Interzone

by William S. Burroughs

  “Interesting, don’t you think?”

  “Decidedly,” says the venomous thin-faced Colonel, circumcises a boy with his cigar cutter, lights his cigar with the foreskin.

  The boy like a nun so pure and alive for the moment to take the death vow it hurts, a soft blue blast of sadness. Boy grin dissolves slow into the sunlight over the bullhead hole, quarry, vacant lot with a pond in it. The boy looks down at his bloody arms marked with the needle-wound stigmata. Soft sadness of death. Riddled child cancer. “Hope to God the President’s Radium Bicycle gets here on time,” says the White House Press Department, looking nervously at his watch.

  Mirror suits scatter into white sand desert, reveal the vicious leer of the brazen victim.

  The hangman in doublet is adjusting the knot with bestial leers and obscene gestures.

  A pig forty feet high is sliced open by a huge neon-tube knife. Amusement park stretch in roller-coastering black lace to the horizons of smoky cities.

  Greg sits in the school toilet. Clean sharp turds fall out his tight young ass (turds like yellow clay washed clean in summer rain covered with crystal snail tracks in the morning sun lights the green flame of grass).

  The man with black Japanese mustache, each hair frozen in white grease. (Black branches with the white ice cover catch the morning sun over a frozen lake when we get back from the hunting trip.)

  Ambivalent alcoholic hangs himself with a great Bronx cheer, blasting out all his teeth, and tears at the noose. (Shivering dog breaks his teeth on the steel trap under a cold white moon.)

  “Candy, I Call My Sugar Candy.” Hanged boy descends on a rope of toffee, comes in the mouth of a fourteen-year-old girl eats toffee and taps out “Candy” on the neon-lighted table—outside, the blight of Oklahoma beaten by the calm young eyes.

  The boy has found the vibrator in his mother’s closet. They won’t be back before five … plenty of time. Drops pants to ankles, cock springs up hard and free with that lovely flip make old queen bones stir with root nerves and ligaments. He grease the tip, and it turn into a vulgar cock given to Bronx cheers at moment of orgasm and other shocking departures from good taste. (Emily Post is writing a million-word P.S. to Etiquette, entitled The Cock in Our House.) He stands front mirror, stick it slow up his ass to the glad gland give a little fart of pleasure. Bubble filled with fart gas hang in the air heavy as ectoplasm dispersed by the winds of morning sweep the dust out with slow old man hands coughing and spitting in the white blast of dawn. Sperm splash the mirror, turn black and go out in a short circuit with ozone smell of burning iron.

  Greg has come up behind Brad in the park, goose him and his hand sink in.

  “Hello, Brad.” He pulls his hand out with a resounding fart and rubs ambergris over his body, poses for Health and Strength in faggot-skin jockstrap.

  So there he stand on top of the filing cabinet naked as a prick hang out in the muted blue incense of the lesbian temple. (Cold-eyed nuns rustle by, metallic purity leaves a whiff of ozone.) Funny how a man comes back to something he left behind in a Peoria hotel drawer 1932.

  You are nearing the frontier where all the pitchmen and street peddlers, three-card-monte quick-con artists of the world spread out their goods. Old pushers, embittered by years of failure, mutter through the endless gray lanes of junk amok with a joint (i.e., a syringe), shooting the passersby. The tourist is torn in pieces by Soul Short-Change hypes fight over pieces. (Piranha fish tear each other to great ribbons of black-market beef. White bone glistens through, covered with iridescent ligaments.)

  Neon tubes glow in the blood of the world. Everyone see his neighbor clear as an old message on the shithouse wall stand out in white flames of a burning city.

  Greg turns away with a cry of defeat. Bone ache for the Marble God smiling into park covered with weeds.

  Fish thrown to the seal by naked boy grin for ooze in verdigris: KEEP THE CHANGE.

  Smile sweet as a blast of ozone from a June subway, teeth tinkle like little porcelain balls.

  Hold your tight nuts frozen in limestone convolutions.

  “I’ll be right over stick a greased peccary up her Hairy Ear.” Albanian argot for cunt.

  Sea of frozen shit in the morning sun and maggots twelve feet long stir underneath, the crust breaks here and there. Asshole farts up sulfur gases and black boiling mud.

  Crisp green lettuce heads glitter with frost under a tinkling crystal moon.

