Читать книгу Last Words - William S. Burroughs - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThursday This is November 14, 1996.
November 10, Calico was killed at 19th and Learnard. I heard about it the 12th from José. Tom had seen the cat by side of the road.
In the empty spaces where the cat was, that hurt physically. Cat is part of me. Mornings since, I break into uncontrollable sobbing and crying when I remember [where] she used to be—sit—move, etc. No question of histrionics. It just happens.
So dream remembered:
Oh, it was also a cat. I wasn’t sure it could find its way.
November 15, 1996. Friday
Still hits whenever I see a place where she used to occupy.
The heart doc says I am leaking.
Well, “Qui vivra verra.”
November 16, 1996
Coming up narrow tenement stairs. Met two people coming down at landing, said: “Hello.”
At top of stairs was a cubicle room with old sewing machine and other odds and ends, and there was an affectionate cat, whose head seemed removable. This room was open at top, three floors up.
Other people on roof said something about “Absolutely,” referring to the cats.
Nov 17 or 18, 1996. Monday
Project: overheard, casual walking down 2nd Ave NYC. Two black guys pass, talking. One, in a white sweatshirt, says: “Counselors and all that shit.”
Obviously talking about the Methadone program. How some black voices can cut right to the bone through all the bullshit.
“Very dangerous.”
William Bennett, late—I hope, certainly former—Drug Czar under Reagan and Bush. He continues: “We must target the ‘casual user.’”
“Which is it this time, Holmes? Cocaine or morphine?”
“Both, Watson, a speedball.”
Casual users who hold jobs and manage their lives successfully (like me) send a message that people can use illegal drugs and still function adequately.
“Very dangerous.”
Dangerous to whom exactly, Mr. Bennett? Very dangerous to liars like Bennett and Anslinger and the whole ill-intentioned and downright evil cluster of fiends born from the Harrison Narcotics Act. A vast hierarchy of evil, from street narcs working their snitches to kids turning in their parents.
“The War Against Drugs has united us as a nation.”
Bush or Reagan—take your pick.
A nation of what? Stool pigeons? Informers?
I like the Russian word for “informer”: stukach. A word to be spit.
Our pioneer ancestors would puke in their graves.
“Very dangerous.”
What is this asshole Bennett, who smokes two packs of cancer a day, really saying? To be a good American you have to be a goddamn liar? Of course people live to ripe and productive old age on junk. Look at Herbert Huncke, 81; De Quincy, 74; George Crabbe, English poet, 78; and yours truly, [82] and still kicking.
Turn-of-the-century physician who treated a number of morphine addicts said: “The general health of the morphine addict is excellent.”
“Very dangerous.”
Nixon said that Tim Leary, old friend of mine, was “the most dangerous man in America.” Dangerous to whom, exactly? To a blueprint for an international police state under cover of a total drug war.
A bit late to hit the barricades and paving stones. Maybe two hundred years ago—already arresting “drug dealers” in other countries. (Suppose some greasy spic narcs should have dragged Reagan out of the White House for undisclosed offenses?)
And an old queen is hauled before a Dutch court for “minor incidents” in the Philippines.
“Very dangerous.”
To queens who batten on these Moors in Morocco and elsewhere.
“This international parasitism is a very bad thing.”
Dr. John Yerbury Dent was the least paranoid of men, and he had the full warmth and goodwill, the best the English can offer.
He said: “I think what the American narcotics people are doing is bad.”
He didn’t want to use the word: Evil. But I do. Evil for anything Homo Sap may have created or may hope to create. I mean Evil, Evil, Evil—implemented by corrupt, evil, sadistic individuals.
Always accuse others of what you (the liar) are doing. Not to go into the media of it, that rancid old cenote, bubbling up belches of coal gas from rotten lungs and guts. Nothing good is bubbling up here.
November 19, 1996. Tuesday
Lake or river with patches of algae on top. I swim across to a wooden dock avoiding the algae.
Another lake with clear water. I can see down to clusters of goldfish 20 feet [below], and between.
Walking (wrong number, Harris Construction) back to the Bunker. Tried a shortcut through a Turkish Bath that opens on a closet, that opens on the hall at 222 Bowery. Decide not to take the Turkish shortcut.
“I got twenty-three dope fiends in here now.”
(Harried attendant at the Lexington Narc hospital.)
In a dream last night (Nov. 18, Monday) I was a cop. I said:
“I got a gun and I got a baton. I need handcuffs and a two-way radio.”
Standing at counter waiting for my radio and handcuffs, pepper gas and other good things.
“Very dangerous” for Bennett and Co., that any man could feel a basic, deep, real emotion like grief, heartbreak, the joy that comes from danger and death.
“Is it not fine to dance and sing
While the bells of death do ring?”
“Very dangerous”
“Bring out your dead.”
The heart of the matter.
Desertion: Waiting day after day, tomorrow and tomorrow, hope always dimmer, further away.
“I was waiting there.”
Let he who created a world of sin and stones cast the first stone.
Nothing under the mask but Death.
Bennett & Co deplore relative ethics. They want absolute. All right, let’s get absolute:
What they are doing is WRONG, EVIL, by any human standards.
Tomorrow, November 20, 1996
It was a Wednesday and Victor Bockris will give me a medal for longevity.
You just live long enough and you will become the grand old man of letters a bit tired with his very tired old jokes. Some bordering on the risqué.
(The grand old man of letters will accrete around you with cashmere shawls.)
The man in a cheap hotel makes it with lady in next room. Next day as they meet on a landing, she says: “Bonjour, Monsieur,” wiggling her little finger suggestively. He responds by taking off his hat and placing the top side over his crotch: “Bonjour, Madame!”
Well, I guess my Pullman car joke is a bit heavy for a mixed audience. Or the one about animals checking their equipment and some character has the elephant’s [trunk]. Don’t clearly see the point in that one.
Any case, back at a party in the 30s and there was someone there who could—and unfortunately did—imitate Roosevelt:
“My friends, I hate war. Eleanor hates war. And I hate Eleanor.”
Heh, heh. It was a long time ago, and it wasn’t funny even then.
