Read The Wild Boys Online

Authors: William S. Burroughs

Tags: #dystopia, #post-apocalyptic, #humor, #SF

The Wild Boys (17 page)

“There are many groups scattered over a wide area from the outskirts of Tangier to the Blue Desert of Silence … glider boys with bows and laser guns, roller-skate boys—blue jockstraps and steel helmets, eighteen-inch bowie knives—naked blowgun boys long hair down their backs a kris at the thigh, slingshot boys, knife throwers, bowmen, bare-hand fighters, shaman boys who ride the wind and those who have control over snakes and dogs, boys skilled in bone-pointing and Juju magic who can stab the enemy reflected in a gourd of water, boys who call the locusts and the fleas, desert boys shy as little sand foxes, dream boys who see each other’s dreams and the silent boys of the Blue Desert. Each group developed special skills and knowledge until it evolved into humanoid subspecies. One of the more spectacular units is the dreaded Warrior Ants made up of boys who have lost both hands in battle. They wear aluminum bikinis and sandals and tight steel helmets. They are attended by musicians and dancing boys, medical and electronic attendants who carry the weapons that are screwed into their stumps, buckle them into their bikinis, lace their sandals, wash and anoint their bodies with a musk of genitals, roses, carbolic soap, gardenias, jasmine, oil of cloves, ambergris and rectal mucus. This overpowering odor is the first warning of their presence. The smaller boys are equipped with razor-sharp pincers that can snip off a
finger or sever a leg tendon. And they click their claws as they charge. The taller boys have long double-edged knives that can cut a scarf in the air screwed into both stumps.”

On the screen the old regiment same canyon same Colonel. The Colonel sniffs uneasily. His horse rears and neighs. Suddenly there is a blast of silver light reflected from helmets knives and sandals. They hit the regiment like a whirlwind the ground ants cutting tendons, the shock troops slashing with both arms wade through the regiment heads floating in the air behind them. It is all over in a few seconds. Of the regiment there are no survivors. The wild boys take no prisoners. The first to receive attention were those so seriously wounded they could not live.

The Colonel paused and filled his kif pipe. He seemed to be looking at something far away and long ago and I flinched for I was a snippy Fulbright queen at the time dreading some distastefully intimate
experience
involving the amorous ghost of an Arab boy. What a bore he is with his tacky old Lawrence sets faithful native youths dying in his arms.

“As I have told you the first wild-boy tribes were fugitive survivors from the terror of Colonel Arachnid ben Driss. These boys in their early- and mid-teens had been swept into a whirlwind of riots, burning screams, machine guns and lifted out of time. Migrants of ape in gasoline crack of history. Officials denied that any repressive measures had followed nonexistent riots.

“ ‘There is no Colonel Arachnid in the Moroccan Army’ said a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior.

“No witnesses could be found who had noticed anything out of the ordinary other than the hottest August
in many years. The gasoline boys and Colonel Arachnid were hallucinated by a drunken Reuters man who became temporarily deranged when his houseboy deserted him for an English pastry cook. I was myself the Reuters man as you may have gathered.”

Here are the boys cooking over campfires … quiet valley by a stream calm young faces washed in the dawn before creation. The old phallic Gods of Greece and the assassins of Alamout still linger in the Moroccan hills like sad pilots waiting to pick up survivors. The piper’s tune drifts down a St Louis street with the autumn leaves.

On screen an old book with gilt edges. Written in golden script
The Wild Boys
. A cold spring wind ruffles the pages.

Weather boys with clouds and rainbows and Northern lights in their eyes study the sky.

Glider boys ride a blue flash sunset on wings of pink and rose and gold laser guns shooting arrows of light. Roller-skate boys turn slow circles in ruined suburbs China-blue half-moon in the morning sky.

Blue evening shadows in the old skating rink, smell of empty locker rooms and moldy jockstraps. A circle of boys sit on a gym mat hands clasped around the knees. The boys are naked except for blue steel helmets. Eyes move in a slow circle from crotch to crotch, silent, intent, they converge on one boy a thin dark youth his face spattered with adolescent pimples. He is getting stiff. He steps to the center of the circle and turns around three times. He sits down knees up facing the empty space in the circle where he sat. He pivots slowly looking at each boy in turn. His eyes lock with one boy. A fluid click a drop of lubricant squeezes out the tip of his phallus. He lies back his head on a leather
cushion. The boy selected kneels in front of the other studying his genitals. He presses the tip open and looks at it through a lens of lubricant. He twists the tight nuts gently runs a slow precise finger up and down the shaft drawing lubricant along the divide line feeling for sensitive spots in the tip. The boy who is being masturbated rocks back hugging knees against his chest. The circle of boys sits silent lips parted watching faces calmed to razor sharpness. The boy quivers transparent suffused with blue light the pearly glands and delicate coral tracings of his backbone exposed.

