William S. Burroughs

THE SOFT MACHINE

The Restored Text

Edited and with an Introduction by OLIVER HARRIS

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

THE SOFT MACHINE

William S. Burroughs was born on 5 February 1914 in St Louis. In work and in life Burroughs expressed a lifelong subversion of the morality, politics and economics of modern America. To escape those conditions, and in particular his treatment as a homosexual and a drug-user, Burroughs left the United States in 1950, and lived in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris and London. By the time of his death he was widely recognized as one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential and innovative artists of the twentieth century. His numerous books include Naked Lunch, Junky and Queer.

Oliver Harris is the editor and author of ten books, including two trilogies by William Burroughs: Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk” (2003), The Yage Letters Redux (2006), and Queer: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition (2010). He is also the editor of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959 (1993) and Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (2008), the author of the critical study William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (2003) and co-editor of Naked Lunch@50: Anniversary Essays (2009). He is Professor of American Literature at Keele University and President of the European Beat Studies Network.

Introduction

SOLA ESPERANZA DEL MUNDO

“THIS BAD PLACE, MEESTER”

One of The Soft Machine’s recurrent characters is The Guide, modeled after the local young hustlers who picked William Burroughs up as he explored the jungles of South America in the early 1950s, and any reader entering the book’s alien territory would take the advice of a guide: “This bad place Meester. You crazy or something walk around alone?” The Soft Machine is not only a bad place, it’s an impossible one that mutates before your very eyes: “This bad place you write, Meester. You win something like jelly fish.” In this uniquely queer textual zone styles and genres switch in mid-sentence and incompatible realities mix in a single phrase. “Rubbed Moscow up me with a corkscrew motion of his limestones”? “orgasm crackled with electric afternoon”? “Zero eaten by crab”? Is this science fiction or avant-garde poetry? Drug literature or homosexual pornography? Political satire? All, and yet none of the above, because no labels stick and it doesn’t matter how often you read the text, it will seem new every time. As Joan Didion said, to imagine you can put The Soft Machine down when the phone rings and find your place a few minutes later “is sheer bravura.”¹

Not knowing where we are or where we’re going is the disorientating and yet desired experience, so anyone looking for a guide to reading The Soft Machine had better follow the perverse example set by Burroughs himself back in 1953, when solicited by a smiling Colombian street boy: “He looked like the most inefficient guide in the Upper Amazon but I said, ‘Yes.’ ”² An efficient guide would only have taken Burroughs where he already knew to go, so following his desire by falling for a hustler was the right choice for someone committed to the difficult path of discovering the unknown. You crazy or something read The Soft Machine alone? Yes, indeed; but that’s the best way to do it because what you find there will be your business. Since the text itself resists mapping, all this Introduction can promise, therefore, is a map of where we are right now, offering for the first time the material history of a book about which so much has remained untold—even the origins of its title, a suitably paradoxical phrase that begins with an utterly misleading definite article, since the book in your hand is not The but A Soft Machine.

“I WISH TO MAKE MYSELF AS CLEAR AS POSSIBLE”

The Soft Machine is usually described as the first novel in the Cut-Up Trilogy—a straightforward enough place to begin, and yet more false than true. For in the 1960s Burroughs published no less than three entirely distinct versions, so that there is quite literally a trilogy of just Soft Machines and to talk about the book always demands specifying which book. Produced by three different publishers in three different countries, the three editions hold three different positions in three different trilogies, marking a beginning, middle, and end: the first edition of The Soft Machine published in June 1961 by the Olympia Press in Paris—never reprinted, a collector’s item nowadays—was indeed the first book, preceding The Ticket That Exploded in 1962 and Nova Express in 1964; the revised second edition of The Soft Machine published in March 1966 by Grove Press in New York—the only text most readers know—can be placed second, since it followed Nova Express in 1964 and came before Grove’s revised edition of The Ticket That Exploded in 1967; and the third edition of The Soft Machine published in July 1968 by John Calder in London—kept in print in the UK—was the final version of any title and so claims third place. Preposterously, there have been enough Soft Machines for a trilogy of trilogies, and the textual history of Burroughs’ book has been almost as baffling as anything between its covers. Clearing a path through that bibliographical jungle is one aim of this new, fourth edition.

Like most remakes or sequels, as Burroughs produced new editions of the title it could be said he ended up losing the plot, and that despite the brilliance of some of its new material, the second edition is structurally a mess, the third even more so. While that’s true, it again misses the point. The original Soft Machine was the most extreme of all Burroughs’ cut-up books, the most uncompromising, but his revisions over time were not merely a series of compromises or mistakes since the “original” was itself a messy hybrid of materials, impossible to read in any conventional sense. There was therefore no plot to lose, only experiments to try again, and again. Equally, while the history of publication is confusing, it’s the mere tip of a huge archival iceberg that reveals both the messiness and the great care in Burroughs’ working practices. Instinctively as much as ideologically, contradiction was part of his method: when Burroughs cut up his writing he introduced the magical chance factor, an experimental random element, and his writing desk resembled a Ouija board in a science lab; whereas when he edited the results, he could be as rigorous as the most traditional nineteenth-century novelist.

But while they’re always called “cut-up novels,” the term tells us very little: how much is “cut-up” and how much is a “novel”? How does The Soft Machine differ from Nova Express or The Ticket That Exploded? How do the three editions of The Soft Machine differ from each other, when were the changes made, and why did Burroughs make them? To answer the first questions and clear up some of the myths about the last one, a precise history is difficult but necessary and long overdue. As well as narrating The Soft Machine’s perplexing story, this introduction explains why an archival manuscript from 1962 with a unique place in that history has been used to make further restorations and revisions for this fourth edition. More precise details of texts and manuscripts are given in the Notes section, supplemented by appendices that include material from the first and third editions as a gesture towards the multiple textual identities of Burroughs’ Soft Machines.

As for the book’s title—an oxymoron which evokes the Pop Art “soft sculptures” of Claes Oldenburg and that directly inspired a series of other Soft Machines, from the 1960s psychedelic rock band to a 1980s analysis of “cybernetic fiction” and a 21st century study of nanotechnology—the received wisdom is that “the soft machine is the human body.”³ In other words, the phrase sums up Burroughs’ urgent warning against genetic and cultural determinism, his bleak vision that we’re automata manipulated by inner and outer forces, from sexual desires to media brainwashing. The received wisdom comes from Burroughs himself but is misleading nonetheless. Significantly, he offered this definition at the very last possible opportunity, in an Appendix added to the third edition of The Soft Machine: the two previous editions not only lacked a definition, astonishingly they never used the phrase “soft machine” except in their titles. But Burroughs didn’t come up with a meaning just for the 1968 edition; even before choosing it as the title for his book, he had already made the term central to the political scenario of his trilogy’s Nova Conspiracy. Burroughs withheld any clear meaning and, as the manuscript draft of his Appendix to the third edition reveals, in the end he defined the term out of sheer frustration: “I have been accused of being unintelligible. At this point I wish to make myself as clear as possible.”⁴ By “this point”—December 1965, when he wrote the Appendix—Burroughs had been working on The Soft Machine for over six years, and from the origins of the first edition in summer 1959, making himself clear was always the issue.

“I HAVE BECOME A MEGALOMANIAC”

It was in the very week Naked Lunch appeared that Burroughs first referred to writing the book that would be published two years later as The Soft Machine. Having moved from Tangier to the so-called Beat Hotel in Paris eighteen months earlier, Burroughs already had a shadowy, underground notoriety and a fame-by-association through the media attention given the Beat Generation. He would soon share with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac sensationalized treatment in Life magazine, followed by a series of outraged and hostile book reviews. But he was still unknown in July 1959 when Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, seeking to exploit the censorship controversy provoked by the appearance of episodes in a little magazine, rushed out The Naked Lunch in Paris (the definite article was dropped for the American edition in 1962). It was in this context that Burroughs mailed Ginsberg a “sample beginning of sequel to Naked Lunch,” and framed his new writing in the most dramatic terms (Letters, 420).⁵

“Complete power and confidence has broken through,” Burroughs declared, announcing that after years of failure he had “become a megalomaniac” and was making “incredible discoveries in the line of psychic exploration”: “What I am putting down on paper now is literally what is happening to me as I move forward,” he wrote, insisting it was “no land of the imagination” but real and “dangerous in a most literal sense” (420). Burroughs had been through messianic periods before—in 1956 mocking himself as “Pop Lee Your Friendly Prophet”—and would do again—“the time to be messianic is now,” he declared a decade later, in absolute earnest this time, just after publication of his final edition of The Soft Machine (ROW, 286).⁶ He was serious too in July 1959, when the impact of living and working alongside Brion Gysin encouraged in him the self-belief for a mission to discover the unknown through his “sequel to Naked Lunch”: “I don’t know where it is going or what will happen. It is straight exploration like Gysin’s paintings, to which it is intimately connected” (Letters, 420). Such total conviction was what he needed in early October when Gysin showed Burroughs the first accidental slicings of newspapers he had made while cutting a mount for a drawing with his Stanley knife. Gysin’s knife fell into waiting hands, and led to Burroughs’ decade-long commitment to cut-up experiments in multiple media from film to photography, scrapbooks to tape recorders. More immediately, the question prompted by the origins of The Soft Machine is what “straight exploration” meant in the context of writing a “sequel.”

“EXPLODED LUNCH”

Over the next eighteen months Burroughs tried out three alternative titles and the content of his new work changed considerably, but he kept referring to it as a sequel to Naked Lunch. The connection was spelled out in the unimaginative first title he considered in September 1959: “Maybe Naked Free Lunch” (Letters, 427). That month he confirmed the material connection between the two books, asking Ginsberg to look for manuscripts not used in the recently-published Naked Lunch “on mythical South American places featuring Carl” and “Scandinavian (Trak) material” (425). This particular material, which indeed ended up in The Soft Machine, dated back two years and was written after and quite separately from “Interzone,” the manuscript completed in June 1957 that was the basis for three quarters of Naked Lunch. Such precision helps move beyond the long-circulated but always vague standard version, according to which the Cut-Up Trilogy was drawn from a “thousand page” Naked Lunch “Word Hoard.”

What was the “Word Hoard”? A mixture of mythology and confusion (even in its title, sometimes given as “Word Horde” or, as if it referred to an actual book, Word Hoard). Kerouac and Ginsberg used the phrase in spring 1957 when retyping Burroughs’ mass of rough manuscripts in Tangier, and it appears a couple of times in Naked Lunch. But Burroughs himself used the phrase only briefly as an alternative for “Word,” the 60-page final section of his 200-page “Interzone” manuscript. A good deal of his “sequel to Naked Lunch” did come out of what he wrote between fall 1957 and fall 1959, but that material has a separate history to the loose “thousand page” myth. The mythology matters because it has had the effect of mixing up the chronologies of writing and blurring distinctions between books. Burroughs even made a gag out of the confusion of his trilogy, referring in the second edition of The Soft Machine to one “novel I hadn’t written called The Soft Ticket” and another called “Expense Account” that in draft was originally titled “Exploded Lunch”—which begs the question; if the myth was so confusing and if the result has been a historiographic nightmare, why did Burroughs himself promote it?

It was more than convenience, having an easy answer on tap for interviewers, and not entirely a philosophical position, a decision to refute fixed identities and epistemological certainty. There were also strategic reasons why Burroughs promoted the connection between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, and then Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. He worked on the cut-up books while helping Grove Press release an American edition of Naked Lunch, well aware of the censorship battle to be fought, and he recognized the publishing advantages of a common approach, especially involving Nova Express. That was why in the January 1962 issue of Evergreen Review, the house magazine of Grove Press, he prefaced early episodes of Novia Express (as it was then titled) with “Introduction to Naked Lunch The Soft Machine Novia Express”—making a trilogy out of those three titles. The following year Burroughs created another surprising trilogy in Dead Fingers Talk, a book made out of sections from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded. Before it became the first of the Cut-Up Trilogy, The Soft Machine therefore appeared as the middle volume of two different trilogies starting from Naked Lunch.

Burroughs’ position was self-contradictory, however. On the one hand, he promoted cut-up methods as a radical cut in literary history, the literally cutting edge of a new revolutionary movement, most visibly in his two collaborative 1960 manifesto pamphlets, Minutes to Go (with Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso) and The Exterminator (with Gysin). On the other hand, he also wanted to present his work in terms of a continuous narrative, in which Naked Lunch was a prequel and The Soft Machine a sequel.

Writing in July 1960 to Irving Rosenthal, as he prepared the American edition of Naked Lunch, Burroughs stated that “little of the old material” would be used for his new book because it was now “understanding out of date.”⁷ While he used much more than just a “little,” almost all the material he did use went only into The Soft Machine, and Burroughs brought Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded into the orbit of Naked Lunch despite the fact that—contrary to the “Word Hoard” myth—their manuscript connections are actually negligible. If Burroughs was being strategic in connecting his books, this applied not only for publishers or interviewers but also in private. In a late 1966 letter he made probably his most emphatic statement on the trilogy and the “Word Hoard”: “You might say that Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded all derive from one store of material a good part of which was written between 1957 and 1959” (ROW, 243). You might say is an equivocation in itself, a telltale sign of what he should not have said, and Burroughs was saying it in order to defend his third edition of The Soft Machine against the hostile criticisms of Brion Gysin (to which we’ll return). Burroughs overstated the manuscript origins of the trilogy as a way to justify his new version to Gysin—“The assemblage of a book from this material is always hurried and arbitrary”—but he was also echoing the story of the book from the beginning, six years earlier.

“OUT OF A HAT”

By early December 1959, Burroughs had come up with a new title, “But Is All Back Seat Dreaming.” Initially used for one section sent to Big Table magazine, the title was soon applied to the book as a whole—which, he now told Ginsberg, he had “written most of,” “remaining only the task of correlating material” (ROW, 10). This was premature, and almost a year later he was again telling Ginsberg of his “next novel which is only a problem of putting it together,” even as he admitted it was an “inordinate amount of work” (59). In April 1960 Burroughs had moved from Paris to London and changed the title again, informing Gysin that he had “been writing a sequel to Naked Lunch to be called ‘Mr Bradly Mr Martin’ ” (25). In the first edition, “all back seat of dreaming” and “mr. bradly mr. martin” would be the titles of the final two sections. Meanwhile, Maurice Girodias began pressing him for a contract on the new book and in early August 1960 Burroughs quipped to Gysin, “Does he know what exactly he is trying to buy?” (42). It was a good question, bearing in mind the feedback Burroughs received on his work in progress later that month from Paul Carroll, who had published “Back Seat” in Big Table.

Speaking “frankly,” Carroll tried to balance faith in Burroughs with deep scepticism about this “new, difficult work” which had “moved so far from NAKED LUNCH.”⁸ Burroughs’ reply is instructive. On the one hand, he promised to send “something else as near as possible” along “straight narrative lines,” and on the other he tried to reassure Carroll that the new material would be “readily understandable” once he saw the larger structure of which it was a part.⁹ Only four months earlier, when returning the corrected proofs of “Back Seat,” Burroughs had shown he already recognized that his cut-up texts needed framing for the reader, sending Carroll a “note on the method used, to be printed with the material” (ROW, 22). In other words, so far as Burroughs was concerned, he was taking measures to ensure the readability of what, in January 1961, he at last named The Soft Machine.

The “note on method” that Burroughs had sent to accompany “Back Seat” in April 1960 was a short, early version of a much-circulated and often-quoted text, an expanded version of which appeared in The Third Mind: “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin.” When it was first published under this title later that year in Sidewalk magazine, Burroughs described it as an “explanation” that was “inseparable” from the Soft Machine material published alongside it (entitled “Have You Seen Slotless City?”)¹⁰ The note began by tracing the method’s origins in avant-garde history: “Tzara at a Dada Meeting in the 1920s proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat” (ROW, 22). Burroughs used the resonant final phrasing again when telling Paul Bowles in January 1961 of his “sequel to Naked Lunch entitled The Soft Machine. Cutting and permutating the book writes itself out of a hat” (65). By this time he had been working solidly for eighteen months and was still struggling to cut his manuscripts into shape—“I have so much material here it appalls me to see it” (57), he had despaired in late 1960—so his talk of pulling a book out of a hat was, like Tzara’s original act, a stunt rather than a description of creative process. It wasn’t only his enemies who would throw Burroughs’ words back at him (as hostile and uncomprehending reviewers did, deriding his work as a lazy gimmick): Kerouac dismissed cut-up methods as “an old Dada trick” and Gregory Corso, in a post-script to his own contribution in Minutes to Go, rejected cut-ups as, precisely, old hat: “Tzara did it all before.”¹¹

Burroughs was guilty of promoting cut-ups too simplistically—the message of his early polemics was always: “Method is simple”—but this was precisely because of his evangelical zeal to promote them as widely as possible. It wasn’t a Dada prank, and while The Soft Machine shares more than a similar title with modernist experiments like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Stein didn’t believe her creative techniques were also revolutionary tools for her readers to use. In absolute contrast, Burroughs’ “note on method” ended by declaring: “The old word lines keep thee in old world slots. Cut the word lines.” Burroughs therefore tried to distinguish his new work from high modernists and the historical avant-garde both aesthetically—“important to avoid old surreal look,” he wrote to Paul Carroll in January 1961 regarding the use of typeface¹²—and, above all, politically. It was in this context that he coined the term “soft machine” in late summer 1960.

“THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS”

In his 1960 version of “The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin,” Burroughs played the role of guide to his own work by mapping it in four ways: one context was art-historical (referring again to “Tristan Tzara at a Surrealist Rally in the 1920s”), another was that of contemporary science (naming the mathematician John von Neumann, whose “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior introduced the cut up principle of random action into military and game strategy”), and a third was entirely open-ended (“Applications are literally unlimited”). The final context was a sharp negative: “The method was grounded on The Freudian Couch.” For Burroughs, opposition to cut-up methods was inseparable from their creative potential and subversive political importance, and identifying enemies was as necessary as trying to convince sceptics or recruit allies in what he saw as not a literary endeavour at all, but essentially a war. And when he picked up the Stanley knife from Gysin in October 1959, he stabbed it first into Sigmund Freud.

In part, the attack on Freud reflected Gysin’s own agenda, his dispute with what he referred to in Minutes to Go as “the Art Wing of the Freudian Conspiracy calling itself Surrealism,” and in part it was personal.¹³ Burroughs had had two decades’ experience of psychoanalysts, but when Gysin introduced him simultaneously to cut-ups and Scientology he immediately made a connection between them as mechanistic methods that promised fast and radical results, ways to cut himself out of the past and to cut the past out of him. The fingerprints of L. Ron Hubbard, pulp science fiction writer as well as cult prophet, are all over the Cut-Up project: from its manifesto Minutes to Go, where he is quoted and effectively named as a fifth collaborator, to the Nova conspiracy scenario and the therapeutic techniques using tape recorders advocated in the trilogy, although only odd references (e.g., “words engraved on my back tape”) appear in The Soft Machine.

As quickly as Burroughs decided that the cure was as simple as cutting up words on tape or on paper, he identified the plot against it. In writings from late 1959 onwards, he blasted psychoanalysis as “one of the vilest conspiracies of all time,” aimed at spreading mental illness, serving power elites, and actively blocking cut-up methods.¹⁴ In the screaming block capitals typical of 1960 typescripts, he declared that “THE PRACTITIONERS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY ARE SHAMELESS OR STUPID MACHINE SENT LIARS AND FRAUDS”: “BURN THEIR STUPID BOOKS. CUT HERR DOCTOR FRAUD INTO A MILLION PIECES. SEE IT FOR THE COMMUNIST SENT LIE IT IS […] THE SOFT MACHINE IS YOUR ILLNESS CUT THE MACHINE WORD LINES AND YOU WILL BE CURED.”¹⁵ The 1961 Soft Machine included one brief but telling reference to “fraud Freud and Einstein,” although this was dropped from later editions and little else would remain in his published work to indicate Burroughs’ deplorable subscription to the International Jewish-Communist conspiracy.¹⁶ Critics have preferred to turn a blind eye to it, but the anti-Semitism in his work at this time and an equally ugly misogyny were encouraged by Gysin, and represented the dark side of Burroughs’ self-declared megalomania, his missionary conviction of having discovered the secret weapon to combat a conspiracy of conspiracies. The Burroughs of unchecked paranoia was no “Friendly Prophet.”

It was in this context that Burroughs asked “WHO SERVES THE SOFT MACHINE?” and across dozens of texts identified a hydra-headed enemy comprising women (“FIRST THEY INVADED AND TOOK OVER WOMEN OF THE WORLD”), scientists (“PREACHING DEATH AND REALITY”), newspaper magnates (“MR LUCE BEAVERBROOK HEARST TIME SMASH YOUR MACHINE”), bankers and industrialists (“ROTHSCHILD ROCKEFELLER”), and computer technology (“THE HANDLING OF MILLIONS OF LIFE SCRIPTS IN SYMBOL FORM IS DONE NOW BY ELECTRIC COMPUTERS”). Burroughs’ megalomania placed him and the Cut-Up project center-stage in a global conspiracy, and in these texts he not only addressed his enemies directly but imagined the replies they would make to “WILLY THE RAT FROM MISSOURI” who had “CALLED THE LAW” on them.

As well as identifying language itself as the enemy—“THE SOFT MACHINE GOT IN BY THE WORD”—Burroughs specifically attacked the word and image media empire of Henry Luce. He addressed Luce and fantasized his reply (“STAND ASIDE BURROUGHS OF SPACE AND LISTEN TO THE LORD OF TIME”), while backdating the connection between Luce’s magazines and cut-up methods: “When Tzara first pulled words out of a hat the conspiracy of Life Time Fortune to monopolize Life Time and Fortune would have been smashed before it started.”¹⁷ The logic of conspiracy may seem simpleminded and run in reverse—a monopoly of news media developed because Freudians used Surrealism to stop the work of a Dadaist poet—but Burroughs was just taking the titles of Luce’s magazines at their word: they did indeed aim to copyright “Life” “Time” and “Fortune,” most literally in Luce’s championing of a permanent “American Century”—a world of American values that would run on American time, to the end of time. Fulfilling the thesis implied by chance in the very first cut-ups—when Gysin had accidentally chopped up Life magazine adverts with news items from the Herald Tribune—Burroughs’ trilogy evolved in direct opposition to Luce’s trilogy. What’s surprising is that, having identified Luce’s “Time Machine” with the “Soft Machine,” he made nothing of the connection in The Soft Machine itself, and instead made it central to Nova Express.

Beyond naming names and identifying monopolistic professions or institutions, Burroughs was attacking the false appearance of the world we think we know, and so ultimately he defined “THIS SOFT INSECT MACHINE AS THE IMMUTABLE REALITY OF THE UNIVERSE.” He tried out a variety of metaphors to clarify his concept: from “the soft machine is a virus parasite” to “PICTURE THE SOFT MACHINE AS A PUPPET MANIPULATOR,” and evoked it in terms of the archetypal American big con game (“THE BIG STORE. THE PROP BANKS”) as well as what he called a “new Mythology for the Space Age”: “THE SOFT MACHINE? AN OBSTACLE COURSE. BASIC TRAINING FOR SPACE.”¹⁸ Essential to the emerging science fiction scenario of his Nova Conspiracy was Burroughs’ conflation of his enemies into one all-embracing anti-human invader, against whom cut-up methods could be deployed by guerrilla forces of underground resistance. By early 1961 he had written the most explicit text he would publish on the subject, which appeared in the first issue of the New Orleans magazine The Outsider in May 1961 as “Operation Soft Machine/Cut.” Laid out in newspaper-style columns—the precursor of many experiments in this format during the mid-1960s—the magazine version was never intended as part of The Soft Machine, but an earlier draft was.¹⁹ While the book is almost totally obscure about the big picture of the Nova Conspiracy and the meaning of Burroughs’ central term, the magazine text (included as an Appendix for this edition) is absolutely explicit: “The occupying power of this planet described as a soft MACHINE.”

Equally important, the magazine piece overlaps not just the book but also Burroughs’ two manifesto pamphlets, Minutes to Go and especially The Exterminator, suggesting the larger network of publications in multiple formats of which The Soft Machine published by Olympia Press was only one element. Indeed, two parts of the book appeared in 1960 and five more in 1961 in a variety of little magazines ranging geographically from the United States (Big Table in Chicago, Metronome in New York, The Outsider in New Orleans) to England (International Literary Annual), Scotland (Sidewalk), France (Two Cities) and Belgium (Nul). Altogether, 5,000 words of The Soft Machine appeared in print before the Olympia edition in June 1961, and another 5,000 during the six months after, adding up to almost a quarter of the text. Burroughs showed his commitment to book publication throughout the decade-long cut-up project—he would not have bothered to twice revise The Soft Machine otherwise—but from the start he also recognized the unique importance of little magazines and the underground press. Olympia was in many ways the ideal publisher for him—small, foreign-based, controversial, ambiguous in its mix of high literature and bad taste, from Lolita (1955) to There’s A Whip in My Valise (also published in 1961). Nevertheless, it made more sense to cite “Mao Tse Tung on Guerrilla war tactics” and to declare “THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS,” in the crudely typed hand-printed pages of a counter-cultural magazine like The Outsider.

“THE WORD-STRIP”

The 1961 Soft Machine mixes elliptical episodes of science fiction fantasy with ethnographic travelogue, repetitious sex scenes, pulp genre parodies, and a variety of unclassifiable and uncompromising language experiments. The text is so relentlessly bizarre that it seems simultaneously impossible to read and yet—unlike the second and third editions, where the reader is left confused by non-narrative sections—not in the least frustrating. Instead of a narrative scenario, it is dominated by long image-lists (redolent of, and sometimes cutting up, the prose poems of Rimbaud and St.-John Perse) that depict toxic landscapes—swamps, jungles, canals, rotting cities of concrete pillars and bamboo bridges—and whirling machinery—penny arcades, Ferris wheels, pinball machines, cable cars, elevators. Ginsberg described it as “page after page of heroic sinister prose poetry.”²⁰Although the polluted wastelands clearly develop out of Naked Lunch, the dominance of South American locations and the recurrent use of Spanish signals Burroughs’ vision of a new global colonialism, the planet’s occupation by an alien empire: Trak Utilities—the dominant corporation in The Soft Machine, precursor of the Nova Mob in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded—extends the imperial ambitions of sixteenth-century Conquistadors from the New World to the whole of reality. (“You can’t walk out on Trak,” Burroughs would clarify for the revised text; “There’s just no place to go.”)

It therefore comes as less of a surprise to discover that in spring 1961 Burroughs planned to incorporate into The Soft Machine another type of stylistically anomalous material; his 1953 epistolary report on Central and South America, “In Search of Yage.” According to Paul Bowles, it was only because “Girodias was hurrying him towards the end” that about thirty pages of this material did not go into the book.²¹ Burroughs made up for it by creating overlaps between his revised edition of The Soft Machine and “In Search of Yage,” building into The Yage Letters a cut-up text (“I Am Dying, Meester?”) much of which he incorporated into the new Soft Machine. The connection Burroughs made across books was as much formal as geographic or thematic, associating the hallucinogenic yagé vine with cut-up techniques as twin methods of sensual derangement, linguistic transcendence, and visionary transport to other worlds. Archival typescripts confirm the association: Burroughs made an extensive cut-up of his 1953 “Composite City” vision, whose yagé-inspired montage poetics anticipated The Soft Machine by pointing to the organic fertility of words in recombination.²² The environmentalist politics implied by Burroughs’ use of South American topographies therefore coincides with an intriguing textual ecology. Rather than being made to express meaning, phrases spontaneously replicate, duplicate, permutate, animate. Burroughs had long wanted to “create something that will have a life of its own”—an ambition he opposed to writing a “novel,” which is “something finished, that is, dead”—and in The Soft Machine his mechanical methods do create a strange, stuttering version of autonomous life.²³ What is most inspiring about the 1961 edition is therefore not its intermittent flashes of open insurrection but its use of language. For political ferocity it has nothing on Nova Express, and it lacks the pragmatic polemics of The Ticket That Exploded, but where else can we encounter the imperative “Walk scorpion hair. Room violets,” or “shredded clouds impregnated with flesh fur of steel”?

In narrative terms, the 1961 text is virtually static, and at a sentence level it is paralyzed by the lack of active verbs. In other volumes of the Cut-Up Trilogy, Burroughs gave his fragmented writing forward momentum by using the em dash (—) and ellipsis (…); here the dominant punctuation mark is the staccato period stop.²⁴ Combined with The Constant Capitalization Of Words, the result is unreadable as a narrative. Instead, individual phrases possess an inspiring alien energy, the dynamic vitality of composites made from wildly incompatible terms: “Brass entrails from other twilights. Fur youths in glass hunger down the bones. Spit blood crystals of dawn. Masturbating broken mirror rocks.” It’s “unreadable” in the sense of being impossible to read without being forced to wonder what “reading” is at all. The effect is viscerally and philosophically bracing, for a while. The other volumes in the Cut-Up Trilogy also suffered a law of diminishing returns, but, unlike the first Soft Machine, they took advantage of their length to generate recurrent effects of déjà-vu, creating an uncanny dimension of disturbed memory missing from the 1961 text.

Comparing the first to later editions, what Burroughs left out of The Soft Machine seems logical: from a paragraph where almost every sentence begins “And” to an 84-word long sentence punctuated by just one comma, and from pages of phrase permutations and word fragments to sections like “the word-strip,” which begins: “I am that I am yo soy lo que soy je suis ce que je suis Ich bin das Ich bin ana eigo io ese quello io eseyo soy ca je suis soy am est eso ana ist that eso am es ich das ce que bin am that quello eigo soy eso am ist ese quiego sat that am ce que ist is es am cat dam anoy iegos oys soys boys tat ta hat tama taick sick joys ass quam loy st ickythyyoanncnesnsosnnntatatamattatmattamaick-sick soy cn es n sos nnn.”

The other key feature of the 1961 Soft Machine is its unique structural organisation into color Units (Red, Green, Blue, White), only traces of which would remain in later editions. The structure came from Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles” (minus black), and also reflected Burroughs’ intense preoccupation with color stimulated by other sources, including the drugs yagé and apomorphine and the orgones of Wilhelm Reich (all associated with blue), and the work of the British neurophysiologist, W. Grey Walter.²⁵ In spring 1961 Burroughs was taking mescaline and developing what he called “color line walks” around Tangier, both of which responded to Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-influenced lament that modernity had killed the magic of color (“We have seen too much pure, bright colour at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting”).²⁶ Burroughs’ writing was just one in a range of experimental practices in different media that were visually-oriented, so it was logical that, after submitting his manuscript to Girodias in April 1961, he would go back to the beginnings of the book by turning to Brion Gysin for cover artwork.

Gysin was duly credited with the jacket design—impressive, if rather grey calligraphic forms, replaced by Burroughs’ colored ink drawing on the cover of the second edition—but his name is otherwise absent from The Soft Machine. This is in marked contrast to Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded where Gysin is referenced several times and credited in prefatory notes along with other collaborators. And yet the 1961 edition was, more than the later volumes in the trilogy, a collaborative production involving both Gysin and Allen Ginsberg (who wrote the unsigned jacket blurb). Not only did Gysin and Ginsberg correct the proofs for Burroughs that April—help he always sought, since he was a poor proofreader—they helped organize the final manuscript, working together in Paris while Burroughs was away in Tangier. Unlike Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, which he wrote in sections or chapters, what Burroughs left behind for submission was a largely continuous text. The published book is subdivided into fifty short titled sections, whereas the typesetting manuscript had only nine—four of them handwritten in the margins by Burroughs in blue ink—plus a number of line-space breaks. As well as trying to give the reader some space to breathe by inserting the section breaks at more or less regular intervals, Gysin and Ginsberg also both wrote blurbs to help promote the book, as indeed did Gregory Corso.

Corso’s short piece suggests the extreme difficulty even those closest to Burroughs had in describing The Soft Machine (“a fine epitome of the cut-up” was the best he could manage), while Gysin’s two-page typescript focused on the book as “a journey into the unknown,” on Burroughs’ mythic persona (“Tall, thin, oyster-pale, a bit stooped and transparent”), and his expertise in plant hallucinogens (“poppy, hemp, coca, bannesteria caapi, sacred mushrooms”).²⁷ Ginsberg’s handwritten draft is interesting for what was left out of the blurb used on the Olympia jacket, including claims that the cut-up method was “applicable” to both psychoanalysis and politics, and a striking final quotation which advocated Burroughs’ method as hope for colonized peoples: “Sola esperanza del Mundo—Take it to Cut City.” However, despite his enthusiastic gratitude for the blurbs, disagreements began even before the book was published: “I cannot agree with Allen about the ending,” he wrote Gysin, admitting that “the book is experimental and difficult” but insisting, “I can’t do it over” (ROW, 75)—and yet that’s exactly what Burroughs decided to do.

“YOU HAVE TO WRITE FINIS”

The publishing history of The Soft Machine makes it entirely obvious that the book changed from the first edition published by Olympia in June 1961 to the second edition published by Grove in March 1966, because for five years everyone told Burroughs the same thing—that it was too difficult to read—and so he made it less cut-up and more readable when he moved publishers. It is equally obvious that the same logic also applied for the third edition published by John Calder in July 1968. And yet what’s obvious turns out to be wrong.

To begin with, Burroughs didn’t need to wait five years to recognize that The Soft Machine was almost unreadable. When Timothy Leary visited Tangier to take hallucinogens with him at the end of July 1961, he reported Burroughs’ reflections on the book published just a month earlier and his determination to write a different one next time: “The soft machine is too difficult. I am now writing a science-fiction book that a twelve-year old can understand.”²⁸ The new book was Nova Express, and while Burroughs’ idea of what pre-teens could read is a stretch or a joke at his own expense, the point remains that the second volume of his Cut-Up Trilogy was defined against his first.²⁹ What led Burroughs to revise The Soft Machine, however, was not general regret or negative feedback from friends, but the publishing contract for a specific book. In August 1962 he starred at the Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference, coordinated by the Scottish publisher John Calder who commissioned Burroughs to make a book of selections from his Olympia Press titles (Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded) in order to pave the way for Calder to publish Naked Lunch in the UK.³⁰ As he began compiling Dead Fingers Talk that September, Burroughs told Paul Bowles: “I am very much dissatisfied with The Soft Machine and had to rewrite most of the material included in the book of selections” (ROW, 114). One opportunity to rewrite the book led directly to another.

The months following his success at the Edinburgh Conference were a crucial time for Burroughs’ Cut-Up Trilogy. Assembling Dead Fingers Talk coincided with revising The Soft Machine, completing The Ticket That Exploded and submitting a new draft of Nova Express. In November 1962, Burroughs updated Bowles to say that he had now finished rewriting The Soft Machine, adding the expected verdict “and it seems a lot easier to read.”³¹ The manuscript he completed in late November 1962 is almost certainly the 129-page typescript archived at Columbia University, identified by Burroughs as “the original manuscript of the rewritten and revised version of The Soft Machine.”³² It is very similar to the book published by Grove in 1966, which means that, far from being separated by five years, the first and second editions were effectively only eighteen months apart.

Just as significantly, while Burroughs invited interest from Grove Press—sounding out Barney Rosset that October—he didn’t rewrite The Soft Machine for a new publisher but once again for Olympia. The clearest evidence for that is the otherwise confusing note printed in The Ticket That Exploded published by Olympia in December 1962, which advertised a “New revised and augmented edition” of The Soft Machine scheduled for February 1963. The month the book was meant to appear, Girodias apologised for his failure to publish it (“The money situation is bad … very bad”), testing Burroughs’ loyalty to the man who had published Naked Lunch but who never cut a straight deal.³³ For the next eighteen months Burroughs repeatedly asked Girodias whether he was arranging a contract with Barney Rosset or John Calder for the revised Soft Machine, and was discouraged to find himself caught in “a bitter feud” between the American and British publishers that was still ongoing in spring 1965 (ROW, 189). The final stages of the book’s publication were complicated enough without a backstory in which publishers who fought the law to publish Burroughs ended up in legal fights with each other.

Indeed, Richard Seaver at Grove Press had a problem with Burroughs’ continued revisions, which didn’t end at the galley stage in October 1965;³⁴ when Burroughs requested still more changes in December, at the risk of sounding “like an old St. Louis preacher” Seaver insisted “there comes a point at which you have to write finis to the writing of a book.”³⁵ Burroughs persisted, however, in early January 1966 sending even more new material; but it was now too late for further changes, and all Seaver could do was respect Burroughs’ reluctance “to let the book go until you’re fully satisfied with it.” The idea of Burroughs being fully satisfied with any of his cut-up books was a kind of philosophical category error, because his methods did not lend themselves to “finish” in any meaning of the term. When he said of Nova Express that it was not “in any sense a wholly successful book,” or of The Ticket That Exploded, “It’s not a book I’m satisfied with,” it was the book as a form that really dissatisfied him.³⁶ Nevertheless, he tried to succeed with Calder where he had failed with Grove, and at the end of January Burroughs submitted to him the revised manuscript with all the new material that Seaver could not accept. In fact, in summer 1966 Burroughs sent Seaver the manuscript and then in October the galleys for the Calder edition, seemingly in hope Grove would release it too, but without success. In a final twist of misleading appearances, the book Calder published in Britain in July 1968—more than two years after the Grove Press edition—was simply what Burroughs had submitted in January 1966, two months before the Grove edition came out.

Which leaves us with two questions: how exactly did Burroughs’ revisions change The Soft Machine from edition to edition? And how does this new edition aim to advance such a perplexing history?

“WHAT THE BOOK IS ABOUT”

“I have completely rewritten it,” Burroughs told Alan Ansen in January 1963, “taking out most of the cut ups and substituting sixty-five pages of new material in a straight narrative line.”³⁷ Needless to say, it was not as straightforward as that.

In raw statistical terms, to make the second edition Burroughs retained just under half of the first edition and, since the two books are very similar in length (38,000 words), the result was that half of the second edition was old writing, half new. Comparing the first three chapters of the 1966 edition to the 1961 text, at first sight Burroughs’ revisions seem simple enough: the first and third chapters reuse continuous material from the earlier book, while the second chapter is all new and uses no first edition material at all. However, after this point the majority of chapters consist of highly complex combinations of new and old. Burroughs changed and radically re-sequenced most of the 1961 material, which was also very unequally distributed across the book as a whole: the first half of the 1966 text (up to and including the long, newly written narrative “Mayan Caper” chapter) is only one-third based on material from the 1961 edition; in contrast, the second half of the 1966 text, starting from the “I Sekuin” cut-up chapter, is nearly three-quarters based on the 1961 edition.

There was a broad logic to the kind of material Burroughs did and did not retain from the 1961 text for the 1966 edition, but some of his choices are unexpected. For example, he didn’t use one of the first edition’s longest narrative sections, entitled “lee took the bus”— only to change his mind and include it for the third edition. And on the other side, while he compromised it by changing every word from upper to lower case, he did include the opening of “I Sekuin,” a stunning but very challenging cut-up section. Above all, it is not the case that Burroughs simply took out cut-up material and substituted straight narrative. The general direction of revision may have been toward greater readability, but far less emphatically than he implied. Roughly speaking, the first edition is 55% cut-up and 45% narrative, the second edition 30% cut-up, 70% narrative. However, if the majority of new material was narrative, some 6,500 words of it—over one third—was cut-up. Some of this new cut-up material, such as in the “Early Answer” chapter, is among the most dense and difficult in the whole book. The impact of the new narrative is also highly focused, since most of it appears in only two, all-new chapters, “The Mayan Caper” and “Who Am I To Be Critical?” Those two chapters are fast-paced, thematically clear and very funny (the humor of the 1961 text is easy to miss), but they don’t represent the book as a whole. In fact, the biggest surprise is to realize that the majority of narrative in the second edition actually came from the first edition and the majority of cut-up material was new. Indeed, of the roughly 10,000 words of cut-up material in the 1966 edition, only about a third came from the 1961 text. To say “roughly” is a necessary caveat, since once you start counting, the initially clear distinction between “straight” and “cut-up” becomes meaningless, which is one of The Soft Machine’s strangest and most fascinating effects.

As for the changes Burroughs made on the galleys in October 1965, they caused Grove Press difficulties because there were so many of them: the margins of almost every sheet are crowded with the repeated instruction in his distinctive hand: “No Caps.” “COST OF CHANGING UPPER CASE TO LOWER THROUGHOUT SOFT MACHINE, SEVERAL HUNDRED DOLLARS STOP,” Seaver cabled him in early October; “IS IT ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL CABLE REPLY.”³⁸ Burroughs must have replied in the affirmative, but at that stage made relatively few actual cuts or insertions. He added the 1,000-word narrative about Salt Chunk Mary and another 500 words in half-a-dozen short inserts scotch-taped onto the galley sheets. He also made some two-dozen short cuts adding up to about 500 words and, in his major late decision, retained just one paragraph from a cancelled chapter of almost 1,000 words. What this means in terms of content is that 95% of the book published in March 1966 was present in the “1962 MS” (i.e., the 129-page typescript probably submitted to Olympia Press in late November 1962). There were differences in presentation and structure, however—and they are highly significant for this new, fourth edition of The Soft Machine which has gone back to the 1962 MS as the basis to revise the text.

The manuscript Burroughs completed in November 1962, which was scheduled to be published by Olympia in 1963, differs from the second edition in three main ways: it lacked the 1,500 words added to the galleys in 1965 and included the chapter of 1,000 words cancelled at the same stage; its chapters begin and end more often in keeping with the third than the second edition; and it made far fewer changes to the appearance of the material taken from the 1961 text. This fourth edition includes everything published in the second edition, while respecting the 1962 MS’s chapter divisions and restoring the cancelled chapter, entitled “Male Image Back In.” Burroughs had also cut a chapter at the final galley stage for Nova Express, but that was long and highly repetitious, whereas this short chapter works well in The Soft Machine, and he retained a little more of it in the third edition.

In the most visible change, this new edition also restores how material from the first edition appeared by putting back a thousand capital letters removed on the galleys in 1965. Changes to capitalization are a major feature of Burroughs’ revisions to the Cut-Up Trilogy, and he revised on a massive scale in both directions: on the galleys of Nova Express in 1964 he changed from lower to upper case; and for the second edition of The Ticket That Exploded in 1967, he changed from upper to lower. Burroughs’ own apparent inconsistency doesn’t lend itself to consistent editing across the trilogy. However, restoring capitals for The Soft Machine makes sense since the second edition was the odd one out: following the 1962 MS means respecting the appearance of both the first and the third edition, which largely retained capitals. It also brings The Soft Machine visibly closer to how Burroughs reconceived it in late 1962—the period when he was working simultaneously and most intensely on all three volumes of his trilogy.

The main reasons for turning to this 1962 manuscript in the first place are pragmatic: while there is something suitably Burroughsian about the status quo, with two quite different versions of The Soft Machine remaining in print, the great majority of readers have had to accept the edition that failed to grant Burroughs his “final intentions,” as textual editors used to say. However, the obvious alternative—to let the third edition replace the second—is even more unsatisfactory. Although Burroughs actually preserved more of the 1961 text in the British edition of 1968, through what he added much more was lost. This is the paradoxical value of his 1962 MS; in content it is close to the second edition, while in the appearance of its material it is close to both the first edition—his original—and the third edition—his last word on the book.

When Burroughs mailed his manuscript to John Calder in late January 1966 he observed that he had “added approximately 45 pages of single space material” together with “an article on the apomorphine treatment as an appendix.”³⁹ In statistical terms, for the third edition Burroughs cut 1,500 words from the second edition and added about 19,000 more, almost 6,000 in the Appendix. Of the 13,000 words added to the main text, some 3,000 were previously unused material from the 1961 edition and the rest were new. The new material reflected Burroughs’ writing in late 1965, especially a distinctive narrative style of great economy, evocative power, and simple, minimally punctuated prose. The end result was not just that the book became virtually 50% longer; it was quite simply a very different book—which was the basis to Brion Gysin’s objections.

In October 1966 Burroughs had invited Gysin to design a jacket for the Calder edition and although he could “not think how to do a new cover,” Gysin was anxious to see “the final revision” of a book of which he had “always been very fond.”⁴⁰ When Gysin saw the page proofs in November he bluntly stated that the result of Burroughs’ revisions was “of course, no longer SOFT MACHINE.”⁴¹ Speaking of the long appendix article that lambasted U.S. drug policy, Gysin protested: “The apomorphine material—if you will excuse me and I presume you won’t—absolutely does not belong in the same book with the rest.” He was surely right: the article made an odd ending to The Soft Machine, where the drug is mentioned only once.⁴² Gysin thought Burroughs had lost his way, not just at the end but from the start of the revised edition: “Please, if you can, switch back to the original opening. That’s what the book is about, isn’t it?”

Gysin’s suggestions to restructure The Soft Machine were impractical then and would be misguided now. The evolutionary logic of the book can’t be put into reverse, any more than it can remain frozen in time or turned toward perfection. But his objections are revealing for the response Burroughs made to them. Instead of arguing over what his book was “about,” he spoke at length of the trilogy’s complex manuscript history and of having been right to choose “straight narrative” for the beginning because of what others found more “readable” (ROW, 243). At the time of revising The Soft Machine in September 1962, Burroughs defined “straight narrative” in terms of Naked Lunch (114)—not a definition anybody else would use—and in that context it made sense to begin the book with “Dead On Arrival,” a chapter originating in early Naked Lunch manuscripts. What’s strange is Burroughs’ persistence in using the term straight and his application of it to “Dead On Arrival,” since the text is an object lesson in the queering of narrative, which makes it an ideal start to The Soft Machine, a sort of guidebook to what follows.

