Queer Read online

  "YOU DONT BELONG HERE!" Yes, the hieroglyphics provided one key to the mechanism of possession. Like a virus, the possessing entity must find a port of entry.

  This occasion was my first clear indication of something in my being that was not me, and not under my control. I remember a dream from this period: I worked as an exterminator in Chicago, in the late 1930's, and lived in a rooming house on the near North Side. In the dream I am floating up near the ceiling with a feeling of utter death and despair, and looking down I see my body walking out the door with deadly purpose.

  One wonders if Yage could have saved the day by a blinding revelation. I remember a cut-up I made in Paris years later: "Raw peeled winds of hate and mischance blew the shot." And for years I thought this referred to blowing a shot of junk, when the junk squirts out the side of the syringe or dropper owing to an obstruction. Brion Gysin pointed out the actual meaning: the shot that killed Joan.

  I had bought a Scout knife in Quito. It had a metal handle and a curious tarnished old look, like something from a turn-of-the-century junk shop. I can see it in a tray of old knives and rings, with the silver plate flaking off. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon, a few days after I came back to Mexico City, and I decided to have the knife sharpened. The knife-sharpener had a little whistle and a fixed route, and as I walked down the street towards his cart a feeling of loss and sadness that had weighed on me all day so I could hardly breathe intensified to such an extent that I found tears streaming down my face.

  "What on earth is wrong?" I wondered.

  This heavy depression and a feeling of doom occurs again and again in the text. Lee usually attributes it to his failures with Allerton: "A heavy drag slowed movement and thought. Lee's face was rigid, his voice toneless." Allerton has just refused a dinner invitation and left abruptly: "Lee stared at the table, his thoughts slow, as if he were very cold." (Reading this / am cold and depressed.)

  Here is a precognitive dream from Cotter's shack in Ecuador: "He was standing in front of the Ship Ahoy. The place looked deserted. He could hear someone crying. He saw his little son, and knelt down and took the child in his arms. The sound of crying came closer, a wave of sadness.

  ... He held little Willy close against his chest. A group of people were standing there in Convict suits. Lee wondered what they were doing there and why he was crying."

  I have constrained myself to remember the day of Joan's death, the overwhelming feeling of doom and loss . . . walking down the street I suddenly found tears streaming down my face.

  "What is wrong with me?" The small Scout knife with a metal handle, the plating peeling off, a smell of old coins, the knife-sharpener's whistle. Whatever happened to this knife I never reclaimed?

  I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

  I have constrained myself to escape death. Denton Welch is almost my face. Smell of old coins.

  Whatever happened to this knife called Allerton, back to the appalling Margaras Inc. The realization is basic formulated doing? The day of Joan's doom and loss. Found tears streaming down from Allerton peeling off the same person as a Western shootist. What are you rewriting?

  A lifelong preoccupation with Control and Virus. Having gained access the virus uses the host's energy, blood, flesh and bones to make copies of itself. Model of dogmatic insistence never never from without was screaming in my ear, "YOU DON'T BELONG HERE!"

  A straitjacket notation carefully paralyzed with heavy reluctance. To escape their prewritten lines years after the events recorded. A writers block avoided Joans death. Denton Welch is Kim Carson's voice through a cloud underlined broken table tapping.

  William S. Burroughs February 1985

  Chapter 1

  Lee turned his attention to a Jewish boy named Carl Steinberg, whom he had known casually for about a year. The first time he saw Carl, Lee thought, "I could use that, if the family jewels weren't in pawn to Uncle Junk."

  The boy was blond, his face thin and sharp with a few freckles, always a little pink around the ears and nose as though he had just washed. Lee had never known anyone to look as clean as Carl. With his small round brown eyes and fuzzy blond hair, he reminded Lee of a young bird.

  Born in Munich, Carl had grown up in Baltimore. In manner and outlook he seemed European. He shook hands with traces of a heel-click. In general, Lee found European youths easier to talk to than Americans. The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners, and on the proposition that for social purposes, all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.

  What Lee looked for in any relationship was the feel of contact. He felt some contact with Carl.

