from his shoeshine box. The boy caught it and rubbed Vaseline on his cock, throbbing to his heartbeats. The Dib stepped toward him and the boy caught him by the hips turning him around. The Dib parted his cheeks with both hands leaning forward and the red penis quivered into his flesh. Holding the Dib’s hips in both hands the boy’s body contracted pulling together. His ears began to vibrate lips parted from long yellow teeth smooth and hard as old ivory. His deep-set black eyes lit up inside with red fire and the hair stood up straight on his head. The Dib’s body arched spurting pearly gobs in the stagnant sunlight. For a few seconds they shivered together then the boy shoved the Dib’s body away as if he were taking off a garment. They went to a pool across a lawn, washed themselves, came back and put on their jockstraps.

  “This Jimmy the Shrew. He messenger special delivery C.O.D.” They talked briefly in their language, which is transliterated from a picture language known to all wild boys in this area.

  “He say time barrier ahead. Very bad.”

  The Shrew took a small flat box from his handle-bar basket and handed it to the Dib. “He giving us film grenades.” The Dib opened the box and showed me six small black cylinders. The Shrew got on his bicycle and rode away down the avenue and disappeared in a blaze of hibiscus.

  We walked on through the suburbs, heading north. The houses were smaller and shabbier. A menace and evil hung in the empty streets like a haze and the air was getting cold around the edges. We rounded a corner and a sharp wind spattered the Dib’s body with goose pimples. He sniffed uneasily.

  “We coming to bad place, Johnny. Need clothes.”

  “Let’s see what we can find in here.”

  There was a rambling ranch-style house, obviously built before the naborhood had deteriorated. We stepped through a hedge and passed a ruined barbecue pit. The side door was open. We were in a room that had served as an office. In a drawer of the desk the Dib found a .38 snub-nosed revolver and box of shells.

  “Whee, look” he cried and popped his find into the shoeshine box.

  We went through the house like a whirlwind, the Dib pulling out suits and sport coats from closets and holding them against his body in front of mirrors, opening drawers, snatching what he wanted and dumping the rest on the floor. His eyes shone and his excitement mounted as we rushed from room to room, throwing any clothes we might use onto beds and chairs and sofas. I felt a wet-dream tension in my crotch, the dream of packing to leave with a few minutes to catch a boat, and more and more drawers full of clothes to pack, the boat whistling in the harbor.

  As we stepped into a little guest room, the Dib in front of me, I stroked his smooth white buttocks and he turned to me, rubbing his jock.

  “This make me very hot Meester.”

  He sat down on the bed and pulled off his jockstrap and his cock flipped out lubricating. “Whee” he said and lay back on his elbows kicking his feet. “Jacking me off.” I slipped off my strap and sat down beside him, rubbing the lubricant around the tip of his cock, and he went off in a few seconds.

  We took a shower and made a selection of clothes, or rather, I made the selection, since the Dib’s taste ran to loud sport coats wide ties and straw hats. I found a blue suit for him and he looked like a 1920 prep school boy on vacation. For myself I selected a grey glen plaid and a green fedora. We packed the spare gun and extra shells into a briefcase with the film grenades the Shrew had given us.

  Fish smells and dead eyes in doorways, shabby quarters of a forgotten city, streets half-buried in sand. I was beginning to remember the pawn shops, guns and brass knucks in a dusty window, cheap rooming houses, chili parlors, a cold wind from the sea.

  Police line ahead, frisking seven boys against a wall. Too late to turn back, they’d seen us. And then I saw the photographers, more photographers than a routine frisk would draw. I eased a film grenade into my hand. A cop stepped toward us. I pushed the plunger down and brought my hands up tossing the grenade into the air. A black explosion blotted out the set and we were running down a dark street toward the barrier. We ran on and burst out of a black silver mist into late afternoon sunlight on a suburban street, cracked pavements, sharp smell of weeds.

  THE PENNY ARCADE PEEP SHOW

  Naked boys standing by a water hole, savannah backdrop, a herd of giraffe in the distance. The boys talk in growls and snarls, purrs and yipes, and show their teeth at each other like wild dogs. Two boys fuck standing up, squeezing back, teeth bare, hair stands up on the ankles, ripples up the legs in goose pimples, they whine and whimper off.

  In the rotten flesh gardens languid Bubu boys with black smiles scratch erogenous sores, diseased putrid sweet, their naked bodies steam off a sepia haze of nitrous choking vapors.

  Green lizard boy by a stagnant stream smiles and rubs his worn leather jockstrap with one slow finger.

  Dim street light on soiled clothes, boy stands there naked with his shirt in one hand, the other hand scratching his ass.

  Two naked youths with curly black hair and pointed Pan ears casting dice by a marble fountain. The loser bends over, looking at his reflection in the pool. The winner poses behind him like a phallic god. He pries the smooth white buttocks apart with his thumbs. Lips curl back from sharp white teeth. Laughter shakes the sky.

  Glider boys drift down from the sunset on red wings and rain arrows from the sky.

