The first book that william s. burroughs published after having exhausted his original “word
horde” (material composed in Morocco in the midto late-1950s) was The Wild Boys, which was the
basis for naked luncH and the cut-ups trilogy—
The soft macHine, The ticket tHat exploded,
and nova express. Unlike those novels, there are
few characters in The Wild Boys that overlap with
Burroughs’s preceding works. The novel also incorporates Burroughs’s “cut-up” method much more
selectively (and rarely) than he does in the cut-ups
trilogy. Therefore, many critics see the book as a
“return to narrative” on Burroughs’s part. Burroughs himself says that the book owes a debt to
19th-century narrative fiction, boy’s adventure
magazines, and the nostalgic novels of English
writer Denton Welch. Welch inspired Burroughs’s
main character in the book, Audrey Carsons, who
functions as Burroughs’s alter ego in this book. In
The Cities of the Red Night, Audrey matures into
Kim Carsons. The Wild Boys is thus an important
new beginning for Burroughs in the late 1960s.
Although the book’s title would indicate that
it concerns itself with “the wild boys,” the book
deals with them less than its “sequel,” Port of
Saints, does, and there are also “wild boy” sections
of Burroughs’s collection of short pieces from this
time period, Exterminator! The wild boys are part
of a fantasy world that is set around 1988 (20 years
after the book was written) in which three-quarters
of the world’s population has been wiped out by radiation or by a plague, leaving the world open to
a takeover by packs of roaming boys. These boys
have been incubated in test tubes and thus have always lived apart from women, making them a new
line in the evolution of the species. “It’s all simply a
personal projection,” Burroughs told Robert Palmer
in 1972. “A prediction? I hope so. Would I consider
events similar to The Wild Boys scenario desirable?
Yes, desirable to me.”
The Wild Boys has 18 “chapters,” five of which
are titled “In the Penny Arcade.” These sections
are often startlingly visual, akin to a still life. The
first has a quite famous description of a “flesh garden,” some of Burroughs’s best fantasy writing. The
other chapters are loosely connected if at all, and
some, such as the opening section on the assassin
Tío Mate, should probably have been included in
Exterminator! as Burroughs himself later suggested.
Still, the book does have a strange, accruing momentum, akin to the sense that the viewer makes
out of a collage. Particularly at the end, the “wild
boy” scenario takes over and develops. The book is
subtitled A Book of the Dead because, as Burroughs
says, all of the characters are dead. Audrey Carsons
dies at the beginning of the book in a car accident,
an accident that is repeated several times in the
text in different settings.
In The Wild Boys, Burroughs started to use material from his St. Louis (Pershing Avenue) childhood in his books, giving them a nostalgic tone.
Audrey Carsons is a portrait of a deeply insecure
16-year-old Burroughs who is described by “a St.
Louis aristocrat” (Politte Elvins, based on Kells Elvins’s father) as looking like “a sheep-killing dog.”
Like Burroughs, Audrey never feels at ease around
the rich men and their sons at the private school
that he attends. As the narrator tells us, “He was
painfully aware of being unwholesome.” Audrey
and a boy named John Hamlin take a Dusenberg
out for a joy ride, and they are both killed in a
flaming car wreck. Behind the scenes of what turns
out to be one of Burroughs’s “reality films,” Old
Sarge has gripped the wheel and caused the fatal
accident.
Burroughs creates an alternative version of
the “detour” wreck. John and Audrey tour a carnival, circa the 1890s. Like much of the book, it
is intended to have an 1890s sepia tone to it. The
wild boys roam the carnival, carrying long knives
and wearing rainbow-colored jockstraps. Audrey
enters a peep show. There is a good deal of dream
material that is evident in the hallucinatory visions
that Audrey views inside. This section makes clear
the inspiration of the book in pulp magazines and
boy’s adventure stories: “I was waiting there pale
character in someone else’s writing breathing old
pulp magazines.” A spectacular effect is achieved
in a scene where Audrey tours a “flesh garden,”
which is described to him in broken English by a
native naturalist: “The scene is a sketch from an
explorer’s notebook.”
