Naked Lunch (3 page)

And the fruit is thinking: ‘What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark’s about this one.’ He’s a character collector, would stand
still for Joe Gould’s seagull act. So I put it on him for a sawski and make a meet to sell him some ‘pod’ as he calls it, thinking, ‘I’ll catnip the jerk.’ (Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or uninstructed.)

‘Well,’ I said, tapping my arm, ‘duty calls. As one judge said to another: “Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.”’

I cut into
the automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else’s overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous, dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt.

I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times, spectral janitors, grey as ashes, phantom porters sweeping out dusty old halls
with a slow old man’s hand, coughing and
spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk, patient and cautious and slow, dropped into their bloodless hands a few hours of warmth.

I made the round with him once for kicks. You know how
old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body’s decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk. Really
disgust you to see it.

‘Well, my boys will be like that one day,’ I thought philosophically. ‘Isn’t life peculiar?’

So back downtown by the Sheridan Square Station in case the dick is lurking in a broom closet.

Like I say it couldn’t last. I knew they were out there powowing and making their evil fuzz magic, putting dolls of me in Leavenworth. ‘No use sticking needles in that one, Mike.’

I hear they got Chapin with a doll. This old eunuch dick just sat in the precinct basement hanging a doll of him day and night, year in year out. And when Chapin hanged in Connecticut, they find this old creep with his neck broken.

‘He fell downstairs,’ they say. You know the old cop bullshit.

Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by
radar. ‘Not this street, the next, right … now left. Now right again,’ and there he is, toothless old woman face and cancelled eyes.

I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and
spectral and anonymous they don’t see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune. So the customers come in on
Smiles
, as
I’m in the Mood for Love
,
or
They Say We’re Too Young to Go Steady
, or whatever the song is for that day. Sometime you can see maybe fifty ratty-looking junkies squealing sick, running along behind a boy with a harmonica, and there is The Man on a cane seat throwing bread to the swans, a fat queen drag walking his Afghan hound through the East Fifties, and old wino pissing against an El post, a radical Jewish student giving
out leaflets in Washington Square, a tree surgeon, an exterminator, an advertising fruit in Nedick’s where he calls the counterman by his first name. The world network of junkies, tuned on a cord of rancid jissom, tying up in furnished rooms, shivering in the junk-sick morning. (Old Pete men suck the black smoke in the Chink laundry back room and Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of time
or cold turkey withdrawal of breath.) In Yemen, Paris, New Orleans, Mexico City and Istanbul – shivering under the air hammers and the steam shovels, shrieked junky curses at one another neither of us heard, and the Man leaned out of a passing steam roller and I coped in a bucket of tar. (Note: Istanbul is being torn down and rebuilt, especially shabby junk quarters. Istanbul has more heroin junkies
than NYC.) The living and the dead, in sickness or on the nod, hooked or kicked or hooked again, come in on the junk beam and the Connection is eating Chop Suey on Dolores Street, Mexico D.F., dunking pound cake in the automat, chased up Exchange Place by a baying pack of People. (Note: People is New Orleans slang for narcotic fuzz.)

The old Chinaman dips river water into a rusty tin can, washes
down a yen pox hard and black as a cinder. (Note: Yen pox is the ash of smoked opium.)

Well, the fuzz has my spoon and dropper, and I know they are coming in on my frequency led by this blind
pigeon known as Willy the Disk. Willy has a round, disk mouth lined with sensitive, erectile black hairs. He is blind from shooting in the eyeball, his nose and palate eaten away sniffing H, his body a mass
of scar tissue hard and dry as wood. He can only eat the shit now with that mouth, sometimes sways out on a long tube of ectoplasm, feeling for the silent frequency of junk. He follows my trail all over the city into rooms I move out already, and the fuzz walks in some newlyweds from Sioux Falls.

‘All right, Lee!! Come out from behind that strap-on! We know you,’ and pull the man’s prick off
straightaway.

Now Willy is getting hot and you can hear him always out there in darkness (he only functions at night) whimpering, and feel the terrible urgency of that blind, seeking mouth. When they move in for the bust, Willy goes all out of control, and his mouth eats a hole right through the door. If the cops weren’t there to restrain him with a stock probe, he would suck the juice right
out of every junky he ran down.

I knew, and everybody else knew they had the Disk on me. And if my kid customers ever hit the stand: ‘He force me to commit all kinda awful sex acts in return for junk’ I could kiss the street good-bye.

So we stock up on H, buy a second-hand Studebaker, and start West.

The Vigilante copped out as a schizo possession case:

‘I was standing outside myself trying
to stop those hangings with ghost fingers.… I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants – a body – after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is only the colorless no smell of death.… Nobody can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh.’

He stood there in elongated court room shadows,
his face torn like a broken film by lusts and hungers of larval
organs stirring in the tentative ectoplasmic flesh of junk kick (ten days on ice at time of the First Hearing) flesh that fades at the first silent touch of junk.