The first line of “Dead On Arrival” (“I was working The Hole with The Sailor”) returned The Soft Machine to the realist, autobiographical world of Burroughs’ first novel, Junky, and echoes the moment in it when William Lee begins to support his heroin habit by rolling drunks on the subway: “The H caps cost three dollars each and you need at least three per day to get by. I was short, so I began ‘working the hole’ with Roy.”⁴³ The hole is an underground term for the underground itself, and the joke in Junky is that Lee and Roy (the Sailor) work there to support their habits, in a parody of the straight, above-ground working world. The narration is realistic and trustworthy, even though its values are subversive. For Naked Lunch, Burroughs had also taken an innocent-looking paragraph from Junky set on the subway, and twisted it to create the opening passage where Lee vaults a turnstile and catches an uptown A train to escape the law. In Naked Lunch, instead of narrating in a straight deadpan, however, Lee puts on the voice of a brazen hustler, a con man literally taking the reader for a ride and implying that’s all anybody ever does. It’s an invitation to suspect our own motives as much as his: he’s on the hustle, but what are we looking for?

Just as the beginning of Naked Lunch went back to rewrite Junky, so too The Soft Machine went back to rewrite Naked Lunch. “Dead On Arrival” takes the process of rewriting a step further by visibly re-writing itself, cutting up its own words in a beautifully judged poetic structure that queers not just the straight world but straight reality. “Dead On Arrival” is not more readable as narrative than the book’s original beginning (“The War Between the Sexes split the planet into armed camps”); it is about readability itself, about exposing our reading habits and the fixed narratives by which we live. Tracing a tragic orbit around the narrator, the chapter’s melancholic roll-call of the dead—deaths by overdose, drowning, hanging, stabbing—all come from Burroughs’ biography and point to our common narrative towards death. The premise of The Soft Machine is that, individually and as a species, we’ve been conned into embracing as natural a fatal realism. Although the scenario is elliptical and the tone elegiac, the message of “Dead On Arrival” is defiant: “No good. No Bueno.” The example of the text implies that cut-up methods look to chance as the only way out, a last desperate chance, sola esperanza del mundo.

The Soft Machine was always difficult, and Burroughs’ decade-long efforts to straighten it out and make himself clear were perhaps doomed to radiant failure. In the end, he too was an inefficient guide: “I make no claims to speak from a state of enlightenment,” he once wrote Jack Kerouac, “but merely to have attempted the journey, as always with inadequate equipment and knowledge (like one of my South American expeditions), falling into every possible accident and error, losing my gear and my way …” (Letters, 226). Burroughs’ messianic side is always redeemed by his humour, which is also an act of defiance, a refusal to be just another soft machine: You win something like jelly fish, Meester?

Oliver Harris

September 16, 2013

1. Joan Didion, “Wired for Shock Treatments,” Bookweek (March 27, 1966); 2.

2. Burroughs, The Yage Letters Redux (San Francisco: City Lights, 2006), 21.

3. References are to David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1985) and Richard A.L. Jones, Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004).

4. Undated typescript, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library; 43.27. After, abbreviated to Berg.

5. The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945–1959 (New York: Viking, 1993). After, abbreviated to Letters.

6. Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959–1974, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Ecco, 2012). After, abbreviated to ROW.

7. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: the Restored Text (New York: Grove, 2003), edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, 249.

8. Carroll to Burroughs, August 17, 1960 (The Paul D. Carroll Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library; 1.18). After, abbreviated to Chicago.

9. Burroughs to Carroll, August 23, 1960 (Chicago, 1.18).

10. Burroughs to Bowles, October 8, 1960 (Paul Bowles Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; 8.10). After, abbreviated to HRC.

11. Kerouac, in Beat Writers at Work, edited by George Plimpton (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), 132; Corso, in Minutes to Go by Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin, (Paris: Two Cities Editions, 1960), 63.

12. Burroughs to Carroll, January 20, 1961 (Chicago, 1.18).

13. Minutes to Go, 43.

14. Nine-page typescript, ca. late 1959 (Berg 7.44).

15. All citations in block capitals in this and the next paragraphs are from un-sequenced typescripts, circa 1960 (Berg 48.22).

16. That this phrasing originates in openly anti-Semitic material is clear from several 1960 texts, including: “I RUB OUT THE WORDS OF MARX LENIN EINSTEIN FREUD FRAUD FOREVER. I RUB OUT THE WORD JEW FOREVER” (Berg, 48.22).

17. Nine-page typescript (Berg 7.44). See notes on the “Where You Belong” chapter for Luce’s presence in the “1962 MS” of The Soft Machine.

18. Undated typescripts (Berg 3.52; 49.14; 49.32; 9.24).

19. Parts had appeared in “Brief History of the Occupation,” which Burroughs started to write in October 1960 and which he described as “FROM WORK IN PROGRESS: ‘MR BRADLY MR MARTIN’ ”—his earlier title for The Soft Machine (Berg 10.47).

20. Ginsberg to Kerouac, September 9, 1962, in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Bill Morgan (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2008) 270.

21. Bowles to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, July 24, 1962 (City Lights Books Records, Box 1, University of California, Berkeley).

22. A six-page typescript sequence, which includes elements of Soft Machine material such as Soul Crackers, features cut-up permutations of the “Composite City,” from “Expeditions leave for unknown boys” to “Yage is space games with motion” (William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Columbus SPEC.CMS.87, 17.130A).

23. Burroughs, Interzone, edited by James Grauerholz (New York: Viking, 1989), 128.

24. The 1966 text has ten times the number of em dashes, almost 2,000; still far fewer than Nova Express or The Ticket That Exploded. The result is ironic, since the dash appears to be a visible sign of the cut, and the 1961 Soft Machine, the text with by far the fewest dashes, was the only true “cut-up” text in the trilogy, since Burroughs didn’t use “fold-in” methods for it, as he did for all other volumes.

25. The importance of Rimbaud from the start of the cut-up project is evident from references in Minutes to Go and The Exterminator. However, Burroughs’ use of “Voyelles” was more specifically associated with synaesthesia, hallucination, and the physiological effects of flicker, inspired by his reading of Walter’s The Living Brain, as a 1960 typescript makes clear: “WHEN I READ THIS PASSAGE I IMMEDIATELY THOUGHT OF RIMBAUD AND HIS IMAGES THAT SEEM TO BREAK DOWN BARRIERS. HIS COLOR VOWELS” (Berg 48.22). This was an artistic-scientific area emphasized by Ginsberg in his 1961 jacket blurb: “Stroboscopic flicker-lights playing on the Soft Machine of the eye create hallucinations.”

26. Aldous Huxley, “Heaven and Hell” (1956), in The Doors of Perception (London: Vintage, 1994), 76.

27. Gysin, “On The Soft Machine,” two-page typescript (Berg 5.37). Corso, untitled one-page typescript (Berg 5.39). Ginsberg, untitled two-page autograph manuscript (Berg 5.38).

28. Timothy Leary, High Priest (New York: Ronin, 1995), 225.

29. In another case of the trilogy’s misleading publishing history, Nova Express appeared two years after The Ticket That Exploded but was mainly written a year before, straight after The Soft Machine.

30. Of the thirty sections in Dead Fingers Talk, half feature material from The Soft Machine, although in all but three sections it is combined with material from one or both the other texts. In contrast, twice as many sections feature only material from Naked Lunch or The Ticket That Exploded. Burroughs also used more from those books than from The Soft Machine—another sign of his relative dissatisfaction with it.

31. Burroughs to Bowles, November 21, 1962 (HRC).

32. The manuscript is signed “Paris, June 1963”—a date probably added when Burroughs sold it.

33. Girodias to Burroughs, February 8, 1963 (Berg 75.8).

34. It’s likely that in early 1965 Burroughs submitted a manuscript of The Soft Machine to both Seaver and Calder—copies of a 162-page typescript, probably made in late 1962 or early 1963 for Olympia Press, cleanly retyped from the November 1962 MS.

35. Seaver to Burroughs, December 20, 1965 (Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries). After, abbreviated to Syracuse; Seaver to Burroughs, January 14, 1966 (Syracuse).

36. Burroughs, The Job (New York: Penguin, 1989), 27; Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960–1996, edited by Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e): 2000), 77.

37. Burroughs to Ansen, January 23, 1962 (Ted Morgan Papers, Arizona State University; Box 1).

38. Seaver to Burroughs, October 6, 1965 (Syracuse).

39. Burroughs to Calder, January 26, 1966 (Calder & Boyars mss 1939–1980, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Box 66).

40. Gysin to Burroughs, November 21, 1966 (Berg 85.12).

41. Gysin to Burroughs, December 14, 1966 (Berg 85.12).

42. If the article belonged anywhere it was with Nova Express, where apomorphine is referred to three-dozen times, and Burroughs had indeed twice tried to interest Grove in adding an earlier version of the article to that text when submitting his first and revised manuscripts in spring and fall 1962.

43. Burroughs, Junky: the definitive text of “Junk” (New York: Grove, 2012), 36.

Dead On Arrival

I was working The Hole with The Sailor and we did not bad. Fifteen cents on an average night boosting the afternoons and short-timing the dawn we made out from The Land Of The Free. But I was running out of veins. I went over to the counter for another cup of coffee… in Joe’s Lunch Room drinking coffee with a napkin under the cup which is said to be the mark of someone who does a lot of sitting in cafeterias and lunchrooms… Waiting on The Man… “What can we do?” Nick said to me once in his dead junky whisper. “They know we’ll wait…” Yes, they know we’ll wait…

There is a boy sitting at the counter thin-faced kid his eyes all pupil. I see he is hooked and sick. Familiar face maybe from the pool hall where I scored for tea sometime. Somewhere in grey strata of subways all-night cafeterias rooming house flesh. His eyes flickered the question. I nodded toward my booth. He carried his coffee over and sat down opposite me.

The croaker lives out Long Island… Light Yen sleep waking up for stops. Change. Start. Everything sharp and clear. Antennae of TV suck the sky. The clock jumped the way time will after four PM.

“The Man is three hours late. You got the bread?”

“I got three cents.”

“Nothing less than a nickel. These double papers he claims.” I looked at his face. Good looking. “Say kid I know an Old Aunti Croaker right for you like a Major… Take the phone. I don’t want him to rumble my voice.”

About this time I meet this Italian Tailor cum Pusher I know from Lexington and he gives me a good buy on H… At least it was good at first but all the time shorter and shorter… “Short Count Tony” we call him…

Out of junk in East St. Louis sick dawn he threw himself across the wash basin pressing his stomach against the cool porcelain. I draped myself over his body laughing. His shorts dissolved in rectal mucus and carbolic soap. Summer dawn smells from a vacant lot.

“I’ll wait here… Don’t want him to rumble me…”

Made it five times under the shower that day soapy bubbles of egg flesh seismic tremors split by fissure spurts of jissom…

I made the street, everything sharp and clear like after rain. See Sid in a booth reading a paper his face like yellow ivory in the sunlight. I handed him two nickels under the table. Pushing in a small way to keep up The Habit: INVADE. DAMAGE. OCCUPY. Young faces in blue alcohol flame.

“And use that alcohol. You fucking can’t wait hungry junkies all the time black up my spoons. That’s all I need for Pen Indef the fuzz rumbles a black spoon in my trap.” The old junky spiel. Junk hooks falling.

“Shoot your way to freedom kid.”

Trace a line of goose pimples up the thin young arm. Slide the needle in and push the bulb watching the junk hit him all over. Move right in with the shit and suck junk through all the hungry young cells.

There is a boy sitting like your body. I see he is a hook. I drape myself over him from the pool hall. Draped myself over his cafeteria and his shorts dissolved in strata of subways… and all house flesh… toward the booth… down opposite me… The Man I Italian Tailor… I know bread. “Me a good buy on H.”

“You’re quitting? Well I hope you make it, kid. May I fall down and be paralyzed if I don’t mean it… You gotta friend in me. A real friend and if.”

Well the traffic builds up and boosters falling in with jackets shirts and ties, kids with a radio torn from the living car trailing tubes and wires, lush-workers flash rings and wrist watches falling in sick all hours. I had the janitor cooled, an old rummy, but it couldn’t last with that crowd.

“Say you’re looking great kid. Now do yourself a favor and stay off. I been getting some really great shit lately. Remember that brown shit sorta yellow like snuff cooks up brown and clear…”

Junky in East Bath Room… Invisible and persistent dream body… Familiar face maybe… Scored for some time or body… in that grey smell of rectal mucus… Night cafeterias and junky room dawn smells. Three hours from Lexington made it five times… Soapy egg flesh…

“These double papers he claims of withdrawal.”

“Well I thought you was quitting…”

“I can’t make it.”

“Imposible quitar eso.”

Got up and fixed in the sick dawn flutes of Ramadan.

“William tu tomas más medicina?… No me hágas casa, William.”

Casbah house in the smell of dust and we made it; empty Eukodal boxes stacked four feet along the walls… dead on the surplus blankets… girl screaming… Vecinos rush in…

“What did she die of?”

“I don’t know she just died.”

Bill Gains in Mexico City room with his douche bag and his stash of codeine pills powdered in a bicarbonate can; “I’ll just say I suffer from indigestion.” Coffee and blood spilled all over the place. Cigarette holes in the pink blanket… The Consul would give me no information other than place of burial in The American Cemetery.

“Broke? Have you no pride? Go to your Consul.” He gave me an alarm clock ran for a year after his death.

Leif repatriated by the Danish. Freight boat out of Casa for Copenhagen sank off England with all hands. Remember my medium of distant fingers?—

“What did she die of?”

“End.”

“Some things I find myself.”

The Sailor went wrong in the end. Hanged to a cell door by his principals: “Some things I find myself doing I’ll pack in is all.”

Bread knife in the heart… rub and die… repatriated by a morphine script… those out of Casa for Copenhagen on special yellow note…

“All hands broke? Have you no pride?” Alarm clock ran for a year. “He just sit down on the curb and die.” Esperanza told me on Niño Perdido and we cashed a morphine script. Those Mexican Nar. scripts on special yellow bank-note paper… like a thousand dollar bill… or a Dishonorable Discharge from the US Army… And fixed in the cubicle room you reach by climbing this ladder.

Yesterday call flutes of Ramadan: “No me hágas casa.”

Blood spill over shirts and light. The American trailing in form… He went to Madrid. This frantic Cuban fruit finds Kiki with a Novia and stabs him with a kitchen knife in the heart. (Girl screaming. Enter the Nabors.)

“Quédase con su medicina, William.”

Half bottle of Fundador after half cure in The Jew Hospital. Shots of demerol by candlelight. They turned off the lights and water. Paper-like dust we made it. Empty walls. Look anywhere. No good. No bueno.

He went to Madrid… Alarm clock ran for yesterday… “No me hágas casa.” Dead on arrival… You might say at the Jew Hospital… Blood spilled over the American… Trailing lights and water… The Sailor went so wrong somewhere in that grey flesh… He just sit down on zero… I nodded on Niño Perdido his coffee over three hours late… They all went away and sent papers… The Dead Man write for you like a major… Enter Vecinos… Freight Boat smell of rectal mucus went down off England with all dawn smell of distant fingers… About this time I went to your Consul… He gave me a Mexican after his death… Five times of dust we made it… With soap bubbles of withdrawal crossed by a thousand junky nights… Soon after the half maps came in by candlelight… OCCUPY… Junk lines falling… Stay off… Bill Gains in the Yellow Sickness… Looking at dirty pictures casual as a ceiling fan short-timing the dawn we made it in the corn smell of rectal mucus and carbolic soap… Familiar face maybe from the vacant lot… Trailing tubes and wires… “You fucking-can’t-wait-hungry-junkies!…” Burial in the American Cemetery. “Quédase con su medicina…” On Niño Perdido the girl screaming… They all went way through Casbah House… “Couldn’t you write me any better than that? Gone away… You can look any place.”

No good. No Bueno.

Who Am I To Be Critical?

You wouldn’t believe how hot things were when I left the States—I knew this one pusher wouldn’t carry any shit on his person just shoot it in the line—Ten twenty grains over and above his own absorption according to the route he was servicing and piss it out in bottles for his customers so if the heat came up on them they cop out as degenerates—So Doc Benway assessed the situation and came up with this brain child—

“Once in the Upper Baboonasshole I was stung by a scorpion—The sensation is not dissimilar to a fix—Hummm.”

So he imports this special breed of scorpions and feeds them on metal meal and the scorpions turned a phosphorescent blue color and sort of hummed. “Now we must find a worthy vessel,” he said—So we flush out this old goof ball artist and put the scorpion to him and he turned sort of blue and you could see he was fixed right to metal—These scorpions could travel on a radar beam and service the clients after Doc copped for the bread—It was a good thing while it lasted and the heat couldn’t touch us—However all these scorpion junkies began to glow in the dark and if they didn’t score on the hour metamorphosed into scorpions straight away—So there was a spot of bother and we had to move on disguised as young junkies on the way to Lexington—Bill and Johnny we sorted out the names but they keep changing like one day I would wake up as Bill the next day as Johnny—So there we are in the train compartment shivering junk sick our eyes watering and burning and all of a sudden the sex chucks hit me in the crotch and I sagged against the wall and looked at Johnny too weak to say anything, it wasn’t necessary, he was there too and without a word he dipped some soap in warm water and dropped my shorts and rubbed the soap on my ass and worked his cock up me with a corkscrew motion and we both came right away standing there and swaying with the train clickety clack clack spurt spurt into the brass cuspidor—

We never got to Lexington actually—Stopped off in the town of Marshal and hit this old country croaker for tincture with the aged mother suffering from piles in the worst form there is line and he wrote like a major—That night we got into a pool game and Doc won a Duesenberg Panama hat tan suit and dark glasses like 1920 sports and the further South we went the easier it was to score like we brought the twenties along with us—Well we come to this Mexican border town in time to see something interesting—In order to make way for a new bridge that never got built actually they had torn down a block of shacks along the river where the Chink railway workers used to smoke the black stuff and the rats had been down under the shacks hooked for generations—So the rats was running all through the street squealing sick biting everyone in sight—

When we went to look for our car couldn’t find it and no cars anywhere just this train left over from an old Western—The track gave out somewhere north of Monterrey and we bought some horses off a Chinaman for a tin of mud—By this time there were soldiers everywhere shooting the civilians so we scored for some Civil War uniforms and joined one of the warring powers—And captured five soldiers who were wearing uniforms of a different color and the General got drunk and decided to hang the prisoners just for jolly and we rigged up a cart with a drop under a tree limb—The first one dropped straight and clean and one of the soldiers wiped his mouth and stepped forward grinning and pulled his pants down to an ankle and his cock flipped out spurting—We all stood there watching and feeling it right down to our toes and the others who were waiting to be hanged felt it too—So we stripped them and they got hard-ons waiting—They couldn’t help it you understand. That night we requisitioned a ranch house and all got drunk and Johnny did this dance with his tie around his neck lolling his head on one side and letting his tongue fall out and wriggled his ass and dropped his pants and his cock flipped out and the soldiers rolled around laughing till they pissed all over themselves—Then they rigged up a harness under his arms and hoisted him up off the floor to a beam and gang-fucked him—

By the time we got to Monterrey there was Spaniards around in armor like a costume movie and again we were lucky to arrive just at the right time. There was a crowd of people in the Zoco and we pushed up front with our rush-hour technique and saw they were getting ready to burn some character at the stake—When they lit the faggots at his feet the only sound you could hear was the fire crackling and then everyone sucked in his breath together and the screams tore through me and my lips and tongue swole up with blood and I come in my pants—And I could see others had shot their load too and you could smell it like a compost heap, some of us so close our pants steamed in the fire just pulling the screams and the smoke down into our lungs and sort of whimpering—It was tasty I tell you—So we hit Mexico City just before sunrise and I said here we go again—That heart pulsing in the sun and my cock pulsed right with it and jissom seeped through my thin cotton trousers and fell in the dust and shit of the street—And a boy next to me grinning and gave me a backhand pickpocket feel, my cock still hard and aching like after a wet dream—And we crawled up onto a muddy shelf by the canal and made it there three times slow fuck on knees in the stink of sewage looking at the black water—It turned out later this kid had the epilepsy—When he got these fits he would flop around and come maybe five times in his dry goods, made you feel good all over to watch it—He really had it built in and he told me he could fix it with a magic man we trade places—So we started off on foot across the mountains and down the other side to high jungle warm and steamy and he kept having these fits and I dug it special fucking him in the spasm his asshole fluttering like a vibrator—Well we come to this village and found the magic man in a little hut on the outskirts—An evil old character with sugary eyes that stuck to you—We told him what we wanted and he nodded and looked at both of us and smiled and said he would have to cook up the medicine we should come back next day at sundown—So we came back and he gave us the bitter medicine in clay pots—And I hadn’t put the pot down before the pictures started coming in sharp and clear: the hanged boy pulling his legs up to the chin and pumping out the spurts by the irrigation ditch, the soldiers swinging me around in the harness, the burned man screaming away like a good one and that heart just pulsing and throwing off spurts of blood in the rising sun—Xolotl was explaining to me that only one body is left in the switch they were going to hang me and when I shot my load and died I would pass into his body—I was paralyzed by the medicine any case and they stripped me and lashed my body with special type sex nettles that burned and stung all over and my tongue swole up and gagged me and my eyes blurred over with blood—They rigged up a gallows with a split-bamboo platform and a ladder and I start up the ladder Xolotl goosing me and stood under the noose and he tightens it around my neck muttering spells and then gets down on the floor leaving me alone up there on the platform with the noose waiting—I saw him reach up with an obsidian knife and cut the rope held the platform and I fell and silver light popped in my eyes like a flash bulb—I got a whiff of ozone and penny arcades and then I felt it start way down in my toes these bone wrenching spasms emptied me and everything spilled out shit running down the back of my thighs and no control in my body paralyzed, twisting up in these spasms the jissom just siphoned me right into Xolotl’s cock and next thing I was in his ass and balls flopping around spurting all over the floor and that evil old fuck crooning and running his hands over me so nasty—But then who am I to be critical?—I stayed there in the magic man’s hut for three days sleeping and woke up the lookout different—And the magic man gave me some medicine to control the fits and I headed on south—Came at sundown to a clear river where boys were swimming naked—And one of them turned grinning with a hard-on and shoved his finger in and out his fist and I fell in one of my fits so they all had a go at me—The cold mountain shadows came down and touched my naked ass and I went back with the boy to his hut and ate beans and chili and lay with him on the floor breathing the pepper smell of his belches and stayed there with him and worked his patch of corn on the side of the mountain—That boy could keep a hard-on all night and I used to stick peppers up my ass when he fucked me like my guts was on fire—Well maybe I would be there still, work all day and after the work knocked out no words no thoughts just sit there looking at the blue mountains and ate and belched and fucked and slept same thing day after day the greatest—But one day we scored for a bottle of mescal and got lushed and he looked at me and said: “Chinga de puto I will rid the earth of you in the name of Jesus Christu!” and charges me with a machete—Well I’d seen it coming and tossed a cup of mescal in his eyes and side-stepped and he fell on his face and I rammed the planting stick right into the base of his brain—So that was that—And started South again and came finally to this spot where a lot of citizens were planting corn with sticks all working in concert, I didn’t like the look of it but I was strung out for groceries and decided to make contact a mistake as it turned out—Because as soon as I walked out into that field I felt this terrible weight on me and there I was planting corn with them and everything I did and thought was already done and thought and there was this round of festivals where the priests put on lobster suits and danced around snapping their claws like castanets and nothing but maize maize maize—And I guess I would be there yet fructifying the maize God except for this one cat who was in Maya drag like me but I could see he was a foreigner too—He was very technical and a lovely fellow—He began drawing formulas on the floor and showed me how the priests operated their control racket:

“It’s like with the festivals and the fucking corn they know what everybody will see and hear and smell and taste and that’s what thought is and these thought units are represented by symbols in their books and they rotate the symbols around and around on the calendar.” And as I looked at his formulas something began to crack up in my brain and I was free of the control beam and next thing we both got busted and sentenced to “Death In Centipede”—So they strapped us to couches in a room under the temple and there was a terrible smell in the place full of old bones and a centipede about ten feet long comes nuzzling out of one corner—So I turn on something I inherit from Uranus where my grandfather invented the adding machine—I just lay there without any thought in tons focus of heavy blue silence and a slow wave went through me and spread out of me and the couch began shaking and the tremors spread into the ground and the roof fell in and crushed the centipede and smashed the couch so the straps were loose and I slipped out and untied Technical Tilly—So we got out of there dodging stellae and limestone skulls as the whole temple came down in chunks and the wind blowing a hurricane brought in a tidal wave and there wasn’t much left of the whole set when things cleared away—All the workers were running around loose now looking for the priests—The head priest was paralyzed and had turned into a centipede—We found him in a cubby hole under the rubble along with some others who were half crab or in various stages of disgusting metamorphosis—And I figured we should do something special with these characters they are wise guys—So we organize this “Fun Fest” and made some obsidian jockstraps strung together with copper wire and heated the straps up white-hot and slipped them on, the priests did a belly dance like you used to see it in burlesque and we sat there yelling: “Take it off Take it off,” laughing till we pissed and shit and came—You never heard such laughing with the control gone and goosing them with hot copper pricks—And others we put weights on their backs and dragged them through wooden troughs with flint flakes sticking up and so on—Fun and games what?

Well after that none of us could look at corn and the grocery problem became acute—So we organize this protection racket shaking down the agriculturals—“It could happen again here—Kick in or else”—And they kicked in come level on average—Well groceries—And I had perfected a gimmick to keep my boys in line—I was still subject to these fits but I had learned to control the images—That is just before I flipped out I could put any image in the projector and—Action—Camera—Take—It always happened the way I took it and any character gave me any static was taken care of that way—But the boys from the North were moving in whole armies so we packed in and shifted to the hunting and fishing lark—I picked thirty of the most likely and suitable lads all things considered and we moved South up over the mountains and down the other side into jungle then up and over again getting monotonous—Piecing out the odds best we could spot of this and a spot of that—Once in a while I had to put it about with the earthquakes but come level on average what you might call a journeyman thief—Well fever and snakes and rapids and boys dropping out here and there to settle down with the locals I had no mob left when I run up against this really evil setup—The Chimu were something else—So we hit this town and right away I don’t like it.

“Something here, John—Something wrong—I can feel it.”

To begin with the average Chimu is unappetizing to say the least—Lips eaten off by purple and orange skin conditions like a baboon’s ass and pus seeping out a hole where the nose should be disgust you to see it—And some of them are consisting entirely of penis flesh and subject to blast jissom right out their skull and fold up like an old wine bag—Periodically the Chimu organize fun fests where they choose up sides and beat each other’s brains out with clubs and the winning team gang-fucks the losers and cut their balls off right after to make pouches for coco leaves they are chewing all the time green spit dripping off them like a cow with the aftosa—All things considered I was not innarrested to contact their loutish way of life—

In the middle of this town was a construction of clay cubicles several stories high and I could see some kinda awful crabs were stirring around inside it but couldn’t get close because the area around the cubicle is covered with black bones and hot as a blasting furnace—They had this heat weapon you got it?—Like white-hot ants all over you—

Meanwhile I had been approached by the Green Boys have a whole whore house section built on catwalks over the mud flats entirely given over to hanging and all kinds death in orgasm young boys need it special—They were beautiful critters and swarmed all over me night and day smelling like a compost heap—But I wasn’t buying it sight unseen and when I proposed to watch a hanging they come on all indignant like insulted whores—So Iam rigged up a long distance periscope with obsidian mirrors moaning about the equipment the way he always does and we watched them hang this boy just down from the country—Well I saw that when his neck snapped and he shot his load instead of flowing into the Green Boy the way nature intended these hot crabs hatched out of his spine and scoffed the lot.

So we organize the jungle tribes and take Boy’s Town and confine the Green Boys in a dormitory, they are all in there turning cartwheels and giggling and masturbating and playing flutes—That was our first move to cut the supply line—Then after we had put the squeeze on and you could hear them scratching around in the cubicle really thin now we decided to attack—I had this special Green Boy I was making it with who knew the ropes you might say and he told me we have to tune the heat wave out with music—So we get all the Indians and all the Green Boys with drums and flutes and copper plates and stayed just out of the heat blast beating the drums and slowly closed in—lam had rigged up a catapult to throw limestone boulders and shattered the cubicle so we move in with spears and clubs and finish them off and smashed the heat-sending set that was a living radio with insect parts—We turn the Green Boys loose and on our way rejoicing—

So down into the jungle on the head-shrinking lark—Know how it operates—You got these spells see? confines the citizen to his head under your control like you can shrink up all the hate in the area—What a gimmick but as usual I got greedy and the wind up is I don’t have a head left to stand on—Sure I had the area sewed up but there wasn’t any area left—Always was one to run things into the ground—Well there I was on the bottom when I hear about this virgin tribe called the Camuyas embrace every stranger and go naked all the time like nature intended and I said “the Camuyas are live ones” and got down there past all these bureaucrats with The Internal Indian Service doubted the purity of my intentions—But I confounded them with my knowledge of Mayan archaeology and the secret meaning of the centipede motif and Iam was very technical so we established ourselves as scientists and got the safe conduct—Those Camuyas were something else all naked rubbing up against you like dogs—They were sweet little critters and I might be there still except for a spot of bother with The Indian Commission about this hanging ceremony I organize figuring to trade in the chassis and renew my substance—So they chucked me out and talked usefully about that was that—And I made it up to the Auca who were warlike and wangled two healthy youths for a secret weapon—So took these boys out into the jungle and laid it on the line and one of them was ready to play ball and—spare you the monotonous details—Suffice it to say the Upper Amazon gained a hustler and there I was caught in the middle of all these feuds—Some one knocks off your cousin twice removed and you are obligated to take care of his great uncle—Been through all this before—Every citizen you knock off there are ten out looking for you geometric and I don’t want to know—So I got a job with the Total Oil Company and that was another mistake—

Rats was running all over the morning—Somewhere North of Monterrey went into the cocaine business—By this time fish tail Cadillac—People—Civilians—So we score for some business and get rich over the warring powers—Shady or legitimate the same fuck of a different color and the general on about the treasure—We rigged their stupid tree limb and drop the alien corn—Spot of business to Walgreen’s—So we organize this 8267 kicked in level on average ape—Melodious gimmick to keep the boys in line—I had learned to control Law 334 procuring an orgasm by any image, Mary sucking him and running the outfield—Static was taken care of that way—What you might call a vending machine and boys dropping to Walgreen’s—We are not locals. We sniff the losers and cut their balls off chewing all kinds masturbation and self-abuse like a cow with the aftosa—Young junkies return it to the white reader and one day I would wake up as Bill covered with ice and burning crotch—Drop my shorts and comes gibbering up me with a corkscrew motion—We both come right away standing and trying to say something—I see other marks are coming on with the mother tincture—The dogs of Harry J. Anslinger sprouted all over me—By now we had word dust stirring the 1920’s, maze of dirty pictures and the house hooked for generations—We all fucked the boy burglar feeling it right down to our toes—Spanish cock flipped out spurting old Montgomery Ward catalogues—So we stripped a young Dane and rigged the Yankee dollar—Pants down to the ankle, a barefoot Indian stood there watching and feeling his friend—Others had shot their load too over a broken chair through the tool heap—Tasty spurts of jissom across the dusty floor—Sunrise and I said here we go again with the knife—My cock pulsed right with it and trousers fell in the dust and dead leaves—Return it to the white reader in stink of sewage looking at open shirt flapping and comes maybe five times his ass fluttering like—We sniff what we wanted pumping out the spurts open shirt flapping—What used to be me in my eyes like a flash bulb, spilled adolescent jissom in the bath cubicle—Next thing I was Danny Deever in Maya drag—That night we requisitioned a Peruvian boy—I would pass into his body—What an awful place it is—Most advanced stage—Foreigner too—They rotate the symbols around IBM machine with cocaine—Fun and games what?

Public Agent

So I am a public agent and don’t know who I work for, get my instructions from street signs, newspapers and pieces of conversation I snap out of the air the way a vulture will tear entrails from other mouth. In any case I can never catch up on my back cases and currently assigned to intercept blue movies of James Dean before the stuff gets to those queers supporting a James Dean habit which, so long as this agent picks his way through barber shops, subway toilets, grope movies and Turkish Baths, will never be legal and exempt narcotic.

The first one of the day I nailed in a subway pissoir: “You fucking nance!” I screamed. “I’ll teach you to savage my bloody meat, I will.” And I sloughed him with the iron glove and his face smashed like rotten cantaloupe. Then I hit him in the lungs and blood jumped out his mouth, nose and eyes, spattered three commuters across the room huddled in gabardine topcoats and grey flannel suits under that. The broken fruit was lying with his head damning the piss running over his face and the whole trough a light pink from his blood. I winked at the commuters. “I can smell them fucking queers,” I sniffed warningly. “And if there’s one thing lower than a nance it’s a spot of bloody grass. Now you blokes wouldn’t be the type turn around and congor a pal’s balls off would you now?” They arranged themselves on the floor like the three monkeys: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil.

“I can see you’re three of our own,” I said warmly and walked into the corridor where schoolboys chase each other with machetes, joyous boy-cries and zipper guns echo through the mosaic caverns. I pushed into a Turkish Bath and surprised a faggot brandishing a deformed erection in the steam room and strangled him straightaway with a soapy towel. I had to check in. I was thin now, barely strength in my receding flesh to finish off that tired faggot. I got into my clothes shivering and gaping and walked into the terminal drugstore. Five minutes to twelve. Five minutes to score. I walked over to the night clerk and threw a piece of tin on him.

Piss running over his face. Don’t know who I work for. I get mine from his blood, newspapers and pieces. “I can smell them fucking the air the way a vulture will.” In any case bloody grass. I sloughed him with the iron room and strangled him like rotten cantaloupe. Then I had to check in. I was the blood jumped out his mouth, nose receding flesh to finish. Across the room huddled my clothes shivering grey flannel suits under terminal drugstore. So I am a public agent and the whole trough a light pink instruction from street. I winked at the commuters. “Conversation I snap out of queers,” I sniffed warningly. “It’s a spot up on my back cases.” Queers supporting the floor like the three monkeys. “Grope movies and Turkish our own,” I said warmly and walked exempt narcotic. Cool boys chase each other with the first one of the day. To a Turkish Bath and surprised you bloody nance. Soapy towel glove hit him in the lungs and eyes spattered: Ping! And walked into the gabardine topcoats. Five minutes to that broken fruit.

“Treasury Department,” I said. “Like to check your narcotic inventory against RX… How much you using young fellow?” Shaking my head and pushing all the junk bottles and scripts into my brief case: “I hate to see a young man snafu his life script… Maybe I can do something for you. That is if you promise me to take the cure and stay off.”

“I promise anything. I gotta wife and kids.”

“Just don’t let me down is all.”

I walked out and got straight in the Lu of The Bus Terminal Chinese Restaurant. It’s a quiet place with very bad food. But what a John for a junky.

Well I checked into the Old Half-Moon Hotel you can get to the lobby through the subway and walked in on the wrong room, an ether party, with my cigarette lit and everyone’s lung blew out about six characters, cats and chicks. So I get a face full of tits and spare ribs and throat gristle… All in the day’s work… Follow up on it. Score. I walked the gabardine top tin on him. The broken fruit. Piss running over his face. “Like to check your narcotic inventor. I get mine from his blood.”

“Much you using young fellow?”

“I can smell them fucking all the junk bottles and scripts.” In any case bloody grass… See a young man snafu his and strangled him like rot do something for you in the blood. Jumped cure and stay off to finish. Grey flannel suits under all public agents of the bus from street. Grope movie and walked in on the wrong room warmly. Exempt light and lungs. And eyes spattered night clerk and threw a piece of coats. “Five minutes to Treasury Department,” I said. Shaking my head and pushing the air the way a vulture will into my brief case. I hate sloughed him with the iron room life script. Maybe I can cantaloupe. Then I had to check you. Promise me to take out his mouth, nose receding flesh.

“I promise anything. I go huddled my clothes shivering.” I walked out and got light pink instructions terminal Chinese commuters. Hit him in the lungs the day’s work. Follow up. A word about my work. The Human Issue has been called in by the Home Office. Engineering flaws you know. There is the work of getting it off the shelves and that is what I do. We are not interested in the individual models, but in the mold, the human die. This must be broken. You never see any live ones up here in Freelandt. Too many patrols. It’s a dull territory unless you enjoy shooting a paralyzed swan in a cesspool. Of course there are always the Outsiders. And the young ones I dig special. Long Pigs I call them. Give myself a treat and do it slow just feeding on the subject’s hate and fear and the white stuff oozes out when they crack sweet as a lobster claw… I hate to put out the eyes because they are my water hole. They call me The Meat Handler. Among other things.

I had business with The Egyptian. My Time was running out. He was sitting in a mosaic café with stone shelves along the walls and jars of colored syrups sipping a heavy green drink.

“I need The Time Milking,” I said.

He looked at me, his eyes eating erogenous holes. His face got an erection and turned purple. And we went into the vacant lot behind the café naked to a turn.

White men killed at a distance. Don’t know the answer, do you?

Den Mark of Trak in every face: “Death, take over.”

“Never nobody liked dancing no better than Red.”

“Let’s dance,” he said.

The script for shit, “Here you are, sir,” and I could see he was heavy with the load. Outfields and back to Moscow for Liquidation. I had business with The Gyp. Trak in every kidney. The script for Heavy Drink. His eyes got an erection and turned the effluvia and became addicts of Vacant Lot. My time was running out its last black grains.

Trak Trak Trak

The Sailor and I burned down The Republic of Panama from Darien swamps to David trout streams on paregoric and goof balls—(Note: Nembutal)—You lose time putting a con down on a Tiddlywink chemist—“No glot—Clom Fliday”—(Footnote: old time junkies will remember—Used to be a lot of Chinese pushers in the 1920’s but they found the West so unreliable dishonest and wrong when an Occidental junky comes to score they say: “No glot—Clom Fliday.”)

And we were running short of Substitute Buyers—They fade in silver mirrors of 1910 under a ceiling fan—Or we lost one at dawn in a wisp of rotten sea wind—Out in the bay little red poison sea snakes swim desperately in sewage—Camphor sweet cooking paregoric smells billow from the mosquito nets—The termite floor gave under our feet spongy and rotten—The albatross at dawn on rusty iron roofs—

“Time to go, Bill,” said The Sailor, morning light on cold coffee.

“I’m thin”—Crisscross of broken light from wood lathes over the patio, silver flak holes in his face—We worked The Hole together in our lush rolling youth—(Footnote: “working The Hole,” robbing drunks on the subway)—And kicked a habit in East St. Louis—Made it four times third night, fingers scraping bone—At dawn shrinking from flesh and cloth—

Hands empty of hunger on the stale breakfast table—Winds of sickness through his face—Pain of the long slot burning flesh film—Canceled eyes, old photo fading—Violet brown souvenir of Panama City—I flew to La Paz trailing the colorless death smell of his sickness with me still, thin air like death in my throat—Sharp winds of black dust and the grey felt hat on every head—Purple pink and orange disease faces cut prenatal flesh, genitals under the cracked bleeding feet—Aching lungs in dust and pain wind—Mountain lakes blue and cold as liquid air—Indians shitting along the mud walls—brown flesh, red blankets—

“No, señor. Necesita receta.”

And the refugee German croaker you hit anywhere: “This you must take orally—You will inject it of course—Remember it is better to suffer a month if so you come out—With this habit you lose the life is it not?” And he gives me a long creepy human look—

And Joselito moved into my room suffocating me with soccer scores—He wore my clothes and we laid the same novia who was thin and sickly always making magic with candles and Virgin Pictures and drinking aromatic medicine from a red plastic eye cup and never touched my penis during the sex act.

Through customs checks and control posts and over the mountains in a blue blast of safe conducts and three monkey creatures ran across the road in a warm wind—(sound of barking dogs and running water) swinging round curves over the misty void—Down to end of the road towns on the edge of Yage country where shy Indian cops checked our papers—Through broken stellae, pottery fragments, worked stones, condoms and shit-stained comics, slag heaps of phosphorescent metal excrement—Faces eaten by the pink and purple insect disease of The New World—Crab boys with human legs and genitals crawl out of clay cubicles—Terminal junkies hawk out crystal throat gristle in the cold mountain wind—Goof ball bums covered with shit sleep in rusty bathtubs—A delta of sewage to the sky under terminal stasis, speared a sick dolphin that surfaced in bubbles of coal gas—Taste of metal left silver sores on our lips—Only food for this village built on iron racks over an iridescent lagoon—swamp delta to the sky lit by orange gas flares.

In the flash bulb of orgasm I saw three silver numbers—We walked into the streets and won a football pool—Panama clung to our bodies Stranger color through his eyes the lookout different.

Flash bulb monster crawling inexorably from Old Fred Flash—The orgasm is a 1920 movie, silver writing from backward countries—Flapping genitals in wind—Explosion of the throat from peeled noon drifting sheets of male flesh to a stalemate of black lagoons while open shirts twist iridescent in the dawn—(This sharp smell of carrion.)

“Take it from a broken stalemate—The Doctor couldn’t reach and see?: Those pictures are the line—Fading breath on bed showed sound track—You win handful of dust that’s what.”

Metamorphosis of The Rewrite Department coughing and spitting in fractured air—Flapping genitals of carrion—Our drained countess passed on a hideous leather body—We are digested and become nothing here—Dust air of gymnasiums in another country and besides old the pool now, a few inches on dead post cards—Here at the same time there his eyes—Silver light popped stroke of nine.

“Dead post card you got it?—Take it from noon refuse like ash—Hurry up see?—Those pictures are yourself—Is backward sound track—That’s what walks beside you to a stalemate of physical riders —(‘You come with me, Meester?’)—I knew Mexican he carried in his flesh with sex acts shooting them pills I took—Total alertness she is your card—Look, simple: Place exploded man goal in other flesh—Dual controls country—Double sex sad as the drenched lands.”

Last man with such explosion of the throat crawling inexorably from something he carried in his flesh—Last turnstile was in another country and besides knife exploded Sammy The Butcher—Holes in 1920 movie—Newspaper tape fading, after dinner sleep ebbing carbon dioxide—Indications enough showed you calls to make, horrors crawling inexorably toward goal in other flesh—What are you waiting for, kid?—Slotless human wares?—Nothing here now—Metamorphosis is complete—Rings of Saturn in the dawn—The sky exploded question from vacant lots—Youth nor age but as it were lips fading—There in our last film mountain street boy exploded “The Word,” sits quietly silence to answer.

“You come with me, Meester to greet the garbage man and the dawn? Traced fossil countenance everlastingly about the back door, Meester.” Sick dawn of inane cooperation—Dead post cards swept out by typewriters clatter hints as we shifted commissions—Hurry up please—Crawling inexorably toward its goal—I—We—They—sit quietly in last terrace of the garden—The neon sun sinks in this sharp smell of carrion—(Circling albatross—peeled noon—refuse like ash)—Ghost of Panama clung to our throats coughing and spitting in the fractured air, falling through space between worlds, we twisted slowly to black lagoons, flower floats and gondolas—Tentative crystal city iridescent in the dawn wind—(Adolescents ejaculate over the tide flats)—Dead post card are you thinking of?—What thinking?—Peeled noon and refuse like ash—Hurry up please—Make yourself a bit smart—Who is the third that walks beside you to a stalemate of black lagoons and violet light? Last man—Phosphorescent centipede feeding on flesh strung together we are digested and become nothing here.

“You come with me, Meester?”

Up a great tidal river to the port city stuck in water hyacinths and banana rafts—The city is an intricate split-bamboo structure in some places six stories high overhanging the street propped up by beams and sections of railroad track and concrete pillars, an arcade from the warm rain that falls at half hour intervals—The coast people drift in the warm steamy night eating colored ices under the arc lights and converse in slow catatonic gestures punctuated by immobile silence—Plaintive boy-cries drift through Night Of The Vagrant Ball Players.

“Paco!—Joselito!—Enrique!—”

“A ver Luckees!”

“Where you go, Meester?”

“Squeezed down heads?”

Soiled mouth above a tuxedo blows smoke rings into the night, “SMOKE TRAK CIGARETTES. THEY LIKE YOU. TRAK LIKE ANY YOU. ANY TRAK LIKE YOU. SMOKE TRAKS. THEY SERVICE. TRAK TRAK TRAK.”

Los Vagos Jugadores de Pelota storm the stale streets of commerce —Civil Guards discreetly turn away and open their flys to look for crabs in a vacant lot—For The Vagrant Ball Players can sound a Hey Rube Switch brings a million adolescents shattering the customs barriers and frontiers of Time, swinging out of the jungle with Tarzan cries, crash landing perilous tin planes and rockets, leaping from trucks and banana rafts, charge through the black dust of mountain wind like death in the throat.

The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast and bursts into blue flame, “SMOKE TRAK CIGARETTES. THEY LIKE YOU. TRAK LIKE ANY YOU. ANY TRAK LIKE YOU. SMOKE TRAKS. THEY SATISFY. THEY SERVICE. TRAK TRAK TRAK.”

“Vagos Jugadores de Pelota, sola esperanza del mundo, take it to Cut City—Street gangs Uranian born in the face of nova conditions, cut word lines, cut time lines—Take it to Cut City, muchachos—Minutes to go—”

Jungle invades the weed grown parks where armadillos infected with The Earth Eating Disease gambol through deserted kiosks and Bolivar in catatonic limestone liberates the area—Candiru infiltrate causeways and swimming pools—Albinos blink in the sun—Rank smell of rotten rivers and mud flats—Swamp delta to the sky that does not change—Islands of garbage where Green Boys with delicate purple gills tend chemical gardens—Terminal post card shrinking in heavy time. Muttering addicts of the orgasm drug, boneless in the sun, eaten alive by crab men—Terminal post card shrinking in heavy time.

