William S. Burroughs

Penniless and withdrawing from opiates, Danny emerges from a 72-hour stay in a police holding cell. Hoping to make enough money to buy his next hit of heroin, he scours the streets looking for something to steal. After an unsuccessful attempt to break into a parked car, he discovers an unattended suitcase sitting in a doorway. He makes off with the case and takes it to an abandoned park to examine its contents. There he finds that the case contains two severed human legs. Disgusted, he discards the legs and tries to find a buyer for the suitcase. He finds a buyer who gives him three dollars but also informs him that the local heroin dealer has been arrested.

Unable to find heroin anywhere Danny decides to visit a doctor with the hopes of obtaining some morphine. When he reaches the doctor’s house he pretends to be suffering from facial neuralgia. The doctor is suspicious but gives Danny a quarter of a grain of morphine free of charge.

Drugs in pocket, Danny rents a room for two dollars. As he prepares to inject the morphine, he hears groaning coming from the next room. Distracted, he follows the sound of the groaning across the hall to find a young man suffering from kidney stones. Danny offers to call an ambulance, but soon realizes that the paramedics will not come as they believe the young man is faking illness to obtain opiates. Danny selflessly administers his morphine to the young man. The morphine immediately alleviates the young man’s pain. Danny returns to his room. All of a sudden he begins feeling the effects of heroin; it appears that his good deed has been rewarded with “the immaculate fix.” Danny nods off to sleep.

◊  ‘I am not an addict, I am the addict’ ↓ [“The Beginning Is Also the End”_1963]

I am not an addict. I am the addict. The addict I invented to keep this show on the junk road. I am all the addicts and all the junk in the world. I am junk and I am hooked forever. Now, I am using junk as a basic illustration. Extend it. I am reality and I am hooked, on, reality. Give me an old wall and a garbage can and I can, by God, sit there forever. Because I am the wall and I am the garbage can. But I need someone to sit there and look at the wall and the garbage can. That is, I need a human host. I can’t look at anything. I am blind. I can’t sit anywhere. I have nothing to sit on.

And let me take this opportunity of replying to my creeping opponents. It is not true that I hate the human species. I just don’t like human beings. I don’t like animals. What I feel is not hate. In your verbal garbage the closest word is distaste. Still I must live in and on human bodies. An intolerable situation, you will agree. To make that situation clearer, suppose you were stranded on a planet populated by insects. You are blind. You are a drug addict. But you find a way to make the insects bring you junk. Even after thousands of years living there you still feel that basic structural distaste for your insect servants. You feel it every time they touch you. Well, that is exactly the way I feel about my human servants. Consequently since my arrival some 500,000 years ago, I have had one thought in mind. What you call the history of mankind is the history of my escape plan. I don’t want “love.” I don’t want forgiveness. All I want is out of here.

¤  The Naked Lunch

 . . .  Meeting of International Conference of Technological  Psychiatry

Doctor “Fingers” Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, rises and turns on the Conferents the cold blue blast of his gaze:

“Gentlemen, the human nervous system can be reduced to a compact and abbreviated spinal column. The brain, front, middle and rear must follow the adenoid, the wisdom tooth, the appendix…. I give you my Master Work: The Complete All American De-anxietixed Man….”

Blast of trumpets: The Man is carried in naked by two Bearers who drop him on the platform with bestial, sneering brutality…. The Man wriggles…. His flesh turns to viscid, transparent jelly that drifts away in green mist, unveiling a monster black centipede. Waves of unknown stench fill the room, searing the lungs, grabbing the stomach….

Schafer wrings his hands sobbing: “Clarence! How can you do this to me?? Ingrates!! Every one of them ingrates!’

The Conferents start back muttering in dismay:

“I’m afraid Schafer has gone a bit too far….”

“I sounded a word of warning….”

“Brilliant chap Schafer… but…”

“Man will do anything for publicity….”

“Gentlemen, this unspeakable and in every sense illegitimate child of Doctor Schafer’s perverted brain must not see the light…. Our duty to the human race is clear….”

“Man he done seen the light,” said one of the Bearers.

“We must stomp out the Un-American crittah,’ says a fat, frog-faced Southern doctor who has been drinking corn out of a mason jar. He advances drunkenly, then halts, appalled by the formidable size and menacing aspect of the centipede….

“Fetch gasoline!” he bellows. “We gotta burn the son of a bitch like an uppity Nigra!”

“I’m not sticking my neck out, me,” says a cool hip young doctor high on LSD25…. “Why a smart D.A. could…”

Fadeout. “Order in The Court”

D.A.:“Gentlemen of the jury, these ‘learned gentlemen’ claim that the innocent human creature they have so wantonly slain suddenly turned himself into a huge black centipede and it was ‘their duty to the human race’ to destroy this monster before it could, by any means at its disposal, perpetrate its kind….

“Are we to gulp down this tissue of horse shit! Are we to take these glib lies like a greased and nameless asshole? Where is this wondrous centipede?

” ‘We have destroyed it,’ they say smugly…. And I would like to remind you, Gentlemen and Hermaphrodites of the Jury, that this Great Beast” — he points to Doctor Schafer — “has, on several previous occasions, appeared in this court charged with the unspeakable crime of brain rape…. In plain English” — he pounds the rail of the jury box, his voice rises to a scream — “in plain English, Gentlemen, forcible lobotomy….”

The Jury gasps…  One dies of a heart attack…. Three fall to the floor writhing in orgasms of prurience….

The D.A. points dramatically: “He it is…. He and no other who has reduced whole provinces of our fair land to a state bordering on the far side of idiocy…. He it is who has filled great warehouses with row on row, tier on tier of helpless creatures who must have their every want attended…. ‘The Drones’ he calls them with a cynical leer of pure educated evil…. Gentlemen, I say to you that the wanton murder of Clarence Cowie must not go unavenged: This foul crime shrieks like a wounded faggot for justice at least!”

The centipede is rushing about in agitation.

“Man, that mother fucker’s hungry,” screams one of the Bearers.

“I’m getting out of here, me.”

A wave of electric horror sweeps through the Conferents…. They storm the exits screaming and clawing….

∞  ‘Did I ever Tell you about the Man who Taught his asshole to Talk’ ⇓

 . . .  introduced by The Disposible Heroes Of Hiphoprisy  [«Spare Ass Annie»_1993]

Why not one all-purpose blob? Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard.

«This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

«This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called ‘The Better ‘Ole’ that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, «Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?’

«‘Nah! I had to go relieve myself.’

«After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

«Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and start eating. He thought this was cute at first and built and act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights… It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him:

‘It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don’t need you around here any more. I can talk and eat AND shit.’

«After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous – (You know that a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) – except for the EYES you dig. That’s one thing the asshole COULDN’T do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes WENT OUT, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.

That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there’s always a space between. In popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out globs of that un-D.T. to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate cancerous life-form, reproducing a hideous random image. Some would be entirely made of penis-like erectile tissue, others viscera barely covered over with skin, clusters of three and four eyes together, criss-cross of mouths and assholes, human parts shaken around and poured out …

. . . ‘The Talking Asshole Routine’  ⇐ [read & introduced by Frank Zappa]

♦  David Cronenberg’s NAKED LUNCH ⇐  [movie clips]

Some fragments from David Cronenberg’s film adaptation. Featuring Peter Weller, Ian Holm, Judy Davis & Roy Scheider (a 1991 co-production by film companies of Canada, the UK, and Japan)

◊  The Evening News  ⇓

This poem from «The Exterminator» was constructed by cutting in phrases from a daily horoscope and a French newspaper. America 1967. Some phrases were translated into English and others were allowed to remain in French. I would say the poem bears some affinity to the Waste Land by TS Eliot.

The old desk sergeant looked grimly at the wanted pictures yellow pealing 30th day without an arrest in New York area

they risk 15 light-years, entire future, certain discussions, cool gardens and pools of the evening.

The old turnkey makes the round of empty cells. «Sleep tight boys.”

No one there

muttering phantom voices, peet men junkies con men

the old hop smoking worlds mutter between years.

The Sailor hanging by his belt, a drunk banging on the door of his cell

thin grey pickpocket stops him.

«Get me this letter out, Screw. It’s worth an Abe to you.»

pulls the Abe out of his fibrous junkie shoe.

«I need an arrest, Mike. I’m thin.»

«Fuck off punk I can’t find an old drunk.”

No arrest. She reads it in his dull eyes.

“Conservez toujours une bonne morale.»

a sharp cold bray of laughter sliding away into the sky

Couldn’t reach from the old cop film.

Twirling his club down cobblestone streets, the sky goes out against his back

in a darkening park couldn’t reach with the sap

I do not need to remind you laws as strict as the United States . . .

urine in straw a yellow sky his bicycle of light

“poumons sensibles.”

a blue smell of hope as he rounded the corner and the sea air hit his face

«Leaving the fading film please. Got up. Remembered  Thank you.”

The Old Courthouse empty cells and precincts

bondsmen judges lawyers probation officers paper cups of coffee on the desk

NARCOTICS DEPARTMENT . . . the door is open

files and pictures scattered on the floor stained with urine and excrement.

On the wall in phosphorous roach paste ‘AH PUCH JACKED OFF HERE.’

Laws as severe as the United States,

«L’indécision ne servirait pas votre cause ce soir.»

◊  Twilight’s Last Gleamings  ↓

This piece, written in collaboration with Kells Elvins’ in 1938 commemorates actually the first appearance

of Doctor Benway, which wasn’t published till many years later. TWILIGHT’S LAST GLEAMINGS

This is America, off Jersey coast.

~Ladies and gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm. We had a minor problem in the boiler room, but everything is now under c___

(… Sound effects of a nuclear blast …)

Doctor Benway, ship’s doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four-inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel.

