Naked Lunch

" 'There's only one thing to do. I'm going to call the police,' says a strong-minded, outspoken old thing; and she clump across the floor on her low heels and calls the fuzz."

"Well, the faggot draws a deuce; and in the box he meets this cat who is some species of cheap hustler, and love sets in or at least a facsimile thereof convince the parties inna first and second parts. As continuity would have it, they are sprung at the same time more or less and take up residence in a flat on the Lower East Side. ...And cook in and both are working legit modest jobs. ...So Brad and Jim know happiness for the first time.

"Enter the powers of evil.... Lucy Bradshinkel has come to say all is forgiven She has faith in Brad and wants to set him up in a studio. Of course, he will have to move to the East Sixties.... 'This place is impossible, dahling; and your friend...' And a safe mob wants Jim back to drive a car. This is a step up, you dig? Offer from citizens hardly see him before.

"Will Jim go back to crime? Will Brad succumb to the blandishments of an aging vampire, a ravening Maw?... Needless to say, the forces of evil are routed and exit with ominous snarls and mutterings.

" 'The Boss isn't going to like this.'

" 'I don't know why I ever wasted my time with you, you cheap, vulgar little fairy.'

66

"The boys stand at the tenement window, their arms around each other, looking at the Brooklyn Bridge. A warm spring wind ruffles Jim's black curls and the fine hennaed hair of Brad.

" 'Well, Brad, what's for supper?'

" 'You just go in the other room and wait.' Playfully he shoos Jim out of the kitchen, and puts on his apron.

"Dinner is Lucy Bradshinkel's cunt saignant cooked in kotex papillon. The boys eat happily looking into each other's eyes. Blood runs down their chins." Let the dawn blue as a flame cross the city.... The backyards are clean of fruit, and the ash pits give up their hooded dead....

"Could you show me the way to Tipperary, lady?" Over the hills and far away to Blue Grass.... Across the bone meal of lawn to the frozen pond where suspended goldfish wait for the spring Squaw Man.

The screaming skull rolls up the back stairs to bite off the cock of erring husband taking dour advantage of his wife's earache to do that which is inconvenient. The young landlubber dons a southwester, beats his wife to death in the shower....

BENWAY: "Don't take it so hard, kid.... 'Jeder macht eine kleine Dummheit.'" (Everyone makes a little dumbness. )

SCHAFER: "I tell you I can't escape a feeling... well, of evil about this." BENWAY: "Balderdash, my boy... We're scientists. ...Pure scientists. Disinterested research and damned be him who cries 'Hold, too much !' Such people are no better than party poops." SCHAFER: "Yes, yes, of course... and yet... I can't get that stench out of my lungs...." BENWAY (irritably): "None of us can.... Never smelled anything remotely like it.... Where was I? Oh yes, what would be result of administering curare plus iron lung during acute mania? Possibly the subject, unable to discharge his tensions in motor activity, would succumb on the spot like a jungle rat. Interesting cause of death, what?"

Schafer is not listening. "You know," he says impulsively, "I think I'll go back to plain oldfashioned surgery. The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place...."

BENWAY: "Why not one all-purpose blob? Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard.

"This ass talk had a sort of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell.

"This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called 'The Better 'Ole' that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, 'Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?'

"'Nah! I had to go relieve myself.'

"After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

67

"Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy incurving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: 'It's you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.'

"After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontaneous --(did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) --except for the eyes you dig. That's one thing the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye on the end of a stalk.

"That's the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there's always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out globs of that un-D.T. to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate cancerous life-form, reproducing a hideous random image. Some would be entirely made of penis-like erectile tissue, others viscera barely covered over with skin, clusters of 3 and 4 eyes together, criss-cross of mouth and assholes, human parts shaken around and poured out any way they fell.

"The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to the complete parasitism of a virus.

"(It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another --the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.)

"Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapses. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existences as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.

"In Timbuctu I once saw an Arab boy who could play a flute with his ass, and the fairies told me he was really an individual in bed. He could play a tune up and down the organ hitting the most erogenously sensitive spots, which are different on everyone, of course. Every lover had his special theme song which was perfect for him and rose to his climax. The boy was a great artist when it 68

came to improving new combines and special climaxes, some of them notes in the unknown, tie-ups of seeming discords that would suddenly break through each other and crash together with a stunning, hot sweet impact.

"Fats" Terminal has organized a purple-assed baboon stick from motorcycles. The Huntsmen have gathered for the Hunt Breakfast in The Swarm Bar, a hang-out for elegant pansies. The Huntsmen strut about with imbecile narcissism in black leather jackets and studded belts, flexing their muscles for the fags to feel. They all wear enormous falsie baskets. Every now and then one of them throws a fag to the floor and pisses on him.

They are drinking Victory Punch, compounded of paregoric, Spanish Fly, heavy black rum, Napoleon brandy and canned heat. The punch is served from a great, hollow, gold baboon, crouched in snarling terror, snapping at a spear in his side. You twist the baboon's balls and punch runs out his cock. From time to time hot hors-d'oeuvres pop out the baboon's ass with a loud farting noise. When this happens the Huntsmen roar with bestial laughter, and the fags shriek and twitch. Master of the Hunt is Captain Everhard, who was drummed out of the Queen's 69th for palming a jockstrap in a game of strip poker. Motorcycles careening, jumping, overturning. Spitting, shrieking, shitting baboons fighting hand to hand with the Huntsmen. Riderless cycles scrabbling about in the dust like crippled insects, attacking baboon and Huntsman.... The Party Leader rides in triumph through yiping crowds. A dignified old man shits at sight of him and tries to sacrifice himself under the wheels of the car.

PARTY LEADER: "Don't sacrifice your old dried up person under the wheels of my brand new Buick Roadmaster Convertible with white-walled tires, hydraulic windows and all the trimmings. It's a chip Arab trick --look to thy accent, Ivan --save it for fertilizer.... We refer you to the conservation department to consummate your swell purpose...." The washing boards are down, and the sheets are sent to the Laundromat to lose those guilty stains --Emmanuel prophesies a Second Coming....

There's a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine.

The junky sits with needle poised to the message of blood, and the con man palpates the mark with fingers of rotten ectoplasm....

Dr. Berger's Mental Health Hour.... Fadeout.

TECHNICIAN: "Now listen, I'll say it again, and I'll say it slow. 'Yes.'" He nods. "And make with the smile. . The smile." He shows his false teeth in hideous parody of a toothpaste ad. "'We like apple pie, and we like each other. It's just as simple as that,' --and make it sound simple, country simple.... Look bovine, whyncha? You want the switchboard again? Or the pail?" SUBJECT --Cured Criminal Psychopath --"No!... No! ...What's this bovine?" TECHNICIAN: "Look like a cow."

SUBJECT --with cow's head --"Moooo Moooo."

TECHNICIAN (starting back): "Too much!! No! Just look square, you dig, like a nice popcorn John...."

SUBJECT: "A mark?"

TECHNICIAN: "Well, not exactly a mark. Not enough larceny in this citizen. He is after light concussion....You know the type. Telepathic sender and receiver excised. The Service Man Look... Action, camera."

SUBJECT: "Yes, we like apple pie." His stomach rumbles loud and long. Streamers of saliva hang off his chin....

69

Dr. Berger looks up from some notes. He look like Jewish owl with black glasses, the light hurt his eyes: "I think he is an unsuitable subject.... See he reports to Disposal." TECHNICIAN: "Well, we could cut that rumble out of the sound track, stick a drain in his mouth and..."

DR. BERGER: "No... He's unsuitable." He looks at the subject with distaste as if he commit. some terrible faux-pas like look for crabs in Mrs. Worldly's drawing room. TECHNICIAN (resigned and exasperated): "Bring in the cured swish." The cured homosexual is brought in.... He walks through invisible contours of hot metal. He sits in front of the camera and starts arranging his body in a countrified sprawl. Muscles move into place like autonomous parts of a severed insect. Blank stupidity blurs and softens his face: "Yes," he nods and smiles, "we like apple pie and we like each other. It's just as simple as that." He nods and smiles and nods and smiles and –

"Cut!..." screams the Technician. The cured homosexual is led out nodding and smiling.

"Play it back."

The Artistic Adviser shakes his head: "It lacks something. To be specific, it lacks health." BERGER (leaps to his feet): "Preposterous! It's health incarnate!..." ARTISTIC ADVISER (primly): "Well if you have any-thing to enlighten me on this subject I'll be very glad to hear it, Doctor Berger.... If you with your brilliant mind can carry the project alone, I don't know why you need an Art Adviser at all." He exits with hand on hip singing softly: "I'll be around when you're gone."

TECHNICIAN: "Send in the cured writer.... He's got what? Buddhism?... Oh, he can't talk. Say so at first, whyncha?" He turns to Berger: "The writer can't talk. ...Overliberated, you might say. Of course we can dub him...."

BERGER (sharply): "No, that wouldn't do at all.... Send in someone else." TECHNICIAN: "Those two was my white-haired boys. I put in a hundred hours overtime on those kids for which I am not yet compensate...."

BERGER: "Apply triplicate.... Form 6090."

TECHNICIAN: "You telling me how to apply already? Now look, Doc, you say something once. 'To speak of a healthy homosexual it's like how can a citizen be perfectly healthy with terminal cirrhosis.' Remember?"

BERGER: "Oh yes. Very well put, of course," he snarls viciously. "I don't pretend to be a writer." He spits the word out with such ugly hate that the Technician reels back appalled.... TECHNICIAN (aside): "I can't bear the smell of him. Like old rotten replica cultures.... Like the farts of a maneating plant.... Like Schafer's hurumph" (parodies academic manner) "Strange Serpent... What I'm getting at, Doc, is how can you expect a body to be healthy with its brains washed out?... Or put it another way. Can a subject be healthy in abstentia by proxy already?" BERGER (leaps up): "I got the health!... All the health! Enough health for the whole world, the whole fuckin world! t I cure everybody!"

The Technician looks at him sourly. He mixes a bicarbonate of soda and drinks it and belches into his hand. "Twenty years I've been a martyr to dyspepsia." Lovable Lu your brainwashed poppa say: "I'm strictly for fish, and I luuuuuve it.... Confidentially, girls, I use Steely Dan's Yokohama, wouldn't you? Danny Boy never lets you down. Besides it's more hygienic that way and avoids all kinda awful contacts leave a man paralyzed from the waist down. Women have poison juices....

"So I told him, I said: 'Doctor Berger, don't think you can pass your tired old brainwashed belles on me. I'm the oldest faggot in the Upper Baboon's Asshole....'" 70

Switch envelopes in clip clap joint where fraudulent girls put the B on you in favor of the House 666 and there is no health in them clap broads rotten to the apple corer of my unconsummate cock. Who shot Cock Robin?... The sparrow falls to my trustful Webley, and a drop of blood gathers at his beak....

Lord Jim has turned bright yellow in the woe withered moon of morning like white smoke against the blue stuff, and shirts whip in a cold spring wind on limestone cliffs across the river, Mary, and the dawn is broken in two pieces like Dillinger on the lamster way to the Biograph. Smell of neon and atrophied gangsters, and the criminal manqué nerves himself to crack a pay toilet sniffing ammonia in a bucket.... "A caper," he says. "I'll pull this capon I mean caper." PARTY LEADER (mixing another scotch): "The next riot goes off like a football play. We have imported a thousand bone fed, blue ribbon Latahs from Indochina. ...All we need is one riot leader for the whole unit." His eyes sweep the table.

LIEUTENANT: "But, chief, can't we get them started and they imitate each other like a chained reaction?" The Diseuse undulate through the Market: "What's a Latah do when he's alone?'

P.L.: "That a technical point. We'll have to consult Benway. Personally, I think someone should follow through on the whole operation."

"I do not know," he said for lack of the requisite points and ratings to secure the appointment.

"They have no feelings," said Doctor Benway, slashing his patient to shreds. "Just reflexes... I urge distraction. '

"The age of consent is when they learn to talk."

"May all your troubles be little ones as one child molester say to the other."

"It's really ominous, my dear, when they start trying on your clothes and give you those doppelganger kicks...."

Frantic queen trying to claw sport jacket off departing boy.

"My two hundred dollar cashmere jacket," she screeches....

"So he has an affair with this Latah, he wants to dominate someone complete the silly old thing.... The Latah imitates all his expressions and mannerisms and simply sucks all the persona right out of him like a sinister ventriloquist's dummy.... 'You've taught me everything you are.... I need a new amigo.' And poor Bubu can't answer for himself, having no self left." JUNKY: "So there we are in this no-horse town strictly from cough syrup." PROFESSOR: "Coprophilia... gentlemen... might be termed the hurumph... redundant vice...."

"Twenty years an artist in the blue movies and I never sink so low as fake an orgasm."

"No good junky cunt hang up her unborn child.... Women are no good, kid."

"I mean this dead level conscious sex,... Might as well take your old clothes to the Laundromat...."

"And right in the heat of passion he says, 'Do you have an extra shoetree?' "

"She tell me how forty Arabs drag her into a mosque and rape her presumably in sequence.... Though they're bad to push --all right, end of the line, Ali. Really, my pets, most distasteful routine I ever listen to. I was after being raped myself by a pride of rampant bores." A group of sour Nationalists sits in front of the Sargasso sneering at the queens and jabbering in Arabic.... Clem and Jody sweep in dressed like The Capitalist in a communist mural. CLEM: "We have come to feed on your backwardness."

JODY: "In the words of the Immortal Bard, to batten on these Moors." NATIONALIST: "Swine! Filth! Son of dogs! Don't you realize my people are hungry?" 71

CLEM: "That's the way I like to see them."

The Nationalist drops dead, poisoned by hate.... Dr. Benway rushes up: "Stand back everybody, give me air." He takes a blood sample. "Well, that's all I can do. When you gotta go you gotta go."

The traveling queer Christmas tree burns bright on the rubbish heaps of home where boys jack off in the school toilet --how many young spasms on that old oaken seat worn smooth as gold.... Sleep long in the valley of the Red River where cobwebs hang black windows and boy bones.... Two Negro fags shriek at each other.

FAG 1: "Shut up, you cheap granuloma gash.... You known as Loathsome Lu in the trade." DISEUSE: "The girl with the innaresting groin."

FAG 2: "Meow. Meow." He slips on leopard skin and iron claws.... FAG 1: "Oh oh. A Society Woman." He flees screaming through the Market, pursued by the grunting, growling transvestite....

Clem trips a spastic cripple and takes his crutches.... He does a hideous parody twitching and drooling....

Riot noises in the distance --a thousand hysterical Pomeranians. Shop shutters slam like guillotines. Drinks and trays hang in the air as the patrons are whisked inside by the suction of panic.

