Interzone

by William S. Burroughs

I met Mark Bradford, the playwright. He says: “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “William Lee.”

  “Oh!” He drops my hand. “Well … uh, excuse me.” He left Interzone the following day.

  To a person in the medium of success, Willy Lee is an ominous figure. You meet him on the way down. He never hits a place when it is booming. When Willy Lee shows, the desert wind is blowing dust into empty bars and hotels, jungle vines are covering the oil derricks. A mad realtor sits in a spectral office, a famished jackal gnaws his numb, gangrenous foot: “Yes sir,” he says, “this development is building right up.”

  A successful composer says to his protégé, a young Arab poet: “Start packing, Titmouse. I just saw Willy Lee in the Socco Chico. Interzone has had it.”

  “Why, is he dangerous? You don’t have to see him.”

  “See him—I should think not. It’s like this: A culture gets its special stamp—Mayan, Northwest Coast, North Pacific—probably from one person or small group of people, who originally exuded these archetypes. After that, the archetypes are accepted unchanged for thousands of years. Well, Lee goes around exuding his own archetypes. It isn’t done anymore. Already the Interzone Café reeks of rotting, aborted, larval archetypes. You notice that vibrating soundless hum in the Socco? That means someone is making archetypes in the area and you’d best evacuate right now…. Look, I am a success because I mesh with existing archetypes. If I accept, or even get to know, Lee’s archetypes … and his routines!!!” The composer shudders. “Not me. Get packing, we’re meeting Cole in Capri.”

  I just lit up…. A very dangerous party, Miss Green. Just one long drag on the unnatural teat she’s got under her left arm and you are stoned, Pops…. In Mexico once I picked up on some bum-kick weed, and then got on a bus. I had a small pistol, a .41- caliber double-barreled Remington derringer in a holster tucked inside my belt so it was pointing just where the leg joins the body…. Suddenly I could feel the gun go off, smell the powder smoke, the singed cloth, feel the horrible numb shock, then the pit-pat of blood dripping like piss on the floor…. Later I examined the gun and found the safety half-cock was broken and such accidental discharge was quite possible.

  I see the Un-American Committee has got around to Chris Goodwin. About time. I knew him when, dearie. A rank card-carrying Scumunist. Queer, of course. He married a transvestite Jew Liz who worked on Sundial, that left-wing tabloid.—You recall the rag folded when their angel, an Albanian condom tycoon who came on like an English gentleman—the famous Merchant of Sex, who scandalized the International Set when he appeared at the Duc du Ventre’s costume ball as a walking prick covered by a huge condom—went broke and shot himself during World War II. He couldn’t get rubber, and Alcibiades Linton, the Houston Bubble Gum King, beat him out on Mexican chicle—perhaps these long parentheses should be relegated to footnotes. —I don’t know why Chris married her. Probably for the looks of the thing, not knowing exactly how such things do look…. Did I ever tell you about my New Yorker cartoon? One State Department pansy visiting another. Kids crawling all over both of them, so the visiting swish says to the other: “Really, my dear, this front thing can be carried too far.” —Anyhoo, his Liz wife was killed by Kurds in Pakistan—the reference is not to sour milk but to a species of Himalayan bandit. So Chris comes back with his dead wife in a jeep and says: “Poor Rachel. She was the life of every party. Kurds, you know.” Kurds indeed. He liquidated her on orders from Moscow. Fact is, she “had taken to living on a slope of aristocracy,” and ultimately “became crude and rampant”—I quote from the Moscow Ultimatum. I am leaving a reference to Turds for Milton Berle or anyone else who wants it….

  Also an improvement on the new anti-enzyme toothpaste to keep off lieutenants j.g. (junior grade) … a queen-repellent smelling of decayed queen flesh. (Shark repellent issued by the Navy smells like decayed sharks. Will put even a shark off his feed.)

  The unfrocked commander lost his breevies, as he calls them, his jockstrap bathing suit that just does cover his equipment. That is, the maid lost his breevies in the laundry and he has been arguing with her about it for the past week.

  Today the maid showed me the breevies and said: “Are they his?” pointing to his room, and I said: “I presume that they are … they certainly aren’t yours, madam.”

  Typical Interzone conversation: “My dear, let me tell you where you can buy the most marvelous cakes. Doughnut dough outside, hot custard filling, and rolled in sugar … Just opposite the Mecca bus terminal in the wholesale market. A very attractive boy cooks the cakes, who by the way is available.”