–   Perhaps the appendix is already out, doctor  – the nurse said peering dubiously over his shoulder –  I saw a little scar …  The appendix is already out…

–   Ouch, I’m taking the appendix out. What d’you think I’m doing here?

–   Perhaps the appendix is on the left side, doctor. That happens sometimes, you know.

–   Stop breathing down my neck. I’m coming to that. Don’t you think that I know where an appendix is? I studied appendectomy in 1904 at Harvard!

He lifts the abdominal wall and searches along the incision, dropping ashes from his cigarette. 

–   And get me a new scalpel. This one’s got no edge to it!

He thrust a red fist at her. The doctor reels back and flattens against the wall a bloody scalpel clutched in one hand. The patient slide off the operating table, spilling intestines across the floor. Doctor Benway sweeps instruments, cocaine and morphine into his satchel…

–   Sew her up!   I can’t be expected to work under such conditions!

 

By the dawn’s early light, Doctor Benway pushed through a crowd at the rail and boarded the first lifeboat.

–   You all right  – he said, sitting himself among the women –  I am the doctor.

::::::   ::::::

¤ → Dr Benway Operates  (NAKED LUNCH)→

The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid.  I think they’re using it for an operating room…

NURSE:                «I can’t find her pulse,  doctor.»

Dr BENWAY:       «Cardiac arrest, god damn it!»

…He looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets. He fences on the patient.

«Make an incision,  doctor Lympf, I’m gonna massage the heart.»

Doctor Lympf shrugs and begins the incision.  Doctor Benway washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet bowl.

NURSE:                «Shouldn’t it be sterilised,  doctor?»

Dr BENWAY:        «Very likely,  but there is no time.»   Watching his assistant make the incision, he sits on the suction cup like a cane seat.

«You,  young squirts, couldn’t lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture… All the skill is going out in surgery, all the know-how and make do. Did I ever tell you about the time I performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once, I was caught short without instrument ONE, and removed an uterine tumor with my teeth. That was in the Upper Effendi and besides the wench is dead.”

Dr LYMPF:             «The incision is ready,  doctor.»

Doctor Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down.  Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall.  The cut makes a horrible sucking sound.

NURSE:                  «I think she’s gone,  doctor.»

Dr BENWAY:         «Well, it’s all in a day’s work.»  He walks across the room to a medicine cabinet.

«Some fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush.  Nurse,  send the boy out to fill this RX on the double!»

Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: “Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that…. You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.»

«Just as a bullfighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second…. Did any of you ever see Dr. Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: ‘I don’t give them time to die,’ he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. ‘Fucking undisciplined cells!’ he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.”

A young man leaps down into the operating theatre and, whipping out a scalpel, advances on the patient.

DR. BENWAY:  “An espontaneo! Stop him before he guts my patient!”

(Espontaneo is a bullfighting term for a member of the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the bull before he is dragged out of the ring.)

The orderlies scuffle with the espontaneo, who is finally ejected from the hall. The anesthetist takes advantage of the confusion to pry a large gold filling from the patient’s mouth….

◊  Bradley the Buyer  ↓  [Dead Fingers Talk]

Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm, misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water.

“Thomas and Charlie,” I said.

“What?”

“That’s the name of this town. Sea level. We climb straight up from here ten thousand feet.” I took a fix and went to sleep in the back seat. She was a good driver. You can tell as soon as someone touches the wheel.

Mexico City where Lupita sits like an Aztec Earth Goddess doling out her little papers of lousy shit.

“Selling is more of a habit than using,” Lupita says. Non-using pushers have a contact habit, and that’s one you can’t kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct. He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don’t remember him afterwards. So he twists one after the other.

Well the Buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can’t drink. He can’t get it up. His teeth fall out. He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Babe Ruths he digs special. “It really disgusts you to see the Buyer sucking on them candy bars so nasty,” a cop says.

The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks. “I’ll just set in my room,” he says. “Fuck ‘em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry.”

Buy a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the Buyer hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it.

“Oh all right,” the boy says. “So what you want to make?”

“I just want to rub up against you and get fixed.”

“Ugh – Well all right – But why cancha just get physical like a human?”

Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. “Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for,” he says. “Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets wet all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax – I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like an old rotten canteloupe.”

“Well it’s still an easy score.”

The boy sighed resignedly; “Yes, I guess you can get used to anything. I’ve got a meet with him again tomorrow.”

The Buyer’s habit keeps getting heavier. He needs a recharge every half hour. Sometimes he cruises the precints and bribes the turnkey to let him in with a cell of junkies. It gets to where no amount of contact will fix him. At this point he receives a summons from the District Supervisor:

“Bradley, your conduct has given rise to rumors – and I hope for your sake they are no more than that – so unspeakably distasteful that – I mean Caesar’s wife – hump – that is, the Department must be above suspicion – certainly above such suspicions as you have seemingly aroused. You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation.”

The Buyer throws himself on the ground and crawls over to the D.S. “No, Boss Man, no – The Department is my very lifeline.”

He kisses the District Supervisors’s hand, thrusting the fingers into his mouth (the D.S. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost his teeth “inna thervith”. “Please Boss Man. I’ll wipe your ass, I’ll wash out your dirty condoms, I’ll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose.“

“Really, this is most distasteful! Have you no  pride? I must tell you I feel a distinct revulsion. I mean there is something, well, rotten about you, and you smell like a compost heap.” He put a scented handkerchief in front of his face. “I must ask you to leave this office at once.”

“I’ll do anything, Boss, anything.” His ravaged green face splits in a horrible smile. “I’m still young, Boss, and I’m pretty strong when I get my blood up.”

The D.S. retches into his handkerchief and points to the door with a limp hand. The Buyer stands up looking at the D.S. dreamily. His body begins to dip like a dowser’s wand. He flows forward.

“No! No!” screams the D.S.

“Schlup – schlup – schlup.” An hour later they find the Buyer on the nod in the D.S.’s chair. The D.S. has disappeared without a trace.

The Judge: “Everything indicates that you have, in some unspeakable manner uh – assimilated the District Supervisor. Unfortunately there is no proof. I would recommend that you be confined or more accurately contained in some institution, but I know of no place suitable for a man of your caliber. I must reluctantly order your release.”

“That one should stand in an aquarium,” says the arresting officer.

The Buyer spreads terror throughout the industry. Junkies and agents disappear. Like a vampire bat he gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anaesthesizes his victims and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence. And once he has scored he holes up for several days like a gorged boa constrictor. Finally he is caught in the act of digesting the Narcotics Commissioner and destroyed with a flame thrower – the court of inquire ruling that such means were justified in that the Buyer had lost his human citizenship and was, in consequence, a creature without species and a menace to the narcotics industry on all levels.

◊→  ‘The Heat Closing In’  ⇓  [Naked Lunch]

My first reading is from Naked Lunch, a section it was first published here in the University of Chicago in 1959, and this led to the publication of the Olympia edition in Paris…

I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train..Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type: comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, calls the counterman in Nedick’s by his first name. A real asshole. And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (imagine tailing somebody in a white trench coat. Trying to pass as a fag I guess) hit the platform. I can hear the way he would say it holding my outfit in his left hand, right hand on his piece: «I think you dropped something, fella.»

But the subway is moving.

«So long flatfoot!» I yell, giving the fruit his B production. I look into the fruit’s eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the two hundred dollar sharkskin suit, the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and carrying The News as a prop. «Only thing I read is Little Abner.»

A square wants to come on hip…Talks about «pod,» and smoke it now and then, and keeps some around to offer the fast Hollywood types.

«Thanks, kid,» I say, «I can see you’re one of our own.» His face lights up like a pinball machine, with stupid, pink affect.

«Grassed on me he did,» I said morosely. (Note: Grass is English thief slang for inform.) I drew closer and laid my dirty junky fingers on his sharkskin sleeve. «And us blood brothers in the same dirty needle. I can tell you in confidence he is due for a hot shot.» (Note: This is a cap of poison junk sold to addict for liquidation purposes. Often given to informers. Usually the hot shot is strychnine since it tastes and looks like junk.) «Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don’t if the shot is right. That’s the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit—Kid, it was tasty…

«Recollect when I am traveling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi…We is working the fags in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigilante turns up for work in cowboy boots and a black vest with a hunka tin on it and a lariat slung over his shoulder.

«So I say: ‘What’s with you? You wig already?’

«He just looks at me and says: ‘Fill your hand stranger’ and hauls out an old rusty six shooter and I take off across Lincoln Park, bullets cutting all around me. And he hangs three fags before the fuzz nail him. I mean the Vigilante earned his moniker…

And the fruit is thinking: «What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark’s about this one.» He’s a character collector, would stand still for Joe Gould’s seagull act. So I put it on him for a sawski and make a meet to sell him some «pod» as he calls it, thinking, «I’ll catnip* the jerk.»

(* Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or uninstructed.)

«Well,» I said, tapping my arm, «duty calls. As one judge said to another: ‘Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.'»

I cut into the Automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else’s overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous, dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt.

I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times, spectral janitors, grey as ashes, phantom porters sweeping out dusty halls with a slow old man’s hand, coughing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk, patient, cautious and slow, dropped into their bloodless hands a few hours of warmth.

I made the round with him once for kicks. You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at the sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body’s decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it.

«Well, my boys will be like that one day,» I thought. «Isn’t life peculiar?»

◊  ‘From Here To Eternity’   ⇓   [Exterminator]

Mildred Pierce reporting:
I was there. I saw it. I saw women thrown down on Fifth Avenue and raped in their mink coats by blacks and whites and yellows while street urchins stripped the rings from their fingers. A young officer stood nearby. “Aren’t you going to do something?” I demanded.

He looked at me and yawned.

