Queer

by William S. Burroughs

  "Ahh, well all right."

  Lee got in bed with Allerton. He was shaking with cold and junk sickness.

  "You're twitching all over," said Allerton. Lee pressed against him, convulsed by the adolescent lust of junk sickness.

  "Christ almighty, your hands are cold."

  When Allerton was asleep, he rolled over and threw his knee across Lee's body. Lee lay still so he wouldn't wake up and move away.

  The next day Lee was really sick. They wandered around Quito. The more Lee saw of Quito, the more the place brought him down. The town was hilly, the streets narrow. Allerton stepped off the high curb and a car grazed him. "Thank god you're not hurt,"

  Lee said. "I sure would hate to be stuck in this town."

  They sat down in a little coffeehouse where some German refugees hung out, talking about visas and extensions and work permits, and got into a conversation with a man at the next table. The man was thin and blond, his head caved in at the temples. Lee could see the blue veins pulsing in the cold, high-mountain sunlight that covered the man's weak, ravaged face and spilled over the scarred oak table onto the worn wooden floor. Lee asked the man if he liked Quito.

  "To be or not to be, that is the question. I have to like it."

  They walked out of the coffeehouse, and up the street to a park. The trees were stunted by wind and cold. A few boys were rowing around and around in a small pond. Lee watched them, torn by lust and curiosity. He saw himself desperately rummaging through bodies and rooms and closets in a frenzied search, a recurrent nightmare. At the end of the search was an empty room. He shivered in the cold wind.

  Allerton said, "Why don't you ask in the coffee shop for the name of a doctor?"

  "That's a good idea."

  The doctor lived in a yellow stucco villa on a quiet side street. He was Jewish, with a smooth, red face, and spoke good English. Lee put down a dysentery routine. The doctor asked a few questions. He started to write out a prescription. Lee said, "The prescription that works best is paregoric with bismuth."

  The doctor laughed. He gave Lee a long look. Finally he said, "Tell the truth now." He raised a forefinger, smiling. "Are you addicted to opiates? Better you tell me. Otherwise I cannot help you."

  Lee said, "Yes."

  "Ah ha," said the doctor, and he crumpled up the prescription he was writing and dropped it in the wastebasket. He asked Lee how long the addiction had lasted. He shook his head, looking at Lee.

  "Ach," he said, "you are a young person. You must stop this habit. So you lose your life. Better you should suffer now than continue this habit." The doctor gave Lee a long, human look.

  "My god," Lee thought, "what you have to put up with in this business." He nodded and said, "Of course, Doctor, and I want to stop. But I have to get some sleep. I am going to the coast tomorrow, to Manta."

  The doctor sat back in his chair, smiling. "You must stop this habit." He ran through the routine again. Lee nodded abstractedly. Finally the doctor reached for his prescription pad: three c.c.'s of tincture.

  The drugstore gave Lee paregoric instead of tincture. Three c.c.'s of P.G. Less than a teaspoonful. Nothing. Lee bought a bottle of antihistamine tablets and took a handful. They seemed to help a little.

  Lee and Allerton took a plane the next day for Manta.

  The Hotel Continental in Manta was made of split bamboo and rough boards. Lee found some knotholes in the wall of their room, and plugged the holes up with paper. "We don't want to get deported under a cloud," he said to Allerton. "I'm a little junk sick, you know, and that makes me sooo sexy. The neighbors could witness some innaresting sights."

  "I wish to register a complaint concerning breach of contract," said Allerton. "You said twice a week."

  "So I did. Well, of course the contract is more or less elastic you might say. But you are right.

  Twice a week it is, sire. Of course, if you get hot pants between times, don't hesitate to let me know."

  "I'll give you a buzz."

  The water was just right for Lee, who could not stand cold water. There was no shock when he plunged in. They swam for an hour or so, then sat on the beach looking at the sea. Allerton could sit for hours doing absolutely nothing. He said, "That boat out there has been warming up for the past hour."

  "I am going into town to dig the local bodegas and buy a bottle of cognac," Lee told him.