A naked boy on perilous wings soars over a blue chasm. The air is full of wings … gliders launched from skis and sleds and skates, flying bicycles, sky-blue gliders with painted birds, an air schooner billowing white sails stabilized by autogiros. Boys climb in the rigging and wave from fragile decks.

Boy on a bicycle with autogiro wings sails off a precipice and floats slowly down into a valley of cobblestone streets and deep-blue canals. In a golf course sand pit hissing snake boys twist in slow copulations guarded by a ring of cobras.

The legend of the wild boys spread and boys from all over the world ran away to join them. Wild boys appeared in the mountains of Mexico, the jungles of South American and Southeastern Asia. Bandit country, guerrilla country, is wild-boy country. The wild boys exchange drugs, weapons, skills on a world-wide network. Some wild-boy tribes travel constantly taking the best cannabis seeds to the Amazon and bringing back cuttings of the Yage vine for the jungles of Southern Asia and Central Africa. Exchange of spells and potions. A common language based on variable transliteration of a simplified hieroglyphic script is spoken and written by
the wild boys. In remote dream rest areas the boys fashion these glyphs from wood, metal, stone and pottery. Each boy makes his own picture set. Sea chest in an attic room, blue wallpaper ship scenes, copies of
Adventure
and
Amazing Stories
, a .22 pump-action rifle on the wall. A boy opens the chest and takes out the words one by one … The erect phallus which means in wild-boy script as it does in Egyptian to stand before or in the presence of, to confront to regard attentively … a phallic statue of ebony with star sapphire eyes a tiny opal set in the tip of the phallus … two wooden statues face each other in a yellow oak rocking chair. The boy statues are covered with human skin tanned in ambergris, carbolic soap, rose petals, rectal mucus, smoked in hashish and burning leaves … a yellow-haired boy straddles a copper-skinned Mexican, feet braced muscles carved in orgasm … an alabaster boy lights up blue inside, piper boy with a music box, roller-skate boy of blue slate with a bowie knife in his hand, a post card world of streams, freckled boy, blue outhouses covered with morning glory- and rose vines where the boys jack off on July afternoons shimmers in a Gysin painting … little peep shows … flickering silver titles … others with colors and odors and raw naked flesh … tight nuts crinkle to autumn leaves … blue chasms … a flight of birds. These word objects travel on the trade routes from hand to hand. The wild boys see, touch, taste, smell the words. Shrunken head of a CIA man … a little twisted sentry his face cyanide blue … (A highly placed narcotics official tells a grim President: “The wild-boy thing is a cult based on drugs, depravity and violence more dangerous than the hydrogen bomb.”)

At a long work bench in the skating rink boys tinker
with tiny jet engines for their skates. They forge and grind eighteen-inch bowie knives bolting on handles of ebony and the ironwoods of South America that must be worked with metal tools …

The roller-skate boys swerve down a wide palm-lined avenue into a screaming blizzard of machine-gun bullets, sun glinting on their knives and helmets, lips parted eyes blazing. They slice through a patrol snatching guns in the air.

Jungle work bench under a thatched roof … a ten-foot blowgun with telescopic sights operated by compressed air … tiny blowguns with darts no bigger than a mosquito sting tipped with serum jaundice and strange fevers …

In houseboats, basements, tents, tree houses, caves, and lofts the wild boys fashion their weapons … a short double-edged knife bolted to a strong spring whipped back and forth slices to the bone … kris with a battery vibrator in the handle … karate sticks … a knob of ironwood protrudes between the first and second fingers and from each end of the fist … loaded gloves and knuckle-dusters … crossbows and guns powered by thick rubber sliced from an inner tube. These guns shoot a lead slug fed in from a magazine above the launching carriage. Quite accurate up to twenty yards … a cyanide injector shaped like a pistol. The needle is unscrewed from the end of the barrel, the pistol cocked by drawing back a spring attached to the plunger. A sponge soaked in cyanide solution is inserted, the needle screwed back in place. When the trigger releases the spring a massive dose of cyanide is squeezed into the flesh causing instant death. When not in use the needle is capped by a Buck Rogers Death Ray … cyanide darts and knives with hollow perforated blades
… a flintlock pistol loaded with crushed glass and cyanide crystals …

Cat boys fashion claws sewn into heavy leather gloves that are strapped around the wrist and forearm, the incurving hollow claws packed with cyanide paste. The boys in green jockstraps wait in a tree for the jungle patrol. They leap down on the soldiers, deadly claws slashing, digging in. Boys collect the weapons from twisted blue hands. They wash off blood and poison in a stream and pass around a kif pipe.

