Memphis Crayfish People - "The Best, Jerry, The Best!"

fr. The Western Lands, by William S. Burroughs

January 4, 1986. Dream that I was sharing a room with Joe Stalin. The room was an alcove off a corridor leading to a restaurant. This is in Chicago. It don't look like Chicago. It looks like a prop town of cardboard under a gray haze. East St. Louis is across the river, weeds growing through craked side-walks, a little pocket of the 1920s...air lines here and there, a whiff of riverboats and hobo jungles.
     I am looking at Stalin, thinking here is a man with the deaths of millions on his hands. No doubt he'd think no more of killing me than any other decadent bourgeois. But he is friendly, and it isn't the Joe Stalin I used to know in newsreels and pictures. Both are short, but this Joe has no mustache. He is unshaven, sloppy looking, middle-aged, dirty and greasy.
     "The lair of the bear is in Chicago."
     [Michelle, Gloria, Jim, Pat, Theresa, John, Torgerud The Arrogant Prevaricating Projectioist Inveterate Liar & Scapegoat Circus MC->("Yeaaah, I don't know anything about that. Simply holding up my end of conversation and tedious as always with him; happened to mention Columbia University where he through preceeding little fit of passive-agressive pique"), Steve & Debbie, Beale St. Spaced Babe with the stuffed lion or dog in her default bedroom bathroom upstairs too dirty for cover story she --...[transmissioon lost here]/:/;/, I have to retire to the lounge here in Bunker 'G' need to micturate and again with the cold -- too many people sleeping eating jabbering eubonic gibberish or worse, a girl has to be careful; be right back 1317 hours 28JUNE03 || 1321 hours 28JUNE03 OK, back, I'll continue here now then[|~!|]...tired, irritated by "the common cold" weakness again and strange moto-empti- vision-under-hideous-x-sense-of-being--Dasein, still "must...warn... others..."phklaghffg!]"
     That's a cut-up or dream sentence from 1963 Tangier. It didn't mean anything at the time. Still doesn't. Here's another: "Captain Bairns was arrested today in the murder at sea of Chicago. Witnesses from a distance observed a brilliant flash as the operator was arrested" "Life is a flickering shadow, with violence before and after it." Ian Sommerville told me in a dream.
     And what the bloody hell is Joe eating? Some sort of black meat pie, blood pudding perhaps. I can't take my eyes off it, as though I am looking at him to see the lineaments of multimillion murders. The first hundred thousand is the hardest.*
     [Don Raveahy, of the eponymous weekly rat holes, said to me in his smoke-gagged office when we were still courting, out of the clear blue reflection of his Brazillian butterfly SUV, "You know, sometimes I think, 'that Hitler [guy] must have been a special man...". This was about the same week that he explained to me how the U.S. works; I had to stand still for this maggoty crap too: "It's all -- the form of government here is Capitalism. What is Capitalism, right? Survival of the fittest -- that's what Capitalism is...I survive, so I am vindicative (sic) and I am superior to the other [laws]." -&- "--Memphis is no worse than any other city; there is crime and putrescent smell of outlandish vulgar ignorance almost everywhere surviving fittly in every fat fit city." -- belched and poured me another giant SKYY Vodka, would only drink SKYY, or whatever else happened to be within reach. He had very long arms, had a photograph of Kenny Rogers, himself between, and Mohammed Ali on the wall over the office's restroom door, pic taken while, allegedly, he drove a limo in L.A.... --If they are good enough to invidicate..." -- through a dart here at thin air, no one of his many boards anywhere around. He'd been given his President-ship (wooden desk nameplate) of the ("been in three hollywood movies...") trailer park as a scrap of Nepotism thrown his way by his very wealthy and high government jobbed brother. The sane one, who mailed him boxes of self-help books. Used them as props on residents' and former residents' furniture, TV, appliances displayed in this smoke-filled room of no consequence except his addiction to forced Schadenfreude by and as designed from the minute anybody with potential walked into the place. He took the booty under cover of "understandings".]
*After that it's all downhill, they tell me. Nothing shows in his greasy dish. just nothing good or bad. He isn't even repulsive.
     But he does have the look about him of someone who was somebody... "Look, that's Al Capone, or John Barrymore, or Jack Buck Manolete." Somebody who used to be somebody ... there, in a shirt without a collar, and even a brass stud sticking out. But yes, he was somebody ... no doubt about that.
     It isn't even a private room. Through a window I can see the cash register and the hostess leading the patrons to tables. Middle-aged men who call their wives "Mother":
     "Now, Mother and I was in Mexico and we ddn't like it at all. Mother's piles flared up and and we couldn't get any soothing Tuck and I said right out, 'When are you folks going to get civilized?' And the druggest said, "We don't want your syphilis, got plenty of our own,' and he shoved the opium suppository up Mother and it did ease her a bit."
     The hostess looks like Live Oyl, a long neck and a chicken head. I look at Joe. He knew the secret power: sit long and move fast. Hitler could move, but he couldn't sit. Stalin could sit like any peasant can.