  Incredibly ugly and bestial women come down from the mountains carrying loads of charcoal on their backs. These are Berber women, unveiled, a blue tattoo stripe follows the cleft line from base of nose to upper lip, from lower lip to chin. Does the tattoo stripe continue along cleft line from cunt to asshole? I’m afraid we’ll have to pigeonhole that under “Mysteries of the East.” Our field man is a swish…. I notice many of these old charcoal beasts have their noses eaten away.

  Two fags passing noseless woman: “My dear, these people lose their noses through sheer carelessness.”

  Interzone is crawling with pedophiles, citizens hung up on pre-puberty kicks. I don’t dig it. I say anyone can’t wait till thirteen is no better than a degenerate.

  Above notes under file head T.B.W.I.—To Be Weaved In … A routine starts here concerning a rich writer who employs an extensive staff to do menial work like “weaving.” I have a group of men and women, “My Eager Little Beavers” as I call them…. So this writer is a sadistic tyrant, you dig? I come and supervise the work, maintaining the nauseous fiction they really are beavers, and they have to wear beaver suits and stand for a roll call …“Sally Beaver, Marvin Beaver,” et cetera, et cetera.

  “And watch you don’t get caught when a tree falls,” I say jovially, holding up a finger stub.

  Sort of a horrible tour de force, like the books of Anthony Burgess. Nobody gives those people who write children’s books credit for what they have to go through. I have discovered a certain writer of children’s books is a great Kafkian figure. He chose to hide himself in children’s stories as a joke.

  For example, there was a story of Old Grumpy Stubbs, who said he needed subsidiary personalities—Subs, he calls them—to keep his psyche cleaned out and perform other menial chores around the “farm.”

  “So just sign here, my friend. You’ll never regret this as long as you live.”

  But poor Albrecht the woodcutter did regret it as soon as he got back to his little proviso apartment—that is, an apartment that has already been leased to someone else, or on which the lease has expired, so you can only hope to stall a few days until they get the necessary papers for dispossessing you. Albrecht had lived in provisos all his life.

  Well, even though he couldn’t read Clause 9(v) of the contract—which can only be deciphered with an electron microscope and a virus filter—Albrecht knew somehow he had done a terrific thing to sell out to Old Stubbs, so called because he had cut off all but two of his fingers in an effort to amuse his constituents: “I get it back!” he would say, jovially rubbing his mutilated hands together. “I get it back!”

  “I just don’t know,” Albrecht reflected. “Now Old Stubbs he talks real nice and he did cut off a thumb for me…. It isn’t every Sub can say he got a thumb off the old man. Some of them didn’t get nothing.”

  An Advertising Short for Television:

  “So there they are, these two young kids, naked in a jungle clearing under a great, cheesy moon so big and close, like a big soft white ass, you dig me? Like you could reach right up and goose it, and all around the myriad sounds of the jungle night. They have found the Lost City in each other’s arms.

  “Well, do they get living et by mosquitoes?” (These lapses into faulty syntax are carefully cultivated by J.R., the Director. He is starting a J.R. legend, you dig?) “Do they wake up in the morning with their assholes swoll shut they c
an’t shit? Not at all. They wake up in the magic of a jungle morning. A cool breeze gooses them gently, running light fingers over their lean, hard young bodies. Half in sleep, they begin to move in rhythmic contractions….

  “Well, the Hays Office steps in here, boys. They would have stepped in last night, but the Assistant Coordinate Censor fell out of the launch watching an Indian boy jack off in his dugout, and a candiru skedaddled up his prick and we had to roust out a witch man to extract the little varmint.” (The candiru is a little eel-like critter about two inches long by one-quarter inch in diameter, that darts up your prick, ass, or a woman’s cunt if he can’t do any better, holding himself in situ by barbs. Just what he figures to gain by this maneuver is not known, and no martyrs have stepped forward to study the candiru’s life cycle on location.)

  “So why aren’t they attacked by the whining hordes? Does love protect them? Balls! They use the new DuPont 8-hour B-22 Insect Repellent, that’s why. You too can shit or fuck in comfort from the jungles of Madagascar to the great Arctic marshes of Lapland, where the mosquitoes drink deep under the sword of Damocles like in a British pub: ‘Hurry up please, it’s time …’ ”

  Antonio the Portuguese Mooch

  The Portuguese mooch came and sat down with Lee. Lee glanced up and said: “Hello, Antonio. Sit down.” He went on writing and ignored the demanding waves emanating from Antonio. Antonio compressed his lips and sighed. He clapped tiny hands which were the blue-purple color of poor circulation. He ordered a glass of water, turning his simian profile to ignore the waiter’s look of cold contempt.