Snake boys in fish-skin jockstraps wade out of the bay. Each boy has a venomous speckled sea snake coiled around his arm. They move through scrub and palm to an electric fence that surrounds the officer’s club. Through flowering shrubs Americans can be seen in the swimming pool blowing and puffing. The boys extend their arms through the fence index finger extended. The snakes drop off and glide toward the swimming pool.

A jungle patrol in Angola … suddenly black mambas streak down from trees on both sides of their path mouths open fangs striking necks and arms lashing up from the ground. Mamba boys black as obsidian with mamba-skin jockstraps and kris glide forward.

Five naked boys release cobras above a police post. As the snakes glide down the boys move their heads from side to side. Phalluses sway and stiffen. The boys snap their heads forward mouths open and ejaculate. Strangled cries from the police box. Faces impassive the boys wait until their erections subside.

Boys sweep a cloud of bubonic fleas like a net with tiny black knots into an enemy camp.

A baby- and semen black market flourished in the corrupt border cities, and we recruited male infants from birth. You could take your boy friend’s sperm to
market, contact a broker who would arrange to inseminate medically inspected females. Nine months later the male crop was taken to one of the remote peaceful communes behind the front lines. A whole generation arose that had never seen a woman’s face nor heard a woman’s voice. In clandestine clinics fugitive technicians experimented with test-tube babies and cuttings. Brad and Greg got out just under a “terminate with extreme prejudice” order … And here is their clinic in the Marshan Tangier. Laughing, comparing a line of boys jack off into test tubes …

Here is a boy on his way to the cutting room. Brad and Greg explain they are going to take a cutting from the rectum very small and quite painless and the more excited he is when they take the cutting better chance there is that the cutting will
make
… They arrange him on a table with his knees up rubber slings behind the knees to keep him spread and turn an orgone funnel on his ass and genitals. Then Brad slips a vibrating cutting tube up him. These are in hard rubber and plastic perforated with pinpoint holes. Inside is a rotary knife operated from the handle. When the ring expands it forces bits of the lining through the holes which are then clipped off by the knife.

Brad switches on the vibrator. The boy’s pubic hairs crackle with blue sparks, tight nuts pop egg-blue worlds in air … Some boys red out rose-red delicate sea-shell pinks come rainbows and Northern lights … Here are fifty boys in one ward room, bent over hands on knees, on all fours, legs up. Greg throws the master switch. The boys writhe and squirm, leap about like lemurs, eyes blazing blue chasms, semen pulsing sparks of light. Little phantom figures dance on their bodies,
slide up and down their pulsing cocks, and ride the cutting tubes …

Little boy without a navel in a 1920 classroom. He places an apple on the teacher’s desk

“I am giving you back your apple teacher.”

He walks over to the blackboard and rubs out the word MOTHER.

Flanked by Brad and Greg he steps to the front of the stage and takes a bow to an audience of cheering boys eating peanuts and jacking off.

Now the cuttings are no longer needed. The boys create offspring known as Zimbus. Brad and Greg have retired to a remote YMCA. Zimbus are created after a battle when the forces of evil are in retreat…

