William S. Burroughs (3 page)

The golden grass,
the sinister black water were like the landscape of some forgotten
planet. He could see himself eating trout there forever, heaps of
bones with grass growing through.

Kim is a slimy,
morbid youth of unwholesome proclivities with an insatiable appetite
for the extreme and the sensational. His mother had been into
table-tapping and Kim adores ectoplasms, crystal balls, spirit
guides and auras. He wallows in abominations, unspeakable rites,
diseased demon lovers, loathsome secrets imparted in a thick
slimy whisper, ancient ruined cities under a purple sky, the smell of
unknown excrements, the musky sweet rotten reek of the terrible Red
Fever, erogenous sores suppurating in the idiot giggling flesh. In
short, Kim is everything a normal American boy is taught to
detest.
He is evil and slimy and
insidious.
Perhaps his
vices could be forgiven him, but he was also given to the subversive
practice of
thinking.
He was in fact incurably intelligent.

Later, when he
becomes an important player, he will learn that people are not bribed
to shut up about what they know. They are bribed not to find it out.
And if you are as intelligent as Kim, it's hard not to find things
out. Now, American boys are told they should think. But just wait
until your thinking is basically different from the thinking of
a boss or a teacher...You will find out that you
aren't
supposed
to think.

Life is an
entanglement of lies to hide its basic mechanisms.

Kim remembers a
teacher who quoted to the class: "If a thing is worth doing at
all it is worth doing well...
"

"Well sir, I
mean the contrary is certainly true. If a thing is worth doing at
all, it is worth doing, even badly," said Kim pertly,
hoping to impress the teacher with his agile intelligence. "I
mean, we can't all become Annie Oakleys doesn't mean we can't get
some fun and benefit from shooting...
"

The teacher didn't
like that
at all,
and for the rest of the school year singled
Kim out for heavy-handed sarcasm, addressing him as "our
esteemed woodsman and scout." When Kim couldn't answer a history
question, the teacher asked, "Are you one of these strong,
silent men?" And he wrote snippy little comments in the margins
of Kim's compositions: "Not
quite
as badly as
that,"
viciously underlining the offending passage. At the end of the
term the teacher gave him a
Β
—
for the course, though Kim
knew fucking well he deserved an A.

To be sure, Kim was
rotten clear through and he looked like a sheep-killing dog and
smelled like a polecat, but he was also the most ingenious, curious,
resourceful, inventive little snot that ever rose from the pages of
Boy
'
s
Life,
thinking up ways of doing things better than other folks.
Kim would get to the basic root of what a device is designed to do
and ask himself, Is it doing it in the simplest and most
efficient way possible? He knew that once an article goes into mass
production, the last thing a manufacturer wants to hear about is a
better and simpler article that is
basically different.
And
they are not interested in a more efficient, simpler or better
product. They are interested in making money.

When Kim was fifteen
his father allowed him to withdraw from the school because he was so
unhappy there and so much disliked by the other boys and their
parents.

"I don't want
that boy in the house again," said Colonel Greenfield. "He
looks like a sheep-killing dog."

"It is a
walking corpse," said a Saint Louis matron poisonously.

"The boy is
rotten clear through and he stinks like a polecat," Judge
Farris pontificated.

This was true. When
angered or aroused or excited Kim flushed bright red and steamed off
a rank ruttish animal smell.

And sometimes he
lost control over his natural functions. He took comfort from
learning that partially domesticated wolves suffer from the same
difficulty.

"The child in
not wholesome," said Mr. Kindhart, with his usual restraint. Kim
was the most unpopular boy in the school, if not in the town of Saint
Louis.

"They have
nothing to teach you anyway," his father said. "Why, the
headmaster is a fucking priest."

The summers they
spent at the farm, and during the day Kim spent much of his time
outdoors, hiking, hunting, and fishing. He loved squirrel hunting in
the early morning, and usually went hunting with Jerry Ellisor, a
buck-toothed, slightly retarded boy who lived next door. Jerry was
subject to fits, so Kim carried a leather-covered stick he would
shove in Jerry's mouth to keep him from biting his tongue off. Kim
enjoyed watching these fits because sometimes Jerry would get a
hard-on and shoot off in his pants, and that was a powerful sight.
And Jerry had a slinky black hound dog. Everybody knows you can't
find squirrels without a dog to bark up the tree where a squirrel is.

His father had an
extensive and eclectic library, and Kim spent much of his time
reading during the winter months. Kim read everything in his father's
library, Shakespeare and all the classics. Dickens was not for him,
and he couldn't abide Sir Walter Scott. Knights and ladies repelled
him. Armor was a cumbersome and impractical device, jousting was
stupid and bestial, and romantic love was disgusting, rather like the
cult of Southern womanhood. He noticed that he was particularly
detested by self-styled Southern gentlemen, a truly pestiferous
breed. The animal doctor should put all Southern gentlemen to sleep,
along with the knights and the ladies, he decided.

There were a number
of medical books, which Kim read avidly. He loved to read about
diseases, rolling and savoring the names on his tongue: tabes
dorsalis, Friedreich's ataxia, climactic buboes
...
and
the pictures! the poisonous pinks and greens and yellows and purples
of skin diseases, rather like the objects in those Catholic stores
that sell shrines and madonnas and crucifixes and religious
pictures. There was one skin disease where the skin swells into a red
wheal and you can
write
on it. It would be fun to find a boy
with this disease and draw pricks all over him. Kim thought maybe he
would study medicine and become a doctor, but while he liked diseases
he didn't like sick people. They complained all the time. They were
petulant and self-centered and boring. And the thought of
delivering babies was enough to turn a man to stone.