  “We’ll make a heap of money, Clem, if the price is right.” He plucks a boy’s balls, look over careful for lettuce blight, probing veins and ligaments with gentle old-woman fingers, feel soft for the vein in the pink dawn light; and the young boy wake naked out of wet dream, watch his cock spurt into the morning.

  The boy flies screaming in a jet of black blood, turns a red tube in the air, ineffable throbbing pink, rains soft pink cushions on your ass in a soft slow come.

  The boy has cut off his limestone balls and tossed them to you with a grin—light on water. Now the body sinks with a slow Bronx cheer to a torn pink balloon hang on rusty nail in the barn. Pink and purple lights play over it from a great black crane swing over rubbish heap go back to stone and trees.

  His neck has grown around the rope like a tree. (Vine root in old stone wall. Voice fade to decay, loose a soundless puff of dust, fall slow through the sunlight.)

  The boy has eaten a pat of butter, turns into middle-aged cardiac. “That’s the way I like to see them,” says Doctor Dodo Rindfest—known as Doodles to his many friends. “Them old cardiac rams alla time die up a reluctant ewe.”

  The old queen wallows in bathtub of boy balls. Others jack off over him jitterbugging, walking through the Piney Woods with a .22 in the summer dawn (chiggers pinpoint the boy’s groin in red dots), hanging on the back of freight trains careen down the three-mile grade into a cowboy ballad bellowed out by idiot cows through the honky-tonks of Panhandle.

  Screaming round the roller coaster in a stolen car, play chicken with a bronze scorpion big as a trailer truck on route 666 between Lynchburg and Danville.

  The boy rise in sea-green marble to jack off on the stones of Venice invisible to the ravening castrates of the world, fill the canals with miasmic mist of whimpering halitosis can’t get close enough to offend.

  The boy has hit you with soft snowballs burst in light burn you soft and pink and cold as cocaine.

  Don’t walk out on a poor old queen leave her paralyzed come to an empty house. Spurt into the cold spring wind whip the white wash in Chicago, into the sizzling white desert, into the limestone quarry, into the old swimming hole, bait a boy’s hook for a throbbing sunfish burn the black water with light.

  The wind sighs through the silk stocking hang in clear blue of Mexico clear against the mountain a wind sock of sweet life. (Sweet smell of boy balls and rusty iron cool in the mouth.)

  Attic under the round window eye. Summer dawn the two young bodies glow incandescent pink copulations, cock sink into the brown pink asshole up the pearly prostate, sing out along the white nerves. First soft licks of rimming tighten balls off like a winch up the ass. Rim on, MacDuff, till the pool be drained and fill with dead brown leaves, dirty snow drift across my body frozen in the kiss wakes the soft purple flower of shit.

  The boy burglar fucked in the long jail with the Porter Tuck—a bullfighter of my acquaintance recently gored in the right lung—in the lungs risk the Great Divide, ousted from the cemetery for the nonpayment come gibbering into the queer bar with a mouldy pawn ticket to pick up the back balls of Tent City, where castrate salesmen sing the IBM song in quavering falsetto.

  Balls on the window ledge fall like a broken flowerpot onto the pavement of arson yearly wounded to the sea.

  Slow cunt tease refuse until the conversion of the Jew to Diesel go around raping decent cars with a nasty old Diesel Conversion Unit cancerous, so red the rosette, on earth as in heaven this day our breadfruit of cunt.

  Crabs frolic through his forest, wrestling with the angle hard-on al
l night thrown in the home full of valor by adolescent rustler, hide in the capacious skirts of home on the range and the hunter come home from the Venus Hill take the back road to the rusty limestone cave.

  Rock and roll around the floor scream for junk fix the Black Yen ejaculate over the salt marshes where nothing grow, not even a mandrake. (Year of the rindpest. Everything died, even the hyenas had to bite a man’s balls and run like smash and grab.)

  Talk long enough say something. It’s the law of averages … a few chickens … only way to live.

  Don’t neglect the fire extinguisher and stand by with the Kotex in case one of these Southern belles get hot and burst into flame. (Bronx cheer of a fire-eater.)

  Cleave fast to mayhem and let not arson be far from thee and clamp murder to thy breast with WHOOOOOOOOPS of seal leap at your throat in Ralph’s. Not a bit alarmed about that. Think of something else.