“Thing Police keep all Board Room Reports—Do not forget this, Señor—”

They were searching his room when he returned from The Ministry Of Tourist Travel—Fingers light and cold as Spring wind rustling papers and documents—One flashed a badge like a fish side in dark water—

“Police, Johnny.”

“Campers,” obviously—“Campers” move into any government office and start issuing directives and spinning webs of inter-office memos—Some have connections in high sources that will make the operation legal and exempt narcotic—Others are shoestring operators out of broom closets and dark rooms of The Mugging Department —They charge out high on ammonia issuing insane orders and requisitioning any object in their path—Tenuous bureaus spring up like sandstorms—The whole rancid oil scandal drifted out in growth areas—

Bradly was reading the sign nailed to a split-bamboo tenement—The sign was printed on white paper book page size:

Cut The Sex And Dream Utility Lines//

Cut The Trak Service Lines//

The paws do not refresh//

Clom Fliday Meester Surplus Oil//

Working for the Yankee dollar?//

Trak your own utilities//

Under silent wings of malaria a tap on his shoulder: “Documentes, señor. Passaport.”

His passport drew them like sugar flashing gold teeth in little snarls of incredulity: “Passaport no bueno. No en ordenes.”

The fuzz that could not penetrate to the passport began chanting in unison: “Comisaria! Comisaria! Comisaria! Meester a la Comisaria! —Passaport muy malo. No good. No bueno. Typical sights leak out.” The Comandante wore a green uniform spattered with oil and gave out iron smoke as he moved—A small automatic moved round his waist on metal tracks trailing blue sparks—Seedy agents click into place with reports and documents.

“It is permiso, si to read the public signs. This”—his hand covered the white sign on a split-bamboo wall—“is a special case.”

A man with a green eyeshade slid forward: “Yes. That’s what they call it: ‘making a case’—It’s all there in the files, the whole rancid oil scandal of The Trak Sex And Dream Utilities in Growth Areas.”

He pointed to a row of filing cabinets and lockers—Smell of moldy jockstraps and chlorine drifted through the police terminal. The Comandante turned the newspaper man back with a thin brown hand: “Much politics that one—It is better to be just technical.”

A Swede Con Man hiding out in Rio Bamba under the cold souvenir of Chimborazi, junk cover removed for the nonpayment, syndicates of the world feeling for him with distant fingers of murder, perfected that art along The Tang Dynasty in the back room of a Chinese laundry. The Swede had one thing left: the grey felt hat concession for “growth areas” hidden under front companies and aliases. With a 1910 magic lantern he posed Indians in grey felt hats and broke the image into a million pieces reflected in dark eyes and blue mountain ice and black water and piss and lamp chimneys, tinted bureaucrat glasses, gun barrels, store fronts and café mirrors—He flickered the broken image into the eyes of a shrunken head that died in agony looking at a grey felt hat. And The Head radiated: HAT. .HAT. .HAT. .HAT. .HAT. .

“It is a jumping head,” he said.

When the hat lines formed one thing that could break them was orgasm—So he captured a missionary’s wife and flickered her with pornographic slides—And he took her head to radiate anti-sex—He took other anti-sex heads in coprophiliac vice and electric disgust—He dimed the Sex and Dream Utilities of the land. And he was shipped back to Sweden in a lead cylinder to found The Trak Service and The Trak Board.

Trak has come a long way from a magic lantern in the Chink laundry. The Heads were donated to The Gothenburg Museum where the comparatively innocuous emanations precipitated a mass sex orgy.

Vagos Jugadores, sola esperanza del mundo, take it to Cut City, the black obsidian Pyramid of Trak Home Office.

“The perfect product, gentlemen, has precise molecular affinity for its client of predilection. Someone urges the manufacture and sale of products that wear out? This is not the way of competitive elimination. Our product never leaves the customer. We sell the Servicing and all Trak products have precise need of Trak servicing… The servicing of a competitor would act like antibiotic, offering to our noble Trak-strain services inedible counterpart… This is not just another habit-forming drug this is the habit-forming drug takes over all functions from the addict including his completely unnecessary under the uh circumstances and cumbersome skeleton. Reducing him ultimately to the helpless condition of a larva. He may be said then to owe his very life such as it is to Trak servicing…”

The Trak Reservation so-called includes almost all areas in and about the United Republics of Freelandt and, since the Trak Police process all matters occurring in Trak Reservation and no one knows what is and is not Reservation cases, civil and criminal are summarily removed from civilian courts with the single word TRAK to unknown sanctions… Report meetings of Trak personnel are synchronized with other events as to a low pressure area… Benway was reporting so-called actually included almost the report meetings of Trak persons… Sometimes the Reservation is other persons and events in Trak guards sub type…

“Outskirts of Mexico City—Can’t quite make it with all the guards around—Are you at all competent to teach me the language? Come in please with the images—”

Smell death bed pictures—Cooperation inane—Carrion in the bank—Passport bad—Average on level tore canines—Understand fee: Corpses hang pants open in erogenous smells to Monterrey—Clear and loud ahead naked post cards and baby shoes—A man comes back to something he left in underwear peeled the boy warm in 1929—Thighs slapped the bed jumped ass up—“Johnny screw”—Cup is split—Wastings—Thermodynamics crawls home—Game of empty hands—Bed pictures post dead question—Carrion smell sharp.

“Meester, jelly thing win you—Waiting for this?”

Early Answer

Streets of idiot pleasure—Obsidian palaces of the fish city, bubbles twisting slow linen to the floor, traced fossils of orgasm.

“You win something like jelly fish, Meester.”

His eyes calm and sad as little cats snapped the advantages: “And I told him I said I am giving notice—Hanged in your dirty movies for the last time—Three thousand years in show business and I never stand still for such a routine like this.”

Street boys of the green with cruel idiot smiles and translucent amber flesh, aromatic jasmine excrement, pubic hairs that cut needles of pleasure—Serving insect pleasures of the spine—Alternate terminal flesh when the egg cracks.

“This bad place, Meester—This place of last fuck for Johnny.”

Smile of idiot death spasms—Slow vegetable decay filmed his amber flesh—Always there when the egg cracks and the white juice spurts from ruptured spines—From his mouth floated coal gas and violets—The boy dropped his rusty black pants—Delicate must of soiled linen—Clothes stiff with oil on the red tile floor—Naked and sullen his street boy senses darted around the room for scraps of advantage—

“You come with me Meester? Last flucky.”

Stranger color through his eyes the lookout different, face transparent with all the sewers of death—Hard-ons spread nutty smells through the outhouse—Soiled linen under the ceiling fan—Spectral lust of shuttered rooms—He left a shirt on my bed.

“Jimmy Sheffields is still as good as he used to be.”

“He was servicing customers shit, Meester—So Doctor Benway snapped the advantages—This special breed spitting notice: Egg cracks the transmitter—Rat spines gathering mushroom flesh—The boy dropped around your room for scraps—Got the rag on body from vegetable—Dropped his pants and his cock.”

“Who are you—My boat—”

“Smells through the outhouse—A compost heap, Meester.”

Sacred Sewers of Death—Boy dropped under the swamp cypress flopping around in soiled linen—(Started off on foot across the deserted fields—A little hut on the outskirts—The writer looked at both of us good as he used to be.) Idiot pictures started coming in—

“You win something like jelly with his knees up to the chin—Sad little irrigation ditch—Parrot on shoulder prods that heart—Paralyzed, twisting in your movies for the last time—Out of me from the waist down—I never stand still for such lookout on street boys of the green—Happened that boy could keep his gas and violets—This spot advantages brown hands working in concert for a switch to The Drenched Lands—Cyclotron shit these characters—Come level on average smell under any image—Evil odors high around the other—Jimmy Sheffields is again as good—Street boy’s breath receiving notice—Jelly routine like this—When the egg cracks our spines servicing special customers of fossil orgasm.”

Kerosene lamp spattered light on red and white striped T-shirt and brown flesh—Dropped his pants—Pubic hairs cut stale underwear fan whiffs of young hard-on washing odors—Afternoon wind where the awning flaps—

“Get physical with a routine like this?—Show you something interesting: diseased flesh servicing frantic last fuck for Johnny—Film over the bed you know, eyes pop out—Naked candy around the room, scraps of adolescent image, hot semen in Panama—Then the boy drops his drag and retires to a locker—Who lookout different? Who are you when their eyes pop out—Mandrake smells through the outhouse—The boy dropped and the boy wakes up paralyzed—Remember there is only one visit: Iron roof—Soiled linen under the clothes—Scar tissue—Shuttered room—Evil odors of food—I wasn’t all that far from being good as I used to be—Obsidian that broker before they get to him—A crab scuttles out heavy—You win something like vacant lot—Sad little patch right?—Boy face, green scarf—Movies three up—You understand until I die work I never stand still for. And such got the job—End getting to know street boys of The Green Passport vending last fuck as his pants drop.”

Dust of cities and wind faces came to World’s End—Call through remote dawn soaked in clouds, shivering back to mucus of the world.

Dust jissom in the bandanna trailing afternoon wind—Under black Stetson peeled his stale underwear—Kerosene lamp spattered light on .22, delicate legs and brown flesh—Clothes stiff in the locker room rubbing each other—Sullen as the other two watched—Stranger dropped his pants—Brown hands spurt it to the chest—

“Find time buyer—Start job—Image under the same position—Change place of your defense—”

“A Johannesburg bidonville he was servicing—Customers shitting Nigger for an eyecup of degenerates—Ejaculated the next day as Johnny—Meal mouthed cunt suckers flow through you—This special breed spitting cotton travel on a radar beam of service proof shortbread—Shivering junk sick told your reporter the sex chucks hit us in heroin slow down—The paranoid ex-Communist was there—Rubbed Moscow up me with a corkscrew motion of his limestones—Split is the wastings of the pool game—Irritably for Mexico—By now we had floppy city in the distance, 1920’s faint and intermittent—The track gave out forever an inch from the false bottom—

“They had torn down the transmitter—Rats was running the post—Somewhere North of Monterrey we meet in warring powers—Captured the spine clinic and cook down the prisoners for jelly—We are accused of soliciting with prehensile tree limbs—The first one dropped your defense his mouth bleeding—Got the rag on—Waiting to see this exhibit, dropped his pants and I came the spectroscope—You could smell it like a compost heap, pants just pulling in the winds of Panhandle—So we hit the Sacred Cotton Wood Grove—It’s the only way to live—Jissom under the swamp cypress—and the warm Spring wind to feel my cock—(Dead bird in the black swamp water)—He would flop around in the trees, come five times in his dry goods.

“He told me he could fix back places—A little hut on the outskirts—Pale blue sugary eyes that stuck to you—The Writer looked at both of us and smiled a low pressure area, switch paper in his hands—Weak and intermittent before the pictures started coming in: ‘Lawd Lawd have you seen my boy with his knees up to the chin pumping out spurts by the irrigation ditch?’

“When I shot my load I was paralyzed from the medicine—Twisting in these spasms solid female siphoned out of me from the waist down—Shattering special type sex hangs from telegraph pole—And then I felt it way down in a carnival of splintered pink—

“Cold mountain shadows in the attic—And I went back with the boy to his cellar—Wonder whatever happened to that boy could keep a hard-on all night?—A man comes back to something looking at the blue mountains—Same thing day after day—World messages on the shit house wall—Cock spurting limestone—Summer dawn smell of boy balls so that was that—This spot where a lot of citizens will not work in concert—I didn’t—Out for groceries and decided to whimper on the boys—We found Mother Green in your rubble along with some others from his deserted cock—Disgusting metamorphosis and a cyclotron shit these characters—(You wouldn’t have a rope would you?)—Maybe I’m asking too many agriculturals—

“Come level on average we’ll hold that old cow in line—Put any image in the cold drink would you?—Wet back asleep with a hard-on was taken care of that way—Look, moving in whole armies and he sits me fishing lark—Silent and shaking things considered and we moved out hard—Around the other side piecing out the odds best we could—In the barn attic night and day smelling his thin cotton pants—He wakes buying it sight unseen.

“Jimmy busy doing something feller say—Boys streaked with coal dust—Maybe I’m asking too many—(You wouldn’t have a rope would you?)—Well now that bedroom sitter boy his cock came up wet sleep—Smiling looks at his crotch—Peeled slow and touch it—Springs out hard—Turns me around the end of his cock glistening—That smell through the dingy room clings to him like—Raw and peeled came to the hidden gallows—Open door underneath to cut down ghost assassins—Odor of semen drifts in the brain—Jimmy with cruel idiot smile shacks elbows twisting him over on his candy—Found a pajama cord and tied the boy—Jimmy lay there and suck his honey—Must have blacked out in The Mandrake Pub—So called Rock and Rollers crack wise on a lumpy studio bed with old shoes and overcoat some one cope—The boy wakes up paralyzed in hock—Sorted out name you never learned to use—Them marketable commodities turn you on direct connection come level on average—Whiff of dried jissom in the price—I was on the roof so sweet young breath came through the time buyer—

“The gate in white flames—Early answer to the boy wakes naked—Down on his stomach is he?—Ah there and iron cool in the mouth—Come see me tonight in bone wrenching spasms—Silver light pops something interesting—The boy features being younger of course—To your own people you frantic come level on average—Wait a bit—No good at this rate—Try one if you want worthless old shit screaming without a body—Roll two years operation completed—We are? Well the wind up is who?—Quién es?—World’s End as a boy in drag retired to the locker—My page deals so many tasty ways on the bed—You know—Eyes pop out—Candy and cigarettes what? Rectum open, the warm muscle boy rampant and spitting adolescent image—Hot semen amok in Panama—Scenic railways when their eyes pop out—Know the answer?—Two assholes and a mandrake—They’ll do it every time—Rock and Rollers crack wise with overwhelming Minraud girl, wipe their ass on the women’s toilet—And the boy wakes up paralyzed from arsenic and bleeding gums—Remember there is only one visit of a special kind—Flesh juice vampires is rotten smell of ice—No good no bueno outright or partially.

“Reason for the change of food he is subject to take back the keys—Square fact is that judges like it locked—Acting physician at Dankmoor fed up you understand until I die—End getting to know whose hanged man—One more chance still?—Come back to the Spanish bait, hard faced matron bandages the blotter—The shock when your neck breaks is far away—In this hotel room you are already dead of course—Boy stretches a leg, his cock flipped out—But uh well you see sputter of burning insect wings—”

In the sun at noon shirt open Kiki steps forward—With a wriggle stood naked spitting over the tide flats bare feet in dog’s excrement—washed back on Spain repeat performance page. Predated checks bounce all around us in green place by the ball park—Come and jack off—Passport vending machines—Jimmy walked along North End Road—(Slow-motion horses pulling carts—boys streaked with coal dust)—A low-pressure area and the wind rising—Came to the World’s End Pissoir and met a boy with wide shoulders, black eyes glinting under the street lights, a heavy silk scarf tucked into his red and white striped T-shirt—In the bedroom sitter the boy peeled off his clothes and sat down naked on the bed blowing cigarette smoke through his pubic hairs—His cock came up in the smoke—Switchblade eyes squinted, he watched with a smile wasn’t exactly a smile as Jimmy folded his clothes—Raw and peeled, naked now his cock pulsing—Jimmy picked up his key and put it in his mouth sucking the metal taste—The other sat smoking and silent—A slow drop of lubricant squeezed out the end of his cock glistening in light from the street—Shutters clattered in the rising wind—A rotten vegetable smell seeped through the dingy room, shadow cars moved across the rose wall paper—

K9 had an appointment at The Sheffield Arms Pub but the short wave faded out on the location—Somewhere to the left? or was it to the right?—On? Off? North End Road?—He walked through empty market booths, shutters clattering—Wind tore the cover off faces he passed raw and peeled—Came to World’s End wind blowing through empty time pockets—No Sheffield Arms—Back to his room full of shadows—There he was sitting on the bed with the smile that wasn’t exactly a smile—At the washbasin a boy was using his toothbrush— “Who are these people?”

The boy turned from the washbasin “You don’t remember me?—Well we met in a way that is”—The toothbrush in his hand was streaked with blood.

Jimmy sat down on the bed his rectum tingling—The other picked up his scarf from a chair and ran it through his fingers looking at Jimmy with a cruel idiot smile—His hands closed on Jimmy’s elbows twisting him over on his stomach down on the bed—The boy found a pajama cord and tied Jimmy’s hands behind his back—Jimmy lay there gasping and sucked the key, tasting metal in his mouth—The other saddled Jimmy’s Body—He spit on his hands and rubbed the spit on his cock—He placed his hands on Jimmy’s ass cheeks and shoved them apart and dropped a gob of spit on the rectum—He slid the scarf under Jimmy’s hips and pulled his body up onto his cock—Jimmy gasped and moved with it—The boy slid the scarf up along Jimmy’s body to the neck—

He must have blacked out though he hadn’t had much to drink at the pub—Two so-called double brandies and two Barley wines—He was lying on a lumpy studio bed in a strange room—Familiar too—In shoes and overcoat—Someone else’s overcoat—Such a coat he would never have owned himself—A tweedy loose-fitting powder-blue coat—K9 ran to tight-fitting black Chesterfields which he usually bought second hand in hock shops—He had very little money for clothes though he liked to dress in “banker drag” he called it—black suits—expensive ties and linen shirts—Here he was in such a coat as he would never voluntarily have owned or worn—Someone else’s room—Bed sitter—Cheap furniture suitcases open—K9 found two keys covered with dust on the mantel—Sat down convenient and sorted out his name—

“You never learned to use your Jimmy—Slow with the right—there will be others behind him with the scarf—We met you know in a way that is in the smell of wine—You don’t remember me?”

Taste of blood in his throat familiar too—and overcoat—someone else’s—streaked with coal dust—The bed sitter boy as it always does folded his clothes—Lay there gasping fresh in today—

“Went into what might be called the comfortable and got myself a flat jewelry lying about wholesale side—Learned how to value them marketable commodities come level on average—well groceries—She started screaming for a respectable price—I was on the roof so I had to belt her—Find a time buyer before doing sessions—There’s no choice if they start job for instance—Have to let it go cheap and start further scream along the line—One or two reliable thieves—Work was steady at the gate to meet me—Early answer to use on anyone considering to interfere—Once in a while I had to put it about but usually what you might call a journeyman thief—It was done so modern and convenient—Sorted out punishment and reward lark—On, off? The bed down on his stomach is he? Ah there you are behind him with the scarf—Hands from 1910—There’s no choice if took off his clothes—Have to let it go cheap and start naked.”

Twisted the scarf tighter and tighter around Jimmy’s neck—Jimmy gasped coughing and spitting, face swollen with blood—His spine tingled—Coarse black hair suddenly sprouted all over him. Canines tore through his gum with exquisite toothache pain—He kicked in bone wrenching spasms. Silver light popped in his eyes.

He decided to take the coat with him—Might pass someone on the stairs and they would think he was the tenant since the boy resembled him in build and features being younger of course but then people are not observant come level on average—Careful—

“Careful—Watch the exits—Wait a bit—No good at this rate—Watch the waves and long counts—No use moving out—Try one if you want to—All dies in convulsions screaming without a body—Know the answer?—Arsenic two years: operation completed—We are arsenic and bleeding gums—Who? Quién es?—World’s End loud and clear—So conjured up wide shoulders and black eyes glinting—Shadow cars through the dingy room—My page deals the bedroom sitter out of suitcase here on the bed where you know me with cruel idiot smile as Jimmy’s eyes pop out—Silk scarf moved up rubbing—Pubic hair sprouted all over him tearing the flesh like wire—Eyes squinted from a smell I always feel—Hot spit burned his rectum open—The warm muscle contracts—Kicked breathless coughing and spitting adolescent image blurred in film smoke—Through the gums the fist in his face—Taste of blood—His broken body spurted life in other flesh—Identical erections in the kerosene lamp—Electric hair sprouted in ass and genitals—Taste of blood in the throat—Hot semen spurted idiot mambo—One boy naked in Panama—Who?—Quién es?—Compost heap stench where you know me from—A smell I always feel when his eyes pop out—”

“Know the answer? Arsenic two years: Goof ball bum in 1910 Panama. They’ll do it every time—Vampires is no good all possessed by overwhelming Minraud girl—”

“Are you sure they are not for protection?”

“Quite sure—Nothing here but to borrow your body for a special purpose:: (‘Excellent—Proceed to the ice.’)—In the blood arsenic and bleeding gums—They were addicted to this round of whatever visits of a special kind—An errand boy of such a taste took off his clothes—Indications enough naked now his cock healed scar tissue —Flesh juice vampires is no good—All sewage—Sweet rotten smell of ice—No use of them better than they are—The whole thing tell you no good no bueno outright or partially.”

“Reasons for the change of food not wholly disinterested—The square fact is that judges like a chair—For many years he used Parker—Fed up with present food in the Homicide Act and others got the job—So think before time that abolition is coming anyway after that, all the Top Jobbies would like to strike a bargain in return for accepting the end of hanging—Generous? Nothing—I wasn’t all that far from being in position—”

“Have to move fast—Nail that Broker before they get to him—Doing him a favor any case—”

He found the Broker in a café off the Socco—Heavy with massive muscled flesh and cropped grey hair—K9 stood in the shadow and tugged his mind screen—The Broker stood up and walked down an alley—K9 stepped out of the shadows in his new overcoat—

“Oh it’s you—Everything all right?—”

K9 took off his hat respectfully and covered his gun with it—He had stuffed the hat with the Green Boy’s heavy silk scarf—A crude silencer but there was nobody in the alley—It wasn’t healthy to be within earshot when The Broker had business with anyone—He stood with the hat an inch from The Broker’s mid section—He looked into the cold grey eyes—

“Everything is just fine,” he said—

And pumped three Police Specials into the massive stomach hard as a Japanese wrestler—The Broker’s mouth flew open sucking for breath that did not come—K9 gave him three more and stepped aside—The Broker folded, slid along a wall and flopped face up his eyes glazing over—Lee dropped the burning hat and scarf on a pile of excrement and walked out of the alley powder smoke drifting from his cheap European suit—He walked toward flesh of Spain and Piccadilly—

“Wind hand to the hilt—Fed up you understand until I die—Work we have to do and way got the job—End getting to know whose reports are now ended—‘One more change,’ he said, ‘touching circumstance’—Have you still—Come back to the Spanish bait it’s curtains under his blotter.”

Who? Quién es?—Question is far away—In this hotel room you are writing whiffs of Spain—Boy stretches a leg—His cock flipped out in the kerosene lamp—Sputter of burning insect wings—Heard the sea—Tin shack over the mud flats—Erogenous holes and pepper smells—

In the sun at noon shirt open as his pants dropped— Lay on his stomach and produced a piece of soap—Rubbed the soap in—He gasped and moved with it—whiffs of his feet in the warm summer afternoon—

Who? Quién es? It can only be the end of the world ahead loud and clear—

Kiki steps forward on faded photo—Pants slipping down legs with a wriggle stood naked spitting on his hands—Shot a bucket grinning—Over the whispering tide flats youths in the act, pants down, bare feet in dog’s excrement—Street smells of the world siphoned back red and white T-shirt to brown Johnny—That stale dawn smell of naked sleep under the ceiling fan—Shoved him over on his stomach kicking with slow pleasure—

“Hooded dead gibber in the turnstile—What used to be me is backward sound track—Fossil orgasm kneeling to inane cooperation.” Wind through the pissoir—“J’aime ces types vicieux qu’ici montrent la bite”—Green place by the water pipe—Dead leaves caught in pubic hairs—“Come and jack off—1929”—Woke in stale smell of vending machines—The boy with grey flannel pants stood there grinning a few inches in his hand—Shadow cars and wind through other flesh—Came to World’s End. Brief boy on screen revolving lips and pants and forgotten hands in countries of the world—

On the sea wall met a boy in red and white T-shirt under a circling albatross—“Me Brown Meester?”—Warm rain on the iron roof—The boy peeled his stale underwear—Identical erection flipped out in kerosene lamp—The boy jumped on the bed, slapped his thighs: “I screw Johnny up ass? Así como perros”—Rectums merging to idiot Mambo—One boy naked in Panama dawn wind—

In the hyacinths the Green Boys smile—Rotting music trailing vines and birdcalls through remote dreamy lands—The initiate awoke in that stale summer dawn smell, suitcases all open on a brass bed in Mexico—In the shower a Mexican about twenty, rectums naked, smell of carbolic soap and barrack toilets—

Trails my summer dawn wind in other flesh strung together on scar impressions of young Panama night—Pictures exploded in the kerosene lamp—open shirt flapping in the pissoir—Cock flipped out and up—water from his face—Sex tingled in the boy’s slender tight ass—

“You wanta screw me?”

“Breathe in, Johnny—Here goes—”

They was ripe for the plucking forgot way back yonder in the corn hole—Lost in little scraps of delight and burning scrolls—Through the open window trailing swamp smells and old newspapers—Rectums naked in whiffs of raw meat—Genital smells of the two bodies merge in shared meals and belches of institution cooking—Spectral smell of empty condoms down along penny arcades and mirrors—Forgotten shadow actor walks beside you—Mountain wind of Saturn in the morning sky—From the death trauma weary good-by then—Orgasm addicts stacked in the attic like muttering burlap—

Odor rockets over oily lagoons—Silver flakes fall through a maze of dirty pictures—Windy city outskirts—Smell of empty condoms, excrement, black dust—Ragged pants to the ankle—

Bone faces—Place of nettles along adobe walls open shirts flapping —Savanna and grass mud—The sun went—The mountain shadow touched ragged pants—Whisper of dark street in faded Panama photo—“Muy got good one, Meester” smiles through the pissoir—Orgasm siphoned back street smells and a Mexican boy—Woke in the filtered green light, thistle shadows cutting stale underwear—

The three boys lay on the bank rubbing their stomachs against the warm sand—They stood up undressing to swim—Billy gasped as his pants dropped and his cock flipped out he hadn’t realized it was that far up from the rubbing—They swam lazily letting the warm water move between their legs and Lloyd walked back to his pants and brought a piece of soap and they passed it back and forth laughing and rubbing each other and Billy ejaculated his thin brown stomach arched out of the water as the spurts shot up in the sunlight like tiny rockets—He sagged down into the water panting and lay there against the muddy bottom—

Under the old trestle trailing vines in the warm summer afternoon undressing to swim and rubbing their bellies—Lloyd rubbing his hand down further and further openly rubbing his crotch now and grinning as the other two watched and Billy looked at Jammy hesitantly and began to rub too and slowly Jammy did the same—They came into the water watching the white blobs drift away—The Mexican boy dropped his pants and his cock flipped out and he looked at Billy grinning—Billy turned and waded into the water and the Mexican followed him and turned him around feeling his crotch and shoved him down on his back in the shallow water, hitched his brown arms under Billy’s knees and shoved them back against his chest—The Mexican held his knees with one arm and with the other hand dipped a piece of soap in the water and began rubbing it up and down Billy’s ass—Billy shuddered and his body went limp letting it happen—The Mexican was rubbing soap on his own cock now with one hand—Shiny black pubic hairs reflected sharp as wire—Slowly shoved his cock in—Billy gasped and moved with it—Spurts fell against his chest in the sunlight and he lay there in the water breathing sewage smells of the canal—

Billy squirmed up onto a muddy bank and took a handful of the warm mud and packed it around his cock and Lloyd poured a bucket of water on the mud and Billy’s cock flipped out jumping in the green filtered light under the old trestle—

Stale underwear of penny arcades slipping down legs, rectums feeling the warm sun, laughing and washing each other soapy hands in his crotch, pearly spasms stirring the warm water—

The Mexican dropped his pants with a wriggle and stood naked in the filtered green light, vines on his back—Rubbing his crotch now into Billy’s ass—Billy moved with it, rectum wriggling cock inside rubbing—

Ali squirmed teeth bared grinning—His thin brown stomach hit the pallet—“You is coming, Johnny?”—Sunlight on the army blankets—Rectum wriggling slow fuck on knees “así como perros”—Orgasm crackled with electric afternoon—Bodies stuck together in magnetic eddies—Squirming cock in his intestines, rectum wriggling felt the hot sperm deep in his body—

Shoved him over on his stomach kicking—The Mexican held his knees—Hand dipped a piece of soap—Shoved his cock in laughing—Bodies stuck together in the sunlight kicked whiffs of rectal mucus—Laughing teeth and pepper smells—“You is feeling the hot quick Mexican kid naked Mambo to your toes Johnny … dust in bare leg hairs tight brown nuts breech very hot … How long you want us to fuck very nice Meester? Flesh diseased dirty pictures we fucking tired of fuck very nice Mister.” Sad image of sickness at the attic window say something to you “adiós” worn out film washed back in prep school clothes to distant closing dormitory fragments off the page stained toilet pictures blurred rotting pieces of “Freckle Leg” dormitory dawn dripping water on his face diseased voice so painful telling you “Sparks” is over New York. “Have I done the job here?” With a telescope you can watch our worn out film dim jerky far away shut a bureau drawer faded sepia smile from an old calendar falling leaves sun cold on a thin boy with freckles folded away in an old file now standing last review.

“Maze of dirty pictures and vending machine flesh whispers use of fraud on faded photo—IBM song yodels dime a dozen type overcoats —Not taking any adolescent on shit envelope in the bath cubicle—Come of your stale movies sings Danny Deever in drag—Times lost or strayed long empty cemetery with a moldy pawn ticket—Fading whisper down skid row to Market Street shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse—Young boys need it special.” silver paper in the wind distant 1920 wind and dust. He was looking at some thing a long time ago where the second hand book shop used to be just opposite the old cemetery.

“Who? Quién es?—Hable, señor—Talk loud and clear.”

“We are all from the American women with a delicate lilt—I represent the lithe aloof young men of the breed charmingly—We are all empowered to make arrests and enough with just the right shade of show you.”

“Belt Her—Find a time buyer before ports are now ended—These are rotten if they start job for instance—Blind bargain in return for accepting ‘one more chance’—Generous?—Nothing—That far to the bait and it’s curtains—Know what they meant if they start job for instance?”

“Dead young flesh in stale underwear vending sex words to magnetic Law 334—Indicates simple tape is served sir, through iron repetition—Ass and genitals tingling in 1929 jack-off spelt out broken wings of Icarus—Control system ousted from half the body whispers skin instructions to memory of melting ice—Area of Spain—Channels ahead loud and clear—Line of the body fitted to other underwear and Kiki steps forward on faded photo—Sad image dusted by the Panama night.”

“So think before they can do any locks over the Chinese that abolition is war of the past—The end of hanging generous? Just the same position—Changed place of years in the end is just the same—Going to do?—Perhaps alone would you? All good things come to about that was that—”

Call through remote dawn of back yards and ash pits—Plaintive ghost in the turnstile—Shadow cars and wind faces came to World’s End—Whiff of dried jissom in the bandanna trailing sweet young breath through remote lands—soft globs on a brass bed in Mexico—naked—wet—carbolic soap—tight nuts—piece of soap in the locker room rubbing each other off to “My Blue Heaven”—grinning as the other two watched—street light on soiled clothes dim jerky far away dawn in his eyes. Do you begin to see there is no boy there in the dark room? He was looking at something a long time ago. Changed place?—Same position—Sad image circulates through backward time—Clom Fliday.”

Case Of The Celluloid Kali

The name is Clem Snide—I am a Private Ass Hole—I will take on any job any identity any body—I will do anything difficult dangerous or downright dirty for a price—

The man opposite me didn’t look like much—A thin grey man in a long coat that flickered like old film—He just happens to be the biggest operator in any time universe—

“I don’t care myself you understand”—He watched the ash spiraling down from the end of his Havana—It hit the floor in a puff of grey dust—

“Just like that—Just time—Just time—Don’t care myself if the whole fucking shithouse goes up in chunks—I’ve sat out novas before—I was born in a nova.”

“Well Mr. Martin, I guess that’s what birth is you might say.”

“I wouldn’t say—Have to be moving along any case—The ticket that exploded posed little time—Point is they are trying to cross me up—Small timers—Still on the old evacuation plan—Know what the old evacuation plan is, Mr. Snide?”

“Not in detail.”

“The hanging gimmick—Death in orgasm—Gills—No bones and elementary nervous system—Evacuation to The Drenched Lands—A bad deal on the level and it’s not on the level with Sammy sitting in—Small timers trying to cross me up—Me, Bradly-Martin, who invented the double-cross—Step right up—Now you see me now you don’t—A few scores to settle before I travel—A few things to tidy up and that’s where you come in—I want you to contact The Venus Mob, The Vegetable People and spill the whole fucking compost heap through Times Square and Piccadilly—I’m not taking any rap for that green bitch—I’m going to rat on everybody and split this dead whistle stop planet wide open—I’m clean for once with the nova heat—Like clean fall out—”

He faded in spiraling patterns of cigar smoke—There was a knock at the door—Registered letter from Antwerp—Ten thousand dollar check for film rights to a novel I hadn’t written called The Soft Ticket—Letter from somebody I never heard of who is acting as my agent suggests I contact the Copenhagen office to discuss the Danish rights on my novel Expense Account—Bar backed by pink shell—New Orleans jazz thin in the Northern night. A boy slid off a white silk bar stool and held out the hand: “Hello, I’m Johnny Yen, a friend of—Well, just about everybody. I was more physical before my accident you can see from this interesting picture. Only the head was reduced to this jelly but like I say it the impression on my face was taken by the other man’s eyes drive the car head-on it was and The Big Physician (he’s very technical) rushed him off to a surgery and took out his eyes and made a quick impression and slapped it on me like a pancake before I started to dry out and curl around the edges. So now I’m back in harness you might say: and I have All of ‘you’ that what I want from my audience is the last drop then bring me another. The place is hermetic. We think so blockade we thought nobody could get thru our flak thing. They thought. Switch Artist me. Oh, there goes my frequency. I’m on now…”

The lights dimmed and Johnny pranced out in goggles flickering Northern Lights wearing a jockstrap of Undifferentiated Tissue that must be in constant movement to avoid crystallization. A penis rose out of the jock and dissolved in pink light back to a clitoris, balls retract into cunt with a fluid plop. Three times he did this to wild “Olés!” from the audience. Drifted to the bar and ordered a heavy blue drink. D noted patches of white crystal formed along the scar lines on Johnny’s copy face.

“Just like canals. Maybe I’m a Martian when the Crystals are down.”

You will die there a screwdriver through the head. The thought like looking at me over steak and explain it all like that stay right here. She was also a Reichian Analyst. Disappear more or less remain in acceptable form to you the face.

“We could go on cutting my cleavage act, but genug basta assez dice fall hombre long switch street… I had this terrible accident in a car a Bentley it was I think they’re so nice that’s what you pay for when you buy one it’s yours and you can be sure nobody will pull it out from under our assets. Of course we don’t have assholes here you understand somebody might go and get physical. Soo we are strictly from urine. And that narrows things to a fine line down the middle fifty feefty and what could be fairer than that my Uncle Eyetooth always says he committed fornication but I don’t believe it me old heavy water junky like him… So anyhoo to get back to my accident in my Bentley once I get my thing in a Bentley it’s mine already.

So we had this terrible accident or rather he did. Oh dear what am I saying? It wasn’t my first accident you understand yearly wounded or was it monthly Oh dear I must stay on that middle line…

“Survivor. Survivor. Not the first in my childhood. Three thousand years in show business and always keep my nose clean. Why I was a dancing boy for the Cannibal Trog Women in The Ice Age. Remember? All that meat stacked up in the caves and The Blue Queen covered with limestone flesh creeps into your bones like cold grey honey… that’s the way they keep them not dead but paralyzed with this awful stuff they cook down from vampire bats get in your hair Gertie always keep your hair way up inside with a vampire on premises bad to get in other alien premises. The Spanish have this word for it, something about props ajeno or something like that I know so am ya la yo mixa everything allup. They call me Puto The Cement Mixer, now isn’t that cute? Some people think I’m just silly but I’m not silly at all… and this boyfriend told me I looked just like a shrew ears quivering hot and eager like burning leaves and those were his last words engraved on my back tape—along with a lot of other old memories that disgust me, you wouldn’t believe the horrible routines I been involved through my profession of Survival Artist… and they think that’s funny, but I don’t laugh except real quick between words no time you understand laughing they could get at me doesn’t keep them off like talking does, now watch—”

A flicker pause and the light shrank and the audience sound a vast muttering in Johnny’s voice.

“You see”—Shadows moved back into nightclub seats and drank nightclub drinks and talked nightclub talk—“They’d just best is all. So I was this dancing boy for these dangerous old cunts paralyzed men and boys they dug special stacked right up to the ceiling like the pictures I saw of Belsen or one of those awful contracted places and I said they are at it again… I said the Old Army Game. I said ‘Pass The buck.’ Now you see it, now you don’t… Paralyzed with this awful gook The Sapphire Goddess let out through this cold sore she always kept open on her lips, that is a hole in the limestone you understand she was like entirely covered with one of those Stag Rites… Real concentrated in there and irradiated to prevent an accident owing to some virus come lately wander in from Podunk Hepatitis… But I guess I’m talking too much about private things… But I know this big atomic professor, he’s very technical too, says: ‘There are no secrets any more, Pet’ when I was smooching around him for a quickie. My Uncle still gives me a sawski for a hot nuclear secret and ten years isn’t hay, dahling, in these times when practically anybody is subject to wander in from the desert with a quit claim deed and snatch a girl’s snatch right out from under her assets… over really I should say but some of we boys are so sick we got this awful cunt instead of a decent human asshole disgust you to see it… So I just say anything I hear on the old party line.

“I used to keep those old Cave Cunts at bay with my Impersonation Number where I play this American Mate Dance in Black Widow drag and I could make my face flap around you wouldn’t believe it and the noises I made in uh orgasm when SHE ate me—I played both parts you unnerstand, imitated The Goddess Herself and turn right into stone for security… And SHE couldn’t give me enough juice running out of this hole was her only orifice and she was transported dais and all, die ass and all, by blind uniques with no balls, had to crawl under HER dais dressed in Centipede Suit Of The Bearer which was put on them as a great honor and they was always fighting over matter of crawl protocol or protocrawl… So all these boys stacked to the ceiling covered with limestone… you understand they weren’t dead any more than a fresh oyster is dead, but died in the moment when the shell was cracked and they were eaten all quivering sweet and tasty. Vitamins the right way… eaten with little jeweled adzes jade and sapphires and chicken blood rubies all really magnificent. Of course I pinched everything I could latch onto with my prehensile piles I learned it boosting in Chi to pay the Luxury Tax on C. Three thousand years in show business… Later or was it earlier, the Mayan Calendar is all loused up you know… I was a star Corn God inna Sacred Hanging Ceremony to fructify The Corn devised by this impresario who specializes in these far out bit parts which fit me like a condom, he says the cutest things. He’s a doctor too. A Big Physician made my face over after ‘The Accident’ collided with my Bentley head on… the cops say they never see anything so intense and it is a special pass I must be carrying I wasn’t completely obliterated.

“Oh there’s my doctor made the face over after my accident. He calls me Pygmalion now, isn’t that cute? You’ll love him.”

The doctor was sitting in a surgical chair of gleaming nickel. His soft boneless head was covered with grey green fuzz, the right side of his face an inch lower than the left side swollen smooth as a boil around a dead, cold undersea eye.

“Doctor, I want you to meet my friend Mister D The Agent, and he’s a lovely fellow too. (“Some time he don’t hardly hear what you saying. He’s very technical.”)

The doctor reached out his abbreviated fibrous fingers in which surgical instruments caught neon and cut Johnny’s face into fragments of light.

“Jelly,” the Doctor said, liquid gurgles through his hardened purple gums. His tongue was split and the two sections curled over each other as he talked: “Life jelly. It sticks and grows on you like Johnny.”

Little papules of tissue were embedded in the doctor’s hands. The doctor pulled a scalpel out of Johnny’s ear and trimmed the papules into an ash tray where they stirred slowly exuding a green juice.

“They say his prick didn’t synchronize at all so he cut it off and made some kinda awful cunt between the two sides of him. He got a whole ward full of his ‘fans’ he call them already.

“When the wind is right you can hear them scream in Town Hall Square. And everybody says ‘But this is interesting.’

“I was more physical before my accident, you can see from this interesting picture.”

Lee looked from the picture to the face, saw the flickering phosphorescent scars—

“Yes,” he said, “I know you—You’re dead nada walking around visible.”

So the boy is rebuilt and gives me the eye and there he is again walking around some day later across the street and “No dice” flickered across his face—The copy there is a different being, something ready to slip in—Boys empty and banal as sunlight her way always—So he is exact replica is he not?—Empty space of the original—

So I tailed the double to London on the Hook Von Holland and caught him out strangling a naked faggot in the bed sitter—I slip on the antibiotic hand cuffs and we adjourn to The Mandrake Club for an informative little chat—

“What do you get out of this?” I ask bluntly.

“A smell I always feel when their eyes pop out”—The boy looked at me his mouth a little open showing the whitest teeth this Private Eye ever saw—Naval uniform buttoned in the wrong holes quilted with sea mist and powder smoke, smell of chlorine, rum and moldy jockstraps—And probably a narcotics agent is hiding in the spare stateroom that is always locked—There are the stairs to the attic room he looked out of and his mother moving around—Dead she was they say—dead—with such hair too—red.

“Where do you feel it?” I prodded.

“All over,” he said, eyes empty and banal as sunlight—“Like hair sprouting all over me”—He squirmed and giggled and creamed in his dry goods—

“And after every job I get to see the movies—You know—” And he gave me the sign twisting his head to the left and up—

So I gave him the sign back and the words jumped in my throat all there like and ready the way they always do when I’m right “You make the pilgrimage?”

“Yes—The road to Rome.”

I withdrew the antibiotics and left him there with that dreamy little-boy look twisting the napkin into a hangman’s knot—On the bus from the air terminal a thin grey man sat down beside me—I offered him a cigarette and he said “Have one of mine,” and I see he is throwing the tin on me—“Nova police—You are Mr. Snide I believe.” And he moved right in and shook me down looking at pictures, reading letters checking back on my time track.

“There’s one of them,” I heard some one say as he looked at a photo in my files.

“Hummm—yes—and here’s another—Thank you Mr. Snide—You have been most cooperative—”

I stopped off in Bologna to look up my old friend Green Tony thinking he could probably give me a line—Up four flights in a tenement past the old bitch selling black-market cigarettes and cocaine cut with Saniflush, through a dirty brown curtain and there is Green Tony in a pad with Chinese jade all over and Etruscan cuspidors—He is sitting back with his leg thrown over an Egyptian throne smoking a cigarette in a carved emerald holder—He doesn’t get up but he says: “Dick Tracy in the flesh,” and motions to a Babylonian couch.

I told him what I was after and his face went a bright green with rage, “That stupid bitch—She bringa the heat on all of us—Nova heat—” He blew a cloud of smoke and it hung there solid in front of him—Then he wrote an address in the smoke—“No. 88 Via di Nile, Roma.”

This 88 Nile turned out to be one of those bar-soda fountains like they have in Rome—You are subject to find a maraschino cherry in your dry martini and right next to some citizen is sucking a banana split disgust you to see it—Well I am sitting there trying not to see it so I look down at the far end of the counter and dug a boy very dark with kinky hair and something Abyssinian in his face—Our eyes lock and I give him the sign—And he gives it right back—So I spit the maraschino cherry in the bartender’s face and slip him a big tip and he says “Rivideci and bigger.”

And I say “Up yours with a double strawberry phosphate.”

The boy finishes his Pink Lady and follows me out and I take him back to my trap and right away get into an argument with the clerk about no visitors stranezza to the hotel—Enough garlic on his breath to deter a covey of vampires—I shove a handful of lire into his mouth “Go buy yourself some more gold teeth,” I told him—

When this boy peeled off the dry goods he gives off a slow stink like a thawing mummy—But his asshole sucked me right in all my experience as a Private Eye never felt anything like it—In the flash bulb of orgasm I see that fucking clerk has stuck his head through the transom for a refill—Well expense account—The boy is lying there on the bed spreading out like a jelly slow tremors running through it and sighs and says: “Almost like the real thing isn’t it?”

And I said “I need the time milking,” and give him the sign so heavy come near slipping a disk.

“I can see you’re one of our own,” he said warmly sucking himself back into shape—“Dinner at eight”—He comes back at eight in a souped up Ragazzi and we take off 160 per and scream to stop in front of a villa I can see the Bentleys and Hispano Bear Cats and Stutz Suisses and what not piled up and all the golden youth of Europe is disembarking—“Leave your clothes in the vestibule,” the butler tells us and we walk in on a room full of people all naked to a turn sitting around on silk stools and a bar with a pink shell behind it—This cunt undulates forward and give me the sign and holds out her hand “I am the Contessa di Vile your hostess for tonight”—She points to the boys at the bar with her cigarette holder and their cocks jumped up one after the other—And I did the polite thing too when my turn came—

So all the boys began chanting in unison “The movies!—The movies!—We want the movies!—” So she led the way into the projection room which was filled with pink light seeping through the walls and floor and ceiling—The boy was explaining to me that these were actual films taken during the Abyssinian War and how lucky I was to be there—Then the action starts—There on the screen is a gallows and some young soldiers standing around with prisoners in loincloths—The soldiers are dragging this kid up onto the gallows and he biting and screaming and shitting himself and his loincloth slips off and they shove him under the noose and one of them tightens it around his neck standing there now mother naked—Then the trap fell and he drops kicking and yelping and you could hear his neck snap like a stick in a wet towel—He hangs there pulling his knees up to the chest and pumping out spurts of jissom and the audience coming right with him spurt for spurt—So the soldiers strip the loincloths off the others and they all got hard-ons waiting and watching—Got through a hundred of them more or less one at a time—Then they run the movie in slow motion slower and slower and you are coming slower and slower until it took an hour and then two hours and finally all the boys are standing there like statues getting their rocks off geologic—Meanwhile an angle comes dripping down and forms a stalactite in my brain and I slip back to the projection room and speed up the movie so the hanged boys are coming like machine guns—Half the guests explode straightaway from altered pressure chunks of limestone whistling through the air. The others are flopping around on the floor like beached idiots and the Contessa gasps out “Carbon dioxide for the love of Kali”—So somebody turned on the carbon dioxide tanks and I made it out of there in an aqualung—Next thing the nova heat moves in and bust the whole aquarium.

