Anybody who comes over here probably notices I have William Burroughs prominently posted in my sidebar.
I first “met” Burroughs when I was 14 and surreptitiously purchased a paperback, The Beat Generation and The Angry Young Men, an anthology of American Beats and British “Angry Young Men” who were quite different actually, but lumped together in a post-war new writers gang. For some reason Norman Mailer was included with the Beats, but hey… I bought the book mainly to read Howl under the covers. My mother would have howled loudly and birthed a cow if she’d seen the book. She’d already confiscated Gone with the Wind, Sayanora, and a couple copies of Confidential. Peyton Place came later.
Anyway, caught somewhere between John Chellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac was Burroughs, writing under the name “Bill Lee” and a chapter from the seminal dope book Junky. The Beats were in many ways, traditional American rah-rahers with an edge (Think of Jack and Neal as Tom and Huck–or better yet Huck, and Jim), but Burroughs was something else. absolutely unncategorizable. Who else was writing about shooting smack, sucking benzidrine strips, and banging out illicit and forbidden sex? And… he wore a suit. This, I figured was real life.
I can go a long time without my Burroughs fix, but I always come back to him. Recently, while surfing for something–I can’t remember what–I ran across his The Do-Rights from Nova Express. Burroughs calls it “a folkloric text from the Lexington Narcotics Center.” I was familiar with The Do-Rights, but it took on a whole new meaning in the context of the adoption reform flimflammery most recently practiced in Washington, Montana, Ohio, and New Jersey where Do -Rights and their pernicious do-righteryness sold bastards down DV River of No Return on a leaky barge that Huck and Jim would never have touched much less jumped on.
Our Adoption Do-Rights are known by various names: deformers, Scooby-Dooers, Do-Bees ,asskissers, and the American Adoption Congress and its hangers-on.The goal of these pristine patsys is to be liked by downtown fat cat tax eaters, adoption industry hacks, and therapists who do their damnedest to suck the life out of Class Bastard dispensing persona bromidal solutions to political and class rot.
As Burroughs so perfectly put it:
A Do-right always shows up with letters from his clergyman, banker, employer and, you know, pictures of himself as an Eagle Scout, shaking hands with the priest on graduation day There is no limit to what they’ll do. You know the type. Falls all over himself to light the boss’s’ cigarette. The doctor walks into the ward and says “rather warn in here.” As one man the Do-Rights break out in a sweat and rush around opening windows. “Cold in her isn’t it?” Immediately, the Do-Rights see their breath in the air, snatch blankets, and bundle themselves up to a chrous of chattering teeth. Front office brown nose finks to the bone. Doctor, when I die, I want to be buried right in the same coffin with you….
…Get there firstest with the brownest nose.
Here’s the whole thing from the film Nova Express directed by Andre Perkowski