Interzone

by William S. Burroughs

  The vibrating chair receives the yellow cop killer, burns his piles white as a dead leech.

  Death dressed as an admiral hang Billy Budd with his own hands and Judge Lynch sneer, “Dead suns can’t witness.” But the witness will rise from the concrete of Hudson with a fossil prick to point out the innocent wise guy.

  And when the graves start yielding up the dead—Goddammit I pay rent in perpetuity for the old gash, now she rise like Christ in drag.

  It’s the final gadget, the last of the big-time gimmicks—wires straight into the hypothalamus orgasm center! White nerves spilling out at ear and winking lewdly from corner of the eye, the queen twitch his switch and pant, “Gawd you heat my synapses! Turn me on DaddyOOOOOOOOOOH!!”

  “You cheap bitch! You nausea artist! I wouldn’t demean myself to connect your horrible old synapses.” So the queen has slink a slug in the pay toilet and blew her top off with an overcharge.

  So this is Smiles Benson, your loathsome counselor. You can just tell old Smiles anything, so come on in, kiddies, and let your hair down with a gash and show me all your interesting sores.

  Drop your pants, sister, my Mary hides behind the prostate trap with her protoplasm showing, dissolve herself and run out her bloody cunt. Must be careful of the word bloody. Quite thick in England they tell me. Wouldn’t want to offend the office manager and he take back the keys to the office shithouse. Always keep it locked so no Sinister Stranger sneak a shit, give all the kids in the office some horrible disease; and old Mr. Anker from Accounting, his arms scarred like a junky from Wassermanns, spray plastic over it before he travail there.

  Prostate white as an eye receives the delight massage, shoot it up the spine to the hypothalamus with delicious bone tickles, the spine squeeze the body in spasms of delight and throws its white juice.

  Put the orgasm line direct in the hypothalamus socket and we are in business. My line is Total Disability and Termite-Proof Orgasms. It’s the American way, folks, if you want a thing done do it yourself first, then mass-reduce anyone stand still for it, anyplace you can find traction. Hanging is an outmoded trip around the world to the Hypothalamus Orgasm Center. England missed the bus. Don’t break your neck to get an orgasm, folks. Buy Uncle Lee’s portable charge set, turn you on direct connection. Shit sure contract your spine in spasms.

  “Turn the cocksucker off!! I’m Stoned!!”

  Technicians: “Fluid drained out! Hydraulic switch ain’t worth a fart.” He mixes a bicarbonate of soda and belches into his hand. White bone juice spurt out.

  The Jordanian soldier, convict of selling a map of the barracks privy to Jew agents, hanged in the marketplace of Amman, crawl up onto the gallows poop deck to hoist the Black Wind Sock of the Insect Trust. Black rocks and great brown lagoons invade the world silent and sure as junk taking the sick cells.

  There stands the deserted transmitter, crystal tubes click on the message of retreat from the Human Hill.

  “Fellow worshippers of the Centipede God, there is no halfway house. To compromise at animal level were to invite carnivorous disaster, and as such I protest. We gotta make it all the way lest any citizen raise his voice to say, ‘I do not check those deeds that you have done!’ ”

  Only the dry hum of wings rub together and giant centipedes crawl in the ruined city of our long home.

  Thermodynamics has won at a crawl…. Orgone balked at the post…. Christ bled…. Time ran out.

  “We were caught with our pants down,” admits General Peterson. “They rimmed the shit out of us.”

  Will the centipede stand in the spine like he’s supposed? Will Greg let his bone-teasing lover Brad hang him for kicks? He shove his hypothalamus, rotten with stasis sores all over it, into Brad’s face and scream, “Break it, Brad, and let the white juice flow! Bury me under the school privy, let the winds of East Texas whimper through my ribs filling up with young boy sweet shit.”