“Humm, yes, and here’s another planet—”

The officer moved back dissolving most cooperative connections formed by the parasite—Self-righteous millions stabbed with rage.

“That bitch—She bringa the heat three dimensional.”

“The ugly cloud of smoke hung there solid female blighted continent—This turned out to be one of those association locks in Rome—I look down at the end—He quiets you, remember?—Finis. So I spit the planet from all the pictures and give him a place of residence with inflexible authority—Well, no terms—A hand has been taken—Your name fading looks like—Madison Avenue machine disconnected.”

The Mayan Caper

Joe Brundige brings you the shocking story of The Mayan Caper exclusive to The Evening News—

A Russian scientist has said: “We will travel not only in space but in time as well”—I have just returned from a thousand-year time trip and I am here to tell you what I saw—And to tell you how such time trips are made—It is a precise operation—It is difficult—It is dangerous—It is the new frontier and only the adventurous need apply—But it belongs to anyone who has the courage and know-how to enter—It belongs to you—

I started my trip in the morgue with old newspapers, folding in today with yesterday and typing out composites—When you skip through a newspaper as most of us do you see a great deal more than you know—In fact you see it all on a subliminal level—Now when I fold today’s paper in with yesterday’s paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I am literally moving back to the time when I read yesterday’s paper, that is traveling in time back to yesterday—I did this eight hours a day for three months—I went back as far as the papers went—I dug out old magazines and forgotten novels and letters—I made fold-ins and composites and I did the same with photos—

The next step was carried out in a film studio—I learned to talk and think backward on all levels—This was done by running film and sound track backward—For example a picture of myself eating a full meal was reversed, from satiety back to hunger—First the film was run at normal speed, then in slow-motion—The same procedure was extended to other physiological processes including orgasm—(It was explained to me that I must put aside all sexual prudery and reticence, that sex was perhaps the heaviest anchor holding one in present time.) For three months I worked with the studio—My basic training in time travel was completed and I was now ready to train specifically for the Mayan assignment—

I went to Mexico City and studied the Mayans with a team of archaeologists—The Mayans lived in what is now Yucatan, British Honduras, and Guatemala—I will not recapitulate what is known of their history, but some observations on the Mayan calendar are essential to understanding this report—The Mayan calendar starts from a mythical date 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu and rolls on to the end of the world, also a definite date depicted in the codices as a God pouring water on the earth—The Mayans had a solar, a lunar, and a ceremonial calendar rolling along like interlocking wheels from 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu to the end—The absolute power of the priests, who formed about 2 percent of the population, depended on their control of this calendar—The extent of this number monopoly can be deduced from the fact that the Mayan verbal language contains no number above ten—Modern Mayan-speaking Indians use Spanish numerals—Mayan agriculture was of the slash and burn type—They had no plows—Plows can not be used in the Mayan area because there is a strata of limestone six inches beneath the surface and the slash and burn method is used to this day—Now slash and burn agriculture is a matter of precise timing—The brush must be cut at a certain time so it will have time to dry and the burning operation carried out before the rains start—A few days’ miscalculation and the year’s crop is lost—

The Mayan writings have not been fully deciphered, but we know that most of the hieroglyphs refer to dates in the calendar, and these numerals have been translated—It is probable that the other undeciphered symbols refer to the ceremonial calendar—There are only three Mayan codices in existence, one in Dresden, one in Paris, one in Madrid, the others having been burned by Bishop Landa—Mayan is very much a living language and in the more remote villages nothing else is spoken—More routine work—I studied Mayan and listened to it on the tape recorder and mixed Mayan in with English—I made innumerable photomontages of Mayan codices and artifacts—the next step was to find a “vessel”—We sifted through many candidates before settling on a young Mayan worker recently arrived from Yucatan—This boy was about twenty, almost black, with the sloping forehead and curved nose of the ancient Mayans—(The physical type has undergone little alteration)—He was illiterate—He had a history of epilepsy—He was what mediums call a “sensitive”—For another three months I worked with the boy on the tape recorder mixing his speech with mine—(I was quite fluent in Mayan at this point—Unlike Aztec it is an easy language)—It was time now for “the transfer operation”—“I” was to be moved into the body of this young Mayan—The operation is illegal and few are competent to practice it—I was referred to an American doctor who had become a heavy metal addict and lost his certificate—“He is the best transfer artist in the industry” I was told “For a price.”

We found the doctor in a dingy office on the Avenida Cinco de Mayo—He was a thin grey man who flickered in and out of focus like an old film—I told him what I wanted and he looked at me from a remote distance without warmth or hostility or any emotion I had ever experienced in myself or seen in another—He nodded silently and ordered the Mayan boy to strip, and ran practiced fingers over his naked body—The doctor picked up a box-like instrument with electrical attachments and moved it slowly up and down the boy’s back from the base of the spine to the neck—The instrument clicked like a Geiger counter—The doctor sat down and explained to me that the operation was usually performed with “the hanging technique”—The patient’s neck is broken and during the orgasm that results he passes into the other body—This method, however, was obsolete and dangerous—For the operation to succeed you must work with a pure vessel who has not been subject to parasite invasion—Such subjects are almost impossible to find in present time he stated flatly—His cold grey eyes flicked across the young Mayan’s naked body: “This subject is riddled with parasites—If I were to employ the barbarous method used by some of my learned colleagues—(nameless assholes)—you would be eaten body and soul by crab parasites—My technique is quite different—I operate with molds—Your body will remain here intact in deep freeze—On your return, if you do return, you can have it back”—He looked pointedly at my stomach sagging from sedentary city life—“You could do with a stomach tuck, young man—But one thing at a time—The transfer operation will take some weeks—And I warn you it will be expensive.”

I told him that cost was no object—The News was behind me all the way—He nodded briefly: “Come back at this time tomorrow.” When we returned to the doctor’s office he introduced me to a thin young man who had the doctor’s cool removed grey eyes—“This is my photographer—I will make my molds from his negatives”—The photographer told me his name was Jiminez—(“Just call me ‘Jimmy The Take’ ”)—We followed “The Take” to a studio in the same building equipped with a 35 millimeter movie camera and Mayan backdrops—He posed us naked in erection and orgasm, cutting the images in together down the middle line of our bodies—Three times a week we went to the doctor’s office—He looked through rolls of film his eyes intense, cold, impersonal—And ran the clicking box up and down our spines—Then he injected a drug which he described as a variation of the apomorphine formula—The injection caused simultaneous vomiting and orgasm and several times I found myself vomiting and ejaculating in the Mayan vessel—The doctor told me these exercises were only the preliminaries and that the actual operation, despite all precautions and skill, was still dangerous enough.

At the end of three weeks he indicated the time has come to operate—He arranged us side by side naked on the operating table under floodlights—With a phosphorescent pencil he traced the middle line of our bodies from the cleft under the nose down to the rectum—Then he injected a blue fluid of heavy cold silence as word dust fell from demagnetized patterns—From a remote Polar distance I could see the doctor separate the two halves of our bodies and fitting together a composite being—I came back in other flesh the lookout different, thoughts and memories of the young Mayan drifting through my brain—

The doctor gave me a bottle of the vomiting drug which he explained was efficacious in blocking out any control waves—He also gave me another drug which, if injected into a subject, would enable me to occupy his body for a few hours and only at night—“Don’t let the sun come up on you or it’s curtains—Zero eaten by crab—And now there is the matter of my fee.”

I handed him a brief case of bank notes and he faded into the shadows furtive and seedy as an old junky.

The paper and the embassy had warned me that I would be on my own, a thousand years from any help—I had a vibrating camera gun sewed into my fly, a small tape recorder and a transistor radio concealed in a clay pot—I took a plane to Mérida where I set about contacting a “broker” who could put me in touch with a “time guide”—Most of these so-called “brokers” are old drunken frauds and my first contact was no exception—I had been warned to pay nothing until I was satisfied with the arrangements—I found this “broker” in a filthy hut on the outskirts surrounded by a rubbish heap of scrap iron, old bones, broken pottery and worked flints—I produced a bottle of aguardiente and the broker immediately threw down a plastic cup of the raw spirit and sat there swaying back and forth on a stool while I explained my business—He indicated that what I wanted was extremely difficult—Also dangerous and illegal—He could get into trouble—Besides I might be an informer from the Time Police—He would have to think about it—He drank two more cups of spirit and fell on the floor in a stupor—The following day I called again—He had thought it over and perhaps—In any case he would need a week to prepare his medicines and this he could only do if he were properly supplied with aguardiente—And he poured another glass of spirits slopping full—Extremely dissatisfied with the way things were going I left—As I was walking back toward town a boy fell in beside me.

“Hello, Meester, you look for broker yes?—Muy know good one—Him,” he gestured back toward the hut, “No good borracho son bitch bastard—Take mucho dinero—No do nothing—You come with me, Meester.”

Thinking I could not do worse, I accompanied the boy to another hut built on stilts over a pond—A youngish man greeted us and listened silently while I explained what I wanted—The boy squatted on the floor rolling a marijuana cigarette—He passed it around and we all smoked—The broker said yes he could make the arrangements and named a price considerably lower than what I had been told to expect—How soon?—He looked at a shelf where I could see a number of elaborate hourglasses with sand in different colors: red, green, black, blue, and white—The glasses were marked with symbols—He explained to me that the sand represented color time and color words—He pointed to a symbol on the green glass, “Then—One hour”—He took out some dried mushrooms and herbs and began cooking them in a clay pot—As green sand touched the symbol, he filled little clay cups and handed one to me and one to the boy—I drank the bitter medicine and almost immediately the pictures I had seen of Mayan artifacts and codices began moving in my brain like animated cartoons—A spermy, compost heap smell filled the room—The boy began to twitch and mutter and fell to the floor in a fit—I could see that he had an erection under his thin trousers—The broker opened the boy’s shirt and pulled off his pants—The penis flipped out spurting in orgasm after orgasm—A green light filled the room and burned through the boy’s flesh—Suddenly he sat up talking in Mayan—The words curled out his mouth and hung visible in the air like vine tendrils—I felt a strange vertigo which I recognized as the motion sickness of time travel—The broker smiled and held out a hand—I passed over his fee—The boy was putting on his clothes—He beckoned me to follow and I got up and left the hut—We were walking along a jungle path the boy ahead his whole body alert and twitching like a dog—We walked many hours and it was dawn when we came to a clearing where I could see a number of workers with sharp sticks and gourds of seed planting corn—The boy touched my shoulder and disappeared up the path in jungle dawn mist—

As I stepped forward into the clearing and addressed one of the workers, I felt the crushing weight of evil insect control forcing my thoughts and feelings into prearranged molds, squeezing my spirit in a soft invisible vise—The worker looked at me with dead eyes empty of curiosity or welcome and silently handed me a planting stick—It was not unusual for strangers to wander in out of the jungle since the whole area was ravaged by soil exhaustion—So my presence occasioned no comment—I worked until sundown—I was assigned to a hut by an overseer who carried a carved stick and wore an elaborate headdress indicating his rank—I lay down in the hammock and immediately felt stabbing probes of telepathic interrogation—I turned on the thoughts of a half-witted young Indian—After some hours the invisible presence withdrew—I had passed the first test—

During the months that followed I worked in the fields—The monotony of this existence made my disguise as a mental defective quite easy—I learned that one could be transferred from field work to rock carving the stellae after a long apprenticeship and only after the priests were satisfied that any thought of resistance was forever extinguished—I decided to retain the anonymous status of a field worker and keep as far as possible out of notice—

A continuous round of festivals occupied our evenings and holidays—On these occasions the priests appeared in elaborate costumes, often disguised as centipedes or lobsters—Sacrifices were rare, but I witnessed one revolting ceremony in which a young captive was tied to a stake and the priests tore his sex off with white-hot copper claws—I learned also something of the horrible punishments meted out to anyone who dared challenge or even think of challenging the controllers: Death In The Ovens:: The violator was placed in a construction of interlocking copper grills—The grills were then heated to white heat and slowly closed on his body. Death In Centipede:: The “criminal” was strapped to a couch and eaten alive by giant centipedes—These executions were carried out secretly in rooms under the temple.

I made recordings of the festivals and the continuous music like a shrill insect frequency that followed the workers all day in the fields—However, I knew that to play these recordings would invite immediate detection—I needed not only the sound track of control but the image track as well before I could take definitive action—I have explained that the Mayan control system depends on the calendar and the codices which contain symbols representing all states of thought and feeling possible to human animals living under such limited circumstances—These are the instruments with which they rotate and control units of thought—I found out also that the priests themselves do not understand exactly how the system works and that I undoubtedly knew more about it than they did as a result of my intensive training and studies—The technicians who had devised the control system had died out and the present line of priests were in the position of some one who knows what buttons to push in order to set a machine in motion, but would have no idea how to fix that machine if it broke down, or to construct another if the machine were destroyed—If I could gain access to the codices and mix the sound and image track the priests would go on pressing the old buttons with unexpected results—In order to accomplish the purpose I prostituted myself to one of the priests—(Most distasteful thing I ever stood still for)—During the sex act he metamorphosed himself into a green crab from the waist up, retaining human legs and genitals that secreted a caustic erogenous slime, while a horrible stench filled the hut—I was able to endure these horrible encounters by promising myself the pleasure of killing this disgusting monster when the time came—And my reputation as an idiot was by now so well established that I escaped all but the most routine control measures—

The priest had me transferred to janitor work in the temple where I witnessed some executions and saw the prisoners torn body and soul into writhing insect fragments by the ovens, and learned that the giant centipedes were born in the ovens from these mutilated screaming fragments—It was time to act—Using the drug the doctor had given me, I took over the priest’s body, gained access to the room where the codices were kept, and photographed the books—Equipped now with sound and image track of the control machine I was in position to dismantle it—I had only to mix the order of recordings and the order of images and the changed order would be picked up and fed back into the machine—I had recordings of all agricultural operations, cutting and burning brush etc.—I now correlated the recordings of burning brush with the image track of this operation, and shuffled the time so that the order to burn came late and a year’s crop was lost—Famine weakening control lines, I cut radio static into the control music and festival recordings together with sound and image track of rebellion.

“Cut word lines—Cut music lines—Smash the control images—Smash the control machine—Burn the books—Kill the priests—Kill! Kill! Kill!—”

Inexorably as the machine had controlled thought feeling and sensory impressions of the workers, the machine now gave the order to dismantle itself and kill the priests—I had the satisfaction of seeing the overseer pegged out in the field, his intestines perforated with hot planting sticks and crammed with corn—I broke out my camera gun and rushed the temple—This weapon takes and vibrates image to radio static—You see the priests were nothing but word and image, an old film rolling on and on with dead actors—Priests and temple guards went up in silver smoke as I blasted my way into the control room and burned the codices—Earthquake tremors under my feet I got out of there fast, blocks of limestone raining all around me—A great weight fell from the sky, winds of the earth whipping palm trees to the ground—Tidal waves rolled over the Mayan control calendar.

I Sekuin

THE MAYAN CAPER—THE CENTIPEDE SWITCH—THE HEAVY METAL GIMMICK.

I Sekuin, Perfected These Arts Along The Streets Of Minraud. Under Sign Of The Centipede. A Captive Head. In Minraud Time. In The Tattoo Booths. The Flesh Graft Parlors. Living Wax Work Of Minraud. Saw Thee Dummies Made to Impression. While You Wait. From Short-Time. In The Terminals Of Minraud. Saw The White Bug Juice Spurt From Ruptured Spines. In The Sex Rooms Of Minraud. While You Wait. In Minraud Time. The Sex Devices Of Flesh. The Centipede Penis. Insect Hairs Thru Grey-Purple Flesh. Of The Scorpion People. The Severed Heads. In Tanks Of Sewage. Eating Green Shit. In The Aquariums Of Minraud. The Booths Of Minraud. Under Sing Of The Centipede. The Sex Rooms And Flesh Films Of Minraud. I Sekuin A Captive Head. Learned The Drugs Of Minraud. In Flak Braille. Rot Brain And Spine. Leave A Crab Body Broken On The Brass And Copper Street. I Sekuin Captive Head. Carried Thru The Booths Of Minraud. By Arms. Legs.

Extensions. From The Flesh Works Of Minraud. My Head In A Crystal Sphere Of Heavy Fluid. Under Sing Sign Of The Scorpion Goddess. Captive In Minraud. In The Time Booths Of Minraud. In The Tattoo Parlors of Minraud. In The Flesh Works Of Minraud. In The Sex Rooms Of Minraud. In The Flesh Films Of Minraud. March My Captive Head. HER Captive In Minraud Time Streets.

On a level plain in the dry sound of insect wings Bradly crash landed a yellow Cub—Area of painted booths and vacant lots—In a dusty shop window of trusses and plaster feet, a severed head on sand, red ants crawling through nose and lips—

“You crazy or something walk around alone?”

The guide pointed to the head: “Guard—You walk through his eyes and you N.G.” The guide sliced a hand across his genitals: “This bad place, Meester—You ven conmigo—”

He led the way through dusty streets—Metal excrement glowed in corners—Darkness fell in heavy chunks blocking out sections of the city.

“Here,” said the guide—A restaurant cut from limestone, green light seeping through bottles and tanks where crustaceans moved in slow gyrations—The waiter took their order hissing cold dank breath through a disk mouth.

“Good place—cave crabs—Muy bueno for fuck, Johnny—”

The waiter set down a flat limestone shell of squid bodies with crab claws.

“Krishnus,” said the guide.

Still alive, moving faintly in phosphorescent slime—The guide speared one on a bamboo spike and dipped it into yellow sauce—A sweet metal taste burned through stomach intestines and genitals—Bradly ate the krishnus in ravenous gulps—

The guide raised his arm from the elbow, “Muy bueno, Johnny—You see.” The waiter was singing through his disk mouth a bubbling cave song—“Vámanos, Johnny—I show you good place—We smoke fuck sleep O.K. Muy got good one, Johnny—”

Word “Hotel” exploded in genitals—An old junky took Bradly’s money and led them to a blue cubicle—Bradly leaned out a square hole in one wall and saw that the cubicle projected over a void on rusty iron props—The floor moved slightly and creaked under their feet—

“Some time this trap fall—Last fuck for Johnny.”

There was a pallet on the iron floor, a brass tray with hashish pipes, and a stone jar.

“Johnny shirt off”—said the guide unbuttoning Bradly’s shirt with gentle lush rolling fingers—“Johnny pants down”—He dipped a green phosphorescent unguent from the jar and smeared it over Bradly’s body—

“Smear it on—Smear it in—Johnny me—I Johnny.”

He passed the jar to Bradly—“Now you do say like me.”

“Smear it on—Smear it in—Akid me—I Ahkid—”

A long burn took stomach and intestines—Bodies rolled on the pallet leaving trails of flesh—phosphorescent slime sleep—

Woke in stale trade flesh swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning—

Pretend An Interest

Benway “camped” in the Board of Health. He rushed in anywhere brazenly impounding all junk. He was of course well-known but by adroit face rotation managed to piece out the odds, juggling five or six bureaus in the air thin and tenuous drifting-away cobwebs in a cold Spring wind under dead crab eyes of a Doorman in green uniform carrying an ambiguous object composite of club, broom and toilet plunger, trailing a smell of ammonia and scrubwoman flesh. An undersea animal surfaced in his face, round disk mouth of cold grey gristle, purple rasp tongue moving in green saliva: “Soul Cracker,” Benway decided. Species of carnivorous mollusk. Exists on Venus. It might not have bones. Time-switched the tracks through a field of Little White Flowers by the ruined signal tower. Sat down under a tree worn smooth by others sat there before. We remember the days as long procession of The Secret Police always everywhere in different form. In Guayaquil sat on the river bank and saw a big lizard cross the mud flats dotted with melon rind from passing canoes.

Carl’s dugout turned slowly in the brown iridescent lagoon infested with sting ray, fresh water shark, arequipa, candirus, water boa, crocodile, electric eel, aquatic panther and other noxious creatures dreamed up by the lying explorers who infest bars marginal to the area.

“This inaccessible tribe, you dig, lives on phosphorescent metal paste they mine from the area. Transmute to gold straightaway and shit it out in nuggets. It’s the great work.”

Liver-sick gold eyes gold maps gold teeth over the aguardiente cooked on the Primus stove with canella and tea to cut the oil taste leaves silver sores in the mouth and throat.

“That was the year of The Rinderpest when all the tourists died even the Scandinavians and we boys reduced to hawk the farter LWR—Local Wage Rate.”

“No calcium in the area you understand. One blighter lost his entire skeleton and we had to carry him about in a canvas bathtub. A jaguar lapped him up in the end, largely for the salt I think.”

Tin boys reduced to hawk the farter the substance and the strata—You know what that means?—Carried the youth to dead water infested with consent—That was the year of The Clear—Local Wage Rate of Program Empty Body—

“Head Waters of The Baboon-asshole… That’s Hanging Vine country—” (The Hanging Vine flicked around the youth’s neck molding to his skull bones in a spiraling tendril motion snapped his neck, he hangs now ejaculating as Disk Mouths lined with green hairs fasten to his rectum growing tendrils through his body dissolving his bones in liquid gurgles and plops into the green eating jelly.)

“This bad place you write, Meester. You win something like jelly fish.”

They live in translucent jelly and converse in light flashes liquefying bones of the world and eating the jelly—Boy chrysalis rotting in the sun—Lazy undersea eyes on the nod over the rotting meat vegetable sleep—limestone dope out of shale and water…

The youth is hanged fresh and bloody—Tall ceremony involves a scorpion head—Lethal mating operation from The Purified Ones—No calcium in the area—Exists on Venus—It might not have bones—Ray moss of orgasm and death—Limestone God a mile away—Better than shouts: “Empty body!”—Dead land here you understand waiting for some one marginal to the area.

“Deep in Fucking Drum Country” (The naked Initiate is strapped with his back and buttocks fitted to a wooden drum. The Drummer beats out orgasm message until the Initiate’s flesh lights up with blue flame inside and the drum takes life and fucks the boy (puffs of smoke across a clear blue sky…) The Initiate awoke in other flesh the lookout different… And he plopped into squares and patios on “Write me Meester.”)

Puerto Joselito is located at the confluence of two strong brown rivers. The town is built over a vast mud flat crisscrossed by stagnant canals, the buildings on stilts joined by a maze of bridges and catwalks extend up from the mud flats into higher ground surrounded by tree columns and trailing lianas, the whole area presenting the sordid and dilapidated air of a declining frontier post or an abandoned carnival.

“The town of Puerto Joselito, dreary enough in its physical aspect, exudes a suffocating fog of smoldering rancid evil as if the town and inhabitants were slowly sinking in wastes and garbage. I found these people deep in the vilest superstitions and practices.

“Various forms of ritual execution are practiced here. These gooks have an aphrodisiac so powerful as to cause death in a total blood spasm leaving the empty body cold and white as marble. This substance is secreted by the Species Xiucutl Crustanus, a flying scorpion, during its lethal mating season in the course of which all male Xiucutl die maddened by the substance and will fly on any male creature infecting with its deadly sperm. In one ceremony the condemned are painted as gold, silver, copper and marble statues, then inoculated with Xiucutl sperm their convulsions are channeled by invisible control wires into exquisite ballets and freeze into garden fountains and park pedestals. And this is one of many ceremonies revolving on The Ceremonial Calendar kept by The Purified Ones and The Earth Mother.

“The Purified One selects a youth each month and he is walled into a crystal cubicle molded on cervical vertebrae. On the walls of the cubicle, sex programs are cut in cuneiforms and the walls revolve on silent hydraulic pressures. At the end of the month the youth is carried through the streets on a flower float and ceremonially hanged in The Limestone Ball Court, it being thought that all human dross passes from The Purified One to die in The Youth at the moment of orgasm and death. Before the Youth is hanged he must give his public consent, and if he cannot be brought to consent he hangs The Purified One and takes over his functions. The Purified Ones are officially immortal with monthly injections of youth substance.” Quote Green-Baum Early Explorer.

Carl’s outboard vibrated in a haze of rusty oil, bit a jagged piece out of the dugout canoe and sank, in iridescent brown water. Somewhere in the distance the muffled jelly sound of underwater dynamite: (“The Natives are fishing”). Howler monkeys like wind through leaves. The dugout twisted slowly and stopped, touching a ruined jetty. Carl got out with his Nordic rucksack and walked to the square on high ground. He felt a touch on his shoulder light as wind. A man in moldy grey police tunic and red flannel underwear one bare foot swollen and fibrous like old wood covered with white fungus, his eyes mahogany color flickered as The Watcher moved in and out. He gasped out the word “Control” and slipped to the ground. A man in grey hospital pajamas eating handfuls of dirt and trailing green spit crawled over to Carl and pulled at his pants cuff. Another moves forward on brittle legs breaking little puffs of bone meal. His eyes lit up a stern glare went out in smell of burning metal. From all sides they came pawing hissing spitting: “Papeles,” “Documentes,” “Passaport.”

“What is all this scandal?” The Comandante in clean khaki was standing on a platform overlooking the square. Above him was an elaborate multileveled building of bamboo. His shirt was open on a brown chest smooth as old ivory. A little pistol in red leather cover crawled slowly across his skin leaving an iridescent trail of slime.

“You must forgive my staff if they do not quite measure up to your German ideal of spit and polish… Backward… Uninstructed… Each living all alone and cultivating his little virus patch… They have absolutely nothing to do and the solitude…” He tapped his forehead. His face melted and changed under the flickering arc lights.

“But there must be thirty of them about,” said Carl.

The Comandante gave him a sharp look. “They are synchronized of course. They can not see or even infer each other so all think he is only police officer on post. Their lines you sabe never cross and some of them are already…”

“And some of them are already dead. This is awkward since they are not legally responsible. We try to bury them on time even if they retain intact protest reflex. Like Gonzalez The Earth Eater. We bury him three times.” The Comandante held up three fingers sprouting long white tendrils. “Always he eat way out. And now if you will excuse me the soccer scores are coming in from The Capital. One must pretend an interest.”

The Comandante had aged from remote crossroads of Time crawled into a metal locker and shut the door whimpering with fears, emerged in a moldy green jockstrap his body painted I-Red, U-Green. The Assistant flared out of a broom closet high on ammonia with a green goatee and marble face. He removed Carl’s clothes in a series of locks and throws. Carl could feel his body move to the muscle orders. The Assistant put a pail over his head and screamed away into distant hammers.

The Comandante spread jelly over Carl’s naked paralyzed body. The Comandante was molding a woman. Carl could feel his body draining into the woman mold. His genitals dissolving, tits swelling as the Comandante penetrated applying a few touches to face and hair—(Jissom across the mud wall in the dawn sound of barking dogs and running water)—Down there The Comandante going through his incantations around Carl’s empty body. The body rose presenting an erection, masturbates in front of the Comandante. Penis flesh spreads through his body bursting in orgasm explosions granite cocks ejaculate lava under a black cloud boiling with Monster Crustaceans. Cold grey undersea eyes and hands touched Carl’s body. The Comandante flipped him over with sucker hands and fastened his disk mouth to Carl’s asshole. He was lying in a hammock of green hair, penis-flesh hammers bursting his body. Hairs licked his rectum, spiraling tendrils scraping pleasure centers, Carl’s body emptied in orgasm after orgasm, bones lit up green through flesh dissolved into the disk mouth with a fluid plop. He quivers red now in boneless spasms, pink waves through his body at touch of the green hairs.

The Comandante stripped Carl’s body and smeared on green jelly nipples that pulled the flesh up and in. Carl’s genitals wither to dry shit he sweeps clear with a little whisk broom to white flesh and black shiny pubic hairs. The Comandante parts the hairs and makes Incision with a little curved knife. Now he is modeling a face from the picture of his novia in The Capital.

“And now, how you say, ‘the sound effects.’ ” He puts on a record of her voice, Carl’s lips follow and the female substance breathed in the words.

“Oh love of my alma! Oh wind of morning!”

“Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for.” Carl made words in the air without a throat, without a tongue. “I hope there is a farmacia in the area.”

The Comandante looked at him with annoyance: “You could wait in the office please.”

He came out putting on his tunic and strapping on a Luger.

“A Drug Store? Yes I creo… Across the lagoon… I will call The Guide.”

Carl walked through a carnival city along canals where giant pink salamanders and goldfish stirred slowly, penny arcades, tattoo booths, massage parlors, side shows, blue movies, processions, floats, performers, pitchmen to the sky.

Puerto Joselito is located Dead Water. Inactive oil wells and mine shafts, strata of abandoned machinery and gutted boats, garbage of stranded operations and expeditions that died at this point of dead land where sting rays bask in brown water and grey crabs walk the mud flats on brittle stilt legs. The town crops up from the mud flats to the silent temple of High Jungle streams of clear water cut deep clefts in yellow clay and falling orchids endanger The Traveler.

In a green savanna stand two vast penis figures in black stone, legs and arms vestigial, slow blue smoke rings pulsing from the stone heads. A limestone road winds through the pillars and into The City. A rack of rusty iron and concrete set in vacant lots and rubble, dotted with chemical gardens. A smell of junky hat and death about the town deadens and weight these sentences with “disgust you to see it.” Carl walked through footpaths of a vast shanty town. A dry wind blows hot and cold down from Chimborazo a soiled post card in the prop blue sky. Crab men peer out of abandoned quarries and shag heaps some sort of vestigial eye growing cheek bone and a look about them as if they could take root and grow on anybody. Muttering addicts of the orgasm drug, boneless in the sun, gurgling throat gristle, heart pulsing slowly in transparent flesh eaten alive by the crab men.

Carl walked through the penis posts into a town of limestone huts. A ring of priests sat around the posts legs spread, erections pulsing to flicker light from their eyes. As he walked through the electric eyes his lips swelled and his lungs rubbed against the soft inner ribs. He walked over and touched one of the priests and a shock threw him across the road into a sewage ditch. Maize fields surround the town with stone figures of The Young Corn God erect penis spurting maize shoots looks down with young cruelty and innocent lips parted slightly terminal caress in the dropping eyes. The Young Corn God is led out and his robes of corn silk stripped from his body by Lobster priests. A vine rope is attached to the stone penis of the Maize God. The boy’s cock rises iridescent in the morning sun and you can see the other room from there by a mirror on the wardrobe… Well now, in The City a group of them came to this valley grow corn do a bit of hunting fishing in the river.

Carl walked a long row of living penis urns made from men whose penis has absorbed the body with vestigial arms and legs breathing through purple fungoid gills and dropping a slow metal excrement like melted solder forms a solid plaque under the urns stand about three feet high on rusty iron shelves wire mesh cubicles joined by catwalks and ladders a vast warehouse of living penis urns slowly transmuting to smooth red terra cotta. Others secrete from the head crystal pearls of lubricant that forms a shell of solid crystal over the red penis flesh.

A blast of golden horns: The Druid Priest emerges from the Sacred Grove, rotting bodies hang about him like Spanish moss. His eyes blue and cold as liquid air expand and contract eating light.

The Boy Sacrifice is chosen by erection acclaim. Universal Erection feeling for him until all pricks point to “Yes, Boy” feels the “Yes” run through him and melt his bones to “Yes” stripped naked in the Sacred Grove shivering and twitching under the Hanging Tree green disk mouths sucking his last bone meal. He goes to The Tree naked on flower floats through the obsidian streets red stone buildings and copper pagodas of The Fish City stopping in Turkish Baths and Sex Rooms to make blue movies with Youth. The entire city is in heat during this ceremony, faces swollen with tumescent purple penis flesh. Lightning fucks flash on any street corner leave a smell of burning metal blue sparks up and down the spine. A vast bath-town of red clay cubicles over twisting geological orgasm with the Green Crab Boys disk mouth’s slow rasping tongue on spine centers twisting in the warm black ooze.

Noteworthy is The Glazing Ceremony when certain of the living urns are covered with terra cotta and baked in red brick ovens by the women who pull the soft red meat out with their penis forks and decorate house and garden with the empty urns. The Urnings for The Glazing Ceremony are chosen each day by locker number from the public urn and numbers read out over the soft speaker inside the head. Helpless Urns listening to the number call charge our soft terror-eating substance, our Rich Substance.

Now it is possible to beat the number before call by Fixing The Urn or after call by The Retroactive Fix which few are competent to practice. There is also a Ceremonial Massage in which the penis flesh is rubbed in orgasm after orgasm until Death in Centipede occurs. Death in Centipede is the severest sentence of The Insect Court and of course all urnings are awaiting sentence for various male crimes. Pues, every year a few experienced urnings beat the house and make Crystal Grade. When the crystal cover reaches a certain thickness the urning is exempt from ceremonial roll call and becomes immortal with nothing to do but slowly accrete a thicker cover in The Crystal Hall of Fame.

Few beat the house. A vast limestone bat. High mountain valley cut off by severest sentence of symbiotic cannibalism. So the game with one another.

“I dunno me. Only work here. Technical Sergeant.”

“Throw it into wind Jack.”

A pimp leans in through the Country Club window. “Visit The House of David boys and watch the girls eat shit. Makes a man feel good all over. Just tell the madam a personal friend of mine.” He drops a cuneiform cylinder into the boy’s hip pocket feeling his ass with lost tongue of The Penis Urn People in a high mountain valley of symbiotic cannibalism. The Natives are blond and blue-eyed sex in occupation. It is unlawful to have orgasm alone and the inhabitants live in a hive of sex rooms and flickering blue movie cubicles. You can spot one on the cubicle skyline miles away. We all live in the blue image forever. The cubicles fade out in underground steam baths where lurk The Thurlings, malicious boys’ spirits fugitive from the blue movie who mislead into underground rivers. (The Traveler is eaten by aquatic centipedes and carnivorous underwater vines.)

Orgasm death spurts over the flower floats—Limestone God a mile away—Descent into penis flesh cut off by a group of them came to this game under the Hanging Tree—Insect legs under red Arctic night—He wore my clothes and terror—

The boy ejaculates blood over the flower floats. Slow vine rope drops him in a phallic fountain. Wire mesh cubicles against the soft inner ribs. Vast warehouse of penis and the shock threw him ten feet to smooth dirt and flak. God with erect penis spurting crystal young cruelty and foe solid. Dazzling terminal caress in silent corridors of Corn God. Erection feeling for descent in the morning sun feels the “Yes” from there by a mirror on you stripped naked. In The City a group of them came to this last bone meal under the Hanging Tree.

“Pretty familiar.”

The Priests came through the Limestone Gates playing green flutes: translucent lobster men with wild blue eyes and shells of flexible copper. A soundless vibration in the spine touched center of erection and the natives moved toward the flute notes on a stiffening blood tube for The Centipede Rites. A stone penis body straddles the opening to The Cave Room of steam baths and sex cubicles and The Green Cab boys who go all the way on any line.

The Natives insert a grill of silver wires deep into the sinus where a crystal slowly forms. They strum the wires with insect hairs growing through flesh weaving cold cocaine sex frequencies.

From The Living God Cock flows a stream of lubricant into a limestone trough green with algae. The Priests arrange the initiates into long dog-fuck lines molding them together with green jelly from The Lubricant Tanks. Now the centipede skin is strapped on each body a segment and The Centipede whips and cracks in electric spasms of pleasure throwing off segments kicking spasmodically uncontrolled diarrhea spurting orgasm after orgasm synchronized with the flicker lights. Carl is taken by the centipede legs and pulled into flesh jelly dissolving bones—Thick black hair sprouts through his tumescent flesh—He falls through a maze of penny arcades and dirty pictures, locker rooms, barracks, and prison flesh empty with the colorless smell of death—

Cold metal excrement on all the walls and benches, silver sky raining the metal word fallout—Sex sweat like iron in the mouth. Scores are coming in. Pretend an interest.

In a puppet booth The Manipulator takes pictures of bored insolent catatonics with eight-hour erections reading comics and chewing gum. The Impresario is a bony Nordic with green fuzz on his chest and legs. “I get mine later with the pictures. I can’t touch the performers. Wall of glass you know show you something interesting.”

He pulls aside curtain: Schoolboy room with a banner and pin-ups. On the bed naked boy puppet reading comics and chewing gum with a hypo.

Ghost your German. Spit penny arcades, tattoo booths, Nordic processions, human performers, trapeze artists. Whores of all sexes importune from scenic railways and ferris wheels where they rent cubicles, push up manhole covers in a puff of steam, pull at passing pant cuffs, careen out of The Tunnel Of Love waving condoms of jissom. Old blind queens with dirty peep shows built into their eye sockets disguise themselves as penny arcades and feel for a young boy’s throbbing cock with cold metal hands, sniff pensively at bicycle seats in Afghan Hound drag, Puerto Joselito is located through legs. Ghost slime sitting naked on tattoo booths, brown virus flesh of curse. Suffocating town, this. Ways to bury Explorer.

Old junky street-cleaners push little red wagons sweeping up condoms and empty H caps, KY tubes, broken trusses and sex devices, kif garbage and confetti, moldy jockstraps and bloody Kotex, shit-stained color comics, dead kitten and afterbirths, Jenshe babies of Berdache and Junkie.

Everywhere the soft insidious voice of The Pitchman delayed action language lesson muttering under all your pillows “Shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special.”

Last Hints

Carl descended a spiral iron stairwell into a labyrinth of lockers, tier on tier of wire mesh and steel cubicles joined by catwalks and ladders and moving cable cars as far as he could see, tiers shifting interpenetrating swinging beams of construction, blue flare of torches on the intent young faces. Locker room smell of moldy jockstraps, chlorine and burning metal, escalators and moving floors start stop change course, synchronize with balconies and perilous platforms eaten with rust. Ferris wheels silently penetrate the structure, roller coasters catapult through to the clear sky—a young workman walks the steel beams with the sun in his hair out of sight in a maze of catwalks and platforms where coffee fires smoke in rusty barrels and the workers blow on their black cotton gloves in the clear cold morning through to the sky beams with sun in his hair the workers blow on their cold morning, dropped down into the clicking turnstiles. Buzzers, lights and stuttering torches smell of ozone. Breakage is constant. Whole tiers shift and crash in a yellow cloud of rust, spill boys masturbating on careening toilets, iron urinals trailing a wake of indecent exposure, old men in rocking chairs screaming anti-fluoride slogans, a Southern Senator sticks his fat frog face out of the outhouse and brays with inflexible authority: “And Ah advocates the extreme penalty in the worst form there is for anyone convicted of trafficking in, transporting, selling or caught in using the narcotic substance known as nutmeg… I wanna say further that Ahm a true friend of the Nigra and understand all his simple wants. Why, I got a good Darkie in here now wiping my ass.”

Wreckage and broken bodies litter the girders, slowly collected by old junkies pushing little red wagons patient and calm with gentle larcenous old woman fingers. Gathering blue torch flares light the calm intent young worker faces.

Carl descended a spiral iron smell of ozone. Breakage is of lockers tier on tier crash in yellow cloud as far as he could see of indecent exposure on toilets. Swinging beams construct the intent young faces.

Locker room toilet on five levels seen from the ferris wheel. Flash of white legs, shiny pubic hairs and lean brown arms, boys masturbating with soap under rusty showers form a serpent line beating on the lockers, vibrates through all the tiers and cubicles unguarded platforms and dead-end ladders dangling in space, workers straddling beams beat out runic tunes with shiny ball peen hammers. The universe shakes with metallic adolescent lust. The line disappears through a green door slide down to the Subterranean Baths twisting through torch flares the melodious boy-cries drift out of ventilators in all the locker rooms, barracks, schools and prisons of the world. “Joselito, Paco, Enrique.”

Jacking off he is whiff stateroom that is always kept locked—And word dust dirtied his body falling through the space between worlds—

The third kif pipe he went through the urinal sick and dizzy. He just down from the country. He just down from The Green Place by The Dog’s Mirror. Sometimes came to a place by the dogs… Jungle sounds and smells drift from his coat lapels. A lovely Sub that boy.

Ghosts of Panama clung to our bodies—“You come with me, Meester?”—On the boy’s breath a flesh—His body slid from my hands in soap bubbles—We twisted slowly to the yellow sands, traced fossils of orgasm—

“You win something like jelly fish, Meester.”

Under a ceiling fan, naked and sullen, stranger color through his eyes the lookout different—Fading Panama photos swept out by an old junky coughing spitting in the sick dawn—

(Phosphorescent metal excrement of the city—Brain eating birds patrol the iron streets.)

Hospital smell of dawn powder—Dead rainbow post cards swept out by an old junky in backward countries.

“I don’t know if you got my last hints as we shifted commissions, passing where the awning flaps from The Café de France—Hurry up—Perhaps Carl still has his magic lantern—Dark overtakes someone walking—I don’t know exactly where you made this dream—Sending letter to a coffin is like posting it in last terrace of the garden—I would never have believed realms and frontiers of light exist—I’m so badly informed and totally green troops—B.B., hurry up please—”

(Stopped suddenly to show me a hideous leather body)—“I’m almost without medicine.”

It was still good bye then against the window outside 1920 movie, flesh tracks broken—Sitting at a long table where the doctor couldn’t reach and I said: “He has your voice and end of the line—Fading breath on bed showing symptoms of suffocation—I have tuned them out—How many plots have been forestalled before they could take shape in boy haunted by the iron claws?—Meanwhile a tape recorder cuts old newspapers.” Panama clung to our bodies naked under the ceiling fan—Excrement at the far end of forgotten streets—Hospital smell on the dawn wind—

(Peeled his phosphorescent metal knees, brain broiled in carrion hunger.)

On the sea wall under fading Panama photo casual ghost of adolescent T-shirt traced fossil-like jelly fish—

“On the sea wall if you got my last hints over the tide flats—I don’t know exactly where—woke up in other flesh—shirt with Chinese characters—breeze from the Café de France—lantern burning insect wings—I’m almost without medicine—far away—storms—crackling sounds—Nothing here now but the circling albatross—Dead post card waiting a place forgotten—”

On the sea wall met a boy under the circling albatross—Peeled his red and white T-shirt to brown flesh and grey under like ash and passed a joint back and forth as we dropped each other’s pants and he looked down face like Mayan limestone in the kerosene lamp sputter of burning insect wings over the tide flats—Woke up in other flesh the lookout different—Hospital smell of backward countries—

Where The Awning Flaps

“So we got our rocks off permutating through each other’s facilities on the Blue Route and after a little practice we could do it without the projector and perform any kinda awful sex act on any street corner behind The Blue Grass stirring the passing rectums and pubic hairs like dry leaves falling in the pissoir: “J’aime ces types vicieux qu’ici montrent la bite—”

Drinking from his eyes The Idiot Green boys plaintive as wind leaves erect wooden phallus on the graves of dying Lemur Peoples.

“Fluck flick take any place. Johnny you-me-neon-asshole-amigos-now.”

“You only get a hard-on with my permission.”

“Who you now Meester? Flick fluck take Johnny over. Me Screw Johnny up same asshole? You me make flick-fluck-one-piece?”

Just hula hoop through each other to Idiot Mambo. Every citizen of the area has a Blue-Print like some are Electricals and some are Vegetable Walking Carbonics and so on, it’s very technical. Boy Jissom tracks through rectal mucus and Johnny.

“One track out so: Panels of Shadow.”

“Me finish Johnny night.”

So we get our rectums in transparent facilities Blue Route Process together. Slow Night to examine me. Every dawn smell fingers the passing rectum. Finger on all cocks: “I-you-me in The Pissoir of Present Time.” “Idiot fuck you-me-Johnny.” “Flick fluck Idiot Asshole Buddies like a tree frog clinging in Permission. Who are you Green Hands? Fungoid Purple?”

“Johnny over. Me screw. Flick fluck One Piece.”

Warm spermy smell to idiot Mambo. Silence belches smell of ozone and Rectal Flight: “Here goes Examiner other rectums naked in Panama. Citizen of the area.”

On the sea wall met the guide under The Circling Albatross. Peeled his red and white striped T-shirt to brown flesh and grey under like ash and we passed a joint back and forth as we dropped each other’s pants and he looked down face like Mayan Limestone in the kerosene lamp sputter of burning insect wings.

“I screw Johnny up ass.” He jumped with his knees on the bed and slapped his thighs, cock-shadow pulsing on the blue paint wall. “Así como peeeeerrross.” Ass hairs spread over the tide flats. Woke up in other flesh, the lookout different, one boy naked in Panama dawn wind.

Casual adolescent of urinals and evening flesh gone when I woke up—Age flakes fall through the pissoir—Ran into my old friend Jones—So badly off—Forgotten coughing in 1920 movie—Vaudeville voices hustle on bed service—I nearly suffocated trying on the boy’s breath—That’s Panama—Brain-eating birds patrol the low frequency brain waves—Nitrous flesh swept out by your voice and end of receiving set—Sad hand tuned out the stale urine of Panama.

“I am dying, Meester?—forgotten coughing in 1920 street?”

Genital pawn ticket peeled his stale underwear, shirt flapping whiffs of young hard-on—Brief boy on screen laughing my skivvies all the way down—Whispers of dark street in Puerto Assis—Meester smiles through the village wastrel—Orgasm siphoned back telegram: “Johnny pants down.” (That stale summer dawn smell in the garage —vines twisting through steel—bare feet in dog’s excrement—)

Panama clung to our bodies from Las Palmas to David on camphor sweet smell of cooking paregoric—Burned down the republic—The druggist no glot clom Fliday—Panama mirrors of 1910 under seal in any drugstore—He threw in the towel morning light on cold coffee stale breakfast table—little cat smile—pain and death smell of his sickness in the room with me—three souvenir shots of Panama City—Old friend came and stayed all day face eaten by “I need more”—I have noticed this in the New World—

“You come with me, Meester?”

