Interzone

by William S. Burroughs

  “The Map! The Map!”

  The map turns to shitty toilet paper in his hands, blow across a vacant lot in East St. Louis, catch on clean barbed wire and burn with a blue flame.

  The boy pulls off the patch, parrot flies into the jungle, cutlass turns to machete. He is studying the Map and swatting sand flies.

  The author has gathered his multiple personalities for a rally at Tent City on the banks of the river Jordan. “Come on in and park your piles, boys. You is Burroughs and Wellcome. Now I wanta hear something artistic like the time you got out of that old black Model A, Cowper’s juice seeping right through your thin schoolboy slacks, and jack off into the dogwood and your jissom turn to little white flowers in the air fall so slow and sweet through the air.

  “He’s the Last Dead End Kid.”

  “He ain’t talking.”

  “Well, let him soften up a bit.”

  “Wait till his balls dissolve down to little black frog eggs.” (Tadpoles wriggle away in the black lagoon.) “Then he’ll talk, and be glad to talk.”

  “Yonny, glo home.”

  “This is my home, you Chinaman cocksucker. Fuck off, you! And remember, there is only one captain of those shits—as I affectionately call my S.P.s, Subsidiary Personalities. You nothing but an L.S.P.: Local Subsidiary Personality. Get forward, or I shall put a ball through all your heads.”

  “You don’t got the balls, Gertie.”

  “Why, you Southern white trash rim a shittin’ nigger for an eyecup of P. G.!”

  “You dare get sassy and fat with me? You tired old Southern belle, nobody care if you come in or not except for your unsanitary habits eatin’ with prehensile piles the way it break up the Family Reunion.”

  “And what’s eatin’ you, you little intimidate prick? Nobody goin’ to cut our nuts off while I’m around, and I can kick the shit out of any Liz inna Zone. Now we drop that fucking Lucha Libre dyke down the marl hole she crawl up out of. Strictly from Loch Ness. Strange and undesirable serpent. So for the Chrissake, kid—make with the smile. The show must go on.

  “And as for you, you black-assed mealy-mouthed cuntsucker always mutter around about, ‘Lawsy, boss, I believe in life, boss,’ just as sure as that old river yonder, life flow through you, sit still in the springtime, wash me back to old Virginia and cornhole me up my tater … spitting cotton.”

  A delicious frisson offer up your pink ass sweat like a young boy’s lip to a black buck in a nigger shack make you scream and whisper and moan for it. “Aw now I couldn’t screw the young Massa! I’m a good nigger.”

  “I’ll teach you to brown a golden lad, you hog-balled bastard. Come hawg-cutting day. Hmm, on second thought …”

  “Please! Rasmus, please!”

  “I ain’t uppity, boss. Better put your pants on. Might dirty your little white ass sitting around naked in a nigger shack.”

  “Yes, sir, that old river seen a heap of folks come and go, shit and die. He flood out in the spring, and he shrink down in the long heat of summer, them crawdads crawl way down into the earth. Ever suck the sweet cool water up out of a crawdad hole?”

  “For the love of God, sheriff, lock up this rusty word hoard.”

  “Now, you nameless assholes, remember I do the shitting around here, all the shitting; and any wise prick try to dip into my ass is going to be kicked right down the marl hole with the Gibbering Larvals. I mean, show your culture. When the Massa shits, keep your distance, folks. He is subject to eject a choking cloud of dried yellow hepatitis fallout.” (A puffball bursts in Missouri field. Dry heat of August. Sound of insects.)

  “Now it is chiefly you two half-assed entities I am concerned with. Your recalcitrant and perfidious maneuvers constitute a menace to the enterprise, which, as I well aware, you sworn to sabotage. Scumunist pricks, slop out of my public trough. And the Chink Dummy yacks party line on a queer barstool, blatting out the Formulas of Doom. And you, Johnny-Come-Lately, advance and be recognized. What’re you now, a cock biter? Well, I don’t think we have an opening for a man of your caliber. Keep you on file.”

  “Filthy little beast.” She tweaks the Child in the nuts, and he doubles over retching. “Faugh!” she screams, starting back. “Bitch dog! Puking cock-roach!” She splits his lips with an expert one-finger slap—like a dog chain across the face.

