William S. Burroughs (15 page)

8.
They
are more at home occupying women than men. Once they have a woman,
they have the male she cohabits with. Women must be regarded as the
principal reservoir of the alien virus parasite. Women and religious
sons of bitches. Above all, religious women.

We will take every
opportunity to weaken the power of the church. We will lobby in
Congress for heavy taxes on all churches. We will provide more
interesting avenues for the young. We will destroy the church with
ridicule. We will secularize the church out of existence. We
will introduce and encourage alternative religious systems. Islam,
Buddhism, Taoism. Cults, devil worship, and rarefied systems like the
Ishmaelite and the Manichaean. Far from seeking an atheistic world as
the communists do, we will force Christianity to compete for the
human spirit.

We will fight any
extension of federal authority and support States' Rights. We
will resist any attempt to penalize or legislate against the
so-called victimless crimes
...
gambling,
sexual behavior, drinking, drugs.

We will give all our
attention to experiments designed to produce asexual offspring, to
cloning, use of artificial wombs, and transfer operations.

We will endeavor to
halt the Industrial Revolution before it is too late, to regulate
populations at a reasonable point, to eventually replace
quantitative money with qualitative money, to decentralize, to
conserve resources. The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus
revolution, dedicated to controlled proliferation of identical
objects and persons. You are making soap, you don't give a shit who
buys your soap, the more the soapier. And you don't give a shit who
makes it, who works in your factories. Just so they make soap.

They were down in
Mexico, hiding out in the hacienda of the Fuentes family. They did
some hunting for the table. Kim tamed a peccary and it would follow
him like a dog. There was an old family assassin named Tio Mate, who
could shoot vultures out of the sky with his
44
tip-up Smith and Wesson.

Kim procured some
sacred mushrooms from his Indian lover, which he brewed in a
clay pot and crooned over it and spit in it and just before sunset we
all take the potion and Kim's spirit guide leads us to a room we had
never seen before huge house anyhoo and we find trunks full of female
clothes so we dress up and camp around Kim calls himself the Green
Nun, and Tom does the Pious Senora, and Boy is the blushing Senorita.
The Green Nun rummages around and finds a brace of double-barreled
twenty-gauge shotgun pistols perfectly balanced with rubber
grips and her loads it with number-four shot.

And a belt with
holsters, the guns slide out smooth as silk, the whole equipage hide
under his nun cape. Boy, who has been vulture shooting with Tio Mate,
opts for the
44
Smith and Wesson, and Tom has a weird Webley semiautomatic
revolver, with a shield over the cylinder to protect his hand from
sparks and a hand grip that folds down from the barrel.

So attired and armed
we get in the buckboard and drive down to the village, where the
Chief of Police and his asshole cronies is getting drunker and meaner
by the minute...They know something is going on up at the hacienda.

"Brujeria
...
"
(Witchcraft
...)

"Y
maricones.
"

The Jefe is a strain
of blond Mexican with reddish hair, little red bristly
eyelashes, blue pig-eyes, and a pug nose with red hairs flaring out
like copper wire. Strong and heavyset, his whole being exudes animal
ill-temper and menace. He is conspiring to displace the Fuentes
family, who opposed his appointment. Kim had seen him shortly
after his arrival and it was pure hate at first sight...

The four boys sweep
into the saloon. The Jefe swells with rage.

Kim smiles at him
and touches the huge silver crucifix at his throat, in the same
moment tossing his nun cape aside.

"CHINGOA!"
the Jefe screams and goes for his pearl-handled
45
automatic. Kim slides the gun out
and points for the Jefe's pig snout and there is a bloody hole where
the Jefe's nose and eyes were. He spins backward into the man behind
him, a gaunt wooden-faced man with a black coat and black bow tie.

Kim lines up just
under the tie and opens his throat to the spine. He drops to the
floor to shift guns
...

Boy and Tom are
dropping them like ducks in a shooting gallery. I see a stolid farmer
type lining up on Tom with a
30-30
and I
shoot up from the floor just below the rib cage where the Aztecs cut
in to pull the heart out. He rocks back, his eyes open and close like
a doll. The gun falls from his hands.

Twelve of those
lousy macho shits died in the shoot-out. We lost one boy
—
a
sad quiet kid named Joe had got himself up as a whore in a purple
dress slit down the sides. Had his gun in a shoulder holster and it
caught in his strap-on tits. Hit five times.

When we get back to
the hacienda with dead Joe, Tio Mate takes us in to see the
patron,
a courtly old gentleman with black clothes and silver braid all
over.

"It gives me
much pleasure to see boys earn their keep."

We all recognize the
voice of Kim's spirit guide.

The boys smile.

"Can I pet the
skull?" Kim asks. "Certainly. You all can."

Tio Mate steps to
the door and calls the Skull Keeper. And he brings the skull in on a
silk pillow and sets it down on a table of polished petrified wood.
And we all crowd around to pet it. I can feel the tingle run up my
arms, a soft burn, and the smell of stale flowers and jungles and
decay and musky animal smells...Kim draws the smell deep into his
lungs.

"When I touched
it I felt itchy prickles run up my arm in rhythmic pulses. It's a
living thing, warm and resinous to the touch, like amber.

"I am stroking
out a smell of stagnant swamp water, gardens turning back to
jungle, and a sharp rank animal smell."

Smell of some
creature so alien Kim feels queasy trying to imagine the creature
that would smell like that. He knew that the skull came from the
planet Venus. He had experienced vivid dream visions of Venus and he
intended to write a guidebook...He did sketches and sometimes he
would tell Tom:

"Take a picture
of that. It's pure Venus, my dear
..."