CHORUS OF FAGS: "We'll all be raped. I know it, I know it." They rush into a drugstore and buy a case of KY.

PARTY LEADER (holding up his hand dramatically): "The voice of the People." Pearson the Money Changeling comes acropping the short grass seized by the extortionate commandant of Karma, hiding in a vacant lot with the garter snakes, to be sniffed out by the scrutable dog....

The Market is empty except for an old drunkard of indeterminate nationality passed out with his head in a pissoir. The rioters erupt into the Market yiping and screaming "Death to the French" and tear the drunkard to pieces.

SALVADOR HASSAN (squirming at a keyhole): "Just look at those expressions, the whole beautiful protoplasmic being all exactly alike." He dances the Liquefactionist Jig. Whimpering queen falls to the floor in an orgasm. "Oh God it's too exciting. Like a million hot throbbing cocks."

BENWAY: "Like to run a blood test on those boys."

A portentously inconspicuous man, grey beard and grey face and shabby brown jellaba, sings in slight unplaceable accent without opening his lips:

"Oh you dolls, you great big beautiful dolls."

Squads of police with thin lips, big noses and cold grey eyes move into the Market from every entrance street. They club and kick the rioters with cold, methodical brutality. The rioters have been carted away in trucks. The shutters go up and the citizens of Interzone step out into the square littered with teeth and sandals and slippery with blood. The sea chest of the dead man is in the Embassy, and the vice consul breaks the news to mother.

There is no... Morning... Daybreak... n'existe plus.... If I knew I'd be glad to tell you. Either way is a bad move to the East Wing.... He is gone through an invisible door.... Not here... You can look any place.... No good... No bueno... Hustling myself. ...C'lom Fliday. 72

(Note: Old time, veteran Schmeckers, faces beaten by grey junk weather, will remember.... In 1920s a lot of Chinese pushers around found The West so unreliable, dishonest and wrong, they all packed in, so when an Occidental junky came to score, they say: "No glot.... C'lom Fliday....") 73

ISLAM INCORPORATED AND THE

PARTIES OF INTERZONE

I was working for an outfit known as Islam Inc., financed by A. J., the notorious Merchant of Sex, who scandalized international society when he appeared at the Duc de Ventre's ball as a walking penis covered by a huge condom emblazoned with the A. J. motto "They Shall Not Pass."

"Rather bad taste, old boy," said the Duke.

To which A. J. replied: "Up yours with Interzone K.Y." The reference is to the K.Y. scandal which was still in a larval state at that time. A. J.'s repartee often refers to future events. He is a master of the delayed squelch.

Salvador Hassan O'Leary, the After Birth Tycoon, is also involved. That is, one of his subsidiary companies has made unspecified contributions, and one of his subsidiary personalities is attached to the organization in an advisory capacity without in any way committing himself to, or associating himself with, the policies, actions or objectives of Islam Inc. Mention should also be made of Clem and Jody, the Ergot Brothers, who decimated the Republic of Hassan with poison wheat, Autopsy Ahmed, and Hepatitis Hal, the fruit and vegetable broker.

A rout of Mullahs and Muftis and Husseins and Caids and Glaouis and Sheiks and Sultans and Holy Men and representatives of every conceivable Arab party make up the rank and file and attend the actual meetings from which the higher ups prudently abstain. Though the delegates are carefully searched at the door, these gatherings invariably culminate in riots. Speakers are often doused with gasoline and burned to death, or some uncouth desert Sheik opens up on his opponents with a machine gun he had concealed in the belly of a pet sheep. Nationalist martyrs with grenades up the ass mingle with the assembled conferents and suddenly explode, occasioning heavy casualties.... And there was the occasion when President Ra threw the British Prime Minister to the ground and forcibly sodomized him, the spectacle being televised to the entire Arab World. Wild yipes of joy were heard in Stockholm. Interzone has an ordinance forbidding a meeting of Islam Inc. within five miles of the city limits.

A. J.--he is actually of obscure Near East extraction --had at one time come on like an English gentleman. His English accent waned with the British Empire, and after World War II he became an American by Act of Congress. A. J. is an agent like me, but for whom or for what no one has ever been able to discover. It is rumored that he represents a trust of giant insects from another galaxy.... I believe he is on the Factualist side (which I also represent); of course he could be a Liquefactign Agent (the Liquefaction program involves the eventual merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic absorption). You can never be sure of anyone in the industry. A. J.'s cover story? An international playboy and harmless practical joker. It was A. J. who put the piranha fish in Lady Sutton-Smith's swimming pool, and dosed the punch with a mixture of Yage, Hashish and Yohimbine during a Fourth of July reception at the U.S. Embassy, precipitating an orgy. Ten prominent citizens --American, of course --subsequently died of shame. Dying of shame is an accomplishment peculiar to Kwakiutl Indians and Americans --others simply say " Zut alors" or

" Son cosas de la vida" or "Allah fucked me, the All Powerful...." And when the Cincinnati Anti-Fluoride Society met to toast their victory in pure spring water, all their teeth dropped out on the spot.

"And I say unto you, brothers and sisters of the Anti-Fluoride movement, we have this day struck such a blow for purity as will never call a retreat.... Out, I say, with the filthy foreign fluorides!

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We will sweep this fair land sweet and clean as a young boy's tensed flank. ...I will now lead you in our theme song The Old Oaken Bucket."

A well head is lighted by fluorescent lights that play over it in hideous juke-box colors. The AntiFluorides file past the well singing as each dips up a drink from the oaken bucket....

"The old oaken bucket, the gold oaken bucket

The glublthulunnubbeth..."

A. J. had tampered with the water, inserting a South American vine that turns the gums to mush. (I hear about this vine from an old German prospector who is dying of uremia in Pasto, Columbia. Supposed to grow in the Putumayo area. Never located any. Didn't try very hard.... The same citizen tells me about a bug like a big grasshopper known as the Xiucutil: "Such a powerful aphrodisiac if one flies on you and you can't get a woman right away you will die. I have seen the Indians running around pulling themselves off from the contact with this animal." Unfortunately I never score for a Xiucutil....)

On opening night of the New York Metropolitan, A. J., protected by bug repellent, released a swarm of Xiucutils.

Mrs. Vanderbligh swatting at a Xiucutil: "Oh!... Oh!...OOOOOOOOOOOH!1!" Screams, breaking glass, ripping cloth. A rising crescendo of grunts and squeals and moans and whimpers and gasps.... Reek of semen and cunts and sweat and the musty odor of penetrated rectums,... Diamonds and fur pieces, evening dresses, orchids, suits and underwear litter the floor covered by a writhing, frenzied, heaving mass of naked bodies. A. J. once reserved a table a year in advance Chez Robert where a huge, icy gourmet broods over the greatest cuisine in the world. So baneful and derogatory is his gaze that many a client, under that withering blast, has rolled on the floor and pissed all over himself in convulsive attempts to ingratiate.

So A. J. arrives with six Bolivian Indians who chew coca leaves between courses. And when Robert, in all his gourmet majesty, bears down on the table, A. J. looks up and yells: "Hey, Boy!

Bring me some ketchup."

(Alternative: A. J. whips out a bottle of ketchup and douses the haute cuisine. ) Thirty gourmets stop chewing at once. You could have heard a s oufflé drop. As for Robert, he lets out a bellow of rage like a wounded elephant, runs to the kitchen and arms himself with a meat cleaver.... The Sommelier snarls hideously, his face turning a strange iridescent purple.... He breaks off a bottle of Brut Champagne... '26.... Pierre, the Head Waiter, snatches up a boning knife. All three chase A. J. through the restaurant with mangled inhuman screams of rage.... Tables overturn, vintage wines and matchless food crash to the floor.... Cries of "Lynch him!" ring through the air. An elderly gourmet with the insane bloodshot eyes of a mandril, is fashioning a hangman's knot with a red velvet curtain cord.... Seeing himself cornered and in imminent danger of dismemberment at least, A.J. plays his trump card.... He throws back his head and lets out a hog call; and a hundred famished hogs he had stationed nearby rush into the restaurant, slopping the haute cuisine. Like a great tree Robert falls to the floor in a stroke where he is eaten by the hogs: "Poor bastards don't know enough to appreciate him," says A. J.

Robert's brother Paul emerges from retirement in a local nut house and takes over the restaurant to dispense something he calls the "Transcendental Cuisine." ...Imperceptibly the quality of the food declines until he is serving literal garbage, the clients being too intimidated by the reputation of Chez Robert to protest.

75

Sample Menu:

The Clear Camel Piss Soup with boiled Earth Worms

The Filet of Sun-Ripened Sting Ray

basted with Eau de Cologne and garnished with nettles

The After-Birth Supreme de Boeuf,

cooked in drained crank case oil,

served with a piquant sauce of rotten egg yolks

and crushed bed bugs

The Limburger Cheese sugar cured in diabetic urine

doused in Canned Heat Flamboyant....

So the clients are quietly dying of botulism.... Then A. J. returns with an entourage of Arab refugees from the Middle East. He takes one mouthful and screams:

"Garbage God damn it. Cook this wise citizen in his own swill!" And so the legend of A. J. the laughable, lovable eccentric grew and grew.... Fadeout to Venice....Gondoliers singing and pathic cries swell up from San Marco and Harry's. Charming old Venetian anecdote about this bridge, it seems some Venetian sailors take a trip around the world and all turn into fruits they fuck the cabin boy already, so when they get back to Venice it is necessary women walk over this bridge with their lungs hanging out to arouse the desires of these dubious citizens. So get a battalion of shock troops up to San Marco on the double.

"Girls, this is O.A.O., Operation All Out. If your tits won't stop them bring up your cunts and confound these faggots."

"Oh Gertie it's true. It's all true. They've got a horrid gash instead of a thrilling thing."

"I can't face it."

"Enough to turn a body to stone."

Paul spoke wiser than he know being a really evil old shit when he talk about men lying with men doing that which is inconvenient. Inconvenient is the word. So who want to trip over a cock on the way to a cunt, and when a citizen get the yen to hump a gash, some evil stranger rush in and do that which is inconvenient to his ass.

A. J. rush across San Marco slashing at pigeons with a cutlass: "Bastards! Sons of bitches!" he screams.... He staggers aboard his barge, a monstrous construction in gilt and pink and blue with sails of purple velvet. He is dressed in a preposterous naval uniform covered with braid and ribbons and medals, dirty and torn, the coat buttoned in the wrong holes.... A. J. walks to a huge reproduction of a Greek urn topped by a gold statue of a boy with an erection. He twists the boy's balls and a jet of champagne spurts into his mouth. He wipes his mouth and looks around.

"Where are my Nubians, God damn it?" he yells.

His secretary looks up from a comic book: "Juicing. ...Chasing cunt."

"Goldbricking cocksuckers. Where's a man without his Nubians?"

"Take a gondola whyncha?'

"A gondola?" A. J. screams. "I put out for this cocksucker I should ride in a gondola already? Reef the mainsail and ship the oars, Mr. Hyslop.... I'm gonna make with the auxiliary." Mr. Hyslop 76

shrugs resignedly. With one finger he begins punching a switchboard.... The sails drop, the oars draw into the hull.

"And turn on the perfume whyncha? The canal stinks up a breeze."

"Gardenia? Sandlewood?'

"Naw. Ambrosia." Mr. Hyslop presses another button and a thick cloud of perfume settles over the barge. A. J. is seized with a fit of coughing....

"Make with the fans" he yells. "I'm suffocatin'!" Mr. Hyslop is coughing into a handkerchief. He presses a button. Fans whir and thin out the ambrosia. A. J. in-stalls himself at the rudder on a raised dais. "Contact!" The barge begins to vibrate. "Avanti, God damn it!" A. J. yells and the barge takes off across the canal at a tremendous speed overturning gondolas full of tourists, missing the motoscafi by inches, veering from one side of the canal to the other (the wake washes over the sidewalks drenching passersby) shattering a fleet of moored gondolas, and finally piles up against a pier, spins out into the middle of the canal.... A column of water spurts six feet in the air from a hole in the hull.

"Man the pumps, Mr. Hyslop. She's shipping water." The barge gives a sudden lurch throwing A. J. into the canal.

"Abandon ship, God damn it! Every man for himself!" Fadeout to Mambo music. The inauguration of Escuela Amigo, a school for delinquent boys of Latin American origin, endowed by A. J., Faculty Boys and press attending. A. J. staggers out onto a platform draped with American flags.

"In the immortal words of Father Flanagan there is no such thing as a bad boy.... Where's the statuary, God damn it?"

TECHNICIAN: "You want it now?"

A. J.: "What you think I'm doing here Furthucrisakes? I should unveil the son of a bitch in abstentia?"

TECHNICIAN: "All right... All right. Coming right up." The statue is towed out by a Graham Hymie tractor and placed in front of the platform. A. J. presses a button. Turbines start under the platform, rising to a deafening whine. Wind blows the red velvet drapes off the statue. They tangle around the Faculty members in the front row.... Clouds of dust and debris whip through the spectators. The sirens slowly subside. The Faculty disengages itself from the drapes.... Everyone is looking at the statue in breathless silence.

FATHER GONZALEZ: "Mother of God!"

THE MAN FROM Time: "I don't believe it." Daily News: "It's nothing but fruity."

Chorus of whistles from the boys.

A monumental creation in shiny pink stone stands revealed as the dust settles. A naked boy is bending over a sleeping comrade with evident intention to waken him with a flute. One hand is holding the flute, the other reaching for a piece of cloth draped over the sleeper's middle. The cloth bulges suggestively. Both boys wear a flower behind the ear, identical expressions, dreamy and brutal, depraved and innocent. This creations tops a limestone pyramid on which is inscribed in letters of porcelain mosaic --pink and blue and gold --the school motto: " With it and for it." A. J. lurches forward and breaks a champagne bottle across the boy's taut buttocks.

"And remember, boys, that's where champagne comes from." 77

Manhattan Serenade. A. J. and entourage start into New York night club. A. J. is leading a purple-assed baboon on a gold chain. A. J. is dressed in checked linen plus fours with a cashmere jacket.

MANAGER: " Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What's that?'

A.J.: "It's an Illyrian poodle. Choicest beast a man can latch onto. It'll raise the tone of your trap."

MANAGER: "I suspect it to be a purple-assed baboon and it stands outside." STOOGE: "Don't you know who this is? It's A. J., last of the big time spenders." MANAGER: "Leave him take his purple-assed bastard and big time spend some place else." A. J. stops in front of another club and looks in. "Elegant fags and old cunts, God damn it! We come to the right place. Avanti, ragazzi !"

He drives a gold stake into the floor and pickets the baboon. He begins talking in elegant tones, his stooges filling in.

"Fantastic!"

"Monstrous!"

"Utter heaven!"

