Naked Lunch (2 page)

I saw the apomorphine treatment really work. Eight days later I left the nursing home eating and sleeping normally.
I remained completely off junk for two full years – a twelve year record. I did relapse for some months as a result of pain and illness. Another apomorphine cure has kept me off junk through this writing.

The apomorphine cure is
qualitatively different from other methods of cure. I have tried them all. Short reduction, slow reduction, cortisone, antihistamines, tranquilizers, sleeping cures, tolserol, reserpine. None of these cures lasted beyond the first opportunity to relapse. I can say definitely that I was never
metabolically
cured until I took the apomorphine cure. The overwhelming relapse statistics from the Lexington
Narcotic Hospital have led many doctors to say that addiction is not curable. They use a dolophine reduction cure at Lexington and have never tried apomorphine so far as I know. In fact, this method of treatment has been largely neglected. No research has been done with variations of the apomorphine formula or with synthetics. No doubt substances fifty times stronger than apomorphine could
be developed and the side effect of vomiting eliminated.

Apomorphine is a metabolic and psychic regulator that can be discontinued as soon as it has done its work. The world is deluged with tranquilizers and energizers but this unique regulator has not received attention. No research has been done by any of the large pharmaceutical companies. I suggest that research with variations of apomorphine
and synthesis of it will open a new medical frontier extending far beyond the problem of addiction.

The smallpox vaccine was opposed by a vociferous lunatic group of anti-vaccinationists. No doubt a scream of protest will go up from interested or unbalanced individuals as the junk virus is shot out from under them. Junk is big business; there are always cranks and operators. They must not be
allowed to interfere with the essential work of inoculation treatment and quarantine.
The junk virus is public health problem number one of the world today.

Since
Naked Lunch
treats this health problem, it is necessarily brutal, obscene and disgusting. Sickness has often repulsive details not for weak stomachs.

Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic were written as a
tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan’s Swift’s
Modest Proposal.
These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is. As always the lunch is naked. If civilized countries want to return to Druid Hanging Rites in the Sacred Grove or to drink blood with the Aztecs and feed their Gods with blood of human sacrifice,
let them see what they actually eat and drink. Let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon.

As I write I have almost completed a sequel to
Naked Lunch.
A mathematical extension of the Algebra of Need beyond the junk virus. Because there are many forms of addiction I think that they all obey basic laws. In the words of Heisenberg: ‘This may not be the best of all possible universes
but it may well prove to be one of the simplest.’ If man can
see
.

Post Script … Wouldn’t You
?

And speaking
Personally
and if a man speaks any other way we might as well start looking for his Protoplasm Daddy or Mother Cell.…
I Don’t Want To Hear Any More Tired Old Junk Talk And Junk Con.…
The same things said a million times and more and there is no point in saying anything because
NOTHING Ever
Happens
in the junk world.

Only excuse for this tired death route is THE KICK when the junk circuit is cut off for the non-payment and the junk-skin dies of junk-lack and overdose of time and the Old Skin has forgotten the skin game simplifying a way under the junk cover the way skins will.… A condition of
total exposure is precipitated when the Kicking Addict cannot choose but see smell and
listen.… Watch out for the cars.…

It is clear that junk is a Round-the-World-Push-an-Opium-Pellet-with-Your-Nose-Route. Strictly for Scarabs – stumble bum junk heap. And as such report to disposal. Tired of seeing it around.

Junkies always beef about
The Cold
as they call it, turning up their black coat collars and clutching their withered necks … pure junk con. A junky does not want to be warm,
he wants to be Cool-Cooler-COLD. But he wants The Cold like he wants His Junk – NOT OUTSIDE where it does him no good but INSIDE so he can sit around with a spine like a frozen hydraulic jack … his metabolism approaching Absolute ZERO TERMINAL addicts often go two months without a bowel move and the intestines make with sit-down-adhesions – Wouldn’t you? – requiring the intervention of an apple
corer or its surgical equivalent.… Such is life in The Old Ice House. Why move around and waste TIME?

Room for One More Inside, Sir.

Some entities are on thermodynamic kicks. They invented thermodynamics.… Wouldn’t you?

And some of us are on Different Kicks and that’s a thing out in the open the way I like to see what I eat and visa versa mutatis mutandis as the case may be.
Bill’s Naked Lunch
Room
.… Step right up.… Good for young and old, man and bestial. Nothing like a little snake oil to grease the wheels and get a show on the track Jack. Which side are you on? Fro-Zen Hydraulic? Or you want to take a look around with Honest Bill?

So that’s the World Health Problem I was talking about back in The Article. The Prospect Before Us Friends of MINE. Do I hear muttering about a personal
razor and some bush league short con artist who is known to have invented The Bill? Wouldn’t You? The razor belonged to
a man named Ockham and he was not a scar collector. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
‘If a proposition is NOT NECESSARY it is MEANINGLESS and approaching MEANING ZERO.’

‘And what is More UNNECESSARY than junk if You Don’t Need it?’

Answer
? ‘Junkies, if you
are not ON JUNK.’

