Interzone
Page 19
The Grand Dragoness has given the order to her agents yack on all the queer barstools in the world: “Get Burroughs.” She gives a little bump and fart. “It would be well not to fail.”
“Continual assault of hostility,” said the languid lavatory attendant. “Can’t help it.”
In a limestone gorge near East St. Louis, Illinois, met a copper lad with a rusty loincloth crumble from his stiffening member seize me in stone hands and fuck me with a crystal cock.
Interrupted by Paco, a little Spanish whore. Great pests from little assholes grow. “Untimely comes this dirt,” shrieked the poet swallow forever the Perfect Line. What a con that was…. The cast-off lover trailing broken potentials looks at me with reproach he can never formulate, sad and hostile sick conning eyes, feels with idiot slyness for the horrified cock.
“This is trivial,” he said cunningly to the mastiff bitch.
“Satori,” said the Zen monk. “I see …” He crosses the room and opens the door. “The Mons Calpa from Gibraltar.”
—unload her unhatched shits upon us. “Another consignment of undesirables,” sighed Immigration. “No, we do not admit advanced cases of lymphogranuloma, and we have no form of dole for disabled stool pigeon lost his voice in the service.”
We are not at all innarested to find a prick crawl up the back stairs, make time in the broom closet, remember? and spurt all over the white sheet in the hung-over Sunday dawn…. We goin’ to home it over the silver plate into the golden toilet and jack out our balls on the mosaic floor into the carp pool, keeps them healthy, fat and sluggish.
Assassin of geraniums! Murderer of the lilies!
Over the bridge to Brighton Rock, place of terrible pleasures and danger, where predatory brainwashers stalk the passersby in black Daimlers. Clients check Molotov cocktails and flamethrowers with the beautiful diseased hatcheck person of indeterminate sex…. And the government falls at least once a day.
Set wades in blood up to her cunt, cuts down the blasphemers of Ra with her sick hell of junk.
The snake’s venom is paid for with coins of the realm of night. No hiding place …
Wooden steps wind up a vast slope, scattered stone huts. Greg licks the black rim of the world in a cave of rusty limestone. Across the hills to Idaho, under the pine trees, boys hang a horse with a broken leg. One plays “I’m Leavin’ Cheyenne” on his harmonica, they pass around an onion and cry. They stand up and swing off through the branches with Tarzan cries.
We is all out on a long silver bail.
It was a day like any other when I walk down the Main Line to the Sargasso, pass faces set a thousand years in matrix of evil, faces with eerie innocence of old people, faces vacant of intent. Sit down in the green chair provided for me by other men occupy all the others. Convey my order with usual repetitions—at one time I was threatened by rum and Cinzano, whereas I order mint tea. I sit back and make this scene, mosaic of juxtapositions, strange golden chains of Negro substance seeped up from the Unborn South. So I do not at once dig the deformed child—I call it that for want of a better name: actually it look between unsuccessful baboon and bloated lemur, with a sort of moldy sour bestial look in the eyes—that was sitting to all intents and purposes on the back of my chair.
Shellac red-brick houses, black doors shine like ice in the winter sun. Lawn down to the lake, old people sit in green chairs, huddle in lap robes.
We are on the way over with a bolt of hot steel wool to limn your toilet with spangled orgones. Conspicuous consumption is rampant in the porticoes slippery with Koch spit, bloody smears on the cryptic mosaic—frozen cream cone and a broken dropper. As when a junky long dead woke with a junk-sick hard-on, hears the radiator thump and bellow like an anxious dinosaur of herbivorous tendencies—treeless plain stretch to the sky, vultures have miss the Big Meat….
Will he fight? is the question at issue.
“Yes,” snarls President Ra look up from a crab hunt, charge the Jockey Club with his terrible member. “Fuck my sewage canal, will you? Don’t like you and don’t know you. Some Coptic cocksucker vitiate the pure morning joy of hieroglyph.”
“At least we have saved the bread knife,” he said.
“The message is not clear,” said Garcia, when they brought him the brujo rapt in nutmeg.
Priest whips a yipping Sellubi down the limestone stairs with a gold chain.
“Unlawful flight to prevent consummation,” lisps the toothless bailiff. The trembling defendant—survivor of the Coconut Grove fire—stands with a naked hard-on.
“Death by Fire in Truck,” farts the Judge in code.
“Appeal is meaningless in the present state of our knowledge,” says the defense, looking up from electron microscope.
“You have your warning,” says the President.
“The monkey is not dead but sleepeth,” brays Harry the Horse, with inflexible authority.
The centipede nuzzles the iron door rusted to thin black paper with urine of a million fairies. Red centipede in the green weeds and broken stelae. Inside the cell crouch prisoners of the Colónia. Mugwump sits naked on a rusty bidet, turns a crystal cylinder etched with cuneiforms. Iron panel falls in dust, red specks in the sunlight.
A vast Moslem muttering rises from the stone square where brass statues suffocate.
He just wanted a decent book to read …
Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.
We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’
Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books
The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.
Reading habits (and cigarette prices) have changed since 1935, but Penguin still believes in publishing the best books for everybody to enjoy.We still believe that good design costs no more than bad design, and we still believe that quality books published passionately and responsibly make the world a better place.
So wherever you see the little bird – whether it’s on a piece of prize-winning literary fiction or a celebrity autobiography, political tour de force or historical masterpiece, a serial-killer thriller, reference book, world classic or a piece of pure escapism – you can bet that it represents the very best that the genre has to offer.
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1989
Published in Penguin Books 1990
Published in Penguin Classics 2009
Copyright © William S. Burroughs, 1989
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Passages from Naked Lunch used by permission of Grove Press, a division of Wheatland Corporation. “The Finger”, “Lee’s Journals”, “An Advertising Short for TV”, “Antonio the Portuguese Mooch,” “Displaced Fuzz”, “Spare Ass Annie”, and “The Dream Cops” first appeared in Early Routines, Cadmus Editions. “The Conspiracy” was previously published in Kulcher.
ISBN: 978-0-14-197569-6
Introduction
* Alan Ansen, William Burroughs (Sudbury, Mass.: Water Row Press, 1986).