A. J. puts a long cigarette holder in his mouth. The holder is made of some obscenely flexible material. It swings and undulates as if endowed with loathsome reptilian life. A. J.: "So there I was flat on my stomach at thirty thousand feet." Several nearby fags raise their heads like animals scenting danger. A. J. leaps to his feet with an inarticulate snarl.

"You purple-assed cocksucker!" he screams. "I'll teach you to shit on the floor!" He pulls a whip from his umbrella and cuts the baboon across the ass. The baboon screams and tears loose the stake. He leaps on the next table and climbs up an old woman who dies of heart failure on the spot. A. J.: "Sorry, lady. Discipline you know."

In a frenzy he whips the baboon from one end of the bar to the other. The baboon, screaming and snarling and shitting with terror, climbs over the clients, runs up and down on top of the bar, swings from drapes and chandeliers....

A. J.: "You'll straighten up and shit right or you won't be inna condition to shit one way or the other."

STOOGE: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself upsettin' A. J. after all he's done for you." A. J.: "Ingrates! Every one of them ingrates! Take it from an old queen." Of course no one believes this cover story. A. J. claims to be an "independent," which is to say:

"Mind your own business." There are no independents any more. ... The Zone swarms with every variety of dupe but there are no neutrals there. A neutral at A. J.'s level is of course unthinkable.... Hassan is a notorious Liquefactionist and suspect to be a secret Sender --"Shucks, boys," he says with a disarming grin, "I'm just a blooming old cancer and I gotta proliferate." He picks up a Texas accent associating with Dry Hole Dutton, the Dallas wildcatter, and he wears cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat at all times indoors and out.... His eyes are invisible behind black glasses, his face smooth and blank as wax above a well-cut suit made entirely from immature high denomination bank notes. (Bank notes are in fact currency, but they must mature before they can be negotiated.... Bank notes run as high as one million clams a note.)

"They keep hatching out all over me," he says shyly. ..."It's like, gee, I don't know how to say it. It's like I was a Mummy scorpion carrying those little baby notes around on my warm body and feeling them grow.... Gosh I hope I don't bore you with all this." 78

Salvador, known as Sally to his friends --he always keeps a few "friends" around and pays them by the hour --got cured in the slunk business in World War II. (To get cured means to get rich. Expression used by Texas oil men.) The Pure Food and Drug Department have his picture in their files, a heavy faced man with an embalmed look as if paraffin had been injected under the skin which is smooth, shiny and poreless. One eye is dead grey color, round as a marble, with flaws and opaque spots. The other is black and shiny, an old undreaming insect eye. His eyes are normally invisible behind black glasses. He looks sinister and enigmatic --his gestures and mannerisms are not yet comprehensible --like the secret police of a larval state. In moments of excitement Salvador is apt to lapse into broken English. His accent at such moments suggests an Italian origin. He reads and speaks Etruscan, A squad of accountant investigators have made a life work of Sal's international dossier.... His operations extend through the world in an inextricable, shifting web of subsidiaries, front companies, and aliases. He has held 23 passports and been deported 49 times --deportation proceedings pending in Cuba, Pakistan, Hong-Kong and Yokohama.

Salvador Hassan O'Leary, alias The Shoe Store Kid, alias Wrong Way Marv, alias After Birth Leary, alias Slunky Pete, alias Placenta Juan, alias K. Y. Ahmed, alias El Chinche, alias El Culito, etc., etc. for fifteen solid pages of dossier, first tangled with the law in NYC where he was traveling with a character known to the Brooklyn police as Blubber Wilson, who hustled his goof ball money shaking down fetishists in shoe stores. Hassan was charged some third degree extortion and conspiracy to impersonate a police officer. He had learnt the shakeman's Number One rule: D.T.-Ditch Tin --which corresponds to the pilot's KFS --Keep Flying Speed.... As The Vigilante puts it:

"If you get a rumble, kid, ditch your piece of tin if you have to swallow it." So they didn't bust him with a queer badge. Hassan testified against Wilson, who drew Pen Indef. (longest term possible under New York law for a misdemeanor conviction. Nominally an indefinite sentence, it means three years in Riker's Island). Hassan's case was nolle prossed. "I'd have drawn a nickel," Hassan said, "if I hadn't met a decent cop." Hassan met a decent cop every time he took a fall. His dossier contains three pages of monikers indicating his proclivity for cooperating with the law, "playing ball" the cops call it. Others call it something else: Ab the Fuzz Lover, Finky Marv, The Crooning Hebe, Ali the Stool, Wrongo Sal, The Wailing Spic, The Sheeny Soprano, The Bronx Opera House, The Copper's Djinn, The Answering Service, The Squeaking Syrian, The Cooing Cocksucker, The Musical Fruit, The Wrong Ass Hole, The Fairy Fink, Leary the Nark, The Lilting Leprechaun... Grassy Gert.

He opened a sex shop in Yokohama, pushed junk in Beirut, pimped in Panama. During World War II he shifted into high, took over a dairy in Holland and cut the butter with used axle grease, cornered the K.Y. market in North Africa, and finally hit the jackpot with slunks. He prospered and proliferated, Hooding the world with cut medicines and cheap counterfeit goods of every variety. Adulterated shark repellent, cut antibiotics, condemned parachutes, stale anti-venom, inactive serums and vaccines, leaking lifeboats.

Clem and Jody, two oldtime vaudeville hoofers, cope out as Russian agents whose sole function is to represent the U.S. in an unpopular light. When arrested for sodomy in Indonesia, Clem said to the examining magistrate:

"'Tain't as if it was being queer. After all they's only Gooks." They appeared in Liberia dressed in black Stetsons and red galluses:

"So I shoot that old nigger and he flop on his side one leg up in the air just akicking."

"Yeah, but you ever burn a nigger?"

79

They are always pacing round Bidonvilles smoking huge cigars:

"Haveta get some bulldozers in here Jody. Clean out all this crap." Morbid crowds follow them about hoping to witness some superlative American outrage.

"Thirty years in show business and I never handle such a routine like this. I gotta dispossess a Bidonville, give myself a bang of H, piss on the Black Stone, make with the Prayer Call whilst dressed in my hog suit, cancel Lend Lease and get fucked up the ass simultaneous.... What, am I an octopus already?" Clem complains.

They are conspiring to kidnap the Black Stone with a helicopter and substitute a hog pen, the hogs trained to give the Bronx cheer when the pilgrims show. "We try to train them squealing bastards to sing: 'Three cheers for the Red White and Blue,' but it can't be done...."

"We connect for that wheat with Ali Wong Chapultepec in Panama. He tells us it is a high grade of shit this Finnish skipper die inna local jump joint and leave this cargo to the madame.... 'She was like a mother to me,' he says and those were his last words.... So we buy it in good faith off the old gash. Laid ten pieces of H on her."

"Good H too. Good Aleppo H."

"Just enough milk sugar to keep her strength up."

"We should look a gift horse in the ass already?"

"Isn't it true than when you got to Hassan you gave a banquet for the Caid and served couscous made from the wheat?"

"We sure did. And you know those citizens were so loaded on that marijuana they all wig inna middle of the banquet.... Me, I just had bread and milk... ulcers you know."

"Likewise."

"So they all run around screaming they is on fire and the bulk of them die the following morning."

"And the rest the morning after that."

"What they expect already when they rot theirselves with Eastern vices?"

"Funny thing those citizens turn all black and their legs drop off."

"Horrible result of marijuana addiction."

"The very same thing occurred to me."

"So we deal directly with the old Sultan who is being a well-known Latah. After that everything is plain sailing you might say."

"But you wouldn't believe it, certain disgruntled elements chased us right down to our launch."

"Handicapped somewhat by lack of legs."

"And a condition in the head."

(Ergot is a fungus disease grows on bad wheat. During the Middle Ages Europe was periodically decimated by outbreaks of Ergotism, which was called St. Anthony's fire. Gangrene frequently supervenes, the legs turn black and drop off. )

They unload a shipment of condemned parachutes on the Ecuadorian Air Force. Manoeuvres: Boys plummet streaming 'chutes like broken condoms splash young blood over pot-bellied generals... shattering wake of sound as Clem and Jody disappear over the Andes in jet getaway.... The exact objectives of Islam Inc. are obscure. Needless to say everyone involved has a different angle, and they all intend to cross each other up somewhere along the line. A. J. is agitating for the destruction of Israel: "With all this feeling against the West a chap has a spot of bother scoring for the young Arab amenities.... The situation is little short of intolerable.... Israel constitutes a downright inconvenience." Typical A. J. cover story. 80

Clem and Jody give out they are interested in the destruction of Near East oil fields to boost the value of their Venezuelan holdings.

Clem writes a number to the tune of "Crawdad" (Big Bill Broonzy). What you gonna do when the oil goes dry?

Gonna sit right there and watch those Arabs die.

Salvador emits a thick screen of international finance to cloak, at least from the rank and file, his Liquefactionist activities.... But over a few stiff yages he lets his hair down among friends.

"Islam is jellied consommé already," he says, dancing the Liquefactionist Jig.... And then, unable to contain himself, he bursts into a hideous falsetto:

It's trembling on the brink

One push and down it sink

Hey, Maw, get ready my veil.

"Well, these citizens have engaged the services of a Brooklyn Jew who passes himself off as the second coming of Mohammed.... In fact Doctor Benway delivered him by Caesarian section from a Holy Man in Mecca....

"If Ahmed won't come out... We'll go in and get him."

This shameless plant is accepted without question by the gullible Arabs.

"Nice folk, these Arabs... Nice ignorant folk," Clem says. So this phony gives out with daily Surahs on the radio: "Now friends of the radio audience, this is Ahmed your friendly prophet.... Today I'd like to talk about the importance of being dainty and kissin' fresh at all times.... Friends, use Jody's chlorophyll tablets and be sure." Now a word about the parties of Interzone....

It will be immediately clear that the Liquefaction Party is, except for one man, entirely composed of dupes, it not being clear until the final absorption who is whose dupe.... The Liquefactionists are much given to every form of perversion, especially sado-masochistic practices.... Liquefactionists in general know what the score is. The Senders, on the other hand, are notorious for their ignorance of the nature and terminal state of sending, for barbarous and selfrighteous manners, and for rabid fear of any fact --. It was only the intervention of the Factualists that prevented the Senders from putting Einstein in an institution and destroying his theory. It may be said that only a very few Senders know what they are doing and these top Senders are the most dangerous and evil men in the world.... Techniques of Sending were crude at first. Fadeout to the National Electronic Conference in Chicago.

The Conferents are putting on their overcoats.... The speaker talks in a fiat shopgirl voice:

"In closing I want to sound a word of warning.... The logical extension of encephalographic research is biocontrol; that is control of physical movement, mental processes, emotional reactions and apparent sensory impressions by means of bioelectric signals injected into the nervous system of the subject."

"Louder and funnier!" The Conferents are trouping out in clouds of dust.

"Shortly after birth a surgeon could install connections in the brain. A miniature radio receiver could be plugged in and the subject controlled from State-controlled transmitters." 81

Dust settles through the windless air of a vast empty hall --smell of hot iron and steam; a radiator sings in the distance.... The Speaker shuffles his notes and blows dust off them....

"The biocontrol apparatus is prototype of one-way telepathic control. The subject could be rendered susceptible to the transmitter by drugs or other processing without installing any apparatus. Ultimately the Senders will use telepathic transmitting exclusively.... Ever dig the Mayan codices? I figure it like this: the priests --about one per cent of population --made with one-way telepathic broadcasts instructing the workers what to feel and when.... A telepathic sender has to send all the time. He can never receive, because if he receives that means someone else has feelings of his own could louse up his continuity. The sender has to send all the time, but he can't ever recharge himself by contact. Sooner or later he's got no feelings to send. You can't have feelings alone. Not alone like the Sender is alone --and you dig there can only be one Sender at one place-time.... Finally the screen goes dead.... The Sender has turned into a huge centipede.... So the workers come in on the beam and burn the centipede and elect a new Sender by consensus of the general will.... The Mayans were limited by isolation.... Now one Sender could control the planet.... You see control can never be a means to any practical end.... It can never be a means to anything but more control.... Like junk..."

The Divisionists occupy a mid-way position, could in fact be termed moderates.... They are called Divisionists because they literally divide. They cut off tiny bits of their flesh and grow exact replicas of themselves in embryo jelly. It seems probable, unless the process of division is halted, that eventually there will be only one replica of one sex on the planet: that is one person in the world with millions of separate bodies.... Are these bodies actually independent, and could they in time develop varied characteristics? I doubt it. Replicas must periodically recharge with the Mother Cell. This is an article of faith with the Divisionists, who live in fear of a replica revolution.... Some Divisionists think that the process can be halted short of the eventual monopoly of one replica. They say: "Just let me plant a few more replicas all over so I won't be lonely when I travel.... And we must strictly control the division of Undesirables...." Every replica but your own is eventually an "Undesirable." Of course if someone starts inundating an area with Identical Replicas, everyone knows what is going on. The other citizens are subject to declare a "Schluppit" (wholesale massacre of all identifiable replicas). To avoid extermination of their replicas, citizens dye, distort, and alter them with face and body molds. Only the most abandoned and shameless characters venture to manufacture I.R.s --Identical Replicas.

A cretinous albino Caid, product of a long line of recessive genes (tiny toothless mouth lined with black hairs, body of a huge crab, claws instead of arms, eyes projected on stalks) accumulated 20,000 I.R.s.

"As far as the eye can see, nothing but replicas," he says, crawling around on his terrace and speaking in strange insect chirps. "I don't have to skulk around like a nameless asshole growing replicas in my cesspool and sneaking them out disguised as plumbers and delivery men.... My replicas don't have their dazzling beauty marred by plastic surgery and barbarous dye and bleach processes. They stand forth naked in the sun for all to see, in their incandescent loveliness of body, face and soul. I have made them in my image and enjoined them to increase and multiply geometric for they shall inherit the earth."

A professional witch was called in to make Sheik Aracknid's replica cultures forever sterile.... As the witch was preparing to loose a blast of anti-orgones, Benway told him: "Don't knock yourself out. Frederick's ataxia will clean out that replica nest. I studied neurology under Professor Fingerbottom in Vienna... and he knew every nerve in your body. Magnificent old thing... Came to a 82

sticky end.... His falling piles blew out the Duc de Ventre's Hispano Suiza and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe skin upholstery.... Even the eyes and brain went with a horrible schlupping sound. The Duc de Ventre says he will carry that ghastly schlup to his mausoleum."

Since there is no sure way to detect a disguised replica (though every Divisionist has some method he considers infallible) the Divisionists are hysterically paranoid. If some citizen ventures to express a liberal opinion, another citizen invariably snarls: "What are you? Some stinking Nigger's bleached-out replica?"

