Last Words. William S. Burroughs

a cold eye on life, a cold eye on death—Horseman, pass by!”

      No wonder for no apparent medical reason the surgeon could ascertain the young man’s heart just stopped in mid-surgery.

      I think for no reason to continue his lusty singing and to debase the human image by a hundred cuts. So horrible beyond realization—a shattered, falsified picture of a non-being. What force could so deform a man? Sucking screams off cancer patients, not even.

      To nurse: “I heard screams last night, was that the cancer case?”

      Nurse: “You’ll never hear a sound from Mr. Miller, must have been in maternity.”

      “Oh.”

      The young man deflates like a pale green balloon.

      “Oh, oh, oh.”

      “Well, it’s time for your pre-operative medication.”

      “Young man in a sudden panic.

      “I, uh, well...”

      Darkness creeps up from the front of his bed.

      “I am the Captain of my soul,” he mutters, as the stretcher slides down the hall, into an elevator—to the O.R.

      In Tangier, my typewriter in hock to buy Eukodol, a chemical derivative of codeine, many times stronger. Dihydro-oxy-codeine—finally outlawed, owing to side effect of euphoria, hits like a speedball, Kid.

      Guess I used all of it up in Tangier—but it’s still out there in Quevedo, Ecuador, on a dusty back shelf, covered with mildew on a South Sea island—

      “Shoot it in the main line, Kid. Hits like a speedball.”

      Maybe up in some Swede town under the Northern Lights—Christmas story.

      “Any more of that?”

      “Well yes—a consignment of twenty boxes—twenty in each box. Let you have it all for, well, say $100 U.S. dollars.”

      “Done.”

      Can we, the males, live without the other half? Female?

      And O.H. must always talk. O.H. is talk, was the original invasion—was “word,” of course, so cut word out in slow withdrawal.

      It’s going to hurt and hurt bad.

      Saturday November 30, 1996.

      I said: “L. Ron Hubbard needs a knife in his gizzard.”

      And I demonstrate with an assassin knife from Alamut how one strikes upward under the left rib cage to the heart. And I threw another knife into what looked like tinfoil.

      Unpleasant feel of no meaning to me. Just floating by.

      So to go on from here.

      What is the “whatever comes?”

      As Federn used to say in his study, [middle]-European apartment—rather like Schlumberger’s in Paris—

      Steak and bread and salad—red wine—talking to Allen Ginsberg about some English [person], says:

      “A blues singer, a blues shouter. Everybody going to see my black bottom. He really gives out.”

      What, exactly?

      Perhaps somewhere out there—Quevedo, Ecuador, uno de puro, Peru... on the back shelf a dusty box of ampules, Eukodol, 15 mg per ampule.

      “Shoot it in the main line, Kid, hits like a speedball.”

      Who. When where? Why?

      Short stories?

      Like the feeling there is some final resolution ahead—has to be?

      “Quién es?” Last words of Billy the Kid. Garrett was very close, five feet, maybe. Couldn’t miss.

      The Secret Army?

      I won’t say “we lost,” because some of what’s left of us is still in there.

      War stories—the room on top of the Lottery Bldg. in Tangier. John Hopkins came in and said from the balcony: “Looks like a naval battle.”

      (It had been a desperate engagement. Day after day the war.)

      Heavy fog with holes in it, like artillery fire.

      So what we got now?

      Why not realize their pretext, and hit the Evil of the War Against Drugs. The sums involved in the money laundries are trillions of dollars, while people caught with an ounce of morphine are hanged.

      Yes, the whole pestilent horde born from the Harrison Narc. Act is Evil with regard [to] anything Homo Sap can or will ever create—with regard [to] the space frontier. In a malignant intervention of Alien (to resident mammals) influence. And as usual Homo Sap laps it up as the right way to go.

      “We’ll build more prisons,” Bush snarled.

      “We already got one million inside.”

      (ref. The Job)

      * * *

      It was May 1, May Day, and all at once it just fell apart, the whole flimsy structure just collapsed like the proverbial house of cards.

      No, it was not like a return to warlords. There just weren’t any warlords left, or any other human roles. People fell apart like a rotten undervest, like rotten burlap, there wasn’t anything left to hold them together. Only one thing did, that was war, and there was no more war. The only thing had kept the planet together (in a literal sense there are two halves magnetized together) was WAR. No more unemployment. Shit, nothing left to be employed for—groups of people strut about in improvised uniforms, waving rusty sabers.

       “Voici le sabre

       De mon père.”

      Allons enfants de la patrie,

       Le jour de gloire est arrivé—

      o’er the land of the free

      and the home of the brave

      Shall I hit the road against the Evil of the Drug War, the War Against Drugs—Illegal drugs. All right to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day as Bennett did or maybe does. That legal.

      Well, the Evil—narc working his snitches for a buy, kids, after-school pep talk, turning in their parents for drugs. It’s EVIL.

      Not like “both sides of the question.”

      It’s Evil, and the real $$$$$$$$ in Malaysia and Singapore and West Indies, Bahamas.

      Target Lake Charles. Here Mel picked up a tracer. Port Arthur? Of course. Can feel it now. Rauschmit!—out with it!

      So Mel, come in please. Mel, come on. Mel—come dirty.

      “This is a fact, they kill you.”

      Who they, Mel?

      They same as people who conflict with ...

      “For chrissakes, don’t do that.”

      “I wouldn’t ever do that.

      What try get out.

      No get. End.

      “His macho quick-draw act too laughable for words.”

      I hear her loud and clear and—“rather amusing, going to abolish words”—bitching, waking up bitching the way Spanish wives do.

      Be able to sit in silence on sand muted street for hours?

      Why not? Other folk want to yack, let them.

      I never indicated the only way to do or go anywhere. Shotgun art one of various random procedures—Pollock drip canvases, Yves Klein set his canvases