Last Words - William Burroughs

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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 on fire and put out the fire at the right moment.

      November 30, 1996

      Oh, last night a Turkish Bath scene, vaguely sexual—ho hum.

      I [was an] ultimate monster or drug dealer, and a child molester. Am [a] crack addict, but that only a sideline.

      He loved cats and ferrets, and weasels and all sneaky killing animals. And he was into crystal balls and ectoplasm and all that unwholesome stuff.

      I repeat: What the American Narcotics Dept. is doing, did do and will do, is Evil. They insist on the lie of absolute right and wrong. They want absolutes—all right. Evil from the point of view of any decent person. From the street narcs working their snitches to the kids turning in their parents.

      I’m an old-fashioned person, and I don’t like informers. No matter how federal judges may be lenient with violators who have “cooperated” (rolled over) with authorities (“rolled over” is current phrase), and bear down heavy on those who “refuse to cooperate.”

      Dec 1, 1996. Sunday

      In a plane coming in for a landing in Paris. The plane landed in a narrow slot. Outside I could see Paris streets and then the plane angled upwards, looked ready to stall at any moment, and I felt physical fear.

      “It’s going to crash!”

      But it didn’t crash. Landed OK in Paris.

      Paris is in many ways my favorite city. Never really got into Rome. London was always antithetical to me. Leaving NYC which is always New York. Small towns like Tangier.

      December 2, 1996. Monday

      Enemy have two notable weaknesses:

      1. No sense of humor. They simply don’t get it.

      2. They totally lack understanding of magic, and being totally oriented toward control, what they don’t understand is a menace, to be destroyed by any means—consequently they tip their hand. They don’t seem to

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