The casualties in barroom fights are staggering. In fact the fear of Negro replicas --which may be blond and blue-eyed --has depopulated whole regions. The Divisionists are all latent or overt homosexuals. Evil old queens tell the young boys: "If you go with a woman your replicas won't grow." And citizens are forever putting the hex on someone else's replica cultures. Cries of: "Hex my culture will you, Biddy Blair!" followed by sound effects of mayhem, continually ring through the quarter.... The Divisionists are much given to the practice of black magic in general, and they have innumerable formulas of varying efficacy for destroying the Mother Cell, also known as the Protoplasm Daddy, by torturing or killing a captured replica.... The authorities have finally given up the attempt to control, among the Divisionists, the crimes of murder and unlicensed production of replicas. But they do stage pre-election raids and destroy vast replica cultures in the mountainous regions of the Zone where replica moon-shiners hole up.

Sex with a replica is strictly forbidden and almost universally practiced. There are queer bars where shameless citizens openly consort with their replicas. House detectives stick their heads into hotel rooms saying: "Have you got a replica in here?"

Bars subject to be inundated by low class replica lovers put up signs in ditto marks: " " " "s Will Not Be Served Here.... It may be said that the average Divisionist lives in a continual crisis of fear and rage, unable to achieve either the self-righteous complacency of the Senders or the relaxed depravity of the Liquefactionists.... However the parties are not in practice separate but blend in all combinations.

The Factualists are Anti-Liquefactionist, Anti-Divisionist, and above all Anti-Sender. Bulletin of the Coordinate Factualist on the subject of replicas: "We must reject the facile solution of flooding the planet with 'desirable replicas.' It is highly doubtful if there are any desirable replicas, such creatures constituting an attempt to circumvent process and change. Even the most intelligent and genetically perfect replicas would in all probability constitute an unspeakable menace to life on this planet...."

T.B.--Tentative Bulletin-Liquefaction: "We must not reject or deny our protoplasmic core, striving at all time to maintain a maximum of flexibility without falling into the morass of liquefaction...." Tentative and Incomplete Bulletin: "Emphatically we do not oppose telepathic research. In fact, telepathy properly used and understood could be the ultimate defense against any form of organized coercion or tyranny on the part of pressure groups or individual control addicts. We oppose, as we oppose atomic war, the use of such knowledge to control, coerce, debase, exploit or annihilate the individuality of another living creature. Telepathy is not, by its nature, a oneway process. To attempt to set up a one-way telepathic broadcast must be regarded as an unqualified evil...."

D.B.--Definitive Bulletin: "The Sender will be defined by negatives. A low pressure area, a sucking emptiness. He will be portentously anonymous, faceless, colorless. He will --probably --be 83

born with smooth disks of skin instead of eyes. He always knows where he is going like a virus knows. He doesn't need eyes."

"Couldn't there be more than one Sender?"

"Oh yes, many of them at first. But not for long. Some maudlin citizens will think they can send something edifying, not realizing that sending is evil. Scientists will say: 'Sending is like atomic power.... If properly harnessed.' At this point an anal technician mixes a bicarbonate of soda and pulls the switch that reduces the earth to cosmic dust. ('Belch... They'll hear this fart on Jupiter.')... Artists will confuse sending with creation. They will camp around screeching 'A new medium'

until their rating drops off.... Philosophers will bat around the ends and means hassle not knowing that sending can never be a means to anything but more sending, like Junk. Try using junk as a means to something else.... Some citizens with 'Coca Cola and aspirin' control habits will be talking about the evil glamor of sending. But no one will talk about anything very long. The Sender, he don't like talking."

The Sender is not a human individual.... It is The Human Virus. (All virus are deteriorated cells leading a parasitic existence.... They have specific affinity for the Mother Cell; thus deteriorated liver cells seek the home place of hepatitis, etc. So every species has a Master Virus: Deteriorated Image of that species. )

The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated.

84

THE COUNTY CLERK

The County Clerk has his office in a huge red brick building known as the Old Court House. Civil cases are, in fact, tried there, the proceeding inexorably dragging out until the contestants die or abandon litigation. This is due to the vast number of records pertaining to absolutely everything, all filed in the wrong place so that no one but the County Clerk and his staff of assistants can find them, and he often spends years in the search. In fact, he is still looking for material relative to a damage suit that was settled out of court in 1910. Large sections of the Old Court House have fallen in ruins, and others are highly dangerous owing to frequent cave-ins. The County Clerk assigns the more dangerous missions to his assistants, many of whom have lost their lives in the service. In 1912 two hundred and seven assistants were trapped in a collapse of the North-by-North-East wing. When suit is brought against anyone in the Zone, his lawyers connive to have the case transferred to the Old Court House. Once this is done, the plaintiff has lost the case, so the only cases that actually go to trial in the Old Court House are those instigated by eccentrics and paranoids who want "a public hearing," which they rarely get since only the most desperate famine of news will bring a reporter to the Old Court House.

The Old Court House is located in the town of Pigeon Hole outside the urban zone. The inhabitants of this town and the surrounding area of swamps and heavy timber are people of such great stupidity and such barbarous practices that the Administration has seen fit to quarantine them in a reservation surrounded by a radioactive wall of iron bricks. In retaliation the citizens of Pigeon Hole plaster their town with signs: " Urbanite Don't Let The Sun Set On You Here," an unnecessary injunction, since nothing but urgent business would take any urbanite to Pigeon Hole. Lee's case is urgent. He has to file an immediate affidavit that he is suffering from bubonic plague to avoid eviction from the house he has occupied ten years without paying the rent. He exists in perpetual quarantine. So he packs his suitcase of affidavits and petitions and injunctions and certificates and takes a bus to the Frontier. The Urbanite customs inspector waves him through: "I hope you've got an atom bomb in that suitcase."

Lee swallows a handful of tranquilizing pills and steps into the Pigeon Hole customs shed. The inspectors spend three hours pawing through his papers, consulting dusty books of regulations and duties from which they read incomprehensible and ominous excerpts ending with: "And as such is subject to fine and penalty under act 666." They look at him significantly. They go through his papers with a magnifying glass. "Sometimes they slip dirty limericks between the lines."

"Maybe he figures to sell them for toilet paper. Is this crap for your own personal use?"

"Yes."

"He says yes."

"And how do we know that?"

"I gotta affidavit."

"Wise guy. Take off your clothes."

"Yeah. Maybe he got dirty tattoos."

They paw over his body probing his ass for contraband and examine it for evidence of sodomy. They dunk his hair and send the water out to be analyzed. "Maybe he's got dope in his hair." Finally, they impound his suitcase; and he staggers out of the shed with a fifty pound bale of documents. A dozen or so Recordites sit on the Old Court House steps of rotten wood. They watch his approach with pale blue eyes, turning their heads slow on wrinkled necks (the wrinkles full of dust) to follow his body up the steps and through the door. Inside, dust hangs in the air like fog, 85

sifting down from the ceiling, rising in clouds from the floor as he walks. He mounts a perilous staircase --condemned in 1929. Once his foot goes through, and the dry splinters tear into the flesh of his leg. The staircase ends in a painter's scaffold, attached with frayed rope and pullies to a beam almost invisible in dusty distance. He pulls himself up cautiously to a ferris wheel cabin. His weight sets in motion hydraulic machinery (sound of running water). The wheel moves smooth and silent to stop by a rusty iron balcony, worn through here and there like an old shoe sole. He walks down a long corridor lined with doors, most of them nailed or boarded shut. In one office, Near East Exquisitries on a green brass plaque, the Mugwump is catching termites with his long black tongue. The door of the County Clerk's office is open. The County Clerk sits inside gumming snuff, surrounded by six assistants. Lee stands in the doorway. The County Clerk goes on talking without looking up.

"I run into Ted Spigot the other day... a good old boy, too. Not a finer man in the Zone than Ted Spigot. ...Now it was a Friday I happen to remember because the Old Lady was down with the menstrual cramps and I went to Doc Parker's drugstore on Dalton Street, just opposite Ma Green's Ethical Massage Parlor, where Jed's old livery stable used to be.... Now, Jed, I'll remember his second name directly, had a cast in the left eye and his wife came from some place out East, Algiers I believe it was, and after Jed died she married up again, and she married one of the Hoot boys, Clem Hoot if my memory serves, a good old boy too, now Hoot was around fifty-four fifty-five year old at the time.... So I says to Doc Parker: 'My old lady is down bad with the menstrual cramps. Sell me two ounces of paregoric.'

"So Doc says, 'Well, Arch, you gotta sign the book. Name, address and date of purchase. It's the law.' "So I asked Doc what the day was, and he said, 'Friday the 13th.'

"So I said, ' I guess I already had mine.'

"'Well,' Doc says, 'there was a feller in here this morning. City feller. Dressed kinda flashy. So he's got him a RX for a mason jar of morphine.... Kinda funny looking prescription writ out on toilet paper.... And I told him straight out: "Mister, I suspect you to be a dope fiend." '

"'"I got the ingrowing toe nails, Pop. I'm in agony."' he says.

"'"Well," I says, "I gotta be careful. But so long as you got a legitimate condition and an RX from a certified bona feedy M.D., I'm honored to serve you." ' "'"That croaker's really certified," he say.... Well, I guess one hand didn't know what the other was doing when I give him a jar of Saniflush by error.... So I reckon he's had his too.'

"'Just the thing to clean a man's blood.'

"'You know, that very thing occurred to me. Should be a sight better than sulphur and molasses.... Now, Arch, don't think I'm nosey; but a man don't have no secrets from God and his druggist I always say.... Is you still humping the Old Gray Mare?'

" 'Why, Doc Parker... I'll have you know I'm a family man and an Elder in the First Denominational Non-sextarian Church and I ain't had a piece a hoss ass since we was kids together.'

"'Them was the days, Arch. Remember the time I got the goose grease mixed up with the mustard? Always was a one to grab the wrong jar, feller say. They could have heard you squealing over in Cunt Lick County, just a squealing like a stoat with his stones cut off.'

"'You're in the wrong hole, Doc. It was you took the mustard and me as had to wait till you cooled off.' "'Wistful thinking, Arch. I read about it one time inna magazine settin' in that green outhouse behind the station.... Now what I meant awhile back, Arch, you didn't rightly understand me.... I was referring to your wife as the Old Cray Mare.... I mean she ain't what she used to be what with all them carbuncles and cataracts and chilblains and hemorrhoids and aftosa.' "'Yas, Doc, Liz is right sickly. Never was the same after her eleventh miscarriaging.... There was something right 86

strange about that. Doc Ferris he told me straight, he said: "Arch, 'tain't fitting you should see that critter." And he gives me a long look made my flesh crawl.... Well, you sure said it right, Doc. She ain't what she used to be. And your medicines don't seem to ease her none. In fact, she ain't been able to tell night from day since using them eye drops you sold her last month.... But, Doc, you oughtta know I wouldn't be humping Liz, the old cow, meaning no disrespect to the mother of my dead monsters. Not when I got that sweet little ol' fifteen year old thing.... You know that yaller girl used to work in Marylou's Hair Straightening and Skin Bleach Parlor over in Nigga town.'

"'Getting that dark chicken meat, Arch? Gettin' that coon pone?'

"'Gettin' it steady, Doc. Gettin' it steady. Well, feller say duty is goosing me. Gotta get back to the old crank case.'

"'I'll bet she needs a grease job worst way.'

"'Doc, she sure is a dry hole.... Well, thanks for the paregoric.

" 'And thanks for the trade, Arch.... He he he... Say, Archy boy, some night when you get caught short with a rusty load drop around and have a drink of Yohimbiny with me.'

"'I'll do that, Doc, I sure will. It'll be just like old times.

"So I went on back to my place and heated up some water and mixed up some paregoric and cloves and cinnamon and sassyfrass and give it to Liz, and it eased her some I reckon. Leastwise she let up aggravatin' me. ... Well, later on I went down to Doc Parker's again to get me a rubber... and just as I was leaving I run into Roy Bane, a good ol' boy too. There's not a finer man in this Zone than Roy Bane.... So he said to me he says, 'Arch, you see that ol' nigger over there in that vacant lot? Well, sure as shit and taxes, he comes there every night just as regular you can set your watch by him. See him behind them nettles? Every night round about eight thirty he goes over into that lot yonder and pulls himself off with steel wool.... Preachin' Nigger, they tell me.'

"So that's how I come to know the hour more or less on Friday the 13th and it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes half an hour after that, I'd took some Spanish Fly in Doc's store and it was jest beginning to work on me down by Grennel Bog on my way to Nigger town.... Well the bog makes a bend, used to be nigger shack there.... They burned that ol' nigger over in Cunt Lick. Nigger had the aftosa and it left him stone blind.... So this white girl down from Texarkana screeches out:

"'Roy, that ol' nigger is looking at me so nasty. Land's sake I feel just dirty all over.'

"'Now, Sweet Thing, don't you fret yourself. Me an' the boys will burn him.'

"'Do it slow, Honey Face. Do it slow. He's give me a sick headache.'

"So they burned the nigger and that ol' boy took his wife and went back up to Texarkana without paying for the gasoline and old Whispering Lou runs the service station couldn't talk about nothing else all Fall: 'These city fellers come down here and burn a nigger and don't even settle up for the gasoline.'

"Well, Chester Hoot tore that nigger shack down and rebuilt it just back of his house up in Bled Valley. Covered up all the windows with black cloth, and what goes on in there ain't fittin' to speak of.... Now Chester he's got some right strange ways.... Well it was just where the nigger shack used to be, right across from the Old Brooks place floods out every Spring, only it wasn't the Brooks place then... belonged to a feller name of Scranton. Now that piece of land was surveyed back in 1919.... I reckon you know the man did the job too.... Feller name of Hump Clarence used to witch out wells on the side.... Good ol' boy too, not a finer man in this Zone than Hump Clarence.... Well it was just around about in there I come on Ted Spigot ascrewin a mud puppy." Lee cleared his throat. The Clerk looked up over his glasses. "Now if you'll take care, young feller, till I finish what I'm asaying, I'll tend to your business." 87

And he plunged into an anecdote about a nigra got the hydrophobia from a cow.

"So my pappy says to me: 'Finish up your chores, son, and let's go see the mad nigger....' They had that nigger chained to the bed, and he was bawling like a cow.... I soon got enough of that ol'

nigger. Well, if you all will excuse me I got business in the Privy Council. He he he!" Lee listened in horror. The County Clerk often spent weeks in the privy living on scorpions and Montgomery Ward catalogues. On several occasions his assistants had forced the door and carried him out in an advanced state of malnutrition. Lee decided to play his last card. "Mr. Anker," he said,

"I'm appealing to you as one Razor Back to another," and he pulled out his Razor Back card, a memo of his lush-rolling youth.