And what has become of the New Yorker cartoons? They are not funny or even comprehensible any more. Where are the classic cartoons of Charles Addams and Peter Arno?
Yes, where are the snows of yesteryear. And the speedballs I useta know?
Well, I guess it’s time for my Ovaltine and a long good night.
“Well just who are you?”
“Come in please.”
The name is Sam Beckett, of course.
So back to basics—anything etc. The simple concept of a “decent person.” You can see it is the best of the English. It is self-evident.
“You I cannot help but see....”
Old props falling from East St. Louis, to Shanghai to Panama, NYC, London, through London—come through, London:
“Loud and clear.”
“How can I know?”
One outpost of joy from within is a deadly threat to the invading, invaders, who are?
Are, our, the voices, creaks—they must eliminate.
This “just want to live over here and do our thing” is absolutely intolerable to the invaders.
I can see their radar screen picking up José and me coming back from the Methadone Clinic. Funny thing, that cop never looked at me. Never asked José what in hell Burroughs Communications was? And I would have to stand forth and say:
“I am William Burroughs. I communicate.”
How often on undercover [assignment] on this planet is one tempted to use “Deadly Force.”
Get a hold on yourself, young man, and lie straight. What they call truth here is lie there—their lie.
“Our sacred truth. We’ll die for it if given the chance.”
Sorry, they aren’t fitted even for the hawg-pen of Creation.
Wednesday November 20, 1996.
Dream of sex that cannot be realized for some reason. No connection with waking consciousness.
“That old feeling.” Complete with self-pity.
“That old feeling is still in my leaking heart.”
Hmm. Who was it. Composite, I guess.
Every time I put out three cat pans instead of four, the death of Calico hits again—or I see the place [where] she used to eat, beside the sink. All the empty places. The memory of what has been and never more will be. Killed by a car, she left with me all the places she used to be and never more would be.
If I thought the driver did it deliberately—if then I could find him—I have a catalogue here advertising a vial of Road Kill. A touch in his ear, on the porch, sent in envelopes under his door.
Well, can it. This is going nowhere, like the man whose child suffocated in an icebox HE himself had left out, chopping the box to pieces with an axe.
You don’t get off that easy, pal. Who left the icebox out there?
Film—
A series of short takes—headlines—“Flight 800 lost over Atlantic.”
Switch to airport: “Flight 800 now boarding at Gate 23.”
Precognitive fear—now we come to the mushroom cloud that darkened the earth—Hiroshima.
Paul Bowles’s dream: “Off the track! Off the track!”
Psychics, experts, scientists say the Earth will go out of orbit in the year 2000. Idiocy, War on Drugs—fear hanging over the planet. “The Man.” “Yellow Peril”—etc.
Short, short cuts.
Plane—Pop singer takes shot in head. Shots in other times and places. (We see blood blossom in a million syringes, and hit home.)
Cuts to Doctor Kent—Painless Cure.
“Very dangerous.”
The sickness of the world is junk—fear of, attempts to control and to spread, for excuse to control—
It’s all so obvious—intelligent opposition from the Drug Policy Letter.
On plane—sleeping passengers—dream flashes.
“My creeping opponents say that I am trading on my reputation as a writer to gain notice as a painter. Of course I am. In this life, one is well advised to play the cards one has for all they are worth.
“If one is lucky enough to be born with a beautiful face and the corresponding physical attributes, instead of moaning ‘Oh people only want me for my face,’ play your face card. Youth plays the cards of youth and vitality—in youth, play your youth cards. In old age, claim the privileges of age, and get your snout in the public trough before it dries up.
“I want to thank all those who have made this show possible and contributed their expertise as performers, as curators and organizers. And in particular Robert Sobieszek, for a magnificent job [of] selecting and presenting the material at the L.A. County Museum of Art, the same show that is here now.
“And I thank sincerely those who have come here to perform this evening, and all of you who are here tonight.”
November 29, 1996. Friday
“So laughable,” she says.
It’s the banishing ritual—ho ho ho, hum hum hum.
“Whatever comes .. . !”
Herr Professor Federn. Sure, it worked sometimes, back in the age of hysteria, dissociation, multiple personalities. Don’t work now—like penicillin—
See “mental illness” as a vast organism dedicated to fuck up the Sapiens Project. How can an illness be “mental”? What [does] it feed on?
So for “mental” in the books, substitute “don’t know” or “soul sickness.”
So? I wonder.
Back at Chestnut Lodge. If I had stayed? Where would I be now?
Qui vivra verra.
It was not to be.
I like a weapon close to me
Because I am so cowardly
I have seen Fear
and Fear has made me free
Who lives will see
To look Death in the eye
With no Kamikaze lie
Wrap no flag around me
Who lives will see.
Man can be alone with Death
Will receive a second breath.
Café Lipp—hiking thru tall grass. I had forgotten my gun and [holster]. I was with someone indistinct—rummaging thru drawers, found only the .25. A deep wood drawer, completely empty.
“A Nothing Man” at the 1962 Writers Conference in Edinburgh. Put me on the literary map, thanks in part to Mary McCarthy, my spiritual sister—more than that—
What a job [she did] on the worst of the male sex: “The Young Man”—
A hospital for minor surgery. Hears screams in the night.
“The cancer patient at last!”
And he sang out lustily:
“Cast a cold eye on life, a cold eye on death—Horseman, pass by!”
No wonder for no apparent medical reason the surgeon could ascertain the young man’s heart just stopped in mid-surgery.
I think for no reason to continue his lusty singing and to debase the human image by a hundred cuts. So horrible beyond realization—a shattered, falsified picture of a non-being. What force could so deform a man? Sucking screams off cancer patients, not even.
To nurse: “I heard screams last night, was that the cancer case?”
Nurse: “You’ll never hear a sound from Mr. Miller, must have been in maternity.”
“Oh.”
The young man deflates like a pale green balloon.
“Oh, oh, oh.”
“Well, it’s time for your pre-operative medication.”
“Young man in a sudden panic.
“I, uh, well...”
Darkness creeps up from the front of his bed.
“I am the Captain of my soul,” he mutters, as the stretcher slides down the hall, into an elevator—to the O.R.
