The Adding Machine Read Online Free Page A
Author: William S. Burroughs
Chicago for Esquire.
My Own Business
Brion Gysin, Stewart Gordon, and I were sitting in front of a little Spanish café in Tangier when this middle-aged Spaniard walked by, and we all gasped: ‘My God, that’s a harmless-looking person!’ I’d noticed him around town, and spotted him as a real M.O.B.ist: which is nothing special, just minds his own business of staying alive and thinks that what other people do is other people’s business.
The old hop-smoking rod-riding underworld had a name for it:’ a member of the Johnson family.’ Wouldn’t rush to the law if he smelled hop in the hall, doesn’t care what fags in the back room are doing, stands by his word. Good man to do business with. They are found in all walks of life. The cop who slipped me a joint in a New Orleans jail, for instance. Or when I was pushing junk in New York back in 1948, the hotel clerk who stopped me in the lobby: ‘I don’t know how to say this, but there is something wrong about the people who come to your room.’ (Something wrong is putting it softly: ratty junkies with no socks, dressed in three boosted suits puffing out, carrying radios torn from the living car, trailing wires like entrails. ‘This isn’t a hock shop!’ I scream. ‘Get this shit out of here!’ Regaining my composure I say severely, ‘You are lowering the entire tone of my establishment.’) ‘So I just wanted to warn you to be careful and tell those people to watch what they say over the phone ... if someone else had been at the switchboard...’
And a hotel clerk in Tunis; I handed him some money to put in the safe. He put the money away and looked at me: ‘You do not need a receipt Monsieur.’ I looked at him and saw that he was a Johnson, and knew that I didn’t need a receipt.
Yes, this world would be a pretty easy and pleasant place to live in if everybody could just mind his own business and let others do the same. But a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: ‘Some people are shits, darling.’ I was never able to forget it.
Mexican druggist throwing a script back at me: ‘We do not serve dope fiends.’ It’s like Mr. Anslinger said: ‘The laws must express society’s disapproval of the addict.’
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite, and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right. And right here we must make a distinction between a hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain, ordinary, mean no-good son of a bitch. Some of these sons of bitches don’t cause any trouble at all, just want to be left alone and are only dangerous when molested, like the Brown Recluse. Others cause minor trouble, like barroom fights and bank robberies. To put it country simple, Anslinger was an obligate shit; Dillinger, Jesse James and Billy the Kid were just sons of bitches.
This right virus has been around for a long time, and perhaps its most devoted ally has been the Christian Church: from the Inquisition to the Conquistadores, from the American Indian Wars to Hiroshima, they are RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT. If the Christian Church has given the virus a nice long home, it has also sustained a number of evictions in the past forty years.
When I was in high school in the 1920’s, anybody expressing doubts about our treatment of the Indians, capital punishment, the natural inferiority of blacks, the abomination of being a flit * or a dope fiend, would have been shunned by his schoolmates as a dangerous radical or practitioner of the hideous vices he defended.
Yes, quite a change, and quite a few points gained for the M.O.B.ists: virtual abolition of censorship, decriminalization of pot, gay rights, and segregation issues at least out
My Own Business
Brion Gysin, Stewart Gordon, and I were sitting in front of a little Spanish café in Tangier when this middle-aged Spaniard walked by, and we all gasped: ‘My God, that’s a harmless-looking person!’ I’d noticed him around town, and spotted him as a real M.O.B.ist: which is nothing special, just minds his own business of staying alive and thinks that what other people do is other people’s business.
The old hop-smoking rod-riding underworld had a name for it:’ a member of the Johnson family.’ Wouldn’t rush to the law if he smelled hop in the hall, doesn’t care what fags in the back room are doing, stands by his word. Good man to do business with. They are found in all walks of life. The cop who slipped me a joint in a New Orleans jail, for instance. Or when I was pushing junk in New York back in 1948, the hotel clerk who stopped me in the lobby: ‘I don’t know how to say this, but there is something wrong about the people who come to your room.’ (Something wrong is putting it softly: ratty junkies with no socks, dressed in three boosted suits puffing out, carrying radios torn from the living car, trailing wires like entrails. ‘This isn’t a hock shop!’ I scream. ‘Get this shit out of here!’ Regaining my composure I say severely, ‘You are lowering the entire tone of my establishment.’) ‘So I just wanted to warn you to be careful and tell those people to watch what they say over the phone ... if someone else had been at the switchboard...’
And a hotel clerk in Tunis; I handed him some money to put in the safe. He put the money away and looked at me: ‘You do not need a receipt Monsieur.’ I looked at him and saw that he was a Johnson, and knew that I didn’t need a receipt.
Yes, this world would be a pretty easy and pleasant place to live in if everybody could just mind his own business and let others do the same. But a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: ‘Some people are shits, darling.’ I was never able to forget it.
Mexican druggist throwing a script back at me: ‘We do not serve dope fiends.’ It’s like Mr. Anslinger said: ‘The laws must express society’s disapproval of the addict.’
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has. Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite, and my contention is that evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain brain area which we may term the RIGHT center. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right. And right here we must make a distinction between a hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain, ordinary, mean no-good son of a bitch. Some of these sons of bitches don’t cause any trouble at all, just want to be left alone and are only dangerous when molested, like the Brown Recluse. Others cause minor trouble, like barroom fights and bank robberies. To put it country simple, Anslinger was an obligate shit; Dillinger, Jesse James and Billy the Kid were just sons of bitches.
This right virus has been around for a long time, and perhaps its most devoted ally has been the Christian Church: from the Inquisition to the Conquistadores, from the American Indian Wars to Hiroshima, they are RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT. If the Christian Church has given the virus a nice long home, it has also sustained a number of evictions in the past forty years.
When I was in high school in the 1920’s, anybody expressing doubts about our treatment of the Indians, capital punishment, the natural inferiority of blacks, the abomination of being a flit * or a dope fiend, would have been shunned by his schoolmates as a dangerous radical or practitioner of the hideous vices he defended.
Yes, quite a change, and quite a few points gained for the M.O.B.ists: virtual abolition of censorship, decriminalization of pot, gay rights, and segregation issues at least out
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