The first to receive attention were those so seriously wounded that they could not live … A red-haired boy who had been shot through the liver was quickly stripped of bikini and sandals and propped up in a sitting position. Since they believe that the spirit leaves through the back of the head a recumbent position is considered unfavorable. The pack stood around the dying boy in a circle and a technician deftly removed the helmet. I saw then that the helmet was an intricate piece of electronic equipment. The technician took an eighteen-inch cylinder from a leather carrying case. The cylinder is made up of alternate layers of thin iron and human skin taken from the genitals of slain enemies. In the center of the cylinder is an iron tube which protrudes slightly from one end. The tube was brought within a few inches of the boy’s wound. This has the effect of reducing pain or expediting the healing of a curable wound. Pain-killing drugs are never used since the cell-blanketing effect impedes departure of the
spirit. Now a yoke was fitted over the boy’s shoulders and what looked like a diving helmet was placed over his head. This helmet covered with leather on the outside is in two pieces one piece covering the front of the head the other the back. The technician made an adjustment and suddenly the back section shot back to the end of the yoke where it was caught and held by metal catches. Two sections are of magnetized iron inside the technician adjusting the direction of magnetic flow so that by a repelling action the two sections spring apart pushing the spirit out the back of the head. The flow is then reversed so that the two sections are pulling toward each other but held apart. This pulls the spirit out. A luminous haze like heat waves was quite visibly draining out the boy’s head. The dancing boys who had gathered in a circle around the dying boy began playing their flutes a haunting melody of Pan pipes train whistles and lonely sidings as the haze shot up into the afternoon sky. The body went limp and the boy was dead. I saw this process repeated a number of times. When the dying had been separated from their bodies by this device those with curable wounds were treated. The cylinder was brought within an inch of the wound and moved up and down. I witnessed the miracle of almost immediate healing. A boy with a great gash in his thigh was soon hobbling about the wound looking as if it had been received some weeks before. The firearms were divided among the dancing boys and attendants. The boys busied themselves skinning the genitals of the slain soldiers pegging the skins out and rubbing in pastes and unguents for curing. They butchered the younger soldiers removing the heart and liver and bones for food and carted the cadavers some distance from the camp. These chores accomplished the boys spread out
rugs and lit hashish pipes. The warriors were stripped by their attendants massaged and rubbed with musk. The setting sun bathed their lean bodies in a red glow as the boys gave way to an orgy of lust. Two boys would take their place in the center of a rug and copulate to drums surrounded by a circle of silent naked onlookers. I observed fifteen or twenty of these circles, copulating couples standing, kneeling, on all fours, faces rapt and empty. The odor of semen and rectal mucus filled the air. When one couple finished another would take its place. No words were spoken only the shuddering gasps and the pounding drums. A yellow haze hovered over the quivering bodies as the frenzied flesh dissolved in light. I noticed that a large blue tent had been set up and that certain boys designated by the attendants retired to this tent and took no part in the orgy. As the sun sank the exhausted boys slept in naked heaps. The moon rose and boys began to stir and light fires. Here and there hashish pipes glowed. The smell of cooking meat drifted through the air as the boys roasted the livers and hearts of the slain soldiers and made broth from the bones. Desert thistles shone silver in the moonlight. The boys formed a circle in a natural amphitheater that sloped down to a platform of sand. On this platform they spread a round blue rug about eight feet in diameter. The four directions were indicated on this rug by arrows and its position was checked against a compass. The rug looked like a map crisscrossed with white lines and shaded in striations of blue from the lightest egg blue to blue black. The musicians formed an inner circle around the rug playing on their flutes the haunting tune that had sped the dying on their way. Now one of the boys who had taken no part in the recent orgy
stepped forward onto the rug. He stood there naked sniffing quivering head thrown back scanning the night sky. He stepped to the North and beckoned with both hands. He repeated the same gesture to the South East and West. I noticed that he had a tiny blue copy of the rug tattooed on each buttock. He knelt in the center of the rug studying the lines and patterns looking from the rug to his genitals. His phallus began to stir and stiffen. He leaned back until his face was turned to the sky. Slowly he raised both hands palms up and his hands drew a blue mist from the rug. He turned his hands over palms down and slowly lowered them pulling blue down from the sky. A pool of color swirled about his thighs. The mist ran into a vague shape as the color shifted from blue to pearly grey pink and finally red. A red being was now visible in front of the boy’s body lying on his back knees up transparent thighs on either side of his flanks. The boy knelt there studying the red shape his eyes molding the body of a red-haired boy. Slowly he placed his hands behind knees that gave at his touch and moved them up to trembling ears of red smoke. A red boy was lying there buttocks spread the rectum a quivering rose that seemed to breathe, the body clearly outlined but still transparent. Slowly the boy penetrated the phantom body I could see his penis inside the other and as he moved in and out the soft red gelatin clung to his penis thighs and buttocks young skin taking shape legs in the air kicking spasmodically a red face on the rug lips parted the body always more solid. The boy leaned forward and fastened his lips to the other mouth spurting sperm inside and suddenly the red boy was solid buttocks quivering against the boy’s groin as they breathed in and out of each other’s lungs locked together the
red body solid from the buttocks and penis to the twitching feet. They remained there quivering for thirty seconds. A red mist steamed off the red boy’s body. I could see freckles and leg hairs. Slowly the boy withdrew his mouth. A red-haired boy lay there breathing deeply eyes closed. The boy withdrew his penis, straightened the red knees and lay the newborn Zimbu on his back. Now two attendants stepped forward with a litter of soft leather. Carefully they lifted the Zimbu onto the litter and carried him to the blue tent.

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