  The spectators scream through the Track. The electronic brain shivers berserk in blue and pink and chlorophyll orgasms, spitting out money printed on rolls of toilet paper, condoms full of ice cream, Kotex hamburgers—FBI files spurt out in a great blast of bone meal, garden tools and barbecue sets whistle through the air, skewer the spectators. A million jukeboxes truck and jitterbug and waltz and mambo across the floor, snatch money from the spectators, shove it up the slot. A rousing Bronx cheer throws a silent greased spray of glass across the bars and soda fountains and lunch rooms of America and the jukebox goes out like a dead electric eye. Mixmasters attack the markets and fields, orchards and warehouses, flood the world with juice. Bendixes tear clothes from spectators, snap up sheets and rugs. The Brain spews out test results; positive Wassermann ejects a huge rubber spirochete, albuminous urine throws out an artificial kidney, Contraceptive Unit rams a squealing peccary up a woman’s snatch with vaginal jelly; the cream separator has cut a cow in half, and the automatic milker jack boys off to white bone juice, carries it away in slop bucket to feed the hogs that never touch the ground, supported in plastic slings, great globs of fat folding over the mouth, like a gorged tick—tiny hooves stick out the white lard wiggling feeble. And the halitosis tester billows out rings of pure black stink, sear the lungs like burning shit, and the electric chair executes at ten-minute intervals equipped with built-in court and jail.

  “Just feed your criminal into the machine and his cremated ashes fall out the other end in a plastic Chimu Funeral Urn. Infallible electronic jurisprudence prevent miscarriages and Suburbia is spared screams for mercy or some nausea artist strip on the gallows with a hard-on, scream, ‘I’m ready for a meet with my maker!’ and leer at the doctor so nasty or roll around the gas chamber floor shitting and ejaculating, while the sheriff whimpers at the witness slot—and who want to see the prick turn red like an old blood sausage and burst open when the switch goes home? The machine does it all, folks.”

  General Peterson leaps on a Bendix and careens around the track at supersonic speed, his voice falls out of his empty wake of air—“Hold that line, boys! Exterminate the bastards!” He is washed away screaming in a river of DDT.

  The thinking machine runs out of thought, and sucks the brains out of everybody with stainless steel needles glittering in pinball pinks and gas flares and sky rockets.

  Outside, the dry husk of insects….

  Now the thoughtful reader may have observed certain tendencies in the author might be termed unwholesome. In fact some of you may be taken aback by the practices of this character. The analyst say: “Mr. Lee have you not consider, to thread thy cock on a lifelong oyster string of pearly cunts and get with normal suburban kicks is chic as Cecil Beaton’s ass this season in Hell?”

  I call in my friends and we spend whole evenings listen to the Bendix sing “Sweet and Low,” “The Wash Machine Boogie”; and the sinister cream separator, a living fossil, bitter as rancid yak butter, seeks the bellowing Hoover with a leopard’s grunt. Suburbia hath horrors to sate a thousand castrates and stem the topless cocks of Israel.

  Going my way, brother? The hitchhiker walks home through gathering mushroom clouds, and we meet in the Dead Ass Café, to break glass ashtrays over our foreheads pulsing in code … slip with a broken neck to the ground-floor mezzanine and put sickness up the cunt of Mary, yearly wounded with a frightened girl.

  Brothers, the limit is not yet. I will blow my fuse and blast my brains with a black short-circuit of arteries, but I will not be silent nor hold longer back the enema of my word hoard, been dissolving all the shit up there man and boy forty-three years and who ever held an enema longer? I claim the record, folks, and any Johnny-Come-Late think he can out-nausea the Maestro, let him shove his ass forward and do a temple dance with his piles.

  “Not bad, young man, not bad. But you must learn the meaning of discipline. Now you will observe in my production every word got some kinda awful function fit into mosaic on the shithouse wall of the world. That’s discipline, son. Always at all times know thy wants and demand same like a thousand junkies
storm the crystal spine clinics cook down the Gray Ladies.”

  The bartender has kick the Sellubi, his foot sink in the ass and the Sellubi comes across the dusty floor. The bartender braces himself against the brass rail, put other foot in the Sellubi’s back and pops him off into the street.

  “Step right up ladies and gents to see this character at the risk of all his appendages and extremities and appurtenances will positively shoot himself out of a monster asshole….” An outhouse is carried in on the shoulders of Southern Negroes in dungarees, singing spirituals.

  “And the walls come tumbling down.”

  The outhouse falls in a cloud of powdered wood and termites, and the Human Projectile stands there in his black shit suit. A giant rubber asshole in a limestone cliff clicks open and sucks the Human Projectile in like spaghetti. Noise of distant thunder and the Projectile pops out with a great fart, flies a hundred feet through the air into a net supported by four gliders. His shit suit splits and a round worm emerges and does a belly dance. The worm suit peels off like a condom and the Aztec Youth stands naked with a hard-on in the rising sun, ejaculates bloody crystals with a scream of agony. The crowd moans and whimpers and writhes. They snatch up the stones dissolve in red and crystal light…. The boy has gone away through an invisible door.

