Authors: William Burroughs
Carl reached out with numb fingers and touched one of the photographs. The doctor put the photo back into the
pack and shuffled and cut and he placed the pack on Carl’s file and slapped it smartly. He spread the photos face up in front of Carl. ‘Is she there?’
Carl shook his head.
‘Of course not. She is in here where she belongs. A
woman’s place what???’ He opened the file and held out the girl’s photo attached to a Rorschach plate.
‘Is that her?’
Carl nodded silently.
‘You have good taste, my boy.
I may tell you in strictest confidence that some of these girls …’ with gambler fingers he shifts the photos in Three Card Monte Passes – ‘are really
boys.
In uh
drag
I believe is the word???’ His eyebrows shot up and down with incredible speed. Carl could not be sure he had seen anything unusual. The doctor’s face opposite him was absolutely immobile and expressionless. Once again Carl experienced
the floating sensation in his stomach and genitals of a sudden elevator stop.
‘Yes, Carl, you seem to be running our little obstacle course with flying colors.… I guess you think this is all pretty silly don’t you now …???’
‘Well, to tell the truth … Yes …’
‘You are frank, Carl.… This is good.… And now … Carl …’ He dragged the name out caressingly like a sweet con dick about to offer you an
Old Gold – (just like a cop to smoke Old Golds somehow) and go into his act.…
The con dick does a little dance step.
‘Why don’t you make The Man a proposition?’ he jerks a head towards his glowering super-ego who is always referred to in the third person as ‘The Man’ or ‘The Lieutenant.’
‘That’s the way the Lieutenant is, you play fair with him and he’ll play fair with you.… We’d like to go
light on you.… If you could help us in some way.’ His words open out into a desolate waste of cafeterias and street corners and lunch rooms. Junkies look the other way munching pound cake.
‘The Fag is wrong.’
The Fag slumps in a hotel chair knocked out on goof balls with his tongue lolling out.
He gets up in a goof ball trance, hangs himself without altering his expression or pulling his tongue
in.
The dick is diddling on a pad.
‘Know Marty Steel?’ Diddle.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you score off him?’ Diddle? Diddle?
‘He’s skeptical.’
‘But you can score.’ Diddle diddle. ‘You scored off him last week didn’t you?’ Diddle???
‘Yes.’
‘Well you can score off him this week.’ Diddle … Diddle … Diddle … ‘You can score off him today.’ No diddle.
‘No! No! Not that!!’
‘Now look are you going to cooperate’
– three vicious diddles – ‘or does the … does the Man cornhole you???’ He raises a fay eyebrow.
‘And so Carl you will please oblige to tell me how many times and under what circumstances you have uh indulged in homosexual acts???’ His voice drifts away. ‘If you have never done so I shall be inclined to think of you as a somewhat atypical young man.’ The doctor raises a coy admonishing finger.
‘In any case …’ He tapped the file and flashed a hideous leer. Carl noticed that the file was six inches thick. In fact it seemed to have thickened enormously since he entered the room.
‘Well, when I was doing my military service … These queers used to proposition me and sometimes … when I was blank …’
‘Yes, of course, Carl,’ the doctor brayed heartily. ‘In your position I would have done the
same I don’t mind telling you heh heh heh.… Well, I guess we can uh
dismiss as irrelevant
these uh understandable means of replenishing the uh
exchequer.
And now, Carl, there were perhaps’ – one finger tapped the file which gave out a faint effluvia of moldy jock straps and chlorine – ‘occasions. When no uh economic factors were involved.’
A green flare exploded in Carl’s brain. He saw Hans’
lean brown body – twisting towards him, quick breath on his shoulder. The flare went out. Some huge insect was squirming in his hand.
His whole being jerked away in an electric spasm of revulsion.
Carl got to his feet shaking with rage.
‘What are you writing there?’ he demanded.
‘Do you often doze off like that? In the middle of a conversation …?’
‘I wasn’t asleep that is.’
‘You weren’t?’
‘It’s just that the
whole thing
is unreal.… I’m going now. I don’t care. You can’t force me to stay.’
He was walking across the room towards the door. He had been walking a long time. A creeping numbness dragged his legs. The door seemed to recede.
‘Where can you go, Carl?’ The doctor’s voice reached him from a great distance.
‘Out … Away … Through the door …’
‘The Green Door, Carl?’
The
doctor’s voice was barely audible. The whole room was exploding out into space.
Have You Seen Pantopon Rose
Stay away from the Queen’s plaza, son.… Evil spot haunted by dicks scream for dope fiend lover.… Too many levels.… Heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia … like burning lions … fall on poor old lush worker scare her veins right down to the bone.… Her skin-pop a week or so
do that five-twenty-nine kick
handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.…
So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware.… Look down, look down along that line before you travail there.…
The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron.…
– Queen’s Plaza is a bad spot for lush workers.… Too many levels and lurking places for subway heat, and impossible to cover when you put the hand out.…
Five months and twenty-nine days: sentence given for ‘jostling,’ that is, touching a flop with obvious intent.… Innocent people may be convicted of murder but not of jostling.
Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor, old time, junkies and lushingworkers of my acquaintance.… The old 103rd street klatch.… Sailor and Irish hanged themselves in the Tombs.… The Beagle is dead of an overdose and the Fag went wrong.…
‘Have you seen Pantopon Rose?’ said the old junky.…‘Time to cosq,’ put on a black overcoat and made the square.… Down skid road to Market Street Museum shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special.…
The gangster in concrete rolls down the river channel.… They cowboyed him in the steam room.… Is this Cherry Ass Gio the Towel Boy or Mother Gilling, Old Auntie of Westminster
Place?? Only dead fingers talk in Braille.…
The Mississippi rolls great limestone boulders down the silent alley.…
‘Clutter the glind!’ screamed the Captain of Moving Land.…
Distant rumble of stomachs.… Poisoned pigeons rain from the Northern Lights.… The reservoirs are empty: … Brass statues crash through the hungry squares and alleys of the gaping city.…
Probing for a vein in the junk-sick
morning.…
Strictly from cough syrup …
A thousand junkies storm the crystal spine clinics, cook down the Grey Ladies.…
In the limestone cave met a man with Medusa’s head in a hat box and said, ‘Be Careful,’ to the Customs Inspector.… Frozen forever hand an inch from the false bottom.…
Window dressers scream through the station, beat the cashiers with the fairy hype.…(The Hype is a short change
con.… Also known as The Bill.…)
‘Multiple fracture,’ said the big physician.… ‘I’m very technical.…’
Conspicuous consumption is rampant in the porticos slippery with Koch spit.…
The centipede nuzzles the iron door rusted to thin black paper by the urine of a million fairies.…
This is no rich mother load, but vitiate dust, second run cottons trace the bones of a fix.…
Coke Bugs
The Sailor’s
grey felt hat and black overcoat hung twisted in atrophied yen-wait. Morning sun outlined. The Sailor in the orange-yellow flame of junk. He had a paper napkin under his coffee cup – mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffee in the plazas, restaurants, terminals and waiting rooms of the world. A junky, even at The Sailor’s level, runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption
into the Time of others, like all petitioners, he must wait. (How many coffees in an hour?)
A boy came in and sat at the counter in broken lines of long, sick junk-wait. The Sailor shivered. His face fuzzed out of focus in a shuddering brown mist. His hands moved on the table, reading the boy’s Braille. His eyes traced little
dips and circles, following whorls of brown hair on the boy’s neck
in a slow, searching movement.
The boy stirred and scratched the back of his neck: ‘Something bit me, Joe. What kinda creep joint you run here?’
‘Coke bugs, kid,’ Joe said, holding eggs up to the light. ‘I was travelling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In Butte, state of Montany, her got the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers.
I knew this cop in Chi sniff coke used to come in form of crystals, blue crystals. So he go nuts and start screaming the Federals is after him and run down this alley and stick his head in the garbage can. And I said, “What you think you are doing?” and her say, “Get away or I shoot you! I got myself hid good!” When the roll is called up yonder we’ll be there, right?’
Joe looked at The Sailor
and spread his hands in the junky shrug.
The Sailor spoke in his feeling voice that reassembles in your head, spelling out the words with cold fingers: ‘Your connection is broken, kid.’
The boy shied. His street-boy face, torn with black scars of junk, retained a wild, broken innocence; shy animals peering out through grey arabesques of terror.
‘I don’t dig you, Jack.’
The Sailor leapt into
sharp, junky focus. He turned back his coat lapel, showing a brass hypo needle covered with mold and verdigris. ‘Retired for the good of the service.… Sit down and have a blueberry crumb pie on the expense account. Your monkey loves it.… Make his coat glossy.’
The boy felt a touch on his arm across eight feet of morning lunch room. He was suddenly siphoned into the booth, landing with an inaudible
shlup. He looked into The Sailor’s eyes, a green universe stirred by cold black currents.
‘You are agent, mister?’
‘I prefer the word … vector.’ His sounding laughter vibrated through the boy’s substance.
‘You holding, man? I got the bread.…’
‘I don’t want your money, Honey: I want your Time.’
‘I don’t dig.’
‘You want fix? You want straight? You wanta, nooood?’
The Sailor cradled something
pink and vibrated out of focus.
‘Yeah.’
‘We’ll take the Independent. Got their own special heat, don’t carry guns only saps. I recall, me and the Fag fell once in Queen’s Plaza. Stay away from Queen’s Plaza, son … evil spot … fuzz haunted. Too many levels. Heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia like burning lions … fall on poor old lush worker, scare her veins right down to the
bone. Her skin pop a week or do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.… So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware, Look down, look down along that line before you travel there.…’
The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron.
The Exterminator Does a Good Job
The Sailor touched the door gently, following patterns of painted oak in a slow twist, leaving
faint, iridescent whorls of slime. His arm went through to the elbow. He pulled back an inside bolt and stood aside for the boy to enter.
Heavy colorless smell of death filled the empty room.
‘The trap hasn’t been aired since the Exterminator fumigated for coke bugs,’ said The Sailor apologetically.
The boy’s peeled senses darted about in frenzied exploration.
Tenement flat, railroad flat vibrating
with silent motion. Along one wall of the kitchen a metal trough – or was it metal, exactly? – ran into a sort of aquarium or tank half-filled with translucent green fluid. Moldy objects, worn out in unknown service, littered the floor: a jockstrap designed to protect some delicate organ of flat, fan-shape; multi-levelled trusses, supports and bandages; a large U-shaped yoke of porous pink
stone; little lead tubes cut open at one end.
Currents of movement from the two bodies stirred stagnant odor pools; atrophied boy-smell of dusty locker rooms, swimming pool chlorine, dried semen. Other smells curled through pink convolutions, touching unknown doors.
The Sailor reached under the wash-stand and extracted a package in wrapping paper that shredded and fell from his fingers in yellow
dust. He laid out dropper, needle and spoon on a table covered with dirty dishes. But no roach antennae felt for the crumbs of darkness.
‘The Exterminator does a good job,’ said The Sailor. ‘Almost too good, sometimes.’
He dipped into a square tin of yellow pyretheum powder and pulled out a flat package covered in red and gold Chinese paper.
‘Like a firecracker package,’ the boy thought. At
fourteen lost two fingers.… Fourth of July fireworks accident … later, in the hospital, first silent proprietary touch of junk.