Interzone

by William S. Burroughs

  “TILT.”

  Gray head bob up in the old swimming hole. The boys climb up each other, scream, “EEEEK! A man!”

  “He will be fetched down, this creature.”

  “A fairy.”

  “Monstrous!”

  “Fantastic!”

  “Get her!”

  “Slam the steel shutter of latency!”

  “Radius radius. It is enough.”

  “Doctorhood is being made with me.”

  Middle-aged Swede in yachting cap, naked tattooed torso, neutral blue eyes, gives a shot of heroin to the schizophrenic (whiff of institution kitchens). Gray ghosts of a million junkies bend close as the Substance drains into living flesh.

  “Is this the fix that staunched a thousand shits and burnt the scented drugstores of Lebanon?”

  Student in medieval hose and doublet with cock guard: “If a cat hath nine lives, verily this olde pricke of mine hath nine childhoods, each more maudlin than its fellow.”

  The professor is caught short and shits in a piece of newspaper, rolls it up and throws it at a passing citizen of indeterminate nationality who screams curses in twenty languages living and dead.

  “It’s a cheap Shanty Irish trick, shitting in a piece of paper and throwing it at passersby.”

  “So who’s lace-curtain? This stark young novelist like a dirty windswept street.” Fade out 1920s tunes, fireworks cover stutter of machine-gun fire from black Cadillacs longer and lower, fade into Soviet tanks.

  “One of my earliest memories was a bull’s-eye score scored by Mary O’Toole the local Liz on a dignified old junky so loaded he didn’t register. Just walk along with shit dripping off his pan, a boyish smile on his lips. I shall never forget that smile … in times of affliction such as come to any woman. Goddammit, another impersonator! Be there a man with soul so dead to himself have never said this is my own my native ass?”

  American queens shriek and howl in revolting paroxysms of self-pity. They declare a nausea contest. The most abject queen of them all gathers his rotting protoplasms for an all-out effort….

  “My power’s coming! … My power’s coming!” he screeches.

  Orchestra strikes up, and female impersonator prances out in hillbilly drag with hairy knobby knees showing.

  “She’ll be swishing round the mountain when she comes….”

  The queen’s familiar spirits are gathering, larval whimpering entities. The queen writhes in a dozen embraces, accommodating the passionate exigencies of invisible partners, now sucking noisily, now throwing his legs over his head with a loud “Whoopeee!” He sidles across the floor with his legs spread, reaches up and caresses one of the judges with a claw … he has turned himself into a monster crab with a human body from the waist down. Beneath the skin liquid protoplasm quivers like jellied consommé as he offers up his ass.

  The judges start back, appalled.

  “He liquefy himself already!”

  “Deplorable!”

  Other contestants jealously throw off their clothes to reveal an impressive variety of unattractive physiques.

  “Look at me!”

  “Feast your eyes on my ugliness!”

  One queen pulls the falsie top off his pinhead and begins cackling like a chicken: “I don’t need that old head anyhoo!”

  Junky furnished room opens on red-brick slum—young addict, sculpted to bone and muscle, probes for a blue vein with a brass needle in his smooth white arm.

  Mexican finca: drunken machos in dark glasses reel about on the patio, blasting at terrified cats with .45 automatics. All wear two-hundred-dollar English suits and drink Old Pharr Scotch from bottles. They miss the cats, wound each other, scream “¡Chinga!” in chorus as each empties his gun into a compañero.

  Barefoot, ragged boys steal in, silent as dawn. Hideous atomic mutations, some miss a lower jaw, others have two black holes and no nose. They strip the bodies, drink the Scotch—one born without a mouth sticks a bottle up his ass and tilts his body forward. They put on the suits, which hang on them in folds, and posture in parody of drunken machos, spitting, patting .45s, flashing police badges and nude pictures of Chapultepec blonds. Exit boys without a sound.

  Sunrise. Vultures settle, peck at dark glasses.

  Modern apartment a là swish. Fags and old women gabble and giggle faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed.

  Blue-walled Arab whorehouse. Outside, the yipes of rioters; shop shutters slam, Arab music blasts from loudspeakers mixed with Radio Cairo like a berserk tobacco auction. Fades to flutes of Ramadan.

  Stop! Here is Terminal!

  W.Q. “Fats” Terminal wake with a fart and let out a bray can be heard for blocks.