Dr. BENWAY (fr. Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs)

[...]          "I deplore brutality," he said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his[/her] personal identity. He[/she] must be made to feel that he[/she] deserves any treatment he[/she] receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him[/her]. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct" {or confront him[/her] with the real interpersonal dynamic. [W-ed-B]}.
     Every citizen of Annexia was required to apply for and carry on his [/her] person at all times a whole portfolio of documents. Citizens were subject to be stopped in the street at any time; and the Examiner, who might be in plain clothes, in various uniforms, often in a bathing suit or pyjamas, sometimes stark naked except for a badge [affixed] to his[/her] left nipple, after checking each paper, would stamp it. On subsequent inspection the citizen was required to show the properly entered stamps of the last inspection. The Examiner, when he stopped a large group, would only examine and stamp the cards of a few. The others were then subject to arrest because their cards were not properly stamped. Arrest meant "provisional detention"; that is, the prisoner would be released if and when his Affadavit of Explanation, properly signed and stamped, was approved by the Assistant Arbiter of Explanations. Since this official hardly ever came to his office, and the Affadavit of Explanation had to be presented in person, the explainers spent weeks and months waiting around in unheated offices with no chairs and no toilet facilities.
     Documents issued in vanishing ink faded into old pawn tickets. New documents were constantly required. The citizens rushed from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet impossible deadlines.
     All benches were removed from the city, all fountains turned off, all flowers and trees destroyed. Huge electric buzzers on the top of every apartment house (everyone lived in apartments) rang the quarter hour. Often the vibrations would throw people out of bed. Searchlights played over the town all night (no one was allowed to use shades, curtains, shutters or blinds).
     No one ever looked at anyone else because of the strict law against importuning, with or without verbal approach, anyone for any purpose, sexual or otherwise. All cafes and bars were closed. Liquor could only be obtained with a special permit, and the liquor so obtained could not be sold or given or in any way transferred to anyone else, and the presence of anyone else in the room was considered prima facie evidence of conspiracy to transfer liquor.
     No one was permitted to bolt his[/her] door, and the police had pass keys to every room in the city. Accompanied by a mentalist they rush into someone's quarters and start "looking for it."
     The mentalist guides them to whatever the man wishes to hide: a tube of vaseline, an enema, a handerkerchief with [procreative seed] on it, a weapon, unlicensed alcohol. And they always submitted the suspect to the most humiliating search of his naked person on which they make sneering and derogatory comments. Many a latent homosexual was carried out in a straitjacket when they planted vaseline in his [sphincter (from the latin for ring) muscle]. Or they pounce on any object. A pen wiper or a shoe tree.
     "And what's this supposed to be for?"
     "It's a pen wiper."
     "A pen wiper, he says."
     "I've heard everything now."
     "I guess this is all we need. Come on, you."
After a few months of this the citizens cowered in corners like neurotic cats.

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