I found Colonel Bradshaw bivouacking at the Ritz. I told him bluntly what was going on. His eyes glinted shamelessly as he said, “Well you have to take a broad general view of things.”

And that’s what I have been doing. Taking a broad general view of American troops raping and murdering helpless civilians while American officers stand around and yawn.

“Been at it a long time, lady. It’s the old army game from here to eternity.”

This license was dictated by considerations taken into account by prudent commanders throughout history. It pays to pay the boys off. Even the noble Brutus did it…

Points with his left hand in catatonic limestone.

“The town is yours soldiers brave.”

Tacitus describes a typical scene… “If a woman or a good looking boy fell into their hands they were torn to pieces in the struggle for possession and the survivors were left to cut each others’ throats.”

«Mother loving American Army run by old women, many of them religious, my God; hanging Amercian soldiers for raping and murdering civilians…”

Old Sarge bellows from here to eternity.

“WHAT THE BLOODY FUCKING HELL ARE CIVILIANS FOR?

SOLDIERS’ PAY.”

The CO stands there and smiles. Just ahead is a middle-western town on a river, thirty thousand civilians. The CO points:

«It’s all yours boys. Every man woman and child. God is nigh.»

«LET’S GET US SOME CIVVIES.»

«Now just a minute boys, listen to Old Sarge. Why make the usual stupid scene kicking in liquor stores grabbing anything in sight? You wake up hungover in an alley your prick sore from fucking dry cunts and assholes your eye gouged out by a broken beer bottle you and your asshole buddy wanted the same piece of ass. No fun in that. Why not leave it like this? They go about their daily routine business as usual schools all open . . . You see what I mean. We did take what we want when we wanted … Cool and steady and easy and make them like it»

The young lieutenant from camouflage sees what he means . . . BOYS . . . swimming pools and locker rooms full of them.

«Getting it steady year after year. Now that’s what I call PAY.»

Precarious governments march in anywhere and take over . . . war lords . . . city states fortified against foraging crowds from starving cities . . .

◊  The Do-Rights  ↓

This folkloric text from the Lexington narcotic hospital was actually inspired by the words of Jubinol, the ancient Roman satirist, referring to great parasites and sycophants – All our soul sciences are fasting with  [ ? ] betting they go to hell – the hell they go.

«If you ever say you’re warm, he breaks into a sweat. If you complain of a draft, he screams for his overcoat.’

THE DO-RIGHTS ←

There is an exclusive wing of Lexington reserved for the do-rights, who are considered good rehabilitation prospects. They get better runs and more medication.

Now, the do-right always shows up with letters from his employer, banker, congressman, pictures himself as an eagle scout shaking hands with the priest on graduation day You know the type, falls all over himself to light the boss’s cigarette. The doctor walks into the ward.

– It’s rather warm in here.

As one man, the do-right breaks into a sweat and rushes out opening windows.

– A bit cold in here, isn’t it?

Immediately the do-rights snatch blankets and bundle themselves up to a course of shattering teeth. Front office brown-nosed pink to the bone.

– Doctor, when I die I want to be buried right in the same coffin with you. You’re the finest, most deepen, most decent, most deeply humane man I have ever known.

– I’ll put you down for additional medication, eon.

– Thank you doctor, pushers should receive the death penalty.

 (for the do-rights, me . . .  Get there firstest, with the brownest nose)

While down in the dim wards in gray rooms, where the do-wrongs fuck and spit and shiver and vomit . . .

– Fucking croaker, wouldn’t give me a goofball. Ask me what the American flag means to me, and I’ll tell them: «Soak it in heroine, doc, and I’ll suck it.» He says I got the wrong attitude; I should see the chap and get straight with Jesus.

And then, with their tears streaming down their lousy pink faces, the do-rights slip up as one man and bellow out the Stars Spangle Banner.

¤  William S. Burroughs:  Commisioner of Sewers ←1991

•  Uranian Willy  ↓  [The Soft Machine]

Uranian Willy the heavy metal Kid, also known as Willy the Rat – He wised up the marks.

«This is war to extermination – Fight cell by cell through bodies and mind screens of the earth –  Souls rotten from the Orgasm Drug – Flesh shuddering from the Ovens – Prisoners of the earth, come out – Storm the studio . . .”

Burned metal smell of interplanetary war in the raw noon streets swept by screaming glass blizzards of enemy flak.

Shift linguals – Free doorways – Cut wordlines –  Photo falling – Word falling – Break through in Grey Room – Towers open fire – Partisans of all nations, open fire – Towers, open fire – Kill… Blast… Pound… Stab… Kill…»

«Pilot K9, you are cut off – Back – Back – Back before the whole fucking shithouse goes up – Return to base immediately – Ride music beam back to base – Stay out of that time flak – All pilots ride Pan Pipes back to base.»

The technicians made a bicarbonate of soda surveying the havoc on his viewscreen. It was impossible to estimate the damage – Anything put out up till now is like pulling a figure out of the air – Enemy installation shattered – Personnel decimated – Board books taken – Electric waves of resistance sweeping through mind screens of the earth – The message of total resistance on short wave of the world.

«This is war to extermination – Shift linguals – Cut word lines – Vibrate tourists – Free doorways – Photo falling – Word falling – Break through in Grey Room – Calling partisans of all nations – Towers, open fire.»

◊  Where You Belong  ↓  [The Soft Machine]

This is from «The Soft Machine»; it’s called «Where You Belong»

My trouble began when they decided I was executive timber – It starts like this: a big blond driller from Dallas picks me out of the labor pool to be his houseboy in a prefabricated air-conditioned bungalow. He comes on rugged, but as soon as we strip down to the ball park  over to his stomach, kicking white horse and screams out part the shit out of me. I give him my slow pimp scowl and in solid.

When his friend comes down from New York the driller says ‘This is the boy I was telling you about’ – And Friend looks me over chewing his cigar and says: ‘What are you doing over there with the apes? Why don’t you come over here with the Board where you belong?’ And he slips me a long slimy look.

Friend works for the Trak News Agency – ‘We don’t report the news – We write it.’

And next thing I know they have strapped a grey flannel suit on me and I am sent to this school in Washington to learn how this writing the news before it happens is done – I sus it is the Mayan caper with an IBM machine and I don’t want to be caught short in a grey flannel suit when the lid blows off.

So the District Supervisor calls me in and puts the old white schmaltz down on me:

‘Now kid what are you doing over there with the niggers and the apes? Why don’t you straighten out and act like a white man? – After all they’re only human cattle   –  You know that yourself  –  I hate to see a bright young man fuck up and get off on the wrong track  –  Sure it happens to all of us one time or another  –  Why the man who went on to invent Shitola was sitting right where you’re sitting now twenty-five years ago and I was saying the same things to him  –  Well, he straightened out the way you’re going to straighten out now.»

Yes sir, that Shitola combined with an ape diet; all we have to do is press the button and a hundred million more or less gooks flush out in the grinding green cancer piss.

«That’s BIG, isn’t it? And any man with white blood in him wants to be part of something big. You can’t deny your blood kid  –  You’re white white white  – And you can’t walk out on Trak  –  There’s just no place to go.»

Most distasteful thing I ever stood still for – So I walk out and the lid blew off.

◊  Just Say ‘NO’ to Drug Hysteria  ↓  (excerpt)

Then along came Ronnie and Nancy, hand in hand, to tell us nobody has the right to mind his own business:

«Indifference is not an option. Only outspoken insistence that drug use will not be tolerated.»

Everyone is obligated to become hysterical at the mere thoughts of drug use, just as office workers in 1934 were obligated to scream curses, like Pavlov’s frothing dogs, when the enemy leader appeared on screen. And they’d better scream loud and scream ugly.

I remember during the Mighty Belt flap, Eyewitness News was going around, prowling the streets, you know, sticking mikes in people’s faces. One horrible biddy stated: «Well, I think making the money they do, they should serve as an example.» She gets plenty of mike time.

And here’s a black cat working on some underground cables, straightens up and says, «I think if someone uses drugs, it’s his own bus—»  He didn’t even get the word out. Freedom of the press to select what they want to hear, and call it the voice of the people.

Urine tests! Our pioneer ancestors would piss in their graves at the thought of urine tests to decide whether a man is competent to do his job. The measure of competence is performance. When told that General Grant had a drinking problem, Lincoln said: «Find out what brand of whiskey he drinks, and distribute it to my other generals.»

Doctor Halsted, one of the great American surgeons who introduced antiseptic procedures at a time when surgeons, far from donning rubber gloves, did not even wash their hands, and the death rate from post-operative infections ran up to 80 percent. He was a life-long morphine addict. But he could still hack it and hack it good, and he lost no patients because of his personal habit. In those «good old days,» a man’s personal habits were personal and private. Now even a citizen’s blood and urine are subject to arbitrary seizure and search. Why, the world’s greatest detective could not have survived a urine test. «Which is it this time, Holmes, cocaine or morphine?» Watson asks…

It’s rather disquieting to speculate what may lurk behind this colossal red herring of the War Against Drugs – a war neither likely to, nor designed to succeed. One thing is obvious: old, clean money and new, dirty money are shaking hands under the table. And the old tried-and-failed police approach will continue and escalate. In politics, if something doesn’t work, that is the best reason to go on doing it. If something looks like it might work, stay well away. Things like that could make waves, and the boys at the top, they don’t like waves   ≈  ≈  ≈

♦  The President  ⇓

•→ ‘Why I Stopped Wanting to be President’ ⇒

This piece was written for Harper’s magazine in a reply to the question: ‘When did you stop wanting to be President?’

When did I stop wanting to be President? At birth certainly, and perhaps before . . .