In Tangier, my typewriter in hock to buy Eukodol, a chemical derivative of codeine, many times stronger. Dihydro-oxy-codeine—finally outlawed, owing to side effect of euphoria, hits like a speedball, Kid.
Guess I used all of it up in Tangier—but it’s still out there in Quevedo, Ecuador, on a dusty back shelf, covered with mildew on a South Sea island—
“Shoot it in the main line, Kid. Hits like a speedball.”
Maybe up in some Swede town under the Northern Lights—Christmas story.
“Any more of that?”
“Well yes—a consignment of twenty boxes—twenty in each box. Let you have it all for, well, say $100 U.S. dollars.”
“Done.”
Can we, the males, live without the other half? Female?
And O.H. must always talk. O.H. is talk, was the original invasion—was “word,” of course, so cut word out in slow withdrawal.
It’s going to hurt and hurt bad.
Saturday November 30, 1996.
I said: “L. Ron Hubbard needs a knife in his gizzard.”
And I demonstrate with an assassin knife from Alamut how one strikes upward under the left rib cage to the heart. And I threw another knife into what looked like tinfoil.
Unpleasant feel of no meaning to me. Just floating by.
So to go on from here.
What is the “whatever comes?”
As Federn used to say in his study, [middle]-European apartment—rather like Schlumberger’s in Paris—
Steak and bread and salad—red wine—talking to Allen Ginsberg about some English [person], says:
“A blues singer, a blues shouter. Everybody going to see my black bottom. He really gives out.”
What, exactly?
Perhaps somewhere out there—Quevedo, Ecuador, uno de puro, Peru... on the back shelf a dusty box of ampules, Eukodol, 15 mg per ampule.
“Shoot it in the main line, Kid, hits like a speedball.”
Who. When where? Why?
Short stories?
Like the feeling there is some final resolution ahead—has to be?
“Quién es?” Last words of Billy the Kid. Garrett was very close, five feet, maybe. Couldn’t miss.
The Secret Army?
I won’t say “we lost,” because some of what’s left of us is still in there.
War stories—the room on top of the Lottery Bldg. in Tangier. John Hopkins came in and said from the balcony: “Looks like a naval battle.”
(It had been a desperate engagement. Day after day the war.)
Heavy fog with holes in it, like artillery fire.
So what we got now?
Why not realize their pretext, and hit the Evil of the War Against Drugs. The sums involved in the money laundries are trillions of dollars, while people caught with an ounce of morphine are hanged.
Yes, the whole pestilent horde born from the Harrison Narc. Act is Evil with regard [to] anything Homo Sap can or will ever create—with regard [to] the space frontier. In a malignant intervention of Alien (to resident mammals) influence. And as usual Homo Sap laps it up as the right way to go.
“We’ll build more prisons,” Bush snarled.
“We already got one million inside.”
(ref. The Job)
* * *
It was May 1, May Day, and all at once it just fell apart, the whole flimsy structure just collapsed like the proverbial house of cards.
No, it was not like a return to warlords. There just weren’t any warlords left, or any other human roles. People fell apart like a rotten undervest, like rotten burlap, there wasn’t anything left to hold them together. Only one thing did, that was war, and there was no more war. The only thing had kept the planet together (in a literal sense there are two halves magnetized together) was WAR. No more unemployment. Shit, nothing left to be employed for—groups of people strut about in improvised uniforms, waving rusty sabers.
“Voici le sabre
De mon père.”
Allons enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé—
o’er the land of the free
and the home of the brave
Shall I hit the road against the Evil of the Drug War, the War Against Drugs—Illegal drugs. All right to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day as Bennett did or maybe does. That legal.
Well, the Evil—narc working his snitches for a buy, kids, after-school pep talk, turning in their parents for drugs. It’s EVIL.
Not like “both sides of the question.”
It’s Evil, and the real $$$$$$$$ in Malaysia and Singapore and West Indies, Bahamas.
Target Lake Charles. Here Mel picked up a tracer. Port Arthur? Of course. Can feel it now. Rauschmit!—out with it!
So Mel, come in please. Mel, come on. Mel—come dirty.
“This is a fact, they kill you.”
Who they, Mel?
They same as people who conflict with ...
“For chrissakes, don’t do that.”
“I wouldn’t ever do that.
What try get out.
No get. End.
“His macho quick-draw act too laughable for words.”
I hear her loud and clear and—“rather amusing, going to abolish words”—bitching, waking up bitching the way Spanish wives do.
Be able to sit in silence on sand muted street for hours?
Why not? Other folk want to yack, let them.
I never indicated the only way to do or go anywhere. Shotgun art one of various random procedures—Pollock drip canvases, Yves Klein set his canvases on fire and put out the fire at the right moment.
November 30, 1996
Oh, last night a Turkish Bath scene, vaguely sexual—ho hum.
I [was an] ultimate monster or drug dealer, and a child molester. Am [a] crack addict, but that only a sideline.
He loved cats and ferrets, and weasels and all sneaky killing animals. And he was into crystal balls and ectoplasm and all that unwholesome stuff.
I repeat: What the American Narcotics Dept, is doing, did do and will do, is Evil. They insist on the lie of absolute right and wrong. They want absolutes—all right. Evil from the point of view of any decent person. From the street narcs working their snitches to the kids turning in their parents.
I’m an old-fashioned person, and I don’t like informers. No matter how federal judges may be lenient with violators who have “cooperated” (rolled over) with authorities (“rolled over” is current phrase), and bear down heavy on those who “refuse to cooperate.”
Dec 1, 1996. Sunday
In a plane coming in for a landing in Paris. The plane landed in a narrow slot. Outside I could see Paris streets and then the plane angled upwards, looked ready to stall at any moment, and I felt physical fear.
“It’s going to crash!”
But it didn’t crash. Landed OK in Paris.
Paris is in many ways my favorite city. Never really got into Rome. London was always antithetical to me. Leaving NYC which is always New York. Small towns like Tangier.
December 2, 1996. Monday
Enemy have two notable weaknesses:
1. No sense of humor. They simply don’t get it.
2. They totally lack understanding of magic, and being totally oriented toward control, what they don’t understand is a menace, to be destroyed by any means—consequently they tip their hand. They don’t seem to care anymore—but famous last words: “We’ve got it made.”
