Queer

by William S. Burroughs

  "Yes, I know. Too bad. If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes."

  Lee was taking off his clothes. He lay down beside Allerton. "Wouldn't it be booful if we should juth run together into one gweat big blob," he said in baby talk. "Am I giving you the horrors?"

  "Indeed you are."

  Allerton surprised Lee by an unusual intensity of response. At the climax he squeezed Lee hard around the ribs. He sighed deeply and closed his eyes.

  Lee smoothed his eyebrows with his thumbs. "Do you mind that?" he asked.

  "Not terribly."

  "But you do enjoy it sometimes? The whole deal, I mean."

  "Oh, yes."

  Lee lay on his back with one cheek against Allerton's shoulder, and went to sleep.

  Lee decided to apply for a passport before leaving Guayaquil. He was changing clothes to visit the embassy, and talking to Allerton. "Wouldn't do to wear high shoes. The Consul is probably an elegant pansy. . . . 'My dear, can you believe it? High shoes. I mean real old button-hooky shoes.

  I simply couldn't take my eyes off those shoes. I'm afraid I have no idea what he wanted.'

  "I hear they are purging the State Department of queers. If they do, they will be operating with a skeleton staff , . . ah, here they are."Lee was putting on a pair of low shoes. "Imagine walking in on the Consul and asking him right out for money to eat on. ... He rears back and claps a scented handkerchief over his mouth, as if you had dropped a dead lobster on his desk: 'You're broke!

  Really, I don't know why you come to me with this revolting disclosure. You might show a modicum of consideration. You must realize how distasteful this sort of thing is. Have you no pride?'"

  Lee turned to Allerton. "How do I look? Don't want to look too good, or he will be trying to get in my pants. Maybe you'd better go. That way we'll get our passports by tomorrow."

  Listen to this." Lee was reading from a

  Guayaquil paper. "It seems that the Peruvian delegates at the anti-tuberculosis congress in Salinas appeared at the meeting carrying huge maps on which were shown the parts of Ecuador appropriated by Peru in the 1939 war. The Ecuadoran doctors might go to the meeting twirling shrunken heads of Peruvian soldiers on their watch chains."

  Allerton had found an article about the heroic fight put up by Ecuador's wolves of the sea.

  "Their what?"

  "That's what it says: Lobos del Mar. It seems that one officer stuck by his gun, even though the mechanism was no longer operating."

  "Sounds simpleminded to me."

  They decided to look for a boat in Las Playas. Las Playas was cold and the water was rough and muddy, a dreary middle-class resort. The food was terrible, but the room without meals was almost the same as full pensión. They tried one lunch. A plate of rice without sauce, without anything. Allerton said, "I am hurt." A tasteless soup with some fibrous material floating in it that looked like soft, white wood. The main course was a nameless meat as impossible to identify as to eat.

  Lee said, "The cook has barricaded himself in the kitchen. He is shoving this slop out through a slot." The food was, as a matter of fact, passed out through a slot in a door from a dark, smoky room where, presumably, it was being prepared.

  They decided they would go on to Salinas the next day. That night Lee wanted to go to bed with Allerton, but he refused and the next morning Lee said he was sorry he asked so soon after the last time, which was a breach of contract.

  Allerton said, "I don't like people who apologize at breakfast."

  Lee said, "Really, Gene, aren't you taking an unfair advantage? Like someone was junk sick and I don't use junk. I say, 'Sick, really? I don't know why you tell me about your disgusting condition.

  You might at least have the decency to keep it to yourself if you are sick. I hate sick people. You must realize how distasteful it is to see you sneezing and yawning and retching. Why don't you go someplace where I won't have to look at you? You've no idea how tiresome you are, or how disgusting. Have you no pride?'"

  Allerton said, 'That isn't fair at all."

  "It isn't supposed to be fair. Just a routine for your amusement, containing a modicum of truth.

  Hurry and finish your breakfast. We'll miss the Salinas bus."

  Salinas had the quiet, dignified air of an upper-class resort town. They had come in the off season. When they went to swim they found out why this was not the season: the Humboldt current makes the water cold during the summer months. Allerton put his foot in the water and said, "It's nothing but cold," and refused to go in. Lee plunged in and swam for a few minutes.

