William S. Burroughs

by The Place of Dead Roads

  The case of Toby, who haunted an old YMCA locker room...Toby is described by several observers as blond with rather vacant blue eyes, about sixteen years old. There are a few pimples on his face which are faintly phosphorescent. He gives off a rank ruttish animal smell when aroused. Kim spent a month in this room and enjoyed many encounters with Toby.

  The first time, he saw him standing naked at the foot of the bed. Kim showed no fear and threw back the covers to invite the boy to get in bed with him, which he did. Then Kim caressed the boy, who writhed and steamed off his skunky smell, which increased Kim's excitement as well. He slowly turned the boy on his side, stroking the phosphorescent pimples on his buttocks. The boy emitted a purring hissing sound. No Vaseline was needed to penetrate the boy's rectum, which opened to receive him with a soft gelatinous clutch, the feeling being rather like his cock was between two reversed magnetic fields. That is, the sensation penetrated his penis rubbing inside and now the boy was slowly melting into him or rather Kim was entering the boy's body feeling down into the toes and the fingers pulling the boy in further and further then there was a fluid click as their spines merged in an ecstasy that was almost painful, a sweet toothache pain as they both ejaculated and their rectums and prostate glands squeezed together and the tips of their cocks merged and glowed with a soft-blue fire and Kim was alone or rather Toby was all the way in him now.

  There were a number of such encounters and always Toby took the passive role. In the moment of orgasm they merged completely so that Kim's cock was spurting in air but he could feel Toby squirming inside him. Afterward the boy would slowly separate and lie beside him in the bed, almost transparent but with enough substance to indent the bedding. Kim concluded that the creature was simply composed of less dense matter than a human. For this reason interpenetration was possible.

  Toby could speak, though he seldom did so. And he could follow instructions up to a point. At the time, Kim was engaged in a bitter war with Mafia hit men who had gone to the mattresses. Toby was able to find their lair, which reeked of garlic and unwashed Old World bodies, for these were Mustache Petes brought in from Sicily. Kim asked if Toby could use a gun and he said no, "too heavy," but he could cause gas leaks or a gas explosion. Kim learns later that the familiars specialize in certain services. Some, like Carl, are electronics experts...though for operations involving actual wiring they need a suitable human vehicle, usually some quiet boy who was always good at taking things apart and fixing circuits. In fact electronics equipment is especially liable to psychic influence. Carl can stop a tape recorder by looking at it...Kim finds out that familiars all have their familiars and assistants, though it is not always clear who is the master and who the servant. Familiars can be very helpful, they can also harass one unmercifully. Carl, for example, if he is in a sulky mood, can make the simplest wiring job impossible, he can burn out lights, trip one up with electric cords, louse up a TV, tape recorder or hi-fi. And he takes various forms. One is Agouchi, a Navajo spirit, a little man three feet tall with blazing blue eyes and bright red hair who squeezes the testicles in the moment of orgasm. Agouchi can always be recognized by his odor, blending the aroma of leather shorts slept in all winter by a Scandinavian Force Boy with the ozone smell after lightning strikes...

  Thunder offstage.

  Kim studies the scant sources on Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain. This man is the only spiritual leader who has anything to say to the Johnsons who is not a sold-out P.R. man for the Slave Gods. Slave Gods need slaves like a junky needs junk. Only by stunting and degrading the human host can they maintain their disgusting position. Above all they must keep the Johnsons out of space. No one must ever be allowed to leave their planet. Hassan i Sabbah was a member of the Ishmaelite cult, who were viciously persecuted by the orthodox Moslems. They had already gone underground and built up a network of secret agents.

  Hassan incurred the displeasure of a potentate and fled for his life. It was during this flight that he received the vision of the Imam and took over the Ishmaelite sect with all its underground networks. He spent several years in Egypt. Once again he was a fugitive. He escaped by boat and is said to have calmed a storm. He gathered a few followers and, after years of perilous wanderings, established himself and his followers in the fortress of Alamut in what is now northern Iran...(the fortress is still there). Here he maintained himself for thirty years and trained his assassins, who spread terror through the Moslem world.

  The Old Man could reach as far as Paris. Sources tell us nothing of the training received by his assassins at Alamut, but we do know it sometimes took years of preparation before the assassin was dispatched on his mission. No one has explained how the Old Man conveyed the signal for an assassination across hundreds or thousands of miles. The library at Alamut was apparently a myth and no written teachings have survived. Whom did he assassinate and why? Most of the hits were caliphs, sultans and religious leaders, mullahs and such. Hassan i Sabbah did not initiate attack. He waited until the enemy made a move against him. In this way his position was similar to Kim's...Just minding his own business when some punk looking for the rep of killing the famous Kim Carsons starts the argument.