Deadly by the logic of fiction.
Just can’t let them villains off scot-free?
Why Scot? Why not Swats, or Cot, Pot, Rot, Sot, slut, spot, shot, trot free—
Any case, they tend to overplay a hand. Ninety-nine percent bilious weasels.
It’s slappable—
and who is here now?—
best I can—got it back.
You never really have it till you lose it, Fritz. Till you lose it and then get it back. Few make it back from that track, Jack.
“As to what life may be worth when the honor is gone....”
“(French Naval officer in Lord Jim. One of the great characters of fiction.)
And look at the others by Conrad: Councillor Mikulin from Under Western Eyes, the Nigger “Wait” from Nigger of the Narcissus. All touched with [the] hand of creation.
Many others of course, maybe just a walk-on.
Brion Gysin hated Denton Welch. Didn’t see that it is just the petulant queerness in which he is straitjacketed—“Little Punky”—that makes his works such a great escape act.
Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality, so [the] writer can escape the limits of reality.
The unworthies in power feel danger, like cows uneasily pawing the ground with a great “Moo.”
The song of the quick that is heard by the ears of the dead the widows ofLangley are loud in their wail and the idols are broken in the temples of Yale for the might of the Board unsmote by the sword has melted like snow in the glance of the bored
Ho hum— to look death in the eye, with no posturing lie, just one on one... who lives will see. Is Death an organism?
Way down in Tierra del Fuego—a lot of Eukodol ampules.
This horror of drugs, orchestrated by Hearst and his “yellow peril,” then Anslinger—Harrison Narcotics Act—criminals by Act of Congress. You can’t compare alcohol, cigarettes to narcotics. Why not? Because alcohol and tobacco are legal, that’s why. What nonsense is here.
What they really can’t understand is division, possession—or perhaps they understand all too well, and do not want [it] examined.
Tell any feminist I shot Joan in a state of possession, and she will scream:
“Nonsense! No such thing. HE did it.”
Opera of the Angler Fish that absorbs the male till nothing is left of him but his testicles, balls, nuts, sticking out of her body.
All of me why not take all of me so we become one big WE how great to be one great fat me Excuse me: include me out.
December 5, 1996. Thursday
Now imagine a woman dancing out rug rat?
Well, it was like he was dancing [it] out in terrible agony, something in his spine, and the smell of rotten crabs, sweet gagging stench of excrement—and death.
After the shot he collapsed on the bed and lay there inert, but something was stirring in his spine from neck to the tail—and now pieces tore loose in the eggs and then a red, glistening head emerges in reeking yellow slime—and then the whole centipede, crawling out quick.
I got out my Detective Special. Then, moving with hideous speed and purpose, it scuttled through [the] ballroom screen.
“Head it off. Must kill it.”
Too late, I turn back to the empty chrysalis of the body that once had been Parker, and even as I watched, the very flesh and bones disintegrated into a lost ballpoint pen on the floor.
Oh here it is—on the bed.
So.
December 8, 1996. Sunday
Dream last night that I was in a cubicle room with mosquitoes. (According to the news, Nov. 26,1996: dreams of insects on one can precede a deadly illness. Recall another recent dream of biting flies.)
I take train for Manhattan. Got off at 10th Street. Can I walk from here to where?
Dec 9, 1986—hum—I mean ’96
Check back on this date ten years ago.
In Paul’s dream we see a potential scenario, which should be indicated by a special mode or style—screaming in all languages known and unknown, suddenly cut off—dimmed down—old man with cat. Has 1890s look:
“Is it the end, Holmes?”
“Fraid so, old chap. Tried to get a warning out. No one could believe it. I mean, they were designed not to believe it.”
“What do you propose to do, Holmes?”
“Nothing whatever, Watson. The time for intervention is gone.”
Back to September 17,1996:
He steps to his modest balcony: to the sky, the powerful and rich of the earth on their knees beg his help.
“Aw, why dontcha ask your mother,” he snarls into the big mic, for all to hear.
The mob writhes forward, hands clasped in the [begging posture].
“Please—“
“These are unsightly tricks,’ in the words of the Immortal Bard.”
Fear! What is fear of. What is subject afraid of? The unknown?
Of course not. The half-known, the you-don’t-want-to-know. And what is that?
A reed in water—hieroglyph for “?”
Endangered hats on female heads shift in winds of instant fashion. Wives trail by each other at cocktails, vernissages, faster, faster—
“Off the track! Off the track!” Great chunks of suburban houses tilt, slide, crumble.
Present time feeling of being deracinated, without roots—moving—(someone just called for Jim Patterson. Wrong Jim. McCrary? Sorry)—moving where?
Mutie cat holds out paw as if to restrain me. Now she is purring round my feet. Took food to Ginger on front porch.
A sudden rent in the sky, clouds pulled in—the hole is more “real” than the sky.
December 11, 1996
Let the little growth on my head rest. It is an inoperable, benign, nonentity. So let it stay like that. If the soft machine works, don’t fix it. If it works, don’t fix it.
The words under the words, bubbling up with a belch of coal gas:
“We are—They are—come on! Hit! Hit!”
He cowered there, nursing the welt inflicted.
December 12, 1996
Story of the rich junky.
I [was] described by a moron critic as the world’s richest ex-junky. If $1,500 in [the] bank and no other assets made me the richest.
Had I been as rich as I would have been if my father had kept his Burroughs stock (ten million $$ right there), Naked Lunch would never have been written, nor any comparable work.
Show me a great writer very rich on inherited money. In France some good writers, like Gide, were well off, but not stratospheric rich.
Big $$ is a tight club. The staff has to be sure [the] applicant won’t do anything contradictory to big money. Anything creative is not indicated and will not be tolerated.
Like what would I do if I were president. I would never be president. You gotta qualify, see. Same way with Big $ Daddy. I mean big enough to have political influence. Chemical Co. purchasing Apomorphine variations, and endorphin, etc. Own a newspaper, that kinda money.
No way he can get that $$ without the big OK, and without that $$ he’s just an “eccentric.”
Lovable, of course.