The Clerk looked at the card suspiciously: "You don't look like a bone feed mast-fed Razor Back to me.... What you think about the Jeeeeews... ?"

"Well, Mr. Anker, you know yourself all a Jew wants to do is doodle a Christian girl.... One of these days well cut the rest of it off."

"Well, you talk right sensible for a city feller.... Find out what he wants and take care of him.... He's a good ol' boy."

88

INTERZONE

The only native in Interzone who is neither queer nor available is Andrew Keif's chauffeur, which is not affectation or perversity on Keif's part, but a useful pretext to break off relations with anyone he doesn't want to see: "You made a pass at Aracknid list night. I can't have you to the house again." People are always blacking out in the Zone, whether they drink or not, and no one can say for sure he didn't make a pass at Aracknid's unappetizing person.

Aracknid is a worthless chauffeur, barely able to drive. On one occasion he ran down a pregnant woman in from the mountains with a load of charcoal on her back, and she miscarriaged a bloody, dead baby in the street, and Keif got out and sat on the curb stirring the blood with a stick while the police questioned Aracknid and finally arrested the woman for a violation of the Sanitary Code.

Aracknid is a grimly unattractive young man with a long face of a strange, slate-blue color. He has a big nose and great yellow teeth like a horse. Anybody can find an attractive chauffeur, but only Andrew Keif could have found Aracknid; Keif the brilliant, decadent young novelist who lives in a remodeled pissoir in the red light district of the Native Quarter. The Zone is a single, vast building. The rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house, the next bed that is, since the rooms are mostly bed where the business of the Zone is transacted. A hum of sex and commerce shakes the Zone like a vast hive:

"Two thirds of one percent. I won't budge from that figure; not even for my bumpkins."

"But where are the bills of lading, lover?"

"Not where you're looking, pet. That's too obvious."

"A bale of levies with built-in falsie baskets. Made in Hollywood."

"Hollywood, Siam."

"Well American style. "

"What’s the commission.... The commission... The commission. "

"Yes, nugget, a shipload of K.Y. made of genuine whale dreck in the South Atlantic at present quarantined by the Board of Health in Tierra del Fuego, The commission, my dear! If we can pull this off we'll be in clover." (Whale dreck is reject material that accumulates in the process of cutting up a whale and cooking it down. A horrible, fishy mess you can smell for miles. No one has found any use for it. )

Interzone Imports Unlimited, which consists of Marvie and Leif The Unlucky, had latched onto the K.Y. deal? In fact they specialize in pharmaceuticals and run a 24-hour Pro station, six ways coverage fore and aft, as a side line. (Six separate venereal diseases have been identified to date.) They plunge into the deal. They form unmentionable services for a spastic Greek shipping agent, and one entire shift of Customs inspectors. The two partners fall out and finally denounce each other in the Embassy where they are referred to the We Don't Want To Hear About It Department, and eased out a back door into a shit-strewn vacant lot, where vultures fight over fish heads. They flail at each other hysterically.

'You're trying to fuck me out of my commission!"

"Your commission! Who smelled out this good thing in the first place?"

"But I have the bill of lading."

"Monster! But the check will be made out in my name."

"Bawstard! You'll never see the bill of lading until my cut is deposited in escrow." 89

"Well, might as well kiss and make up. There's nothing mean or petty about me." They shake hands without enthusiasm and peck each other on the cheek. The deal drags on for months. They engage the services of an Expeditor. Finally Marvie emerges with a check for 42 Turkestan kurds drawn on an anonymous bank in South America, to clear through Amsterdam, a procedure that will take eleven months more or less.

Now he can relax in the cafes of The Plaza. He shows a photostatic copy of the check. He would never show the original of course, lest some envious citizen spit ink eradicator on the signature or otherwise mutilate the check.

Everyone asks him to buy drinks and celebrate, but he laughs jovially and says, "Fact is I can't afford to buy myself a drink. I already spent every kurd of it buying Penstrep for Ali's clap. He's down with it fore and aft again. I came near kicking the little bastard right through the wall into the next bed. But you all know what a sentimental old thing I am." Marvie does buy himself a shot glass of beer, squeezing a blackened coin out of his fly onto the table. "Keep the change." The waiter sweeps the coin into a dust pan, he spits on the table and walks away.

"Sore head! He's envious of my check."

Marvie had been in Interzone since "the year before one" as he put it. He had been retired from some unspecified position in the State Dept. "for the good of the service." Obviously he had once been very good looking in a crew-cut, college boy way, but his face had sagged and formed lumps under the chin like melting paraffin. He was getting heavy around the hips. Leif The Unlucky was a tall, thin Norwegian, with a patch over one eye, his face congealed in a permanent, ingratiating smirk. Behind him lay an epic saga of unsuccessful enterprises. He had failed at raising frogs, chinchilla, Siamese fighting fish, rami and culture pearls. He had attempted, variously and without success, to promote a Love Bird Two-in-a-coffin Cemetery, to corner the condom market during the rubber shortage, to run a mail order whore house, to issue penicillin as a patent medicine. He had followed disastrous betting systems in the casinos of Europe and the race tracks of the U.S. His reverses in business were matched by the incredible mischances of his personal life. His front teeth had been stomped out by bestial American sailors in Brooklyn. Vultures had eaten out an eye when he drank a pint of paregoric and passed out in a Panama City park. He had been trapped between floors in an elevator for five days with an oil-burning junk habit and sustained an attack of D.T.s while stowing away in a foot locker. Then there was the time he collapsed with strangulated intestines, perforated ulcers and peritonitis in Cairo and the hospital was so crowded they bedded him in the latrine, and the Greek surgeon goofed and sewed up a live monkey in him, and he was gangfucked by the Arab attendants, and one of the orderlies stole the penicillin substituting Saniflush; and the time he got clap in his ass and a self-righteous English doctor cured him with an enema of hot, sulphuric acid, and the German practitioner of Technological Medicine who removed his appendix with a rusty can opener and a pair of tin snips (he considered the germ theory "a nonsense.") Flushed with success he then began snipping and cutting out everything in sight: "The human body is filled up vit unnecessitated parts. You can get by vit one kidney. Vy have two? Yes dot is a kidney.... The inside parts should not be so close in together crowded. They need lebensraum like the Vaterland."

The Expeditor had not yet been paid, and Marvie was faced by the prospect of stalling him for eleven months until the check cleared. The Expeditor was said to have been born on the Ferry between the Zone and the Island. His profession was to expedite the delivery of merchandise. No one knew for sure whether his services were of any use or not, and to mention his name always 90

precipitated an argument. Cases were cited to prove his miraculous efficiency and utter worthlessness.

The Island was a British Military and Naval station directly opposite the Zone. England holds the Island on yearly rent-free lease, and every year the lease and permit of residence is formally renewed. The entire population turns out, attendance is compulsory, and gathers at the municipal dump. The President of the Island is required by custom to crawl across the garbage on his stomach and deliver the Permit of Residence and Renewal of the Lease, signed by every citizen of the Island, to The Resident Governor who stands resplendent in dress uniform. The Governor takes the permit and shoves it into his coat pocket:

"Well," he says with a tight smile, "so you've decided to let us stay another year have you? Very good of you. And everyone is happy about it?... Is there anyone who isn't happy about it?" Soldiers in jeeps sweep mounted machine-guns back and forth across the crowd with a slow, searching movement.

"Everybody happy. Well that's fine." He turns jovially to the prostrate President. "I'll keep your papers in case I get caught short. Haw Haw Haw." His loud, metallic laugh rings out across the dump, and the crowd laughs with him under the searching guns.

The forms of democracy are scrupulously enforced on the Island. There is a Senate and a Congress who carry on endless sessions discussing garbage disposal and outhouse inspection, the only two questions over which they have jurisdiction. For a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century, they had been allowed to control the dept. of Baboon Maintenance but this privilege had been withdrawn owing to absenteeism in the Senate.

The purple-assed Tripoli baboons had been brought to the Island by pirates in the 17th century. There was a legend that when the baboons left the Island it would fall. To whom or in what way is not specified, and it is a capital offense to kill a baboon, though the noxious behaviour of these animals harries the citizens almost beyond endurance. Occasionally someone goes berserk, kills several baboons and himself.

The post of President is always forced on some particularly noxious and unpopular citizen. To be elected President is the greatest misfortune and disgrace that can befall an Islander. The humiliations and ignominy are such that few Presidents live out their full term of office, usually dying of a broken spirit after a year or two. The Expeditor had once been President and served the full five years of his term. Subsequently he changed his name and underwent plastic surgery, to blot out, as far as possible, the memory of his disgrace.

"Yes of course... we'll pay you," Marvie was saying to the Expeditor.

"But take it easy. It may be a little while yet...."

"Take it easy? A little while!... Listen."

"Yes I know it all. The finance company is repossessing your wife's artificial kidney.... They are evicting your grandmother from her iron lung."

"That's in rather bad taste, old boy.... Frankly I wish I had never involved myself in this uh matter. That bloody grease has too much carbolic in it. I was down to customs one day last week. Stuck a broom handle into a drum of it, and the grease ate the end off straight away. Besides, the stink is enough to knock a man on his bloody ass. You should take a walk down by the port."

"I'll do no such thing," Marvie screeched. It is a mark of caste in the Zone never to touch or even go near what you are selling. To do so gives rise to suspicion of retailing, that is of being a common peddler. A good part of the merchandise in the Zone is sold through street peddlers.

"Why do you tell me all this? It's too sordid! Let the retailers worry about it." 91

"Oh it's all very well for you chaps, you can scud out from under. But I have a reputation to maintain.... There'll be a spot of bother about this."

"Do you suggest there is something illegitimate in this operation?"

"Not illegitimate exactly. But shoddy. Definitely shoddy."

"Oh go back to your Island before it falls! We knew you when you were peddling your purple ass in the Plaza pissoirs for five pesetas."

"And not many takers either," Leif put in. He pronounced it ither. This reference to his Island origin was more than the Expeditor could stand.... He was drawing himself up, mobilizing his most frigid impersonation of an English aristocrat, preparing to deliver an icy, clipped "crusher," but instead, a whining, whimpering, kicked dog snarl broke from his mouth. His presurgery face emerged in an arc-light of incandescent hate.... He began to spit curses in the hideous, strangled gutturals of the Island dialect.

The Islanders all profess ignorance of the dialect or flatly deny its existence. "We are Breetish," they say. "We don't got no bloody dealect."

Froth gathered at the corners of the Expeditor's mouth. He was spitting little balls of saliva like pieces of cotton. The stench of spiritual vileness hung in the airs about him like a green cloud. Marvie and Leif fell back twittering in alarm.

'He's gone mad," Marvie gasped. "Let's get out of here." Hand in hand they skip away into the mist that covers the Zone in the winter months like a cold Turkish Bath. 92

THE EXAMINATION

Carl Peterson found a postcard in his box requesting him to report for a ten o'clock appointment with Doctor Benway in the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis....

"What on earth could they want with me?" he thought irritably.... "A mistake most likely." But he knew they didn't make mistakes.... Certainly not mistakes of identity.... It would not have occurred to Carl to disregard the appointment even though failure to appear entailed no penalty.... Freeland was a welfare state. If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion....

Carl walked through the Town Hall Square.... Nickel nudes sixty feet high with brass genitals soaped themselves under gleaming showers.... The Town Hall cupola, of glass brick and copper crashed into the sky.

Carl stared back at a homosexual American tourist who dropped his eyes and fumbled with the light filters of his Leica....

Carl entered the steel enamel labyrinth of the Ministry, strode to the information desk... and presented his card.

"Fifth floor... Room twenty-six..."

In room twenty-six a nurse looked at him with cold undersea eyes.

"Doctor Benway is expecting you," she said smiling. "Go right in."

"As if he had nothing to do but wait for me," thought Carl... The office was completely silent, and filled with milky light. The doctor shook Carl's hand, keeping his eyes on the young man's chest....

"I've seen this man before," Carl thought.... "But where?" He sat down and crossed his legs. He glanced at an ashtray on the desk and lit a cigarette.... He turned to the doctor a steady inquiring gaze in which there was more than a touch of insolence. The doctor seemed embarrassed.... He fidgeted and coughed... and fumbled with papers....

"Hurumph," he said finally.... "Your name is Carl Peterson I believe...." His glasses slid down into his nose in parody of the academic manner.... Carl nodded silently.... The doctor did not look at him but seemed none the less to register the acknowledgment. ... He pushed his glasses back into place with one finger and opened a file on the white enameled desk.

"Mmmmmmmm. Carl Peterson," he repeated the name caressingly, pursed his lips and nodded several times. He spoke again abruptly: "You know of course that we are trying. We are all trying. Sometimes of course we don't succeed." His voice trailed off thin and tenuous. He put a hand to his forehead. "To adjust the state --simply a tool --to the needs of each individual citizen." His voice boomed out so unexpectedly deep and loud that Carl started. "That is the only function of the state as we see it. Our knowledge... incomplete, of course," he made a slight gesture of depreciation....

"For example... for example... take the matter of uh sexual deviation." The doctor rocked back and forth in his chair. His glasses slid down onto his nose. Carl felt suddenly uncomfortable.

"We regard it as a misfortune... a sickness... certainly nothing to be censored or uh sanctioned any more than say... tuberculosis.... Yes," he repeated firmly as if Carl had raised an objection....

"Tuberculosis. On the other hand you can readily see that any illness imposes certain, should we say obligations, certain necessities of a prophylactic nature on the authorities concerned with public health, such necessities to be imposed, needless to say, with a minimum of inconvenience and hardship to the unfortunate individual who has, through no fault of his own, become uh infected.... 93

That is to say, of course, the minimum hardship compatible with adequate protection of other individuals who are not so infected.... We do not find obligatory vaccination for smallpox an unreasonable measure.... Nor isolation for certain contagious diseases.... I am sure you will agree that individuals infected with hurumph what the French call 'Les Maladies galantes' heh heh heh should be compelled to undergo treatment if they do not report voluntarily." The doctor went on chuckling and rocking in his chair like a mechanical toy.... Carl realized that he was expected to say something.

"That seems reasonable," he said.

The doctor stopped chuckling. He was suddenly motionless. "Now to get back to this uh matter of sexual deviation. Frankly we don't pretend to understand --at least not completely --why some men and women prefer the uh sexual company of their own sex. We do know that the uh phenomena is common enough, and, under certain circumstances a matter of uh concern to this department."

For the first time the doctor's eyes flickered across Carl's face. Eyes without a trace of warmth or hate or any emotion that Carl had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, predatory and impersonal. Carl suddenly felt trapped in this silent underwater cave of a room, cut off from all sources of warmth and certainty. His picture of himself sitting there calm, alert with a trace of well mannered contempt went dim, as if vitality were draining out of him to mix with the milky grey medium of the room.