‘Sharkey’s Night’  ↓  [w/ Laurie Anderson]

Sun’s going down. Like a big bald head.
Disappearing behind the boulevard. (Oooeee.) It’s Sharkey’s night.
Yeah. It’s Sharkey’s night tonight. And the manager says: Sharkey?
He’s not at his desk right now. (Oh yeah.) Could I take a message?

And Sharkey says: Hey, kemosabe! Long time no see.
He says: Hey sport. You connect the dots. You pick up the pieces.
He says: You know, I can see two tiny pictures of myself
And there’s one in each of you eyes. And they’re doin’ everything I do.
Every time I light a cigarette, they light up theirs.
I take a drink and I look in and they’re drinkin’ too.
It’s drivin’ me crazy. It’s drivin’ me nuts.

And Sharkey says: Deep in the heart of darkest America.
Home of the brave. He says: Listen to my heart beat.
Paging Mr. Sharkey. White courtesy telephone please.

•→Tio Mate Smiles [«The Wild Boys»]

◊  William Burroughs’ Thanksgiving Prayer  ↓

Thanksgiving Day, Nov 28,1986 first appeared in the chapbook Tornado Alley, with illustrations by S. Clay Wilson. Gus Van Sant then made a short film of Burroughs reading the text. The poem resonates today as exposing what has gone horribly wrong in the USA, or maybe what has always been wrong.

Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986 – William S. Burroughs
For John Dillinger – In hope he is still alive

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons,

destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts

thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison

thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger
thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot
thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through
thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches,

for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces

thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers
thanks for laboratory AIDS
thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs
thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business
thanks for a nation of finks — yes,

thanks for all the memories all right, lets see your arms

you always were a headache and you always were a bore
thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

♦   A New Standard by which to Measure Infamy  ↓

«Somewhere in the shadow of the Titanic disaster —still living by the inexplicable grace of God— slinks a cur in human shape, to-day the most despicable human being in all the world. In that grim midnight hour, already great in history, he found himself hemmed in by the band of heroes whose watchword and countersign rang out across the deep  — «Women and children first!»


What did he do? 
He scuttled to the stateroom deck, put on a woman’s skirt, a woman’s hat and a woman’s veil, and picking his crafty way back among the brave and chivalric men who guarded the rail of the doomed ship, he filched a seat in one of the lifeboats and saved his skin. His identity is not yet known, though it will be in good time. So foul an act as that will out like murder.

This man still lives. Surely he was born and saved to set for men a new standard by which to measure infamy and shame.»

•          •          •

Φ  Scandal at the Jungle Hiltons   ⇓   [‘Dead City Radio’_1990]

He can see it already. The jungle Hiltons. . .  «When Orchids Bloom in the Moonlight» on the Muzak. . . the bar, with orchids and a tank against one wall full of piranha fish. 

The management throws in live goldfish and pieces of raw meat. It’s quite an attraction. The motels and souvenir shops and hamburger joints, drunken Indians, polluted rivers,  the gritty bite of diesel fumes.  In front of the Manaos Opera House, tourists posing with a boa constrictor.

 

Terrible scandal:  a big pop star,  in a jealous rage fueled by cocaine,  grabbed his girlfriend’s Yorkshire terrier and threw it into the piranha tank.  As the piranhas attacked the floundering dog,  the hysterical starlet threw a heavy bronze ashtray which shattered the tank,  spilling snapping fish and bloody water across the patrons as the disemboweled,  screaming dog dragged its intestines across the floor. 

Quite a scene it was,  and of course there were plenty of cameras to freeze-dry this edifying spectacle for posterity and export.  It’s the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed.

                 [The Western Lands]

¤   Ah Pook, the Destroyer  ↓ [1990]

[«Dead City Radio«] – W S Burroughs invokes various Mayan Gods to the music of John Cale.

‘When I die I become Death – Death is the seed from which I grow…’

Ah Pook The Destroyer/Brion Gysin’s All-Purpose Bedtime Story

Itzamna, Spirit of Early Mists and Showers.

Ix Tab,   Goddess of Ropes and Snares.

Ix Chel, the Spider-Web-that-Catches~the-Dew-of-Morning

Zuhuy Kak,  Virgin Fire,  Patroness of Infants.

Ah Dziz,  the Master of Cold.

Kak U Pacat, who works in Fire.

Ix Tadoom, she who spits out precious stones.

Hex Chun Chan, the Dangerous One.

Ah Pook,  the Destroyer.

.  .  .  Hiroshima 1945, August 6. Sixteen minutes past 8 am.

                  •   Who really gave that order?

ANSWER:         Control. The ugly American. The instrument of control.

QUESTION:      If control’s control is absolute, why does control need to control?

ANSWER:          Control needs time.

QUESTION:      Is control controlled by its need to control?

ANSWER:          Yes.

               •   Why does control need humans, as you call them?

               •   Wait – Wait – Time – A landing field. Death needs time like a junky needs junk.

               •   And what does Death need time for?

            •  The answer is so simple.  Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for Ah Pook’s sake.

        •  Death needs time for what it kills to grow in for Ah Pook’s sweet sake, you stupid vulgar greedy ugly American death sucker. Death needs time for what it kills to grow in for Ah Pook’s sweet sake.  You stupid vulgar greedy ugly American death sucker.  Like this.

Brion Gysin had the All-Purpose Nuclear Bedtime Story.  The All-Purpose Bedtime Story in fact. Some trillions of years ago a slappy dirty giant flicked grease from his fingers. One of those gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor.

Splat!

∇  ‘Apocalypse’  ⇓  [NBC Symphony Orchestra]

Mariners sailing close to the shores of Tuscany heard a voice cry out from the hills, the trees and the sky: «The Great God Pan is dead!» Pan, God of Panic: the sudden awareness that everything is alive and significant. The date was December 25, 1 A.D. But Pan lives on in the realm of the imagination, in writing and painting and music. Look at Van Gogh’s sunflowers, writhing with portentous life; listen to the Pipes of Pan in Joujouka. Now Pan is neutralized framed in museums, entombed in books, relegated to folklore.
But art is spilling out of its frames into subway graffiti. Will it stop there? Consider an apocalyptic statement: ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.’ – Hassan i Sabbah. Not to be interpreted as an invitation to all manner of restrained and destructive behavior; that would be a minor episode, which would run its course. Everything is permitted because nothing is true. It is all make-believe, illusion, dream… ART. When art leaves the frame and the written word leaves the page – not merely the physical frame and page, but the frames and pages of assigned categories – a basic disruption of reality itself occurs: the literal realization of art.

Success will write APOCALYPSE across the sky. The artist aims for a miracle. The painter wills his picture to move off the canvas with a separate life, movement outside of the picture, and one rent in the fabric is all it takes for pandemonium to sluice through.
Last act, the End, this is where we all came in. The final Apocalypse is when every man sees what he sees, feels what he feels, and hears what he hears. The creatures of all your dreams and nightmares are right here, right now, solid as they ever were or ever will be, electric vitality of careening subways faster faster faster stations flash by in a blur.

Pan God of Panic, whips screaming crowds, as millions of faces look up at the torn sky:

OFF THE TRACK! OFF THE TRACK!

The planet is pulling loose from its moorings, careening into space, spilling cities and mountains and seas into the Void, spinning faster and faster as days and nights flash by like subway stations. Iron penis chimneys ejaculate blue sparks in a reek of ozone, tunnels crunch down teeth of concrete and steel, flattening cars like beer cans. Graffiti eats through glass and steel like acid, races across the sky in tornados of flaming colors.

Cherry-pickers with satin brushes big as a door inch through Wall Street, leaving a vast souvenir postcard of the Grand Canyon. Water trucks slosh out paint, outlaw painters armed with paint pistols paint everything and everyone in reach. Survival Artists, paint cans strapped to their backs, grenades at their belts, paint anything and anybody within range. Skywriters, dogfight, collide and explode in paint. Telephone poles dance electric jigs in swirling crackling wires. Neon explosions and tornados flash through ruined cities, volcanoes spew molten colors as the earth’s crust buckles and splinters into jigsaw pieces.

The household appliances revolt: washing machines snatch clothes from the guests, bellowing Hoovers suck off makeup and wigs and false teeth, electric toothbrushes leap into screaming mouths, clothes dryers turn gardens into dust bowls, garden tools whiz through lawn parties, impaling the guests, who are hacked to fertilizer by industrious Japanese hatchets. Loathsome, misshapen, bulbous plants spring from their bones, covering golf courses, swimming pools, country clubs and tasteful dwellings.

At my back – faster and faster – I always hear ‘Hurry up – energy ground down into – please it’s time closing’ – sidewalks and street by billions of feet and tires erupt from manholes and tunnels break out with volcanic force let it come down careening subways faster and faster stations blur by, Pan whips screaming crowds with flaming pipes millions of faces look up at the torn sky  OFF THE TRACK – OFF THE TRACK the planet is pulling loose from its moorings, careening off into space spilling cities and mountains and seas into the Void faster and faster.

Skyscrapers scrape rents of blue and white paint from the sky, the rivers swirl with color, nitrous ochres and reds eat through the bridges, falling into the rivers, splashing colors across warehouses and piers and roads and buildings, AMOK art floods inorganic molds, stirring passions and metal and glass, steel girders writhing in mineral lusts burst form their concrete covers, wall of glass melt and burn with madness in a billion crazed eyes, bridges buck cars and trucks into the rivers, the sidewalks run ahead faster and faster, energy ground down into sidewalks and streets by billions of feet and tires erupts from manholes and tunnels, breaks out with volcanic force:
LET IT COME DOWN
Caught in New York beneath the animals of the village, the Piper pulled down the sky.