Tomorrow James’s birthday—
Last night some sexy nonsense, no get—dreams about Mikey Portman, dead these many years.
So: “I paid for that C, Mikey, and I aims to use it.”
Had to put my foot down heavy with Mikey. It was freezing, windy London night—down to get this C from this old coke hag, bugs was crawling out of her—
Her said: “Coke bugs, sure”—transparent.
December 14, 1996. James Day.
The story of the Burroughs Family. Vague, disreputable ghosts—
begging letters from widows of remote uncles:
“He was always kind to me except when—drinking—”
To set the record straight: William Seward Burroughs, who created the first practical adding machine. Died in Citronelle, Alabama, of TB age 41. He left four heirs: Horace, Mortimer, Jennie, Helen.
Administrator of the estate had the word: “buy the family out—$100,000 each.” Big money in those days, when a silver dollar bought a first-class meal couldn’t be bought now for any price, or a good piecea ass.
At the insistence of my mother, Dad held back a small block of Burroughs stock. With remainder bought the Burroughs Glass Co.
Facts. Bits of detail filter back from Mother. Dad had killed a little colored boy years ago. Goes into a dark room, and there is brother Horace with claws—
Mother on Horace:
“When he came into a room it was like someone had walked out”—
Killed himself by breaking out a window and cut his wrists with the glass shards—? Don’t sound like a junky to me.
Horace here:
“It wasn’t, Bill. They killed me. They is just who you think.”
“Why? What about Helen? Horace—come in?”
Did he? Many long years ago—
Yagé mucho da.
Sees a fox.
“Why not?”
No dreams last night I can remember back now.
You got dope,
you got hope.
Just let your hand take over and ...
“Easy, in any drugstore. Walk in, flash a fiver and—the morphine is right ready, and of course, the syringe.”
First vein shot was an accident.
“Who cut into you Horace?”
He wasn’t special, but he was always there—and that’s a basic secret: just be there. He didn’t cut his wrists.
Very confused images—ignorant Armies clash by night—
“It is getting just too tiresome.”
Horace has a sort of English lower-class feel to his spirit—nasty and cheap, but he ain’t lying when he says he was murdered. ...
“You’ll cover for us. Listen I run. We know, respectable. Well, let’s keep it that way. Guy was depressed—and so ... fill in the blanks.”
Yeah, I guess.
What coulda done it?
Well, what did it.
The room could never be rented again. Roomer left after one night, complaining of showers of glass in dreams getting always more real, sharp.
Even so it’s still weird.
So what. Articulate it.
How many species became extinct? And why?
About half a million, they tell me—always something inexpressibly sad about the last of a line.
December 15, 1996. Sunday
To miss a cat is to miss your cat, part of you.
It hurts physically, like an amputation. There on top of the sofa, on the side of the sink where she always ate. It hurts.
As Wordsworth, that old child molester, said:
“She died and left to me
this heath this calm this quiet scene
The memory of what has been
and never more will be.”
Many spiritual disciplines establish as a prerequisite of advancement the attainment of inner silence. Rub out the word. Castaneda in The Teachings of Don Juan stresses the need to suspend the inner dialog—rub out the word—and gives precise exercises designed to attain a wordless state.
Rub out the word—laughable if you will, Leslie—
Alan—hear me?
Yes, William.
Well—the dream—don’t surrender. It’s a trick!
I went down under a hail of dream bullets. They don’t kill. I had made my point and position clear. That P.P. very stratospheric, way out.
Any group acquires group markings. Feminists: self-righteous—able to believe any lie they have invented, utterly humorless—without honor or common decency in their dealing with the “sex enemy.” It’s just a bore—
Now the macho—John Wayne square-jawed, bigoted, stupid—insensitive—
So as soon you got a pressure you have an archetype.
December 16, 1996
Scientists are mired in respectability. Does it not penetrate their skulls that some phenomena might only occur once? Or at a certain pattern in time—only every third Tuesday, etcetera.
And they have an insatiable appetite for Data: “More data!” they scream, “and nothing anecdotal.” (This maybe the only data in some cases.)
“Not conclusive!”
Is anything ever?
December 16, 1996
Reading account from 1879 settlers. Hospitable:
“Tie your horse and come in.”
I always carried a gallon of whiskey to smooth things out. Wouldn’t say no to a shot of whiskey? They wouldn’t.
Of course the dog always announced my arrival. Principal function of country dog to give notice of approach.
“Pays the hand $15 per month. Pays me $5 per month for your sleeping and breakfast here.”
Them was the days.
Dream last night. John de—no sex—and water again last night. I was holding onto the bowsprit—which dunked into the water sometimes.
Always these dreams of water, dirty, clear, deep blue—waters deep blue.
December 17, 1996. Tuesday
Cold heavy depression now. Disintegrating—into grass with snow, making old gentlemen with white whiskers.
Gray clouds—black branches—water ebbing, leaves, then:
“Me stranded—”
I told “me” so—
“The razor inside sir, jerk the handle.”
I just did, and it all leaked out like hydraulic fluid and I said: “Let it go”—
And I went and I laughed like the little boy on the ghost horse—laughing a laugh that was not of this world.
(Entire story one of the best in this genre, like Radiant Boys.)
I hate a liar I’d set one on fire they perjure the universe turn everything around till the worst is applauded as the best and the best kicked into the gutter and spit on.
“I Am Enraged”—(a column like Ed Anger’s):
The vile bestial settlers and sheep people wiped out the marsupial wolf.
Settlers need varmint like a cult needs enemies—and they [are] impervious to facts.
“Coyotes is decimated me lambs, me calves.”
Absolute hogwash, of course.
Killed all the wolves and lynxes, so the deer overgrazed and starved.
Try beating sense into them—look at that face:
“How did you know it was about the wolf critter?”
“It sticks out all over you.”
“Well they was killing our stock.”
“No they weren’t. Wild dogs—and how many was killed?”
“Well not so many.”
“Exactly.”
Slake this evil killing fever—stockmen need varmints like cult-ists need enemies.
Trucks unloading vicious, slobbering dogs:
“All right, turn ’em loose—kill, kill, kill.”
Now dream of spilling pot seed on the floor, then putting into a picture where the seeds would stick.