  Slingshot boys glide in across a valley, riding their black plastic wings like sheets of mica in the sunlight, torn clothes flapping hard red flesh. Each boy carries a heavy slingshot attached to his wrist by a leather thong. At their belts are leather pouches of round black stones.

  The roller-skate boys sweep down a hill in a shower of autumn leaves. They slice through a police patrol. Blood spatters dead leaves in air.

  The screen is exploding in moon craters and boiling silver spots.

  “Wild boys very close now.”

  Darkness falls on the ruined suburbs. A dog barks in the distance.

  Dim jerky stars are blowing away across a gleaming empty sky, the wild boys smile.

  August 17, 1969 London

  from exterminator!

  “EXTERMINATOR!”

  “You need the service?”

  During the war I worked for A. J. Cohen Exterminators ground floor office dead-end street by the river. An old Jew with cold grey fish eyes and a cigar was the oldest of four brothers. Marv was the youngest wore windbreakers had three kids. There was a smooth well-dressed college-trained brother. The fourth brother burly and muscular looked like an old time hoofer could bellow a leather-lunged “Ma
mmy” and you hope he won’t do it. Every night at closing time these two brothers would get in a heated argument from nowhere I could see the older brother would take the cigar out of his mouth and move across the floor with short sliding steps advancing on the vaudeville brother.

  “You vant I should spit right in your face!? You vant!? You vant? You vant!?”

  The vaudeville brother would retreat shadowboxing presences invisible to my goyish eyes which I took to be potent Jewish Mammas conjured up by the elder brother. On many occasions I witnessed this ritual open-mouthed hoping the old cigar would let fly one day but he never did. A few minutes later they would be talking quietly and checking the work slips as the exterminators fell in.

  On the other hand the old brother never argued with his exterminators. “That’s why I have a cigar” he said the cigar being for him a source of magical calm.

  I used my own car a black Ford V8 and worked alone carrying my bedbug spray, pyrethrum powder, bellows and bulbs of fluoride up and down stairs.

  “Exterminator! You need the service?”

  A fat smiling Chinese rationed out the pyrethrum powder—it was hard to get during the war—and cautioned us to use fluoride whenever possible. Personally I prefer a pyrethrum job to a fluoride. With the pyrethrum you kill the roaches right there in front of God and the client whereas this starch and fluoride you leave it around and back a few days later a southern defense worker told me “They eat it and run around here fat as hawgs.”

  From a great distance I see a cool remote naborhood blue windy day in April sun cold on your exterminator there climbing the grey wooden outside stairs.

  “Exterminator lady. You need the service?”

  “Well come in young man and have a cup of tea. That wind has a bite to it.”

  “It does that, ma’m, cuts me like a knife and I’m not well you know/cough/.”

  “You put me in mind of my brother Michael Fenny.”

  “He passed away?”

  “It was a long time ago April day like this sun cold on a thin boy with freckles through that door like yourself. I made him a cup of hot tea. When I brought it to him he was gone.” She gestured to the empty blue sky “Cold tea sitting right where you are sitting now.” I decide this old witch deserves a pyrethrum job no matter what the fat Chinese allows. I lean forward discreetly.

  “Is it roaches Mrs. Murphy?”

  “It is that from those Jews downstairs.”

  “Or is it the hunkys next door Mrs. Murphy?”

  She shrugs “Sure and an Irish cockroach is as bad as another.”

  “You make a nice cup of tea Mrs. Murphy . . . Sure I’ll be taking care of your roaches . . . Oh don’t be telling me where they are . . . You see I know Mrs. Murphy . . . experienced along these lines . . . And I don’t mind telling you Mrs. Murphy I like my work and take pride in it.”

  “Well the city exterminating people were around and left some white powder draws roaches the way whiskey will draw a priest.”

  “They are a cheap outfit Mrs. Murphy. What they left was fluoride. The roaches build up a tolerance and become addicted. They can be dangerous if the fluoride is suddenly withdrawn. . . . Ah just here it is . . .”

  I have spotted a brown crack by the kitchen sink put my bellows in and blow a load of the precious yellow powder. As if they had heard the last trumpet the roaches stream out and flop in convulsions on the floor.

  “Well I never!” says Mrs. Murphy and turns me back as I advance for the coup de ¿race . . . “Don’t shoot them again. Just let them die.”

  When it is all over she sweeps up a dustpan full of roaches into the wood stove and makes me another cup of tea.

  When it comes to bedbugs there is a board of health regulation against spraying beds and that of course is just where the bugs are in most cases. Now an old wood house with bedbugs back in the wood for generations only thing is to fumigate. . .. So here is Mamma with a glass of sweet wine her beds back and ready . . .

  I look at her over the syrupy red wine . . . “Lady we don’t spray no beds. Board of health regulations you know.”

  “Ach so the wine is not enough?”

  She comes back with a crumpled dollar. So I go to work . . . bedbugs great red clusters of them in the ticking of the mattresses. I mix a little formaldehyde with my kerosene in the spray it’s more sanitary that way and if you tangle with some pimp in one of the Negro whorehouses we service a face full of formaldehyde keeps the boy in line. Now you’ll often find these old Jewish grandmas in a back room like their bugs and we have to force the door with the younger generation smooth college-trained Jew there could turn into a narcotics agent while you wait.