  The town looked old, with limestone streets and dirty saloons crowded with sailors and dockworkers. A shoeshine boy asked Lee if he wanted a "nice girl." Lee looked at the boy and said in English, "No, and I don't want you either."

  He bought a bottle of cognac from a Turkish trader. The store had everything: ship stores, hardware, guns, food, liquor. Lee priced the guns: three hundred dollars for a 30-30 lever-action Winchester carbine that sold for seventy-two dollars in the States. The Turk said duty was high on guns. That was the reason for this price.

  Lee walked back along the beach. The houses were all split bamboo on wood frame, the four posts set directly in the ground. The simplest type of house construction: you set four heavy posts deep in the ground and nail the house to the posts. The houses were built about six feet off the ground. The streets were mud. Thousands of vultures roosted on the houses and walked around the streets, pecking at offal. Lee kicked at a vulture, and the bird flapped away with an indignant squawk.

  Lee passed a bar, a large building built directly on the ground, and decided to go in for a drink.

  The split-bamboo walls shook with noise. Two middle-aged wiry little men were doing an obscene mambo routine opposite each other, their leathery faces creased in toothless smiles. The waiter came up and smiled at Lee. He didn't have any front teeth either. Lee sat down on a short wood bench and ordered a cognac. A boy of sixteen or so came over and sat down with Lee and smiled an open, friendly smile. Lee smiled back and ordered a refresco for the boy. He dropped a hand on Lee's thigh and squeezed it in thanks for the drink. The boy had uneven teeth, crowded one over the other, but he was a young boy. Lee looked at him speculatively; he couldn't figure the score. Was the boy giving him a come-on, or wars he just friendly? He knew that people in the Latin American countries were not self-conscious about physical contact. Boys walked around with their arms around each other's necks. Lee decided to play it cool. He finished his drink, shook hands with the boy, and walked back to the hotel.

  Allerton was still sitting on the porch in his swimming trunks and a short-sleeved yellow shirt, which flapped around his thin body in the evening wind. Lee went inside to the kitchen and ordered ice and water and glasses. He told Allerton about the Turk, the town and the boy. "Let's go dig that bar after dinner," he said.

  "And get felt up by those young boys?" said Allerton. "I should say not."

  Lee laughed. He was feeling surprisingly well. The antihistamine cut his junk sickness to a vague malaise, something he would not have noticed if he did not know what it was. He looked out over the bay, red in the setting sun. Boats of all sizes were anchored in the bay. Lee wanted to buy a boat and sail up and down the coast. Allerton liked the idea.

  "While we are in Ecuador we must score for Yage," Lee said. "Think of it: thought control. Take anyone apart and rebuild to your taste. Anything about somebody bugs you, you say, 'Yage! I want that routine took clear out of his mind.' I could think of a few changes I might make in you, doll." He looked at Allerton and licked his lips. "You'd be so much nicer after a few alterations.

  You're nice now, of course, but you do have those irritating little peculiarities. I mean, you won't do exactly what I want you to do all the time."

  "Do you think there is anything in it, really?" Allerton asked.

  "The Russians seem to think so. I understand Yage is the most efficient confession drug. They have also used peyote. Ever try it?"

  "No."

  "Horrible stuff. Made me sick like I wanted to die. I got to puke and I can't. Just excruciating spasms of the asparagras, or whatever you call that gadget. Finally the peyote conie
s up solid like a ball of hair, solid all the way up, clogging my throat. As nasty a sensation as I ever stood still for. The high is interesting, but hardly worth the sick stage. Your face swells around the eyes, and the lips swell, and you look and feel like an Indian, or what you figure an Indian feels like.

  Primitive, you understand. Colors are more intense, but somehow flat and two-dimensional.

  Everything looks like a peyote plant. There is a nightmare undercurrent.

  "I had nightmares after using it, one after the other, every time I went back to sleep. In one dream I had rabies and looked in the mirror and my face changed and I began howling. Another dream I had a chlorophyll habit. Me and five other chlorophyll addicts are waiting to score. We turn green and we can't kick the chlorophyll habit. One shot and you are hung for life. We are turning into plants. You know anything about psychiatry? Schizophrenia?"