What a bloody fool I was—unsung hero of a war with aliens nobody knew about (except the soldiers), and certainly would not want to hear about or believe now. And which “we” apparently lost.
In a dream an old bum told me:
“We lost!”
Remember David Edge for the British, wising me up about the CIA contingent:
“They order you to do things they are afraid to do themselves, and then laugh at you for doing it.”
Remember the (enter T.P.)—the flying contraption I was on. Arch music laid on by Paul Bowles. Christopher Wanklyn was also there. I could feel the ship cracking up under me, just made it back on Pan music.
Paul said to Christopher:
“I was afraid it was going up.”
“You mean the ship?”
“No, the whole planet.”
Paranoid fantasies. Real enough at the time and in retrospect.
No, I wasn’t hallucinating. “They” would like me to think I am—as Laurie Anderson says:
“THEY ARE.”
Well, old unhappy far off things and battles long ago.
But the scars are still there.
Reversal:
“I’ll take these into the art room,” says the Butler.
“Certainly sir,” says the titled master.
“Don’t give me no shit, sir,” says the Butler.
“Don’t give me no shit,” master interjects. “Sir?”
“Of course, you cocksucker ...”—after long pause: “Sir.”
December 22, 1996. Sunday
Gloomy Sunday. Last night no breakfast, in the Land of the Dead. Dave and Sue were there in hotel room sort of, and I see the time is 7:20 A.M.
Go down. A room with a long table and a photo of some vague food—meat? Vaguely red. Halfway up back wall is a large opening, I presume accesses the kitchen.
Now four striped gray cats come out. Then I see a black dude with a high starched white collar. Face like ceramic mask. I brace him for breakfast. He does not react.
From Paul Bowles:
“I disturbed an agitated centipede.”
“Don’t kill it.”
“Someone should.”
Why the hell not. To me it is the most abominable of all creatures.
What hideous dead-end led to the creation of a centipede? If you can’t stand it, kill it!! With every other [animal] almost I say don’t kill it: snakes, lizards, any decent life-form. But you’re not a decent life-form anymore. Centipede legs is sprouting outa you.
“Get outa my bar. Quick. I don’t like centipedes!”
Just a guess: Centipede came from a hot impasse. Scorpion crawls out cold—
maybe—well, a man has to play the cards he is dealt—
and who deals the cards?
“Making [it] just as hard as you can on the dealer.”
Dealers change—his will is the wind’s will.
Papa Hemingway said it:
“It just doesn’t come anymore.”
Your credit’s gone Papa—your margin is et up.
Suicide is never good.
“It is a cowardly vetch, O my brothers.”
How you doing, Burgess?
A writer should feel his way into all his fans everywhere, and fan them to action.
The whole evil of which the War Against Drugs is one factor. Mark it to its place: it’s EVIL and it means no good for anything
Homo (experiment) Sap can or will create of value. It is here to exterminate.
For I shot a comrade sleeping
nine hundred of the hive, and
the swarm’s disgrace.
Now they’ve halted it by a disposal unit on the ground.
“These are the unsightly tricks before high heaven, that make the Angels weep—”
When whales and seals and elephants weep, I cannot suppress the deadly Sin of Anger.
Always the cloth: “Toro! Toro!” and one charges again and again—
Let it go, like the men carried up by balloon ropes and couldn’t get the thing in time to turn loose.
Brothers and Sisters, this sermon is about turning loose in time. Which means turning loose of all your body jerks—clutch. Too late. A hundred feet up.
Brothers and Sisters, turn loose while there is still a [milli] second of time.
Can a [milli]second take 3-D form?
A boy wished his brother dead, and his father in the package.
When this wish emerged in his “life review,” he said:
“I would rather sacrifice my own life.”
And of course he meant it, but he didn’t feel it. So he don’t even get a whiff of grace.
In despair he threw himself somewhere, and was saved by his love for cats. No priest or psychiatrist could do it. It was Brion Gysin, and:“meow meow meow.”
Is there any final honesty of character?
Not with the Other Half—sprawled through a man.
Yeah, men in sensory withdrawal often felt like “another body was slobbed across them.
“Well, it sure was.
So take a good look at what is sprawled through you. Does it have your best interests in mind?
“Fuck no.”
(Use them and lose them.)
December 23, 1996
(A boat in lake.) I was afraid it would turn over at high speed.
Dreams less and less interesting.
December 24, 1996
With two boys. Jumped off cliff to show how one could float down. First jump-off-cliff dream in some time. Things are hotting up in L.O.D. No-breakfast dreams a few days ago.
So: How To Discover Past Lives.
Well, write one. Sure, I could write a batch, but easy:
Paris 1830 or so—Charles Baudelaire. Everything clear and sharp, the smell, the cats, the opium feel I know so well. I too had syphilis.
The horror. Je m’y connais—I know the sickness. It has come back.
The restaurants, cafés, the food, music—“jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres”—Verlaine, Rimbaud, they run into each other—Paris—pissoir.
“Simon, aimes-tu le bruit des pas, sur les feuilles mortes?”
And this from a pissoir wall:
“J’aime ces types vicieux, qu’ici montrentla bite.”
“I like the vicious types who show the cock here.”
Me too.
Back to Paris. So many pharmacie—
“Codethyline Houdé?”
“Oui, Monsieur.”
Verlaine: “an old faun in terra-cotta, foreseeing no doubt an unfortunate sequence (une suite mauvaise) to these hours that pass to the sound of tambourines.”
I was never a King. An advisor—a Machiavelli—yes, but not the Prince.
I always had contempt for them. They are stupid.
Scribe, Priest, advisor, artist, yes.
Back deep are horrors that I cannot yet face. So we start with the easy ones like Paris.
Et puis? Well, Soldiers of Fortune in 1920—and earlier—doesn’t hold water. Just film.
No smells, food, feeling. No gun really jumps in my hand. So where the—
December 26, 1996
The touchstone is a feeling of lyric joy.
A scene in a dream, intricate and large building, colors, water, two men talking. I find it in Conrad, in the banal reflections of Almayer on the unhealthy conditions on the east bank of the river.