  Nimun with sullen cat eyes look for a scrap of advantage, he snap it up and carry it away to the secret place where he lives and no one can find the way to his place. Old queens claw wildly at his bronze body, scream, “Show me your secret place, Nimun. I’ll give you all my hoard of rotten ectoplasm.”

  “What place? You dreaming, mister? I live in the Mills Hotel.”

  “But WHERE YOU BEEN??????????”

  The Skip Tracer has come to disconnect your hypothalamus for the nonpayment of orgones:

  “I got a fact process here, Jack. You haven’t paid your orgone bill since you was born already and used to squeak out of the womb, ‘Don’t pay it Ma. Think of your unborn child. You wanta get the best for me,’ like a concealed rat. Know this, Operators, Black and Gray Marketeers, Pimps and White Slavers, Paper Hangers of the world: no man can con the Skip Tracer when he knocks on your door with a fact process. He who gives out no orgones will be disconnected from life for the nonpayment.”

  “But give me time. I’m caught short….”

  “Time ran out in the 5th at Tropical…. Disconnect him boys.”

  “Lost my shoe up him,” grumbles the bartender. “My feet are killing me, I got this condition of bunions you wouldn’t believe it. Turn on the ventilator, Mike. When a man live on other people’s shit he can fart out a stink won’t quit. I knew this one Sellubi could fart out smoke rings, and they is bad to shoplift with their prehensile piles….”

  “Order in the court! You are accused of soliciting with prehensile piles. What have you to say in your defense?”

  “Just cooling them off, Judge. Raw and bleeding … wouldn’t you?”

  Judge: “That’s beside the point…. What do you recommend, Doctor?”

  Dr. Burger: “I recommend hypothalamectomy.”

  The Sellubi turns white as a dead leech and shits his blood out in one solid clot. Warm spring rain washes shit off a limestone statue of a life-size boy hitchhiking with his cock. “GOING MY WAY?” in dead neon on a red-brick dais overlook a deserted park in East St. Louis.

  The Hoover bellows retreat and the Business Man says to his honey-face, “I’m tired, sweet thing, and got the rag on.”

  The team hangs Brad in the locker room. Ceremonial dress of shoulder pads and jockstrap. His friend will pull the jockstrap down, let the cock spurt free and break his neck with a stiff arm. He is buried under the school outhouse where black widows lurk is bad to bite young boy ass.

  Fearless boy angels fly through the locker room jacking off, “Whooooooooooooooo”—they jet away in white wake of jissom, leave a crystal laugh hang in the air.

  Transmute your substance…. Burn the black shit blue. No disgust on the human tightrope. Stay on that rope brothers and sisters and those who evade the sex census holed up in the mountains of Interzone.

  No one transmute by proxy, nor send the chauffeur with thy pelvis in a hat box, nor Nubian Expeditor bearing your hypothalamus in a crystal cylinder. Folks, you must bring your own ass in at the door. The Saint can’t come for you and why should I repeat myself in your horrible old body disgust me already with stasis sores?

  Negroes with sad monkey eyes stand in a jungle clearing—animal substance invades the thickening face—disease of the race in blood and bones, and white lymphogranuloma swell the groins. Little toe amputates spontaneous, it’s a dirty nigger trick, and the bleached-blond-passing replica crook her little toe elegant, it drop off clean and bloodless on Mrs. Worldly’s drawing-room floor.

  Great raindrops fall like crystal skulls through the green air, and Portuguese gauchos with huge black mustaches ride through the clearing, sing strange sad songs. Planters use cured Nigra balls on the golf course, whacking them over the gallows. Their women sit on the club veranda. Peeled balls float like opal chips in jars of glycerin at withered yellow necks, a resplendent tiara at the governor’s ball catch the Aladdin lamp sputter of burning insect wings. The woman dreams of a Black Mamba and wake shrieking, “The houseboy fucked me!”

  “Rusty load of ectoplasm … gotta score for a medium tonight,” said the arty ghost. “Don’t have a regular stand like some lucky pricks go around all the time on the nod. Earth-bound to the monkey three hundred years man boy and ghost.”

