The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead Read online

  Disguise is not a false beard dyed hair and plastic surgery. Disguise is clothes and bearing and behavior that leave no questions unanswered … American tourist with a wife he calls “Mother” … old queen on the make … dirty beatnik … marginal film producer … Every article of my luggage and clothing is carefully planned to create a certain impression. Behind this impression I can operate without interference for a time. Just so long and long enough. So I walk down Boulevard Pasteur handing out money to guides and shoeshine boys. And that is only one of the civic things I did. I bought one of those souvenir matchlocks clearly destined to hang over a false fireplace in West Palm Beach Florida, and I carried it around wrapped in brown paper with the muzzle sticking out. I made inquiries at the Consulate

  “Now Mother and I would like to know.”

  And “MOTHER AND I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW” in American Express and the Minzah pulling wads of money out of my pocket “How much shall I give them?” I asked the vice-consul for a horde of guides had followed me into the Consulate. “I wonder if you’ve met my congressman Joe Link?”

  Nobody gets through my cover I assure you. There is no better cover than a nuisance and a bore. When you see my cover you don’t look further. You look the other way fast. For use on any foreign assignment there is nothing like the old reliable American tourist cameras and light meters slung all over him.

  “How much shall I give him Mother?”

  I can sidle up to any old bag she nods and smiles it’s all so familiar “must be that cute man we met on the plane over from Gibraltar Captain Clark welcomes you aboard and he says: ‘Now what’s this form? I don’t read Arabic.’ Then he turns to me and says ‘Mother I need help.’ And I show him how to fill out the form and after that he would come up to me on the street this cute man so helpless bobbing up everywhere.”

  “What is he saying Mother?”

  “I think he wants money.”

  “They all do.” He turns to an army of beggars, guides, shoeshine boys and whores of all sexes and makes an ineffectual gesture.

  “Go away! Scram off!”

  “One dirham Meester.”

  “One cigarette.”

  “You want beeg one Meester?”

  And the old settlers pass on the other side. No they don’t get through my cover. And I have a lot of special numbers for emergency use … Character with wild eyes that spin in little circles believes trepanning is the last answer pull you into a garage and try to do the job with an electric drill straightaway.

  “Now if you’ll kindly take a seat here.”

  “Say what is this?”

  “All over in a minute and you’ll be out of that rigid cranium.”

  So word goes out stay away from that one. You need him like a hole in the head. I have deadly old-style bores who are translating the Koran into Provençal or constructing a new cosmology based on “brain breathing.” And the animal lover with exotic pets. The CIA man looks down with moist suspicious brow at the animal in his lap. It is a large ocelot its claws pricking into his flesh and every time he tries to shove it away the animal growls and digs in. I won’t be seeing that Bay of Pigs again.

  So I give myself a week on the build-up and make contact. Colonel Bradly knows the wild boys better than any man in Africa. In fact he has given his whole life to youth and it would seem gotten something back. There is talk of the devil’s bargain and in fact he is indecently young-looking for a man of sixty odd. As the Colonel puts it with engaging candor: “The world is not my home you understand here on young people.”

  We have lunch on the terrace of his mountain house. A heavily wooded garden with pools and paths stretches down to a cliff over the sea. Lunch is turbot in cream sauce, grouse, wild asparagrass, peaches in wine. Quite a change from the grey cafeteria food I have been subjected to in Western cities where I pass myself off as one of the faceless apathetic citizens searched and questioned by the police on every corner, set upon by brazen muggers, stumbling home to my burglarized apartment to find the narcotics squad going through my medicine chest again. We are served by a lithe young Malay with bright red gums. Colonel Bradly jabs a fork at him.

  “Had a job getting that dish through immigration. The Consulate wasn’t at all helpful.” After lunch we settle down to discuss my assignment.