  He looks at her face gray as junk eyes betrayed to death go out in empty light sockets. Blue smoke drifts out.

  Come in, please! Come in, please! Can’t move a cell of my body without got the Word. I’m a synopsis Latah. Nobody know my trouble, and especially not Jesus, the miracle artist. Something he don’t like? Go make with the miracle, James, I show you how. Now the perpetrating of miracles constitute a brazen attempt to louse up the universe. When you set up something as MIRACLE, you deny the very concept of FACT, establish a shadowy and spurious court infested by every variety of coyote and shady fixer, beyond Court of Fact.

  Idiot raconteur cling to you like a linguaphone. Ever hear “This is the penwiper of my brother-in-law” repeat a million times? Once those sockets in your head, can’t turn nobody out no more. The sockets weep little tears of blue flame.

  Now look, none of this trying to slide in the pitch on the chick deal you got cooking. Back there in Bebop jive talk. This is not an escort service but a functioning (after a fashion) organism. Positively no pimping in the aorta.

  Run fingers over her chassis light as moths leave little blue phosphorescent wake burn slow behind. Converge a soft blue crackle up her cunt and burn inside her begin to squirm and wiggle and moan. (Burn her tits.)

  “Of course I’m sure of ultimate ‘victory,’ but the little prick’s got the orgone supply sew tight up as young boy nuts.”

  “We gotta find a way to get at it, boss.”

  “Mindless idiot! The only way to get at it is through him.”

  “Well, we gotta con him.”

  “How do you mean? Like this? ‘Of course you know I’m down here from Front Office, con you back into a Gibbering Larval and take over the orgone supply. Now this con involves Duty, HIGHER DUTY and 32nd DEGREE DUTY, all of which devolve on you should act precise like I prefer it.’ ”

  They’ll move in right away, take a girl over, piss out her cock and start farting code to the Enemy. “It’s a fifth column, is what it is,” I said to Luke only yesterday. “We should pass it along to the Torso, come down from Cleveland take care of those pricks.”

  “Smartest thing is not to let me in first base. Once I get my little foot through that door, which you would be well advised not to open—I mean a con like that require personality…. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, we gotta talk to him straight, man to man: ‘Now, kid, you want something, I want something. I do something for you, you do something for me. That’s the way the ball bounces.”

  The Child blasts all his teeth out in a great Bronx cheer. (Pansy dressed in spring robes catch them in butterfly net, throw them at the boy’s mouth; they float back and fit into a whitewashed brick wall.)

  They was ripe for the plucking, forgot way back yonder in that cornhole, lost in little scraps of delight and burning scrolls.

  The Egyptian struts in with hump of racial hate on his back, feeds off him regular as clockwork—big fat boy in there swill butter and animal fats in the worst form there is.

  (Oh, death, where is thy sting? The Man is never on time.) Corseted Tenor: “You and I are good for nothing but pie.” Steak and kidney pie is served in top hats by naked chorus girls—pubic hairs, finger toe nails and teeth silver painted.

  Crystal oaks and pines and persimmons light up green and purple and blue and deep cherry red, frozen in pathic postures. Heavy snow opportunely blankets arrival of W.Q. “Fats” Terminal, cosmic horse’s ass.

  I am looking over a river in Tolima—section of Colombia where is much leprosy and guerrilla war—through cardboard opera glasses of leprosy.

  “How did you get this terrible habit, kid?”

  “In the family. The G
arcías have always been lepers, and proud of it. You bet I’m going back to Carville.”

  “Put a Direction Finder on the Chink, smell out that Controller.”

  The Private Eye strips to bulletproof plastic transparent magnifying shorts.

  “Show you something interesting.” He switches on his pelvis. “Light all the veins in my prick. Beautiful pink sight.”

  The plague break out in the lobby of the U.N. Victims are spirited away in black Cadillacs, flushed down a garbage disposal unit in a special kitchen of the Arab delegates where a man knew what to do with his fat old dog offend with halitosis. Sidi Slimano turn up the garbage disposal full blast, shake the house like a tornado—he leap onto the kitchen table, do a Russian dance with shrill “hy, hy, hy”s and a Negro janitor, with a eunuch jockstrap over his balls, feed the yipping dog into the unit, hair and blood spurt out 1963 on the wall.