  The boy listened politely and seemed to understand what Lee was saying. After some initial balking, he accepted the fact of Lee's sexual interest in his person. He told Lee, "Since I can't change my mind about you, I will have to change my mind about other things."

  But Lee soon found out he could make no progress. "If I got this far with an American kid," he reasoned, "I could get the rest of the way. So he's not queer. People can be obliging. What is the obstacle?" Lee finally guessed the answer: "What makes it impossible is that his mother wouldn't like it." And Lee knew it was time to pack in. He recalled a homosexual Jewish friend who lived in Oklahoma City. Lee had asked, "Why do you live here? You have enough money to live anywhere you like." The reply was, "It would kill my mother if I moved away." Lee had been speechless.

  One afternoon Lee was walking with Carl by the Amsterdam Avenue park. Suddenly Carl bowed slightly and shook Lee's hand. "Best of luck," he said, and ran for a streetcar.

  Lee stood looking after him, then walked over into the park and sat down on a concrete bench that was molded to resemble wood. Blue flowers from a blossoming tree had fallen on the bench and on the walk in front of it. Lee sat there watching the flowers move along the path in a warm spring wind. The sky was clouding up for an afternoon shower. Lee felt lonely and defeated. "I'll have to look for someone else," he thought. He covered his face with his hands. He was very tired.

  He saw a shadowy line of boys. As each boy came to the front of the line, he said "Best of luck,"

  and ran for a streetcar.

  "Sorry . . . wrong number ... try again . . . somewhere else . . . someplace else . . . not here. . . not me ... can't use it, don't need it, don't want it. Why pick on me?" The last face was so real and so ugly, Lee said aloud, "Who asked you, you ugly son of a bitch?"

  Lee opened his eyes and looked around. Two Mexican adolescents walked by, their arms around each other's necks. He looked after them, licking his dry, cracked lips.

  Lee continued to see Carl after that, until finally Carl said "Best of luck" for the last time, and walked away. Lee heard later he had gone with his family to Uruguay.

  Lee was sitting with Winston Moor in the Rathskeller, drinking double tequilas. Cuckoo clocks and moth-eaten deer heads gave the restaurant a dreary, out-of-place, Tyrolean look. A smell of spilt beer, overflowing toilets and sour garbage hung in the place like a thick fog and drifted out into the street through narrow, inconvenient swinging doors. A television set which was out of order half the time and which emitted horrible, guttural squawks was the final touch of unpleasantness.

  "I was in here last night," Lee said to Moor. "Got talking to a queer doctor and his boyfriend. The doctor was a major in the Medical Corps. The boyfriend is some kind of vague engineer. Awful-looking little bitch. So the doctor invites me to have a drink with them, and the boyfriend is getting jealous, and I don't want a beer anyway, which the doctor take
s as a reflection on Mexico and on his own person. He begins the do-you-like-Mexico routine. So I tell him Mexico is okay, some of it, but he personally is a pain in the ass. Told him this in a nice way, you understand. Besides, I had to go home to my wife in any case.

  "So he says, 'You don't have any wife, you are just as queer as I am.' I told him, 'I don't know how queer you are, Doc, and I ain't about to find out. It isn't as if you was a good-looking Mexican.

  You're a goddamned old ugly-looking Mexican. And that goes double for your moth-eaten boyfriend.' I was hoping, of course, the deal wouldn't come to any extreme climax. . . .

  "You never knew Hatfield? Of course not. Before your time. He killed a cargador in a pulquería.

  The deal cost him five hundred dollars. Now, figuring a cargador as rock bottom, think how much it would cost you to shoot a major in the Mexican Army."

  Moor called the waiter over. "Yo quiero un sandwich," he said, smiling at the waiter. "¿Quel sandwiches tiene?"

  "What do you want?" Lee asked, annoyed at the interruption.

  "I don't know exactly," said Moor, looking through the menu. "I wonder if they could make a melted cheese sandwich on toasted whole-wheat bread?" Moor turned back to the waiter, with a smile that was intended to be boyish.