  “I have arisen, Goddammit! Fetch the royal lounging robes!”

  His secretary trots in, a huge slovenly man in filthy sweatshirt and rusty black pants. “Fats” struggles into his purple bathrobe and straps on his cavalry sword, with which he decapitated the Countess de Perrier’s Russian wolfhound. A long-ago garden party in his slim youth, before he was blacklisted by every embassy and hostess in the world.

  He barely escaped with his life from Seville after a perfect kill, and the noble bull dying and the matador talk to it soft and nasty sweet and everybody silent, “Fats” loose his terrible Bronx cheer, leap down into the arena and kick the dying bull in the nuts.

  “Fats” is connected in some unspecified way with every underground of the world: Mafia, IRA, Bolivian Trotskyites, PDL, EOKA, Islam, Inc., Arab Brotherhood, Mau Mau. He expresses himself typically on all movements and leaders of movements: “Black-assed cocksuckers don’t know their piles from a finger stall. They couldn’t resist a virus. What I think about Sidi?” He lets out his famous Bronx cheer.

  No resistance movement dares to dispense with his “services.” He edits a newspaper known as the Underground Express, mostly consists of bulletins and trade gossip: “What well-known asshole currently throbs to a DARK HORSE? Is my cunt red? All Mau Mau requested to castrate themselves if captured, to foil the degenerate appetites of English Capitalist hangman Smithers ‘The Nance’ Macintosh, who was drummed out of the Black Watch for importuning the Crown Prince with prehensile piles at the Queen’s funeral.”

  “I think Fats is swell,” said the inspirational female analyst.

  “A preposterous slander!” shrieks Dr. Burger.

  “We are at a loss,” snarls Brundage the Insolvent, dissolving in a pool of shit.

  “Clearly an anal type,” observes Dr. Burger severely. “Faugh!”

  “Discrimination!” screams a Negro fag, high on injustice.

  “So I hung an albatross…. It was my training done it, born and bred to hang dat cocksucker.”

  “We hear it was the other way around, Doc,” said the snide reporter with narrow shoulders and bad teeth.

  The doctor’s face crimsons. “And I wish to state that I have been doctor at Dankmoor Prison thirty years man boy and bestial and I always keep my nose clean … never compromise myself to be alone with the hanged man, always insist on presence of my baboon assistant, witness and staunch friend in any position.”

  “Oral breakthrough,” lisped the skeleton.

  “Very likely,” said the Horse Trader, spitting out all his teeth.

  “Orgone service is terrible around here,” said the rectal cancer case.

  “Already loth my ath inna thervith,” lisped out the hole in his side.

  “God purge me of the black yen for his bones,” whimpered the aging queen, her prick dropping like a wind sock where there is no wind.

  Negroes thin and brittle as smooth black sticks cut each other with sneering razors. No surrender in yellow eyes like incandescent gold.

  Adolescent hoodlums have crucified Christ with Bronx cheers, go honkytonking and nobody give a shit when He give up the Ghost.

  And “Fats” bites into a sandwich. “Butter!” he screams. “They is trying to poison me with cholesterol!”

  The young rustler is appr
ehended by his friend at the old swimming hole. Under the eyes of giggling boys he is hanged from the diving branch, pirouettes in the air with an entrechat six—breathless pause at leap top.

  “Let this be a lesson to you boys,” said the old sheriff, eyes pale and empty as blue sky over the neon midways of America.

  Shattering bloody blue of Mexico, brains spilled in the cocktail lounge, white leather and blue silk, and the fat macho substance in dark glasses has burned down the jai alai bookie with his obsidian-handled forty-five.

  Heart in the sun, headless snake, hanged man’s cock pulsing on the holy gallows, pantless corpses hang from posts along the road to Monterrey.

  The boys whistle and wolf-call. One catches jissom in a straw hat and passes it around in obscene, begging pantomime and each boy jacks off into it. A boy twangs the rope and sings like an angel, voice clear, hard, metallic as wind in high wires over a gorge, waterfalls and rainbow.

  “Watch those prehensile tensions!” screams the belching Technician … as the bridge wires snap, spill screaming hot rods into the void.

  “Play chicken with gravity, you little pricks!” snarls the Technician. “I told them the fucking bridge wasn’t worth a—” He farts loud and ugly.