  We are prepared to divulge all and to state that on a Thursday in the month of September 1917, we did, in the garage of the latter, at his solicitations and connivance, endeavor to suck the cock of one George Brune Brubeck, the Bear’s Ass, which act disgust me like I try to bite it off and he slap me and curse and blaspheme like Christopher Marlowe with the shiv through his eye the way it wasn’t fitting a larval fag should hear any old nameless asshole unlock his rusty word hoard.

  The blame for this atrociously incomplete act rest solidly on the basement of Brubeck, my own innocence of any but the most pure reflex move of self-defense and -respect to eliminate this strange serpent thrust so into my face at risk of my Man Life, so I, not being armed (unfortunately) with a blunderbuss, had recourse to nature’s little white soldiers—our brave defenders by land—and bite his ugly old cock in a laudable attempt to circumcise him thereby reduce to a sanitary condition. He, not understanding the purity of my motives, did inopportunely resist my well-meaning would-be surgical intervention, which occasioned to him light contusions of a frivolous nature. Whereupon he did loose upon my innocent head a blast of blasphemies like burning lions or unsuccessful horse abortionists cooked in slow Lux to prevent the shrinkage of their worm.

  We are not unaware of the needs of our constituents. Never out of our mind, and you may rest assured that we will leave no turd interred to elucidate these rancid oil scandals. We will not be intimidated by lesbians armed with hog castrators and fly the Jolly Roger of bloody Kotex, nor succumb to the blandishments of a veteran queen in drag of Liz in riding pants. Even the Terrible Mother will be touched by the grace of process.

  So leave us throw aside the drained crankcase of Brubeck and proceed to unleaven the yeast bread of cunt and unfurl the jolly condom…. I walk up to this chick, flash a condom on her like a piecea tin, you dig, and I say, “Come with me.”

  “Fresh,” she say and slap me hard, the way I know it is this impersonator is a insult. I insinuate a clap up her ass without so much as by-your-leave.

  So I says, “I thought you was McCoy. You look so nice and female to an old cowhand.”

  “Oh go impersonate a purple-assed baboon, you stupid old character. I’d resist you to the last bitch in any sex.”

  I stand on the Fifth Amendment, will not answer question of the senator from Wisconsin. “Are you or have you ever been a member of the male sex?” They can’t make Dicky whimper on the boys. Know how I take care of crooners, don’t you? Just listen to them. A word to the wise guy. I mean you gotta be careful of politics these days, some old department get physical kick him right in his Coordinator. Well, that’s the hole story, and I guess I oughta know after all these years. Wellcome and Burroughs to the family party, a member in hrumph good standing we hope.

  Castrates, Don’t Let The Son Set On You Here—precocious little prick could get it by ass mosses. (Seaweed in a dark green grotto.)

  The Philosophic Doctor sits on his rattan-ass Maugham veranda drinking pink gin fades to a Manhattan analyst looking over a stack of notes.

  “So our murder was, it seems, the bitten Brubeck, who has since recovered and spread his hideous progeny from the wards of Seattle to the parishes of New Orleans, nameless blubby things crawl out of ash pits all covered with shitty sheets, walk around gibber like dead geese.”

  This refers to a nightmare of the subject’s childhood in which he found himself threatened by two figures covered with soiled sheets—poison juices, Goddammit! Dream occur after the subject’s collaborating father read him “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” where, as you will doubtless recall, one woman got her head cut clean off and rammed up the chimney. So, Brubeck, you know what you can do with your Liz bitch; and if you don’t, my orangutan friend will show you.

  “I have frequently observed in the course of my practices, hrumph, I mean practice, that homosexuals often express a willingness to, humph, copulate with headless women—a consummation devoutly to be wished. As one subject expressed it, ‘Now I read where this chicken live a week without a head. They feed it through this tube stick out so the neck don’t heal over and close up the way a cunt would heal over she didn’t open it up every month with an apple corer, to let the old blood out. I mean a broad don’t need that head anyhoo.’ And recall that it was Medusa’s head turned the boys to stone. I suggest that the perilous part of a woman is her hypothalamus, sending solid female static fuck up a man’s synapses and leave him paralyzed from the waist down.”

  So I am prepared to state that the above is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, so help me God or any other outfit when my dignity and sovereignty be threatened by brutal short-arm aggression. Sworn before me, Harry Q. T. Burford on this day.