I saw it happen. Ten pounds lost in ten minutes standing with the syringe in one hand holding his pants up with the other, his abdicated flesh burning in a cold yellow
halo, there in the New York hotel room … night table litter of candy boxes, cigarette butts cascading out of three ashtrays, mosaic of sleepless nights and sudden food needs of the kicking addict nursing his baby flesh.…

The Vigilante is prosecuted in Federal Court under a lynch bill and winds up in a Federal Nut House specially designed for the containment of ghosts: precise, prosaic impact
of objects … washstand … door … toilet … bars … there they are … this is it … all lines cut … nothing beyond … Dead End … And the Dead End in every face.…

The physical changes were slow at first, then jumped forward in black klunks, falling through his slack tissue, washing away the human lines.… In his place of total darkness mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps forward to snap with transparent
teeth … but no organ is constant as regards either function or position … sex organs sprout anywhere … rectums open, defecate and close … the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments.…

The Rube is a social liability with his attacks as he calls them. The Mark Inside was coming up on him and that’s a rumble nobody can cool; outside Philly he jumps out to con a
prowl car and the fuzz takes one look at his face and bust all of us.

Seventy-two hours and five sick junkies in the cell with us. Now not wishing to break out my stash in front of these hungry cookies, it takes maneuvering and laying of gold on the turnkey before we are in a separate cell.

Provident junkies, known as squirrels, keep stashes against a bust. Every time I take a shot I let a few
drops fall into my vest pocket, the lining is stiff with stuff. I had a plastic dropper in my shoe and a safety-pin stuck in my belt. You know how this pin and dropper routine is put down: ‘She seized a safety-pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged
out of sight into the gaping wound. But her hideous galvanized need (hunger of insects in dry places) has broken the dropper off deep in the flesh of her ravaged thigh (looking rather like a poster on soil erosion). But what does she care? She does not even bother to remove the splintered glass, looking down at her bloody haunch with the cold blank eyes of a meat trader. What does she care for
the atom bomb, the bed bugs, the cancer rent, Friendly Finance waiting to repossess her delinquent flesh.… Sweet dreams, Pantopon Rose.’

The real scene you pinch up some leg flesh and make a quick stab hole with a pin. Then fit the dropper
over, not in
the hole and feed the solution slow and careful so it doesn’t squirt out the sides.… When I grabbed the Rube’s thigh the flesh came up like wax
and stayed there, and a slow drop of pus oozed out the hole. And I never touched a living body cold as the Rube there in Philly.…

I decided to lop him off if it meant a smother party. (This is a rural English custom designed to eliminate aged and bedfast dependants. A family so afflicted throws a ‘smother party’ where the guests pile mattresses on the old liability, climb up on top of the mattresses
and lush themselves out.) The Rube is a drag on the industry and should be led out into the skid rows of the world. (This is an African practice. Official known as the ‘Leader Out’ has the function of taking old characters out into the jungle and leaving them there.)

The Rube’s attacks become an habitual condition. Cops, doormen, dogs, secretaries snarl at his approach. The blond God has fallen
to untouchable vileness. Con men don’t change, they break, shatter – explosions of matter in cold interstellar space, drift away in cosmic dust, leave the empty body behind. Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.…

I left the Rube standing on a corner, red brick slums to the sky, under a steady rain of soot. ‘Going to hit this croaker I know. Right back with
that good pure drugstore M.… No, you wait here – don’t want him to rumble you.’ No matter how long, Rube, wait for me right on that corner. Goodbye, Rube, goodbye kid.… Where do they go when they walk out and leave the body behind?

Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorticated wops, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halstead, Cicero, Lincoln Park, panhandler
of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses.

Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long. (Through the bars of East St Louis lies the dead frontier, riverboat days.)
Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru.

America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

And always cops: smooth college-trained state cops,
practised, apologetic patter, electronic eyes weigh your car and luggage, clothes and face; snarling big city dicks, soft-spoken country sheriffs with something black and
menacing in old eyes color of a faded grey flannel shirt.…

And always car trouble: in St. Louis traded the 1942 Studebaker in (it has a built-in engineering flaw like the Rube) on an old Packard limousine heated up and barely
made Kansas City, and bought a Ford turned out to be an oil burner, packed it in on a Jeep we push too hard (they are no good for highway driving) – and burn something out inside, rattling around, went back to the old Ford V-8. Can’t beat that engine for getting there, oil burner or no.

And the U.S. drag closes around us like no other drag in the world, worse than the Andes, high mountain towns,
cold wind down from postcard mountains, thin air like death in the throat, river towns of Ecuador, malaria grey as junk under black Stetson, muzzle loading shotguns, vultures pecking through the mud streets – and what hits you when you get off the Malmo Ferry in (no juice tax on the ferry) Sweden knocks all that cheap, tax free juice right out of you and brings you all the way down: averted eyes
and the cemetery in the middle of town (every town in Sweden seems to be built around a cemetery), and nothing to do in the afternoon, not a bar nor a movie and I blasted my last stick of Tangier tea and I said, ‘K.E. let’s get right back on that ferry.’

But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can’t see it, you don’t know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of
a subdivision street – every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore and market and liquorstore. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from?

Not the bartender, not the customers, nor the cream-colored plastic rounding the bar stools, nor the dim neon. Not even the TV.