  “All right Grandma, open up! The exterminator is here.”

  She is screaming in Yiddish no bugs are there we force our way in I turn the bed back . . . my God thousands of them fat and red with Grandma and when I put the spray to them she moans like the Gestapo is murdering her nubile daughter engaged to a dentist.

  And there are whole backward families with bedbugs don’t want to let the exterminator in.

  “We’ll slap a board of health summons on them if we have to” said the college-trained brother. . . . “I’ll go along with you on this one. Get in the car.”

  They didn’t want to let us in but he was smooth and firm. They gave way muttering like sullen troops cowed by the brass. Well he told me what to do and I did it. When he was settled at the wheel of his car cool grey and removed he said “Just plain ordinary sons of bitches. That’s all they are.”

  T.B. sanitarium on the outskirts of town . . . cool blue basements fluoride dust drifting streaks of phosphorus paste on the walls . . . grey smell of institution cooking . . . heavy dark glass front door. . . . Funny thing I never saw any patients there but I don’t ask questions. Do my job and go, a man who works for his living. . . . Remember this janitor who broke into tears because I said shit in front of his wife it wasn’t me actually said it it was Wagner who was dyspeptic and thin with knobby wrists and stringy yellow hair . . . and the fumigation jobs under the table I did on my day off. . .

  Young Jewish matron there “Let’s not talk about the company. The company makes too much money anyway. I’ll get you a drink of whiskey.” Well I have come up from the sweet wine circuit. So I arrange a sulphur job with her five Abes and it takes me about two hours you have to tape up all the windows and the door and leave the fumes in there twenty-four hours studying the good work.

  One time me and the smooth brother went out on a special fumigation job . . . “This man is sort of a crank . . . been out here a number of times . . . claims he has rats under the house. . . . We’ll have to put on a show for him.”

  Well he hauls out one of those tin pump guns loaded with cyanide dust and I am subject to crawl under the house through spider webs and broken glass to find the rat holes and squirt the cyanide to them.

  “Watch yourself under there” said the cool brother. “If you don’t come out in ten minutes I’m coming in after you.”

  I liked the cafeteria basement jobs long grey basement you can’t see the end of it white dust drifting as I trace arabesques of fluoride on the wall.

  We serviced an old theatrical hotel rooms with rose wallpaper photograph albums . . . “Yes that’s me there on the left.”

  The boss has a trick he does every now and again assembles his staff and eats arsenic been in that office breathing the powder in so long the arsenic just brings an embalmer’s flush to his smooth grey cheek. And he has a pet rat he knocked all its teeth out feeds it on milk the rat is now very tame and affectionate.

  I stuck the job nine months. It was my record on any job. Left the old grey Jew there with his cigar the fat Chinese pouring my pyrethrum powder back into the barrel. All the brothers shook hands. A distant cry echoes down cobblestone streets through all the grey basements up the outside stairs to a windy blue sky.

  “Exterminator!”

  THE DISCIPLINE OF DE

  A cold dry windy day
clouds blowing through the sky sunshine and shadow. A dead leaf brushes my face. The streets remind me of St. Louis. . . . red brick houses, trees, vacant lots. Bright and windy back in a cab through empty streets. When I reach the fourth floor it looks completely unfamiliar as if seen through someone else’s eyes.

  “I hope you find your way . . . red brick houses, trees . . . the address in empty streets.”

  Colonel Sutton-Smith, sixty-five, retired not uncomfortably on a supplementary private income . . . flat in Bury Street St. James’s . . . cottage in Wales . . . could not resign himself to the discovery of Roman coins under the grounds of his cottage interesting theory the Colonel has about those coins over two sherries never a third no matter how nakedly his guest may leer at the adamant decanter. He can of course complete his memoirs . . . extensive notes over a period of years, invitations, newspaper clippings, photographs, stretching into the past on yellowing dates. Objects go with the clippings, the notes, the photos, the dates. . .. A kris on the wall to remember Ali who ran amok in the marketplace of Lampipur thirty years ago, a crown of emerald quartz, a jade head representing a reptilian youth with opal eyes, a little white horse delicately carved in ivory, a Webley .455 automatic revolver . . . (Only automatic revolver ever made the cylinder turns on ratchets stabilizing like a gyroscope the heavy recoil.) Memories, objects stuck in an old calendar.

  The Colonel decides to make his own time. He opens a school notebook with lined papers and constructs a simple calendar consisting of ten months with twenty-six days in each month to begin on this day February 21, 1970, Raton Pass 14 in the new calendar. The months have names like old Pullman cars in America where the Colonel had lived until his eighteenth year . . . names like Beauacres, Bonneterre, Watford Junction, Sioux Falls, Pikes Peak, Yellowstone, Bellevue, Cold Springs, Lands End dated from the beginning Raton Pass 14 a mild grey day. Smell of soot and steam and iron and cigar smoke as the train jolts away into the past. The train is stopped now red brick buildings a deep blue canal outside the train window a mild grey day long ago.