I am there. The muddy river flows by—often the joy lasts only for a few seconds—
When people blather about “happiness,” like some permanent medium you can accrete around yourself and never want for anything again. The archetype swindler’s line.
“Greeve,” in The Heart of the Matter, lists three types can be happy:
(1) The Unaware. Don’t see. Won’t see—some insulated with $$$
(2) The Coarse. Hard, evil, like Bugsy Siegel—looks pretty well satisfied with himself, and a horrid sight it is, the ugliness bursting through—
“Bugsy!”
Two 30-30S in swelled head. What a sorry hero type to emulate.
Go in any Chicago bar. The clerks, the other loutish jerks, all trying to look like mobsters. Show me what they want to be, and I will tell you who they are: wretched failures at wretched jobs. Always, of course, “unfairly treated” by superiors.
Especially postal workers. Just yesterday another disgruntled mail carrier killed the supervisor—two shots in the head—
(all Postal Supervisors [should be] armed at all times)
Saturday, December 28, 1997.
Vague dreams.
Well, tried some exercises to uncover past lives. A few nibbles—a voice, a bit petulant and put-upon says:
“Well, I’Ve been instructed to show you this.”
And showed me very little.
The old Senseney house at Walton and Pershing. It was Mrs. Senseney who said of me:
“Stay away from it. It is a walking corpse.”
Well, it isn’t every corpse can walk. Hers can’t.
And this walker can still talk.
(Hers can’t, and this corpse can still walk.)
Oh well, not much light. I hope—about lives past or future or present to be found in this tawdry, snobbish, cruel—
How she could toy with a climbing Jewess:
“Oh, Mrs. Senseney, I had such fun at the Wallace party.”
“You were very fortunate, weren’t you.”
The dining room was always cold and dank. The bedroom where she slept, and crept and leapt on some poor Jewess—the stink of it was pure Death. That is, it had no stink at all.
Don’t know how I have such a clear picture of this room—and a blue kimono and blue coverlet, on untidy bed.
These are gloomy glimpses. Bits of vivid and, fortunately, vanishing details. The St. Louis bourgeois....
“Well, I had a fine dinner, enjoyed it”—(after three stiff whiskeys)—“but I can’t help feeling a twinge of conscience when I think of all the millions of people don’t have enough to eat.” (Discreet belch)
Dr. Senseney was a terrible doctor. Nearly killed me on a tonsil operation, flushed with an uneventful removal of adenoids, which I kept in alcohol in a jar next to a 6-inch centipede from under a rock in New Mexico, Valley Ranch, and my horse was named Grant. A Strawberry Roan. And the band played on. And I came near bleeding to death from his bungling hands.
“I did all I could” says he, and that was certainly no lie.
But I come of good stock and can survive the ineptitude of a socialite puff[ed]-shirt croaker (a sort of bladder with a face on it).
Cut his throat with my Scout knife and dragged him around the block behind my Red Bug three times.
“He molested met!” I sobbed.
And that was no lie, with his story about bringing a French fairy back to his digs. It was raining and cold:
“Then I knocked him into the gutter and slammed the door.”
Yes, he sure was molesting me.
“Why if any son of mine, or any friend of mine, turned that way, I’d kill him with my own hands.”
At this point I was molested, so I couldn’t contain myself, kicked him in his nuts, and was on him with the shiv and all he could do was let out a squawk like a stricken turkey.
What all day? And so much negative Karma.
December 29?—30?, 1996
I was locked out of my apartment. The janitor with a pass key was Cabell Hardy on the 3rd floor.
(Found his letter today and immediately answered. Should have done before, but I did not register. The dream nudged me—gracias Allah.)
A little restaurant with one waitress. Somehow my gun was checked with her, and there were these two cops there (like Mexico). One had a harelip and looked like Big Al in the Beat Hotel (nostalgia hits me—the Beaux Arts Restaurant, the Balkan, Brion’s room).
It is not certain they are or are not there to arrest me.
Outside is a dock (short and in ruins), deep blue water. Fish down there.
Reading New Yorker article about Hiroshima:
“Once, like everyone else, I thought the bomb had ended the war and saved many lives.”
Include me out of your “everyone else.” The war was already won. Japan was asking for peace through Sweden. It was obvious official USA were and are such shits as boggles a sane and relatively decent mind.
You see, they wanted a “virgin” target. Enough blood on that sheet to satisfy the bloody lot of you.
“Thank God it wasn’t a dud,” said Oppenheimer.
“We are become [Death], destroyer of worlds.”
“Most perfect aiming point I’Ve seen in this whole damn war,” said Colonel Paul Tibbets, pilot of the (Ebola) Enola Gay that dropped it.
“Shadow left by a Japanese idler as he waited on the stone steps of a bank that never opened.”
“Clock stopped at 8:15 A.M.”
Gets worse and worse. The Ugly American keeps on getting uglier, until there is no uglier image what can be got.
And what is that final point? The ultimate F.U.?
Well now, of course you’re a woman—I understand these things. I am a man of the world, my little short rib.
December 30, 1996
Reading New Yorker, July 31, 1995, account of “firestorms” in Hamburg occasioned by Allied bombing. (They don’t need an Atom bomb.) Then Dresden, to break German morale. The result was history’s second major firestorm. Like I say, top people in USA and England were such shits as you can’t believe.
What is left in these minds? Very little of value to me or anyone I can relate to. “All my relations,” as the Indians say. Like the drug anti’s in Malaysia say: “dealers are not human to him.”
And he—Mohathir Mohamed, Prime Minister—is not human to me. I curse him with my whole heart. There is nothing in him I feel for, or with.
Same goes for the firestorm impresarios.
So as this inglorious chapter in the USA draws to a dreary close with Clinton squeaking like the rat he turned out to be, that [in] Arizona and California together courts [are] quasi-legalizing marijuana for medical or any other purpose. ...
You must mark it to its place. It is an ILLEGAL drug and by illegal, beyond question.
Tuesday, December 31, 1996.
I will start my auto—
you know—
If he—
Then I felt the touch of a higher power and I became a morphine addict. Best thing I ever did for myself. Without God’s Own Medicine I could well have ended up one of those “Write the Great American Novel” [types] that never get off the ground, or an alcoholic academic:
“Will he get tenure? Will he break up with his lover of ten years?”