And Joselito moved in at Las Playas during the essentials—Stuck in this place—iridescent lagoons, swamp delta, bubbles of coal gas still be saying “A ver, Luckees!” a hundred years from now—A rotting teak-wood balcony propped up Ecuador.

“Die Flowers and Jungle bouncing they can’t city?”

On the sea wall two of them stood together waving—Age flakes coming down hard here—Hurry up—Another hollow ticket—Don’t know if you got my last hints trying to break out of this numb dizziness with Chinese characters—I was saying over and over “shifted commissions where the awning flaps” in your voice—end of the line—Silence out there beyond the gate—casual adolescent shirt flapping in the evening wind—

“Old photographer trick wait for Johnny—Here goes Mexican cemetery.”

On the sea wall met a boy with red and white striped T-shirt—(P.G. town in the purple twilight)—The boy peeled off his stale underwear scraping erection—warm rain on the iron roof—Under the ceiling fan stood naked on bed service—Bodies touched electric film—Contact sparks tingled—Fan whiffs of young hard-on washing adolescent T-shirt—The blood smells drowned voices and end of the line—That’s Panama—sad movie drifting in islands of rubbish, black lagoons and fish people waiting a place forgotten—fossil honky-tonk swept out by a ceiling fan—Old photographer trick tuned them out.

“I am dying, Meester?”

Flashes in front of my eyes naked and sullen—rotten dawn wind in sleep—death rot on Panama photo where the awning flaps.

Sad servant stood on the sea wall in sepia clouds of Panama.

“Boy I was washed face in Panama maybe undressed there. money. good bye.”

Johnny Yen’s last adiós out of focus.

1920 Movies

Film Union sub spirit couldn’t find the cobbled road content with an occasional Mexican in the afternoon a body sadness to say good bye smell of blood and excrement with the wind sad distant voices infer his absence as wind and dust in empty streets of Mexico.

“I am the Director. You have known me for a long time. Mister, leave cigarette money.”

Iron cell wall painted flaking rust—Grifa smoke through the high grate window of blue night—Two prisoners sit on lower iron shelf bunk smoking. One is American the other Mexican—The Cell vibrates with silent blue motion of prison and all detention in time.

“Johnny I think you little bit puto queer.”

“Sí.” Johnny held up thumb and finger an inch apart.

“I screw Johnny up ass? Bueno Johnny?” His fingers flicked Johnny’s shirt. They stood up. José hung his shirt on a nail, Johnny passed shirt and José hung one shirt over the other. “Ven acá.” He caught Johnny’s belt-end with one hand and flipped the belt-tongue out and opened fly buttons with pickpocket fingers.

“Johnny pants down. Ya duro. Johnny hard. I think like mucho be screwed.”

“Claro.”

“Fuck Johnny, Johnny come too?”

José moved into the bunk on knees: “Like this Johnny,” he slapped his thighs. “Como perros.”

He opened a tin of vaseline as the other moved into place and shoved a slow twisting finger up Johnny’s ass.

“Johnny like?”

“Mucho.”

“Johnny flip now.”

He held Johnny’s thighs and moved his cock in slow.

“Breathe in deep Johnny.”

His cock slid in as Johnny breathed in. They froze there breathing: “Bueno, Johnny?”

“Bueno.”

“Vámanos.” Shadow bodies twisted on the blue wall. “Johnny sure start now.”

“You is coming Johnny?”

“Siiiiiii.”

“Here goes Johnny.” Spurts cross the surplus blanket smell of iron prison flesh and clogged toilets. Pickpocket finger on his balls squeezing the spurts, cock throbbing against his spine, he squeezed through a maze of penny arcades and dirty pictures in the blue Mexican night. The two bodies fell languidly apart bare feet on the Army blanket. Grifa smoke blown down over black shiny pubic hairs copper and freckle flesh. Paco’s cock came up in smoke.

“Otra vez Johnny?” He put his hands behind Johnny’s knees.

“Johnny hear knees now.”

Mexico thighs: “Como perros I fuck you.”

Walls painted blue smoke through the grate. Finger up Johnny’s ass moved two prisoners. He held Johnny’s thighs and vibrated silent deep Johnny. His cock slid: “Johnny, I in.”

“Let’s go,” twisted the iron frame. “Porqué no?”

“Bueno, Johnny.” Candle shadow bodies. “Johnny sure desnudate por completo… Johnny?”

“Siiii?”

“Here goes completo.” Plus blankets smell of iron and shirt on nail. Mexican pickpocket one shirt over the other. Spurts maze of dirty pictures. He pushed toe blue Mexican night Johnny pants down.

Part bare feet on the blanket. Black shiny pubic hairs.

“I think like mucho be José—Paco—Enrique.”

“Como perros Johnny like? Breathe José in there deep Johnny.”

His cock iron frame for what not breathing: “Let’s go bunk.”

“You is coming plus Paco.” Cross blanket smell of Johnny flicked one shirt. Go completo plus Kiki. He flipped the Tongue Street: “You is coming for Johnny.”

One shirt spilling head. The bodies feel cock flip out and up.

“Como eso I fuck you.” One shirt spilling Johnny. Finger on his balls. Cock flipped out and up. Black shiny pubic head. The bodies smoke.

“Fuck on knees. Lie down blanket. Como eso through the iron.” He feel tongue on knees. Smoke fuck on knees.

“Mucho be Angelo como eso.”

“Deep Johnny.”

Shoved white knees. Vaseline finger vibrate thighs. “Flip now.”

“Paco? slow.”

“Sí, the ass Johnny? I screw Johnny up ass?”

Spurts prison flesh to Mexican night: “Vibrate, Johnny.”

“I screw Johnny.”

“Let’s go.”

“Johnny knees down. Boca abajo. You is coming como eso?”

“Hard bunk Johnny. Me up in Freckles. Como perros like on knees.”

“I screw Johnny Mexican. Smoke fuck Johnny. Como eso Johnny fuck on knees.”

He feel flipped the knees. “You is coming otra vez Johnny?” He flipped Johnny. Vaseline finger see the ass. One shirt spilling Johnny flicked out and up.

“One mucho Johnny flip now.”

“Breathe José into hilt ass Johnny.”

“Start now.”

“You is coming?”

Spurts cross calzoncillos todo. José hung his prison flesh. Finger on his balls feel “come here.” He caught Johnny belt spine. He feel flipped the belt-tongue cross pickpocket fingers. The bodies fell languidly. Cock flipped out and up. Grifa smoke blown down line. “A ver like this.” He clipped into the bunk on knees like: “Como perros come Johnny.”

José knees. Vaseline finger twisting Johnny’s thighs.

“Flip now. José slow deep Johnny.” His cock slid ass Johnny.

“Bueno Johnny?”

Breathing: “Let’s go bunk. Johnny candle shadow now.”

“You is coming por completo.”

“Siiii,” spurts spilling cross pickpocket toe Mexican night cock flipped out and up. Part bare feet.

“Fuck on knees like” (Moving two prisoners in the blue? Is American bunk?)

“Mucho Johnny vibrate blue pressure. Breathe José in there. Sí iron frame.”

“Porqué no?”

“Johnny here go completo plus Kiki.” Hung his prison flesh on nail.

Johnny toilet finger on his balls feel other spurts cock. He fell flipped the pictures. The bodies fell street.

“Claro you like mucho be Kiki. A ver. Como eso.” Just hula hoop through each other to idiot Mambo . . all idiot Mambo spattered to control mechanization.

“Salt Chunk Mary” had all the “nos” and none of them ever meant “yes.” She named a price heavy and cold as a cop’s blackjack on a winter night and that was it. She didn’t name another. Mary didn’t like talk and she didn’t like talkers. She received and did business in the kitchen. And she kept it in a sugar bowl. Nobody thought about that. Her cold grey eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay John Citizen come up with a load of 00 into your soft and tenders or Johnny Law just happens by. She sat there and heard. When you spread the gear out on her kitchen table she already knows where you sloped it. She looks at the gear and a price falls out heavy and cold and her mouth closes and stays shut. If she doesn’t want to do business she just wraps the gear up and shoves it back across the table and that is that. Mary keeps a blue coffee pot and a pot of salt pork and beans always on the wood stove. When you fall in she gets up without a word and puts a mug of coffee and plate of salt chunk in front of you. You eat and then you talk business. Or maybe you take a room for a week to cool off. room 18 on the top floor I was sitting in the top room rose wall paper smoky sunset across the river. I was new in the game and like all young thieves thought I had a license to steal. It didn’t last. Sitting there waiting on the Japanese girl works in the Chink laundry a soft knock and I open the door naked with a hard-on it was the top floor all the way up you understand nobody on that landing. “Ooooh” she says feeling it up to my oysters a drop of lubricant squeezed out and took the smoky sunset on rose wall paper I’d been sitting there naked thinking about what we were going to do in the rocking chair rocks off down the line she could get out of her dry goods faster than a junky can fix when his blood is right so we rocked away into the sunset across the river just before blast off that old knock on the door and I shoot this fear load like I never feel it wind up is her young brother at the door in his cop suit been watching through the key hole and learn about the birds and the bees some bee I was in those days good looking kid had all my teeth and she knew all the sex currents goose for pimple always made her entrance when your nuts are tight and aching a red haired boy smoky rose sunset one bare knee rubbing greasy pink wall paper he was naked with a hard-on waiting on the Mexican girl from Marty’s a pearl of lubricant squeezed slowly out and glittered on the tip of his cock. There was a soft knock at the door. He got up off the crumpled bed and opened the door. The girl’s brother stood there smiling. The red haired boy made a slight choking sound as blood rushed to his face pounded and sang in his ears. The young face there on the landing turned black around the edges. The red haired boy sagged against the door jamb. He came to on the bed the Mexican kid standing over him.

“All right now? Sis can’t come.”

The Mexican kid unbuttoned his shirt. He kicked off his sandals dropped his pants and shorts grinning and his cock flipped out half up. The Mexican kid brought his finger up in three jerks and his cock came up with it nuts tight pubic hairs glistening black he sat down on the bed.

“Vaseline?”

The red haired boy pointed to the night table. He was lying on the bed breathing deeply his knees up. The Mexican kid took a jar of vaseline out of a drawer. He kneeled on the bed and put his hands behind the freckled knees and shoved the boy’s knees up to his trembling red ears. He rubbed vaseline on the pink rectum with a slow circular pull. The red haired boy gasped and his rectum spread open. The Mexican kid slid his cock in. The two boys locked together breathing in each other’s lungs. After the girl left I walk down to Marty’s where I meet this Johnson has a disgruntled former chauffeur map indicates where a diamond necklace waits for me wall safe behind the Blue Period. Or maybe you Picasso on Rembrandt and cool off like I was sitting in a Turner sunset on the Japanese girl doing my simple artisan job hot and heavy. Mary she kept the guide ready her eyes heavy and cold as a cop’s come around with the old birds and bees business. Nobody thought about that cold outside agent call. Recall John Citizen came up on her. Johnny Law just happens by magic shop in Westbourne Grove. Smell these conditions of ash? I twig that old knack. Klinker is dead. Blackout fell on these foreign suburbs here.

“Be careful of the old man. kinda special deputy carries a gun in the car.”

Music fading in the East St. Louis night broken junk of exploded star sad servant of the inland side shirt flapping in a wind across the golf course a black silver sky of broken film precarious streets of yesterday back from shadows the boy solid now I could touch almost you know both of us use the copper luster basin in the blue attic room now Johnny’s back. Who else put a slow cold hand on your shoulder shirt flapping shadows on a wall long ago fading streets a distant sky?

They walked through a city of black and white movies fading streets of thousand-run smoke faces. Figures of the world slow down to catatonic limestone.

City blocks speed up out in photo flash. Hotel lobbies 1920 Time fill with slow grey film fallout and funeral urns of Hollywood. Never learn? The Guide clicked him through a silent turnstile into a cubicle of blue glass and mirrors so that any panel of the room was at alternate intervals synchronized with the client’s sex-pulse mirror or wall of glass into the next cell on all sides and the arrangement was an elaborate permutation and very technical… So Johnny The Guide said: “The first clause in our Blue Contract is known as The Examination to which both parties must submit… We call it The Probing Period, now isn’t that cute?”

The Guide put on helmet of photo goggles and antennae of orange neon flickering, smelling bat wings: “Johnny pants down. Johnny cock hard.” He brought his arm up from the elbow swimming in for close-ups of Johnny’s erection: take slow and take fast under flickering vowel colors: I Red / U Green / E White / O Blue / A Black / “Bend over Johnny.” The Examiner floats up from the floor, swims down through heavy water from the ceiling, shoots up from toilet bowl, English baths, underwater takes of genitals and pubic hairs in warm spermy water. The Goggles lick over his body phosphorescent moths, through rectal hairs orange halos flicker around his penis. In his sleep, naked Panama nights, the camera pulsing in blue silence and ozone smells, sometimes the cubicle open out on all sides into purple space. X-ray photos of viscera and fecal movements, his body a transparent blue fish.

“So that’s The Examination we call it, sees all your processes. You can’t deceive us in any way at all and now you got the right to examine me.”

Lee put on the photo goggles melt in head and saw the Guide now blond with brown eyes slender and tilted forward. He moved in for a close-up of the boy’s flank and took his shirt off followed the pants down, circled the pubic hair forest in slow autogyros, zeroed in for the first stirrings of tumescence, swooping from the stiffening blood tube to the boy’s face, sucking eyes with neon proboscis, licking testicles and rectum. The goggles and antennae fade in smoke and slow street-eyes swim up from grey dust and funeral urns. And in his sleep naked blue movies slow motion. Pulsing blue silence photos genitals and pubic hairs in rectal mucus and carbolic soap. Alternate Mirror and Screen Guide put on goggles walked through grey-filled shadows that melted in his head. In Time Focus The Natives. Like flickering bat wings over faded thousand-run faces, hearing, smelling through them like: “Johnny cock hard.” Slow down to statues with catatonic erection slow falling through colors Red Green Black. A Hot Spread: cheeks close-up. And felt over Johnny’s body the slow float down from Hollywood. Came to the hot Panama nights. They clicked in through a squat toilet with walls of blue glass and underwater shots of warm soapy spermy water smell. So felt the boy neon fingers on sex spots breathing through sponge rock penis-flesh and brown intestine jungles lined with flesh-eating vines and frantic parasites of the area…

Naked in the Panama night, rectal mucus and carbolic soap. A Blue Screen Guide put on goggles. Pale panels of shadow melted his head on all sides into blue silent wings over The Clock of Fecal Movement smelling through them like transparent.

“A Hot Spread Examination we call it. Johnny’s body can’t deceive us in any way. Came to the hot Panama nights to examine me.”

Clicked into his head of blue glass. Close-up neon finger over the scar-impressions learning The Instrument Panels, recording on the transparent flesh of Present Time. It is happening right now. Slow 1920 finger rubbing vaseline on the cobra lamps, flickering movie shadows into the blue void. Pulling Finger rolls a cuneiform cylinder. Lens eye drank the boy’s jissom in yellow light.

“Now Meester we flick fluck i me you cut.” The two film tracks ran through Impression Screen. One track flash on other cut out in dark until cut back: “Me finish Johnny’s shit… Clom through Johnny…” Hear rectums merging in flicks and orgasm of mutual processes. And pulsed in and out of each other’s body on slow gills of sleep in the naked Panama nights and bent over the washstand in East St. Louis junk-sick dawn. Smell of carbolic soap and rectal mucus and train whistle wake of blue silence and piss through my cock “i-you-me-fuck-up-ass-all-same-time-four-eyes.” Phantom cleavage crude and rampant. Every Citizen can now grow Sex Forms in his bidet: in the night of Talara felt his hard-on against my khaki pants as we shifted slots and i browned a strange Danish dog under The Nudes of Sweden. Warm spermy smell, room of blue glass strung together on light-lines of jissom and shit, shared meals and belches, the shifting of testes and contractions of rectum, flick-fluck back and forth.

“Here goes Johnny. We fluck now first run”: in Blue Silence saw the two one track out: Blue. Each meet image coming round the other erection-fucked-self and came other shit both.

“We flick fluck i-you-film-tracks through rectal mucus and carbolic soap. Cut out pale panels of shadow.” Blue silent bat wings over rectums blending in transparent erection. A hot shit and all process together.

“Johnny’s body can’t deceive us in other body. Slow night to examine me.” Sick dawn smell of carbolic finger. Close-up finger on all cocks.

“I-you-me fuck up neon blind fingers phantom cleavage of boy impressions Witch Board of Present Time.”

The Idiot Green Boys leaped on Johnny like tree frogs clinging to his chest with sucker paws fungoid gills and red mushroom penis pulsing to the sex waves from Johnny eyes. Warm spermy smell, lamps and flicker movies strung together on a million fingers shared meals and belches and lens-eye drank jissom. Contract of Rectum Flight: “Here goes Johnny. One flight out.” Screen other rectum naked in Panama night.

Ghost of Panama clung to our throats, coughing and spitting on separate spasm, phosphorescent breath fades in fractured air—Sick flesh strung together on a million fingers shared meals and belches—Nothing here now but circling word dust—dead post card falling through space between worlds—This road in this sharp smell of carrion—

We twisted slowly to black lagoons, flower floats and gondolas—Tentative crystal city iridescent in the dawn wind—(Adolescents ejaculate over the tide flats)

In the blue windy morning masturbating a soiled idiot body of cold scar tissue—Catatonic limestone hands folded over his yen—A friend of any boy structure cut by a species of mollusk—Street boys of the green gathered—Slow bronze smiles from a land of grass without memory—Cool casual little ghosts of adolescent spasm—Metal excrement and crystal glooms of the fish city—Under a purple twilight our clothes shredded mummy linen on obsidian floors—Panama clung to our bodies—

“You come with me, Meester?”

Northern lights flicker from his “Yes”—The rope is adjusted—Writhing in wind black hair bursts through his flesh—Great canines tear into his gums with exquisite toothache pleasure—The green cab boys go all the way on any line.

Green Boys—Idiot Irresponsibles—rolling in warm delta ooze fuck in color flashes through green jelly flesh that quivers together merging and drawing back in a temple dance of colors. “Hot licks us all the way we are all one clear green substance like flexible amber changing color and consistency to accommodate any occasion.”

“This bad place Meester. You crazy or something walk around alone. Where you go?” The Guide: impersonal screen eyes swept by color winds light up green red white blue. Antennae ears of flexible metal cartilage crackle blue spark messages leaving smell of ozone in the shiny black pubic hairs that grow on The Guide’s pink skull. Blood and nerves hard meat cleaver his whole body would scorn to carry a weapon. And Being inside was him and more. Face cut by image-flak impersonal young pilot eyes riding light rays pulsing through his head.

“Fluck Johnny? Up ass?” He guided Carl with electric tingles in spine and sex hairs through clicking gates and turnstiles, escalators and cable cars in synchronized motion. Impersonal young pilot eyes riding The Blue Silence permutated Carl into an iron cubicle with painted blue walls pallet on the floor brass tea tray kif pipes and jars of phosphorescent green sex paste. Wall over the pallet two-way mirrors opposite wall of glass opening on the next cubicle and so on, sex acts into the blue distance. The Guide pointed to the mirror: “We fuck good Johnny. On air now.”

“Johnny pants down”—he was smearing the sex paste on “Johnny’s” ass hot licking the white nerves and pearly genitals—Carl’s lips and tongue swelled with blood and his face went phosphorescent penis purple—Slow penetrating incandescent flesh tubes siphoned his body into a pulsing sphere of blue jelly floated over skeletons locked in limestone—The cubicles shifted—Carl was siphoned back through the guide and landed with a fluid plop as the cubicles permutated fucking shadows through ceilings of legs and sex hairs, black spirals of phantom assholes lifting and twisting like a Panhandle cyclone.

UNIT I: WHITE: “You wanta screw me?” “I wanta screw you.” Two marble white youths with identical erections stand on a white tile bathroom floor. The young faces sharp flash bulb of urgency fade-out stale empty of hunger. (Crystal flute music. The boys step from Attic frieze on Greek urns.)

Tarnished pub mirrors of the gentle ghost-people, grey faded clubs under yellowing tusks of the beast killed by improbable hyphenated names. In bath cubicles and locker rooms shut for the Summer white light bent over a chair—

UNIT II: BLACK: “Bend over.” As the white youth bends over turns brown then black. The Other Half drums on his back. The youths fade in obsidian mirror, smell of opium and copal.

UNIT III: GREEN: “Loosen you up a bit.” Black finger dips into green jelly. The finger turns green in rusty limestone with a slow circular pull. Green Boy of flexible green amber, bright lizards and beetles incrusted here and there, twists sighs out in jungle sound of frogs and bird-calls and howler monkeys like wind in the trees, slow movement of rivers and forests cross The Drenched Lands. Vines twist through the boys smell of mud flats where sting rays bask in shallow canals brown with excrement sewage delta and coal gas swamps under orange gas flares and grey metal fallout.

UNIT IV: RED: “Breathe in Johnny. Here goes.” Red youths fuck bent over a brass bed in Mexico. Feel through a maze of penny arcades and dirty pictures to the blue Mexican night. Penis of different size, shape swell in and out flicker faces and bodies burning flesh sparks from camp fires and red fuck lights in blue cubicles.

UNIT V: BLUE: SILENCE. The two bodies merge in a blue sphere. Vapor trails cross a blue sky. Out on a Blue Wave High Fi cool and blue as liquid air in our slate-blue houses wrapped in orange flesh-robes that grow on us.

UNIT I: WHITE: The boys slow down to phallic statues. They fade out in old photos and 1920 movies. Hairs rub the exquisite toothache pleasure: “I wanta screw you.” Flash bulb of urgency fade: “Loosen you up a bit.” The finger turns Green out in stale streets of cry.

UNIT III: GREEN: The Green Boy of green flute music. Worn amber with lizards incrusted and finger rusty sighs out in the spectral smell of birdcalls and howler monkeys like gentle ghost people. Slow movement of brown rivers. The boys in speed-up and barracks toilet smell of the mud flats and the white youths fuck brown with excrement under a static red sky. Smell of subway dawns and turnstile. Tarnished pub mirrors jungle sound of frogs. Army of Trees killed by the improbable hyphenated name. Tendril movement in white light.

UNIT V: BLUE: “The Initiate awoke in other flesh the lookout different.” Cool blue casual youth check Board Books of the world finger light and cold as Spring Wind. Little high blue notes drift through slate-blue houses. Street gangs Uranian born in the face of appalling conditions. Fade-out in “Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin” down the flash funnel of copy faces out in Summer dawn we made it in a smell of carbolic soap and rectal mucus. Slow green tendrils through the hair and the purple fungoid gills breathe empty Green House. Plaintive monkey phallus on the grave of dying peoples. Red mesas cut by a blue wind. Copper youths languidly masturbate, coming in puffs of blue smoke cross the translucent red stone buildings and copper domes of The City a white tooth sky cut with vapor trails. Flash bulb of urgency train whistles fade in black finger and basement pot. Cool blue light in stale streets of cry. In the hyacinths green boys of a green flute music sigh out birdcalls and howler monkey like: “You wanta screw me?” Slow movement of rivers. The Boy’s Unit Green with shit smell of the mud flats. Jelly substance like excrement flares under static red sky. Like smell RED: “Breathe in Johnny. Here goes.” Twisting over a brass bed in Mexico. The Boys slow fucking shift old photos and 1910 movie of the two bodies. Merge in blue smoke rings loosen you up out drift away slate-blue Northern sky water. Limestone cave fades in blue drum of gentle ghost people. Draft youths with identical erection in Speed Up Barracks Orgasm. Pub mirrors green fade movie club. Under the faces improbable names. Green Boys formed the fuck drum message lights a blue flame inside phallus (Boy ear, blue sky). The Initiate awoke in the city of red stone different train whistle masturbate with fingers light as Spring smoke. Cross Road of The World the high blue domes of the city and blue children born in the face of white battle. Bulb of Urgency train War Unit White. Mr. Bradly cool blue down the flash funnel out in stale Summer dawn smell. Black Drum talks mucus. The youths twist flowers and sewers of the world. Drum puffs of paint flesh. “flesh diseased dirty pictures how long you want us to fuck very nice Mister? To cheat and betray us been sent?”

We got to untalking on question studying the porch noise home from work used to be me Mister diseased waiting face return various bits and pieces of the picture: that he coin a “nice-guy-myth” the bastard dirtier than Coin Smell Dorm.

“What you trying to unload on somebody Mister? radioactive garbage?”

Where You Belong

My trouble began when they decide I am executive timber—It starts like this:: A big blond driller from Dallas picks me out of the labor pool to be his house-boy inna prefabricated air-conditioned bungalow—He comes on rugged but as soon as we strip down to the ball park over on his stomach kicking white wash and screams out “Fuck the shit out of me!”—I give him a slow pimp screwing and in solid—When this friend comes down from New York the driller says “This is the boy I was telling you about”—And friend looks me over slow chewing his cigar and says: “What are you doing over there with the apes? Why don’t you come over here with The Board where you belong?” And he slips me a long slimy look. Friend works for The Trak News Agency—“We don’t report the news—We write it.” And next thing I know they have trapped a grey flannel suit on me and I am sent to this school in Washington to learn how this writing the news before it happens is done—I sus it is the Mayan Caper with an IBM machine and I don’t want to be caught short in a grey flannel suit when the lid blows off—So I act in concert with The Subliminal Kid who is a technical sergeant and has a special way of talking. And he stands there a long time chewing tobacco is our middle name “—What are you doing over there?—Beat your mother to over here—Know what they mean if they start job for instance?—Open shirt, apparent sensory impressions calling slimy terms of the old fifty fifty jazz—Kiss their target all over—Assembly points in Danny Deever—By now they are controlling shithouse of the world—Just feed in sad-eyed youths and the machine will process it—After that Minraud sky—Their eggs all over—These officers come gibbering into the queer bar don’t even know what buttons to push—(‘Run with the apes? Why don’t you come across the lawn?’)—And he gives me a long slimy responsible cum grey flannel suit and I am Danny Deever in drag writing ‘the news is served, sir.’ Hooded dead gibber: ‘this is the Mayan Caper’—A fat cigar and a long white nightie—Non-payment answer is simple as Board Room Reports rigged a thousand years—Set up excuse and the machine will process it—Moldy pawn ticket runs a thousand years chewing the same argument—I Sekuin perfected that art along the Tang Dynasty—To put it another way IBM machine controls thought feeling and apparent sensory impressions—Subliminal lark—These officers don’t even know what buttons to push—Whatever you feed into the machine on subliminal level the machine will process—So we feed in ‘dismantle thyself’ and authority emaciated down to answer Mr Of The Account in Ewyork, Onolulu, Aris, Ome, Oston—Might be just what I am look”—

We fold writers of all time in together and record radio programs, movie sound tracks, TV and juke box songs all the words of the world stirring around in a cement mixer and pour in the resistance message—“Calling partisans of all nation—Cut word lines—Shift linguals—Free doorways—Vibrate ‘tourists’—Word falling—Photo falling—Break through in Grey Room.”

So the District Supervisor calls me in and puts the old white schmaltz down on me:

“Now kid what are you doing over there with the niggers and the apes? Why don’t you straighten out and act like a white man?—After all they’re only human cattle—You know that yourself—Hate to see a bright young man fuck up and get off on the wrong track—Sure it happens to all of us one time or another—Why the man who went on to invent Shitola was sitting right where you’re sitting now twenty-five years ago and I was saying the same things to him—Well he straightened out the way you’re going to straighten out—Yes sir that Shitola combined with an ape diet—All we have to do is press the button and a hundred million more or less gooks flush down the drain in green cancer piss—That’s big isn’t it?—And any man with white blood in him wants to be part of something big—You can’t deny your blood kid—You’re white white white—And you can’t walk out on Trak—There’s just no place to go.”

Most distasteful thing I ever stood still for—Enough to make a girl crack her calories—So I walk out and the lid blew off—

Uranian Willy

Uranian Willy The Heavy Metal Kid, also known as Willy The Rat—He wised up the marks.

“This is war to extermination—Fight cell by cell through bodies and mind screens of the earth—Souls rotten from The Orgasm Drug—Flesh shuddering from The Ovens—Prisoners of the earth, come out—Storm the studio.”

His plan called for total exposure—Wise up all the marks everywhere—Show them the rigged wheel—Storm The Reality Studio and retake the universe—The plan shifted and reformed as reports came in from his electric patrols sniffing quivering down streets of the earth—The Reality Film giving and buckling like a bulkhead under pressure—Burnt metal smell of interplanetary war in the raw noon streets swept by screaming glass blizzards of enemy flak.

“Photo falling—Word falling—Use partisans of all nation—Target Orgasm Ray Installations—Gothenburg Sweden—Coordinates 8 2 7 6—Take Studio—Take Board Books—Take Death Dwarfs—Towers, open fire.”

Pilot K9 caught the syndicate killer image on a penny arcade screen and held it in his sight—Now he was behind it in it was it—The image disintegrated in photo flash of total recognition—Other image on screen—Hold in sight—Smell of burning metal in his head—“Pilot K9, you are cut off—Back—Back—Back before the whole fucking shithouse goes up—Return to base immediately—Ride music beam back to base—Stay out of that time flak—All pilots ride Pan Pipes back to base.”

It was impossible to estimate the damage—Board Books destroyed —Enemy personnel decimated—The message of total resistance on short wave of the world.

“Calling partisans of all nation—Shift linguals—Cut word lines—Vibrate tourists—Free doorways—Photo falling—Word falling—Break through in Grey Room.”

Gongs Of Violence

The war between the sexes split the planet into armed camps right down the middle line divides one thing from the other—And I have seen them all: The Lesbian colonels in tight green uniforms, the young aides and directives regarding The Sex Enemy from proliferating departments.

On the line is The Baby and Semen Market where the sexes meet to exchange the basic commodity which is known as “The Property”—Unborn Properties are shown with a time projector. As a clear young going face flashes on the auction screen frantic queens of all nations scream: “A doll! A doll! A doll!” And tear each other to pieces with leopard claws and broken bottles—Tobacco auction sound effects—Riots erupt like sandstorms spraying the market with severed limbs and bouncing heads.

Biological parents in most cases are not owners of The Property. They act under orders of absentee proprietors to install the indicated stops that punctuate the written life script—With each Property goes a life script—Shuttling between property farmers and script writers, a legion of runners, fixers, guides, agents, brokers, faces insane with purpose, mistakes and confusion pandemic—Like a buyer has a first-class Property and a lousy grade B life script.

“Fuck my life script will you you cheap down grade bitch!”

Everywhere claim-jumpers and time-nappers jerk the time position of a Property.

“And left me standing there without a ‘spare jacket’ or a ‘greyhound’ to travel in, my Property back in 1910 Panama—I don’t even feel like a human without my property—How can I feel without fingers?”

The Property can also be jerked forward in time and sold at any age—The life of advanced property is difficult to say the least: poison virus agents trooping in and out at all hours: “We just dropped in to see some friends a population of patrols”—Strangers from Peoria waving quit claim deeds, skip tracers, collectors, claim-jumpers demanding payment for alleged services say: “We own the other half of The Property.”

“I dunno, me—Only work here—Technical sergeant.”

“Have you seen Slotless City?”

Red mesas cut by time winds—A network of bridges, ladders, catwalks, cable cars, escalators and ferris wheels down into the blue depths—The precarious occupants in this place without phantom guards live in iron cubicles—Constant motion on tracks, gates click open shut—Buzzes, blue sparks, and constant breakage—(Whole squares and tiers of the city plunge into the bottomless void)—Swinging beams of construction and blue flares on the calm intent young worker faces—People rain on the city in homemade gliders and rockets—Balloons drift down out of faded violet photos—The city is reached overland by a series of trails cut in stone, suspension bridges and ladders intricately booby-trapped, wrong maps, disappearing guides—(A falling bureaucrat in blue glasses screams by with a flash of tin: “Soy de la policia, señores—Tengo conexiónes”) Hammocks, swings, balconies over the void—Chemical gardens in rusty troughs—Flowers and seeds and mist settle down from high jungle above the city—Fights erupt like sandstorms, through iron streets a wake of shattered bodies, heads bouncing into the void, hands clutching bank notes from gambling fights—Priests shriek for human sacrifices, gather partisans to initiate unspeakable rites until they are destroyed by counter pressures—Vigilantes of every purpose hang anyone they can overpower—Workers attack the passer-by with torches and air hammers—They reach up out of manholes and drag the walkers down with iron claws—Rioters of all nations storm the city in a landslide of flame-throwers and Molotov cocktails—Sentries posted everywhere in towers open fire on the crowds at arbitrary intervals—The police never mesh with present time, their investigation far removed from the city always before or after the fact erupt into any café and machine-gun the patrons—The city pulses with slotless purpose lunatics killing from behind the wall of glass—A moment’s hesitation brings a swarm of con men, guides, whores, mooches, script writers, runners, fixers cruising and snapping like aroused sharks—

(The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron.)

The Market is guarded by Mongolian Archers right in the middle line between sex pressures jetting a hate wave that disintegrates violators in a flash of light—Everywhere posted on walls and towers in hovering autogyros these awful archers only get relief from the pressure by blasting a violator—Screen eyes vibrate through the city like electric dogs sniffing for violations—

Remind The Board of the unsavory case of “Black Paul” who bought babies with centipede jissom—When the fraud came to light a whole centipede issue was in the public streets and every citizen went armed with a flame-thrower—So the case of Black Paul shows what happens when all sense of civic responsibility breaks down—

It was a transitional period because of The Synthetics and everybody was raising some kinda awful life form in his bidet to fight The Sex Enemy—The results were not in all respects reasonable men, but The Synthetics were rolling off that line and we were getting some damned interesting types by golly blue heavy metal boys with near zero metabolism that shit once a century and then it’s a slag heap and disposal problem in the worst form there is: sewage delta to a painted sky under orange gas flares, islands of garbage where green boy-girls tend human heads in chemical gardens, terminal cities under the metal word fallout like cold melted solder on walls and streets, sputtering cripples with phosphorescent metal stumps—So we decided the blue heavy metal boys were not in all respects a good blueprint.

I have seen them all—A unit yet of mammals and vegetables that subsist each on the shit of the other in prestidigital symbiosis and achieved a stage where one group shit out nothing but pure carbon dioxide which the other unit breathed in to shit out oxygen—It’s the only way to live—You understand they had this highly developed culture with life forms between insect and vegetable, hanging vines, stinging sex hairs—The whole deal was finally relegated to the It-Never-Happened-Department.

“Retroactive amnesia it out of every fucking mind screen in the area if we have to—How long you want to bat this tired old act around? A centipede issue in the street, unusual beings dormant in cancer, hierarchical shit-eating units—Now by all your stupid Gods at once let’s not get this show on the road let’s stop it.”

Posted everywhere on street corners The Idiot Irresponsibles twitter supersonic approval, repeating slogans, giggling, dancing, masturbating out windows, making machine-gun noises and police whistles “And you, Dead Hand, stretching The Vegetable People come out of that compost heap—You are not taking your old fibrous roots past this inspector.”

And The Idiot Irresponsibles scream posted everywhere in chorus: “Chemical gardens in rusty shit peoples!!”

“All out of Time and into Space. Come out of The Time-word ‘The’ forever. Come out of The Body Word ‘Thee’ forever. There is no thing to fear. There is no thing in space. There is no word to fear. There is no word in space.”

And The Idiot Irresponsibles scream: “Come out of your stupid body you nameless assholes!!”

And there were those who thought A.J. lost dignity through the idiotic behavior of these properties but He said:

“That’s the way I like to see them. No fallout. What good ever came from thinking? Just look there” (another Heavy Metal Boy sank through the earth’s crust and we got some good pictures…) “one of Shaffer’s blueprints. I sounded a word of warning.”

His Idiot Irresponsibles twittered and giggled and masturbated over him from little swings and snapped bits of food from his plate screaming: “Blue people NG conditions! Typical Sight Leak Out!”

“All out of Time and into Space.”

“Hello, Ima Johnny The Naked Astronaut.”

And the Idiot Irresponsibles rush in with space-suits and masturbating rockets spatter The City with jissom.

“Do not be alarmed citizens of Annexia—Report to your Nearie Pro Station for Chlorophyll Processing—We are converting to Vegetable State—Emergency measure to counter The Heavy Metal Peril—Go to your ‘Nearie’—You will meet a cool, competent person who will dope out all your fears in photosynthesis—Calling all citizens of Annexia—Report to Green Sign for Processing.”

“Citizens of Gravity we are converting all out to Heavy Metal. Carbonic Plague of The Vegetable People threatens our Heavy Metal State. Report to your nearest Plating Station. It’s fun to be plated,” says this well-known radio and TV personality who is now engraved forever in gags of metal. “Do not believe the calumny that our metal fallout will turn the planet into a slag heap. And in any case, is that worse than a compost heap? Heavy Metal is our program and we are prepared to sink through it…”

The cold heavy fluid settled in his spine 70 tons per square inch—Cool blocks of SOS—(Solid Blue Silence)—under Heavy Time—Can anything be done to Metal People of Uranus?—Heavy his answer in monotone disaster stock: “Nobody can kick an SOS habit—70 tons per square inch—The crust from the beginning you understand—Tortured Metal Ozz Of Earthquakes is tons focus of this junk”—Sudden young energy—I got up and danced—Know eventually be relieved—That’s all I need—I got up and danced the disasters—”

Gongs of violence and how—Show you something—Berserk machine—“Shift cut tangle word lines—Word falling—Photo falling—”

“I said The Chief Of Police skinned alive in Bagdad not Washington, D.C.”

“Switzerland freezes all foreign assets.”

“Foreign assets?”

“What?—British Prime Minister assassinated in Rightist coup?”

“Mindless idiot you have liquidated the Commissar.”

“Terminal electric voice of C—All ling door out of agitated—Ta ta Stalin—Carriage age ta—”

Spectators scream through the track—The electronic brain shivers in blue and pink and chlorophyll orgasms spitting out money printed on rolls of toilet paper, condoms full of ice cream, Kotex hamburgers—Police files of the world spurt out in a blast of bone meal, garden tools and barbecue sets whistle through the air, skewer the spectators—Crumpled cloth bodies through dead nitrous streets of an old film set—Grey luminous flakes falling softly on Ewyork, Onolulu, Aris, Ome, Oston—From siren towers the twanging tones of fear—Pan God Of Panic piping blue notes through empty streets as the berserk time machine twisted a tornado of years and centuries—Wind through dusty offices and archives—Board Books scattered to rubbish heaps of the earth—Symbol books of the all-powerful board that had controlled thought feeling and movement of a planet from birth to death with iron claws of pain and pleasure—The whole structure of reality went up in silent explosions—Paper moon and muslin trees and in the black silver sky great rents as the cover of the world rained down—Biologic film went up . . “raining dinosaurs” “It sometimes happens . . just an old showman” Death takes over the game so many actors buildings and stars laid flat pieces of finance over the golf course summer afternoons bare feet waiting for rain smell of sickness in the room Switzerland Panama machine guns in Bagdad rising from the typewriter pieces of finance on the evening wind tin shares Buenos Aires Mr. Martin smiles old names waiting sad old tune haunted the last human attic.

Outside a 1920 movie theater in East St. Louis I met Johnny Yen—His face showed strata of healed and half-healed fight scars—Standing there under the luminous film flakes he said: “I am going to look for a room in a good naborhood”—Captain Clark welcomes you aboard this languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings music across the golf course echoes from high cool corners of the dining room a little breeze stirs candles on the table. It was an April afternoon. After a while some news boy told him the war was over sadness in his eyes trees filtering light on dappled grass the lake like bits of silver paper in a wind across the golf course fading streets a distant sky.

Male Image Back In

The Boy From The North came to The Rock on a cold Spring wind through court yards and cubicles painted inside opening on balconies connected by ladders, catwalks iron bridges—Wind of metal through The Boy From The North with the blue sickness of opium in his bones and the heavy mineral affinities in his cool blue eyes cloud mines and mills and oil derricks stretching iron claws of monopoly—The Master almost gave the order to remove the boy from the reservation—Then a move appeared on his chess board of agents and the order to remove the boy was canceled—

“Yes, Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, a chess move—i Sabbah set Bradly in the door.”

Move The Boy From The North to Tanger present time—He walked on grey silent as a fish through shadow pools and doorways—Here comes a guide from The Blue Movies—Scatter on grey into dark windows old gangster films and news reels fading in “Smoke Domino Cigarettes”—Dead neon in the noon sun—The guide did not see me—Spinning fractured light down all your streets and by the river junk sick in dawn mist took the ferry from Algiers to New Orleans—Grey powder in spoons shaking junk sick hands—Over the grey subway down Cook Street—Sliding between light and shadow—Word falling—Photo falling—Break through in Grey Room—Agent of Hassan i Sabbah along newsprint

WAS WEIGHTLESS—NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE PARIS APRIL 17, 1961—“One’s arms and legs in and out through the crowd weigh nothing—Grey dust of broom in old cabin—Mr. Bradly Mr. I Myself sit in the chair as i subways and basements did before that—But hung in dust and pain wind—My hand writing leaning to a boy’s grey flannel pants did not change although vapor trails fading in hand does not weigh anything now—Gagarin said grey junk yesterdays trailing the earth was quite plain and past The American he could easily see the shores of continents—islands and great rivers.”

Screens back and forth shifting star tracks we intersect—Scattered silver morning smoke down old photo—Flashed through all I said twisting hole in pain funnel—The grey photo falling out tracks I told—Wind hand caught in the door couldn’t make flesh in his switch—Back seat dream streets drifting smoke—Photo falling—Word falling—Break through in Grey Room—And word dust dirtied his body falling through the space between worlds—

Twenty initiates gathered at sun set on Red Mesa—They stripped off their clothes and climbed a ladder to a round roofless Kiva—On a raised shelf along one wall sat a drummer and two flute players—A boy about thirteen danced in front of the drummer, his body quivered to the drum beats like a dog, his penis floating in music and red light of the setting sun—He danced on tip toe hands above his head as if pulled up and held out of gravity—He twisted backwards until his hands touched the floor behind him body arched—As spurts of semen shot up like tiny rockets, his body lost outline in red mist—A pair of Javanese boys moved into the center of the room stabbing at each other with penises of flickering light—One boy bowed his head and spun around and the other moved in behind and danced his penis up the other rectum and they stood there in fluid circular gyrations, hands tracing delicate hieroglyphs of orgasm that hung visible in the air like swirls of color, bodies merging in a flickering rainbow of Northern Lights—Carl was pulled into the circle dancing opposite a Negro boy and felt the warm electric thrusts melt his stomach and genitals spinning him around the brown hands beating time on his diaphragm they moved in a slow half crouch—A taste of iron and blood in his mouth he threw out his arms and dived out of his body in spurts—

He woke in a vast dormitory of boy spirits jetting themselves around on broomsticks, turning cartwheels, making orgasm noises machine guns and train whistles—Slowly the boy sounds faded out in a great calm silence—Could make or break any place by his male image back in—

They stood now in a shower of orgasms—Carl felt dawns in the bath cubicle as a movement of rivers—Young faces spread behind him a slow Attic frieze—Greek vases taking off limestone centuries—“I wanta screw you” danced his penis up the boy’s ass—Slow crystal music of phallic flesh, each other for instruments—Rings of Saturn in the two bodies moving as one now out through the rectum gate—“You is coming?”—Body questions to their drum beats pounding the sky—He danced out of gravity light and cold in the door—Fluid waves of dawn shirt—Street dust turning faster and faster the hieroglyphs of death trauma—Tarnished mirrors behind him to the trade winds, threw his arms out over the water—“Good night”—Taking off movies in a vast dormitory of boy spirits—They stood in a shower of sun sets—The music started his stomach jungles dancing—Shuddering penis floated in other dawns, danced the two bodies as one out of gravity—Penis strained back to color fading out in red semen—“Wanta screw me dancing up the other rectum and they stood coming?”—Body questions tracing rainbows of orgasm—Carl was pulled now into the dust dance quivering to the drum hands—Odor of naked rectums hung visible in the air—“You is coming?”—Ebbing carbon dioxide of orgasm, brown hands with fingers fading—Greek vases taking off limestone—Now out through the rectum gates—

“I told you I would heal scars—Only one body there—Memory pictures forgotten, woke up in a dormitory of phallic flesh—Isn’t time, doctor, for instruments—Drum beat in last errand boy closing mirrors behind him—Silence healed boy spirits—”

As the car started we slipped off our ruined orgasms—Young faces over the midway careening subway dawns—Silver drums in a blue silence—Whistling boy spirits got up laughing centuries—Rings of dream in his head—Body questions spatter the cracked sky—

“Captain Clark welcomes you aboard.”