  Spontaneous amputation of cock occurs among boys, it just turn to shit and pop off with a fart. The boy picks his cock out of shit shale, the careful archaeologist, and sprays shellac all over it—subject to turn to dust when it hits the air after all those shit-bound years.

  Johnny make it all the way in St. Louis before spellbound audience—throw off his pink bathrobe naked as the Young Corn God, hang himself for keeps ejaculating crystal skulls…. There was this citizen have a circus act, hang himself with a special elastic rope. A dangerous act they tell me, you gotta check the rope for elasticity before every performance. In St. Louis he didn’t check the rope and his neck snapped, he was carried out by leering cops with a paralyzed hard-on … and the last spasm on the operating table under floodlight—a trouper to the end. The wind sock sags and the croaker shakes his head and the nurse covers Johnny’s prick with a sheet.

  So he turns to limestone, and setting his hard cock in the cunt of shadow, fades down the mountainside, and pipes call “Taps for Danny Boy” and “Johnny’s So Long at the Fair.”

  The Ringmaster has pulled a rope switch … the old army game. “The One, the Only, Midway Johnny, though his spine breaks in his neck, gives the performance of all time!”

  The Dreamer—impresario of that Los Angeles cemetery underlines mortality with shit—gilds Johnny with angel wings springing from an outhouse on the tomb of a rich old queen rolls right over in her grave.

  “Just build a privy over me, boys,” said the rustler to his bunk-mates, and the sheriff nods in dark understanding. Druid blood stirring in the winds of Panhandle, and bloody rites to the Cow God are consummate in the Sacred Cottonwood groves. Johnny is eaten in Kansas City by bankers and brokers with black mustache and gold watch chain.

  “Now that’s what I call tenderloin,” B.Q. says, pensively studying a sliver of red meat on the end of his toothpick.

  “Yeah, but the meat’s gotta hang…. Now in Dodge City they are serving raw unparalyzed boys is subject to come up on a poor old queen and slice her motherfucking head off and rummage through her intestines for gold fillings. Eager beaver might swallow a gold crown with the jissom.”

  “But here the boys is cut down to eating size the way I like to see a cut of boy, Clem.”

  The Cow God and the Horse God, the Bank God, the Cop God and the Eunuch God of Small Business claim their yearly crop of Young Gods in the Vibrating Chair, the Green Outhouse and the rope sing like wind in wire.

 
And the broker shits Johnny out in his marble shithouse with sunken bath, smokes his great greasy Havana, chewing it slow and dirty, and take the chewed end out to look at and lick his mustache and belch.

  Lean sick junkies play Banker and Broker in Washington Square.

  “Billy Budd must hang! All hands aft to see this exhibit.” Billy Budd gives up the ghost with a great fart, and the sail is rent from top to bottom, and the petty officers fall back confounded…. “Billy” is a transvestite Liz. “There’ll be a spot of bother about this,” mutters the Master-at-Arms, breathing into his halitosis tester.

  The tars scream with rage at the cheating profile in the rising sun. The Liz gives a few tired old kicks and throws a little sliver of black shit curved like a pigtail.

  “Is she dead?”

  “So who cares?”

  “Are we going to stand still for this, boys? The officers pull a switch on us,” said young Hassan, Ship’s Uncle.

  “Gentlemen,” said Captain Vere, “I cannot find words to castigate this foul and unnatural act whereby a boy’s mother take over his body, infiltrate her horrible old substance right onto a decent boat and, with bare tits hanging out, unfurl the nastiest colors of the spectroscope.”

  All the world’s a gallows and we all play with our parts, some are towel boys, others lewd doctors, most of us just dirty old men whimper at life’s Glory Hole.

  A young kid has wandered in off the range with the winds of Texas in his hair. He wipes his ass pensively with a Mandrake.

  A great black tornado has sucked meaning from the Cyclone Belt. Citizens crawl out of the cellar in a blighted subdivision, look after the cyclone with canceled castrate eyes….

  “Lawd! Lawd! I don’t even feel like a human.”

  “At least the TV is left.”

  They squeak out a feeble “Hallelujah.”

  See, the sheriff frame every good-looking kid in the country, say, “Guess I’ll have to hang some cunt for the new frisson. He hang this cute little corn-fed thing, her tits come to attention, squirt milk in his eye blind him like a spitting cobra.