William S. Burroughs Read Free Page B

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