Naked Lunch

"'I'll fix your wagon good, you unbelieving cock-sucker. I'll close you up tight and dry as a junky's ass-hole. I'll by Allah dry up the Peninsula.'

" 'It's a continent already....'

"Leave what Confucius say stand with Little Audrey and the shaggy dogs. Lao-Tze? They scratch him already...'. And enough of these gooey saints with a look of pathic dismay as if they getting fucked up the ass and try not to pay it any mind. And why should we let some old 59

brokendown ham tell us what wisdom is? 'Three thousand years in show business and I always keep my nose clean....'

"First, every Fact is incarcerate along with the male hustlers and those who desecrate the gods of commerce by playing ball in the streets, and some old white-haired fuck staggers out to give us the benefits of his ripe idiocy. Are we never to be free of this grey-beard loon lurking on every mountain top in Tibet, subject to drag himself out of a hut in the Amazon, waylay one in the Bowery? 'I've been expecting you, my son,' and he make with a silo full of corn. 'Life is a school where every pupil must learn a different lesson. And now I will unlock my Word Hoard....'

" 'I do fear it much.'

" 'Nay, nothing shall stem the rising tide.'

" 'I can't stem him, boys. Sauve qui peut.'

" 'I tell you when I leave the Wise Man I don't even feel like a human. He converting my live orgones into dead bullshit.'

"So I got an exclusive why don't I make with the live word? The word cannot be expressed direct.... It can perhaps be indicated by mosaic of juxtaposition like articles abandoned in a hotel drawer, defined by negatives and absence....

"Think I'll have my stomach tucked.... I may be old, but I'm still desirable." (The Stomach Tuck is surgical intervention to remove stomach fat at the same time making a tuck in the abdominal wall, thus creating a flesh corset, which is, however, subject to break and spurt your horrible old guts across the Boor.... The slim and shapely F.C. models are, of course, the most dangerous. In fact, some extreme models are known as O.N.S.--One Night Stands --in the industry.

Doctor "Doodles" Rindfest states bluntly: "Bed is the most dangerous place for an F.C. man." The F.C. theme song is "Believe Me If All These Endearing Young Charms." An F.C. partner is indeed subject to "fleet from your arms like fairy gifts fading away.") In a white museum room full of sunlight pink nudes sixty feet high. Vast adolescent muttering. Silver guard rail... chasm a thousand feet down into the glittering sunlight. Little: green plots of cabbage and lettuce. Brown youths with adzes spied by the old queen across a sewage canal.

"Oh dear, I wonder if they fertilize with human excrement.... Maybe they'll do it right now." He flips out mother of pearl opera glasses --Aztec mosaic in the sun. Long line of Greek lads march up with alabaster bowls of shit, empty into the limestone marl hole.

Dusty poplars shake across the red brick Plaza de Toros in the afternoon wind. Wooden cubicles around a hot spring... rubble of ruined walls in a grove of cottonwoods... the benches worn smooth as metal by a million masturbating boys.

Greek lads white as marble fuck dog style on the portico of a great golden temple... naked Mugwump twangs a lute.

Walking down by the tracks in his red sweater met Sammy the Dock Keeper's son with two Mexicans.

"Hey, Skinny," he said, "want to get screwed?"

"Well... Yeah."

On a ruined straw mattress the Mexican pulled him up on all fours --Negro boy dance around them beating out the strokes... sun through a knot hole pink spotlights his cock. A waste of raw pink shame to the pastel blue horizon where vast iron mesas crash into the shattered sky, "It's all right." The God screams through you three thousand year rusty load.... 60

Hail of crystal skulls shattered the greenhouse to slivers in the winter moon.... The American woman has left a whiff of poison behind in the dank St. Louis garden party. Pool covered with green slime in a ruined French garden. Huge pathic frog rises slowly from the water on a mud platform playing the clavichord.

A Sollubi rushes into the bar and starts polishing The Saint's shoes with the oil on his nose.... The Saint kicks him petulantly in the mouth. The Sollubi screams, whirls around and shits on the Saint's pants. Then he dashes into the street. A pimp looks after him speculatively.... The Saint calls the manager: "Jesus, Al, what kinda creep joint you running here? My brand new fishskin Dégagées..."

"I'm sorry, Saint. He slipped by me."

(The Sollubi are an untouchable caste in Arabia noted for their abject vileness. De luxe cafes are equipped with Sollubi who rim the guests while they eat --holes in the seating benches being provided for this purpose. Citizens who want to be utterly humiliated and degraded --so many people do, nowadays, hoping to jump the gun --over themselves up for passive homosexual intercourse to an encampment of Sollubis.... Nothing like it, they tell me.... In fact, the Sollubi are subject to become wealthy and arrogant and lose their native vileness. What is origin of untouchable? Perhaps a fallen priest caste. In fact, untouchables perform a priestly function in taking on themselves all human vileness.)