  “Yes sir, boys, the shit really hit the fan in ’63,” said the tiresome old prophet can bore the shit out of you in any space-time direction. “Now I happen to remember because it was just two years before that a strain of human aftosa developed in a Bolivian laboratory got loose through the medium of a chinchilla coat fix an income tax case in Kansas City. When it hit New York and everybody with long streamers hang out the mouth, the town look like one big toffee pull. The Abolitionists hanged a purple-assed baboon in Buckingham Palace, and ‘Fats’ Terminal, dressed in his Home Secretary suit, sucked it off in extremis. Cutaway pants, rubber prick two feet long sticking out, ejaculated Black Widows all over the palace. (The Queen is still shit-scared of the W.C.)

  “Now it was just one month before that I was took bad with the menstrual cramps. And a Liz claimed immaculate conception give birth to a six-ounce Spider Monkey thooh the navel—they say the croaker was party to that caper had the monkey on his back all the time. 1963 a dream meet with a Mexican bank robbery.”

  The Arab plays a flute, and the unit undulates up out of the sink on a long flexible metal tube. It gives a great Bronx cheer, and the Arab delegates scream away in burning Cadillacs.

  A Negro boy in turtleneck red sweater dances fearless with the unit under the flickering white light of a Coleman gasoline lamp in an East Texas barn.

  “Undulate me, baby; and let me undulate you.” The unit nips him playfully on the ear, and a drop of blood falls onto his sweater.

  Under icebergs and fjords where naked nymphs goose each other with classic pictures, sooner or later knock a girl up with a tintype, her give birth to a penny arcade.

  “I’m a slow man with a mustache,” said the colonel know how to give a girl the time.

  “Land’s sake, like a hundred little scrub women with pink down brushes scrub your cunt out with ambergris it turn to a conch and give a weird Attic wail.” (Fade out. Jungle calls. The kid stirs muttering in malarial sleep, and Pan pipes drift down the Andes.)

  Death comes slow on Hungarian gallows. “When you gonna pull my leg, get this show on the road?” he gags, his face tumescent with lust.

  “Daddy, that old nigger shit sure do Number Two right on my tummy-wummy.”

  “What’s that you say, girl? That black bastard. A judgment on me for eatin’ the coon pone. A man’s sins do trail him like a fart into Mrs. Worldly’s drawing room, stamp him REJECT.” (The butler puts the Blue Seal on his haunch, while Mrs. Kindheart politely blinds herself with Sani-flush.)

  “Don’t you fret, sweet thing. Me and the boys take care of that nigger when Hawg Day rolls around.”

  The diseuse, in hillbilly dress with a necklace of hog castrators tinkling in the pink dawn, passes a ruined outhouse (Piney Woods backdrop), sings “When Hawg Day rolls around.” The sunrise catches an armadillo rooting in a weed-grown field.

  “Girl, it’s time you learn where castrates come from … blub blub.”

  “Yes poppa eat it lovely old moleskin way.”

  “Let me be your mole cricket, lady.” Candy tongue melt up in there, light up your pink coral grotto.

  Nineteen-ten whorehouse: black silk stocking, white skin: black pubic hair, black-and-white photos. A huge Victrola plays slow and mournful through a vast horn to howling whores. (Drunk, with a top hat and a mustache, takes off his hat and gives a reverent Bronx cheer.)

  Satyr runs down a garden path, marine shoots pink ping-pong balls from tommy gun, rain off his ass turn to little red candy pillows. Armadillos gambol up and eat them in the satyr’s wake.

  “I want you to smell this barstool,” said the paranoid ex-Communist to the manic FBI agent. “Stink juice—and you may quote me—has been applied by paid hoodlums constipated with Moscow goldwasser.” (The water cure, comrade. So I should take the active part in this horrible synopsis?)

  Dirty snow melt in the spring hatch these frozen niggers out the woodpile.

  Some cowboy ride around with the noose on, looking for his last roundup.

  “I live with my boots off,” The Singing Tumbleweed told your reporter, leaning against the whitewashed brick wall of heroin slowdown.

  “I’ll cut your white pecker throat and leave you a squaaawwking chicken. I’m nobody’s fool—good public school of hard knockers and know how to handle this horrible case. When is a woman not a woman? When I cut her motherfucking head off.”