"Treatment of these disorders is, at the present time, hurmph symptomatic." The doctor suddenly threw himself back in his chair and burst into peals of metallic laughter. Carl watched him appalled....

"The man is insane," he thought. The doctor's face went blank as a gambler's. Carl felt an odd sensation in his stomach like the sudden stopping of an elevator. The doctor was studying the file in front of him. He spoke in a tone of slightly condescending amusement:

"Don't look so frightened, young man. Just a professional joke. To say treatment is symptomatic means there is none, except to make the patient feel as comfortable as possible. And that is precisely what we attempt to do in these cases." Once again Carl felt the impact of that cold interest on his face. "That is to say reassurance when reassurance is necessary... and, of course, suitable outlets with other individuals of similar tendencies. No isolation is indicated... the condition is no more directly contagious than cancer. Cancer, my first love," the doctor's voice receded. He seemed actually to have gone away through an invisible door leaving his empty body sitting there at the desk. Suddenly he spoke again in a crisp voice. "And so you may well wonder why we concern ourselves with the matter at all?" He flashed a smile bright and cold as snow in sunlight. Carl shrugged: "That is not my business... what I am wondering is why you have asked me to come here and why you tell me all this... this..."

"Nonsense?"

Carl was annoyed to find himself blushing.

The doctor leaned back and placed the ends of his fingers together:

"The young," he said indulgently. "Always they are in a hurry. One day perhaps you will learn the meaning of patience. No, Carl... I may call you Carl'? I am not evading your question. In cases of suspected tuberculosis we --that is the appropriate department --may ask, even request, someone to appear for a fluoroscopic examination. This is routine, you understand. Most of such examinations turn up negative. So you have been asked to report here for, should I say a psychic fluoroscope? I may add that after talking with you I feel relatively sure that the result will be, for practical purposes, negative....

94

"But the whole thing is ridiculous. I have always interested myself only in girls. I have a steady girl now and we plan to marry."

"Yes Carl, I know. And that is why you are here. A blood test prior to marriage, this is reasonable, no?"

"Please doctor, speak directly."

The doctor did not seem to hear. He drifted out of his chair and began walking around behind Carl, his voice languid and intermittent like music down a windy street.

"I may tell you in strictest confidence that there is definite evidence of a hereditary factor. Social pressure. Many homosexuals latent and overt do, unfortunately, marry. Such marriages often result in... Factor of infantile environment." The doctor's voice went on and on. He was talking about schizophrenia, cancer, hereditary disfunction of the hypothalamus. Carl dozed off. He was opening a green door. A horrible smell grabbed his lungs and he woke up with a shock. The doctor's voice was strangely flat and lifeless, a whispering junky voice:

"The Kleiberg-Stanislouski semen floculation test... a diagnostic tool... indicative at least in a negative sense. In certain cases useful --taken as part of the whole picture.... Perhaps under the uh circumstances." The doctor's voice shot up to a pathic scream. "The nurse will take your uh specimen."

"This way please...." The nurse opened the door into a bare white walled cubicle. She handed him a jar.

"Use this please. Just yell when you're ready." There was a jar of K.Y. on a glass shelf. Carl felt ashamed as if his mother had laid out a handkerchief for him. Some coy little message stitched on like: "If I was a cunt we could open a dry goods store." Ignoring the K.Y., he ejaculated into the jar, a cold brutal fuck of the nurse standing her up against a glass brick wall. "Old Glass Cunt," he sneered, and saw a cunt full of colored glass splinters under the Northern Lights.

He washed his penis and buttoned up his pants.

Something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate, the shifting of his testes, the contractions of his rectum. He was in a room filled with green light. There was a stained wood double bed, a black wardrobe with full length mirror. Carl could not see his face. Someone was sitting in a black hotel chair. He was wearing a stiff bosomed white shirt and a dirty paper tie. The face swollen, skul-less, eyes like burning pus.

"Something wrong?" said the nurse indifferently. She was holding a glass of water out to him. She watched him drink with aloof contempt. She turned and picked up the jar with obvious distaste. The nurse turned to him: "Are you waiting for something special?" she snapped. Carl had never been spoken to like that in his adult life. "Why no...." "You can go then," she turned back to the jar. With a little exclamation of disgust she wiped a gob of semen off her hand. Carl crossed the room and stood at the door.

"Do I have another appointment?'

She looked at him in disapproving surprise: "You'll be notified of course." She stood in the doorway of the cubicle and watched him walk through the outer office and open the door. He turned and attempted a jaunty wave. The nurse did not move or change her expression. As he walked down the stairs the broken, false grin burned his face with shame. A homosexual tourist looked at him and raised a knowing eyebrow. "Some-thing wrong?" Carl ran into a park and found an empty bench beside a bronze faun with cymbals.

"Let your hair down, chicken. You'll feel better." The tourist was leaning over him, his camera swinging in Carl's face like a great dangling tit.

95

"Fuck off you!"

Carl saw something ignoble and hideous reflected back in the queen's spayed animal brown eyes.

"Oh! I wouldn't be calling any names if I were you, chicken. You're hooked too. I saw you coming out of The Institute."

'What do you mean by that?" Carl demanded.

"Oh nothing. Nothing at all."

"Well, Carl," the doctor began smiling and keeping his eyes on a level with Carl's mouth. "I have some good news for you." He picked up a slip of blue paper off the desk and went through an elaborate pantomime of focusing his eyes on it. "Your uh test... the Robinson-Kleiberg floculation test..."

"I thought it was a Blomberg-Stanlouski test." The doctor tittered. "Oh dear no.... You are getting ahead of me young man. You might have misunderstood. The Blomberg-Stanlouski, weeell that's a different sort of test altogether. I do hope... not necessary...." He tittered again: "But as I was saying before I was so charmingly interrupted... by my hurumph learned young colleague. Your KS

seems to be..." He held the slip at arm's length. "...completely uh negative. So perhaps we won't be troubling you any further. And so..." He folded the slip carefully into a file. He leafed through the file. Finally he stopped and frowned and pursed his lips. He closed the file and put his hand flat on it and leaned forward.

"Carl, when you were doing your military service... There must have been... in fact there were long periods when you found yourself deprived of the uh consolations and uh facilities of the fair sex. During these no doubt trying and difficult periods you had perhaps a pin up girl? Or more likely a pin up harem? Heh heh heh..."

Carl looked at the doctor with overt distaste. "Yes, of course," he said. "We all did."

"And now, Carl, I would like to show you some pin up girls." He pulled an envelope out of a drawer. "And ask you to please pick out the one you would most like to uh make heh heh heh...." He suddenly leaned for-ward fanning the photographs in front of Carl's face. "Pick a girl, any girl!" Carl reached out with numb fingers and touched one of the photographs. The doctor put the photo back into the pack and shuffled and cut and he placed the pack on Carl's file and slapped it smartly. He spread the photos face up in front of Carl. "Is she there?" Carl shook his head.

"Of course not. She is in here where she belongs. A woman's place what??" He opened the file and held out the girl's photo attached to a Rorshach plate.

"Is that her?"

Carl nodded silently.

"You have good taste, my boy. I may tell you in strictest confidence that some of these girls..." with gambler fingers he shifts the photos in Three Card Monte Passes --"are really boys. In uh drag I believe is the word?" His eyebrows shot up and down with incredible speed. Carl could not be sure he had seen anything unusual. The doctor's face opposite him was absolutely immobile and expressionless. Once again Carl experienced the floating sensation in his stomach and genitals of a sudden elevator stop.

"Yes, Carl, you seem to be running our little obstacle course with flying colors.... I guess you think this is all pretty silly don't you now... ???"

"Well, to tell the truth... Yes..."

96

"You are frank, Carl... This is good.... And now ...Carl..." He dragged the name out caressingly like a sweet con dick about to offer you an Old Gold --( just like a cop to smoke Old Golds somehow) and go into his act....

The con dick does a little dance step.

"Why don't you make The Man a proposition?" he jerks a head towards his glowering superego who is always referred to in the third person as "The Man" or "The Lieutenant."

"That's the way the Lieutenant is, you play fair with him and he'll play fair with you.... We'd like to go light on you.... If you could help us in some way." His words open out into a desolate waste of cafeterias and street corners and lunch rooms. Junkies look the other way munching pound cake.

"The Fag is wrong."

The Fag slumps in a hotel chair knocked out on goof balls with his tongue lolling out. He gets up in a goof ball trance, hangs himself with-out altering his expression or pulling his tongue in.

The dick is diddling on a pad.

"Know Marty Steel?" Diddle.

"Yes."

"Can you score off him?" Diddle? Diddle?

"He's skeptical."

"But you can score." Diddle diddle "You scored off him last week didn't you?" Diddle???

"Yes."

"Well you can score off him this week." Diddle... Diddle... Diddle... "You can score off him today." No diddle.

"Not No! Not that!!"

"Now look are you going to cooperate" --three vicious diddles --"or does the... does the Man cornhole you?" He raises a fay eyebrow.

"And so Carl you will please oblige to tell me how many times and under what circumstances you have uh indulged in homosexual acts???" His voice drifts away. "If you have never done so I shall be inclined to think of you as a somewhat atypical young man." The doctor raises a coy admonishing finger. "In any case..." He tapped the file and flashed a hideous leer. Carl noticed that the file was six inches thick. In fact it seemed to have thickened enormously since he entered the room.

"Well, when I was doing my military service... These queers used to proposition me and sometimes... when I was blank..."

"Yes, of course, Carl," the doctor brayed heartily. "In your position I would have done the same I don't mind telling you heh heh heh.... Well, E guess we can uh dismiss as irrelevant these uh understandable means of replenishing the uh exchequer. And now, Carl, there were perhaps" --one finger tapped the file which gave out a faint effluvia of moldy jock straps and chlorine --"occasions. When no uh economic factors were involved."

A green flare exploded in Carl's brain. He saw Hans' lean brown body --twisting towards him, quick breath on his shoulder. The flare went out. Some huge insect was squirming in his hand. His whole being jerked away in an electric spasm of revulsion.

Carl got to his feet shaking with rage.

"What are you writing there?" he demanded.

"Do you often doze off like that?? in the middle of a conversation... ?"

"I wasn't asleep that is."

"You weren't?"

97

"It's just that the whole thing is unreal.... I'm going now. I don't care. You can't force me to stay."

He was walking across the room towards the door. He had been walking a long time. A creeping numbness dragged his legs. The door seemed to recede.

"Where can you go, Carl?" The doctor's voice reached him from a great distance.

"Out... Away... Through the door..."

"The Green Door, Carl?"

The doctor's voice was barely audible. The whole room was exploding out into space. 98

HAVE YOU SEEN PANTOPON ROSE

Stay away from Queens Plaza, son.... Evil spot haunted by dicks scream for dope fiend lover.... Too many levels.... Heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia... like burning lions... fall on poor old lush worker scare her veins right down to the bone. ...Her skin-pop a week or do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.... So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware.... Look down, look down along that line before you travail there....

The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron....

--Queens Plaza is a bad spot for lush workers.... Too many levels and lurking places for subway heat, and impossible to cover when you put the hand out.... Five months and twenty-nine days: sentence given for "jostling," that is, touching a flop with obvious intent.... Innocent people may be convicted of murder but not of jostling. Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor, old time, junkies and lush-workers of my acquaintance.... The old 103rd street klatch.... Sailor and Irish hanged themselves in the Tombs.... The Beagle is dead of an overdose and the Fag went wrong....

"Have you seen Pantopon Rose?" said the old junky. ..."Time to cosq," put on a black overcoat and made the square.... Down skid road to Market Street Museum shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special....

The gangster in concrete rolls down the river channel.... They cowboyed him in the steam room.... Is this Cherry Ass Gio the Towel Boy or Mother Gillig, Old Auntie of Westminster Place?? Only dead fingers talk in Braille....

The Mississippi rolls great limestone boulders down the silent alley....

"Clutter the glind!" screamed the Captain of Moving Land.... Distant rumble of stomachs.... Poisoned pigeons rain from the Northern Lights.... The reservoirs are empty.... Brass statues crash through the hungry squares and alleys of the gaping city.... Probing for a vein in the junk-sick morning....

Strictly from cough syrup...

A thousand junkies storm the crystal spine clinics, cook down the Grey Ladies.... In the limestone cave met a man with Medusa's head in a hat box and said, "Be Careful," to the Customs Inspector.... Freezed forever hand an inch from the false bottom.... Window dressers scream through the station, beat the cashiers with the fairy hype.... (The Hype is a short change con.... Also known as The Bill....)

"Multiple fracture," said the big physician.... "I'm very technical...." Conspicuous consumption is rampant in the porticos slippery with Koch spit.... The centipede nuzzles the iron door rusted to thin black paper by the urine of a million fairies.... This is no rich mother load, but vitiate dust, second run cottons trace the bones of a fix.... 99

COKE BUGS

The Sailor's grey felt hat and black overcoat hung twisted in atrophied yen-wait. Morning sun outlined The Sailor in the orange-yellow flame of junk. He had a paper napkin under his coffee cup - mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffee in the plazas, restaurants, terminals and waiting rooms of the world. A junky, even at the Sailor's level, runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption into the Time of others, like all petitioners, he must wait. (How many coffees in an hour?)

A boy came in and sat at the counter in broken lines of long, sick junk-wait. The Sailor shivered. His face fuzzed out of focus in a shuddering brown mist. His hands moved on the table, reading the boy's Braille. His eyes traced little dips and circles, following whorls of brown hair on the boy's neck in a slow, searching movement.

The boy stirred and scratched the back of his neck: "Something bit me, Joe. What kinda creep joint you run here?"

"Coke bugs, kid," Joe said, holding eggs up to the light. "I was travelling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In Butte, state of Montany, her got the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chi sniff coke used to come in form of crystals, blue crystals. So her 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 her say, 'Get away or I shoot you! I got myself led good!' When the roll is called up yonder we'll be there, right?"

Joe looked at the Sailor and spread his hands in the junky shrug. The Sailor spoke in his feeling voice that reassembles in your head, spelling out the words with cold fingers: "Your connection is broken, kid."

The boy shied. His street-boy face, torn with black scars of junk, retained a wild, broken innocence; shy animals peering out through grey arabesques of terror.

"I don't dig you, Jack."

The Sailor leapt into sharp, junky focus. He turned back his coat lapel, showing a brass hypo needle covered with mold and verdigris. "Retired for the good of the service.... Sit down and have a blueberry crumb pie on the expense account. Your monkey loves it.... Make his coat glossy." The boy felt a touch on his arm across eight feet of morning lunch room. He was suddenly siphoned into the booth, landing with an inaudible shlup. He looked into the Sailor's eyes, a green universe stirred by cold black currents.