  "Not much."

  "In some cases of schizophrenia a phenomenon occurs known as automatic obedience. I say,

  'Stick out your tongue,' and you can't keep yourself from obeying. Whatever I say, whatever anyone says, you must do. Get the picture? A pretty picture, isn't it, so long as you are the one giving the orders that are automatically obeyed. Automatic obedience, synthetic schizophrenia, mass-produced to order. That is the Russian dream, and America is not far behind. The bureaucrats of both countries want the same thing: Control. The superego, the controlling agency, gone cancerous and berserk. Incidentally, there is a connection between schizophrenia and telepathy. Schizos are very telepathically sensitive, but are strictly receivers. Dig the tie-in?"

  "But you wouldn't know Yage if you saw it?"

  Lee thought a minute. "Much as I dislike the idea, I will have to go back to Quito and talk to a botanist at the Botanical Institute there."

  "I'm not going back to Quito for anything," said Allerton.

  "I'm not going right away. I need some rest and I want to kick the Chinaman all the way out. No need for you to go. You stay on the beach. Papa will go and get the info."

  Chapter 8

  From Manta they flew on to Guayaquil. The road was flooded, so the only way to get there was by plane or boat.

  Guayaquil is built along a river, a city with many parks and squares and statues. The parks are full of tropical trees and shrubs and vines. A tree that fans out like an umbrella, as wide as it is tall, shades the stone benches. The people do a great deal of sitting.

  One day Lee got up early and went to the market. The place was crowded. A curiously mixed populace: Negro, Chinese, Indian, European, Arab, characters difficult to classify. Lee saw some beautiful boys of mixed Chinese and Negro stock, slender and graceful with beautiful white teeth.

  A hunchback with withered legs was playing crude bamboo panpipes, a mournful Oriental music with the sadness of the high mountains. In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it, you cannot complain.

  People crowded around the musician, listened a few minutes, and walked on. Lee noticed a young man with the skin tight over his small face, looking exactly like a shrunken head. He could not have weighed more than ninety pounds.

  The musician coughed from time to time. Once he snarled when someone touched his hump, showing his black rotten teeth. Lee gave the man a few coins. He walked on, looking at every face he passed, looking into doorways and up at the windows of cheap hotels. An iron bedstead painted light pink, a shirt out to dry . . . scraps of life. Lee snapped at them hungrily, like a predatory fish cut off from his prey by a glass wall. He could not stop ramming his nose against the glass in the nightmare search of his dream. And at the end he was standing in a dusty room in the late afternoon sun, with an old shoe in his hand.

  The city, like all Ecuador, produced a curiously baffling impression. Lee felt there was something going on here, some undercurrent of life that was hidden from him. This was the area of the ancient Chimu pottery, where salt shakers and water pitchers were nameless obscenities: two men on all fours engaged in sodomy formed the handle for the top of a kitchen pot.

  What happens when there is no limit? What is the fate of The Land Where Anything Goes? Men changing into huge centipedes . . . centipedes besieging the houses ... a man tied to a couch and a centipede ten feet long rearing up over him. Is this literal? Did some hideous metamorphosis occur? What is the meaning of the centipede symbol?

  Lee got on a bus and rode to the end of the line. He took another bus. He rode out to the river and drank a soda, and watched some boys swimming in the dirty river. The river looked as if nameless monsters might rise from the green-brown water. Lee saw a lizard two feet long run up the opposite bank.

  He walked back towards town. He passed a group of boys on a corner. One of the boys was so beautiful that the image cut Lee's senses like a wire whip. A slight involuntary sound of pain escaped from Lee's lips. He turned around, as though looking at the street name. The boy was laughing at some joke, a high-pitched laugh, happy and gay. Lee walked on.

  Six or seven boys, aged twelve to fourteen, were playing in a heap of rubbish on the waterfront.

  One of the boys was urinating against a post and smiling at the other boys. The boys noticed Lee.

  Now their play was overtly sexual, with an undercurrent of mockery. They looked at Lee and whispered and laughed. Lee looked at them openly, a cold, hard stare of naked lust. He felt the tearing ache of limitless desire.

