William S. Burroughs Read Free Page A

He could see himself eating trout there forever, heaps of
bones with grass growing through.

3

    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