The Adding Machine
Read The Adding Machine Online
Authors: William S. Burroughs
Copyright © 1985, 1986, 2011 by William S. Burroughs
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Originally published in Great Britain under the title
The Adding Machine: Collected Essasy
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-581-6
Ten Years and a Billion Dollars
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
In the Interests of National Security
My Experiences with Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Box
The name is Bill Burroughs. I am a writer. Let me tell you a few things about my job, what an assignment is like.
You hit Interzone with that grey anonymously ill-intentioned look all writers have.
‘You crazy or something walk around alone? Me good guide. What you want Meester?’
‘Well uh, I would like to write a bestseller that would be a good book, a book about real people and places .. .’
The Guide stopped me. ‘That’s enough Mister. I don’t want to read your stinking book. That’s a job for the White Reader.’ The guide’s face was a grey screen, hustler faces moved across it. ‘Your case is difficult frankly. If we put it through channels they will want a big piece in advance. Now I happen to know the best continuity man in the industry, only handles boys he likes. He’ll want a piece of you too but he’s willing to take it on spec’.
People ask what would lead me to write a book like
Naked Lunch.
One is slowly led along to write a book and this looked good, no trouble with the cast at all and that’s half the battle when you can find your characters. The more far-out sex pieces I was just writing for my own amusement. I would put them away in an old attic trunk and leave them for a distant boy to find...’ Why Ma this stuff is terrific — and I thought he was just an old book-of-the-month-club corn ball’.
Yes I was writing my bestseller... I finished it with a flourish, fading streets a distant sky, handed it to the publisher and stood there expectantly.
He averted his face ... ‘I’ll let you know later, come around, in fact. Always like to see a writer’s digs.’ He coughed, as if he found my presence suffocating. A few nights later he visited me in my attic room, leaded glass windows under the slate roof. He did not remove his long black coat or his bowler hat. He dropped my manuscript on a table.
‘What are you, a wise guy? We don’t have a license on this. The license alone costs more than we could clear.’ His eyes darted around the room. ‘What’s that over there?’ he demanded, pointing to a sea chest.
‘It’s a sea chest.’
‘I can see that. What’s in it?’
‘Oh, nothing much’ just some old things I wrote, not to show anybody, quite bad really .. .’
‘Let’s see some of it.’
Now, to say that I never intended publication of these pieces would not be altogether honest. They were there, just in case my bestseller fell on the average reader like a bag of sour dough — I’ve seen it happen, we all have: a book’s got everything, topical my God, the scene is present-day Vietnam (Falkland Islands!) seen through a rich variety of characters ... How can it miss? But it does. People just don’t buy it. Some say you can put a curse on a book so the reader hates to touch it, or your book simply vanishes in a little swirl of disinterest. So I had to cover myself in case somebody had the curse in; after all, I am a professional. I like cool remote Sunday gardens set against a slate-blue mist, and for that set you need the Yankee dollar.
As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.
I can divide my literary production into sets: where, when and under what circumstances produced. The first set is a street of red brick three-story houses with slate roofs, lawns in front and large back yards. In our back yard my father and the gardener, Otto Belue, tended a garden with roses, peonies, iris and a fish pond. The address is 4664 Pershing Avenue and the house is still there.
My first literary endeavor was called
‘The Autobiography of a Wolf’,
written after reading
‘The Biography of a Grizzly Bear.’
In the end this poor old bear, his health failing, deserted by his mate, goes to a valley he knows is full of poison gas. I can see a picture from the book quite clearly, a sepia valley, animal skeletons, the old bear slouching in, all the old broken voices from the family album find that valley where they come at last to die. ‘They called me the Grey Ghost... Spent most of my time shaking off the ranchers.’ The Grey Ghost met death at the hands of a grizzly bear after seven pages, no doubt in revenge for plagiarism.
There was something called
Carl Cranbury in Egypt
that never got off the ground ... Carl Cranbury frozen back there on yellow lined paper, his hand an inch from his blue steel automatic. In this set I also wrote westerns, gangster stories, and haunted houses. I was quite sure that I wanted to be a writer.
When I was twelve we moved to a five-acre place on Price Road and I attended the John Burroughs School which is just down the road. This period was mostly crime and gangster stories. I was fascinated by gangsters and like most boys at that time I wanted to be one because I would feel so much safer with my loyal guns around me. I never quite found the sensitive old lady English teacher who molded my future career. I wrote at that time Edgar Allan Poe things, like old men in forgotten places, very flowery and sentimental too, that flavor of high school prose. I can taste it still, like chicken croquettes and canned peas in the school dining room. I wrote bloody westerns too, and would leave enigmatic skeletons lying around in barns for me to muse over...
‘Tom was quick but Joe was quicker. He turned the gun on his unfaithful wife and then upon himself, fell dead in a pool of blood and lay there drawing flies. The vultures came later... especially the eyes were alike, a dead blue opaqueness.’ I wrote a lot of hangings: ‘Hardened old sinner that he was, he still experienced a shudder as he looked back at the three bodies twisting on ropes, etched against the beautiful red sunset.’ These stories were read aloud in class. I remember one story written by another boy who later lost his mind,
dementia praecox
they called it: ‘The captain tried to swim but the water was too deep and he went down screaming, “Help, help, I am drowning.’”
And one story, oh very mysterious... an old man in his curtained nineteen-twenties Spanish library chances on a forgotten volume and there written in letters of gold the single word ‘ATHENA,’... ‘That question will haunt him until the house shall crumble to ruins and his books shall moulder away.’
At the age of fourteen I read a book called
You Can’t Win,
being the life story of a second-story man. And I met the Johnson Family. A world of hobo jungles, usually by the river, where the bums and hobos and rod-riding pete men gathered to cook meals, drink canned heat, and shoot the snow. .. black smoke on the hip behind a Chink laundry in Montana. The Sanctimonious Kid: This is a crooked game, kid, but you have to think straight. Be as positive yourself as you like, but no positive clothes. You dress like every John Citizen or we part company, kid.’ He was hanged in Australia for the murder of a constable.
And Salt Chunk Mary: ‘Mary had all the no’s and none of them ever meant yes. She received and did business in the kitchen. Mary kept an iron pot of salt chunk and a blue coffee pot always on the woodstove. You eat first and then you talk business, your gear slopped out on the kitchen table, her eyes old, unbluffed, unreadable. She named a price, heavy and cold as a cop’s blackjack on a winter night. She didn’t name another. She kept her money in a sugar bowl but nobody thought about that. Her cold grey eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next day, Johnny Law just happens by or Johnny Citizen comes up with a load of double-ought buckshot into your soft and tenders. It wouldn’t pay to get gay with Mary. She was a saint to the Johnson Family, always good for a plate of salt chunk. One time Gimpy Gates, an old rod-riding pete man, killed a bum in a jungle for calling Salt Chunk Mary an old fat cow. The old yegg looked at him across the fire, his eyes cold as gunmetal...’ You were a good bum, but you’re dogmeat now.’ He fired three times. The bum fell forward, his hands clutching coals, and his hair catching fire. Well, the bulls pick up Gates and show him the body: ‘There’s the poor devil you killed, and you’ll swing for it.’ The old Yegg looked at them coldly. He held out his hand, gnarled from years of safe-cracking, two fingers blown off by the ‘soup’. ‘If I killed him, there’s the finger pulled the trigger and there’s the tendon pulled the finger.’ The old yegg had beaten them at their own game.