♦→ The Last Words of Hassan Sabbah ↓ [read]

◊   ‘One God Universe’ ↓ [ Spare Ass Annie _ 1993]

Consider the impasse of a one God universe.
He is all-knowing and all-powerful. He can’t go anywhere since He is already everywhere. He can’t do anything since the act of doing presupposes opposition.
His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death … To keep his dying show on the road.

Sooner or later,
«Look boss we don’t have enough energy left to fry an elderly woman in a flea bag hotel bar.»
«Well, we’ll have to start faking it.»

Joe looks after him sourly and mixes a bicarbonated soda.
«Sure, start faking it. Sure, and leave the details to Joe.»

Now look, from a real disaster you get a pig of energy: Sacrifice, Heroism, Grief, Separation, Fear and Violent Death, and remember one violent death yields more energy than a cancer ward. So, from a energy surplus you can underwrite the next one.
So, from a energy surplus you can underwrite the next one.
But the first one’s a fake, you can’t underwrite a shithouse!
Trying to explain to God Almighty where His one God universe is going.
The asshole doesn’t know what buttons to push or what happens when you push them! Abandon ship, god damn it! Every man for himself!

Recollect Pope John XXIII saying, «Like a little soldier, I stand at attention in the presence of my captains.» The old army game from here to eternity: Get there firstest with the brownest nose.

∇  Quick Fix  ⇓

To put the country simple, earth has a lot of things other folks might want…like the whole planet. And maybe these folks would like a few changes made. Like more carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, and room for their way of life. We’ve seen this happen before, right in these United States.Your way of life destroyed the Indian’s way of life. The Indian reservation is extinction. But I offer this distinction. I’m with the invaders, no use trying to hide that. And at the same, I disagree with some of the things they are doing.

Oh we’re not united anymore than you are … Oh we’re not united anymore than you are.

Conservative factions is set on nuclear war as a solution to the Indian personality.

Others disagree  …  Others disagree

I don’t claim that my methods are one hundred percent humane, but I do say, if we can’t think of anything quieter, and tidier than that…

We are all not that much better than new earth aches.

There is no place else to go – The theater is closed … There is no place else to go – The theater is closed

Cut word lines  –  Cut music lines

Smash the control images   –   Smash the control machine.

♦  ‘Old Man Bickford’  ⇓

Old man Bickford, cattle, oil, real estate
He’s one of the poker-playin’, whiskey-drinkin’ evil old men who run the United States of America.

To these backstage operators, presidents, cabinet ministers and ambassadors
and his jokes and errand boys…
they do what they are told to do or else.

His subordinates never know why they have fallen from favor.
That is for them to figure out when his displeasure falls heavy and cold.

Jess Sanford knows he’s in trouble when the Old Man steers him into a little side room with one chair.
The Old Man sits down and smiles.
«Yunno, Jess. I have an intuition about you. I think you’d make a mighty fine President.»

Jess turns pale. He was hearing his death warrant.
«Oh no, Mr. Bickford. I don’t have the qualifications!»

«I disagree with you. I think you do have the qualifications. You’ve got a good front and a fuckin’ big mouth.»

Now Jess knows he talked too much in the wrong place at the wrong time.
«Please, Mr. Bickford. I have a bad heart and the job would kill me!»

Bickford’s smile widens.
«Think about it, Jess, just think about it… I wouldn’t like to see you make a mistake»
←Toronto_1983

Introducing my hero, Kim Carson.

Kim is a morbid, slimy youth of unwholesome proclivities, with an insatiable appetite for the extreme and the sensational.

When Kim was fifteen his father allowed him to withdraw from the school because he was so unhappy there and so much dis­liked by the other boys and their parents.

‘I don’t want that boy in the house again,» said Colonel Greenfield. «He looks like a sheep-killing dog.»

«It is a walking corpse,» said a Saint Louis matron poison­ously.

«The boy is rotten clear through and he stinks like a pole­cat,» Judge Farris pontificated.

Well, this was true: when angered or aroused or excited Kim flushed bright red and steamed off a rank ruttish animal smell . . .

… drop on them and bomb them – Shit one out in the first place.

Yes, I’m talking to you, Dr Robert Oppenheimer, known as Oppie to his friends.

When Oppie heard the good news about Hiroshima, he said, «Thanks God it wasn’t a dud.»

But God, do you think I’m from Hiroshima, Oppenheimer? 

And Truman said,

«God has given us the atom bomb and He will show us how to use it, good God Almighty.

◊  «This is Kim Carson»  ↓  .  .  .

Kim decides to go West and become a shootist. If anyone doesn’t like the way he looks and acts and smells, he can feel his grubby peasant paw.

Kim’s training as a shootist begins. He meets a wise old assassin, whispering Kesnafield.

«This is Kim Carsons, Uncle Kes.»

The old man didn’t seem to hear. He spoke to the air in front of him. «Your hand and your eyes know a lot more about shootin’ than you do. Just learn to stand out of the way.» His empty eyes, old, unbluffed, un­readable, rest on Kim.

«City boy, did you ever see a dog roll in carrion?»

«Yes sir, I was tempted to join him, sir.»

«Did you ever see a black snake pretend to be a rattle­snake?»

The scene flashed in front of Kim’s eyes:  Kills Ellisor and Kim had chased and cornered a six-foot blacksnake. It was a fall day and there were leaves on the ground and the snake coiled himself, opened his mouth, vibrating the tip of its tail in the dry leaves, and both boys saw immediately what was happening: it was pretending to be a rattlesnake, trying to scare us off.

“How did he know enough to do that? What do you think Kim?” the old man asked. “You think you once saw a rattlesnake scare someone?”

«No sir I think he just knows about other snakes.”

«Kim, if you had your choice, would you rather be a poi­sonous snake or nonpoisonous?»

«Oh poisonous, sir, like a green mamba or a spitting cobra.»

«Why?»

«I’d feel safer, sir.»

«And that’s your idea of heaven, feeling safer?»

«Yes sir.»

«Is a poisonous snake really safer?»

«Not really but it must feel good after he bites someone. Safer? Yes sir, dead people are less frightening than live ones.»

«Young man, I think you’re an assassin.”

“I want to be one sir!”

◊  The Wild Fruits  ↓ [The Place of Dead Roads]

Kim recruits a band of flamboyant and picturesque outlaws, called the Wild Fruits. There is the Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent.

–  What’s the matter? Did someone take your lollipop?  Oh senor, I am sorry for you…

And the Priest, who goes into a gunfight giving his adversary the last rites. And the Blind Gun, who zeroes in with bat squeaks.

Kim trains his men to identify themselves with death. He takes some rookie guns out to a dead horse rotting in the sun, eviscerated by vultures.  Kim points to the horse, steaming there in the noonday heat.

–  All right, roll in it.

–  WHAT?

–  Roll in it! Get the stink of death into your chaps and your boots and your guns and your hair!

Well, most of us puked at first, but we got used to it, and vultures followed us around hopefully… We always ride into town with the wind behind us. The townspeople gag and retch:

–    My God, what’s that stink?

–    It’s the stink of death, citizens.

And I think, personally,  the whole planet stinks of death. What are we going to do about it? Well all this may have happened many times before in this old universe. Here we are trillions of years ago in Galaxy X. Rallies being organised to protest the use of black holes as an energy source. A bit late, as it turned out…er…closing time gentlemen.

Brion Gyson has a Bedtime Story. It seems that trillions of years ago a giant flicked grease from his fingers. One of these gobs of grease is our universe on its way to the floor.

THE WESTERN LANDS ⇓

The most unpleasant, precarious and downright stupid immortality blueprint was drafted by the ancient Egyptians. First you had to get yourself mummified, and that was very expensive, making immortality a monopoly of the truly rich However, your continued existence in the Western Lands, that’s Egyptian paradise, was entirely contingent on the continued existence and welfare of your mummy. That is why they had their mummies hid good and protected by pokes and curses.

Well, beside your basic passport, you must also know the name: YOU SHALL NOT PASS UNLESS YOU KNOW MY NAME FOR PAGES AFTER PAGE IN THE EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD.

Well, here’s plain citizen Hoss. He’s got enough vigor and vitality to survive his physical death, but he won’t get far. He’s got no mummy, he’s got no names, he’s got nothing. What happens to a bum like that, a nameless, mummyless asshole? Why, demons will swarm all over him at the first checkpoint. He will be dismembered and thrown into a flaming pit, where his soul will be utterly consumed and destroyed for ever. While others, the sound mummies with the right names to drop in the right places, sail through to the Western Lands.

There are, of course, some second-class souls who just barely squeeze through. Their mummies are not in a good sound condition. These creeps are relegated to third-rate transient hotels just beyond the last checkpoint, where they can smell the charnel-house disposal ovens from their skimpy balconies. «You see that sign?» a bartender snarls.

MAGGOTY MUMMIES WILL NOT BE SERVED HERE

«Might as well face facts … My mummy is going downhill. Cheap job to begin with … Gawd, maggots is crawling all over  … The way that demon guard sniffed at me this morning…»                 

Transient hotels  .  .  .

Well, here you are in your luxury condo, deep in the Western Lands…

You got no security! Some disgruntled former employee sneaks in and throws acid in your mummy’s face, or sloshes gasoline all over and burns the shit out of it.

            «OH oh … someone is fucking with my  mummy…»

            «Brother, you’re fucked.»

You see, Mummies are sitting ducks. No matter who you are, what can happen to your mummy is a pharaoh’s nightmare: grave robbers, scavengers, the dreaded mummy bashers…  Explosions … My god…!

Well, you know, this planet could be a reasonably pleasant place to live if everybody could just mind his own business and let others do the same.

As a wise old black faggot said to me years ago… “Some people are Shits, darling.” I’ll never be able to forget it.

¶  with Material  ↓  ‘Seven Souls’

The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls. 

Top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren, the Secret Name. This corresponds to my Director; He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film.When you die, that’s where Ren came in.

