The Ticket That Exploded (Burroughs, William S.) (6 page)

The levanto dances who’s sorry now? — Hy diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle — Long way to Tipperary — fading khaki pants — Since you went away i see that moon hit the road into space — Do you love me Waltzing Matilda rock around railroad back home? lovey lovey dovey St. Louis Woman after hours — Do you love me with a banjo permutated Dead Man Blues? — If you don’t i wonder who permutated the structure — Everybody love my baby — Lover man, that was ferris wheels clicking in a loverly bunch — solitude through the cables — turkey in the straw —

“BAR MAID WATCH THE EATS!!” —

Don’t Know how i’ll make it — one meat ball — Pull my daisy ding-dong love — Do you love me, love sheets? — Everybody’s gonna have religion oh baby oh jelly — The guide slipped Paul under my skin pulsing red light — pallet on the floor darling Bradly — weak and torn sank in bones and shit of rusty St. Louis woman — when the saints go marching through all the popular tunes waiting for the sunrise in cosmic laughter of cable cars — the Sheik of Araby in constant motion — Blue moon — Margie — ice cream on my knees — Love floating in perilous tracks —

Do you love me, Nancy of the laughing sex words? — Still i feel the thrill of your charms vibrated to neon — giggling out all the little things you used to do — ‘Twas good bye on the line of Bradly’s naked body — love skin on a bicycle built for two — like a deflated balloon — Your cool hands on his naked dollars, baby — You were meant for me sucked through pearly genital face — Still i feel the thrill of you spurting out through the orgasm seems to whisper: “Louise, Mary, swamp mud” — In the blood little things you used to do — recorder jack-off — Substitute mine — Bye Bye body halves — i’m half crazy all for the love of color circuits — Do i love you in throat gristle? Ship ahoy but remember the red river body explode sex words to color — Do you love me? — Take a simple tape from all the things you are — Moanin’ low my sweet 8276 all the time — Who’s sorry now in the underwater street? ‘Twas good bye on color bicycle built for response in the other nervous system —

I’m just a vagabond of the board books — written in can play the game as well as you — (That is color written the two compete) — Do i love you? i wonder — loose? if i don’t have to? a peg like every time i felt blue? It’s a long way through channels — Who’s sorry now? chartered that memory street — Bye Bye — bodies empty — ash from falling tracks — Sweet man is going to go — Keep raining the throat designed to water — Remember every little thing you used to do — fish smell and dead — Know the answer? vacant lot the world and i were the only boy — jelly jelly in the Stardust of the sky — i’ve got you deep inside of me enclosed darling in my fashion — Yes, baby, electric fingers removed flesh my way — Sheets of pain
hung oh baby oh i love her sucked through pearly jelly — i’ve got you under big fat scratching clouds of me — Always be true to your diamond rings — Tell Laura black slow movement but it won’t last — i’ve forgotten you then? Decay breathing? Black lust tearing his insides apart for ants? Love Mary? — The rose of memory shifting color orgasms back home — Good bye — It’s a long way to go — Someone walking — Won’t be two —

The “Other Half” is the word. The “Other Half’ is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the “Other Half” a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common “hallucinations” of subjects during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject’s body at an angle . . yes quite an angle it is the “Other Half” worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that
forces you to talk
. That
organism is the word. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning of what exactly? The earliest artifacts date back about ten thousand years give a little take a little and “recorded” — (or prerecorded) history about seven thousand years. The human race is said to have been on set for 500,000 years. That leaves 490,000 years unaccounted for. Modern man has advanced from the stone ax to nuclear weapons in ten thousand years. This may well have happened before. Mr Brion Gysin suggests that a nuclear disaster in what is now the Gobi desert wiped out all traces of a civilization that made such a disaster possible. Perhaps their nuclear weapons did not operate on the same principle as the ones we have now. Perhaps they had no contact with the word organism. Perhaps the word itself is recent about ten thousand years old. What we call history is the history of the word. In the beginning of
that
history was the word.