A. J. strolls through the Market in black cape with a vulture perched on one shoulder. He stands by a table of agents.

"This you gotta hear. Boy in Los Angeles fifteen year old. Father decide it is time the boy have his first piece of ass. Boy is lying on the lawn reading comic books, father go out and say: 'Son, here's twenty dollars; I want you to go to a good whore and get a piece of ass off her.'

"So they drive to this plush jump joint, and the father say, 'All right, son. You're on your own. So ring the bell and when the woman come give her the twenty dollars and tell her you want a piece of ass.'

" 'Solid, pop.'

"So about fifteen minutes later the boy comes out: " 'Well, son, did you get a piece of ass?'

" 'Yeah. This gash comes to the door, and I say I want a piece of ass and lay the double sawski on her. We go up to her trap, and she remove the dry goods. So I switch my blade and cut a big hunk off her ass, she raise a beef like I am reduce to pull off one shoe and beat her brains out. Then I hump her for kicks."

Only the laughing bones remain, flesh over the hills and far away with the dawn wind and a train whistle. We are not unaware of the problem, and the needs of our constituents are never out of our mind being their place of residence and who can break a ninety-nine year synapses lease? Another installment in the adventures of Clem Snide the Private Ass Hole: "So I walk in the joint, and this female hustler sit at the bar, and I think, 'Oh God you're poule de luxe already.' I mean it's like I see the gash before. So I don't pay her no mind at first, then I dig she is rubbing her legs together and working her feet up behind her head shoves it down to give herself a douche job with a gadget sticks out of her nose the way a body can't help but notice." Iris --half Chinese and half Negro --addicted to dihydro-oxy-heroin --takes a shot every fifteen minutes to which end she leaves droppers and needles sticking out all over her. The needles rust in her dry flesh, which, here and there, has grown completely over a joint to form a smooth green brown wen. On the table in front of her is a samovar of tea and a twenty-pound hamper of brown sugar. No one has ever seen her eat anything else. It is only just before a shot that she hears 61

what anyone says or talks herself. Then she makes some flat, factual statement relative to her own person.

"My asshole is occluding."

"My cunt got terrible green juices."

Iris is one of Benway's projects. "The human body can run on sugar alone, God damn it.... I am aware that certain of my learned colleagues, who are attempting to belittle my genius work, claim that I put vitamins and proteins into Iris's sugar clandestinely.... I challenge these nameless assholes to crawl up out of their latrines and run a spot analysis on Iris's sugar and her tea. Iris is a wholesome American cunt. I deny categorically that she nourishes herself on semen. And let me take this opportunity to state that I am a reputable scientist, not a charlatan, a lunatic, or a pretended worker of miracles.... I never claimed that Iris could subsist exclusive on photosynthesis.... I did not say she could breathe in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen --I confess I have been tempted to experiment being of course restrained by my medical ethics.... In short, the vile slanders of my creeping opponents will inevitably fall back onto them and come to roost like a homing stool pigeon." 62

ORDINARY MEN AND WOMEN

Luncheon of Nationalist Party on balcony overlooking the Market. Cigars, scotch, polite belches.... The Party Leader strides about in a jellaba smoking a cigar and drinking scotch. He wears expensive English shoes, loud socks, garters, muscular, hairy legs --overall effect of successful gangster in drag.

P.L. (pointing dramatically): "Look out there. What do you see?" LIEUTENANT: "Huh? Why, I see the Market."

P.L.: "No you don't. You see men and women. Ordinary men and women going about their ordinary everyday tasks. Leading their ordinary lives. That's what we need...." A street boy climbs over the balcony rail.

Lieutenant: "No, we do not want to buy any used condoms! Cut!" P.L.: "Wait!... Come in, my boy. Sit down.... Have a cigar.... Have a drink." He paces around the boy like an aroused tom cat.

"What do you think about the French?"

"Huh?"

'The French. The Colonial bastards who is sucking your live corpuscles."

"Look mister. It cost two hundred francs to suck my corpuscle. Haven't lowered my rates since the year of the rindpest when all the tourists died, even the Scandinavians." P.L.: "You see? This is pure uncut boy in the street."

"You sure can pick'em, boss."

"M.I. never misses."

P.L.: "Now look, kid, let's put it this way. The French have dispossessed you of your birthright."

"You mean like Friendly Finance?... They got this toothless Egyptian eunuch does the job. They figure he arouse less antagonism, you dig, he always take down his pants to show you his condition.

