- Дождит. - Он огляделся. - Дождь или еще чего. - Когда ты закончил Уортонскую Бизнес-Школу, - сказала она...
Коронат хотя не знал, что такое затеял друг его, однако принял такое же положение и глядел туда и сюда, смотря по оборотам головы Никаноровой. Наконец сей последни..
Несмотря на очевидное остроумие этой догадки, напоминающее самые блестящие времена древнего французского двор..
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 (im- agine 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 some- thing, fella" But the subway is moving. "So long flatfoot!" I yell, giving the fruit his B produc- tion. 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 liquida- tion 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 traveling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi... We is working the fags in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigi- lante 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 stran- ger' and hauls out an old rusty six shooter and I take off across Lincoln Park, bullets cutting all around me. And he hangs 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 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 Sator- day 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 8flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: 'Come back, kid!! Come back!l' 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 Hat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts." And the fruit is thinking: "What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark's about this one." He's a char- acter 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 unin- structed. ) "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 sweep- ing out dusty halls with a slow old man's hand, cough- ing 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 blood- less 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 Hop 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, or I'm in the 1Mood 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, an 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 with- drawal of breath.) In Yemen, Paris, New Orleans, Mex- ico 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, espe- cially shabby junk quarters. Istanbul has more heroin junkies than NYC. ) The living and the dead, in sick- ness 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! I Come out from behind that strap-on! We know you" and pull the man's prick off straight- away. 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 shadow, 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 Hear- ing) flesh that fades at the first silent touch of junk. I saw it happen. Ten pounds lost in ten minutes stand- ing 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 cas- cading 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 spe- cially 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 chunks, falling through his slack tissue, washing away the human lines.... In his place of total darkness mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps for- ward 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 con- sistency 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 coolies, 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 re- possess her delinquent flesh.... Sweet dreams, Panto- pon 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 dependents. A family so afflicted throws a "smother party" where the guests pile mat- tresses on the old liability, climb up on top of the mat- resses 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 drug- store 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 decorated wops, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halstead, Cicero, Lincoln Park, pan- handler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses. Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of tele- vision 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 Mis- souri, 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, practiced, 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 Haw 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, ma- laria 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 not 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. And our habits build up with the drag, like cocaine will build you up staying ahead of the C bring-down. And the junk was running low. So there we are in this no-horse town strictly from cough syrup. And vomited up the syrup and drove on and on, cold spring wind whistling through that old heap around our shivering sick sweating bodies and the cold you always come down with when the junk runs out of you.... On through the peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road and vul- tures over the swamp and cypress stumps. Motels with beaverboard walls, gas heater, thin pink blankets. Itinerant short con and carny hyp men have burned down the croakers of Texas.... And no one in his right mind would hit a Louisiana croaker. State Junk Law. Came at last to Houston where I know a druggist. I haven't been there in five years but he looks up and makes me with one quick look and just nods and says: "Wait over at the counter...." So I sit down and drink a cup of coffee and after a while he comes and sits beside me and says, "What do you want?" "A quart of PG and a hundred nembies." He nods, "Come back in half an hour." So when I come back he hands me a package and says, "That's fifteen dollars.... Be careful." Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper -- have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls.... So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, ma- rooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish.... New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It's a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico. Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, nigger-killing sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and sud- denly the landscape hits you straight with nothing be- tween you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel.... Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water. "Thomas and Charlie," I said. "What?" "That's the name of this town. Sea level. %We climb straight up from here ten thousand feet." I took a fix and went to sleep in the back seat. She was a good driver. You can tell as soon as someone touches the wheel. Mexico City where Lupita sits like an Aztec Earth Goddess doling out her little papers of lousy shit. "Selling is more of a habit than using," Lupita says. Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that's one you can't kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. (Note: Make in the sense of dig or size up. ) I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct. He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don't remember him afterwards. So he twists one after the other.... Well the Buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can't drink. He can't get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey. ) He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Baby Ruths he digs special. "It really disgust you to see the Buyer sucking on them candy bars so nasty," a cop says. The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say, Or so he thinks. "I'll just set in my room," he says. "Fuck 'em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry." But a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the Buyer hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it. "Oh all right," the boy says. "So what you want to make?" "I just want to rub up against you and get fixed." "Ugh... Well all right.... But why cancha just get physical like a human?" Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two col- leagues dunking pound cake. "Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for," he says. "Some way he make him- self all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets wet all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax.... I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like a old rotten cantaloupe." "Well it's still an easy score." The boy sighed resignedly; "Yes, I guess you can get used to anything. I've got a meet with him again tomorrow." The Buyer's habit keeps getting heavier. He needs a recharged every half hour. Sometimes he cruises the precincts and bribes the turnkey to let him in with a cell of junkies. It get to where no amount of contact will fix him. At this point he receives a summons from the District Supervisor: "Bradley, your conduct has given rise to rumors -- and I hope for your sake they are no more than that -- so unspeakably distasteful that... I mean Caesar's wife ...hrump... that is, the Department must be above suspicion... certainly above such suspicions as you have seemingly aroused. You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation." The Buyer throws himself on the ground and crawls over to the D.S. "No, Boss Man, no... The Department is my very lifeline." He kisses the D.S.'s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the D.S. must feel his toothless gums) com- plaining he has lost his teeth "inna thervith." "Please Boss Man. I'll wipe your ass, I'll wash out your dirty condoms, I'll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose.... "Really, this is most distasteful11 Have you no pride? I must tell you I feel a distinct revulsion. I mean there is something, well, rotten about you, and you smell like a compost heap." He put a scented handkerchief in front of his face. "I must ask you to leave this office at once. "I'll do anything, Boss, anything." His ravaged green face splits in a horrible smile. "I'm still young, Boss, and I'm pretty strong when I get my blood up." The D.S. retches into his handkerchief and points to the door with a limp hand. The Buyer stands up looking at the D.S. dreamily. His body begins to dip like a dowser's wand. He Bows forward.... "No! No!" screams the D.S. "Schlup... schlup schlup." An hour later they find the Buyer on the nod in the D.S.'s chair. The D.S. has disappeared without a trace. The Judge: "Everything indicates that you have, in some unspeakable manner uh... assimilated the Dis- trict Supervisor. Unfortunately there is no proof. I would recommend that you be confined or more accurately contained in some institution, but I know of no place suitable for a man of your caliber. I must reluctantly order your release." "That one should stand in an aquarium," says the arresting officer. The Buyer spreads terror throughout the industry. Junkies and agents disappear. Like a vampire bat he gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anesthetizes his victims and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence. And once he has scored he holes up for several days like a gorged boa constrictor. Finally he is caught in the act of digesting the Narcotics Com- missioner and destroyed with a flame thrower -- the court of inquiry ruling that such means were justified in that the Buyer had lost his human citizenship and was, in consequence, a creature without species and a menace to the narcotics industry on all levels.
In Mexico the gimmick is to find a local junky with a government script whereby they are allowed a certain quantity every month. Our Man was Old Ike who had spent most of his life in the States. "I was traveling with Irene Kelly and her was a sport- ing woman. In Butte, state of Montana, she gets the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chi- nese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chicago sniff coke used to come in form of cry- stals, blue crystals. So he go nuts and start screaming the Federals is after him and run down this alley and stick his head in the garbage can. And I said, 'What you think you are doing?' and he say, 'Get away or I shoot you. I got myself hid good.'" We are getting some C on RX at this time. Shoot it in the mainline, son. You can smell it going in, clean and cold in your nose and throat then a rush of pure pleasure right through the brain lighting up those C connections. Your head shatters in white explosions. Ten minutes later you want another shot... you will walk across town for another shot. But if you can't score for C you eat, sleep and forget about it. This is a yen of the brain alone, a need without feel- ing and without body, earthbound ghost need, rancid ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spit- ting in the sick morning. One morning you wake up and take a speed ball, and feel bugs under your skin. 1890 cops with black mus- taches block the doors and lean in through the windows snarling their lips back from blue and bold embossed badges. Junkies march through the room singing the Moslem Funeral Song, bear the body of Bill Gains, stigmata of his needle wounds glow with a soft blue flame. Purposeful schizophrenic detectives sniff at your chamber pot. It's the coke horrors.... Sit back and play it cool and shoot in plenty of that GI M. Day of the Dead: I got the chucks and ate my little Willy's sugar skull. He cried and I had to go out for another. Walked past the cocktail lounge where they blasted the Jai Lai bookie.