A. J. (based on Alan Ansen) reprises his role
from Naked Lunch as the “foremost practitioner of
luxury” who “thinks nothing of spending a million
dollars to put a single dish on his table.” The story
is set in a future dystopia where the very rich have
it better than ever, but the poor scrap like animals.
There is a pastichelike quality, imitating turn-ofthe-century British colonial narratives as the wild
boys provide a “spot of bother” for the smart set.
Several chapters obsessively evoke and reinvoke sex scenes between the wild boys or the native boys in other settings. The scenes here with
the wild boys appear to take place just after the
“control towers” were destroyed in The Ticket That
Exploded, for the boys frolic in the ruins of the control room.
Burroughs writes one chapter, “The Dead
Child,” (in part) from the point of view of his
son, Billy Burroughs III. The Mexico City setting,
where Burroughs shot his wife Joan in 1951 when
Billy was four years old, is chilling: “I don’t like to
go home. My father is taking morphine and always
tying up his arm and talking to this old junky who
has a government scrip and mother drinks tequila
all day.” This story intersects with the story of an
Indian boy and his friend Xolotl, who escape from
the control of the Mayan priests and live in a homoerotic, boy’s jungle-adventure fantasy world.
When they die, they become tree spirits that urge
boys to run from the “nets” cast by women—a variation of the book’s wild-boy theme of men without
women.
Beginning with the chapter “Just Call Me Joe”
and continuing to the end of the book, the focus
is more or less exclusively on the adventures of the
wild boys. They begin their campaign against the
status quo in Marrakech in 1969. Packs of “gasoline
gangs” break into suburban living rooms and light
on fire the couples who are sitting on their couches.
A picture that was taken of one of these marauding youths lighting a cigarette off the match that
he used to torch a gasoline-soaked suburbanite is
taken up by an advertising campaign. The model
is dubbed BOY, and he spawns countless merchandise and imitators. Vivien Westwood and Malcolm
McLaren’s seminal punk-rock boutique called BOY
is said to have been inspired by this passage in The
Wild Boys.
Colonel Arachnid Ben Driss is sent to kill
the gasoline gangs, and most of the boys are eliminated but not all. From around the world, including America, young men leave home to join the
wild boys. During the U.S. Bicentennial, a Colonel Greenfield rallies the troops and takes an expeditionary force to Marrakech to quash the latest
wild-boy uprising. Hundreds of the wild boys surrender to the colonel, but it turns out to be an
ambush, and Greenfield’s army is destroyed. Only
1500 of Greenfield’s 20,000 soldiers make it back
alive to Casablanca.
The second generation of wild boys is actually
bred by “fugitive technicians” who raise the boys in
test tubes. They are the first boys never to grow up
around women; their behavior is novel, and their
culture is unique: “A whole generation arose that
had never seen a woman’s face nor heard a woman’s voice.” In “The Wild Boys,” a Colonel Bradly
describes their habits in anthropological terms, including a mystical ceremony in which the boys exhibit the power to procreate.
By 1988 the world has been taken over by fascists under the pretext of a war against drugs. The
wild boys serve as the liberators of the Americas,
operating out of bases in Mexico and Central and
South America. Burroughs expands this storyline
in Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead
Roads. The boys’ platform of liberation is based on
eliminating “all dogmatic verbal systems. The family unit and its cancerous expansion into tribes,
countries, nations we will eradicate at its vegetable
route.” This program is similar to that of the Articulated in Cities of the Red Night as well as that of
the Johnson Family in The Place of Dead Roads.
Audrey Carsons reappears at the end of the
book. Colonel Bradly sends him on a mission to
contact the roller-skating wild boys in the suburbs of Casablanca. His contact is a shoeshine
boy called The Dib. They hook up with Jimmy the
Shrew, a bicycle boy who arms them with “film
grenades.” They toss one when a cop stops them,
and the novel goes to black. The book ends with
Audrey just on the verge of discovering the wildboy gang. Port of Saints picks up from this point
and centers on the history of the wild boys—much
more so than the book that takes its title from the
name of the test–tube-incubated boy gang.
Rob Johnson