His father had a
large collection of books on magic and the occult, and Kim drew magic
circles in the basement and tried to conjure up demons. His favorites
were the Abominations like Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails
and who rides on a whispering south wind. Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and
Plagues, and especially Gelal and Lilit, who invade the beds of men,
because he did sometimes experience a vivid sexual visitation he
hoped was an incubus. He knew that the horror of these demon lovers
was a gloomy Christian thing. In Japan there are phantom whores known
as "fox maidens," who are highly prized, and the man who
can get his hands on a fox maiden is considered lucky. He felt sure
there were fox boys as well. Such creatures could assume the form of
either sex.

Once he made sex
magic against Judge Farris, who said Kim was rotten clear through and
smelled like a polecat. He nailed a full-length picture of the Judge
to the wall, taken from the society page, and masturbated in front of
it while he intoned a jingle he had learned from a Welsh nanny:

Slip
and stumble
(lips peel back from
his teeth)

Trip
and fall
(his eyes light up
inside)

Down
the stairs And hit the wallllllllllllllll!

His hair stands up
on end. He whines and whimpers and howls the word out and shoots all
over the Judge's leg. And Judge Farris actually did fall downstairs a
few days later, and fractured his shoulder bone. The Judge swore to
anyone who would listen that a scrawny, stinking red dog that must
have gotten in through the basement window suddenly jumped out
at him on the stairs, with a most peculiar smile on its face, showing
all its teeth, wrapped its paws around his legs, tripping him so that
he fell and hit his shoulder against the wall at the landing.

Nobody believed him
except Kim, and Kim knew that he had succeeded in projecting a
thought form. But he was not overly impressed. The Judge was dead
drunk every night and he was always falling down. Magic seemed to Kim
a hit-and-miss operation, and to tell the truth, a bit silly. Guns
and knives were more reliable.

He read about Hassan
i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, Master of the Assassins,
and he was fascinated. How he longed to be a dedicated assassin in an
all-male society. He dreamt of the Old Man, who came to him with a
white beard and pale blue eyes and told him to go kill Colonel
Greenfield, who said he looked like a sheep-killing dog.

"GRRRRRRRRRRRR
...
I'll
leap at his throat, as seals are said to do if mistreated by their
trainers."

There is a smell in
the air after a thunderbolt hits, it's one of those archetypal smells
like the smell of the sea and the smell of opium: one whiff and you
never forget it.

Once Kim Carsons and
Jerry Ellisor saw lightning strike the cornice of the old school
building outside Saint Albans, the smell so heavy you could see it
drifting from the shattered bricks in a violet haze and the boys go
crazy with the smell like a cat with catnip. They strip off their
clothes and caper around masturbating and turning cartwheels and
grinning out between their legs and screaming to the sky:

"SMELL
ME!
"

And Jerry's slinky
black hound dog throws back its head and howls, lightning popping all
around them as the sky gets blacker and blacker with just a line of
bright green around the rim and the next thing we are snatching up
our clothes and running for the cyclone cellar, bricks from the
school bouncing all around us. We both shit ourselves when the
twister ripped the cellar door off and the house went up like
matchsticks. And the dog kept on howling. When we come up out of the
cellar the house is clean gone, with Jerry's bedfast grandmother.
She'd been alone in the house, since Arch and Ma were in town for
their monthly shopping, and Jerry was supposed to look after "the
old stink-bag," as he called her.

"Maybe it
dropted her in the river," Jerry said as they poured hot water
over each other in the sauna and washed the shit off. Everybody was
glad to see the last of her, she'd been clean out of her mind the
past five years, her breasts all eated away with the cancer and Arch
kept buying more morphine to finish her off but she had such a
strength for it no amount would kill her and Arch said it was like
buying feed for a hawg.

"She's a
marl-hole in the worst form there is, no bottom to her."

"Well,
leastwise she don't
eat
much," Ma said. "Half a cup
of soup a day. She can't last much longer on that."

And Jerry pipes up:
"I heard about an old Saint Woman lived twenty years and all she
ever eated was a holy wafer on Sundays."

And Arch just looks
at him and says, "You know any more stories like that?"

"Sure, plenty.
Why, this one old biddy lived forty years after the doctor
said
—
"

And Arch whops him
alongside the head with a ruck-hoe handle.

Jerry took Kim in to
see Grandma once. She reminded Kim of an old rock covered with
lichen, and he thought she could live forever like that.

Now, the sauna was
erected by a Finnish boy who witched wells and did tinkering jobs,
and he had put some Finn magic on it because he had the power. No one
could say his real name, so they all called him Sinki for Helsinki,
where all the Finns is borned at. This Sinki had bright red hair, and
one eye was blue and the other brown. He could whip a knife out of
his sleeve and cut the head clean off a chicken and have the knife
put back away before the blood squirted out
...
WHOOOOSH.
Kim recollects when the sauna is finished Sinki, Jerry and Kim
is the first to get the cleaning in it. They didn't have to worry
about Arch and Ma butting in by this time they is both taking the
morphine and taking it heavy only way they can stand up for the
aggravations of Grandma when the morphine runned out of her any hour
of the day or night she lets out such a bellowing Arch can hear it
clear to the end of his cornfield.

Well, Sinki rubs his
long red pointed dick and Jerry grins his buck teeth bare so we all
get hard and jerk off with a smell like fucking ferrets. Then Sinki
draws a circle on the floor with the jism and says something in Finn
talk and tells us he has put a magic on the sauna it will last the
house out.