"You are agent, mister?"

"I prefer the word... vector." His sounding laughter vibrated through the boy's substance.

"You holding, man? I got the bread...."

"I don't want your money, Honey: I want your Time."

"I don't dig."

"You want fix? You want straight? You wanta, nooood?"

The Sailor cradled something pink and vibrated out of focus.

"Yeah."

"We'll take the Independent. Got their own special heat, don't carry guns only saps. I recall, me and the Fag fell once in Queen's Plaza. Stay away from Queen's Plaza, son... evil spot... fuzz haunted. Too many levels. Heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia like burning lions... fall on poor old lush worker, scare her veins right down to the bone. Her skin pop a week or 100

do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.... So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware! Look down, look down along that line before you travel there...." The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron.

101

THE EXTERMINATOR DOES A GOOD JOB

The Sailor touched the door gently, following patterns of painted oak in a slow twist, leaving faint, iridescent whorls of slime. His arm went through to the elbow. He pulled back an inside bolt and stood aside for the boy to enter.

Heavy, colorless smell of death filled the empty room.

"The trap hasn't been aired since the Exterminator fumigated for coke bugs," said the Sailor apologetically.

The boy's peeled senses darted about in frenzied exploration. Tenement flat, railroad flat vibrating with silent motion. Along one wall of the kitchen a metal trough --or was it metal, exactly?

--ran into a sort of aquarium or tank half-filled with translucent green fluid. Moldy objects, worn out in unknown service, littered the floor: a jock-strap designed to protect some delicate organ of flat, fan-shape; multi-levelled trusses, supports and bandages; a large U-shaped yoke of porous pink stone; little lead tubes cut open at one end.

Currents of movement from the two bodies stirred stagnant odor pools; atrophied boy-smell of dusty locker rooms, swimming pool chlorine, dried semen. Other smells curled through pink convolutions, touching unknown doors.

The Sailor reached under the wash-stand and extracted a package in wrapping paper that shredded and fell from his fingers in yellow dust. He laid out dropper, needle and spoon on a table covered with dirty dishes. But no roach antennae felt for the crumbs of darkness.

"The Exterminator does a good job," said the Sailor. "Almost too good, sometimes." He dipped into a square tin of yellow pyretheum powder and pulled out a flat package covered in red and gold Chinese paper.

"Like a firecracker package," the boy thought. At fourteen lost two fingers.... Fourth of July fireworks accident... later, in the hospital, first silent proprietary touch of junk.

"They go off, here, kid." The Sailor put a hand to the back of his head. He camped obscenely as he opened the package, a complex arrangement of slots and overlays.

"Pure, one hundred per cent H. Scarcely a man is now alive... and it's all yours."

"So what you want off me?"

"Time."

"I don't dig."

"I have something you want," his hand touched the package. He drifted away into the front room, his voice remote and blurred. "You have something I want... five minutes here... an hour someplace else... two ...four... eight... Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.... Every day die a little.... It takes up The Time...."

He moved back into the kitchen, his voice loud and clear: "Five years a piece. Nobody gives a better deal on the street." He put a finger on the dividing line below the boy's nose. "Right down the middle."

"Mister, I don't know what you're talking about."

"You will, baby... in time."

"OK. So what do I do?"

"You accept?"

"Yeah, like..." He glanced at the package. "Whatever... I accept." The boy felt a silent black clunk fall through his flesh. The Sailor put a hand to the boy's eyes and pulled out a pink scrotal egg with one closed, pulsing eye. Black fur boiled inside translucent flesh of the egg.

102

The Sailor caressed the egg with nakedly inhuman hands --black-pink, thick, fibrous, long white tendrils sprouting from abbreviated finger tips. Death fear and Death weakness hit the boy, shutting off his breath, stopping his blood. He leaned against a wall that seemed to give slightly. He clicked back into junk focus.

The Sailor was cooking a shot. "When the roll is called up yonder we'll be there, right?" he said, feeling along the boy's vein, erasing goose-pimples with a gentle old woman finger. He slid the needle in. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. The Sailor pressed the bulb, watching the solution rush into the boy-vein, sucked by silent thirst of blood.

"Jesus!" said the boy. "I never been hit like that before!" He lit a cigarette and looked around the kitchen, twitching in sugar need. "Aren't you taking off?" he asked.

"With that milk sugar shit? Junk is a one-way street. No U-turn. You can't go back no more." They call me the Exterminator. At one brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating in yellow pyretheum powder ("Hard to get now, lady... war on. Let you have a little.... Two dollars.") Sluiced fat bedbugs from rose wall paper in shabby theatrical hotels on North Clark and poisoned the purposeful Rat, occasional eater of human babies. Wouldn't you?

My present assignment: Find the live ones and exterminate. Not the bodies but the "molds," you understand --but I forget that you cannot understand. We have all but a very few. But even one could upset our food tray. The danger, as always, comes from defecting agents: A.J., the Vigilante, the Black Armadillo (carrier of Chagas vectors, hasn't taken a bath since the Argentine epidemic of

'35, remember? ), and Lee and the Sailor and Benway. And I know some agent is out there in the darkness looking for me. Because all Agents defect and all Resisters sell out.... 103

THE ALGEBRA OF NEED

"Fats" Terminal came from The City Pressure Tanks where open life jets spurt a million forms, immediately eaten, the eaters cancelled by black time fuzz....

Few reach the Plaza, a point where The Tanks empty a tidal river, carrying forms of survival armed with defences of poison slime, black, flesh rotting, fungus, and green odors that sear the lungs and grab the stomach in twisted knots....

Because "Fats'" nerves were raw and peeled to feel the death spasms of a million cold kicks....

"Fats" learned The Algebra of Need and survived....

One Friday "Fats" siphoned himself into The Plaza, a translucent-grey, foetal monkey, suckers on his little soft, purple-grey hands, and a lamphrey disk mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow, black, erectile teeth, feeling for the scar patterns of junk.... And a rich man passed and stared at the monster and "Fats" rolled pissing and shitting in terror and ate his shit and the man was moved by this tribute to his potent gaze and clicked a coin out of his Friday cane (Friday is Moslem Sunday when the rich are supposed to distribute alms ). So "Fats" learned to serve The Black Meat and grew a fat aquarium of body.... And his blank, periscope eyes swept the world's surface.... In his wake of addicts, translucentgrey monkeys flashed like fish spears to the junk Mark, and hung there sucking and it all drained back into "Fats" so his substance grew and grew filling plazas, restaurants and waiting rooms of the world with grey junk ooze.

Bulletins from Party Headquarters are spelled out in obscene charades by hebephrenics and Latahs and apes, Sollubis fart code, Negroes open and shut mouth to flash messages on gold teeth, Arab rioters send smoke signals by throwing great buttery eunuchs --they make the best smoke, hangs black and shit-solid in the air --onto gasoline fires in a rubbish heap, mosaic of melodies, sad Panpipes of humpbacked beggar, cold wind sweeps down from post card of Chimborazzi, flutes of Ramadan, piano music down a windy street, mutilated police calls, advertising leaflet synchronize with street fight spell SOS.

Two agents have identified themselves each to each by choice of sex practices foiling alien microphones, fuck atomic secrets back and forth in code so complex only two physicists in the world pretend to understand it and each categorically denies the other. Later the receiving agent will be hanged, convict of the guilty possession of a nervous system, and play back the message in orgasmal spasms transmitted from electrodes attached to the penis. Breathing rhythm of old cardiac, bumps of a belly dancer, put put put of a motorboat across oily water. The waiter lets fall a drop of martini of the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, who lams for the 6:12 knowing that he has been spotted. Junkies climb out the lavatory window of the chop suey joint as the El rumbles past. The Gimp, cowboyed in the Waldorf, gives birth to a litter of rats. (Cowboy: New York hood talk means kill the motherfucker wherever you find him. A rat is a rat is a rat is a rat. Is an informer.) Foolish virgins heed the English colonel who rides by brandishing a screaming peccary on his lance. The elegant fag patronizes his neighbourhood bar to receive a bulletin from Dead Mother lives on in synapses and will evoke the exciting Nanny Beater. Boys jacking off in the school toilet know other as agents from Galaxy X, adjourn to a second-run night spot where they sit shabby and portentous drinking wine vinegar and eating lemons to confound the tenor sax, a hip Arab in blue glasses suspect to be Enemy Sender. The world network of junkies, on a cord of rancid jissom... tying up in furnished rooms... shivering in the sick morning... (Old Pete men suck the Black Smoke in a Chink laundry back room. Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of Time or cold turkey withdrawal of breath --in Arabia --Paris --Mexico City --New York --New 104

Orleans --) The living and the dead... in sickness or on the nod... hooked or kicked or hooked again... come in on the junk beam and The Connection is eating Chop Suey on Dolores Street... dunking pound cake in Bickfords . . chased up Exchange Place by a baying pack of people. Malarials of the world bundle in shivering protoplasm. Fear seals the turd message with a cuneiform account. Giggling rioters copulate to the screams of a burning Nigra. Lonely librarians unite in soul kiss halitosis. That grippy feeling, brother? Sore throat and disquieting as the hot afternoon wind? Welcome to the International Syphilis Lodge --"Methodith-Epithcopal God damn ith" (phrase used to test speech impairment typical of paresis) or the first silent touch of chancre makes you a member in good standing. The vibrating soundless hum of deep forest and orgone accumulators, the sudden silence of cities when the junky cops and even the Commuter buzzes clogged lines of cholesterol for contact. Signal flares of orgasm burst over the world. A tea head leaps up screaming "I got the fear!" and runs into Mexican night bringing down backbrains of the world. The Executioner shits in terror at sight of the condemned man. The Torturer screams in the ear of his implacable victim. Knife fighters embrace in adrenalin. Cancer is at the door with a Singing Telegram.... 105

HAUSER AND O'BRIEN

When they walked in on me that morning at 8 o'clock, I knew it was my last chance, my only chance. But they didn't know. How could they? Just a routine pick-up. But not quite routine. Hauser had been eating breakfast when the Lieutenant called: "I want you and your partner to pick up a man named Lee, William Lee, on your way downtown. He's in the Hotel Lamprey. 103 just off B way."

"Yeah I know where it is. I remember him too."

"Good. Room 606. Just pick him up. Don't take time to shake the place down. Except bring in all books, letters, manuscripts. Anything printed, typed or written. Ketch?"

"Ketch. But what's the angle.... Books... "

"Just do it." The Lieutenant hung up.

Hauser and O'Brien. They had been on the City Narcotic Squad for 20 years. Old timers like me. I been on the junk for 16 years. They weren't bad as laws go. At least O'Brien wasn't. O'Brien was the con man, and Hauser the tough guy. A vaudeville team. Hauser had a way of hitting you before he said anything just to break the ice. Then O'Brien gives you an Old Gold --just like a cop to smoke Old Golds somehow... and starts putting down a cop con that was really bottled in bond. Not a bad guy, and I didn't want to do it. But it was my only chance. I was just tying up for my morning shot when they walked in with a pass key. It was a special kind you can use even when the door is locked from the inside with a key in the lock. On the table in front of me was a packet of junk, spike, syringe --I got the habit of using a regular syringe in Mexico and never went back to using a dropper --alcohol, cotton and a glass of water.

"Well well," says O'Brien.... "Long time no see eh?"

"Put on your coat, Lee," says Hauser. He had his gun out. He always has it out when he makes a pinch for the psychological effect and to forestall a rush for toilet, sink or window.

"Can I take a bang first, boys?" I asked.... "There's plenty here for evidence...." I was wondering how I could get to my suitcase if they said no. The case wasn't locked, but Hauser had the gun in his hand.

"He wants a shot," said Hauser.

"Now you know we can't do that, Bill," said O'Brien in his sweet con voice, dragging out the name with an oily, insinuating familiarity, brutal and obscene.

He meant, of course, "What can you do for us, Bill?" He looked at me and smiled. The smile stayed there too long, hideous and naked, the smile of an old painted pervert, gathering all the negative evil of O'Brien's ambiguous function.

"I might could set up Marty Steel for you," I said. I knew they wanted Marty bad. He'd been pushing for five years, and they couldn't hang one on him. Marty was an oldtimer, and very careful about who he served. He had to know a man and know him well before he would pick up his money. No one can say they ever did time because of me. My rep is perfect, but still Marty wouldn't serve me because he didn't know me long enough. That's how skeptical Marty was.

"Marty?" said O'Brien. "Can you score from him?"

"Sure I can."

They were suspicious. A man can't be a cop all his life without developing a special set of intuitions.

"O.K.," said Hauser finally. "But you'd better deliver, Lee."

"I'll deliver all right. Believe me I appreciate this." I tied up for a shot, my hands trembling with eagerness, an archetype dope fiend. 106

"Just an old junky, boys, a harmless old shaking wreck of a junky." That's the way I put it down. As I had hoped, Hauser looked away when I started probing for a vein. It's a wildly unpretty spectacle.

O'Brien was sitting on the arm of a chair smoking an Old Gold, looking out the window with that dreamy what I'll do when I get my pension look.

I hit a vein right away. A column of blood shot up into the syringe for an instant sharp and solid as a red cord. I pressed the plunger down with my thumb, feeling the junk pound through my veins to feed a million junk-hungry cells, to bring strength and alertness to every nerve and muscle. They were not watching me. I filled the syringe with alcohol.

Hauser was juggling his snub-nosed detective special, a Colt, and looking around the room. He could smell danger like an animal With his left hand he pushed the closet door open and glanced inside. My stomach contracted. I thought, "If he looks in the suitcase now I'm done." Hauser turned to me abruptly. "You through yet?" he snarled. "You'd better not try to shit us on Marty." The words came out so ugly he surprised and shocked himself. I picked up the syringe full of alcohol, twisting the needle to make sure it was tight.

"Just two seconds," I said.

I squirted a thin jet of alcohol, whipping it across his eyes with a sideways shake of the syringe. He let out a bellow of pain. I could see him pawing at his eyes with the left hand like he was tearing off an invisible bandage as I dropped to the floor on one knee, reaching for my suitcase. I pushed the suitcase open, and my left hand closed over the gun butt --I am righthanded but I shoot with my left hand. I felt the concussion of Hauser's shot before I heard it. His slug slammed into the wall behind me. Shooting from the floor, I snapped two quick shots into Hauser's belly where his vest had pulled up showing an inch of white shirt. He grunted in a way I could feel and doubled forward. Stiff with panic, O'Brien's hand was tearing at the gun in his shoulder holster. I clamped my other hand around my gun wrist to steady it for the long pull --this gun has the hammer fled off round so you can only use it double action --and shot him in the middle of his red forehead about two inches below the silver hairline. His hair had been grey the last time I saw him. That was about 15 years ago. My first arrest. His eyes went out. He fell off the chair onto his face. My hands were already reaching for what I needed, sweeping my notebooks into a briefcase with my works, junk, and a box of shells. I stuck the gun into my belt, and stepped out into the corridor putting on my coat. I could hear the desk clerk and the bell boy pounding up the stairs. I took the self-service elevator down, walked through the empty lobby into the street.