  “Bill, I hate to bother you with the tragedies of my life. The life of a European filled with sickness and hunger.” He coughed. “Americans are not able to understand these things…. You—stupid, vulgar, mechanized … How we hate you.” He patted Lee’s arm and smiled, showing his dirty, cheap false teeth. “Not you, of course. You are different from the other Americans. You have a heart at least.”

  “Yes. And liver and lungs and a stomach. What’s on your greasy mind? As if I didn’t know …”

  Antonio did not notice. He was looking into space, his face twisted with monkey-like hate.

  “Yah! To you Americans I am just a little performing monkey who will do dirty little tricks for a penny. Less than a penny … I remember when I am fourteen years old, two drunken American merchant marines have me to jack off at their café table in a crowded street in Lisbon. ‘Guess I win the bet, Joe.’ ‘Yeah, I guess you do. I’ve seen everything now.’ And he passed over a wad of escudos that would feed a Portuguese family for a year. ‘How much is this in money, Joe?’ He holds up a coin like this….” Antonio made an ugly gesture, pinching thumb and forefinger together—Lee was used to Antonio, but sometimes the man gave him a shock with some indescribable twist of malevolent ugliness.

  “ ‘Oh, about one fifth of a cent.’

  “ ‘You think that’s too much? I don’t want to spoil him.’

  “ ‘Oh hell. Might as well spread around a little goodwill.’

  “ ‘Trouble is the little gook might go into convulsions of gratitude and die right here at the table. Haven’t you got anything smaller?’

  “ ‘Wait a minute. Yeah, here we are. Rock bottom. Throw it over there in that horse manure.’ ”

  Antonio’s imitation of American accents was perfect, like a recording, but mixed. Brooklyn and Chicago, California, East Texas, Maine and the Deep South, the voice’s absent owner appearing momentarily at the table, like a speeded-up superimposed movie.

  The waiter set the glass of water down with a smack so that some of the water jumped out onto Antonio’s sleeve. Antonio glared at the waiter, who flicked the table with a towel, then turned his back and walked away.

  “Gratitude you want. We pick your coin out of dung with our teeth, and then, shit running down our chins, we should kiss your fine, long-wearing American boots, and say, ‘Oh thank you, Johnny. Thank you for your generosity…. That you condescend to watch a European of noble family fuck his blood sister and that my performance could find favor in your sight. This I did not dare to hope for…. You are indeed kind….’ ”

  His voice rose to a piercing shriek. Lee looked up, vaguely annoyed.

  “I, with seven-hundred-year-old blood in my veins! I, to kiss the feet of a son-of-a-bitch American peasant pig!”

  He was spitting with rage, like an hysterical cat. Suddenly his plate flew out and he thrust his head forward, snapping for it. Lee glimpsed a horrible extension of Antonio’s mouth, teeth on the end of a flesh tube, undulating across the table, silent, sinister and purposeful as a parasitic worm.

  The plate slid across the table into Lee’s lap. Lee flicked the plate back onto the table, snapping the cloth of his pants. Antonio picked it up and polished it on the tablecloth with one hand. With the other hand he kept his face covered. He replaced the teeth, kneading his face. Finally he turned on Lee a ghastly smile, his face yellow like dirty old wax, sweating with strain.

  “But you are not like the other Americans. You are a … good guy.”

  “Did you ever think of working, young man?” Lee asked.

  “In Tangier is no work.”

  “Well, I know the owner of the Café de la Paix. I might could get you on as a part-time lavatory attendant. After all, it’s honest, respectable work, and there’s a future in it. He’s thinking of putting in a shoeshine parlor, and you might work right into a bootblack job. That is, if you apply yourself, keep your eye on the ball…. When an American finishes shitting, don’t just stand there, wipe his ass. And wipe it better than it was ever wiped before.”

  Antonio glared at Lee. Lee smiled. His face ghastly with strain, hate streaming out of his eyes like a malevolent shortwave broadcast, Antonio smiled back.

  “You are joking, Bill.”