In Cuernavaca or was it Taxco? Jane meets a pimp trombone player and disappears in a cloud of tea smoke. The pimp is one of these vibration and dietary artists -- which is a means he degrades the female sex by forcing his chicks to swallow all this shit. He was con- tinually enlarging his theories... he would quiz a chick and threaten to walk out if she hadn't memorized every nuance of his latest assault on logic and the human image. "Now, baby. I got it here to give. But if you won't receive it there's just nothing I can do." He was a ritual tea smoker and very puritanical about junk the way some teaheads are. He claimed tea put him in touch with supra blue gravitational fields. He had ideas on every subject: what kind of underwear was healthy, when to drink water, and how to wipe your ass. He had a shiny red face and great spreading smooth nose, little red eyes that lit up when he looked at a chick and went out when he looked at anything else. His shoulders were very broad and suggested deformity. He acted as if other men did not exist, con- veying his restaurant and store orders to male personnel through a female intermediary. And no Man ever in- vaded his blighted, secret place. So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming "I got the fear" and ran out of the house. Drank a beer in a little restaurant -- mosaic bar and soccer scores and bullfight posters -- and waited for the bus to town. A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead. B E N W A Y
So I am assigned to engage the services of Doctor Benway for Islam Inc. Dr. Benway had been called in as advisor to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens are well adjusted, co- operatives, honest, tolerant and above all clean. But the invoking of Benway indicates all is not well behind that hygienic facade: Benway is a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control. I have not seen Benway since his precipitate departure from An- nexia, where his assignment had been T.D.-- Total Demoralization. Benway's first act was to abolish con- centration camps, mass arrest and, except under certain limited and special circumstances, the use of torture. "I deplore brutality," he said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physi- cal violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a de- liberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct." Every citizen of Annexia was required to apply for and carry on his person at all times a whole portfolio of documents. Citizens were subject to be stopped in the street at any time; and the Examiner, who might be in plain clothes, in various uniforms, often in a bathing suit or pyjamas, sometimes stark naked except for a badge pinned to his left nipple, after checking each paper, would stamp it. On subsequent inspection the citizen was required to show the properly entered stamps of the last inspection. The Examiner, when he stopped a large group, would only examine and stamp the cards of a few. The others were then subject to arrest because their cards were not properly stamped. Arrest meant "provisional detention"; that is, the pris- oner would be released if and when his Affidavit of Explanation, properly signed and stamped, was ap- proved by the Assistant Arbiter of Explanations. Since this official hardly ever came to his o%office, and the A%fidavit of Explanation had to be presented in person, the explainers spent weeks and months waiting around in unheated offices with no chairs and no toilet facilities. Documents issued in vanishing ink faded into old pawn tickets. New documents were constantly required. The citizens rushed from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet impossible deadlines. All benches were removed from the city, all fountains turned off, all flowers and trees destroyed. Huge electric buzzers on the top of every apartment house (every- one lived in apartments) rang the quarter hour. Often the vibrations would throw people out of bed. Search- lights played over the town all night (no one was permitted to use shades, curtains, shutters or blinds). No one ever looked at anyone else because of the strict law against importuning, with or without verbal approach, anyone for any purpose, sexual or otherwise. All cafes and bars were closed. Liquor could only be obtained with a special permit, and the liquor so ob- tained could not be sold or given or in any way trans- ferred to anyone else, and the presence of anyone else in the room was considered prima facie evidence of conspiracy to transfer liquor. No one was permitted to bolt his door, and the police had pass keys to every room in the city. Accompanied by a mentalist they rush into someone's quarters and start "looking for it." The mentalist guides them to whatever the man wishes to hide: a tube of vaseline, an enema, a hand- kerchief with come on it, a weapon, unlicensed alcohol. And they always submitted the suspect to the most humiliating search of his naked person on which they make sneering and derogatory comments. Many a latent homosexual was carried out in a straitjacket when they planted vaseline in his ass. Or they pounce on any object. A pen wiper or a shoe tree. "And what is this supposed to be for?" "It's a pen wiper." "A pen wiper, he says." "I've heard everything now." "I guess this is all we need. Come on, you." After a few months of this the citizens cowered in corners like neurotic cats. Of course the Annexia police processed suspected agents, saboteurs and political deviants on an assembly line basis. As regards the interrogation of suspects, Ben- way has this to say: "While in general I avoid the use of torture-torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance-the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be em- ployed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punish- ment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as The Switchboard. Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine. "The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets. Ever pop coke in the mainline? It hits you right in the brain, activating connections of pure pleasure. The pleasure of morphine is in the viscera. You listen down into yourself after a shot. But C is electricity through the brain, and the C yen is of the brain alone, a need without body and without feeling. The C-charged brain is a berserk pinball machine, flash- ing blue and pink lights in electric orgasm. C pleasure could be felt by a thinking machine, the first stirrings of hideous insect life. The craving for C lasts only a few hours, as long as the C channels are stimulated. Of course the effect of C could be produced by an electric current activating the C channels.... "So after a bit the channels wear out like veins, and the addict has to find new ones. A vein will come back in time, and by adroit vein rotation a junky can piece out the odds if he don't become an oil burner. But brain cells don't come back once they're gone, and when the addict runs out of brain cells he is in a terrible fucking position. "Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence -- their speech centers are destroyed -- except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning Flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the Flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. "I digress as usual. Pending more precise knowledge of brain electronics, drugs remain an essential tool of the interrogator in his assault on the subject's personal identity. The barbiturates are, of course, virtually use- less. That is, anyone who can be broken down by such means would succumb to the puerile methods used in an American precinct. Scopolamine is often effective in dissolving resistance, but it impairs the memory: an agent might be prepared to reveal his secrets but quite unable to remember them, or cover story and secret life info might be inextricably garbled. Mescaline, harma- line, LSD6, bufotenine, muscarine successful in many cases. Bulbocapnine induces a state approximating schizophrenic catatonia... instances of automatic obe- dience have been observed. Bulbocapnine is a back- brain depressant probably putting out of action the centers of motion in the hypothalamus. Other drugs that have produced experimental schizophrenia -- mescaline, harmaline, LSD6 -- are backbrain stimulants. In schizo- phrenia the backbrain is alternately stimulated and depressed. Catatonia is often followed by a period of excitement and motor activity during which the nut rushes through the wards giving everyone a bad time. Deteriorated schizos sometimes refuse to move at all and spend their lives in bed. A disturbance of the regu- latory function of the hypothalamus is indicated as the 'cause' (causal thinking never yields accurate description of metabolic process -- limitations of existing language) of schizophrenia. Alternate doses of LSD6 and bulbo- capnine -- the bulbocapnine potientiated with curare -- give the highest yield of automatic obedience. "There are other procedures. The subject can be re- duced to deep depression by administering large doses of benzedrine for several days. Psychosis can be induced by continual large doses of cocaine or demerol or by the abrupt withdrawal of barbiturates after prolonged ad- ministration. He can be addicted by dihydro-oxy-heroin and subjected to withdrawal (this compound should be five times as addicting as heroin, and the withdrawal proportionately severe ). "There are various 'psychological methods,' compul- sory psychoanalysis, for example. The subject is re- quested to free-associate for one hour every day (in cases where time is not of the essence). 'Now, now. Let's not be negative, boy. Poppa call nasty man. Take baby walkabout switchboard.' "The case of a female agent who forgot her real iden- tity and merged with her cover story -- she is still a fricoteuse in Annexia -- put me onto another gimmick. An agent is trained to deny his agent identity by asserting his cover story. So why not use psychic jiu-jitsu and go along with him? Suggest that his cover story is his iden- tity and that he has no other. His agent identity becomes unconscious, that is, out of his control; and you can dig it with drugs and hypnosis. You can make a square heterosexual citizen queer with this angle... that is, rein- force and second his rejection of normally latent homo- sexual trends -- at the same time depriving him of cunt and subjecting him to homosexual stimulation. Then drugs, hypnosis, and --" Benway flipped a limp wrist. "Many subjects are vulnerable to sexual humiliation. Nakedness, stimulation with aphrodisiacs, constant su- pervision to embarrass subject and prevent relief of mas- turbation (erections during sleep automatically turn on an enormous vibrating electric buzzer that throws the subject out of bed into cold water, thus reducing the incidence of wet dreams to a minimum). Kicks to hyp- notize a priest and tell him he is about to consummate a hypostatic union with the Lamb -- then steer a randy old sheep up his ass. After that the Interrogator can gain complete hypnotic control -- the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. Needless to say, the sex humiliation angle is contraindicated for overt homosexuals. ( I mean let's keep our eye on the ball here and remember the old party line... never know who's listening in.) I recall this one kid, I condition to shit at sight of me. Then I wash his ass and screw him. It was real tasty. And he was a lovely fellah too. And some times a subject will burst into boyish tears because he can't keep from ejaculate when you screw him. Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden. I was just scratching that lovely surface when I am purged by Party Poops. ...Well, 'son cosas de la vida.' "