It is one tired soap opera and thanks to G.O.M. I didn’t slip on it.
“Will he get tenure? Will the bank approve his application for a second mortgage? Should he make (risk) a pass at young Prescott, in violation of his own rule?”
He will write the Great American Novel someday, simply dripping with “high seriousness,” that will pose and probe momentous questions.
In Egyptian hieroglyphs the idea of “question” is reeds and water.
The touch (nudge) of God’s Own Medicine led me to Junky,[to] Naked Lunch, to finding a vacation—I mean, of course, vocation. A place in life. My place in life—and it opened my eyes to the evil that lurks behind the war against drugs. Illegal drugs. Not just any drugs. Once a drug becomes illegal, it acquires a sulfurous glow from the depths of Hell.
So through G.O.M. I gained self-respect—and in so doing, the respect of others.
I am an unabashed cultural Icon. I stand for the truth. I hate liars.
My familiar is the White Cat, formed of searing white moonlight under which all hidden plots, all lies and deceits, are brought to the light of The Hunting Cat. He can’t be bought. Stack it to the ceiling. He can’t be scared. He is light right through. Fear is deviousness. We march under the banner of The Hunting Cat.
What I mean by truth: I mean what is there when all the bullshit is gone. Not one lie left. All gone away.
And what, if anything, remains is TRUTH and consequences.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Hell, I gotta big mouth, what would happen to me if I lost it—”
Good Old Boy. These are unsightly tricks.
“It has happened. You have lost it.”
The day of the liar is done.
Truth is here when all the words are rubbed out. Words were made to lie with.
(“I will go and laugh with my wife.”)
Wherever that come from it was there.
Now, brothers and sisters, this is not done quick or easy. You find one lie in yourself and shove it out, and three more quicker than him come in. It’s something you have to do every day, every hour, every second.
Trace down those lies. The White Cat will do the rest. The Hunting Cat.
We are—and by “we” I mean [we] who are sick of lies and bullshit—
Clinton—what a wrong number he turns out to be—won by default—better than Dole—says:
“There will be no RX’s for illegal drugs like marijuana for medical or any other purposes.”
An illegal drug is fucking illegal.
The whole Freudian Fraud was embraced by the upper middle ad[vertising and] publishing] executives, because they knew they were compacted of lies. And they foolishly (fondly) thought some Yid from Frankurt-am-Main could straighten the whole mess out.
(Shoot a little G.O.M. and maybe the mess won’t seem so messy.)
Remember Phil White saying about getting on junk:
“Worst thing can happen to a man.”
Or he’d say:
“If God made anything better, He kept it for Himself.”
Take no. 2:
I never regretted junk habit. Those lying bastards have the gall to ask me to speak about the evils of junk—I told them: “shallow pretext for police state,” and they was off-line quick, lest they become contaminated by such evil dissent.
Well, Truth Party knows Evil when and where they see it.
“Talking is a woman.”
Old, old song.
Any group—Black, Jew, woman, white, Arab, Chinese—that sets itself up as the superior creatures, end up as humorless (Communist) doctrinaire (atheists).
Any group puts out lying pamphlets like Scab—(“We at Scab”)—are all “evil-hearted bores.”
So who can prove that I didn’t on my vacations go to Tangier and rape children?
They got some of the rudiments of the Big Lie. But too far off the mark.
It is not the truth that hurts, it is the outrageous lie.
If a man has spent years on a book, to fit it together like a symphony, one says:
“This ill-conceived so-called novel, obviously slopped together in a few weeks, has no serious claims even to criticism.”
That’s what gets a writer’s Angora goat. “Why have I spent seven years on [this] book—”
“slopped together”—
What we are up against: liars with no honesty or integrity or decency, just plain bastards, like the people try to run down squirrels or cats or Gila monsters (an endangered species) or cut up manatees with their speed boats:
“Ha Ha Ha.”
January 4, 1997
Just reading Hersey, and other Hiroshima accounts, and got mad as Ed Anger in The [Weekly World] News again.
That lying bastard Conant of Harvard defends dropping the bomb. In his tendentious article he does not even mention radiation sickness: “the Atomic Plague.”
Scene: Conant at podium, all seems very decorous very, very Harvard, then ...
“Mr. Conant, you don’t mention radiation sickness in your article? Were you aware of this syndrome when you wrote the article in question?”
All over the hall, voices:
“Yes did he know about...”
And someone has smuggled in a magic lantern, projecting horrible burns.
“No, he didn’t know about nothing.”
Conant visibly reels. He is not accustomed to such treatment.
“Well it was a short article—I could hardly be expected—”
Voice:
“He could hardly be expected—“
Shrill, piercing voices:
“And you knew nothing of Japanese overtures for surrender?” ...
Voices:
“He knew nothing. ... He was a good nigger, knew his place and kept in it.”
“Good nigger ...”
“Knew his place ...”
These voices dispersed through the audience, suddenly burst like a bomb in waves of sound—five hundred tape recorders—five hundred voices:
“Get off the stage!”
“Lying cocksucker!”
“Crawl off the stage! Don’t want your type in here!”
“Boo! Boo! Hiss! Hiss!”
Vain attempts to restore order. Conant hustled out by security, pelted with rotten eggs and tomatoes—in a state of collapse.
January 7, 1997
Memoirs—what you wouldn’t want anyone to know.
“My past was an evil river—un fleuve maudit.”
Without tenure—who wants an unemployed teacher of Creative Writing.
So write: the law is Love.
In simple form: a feeling for.
Par exemple, I feel no feeling for a centipede. For an abandoned kitten, I feel much sympathy.
Where did the centipede come from?
And what betrayal of the human species could have led some sonofabitch to feed live baby mice to a caged centipede?
Centipede—come from very hot place, from very hot place which formed the centipede... the OVENS, the Ovens, the Oooovens...
Well, forget [it], who cares anymore.
As Sri Aurobindo said: “It is all over.”
January 8, 1997. Wednesday
Another dream of going through Customs with drugs or guns. Definite fear of arrest and imprisonment.
Walking by marble statues, mutilated—a finger here, a prick there.