  Time seemed to speed up in Salinas. Lee would eat lunch and lie on the beach. After a period that seemed like an hour, or at most two hours, he saw the sun low in the sky: six o'clock. Allerton reported the same experience.

  Lee went to Quito to get information on the Yage. Allerton stayed in Salinas. Lee was back five days later.

  "Yage is also known to the Indians as Ayahuasca. Scientific name is Bannisteria caapi," Lee spread a map out on the bed. "It grows in high jungle on the Amazon side of the Andes. We will go on to Puyo. That is the end of the road. We should be able to locate someone there who can deal with the Indians, and get the Yage."

  They spent a night in Guayaquil. Lee got drunk before dinner and slept through a movie. They went back to the hotel to go to bed and get an early start in the morning. Lee poured himself some brandy and sat down on the edge of Allerton's bed. "You look sweet tonight," he said, taking off his glasses. How about a little kiss? Huh?"

  "Oh, go away," said Allerton.

  "Okay kid, if you say so. There's plenty of time," Lee poured some more brandy in his glass and lay down on his own bed.

  "You know, Gene, not only have they got poor people in this jerkwater country. They also got like rich people. I saw some on the train going up to Quito. I expect they keep a plane revved up in the back yard. I can see them loading television sets and radios and golf clubs and tennis rackets and shotguns into the plane, and then trying to boot a prize Brahma bull in on top of the other junk, so the windup is the plane won't get off the ground.

  "It's a small, unstable, undeveloped country. Economic setup exactly the way I figured it: all raw materials, lumber, food, labor, rent, very cheap. All manufactured goods very high, because of import duty. The duty is supposed to protect Ecuadoran industry. There is no Ecuadoran industry.

  No production here. The people who can produce won't produce, because they don't want any money tied up here. They want to be ready to pull out right now, with a bundle of cold cash, preferably U.S. dollars. They are unduly alarmed. Rich people are generally frightened. I don't know why. Something to do with a guilt complex, I imagine. ¿Quién sabe? I have not come to psychoanalyze Caesar, but to protect his person. At a price, of course. What they need here is a security department, to keep the underdog under."

  "Yes," said Allerton. "We must secure uniformity of opinion."

  "Opinion! What are we running here, a debating society? Give me one year and the people won't have any opinions. 'Now just fall in line here folks, for your nice tasty stew of fish heads and rice and oleomargarine. And over here for your ration of free lush laced with opium.' So if they get out of line, we jerk the junk out of the lush and they're all lying around shitting in their pants, too weak to move. An eating habit is the worst habit you can have. Another angle is malaria. A debilitating affliction, tailor-made to water down the revolutionary spirit."

  Lee smiled. "Just imagine some old humanist German doctor. I say, 'Well, Doc, you done a great job here with malaria. Cut the incidence down almost to nothing.'

  "'Ach, yes. We do our best, is it not? You see this line in the graph? The line shows the decline in this sickness in the past ten years since we commence with our treatment program.'

  "'Yeah, Doc. Now look, I want to see that line go back where it came from.'

  "'Ach, this you cannot mean.'

  "'And another thing.
See if you can't import an especially debilitating strain of hookworm.'

  "The mountain people we can always immobilize by taking their blankets away, leaving them with the enterprise of a frozen lizard."

  The inside wall to Lee's room stopped about three feet from the ceiling to allow for ventilating the next room, which was an inside room with no windows. The occupant of the next room said something in Spanish to the effect Lee should be quiet.

  "Ah, shut up," said Lee, leaping to his feet. "I'll nail a blanket over that slot! I'll cut off your fucking air! You only breathe with my permission. You're the occupant of an inside room, a room without windows. So remember your place and shut your poverty-stricken mouth!"

  A stream of chingas and cabrones replied.

  "Hombre," Lee asked, "¿En dónde está su cultura?"

  "Let's hit the sack," said Allerton. "I'm tired."