  The great black crab penetrated with air-pistol pellet oozes watery crankcase oil.

  The rope rot through, the rustler falls white as Narcissus into the black water, glides down. The boys lean over to watch the descent of the god, dissolve in sunlight, see hairs sharp as fine wire and teeth and freckles—their mourning selves. The sheriff is muttering through his toothless mean old-woman mouth, “Now, I want you fellows to wear trunks…. Decent women with telescopes can see you. We’ve had complaints.”

  The boy floats white as marble in the swimming hole, with a lamprey at his side where Christ’s blood flowed and the colostomy came out spurting shit.

  “Let me do a suck job on you,” said the old queen with a lamprey mouth. A great silver fish goes over the falls with a lamprey on its side, into the rainbow.

  Pinks and blues of 1920s tune drift into the locker room and the two boys, first time tea-high, jack off to “My Blue Heaven.” What are we going to do with all the golden lads? Not enough train whistles and fights against the house odds. “I just can’t get you a fight, kid. Things are tough.”

  Police bullet in the alley, broken wings of Icarus and screams of a burning boy inhaled by the old junky, eyes empty as a vast plain—husk of vulture wings in dry air—pulls the pale smoke into his screaming lungs and his body squirms in the Black Massage.

  They walk down Lindell and into the house surrounded by deserted factories and junkyards; weeds and vines and the sound of insects. They undress slow in a mirror-lined room, fuck all the way out and back across backyards, ash pits and bars, stickball games, virginal lots (little green snakes under rusty iron), cats copulate and boys jack off in packing crate.

  The pusher dropped around to leave his card. “Like the song say, ‘I’ll be around.’ ” Looking for a vein with a tattoo needle, the boy’s chest is marked over the hard limestone bone with blue bites.

  The wind shakes billowing brass like yellow silk.

  Lick of junk sickness eats at your heels like a dream rat, gnaw the shiny white tendons probing for a vein of iron.

  Chorus of Midwest fairies sing “Glow Worm” with lighted wands … plaintive purple ghosts in the June night.

  “ ’Tain’t human. Devil doll …” The Controller hides in some ultimate privy on a black windy slope of the Andes under a sky green as neon.

  Great fat queen in a huge baby carriage pushed by a brutalfaced, gum-chewing Italian with long sideburns and a white silk vest. “AWWWWWW!” squalls the queen. And the Italian changes her diapers absently, his eyes follow a woman’s haunches down the street and into the butcher shop.

  Masochist queen refuse to leave burning warehouse because her hand-trucking lover won’t carry him.

  Empty waxen child faces, the teeth go first.

  Over the hills to the lonesome pines of Idaho, where boy hearts pulse on Christmas trees, and ski-jumpers whistle over our heads like bullets in the crystal night …

  The boy is pure sad, all hate faded like smoke in the dawn wind, clear and calm sad forever.

  Carnival of splintered pink peppermint. Black mustache and child screams after his lost balloon like a frustrated cocksucker. Tattooed sailor leaves the penny arcade with firm young ass.

  “Oh, those Golden Slippers—” Copper-luster chamber pots, brass spittoons, black smoke on the hip in the Chink laundry.

  Ski run revisited by old queen, his friend killed there in 1928, black and empty against the vacationing sky.

  “You’re nothing but a larval,” sneered one subsidiary personality to another. “I’m a decent entity at least, got some outlines to me.”

  So this is the Burroughs special, a dash and a soupçon, a pinch and a handful. If you all like it not, will distribute to the school privy of the world for a glorious burial. Young asses wiped all over the world, white ass and black ass, yaller ass and copper ass, pink ass and bronze ass.

  Two gentlemen opponents square off on the country club lawn. With a bestial snarl one throws up his knee with murderous force. The other pivots deftly, jabbing for his opponent’s eyes with forked fingers. They roll in the grass, screaming like mandrills and clawing at each other’s eyes and genitals.

  Old Colonel nudges Sir Granville Heatherstone: “This is tasty.”

  Sanitarium grounds 1917—junkies sit under spreading oaks in the Indian summer of Iowa. Nurses bustle along with busy hypos.

  “Now, Mr. Harmon, you know you only get five grains.”

  “Oh I think you’re terrible, Mr. Hardwith.”

