Authors: William Burroughs
The old junky has found a vein … blood blossoms in the dropper like a Chinese flower.…he push home the heroin and the boy who jacked off fifty years ago shine immaculate through the ravaged flesh, fill the outhouse with
the sweet nutty smell of young male lust.…
How many years threaded on a needle of blood? Hands slack on lap he sit looking out at the winter dawn with the cancelled eyes of junk. The old queer squirm on a limestone bench in Chapultepec Park as Indian adolescents walk by, arms around each other’s necks and ribs, straining his dying flesh to occupy young buttocks and thighs, tight balls and spurting
cocks.
Mark and Johnny sit facing each other in a vibrating chair, Johnny impaled on Mark’s cock.
‘All set, Johnny?’
‘Turn it on.’
Mark flips the switch and the chair vibrate.… Mark tilt his head looking up at Johnny, his face remote, eyes cool and mocking on Johnny’s face.… Johnny scream and whimper.… His face disintegrates as if melted from within.… Johnny scream like a mandrake, black out
as his sperm spurt, slump against Mark’s body an angel on the nod. Mark pat Johnny’s shoulder absently.… Room like gymnasium.… The floor is foam rubber, covered in white silk.… One wall is glass.… The rising sun fills the room with pink light. Johnny is led in, hands tied, between Mary and Mark. Johnny sees the gallows and sags with a great ‘Ohhhhhhhhhhh!’ his chin pulling down towards his cock,
his legs bending at the knees. Sperm spurts, arching almost vertical in front of his face. Mark and Mary are suddenly impatient and hot.… They push Johnny forward onto the gallows platform covered with moldy jockstraps and sweat shirts. Mark is adjusting the noose.
‘Well, here you go.’ Mark starts to push Johnny off the platform.
Mary: ‘No, let me.’ She locks her hands behind Johnny’s buttocks,
puts her forehead against him, smiling into his eyes she moves back, pulling him off the platform into space.… His face swells with blood.… Mark reaches up with one lithe movement and snaps Johnny’s neck …
sound like a stick broken in wet towels. A shudder runs down Johnny’s body … one foot flutters like a trapped bird.… Mark has draped himself over a swing and mimics Johnny’s twitches, closes
his eyes and sticks his tongue out.… Johnny’s cock springs up and Mary guides it up her cunt, writhing against him in a fluid belly dance, groaning and shrieking with delight … sweat pours down her body, hair hangs over her face in wet strands. ‘Cut him down, Mark,’ she screams. Mark reaches over with a snap knife and cuts the rope, catching Johnny as he falls, easing him onto his back with Mary
still impaled and writhing.… She bites away Johnny’s lips and nose and sucks out his eyes with a pop.… She tears off great hunks of cheek.… Now she lunches on his prick.… Mark walks over to her and she looks up from Johnny’s half-eaten genitals, her face covered with blood, eyes phosphorescent.… Mark puts his foot on her shoulder and kicks her over on her back.… He leaps on her, fucking her insanely.…they
roll from one end of the room to the other, pinwheel end-over-end and leap high in the air like great hooked fish.
‘Let me hang you, Mark.… Let me hang you.… Please, Mark, let me hang you!’
‘Sure baby.’ He pulls her brutally to her feet and pins her hands behind her.
‘No, Mark!! No! No! No,’ she screams, shitting and pissing in terror as he drags her to the platform. He leaves her tied on the
platform in a pile of old used condoms, while he adjusts the rope across the room … and comes back carrying the noose on a silver tray. He jerks her to her feet and tightens the noose. He sticks his cock up her and waltzes around the platform and off into space swinging in a great arc.…‘Wheeeeee!’ he screams, turning into Johnny. Her neck snaps. A great fluid wave undulates through her body. Johnny
drops to the floor and stands poised and alert like a young animal.
He leaps about the room. With a scream of longing that shatters the glass wall he leaps out into space. Masturbating end-over-end, three thousand feet down, his sperm floating beside him, he screams all the way against the shattering blue of the sky, the rising sun burning over his body like gasoline, down past great oaks and
persimmons, swamp cypress and mahogany, to shatter in liquid relief in a ruined square paved with limestone. Weeds and vines grow between the stones, and rusty iron bolts three feet thick penetrate the white stone, stain it shit-brown of rust.
Johnny dowses Mary with gasoline from an obscene Chimu jar of white jade.… He anoints his own body.… They embrace, fall to the floor and roll under a great
magnifying glass set in the roof … burst into flame with a cry that shatters the glass wall, roll into space, fucking and screaming through the air, burst in blood and flames and soot on brown rocks under a desert sun. Johnny leaps about the room in agony. With a scream that shatters the glass wall he stands spreadeagle to the rising sun, blood spurting out his cock … a white marble god, he plummets
through epileptic explosions into the old Medjoub writhe in shit and rubbish by a mud wall under a sun that scar and grab the flesh into goose-pimples.… He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells, feeling the delight of prickly pubic hairs slide up his cock.
John and Mary in hotel room (music of East St. Louis Toodleoo).
Warm spring wind blows faded pink curtains in through open window.… Frogs croak in vacant lots where corn grows and boys catch little green garter snakes under broken limestone stelae stained with shit and threaded with rusty barbed wire.…
Neon
– chlorophyll green, purple, orange – flashes on and off.