I tell you boys, I’ve heard some tired conversation but no other OCCUPATION GROUP can approximate that old thermodynamic junk Slow-DOWN. Now your heroin addict does not say hardly anything and that I can stand. But your Opium ‘Smoker’ is more active since he still has a tent and a Lamp … and maybe 7–9–10 lying up in there like hibernating reptiles keep the temperature up to
Talking Level: How low the other junkies are ‘whereas We – WE have this tent and this lamp and this tent and this lamp and this tent and nice and warm in here nice and warm nice and IN HERE and nice and OUTSIDE ITS COLD.… ITS COLD OUTSIDE where the dross eaters and the needle boys won’t last two years not six months hardly won’t last stumble bum around and there is no class in them.… But WE SIT HERE
and never increase the DOSE … never – never increase the dose never except TONIGHT is a SPECIAL OCCASION with all the dross eaters and needle boys out there in the cold.… And we never eat it never never never never eat it.… Excuse please while I take a trip to The Source Of Living Drops they all have in pocket and opium pellets shoved up the ass in a finger stall with the Family Jewels and the
other shit.

Room for one more inside, Sir.

Well when that record starts around for the billionth light year and never the tape shall change us non-junkies take drastic action and the men separate out from the Junk boys.

Only way to protect yourself against this horrid peril is
come over HERE and shack up with Charybdis.… Treat you right kid.… Candy and cigarettes.

I am after fifteen years
in that tent. In and out in and out in and OUT.
Over
and
Out.
So listen to Old Uncle Bill Burroughs who invented the Burroughs Adding Machine Regulator Gimmick on the Hydraulic Jack Principle no matter how you jerk the handle result is always the same for given co-ordinates. Got my training early … wouldn’t you?

Paregoric Babies of the World Unite. We have nothing to lose but Our Pushers. And
THEY are NOT NECESSARY.

Look down LOOK DOWN along that junk road before you travel there and get in with the Wrong Mob.…

A word to the wise guy.

– William S. Burroughs

When I say I have no memory of writing
Naked Lunch
, this is of course an exaggeration, and it is to be kept in mind that there are various areas of memory. Junk is a pain-killer, it also kills the pain and pleasure implicit in awareness. While the factual memory of an addict may be quite accurate and extensive, his emotional memory may be scanty and, in the case of
heavy addiction, approaching affective zero.

When I say ‘the junk virus is public health problem number one of the world today,’ I refer not just to the actual ill effects of opiates upon the individual’s health (which, in cases of controlled dosage may be minimal), but also to the hysteria that drug use often occasions in populaces who are prepared by the media and narcotics officials for a
hysterical reaction.

The junk problem, in its present form, began with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 in the U.S.A. Anti-drug hysteria is now worldwide, and it poses a deadly threat to personal freedoms and due-process protections of the law everywhere.

– William S. Burroughs
October 1991

I can feel the heat closing in
, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train … Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea
of a character. You know the type comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, call the counterman in Nedick’s by his first name. A real asshole. And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (imagine tailing somebody in a white trench coat – trying to pass as a fag I guess) hit the platform. I can hear the way he would say it holding my outfit
in his left hand, right hand on his piece: ‘I think you dropped something, fella.’

But the subway is moving.

‘So long flatfoot!’ I yell, giving the fruit his B production. I look into the fruit’s eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the two hundred dollar sharkskin suit, the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and carrying
The News
as a prop. ‘Only thing I read is Little Abner.’

A
square wants to come on hip.… Talks about ‘pod,’ and smoke it now and then, and keeps some around to offer the fast Hollywood types.

‘Thanks, kid,’ I say, ‘I can see you’re one of our own.’ His face lights up like a pinball machine, with stupid, pink effect.

‘Grassed on me he did,’ I said morosely. (Note: Grass is English thief slang for inform.) I drew closer and laid my dirty junky fingers
on his sharkskin sleeve. ‘And us blood brothers in the same dirty needle. I can tell you in confidence he is due for a hot shot.’ (Note: This is a cap of poison junk sold to addict for liquidation purposes. Often given to informers. Usually the hot shot is strychnine since it tastes and looks like junk.)

‘Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with
a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don’t if the shot is right. That’s the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit – Kid, it was tasty.…

‘Recollect when I am travelling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi … We is working the fags
in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigilante turns up for work in cowboy boots and a black vest with a hunka tin on it and a lariat slung over his shoulder.

‘So I says: “What’s with you? You wig already?”

‘He just looks at me and says: “Fill your hand stranger” and hauls out an old rusty six shooter and I take off across Lincoln Park, bullets cutting all around me. And he hang three fags before
the fuzz nail him. I mean the Vigilante earned his moniker.…

‘Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con men? Like “raise,” letting someone know you are in the same line?

‘“Get her!”

‘“Get the Paregoric Kid giving that mark the build up!”

‘“Eager Beaver wooing him much too fast.”

‘The Shoe Store Kid (he got that moniker shaking down fetishists in the shoe stores) say:
“Give it to a mark with K.Y. and he will come back moaning for more.” And when the Kid spots a mark he begin to breathe heavy. His face
swells and his lips turn purple like an Eskimo in heat. Then slow, slow he comes on the mark, feeling for him, palpating him with fingers of rotten ectoplasm.

‘The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. That one stepped right off
a
Saturday Evening Post
cover with a string of bullheads, and preserved himself in junk. His marks never beef and the Bunko people are really carrying a needle for the Rube. One day Little Boy Blue starts to slip, and what crawls out would make an ambulance attendant puke. The Rube flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: “Come back, kid!! Come back!!” and
follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded flat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts.’