'Now I'm just a poor old eunuch trying to keep up my habit. Lady, I'd like to give you an extension on that artificial kidney, I got a job to do is all.... Disconnect her, boys.' He shows his gums in a feeble snarl.... 'Not for nothing am I known as Nellie the Repossessor.'

"So they disconnect my own mother, the sainted old gash, and she swell up and turn black and the whole souk stink of piss and the neighbors beef to the Board of Health and my father say: 'It's the will of Allah. She won't piss any more of my loot down the drain.'

"Sick people disgust me already. When some citizen start telling me about his cancer of the prostate or his rotting septum make with that purulent discharge I tell him: 'You think I am innarested to hear about your horrible old condition? I am not innarested at all.' " P.L.: "All right. Cut... You hate the French, don't you?"

"Mister, I hate everybody. Doctor Benway says it's metabolic, I got this condition of the blood.... Arabs and Americans got it special.... Doctor Benway is concocting this serum." P.L.: "Benway is an infiltrating Western Agent."

L.l: "A rampant French Jew..."

L.2: "A hog-balled, black-assed Communist Jew Nigger.

P.L.: "Shut up, you fool!"

L.2: "Sorry, chief. I am after being stationed in Pigeonhole." P.L.: "Don't go near Benway." (Aside: "I wonder if this will go down. You never know how primitive they are....") "Confidentially he's a black magician." 63

L.l: "He's got this resident djinn."

"Uhuh... Well I got a date with a high-type American client. A real classy fellah." P.L.: "Don't you know it's shameful to peddle your ass to the alien unbelieving pricks?"

"Well that's a point of view. Have fun."

P.L.: "Likewise." Exit boy. "They're hopeless I tell you. Hopeless." L.l. "What's with this serum?"

P.L.: "I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything.... Turn a massacre into a sex orgy....

"Or a joke."

"Precisely. Arty type... No principles..."

AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE (opening a box of Lux): "Why don't it have an electric eye the box flip open when it see me and hand itself to the Automat Handy Man he should put it inna water already.... The Handy Man is outa control since Thursday, he been getting physical with me and I didn't put it in his combination at all.... And the Garbage Disposal Unit snapping at me, and the nasty old Mixmaster keep trying to get up under my dress.... I got the most awful cold, and my intestines is all constipated.... I'm gonna put it in the Handy Man's combination he should administer me a high colonic awready."

SALESMAN (he is something between an aggressive Latah and a timid Sender): "Recollect when I am travelling with K. E., hottest idea man in the gadget industry.

"'Think of it!' he snaps. 'A cream separator in your own kitchen!'

" 'K. E., my brain reels at the thought.'

" 'It's five, maybe ten, yes, maybe twenty years away. ...But it's coming.'

"'I'll wait, K. E. No matter how long it is I'll wait. When the priority numbers are called up yonder I'll be there.'

"It was K. E. put out the Octopus Kit for Massage Parlors, Barber Shops and Turkish Baths, with which you can administer a high colonic, an unethical massage, a shampoo, whilst cutting the client's toenails and removing his blackheads. And the M.D.'s Can Do Kit for busy practitioners will take out your appendix, tuck in a hernia, pull a wisdom tooth, ectomize your piles and circumcise you. Well, K. E. is such an atomic salesman if he runs out of Octopus Kits he is subject, by sheer charge, to sell an M.D. Can Do to a barber shop and some citizen wakes up with his piles cut out....

"

'Jesus, Homer, what kinda creep joint you running here? I been gang fucked.'

"'Well, landsake, Si, I was just aiming to administer our complimentary high colonic free and gratis on Thanksgiving Day. K. E. musta sold me the wrong kit again....' " MALE HUSTLER: "What a boy hasta put up with in this business. Gawd! The propositions I get you wouldn't believe it.... They wanta play Latah, they wanta merge with my protoplasm, they want a replica cutting, they wanta suck my orgones, they wanta take over my past experience and leave old memories that disgust me....

"I am fucking this citizen so I think, 'A straight John at last'; but he comes to a climax and turns himself into some kinda awful crab.... I told him, 'Jack, I don't hafta stand still for such a routine like this.... You can take that business to Walgreen's.' Some people got no class to them. Another horrible old character just sits there and telepathizes and creams in his dry goods. So nasty." 64

The bum boys fall back in utter confusion to the brink of the Soviet network where Cossacks hang partisans to the wild wail of bagpipes and the boys march up Fifth Avenue to be met by Jimmy Walkover with the keys to The Kingdom and no strings attached carry them loose in your pocket.... Why so pale and wan, fair bugger? Smell of dead leeches in a rusty tin can latch onto that live wound, suck out the body and blood and bones of Jeeeeesus, leave him paralyzed from the waist down.

Yield up thy forms, boy, to thy sugar daddy got the exam three years early and know all the answer books fix the World Series.