Johnny extracts a candiru from Mary’s cunt with his calipers.… He drops it into a bottle of
mescal where it turns into a Maguey worm.… He gives her a douche of jungle bone-softener, her vaginal teeth flow out mixed with blood and cysts.… Her cunt shines fresh and sweet as spring grass.… Johnny licks Mary’s cunt, slow at first, with rising excitement parts the lips and licks inside feeling the prickle of pubic hairs on his tumescent tongue.… Arms thrown back, breasts pointing straight up,
Mary lies transfixed with neon nails.… Johnny moves up her body, his cock with a shining opal of lubricant at the open slit, slides through her pubic hairs and enters her cunt to the hilt, drawn in by a suction of hungry flesh.… His face swells with blood, green lights burst behind his eyes and he falls with a scenic railway through screaming girls.…
Damp hairs on the back of his balls dry to
grass in the warm spring wind. High jungle valley, vines creep in the window. Johnny’s cock swells, great rank buds burst out. A long tuber root creeps from Mary’s cunt, feels for the earth. The bodies disintegrate in green explosions. The hut falls in ruins of broken stone. The boy is a limestone statue, a plant sprouting from his cock, lips parted in the half-smile of a junky on the nod.
The
Beagle has stashed the heroin in a lottery ticket.
One more shot – tomorrow the cure.
The way is long. Hard-ons and bring downs are frequent.
It was a long time over the stony reg to the oasis of date palms where Arab boys shit in the well and rock n’ roll across the sands of muscle beach eating hot-dogs and spitting out gold teeth in nuggets.
Toothless and strictly from the long hunger, ribs
you could wash your filthy overalls on, that corrugate, they quiver down from the outrigger in Easter Island and stalk ashore on legs stiff and brittle as stilts … they nod in club
windows … fallen into the fat of lack-need to sell a slim body.
The date palms have died of meet lack, the well filled with dried shit and mosaic of a thousand newspapers: ‘Russia denies … The Home Secretary views
with pathic alarm … The trap was sprung at 12:02. At 12:30 the doctor went out to eat oysters, returned at 2:00 to clap the hanged man jovially on the back. “What! Aren’t you dead yet? Guess I’ll have to pull your leg. Haw Haw! Can’t let you choke at this rate – I’d get a warning from the President. And what a disgrace if the dead wagon cart you out alive. My balls would drop off with the shame of
it and I apprenticed myself to an experienced ox. One two three pull.”’
The sail plane falls silent as erection, silent as greased glass broken by the young thief with old-women hands and cancelled eyes of junk.… In a noiseless explosion he penetrates the broken house, stepping over the greased crystals, a clock ticks loud in the kitchen, hot air ruffles his hair, his head disintegrates in a
heavy duck load.… The Old Man flips out a red shell and pirouettes around his shotgun. ‘Aw, shucks, fellers, tweren’t nothing.… Fish in the barrel.… Money in the bank … round-heeled boy, one greased shot brain goose and he flop in an obscene position.… Can you hear me from where you are, boy?
‘I was young myself once and heard the siren call of easy money and women and tight boy-ass and lands
sake don’t get my blood up I am subject to tell a tale make your cock stand up and yipe for the pink pearly way of young cunt or the lovely brown mucous-covered palpitating tune of the young boy-ass play your cock like a recorder … and when you hit the prostate pearl sharp diamonds gather in the golden lad balls inexorable as a kidney stone.… Sorry I had to kill you.… The old grey mare ain’t what
she used to be.… Can’t run down an audience … got to
bring
down that house on the wing, run or sit.… Like an old lion took bad with cavities he need that Amident
toothpaste keep a feller biting fresh at all times.… Them old lions shit suet turn boyeater.… And who can blame them, boys being so sweet so cold so fair in St. James Infirmary Now, son, don’t you get rigor mortis on me. Show respect
for the aging prick.… You may be a tedious old fuck yourself some day.… Oh, uh; I guess not.… You have, like Housman’s barefoot shameless catamite The Congealed Shropshire Ingenue set your fleet foot on the silo of change.… But you can’t kill those Shropshire boys … been hanged so often he resist it like a gonococcus half castrate with pencillin rallies to a hideous strength and multiples geometric.…
So leave us cast a vote for decent acquittal and put an end to those beastly exhibitions for which the sheriff levy a pound of flesh.’
Sheriff: ‘I’ll lower his pants for a pound, folks. Step right up. A serious and scientific exhibit concerning the locality of the Life Center. This character has nine inches, ladies and gentlemen, measure them yourself inside. Only one pound, one queer three dollar
bill to see a young boy come three times at least – I never demean myself to process a eunuch –
completely against his will.
When his neck snaps sharp, this character will shit-sure come to rhythmic attention and spurt it out all over you.’
The boy stands on the trap shifting his weight from one leg to the other: ‘Gawd! What a boy hasta put up with in this business. Sure as shit some horrible
old character get physical.’
Trap falls, rope sings like wind in wire, neck snaps loud and clear as a Chinese gong.
The boy cuts himself down with a switch-blade, chases a screaming fag down the midway. The faggot dives through the glass of a penny arcade peep-show and rims a grinning Negro. Fadeout.
(Mary, Johnny and Mark take a bow with the ropes around their necks. They are not as young
as they appear in the Blue Movies.… They look tired and petulant.)
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-anxietized Man
.…’
Blast of trumpets: The Man is carried in naked by two Negro 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 had 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 Negro 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?