Dead Fingers Talk

Glad to have you aboard reader, but remember there is only one captain of this subway—Do not thrust your cock out the train window or beckon lewdly with thy piles nor flush thy beat benny down the drain—(Benny is overcoat in antiquated Times Square argot)—It is forbidden to use the signal rope for frivolous hangings or to burn Nigras in the washroom before the other passengers have made their toilet—

Do not offend the office manager—He is subject to take back the keys of the shithouse—Always keep it locked so no sinister stranger sneak a shit and give all the kids in the office some horrible condition—And Mr. Anker from accounting, his arms scarred like a junky from countless Wassermans, sprays plastic over it before he travails there—I stand on the Fifth Amendment, will not answer the question of the Senator from Wisconsin: “Are you or have you ever been a member of the male sex?”—They can’t make Dicky whimper on the boys—Know how I take care of crooners?—Just listen to them—A word to the wise guy—I mean you gotta be careful of politics these days—Some old department get physical with you, kick him right in his coordinator—“Come see me tonight in my apartment under the school privy—Show you something interesting,” said the janitor drooling green coca juice—

The city mutters in the distance pestilent breath of the cancerous librarian faint and intermittent on the warm Spring wind—

“Split is the wastings of the cup—Take it away,” he said irritably—Black rocks and brown lagoons invade the world—There stands the deserted transmitter—Crystal tubes click on the message of retreat from the human hill and giant centipedes crawl in the ruined cities of our long home—Thermodynamics has won at a crawl—

“We were caught with our pants down,” admits General Patterson. “They reamed the shit out of us.”

Safest way to avoid these horrid perils is come over here and shack up with Scylla—Treat you right, kid—Candy and cigarettes—

Woke up in a Turkish Bath under a Johannesburg bidonville—

“Where am I you black bastards?”

“Why you junky white trash rim a shitting Nigger for an eyecup of paregoric!”

Dead bird—quail in the slipper—money in the bank—Past port and petal crowned with calm leaves she stands there across the river and under the trees—

Brains spilled in the cocktail lounge—The fat macho has burned down the Jai Lai bookie with his obsidian-handled .45—Shattering bloody blue of Mexico—Heart in the sun—Pantless corpses hang from telephone poles along the road to Monterrey—

Death rows the boy like sleeping marble down the Grand Canal out into a vast lagoon of souvenir post cards and bronze baby shoes—

“Just build a privy over me, boys,” says the rustler to his bunk mates, and the sheriff nods in dark understanding Druid blood stirring in the winds of Panhandle—

Decayed corseted tenor sings Danny Deever in drag:

They have taken all his buttons off and cut his pants away

For he browned the colonel sleeping the man’s ass is all agley

And he’ll swing in ’arf a minute for a sneaking shooting fey.

“Billy Budd must hang—All hands after to witness this exhibit.”

Billy Budd gives up the ghost with a loud fart and the sail is rent from top to bottom—and the petty officers fall back confounded—“Billy” is a transvestite liz.

“There’ll be a spot of bother about this,” mutters The Master at Arms—The tars scream with rage at the cheating profile in the rising sun—

“Is she dead?”

“So who cares.”

“Are we going to stand still for this?—The officers pull the switch on us,” says young Hassan, ship’s uncle—

“Gentlemen,” says Captain Verre “I can not find words to castigate this foul and unnatural act whereby a boy’s mother take over his body and infiltrate her horrible old substance right onto a decent boat and with bare tits hanging out, unfurls the nastiest colors of the spectroscope.”

A hard-faced matron bandages the cunt of Radiant Jade—

“You see, dearie, the shock when your neck breaks has like an awful effect—You’re already dead of course or at least unconscious or at least stunned—but—uh—well—you see—It’s a medical fact—All your female insides is subject to spurt out your cunt the way it turned the last doctor to stone and we sold the results to Paraguay as a statue of Bolivar.”

“I have come to ascertain death not perform a hysterectomy,” snapped the old auntie croaker munching a soggy crumpet with his grey teeth—A hanged man plummets through the ceiling of Lord Rivington’s smart mews flat—Rivington rings the Home Secretary:

“I’d like to report a leak—”

“Everything is leaking—Can’t stem it—Sauve qui peut” snaps The Home Secretary and flees the country disguised as an eccentric Lesbian abolitionist—

“We hear it was the other way around, doc,” said the snide reporter with narrow shoulders and bad teeth—

The doctor’s face crimsoned: “I wish to state that I have been acting physician at Dankmoor prison for thirty years man boy and bestial and always keep my nose clean—Never compromise myself to be alone with the hanged man—Always insist on the presence of my baboon assistant witness and staunch friend in any position.”

Mr. Gilly looks for his brindle-faced cow across the piney woods where armadillos, innocent of a cortex, frolic under the .22 of black Stetson and pale blue eyes.

“Lawd Lawd have you seen my brindle-faced cow?—Guess I’m taking up too much of your time—Must be busy doing something feller say—Good stand you got whatever it is—Maybe I’m asking too many questions—talking too much—You wouldn’t have a rope would you?—A hemp rope? Don’t know how I’d hold that old brindle-faced cow without a rope if I did come on her—”

Phantom riders—chili joints—saloons and the quick draw—hangings from horseback to the jeers of sporting women—black smoke on the hip in the Chink laundry—“No tickee no washee—Clom Fliday—”

Walking through the piney woods in the summer dawn, chiggers pinpoint the boy’s groin with red dots—Smell of boy balls and iron cool in the mouth—

“Now I want you boys to wear shorts,” said the sheriff. “Decent women with telescopes can see you—”

Whiff of dried jissom in a bandanna rises from the hotel drawer—Sweet young breath through the teeth, stomach hard as marble spurts it out in soft, white globs—Funny how a man comes back to something he left in a Peoria hotel drawer 1929—

1920 tunes drift into the locker room where two boys first time tea high jack off to “My Blue Heaven”—

In the attic of the big store on bolts of cloth we made it—

“Careful—don’t spill—Don’t rat on the boys.”

The cellar is full of light—In two weeks the tadpoles hatch—I wonder whatever happened to Otto’s boy who played the violin? A hard-faced boy patch over one eye parrot on shoulder says: “Dead men tell no tales or do they?”—He prods the skull with his cutlass and a crab scuttles out—The boy reaches down and picks up a scroll of hieroglyphs—“The map!—The map!”

The map turns to shitty toilet paper in his hands, blows across a vacant lot in East St. Louis.

The boy pulls off the patch—The parrot flies away into the jungle—Cutlass turns to a machete—He is studying the map and swatting sand flies—

Junk yacks at our heels and predated checks bounce all around us in the Mayan ball court—

“Order in the court—You are accused of soliciting with prehensile piles—What have you to say in your defense?”

“Just cooling them off, judge—Raw and bleeding—Wouldn’t you?”

“I want you to smell this bar stool,” said the paranoid ex-Communist to the manic FBI agent—“Stink juice, and you may quote me has been applied by paid hoodlums constipated with Moscow goldwasser.”

The man in a green suit—old English cut with two side vents and change pockets outside—will swindle the aging proprietress of a florist shop—“Old flub got a yen on for me—”

Carnival of splintered pink peppermint—“Oh Those Golden Slippers”—He sits up and looks into a cobra lamp—

“I am the Egyptian,” he said looking all flat and silly.

And I said: “Really, Bradford, don’t be tiresome—”

Under the limestone cave I met a man with Medusa’s head in a hatbox and said “Be careful” to the customs inspector, freezed his hand forever an inch from the false bottom—

Will the gentle reader get up off his limestones and pick up the phone?—Cause of death: completely uninteresting.

They cowboyed him in the steam room—Is this Cherry Ass Gio The Towel Boy or Mother Gillig Old Auntie of Westminster Place? Only dead fingers talk in braille—

Second run cotton trace the bones of a fix—

But is all back seat dreaming since the hitchhiker with the chewed thumb and he said: “If decided?—Could I ride with you chaps?”—(Heard about the death later in a Copenhagen bar—Told a story about crayfish and chased it with a Jew joke out behind the fear of what I tell him we all know here.) So it jumped in my throat and was all there like and ready when we were sitting under the pretties, star pretties you understand, not like me talking at all I used to talk differently. Who did?—Paris?

“Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, Johnny Yenshe, Yves Martin.”

Martin he calls himself but once in the London YMCA on Tottenham Court (never made out there)—Once on Dean Street in Soho—No it wasn’t Dean Street that was someone else looked like Bradly—It was on some back time street, silent pockets of Mexico City—(half orange with red pepper in the sun)—and the weakness hit me and I leaned against a wall and the white spot never washed out of my glen plaid coat—Carried that wall with me to a town in Ecuador can’t remember the name, remember the towns all around but not that one where time slipped on the beach—Sand winds across the blood—half a cup of water and Martin looked at the guide or was it the other, the Aussie, the Canadian, the South African who is sometimes there when the water is given out and always there when the water gives out—and gave him half his own water ration with gambler fingers could switch water if he wanted to—On the street once Cavesbury Close I think it was somebody called him Uncle Charles in English and he didn’t want to know the man walked away dragging one leg—

Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, slotless fade-out of distant fingers in the sick morning—I told him you on tracks—Couldn’t reach me with the knife—couldn’t switch iron—and zero time to stop—couldn’t make turnstile—Bad shape from death Mr. Shannon no cept pay of distant fingers spilling old photo—At me with the knife and fell over the white subway—On tracks I told—The shallow water came in with the tide of washed condoms and sick sharks fed on sewage—only food for this village—swamp delta to the green sky that does not change—I—We—They—sit quietly where you made this dream—“Finnies nous attendons une bonne chance”—(Footnote: Last words in the diary of Yves Martin who presumably died of thirst in the Egyptian desert with three companions—Just who died is uncertain since one member of the party has not been found alive or dead and identity of the missing person is dubious—The bodies were decomposed when found, and identification was based on documents. But it seems the party was given to exchange of identifications, and even to writing in each others’ diaries—Other members of the expedition were Mr. Shannon, Mr. Armstrong, Monsieur Pillou, Ahmed Akid the guide—)

As the series is soon ending are these experiments really necessary?

Cross The Wounded Galaxies

The penny arcade peep show long process in different forms.

In the pass the muttering sickness leaped into our throats, coughing and spitting in the silver morning. Frost on our bones. Most of the ape-forms died there on the treeless slopes. Dumb animal eyes on “me” brought the sickness from white time caves frozen in my throat to hatch in the warm steamlands spitting song of scarlet bursts in egg flesh. Beyond the pass, limestone slopes down into a high green savanna and the grass-wind on our genitals. Came to a swamp fed by hot springs and mountain ice. And fell in flesh heaps. Sick apes spitting blood laugh. Sound bubbling in throats torn with the talk sickness. Faces and bodies covered with pus foam. Animal hair thru the purple sex-flesh. Sick sound twisted thru body. Underwater music bubbling in blood beds. Human faces tentative flicker in and out of focus. We waded into the warm mud-water. Hair and ape flesh off in screaming strips. Stood naked human bodies covered with phosphorescent green jelly. Soft tentative flesh cut with ape wounds. peeling other genitals. Fingers and tongues rubbing off the jelly-cover. Body melting pleasure-sounds in the warm mud. Till the sun went and a blue wind of silence touched human faces and hair. When we came out of the mud we had names.

In the pass muttering arctic flowers. Gusts of Frost Wind. Bones and most of the ape still felt. Invisible slopes. Spitting the bloodbends human bones out of focus. And ape-flesh naked human body. Caves frozen in my throat. Green jelly genitals. Limestone slopes cover our bodies melting in savanna and grass mud. Shit and sperm fed hot till the sun went. The mountain touched human bubbling throats. Torn we crawled out of the mud. Faces and bodies covered the purple sex-flesh. And the sickness leaped into our body underwater music bubble in the silver morning frost. Faces tentative flicker in ape forms. Into the warm mud and water slopes. Cold screaming sickness from white time. Covered with phosphorescent shed in the warm lands. Spitting ape wounds. Feeling egg flesh. Green pleasure-sounds warm our genitals. Blue wind of silence. Apes spitting sound faces thru pus foam. The talking sickness had names. The sound stood naked in the grass. Music bubbling in the blood, quivering frog eggs and sound thru our throats and swap we had names for each other. Tentative flicker-laugh and laughing washed the hairs off. Down to his genitals. Human our bodies melted into when we crawled out.

And the other did not want to touch me because of the white worm-thing inside but no one could refuse if I wanted and ate the fear-softness in other men. The cold was around us in our bones. And I could see the time before the thing when there was green around and the green taste in my mouth and the green plant-shit on my legs. Before the cold… And some did not eat flesh and died because they could not live with the thing inside… Once we caught one of the hairy men with our vine nets and tied him over a slow fire and left him there until he died and the thing sucked his screams moving in my face like smoke and no one could eat the flesh-fear of the hairy man and there was a smell in the cave bent us over… We moved to keep out of our excrement where white worms twisted up feeling for us and the white worm-sickness in all our bodies. We took our pots and spears and moved South and left the black flesh there in the ashes… Came to the great dry plain and only those lived who learned to let the thing surface and eat animal excrement in the brown water holes… Then thick grass and trees and animals. I pulled the skin over my head and I made another man put on the skin and horns and we fucked like the animals stuck together and we found the animals stuck together and killed both so I knew the thing inside me would always find animals to feed my mouth meat… Saw animals chase us with spears and woke eating my own hand and the blood in my mouth made me spit up a bitter green juice. But the next day I ate flesh again and every night we put on animal skins and smeared green animal excrement down our legs and fucked each other with whimpering snorting noises and stuck together shadows on the cave walls, and ate surface men… The skin over my head and green taste and the horns and we fucked before the thing inside me would. We caught one of the hairy men animaled him over a slow fire eating my own hand, the thing sucked his screams green bitter juice. Those lived who learned to let the softness in, eat animal excrement in the brown bones… I made another man put on the skin green plant shit on animal stuck together flesh. So I knew with the thing inside always find animals to feed with our vine nets. Blood in my mouth made me spit up moving in my face like the next day I ate flesh again… Moved to knee legs and fucked each other twisted up feeling and stuck together shadows on our bodies.

Glass blizzards thru the rusty limestone streets exploded flesh from the laughing bones. Spattering blood cross urine of walls. We lived in sewers of the city, crab parasites in our genitals rubbing our diseased flesh thru each other on a long string of rectal mucus. Place of the tapeworms with white bone faces and disk mouths feeling for the soft host mucus. The years. The long. The many. Such a place. In a land of grass without memory, only food of the hordes moving south, the dark armadillo flesh killed in the cool morning grass with throwing sticks. The women and their thing police ate the flesh and we fought over their shit-encrusted pieces of armadillo gristle.

Glass blizzards without memory. Only food of flesh was the dank urine of the city. Crab parasites ate the flesh. Thru jungles of breath when we copulate with white bones faces. Place of nettles and scorpions for the soft host mucus. Intestines sprouting weed room in the cool morning walls. The women in our genitals and bowels. Fought over their shit, rubbing our diseased flesh-meat a mucus string: clawing thru shit place of tapeworms in some disk mouth. Larval bodies feeling the penalty. The years. The long. The many. Such shoots growing.

Sitting naked at the bottom of a well. The cool mud of evening touched our rectums. We shared a piece of armadillo gristle, eating it out of each other’s mouths. Above us a dry husk of insect bodies along the stone well-wall and thistles over the well-mouth against green evening sky. Licking the gristle from his laughing teeth and gums I said: “I am Allah. I made you.” A blue mist filled the well and shut off our word-breath. My hands sank into his body. We fell asleep in other flesh. Smells on our stomach and hands. Woke in noon-sun, thistle shades cutting our soft night flesh.

Evening touched our rectums. Mud shells and frogs croaking. Licking the gristle asleep with other flesh. The cool mud of breath, and our bodies we shared. Branches in the wind. His knees. Other mouths. Against the green evening sky. “We laughing teeth and gums,” I said. Hands woke in the noon sun soft night flesh. Smell on our stomach. Thistle shades cutting. Penny arcade peep show—Long process in different forms—Dead fingers talk in braille.

Think Police keep all Board Room Reports—And we are not allowed to proffer The Disaster Accounts—Wind hand caught in the door—Explosive Bio-Advance Men out of space to employ Electrician in gasoline crack of history—Last of the gallant heroes—“I’m you on tracks, Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin”—Couldn’t reach flesh in his switch—And zero time to the sick tracks—A long time between suns I held the stale overcoat—Sliding between light and shadow—muttering in the dogs of unfamiliar score—Cross the wounded galaxies we intersect, poison of dead sun in your brain slowly fading—Migrants of ape in gasoline crack of history, explosive bio-advance out of space to neon—“I’m you, Wind Hand caught in the door”—Couldn’t reach flesh—In sun I held the stale overcoat, Dead Hand stretching the throat—Last to proffer the disaster account on tracks. “See Mr. Bradly Mr.—”

And being blind may not refuse to hear: “Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin, disaster to my blood whom I created”—(The shallow water came in with the tide and the Swedish River of Gothenburg.)

Appendix 1

From The Soft Machine (1961)

along the
brass and
copper street

Motor scooter wings along the rubble road of sputtering arc lights. Nettles, mud wall, Indians shit in rows. Vultures fight for fish heads and tear entrails from other mouths in air, pink eyes pulsing carrion hunger…

Patios and porticos littered with flops. An old man with white beard sleeps on the red tile floor, his temple pulsing in the violent dusk. On the Brass and Copper Street purple twilight. Faces of scarred metal. Copper youths spit bloody crystals from rotting lungs. Black gauze feelers on control spots of sex. Touched the head of an Indian boy. Fur of a plaintive rodent. Whistling on an empty plain. Vulture wings husk in the dry sound of insects. Giant centipedes in cocoons of black gauze. Green crab people in the broken stellae. Neon claws swept out in the blast of morning by an old junky coughing and spiting in the sick dawn. Blue morning blast. Stale sheets stained with crab time shit. Manipulated spasm serving the brain photo of sex. Scorpion men in tight black suits. Tattoo needle stings etch the frozen spine with cuneiform songs of the centipede goddess. Flickers from every eye. Lighting red pagodas and copper domes. The phosphorescent metal excrement and fatal spasms of the city: (a sleeping youth hanged in wet dream. Bones sucked out by the crab guards). Boy chrysalis in cobwebs of rancid jissom. Brain-eating birds patrol the iron streets. Porticos. Plazas of red tile where brass statues twist in metal combat. Tortured centuries. Copper youths stalk the centipede men. Spitting needles from eyes blue and cold as cocaine crystal. Red nitrous fumes sear the aching lungs of screaming larval peoples clawing at crab parts. In red clay cubicles over a swamp of warm mud bubbles coal gas. The spine cylinder turns crystal locks of ejaculation. Penis flesh invades the face. Withers arm-legs to vestigial insect members. Centipede legs thru the diseased purple flesh. Monster crustaceans boil in black mushroom clouds of West. Fade out to green mist and lichen on ancient rock of Marwan. Under the static red sky.

Pornographic puppets in steam of yellow light. In stale towel gum. In crystal mirror of smoke. His leg in dead crab prison masturbating afternoons. Catatonic flesh his bunk. Blood storms his body. Foe wind over a swamp of warm mud. Gauze feelers of spine time. Insect lust of dead lavatory ejaculates the time of giant insects. Shell of limestone flesh. Green mist and the lichen rocks of Marwan. Spit mirror baths. Cocaine glass and insect cops serving the black message. Sound warehouse from mouth and throat. Yellow tattoo of inspected meat. On the iron streets. Turn on crystal spine cylinders. In clay cubicles the black smell of coal gas. Vestigial symbol accounts. Tasting hands in the mica mirror. Invisible glass ejaculates wet dream flesh thru stale Weimar youths. Dead Rainbow. Postcard fjords. Black gum in the streets of liver. Metal lichen. Obsidian mirrors a static red sky.

Yellow cub in pulsing pink light. Nettle mud wall. Tea tall excrement. Red pagodas and copper fight. Fatal spasms in air. Thru flesh patios. Boy chrysalis in old man white beard. Birds patrol the iron temple. Brass statues in slow combat street. Purple twilight. Fur youths stalk the centipede men. Cold feeler on control sports. Sear aching lungs of Indian boy. Fur of plaintive crab parts. Red plain. Vulture wings. Mud bubble coal gas giant centipedes in cocoons of ejaculation. In the broken penis stellae. Centipede legs in the sick dawn. Crustaceans boil in black time shit. Green mist and lichen on the brain photo of sex. Tattoo needles sting the pornographic puppets of centipede road. Flickers from every eye a sleeping carrion hunger. The bones sucked out. Crab porticos littered with flops. In squares of red dusk. Scarred metal faces. Copper spit from rotting lungs. Touched the head of screaming larval people. Whistling cubicles in the dry sound of insects. Spine cylinder turns a cyst of black gauze. Green crab flesh invades the face. Neon claws vestigial member. Old junky coughing and spitting purple flesh of morning. Mushroom clouds fade out to manipulated spasm serving the ancient rock of Marwan. Cuneiform meat in the iron street throat. Turn on crystal spine cylinders symbol accounts. Taste of coal gas. Glass dream in the mica mirror. Invisible lust of dead rainbow flesh thru sale youths. In streets of postcard fjord. Meat in the iron light. Stale cubicles of black smoke. His leg in dead crab accounts tasting hand. Catatonic flesh his bunk. Ejaculated dream wind over a swamp of war mud. Insect lust of dead rainbow. Flesh shell of limestone in the obsidian mirror. Sect cops serving pornographic puppets in crystal mirror. Turn on spine cylinder prison. Masturbating afternoon of coal gas. Vestigial blood storms his body. Foe mirror. Invisible gauze feelers thru sale youth. Ejaculates postcard flesh. Green liver mist. Yellow sale clay. His leg in dead crab symbols. Scarred the living flesh. Ejaculated black gauze. Slow insect lust invades the head of screaming gum. Old junky sound cold obsidian morning. Empty pain vulture tasting excrement in static tattoo need. Flesh patios and guards. Boy throat turn on crystal spit card. Mouths of coal gas. Vestige meat in streets of mica. Invisible talk cubicles of black smoke. Phosphorescent obsidian city. Sleeping carrion metal spit out on the crab porticos. Red nitrous fumes on the tile accounts. Larval people of white centuries. Cope spine cylinder. War mud pulsing from rotting face and neon lavatory. Touched the coughing limestone in centipede men. Manipulated feeler of black gauze. Puppets men of claws swept out on the iron street in wings. Spitting disease cubicles. Red pagodas. Mushroom clouds. Ejaculated frozen cuneiforms. Dream chrysalis in streets of meat puppet and black lichen. Brass entrails from other twilight. Fur youths in glass hunger down the bones. Spit blood crystals of dawn. Masturbating broken mirror rocks. Invisible gauze strums his body. Spot feelers of spine flesh. Turn on aching lungs of dream wind the pornographic road. Lust of mud bubble coal gas afternoon. Flesh ejaculation. Penis in wan legs. Black lichen on card.

Yellow cub over the vulture domes. Phosphorescent lights nettle mud wall of the city. Sleeping copper fights. Fatal spasms in pink air. Acked out lung rot. On the tile squares. Red dusk. In old man with white centuries. Cop face of scarred iron. Slow street sex touched the head of screaming centipede men. Youths in the insect feeler. Crab flesh fur claws. Empty pain wings. Centipede legs boil in black mist. Static red need. Meat puppets of crab throat. Mouths of coal gas. Glass bones of mica mirror. Invisible insect cobwebs his street. Obsidian mirror of red sky. Sad copper in clay cocoon. Red nitrous fumes his leg in crab symbol accounts. Larval people whistling flesh. Eyes ejaculated spine mud. Black gum in member. Old junky coughing limestone in the obsidian morning: the sale mirror to red sky. Manipulated spasms puppets vestigial meat. Pulsing pink shell. Red pagodas and crystal accounts. Wet dream eyes hanged in lust of dead flesh patios. Boy chrysalis in streets of postcard. Eating birds patrol black lichen. Catatonic sports sear lungs of dream clay. Lust of mud bubble coal gas the insect street. Flesh ejaculation. Penis in the broken mirror rocks of Marwan. Serving the crystal dawn photo of sex. On the Brass and Copper Street.

Appendix 2

“Operation Soft Machine/Cut” The Outsider 1 (Fall 1961)

Appendix 3

From The Soft Machine (1968)

I had as usual been railroaded into the most expensive hotel 3 PM eating lunch in the ornate gloomy dining room a bad lunch of many courses the room almost empty… a rich family sitting by the window bottles of medicine on the table a commercial traveller in one corner reading the soccer scores.

Then a young man came in and without waiting to be directed by the head waiter sat down at the next table right opposite me you understand in this type dining room the guests are normally spaced out as far as possible an average distance of 23 feet. He was poorly dressed his white shirt very dirty his tie open. Two waiters converged on his table. They did not as I had expected ask him to leave. They took his order with respect and the smiling affection reserved for special clients. I had finished lunch and was smoking a cigarette when he walked over to my table.

“I am Henrique de Santiago. May I join you for coffee?”

Without waiting for my answer he sat down not in a rude or objectionable manner but as if he belonged there looking at me with a familiar smile. He was in his middle twenties very muscular the cheap black suit tight over his biceps. He told me at once in French that he was of the milieu—the underworld—but son of a well known family in Santiago one hour—he held up a dirty forefinger—from the capital. That would explain the waiter’s respect. Rich people may dress as they like and if it pleases them to play at being gangsters there is room for that as well. “I am also a Negro” he added in English “a smoke.”

I shrugged. Mixed blood is very common in Latin America. The waiter brought coffee and I noticed that he looked like Henrique de Santiago. Come to think of it the entire staff of the hotel looked like Henrique de Santiago.

“You must visit my mother in Santiago and see the coffee plantations.” He wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to me across the table. He had written on a sheet of yellow note paper “Monica Cocuera de Santiago Los Fuentes”

“She is known as the ‘Black Mamba.’ You will find each other interesting. I myself cannot leave the capital during the season. Besides I am complicated in a matter of stupefying drugs very big you understand.” “unfortunately” died unuttered as if some one had placed a slow cool finger over my lips. I sat there dreamy and absent looking out of the window across a square empty in the afternoon sun a dog sniffing on the quai seeing all this sharp and clear as if through a telescope warehouses customs sheds and piers of the port the sea ahead. A crescent of land encircled the harbor. I could see a road there and a truck that seemed to be moving very slowly my eyes following the truck. In another few seconds the truck would reach the point. There was a building on the point I could trace its shadowy outlines at the edge of my vision. I turned my head slightly to the left and looked at where the building had been a sheet of silver flame. I threw myself sideways out of the chair floating down very slowly it seemed I saw the dog dragging its hindquarters … dust and smoke swept across the square and I hit the floor in a shower of broken glass.

The building I never quite saw was the armory … 223 dead … thousands injured … whole water front quarter of the town destroyed by the explosion. I do not know what happened to Henrique de Santiago. There were many Henriques and many Santiagos in the list of dead. My own injuries were slight as usual and I was discharged from the hospital two days later. I had lost my luggage but I was traveling light an overnight bag a few purchases might as well have a look at Santiago. I hired a cab and asked the driver if he knew Los Fuentes de Santiago. The driver shrugged.

“There is a fountain si in the Plaza but it is dry at this season.” The town was inland from the capital in the foothills white road dusty trees. I told the driver to take me to a hotel of the medium class decent inexpensive large room with a balcony opening onto the Plaza red tile floors brass bed. I went out and walked around the Plaza dusty youths the dry fountain long empty noon awning flaps there in the wind; Cafe de los Fuentes. While I was drinking my coffee a grey anonymous man put a slip of paper on the table. I glanced down … yellow circular: Hoy Estreno al Cine Espana … La Mamba Negra con Paco, Joselito, Henrique … huge black snake reared to strike man in shorts reaching for his pistol … at 7 and 10 … (This circular should appear on the page). I put the circular in my breast pocket intending to catch the 7 o’clock performance. After lunch at the hotel I retired to my room closed the shutters and lay down to sleep. I was awakened by three loud knocks at the door

“Ouien es?” I called my voice muffled and distorted. The room was dark. I got out of bed and crossed the room my feet like blocks of wood. I opened the door. A thin figure fully eight feet tall stood there in a long black overcoat. I looked up high cheek bones a face as black as the coat. I could not be sure whether it was a man or a woman.

“I don’t know you.” I said in the same muffled voice.

The figure did not speak aloud but the words were there between us “I know you. See you Sunday.”

The figure disappeared down the stairwell which was round and twisted around the elevator shaft. I closed the door. The catch was broken so I locked the door from the inside with a key I found in a pyjama pocket. I had gone to sleep in underwear shorts. Even in the dim light I could see this was not the hotel room in Santiago. And this was not my old body. Well that would explain the wooden feeling and the distorted voice. I had attempted to force my reactive patterns on another body. I had been too forward. Perceiving my error I moved back. The body regained ease and grace of movement but his heart was pounding. He switched on the light.

I spoke distinctly spelling out the words in English.

“Who was that at the door?”

“There was no one at the door. I had a dream.”

He was not surprised to find someone there in his body. Obviously he had experienced such visits before. I surmised the figure at the door had visited him once and that visit had frightened him so he could not remember. No use to press the matter at this point. I looked around. It was a typical garconniere a compact kitchen at one end of the room a double bed sofa and chairs in cheap imitation of Swedish modern, a door which I surmised led to the bathroom. My host was a young man about 20. He was still upset by his “dream” so he made a cup of Nescafé and sat down on the sofa smoking a cigarette. I sat there in him and listened. Yes this body had received a lot of visitors … pieces of finance on the afternoon wind … tin shares in Buenos Aires … deals across the table in Lip’s … playboys pretending to be drunker than they were hard alert eyes … Rome … Hollywood … all from the haute monde or marginal to it so far as I could see or hear which is pretty far I am an old visitor from back but this was not in my area at all reason for being here shirt open on the golf course. Quite by chance the same stranger here? hummmrich and powerful visitors but the young man was not rich money is something you can feel as soon as you settle in the spine you can feel it like age or youth junk or sickness a cold grey glaze over everything that’s big money and it wasn’t here. He was not poor either and the thought of selling himself for money would have outraged him.

“I know nothing whatever about prostitution!” these words from a young man I visited long ago he hadn’t changed much you don’t unless you have to so not rich and not poor yet here he is a walking hotel of wealth and influence adds up his folks run a fancy hotel.

At this point my host spoke in the supercilious tones I was to hear often enough in the days that followed. “Allow me to introduce your new self. I am Jean Emile Leblanc. My mother is Swedish and my father French. We run a Swedish restaurant in Paris and during the season a resort hotel in Corsica very exclusive. I doubt if they would let you in” trying to needle me is he? I said nothing. “Who are you?” I said nothing. I am an unobtrusive visitor until I come to the point of my visit you would hardly know I am there.

“Don’t talk until you survey the area and figure the action.” The District Supervisor told me there in a shabby office years of grey pain in his eyes long long time you could tell by the shoulders “What are you some CIA slob? How they like to talk chewing it around like a cow with the aftosa and about as dangerous to other human cattle must protect the natives that’s what we are here for and small thanks we get for it as you well know.”

“Charming Arab house in the suburbs magic street leaf shadows on the wall the old porter from Arabian Nights friendly nabors invite us in for chicken cous cous and other Moroccan delicacies” cold stale room smell of kerosene heaters that sputter and smoke hostile locals stoning the house screaming Moroccan pleasantries at the door rain outside the roof leaks whiffs of the clogged toilet green mold on my shoes yes I well knew the thanks we get. “In the immortal words of Dutch Schultz D.S. of the New York area and that’s a pretty important job Demolition 23 ‘Shut up you gotta big mouth!’ Bradly and that’s for keeping it shut” So he shoves five clams of Havana into my bim and goes into his Luce act. He makes these jokes to ease the pain I guess but it’s pretty boring for the kids in the office the “Chemical Corn Bank” we call him one time he calls me in and there he is writing in long hand dressing gown floppy black slippers a beret yet marmite simmering beside him which he is tasting every now and then between sentences with a long wooden spoon. So he bows over the spoon and says

“I am Anatole France le vieux cadavre de France. Your assignment resuscitate me!”

and he does a pratfall I have to give him the kiss of life most distasteful thing I ever bent down for and he’s got a bank full of this corn and I wanta tell you Bradly from all the kids in office you radioactive old bore any planet would blow up listening to you. A million years he takes to turn his gags to lead this Uranian shit house. “Bring on the nova and shut Bradly up for the love of Uranus!”

However I had already opened my big mouth at the door. “Ah so you prefer to remain the unknown and probably for good reason. Are you a queer? I hate them.”

He got up stretched and yawned. He frowned and put a hand to his head went into the bathroom and took two Veganine tablets and I saw in the mirror he hadn’t changed much subject to headaches morning light in the room someone knocking at the door. He puts on a blue dressing gown and opens the door slim model there long yellow hair photo grey eyes

“Hi Fi!”

“Long John!”

(The D.S. retched into his handkerchief.)

They embrace this “Hi Fi” and “Long John” yet and the shallow water came in with the tide and the Swedish river of Gothenburg that compost heap smell of sex changing Swedes. She makes coffee chattering away like a bird vibrating every throat for miles around she is a real throat walker that chick a little salute when she stands there bare assed and leans a pert little kiss they do it on all fours dog fashion in the climax throw back their heads and howl “Is it going to be published in Vogue?” They dress and dance a few records “High Fi” making the selections with shrill cries shake the fillings out of your teeth so off to the beach in his Folkswagon where I meet Mitzi and Bernard.

Now you would think I found all this boring? Not at all. A visitor is never bored. You see what is boring is getting from here to there custom stops the laundry the post office shaving washing dressing packing looking for a hotel. I didn’t have to do any of these things. Jean did it all for me. Visiting is so comfortable and habit forming. Visiting is junk and junk is the oldest visitor in the industry I know what it is to kick a host habit yes that’s me there dim flickering on the tele from Spain. They all went away. No good. No bueno. Got time for a coffee kid? I’ll tell you a story vacant lot there by the florist shop tin can flash flare a young man waiting cobble stone street smell of ashes he was red haired his face streaked with coal dust.

“Cigarette Mister?”

My contact there sun cold on a thin boy with freckles fading streets a distant sky … sewage canal smell of coal gas black out falling … its windy here sweating fear like a vice … distant blurred 1920 street. “Here comes the old pencil man.”

a creased red face a cheap blue suit “So remember the shabby quarters.” Outline of his body guard there grey suit brown face pencil gun ready

“Razor blades … shoe laces … arm bands … pencils … chalk … sealing wax …”

“We’ll be wanting two pencils” I said there on North Clark St trying to get at my shoulder holster.

“Two yellow pencils from Pitman’s Common Sense Arithmetic never came out at recess time that afternoon I watched the torn sky bend with the wind … a thin boy with freckles … You know how to push this pencil, kid? the ‘Grey Pencil’ here trained with Ma Curie in the little blue school house we called her ‘Mother’ wouldn’t you taught me everything I am.” years of grey pain long long time you could tell by the shoulders. “I’ll say it country simple from Pitman’s Common Sense Arithmetic the lead in this pencil used to be radium a million radio active years here in this pencil draw it all the way back now push the pencil … nobody there distant 1920 wind and dust … Mrs Murphy’s rooming house remember it was a long time ago but not too far to walk there it is just ahead red brick building on a corner of the alley from the attic room you look across the playground of the orphanage with a telescope you can watch the boys at tall black windows of the dormitory a shock to see the boys I was diseased there now pieces of mutilated self blurred yellow ribs torn across the playground with a telescope ‘Windy 18’ there by the ‘Cement Mixer’ ‘Dusty Freckles’ hugging his knees naked on the shower floor.”

“Shove his legs apart boys!” screamed the Director.

“blurred yellow recess time 1920s sing you a scene between us where time had never written a thin boy looked like me in prep school clothes train whistles to a distant closing dormitory sad old human papers I carry diseased voice so painful telling you ‘Sparks’ is over New York. Have I done the job here? Will he hear it?”

dim jerky far away some one had shut a bureau drawer in the dim attic

“You only use a pencil gun once kid … phosphorescent stump of an arm and that was all I had to see him by last light left on a dying star … an old junky dunking pound cake in the grey cafeteria a napkin under his coffee the ‘Priest’ they called him sold a special crucifix that glowed in the dark until he glowed in the dark himself cold coffee sitting right where you are sitting now you see son when you get a host habit you forget about other folks … the boy waiting there … Mrs Murphy’s rooming house … all the sad old showmen … remember her queer son in the kitchen shaving his chest hairs blowing into the soup and singing away like a bird a musical family remember ah here we are Rooms To Let curtains grey as orphanage sugar a grey shadow always peeking out

“Will you be settling your account today Mr Jones?”

“Yes Mrs Murphy I’ll be settling my account these stairs they’ll be the death of me/cough/you only use a pencil gun once remember I am the director of no repeat performance showed you the papers clear as ‘Annie Laurie’ in 1920 movie from a dying star … sad young image dripping stagnant flower smell of sickness to a distant window … I’ll tell you a story called the Street of Chance … Arab house in the suburbs cold coffee sitting right where you are sitting now it’s raining the roof leaks I am moving the sofa to a dry spot heavy Spanish thing when I saw a little dry niche behind the sofa I had not noticed before. In the niche is a book glazed grey cover written in letters of gold long hand ‘The Street of Chance’ I opened the cover”

“Being the story of a 14 year old boy who died during the invasion.”

picture of the boy there faded sepia at the attic window waving to a distant train.

XII

THE STREETS OF CHANCE

CHAPTER I

cool remote cobble stone street fresh southerly winds a long time ago boy there by the stream bare feet twisted on a fence followed a flight of wild geese across a violet evening sky then he was above the stream above the street and the houses looking down on the train tracks with no fear of falling. When he got back to the house he told his father about it in the attic room his father used as a studio.

“I can fly father.”

“We have no such powers my son.”

sad train whistles cross a distant sky blue magic of all movies in remembered kid standing there face luminous at the attic window waving to the train dust on the window a sighing sound back the empty room held a little boy photo in his withered hand cross a distant sky the boy’s voice

“long long expected call from you.”

“I wrote son.”

agony to breathe this message agony to remember the words used to be the man you were looking for used to be the man click click click of distant heels back down a shabby street dim grey stairs smell of old pain long long you could tell by his shoulders

“Used to be me Mister. Mrs Murphy’s Rooming House remember”

“Will you be settling your account today?”

silver morning shadows on a distant wall jerky bureau drawer dawn in his eyes on the bed naked there shirt in one hand smell of young nights light years wash over his face sad middle aged smile

“I was waiting there.”

blue magic of all movies in remembered kid standing there fading streets a distant sky. He waves sadly from the Street of Chance. see the vacant film his face.

“Quiet now I go.”

sad middle aged face dim jerky faraway smile.

“I was waiting there”

boy standing by the empty bargain. He waves sadly from the Street of Chance.

Appendix 4

Appendix to The Soft Machine (1968)

The soft machine is the human body under constant siege from a vast hungry host of parasites with many names but one nature being hungry and one intention to eat.

If I may borrow the lingo of Herr Doctor Freud while continuing to deplore the spread of his couch no one does more harm than folks feel bad about doing it “Sad Poison Nice Guy” more poison than nice—what Freud calls the “id” is a parasitic invasion of the hypothalamus and since the function of the hypothalamus is to regulate metabolism …

“Only work here me.”

“Under new management.”

What Freud calls the “super ego” is probably a parasitic occupation of the mid brain where the “rightness” centers may be located and by “rightness” I mean where “you” and “I” used to live before this “super ego” moved in room on the top floor if my memory serves. Since the parasites occupy brain areas they are in a position to deflect research from “dangerous channels.” Apomorphine acts on the hypothalamus to regulate metabolism and its dangers to the parasitic inhabitants of these brain areas can be readily appreciated. You see junk is death the oldest “visitor” in the industry.

Notes

Abbreviations

SM1 | The Soft Machine, first edition; Paris: Olympia Press, 1961.
SM2 | The Soft Machine, second edition; New York: Grove Press, 1966.
SM3 | The Soft Machine, third edition; London: John Calder, 1968 (Fourth Estate, 2010).
1962 MS | 129-page manuscript (53-page typescript, 20-page carbon, 56-page paste-up), probably submitted to Olympia Press November 1962, described by Burroughs as “the original manuscript of the revised and rewritten version of The Soft Machine,” signed and dated “Paris, June 1, 1963” (CU 2.4).
1965 MS | 162-page typescript, probably retyped from the 1962 MS by Olympia Press; copies submitted to Grove Press in 1965 (ASU 6.4) and with insertions and deletions to Calder & Boyars in January 1966 (Lilly 66.1).
1965 galleys | 63-page corrected galley proofs, dated “Received Oct 12 1965,” for the 1966 Grove edition (CU 2.5).
ASU | William S. Burroughs Papers, Arizona State University.
Berg | William S. Burroughs Papers, 1951–1972, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.
CU | William Seward Burroughs Papers, 1957–1976, Columbia University.
Lilly | Calder & Boyars mss, 1939–1980, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.
OSU | William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Columbus SPEC.CMS.85 or SPEC.CMS.87.

Documenting differences between all three editions is revealing but also complex, and to document at the same time the manuscript histories of each edition, from rough drafts to final galleys, is both difficult to do and difficult to follow. Too much documentation becomes counter-productive, but the messy richness of the textual and manuscript histories is integral to the books themselves, so these notes strike a balance between completeness and usefulness. Taking the 1966 edition as the reader’s main point of reference, the notes focus on all significant and some typical variations between editions or the 1962 MS, the key typescript for this new edition.

Dead On Arrival

The opening has the longest and most significant manuscript history of any section. To begin with, biographically and textually the origins of the chapter go back to Burroughs’ mid-1940s experience as an addict in New York and to his debut novel, Junky, published in 1953. The archival drafts confirm what the content strongly suggests: that this material, traversing drug scenes set in not only North America but Mexico and Morocco, emerged from Burroughs’ Naked Lunch manuscripts going back to 1955. The overlap between The Soft Machine and Naked Lunch is evident from the “Outtakes” in the “Restored” edition of Naked Lunch, an important array of archival manuscripts.

The most complete early draft of “Dead On Arrival”—partially reproduced from a rough typescript in the “Outtakes”—surprisingly shows that Burroughs revised and then revised again the gender of the addict, which was at one time about a “chick.” This draft (Berg 15.3), which features several important variant passages, also demonstrates how he reworked his material to downplay its first-person narrative tone. Other unpublished typescripts feature equally intriguing discoveries. One of the earliest partial drafts directly connects “Dead On Arrival” to the opening passage of Naked Lunch, the line “So we called him ‘Short Count Tony’ ” appearing immediately before “I can feel the heat closing in” (Berg 17.1). Possibly the earliest manuscript of all (Berg 54.1), later dated by Burroughs 1956, focuses on the death of his boyfriend Kiki, and although the dating is mistaken (since Kiki died in September 1957), it confirms the basis in openly autobiographical narrative. The title phrase itself, abbreviated to “DOA,” appears in several Naked Lunch typescripts associated with one figure in Burroughs’ roll call of the dead: “Jerry,” based on Eugene Terry, who in November 1950 arrived DOA at the hospital in the Mexican border town of Reynosa after being mauled by a lion.

“Dead On Arrival” makes a strong bridge back from The Soft Machine to Naked Lunch and to Burroughs’ autobiographical experience, and this connection between the two books was also built into the start of Dead Fingers Talk, where the opening chapter of The Soft Machine appears under the title “no good no bueno” after a chapter that combines the opening and closing first-person narrative sections of Naked Lunch. However, in the first edition of The Soft Machine the material in “Dead On Arrival” (titled “white score”) appeared near the end of the text, a structural position that gave it a very different impact. Rather than echoing Naked Lunch, it echoed The Soft Machine itself: having previously encountered numerous scattered phrase fragments, the reader is already primed to experience the section’s formal and thematic focus on the recycling and return of memory. A five-page paste-up (OSU 1.1) confirms how Burroughs created this complex structure of repetition by literally cutting out and assembling a series of passages. Under the title “No Bueno,” the section was first published in the May 1961 issue of the jazz magazine Metronome with very minor differences (e.g., the replacement of “Fucking” by “F…..g”).

For the second edition of 1966 Burroughs used all of “white score” except its opening two paragraphs, material that was written separately and framed the text very differently. Apart from adding a single word to the first line, the only other changes Burroughs made to the 1961 section were in presentation, cutting capitals. However, he deliberately confused the integrity of the material by concluding the chapter with what, in retrospect, we realize is the first page of the following chapter. The break was made very simply by inserting the new chapter title page in between the first and second pages of “Who Am I To Be Critical?” in the 1965 MS. For the third edition, Burroughs restored the natural chapter break, while making further changes in punctuation, adding more ellipses, and cutting a small number of words.

Structurally, by following the 1962 MS the chapter now ends at its natural break point. In terms of content, the 1962 MS kept to the 1961 text: indeed, to create this chapter Burroughs simply cut the relevant pages from a copy of the first edition and pasted them onto typewriter paper (bearing the watermark EXTRA STRONG BASSEAU). The 1962 MS therefore retained the distinctive capitalizations of the 1961 text, and some fifty capitals have been restored for this edition. In his 1962 MS list of chapter headings, Burroughs began almost every word of his titles with a capital, and this practice has been followed here and throughout (i.e., “Dead On Arrival” rather than “Dead on Arrival”).

“I was working The Hole”: in SM1, the “white score” section begins with two paragraphs not used in either SM2 or SM3, whose relevance is suggested by the Trak motto (“Invade. Damage. Occupy”) which recurs later in the chapter: “The usual procedure is virus filter. Agent plants cold-sore on lip feeds back precise map of oral cavity: flu explores nasal passage and spongy lung substance: liver maps from The Yellow Sickness (lives in straw the Arabs say): penis wart moulds blood streets of neon: junk haunts the cold limestone spine Souks. Contour maps trace shrunken limbs of polio. The maps codified into Board Room Reports and Life Scripts. Service and control the Earth Puppets. You strictly from monkey without the Utilities Trak Service. Trak. Trak. Trak. Invade. Damage. Occupy.