I reach Freeland, which is clean and dull]1 my God. Benway is directing the R.C., Reconditioning Center. I drop around, and "What happened to so and so'?" sets in like: "Sidi Idriss 'The Nark' Smithers crooned to the Senders for a longevity serum. No fool like an old queen." "Lester Stroganoff Smuunn -- 'El Hassein' -- turned him- self into a Latah trying to perfect A.O.P., Automatic Obedience Processing. A martyr to the industry..." ( Latah is a condition occurring in South East Asia. Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every mo- tion once their attention is attracted by snapping the fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive in- voluntary hypnosis. They sometimes injure themselves trying to imitate the motions of several people at once. ) "Stop me if you've heard this atomic secret...." Benway's face retains its form in the flash bulb of urgency, subject at any moment to unspeakable cleav- age or metamorphosis. It flickers like a picture moving in and out of focus. "Come on," says Benway, "and I'll show you around the R.C." We are walking down a long white hall. Benway's voice drifts into my consciousness from no particular place... a disembodied voice that is sometimes loud and clear, sometimes barely audible like music down a windy street. "Isolated groups like natives of the Bismarck Archi- pelago. No overt homosexuality among them. God damned matriarchy. All matriarchies anti-homosexual, conformist and prosaic. Find yourself in a matriarchy walk don't run to the nearest frontier. If you run, some frustrate latent queer cop will likely shoot you. So some- body wants to establish a beach head of homogeneity in a shambles of potentials like West Europe and U.S.A.? Another fucking matriarchy, Margaret Mead notwith- standing... Spot of bother there. Scalpel fight with a colleague in the operating room. And my baboon as- sistant leaped on the patient and tore him to pieces. Baboons always attack the weakest party in an alterca- tion. Quite right too. We must never forget our glorious simian heritage. Doc Browbeck was party inna second part. A retired abortionist and junk pusher (he was a veterinarian actually) recalled to service during the manpower shortage. Well, Doc had been in the hospital kitchen all morning goosing the nurses and tanking up on coal gas and Klim -- and just before the operation he sneaked a double shot of nutmeg to nerve himself up." (In England and especially in Edinburgh the citizens bubble coal gas through Klim -- a horrible form of pow- dered milk tasting like rancid chalk -- and pick up on the results. They hock everything to pay the gas bill, and when the man comes around to shut it off for the eon- payment, you can hear their screams for miles. When a citizen is sick from needing it he says "I got the klinks" or "That old stove climbing up my back." Nutmeg. I quote from the author's article on nar- cotic drugs in the British Journal of Addiction ( see Appendix ): "Convicts and sailors sometimes have re- course to nutmeg. About a tablespoon is swallowed with water. Result vaguely similar to marijuana with side effects of headache and nausea. There are a number of narcotics of the nutmeg family in use among the Indians of South America. They are usually administered by sniffing a dried powder of the plant. The medicine men take these noxious substances and go into convul- sive states. Their twitchings and mutterings are thought to have prophetic significance." ) "I had a Yage hangover, me, and in no condition to take any of Browbeck's shit. First thing he comes on with I should start the incision from the back instead of the front, muttering some garbled nonsense about being sure to cut out the gall bladder it would fuck up the meat. Thought he was on the farm cleaning a chicken. I told him to go put his head back in the oven, where- upon he had the effrontery to push my hand severing the patient's femoral artery. Blood spurted up and blinded the anesthetist, who ran out through the halls screaming. Browbeck tried to knee me in the groin, and I managed to hamstring him with my scalpel. He crawled about the floor stabbing at my feet and legs. Violet, that's my baboon assistant -- only woman I ever cared a damn about -- really wigged. I climbed up on the table and poise myself to jump on Browbeck with both feet and stomp him when the cops rushed in. "Well, this rumble in the operating room, 'this un- speakable occurrence' as the Super called it, you might say was the blow off. The wolf pack was closing for the kill. A crucifixion, that's the only word for it. Of course I'd made a few 'dumheits' here and there. Who hasn't? There was the time me and the anesthetist drank up all the ether and the patient came up on us, and I was accused of cutting the cocaine with Sanifiush. Violet did it actually. Had to protect her of course.... "So the wind-up is we are all drummed out of the industry. Not that Violet was a bona fide croaker, nei- ther was Browbeck for that matter, and even my own certificate was called in question. But Violet knew more medicine than the Mayo Clinic. She had an extraordi- nary intuition and a high sense of duty. "So there I was flat on my ass with no certificate. Should I turn to another trade? No. Doctoring was in my blood. I managed to keep up my habits performing cutrate abortions in subway toilets. I even descended to hustling pregnant women in the public streets. It was positively unethical. Then I met a great guy, Placenta Juan the After Birth Tycoon. Made his in slunks during the war. (Slunks are underage calves trailing afterbirths and bacteria, generally in an unsanitary and unfit con- dition. A calf may not be sold as food until it reaches a minimum age of six weeks. Prior to that time it is classified as a slunk. Slunk trafficking is subject to a heavy penalty.) Well, Juanito controlled a fleet of cargo boats he register under the Abyssinian flag to avoid bothersome restrictions. He gives me a job as ship's doctor on the S.S. Filiarisis, as filthy a craft as ever sailed the seas. Operating with one hand, beating the rats offa my patient with the other and bedbugs and scorpions rain down from the ceiling. "So somebody wants homogeneity at this juncture. Can do but it costs. Bored with the whole project, me. ...Here we are.... Drag Alley." Benway traces a pattern in the air with his hand and a door swings open. We step through and the door closes. A long ward gleaming with stainless steel, white tile floors, glass brick walls. Beds along one wall. No one smokes, no one reads, no one talks. "Come and take a close look," says Benway. "You won't embarrass anybody." I walk over and stand in front of a man who is sitting on his bed. I look at the man's eyes. Nobody, nothing looks back. "IND's," says Benway, "Irreversible Neural Damage. Overliberated, you might say... a drag on the industry." I pass a hand in front of the man's eyes. "Yes," says Benway, "they still have reflexes. Watch this." Benway takes a chocolate bar from his pocket, removes the wrapper and holds it in front of the man's nose. The man sniffs. His jaws begin to work. He makes snatching motions with his hands. Saliva drips from his mouth and hangs off his chin in long streamers. His stomach rumbles. His whole body writhes in peristalsis. Benway steps back and holds up the chocolate. The man drops to his knees, throws back his head and barks. Benway tosses the chocolate. The man snaps at it, misses, scrambles around on the floor making slobbering noises. He crawls under the bed, finds the chocolate and crams it into his mouth with both hands. "Jesus! These ID's got no class to them." Benway calls over the attendant who is sitting at one end of the ward reading a book of J. M. Barrie's plays. "Get these fucking ID's outa here. It's a bring down already. Bad for the tourist business." "What should I do with them?" "How in the fuck should I know? I'm a scientist. A pure scientist. Just get them outa here. I don't hafta look at them is all. They constitute an albatross." "But what? Where?" "Proper channels. Buzz the District Coordinator or whatever he calls himself... new title every week. Doubt if he exists." Doctor Benway pauses at the door and looks back at the IND's. "Our failures," he says. "Well, it's all in the day's work." "Do they ever come back?" "They don't come back, won't come back, once they're gone," Benway sings softly. "Now this ward has some innarest.' The patients stand in groups talking and spitting on the floor. Junk hangs in the air like a grey haze. "A heart-warming sight," says Benway, "those junkies standing around waiting for the Man. Six months ago they were all schizophrenic. Some of them hadn't been out of bed for years. Now look at them. In all the course of my practices, I have never seen a schizophrenic junky, and junkies are mostly of the schizo physical type. Want to cure anybody of anything, find out who doesn't have it. So who don't got it'? Junkies don't got it. Oh, incidentally, there's an area in Bolivia with no psychosis. Right sane folk in them hills. Like to get in there, me, before it is loused