  They sprawl in green chairs, faces dead as the garroted. “And where the dead leaf fell, there it did rest.”

  Peacocks scream in the red crystal dawn. Golden apple of woman breast swells bronze souvenir ashtray. He sits up and looks into a cobra lamp.

  On a white alabaster bed a Negress black as opium does slow bumps and grinds. “Haven’t got a thing to say,” he sneered through his plastic surgeon nose.

  The gray-faced queen with dark glasses and purple lips sneers and shoves it in gear and shoots away … a white-faced boy carries a dead dog from the suburb road.

  Cursed down your years with a yen like an open needle sore, coal and junk, cancer and black oil in the blood and bones. Ink in the white bones. Black blood from the ruptured crab.

  Porpoises with pink ribbon nooses around their necks pilot the ship to anchor at vast Venetian mooring posts in an endless oily rubbish heap. The ship is stuck in black slime and garbage and rusty iron. The porpoises fade with a Bronx cheer and a distant boat whistle….

  “I am the Egyptian,” he said, looking all flat and silly.

  And I said, “Really, Bradford, don’t be tiresome.”

  Old dank garden in the Midwest August moon, pool full of leaves in black iridescent water.

  Would it be forgiven the rising young diplomat occasional slip and shit on the floor by the punch bowl? Or absently offer his prick instead of his hand to Nikki from the Russian Embassy? Or now and then leap up like the savant in reverse, as though catapult by unseen hand, and fart loud and ugly in Mrs. Worldly’s face? Could grace or charm give these faults a snow job, sure Reggie has them all.

  Insouciance of a child awakened from sleep with a sulky hard-on in the green summer dawn, boy-grin on sunlit water. Hot rod piloted by a debased and brutal angel screams through pregnant Indian women, leave all behind a wake of blood and afterbirths, throw out a blast of condoms with Bronx cheer.

  “Just see me, a fourteen-year-old boy,” said the skinny old queen. “I’ve never been fucked before so I wander down into Mexican town and this copper youth in white pants call me over, make sullen and bestial motions—I bend over and drop my pants. He fucks me with furious quivering contempt that melts my whole pelvis down onto his cock like a glob of gold.”

  Death
rows the boy like sleeping marble down the Grand Canal in a gondola of gold and crystal … poles out into a vast lagoon: souvenir postcards and bronzed baby shoes, Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls, Chimborazo, New York skyline and Aztec pyramid. Pinks and blues and yellows of religious objects in the Catholic store on a red-brick square surrounded by trees.

  “All right. You’re paying for it,” said the Mexican.

  “Only fools do those villains pity who are punished ere they have done their mischief,” said the young Billy Budd as he innocently cut the throats of his lifeboat mates. “Such a thing as too much fun,” he adds primly. “Besides which they was eatin’ me out of house and home. Nip it in the bud, Mary, nip it in the bud.”

  Frenzied dinosaurs uncover a fossil man….

  In the attic of the Big Store on bolts of cloth we made it, careful don’t spill, don’t rat on the boys. Light cuts through the dark chasm, dust in sunlight, the cellar is full of light and air … in two weeks the tadpoles hatch. I wonder what ever happened to Otto’s boy who played the violin?

  Pages blew out across the winds and rubbish of Mexico…. A boy squats by a mud wall whistling mambo through his teeth, wipes his ass with a sheaf of manuscripts. Wind and rubble, vultures peck at fish heads. The boy stands up, shies a stone at the vulture, vaults the wall and whistles away under dusty poplar trees shake in the afternoon wind.

  Spilt is the wastings of the cup…. “Take it away,” he said irritably.

  The city mutters in the distance, pestilent breath of the cancerous librarian faint and intermittent in the warm spring wind.

  Ruined porticoes and arabesques, boys playing languidly on the vine-covered pyramids. Greg screws Brad on all fours, freeze into a dirty picture in the withered hand of a very old queen.

  “Is this a sex hang-up, Brad?” said the Chinese narcotic fuzz.

  The decent women of America object. “Stay where you are!” said Lithping Lu the Deputy. “You fruit varmints give me Burger’s disease in the worst form there is.”

  “I wouldn’t put it in precisely those words,” said Dr. Burger.

  The man in a green suit—old-style English cut, with two side vents and change pockets outside—will swindle the aging proprietress of the florist shop. “Old flub gotta yen on for me.”