Second soul, and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power, LightThe Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she, or it is third man out . . . depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light.Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense – but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal.They go back to Heaven for another vessel. The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.

Number four is Ba, the heart, often treacherous.This is a hawk’s body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist.Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka, the Double, most closely associated with the subject.The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the western Lands.

Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

Number seven is Sekhu, the Remains.

↑  Political Program: Every Man a God

Political program: Everyman a God, and how can this be accomplished? Well, to put it country-simple, by doing your job and doing it well. Because there are many gods…

The God of whores and thieves and pushers.

A God of Fevers and Plebs, who ride in a whispering south wind.

A God of the Long Chance, the horse that comes from last to win in the stretch; the punch-drunk fighter who comes off the floor to win by a knockout.

A God of anti-heroes and outrage. The ship’s captain who put on women’s clothes and he rushed into the first lifeboat. The pilot who bailed out of a burning plane, leaving his passengers to crash.

A God of Future Space Travelers, who are ready to leave the whole human context behind and take a step into the unknown.

Everyman a God, that is, if you can qualify. You can’t be a god of anything unless you can do it.

♦  Colonel Bradfield  ⇓

It is Colonel Bradford’s job to investigate the practical potentials of ESP, sorcery, witchcraft, the lot. He doesn’t give a shit for a natural law or what is or isn’t possible; all he cares about is results. “Bring me the ones that work.”

“What did you bring this old beast in here for?”

A withered old man dressed only in a loin cloth, stiff with yellow piss stains stinking like a snake cave in spring sits down on his leather armchair. Fumigating the chair would be inadequate, the Colonel decides.

“He’s a natural Chief. He can throw an operative curse.”

“I don’t doubt it: he can kill by proximity.”

“He’s got a good track record, Chief.”

“Sure, sure.”

Eighty years in the making. So how did you get that way?

To be a magician you’ve got to be inhuman in some way. Easiest is to eat your own shit and eat steady – eats it in and shits it out and eats it in again – and gets eviler and dirtier – a stink nobody can smell and live… But who am I to be critical?

The trouble is it just isn’t practical.

“But leave no trace – no way to be traced to us!”

“Like hell there isn’t. You think the Irons aren’t into this shit up the ass? You can think and make up the evidence, we all do it. No way to trace is. Big deal. 80 shit-eating years to turn out one more human centipede control a curse if you hold it steady on target. I can train an agent in hours with untraceable poisons and toxines, electronic devices to produce eurhythmical heatbeats. He died in his sleep dreaming about a beautiful deadly woman and all he wanted to do was die in her arms.”

“See what I mean? We don’t need it. “

“But Chief you can’t just throw away a thing like this. Indeed where can we throw it? It’s radioactive.”

“Get it out of here for starters and take the chair out with it.”

¤  VIRUS B-23   ⇓   [Cities of the Red Night] 

This passage concerns a virus which occasions biologic alterations in those who survive, and these alterations are genetically conveyed giving rise to a race of mutants known as the feverfreaks. Some of these mutations are favorable and some otherwise.

A top government official bluntly warned: “Virus B-23 now loose in our overcrowded cities, is an agent that produces biologic changes in those affected – fatal in many cases, permanent and hereditary in those who survive and become carriers for that strain, which as a matter of survival they will spread as far and fast as possible to destroy enemies and quite literally make friends.» Junkies, however, are only lightly affected by the virus and remain characteristically unchanged.

↑  video lasts less than nine minutes . . .

Doctor Pierson was a discreet addict who kept himself down to three shots a day, half a grain in each shot – he could always cover for that. Towards the end of an eight-hour shift he tended to be perfunctory, so when he got the call from emergency he hoped it wouldn’t take long or keep him overtime. Of course he could always slip a half-grain under his tongue, but that was wasteful and he liked to be in bed when he took his shot, and feel it hit the back of his neck and move down the backs of his thighs while he blew cigarette smoke towards the ceiling. As he reached for his bag he noticed that he had barked his knuckles. He couldn’t remember where or when – that happens, when you are feeling no pain.

«It looks like measles, Doctor.»

The doctor looks at the boy’s face with distaste. He disliked children, adolescents, and animals. The word ‘cute’ did not exist in his emotional vocabulary. There were red blotches on the boy’s face but they seemed rather large for measles…

«Well, get it in here, Nurse, whatever it is … away from the other patients. Not that I care what they catch; it’s just hospital procedure.»

The boy was wheeled into a cubicle. His fingers cold with distaste, the doctor folded the sheet down to the boy’s waist and noticed that he was wearing no shorts.

«Why is he naked?» he snapped at the attendants.

«He was like that when they picked him up, Doctor.»

«Well, they might have put something on him!” He turned back to the attendants. «What are you standing there for? Get out! And you, nurse, what are you gawking at?  Order a bed in isolation.»

His temper was always evil when he ran over like this, but right after a shot he could be nice in a dead, fishy way. The doctor turned back to the boy on the bed. His duty as a physician is clear – Hippocrates points sternly to the sheet. «Well, I suppose I have to look at the little naked beast.» He folded the sheet down to the boy’s knees. The boy had an erection. The genitals and the areas adjacent to the genitals were bright red like a red bikini.

The doctor leaped back as he would from a striking snake, but he was too late. A gob of semen hit the back of his hand right on the skinned knuckles. He wiped it off with an exclamation of disgust. He recalled later that he felt a slight tingling sensation which he didn’t notice at the time – being that disgusted with the human body, he wondered why he’d chosen the medical profession. And this dirty child was delaying his fix. «You filthy little beast!» he snapped. The boy sniggered. The doctor pulled the sheet up to the boy’s chin.

He was washing his hands when the nurse came in with a stretcher table and an orderly to take the boy to isolation. The doctor sniffed. «My God, what’s that smell?  I don’t know what this is, Nurse, but it’s rather disgusting. He seems to be in some state of sexual delirium. He also seems to be giving off a horrible odor. Order the broad spectrum … cortisone, of course.  It may be an allergic condition; red-haired and animals are especially liable and the usual antibiotics…. If the sexual condition continues, do not hesitate to administer morphine.» The doctor gasped and clasped a handkerchief in front of his mouth and nose. «Get it out of here!» (He always referred to a patient as «the disease«)

«Do you have a typhoid bed in isolation?»

«Not now we don’t.»

«Well it can’t stay here.»

He had barely settled in bed after his fix when the phone rang. It was the super. «Seems we have an epidemic on our hands, doctor. All staff report back to the hospital immediately.»

‘Could it be that dirty little boy?’ he thought as he dressed and picked up his satchel and walked to the hospital. He saw  there was a police line around the entrance.

«Oh, yes, Doctor, Right over there for your mask.»

«I’ll help you put it on, Doctor.» A brisk young girl in some sort of uniform rubbed her tits against him in a most offensive manner. And before she got the mask on, he smelled it and he knew: it was that dirty little boy.

Inside was a scene from Dante: stretchers side by side in the corridors, sperm all over the sheets, the walls and the floor.

«Be careful, Doctor.» A garrulous old nurse caught his arm in time. «Just put one foot solidly in front of the other, Doctor, that’s right…. It’s terrible, Doctor, the older patients are dying like flies.»

«I don’t want to hear any generalities, Nurse … take me to my ward.»

«Well, Doctor, you can have the northeast wing if you want – right here.»

Every sort of copulation was going on in front of him, every disgusting thing they could think of. Some of them had pillowcases and towels wrapped around each other’s necks in some kind of awful contest. As some of these crazed patients seemed in danger of strangulation, he ordered attendants to restrain them, but no attendants were available.

“Well, we’ll start with morphine and a curare derivative, Nurse.»

«Sorry, Doctor, the morphine stocks are exhausted on the older patients. They go into the most awful spasms at the end, Doctor.»

At this terrible pronouncement the doctor turned pale as death. He slumped to the floor in a faint, his face covered with red blotches. By the time they got his clothes off, his body was also affected, and spontaneous orgasms were observed.

‘Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for,’ he told himself later, ‘but it’s still an easy score’

He recovers in the fear because of his addiction, and the word went out that the junk was the only insurance against the fever. No stemming the black market the Government concedes and legalises. Now begins a deadly war to extermination between the junkies and the fever-freaks. Here’s the old junkie’s CO taking the young lieutenant on his rounds: “They’re out there son,” he points beyond the barbed wire and gun turrets, “waiting, watching, hatching every filthy thing in their diseased minds and bodies. They’ll sell you red hots for junk – kill you in a nasty sex spasm. They want a fever world.”

“That’s what we have to deal with out here.”

“Well, perhaps some times, somewhere, the human race will remember, but a few white men stood between them and the fever-freaks.”

‘What an old wind bag!’ the boy thought, “Where is my fix?”

“I’m sure there’re rations here son. Quarter G three times s day.”

“Captain, that is short.”

“We have to ration it son. God help us if we ever run out and fall into their hands.”

“Swear you’ll kill me first, sir.”

“Of course son. The army always takes care of its own.”

The hipster-bebop junkies never showed at 103rd Street. The 103rd Street boys were all oldtimers – thin, sallow faces; bitter twisted mouths; stiff-fingered, stylized gestures. (There is a junk gesture that marks the junky like the limp wrist marks the fag: the hand swings out from the elbow stiff~fingered, palm up) They were of various nationalities and physical types, but they all looked alike somehow. They all looked like junk. There was Irish, George the Greek, Pantopon Rose, Louie the Bellhop, Eric the Fag, the Beagle, the Sailor, and Joe the Mex. Several of them are dead now, others are doing time.

There are no more junkies at 103rd and Broadway waiting for the connection. The connection has gone somewhere else. But the feel of junk is still there. It hits you at the corner, follows you along the block, then falls away like a discouraged panhandler as you walk on.