  “The wild boys are an overflow from North African cities that started in 1969. The uneasy spring of 1969 in Marrakech. Spring in Marrakech is always uneasy each day a little hotter knowing what Marrakech can be in August. That spring gasoline gangs prowled the rubbish heaps, alleys and squares of the city dousing just anybody with gasoline and setting that person on fire. They rush in anywhere nice young couple sitting in their chintzy middle-class living room when hello! yes hello! the gas boys rush in douse them head to foot with a pump fire extinguisher full of gasoline and I got some good pictures from a closet where I had prudently taken refuge. Shot of the boy who lit the match he let the rank and file slosh his couple then he lit a Swan match face young pure, pitiless as the cleansing fire brought the match close enough to catch the fumes. Then he lit a Player with the same match sucked the smoke in and smiled, he was listening to the screams and I thought My God what a cigarette ad: Clambake on a beach the BOY there with a match. He is looking at two girls in bikinis. As he lights the match they lean forward with a LUCKYSTRIKECHESTERFIELDOLDGOLDCAMELPLAYER in the bim and give a pert little salute. The BOY turned out to be the hottest property in advertising. Enigmatic smile on the delicate young face. Just what is the BOY looking at? We had set out to sell cigarettes or whatever else we were paid to sell. The BOY was too hot to handle. Temples were erected to the BOY and there were posters of his face seventy feet high and all the teenagers began acting like the BOY looking at you with a dreamy look lips parted over their Wheaties. They all bought BOY shirts and BOY knives running around like wolf packs burning, looting, killing it spread everywhere all that summer in Marrakech the city would light up at night human torches flickering on walls, trees, fountains all very romantic you could map the dangerous areas sitting on your balcony under the stars sipping a Scotch. I looked across the square and watched a tourist burning in blue fire they had gasoline that burned in all colors by then … (He turned on the projector and stepped to the edge of the balcony) … Just look at them out there all those little figures dissolving in light. Rather like fairyland isn’t it except for the smell of gasoline and burning flesh.

  “Well they called in a strong man Colonel Arachnid Ben Driss who cruised the city in trucks rounded up the gas boys took them outside the walls shaved their heads and machine-gunned them. Survivors went underground or took to the deserts and the mountains where they evolved different ways of life and modes of combat.”

  The Wild Boys

  “They have incredible stamina. A pack of wild boys can cover fifty miles a day. A handful of dates and a lump of brown sugar washed down with a cup of water keep them moving like that. The noise they make just before they charge … well I’ve seen it shatter a greenhouse fifty yards away. Let me show you what a wild-boy charge is like.” He led the way into the projection room. “These are actual films of course but I have arranged them in narrative sequence. As you know I was with one of the first expeditionary forces sent out against the wild boys. Later I joined them. Seen the charges from both sides. Well here’s one of my first films.”

  The Colonel reins in his horse. It is a bad spot. Steep hills slope down to a narrow dry river bed. He scans the hillsides carefully through his field glasses. The hills slope up to black mesas streaked with iron ore.

  “Since our arrival in the territory the regiment had been feted by the local population who told us how glad they were the brave English soldiers had come to free them from the wild boys. The women and children pelted us with flowers in the street. It reeked of treachery but we were blinded by the terrible Bor Bor they were putting in our food and drink. Bor Bor is the drug of female illusion and it is said that he who takes Bor Bor cannot see a wild boy until it is
too late.

  “The regiment is well into the valley. It is a still hot afternoon with sullen electricity in the air. And suddenly there they are on both sides of us against the black mesas. The valley echos to their terrible charge cry a hissing outblast of breath like a vast WHOOO? … Their eyes light up inside like a cat’s and their hair stands on end. And they charge down the slope with incredible speed leaping from side to side. We open up with everything we have and they still keep coming. They aren’t human at all more like vicious little ghosts. They carry eighteen-inch bowie knives with knuckleduster handles pouring into the river bed above and below us leaping down swinging their knives in the air. When one is killed a body is dragged aside and another takes his place. The regiment formed a square and it lasted about thirty seconds.

  “I had prudently stashed my assets in a dry well where peering out through thistles I observed the carnage. I saw the Colonel empty his revolver and go down under ten wild boys. A moment later they tossed his bleeding head into the air and started a ball game. Just at dusk the wild boys got up and padded away. They left the bodies stripped to the skin many with the genitals cut off. The wild boys make little pouches from human testicles in which they carry their hashish and khat. The setting sun bathed the torn bodies in a pink glow. I walked happily about munching a chicken sandwich stopping now and again to observe an interesting cadaver.

  “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.