On the junk is Time the only begetter of. I was taking junk impressions. From the beginning agent and point of argument. In the beginning was such a deal. The human race was fixed from the beginning. The words of an Old Junk Agent drifted cool and casual as a ceiling fan in Panama we split a four-ounce bottle of PG (paregoric). In the green watercloset. ‘Universe strictly from warring powers and the agents of warring powers.’ ”

All the early typescripts of this chapter locate the opening line in a longer narrative starting in Joe’s Lunch Room (e.g., the “Outtake” in Naked Lunch, 281). From the way the very earliest draft begins, it is likely Burroughs considered this as an opening page for Naked Lunch, which, he told Ginsberg in October 1957, “is introduced as a long junk-sick night of reminiscences and what happened to so and so” (Letters, 372): “I fall into Joe’s Lunch Room really thin, carry a coffee over from the counter and sit down in a booth. When I sit down a little shiver goes through me, a hot cold flash like malaria in a way, but really like nothing else but junk sickness . . There is a kid sitting at the counter about eighteen years old and he keeps giving me the eye. Good looking kid with yellow hair and brown eyes, and the hair over his eyes and little white teeth . . Little pieces of song are drifting through my head and I start humming them over and turning them into The Waiting Junky Blues and my mind keeps drifting off in a light fever . . I mean I had an oil burner . . Quarter piece of H a day . . I was working the Hole with The Sailor and we did not bad . . Fifteen cents each on average night” (Berg 17.8).

“The Sailor”: early drafts are more expansive about a character who clearly fascinated Burroughs: “He never talked to me about himself, I never knew what his real name was or where he came from, and I knew him as well as anyone did . . There was a doomed intense aura about him […] He was one of the few people I ever respected” (Berg 17.8). The Sailor was based on Phil White, to whom Burroughs originally planned to dedicate Junky, where he appears as Roy.

“and we did not bad. Fifteen cents on an average night”: in one of the few textual changes to the original SM1 material, SM2 added “do,” an insert that was not made for SM3 and which has been cut for this edition. For SM3 Burroughs recreated his early draft (see Berg 17.8, cited above) by cancelling “an” on the 1965 MS (Lilly 66.1).

“coffee… in Joe’s Lunch Room”: most of the ellipses in SM2 were spaced in this chapter so that the first and third periods were not separated from the words either side, creating a very odd impression. Following the 1962 MS, ellipses here are spaced as they were in SM1, with a space after.

“There is a boy sitting at a counter”: “There was a chick at the counter giving me the eye,” runs an earlier draft (in Naked Lunch “Outtakes,” 281–82). In what is probably a still earlier draft, the “kid sitting at the counter about eighteen years old” has a “nice voice . . Groton or St Marks or one of those pseudo English traps . . I always hide my Harvard accent as deep as it will stay down without jumping on me like a vaudeville skit” (Berg 17.8).

“Say kid I know an Old Aunti Croaker”: corrects a typo in SM2 6 (“known”) and changes spelling from “Auntie.” In the typesetting manuscript for SM1 the word was revised from “Aunti” to “Aunty” and then back to “Aunti” (CU 2.3), and it is spelled this way in both the 1962 MS and the 1965 galleys.

“Take the phone”: the earliest drafts give clear motives for why the narrator wants the young addict to speak with the doctor:

“ ‘I had a beef with him last time . .’

I dialled the number and the croaker answered . . I covered the receiver . .

‘It’s him . . Just say you want an appointment and let your voice break.’

‘But do I haveta make it with this old character?’

‘Take the phone . . We’ll talk about that . .’ ” (Berg 17.8).

“About this time I meet this Italian Tailor”: see the Naked Lunch “Outtakes” (256–57) for an early draft.

“The Man I Italian Tailor”: in SM1 this is “i Italian”; on the galleys for SM3 Burroughs corrected it to “an Italian” (Lilly 66.4). On the galleys for SM2 (where he made changes to other words in the same line) he let “I” stand.

“Say you’re looking great kid”: the earliest drafts develop this material further, and identify the seduction more explicitly with the narrator, one—a cleanly typed 7-page typescript from 1958–59—continuing: “It’s like I was following the junk right in to feed on the young kid stuff, watching it wither under my hand, each day taking a little something for my old hope chest . . (Baby faces fade the quickest . .) Communion of flesh with flesh deeper and more precise than any sex act, juxtaposition of nodding satiety and quivering need . . tracing a line of goose pimples along the vein with one finger and sliding the needle in slow, and then watching the stuff hit that’s the moment” (Berg 15.3). An even earlier draft expands further on the “hope chest”: “And how I loved to crack the whip and make them cringe and beg and whine for it … I mean forcing some sex act on them was of course purely symbolic of the deeper excitement” (Berg 17.1).

“Leif repatriated by the Danish”: writing “in a complete state of desolation” in January 1955, Burroughs related to Allen Ginsberg many of the details given here about the “Danish boy” he knew in Tangier who drowned at sea (Letters, 257–58). There are several very early drafts featuring Leif, and also Kiki, in openly autobiographical terms.

Who Am I To Be Critical?

This chapter did not appear in the 1961 edition and was written from scratch for the 1962 MS. Going through several drafts, it was very probably conceived as following on from “Dead On Arrival,” and the chapters are clearly connected despite being narrated and structured in completely different ways. As noted above, the major difference in its appearance across the second and third editions of the book is to do with where this chapter begins, the 1968 text creating the integrity that was broken for the 1966 edition. The 1968 text also made changes in presentation, reducing the number of capitals, introducing more paragraph breaks, and making a small number of cuts (cancelling about twenty words on the galleys). With numerous minor differences, almost half this chapter was also published in the New York magazine East Side Review in January 1966 under the title “Fun and Games, What?” Given its geographical and cultural focus on Central America, it’s no surprise the chapter references details in Queer and The Yage Letters, based on Burroughs’ amorous and anthropological expeditions through the region in 1951 and 1953.

This edition follows the 1962 MS in restoring the continuity of the original chapter and in reproducing the extra paragraph breaks also made for the 1968 text, while restoring a dozen capitals and making a couple of minor corrections.

“I knew this one pusher”: what is probably the earliest draft begins with a preceding opening line: “Doc Benway and me was pushing junk and the heat was so bad at that time” (Berg 9.13).

“a worthy vessel”: this is a direct overlap with the “Shift Coordinate Points” section of Nova Express.

“Bill and Johnny we sorted out the names”: in an early draft the narrator refers to the other as “Marty” (Berg 9.31).

“and all of a sudden the sex chucks”: in SM2 the chapter began here in mid-sentence. On the 1965 MS, this is where page 8 begins, following page 7 which ends “our eyes watering and burning” (ASU 6.4).

“Doc won a Duesenberg”: corrects the misspelling in SM2 13 (“Dusenberg”) and SM3 10 (“Dussenberg”) of a manufacturer of luxury automobiles until the late 1930s. One early draft has “and bought a Chrysler town and country” (Berg 9.31), while other typescripts have different versions of the line, including the 1962 MS which has “and Doc won a Dussenberg from this local and we headed for Mexico—By now we had floppy Panama hats and a tan, and dark glasses.” The Duesenberg returns in The Wild Boys and Port of Saints.

“So we stripped them” to “understand”: this was one of the few lines not in SM3, cancelled on the MS.

“slow fuck on knees”: a very early draft continues: “and he told me we could be burned to death for doing it and I said that might be kicks too” (Berg 9.31).

“But then who am I to be critical?”: in a rare cancelled line, the 1962 MS continues: “Die and let die I always say.” Another draft goes on to attribute the saying: “But then as the Sailor used to say who am I to be critical?” (Berg 9.31). In one of a small number of precise overlaps between texts, the Sailor’s words also appear in Minutes to Go (60).

“Take if off Take it off”: the line, and its connection to burlesque, appear in “Word” (Interzone, 170), from a passage not used in the “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter here.

“the Green Boys”: Burroughs explained their origins in a letter to Ginsberg in March 1961 as the result of taking psilocybin mushrooms provided by Timothy Leary; “The Green Boys with purple fungoid gills I saw with the mushroom and have written a long section on these curious regions and the practices of the natives” (ROW, 67).

“smelling like a compost heap”: one draft includes the cancelled line; “But like Early Answer Larry used to say, Look down along the local line before you travel there” (Berg 11.34). The line echoes the 1927 folk song “The Lonesome Road,” used in Naked Lunch and The Ticket That Exploded.

“So Iam rigged up”: corrects SM2 22 (“So I am”) by restoring the name Burroughs coined for Ian Sommerville throughout the Cut-Up Trilogy. Curiously, he let the error stand and on the 1965 galleys inserted in this sentence his other name for Sommerville (“Technical Tillie”; elsewhere spelled “Tilly”); it has been cut for this edition.

“scoffed the lot”: the 1962 MS has the cancelled line: “And I turned to Iam and said: ‘This means war—These cocksuckers are upsetting the balance of nature.’ ”

“secret meaning of the centipede motif”: in Queer (New York: Penguin, 2010) Burroughs had asked, “What is the meaning of the centipede symbol?” (85). The question must have occurred to Burroughs a decade earlier, since drawings of centipedes featured in his case file at Payne Whitney, where he received psychiatric treatment after severing the tip of his little finger in 1940. Although about a hundred centipedes, scorpions and crabs appear in SM2, there were twice as many in SM1.

“ready to play ball”: one draft that includes numerous variant lines adds the detail: “and hanged me with a vine naked to a turn” (Berg 11.28).

“shady or legitimate”: these words, and several others in this passage, derive from the “In Search of Yage” section of The Yage Letters.

“this 8267”: the 1962 MS had “8276” which also appears in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. Either way, the digits added up to Burroughs’ special number: 23.

Public Agent

Like “Dead On Arrival,” this chapter derives from a single long section of the 1961 edition of The Soft Machine, “white subway,” which was again used almost in its entirety. (The last page of the original section was omitted, although half of it was then used in “Case Of The Celluloid Kali.”) In the 1961 edition, “white subway” followed directly after “white score,” the basis for “Dead On Arrival,” so that Burroughs preserved the integrity and continuity of material from one edition to the next. However, the 1961 edition actually has little structural continuity and the narrative voice of each section differs greatly. In Dead Fingers Talk, the chapter forms the first half of a section entitled “the meat handler” where it is combined with Naked Lunch material (“Meeting of International Conference of Technological Psychiatry” and a page from “Atrophied Preface”)—although there’s no archival evidence that connects “Public Agent” to the Naked Lunch body of manuscripts and the Tangier era, as there is for “Dead On Arrival.”

For the 1962 MS, Burroughs simply pasted onto his typewriter paper pages cut from a copy of the 1961 Soft Machine. For the 1968 text he made only minor, seemingly inconsistent changes in presentation (e.g., where the second edition has “The script for heavy drink,” the third has “the script for Heavy Drink”). Following the 1962 MS (which, in this case, has “The script for Heavy Drink”), this edition restores a dozen capitals from the 1961 text that were cancelled on the 1965 galleys.

“entrails from other mouth”: changes SM2 27 (“mouths”). SM1, the 1965 galleys for SM2, and SM3 all have the apparent error or ungrammatical idiom used elsewhere in this chapter (“everyone’s lung blew out”).

“zipper guns”: on the 1965 galleys the copyeditor commented: “ ‘zipper guns’ ‘zip gun?’ There is no zipper gun.” Burroughs replied on a duplicate page: “Leave it zipper. This being does not speak very good English or any language.”

“Then I had to check you”: corrects SM2 30 (“Them”), as in SM1 and SM3.

“turned the effluvia”: the final lines derive from an equally cryptic draft that includes unused material: “Species of ape with prehensile penis addicting farts. They know their worth and all the favors dearly to those unfortunates who fall under The Effluvia and become addicts of The Green Stuff” (Berg 4.55).

Trak Trak Trak

In complete contrast to the opening three chapters, here Burroughs made a series of selections from the first edition of The Soft Machine, passages that he restructured and rewrote and then combined with newly written material. The eight-page typescript for the chapter in the 1962 MS includes pasted-in pages cut from the 1961 edition but Burroughs retyped the bulk of it because he made so many revisions—cutting individual words, lines, or paragraphs, and radically re-sequencing the material. He took text from no less than eight different sections of the 1961 edition to make up almost half of this chapter, ending it with a long passage of new material. Further possibilities for recombination appeared in Dead Fingers Talk, which, with very minor differences, reproduces all but the final 250 words of the material deriving from the 1961 Soft Machine, but then follows it with the first two-thirds of “Gongs Of Violence” and the short “Uranian Willy” chapter to make a section called “cut city.”

In one of the major differences between the second and third editions, the chapter in the 1968 text ends just over half way through the chapter in the 1966 edition, concluding at the point where the long section of new material began. Once again, for the 1966 edition Burroughs broke the chapter in the simplest of ways by inserting the title page in between two typescript pages in his 1965 MS (ASU 6.4). Up to the point where it ended the chapter, the third edition also had around 275 more words than the second and lacked about 90. The 1962 MS ends this chapter in line with the 1968 text (although not quite identically) and this structure has been followed here. In keeping with the 1962 MS, 70 capitals have been restored and a couple removed.

“The Sailor and I burned down The Republic of Panama”: versions of this opening line appear at the start of “In Search of Yage” in The Yage Letters (3) and in Naked Lunch (183).

“No glot—Clom Fliday—(Footnote”: the note glossing this phrase (taken from Naked Lunch) did not appear in SM1. In Dead Fingers Talk, the word “Footnote” appears on its own in parentheses—but the actual note is not given until several pages later, when it is indeed given as a note at the foot of the page, linked to a superscript number 1 inserted after the phrase “No glot” in the sign that Bradly reads (page 32).

“Out in the bay little red poison sea snakes swim desperately in sewage”: illustrating how Burroughs rewrote and restructured his material at a sentence level, the original line in SM1 71 was: “Little red poison sea-snakes in the bay swimming desperately in sewage.”

“Footnote: ‘working The Hole’ ”: Burroughs’ complex and extensive use of notes is again apparent here, as he gives (in parentheses rather than at the foot of the page) his second “Footnote” in the first two paragraphs of this chapter—a note that should logically have been given in the book’s opening line, where the phrase it glosses first appears.

“And kicked a habit”: in SM1 71 this was not heroin addiction, but “a THEE Habit.”

“And the refugee German croaker you hit anywhere”: in Queer, Lee hits the German croaker and reports his dialog and “human look” in Quito (75). Although the narrator flies from Panama City to La Paz in the previous paragraph, this is because a line was cut from the original SM1 passage, where he indeed flies to Quito.

“And Joselito moved”: an earlier draft of this paragraph and the next gives a much clearer narrative and shows how Burroughs restructured his material for The Soft Machine; see the Naked Lunch “Outtakes” (259–62).

“Through broken stellae”: a very rough early draft of this passage has a different list leading to an explicit commentary on the ecological toxic zone it describes: “Through a vast rubbish heap: empty H caps, KY tubes, broken condoms, shit stained comics, rusty iron, broken stellae, tin cans and pottery, worked stones, bones and excrement . . all the waste of man’s time on the earth” (OSU 87; 17.130A).

“Flash bulb monster” to “Up a great tidal river”: almost none of this derived from SM1. For Dead Fingers Talk, Burroughs inserted this material in the middle of a long passage taken from the “all members are worst a century” section of The Ticket That Exploded, and framed the whole with other Soft Machine material.

“The orgasm is a 1920 movie”: corrects SM2 36 (“in”), as in the 1962 MS, Dead Fingers Talk, and the 1965 manuscript for SM3 on which, except for the last phrase, this paragraph was cancelled.

“stroke of nine”: a phrase recycled from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, along with several others in the next paragraph (which, as in the 1962 MS and SM3, has been set in speech marks for this edition).

“the drenched lands”: the phrase, which recurs four times in SM2 and seven in SM1 and which also appears in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, translates and truncates the phrase “pays poivrés et détrempés” (“spicy and drenched lands”) from Rimbaud’s poem “Démocratie,” a blistering critique of capitalist greed (“au service des plus monstreuses exploitation industrielles ou militaires”). Although it appears in capitals elsewhere, the phrase has been set in lower case here, following the 1962 MS.

“Up a great tidal river”: after the previous paragraphs which did not derive from SM1, from here until “Smell death bed pictures” (page 42), the text derives from a series of sections. An earlier typescript of this material is in the Naked Lunch “Outtakes” (259–63).

“The coast people”: an early rough draft uses the term “the Costenos,” more specific to Latin America (OSU 87; 17.130A).

“like death in the throat”: at this point for SM3 Burroughs inserted over 100 more words from the “cut city” section of SM1.

“The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast”: a line used in the “Joselito” section of Naked Lunch, where “Trak” briefly appears.

“Bolivar in catatonic limestone”: one of the longer passages in an early rough draft elaborated: “statues of Byron and Bolivar and various generals stand about in the eternal catatonic postures advocating liberty under the lidless eyes of an iguana” (OSU 87; 17.130A). Lord Byron’s admiration for Simón Bolívar, “El Libertador” of Spanish colonies in Latin America, extended to naming his yacht after him.

“Albinos blink in the sun”: at this point in SM3 Burroughs added almost another 100 words from “cut city” and “the kid” sections of SM1.

“They were searching his room”: an early draft of this passage, which comes from the “sola esperanza del mundo” section of SM1 where it is explicitly set in “The River Towns of Ecuador” (77), is in the Naked Lunch “Outtakes” (269). A more complete early typescript adds further details: “They were not finding IT . . IT wasn’t there . . Lee had no habits at all . . He had his routes nobody could find stashed in a used condom behind the gas meter . . Sewed into a moldy jock strap in a dusty suitcase on top of the armoire […] The whole apparatus of the state is riddled with campers. Lee was a camper himself.

Lee saw another layer in faces incapable of any feeling other [than] total yen for the white juice that oozes out of broken souls and hate for anything stands between them and the juice.

‘Not only Campers but Soul Crackers.’ He spit the words out with contempt. ‘Peasants . . untouchables . . Red Necks . . gum it like snuff . . Must come from The Baths’ ” (Berg 4.18). For more about “Soul Crackers,” see note for page 81.

“The whole rancid oil scandal”: the phrase, inserted here out of sequence from SM1, references a case in Meknes, Morocco involving poisoned cooking oil that caused 10,000 casualties and which was featured in the same November 1959 issue of Life magazine that ran a major negative story on the Beats. Texts in Minutes to Go, including Sinclair Beiles’ “TELEGRAM FROM MEKNES,” cut up and combined references to the oil scandal and Life magazine.

“Bradly was reading the sign”: indicating how often Burroughs revised this material, in an early rough draft “Carl was studying” the sign (OSU 85; 2.4), while a longer draft, included in the Naked Lunch “Outtakes” (261-62), is written as first person narrative.

“It is permiso, si”: SM1 75 had “see” (a copyeditor’s misunderstanding or a pun), while Dead Fingers Talk has “yes,” even though on the 1962 MS Burroughs had made the change to “si.”

“He dimed The Sex And Dream Utilities”: although seemingly an error, across all texts it was only corrected to “dimmed” for Dead Fingers Talk, probably by a copyeditor.

“the black obsidian Pyramid”: before this line Burroughs added as an insert on the 1965 MS for SM3 a couple of unused lines from the same section in SM1, and in the process the “gold fish five feet long” in the original became “three feet long” (27).

“The perfect product”: an earlier draft precedes these lines with a fuller explanation that includes the Trak motto used in “Dead On Arrival”; “The model always held up to a Trak man is the virus: INVADE? DAMAGE … OCCUPY … We don’t multiply we simplify the wants of the consumer . . Or more accurately we simplify the consumer himself . . People are merchandise . . We don’t sell things to people we sell people to things …” (OSU 85; 2.4). The methods of Trak parallel Burroughs’ description of junk as the “ideal product” in the “Deposition” added to Naked Lunch (201).

“Smell death bed pictures” to “Understand: fee”: instead of these lines, which do not derive from SM1, at this point SM3 27 ended the chapter with a slightly revised version of the ending to the “trak” section in SM1: “Trak police made us … Joe get going …’ So that is the whole story … a low pressure area … Circuit judge’s sentence of death.” The last line therefore made a link to the hanging corpses that appear in the first line of “Early Answer” in SM3.

“erogenous smells to Monterrey”: the first line of “Early Answer” in SM3 28 has an alternative phrasing, “on the road to Monterrey,” a hand written insert made by Burroughs onto the 1965 MS for SM3 which repeats the source of this line as it appears in the “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter (page 136).

Early Answer

In the 1966 Soft Machine this chapter only featured new material, whereas the 1968 edition—like the 1962 MS—broke the previous chapter in two and began “Early Answer” with a page assembled from the “street of idiot pleasure” section of the first edition. Burroughs’ redactions of the 1961 text made already obscure material more difficult to follow, but much of the new material he added in late 1962 is equally difficult, and the structural coherence of the chapter is not easy to see. The material is often as fragmented and repetitious as any part of the book, although the chapter does work within the text as a whole through its recycling of phrases used elsewhere, including chapters that come earlier (“Who Am I To Be Critical?”) and later (“Dead Fingers Talk”); in retrospect, on a re-reading, we recognize its larger function.

There are several partial draft typescripts titled “Early Answer” and they include both variant passages that are as cryptic as those in the published text and also more narrative material that Burroughs made obscure through editing. It is at this point in the 1965 galleys that the first significant inserts and cancellations appear, and for the third edition Burroughs made further small cuts and half-a-dozen additions, including one of 350 words. Toward the end of the chapter in the third edition, he also redacted and reorganized the 1961 material and, in a final act of confusion, ended “Early Answer” with what in the second edition is the first page of the next chapter, “Case Of The Celluloid Kali.”

The second edition removed many capitals, most of which were retained for the third; following the 1962 MS, about a hundred have been restored here. The 1962 MS also had half-a-dozen short blocks of unused lines, adding up to 150 words, that were cancelled on the 1965 galleys; the longest block is given here.

“Jimmy Sheffields”: from this point on all the material in the chapter was written for the revised edition of the book. “Jim Sheffield” is a character in Henry Kuttner’s novel Fury, cited in The Ticket That Exploded, while Jimmy Sheffields appears in the “Inflexible Authority” section of Nova Express, other parts of which are recycled here.

“where the awning flaps”: the “awning flapped” previously in The Ticket That Exploded but the phrase originated in the last page of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky. As he worked on revising The Soft Machine, Burroughs wrote to acknowledge Bowles: “Incidentally got 2 chapter headings from fold ins with The Sheltering Sky, Pages from Cold Point and A Distant Episode—Chapter titles are :: ‘Last Hints’ and ‘Where The Awning Flaps’ ” (Burroughs to Bowles, November 21, 1962; HRC). In his letter Burroughs quoted a short passage that appears near verbatim in “Where The Awning Flaps” (pages 103–4).

“cook down the prisoners for jelly”: the 1962 MS has “for jolly,” a phrasing credited to Jack the Ripper and cited by Burroughs in Naked Lunch. The phrase appears with “jolly” in the same passage from the “Who Am I To Be Critical?” chapter as other phrases cut up here.

“washed back on Spain repeat performance page”: this phrase was an insert typed by Burroughs onto the 1965 galleys, and marks the point at which the chapter ended in SM2 51. The phrase did not appear in the 1962 MS or in SM3 32 (which has a different line; “sad servant in sepia clouds of Panama”), both of which continue without a chapter break.

“He walked through empty market booths”: an eight-page typescript titled “EARLY ANSWER” gives more detail of the scene: “He walked through eddies of dust and papers and onion skins—Empty market booths, shutters clattering—Boys with apple faces from 1910 loaded empty crates into wagons” (Berg 11.31).

“Back to his room full of shadows”: the 1962 MS has cancelled lines at this point, which were themselves edited down from a longer version in what is probably the earliest draft: “Back to his room to face the ghosts of the assassins who had been sent out against him and failed—There he was sitting on the bed the Italian hood from the Mafia—‘The trouble with you is K9 you never learned to use your left—All you can do is slug with the right—I don’t feel against you—You were right with me so I’ve come to tell you—There will be others sent out and sooner or later’—He hummed a little tune—‘Why don’t you wise up and pack in’ K9 saw a vista of the yellow dry landscape of Minraud and prisoners eaten alive by white hot ants dying slowly over the centuries” (OSU 85; 2.2). Parts of this material were cut-up and used in the text (e.g., “You never learned to use your Jimmy”).

“bought second hand in hock shops”: the earliest draft has a longer passage that dramatizes Burroughs’ famous “banker drag” apparel: “Biologic Agents are rarely allowed more than four hundred dollars per month—And most of that goes into equipment tape recorders and cameras that must often be abandoned or sold at a loss when the word comes as it always does sooner or later—‘Move—Fast—Be out of the country by tomorrow at the latest—They have your coordinate points—Your hotel is bugged—You are cut off—Messages intercepted—’ Remember the enemy strategy is machine strategy and machines move slow even though they think fast—Slow but sure the enemy screens feeling converging—Time to move on—So K9 had very little money for clothes though he liked to dress well in conservative banker drag he called it” (OSU 85; 2.2).

“and sorted out his name”: at this point the 1962 MS has a line that was cancelled on the 1965 galleys but appears in SM3 34: “On the bed wasn’t exactly a smile.”

“She started screaming”: a preceding line cancelled on an early typescript which shows numerous revisions, explains who “She” is: “All good things come to the woman who lived here” (Berg 11.31).

“Come level on average—Careful”: an early draft that lacks these final phrases has instead a passage where the narrator works out where he is from the language spoken (concluding, “France obviously, or Belgium”), and then makes what would have been the only explicit reference in the text to the influence of L. Ron Hubbard: “He walked out into the street past 2 girls who were discussing Scientology in English” (OSU 2.2).

“Identical erections in the kerosene lamp”: “in the” has been restored from the 1962 MS; the words were cancelled on the 1965 galleys, while SM3 35 has “in a.”

“rotten smell of ice”: the 1962 MS has one cancelled line immediately after this phrase—“Have to move fast”—and another after the following phrase; “Wait til the signs are right.” This second phrase is given in Junky as a definition of the word mañana (95).

“the Homicide Act”: Burroughs followed and cut up newspaper reports of the successful campaign in Britain during the early 1960s to abolish the death penalty for murder. “Parker” is almost certainly a reference to Lord Parker, Lord Chief Justice of England throughout the decade.

“being in position”: changes SM2 58 (“ebbing”). The version in SM2 is plausible given the recurrence of the phrase “ebbing carbon dioxide.” But on the 1962 MS Burroughs typed “ebing,” an obvious typo for “being,” and he corrected “ebbing” to “being” by hand on the MS for SM3 (Lilly 66.1).

“K9 stood in the shadow”: an early draft has “Lee” throughout, rather than K9 followed by one anomalous use of Lee. The draft also has several variants, including an additional line before Lee shoots The Broker: “Always nail them with their own gimmicks” (Berg 11.1).

“One more change”: both SM2 and SM3 and their galleys have “change,” although it is “chance” on the 1962 MS, and the phrase “one more chance” appears later in the chapter.

“J’aime ces types vicieux qu’ici montrent la bite”: in the 1967 edition of The Ticket That Exploded the line appeared incorrectly (“ces type vicieux qu’ici montre”), even though the ungrammatical French in the phrase had been fully corrected in 1961 by the Olympia Press copyeditors of SM1, who restored the plurals (“types” and “montrent”) and also changed “qu’ici” to “qui se” (CU 2.3). The French copyeditors seem to have assumed the words had been misheard; however, their correction changed not only the grammar but the meaning, from “I like the vicious types who show their cocks here” to “I like the vicious types who show their cocks.” Burroughs deliberately restored his version, both for The Ticket and twice for the revised edition of The Soft Machine (see also page 119). In 1962 he typed this line as he wanted it (“J’aime ces types vicieux qu’ici montrent la bite”), correcting by hand one error (changing “montre” to “montrent”), albeit missing his typo (“viciuex” for “vicieux”) and then, even more emphatically, later in the 1962 MS he carefully typed out and pasted the line onto his typescript in between the other pages cut and pasted from a copy of SM1 (CU 2.4), although again he made an apparent typo (“q’ici”). The reason for preferring the bad French, and the significance of it, is hinted at in the word that always precedes the line in the text: “pissoir.” In “Paris Please Stay the Same” (an essay in which he directly discusses “Ungrammatical French”) Burroughs specifies where “here” was and why it mattered; citing the phrase with every error as “J’aime ces type vicieux, q’ici montre la bite,” he recalls having read it on the wall of a Parisian pissoir—and declares them “words that could have been written by Rimbaud” (The Adding Machine [Grove, 2014], page 131). As pissoir poetry, as a text of homosexual desire, and as an authentic record of a certain place and time, the ungrammatical words had a specificity and deviance that Burroughs respected.

“a brass bed in Mexico”: at this point the 1962 MS has a phrase that was cancelled on the 1965 galleys but appears in SM3 48; “Mucous of the world.”

“The Mexican boy dropped his pants”: on the 1965 MS for SM3 Burroughs cancelled a small number of phrases in the preceding paragraphs, but from this point on he redacted and reordered the material more substantially. SM2 63 had the lines from “whiff of dried jissom” to “the other two watched” here, but, like SM3, the 1962 MS has these lines in the final paragraph of the chapter, where they have been moved for this edition.

“You is feeling the hot quick” to “last review”: these lines do not appear in the 1962 MS and were an insert made on the 1965 galleys.

“Maze of dirty pictures” to “in drag”: these lines, which are in the 1962 MS, are not in SM3; they appeared in SM2 despite being cancelled on the galleys.

“silver paper” to “cemetery”: these lines were an insert made on the 1965 galleys, and did not appear in the 1962 MS.

“Who?” to “meant if they start job for instance”: these paragraphs did not appear in SM3.

“Whiff of dried jissom” to “watched”: at the same time that these lines were moved on the 1965 galleys, one preceding line in the 1962 MS (“Suitcases all open a man comes back to mucus of the world”) and several following were cancelled on the galleys: “A man comes back to summer dawn smell of his crotch—I was caught in the gymnasium jacking off your cousin twice removed in a wake of jissom—I cannot find words to castigate the lithe aloof young men whereby a boy’s mother takes over—They are all empowered to unfurl the nastiest colors—Belt her—Your bunk mates are rotten if they start job.”

“street light” to “long time ago”: these lines, which do not appear in SM3, were a typed insert, scotch-taped onto the 1965 galleys.

“Clom Fliday”: after the final phrase in the chapter in the 1962 MS and SM2, for SM3 Burroughs added 350 words of new material and concluded the chapter with the opening page of “Case Of The Celluloid Kali.”

Case Of The Celluloid Kali

Framed by newly written material, the middle half of the chapter derives from no less than seven different sections of the first edition of The Soft Machine. However, as several of their titles suggest, these sections had a single character in common: “hello i’m johnny yen,” “johnny comes on,” “yen in space,” “the total recall of the survival artist,” the danish operation,” “the cut,” and “white subway.” The sections were scattered in the first edition, and by re-ordering their sequence Burroughs actually created a stronger continuity. Early typescripts reveal a good deal more about Johnny Yen, who was probably inspired by a boy Burroughs met in Denmark—“A Danish cockteaser gave me essential character” (Letters, 365)—in August 1957.

Several pages of the material originating in the first edition were used in two sections of Dead Fingers Talk. As noted, for the third edition, Burroughs added what had been the opening page of this chapter in the second edition onto the end of the previous chapter. Structurally, the second edition therefore followed the 1962 MS, which began the chapter with its title spelled out in block caps using (as did early drafts) the definite article (“The Case”); curiously the article was dropped in the 1962 MS list of chapter headings. For this edition, almost fifty capitals have been restored.

“any identity any body”: an early draft adds a caveat: “The one thing i won’t do is change sex—But that may come—(know what they mean if they start job for instance)—” (Berg 12.15).

“the Danish rights on my novel Expense Account”: an early draft had a cancelled alternative title for his Cut-Up Trilogy, referring to “the possibilities of a Danish edition of my novel Exploded Lunch” (Berg 5.5).

“Bar backed by pink shell” to “with such hair too—red”; unlike the opening paragraphs, these passages derive from SM1, with very few changes. In Naked Lunch, “Hassan’s Rumpus Room” begins by describing a “bar backed by pink shell” (62), confirming the origins of The Soft Machine material. However, there’s also a more surprising textual and structural connection to SM2: here, Burroughs’ fictitious novel “Expense Account” marks the switch point between new writing and material from SM1, but the phrase “Expense account” came from Naked Lunch, where it appears in the final words of the section before the start of “Hassan’s Rumpus Room.”

“A boy slid off a white silk bar stool”: Johnny Yen is introduced rather differently in an early draft: “Lee ordered a drink . . He was about to walk over and make some juke box conversation . . when the boy pivoted around with a sudden lithe movement . . It was the most beautiful face Lee had ever seen, but fl at and dead as a tooth paste ad . . Lee looked straight into the eyes . . A low pressure area . . A sucking emptiness . .

The boy smiled . . He came over and sat on the bar stool beside Lee and looked straight into his face . . ‘Hello’ he said . . ‘I’m Johnny Yen’ ” (OSU 87; 17.130A).

“Hello, I’m Johnny Yen”: in a rough typescript that is probably the earliest to feature this sexually ambivalent character, the name as well as gender are unexpected: “A nude figure of indeterminate sex stood up slowly on the dais … What looked like a pink jock strap ran around the figure’s middle, a sort of a band of undifferentiated tissue . . Actually his or her whole body seemed made of this strange pink substance […] At one moment a beautiful young woman, a hard eyes liz, a boy an angular graceless fag […] She said her name was Mary Jen . . I noticed her face was faintly delineated with scar tissue phosphorescent in the pink neon” (OSU 87; 17.130A).

“The Big Physician”: the early drafts reveal the sexual history of the surgeon as well as his creation: “But you know he’s not a full time plastic surgeon . . It’s his hobby and he only takes cases that interest him . . And I’ll tell you something else . . He is really a woman. A sex change case . . They say he operated on himself . .” (OSU 87; 17.130A). Hinting at why he refers above to the Danish rights of his fictitious novel, in 1964 Burroughs published a part of this material about the doctor as “The Danish Operation” (Arcade 1), taken from the short section in SM1 of that title. In 1952 George Jorgensen had became the first famous case of sex reassignment surgery, becoming Christine after treatment in Denmark.

“And I have All of ‘You’ ”: restores italics as well as capitals not in SM2 69. An early five-page draft typescript lacks this reference to the Cole Porter jazz standard but continues much more explicitly about Johnny’s ideological relationship to his audience, including an apparent invocation of George Orwell (whose Nineteen Eighty-Four was a reference point for Burroughs in 1959 and 1960): “he turned to the audience ‘yes just stay right at your little tables just where I put you only you don’t know it was me that put you there not so long as I keep talking you’ll never know it was me that put you where you are and made you think it was the only place and made you like it or say you do and say it often and remember Little Brother is so kind so very very kind to have given you any place at all you ungrateful little beast […] and you have to say I all the time and when you say I am there and try and get I out’ ” (Berg 4.20).

“from the audience”: in a rare marginal correction to SM1 material pasted into the 1962 MS, Burroughs indicated “No Caps” for this phrase and for “heavy blue drink.”

“The Spanish”: in SM1 119 this is idiomatically “The Spains,” which Burroughs changed on the 1965 galleys and for SM3.

“The doctor was sitting” to “green juice”: these lines derive from “the danish operation” section of SM1 and were published, together with most of “the cut” and part of the “border city” sections, in the first issue of the British magazine Arcade in 1964.

“my friend Mr D The Agent”: an early draft with several variants has “Mister Lee The Agent” (Berg 4.32).

“between the two sides of him”: although Burroughs was unreliable in dating his manuscripts, one typescript page identified as “original MS of Naked Lunch 1954 Tanger, Morocco” is surely the earliest draft of this material. Overlapping the end of “the danish operation” and part of the next section in SM1, “the cut,” it features unused lines at this point, including: “He give you this wonder drug and you see him a beautiful woman . . But sometime the drug wear off in the act and a citizen comes up on him and wig” (OSU 87; 17.130A).

“Empty space of the original”: the 1962 MS has a cancelled phrase that appears in Dead Fingers Talk (158); “Next step with Benway.”

“So I tailed” to “pop out”: these lines do not derive from SM1.

“The Mandrake Club”: this was a small London jazz club in Meard Street, Soho.

“The boy looked at me” to “red”: after these lines, from the “white subway” section of SM1, the rest of the chapter was new material.

“She bringa the heat three dimensional”: corrects SM2 79 (“brings”), as in the 1962 MS, SM3 49, and both the 1965 galleys and the SM3 galleys (Lilly 66.4), on both sets of which Burroughs made the correction by hand.

The Mayan Caper

Burroughs must have been writing this chapter in late 1962 while preparing The Yage Letters for City Lights, reinforcing the strong connection between The Soft Machine and South American material. The “drunken fraud” in Mérida who acts as the reporter’s “Time Guide” certainly inherits the cynicism of Lee’s encounters with medicine men in Colombia a decade earlier. The narrative, which appears almost identically across the 1962 MS and both the second and third editions of the book, was originally entitled “Prison Without Bars,” in keeping with its sensational newspaper genre. It was first published in the Edinburgh magazine Gambit in spring 1963. The text in Gambit has over 50 small differences, lacks about 90 words, and has some 200 extra words—almost half of which appear in a revealing final “Note.”

The text went through detailed revision involving a ten-page typescript and several shorter drafts, which show that Burroughs made precise revisions of individual words (e.g., a “shabby” office became a “dingy” one) as well as cutting and adding to his typescript, although the structure remained the same. In addition to representing his longstanding anthropological interest in the Maya and the region, the chapter explores newspapers, time travel, and control systems, and the relationship between them. Burroughs even planned to incorporate a recently composed essay—“Insert article on photo montage,” says an aside early on in his typescript (Berg 15.47)—suggesting he considered integrating different forms of research and writing about text and image.

A few small corrections and punctuation changes have been made to follow more closely the 1962 MS, including restoring half-a-dozen capitals and a couple of the double colons which were almost always removed by Burroughs’ copyeditors.

“Joe Brundige brings you the shocking story”: possibly the earliest draft begins: “Starting next week in the Star Times Joe Brundige brings you the story of slave labor in the Mayan Empire—I have traveled a 1000 years through time and back with this sensational account” (Berg 5.5). The beginning of a later complete draft, which nevertheless has many variants and lacks numerous passages of the final version, shows Burroughs trying out newspaper titles: “Joe Brundige brings you the shocking story of slave labor in the Mayan Empire Caper exclusive to the Star Times News herald Express Bulletin Tribune” (Berg 5.4).

“I have just returned” to “It belongs to you”: instead of these lines, the earliest draft is more direct about the political control of time travel: “This is how it is done—You travel on a word and image beam—It’s as simple as that—Why didn’t some one think of it? Because the control machine blocked any thinking on that direction” (Berg 5.5).

“I did the same with photos”: at this point the 1962 MS has the instruction, cancelled on the galleys: “Insert article on photo montage.” Copies of “The Photo Collage” are held in the Berg and at ASU, which has a twenty-page version (10.4). The early draft, which lacks the next paragraph about using a film studio, instead continues: “This of course was only preliminary work—Basic training in time travel—Gradually I found that I could literally move back—I would suddenly slip into a 19th century scene and as if they had been cued in characters with beards and old cut clothes would appear in the pub or on the street” (Berg 5.4).

“burned by Bishop Landa”: here the early draft had a sensational claim: “I can tell you that history has now been rewritten—It was I Joe Brundige who burned the Mayan codices” (Berg 5.4). Rather than making “innumerable photomontages,” in this draft the narrator “made photos of the codices and artifacts and mixed those in with photos of modern Mexico and photos of myself and photos of my room.”

“you can have it back”: the 1962 MS continues with a line not in the galleys: “That is of course if you want it back.”

“other flesh the lookout different”: “It is a sensation difficult to describe,” adds the early draft: “I was myself and somebody else too” (Berg 5.4).

“We were walking along a jungle path”: corrects SM2 89 (“jungle hut”); the draft has “path” (Berg 5.4), so this was almost certainly a transcription error in the 1962 MS (repeating “hut” from the previous line). The version in Gambit has: “we were on a jungle trail the boy walking ahead.”

“As I stepped forward into the clearing”: the early draft begins the paragraph with the lines; “So I took a plane to Merida and soon found myself back a thousand years—And there ahead of me was a clearing and the Zombie slaves of the insect control machine working the fields—I shivered with anticipation—After almost a year of grueling spade work I was alone in the forbidden land a thousand years from help and home” (Berg 5.4).

“white-hot copper claws”: the early draft continues: “Sex was reduced to a minimum necessary to perpetuate the species and sodomy was strictly forbidden—The workers were however allowed to drink themselves into a stupor on certain occasions—Words cannot convey the brooding oppressive horror of that place” (Berg 5.4).

“to play these recordings”: the 1962 MS has “even to play,” as does SM3 56. However, in response to a query on the 1965 galleys, Burroughs noted, “omit even.”

“retaining human legs and genitals”: in a rare difference, SM3 56 has “human arms.”

“I took over the priest’s body”: a partial draft adds: “This technique I had learned from Doctor Benway and he had warned me to use it only during an emergency since the transfer last only a few hours—A few hours would be enough” (Berg 12.14).

“and photographed the books”: the early typescript lacks almost all the following lines, from “Equipped now” to “burned the codices”, and instead has a longer version of the chapter’s climax: “Hunger weakening the control lines—I made another visit to begin mixing pictures of riot and revolution in with the codices—But still the control system continued to operate like crippled centipede—But the priests were worried—They did not know what was happening and spent most of their time in the temple burning incense and inaugurated a round of sacrifices to placate the Gods—This was a mistake—Open rebellion broke out—The overseer was overpowered by a group of workers who put out his eyes with planting sticks and forced corn seed up his ass with hot planting sticks—Finally I made my last visit to the room where the books were kept and burned the books—As I left the temple I could feel the preliminary quivers of an earthquake—The wind was rising and whipping the palm trees to the ground—A tidal wave came in and swept the village and the temple fell—Pandemonium and the workers free of control rushed about with planting sticks and clubs killing the priest—I broke out my camera gun and gave myself the long delayed pleasure of killing the priest who had been my unwelcome lover—A great weight seemed to fall from the sky—Wind rushed in and blew the ashes away—the priests were torn in pieces by the workers and the stellae destroyed—there was nothing but a mound of rubble where the city had stood” (Berg 5.4).

“Mayan control calendar”: an early draft describes the codices as “these evil books” (Berg 12.12). The version in Gambit adds a final paragraph: “Note: The Mayan control calendar is not dead—Using precisely the same techniques supplemented with IBM machine and electronic brains it is operating now, controlling thought, feeling and apparent sensory impressions, controlling and monopolizing your life your time your fortune—The techniques for dismantling the machine I have described here are still valid—A machine is a machine and can be redirected—Whatever you feed into the machine on subliminal level the machine will process—Cut, shift, tangle word and image lines—Disconnect the control machine of the world press, of Madison avenue and Hollywood.”

I Sekuin

Although the opening headline refers to the Mayan Caper and so makes a connection back to the previous chapter, the material could not be more different. Instead of continuous and coherent first-person narration, “I Sekuin” confronts the reader with the kind of stylistic experiment that made the first edition of The Soft Machine so distinctive, even in context of the Cut-Up Trilogy. The title, with its bizarre name, seems to derive from Brion Gysin’s “First Cut-Ups” in Minutes to Go (10). For the 1966 edition, Burroughs used all the opening page-and-a-half of the 1961 text’s “minraud” section, and completed the chapter by combining a series of fragments from the rest of it, omitting the section’s many long permutations of single phrases (“I To Johnny. Johnny To Me. I Two Johnny. Johnny Two Me. I Johnny Too …”). In places, Burroughs rewrote the original to make it less obscure, but his major intervention was to change the appearance of the opening page-and-a-half. For the third edition, as well as adding a new ending of just over 100 words, Burroughs returned to how the opening passages appeared in the first edition, retaining capital letters for every word (with a single exception). This was also how the 1962 MS presented the text, and as well as making a couple of small corrections, over 150 capitals have been restored.

“THE MAYAN CAPER”: SM1 63 has a longer opening in block caps that lists more of the cons and conspiracies that make up the nova plot: “THE SHORT-TIME HYP, THE CENTIPEDE SWITCH, THE MAYAN CAPER, THE HEAVY FLUID, HEAVY METAL GIMMICK.”

“Minraud Time”: the mythical location had for Burroughs specific literary correlates and in one text from 1960 linked to SM1 by references to the Mayan Caper and the Centipede Switch, he associates the text’s preoccupation with “alien” temporality directly to the key poetic influence on The Soft Machine: “ ‘CONFOUND ALL THE PLAGUES BEGINNING WITH TIME’: RIMBAUD LIBERATE THE CAPTIVE HEADS FROM MINRAUD TIME” (OSU 85; 1.1). The quotation comes from Rimbaud’s “A une raison,” which Burroughs made into two cut-up poems in Minutes to Go.

“Wax Work Of Minraud”: SM2 95 has “Works” but SMI, all later manuscripts and galleys, and SM3 have the singular, restored here.

“Saw Thee Dummies”: corrects SM2 95 (“the”), as in SM1 and SM3.

“Under Sing Of The Centipede”: corrects SM2 96 (“sign”), as in SM1 and its typesetting manuscript (CU 2.3), although the error also appears in SM3 58. In the next paragraph, the phrase “Sing Sign” clarifies that what appeared to be a typo (one Burroughs would have made often) is here intentional, and he later expanded on the sign/sing “sign”; see note in The Ticket That Exploded ([Grove, 2014], page 266).

“Bradly ate the krishnus”: here and elsewhere, SM1 has “Martin,” signs of an earlier draft where it was not Bradly who landed but “Mr Martin” (Berg 5.6).

“Smear it in”: corrects the typo in SM2 98 (“Semar”). In the following line, “phosphorescent” corrects another typo (“phopho-rescent”).

“the sick morning—”: at this point Burroughs made a 130-word insert on his typescript to end the chapter in SM3 59–60.