Joe the Mex had a thin face with a long, sharp, twitchy nose and a down-curving, toothless mouth. Joe’s face was lined and ravaged, but not old. Things had happened to his face, but Joe was not touched. His eyes were bright and young. There was a gentleness about him com­mon to many oldtime junkies. You could spot Joe blocks away. In the anonymous city crowd, he stood out sharp and clear, as though you were seeing him through binoculars. He was a liar, and like most liars, he was constantly chang­ing his stories, altering time and personnel from one telling to the next. One time he would tell a story about some friend, next time he would switch the story around to give himself the lead. He would sit in the cafeteria over coffee and pound cake, talking at random about his experiences.

“We knew this Chinaman has some stuff stashed, and we try every way to make him tell us where it is. We have him tied to a chair. I light matches» – he made a gesture of lighting a match – «and put them under his feet. He won’t say nothing. I feel so sorry for that man. Then my partner hit him in the face with his gun and the blood run all down his face.» He put his hands over his face and drew them down to indicate the flow of blood. “When I see that I turn sick at my stomach and I say, ‘Let’s get out of here and leave the man alone. He ain’t going to tell us nothing.'»

Louie was a shoplifter who had lost what nerve he ever had. He wore a long, shabby, black overcoat that gave him the look of a furtive buzzard. Thief and junky stuck out all over him. Louie had a hard time making it. I heard that at one time he had been a stool pigeon, but at the time I knew him he was generally considered right. George the Greek did not like Louie and said he was just a bum. «Don’t ever invite him to your home, he’ll take ad­vantage: He’ll go on the nod in front of your family. He’s got no class to him.»

George the Greek was the admitted arbiter of this set. He decided who was right and who was wrong. George prided himself on his integrity. «I never beat nobody.»

George was a three-time loser. The next time meant life as an habitual criminal. So his life narrowed down to the necessity of avoiding any serious involvements. No push­ing, no stealing; he worked from time to time on the docks. He was hemmed in on every side and there was no way for him to go but down. When he couldn’t get junk – which was about half the time – he drank and took goof balls.

He had two adolescent sons who gave him a lot of trouble. George was half-sick most of the time in this period of scarcity, and no match for these young louts. His face bore the marks of a constant losing fight. The last time I was in New:York I couldn’t find George. The 103rd Street boys are scattered now and no one I talked to knew what happened to George the Greek.

Fritz the Janitor was a pale thin little man who gave the impression of being crippled. He was on parole after doing five years because he scored for a pigeon. The pigeon was hard up for someone to turn in, and the narcotics agent urgently needed to make an arrest. Between them they built Fritz up to a big-time dope peddler, and smashed a narcotics ring with his arrest. Fritz was glad to attract so much attention and he talked complacently about his “nickel» in Lexington.

The Fag was a brilliantly successful lush-worker. His scores were fabulous. He was the man who gets to a lush first, never the man who arrives on the scene when the lush is lying there with his pockets turned inside out. A sleeping lush – known as a «flop» in the trade – attracts a hierarchy of scavengers. First come the top lush-workers like the Fag, guided by a special radar. They only want cash, good rings, and watches. Then come the punks who will steal anything. They take the hat, shoes, and belt. Finally, brazen, clumsy thieves will try to pull the lush’s overcoat or jacket off him.

The Fag was always first on a good lush. One time he scored for a thousand dollars at the 103rd Street Station. Often his scores ran into the hundreds. If the lush woke up, he would simper and feel the man’s thigh as though his intentions were sexual. From this trick he got his moniker.

He always dressed well, usually in tweed sport coats and gray flannels. A European charm of manner and a slight Scandinavian accent completed his front. No one could have looked less like a lush-roller. He always worked alone. His luck was good and he was determined to avoid contamination. Sometimes, contact with the lucky can change a man’s run of bad luck, but generally it works the other way. Junkies are an envious lot. 103rd Street envied the Fag his scores. But everyone had to admit he was a right guy, and always good for a small touch.

¤→  The Cat Inside  ⇓  (from his last book)

«I am not a dog hater. I do hate what man has made of his best friend. … A cat’s rage is beautiful, burning with a pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. But a dog’s snarl is ugly, a redneck lynch-mob Paki-basher snarl … snarl of someone (who’s) got a «Kill a Queer for Christ» sticker on his heap, a self-righteous occupied snarl. When you see that snarl you are looking at something that has no face of its own. A dog’s rage is not his. It is dictated by his trainer. And lynch-mob rage is dictated by conditioning.»

Thinking back to early adolescence, I recall a recurrent sensation of cuddling some creature against my chest. It is quite small, about the size of a cat. It is not a human baby and it is not an animal. Not exactly. It is part human and part something else. I can recall an occasion in the house at Price Road. I must be twelve or thirteen. I wonder what it is . . . a squirrel? . . . not quite. I can’t see it clearly. I don’t know what it needs. I do know that it trusts me completely.

Much later I was to learn that I am cast in the role of the Guardian, to create and nurture a creature that is part cat, part human, and part something as yet unimaginable, which might result from a union that has not taken place for millions of years.

Another vision at about the same age: I am awake at dawn in the attic room and see little gray men playing in my block house. They move very fast, like a 1920 speed-up film… whisk… they are gone. Just the empty block house in gray dawn light. I am motionless in this sequence, a silent witness.

The magical medium is being bulldozed away. No more green reindeer in Forest Park. The angels are leaving all the alcoves everywhere, the medium in which Unicorns, Bigfoot, Green Deer exist growing always thinner, like the rain forests and the creatures that live and breathe in them. As the forests fall to make way for motels and Hiltons and McDonald’s, the whole magic universe is dying.  .  .

For those of you who’ve not lived in the country (I mean real farm country, not the Hamptons), a word about barn cats. Most farms have barn cats to keep the mice and rats down. These cats are minimally fed on skimmed milk and table scraps. Otherwise they don’t hunt. Of course it often happens that a barn cat becomes a house cat. And that is what every barn cat, every street cat wants. I find this desperate attempt to win a human protector deeply moving.

Fifteen years ago I dreamt I had caught a white cat on a hook and line. For some reason I was about to reject the creature and throw it back, but it rubbed against me, mewing piteously.

Since I adopted Ruski, the cat dreams are vivid and frequent. Often I dream that Ruski has jumped onto my bed. Of course this sometimes happens, and Fletch is a constant visitor, jumping up on the bed and cuddling against me, purring so loud I can’t sleep.

Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and translucent. I am cuddling it. I don’t know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but can walk and talk. «Don’t you want me?» Again, I don’t know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy.

The Land of the Dead. . .. A reek of boiling sewage, coal gas and burning plastics . . . oil patches . . . roller coasters and Ferris wheels overgrown with rank weeds and vines. I can’t find Ruski. I am calling his name… «Ruski! Ruski! Ruski!»

A deep feeling of sadness and foreboding. «I shouldn’t have brought him out here!» I wake up with tears streaming down my face.  .  .

Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) So I don’t think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats don’t start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.

Dogs started as sentinels. It is still their chief function in farm and village, to give notice of approach, as hunters and guards, and that is why they hate cats.

«Look at the services we provide and all cats do is loll around and purr. Ratters, are they? Take a cat half an hour to kill a mouse. All cats do is purr and alienate the Master’s affections from my honest shit-eating face. Worst thing is they got no sense of right and wrong.»

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.  Of course he wants care and shelter. You don’t buy love for nothing. Like all pure creatures, cats are practical. To understand an ancient question, bring it into present time. My meeting with Ruski and my conversion to a cat man reenacts the relation between the first house cats and their human protectors.

And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal.  Practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food… some of them do.  There must have been a split between the cats who accepted domestication and those who did not.

Back to present time with a weary sigh. There will be fewer and fewer exotic, beautiful animals. The Mexican hairless cat is already extinct. The tiny three-pound wild cats that can be easily tamed are always rarer, further away, plaintive lost spirits waiting for the human hand that will never come, fragile and sad as a boat of dead leaves launched in a park pond by a child. Or the phosphorescent bats that emerge once every seven years to fill the air with impossible riots of perfume. . . melodious, distant calls from the bat cats and gliding lemurs. .. the rain forests of Borneo and South America are going. . . to make way for WHAT?

←The Cat Inside

The title is ‘THE CAT INSIDE’. “May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion Gysin, who was going to do the illustrations. In the front room where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black kitten, a little Calico cat, she had five kittens. I pick up my Tourister. It seems heavy. I look inside and there are four kittens.

«Take care of my babies. Take them with you wherever you go.” 

I am selecting cat food at the pet shop in Dillon’s supermarket and I met an old woman. Seems her cats won’t eat any cat food with fish in it. Well, I tell her, mine are just the opposite. They prefer the fishy foods like Salmon Dinner and Seafood Supper.

«Well,» she says, «they certainly are company.»

And what can she do for her company when there is no Dillon’s and no pet shop? What can I do? What can I do? I simply could not stand to see my my cats hungry.

Well, of course there are many wild cats, some of them that could be tamed, er… cats that weigh only three pounds. However, there will be fewer and fewer exotic beautiful animals… The rain forests at Borneo and South America are going to make way for what?

At Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb and couldn’t wait to drop it on the Evil East, the Yellow Peril, the boys are sitting on logs and rocks, eating some sort of food. There is a stream at the end of a slope. The counselor was a Southerner with a politician’s look about him. Like many Southerners, he was a natural order, just naturally full of bullshit. He told us stories by the campfire, culled from the racist garbage of the insidious Sax Rohmer. Remember Sax Rohmer, who created the insidious Doctor Fumanchu? First Yellow Peril. And Fumanchu went on and on, like Tarzan; you thought he was dead and then he popped up again. He also wrote books about the evil Egyptians, the Green Eyes […?], the unspeakable Anthony Ferrara, that totally looked more like a beautiful ego woman than a man up to his crotch, and unspeakable rites and depraved practices and secrets so foul no decent man may learn to […?] Basic postulate:  East is cruel, depraved, devious, immoral, anti-Christ, anti-American, in a word,  evil. West is humane, decent, wholesome and straightforward, moral, sincere and godbearing, in a word,  good. Good for what exactly?