  Lee closed his eyes as Moor launched an attempt to convey the concept of melted cheese on wholewheat toast. Moor was being charmingly helpless with his inadequate Spanish. He was putting down a little-boy-in-a-foreign-country routine. Moor smiled into an inner mirror, a smile without a trace of warmth, but it was not a cold smile: it was the meaningless smile of senile decay, the smile that goes with false teeth, the smile of a man grown old and stir-simple in the solitary confinement of exclusive self-love.

  Moor was a thin young man with blond hair that was habitually somewhat long. He had pale blue eyes and very white skin. There were dark patches under his eyes and two deep lines around the mouth. He looked like a child, and at the same time like a prematurely aged man. His face showed the ravages of the death process, the inroads of decay in flesh cut off from the living charge of contact. Moor was motivated, literally kept alive and moving, by hate, but there was no passion or violence in his hate. Moor's hate was a slow, steady push, weak but infinitely persistent, waiting to take advantage of any weakness in another. The slow drip of Moor's hate had etched the lines of decay in his face. He had aged without experience of life, like a piece of meat rotting on a pantry shelf.

  Moor made a practice of interrupting a story just before the point was reached. Often he would start a long conversation with a waiter or anybody else handy, or he would go vague and distant, yawn, and say, "What was that?" as though recalled to dull reality from reflections of which others could have no concept.

  Moor began talking about his wife. "At first, Bill, she was so dependent on me that she used literally to have hysterics when I had to go to the museum where I work. I managed to build up her ego to the point where she didn't need me, and after that the only thing I could do was leave.

  There was nothing more I could do for her."

  Moor was putting down his sincere act. "My God," Lee thought, "he really believes it."

  Lee ordered another double tequila. Moor stood up. "Well, I have to get going," he said. "I have a lot of things to do."

  "Well, listen," said Lee. "How about dinner tonight?"

  Moor said, "Well, all right."

  "At six in the K.C. Steak House."

  "All right. "Moor left.

  Lee drank half the tequila the waiter put in front of him. He had known Moor off and on in N.Y. for several years and never liked him. Moor disliked Lee, but then Moor didn't like anybody. Lee told himself, "You must be crazy, making passes in that direction, when you know what a bitch he is.

  These borderline characters can out-bitch any fag."

  When Lee arrived at the K.C. Steak House, Moor was already there. With him he had Tom Williams, another Salt Lake City boy. Lee thought, "He brought along a chaperone."

  "... I like the guy, Tom, but I can't stand to be alone with him. He keeps trying to go to bed with me. That's what I don't like about queers. You can't keep it on a basis of friendship. ..." Yes, Lee could hear that conversation.

  During dinner Moor and Williams talked about a boat they planned to build at Ziuhuatenejo. Lee thought this was a silly project. "Boat building is a job for a professional, isn't it?" Lee asked. Moor pretended not to hear.

  After dinner Lee walked back to Moor's rooming house with Moor and Williams. At the door Lee asked, "Would you gentlemen care for a drink? I'll get a bottle. . . ."He looked from one to the other.

  Moor said, "Well, no. You see we want to work on the plans for this boat we are going to build."

  "Oh," said Lee. "Well, I'll see you tomorrow. How about meeting me for a drink in the Rathskeller?

  Say around five."

  "Well, I expect I'll be busy tomorrow."

  "Yes, but you have to eat and drink."

  "Well, you see, this boat is more important to me than anything right now. It will take up all my time."

  Lee said, "Suit yourself," and walked away.

  Lee was deeply hurt. He could hear Moor saying, "Thanks for running interference, Tom. Well, I hope he got the idea. Of course Lee is an interesting guy and all that . . . but this queer situation is just more than I can take." Tolerant, looking at both sides of the question, sympathetic up to a point, finally forced to draw a tactful but firm line. "And he really believes that," Lee thought. "Like that crap about building up his wife's ego. He can revel in the satisfactions of virulent bitchiness and simultaneously see himself as a saint. Quite a trick."