up by literacy, advertising, TV and drive-ins. Make a study strictly from meta- bolism: diet, use of drugs and alcohol, sex, etc. Who cares what they think? Same nonsense everybody thinks, I daresay. "And why don't junkies got schizophrenia? Don't know yet. A schizophrenic can ignore hunger and starve to death if he isn't fed. No one can ignore heroin with- drawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact. "But that's only one angle. Mescaline, LSD6, deteri- orated adrenaline, harmaline can produce an approxi- mat~ schizophrenia. The best stuff is extracted from the blood of schizos; so schizophrenia is likely a drug psy- chosis. They got a metabolic connection, a Man Within you might say. ( Interested readers are referred to Ap- pendix. ) "In the terminal stage of schizophrenia the backbrain is permanently depressed, and the front brain is almost without content since the front brain is only active in response to backbrain stimulation. "Morphine calls forth the antidote of backbrain stimu- lation similar to schizo substance. ( Note similarity between withdrawal syndrome and intoxication with Yage or LSD6. ) Eventual result of junk use -- especially true of heroin addiction where large doses are available to the addict -- is permanent backbrain depression and a state much like terminal schizophrenia: complete lack of affect, autism, virtual absence of cerebral event. The addict can spend eight hours looking at a wall. He is conscious of his surroundings, hut they have no emo- tional connotation and in consequence no interest. Re- membering a period of heavy addiction is like playing back a tape recording of events experienced by the front brain alone. Flat statements of external events. 'I went to the store and bought some brown sugar. I came home and ate half the box. I took a three grain shot etc.' Complete absence of nostalgia in these memories. However, as soon as junk intake falls below par, the withdrawal substance floods the body. "If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido. "Some of my learned colleagues (nameless assholes) have suggested that junk derives its euphoric effect from direct stimulation of the orgasm center. It seems more probable that junk suspends the whole cycle of tension, discharge and rest. The orgasm has no function in the junky. Boredom, which always indicates an un- discharged tension, never troubles the addict. He can look at his shoe for eight hours. He is only roused to action when the hourglass of junk runs out." At the far end of the ward an attendant throws up an iron shutter and lets out a hog call. The junkies rush up grunting and squealing. "Wise guy," says Benway. "No respect for human dignity. Now I'll show you the mild deviant and crimi- nal ward. Yes, a criminal is a mild deviant here. He doesn't deny the Freeland contract. He merely seeks to circumvent some of the clauses. Reprehensible but not too serious. Down this hall... We'll skip wards 23, 86, 57 and 97... and the laboratory." "Are homosexuals classed as deviants?' "No. Remember the Bismarck Archipelago. No overt homosexuality. A functioning police state needs no po- lice. Homosexuality does not occur to anyone as con- ceivable behaviour.... Homosexuality is a political crime in a matriarchy. No society tolerates overt re- jection of its basic tenets. We aren't a matriarchy here, Insh'allah. You know the experiment with rats where they are subject to this electric shock and dropped in cold water if they so much as move at a female. So they all become fruit rats and that's the way it is with the etiology. And shall such a rat squeak out, 'I'm queah and I luuuuuuuuve it' or 'Who cut yours off, you two- holed freak?' 'twere a square rat so to squeak. During my rather brief experience as a psychoanalyst -- spot of bother with the Society -- one patient ran amok in Grand Central with a flame thrower, two committed suicide and one died on the couch like a jungle rat ( jungle rats are subject to die if confronted suddenly with a hope- less situation). So his relations beef and I tell them, 'It's all in the day's work. Get this stiff outa here. It's a bring down for my live patients' -- I noticed that all my homosexual patients manifested strong unconscious heterosex trends and all my hetero patients uncon- scious homosexual trends. Makes the brain reel, don't it?" "And what do you conclude from that?" "Conclude? Nothing whatever. Just a passing obser- vation." We are eating lunch in Benway's office when he gets a call. "What's that?... Monstrous! Fantastic!... Carry on and stand by." He puts down the phone. "I am prepared to accept immediate assignment with Islam Incorporated. It seems the electronic brain went berserk playing six- dimensional chess with the Technician and released every subject in the R.C. Leave us adjourn to the roof. Operation Helicopter is indicated."
From the roof of the R.C. we survey a scene of un- paralleled horror. IND's stand around in front of the cafe tables, long streamers of saliva hanging off their chins, stomachs noisily churning, others ejaculate at the sight of women. Latahs imitate the passers-by with monkey-like obscenity. Junkies have looted the drug- stores and fix on every street corner.... Catatonics deco- rate the parks.... Agitated schizophrenics rush through the streets with mangled, inhuman cries. A group of P.R.'s -- Partially Reconditioned -- have surrounded some homosexual tourists with horrible knowing smiles show- ing the Nordic skull beneath in double exposure. "What do you want?" snaps one of the queens. "We want to understand you." A contingent of howling simopaths swing from chan- deliers, balconies and trees, shitting and pissing on passers-by. (A simopath -- the technical name for this disorder escapes me -- is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge cures it.) Amoks trot along cutting off heads, faces sweet and remote with a dreamy half smile. ...Citizens with incipient Bang-utot clutch their penises and call on the tourists for help.... Arab rioters yipe and howl, castrating, disembowelling, throw burning gasoline.... Dancing boys strip-tease with intestines, women stick severed genitals in their cunts, grind, bump and Hick it at the man of their choice.... Religious fanatics harangue the crowd from helicopters and rain stone tablets on their heads, inscribed with meaningless messages.... Leopard Men tear people to pieces with iron claws, coughing and grunting.... Kwakiutl Canni- bal Society initiates bite off noses and ears.... A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit, exclaiming, "Mmmm, that's my rich substance." A battalion of rampant bores prowls the streets and hotel lobbies in search of victims. An intellectual avant- gardist -- *'Of course the only writing worth considering now is to be found in scientific reports and periodicals" -- has given someone a bulbocapnine injection and is preparing to read him a bulletin on "the use of neo- hemoglobin in the control of multiple degenerative granuloma." ( Of course, the reports are all gibberish he has concocted and printed up. ) His opening words: "You look to me like a man of intelligence." (Always ominous words, my boy .. When you hear them stay not on the order of your going but go at once. ) An English colonial, assisted by five police boys, has detained a subject in the club bar: "I say, do you know Mozambique?" and he launches into the endless saga of his malaria. "So the doctor said to me, 'I can only advise you to leave the area. Otherwise I shall bury you.' This croaker does a little undertaking on the side. Piecing out the odds you might say, and throwing him- self a spot of business now and then." So after the third pink gin when he gets to know you, he shifts to dysen- tery. "Most extraordinary discharge. More or less of a white yellow color like rancid jism and stringy you know." An explorer in sun helmet has brought down a citizen with blow gun and curare dart. He administers artificial respiration with one foot. (Curare kills by paralyzing the lungs. It has no other toxic effect, is not, strictly speaking, a poison. If artificial respiration is admin- istered the subject will not die. Curare is eliminated with great rapidity by the kidneys.) "That was the year of the rindpest when everything died, even the hyenas. ...So there I was completely out of K.Y. in the head- waters of the Baboonsasshole. When it came through by air drop my gratitude was indescribable.... As a matter of fact, and I have never told this before to a living soul -- elusive blighters" -- his voice echoes through a vast empty hotel lobby in 1890 style, red plush, rubber plants, gilt and statues -- "I was the only white man ever initiated into the infamous Agouti Society, wit- nessed and participated in their unspeakable rites." (The Agouti Society has turned out for a Chimu Fiesta. (The Chimu of ancient Peru were much given to sodomy and occasionally staged bloody battles with clubs, running up several hundred casualties in the course of an afternoon. ) The youths, sneering and goos- ing each other with clubs, troop out to the field. Now the battle begins. Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description. Who can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed mandril, alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals? A beastly young hooligan has gouged out the eye of his confrere and fuck him in the brain. "This brain atrophy already, and dry as grandmother's cunt." He turns into Rock and Roll hoodlum. "I screw the old gash -- like a crossword puzzle what relation to me is the outcome if it outcome? My father already or not yet? I can't screw you, Jack, you is about to become my father, and better 'twere to cut your throat and screw my mother playing it straight than fuck my father or vice versa mutatis mutandis as the case may be, and cut my mother's throat, that sainted gash, though it be the best way I know to stem her word horde and freeze her asset. I mean when a fellow be caught short in the switches and don't know is he to over up his ass to 'great big daddy' or commit a torso job on the old lady. Give me two cunts and a prick of steel and keep your dirty finger out of my sugar bum what you think I am a purple-assed reception already fugitive from Gibraltar? Male and female castrated he them. Who can't distinguish between the sexes? I'll cut your throat you white mother fucker. Come out in the open like my grandchild and meet thy unborn mother in dubious battle. Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece. I have cut the janitor's throat quite by mistake of identity, he being such a horrible fuck like the old man. And in the coal bin all cocks are alike." So leave us return to the stricken field. One youth hath penetrate his comrade, whilst another youth does amputate the proudest part of that cock's quivering beneficiary so that the visiting member projects to fill the vacuum nature abhors and ejaculate into the Black Lagoon where impatient piranha snap up the child not yet born nor -- in view of certain well established facts -- at all likely. ) Another bore carries around a suitcase full of trophies and medals, cups and ribbons: "Now this I won for the Most Ingenious Sex Device Contest in Yokohama. (Hold him, he's desperate.) The Emperor gave it to me him- self and there were tears in his eyes, and the runners-up all castrated theirselves with harakiri knives. And I won this ribbon in a Degradation Contest at the Teheran meeting of Junkies Anonymous." "Shot up my wife's M.S, and her down with a kidney stone big as the Hope Diamond. So I give her half a Vagamin and tell her, "You can't expect too much re- lief.... Shut up awready. I wanta enjoy my medica- tions. "Stole an opium suppository out of my grandmother's ass." The hypochondriac lassoes the passer-by and admin- isters a straitjacket and starts talking about his rotting septum: "An awful purulent discharge is subject to How out... just wait till you see it." He does a strip tease to operation scars, guiding the reluctant fingers of a victim. "Feel that suppurated swelling in my groin where I got the lymphogranu- lomas.... And now I want you to palpate my internal hemorrhoids." (The reference is to lymphogranuloma, "climactic i buboes." A virus venereal disease indigenous to Ethio- pia. "Not for nothing are we known as feelthy Ethi- opians," sneers an Ethiopian mercenary as he sodomizes Pharaoh, venomous as the King's cobra. Ancient Egyp- tian papyrus talk all the time about them feelthy Ethiopians. So it started in Addis Ababa like the Jersey Bounce, but these are modern times, One World. Now the cli- mactic buboes swell up in Shanghai and Esmeraldas, New Orleans and Helsinki, Seattle and Capetown. But the heart turns home and the disease shows a distinct predilection for Negroes, is in fact the whitehaired boy of white supremacists. But the Mau Mau voodoo men are said to be cooking up a real dilly of a VD for the white folks. Not that Caucasians are immune: five British sailors contracted the disease in Zanzibar. And in Dead Coon County, Arkansas ("Blackest Dirt, Whit- est People in the U.S.A.-- Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On You Here") the County Coroner come down with the buboes fore and aft. A vigilante committee of neighbors apologetically burned him to death in the Court House privy when his interesting condition came to light. "Now, Clem, just think of yourself as a cow with the aftosa." "Or a poltroon with the fowl pest." "Don't crowd too close, boys. His intestines is subject to explode in the fire." The disease in short arm hath a gimmick for going places unlike certain unfortunate viruses who are fated to languish unconsummate in the guts of a tick or a jungle mosquito, or the saliva of a dying jackal slobbering silver under the desert moon. And after an initial lesion at the point of infee- tion the disease passes to the lymph glands of the groin, which swell and burst in suppurating fissures, drain for days, months, years, a purulent stringy discharge streaked with blood and putrid lymph. Elephantiasis of the genitals is a frequent complication, and cases of gangrene have been recorded where the amputation in medio of the patient from the waist down was indi- cated but hardly worth while. Women usually suffer secondary infection of the anus. Males who resign themselves up for passive intercourse to infected part- ners like weak and soon to be purple-assed baboons, may also nourish a little stranger. Initial proctitis and the inevit4ble purulent discharge -- which may pass un- noticed in the shuRe -- is followed by stricture of the rectum requiring intervention of an apple corer or its surgical equivalent, lest the unfortunate patient be reduced to fart and shit in his teeth giving rise to stubborn cases of halitosis and unpopularity with all sexes, ages and conditions of homo sapiens. In fact a blind bugger was deserted by his seeing eye police dog -- copper at heart. Until quite recently there was no satisfactory treatment. "Treatment is symptomatic" -- which means in the trade there is none. Now many cases yield to intensive therapy with aureomycin, ter- ramycin and some of the newer molds. However a certain appreciable percentage remain refractory as mountain gorillas.... So, boys, when those hot licks play over your balls and prick and dart up your ass like an invisible blue blow torch of orgones, in the words of I. B. Watson, Think. Stop panting and start palpating... and if you palpate a bubo draw your- self back in and say in a cold nasal whine: "You think I am innarested to contact your horrible old condition? I am not innarested at all.") Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face. They open zoos, insane asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers, chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot out lighthouses, file elevator cables to one thin wire, turn sewers into the water supply, throw sharks and sting rays, electric eels and candiru into swimming pools (the candiru is a small eel-like fish or worm about one-quarter inch through and two inches long patronizing certain rivers of ill repute in the Greater Amazon Basin, will dart up your prick or your asshole or a woman's cunt faute de mieux, and hold himself there by sharp spines with precisely what motives is not known since no one has stepped forward to observe the candiru's life-cycle in sito), in nautical costumes ram the Queen Mary full speed into New York Harbor, play chicken with passenger planes and busses, rush into hospitals in white coats carrying saws and axes and scalpels three feet long; throw paralytics out of iron lungs (mimic their suffocations flopping about on the floor and rolling their eyes up), administer injections with bicycle pumps, disconnect artificial kidneys, saw a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw, they drive herds of squealing pigs into the Curb, they shit on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass with treaties, pacts, alliances. By plane, car, horse, camel, elephant, tractor, bicycle and steam roller, on foot, skis, sled, crutch and pogo- stick the tourists storm the frontiers, demanding with inflexible authority asylum from the "unspeakable con- ditions obtaining in Freeland," the Chamber of Com- merce striving in vain to stem the debacle: "Please to be restful. It is only a few crazies who have from the crazy place outbroken."
JOSELITO
And Joselito who wrote bad, class-conscious poetry began to cough. The German doctor made a brief ex- amination, touching Joselito's ribs with long, delicate fingers. The doctor was also a concert violinist, a math- ematician, a chess master, and a Doctor of International Jurisprudence with license to practice in the lavatories of the Hague. The doctor flicked a hard, distant glance across Joselito's brown chest. He looked at Carl and smiled -- one educated man to another smile -- and raised his eyebrow, saying without words: "Alzo for the so stupid peasant we must avoid use of the word is it not? Otherwise he shit himself with fear. Hoch and spit they are both nasty words I think?" He said aloud: "It is a catarro de los pulmones." Carl talked to the doctor outside under the narrow arcade with rain bouncing up from the street against his pant legs, thinking how many people he tell it to, and the stairs, porches, lawns, driveways, corridors and streets of the world there in the doctor's eyes... stuffy German alcoves, butterfly trays to the ceiling, silent portentous smell of uremia seeping under the door, suburban lawns to sound of the water sprinkler, in calm jungle night under silent wings of the Anoph- eles mosquito. (Note: This is not a figure. Anopheles mosquitoes are silent. ) Thickly carpeted, discreet nurs- ing home in Kensington: stiff brocade chair and a cup of tea, the Swedish modern living room with water hyacinths in a yellow bowl -- outside the China blue Northern sky and drifting clouds, under bad water- colors of the dying medical student. "A schnaps I think Frau Underschnitt." The doctor was talking into a phone with a chess board in front of him. "Quite a severe lesion I think... of course without to see the Horoscope." He picks up the knight and then replaces it thoughtfully. "Yes... Both lungs... quite definitely." He replaces the re- ceiver and turns to Carl. "I have observed these people show amazingly quick wound recovery, with low in- cidence of infection. It is always the lungs here... pneumonia and, of course, Old Faithful." The doctor grabs Carl's cock, leaping into the air with a coarse peasant guffaw. His European smile ignores the mis- behavior of a child or an animal. He goes on smoothly in his eerily unaccented, disembodied English. "Our Old Faithful Bacillus Koch." The doctor clicks his heels and bows his head. "Otherwise they would multiply their stupid peasant asshole into the sea, is it not?" He shrieks, thrusting his face into Carl's. Carl retreats sideways with the grey wall of rain behind him. "Isn't there some place where he can be treated?" "I think there is some sort of sanitarium," he drags out the word with ambiguous obscenity, "up at the District Capital. I will write for you the address." "Chemical therapy?" His voice falls Hat and heavy in the damp air. "Who can say. They are all stupid peasants, and the worst of all peasants are the so-called educated. These people should not only be prevented from learn- ing to read, but from learning to talk as well. No need to prevent them from thinking; nature has done that." "Here is the address," the doctor whispered without moving his lips. He dropped a pill of paper into Carl's hand. His dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt, rested on Carl's sleeve. "There is the matter of my fee." Carl slipped him a wadded banknote... and the doctor faded into the grey twilight, seedy and furtive as an old junky.