  He focused on one boy, the image sharp and clear, as if seen through a telescope with the other boys and the waterfront blacked out. The boy vibrated with life like a young animal. A wide grin showed sharp, white teeth. Under the torn shirt Lee glimpsed the thin body.

  He could feel himself in the body of the boy. Fragmentary memories . . . the smell of cocoa beans drying in the sun, bamboo tenements, the warm dirty river, the swamps and rubbish heaps on the outskirts of the town. He was with the other boys, sitting on the stone floor of a deserted house.

  The roof was gone. The stone walls were falling down. Weeds and vines grew over the walls and stretched across the floor.

  The boys were taking down their torn pants. Lee lifted his thin buttocks to slip down his pants. He could feel the stone floor. He had his pants down to his ankles. His knees were clasped together, and the other boys were trying to pull them apart. He gave in, and they held his knees open. He looked at them and smiled, and slipped his hand down over his stomach. Another boy who was standing up dropped his pants and stood there with his hands on his hips, looking down at his erect organ.

  A boy sat down by Lee and reached over between his legs. Lee felt the orgasm blackout in the hot sun. He stretched out and threw his arm over his eyes. Another boy rested his head on his stomach. Lee could feel the warmth of the other's head, itching a little where the hair touched Lee's stomach.

  Now he was in a bamboo tenement. An oil lamp lit a woman's body. Lee could feel desire for the woman through the other's body. "I'm not queer," he thought. "I'm disembodied."

  Lee walked on, thinking, "What can I do? Take them back to my hotel? They are willing enough.

  For a few Sucres. ..." He felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. "Someday I am going to have things just like I want," he said to himself. "And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river."

  Lee's plan involved a river. He lived on the river and ran things to please himself. He grew his own weed and poppies and cocaine, and he had a young native boy for an all-purpose servant.

  Boats were moored in the dirty river. Great masses of water hyacinths floated by. The river was a good half-mile across.

  Lee walked up to a little park. There was a statue of Bolivar, "The Liberating Fool" as Lee called him, shaking hands with someone else. Both of them looked tired and disgusted and rocking queer, so queer it rocked you. Lee stood looking at the statue. Then he sat down on a stone bench facin
g the river. Everyone looked at Lee when he sat down. Lee looked back. He did not have the American reluctance to meet the gaze of a stranger. The others looked away, and lit cigarettes and resumed their conversations.

  Lee sat there looking at the dirty yellow river. He couldn't see half an inch under the surface.

  From time to time, small fish jumped ahead of a boat. There were trim, expensive sailing boats from the yacht club, with hollow masts and beautiful lines. There were dugout canoes with outboard motors and cabins of split bamboo. Two old rusty battleships were moored in the middle of the river—the Ecuadoran Navy. Lee sat there a full hour, then got up and walked back to the hotel. It was three o'clock. Allerton was still in bed. Lee sat down on the edge of the bed. "It's three o'clock, Gene. Time to get up."

  "What for?"

  "You want to spend your life in bed? Come on out and dig the town with me. I saw some beautiful boys on the waterfront. The real uncut boy stuff. Such teeth, such smiles. Young boys vibrating with life."

  "All right. Stop drooling."

  "What have they got that I want, Gene? Do you know?"

  "No."

  "They have maleness, of course. So have I. I want myself the same way I want others. I'm disembodied. I can't use my own body for some reason." He put out his hand. Allerton dodged away.

  "What's the matter?"

  "I thought you were going to run your hand down my ribs."

  "I wouldn't do that. Think I'm queer or something?"

  "Frankly, yes."

  "You do have nice ribs. Show me the broken one. Is that it there?" Lee ran his hand halfway down Allerton's ribs. "Or is it further down?"

  "Oh, go away."

  "But, Gene ... I am due, you know."

  "Yes, I suppose you are."

  "Of course, if you'd rather wait until tonight. These tropical nights are so romantic. That way we could take twelve hours or so and do the thing right." Lee ran his hands down over Allerton's stomach. He could see that Allerton was a little excited.

  Allerton said, "Maybe it would be better now. You know I like to sleep alone."