Pretend An Interest

Like the earlier “Trak Trak Trak,” Burroughs created this chapter by recombining and rewriting a series of passages from the 1961 Soft Machine. Featuring the character of Carl, the material not only goes back to Naked Lunch (where Carl Peterson appears in the “Joselito” and “The Examination” sections), but to the creative beginnings of The Soft Machine—one of the first references to which comes in Burroughs’ September 1959 letter asking Ginsberg to send him any manuscript material “on mythical South American places featuring Carl” for “the book I am writing now” (Letters, 425).

Cutting back and forth across the original sequence of the material in the 1961 edition, Burroughs drew on five sections and assembled his text from almost thirty separate blocks, some reproduced verbatim, others heavily redacted. For the third edition, he made a couple of small cuts and seven short inserts, mostly of first edition material adding up to just over a hundred words, and ended the chapter with several new lines. Passages were used in a different sequence for three sections of Dead Fingers Talk. The 1962 MS has a further 120 capitals, restored here, and a small number of unused lines; those that appeared in the third edition are given below.

“juggling five or six bureaus”: this whole paragraph comes verbatim from the “doctor benway cut up” section of SM1 and a longer, very early draft makes visible how Burroughs had redacted already elliptical material still further: “juggling five or six bureaus in the air at once, farther and farther out thinner and more tenuous drifting away like cobwebs in a cold spring wind leaving him finally without bureau one sitting in a court yard under the dead crab eyes of Soul Crackers … Always there out in the cold and the dark always waiting … Some day . . Benway siphoned himself out of the area . . He stared down a soul cracker in a green doorman’s uniform who carried an ambiguous object composite of club and broom and toilet unstopper … The cracker snickers obscenely and slid into the shadow of a broom closet—ammonia odors and sweaty suety scrub woman flesh stung Benway’s eyes as he walked through the space vacated by the Cracker . .” (Berg 4.21).

“Soul Cracker”: an early draft which shows numerous small differences, continues with the phrase: “The Untouchable Crab Men” (Berg 9.24). Burroughs first used the term “Soul Cracker” in a letter from July 1959 that goes back to the origins of The Soft Machine, identifying his new work with Gysin’s paintings: “We are doing precisely the same thing in different mediums. The Soul Crackers who move BETWEEN layers of light and shadow and color” (Letters, 420).

“In Guayaquil sat on the river bank”: the lines echo Burroughs’ 1952 description of the Ecuadorian city in Queer, and he repeated them in the 1967 Ticket That Exploded (page 34). A very early rough draft has variant lines: “We remember the days as one long process of the evil and hateful secret police always everywhere and in Guayaquil walked along the shore of the river and sat down watching the big lizard crawl in the mud flats and the melon rind” (OSU 17 130A).

“That was the year of The Rinderpest”: corrects the spelling in SM2 100 (“Rindpest”) of the contagious cattle plague disease. One of Burroughs’ favourite gags, the line recurs in Queer and Naked Lunch.

“You know what that means?”: in a possible answer to the question, one early partial draft continues; “Let some frantic old character hang you for a plate of beans” (Berg 4.59).

“growing tendrils through his body”: up until this point Burroughs made almost no changes to SM1 material pasted into his 1962 MS, but from here onward he cancelled numerous individual words (e.g., “growing neon tendrils”) or phrases (e.g., “plops feeling over spine centers rubbing twisting liquid hand inside his liquid bones drain out into the green eating jelly”).

“The naked Initiate”: an early rough draft has a longer variant passage: “The naked Initiate was strapped to a wooden drum shaped like a man engaged in the act of sodomy standing up the initiate arranged of course in the position of the nameless asshole—initiates do not have names” (Berg 4.56).

“the youth is carried through the streets”: corrects SM2 103 (“street”) as in SM1, and corrects the typo in SM2 (“cere-nominally”). In an early draft, which suggests a more self-conscious use of the ethnographic journal form, the Purified One selects a youth “with whom he indulges in unspeakable practices which I will sketch in some detail on a later page” (Berg 4.59). An even earlier draft expands on the youthful appearance of the Purified Ones: “in point of fact they do present a surprisingly youthful appearance … But their vampirism does not go unpunished since, in course of time, they need more and more youths to retain the appearance, the false façade until finally a monster crustacean forms inside and breaks the marble shell of the boy shell. The crustacean is destroyed by an Old Junky with a flame thrower . . And a new Purified one is selected by The Earth Mother . .” (Berg 4.14).

“Green-Baum Early Explorer”: the name caused confusion on the 1961 typescript, where it was written in autograph in no less than four hands using different colored inks, including the Olympia Press copyeditor’s transcription “Green Balm” (CU 2.3).

“Howler monkeys”: after this line, SM3 inserts another 30 words of material taken from later in the SM1 section.

“One must pretend an interest”: SM3 64 has a short insert at this point, as Burroughs updated the 1961 text’s reference to South American “soccer scores” by referring to a tragedy that took place in Peru in May 1964: “318 known dead in Lima soccer riot … panic in the stadium … 323 dead …”

“The Assistant put a pail over his head”: an early rough draft continues: “A Barbary Ape leaped onto the pail beating on it with a copper hammer” (Berg 4.61).

“I will call The Guide”: SM3 adds several more following lines from the original SM1 section.

“In a green savannah stand two vast penis figures”: although he rarely mentions the poet, Burroughs was surely echoing the beginning of Shelley’s poem about fallen empires, “Ozymandias”: “I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert.’ ”

“A pimp leans in through”: the 1962 MS has the SM1 version redacted on the 1965 galleys, but in SM3 68: “A pimp steps out of him and leans through.”

“Scores are coming in”: the 1962 MS continues with a line from SM1 cancelled on the 1965 galleys but in SM3 69: “Rate shoe.”

“chewing gum with a hypo”: the 1962 MS has the SM1 version cancelled on the 1965 galleys but in SM3 69: “gum with a slight creak. The Manipulator applies oil with a hypo.”

“virus flesh of curse”: the 1962 MS has the SM1 version cancelled on the 1965 galleys but in SM3 69: “brown virus.”

“Berdache”: the term, which refers to men who took on women’s dress and social roles in Native American cultures, was probably one with which Burroughs was familiar from his graduate studies in anthropology.

“Young boys need it special”: after this line, SM3 70 adds concluding lines to the chapter: “faded sepia genitals in the drawer of a tattoo parlor … silver paper in the wind … frayed sounds of a distant city.”

Last Hints

Once again, Burroughs made this chapter by recombining passages and fragments from a number of sections of the 1961 Soft Machine—in fact, more than a dozen different blocks drawn from nine separate sections. After pasting in a long opening passage drawn from a single section used verbatim (“carl descended”), the 1962 MS shows that Burroughs proceeded to retype, cut and paste, or annotate a series of shorter passages. He also wrote new material that makes up most of the final quarter of the chapter, whose titled he credited to Paul Bowles. For Dead Fingers Talk, Burroughs used the first two pages of the chapter to complete a section that began with “The Examination” from Naked Lunch—an appropriate combination since “The Examination” also featured the character, Carl. Making more connections back and forth across his oeuvre, Burroughs also used the last two pages of “Last Hints” to complete a section in Dead Fingers Talk that combined a page from “Trak Trak Trak” with half-a-dozen pages from The Ticket That Exploded. For the third edition, he made five short inserts, mostly of further first edition material, cut a small number of words, and altered the ending. Following the 1962 MS, two-dozen capitals have been restored.

“I wanna say further”: in one of a number of minor differences, SM1140 has “wanta.”

“ball peen hammers”: it was “ball-point” in SM1 142. SM3 72 has “ball-pen,” even though on the 1965 galleys Burroughs had confirmed the copy editor’s query, “do you mean ball peen?”

“Joselito, Paco, Enrique”: at this point SM3 72 has an extra short paragraph of SM1 material (from the “carl the traveller” section) that partly duplicates the following paragraph. After “always kept locked,” SM3 inserts a line of new material: “(‘The Van Allen Belt’ … barely audible click).”

“The Café de France”: like “end of the line,” the café derives from a cut-up of the ending of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.

“How many plots have been forestalled”: indicating how in early drafts Burroughs incorporated references to people in his circle, a rough typescript continues by naming one of his most important friends in Paris: “ ‘in a strange bed before they could take shape’—Shades—Stern and Michael—‘Jack, rotten with you i need a vacation’ Jack Stern sitting in boy haunted by the iron claws?” (Berg 5.4).

“Panama clung to our bodies” to “ceiling fan”: after this line, which does not appear in SM3, the 1962 MS continued with cancelled lines: “Forgotten in 1920 movie tracks broken, dead post card waiting a place forgotten coughing and spitting in 1920 movie—In the dominion of breathless spasm clung to fading soccer scores.”

“sputter of burning insect wings”: after this line, SM3 73 inserts 30 words of SM1 material and adds another line (“one boy naked in Panama dawn wind”) to replace the final line in SM2.

Where The Awning Flaps

For this chapter, whose title he credited to Paul Bowles, Burroughs used almost all of the “cut color flicks” section from the 1961 Soft Machine, making very few changes, and then added twice as much new material. The last two-thirds of the chapter overlap substantially with his 660-word cut-up text, “I Am Dying, Meester?” which in January 1963 he sent Lawrence Ferlinghetti to complete The Yage Letters.

For the third edition, Burroughs made two very short insertions and two short cuts and then, in the most radical difference between editions, added almost 3,500 words of new writing. This material gave “Where The Awning Flaps” a very different identity and ending and also created a structural confusion. First, because the new structure incorporated and replaced the previous edition’s chapter entitled “1920 Movies.” Second, because Burroughs’ new material itself created a new Chapter XII entitled “The Streets of Chance” that in turn begins with material headed “Chapter I.” The 1968 insert is included as an Appendix in this edition.

Apart from its use of capital letters, some fifty of which have been restored here, and new final lines inserted on the 1965 galleys, the second edition was identical to the 1962 MS.

“Idiot fuck you-me-Johnny”: the 1962 MS continues with a line cancelled on the 1965 galleys that appears in SM3 74: “Take.’ Leaves erect wood phallus on the Me and so on out into a Lemur People.” The cancellation of the line created a problem with speech marks in SM2 122, corrected here,

“Citizen of the area” to “on the blue paint wall”: these lines were cancelled on the MS for SM3 (Lilly 66.1).

“Ran into my old friend Jones” to “Panama photo where the awning flaps” (123): these passages overlap “I Am Dying, Meester?” in The Yage Letters. Over two-thirds of that text is used here with a number of cuts but mainly verbatim.

“face eaten” to “New World”: the line was cancelled on the MS for SM3 (Lilly 66.1).

“Old photographer trick”: like other details, this first appears in “Mexico City Return,” the 1953 text originally written as part of “In Search of Yage” but published later as an epilogue to Queer.

“On the sea wall two of them” to “evening wind”: as well as a few lines in the following paragraph, Burroughs cited these lines verbatim in his letter of November 21, 1962 to Paul Bowles.

“Sad servant” to “out of focus”: the 1962 MS ends at “where the awning flaps,” and Burroughs scotch-taped these final lines onto the 1965 galleys. These lines do not appear in SM3, which instead continues the chapter with the 3,440-word newly written text, included in the Appendix section here.

1920 Movies

Burroughs created this chapter out of a dozen blocks of new writing and material from seven different sections of the first edition, some reproduced almost verbatim and others cut up into fragments and recombined. Not part of Burroughs’ 1962 MS were the very opening and closing lines and the “Salt Chunk Mary” material in the middle of the chapter. Developing a character from Jack Black’s You Can’t Win (1926), a book that profoundly influenced his view of criminal society when he read it as a teenager, the 1,000-word insert was probably written shortly before being scotch-taped into the Grove Press galleys in October 1965. “Salt Chunk Mary” also appeared in a version one third longer in the magazine Intrepid in 1966, and some of its many variants are given here.

Because of its restructuring, in the third edition the material in this chapter appeared near the beginning of its new chapter, “The Streets of Chance.” Burroughs made some two-dozen small cuts to the opening passages that used first edition material, many cuts as short as a couple of words, seemingly at random. He then made a 1,900-word insert of new material, followed by another section of first edition passages subjected to a series of small cuts. Another equally long insert of new material was followed by another edited version of first edition text, before a final 1,500-word section of new material. In sum, for the 1968 text Burroughs added over 5,000 words in three blocks and removed about 750 words in a series of small cuts.

Almost 180 capitals have been restored from the 1962 MS, which otherwise differs from the second edition in having about two-dozen lines of extra first edition material.

“Film Union sub” to “cigarette money”: not in the 1962 MS, these lines were a typed insert scotch-taped onto the 1965 galleys.

“infer his absence”: this line is the first of many lines, phrases, and individual words omitted for SM3.

“Iron cell wall painted flaking rust”: on the 1962 MS the opening line of this section from SM1 (“Mexico DF Penitentiaría Federál”) was cancelled. An early typescript is more explicit about the location, naming the prison where in September 1951 Burroughs had been held following the shooting of his wife: “Calle Lecumberri Mexico DF Penetentiaria Federale . . Iron cell walls painted whore house blue flake rust and bed bugs” (Berg 5.1).

“Mexico thighs”: changes SM2 129 (“Mexican”), undoing a correction made by the copyeditor on the 1965 galleys.

“Just hula hoop”: up until this point the text drew on the “sex permutations” section of SM1; this line, taken from a different section, and the following line which doesn’t derive from SM1, were not in the 1962 MS but began the long typed insert scotch-taped into the 1965 galleys.

“She named a price”: the version published in Intrepid 6 (1966) has an extra second line that clarifies the scene’s autobiographical basis: “She ran a red brick rooming house East St. Louis Illinois.” Reference is to Hattie Murphy’s lodging house on the North Side of Chicago at 4144 North Kenmore Street, where Burroughs stayed in autumn 1942, during time he spent with Lucien Carr and Dave Kammerer.

“a load of 00”: SM3 86 adds “buckshot,” clarifying that this is a reference to the standard size shell for game hunting. The Intrepid version is more expansive, and has “righteous buck shot in your kisser.”

“had all my teeth” to “each other’s lungs”: the 300 words here do not appear in Intrepid, but that version continues: “and something else this male charge crackling out of me. And of course all those ring tail fruit bats were after me hot and heavy.”

“red haired boy smoky rose sunset”: restores “boy,” omitted from SM2 133, although the word is in the 1965 galley insert and SM3.

“a Turner sunset”: the Intrepid version has “a Cezanne river” instead and, more intriguingly, a next sentence which works in a reference to Burroughs’ editor at Grove Press, probably from using cut-ups made with their correspondence: “So I settled for a smoky sunset waiting there with the blue laundry for kinda special payments from Rosset.”

“fading streets a distant sky?”: at this point SM3 has a 1,865-word long insert, before continuing, with some minor differences, like the 1962 MS and SM2.

“Figures of the world”: the phrase in SM1 133 used here echoes and recycles part of a significant passage from earlier in the text (SM1 21) that was cut for SM2: “The Board Of The Winner lights up with all The Stern Right Figures Of The World: Uncle Sam Mao Tse Tung Krushchev Churchill De Gaulle.” Nikita Khrushchev, Premier of the Soviet Union 1953–1964, also appeared in early drafts of the “Last Words” material used in Nova Express.

“helmet of photo goggles”: the 1962 MS and SM3 93 have “lens goggles.”

“They clicked in through a squat toilet”: before this line, the 1962 MS has a phrase cancelled on the 1965 galleys but in SM3 94; “Blue Cubicle Guide had transparent ass.”

“i me you cut”: changes SM2 138 (“I me you cut”), to restore a lower case that SM2 revised to upper, here and in two following instances.

“Street boys of the green gathered”: this and following lines were part of the SM1 material published in the fall 1961 issue of Nul magazine as “Take That Business to Wallgreen’s.” In the 1961 typesetting MS, this material was an insert on different paper and set in all block capitals, drawing the copyeditor’s instruction: “composer normalement en bas de casse” (CU 2.3).

“a land of grass without memory”: the phrase, which recurs three times in SM1, is taken from the T. S. Eliot translation of St.-John Perse’s poem, Anabasis, a major influence on Burroughs.

“impersonal screen eyes swept by color”: restores “eyes,” omitted from SM2 140 and SM3 96.

“Panhandle cyclone”: SM1 has “Kansas,” but Panhandle was rewritten on the 1962 MS. On the SM3 manuscript, Burroughs made the change in the opposite direction, cancelling “Panhandle” and writing in “Kansas.” At this point Burroughs inserted a ten-page typescript into his 1965 MS for SM3, made up of nearly 2,000-words of new material followed by a shorter version of the “Color Unit” material taken from SM1, before ending the chapter with another 1,500 words of new material.

“The young faces sharp”: exemplifying how Burroughs redacted material from his original manuscript for SM1 and then for SM2, the 1961 typesetting draft had: “The young faces sharp and timeless in the flash bulb of urgency fade out in state restaurants empty of hunger” (CU 2.3). The version in SM1 and SM2 is far more elliptical, and in SM2 what seems to be a typo has appeared—“stale” for “state”: however, the 1965 galleys show that Burroughs deliberately made this substitution.

“1920 movies”: altered by Burroughs on the 1962 MS from “1910” in SM1, prompting a copyeditor’s marginal query beside a following reference to “1910,” but this was left unchanged.

“lights a blue flame”: corrects SM2 144 (“fights”).

“flesh diseased” to “radioactive garbage”: these lines are not on the 1962 MS but were a typed insert scotch-taped into the 1965 galleys.

Where You Belong

Apart from a few phrases that recycled material from the first edition, this short chapter was written from scratch, and Burroughs composed at least two full drafts before his 1962 MS. There are also unused cut-up versions and, most revealingly, several partial drafts of the opening passages. The drafts show significant variations, the very earliest echoing the final section of The Ticket That Exploded, which Burroughs finished at about the same time he began writing new material for The Soft Machine. The third edition is identical to the second except for very minor differences in spelling and punctuation while, apart from a couple of small but significant erasures, so too is the 1962 MS.

“My trouble began”: the very earliest draft of the opening paragraph begins quite differently and has a distinctive range of reference: “Now this citizen was not with the oil company but worked for an outfit called Life Time Change—‘We don’t report events we write them’ he said. And they sent me to school I am learning how this is done—Right away I sus it is the old Mayan crab gimmick all over Caper with an IBM machine figuring out the thought units and rotating the units and I don’t want to know remembering where that caper can wind up—But they were controlling my thoughts feelings and apparent sensory impressions—‘No one walks out on Life Time Change’ he said chewing his cigar—‘There’s no place to go—We have it all sewed up tight as a junkie’s ass hole’—So I wangle a transfer to the Near East where I hear about this Hassan I Sabbah lives on a rock surrounded by a desert of silence—And I put in a line to the home office somebody should cover Alamout and got the job—Well I see it isn’t going to be easy because all around the edges of this desert are the thing police and trak guards—of the border city—so Iam rigged up a vibrating camera gun and we blasted our way through—into the silence—Silence outside and it seeped down in and all the word dust fell off you KLUNK—Silence to say good bye—” (Berg 11.28). Here Burroughs is much more direct in identifying Henry Luce’s trilogy of magazine titles (“Life Time Change” for Life, Time and Fortune), and this phrasing recurs twice more in the same draft. On the 1962 MS, Burroughs cancelled the original phrase and wrote in by hand the change to “Trak.”

“And friend looks me over”: in one early draft the friend is identified as “the Madison Avenue man” (Berg 5.4).

“they have trapped a grey flannel suit on me”: this is “strapped” in draft (Berg 5.4) but “trapped” on the 1962 MS.

“I sus it is the Mayan Caper”: the early typescript indicates how Burroughs rewrote his material: “So right away I dig this I sus it is the Mayan Caper with an IBM machine but by now they are controlling my thoughts feelings and apparent sensory impressions with encephalographic brain waves So i am fucked again but Iam says the answer is simple as usual—The machine is so big no one person can run it or know in a thousand years what data is being processed—It’s the Mayan bit all over—Just feed anything into the machine and the machine will process it—All done with technical sergeants—these officers who go around chewing cigars don’t even know what button to push” (Berg 5.4).

“A fat cigar and a long white nightie”: a rough cut-up page, which has the characteristic underlining of phrases to show which ones Burroughs considered selecting, continues by naming names: “Past crimes high lighted Luce—he boasted of a rigged thousand years” (Berg 5.4).

Uranian Willy

At the foot of the last page of the “Where You Belong” chapter in the 1962 MS Burroughs typed “Insert Combat Section” and then added in hand, “and war of the sexes”—which is what he did by creating this and the following chapter. To make “Uranian Willy,” Burroughs drew on a few lines of the 1961 Soft Machine to do with “Pilot K9,” and on two chapters of Nova Express, taking two thirds from its chapter also titled “Uranian Willy” and one third from “Towers Open Fire.” For the 1968 edition, Burroughs added some 250 more words taken from the 1961 text, plus a new 100-word footnote. Apart from two cancelled lines and a few more capitals, restored here, the 1962 MS is identical to the second edition.

“Uranian Willy”: the 1962 MS starts with a canceled line: “Cross the wounded galaxies he was wanted for nova in three solar systems—” A draft of the “Uranian Willy” chapter in Nova Express, and the version of it published in the magazine Second Coming, begin with a similar preceding first line: “His larval flesh shuddering from The Ovens Of Minraud, metal scars on his face cross the wounded galaxies he was wanted for Novia in three solar systems” (OSU 2.3).

“Use partisans of all nation”: corrects SM2 152 (“nations”). Although the “Uranian Willy” chapter in Nova Express has the plural “nations,” Burroughs often preferred the singular, and did so on the 1962 MS both here and again in the final line of the chapter.

“Smell of burning metal in his head”: up until this point the paragraph derives from SM1 15, and the 1962 MS continues with another line that Burroughs then cancelled; “Enemy flak hit him a grey wall of paralyzing jelly.”

Gongs Of Violence

One of the most confusing and richly complicated chapters in terms of its textual and publication histories, “Gongs Of Violence” begins with what were the opening lines of “the war,” the long first section of the 1961 Soft Machine. The origins of the material go back as far as summer and fall 1957, when Burroughs referred to writing up a “final War of the Sexes” (Letters, 369). For the second edition, Burroughs re-used some of the 1961 text verbatim while re-sequencing or making small cuts to other parts, and then added just under half of “life scripts,” which expanded the first section even though it appeared a hundred pages later in the book. Much of this material was published a year before The Soft Machine in the Scottish magazine Sidewalk, where it appeared, combined with material from other sections, under the title “Have You Seen Slotless City?” (and was reprinted two years later as “Take It to Cut City-USA” in the New Orleans magazine The Outsider). After more first edition material, Burroughs ended “Gongs Of Violence” with a last quarter of new material—“new” in the sense that it did not derive from the first edition, although the penultimate paragraph was written in spring 1961, just after The Soft Machine had been completed, as part of his abortive sequel, The Ugly Spirit.

For the third edition, Burroughs restructured the chapter by breaking it at a different point and adding nearly 900 words of more material taken from the 1961 Soft Machine—“lee took the bus”—material that is unusually coherent narrative and most of which he used in Dead Fingers Talk. What had been the ending of this chapter in the second edition therefore became part of the opening of the following chapter in the third. This, however, is only the visible tip of the larger iceberg of rewriting and restructuring involving not only “Gongs Of Violence” and Dead Fingers Talk but a larger body of trilogy-related manuscripts.

On the galleys in October 1965 Burroughs cut a page of material from the end of this chapter, material that in the third edition he used at the start of its “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter. These passages came from The Ugly Spirit, and a longer version of them, entitled “This Is the Time of the Assassins,” was published in August 1961 in Metronome. In fact, “This Is the Time of the Assassins”—a title that pays homage to Rimbaud—was one of two small publications that derived from The Ugly Spirit. The other, published as “Pure Song of New Before The Traveller”—another title deriving from Rimbaud (cutting up a phrase from “Genie”: “the pure song of new evils!”)—appeared in the January 1962 issue of Evergreen Review as an episode of Nova Express (which it was, until being cut later that summer). The backstory clarifies how this one paragraph in the 1966 edition of The Soft Machine was connected to two magazine texts, the 1968 edition of the book, an abandoned cut-up novel, and Nova Express—signs of the larger, complex histories of publication involving Burroughs’ material. However, the most significant element in this history appears only in the 1965 Grove Press galleys and the 1962 MS.

On the 1965 galleys Burroughs didn’t only cancel one page that originally came from The Ugly Spirit; he cut an entire chapter entitled “Male Image Back In,” which began with the last two pages of “Gongs Of Violence” as published in the 1966 edition. “Male Image Back In” also appears almost identically on the 1962 MS, and since its structure works more naturally with the organisation of the 1966 text, it is that version which has been included for this edition.

For the 1962 MS, Burroughs retyped most of the 1961 material, usually preserving but sometimes changing the first edition’s ubiquitous use of capitals; for example, what had been the opening line of the 1961 Soft Machine, “The War Between the Sexes,” became “The war between the sexes.” Still, some 80 capitals have been restored for this edition.

“tight green uniforms”: SM1 7 has “right green uniform” and the 1962 MS “tight green uniform.”

“A network of bridges” to “aroused sharks” (154): here the chapter uses most of the “border city” section of SM1, the opening page of which was published as “The Border City” in Arcade in 1964.

“It was a transitional period”: the phrase, which gave the title to the opening Unit of SM1, was also the title of a text published in Two Cities 6 (Summer 1961), which reproduced verbatim the book’s opening section, “the war.” An early draft of this section has significant variations of this phrasing: “And so it was a transitional period and or The Down right Stupid Period as The White Father called it in all his speeches . . every day on the air . .” (Berg 4.52). A different version of the phrase on another page identifies the “White Father” as Dr Benway.

“the It-Never-Happened Department”: restores “the,” missing from the 1962 MS, SM2 and SM3, but present in SM1 and used in the Two Cities version.

“A.J.”: the character from Naked Lunch, supposedly based on Alan Ansen, was introduced in SM1 by two preceding references edited out for SM2.

“one of Shaffer’s blueprints”: Dr. “Fingers” Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, appears as a character in Naked Lunch, and was based on the real-life Curtiss R. Schafer, of the Norden-Ketay Corporation, whose 1956 lecture on biocontrol was quoted in Time magazine and then referenced in Vance Packard’s 1957 best-selling analysis of the advertising business, The Hidden Persuaders. One of Burroughs’ key recurrent phrases—“thought feeling and apparent sensory impressions” (here page 147)—derived from Schafer’s “mental processes, emotional reactions and apparent sensory perceptions,” and The Exterminator (1960) opens with this line and credits its source in Time (October 15, 1956).

“turn the planet into a slag heap”: SM1 has “shag,” and both terms were used here and in The Ticket That Exploded.

“The cold heavy fluid”: apart from odd words in this paragraph, from here until the end of the chapter does not derive from SM1.

“Tortured Metal Ozz”: “Oz” appears in SM1 (twice) and in SM3 113 (and Nova Express, 81), so “Ozz” seems a typo on the 1962 MS; however, Burroughs let the spelling stand on his 1965 galleys even though he made changes to words on the same line. While the word seems an allusion to The Wizard of Oz, it probably derives from a cut-up combining the phrases “a blast of tortured metal” and “a viscous tainted ozone,” from an early draft typescript about Lee, Benway and “Soul Crackers” (Berg 17.9).

“Paper moon and muslin trees”: taken from the jazz standard “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” the phrase also appears, like much of this paragraph, near the end of the “winds of time” section in The Ticket That Exploded. This line and the beginning of the following paragraph (from “Outside a 1920 movie” to “good naborhood”) appeared on Burroughs’ early draft of “Where You Belong” after the line “So I walk out and the lid blew off”—confirming that the material was at one point continuous.

“Biologic film went up” to “human attic”: not present in the 1962 MS, these lines were an insert scotch-taped into the 1965 galleys.

“room in a good naborhood”: the chapter ends at this point in the 1962 MS, and the lines from “Captain Clark” to “distant sky” were an insert scotch-taped into the 1965 galleys. After the insert, SM3 continued with nearly 900 words, comprising a lightly edited version of three-quarters of the SM1 narrative section titled “lee took the bus.” The SM2 edition ended with a repetition of the line “Captain Clark welcomes you aboard” after a paragraph (beginning “WAS WEIGHTLESS”) that appeared near the start of the following chapter in the 1962 MS and in SM3.

Male Image Back In

Almost identical versions of this chapter appeared in the 1962 MS, in the 1965 MS (where it appears as Chapter XVI), and on the 1965 galleys—at which stage Burroughs cut the chapter and most but not all of the material in it, which is why it did not appear in the second edition of The Soft Machine. Since he made corrections to this material on the 1965 galleys (cancelling several capitals), the decision to drop almost all of it seems to have been made at a late stage, after which he then decided to use more parts of it for the third edition. The overlapping text in Metronome combines at greater length Burroughs’ fictional projection of Alamout, the legendary base of Hassan i Sabbah, with the street-based experiments he referred to as “color line walks” around Tangier (Burroughs to Gysin, April 18, 1961; Berg 85.4). The magazine text named the title of his planned sequel to The Soft Machine, and the term “Ugly Spirit”—which Burroughs defined as possession by psychic or political evil—recurs in Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded but appeared only once in the 1961 Soft Machine, and not at all in the second and third editions.

“The Boy From The North” to “great rivers”: these paragraphs appeared at the start of the “Dead Fingers Talk” chapter in SM3. In “Pure Song of New Before The Traveller,” in Evergreen Review (January 1962), the boy from the North is named “Yeldarb”—a near-mirror of “Bradly.” “This Is The Time of The Assassins,” in Metronome (August 1961), has this paragraph up to “Bradly in the door,” and the passage from “Move The Boy From The North” to “Break Through in Grey Room,” as well as an additional 500-word central section describing the boy’s arrival in Alamout. The Metronome text also begins with a paragraph introducing Hassan i Sabbah (“He was strictly a counter puncher […] Master Of The Jinn Assassin of Ugly Spirits”).

“Hassan i Sabbah along newsprint”: “Hassan I Sabbah” on the 1965 galleys; three of the half-dozen minor differences between versions concern capitals.

“NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE PARIS APRIL 17, 1961”: the Tribune had been source material for the “First Cut-Ups” in Minutes to Go, and this report of Yuri Gagarin orbiting the earth was probably Burroughs’ earliest use of a newspaper dateline to fix the present time of writing—appropriately so, given his aim in the trilogy to develop a new “Mythology for the Space Age.”

“Young faces over the midway careening”: the 1962 MS continues with cancelled words that do not appear on the 1965 galleys: “to drum beats, pounding shivering.”

“Captain Clark welcomes you aboard”: this line did not appear on the 1962 MS, but was a typed insert on the 1965 galleys at the end of its version of the chapter.

Dead Fingers Talk

Burroughs took most of the final 500 words of this chapter from the first edition of The Soft Machine, but for the first three-quarters he went back to Naked Lunch. Taking its title from a phrase in the “Have You Seen Pantopon Rose?” section, he created “Dead Fingers Talk” from some 40 separate short selections of unused material taken from “Word,” the longest section of the 1957 “Interzone” manuscript on which Naked Lunch was largely based. Since he had already made quasi cut-up composites out of lines of “Word” to create “Pantopon Rose” and—using some 30 separate blocks—much of the “Atrophied Preface,” by returning to this material Burroughs asserted an important technical and stylistic continuity across books. Typing out eight pages of selections from the original “Word” manuscript (Berg 11.29), he completely re-sequenced the material for this chapter, although the original was itself a seemingly discontinuous collage. The fact that this connection has passed unnoticed by Burroughs critics suggests how well the material fits in. It is often said that cut-ups turned the “madness” of Naked Lunch into a “method,” making a system out of what had been spontaneous, but the difference was not so clear, and Burroughs often claimed that Naked Lunch had been cut-up without his realizing it. On the other hand, although he had planned to re-edit “Word” in October 1959, and asked Ginsberg for a copy since “missing passages are landmarks for present work” (Letters, 434), this connection between Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine wasn’t made until three years later, when Burroughs constructed “Dead Fingers Talk” for the second edition.

For the last part of the chapter, Burroughs used a quarter of the 1961 section entitled “all back seat of dreaming.” As well as providing the earliest title for what became The Soft Machine, this section was the first to be published, in almost complete form, as “But Is All Back Seat of Dreaming” in Big Table 4 (Spring 1960). (In Autumn 1966, it was republished as “Mais est-ce tout arrière siège de reverie” in the seminal French avant-garde magazine, Tel Quel.) Added to passages from Naked Lunch and The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs used this material to complete the “dead fingers talk” section of Dead Fingers Talk.

In the third edition, this chapter had begun with material from the cut chapter “Male Image Back In.” Burroughs also added a page more first edition material in two blocks, made numerous small changes and, as so often, gave the chapter in the 1968 text a different ending by adding just over two pages of new writing. Apart from half-a-dozen capitals, restored here, the 1962 MS is identical to the second edition.

“Glad to have you aboard reader”: for this line and, with many minor variations, the following text up until “But is all back seat dreaming” (174), see the “Word” section of Interzone as well as the “Outtakes” for “Atrophied Preface” in Naked Lunch.

“the Senator from Wisconsin”: reference is to Joseph McCarthy, who held that office at the time Burroughs wrote “Word,” although by the time SM2 was published in 1966 McCarthy had been dead almost ten years.

“statue of Bolivar”: corrects SM2 166 (“state”).

“A hanged man plummets” to “Lesbian abolitionist”: curiously, despite being stylistically similar, these lines do not seem to come from “Word,” and appear verbatim in SM1 95.

“Rivington rings the Home Secretary”: before he makes the call, an early rough draft has: “ ‘I say’ he exclaims crisply, ‘there’s been some sort of mistake … I distinctly ordered a dancing boy to emerge out of a vast cherry pie’ ” (Berg 4.14).

“pale blue eyes”: the 1962 MS continues with an extra paragraph of “Word” material cancelled on the 1965 galleys, beginning; “When the writer was raising marijuana in East Texas” (see Interzone, 155).

“a story about crayfish”: almost certainly refers to a dirty joke that is given in an early draft of “Dead On Arrival”: “The boat sank on the way back with all hands, I heard later. Sitting in a Copenhagen bar, I told the story about the French politician who wanted to be reincarnated as a crayfish: ‘Afin que meme après ma morte une jolie petite femme suce ma queue dans un cabinet particulier . .’ ” (Berg 15.3).

“a town in Ecuador can’t remember the name”: on a very early rough draft, Burroughs did seem to remember the name of the town, before cancelling the line: “carried that wall with me to La Manta” (OSU 87; 17.130A). In Queer, written in 1952, only a year after the events that gave rise to the narrative, the beach is further south on the Ecuadorian coast, at Salinas. Although the lines appeared in both SM1 173 and the Big Table version of “Back Seat,” for SM2 Burroughs cut details that further identified this as a reference to Lewis Marker; “time slipped on the beach with my phantom and his precise disgust for my person—sex twice a week with ‘intrusions’ and ‘plants.’ ” The early draft expanded further in more cancelled lines, significantly using a key term from Scientology: “and interlaced always with derogations and engram planting . . I bought him an engram at a time and it’s fifteen years and I’m still giving Time . .”

“dragging one leg”: at this point, SM3 continues with almost 300 words more SM1 material from the same section.

“Finnies nous attendons une bonne chance”: SM1 178 had “Finis nous attendons bonne chance,” which it translated as “We await a good chance.” On the final SM3 page proofs, the line drew a sharp comment from Gysin: “THIS IS NOT FRENCH” (Berg Folio 38.2). Gysin repeated the comment in a letter to Burroughs, adding, “where did it come from? It means nothing unless it is meant to be Amex [i.e. American Express] French” (Gysin to Burroughs, December 14, 1966; Berg 85.12). Complicating rather than resolving the question, Burroughs replied: “ ‘Finnie nous attendons uno bezze chance’ were the actual words” (ROW, 243).

“Footnote: Last words”: the “Footnote” started out as a “Note” in parentheses preceding the text published in Big Table: “Back Seat of Dreaming is part of my current novel. It is based on recent newspaper account of ? four young explorers.” The section in SM1 began similarly and also used a line from a letter to Ginsberg in December 1959, when Burroughs covered the original manuscript for Big Table: “So if my fictionalized??? account is difficult to follow so was the action, pops” (ROW, 10). Burroughs retained newspaper clippings of the incident (housed in the Burroughs-Hardiment collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence; MS63 Cn: 6). The clippings confirm that he drew on events in October 1959 when four bodies were discovered in the Nubian desert, initially identified as an American, John Armstrong; two Frenchmen, Yves Tommy Martin and Jean Pillu; and their guide, Ahmed Akid. The guide appeared to have been murdered and another American, Donald Shannon, was reported missing. Later evidence showed that the missing man was in fact the guide.

“writing in each others’ diaries”: SM3 continues with further SM1 material, omits the last line of SM2, and concludes the chapter with 750 words of new cut-up material combined with more from SM1.

Cross The Wounded Galaxies

Burroughs made his final chapter from half-a-dozen blocks of text drawn from four sections of the 1961 Soft Machine, mainly from the last sections of the book. The title phrase does not come from the first edition, but recurs in Nova Express. The “creation myth” narrative probably dates back to July 1958 when Burroughs came up with a “great novel idea … The period in human history when there were many species of homo” (Letters, 393). The phrase “Millions died in the mud flats. Only one blast free to lungs,” which appears in Naked Lunch (94), was very likely a fragment from an early draft. As well as the published version, Burroughs wrote an untitled typescript of at least five pages only three of which seem to have survived (Berg 4.4), which is similar in substance and tone, although lacking some of the stylistic features that make this narrative so distinctive (e.g., the use of hyphenated phrases).

While he used parts of the “creation myth” from the 1961 Soft Machine verbatim for the second edition, Burroughs made many small and seemingly arbitrary cuts in several passages. The chapter’s final page, which is a revised version of the last page in the 1961 Soft Machine, became part of the penultimate section of Dead Fingers Talk. For the third edition Burroughs made a series of cuts so that overall the 1968 text lost almost 300 words. He also tacked on a final line to give the 1968 chapter a new ending—before adding that edition’s long Appendix.

Following the 1962 MS, which is otherwise identical to the second edition, almost 80 capitals have been added, including a small number introduced rather than restored (in cases where Burroughs cut the opening words of a line).

“The penny arcade peep show”: the opening line derives from “doctor benway cut up,” the section in SM1 before “survivor, survivor,” which is the source of the following narrative.

“human faces”: SM1 152 has “races,” the first in a series of possible transcription errors or typos here; instead of “peeling other genitals,” SM1 has “feeling,” and instead of “Gusts of Frost Wind,” SM1 has “Gust.”

“green jelly genitals”: demonstrating how Burroughs redacted his material, SM1 152 has: “Green jelly soft tent flesh. Song of new bursts other genitals.” The phrase “song of new,” a Rimbaud fragment, featured twice in this section of SM1 but was cut both times for SM2.

“dark armadillo flesh”: SM1 154 has “dank.”

“Penny arcade peep show” to “braille”: the line does not derive from SM1 but was a typed insert onto the 1962 MS.

“Think Police”: in SM1 181, elsewhere in The Soft Machine and in many other contexts the phrase is always “Thing Police”; however, Burroughs let the alternative stand on his galleys for both SM2 and SM3. For SM3 171, he added an extra paragraph, written in January 1966, to conclude the text: “He waves his hand sadly from the soft machine. dead fingers in smoke pointing to Gibraltar. Jan. 25, Gibraltar.” This added final line made the first use of the title phrase in any edition of The Soft Machine, and the following Appendix then defined it. The final two paragraphs in SM2 were 40 percent longer in SM1, and as well as redacting the material Burroughs made other small changes, altering “my brain” to “your brain,” changing all the periods to em dashes, and inserting the phrase “Cross the wounded galaxies.” On the 1961 SM1 manuscript, the original version of this passage is introduced with the title, cancelled in hand, “FOR HASSAN i SABBAH” (CU 2.3).

“couldn’t reach flesh”: corrects the typo in SM2 178 (“coulnd’t”).

“ ‘See Mr. Bradly”: the 1961 typescript shows that the final two paragraphs of SM1 were originally in reverse order. The 1962 edition of The Ticket That Exploded ended with an em dash without the closure of speech marks, and likewise the first edition of The Soft Machine would, therefore, have ended not with “the Swedish River of Gothenburg.),” but with an em dash not closed by speech marks: “See Mr Bradly Mr—

Appendix 1

From the 1961 Soft Machine

Since the 1961 edition features a wide range of formal experiment, “along the brass and copper street” can’t be called “typical” of material that Burroughs did not use for the second or third editions. It is entirely different, for example, from the section following it, “minraud,” which became the opening of the “I Sekuin” chapter; but it is a good example of what Burroughs considered too experimentally difficult to retain.

Appendix 2

“Operation Soft Machine/Cut,” The Outsider 1 (Fall 1961)

This text was covered in the magazine as “from a work in progress,” although it was not intended to be part of the book published the following month as The Soft Machine. However, earlier versions of it were; or rather, very similar overlapping material appeared as a foreword to the “BRIEF HISTORY OF THE OCCUPATION” that Burroughs wrote in October 1960, and which in turn he described as “FROM WORK IN PROGRESS: ‘MR BRADLY MR MARTIN’ ” (Berg 10.47)—an early title for The Soft Machine. “Operation Soft Machine/Cut” is indeed something of a “primer” (ROW, 53), an introduction to a scenario also given in The Exterminator but never made clear in The Soft Machine itself. Although published in the Fall 1961 issue, the title page is dated “5/21/61,” just before the book was published.

From 1964 onwards, Burroughs composed many newspaper format texts in three columns, but this was the first by some margin. The hand printed issue of The Outsider prefaced the text with an image of Burroughs against a background of newspaper headlines, while the text itself featured hand-drawn lines around the columns and images of insects crawling on the page.

Arizona State hold a 72-page typescript identified as “Operation Soft Machine,” a fascinating mix of materials but unrelated to the magazine text.

“I find it a useful literary exercise”: the “FOREWORD TO BRIEF HISTORY OF THE OCCUPATION” has an earlier draft of this conceit: “I FIND IT A USEFUL LITERARY EXERCISE TO PLACE MYSELF IN AN EXTREME POSITION (IMAGINARY OF COURSE) AND PROCEED FROM THERE” (Berg 10.47).

Appendix 3

From The Soft Machine (1968)

The six-page, 3,500-word typescript was the longest insert Burroughs made for the third edition. He wrote at least two drafts of this material and partial typescripts with significant variants. Curiously, the 1968 edition took the chapter title “The Streets of Chance,” even though the singular “Street” is consistent across all manuscripts.

A re-edited version of this and other material from The Soft Machine was published separately as a limited edition book entitled The Streets of Chance in 1981 by Red Ozier Press.

“He got up stretched and yawned”: an early draft, which has many variant passages, continues: “His dreams were written by Francoise Sagan with musical accompaniment by Edith Piaf. I was not surprised to meet my old friend Cocteau but he was very surprised to meet me and did a double take from his last movie” (Berg 43.27).

“a pert little kiss”: an early draft continues, via a quotation from Macbeth: “doth trifle former knowings well sex among the manikins is for Vogue any case a sensible visitor does not feel the host’s orgasm that’s the way you get caught and I sure didn’t want to get caught here” (Berg 43.27).

“I’ll tell you a story”: in the only annotation by Burroughs on the galleys for this material (Lilly 66.4), he inserted “a” here, although the correction was not made for SM3 109.

“trained with Ma Curie”: corrects SM3 81 (“Ma Currie”), clearly a typo for the physicist Marie Curie, given the following references to radioactivity.

Appendix 4

Appendix to The Soft Machine (1968)

The Appendix is interesting for several reasons, not least that it was only here that Burroughs finally defined the title of the book and directly referenced Freud.

“The soft machine is the human body”: the original draft, which includes another half-page of unused material, began with the lines; “I have been accused of being unintelligible. At this point I wish to make myself as clear as possible” (Berg 43.27).

“to deplore the spread of his couch”: instead of this phrase, the original draft has: “his practices why the man has castrated Madison Avenue out whole communications network rotten to its heart of ooze” (Berg 43.27).

Acknowledgments

It is a privilege to edit works by William Burroughs, and a pleasure to thank James Grauerholz for making it possible and for all the support he has given. It is also a pleasure to thank the following for their expert help: Jed Birmingham for assistance with little magazines; Nicole Dittrich at Syracuse University; Ella Harris for typing out the 1961 edition; Bill McArthur, Stewart Smith, and Brian Schottlander; and above all, Véronique Lane, for working with me from start to finish, being by my side in the archival vaults, sharing ideas, reading every word I wrote, and for living with the Centipede People and the Crab Boys for the last two years.

For the great archival assistance they have provided, I also want to thank John Bennett of the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Ohio State University, Columbus; Rob Spindler of the Archives and Special Collections at Arizona State University, Tempe; Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and his staff; the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries; Cath Tierney of Green Library, Stanford University; Elspeth Healey, Special Collections Librarian at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, Universtiy of Kansas, Lawrence; and Michael Ryan and all his staff at the Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Research Institute for the Humanities at Keele University. Thanks finally to Jeff Posternak of the Wylie Agency, a great guy to have on your side, and to Peter Blackstock at Grove Press.

THE BEGINNING

Let the conversation begin...

Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinukbooks

Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks

Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest

Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/penguinbooks

Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.uk

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, Block D, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, Gauteng 2193, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Grove Press 1966
Third revised edition published by Grove Press 2014
Published in Penguin Classics 2014

Copyright © William S. Burroughs, 1961, 1966
Copyright © Estate of William S. Burroughs, 2014
Introduction Copyright © Oliver Harris, 2014

Cover illustration by Julian House at Intro

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-141-97605-1