The realization that something as familiar to you as the movement of your intestines the sound of your breathing the beating of your heart is also alien and hostile does make one feel a bit insecure at first. Remember that you can separate yourself from the “Other Half” from the word. The word is spliced in with the sound of your intestines and breathing with the beating of your heart. The first step is to record the sounds of your body and start splicing them in yourself. Splice in your body sounds with the body sounds of your best friend and see how familiar he gets. Splice your body sounds in with air hammers. Blast jolt vibrate the “Other Half” right out into the street. Splice your body sounds in with anybody or anything. Start a tapeworm club and exchange body sound tapes.
Feel right out into your nabor’s intestines and help him digest his food.
Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it
.

“The Venusian invasion was known as ‘Operation Other Half,’ that is, a parasitic invasion of the sexual area taking advantage, as all invasion plans must, of an already existing fucked-up situation (‘My God what a mess.’ The District Supervisor reminded himself that it was forbidden not only to express contempt for the natives but even to entertain such feelings. Bulletin 2323 is quite explicit on this point. Still he was unable to expunge a residual distaste for protoplasmic life deriving no doubt from his mineral origins. His mission was educational . . . the natives were to be scanned out of patterns laid down by the infamous 5th Colonists. Soon after his arrival he decided that he was confronting not only an outrageous case of colonial mismanagement but attempted nova as well. Reluctantly he called in the Nova Police. The Mission still functioned in a state of siege. Armed with nuclear weapons the 5th Colonists were determined to resist alterations. It had been necessary to issue weapons to his personnel. There were of course incidents . . casualties . . . A young clerk in the Cultural Department declared himself the Angel of Death and had to be removed to a rest home. The D.S. was contemplating the risky expedient of a ‘miracle’ and the miracle he contemplated was
silence
. Few things are worse than a ‘miracle’ that doesn’t come off. He had of course put in an application to the Home Office underlining the urgency of his case contingent on the lengths to which the desperate 5th Colonists might reasonably be expected to go. Higher command had been
vague and distant. He had no definite assurance that the necessary equipment would arrive in time. Would he have 3D in time?) — The human organism is literally consisting of two halves from the beginning word and all human sex is this unsanitary arrangement whereby two entities attempt to occupy the same three-dimensional coordinate points giving rise to the sordid latrine brawls which have characterized a planet based on ‘the Word,’ that is, on separate flesh engaged in endless sexual conflict — The Venusian Boy-Girls under Johnny Yen took over the Other Half, imposing a sexual blockade on the planet — (It will be readily understandable that a program of systematic frustration was necessary in order to sell this crock of sewage as Immortality, the Garden of Delights, and
love
—

“When the Board of Health intervened with inflexible authority, ‘Operation Other Half was referred to the Rewrite Department where the original engineering flaw of course came to light and the Venusian invasion was seen to be an inevitable correlate of the separation flesh gimmick — At this point a tremendous scream went up from the Venusians agitating to retain the flesh gimmick in some form — They were all terminal flesh addicts of course, motivated by pornographic torture films, and the entire Rewrite and Blueprint Departments were that disgusted ready to pull the switch out of hand to It Never Happened’ — ‘Unless these jokers stay out of the Rewrite room’ —

“The Other Half was only one aspect of Operation Rewrite — Heavy metal addicts picketed the Rewrite Office, exploding in protest — Control addicts prowled
the streets trying to influence waiters, lavatory attendants,
clochards
, and were to be seen on every corner of the city hypnotizing chickens — A few rich control addicts were able to surround themselves with latahs and sat on the terraces of expensive cafés with remote cruel smiles unaware i wrote last cigarette —

“My God what a mess — Just keep all these jokers out of the Rewrite Room is all” —

So let us start with one average, stupid, representative case: Johnny Yen the Other Half, errand boy from the death trauma — Now look i’m going to say it and i’m going to say it slow — Death
is
orgasm
is
rebirth
is
death in orgasm
is
their unsanitary Venusian gimmick
is
the whole birth death cycle of action — You got it? — Now do you understand who Johnny Yen is? The Boy-Girl Other Half strip tease God of sexual frustration — Errand boy from the death trauma — His immortality depends on the mortality of others — The same is true of
all
addicts — Mr Martin, for example, is a heavy metal addict — His life line is the human junky — The life line of control addicts is the control word — That is these so-called Gods can only live without three-dimensional coordinate points by forcing three-dimensional bodies on others — Their existence is pure vampirism — They are utterly unfit to be officers — Either they accept a rewrite job or they are all broken down to lavatory attendants, irrevocably committed to the toilet —