  Chapter 9

  They took a river boat to Babahoya. Swinging in hammocks, sipping brandy, and watching the jungle slide by. Springs, moss, beautiful clear streams and trees up to two hundred feet high. Lee and Allerton were silent as the boat powered upriver, penetrating the jungle stillness with its lawnmower whine. From Babahoya they took a bus over the Andes to Ambato, a cold, jolting fourteen-hour ride. They stopped for a snack of chick-peas at a hut at the top of the mountain pass, far above the tree line. A few young native men in gray felt hats ate their chickpeas in sullen resignation. Several guinea pigs were squeaking and scurrying around on the dirt floor of the hut.

  Their cries reminded Lee of the guinea pig he owned as a child in the Fairmont Hotel in St.

  Louis, when the family was waiting to move into their new house on Price Road. He remembered the way the pig shrieked, and the stink of its cage.

  They passed the snow-covered peak of Chimborazo, cold in the moonlight and the constant wind of the high Andes. The view from the high mountain pass seemed from another, larger planet than Earth. Lee and Allerton huddled together under a blanket, drinking brandy, the smell of wood smoke in their nostrils. They were both wearing Army-surplus jackets, zipped up over sweatshirts to keep out the cold and wind. Allerton seemed insubstantial as a phantom; Lee could almost see through him, to the empty phantom bus outside.

  From Ambato to Puyo, along the edge of a gorge a thousand feet deep. There were waterfalls and forests and streams running down over the roadway, as they descended into the lush green valley. Several times the bus stopped to remove large stones that had slid down onto the road.

  Lee was talking on the bus to an old prospector named Morgan, who had been thirty years in the jungle. Lee asked him about Ayahuasca.

  "Acts on them like opium," Morgan said. "All my Indians use it. Can't get any work out of them for three days when they get on Ayahuasca."

  "I think there may be a market for it," Lee said.

  Morgan said, "I can get any amount."

  They passed the prefabricated bungalows of Shell Mara. The Shell Company had spent two years and twenty million dollars, found no oil, and pulled out. They got into Puyo late at night, and found a room in a ramshackle hotel near the general store.

  Lee and Allerton were too exhausted to speak, and they fell asleep at once.

  Next day Old Man Morgan went around with Lee, trying to score for Ayahuasca. Allerton was still sleeping. They hit a wall of evasion. One man said he would bring some the following day. Lee knew he would not bring any.

  They went to a little saloon run by a mulatto woman. She pretended not to know what Ayahuasca was. Lee asked if Ayahuasca was illegal. "No," said Morgan, "but the people are suspicious of strangers."

  They sat there drinking aguardiente mixed with hot water and sugar and cinnamon. Lee said his racket was shrunk-down heads. Morgan figured they could start a head-shrinking plant. "Heads rolling off the assembly line," he said. "You can't buy those heads at any price. The government forbids it, you know. The blighters were killing people to sell the heads."

  Morgan had an inexhaustible fund of old dirty jokes. He was talking about some local character from Canada.

  "How did he get down here?" Lee asked.

  Morgan chuckled. "How did we all get down here? Spot of trouble in our own country, right?"

  Lee nodded, without saying anything.

  Old Man Morgan went back to Shell Mara on the afternoon bus to collect some money owed him.

  Lee talked to a Dutchman named Sawyer who was farming near Puyo. Sawyer told him there was an American botanist living in the jungle, a few hours out of Puyo.

  "He is trying to develop some medicine. I forget the name. If he succeeds in concentrating this medicine, he says he will make a fortune. Now he is having a hard time. He has nothing to eat out there."

  Lee said, "I am interested in medicinal plants. I may pay him a visit."

  "He will be glad to see you. But take along some flour or tea or something. They have nothing out there."

  Later Lee said to Allerton, "A botanist! What a break. He is our man. We will go tomorrow."

  "We can hardly pretend we just happened by," said Allerton. "How are you going to explain your visit?"

  "I will think of something. Best tell him right out I want to score for Yage. I figure maybe there is a buck in it for both of us. According to what I hear, he is flat on his ass. We are lucky to hit him in that condition. If he was in the chips and drinking champagne out of galoshes in the whorehouses of Puyo, he would hardly be interested to sell me a few hundred Sucres' worth of Yage. And, Gene, for the love of Christ, when we do overhaul this character, please don't say, 'Doctor Cotter, I presume.'"