And Uranus where the
Uranians sit in their blue slate houses in cold blue silence
...
Kim
wanted to explore them all
...
He longed for
new dangers and new weapons, "for perilous seas in faery
lands forlorn." For unknown drugs and pleasures, and a
distant star called HOME.

The
Family
has set up a number of posts in America and northern Mexico. They are
already very rich, mostly from real estate. They own newspapers, a
chemical company, a gun factory, and a factory for making
photographic equipment, which will become one of the first film
studios.

Their policy is
Manichaean. Good and evil are in a state of conflict. The outcome is
uncertain. This is not an eternal conflict since one or the other
will win out in this universe. The Christian church, by calling
good "evil" and evil "good," has confused
the issue. The church must be seen as a dedicated instrument of alien
invasion.

Kim has set out to
organize the Johnson Family into an all-out worldwide space program.
He soon finds himself in conflict with very deadly and powerful
forces:

Old Man Bickford,
cattle, oil, and real estate. He owns a big piece of a big state. He
is one of the poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old men who run
America. To these backstage operators, presidents, ambassadors,
cabinet members are just jokes and errand boys. They do what they are
told to do, or else.

Bickford's
subordinates never know why they have fallen from favor. That is for
them to figure out, when his displeasure falls heavy and cold as
a cop's blackjack on a winter night...

"Just step in
here, Jess,...I want to talk to you." The Old Man steers him
into a little side room containing one chair. The Old Man sits down
and smiles.

"You know,
Jess, I have an intuition about you: I think you'd make a mighty fine
president."

Jess turns pale. "Oh
no, Mr. Bickford, I don't have the qualifications...
"

"I disagree
with you. I think you do have the qualifications: a good front,
and a big mouth."

Now Jess knows: he
talked too much at the wrong time and the wrong place.

"Please, Mr.
Bickford
...
I got a bad heart. It would kill
me."

Bickford's smile
widens. "Think about it, Jess. Think about it very carefully. I
wouldn't want to see you make a mistake."

Mr. Hart, the
newspaper tycoon, is on the surface quite different from Bickford.
Bickford enjoys complex relationships with his subordinates; Hart
doesn't like any relationships. Other people are different from him,
and he doesn't like them. He can only tolerate their presence under
controlled conditions. More introverted than Bickford, he is
simpler and more predictable, since he has an overriding obsession:
Mr. Hart is obsessed with immortality. The Tightest right a man
could be is to live infinitely long, he decides, and he directs all
the iron strength of his will to that end. He sets up a house rule
that the word
death
may not be pronounced in his presence.

Once, just for
jolly, Kim wangled an invitation to Hart's showplace, and appeared at
dinner in a skeleton suit. Hart didn't think this was funny at all.

Bickford laughed.
Oh, not in front of Hart. He wasn't there. He had his own reasons for
fomenting ill will between Hart and Kim. And Hart, predictably,
conceived a consuming, relentless hatred for Kim Carsons and his
Johnson Family, as a deadly threat to his immortality. On one point
Hart and Bickford agree: neither of them wants to see the power of
life and death in unpredictable hands.

Kim remembers the
words of Bat Masterson: "A man has to fit in somewhere."

And that was what
was wrong with Kim. It wasn't anything he actually did, or might do.
He just did not
fit.
He wasn't even an outlaw anymore. From
the proceeds of several carefully planned jewel and bank robberies,
he was well on the way to being wealthy. The last of his illegal
diamonds nestled in his vest pocket. Kim didn't fit, and a part that
doesn't fit can wreck a machine. These old pros could see long before
Kim saw that he had the basic secrets of wealth and power and would
become a big-time player if he wasn't stopped. That his dream of a
takeover by the Johnson Family, by those who actually do the
work, the creative thinkers and artists and technicians, was not just
science fiction. It could happen.

Kim wonders naively
why they don't deal him in. The answer is that they will never
accept anyone who does not think and feel as they do. It wasn't the
Johnson Family itself that bothered them or at least it wouldn't
have bothered them if it had been just another Mafia-type criminal
organization. What they didn't like was to see wealth and power in
the hands of those who basically despised the usages of wealth and
power. This was intolerable.

"He must be
stopped!"

Soon Kim will have
enough money to implement the first stage of his plan
—
Big
Picture, he calls it
—
his plan for a
Johnson Family takeover. He will set up a base in New York. He
will organize the Johnsons in Civilian Defense Units. He will oust
the Mafia. He will buy a newspaper to push Johnson Policy, to oppose
any further encroachment of Washington bureaucrats. He intends to
strangle the FDA in its cradle, to defeat any legislation aimed
at outlawing liquor, drugs, gambling, private sexual behavior or the
possession of firearms. He will buy a chemical company with research
facilities where he will develop sophisticated biologic and
chemical agents. He will start a small-arms factory, reserving the
special weapons for the use of the Johnson elite.

"HE MUST BE
STOPPED!"

Waghdas, the City of
Knowledge, is denounced by Hart through newspapers of the world as
"the most dangerous place on earth! A festering sink of
subversion, luring gullible youth with false hopes and fool's
gold...
"

Constantly under
siege, Waghdas changes location often. In houseboats and caravans,
burnt-out tenements and ghost towns...now you see it, now you don't.
One thinks of knowledge as a calm remote area of ancient stone
buildings, ivy, and languid young men, but knowledge can be an
explosive instance. Ever see the marks wise up and take a carnival
apart?