Speed and Kentucky Ham by William S. Burroughs

Author:William S. Burroughs [BURROUGHS JR., WILLIAM S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC041000
ISBN: 9781468302127
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

3

By the way, who am I? Somebody out there must be interested in the answer to that question by now. So permit me to digress for a few minutes by way of introducing myself and my family.

(Light, color, and buzzing confusion. Yes color, doctor, on July 21, 1947 in Conroe, Texas, 4:10 A.M. Born without consent or consultation.)

My mother must have been a remarkable woman. During the entire course of my fetal development, she consumed enough Benzedrine daily to kill Lester Maddox outright while Big Bill, my father took three bangs of H a day to keep up with her in his own ivied and contemplative way. I was born to conversation and in seconds flat onto an alfalfa farm in the Rio Grande valley. The main crop, marijuana, grew between the rows. My father had hired a guy name of Jose to tend the fields, and a couple of times a week he’d go down there and nudge him in the ribs. “Hey José, what’s that growing in my alfalfa? Haw, haw, heh, heh.”

We split for Mexico City almost upon the moment I was born and all I can remember of the valley is the hot droning of locusts in the distance as seen, yes, seen, through gasoline fumes and the net over my crib (under a flat tree near a flat white house) to keep out the scorpions, beastly black things that danced and capered together between the blasted gnarled roots of trees until one was dead and only flexing spasmodically and the other crooked and haywire.

I have no memory of our flat in the native quarter for reasons soon to become evident, but the spiral staircase that led down from our top floor was banked with cool blue walls that kept out the heat. Perhaps I was just young enough then to feel the temperature of the color. At the bottom of the stairs, in poncho and sunlight was my little Mexican friend, Micco, who was the proud possessor of a white rabbit named Chili. I had never worn shoes in my life until one day Chili thumped up to one of my brown and bare toes and bit me like a Gila monster. I went crying to my mother wah!, who was soft and warm and pulsing, and not only got a set of shoes, but also a fresh can of beans.

I had a half sister named Julie, full of smiles—a tiny naked dancer who was my mother’s daughter. She was only two years older than I, and the first hint of disaster that I can recall was an impossibly mad drive along whimsically sudden changing mountain roads, terrifying glimpses of death rusting wreckage far below and hearing my mother saying, “Ha ha, how fast can this old heap go?” Julie and I spent the trip on the floor of the back in the intimacy of fear as Allen pleaded with the driver to slow down. Finally we hit something and there was a little blood, but not much.

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