  “Sure. We’re great kidders, us Americans.”

  “Americans! They come to Europe and buy us like cattle! ‘You’re in the wrong hole, Clem. That’s a he-gook you got there.’ ‘So what, Luke? ’Tain’t as if it was being queer. After all, they’s only gooks.’

  “You cannot understand what it means, Bill. You do not come from an old family. To have seen my great-aunt Mitzi, the Dowager Countess of Borganzola, the proudest family in Europe, an old lady of eighty years, dancing the can-can for drunken American soldiers. ‘Shake the lead out, grandma. I got money on your ass.’ And I stand there helpless. I hate them so almost I cannot pass around the hat.”

  “Okay,” Lee said. “I’ll take over the script now. Your old mother is gaping like a fish, locked out of her iron lung for nonpayment of rent. The finance company is repossessing your wife’s artificial kidney…. It’s going to be tough, sitting there watching her swell up and turn black, drowning in her own piss, your darling wife, the mother of your dead son, last of the noble line of Borganzola, and the croaker said just one more day with the kidney and she is functioning again. A sad, sweet, resigned smile … ‘Ah well … My life has been one long tragedy. But to think that only fifty pesetas would save her! It is too cruel!’

  “You express the dilemma of the European, Antonio. You hate us so much almost you cannot pass around the hat.”

  Displaced Fuzz

  A drastic simplification of U.S. law has thrown thousands of cops and narcotics agents out of work: The DFs—Displaced Fuzz—overran the Placement Center, snarling and whimpering like toothless predators: “I don’t ask much out of life. Just let me give some citizen a bad time.”

  A few of them were absorbed by Friendly Finance:

  DF 1: “Now, lady, we wouldn’t want to repossess the artificial kidney, what with your kid in such a condition like that, not being able to piss.”

  DF 2: “Anna innarest.”

  DF 1: “Anna carrying charges.”

  DF 2: “Anna upkeep.”

  DF 1: “Anna wear and tear onna appliance.”

  DF 2: “Depreciation, whyncha?”

  DF 1: “Check, and the depreciation.”

  DF
2: “It’s like you’re delinquent already…. Mmmm. Quite a gadget.”

  DF 1: “Quite a gadget.”

  DF 2: “Not the sort of thing you could make out of an old washing machine in your basement.”

  DF 1: “If you had an old washing machine.”

  DF 2: “Anna basement.”

  Lady: “But what am I to do? I been replaced by the automation.”

  DF 2: “I’m not Mr. Anthony, lady….”

  DF 1: “You might peddle the kid’s ass if he’ll stand still for it, haw haw haw…. Lady, we’d like to help you…. You see—”

  DF 2: “—We got a job to do is all. You should be able to save sumpin’.”

  DF 1: “Maybe he pisses it all down the drain. Haw haw haw.”

  A DF can still get his kicks with Friendly Finance. But what about the other DFs?

  One of them obtained a sinecure as lavatory attendant in a Greyhound terminal and maintained his self-respect by denouncing occasional improprieties and attempts to tamper with or circumvent the pay toilets. To this end he concealed himself in the towel receptacle, peeking out through a hinged slot.

  Another worked in a Turkish bath and equipped himself with infrared binoculars: “All right, you there in the north corner. I see you.” He couldn’t actually denounce the clients or throw them out, but he did create such an unnerving ambiance—prowling about the halls, poking into the steam room, switching on floodlights, sticking his head into the cubicles through hinged panels in the walls and floors—that many a queen was carried out in a strait-jacket. So he lived out a full life and died at an advanced age of prostate cancer.

  Another was not so fortunate. For a while he worked as a concierge, but he harried the tenants beyond endurance, so they finally banded together and were preparing to burn him alive in the furnace—which he habitually either over-or understoked—when the police intervened. He was removed from office for his own protection. He then secured a position as a subway guard, but was summarily dismissed for using a sharpened pole to push people into the cars during the rush hour. He subsequently worked as a bus driver, but his habit of constantly looking around to see what the passengers were doing precipitated a wreck, from which he emerged shattered in mind and body. He became a psychopathic informer, writing interminable letters to the FBI which J. Edgar used as toilet paper, being of a thrifty temperament. He sank ever lower and ended up Latah for cops, and would spend his days in front of any precinct that would tolerate his presence, having been barred from the area in and about Police Headquarters as a notorious bringdown.