Suddenly, a badger erupts among the boys – I don’t know why he did it, just playful, friendly and inexperienced like the Aztec Indians who brought fruit down to the Spanish and got their hands cut off. So the counselor rushes for his saddlebag and gets out his 1912 Colt .45 auto and starts blasting at the badger, missing it with every shot at six feet. Finally he puts his gun three inches from the badger’s side and shoots. This time the badger rolls down the slope into the stream. I can see the stricken animal, the sad shrinking face, rolling down the slope, bleeding, dying. _“You see an animal, you kill it, don’t you? It might have bitten one of the boys.”

This book is about inter-species contact, not about inter-species communication. There is a basic difference between communication and contact. Communication is designed to avoid contact, to maintain a distance across which communication can take place. Contact involves identification with the creature; you contact, and this can be very painful. Communication can be forced; contact cannot: you cannot force anyone to feel. This cat folk recounts my own experience with inter-species contact, you know, when it happens, it can’t be faked. In this case, of course, contact in the badger is very painful indeed… he just wanted to romp and play and gets shot by a 0.45.  Identify with that. Feel all that. Contact that.

I don’t know how many years ago I saw a TV show on Big Foot... Tracks and sightings in the Northwest mountain area, interviews with local inhabitants… Here’s a three-hundred-pound female slob. «What in your opinion should be done about these creatures, if they exist?» A dark shadow crosses her ugly face and her eyes shine with conviction: «Kill them, they might hurt somebody.»

A specimen of homo-sapiens green, with a longer-range rifle and telescopic sights, [. . . ?] beard, trying to look like an adventurer, and looking like a marginal freelance journalists who writes for survival. He is quite sure Big Feet is out there in those hills and proposes to kill the specimen. If I lived in the area I would be more worried about this jerk with a rifle than about Big Foot! But I suspect Big Foot to be a fake, like the […?] Unicorn. Well, a camera team just happens on Big Foot, with their cameras all set up and ready to go… Light! Section – camera! There he is, about a hundred yards away, walking with a strange slow gait, taking six feet at a stride, like a moonwalk. Scientific stride experts say this is not a human stride. Well, certainly not at twenty-four frames per second. I suspect it to be a man in a gorila suit, projected in slow motion.

When I was four years old, I saw a vision in Forest Park, Saint Louis. My brother was ahead of me with an air rifle; I was lagging behind. I saw a little green reindeer, about the size of a cat, clear and precise in the late afternoon sunlight, as if seen through a telescope. Well, can those images, those visions be photographed? Certainly, anything that can be seen can be photographed, and anything that can be photographed can be faked. The magical medium is being bulldozed away. No more green reindeer in Forest Park. The angels are leaving all the alcoves everywhere, the medium in which Unicorns, Bigfoot, Green Deer exist, always thinner, like the rain forests and the creatures that live and breathe in them. As the forests fall to make way for motels and Hiltons, the whole magic universe is dying.

. . . Well, life such it is goes on… Dillon’s still open, I am the cat who walks alone to Dillon’s supermarkets all their life. Er… this is the end:

We are the cats inside, we are the cats who cannot walk alone and perhaps there is only one place: walk alone for us. _Thank you.

♦  ‘Kill the Badger’ ↓  [from «The Cat Inside» — ‘Dead City Radio’]

At Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb and couldn’t wait to drop it on the Yellow Peril, the boys are sitting on logs and rocks, eating some sort of food. There is a stream at the end of a slope. The counselor was a Southerner with a politician’s look about him. He told us stories by the campfire, culled from the racist garbage of the insidious Sax Rohmer – East is evil, West is good.

Suddenly, a badger erupts among the boys – don’t know why he did it, just playful, friendly and inexperienced like the Aztec Indians who brought fruit down to the Spanish and got their hands cut off. So the counselor rushes for his saddlebag and gets out his 1911 Colt .45 auto and starts blasting at the badger, missing it with every shot at six feet. Finally he puts his gun three inches from the badger’s side and shoots. This time the badger rolls down the slope into the stream. I can see the stricken animal, the sad shrinking face, rolling down the slope, bleeding, dying.

“You see an animal, you kill it, don’t you? It might have bitten one of the boys.”

The badger just wanted to romp and play, and he gets shot with a .45 government issue. Contact that. Identify with that. Feel that. And ask yourself, whose life is worth more? The badger, or this evil piece of white shit? As Brion Gysin said, «Man is a bad animal.»

¤→  ‘Tom the Priest’  ⇐  [‘Drugstore Cowboy‘]

Scenes of WSB impersonating Tom the Priest in Gus van Sant‘s movie… 

The operative word in Drugstore Cowboy is «drug». Matt Dillon plays the leader of a group of dopeheads who wander around the country robbing pharmacies to feed their habits. Dillon’s chums include doltish James Le Gros and teenage junkie Heather Graham; also along for the ride is Dillon’s wife Kelly Lynch. Their nemesis is cop James Remar, whom Dillon takes perverse delight in humiliating. When one of the young addicts dies of an overdose, it prompts Dillon to try to go straight…

∞  w/  Kurt Cobain  ↓  ‘The Priest, they called him’

People hurried by gray shadows on a distant wall it was getting late and no money to score he turned into a side street and the lake wind hit him like a knife. Cab stopped just ahead under a streetlight boy got out with a suitcase thin kid in prep school clothes familiar face the Priest told himself watching from the doorway reminds me of something a long time ago the boy there with his overcoat unbuttoned reaching into his pants pocket for the cab fare. The cab drove away and turned the corner. The boy went inside a building hummm yes maybe; the suitcase was there in the doorway the boy nowhere in sight gone to get the keys most likely have to move fast. He picked up the suitcase and started for the corner made it glanced down at the case didn’t look like the case the boy had or any boy would have the Priest couldn’t put his finger on what was so old about the case, old and dirty poor quality leather and heavy better see what’s inside he turned into Lincoln Park found an empty place and opened the case. Two severed human legs had belonged to a young man with dark skin shiny black leg hairs glittered in the dim street light. The legs had been forced into the case and he had to use his knee on the back of the case to shove them out.

«Legs yet» he said, and walked quickly away with the case might bring a few dollars to score.

The buyer sniffed suspiciously. «Kind of a funny smell about it . . . is this Mexican leather?» The Priest shrugged.

«Well, some joker didn’t cure it.» The buyer looked at the case with cold disfavor.
«Not even right sure he killed it whatever it is three is the best I can do and it hurts but since this is Christmas and you’re the Priest.» $ $ $ He slipped three bills under the table into the Priest’s dirty hand.

The Priest faded into the street shadows seedy and furtive three cents didn’t buy a bag nothing less than a nickel say remember that old auntie croaker told me not to come back unless I paid him the three cents I owe isn’t that a fruit for you blow his stack about three lousy cents.

The doctor was not pleased to see him. «Now what do you want? I told you . . .» The Priest laid three bills on the table. The doctor put the money in his pocket and started to scream. «I’ve had trouble! The people have been around! I may lose my license!» The Priest just sat there eyes old and heavy with years of junk on the doctor’s face.

«I can’t write you a prescription!» The doctor jerked open a drawer and slid an ampule across the table. «That’s all I have in the office!» The doctor stood up. «Take it and get out!» he screamed, hysterical. The Priest’s expression did not change and the doctor added in quieter tones: «After all I’m a professional man and I shouldn’t be bothered by people like you.»

«Is that all you have for me? One lousy quarter g? Couldn’t you lend me a nickel?»

«Get out! Get out! I’ll call the police I tell you!»

«All right doctor. I’m going now.»

Of course it was cold and far to walk rooming house a shabby street room on the top floor these stairs/cough/the Priest there pulling himself up along the banister he went into the bathroom yellow wood panels toilet dripping and got his works from under the washbasin wrapped in brown paper back to his room get every drop in the dropper he rolled up his sleeve. Then he heard a groan from next door room 18 a Mexican kid lived there the Priest had passed him on the stairs and saw the kid was hooked but he never spoke because he didn’t want any juvenile connections bad news in any language and the Priest had had enough bad news in his life heard the groan again a groan he could feel no mistaking that groan and what it meant maybe had an accident or something any case I can’t enjoy my priestly medications with that sound coming through the wall thin walls you understand the Priest put down his dropper cold hall and knocked on the door of room 18.

«Quién es?«

«It’s the Priest, kid, I live next door.»

He could hear someone hobbling across the floor a bolt slid the boy stood there in his underwear shorts eyes black with pain. He started to fall. The Priest helped him over to the bed.

«What’s wrong son?»

«It’s my legs señor . . . cramps . . . and now I am without medicine.»

The Priest could see the cramps like knots of wood there in the young lean legs dark shiny black leg hairs.

«Three years ago I have damaged myself in a bicycle race it was then that the cramps start and . . .»

And now he has the leg cramps back with compound junk interest. The old Priest stood there feeling the boy groan. He inclined his head as if in prayer went back and got his dropper.

«It’s just a quarter g kid.»

«I do not require much señor.»

The boy was sleeping when the Priest left room 18. He went back to his room and sat down on the bed. Then it hit him like heavy silent snow, all the grey junk yesterdays. He sat there and received the immaculate fix. And since he was himself a priest there was no need to call one.

¤   Final passage from  ‘The Western Lands’  by William S Burroughs