Carl saw Joselito in a big clean room full of light, with private bath and concrete balcony. And nothing to talk about there in the cold empty room, water hyacinths growing in a yellow bowl and the China blue sky and drifting clouds, fear flickering in and out of his eyes. When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light, lurked enigmatically in the high cool corners of the room. And what could I say feeling death around me, and the little broken images that come before sleep, there in the mind? "They will send me to the new sanitarium tomorrow. Come and visit me. I will be there alone." He coughed and took a codeineeta. "Doctor I understand, that is I have been given to understand, I have read and heard -- not a medical man myself -- don't pretend to be-that the concept of sani- tarium treatment has been more or less supplanted, or at least very definitely supplemented, by chemical therapy. Is this accurate in your opinion? What I mean to say is, Doctor, please tell me in all sincerity, as one human being to another, what is your opinion of chemi- cal versus sanitarium therapy? Are you a partisan?" The doctor's liver sick Indian face was blank as a dealer's. "Completely modern, as you can see," he gestures toward the room with the purple fingers of bad circu- lation. "Bath... water... flowers. The lot." He fin- ished in Cockney English with a triumphant smirk. "I will write for you a letter." "This letter? For the sanitarium?" The doctor was speaking from a land of black rocks and great, iridescent brown lagoons. "The furniture... modern and comfortable. You find it so of course?"
Carl could not see the sanitarium owing to a false front of green stucco topped by an intricate neon sign dead and sinister against the sky, waiting for darkness. The sanitarium was evidently built on a great lime- stone promontory, over which flowering trees and vine tendrils broke in waves. The smell of flowers was heavy in the air. The commandante sat at a long wooden trestle under a vine trellis. He was doing absolutely nothing. He took the letter that Carl handed him and whispered through it, reading his lips with the left hand. He stuck the letter on a spike over a toilet. He began tran- scribing from a ledger full of numbers. He wrote on and on. Broken images exploded softly in Carl's head, and he was moving out of himself in a silent swoop. Clear and sharp from a great distance he saw himself sitting in a lunchroom. Overdose of H. His old lady shaking him and holding hot coffee under his nose. Outside an old junky in Santa Claus suit selling Christmas seals. "Fight tuberculosis, folks," he whis- pers in his disembodied, junky voice. Salvation Army choir of sincere, homosexual football coaches sings: "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." Carl drifted back into his body, an earthbound junk ghost. "I could bribe him, of course." The commandante taps the table with one finger and hums "Coming Through the Rye." Far away, then urgently near like a foghorn a split second before the grinding crash. Carl pulled a note half out of his trouser pocket.... The commandante was standing by a vast panel of lockers and deposit boxes. He looked at Carl, sick animal eyes gone out, dying inside, hopeless fear re- flecting the face of death. In the smell of flowers a note half out of his pocket, the weakness hit Carl, shutting of his breath, stopping his blood. He was in a great cone spinning down to a black point. "Chemical therapy?" The scream shot out of his flesh through empty locker rooms and barracks, musty resort hotels, and spectral, coughing corridors of T,B. sani- tariums, the muttering, hawking, grey dishwater smell of flophouses and Old Men's Homes, great, dusty cus- tom sheds and warehouses, through broken porticoes and smeared arabesques, iron urinals worn paper thin by the urine of a million fairies, deserted weed-grown privies with a musty smell of shit turning back to the soil, erect wooden phallus on the grave of dying peoples plaintive as leaves in the wind, across the great brown river where whole trees float with green snakes in the branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore out over a vast plain (vulture wings husk in the dry air). The way is strewn with broken condoms and empty H caps and K.Y. tubes squeezed dry as bone meal in the sum- mer sun. "My furniture." The commandante's face burned like metal in the Hash bulb of urgency. His eyes went out. A whif of ozone drifted through the room. The "novia" muttered over her candles and altars in one corner. "It is all Trak... modern, excellent..." he is nod- ding idiotically and drooling. A yellow cat pulls at Carl's pant leg and runs onto a concrete balcony. Clouds drift by. "I could get back my deposit. Start me a little busi- ness someplace." He nods and smiles like a mechanical toy. "Joselito!!!" Boys look up from street ball games, bull rings and bicycle races as the name whistles by and slowly fades away. "Joselito!... Paco!... Pepe!... Enrique!..." The plaintive boy cries drift in on the warm night. The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast, and bursts into blue flame. THE BLACK MEAT
"We friends, yes?" The shoe shine boy put on his hustling smile and looked up into the Sailor's dead, cold, undersea eyes, eyes without a trace of warmth or lust or hate or any feeling the boy had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, impersonal and predatory. The Sailor leaned forward and put a finger on the boy's inner arm at the elbow. He spoke in his dead, junky whisper. "With veins like that, Kid, I'd have myself a time." He laughed, black insect laughter that seemed to serve some obscure function of orientation like a bat's squeak. The Sailor laughed three times. He stopped laughing and hung there motionless listening down into himself. He had picked up the silent frequency of junk. His face smoothed out like yellow wax over the high cheek-bones. He waited half a cigarette. The Sailor knew how to wait. But his eyes burned in a hideous dry hunger. He turned his face of controlled emergency in a slow half pivot to case the man who had just come in. "Fats" Terminal sat there sweeping the cafe with blank, periscope eyes. When his eyes passed the Sailor he nodded minutely. Only the peeled nerves of junk sickness would have registered a move- ment. The Sailor handed the boy a coin. He drifted over to Fat's table with his floating walk and sat down. They sat a long time in silence. The cafe was built into one side of a stone ramp at the bottom of a high white canyon of masonry. Faces of The City poured through silent as fish, stained with vile addictions and insect lusts. The lighted cafe was a diving bell, cable broken, settling into black depths. The Sailor was polishing his nails on the lapels of his glen plaid suit. He whistled a little tune through his shiny, yellow teeth. When he moved an effluvia of mold drifted out of his clothes, a musty smell of deserted locker rooms. He studied his nails with phosphorescent intensity. "Good thing here, Fats. I can deliver twenty. Need an advance of course." "On spec?" "So I don't have the twenty eggs in my pocket. I tell you it's jellied consomme, One little whoops and a push." The Sailor looked at his nails as if he were studying a chart. "You know I always deliver." "Make it thirty. And a ten tube advance. This time tomorrow. "Need a tube now, Fats." "Take a walk, you'll get one." The Sailor drifted down into the Plaza. A street boy was shoving a newspaper in the Sailor's face to cover his hand on the Sailor's pen. The Sailor walked on. He pulled the pen out and broke it like a nut in his thick, fibrous, pink fingers. He pulled out a lead tube. He cut one end of the tube with a little curved knife. A black mist poured out and hung in the air like boiling fur. The Sailor's face dissolved. His mouth undulated forward on a long tube and sucked in the black fuzz, vibrating in supersonic peristalsis disap- peared in a silent, pink explosion. His face came back into focus unbearably sharp and clear, burning yellow brand of junk searing the grey haunch of a million screaming junkies. "This will last a month," he decided, consulting an invisible mirror. All streets of the City slope down between deepen- ing canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafes, some a few feet deep, others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and corridors. At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging insistence. Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede -- sometimes attaining a length of six feet -- found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in cam- ouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters. Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebe- phrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensi- tized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw mate- rials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams. The Meet Cafe occupies one side of the Plaza, a maze of kitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, peril- ous iron balconies and basements opening into the underground baths. On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mug- wumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slow- ing metabolism. (In fact all longevity agents have proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness in prolonging life. ) Addicts of Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles. A number of these How over chairs with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs through which the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time to time touched by invisible currents, serve also same form of communication known only to Reptiles. During the biennial Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing them- selves in clay cubicles and remain for weeks in bio- stasis. In those days of grey terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black winds of insect agony. The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten ectoplasm swept away by an old junky, coughing and spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man comes with alabaster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get smoothed out. The air is once again still and clear as glycerine. The Sailor spotted his Reptile. He drifted over and ordered a green syrup. The Reptile had a little, round disk mouth of brown gristle, expressionless green eyes almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The Sailor waited an hour before the creature picked up his presence. "Any eggs for Fats?" he asked, his words stirring through the Reptile's fan hairs. It took two hours for the Reptile to raise three pink transparent fingers covered with black fuzz. Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to move. (The Black Meat is like a tainted cheese, overpower- ingly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.) A painted youth slithered in and seized one of the great black claws sending the sweet, sick smell curling through the cafe.