Slunk traffickers tail a pregnant cow to her labor. The farmer declares a couvade, rolls screaming in bullshit. The veterinarian wrestles with a cow skeleton. The traffickers machinegun each other, dodging through the machinery and silos, storage bins, haylofts and mangers of a vast red barn. The calf is born. The forces of death melt in morning. Farm boy kneels reverently --his throat pulses in the rising sun.

Junkies sitting on the courthouse steps, waiting on The Man. Red Necks in black stetsons and faded Levis tie a Nigra boy to an old iron lamppost and cover him with burning gasoline.... The junkies rush over and draw the flesh smoke deep into their aching lungs.... They really got relief.... THE COUNTY CLERK: "So there I was sitting in front of Jed's store over in Cunt Lick my peter standing up straight as a jack pine under my Levis just apulsin' in the sun.... Weell, old Doc Scranton walks by, a good old boy too, there's not a finer man in this valley than Doc Scranton. He's got a prolapsed asshole and when he wants to get screwed he'll pass you his ass on three feet of intes-tine.... If he's a mind to it he can drop out a piece of gut reaches from his office clear over to Roy's Beer Place, and it go feelin' around lookin' for a peter, just afeelin' around like a blind worm.... So old Doc Scranton sees my peter and he stops like a pointin' dog and he says to me, 'Luke, I can take your pulse from here.' "

Browbeck and Young Seward fight with hog castrators through barns and cages and yiping kennels... whinnying horses bare great yellow teeth, cows bellow, dogs howl, copulating cats scream like babies, a pen of huge hogs, spines bristling, give a great Bronx cheer. Browbeck the Unsteady has fallen to the sword of Young Seward, clutches at blue intestines spurting from an eight-inch gash. Young Seward cuts off Browbeck's cock and holds it pulsing in the smoky rose sunrise.... Browbeck screams... subway brakes spit ozone....

"Stand back, folks.... Stand back."

"They say somebody pushed him."

"He was weaving around unsteady like he couldn't see good."

"Too much smoke in the eyes, I guess."

Mary the Lesbian Governess has slipped to the pub floor on a bloody kotex.... A threehundred-pound fag tramples her to death with pathic whinnies.... He sings in hideous falsetto:

He is trampling out the vintage cohere the grapes of wrath are stored, He has loosed the fatal lightning of his terrible swift sword.

He pulls a gilded wooden sword and chops the air. His corset flies off and whistles into the dart board.

The old bullfighter's sword buckles on bone and whistles into the heart of the Espontaneo, pins his unconsummate valor to the stands.

65

"So this elegant faggot comes to New York from Cunt Lick, Texas, and he is the most piss elegant fag of them all. He is taken up by old women of the type batten on young fags, toothless old predators too weak and too slow to run down other prey. Old moth-eaten tigress shit sure turn into a fag eater.... So this citizen, being an arty and crafty fag, begins making costume jewelry and jewelry sets. Every rich old gash in Greater New York wants he should do her sets, and he is making money, 21, El Morocco, Stork, but no time for sex, and all the time worrying about his rep..., He begins playing the horses, supposed to be something manly about gambling God knows why, and he figures it will build him up to be seen at the track. Not many fags play the horses, and those that play lose more than the others, they are lousy gamblers plunge in a losing streak and hedge when they win... which being the pattern of their lives.... Now every child knows there is one law of gambling: winning and losing come in streaks. Plunge when you win, fold when you lose. (I once knew a fag dip into the till --not the whole two thousand at once on the nose win or Sing Sing. Not our Gertie... Oh no a deuce at a time...)

"So he loses and loses and lose some more. One day he is about to put a rock in a set when the obvious occur. 'Of course, I'll replace it later.' Famous last words. So all that winter, one after the other, the diamonds, emeralds, pearls, rubies and star sapphires of the haut monde go in hock and replaced by queer replicas....

"So the opening night of the Met this old hag appear as she thinks resplendent in her diamond tiara. So this other old whore approach and say, 'Oh, Miggles, you're so smart... to leave the real ones at home.... I mean we're simply mad to go around tempting fate.'

" 'You're mistaken, my dear. These are real.'

" 'Oh but Miggles dahling, they're not.... I mean ask your jeweler.... Well just ask anybody. Haaaaaa.'

"So a Sabbath is hastily called. (Lucy Bradshinkel, look to thy emeralds. ) All these old witches examining their rocks like a citizen find leprosy on himself.

" 'My chicken blood ruby!'

" 'My black oopalls!' Old bitch marry so many times so many gooks and spics she don't know her accent from her ass....

" 'My stah sahphire!' shriek a poule de luxe. 'Oh it's all so awfull'

" 'I mean they are strictly from Woolworth's....'