All right, back to the case of Johnny Yen — one of many such errand boys — Green Boy-Girls from the terminal sewers of Venus — So write back to the streets, Johnny, back to Ali God of Street Boys and Hustlers —
Write out of the sewers of Venus to neon streets of Saturn — Alternatively Johnny Yen can be written back to a green fish boy — There are always alternative solutions — Nothing is true — Everything is permitted —

“No hassan i sabbah
—
we want flesh
—
we want junk
—
we want power
—”

“That did it — Dial
police’
—

Bulletin from Rewrite:
We had to call in the nova police to keep all these jokers out of the Rewrite Room — Can’t be expected to work under such conditions — Introducing Inspector J. Lee of the nova police — “i doubt if any of you on this copy planet have ever seen a nova criminal — (they take considerable pains to mask their operations) and i am sure none of you have ever seen a nova police officer — When disorder on any planet reaches a certain point the regulating instance scans
police
— otherwise — Sput — Another planet bites the cosmic dust — i will now explain something of the mechanisms and techniques of nova which are always deliberately manipulated — i am quite well aware that no one on any planet likes to see a police officer so let me em phasize in passing that the nova police have no intention of remaining after their work is done — That is, when the danger of nova is removed from this planet we will move on to other assignments — We do our work and go —

“The basic nova technique is very simple: Always
create as many insoluble conflicts as possible and always aggravate existing conflicts — This is done by dumping on the same planet life forms with incompatible conditions of existence — There is of course nothing ‘wrong’ about any given life form since ‘wrong’ only has reference to conflicts with other life forms — The point is these life forms should not be on the same planet — Their conditions of life are basically incompatible in present time form and it is precisely the work of the nova mob to see that they remain in present time form, to create and aggravate the conflicts that lead to the explosion of a planet, that
is
to nova — At any given time recorders fix the nature of absolute need and dictate the use of total weapons — Like this: Take two opposed pressure groups — Record the most violent and threatening statements of group one with regard to group two and play back to group two — Record the answer and take it back to group one — back and forth between opposed pressure groups — This process is known as ‘feedback’ — You can see it operating in any bar room quarrel — In any quarrel for that matter — Manipulated on a global scale feeds back nuclear war and nova — These conflicts are deliberately created and aggravated by nova criminals — The Nova Mob: ‘Sammy the Butcher,’ ‘Green Tony,’ ‘the Brown Artist,’ ‘Jacky Blue Note,’ ‘Limestone John,’ ‘Izzy the Push,’ ‘Hamburger Mary,’ ‘Paddy The Sting,’ ‘the Subliminal Kid,’ ‘the Blue Dinosaur,’ ‘Willy the Rat’ (who informed on his associates) and Mr and Mrs D also known as ‘Mr Bradly Mr Martin’ also known as ‘the Ugly Spirit,’ thought to be the leader of the mob — the nova mob — In all my experience as a police officer i have never seen
such total fear and degradation on any planet — We intend to arrest these criminals and turn them over to the Biological Department for the indicated alterations —

“Now you may well ask whether we can straighten out this mess to the satisfaction of any life forms involved and my answer is this — Your earth case must be processed by the Biological Courts — (admittedly in a deplorable condition at this time)—No sooner set up than immediately corrupted so that they convene every day in a different location like floating dice games, constantly swept away by stampeding forms all idiotically glorifying their stupid ways of life — most of them quite unworkable of course) —attempting to seduce the judges into Venusian sex practices, drug the court officials, and intimidate the entire audience chamber with the threat of nova — In all my experience as a police officer I have never seen such total fear of the indicated alterations on any planet — a thankless job you see and we only do it so it won’t have to be done some place else under even more difficult circumstances —