HOSPITAL
Disintoxication Notes. Paranoia of early withdrawal. . Everything looks blue.... Flesh dead, doughy, toneless. Withdrawal Nightmares. A mirror-lined cafe. Empty. ...Waiting for something.... A man appears in a side door.... A slight, short Arab dressed in a brown jellaba with grey beard and grey face... There is a pitcher of boiling acid in my hand.... Seized by a convulsion of urgency, I throw it in his face.... Everyone looks like a drug addict.... Take a little walk in the hospital patio.... In my absence someone has used my scissors, they are stained with some sticky, red brown gick.... No doubt that little bitch of a criada trimming her rag. Horrible-looking Europeans clutter up the stairs, in- tercept the nurse when I need my medicine, empty piss into the basin when I am washing, occupy the toilet for hours on end -- probably fishing for a finger stall of diamonds they have stashed up their asshole.... In fact the whole clan of Europeans has moved in next to me....The old mother is having an operation, and her daughter move right in to see the old gash receive proper service. Strange visitors, presumably relatives... One of them wears as glasses those gad- gets jewelers screw into their eyes to examine stones. ...Probably a diamond-cutter on the skids... The man who loused up the Throckmorton Diamond and was drummed out of the industry.... All these jewelers standing around the Diamond in their frock coats, wait- ing on The Man. An error of one thousandth of an inch ruins the rock complete and they have to import this character special from Amsterdam to do the job. ...So he reels in dead drunk with a huge air hammer and pounds the diamond to dust.... I don't check these citizens.... Dope peddlers from Aleppo?... Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Il- legal diamond buyers from Johannesburg?... Slave traders from Somaliland? Collaborators at the very least... Continual dreams of junk: I am looking for a poppy field.... Moonshiners in black Stetsons direct me to a Near East cafe.... One of the waiters is a connection for Yugoslav opium.... Buy a packet of heroin from a Malay Lesbian in white belted trenchcoat.... I cop the paper in Tibetan section of a museum. She keeps trying to steal it back. ...I am looking for a place to fix.... The critical point of withdrawal is not the early phase of acute sickness, but the final step free from the medium of junk....There is a nightmare interlude of cellular panic, life suspended between two ways of being.... At this point the longing for junk concen- trates in a last, all-out yen, and seems to gain a dream power: circumstances put junk in your way.... You meet an old-time Schmecker, a larcenous hospital at- tendant, a writing croaker....
A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper, adolescent- nordic-sun-tan slacks, sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted and tucked in the shirt. (Ash-brown is a color like grey under brown skin. You sometimes find it in mixed Negro and white stock, the mixture did not come of and the colors separated out like oil on water.... ) The Guard is a sharp dresser, since he has nothing to do and saves all his pay to buy fine clothes and changes three times a day in front of an enormous mag- nifying mirror. He has a Latin handsome-smooth face with a pencil line mustache, small black eyes, blank and greedy, undreaming insect eyes. When I get to the frontier the Guard rushes out of his casita, a mirror in a wooden frame slung round his neck. He is trying to get the mirror off his neck.... This has never happened before, that anyone reached the frontier. The Guard has injured his larynx taking of the mirror frame.... He has lost his voice.... He opens his mouth, you can see the tongue jumping around inside. The smooth blank young face and the open mouth with the tongue moving inside are in- credibly hideous. The Guard holds up his hand. His whole body jerks in convulsive negation. I go over and unhook the chain across the road. It falls with a clank of metal on stone. I walk through. The Guard stands there in the mist looking after me. Then he hooks the chain up again, goes back into the casita and starts plucking at his mustache.
They just bring so-called lunch.... A hard-boiled egg with the shell of revealing an object like I never seen it before.... A very small egg of a yellow-brown color... Perhaps laid by the duck-billed platypus. The orange contained a huge worm and very little else.... He really got there firstest with the mostest.... In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to an enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome..., An Interzone coroner known as Autopsy Ahmed made a fortune traf- ficking The Worm. The French school is opposite my window and I dig the boys with my eight-power field glasses.... So close I could reach out and touch them.... They wear shorts.... I can see the goose-pimples on their legs in the cold Spring morning.... I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust. Did I ever tell you about the time Marv and me pay two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each other? So I ask Marv, "Do you think they will do it?" And he says, "I think so. They are hungry." And I say, "That's the way I like to see them." Makes me feel sorta like a dirty old man but, "Son cosas de la vida," as Soberba de la Flor said when the fuzz upbraids him for blasting this cunt and taking the dead body to the Bar 0 Motel and fucking it.... "She play hard to get already," he say... "I don't hafta take that sound." (Soberba de la Flor was a Mexican criminal convict of several rather pointless murders. )
The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid. ...I think they are using it for an operating room.... NURSE: "I can't find her pulse, doctor." DR. BENWAY: "Maybe she got it up her snatch in a finger stall." NURSE: "Adrenalin, doctor?" DR.. BENWAY: "The night porter shot it all up for kicks." He looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets.... He advances on the patient.... "Make an incision, Doctor Limpf," he says to his ap- palled assistant.... "I'm going to massage the heart." Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the incision. Dr. Ben- way washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet-bowl.... NURSE: "Shouldn't it be sterilized, doctor?" DR. BENWAY: "Very likely but there's no time." He sits on the suction cup like a cane seat watching his assistant make the incision.... "You young squirts couldn't lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture.... Soon we'll be operating by remote control on patients we never see.... We'll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery.... All the know-how and make-do... Did I ever tell you about the time I per- formed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once I was caught short without instrument one and removed a uterine tumor with my teeth. That was in the Upper Effendi, and besides..." DR. LYMPH F: "The incision is ready, doctor." Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall.... The cup makes a horrible sucking sound. NURSE: "I think she's gone, doctor." DR. BENWAY: "Well, it's all in the day's work." He walks across the room to a medicine cabinet.... "Some fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush! Nurse! Send the boy out to fill this RX on the double!" Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: "Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that.... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning. "Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celer- ity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second.... Did any of you ever see Dr. Tetrazzini per- form? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scal- pel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: 'I don't give them time to die,' he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. 'Fucking undisciplined cells!' he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter." A young man leaps down into the operating theatre and, whipping out a scalpel, advances on the patient. DR. BENWAY: "An espontaneo Stop him before he guts my patient!" (Espontaneo is a bull-fighting term for a member of the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the bull before he is dragged out of the ring. ) The orderlies scuffle with the espontaneo, who is finally ejected from the hall. The anesthetist takes ad- vantage of the confusion to pry a large gold filling from the patient's mouth.... I am passing room 10 they moved me out of yester- day.... Maternity case I assume... Bedpans full of blood and Kotex and nameless female substances, enough to pollute a continent... If someone comes to visit me in my old room he will think I gave birth to a monster and the State Department is trying to hush it up.... Music from I Am an American... An elderly man in the striped pants and cutaway of a diplomat stands on a platform draped with the American flag. A de- cayed, corseted tenor -- bursting out of a Daniel Boone costume -- is singing the Star S pangled Banner, accom- panied by a full orchestra. He sings with a slight lisp.... THE DIPLOMAT (reading from a great scroll of ticker tape that keeps growing and tangling around his feet): "And we categorically deny that any male citizen of the United States of America..." TENOR: "Oh thay can you thee..." His voice breaks and shoots up to a high falsetto. In the control room the Technician mixes a bicar- bonate of soda and belches into his hand: "God damned tenor's a brown artist1" he mutters sourly. "Mikel rumph," the shout ends in a belch. "Cut that swish fart off the air and give him his purple slip. He's through as of right now.... Put in that sex-changed Liz athlete.... She's a fulltime tenor at least.... Costume? How in the fuck should I know? I'm no dress designer swish from the costume department! What's that? The entire costume department occluded as a security risk? What am I, an octopus? Let's see... How about an Indian routine? Pocahontas or Hia- watha?... No, that's not right. Some citizen cracks wise about giving it back to the Indians.... A Civil War uniform, the coat North and the pants South like it show they got together again? She can come on like Buffalo Bill or Paul Revere or that citizen wouldn't give up the shit, I mean the ship, or a G.I. or a Dough- boy or the Unknown Soldier.... That's the best deal. ...Cover her with a monument, that way nobody has to look at her...." The Lesbian, concealed in a paper mache Arc de Triomphe fills her great lungs and looses a tremendous bellow. "Oh say do that Star Spangled Banner yet wave..." A great rent rips the Arc de Triomphe from top to bottom. The Diplomat puts a hand to his fore- head.... The Diplomat: "That any male citizen of the United States has given birth in Interzone or at any other place...." "O'er the land of the FREEEEEEEEEEE..." The Diplomat's mouth is moving but no one can hear him. The Technician clasps his hands over his ears: "Mother of God!" he screams. His plate begins to vibrate like a Jew's harp, suddenly flies out of his mouth.... He snaps at it irritably, misses and covers his mouth with one hand. The Arc de Triomphe falls with a ripping, splinter- ing crash, reveals the Lesbian standing on a pedestal clad only in a leopard-skin jockstrap with enormous falsie basket.... She stands there smiling stupidly and flexing her huge muscles.... The Technician is craw- pleasure to the head.... Ten minutes later you want another shot.... The pleasure of morphine is in the viscera.... You listen down into yourself after a shot. ...But intravenous C is electricity through the brain, activating cocaine pleasure connections.... There is no withdrawal syndrome with C. It is a need of the brain alone -- a need without body and without feeling. Earth- bound ghost need. The craving for C lasts only a few hours as long as the C channels are stimulated. Then you forget it. Eukodol is like a combination of junk and C. Trust the Germans to concoct some really evil shit. Eukodol like morphine is six times stronger than codeine. Heroin six times stronger than morphine. Di- hydro-oxy-heroin should be six times stronger than heroin. Quite possible to develop a drug so habit-form- ing that one shot would cause lifelong addiction.