  (Note: When your reporter was learning to be a pilot, this young angel of a cadet dive on this old gash in a field. Her run instead of flop when he buzz her, he cut her head off with his wings. The commandant’s press agent referred to “this horrible case.”)

  So I am in Mrs. Bridey Murphy’s chowder along with the overalls. The Interrogator operate on the boys and the girls and the cats and the rats, leave them grope for lost balls through a maze of movies and burlesques and penny arcades. (Mad-eyed jungle rats die with a Gallic shrug—“Zut alors! Quoi faire?”)

  “What are you doing?” said the torso artist to his colleague.

  “Just experimenting. Interesting relation between pain, fear and the harumph doctor—and nothing more interesting than this phenomenon.” He shows his hard prick. “Now touch it just there.… See how it pulses. And now I am going to conceive The Great Work,” he says, shitting on the laboratory floor. “I have created life!!” he screams, pointing to a roundworm undulating up out of the shit, give a Bronx cheer, grow to a great serpent with lamprey mouth and chase the “scientist” through his Yokohama appliances.

  “There are some things of which I cannot even bring myself to squeak,” said the rat. “The things a girl sees in a warehouse!”

  Cute little agent use sex as a weapon, crucify an old queen with neon nails, run up the black wind sock over burning boys in a plane crash (all those innocent young male screams). The old queen breathe in the Black Snake. “That hits so good.” (Young male screams drift in on the warm spring wind, stir boy hair in the carny night stand so sweet so cold so fair popping pink gum bubbles, look into the penny arcade, petals of young sweat caught in the lip down make your mouth water for stuff.)

  “Cardinal, can you stand up there in the very ass of God which you have plugged with the Pope, that veteran horse’s ass and cosmic brown-nose?”

  Will the gentle reader get up off his limestone and pick up the phone?

  Cause of death: completely uninteresting.

  The Voices rush in like burning lions.

  “I’ll rip through you,” said, trembling, the Man of Black Bones.

  “So told Lieutenant LeBee, whose auntie was drowned at sea,” said a little squeegee voice.

  “Cross crystal pains of horror to the tilted pond.”

  “Time to retire…. Get a frisk … glittering worms of nostalgia’s call house where young lust flares over the hills of home, and jissom floats like cobwebs in a cold spring wind.”

  “Lovely brown leg. Oh Lordy me baby on the brass bed, and bedbugs crawl under the blue light…. Oh God.”

  “All the day you do it…. Do it right now.”

  “Suck the night tit under the blue flame of Sterno…. Orient pearls to the way
they should go….”

  “The winged horse and the mosaic of iron cut the sky to blue cake….”

  “On crystal balconies pensive angels study pink fingernails. Gilt flakes fall through the sunlight.”

  “Distant rumble of stomachs. Porcine fairies wave thick wallets. Bougainvillea covers the limestone steps. Poisoned pigeons rain from the Northern Lights, plop with burning wings into dry canals. The Reservoirs are empty. Blue stairs end, spiral down, suffocate … where brass statues crash through the hungry squares and alleys of the gaping city….”

  “Iridescent hard-on … Rainbow in the falls.”

  “Can’t hear nothing.”

  “Two kids got relief.”

  “Never more the goose honks train whistle bunkmate…. Man in Lower Ten (eyes caked with mucus) watch the boy get a hard-on.”

  “Not a mark on him. What killed his monkey?”

  “Suicide God, take the back-street junk route. Detours of the fairy canyon shine in the light of dawn. Buildings fall through dust to the plain of salt marshes. Are the boys over the last ridge and into the safe harbor of Cunt Lick, where no wind is?”

  “By the squared circle, cut cock, my mouth, the cunt of and the rag on. Bring your own wife…. Panama Flo, the sex fiend, beat the Gray Nurse for steak-sized chunks.” (The Gray Nurse is most dangerous form of shark. Like all sharks they bite out steak-sized chunks.)

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Libido is dammed by the Eager Beaver.”

  “Notice is served on toilet paper.”

  “Smell shock grabs the lungs with nausea.”

  Fat queen, bursting out of dungarees, carry a string of bullheads to the tilted pond.