  Actually Moor's brush-off was calculated to inflict the maximum hurt possible under the circumstances. It put Lee in the position of a detestably insistent queer, too stupid and too insensitive to realize that his attentions were not wanted, forcing Moor to tbe distasteful necessity of drawing a diagram.

  Lee leaned against a lamppost for several minutes. The shock had sobered him, drained away his drunken euphoria. He realized how tired he was, and how weak, but he was not ready yet to go home.

  Chapter 2

  Everything made in this country falls apart," Lee thought. He was examining the blade of his stainless-steel pocketknife. The chrome plating was peeling off like silver paper. "Wouldn't surprise me if I picked up a boy in the Alameda and his. . . . Here comes honest Joe."

  Joe Guidry sat down at the table with Lee, dropping bundles on the table and in the empty chair.

  He wiped off the top of a beer bottle with his sleeve and drank half the beer in a long gulp. He was a large man with a politician's red Irish face.

  "What you know?" Lee asked.

  "Not much, Lee. Except someone stole my typewriter. And I know who took it. It was that Brazilian, or whatever he is. You know him. Maurice."

  "Maurice? Is that the one you had last week? The wrestler?"

  "You mean Louie, the gym instructor. No, this is another one. Louie has decided all that sort of thing is very wrong and he tells me that I am going to burn in hell, but he is going to heaven."

  "Serious?"

  "Oh, yes. Well, Maurice is as queer as I am." Joe belched. "Excuse me. If not queerer. But he won't accept it. I think stealing my typewriter is a way he takes to demonstrate to me and to himself that he is just in it for all he can get. As a matter of fact, he's so queer I've lost interest in him. Not completely though. When I see the little bastard I'll most likely invite him back to my apartment, instead of beating the shit out of him like I should."

  Lee tipped his chair back against the wall and looked around the room. Someone was writing a letter at the next table. If he had overheard the conversation, he gave no sign. The proprietor was reading the bullfight section of the paper, spread out on the counter in front of him. A silence peculiar to Mexico seeped into the room, a vibrating, soundless hum.

  Joe finished his beer, wiped his mouth with the hack of his hand, and stared at the wall
with watery, bloodshot blue eyes. The silence seeped into Lee's body, and his face went slack and blank. The effect was curiously spectral, as though you could see through his face. The face was ravaged and vicious and old, but the clear, green eyes were dreamy and innocent. His light-brown hair was extremely fine and would not stay combed. Generally it fell down across his forehead, and on occasion brushed the food he was eating or got in his drink.

  "Well, I have to be going," said Joe. He gathered up his bundles and nodded to Lee, bestowing on him one of his sweet politician smiles, and walked out, his fuzzy, half-bald head outlined for a moment in the sunlight before he disappeared from view.

  Lee yawned and picked up a comic section from the next table. It was two days old. He put it down and yawned again. He got up and paid for his drink and walked out into the late afternoon sun. He had no place to go, so he went over to Sears' magazine counter and read the new magazines for free.

  He cut back past the K.C. Steak House. Moor beckoned to him from inside the restaurant. Lee went in and sat down at his table. "You look terrible," he said. He knew that was what Moor wanted to hear. As a matter of fact, Moor did look worse than usual. He had always been pale; now he was yellowish.

  The boat project had fallen through. Moor and

  Williams and Williams' wife, Lil, were back from Ziuhuatenejo. Moor was not on speaking terms with the Williamses.

  Lee ordered a pot of tea. Moor started talking about Lil. "You know, Lil ate the cheese down there. She ate everything and she never got sick. She won't go to a doctor. One morning she woke up blind in one eye and she could barely see out the other. But she wouldn't have a doctor.

  In a few days she could see again, good as ever. I was hoping she'd go blind."

  Lee realized Moor was perfectly serious. "He's insane," Lee thought.

  Moor went on about Lil. She had made advances to him, of course. He had paid more than his share of the rent and food. She was a terrible cook. They had left him there sick. He shifted to the subject of his health. "Just let me show you my urine test," Moor said with boyish enthusiasm. He spread the piece of paper out on the table. Lee looked at it without interest.