  Hassan i Sabbah was well known through the Moslem world just as Kim was known as a gunfighter throughout the Old West. So any general, caliph, mullah, sultan, could take a crack at the Old Man. He knew who would try this before they knew it, and had a man staked out to kill when the move was made.

  The basis of the Ishmaelite cult is a direct conveyance of divine power and leadership through contact with the Imam. This cannot be simulated. You can't fake it any more than you can fake a painting, a poem, an invention, or a meal for that matter. It's there or it isn't. One look and you know. The Old Man's power over his assassins is based on self-evident spiritual truth.

  During his exile in Egypt he learned some basic secret by means of which his future power was realized. Some scholars have assumed erroneously that this secret was the use of hashish. Hashish was only an adjunct. What Hassan i Sabbah learned in Egypt was that paradise actually exists and that it can be reached. The Egyptians called it the Western Lands. This is the Garden that the Old Man showed his assassins...It cannot be faked any more than contact with the Imam can be faked. This is no vague eternal heaven for the righteous. This is an actual place at the end of a very dangerous road.

  The Garden of Edeu was a space station, from which we were banished to the surface of the planet to live by the sweat of mortal brows in a constant losing fight with gravity. But banished by whom? An asshole God who calls himself Jehovah or whatever. Only one spiritual leader found this out, and found a key to a garden...for once you have the key, there are not just one garden but many gardens, an infinite number.

  He found the key in Egypt. But the Egyptians didn't have a key. The Gods held all their keys and admitted only favored mortals. And favored why? Because they served as energy conduits to maintain the station. They were in fact trained vampires put out on mummy leads to suck the energy the space station requires, because the station, from time immemorial, is rooted in time and supplied by time.

  The Old Man was a renegade. His assassins struck down the foremen and overseers who manage the Big Ranch. And every time they did this, they grabbed a key. So the Old Man set up his own station, the Garden of Alamut. But the Garden is not the end of the line. It might be seen as a rest camp and mutation center. Free from harassment, the human artifact can evolve into an organism suited for space conditions and space travel.

  To what extent has the situation changed? Not much. The mummy has been replaced by a virus culture, inserted into suitable human hosts. The Virus 23 serves exactly the same function as a mummy: an energy conduit to keep the ranch going and the human cattle out there on the range getting fat and ready...As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be...World without end MOO MOO MOOOO.

  Cows driven into the slaughter chutes...God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and when the Holy Ghost wears t
hin they simply deny that the space station exists. This is the present directive. Anyway, we got our cows going with the Vatican and coming with the Kremlin, and the huge reservoir of scientific materialism, quite as fanatic as any demented Inquisitor. "Anyone writing about so-called ESP should be publicly horsewhipped and barred from further activity," said someone whose name was so close to Condom that if it fits he should put it on.

  Well done, thou true and faithful servant. We have conveniently ceased to exist. And there have been moments when they had the sky sewed up tight as a junky whore's ass...but it always happens, the big cattle men go soft in the outhouse.

  The Old Man found a way to bypass the mummy route. Present-day immortalists have not done so. They have simply reduced their stinking old mummy to virus crystals for insertion in a human host, like loathsome insects who go around laying their eggs in people. The Old Man's route is sex between males. Sex forms the matrix of a dualistic and therefore solid and real universe. It is possible to resolve the dualistic conflict in a sex act, where dualism need not exist.

  How did the Old Man convey the death order at a distance? The word telepathy is misleading. Organic communication would be a more accurate designation, since the whole organism is involved.

  You transmit and receive as much with your big toe as you do with your brain and what is transmitted is a strong emotional reaction, not neutral data like triangles, circles, and squares. Consider the Russian experiment described in Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. Six baby rabbits of the same litter in a Russian submarine three thousand miles from the mother rabbit. They are then dispatched in a manner calculated to elicit the strongest reaction, seized by bestial Russian tars, swung in the air by their hind legs, urinating and defecating in terror as their brains are bashed out against a torpedo launcher. Three thousand miles away, the mother rabbit showed six strong reactions on the polygraph at the precise instant when her babies were liquidated..."So we will make rabbits of our enemies," the Russkies chortle as they mix Bloody Rabbits from rabbit blood and vodka...So the Old Man transmitted a reaction to activate a preconceived plan.

  "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." Last words of Hassan i Sabbah. And what is the truest thing to a human mark? Birth and Deaths The Old Man showed his assassins freedom from rebirth and death. He created actual beings, designed for space travel.

  The air-breathing potential must come before the transition from water to air. Otherwise it is simply suicidal for water creatures without any air-breathing potential to move into air. So the potential for existence in space must come before the transition from time into space. We are considering here demonstrable biologic alterations. New beings. You can't fake it. You can't breathe in fake lungs.

  8

  "Let's go up the Metropole and suck some bubbly."