  The hotel room in Puyo was damp and cold. The houses across the street were blurred by the pouring rain, like a city under water. Lee was picking up articles off the bed and shoving them into a rubberized sack. A .32 automatic pistol, some cartridges wrapped in oiled silk, a small frying pan, tea and flour packed in cans and sealed with adhesive tape, two quarts of Puro.

  Allerton said, "This booze is the heaviest item, and the bottle's got like sharp edges. Why don't we leave it here?"

  "We'll have to loosen his tongue," Lee said. He picked up the sack and handed Allerton a shiny new machete.

  "Let's wait till the rain stops," said Allerton.

  "Wait till the rain stops!" Lee collapsed on the bed with loud, simulated laughter. "Haw haw haw!

  Wait till the rain stops! They got a saying down here, like I'll pay you what I owe you when it stops raining in Puyo.' Haw haw."

  "We had two clear days when we first got here."

  "I know. A latter-day miracle. There's a movement on foot to canonize the local padre. Vámonos, cabrón."

  Lee slapped Allerton's shoulder and they walked out in the rain, slipping on the wet cobblestones of the main street.

  The trail was corduroy. The wood of the trail was covered with a film of mud. They cut long canes to keep from slipping, but it was slow walking. High jungle with hardwood forest on both sides of the trail, and very little undergrowth. Everywhere was water, springs and streams and rivers of clear, cold water.

  "Good trout water," Lee said.

  They stopped at several houses to ask where Cotter's place was. Everyone said they were headed right. How far? Two, three hours. Maybe more. Word seemed to have gone ahead. One man they met on the trail shifted his machete to shake hands and said at once, "You are looking for Cotter? He is in his house now."

  "How far?" Lee asked.

  The man looked at Lee and Allerton. "It will take you about three hours more."

  They walked on and on. It was late afternoon now. They flipped a coin to see who would ask at the next house. Allerton lost.

  "He says three more hours," Allerton said.

  "We been hearing that for the past six hours."

  Allerton wanted to rest. Lee said, "No. If you rest, your legs get stiff. It's the worst thing you can do."

  "Who told you that?"

  "Old Man Morgan."

  "Well, Morgan or no, I am going to rest."
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br />   "Don't make it too long. It will be a hell of a note if we get caught short, stumbling over snakes and jaguars in the dark and falling into quebrajas— that's what they call these deep crevices cut by streams of water. Some of them are sixty feet deep and four feet wide. Just room enough to fall in."

  They stopped to rest in a deserted house. The walls were gone, but there was a roof that looked pretty sound. "We could stop here in a pinch," said Allerton, looking around.

  "A definite pinch. No blankets."

  It was dark when they reached Cotter's place, a small thatched hut in a clearing. Cotter was a wiry little man in his middle fifties. Lee observed that the reception was a bit cool. Lee brought out the liquor, and they all had a drink. Cotter's wife, a large, strong-looking, red-haired woman, made some tea with cinnamon to cut the kerosene taste of the Puro. Lee got drunk on three drinks.

  Cotter was asking Lee a lot of questions. "How did you happen to come here? Where are you from? How long have you been in Ecuador? Who told you about me? Are you a tourist or travelling on business?"

  Lee was drunk. He began talking in junky lingo, explaining that he was looking for Yage, or Ayahuasca. He understood the Russians and the Americans were experimenting with this drug.

  Lee said he figured there might be a buck in the deal for both of them. The more Lee talked, the cooler Cotter's manner became. The man was clearly suspicious, but why or of what, Lee could not decide.

  Dinner was pretty good, considering the chief ingredient was a sort of fibrous root and bananas.

  After dinner, Cotter's wife said, 'These boys must be tired, Jim."

  Cotter led the way with a flashlight that developed power by pressing a lever. A cot about thirty inches wide made of bamboo slats. "I guess you can both make out here," he said. Mrs. Cotter was spreading a blanket on the cot as a mattress, with another blanket as cover. Lee lay down on the cot next to the wall. Allerton lay on the outside, and Cotter adjusted a mosquito net.

  "Mosquitos?" Lee asked.

  "No, vampire bats," Cotter said shortly. "Good night."

  "Good night."