Habit Note continued: Picking up needle I reach spontaneously for the tie-up cord with my left hand.' This I take as a sign I can hit the one useable vein in my left arm, (The movements of tying up are such that you normally tie up the arm with which you reach for the cord. ) The needle slides in easily on the edge of a callous. I feel around. Suddenly a thin column of blood shoots up into the syringe, for a moment sharp and solid as a red cord. The body knows what veins you can hit and conveys this knowledge in the spontaneous movements you make preparing to take a shot.... Sometimes the needle points like a dowser's wand. Sometime I must wait for the message, But when it comes I always hit blood. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. He hesitated for a full second, then pressed the bulb, watching the liquid rush into the vein as if sucked by the silent thirst of his blood. There was an iridescent, thin coat of blood left in the dropper, and the white paper collar was soaked through with blood like a bandage. He reached over and filled the dropper with water. As he squirted the water out, the shot hit him in the stomach, a soft sweet blow. Look down at my filthy trousers, haven't been changed in months.... The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood.... I am forget- ting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body -- a grey, junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hom- bre Invisible -- the Invisible Man....
Twenty push ups every morning. Use of junk re- moves fat, leaves muscle more or less intact. The addict seems to need less tissue....Would it be possible to isolate the fat-removing molecule of junk?
More and more static at the Drug Store, mutterings of control like a telephone off the hook... Spent all day until 8 P.M. to score for two boxes of Eukodol.... Running out of veins and out of money.
Keep going on the nod. Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.... Fall asleep reading and the words take on code signifi- cance.... Obsessed with codes.... Man contracts a series of diseases which spell out a code message.... Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot.... Junkies have no shame.... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.... The junky's shame disappears with his non- sexual sociability which is also dependent on libido.... The addict regards his body impersonally as an instru- ment to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader. "No use trying to hit there." Dead fish eyes Hick over a ravaged vein. Using a new type sleeping pill called Soneryl.... You don't feel sleepy.... You shift to sleep without transition, fall abruptly into the middle of a dream.... I have been years in a prison camp suffering from mal- nutrition.... The President is a junky but can't take it direct because of his position. So he gets fixed through me.... From time to time we make contact, and I recharge him. These contacts look, to the casual ob- server, like homosexual practices, but the actual ex- citement is not primarily sexual, and the climax is the separation when the recharge is completed. The erect penises are brought into contact -- at least we used that method in the beginning, but contact points wear out like veins. Now I sometimes have to slip my penis under his left eyelid. Of course I can always fix him with an Osmosis Recharge, which corresponds to a skin shot, but that is admitting defeat. An O.R. will put the President in a bad mood for weeks, and might well precipitate an atomic shambles. And the President pays a high price for the Oblique Habit. He has sacrificed all control, and is dependent as an unborn child. The Oblique Addict suffers a whole spectrum of subjective horror, silent protoplasmic frenzy, hideous agony of the bones. Tensions build up, pure energy without emo- tional content finally tears through the body throwing him about like a man in contact with high tension wires. If his charge connection is cut off cold, the Oblique Addict falls into such violent electric convul- sions that his bones shake loose, and he dies with the skeleton straining to climb out of his unendurable flesh and run in a straight line to the nearest cemetery. The relation between an O.A. (Oblique Addict) and his R.C. (Recharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other's company for brief and infrequent intervals -- I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by the recharge process.
Reading the paper.... Something about a triple mur- der in the rue de la Merde, Paris: "An adjusting of scores."...I keep slipping away.... "The police have identified the author... Pepe El Culito... The Little Ass Hole, an affectionate diminutive." Does it really say that?... I try to focus the words... they separate in meaningless mosaic....
LAZARUS GO HOME
Fumbling through faded tape at the pick up frontier, a languid grey area of hiatus miasmic with yawns and gaping goof holes, Lee found out that the young junky standing there in his room at 10 A.M. Was back from two months skin diving in Corsica and off the junk.... "Here to show off his new body," Lee decided with a shudder of morning junk sickness. He knew that he was seeing -- ah yes Miguel thank you -- three months back sitting in the Metropole nodded out over a stale yellow eclair that would poison a cat two hours later, decided that the effort involved in seeing Miguel at all 10 A.M. was enough without the intolerable chore of correcting an error -- ("what is this a fucking farm?") which would also entail current picture of Miguel in much used areas like some great, inconvenient beast of an object on top in the suitcase. "You look marvelous," Lee said, wiping away the more obvious signs of distaste with a sloppy, casual napkin, seeing the grey ooze of junk in Miguel's face, studying patterns of shabbiness as if man and clothes had moved for years through back alleys of time with never a space station to tidy up.... "Besides by the time I could correct the error... Lazarus go home.... Pay The Man and go home.... What I want to see your old borrowed meat for?' "Well it's great to see you off....Do yourself a favor." Miguel was swimming around the room spear- ing fish with his hand.... "When you're down there you never think about horse." "You're better off like this," said Lee, dreamily caress- ing a needle scar on the back of Miguel's hand, follow- ing the whorls and patterns of smooth purple flesh in a slow twisting movement.... Miguel scratched the back of his hand.... He looked out the window.... His body moved in little, gal- vanized jerks as junk channels lit up.... Lee sat there waiting. "One snort never put anybody back on, kid." "I know what I'm doing." "They always know." Miguel took the nail file. Lee closed his eyes: "It's too tiresome." "Uh thanks that was great." Miguel's pants fell to his ankles. He stood there in a misshapen overcoat of Hesh that turned from brown to green and then color- less in the morning light, fell off in globs onto the floor. Lee's eyes moved in the substance of his face... a little, cold, grey Hick.... "Clean it up," he said. "Enough dirt in here now." "Oh uh sure," Miguel fumbled with a dustpan. Lee put the packet of heroin away. Lee lived in a permanent third-day kick, with, of course, certain uh essential intermissions to refuel the fires that burned through his yellow-pink-brown ge- latinous substance and kept off the hovering flesh. In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh.... Long white ten- drils of fungus curled round the naked bones. Mold odors of atrophied testicles quilted his body in a fuzzy grey fog.... During his first severe infection the boiling thermom- eter Hashed a quicksilv