  Now Broadway's full of guys

  Who think they're might wise

  Just because they know a thing or two

  You can see them every day

  Strolling up and down Broadway

  Boasting of the wonders they can do

  There are con men and drifters

  Shake men and grifters

  And they all hang around the Metropole

  But their names would be mud

  Like a chump playing stud

  If they lost that old ace down in the hole...

  Kim has reserved a table. Eyes follow them. But nobody sees Boy do a fifty-dollar palm on the headwaiter. All they see is fifty dollars of respect.

  Cold, watchful, probing eyes...gamblers, con men, sincere untrustworthy eyes of a Murphy Man..."Now there's a party to stay well away from."

  Some have a girl on the old tenderloin

  And that's their ace in the hole

  WHAP..."You no good junky slut, what's this?" He throws some crumpled bills in her face from his manicured fingers. All pimps get manicures. He has the assurance of one who knows his precise area of exploitation and never steps outside of it. (In Kim's party he is way outside his area. Nothing there for a pimp.) An old con man smells money. But he doesn't smell marks. He looks away with a wrench because it's big money he is smelling...

  "No, I'd be wasting my time."

  A heist team smells money too in the pocket. They also smell guns and trouble..."Looks like a bank mob from out west carrying heavy iron..."

  Shake men and grifters...

  There is Joe Varland. He worked the broads on the trains. Nobody knew just how, but he always came back from a train trip with money. Thin scarred face...About thirty-five. Yellow gloves and brass knucks...You notice his eyes..."sleepy and quiescent in the presence of another species...at once helpless and brutal...incapable of initiating action but infinitely capable of taking advantage of the least sign of weakness in another..."

  And he lost that old ace in the hole...

  Slugged a cop and run for it. Didn't run far...A short trip home.

  You can see them every day...

  A shadowland of furnished rooms, chile parlors, pawnshops, opium dens, hobo jungles, bindle stiffs, and rod-riding yeggs, some of them missing a few fingers, mostly from the fulminate caps.

  He remembers a dream phrase spoken in Tom's voice a few months after Tom's death...

  "Life is a flickering shadow with violence before and after it..."

  Walking up and down Broadway...

  Eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent, follow them to their table...Noting the ease and deadly assurance...

  Eyes old unbluffed, unreadable.

  From Florida up to the old North Pole...

  They wind up in a Village all-night place, eating spaghetti, surrounded by long-haired scruffy-looking artists and poets...and there but for the grace of Carsons...

  Yes, he could be living in some cold-water flat, peddling his short stories from editor to editor..."Too morbid," they tell him...

  They pay the check and as they step into the street and turn left on Bleecker Kim feels it up the back of his neck..."Hey Rube," he yells.

  He moves behind a lamppost and drops his satchel, the 44 in his hand. He can see Boy diving for a fireplug, a charge of shot misses him by inches. Kim gets Liver Wurst Joe with the 44 and he drops his sawed-off into the street.

  Guy has the Mauser out across the street, shooting for the driver...Cherry Nose Gio pumps in another round but his aim is bad because Frank the Lip lies dead across the wheel and the car is bucking out of control and he is catching lead from all of us, his head seems to fly apart from Boy's 45...The car jumps the curb, crashes through a shop window in a shower of glass.

  "The coppers will assume of course it is just another woppish beef," Kim says as they walk rapidly away.

  "What the fuck happened?" the Director bellows.

  The Technician shrugs..."Old gangster film stock is worn right down to the celluloid...I can do a chewing-gum patch...turn the glass into rain..."

  "Well how about a hurricane blowing glass splinters down the street?"

  "A hurricane? Jesus fucking Christ...Look, Boss, there is just so much energy...so much IT...You use too much over there, you don't have enough over here...We're overdrawn, Boss...Right now we don't have enough IT to fry an elderly woman in a rooming-house fire..."

  "Well we'll have to start faking it. "

  "All right, Boss...anything you say..."

  He turns to a switchboard, muttering: "So we start faking it...using up film stock that isn't being renewed...You take a real disaster and you get a pig of IT. You can underwrite the next one. But if the first one is a fake you got nothing. You can't underwrite. You start borrowing everything in sight...every fire...every earthquake...every riot...every car crash...Then the bottom falk out and you start springing leaks in the Master Film...like this Carsons thing...Boss wants to hit him. I film it. Carsons and his boys kill the hit men...and every time he slides out from under, he cuts the film...fucking moguls don't even know what buttons to push...fuck him and his hurricane..." The Technician pushes a button marked Rain
...

  THE MANHATTAN AMBUSH

  Rain:::Rain:::Rain:::

  We get out of wet saddles in wet clothes, tie the horses so they can graze in a circle, can't risk hobbles and bells sit down to peppers and jerky, can't risk night fires or shots. Boy made a throwing stick and he brings down an occasional prairie chicken, but not often. In this rain the fish won't bite and any animals we could prey on stay under cover.