  “We must have a long talk, son. You see there are men and there are, well, women; and women are different from men.”

  “In precisely what way, Father?” said young Cesspoll incisively.

  “Well, they’re, well, they’re different, that’s all. You’ll understand when you’re older; and, hurumph, that’s what I want to talk to you about. When you do get older.”

  “Come see me tonight in my apartment under the school privy. Show you something interesting,” said the janitor, drooling green coca juice.

  Women seethe with hot poison juices eat it off in a twink. Laws of hospitality be fucked. Take your recalcitrant ass to your own trap. No drones in my dormitories.

  “I’m no one’s live one,” sneered the corpse to the necrophile. “Go back to your own people, you frantic old character.”

  “Oh be careful. There they go again,” says the old queen as his string break, spilling his balls across the floor. “Stop them, will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don’t just stand there and let the master’s balls roll into the coal bin.”

  “Is them my peeled balls those kids play marbles with? Why shit sure. Boy, who give you the right to play with my balls?”

  “They revert to the public domain after not being claimed forty year, mister.”

  Well, the wind-up is the fag marries the transvestite Liz disguised as a boy in drag, former heartthrob of Greg hang him for kicks and retire to a locker in Grand Central, subsisting on suitcase and shoe leather. So many tasty ways to prepare it, girls—simmered in saddle soap, singe-broiled in brilliantine, smoked over smoldering ashtrays.

  We are in a long white corridor of leaves lithp sunlight.

  The Old West dies slow on Hungarian gallows, so while he is fixing (can’t hit the hypothalamus anymore) we will shake down the trap for hidden miles and tragic flaws hang a golden lad with his own windblown hair.

  When is a boy not a boy? When he is buoyed up by the wind, and the sailplane falls silent as erection.

  The blind vet is on the way over to fuck me in the Grand Canal bent over the Academy Bridge. Someone take a picture and cops the film fest for a big brass bidet.

  The lamprey seeks a silver fish in the green lagoon.

  It would be better off dead. Broken leg. Told by an idiot broken down there you must hear. It is out of the woodpile and into the fire that monkey, and Denmark is rotten with a fu
neral pyre of bullshit.

  “Look into my eyes, baby, mirror of the mad come.”

  “I can see inside the blue flames running on these long white nerves burn the spine in a slow squeeeeeeeeze.”

  Mouths leap forward on flesh tubes, clamp and twist.

  Johnny on all fours and Marv sucking him and running his fingers down the thigh backs and light over the ass and outfields of the ball park. Johnny’s body begins to hump in the middle, each hump a little longer and squeezier like oily fingers inside squeeze your balls soft as pink down, squeeze those sweet marshmallows slow slow slow.

  He throws his head back with a great wolf howl.

  Call the coroner; my skill naught avail.

  Mine it out of your limestone bones, those fossil messages of arthritis; read the metastasis with blind fingers.

  Where else you gonna look? Into the atrophied nuts of the priest, coyote of death? (A coyote is character hangs around the halls of the immigration department in Mexico, D.F., engage to help you for a fee with his inside connections.)

  “I can get you straight in to the District Supervisor. Got an in. Of course, it cost. I don’t want much—all go pay off my tremendous connections.” His voice breaks in a pathic scream.

  “Didja get a stand-on?” said the vulgar old queen to the virginal boy, trembling in white flame of contempt. “Land sakes,” said the queen, “so young so cold so fair—I love it.” (Silver statue in the moonlight.)

  The swindler enters Heaven in a blast of bullshit. Here’s a man hang self opening night of the Met. Cut throat of entire staff, take over the stage, single-handed scene-stealer. Prance out in Isolde drag, sing the “Liebestod” in a hideous falsetto, ending in burlesque striptease. “Take it off! Take it off!” chant his stooges, as pink step-ins, stiff with ass blood, fly out over the audience, she spring the trap. Blood burn to neon pink light through his spine spasms and grinding bone grins. Flesh turn to black shit and flake off—wind and rain and bones on mouldy beach. The queen is a hard-faced boy, patch over one eye, parrot on shoulder, say, “Dead men tell no tales—or do they?” He prods the skull with a cutlass, and a crab scuttles out. The boy reaches down and pick up a scroll.