William Burroughs | Allen Ginsberg

Beggars eaten with unknown diseases leap on the passerby and attempt to sodomize him in the street, throw pus, and scabs, and assorted vectors --- insects suspected of conveying a disease --- pop out festered eyes with great force and accuracy, all this in the hope of infecting some-one.

One ingenious Leper solicits alms by coating his rotting feet with honey and sitting on an ant hill for a certain period each day, figuring the spreading numbness will outdistance the ants until he has no more to give his public. Others give themselves enemas of hot acid on street corners, or break off dried, black fingers and genitals to sell as souvenirs. One notable beggar has such a foul breath he has been known to cause death by nausea. He has only to open his mouth part his lips and hiss threateningly and the passerby empties his pockets. These diseased beggars live in a maze of burrows under the city and pop out anywhere often pushing up through the floor of a crowded café.

The most dreaded disease is known as The Crusts. A vast crab or centipede hatches out inside the body and finally cracks through. Inasmuch as the place where breakthrough occurs is quarantined, and the occupants compelled to dispose of the Stranger as best they can, a man 8 months gone with centipede can name his own price to go somewhere else. Besides which, the terminal stages, when the centipede can be seen stirring beneath the skin, are so abjectly repulsive, impose such blighting knowledge, that few recover from witnessing this spectacle. They succumb to a creeping apathy, and die of inertia.

I feel like I just saw a centipede hatch. Tired, inert. Appalled by prospect of packing etc. A mysterious plague has broken out just where I have to pass through in the north of the country. People dying like flies. No one has any idea what it is, or how conveyed. Sounds like some virulent form of polio or meningitis. 100 people up there are in deep coma and about 25 dead in last few days. See you soon,