It was a beautiful Indian Summer day. I knew I didn't have much chance, but any chance is better than none, better than being a subject for experiments with ST (6) or whatever the initials are. I had to stock up on junk fast. Along with airports, R.R. stations and bus terminals, they would cover all junk areas and connections. I took a taxi to Washington Square, got out and walked along 4th Street till I spotted Nick on a corner. You can always find the pusher. Your need conjures him up like a ghost. "Listen, Nick," I said, "I'm leaving town. I want to pick up a piece of H. Can you make it right now?"

We were walking along 4th Street. Nick's voice seemed to drift into my consciousness from no particular place. An eerie, disembodied voice. "Yes, I think I can make it. I'll have to make a run uptown."

"We can take a cab."

"O.K., but I can't take you in to the guy, you understand."

"I understand. Let's go."

We were in the cab heading North. Nick was talking in his Bat, dead voice. 107

"Some funny stuff we're getting lately. It's not weak exactly.... I don't know.... It's different. Maybe they're putting some synthetic shit in it.... Dollies or something...."

"What!!!? Already?"

"Huh?... But this I'm taking you to now is O.K. In fact it's about the best deal around that I know of. . Stop here."

"Please make it fast," I said.

"It should be a matter of ten minutes unless he's out of stuff and has to make a run.... Better sit down over there and have a cup of coffee.... This is a hot neighborhood." I sat down at a counter and ordered coffee, and pointed to a piece of Danish pastry under a plastic cover. I washed down the stale rubbery cake with coffee, praying that just this once, please God, let him make it now, and not come back to say the man is all out and has to make a run to East Orange or Greenpoint.

Well here he was back, standing behind me. I looked at him, afraid to ask. Funny, I thought, here I sit with perhaps one chance in a hundred to live out the next 24 hours --I had made up my mind not to surrender and spend the next three or four months in death's waiting room. And here I was worrying about a junk score. But I only had about five shots left, and without junk I would be immobilized.... Nick nodded his head.

"Don't give it to me here," I said. "Let's take a cab." We took a cab and started downtown. I held out my hand and copped the package, then I slipped a fifty-dollar bill into Nick's palm. He glanced at it and showed his gums in a toothless smile: "Thanks a lot.... This will put me in the clear..."

I sat back letting my mind work without pushing it. Push your mind too hard, and it will fuck up like an overloaded switchboard, or turn on you with sabotage. And I had no margin for error. Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer. Like one of those thinking machines, you feed in your question, sit back, and wait.... I was looking for a name. My mind was sorting through names, discarding at once F.L.--Fuzz Lover, B.W.--Born Wrong, N.C.B.C.--Nice Cat But Chicken; putting aside to reconsider, narrowing, sifting, feeling for the name, the answer.

"Sometimes, you know, he'll keep me waiting three hours. Sometimes I make it right away like this." Nick had a deprecating little laugh that he used for punctuation. Sort of an apology for talking at all in the telepathizing world of the addict where only the quantity factor --How much $? How much junk? --requires verbal expression. He knew and I knew all about waiting. At all levels the drug trade operates without schedule. Nobody delivers on time except by accident. The addict runs on junk time. His body is his clock, and junk runs through it like an hourglass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need. Then he makes his abrupt intrusion into the time of others, and, like all Outsiders, all Petitioners, he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time.

"What can I say to him? He knows I'll wait," Nick laughed. I spent the night in the Ever Hard Baths --(homosexuality is the best all-around cover story an agent can use) --where a snarling Italian attendant creates such an unnerving atmosphere sweeping the dormitory with infra red see in the dark fieldglasses.

("All right in the North East corner! I see you!" switching on floodlights, sticking his head through trapdoors in the floor and wall of the private rooms, that many a queen has been carried out in a straitjacket.... )

108

I lay there in my open top cubicle room looking at the ceiling... listened to the grunts and squeals and snarls in the nightmare halflight of random, broken lust....

"Fuck off you!"

"Put on two pairs of glasses and maybe you can see something!" Walked out in the precise morning and bought a paper.... Nothing.... I called from a drugstore phone booth... and asked for Narcotics:

"Lieutenant Gonzales... who's calling?"

"I want to speak to O'Brien." A moment of static, dangling wires, broken connections...

"Nobody of that name in this department... Who are you?"

"Well let me speak to Hauser."

"Look, Mister, no O'Brien no Hauser in this bureau. Now what do you want?"

"Look, this is important.... I've got info on a big shipment of H coming in.... I want to talk to Hauser or O'Brien.... I don't do business with anybody else...."

"Hold on.... I'll connect you with Alcibiades." I began to wonder if there was an Anglo-Saxon name left in the Department....

"I want to speak to Hauser or O'Brien."

"How many times I have to tell you no Hauser no O'Brien in this department.... Now who is this calling?"

I hung up and took a taxi out of the area.... In the cab I realized what had happened.... I had been occluded from space-time like an eel's ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso.... Locked out.... Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection.... The Heat was off me from here on out... relegated with Hauser and O'Brien to a landlocked junk past where heroin is always twenty-eight dollars an ounce and you can score for yen pox in the Chink Laundry of Sioux Falls.... Far side of the world's mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O'Brien... clawing at a not-yet of Telepathic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid Addicts:

"I thought of that three hundred years ago."

"Your plan was unworkable then and useless now. ...Like Da Vinci's flying machine plans...." 109

ATROPHIED PREFACE

WOULDN'T YOU?

Why all this waste paper getting The People from one place to another? Perhaps to spare The Reader stress of sudden space shifts and keep him Gentle? And so a ticket is bought, a taxi called, a plane boarded. We are allowed a glimpse into the warm peach-lined cave as She (the airline hostess, of course) leans over us to murmur of chewing gum, dramamine, even nembutal.

"Talk paregoric, Sweet Thing, and I will hear."

I am not American Express.... If one of my people is seen in New York walking around in citizen clothes and next sentence Timbuktu putting down lad talk on a gazelle-eyed youth, we may assume that he (the party non-resident of Timbuktu) transported himself there by the usual methods of communication...

Lee The Agent (a double-four-eight-sixteen) is taking the junk cure... space time trip portentously familiar as junk meet corners to the addict... cures past and future shuttle pictures through 'his spectral substance vibrating in silent winds of accelerated Time.... Pick a shot.... Any Shot....

Formal knuckle biting, floor rolling shots in a precinct cell.... "Feel like a shot of Heroin, Bill? Haw Haw Haw."

Tentative half impressions that dissolve in light . pockets of rotten ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning..

Old violet brown photos that curl and crack like mud in the sun: Panama City... Bill Gains putting down the paregoric con on a Chinese druggist.

"I've got these racing dogs... pedigree greyhounds. . All sick with the dysentery... tropical climate . the shits... you sabe shit?... My Whippets Are Dying...." He screamed.... His eyes lit up with blue fire.... The flame went out... smell of burning metal.... "Administer with an eye dropper. Wouldn't you?... Menstrual cramps... my wife... Kotex... Aged mother... Piles ..raw... bleeding..." He nodded out against the counter.... The druggist took a tooth-pick out of his mouth and looked at the end of it and shook his head....

Gains and Lee burned down the Republic of Panama from David to Darien on paregoric.... They flew apart with a shlupping sound.... Junkies tend to run together into one body.... You have to be careful especially in hot places.... Gains back to Mexico City.... Desperate skeleton grin of chronic junk lack glazed over with codeine and goof balls... cigarette holes in his bathrobe... coffee stains on the floor... smoky kerosene stove... rusty orange flame... The Embassy would give no details other than place of burial in the American Cemetery.... And Lee back to sex and pain and time and Yage, bitter Soul Vine of the Amazon.... I recall once after an overdose of Majoun (this is Cannabis dried and finely powdered to consistency of green powdered sugar and mixed with some confection or other usually tasting like gritty plum pudding, but the choice of confection is arbitrary... ). I am returning from The Lulu or Johnny or Little Boy's Room (stink of atrophied infancy and toilet training) look across the living room of that villa outside Tanger and suddenly don't know where I am. Perhaps I have opened the wrong door and at any moment The Man In Possession, The Owner Who Got There First will rush in and scream:

" What Are Yon Doing Here? Who Are You? "

And I don't know what I am doing there nor who I am. I decide to play it cool and maybe I will get the orientation before the Owner shows.... So instead of yelling "Where Am I?" cool it and look 110

around and you will find out approximately.... You were not there for The Beginning. You will not be there for The End.... Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.... What do I know of this yellow blighted young junky face subsisting on raw opium? I tried to tell him:

"Some morning you will wake up with your liver in your lap" and how to process raw opium so it is not plain poison. But his eyes glaze over and he don't want to know. Junkies are like that most of them they don't want to know... and you can't tell them anything.... A smoker doesn't want to know anything but smoke.... And a heroin junky same way.... Strictly the spike and any other route is Farina....

So I guess he is still sitting there in his 1920 Spanish villa outside Tanger eating that raw opium full of shit and stones and straw... the whole lot for fear he might lose something.... There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. . . . I am a recording instrument.... I do not presume to impose "story" "plot"

"continuity."...Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function.... I am not an entertainer....

"Possession" they call it.... Sometimes an entity jumps in the body --outlines waver in yellow orange jelly --and hands move to disembowel the passing whore or strangle the nabor child in hope of alleviating a chronic housing shortage. As if I was usually there but subject to goof now and again.... Wrong! I am never here.... Never that is fully in possession, but some-how in a position to forestall ill-advised moves.... Patrolling is, in fact, my principle occupation.... No matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this straight jacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection....

Writers talk about the sweet-sick smell of death whereas any junky can tell you that death has no smell . at the same time a smell that shuts off breath and stops blood... colorless no-smell of death... no one can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions and black blood filters of flesh... the death smell is unmistakably a smell and complete absence of smell... smell absence hits the nose first because all organic life has smell... stopping of smell is felt like darkness to the eyes, silence to the ears, stress and weightlessness to the balance and location sense.... You always smell it and give it out for others to smell during junk withdrawal.... A kicking junky can make a whole apartment unlivable with his death smell... but a good airing will stink the place up again so a body can breathe.... You also smell it during one of those oil burner habits that suddenly starts jumping geometric like a topping forest fire....

Cure is always: Let go! Jump!

A friend of mine found himself naked in a Marrakech hotel room second floor.... (He is after processing by a Texas mother who dressed him in girl's clothes as a child.... Crude but effective against infant protoplasm....) The other occupants are Arabs, three Arabs... knives in hand... watching him... glint of metal and points of light in dark eyes . pieces of murder falling slow as opal chips through glycerine... Slower animal reactions allow him a full second to decide: Straight through the window and down into the crowded street like a falling star his wake of glass glittering in the sun... sustained a broken ankle and a chipped shoulder... clad in a diaphanous pink curtain, with a curtain-rod staff, hobbled away to the Commissariat de Police.... Sooner or later The Vigilante, The Rube, Lee The Agent, A. J., Clem and Jody The Ergot Twins, Hassan O'Leary the After Birth Tycoon, The Sailor, The Exterminator, Andrew Keif, "Fats" Terminal, Doc Benway, "Fingers" Schafer are subject to say the same thing in the same words to occupy, at that intersection point, the same position in space-time. Using a common vocal apparatus 111

complete with all metabolic appliances that is to be the same person --a most inaccurate way of expressing Recognition: The junky naked in sunlight...

The writer sees himself reading to the mirror as always... He must check now and again to reassure himself that The Crime Of Separate Action has not, is not, cannot occur.... Anyone who has ever looked into a mirror knows what this crime is and what it means in terms of lost control when the reflection no longer obeys.... Too late to dial P o l i c e.... I personally wish to terminate my services as of now in that I cannot continue to sell the raw materials of death.... Yours, sir, is a hopeless case and a noisome one....

"Defense is meaningless in the present state of our knowledge," said The Defense looking up from an electron microscope....

Take your business to Walgreen’s...

Steal anything in sight.

We are not responsible.

I don't know how to return it to the white reader.

You can write or yell or croon about it... paint about it... act about it... shit it out in mobiles. . So long as you don't go and do it...

Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen.... Death for dope fiends, death for sex queens (I mean fiends) death for the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe movement.... The black wind sock of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve.... Population blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide.... Any number can play.... The Liberal Press and The Press Not So Liberal and The Press Reactionary Scream approval:

"Above all the myth of other-level experience must be eradicated...." And speak darkly of certain harsh realities... cows with the aftosa... prophylaxis....

Power groups of the world frantically cut lines of connection.... The Planet drifts to random insect doom....

Thermodynamics has won at a crawl... Orgone balked at the post.... Christ bled.. Time ran out....

You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point.... I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous like the little toe amputates in a West African disease confined to the Negro race and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a manicured toe bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and laid at her feet by her Afghan Hound.... Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book... Black insect lusts open into vast, other planet landscapes.... Abstract concepts, bare as algebra, narrow down to a black turd or a pair of aging cajones..

How-To extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall.... Doors that only open in Silence.... Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse....

Robert Christie knew The Answering Service... Kill the old cunts... keep pubic hairs in his locket ...wouldn't you?

Robert Christie, mass strangler of women --sounds like a daisy chain --hanged in 1953. Jack The Ripper, Literal Swordsman of the 1890s and never caught with his pants down... wrote a letter to The Press.

"Next time I'll send along an ear just for jolly.. Wouldn't you?" 112

"Oh be careful! There they go again!" said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor.... 'Stop them will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls roll into the coal-bin!"

Window dressers scream through the station, beat the cashiers with the Fairy Hyp. Dilaudid deliver poor me (Dilaudid is souped up, dehydrate morphine). The sheriff in black vest types out a death warrant: "Gotta make it legal and exempt narcotic...." Violation Public Health Law 334... Procuring an orgasm by the use of fraud.... Johnny on all fours and Mary sucking him and running her fingers down the thigh backs and light over the outfields of the ball park....

Over the broken chair and out through the tool-house window whitewash whipping in a cold Spring wind on a limestone cliff over the river... piece of moon smoke hangs in China blue sky... out on a long line of jissom across the dusty floor....

Motel... Motel... Motel... broken neon arabesque... loneliness moans across the continent like fog horns over still oily water of tidal rivers....

Ball squeezed dry lemon rind pest rims the ass with a knife cut off a piece of hash for the water pipe-bubble bubble --indicate what used to be me..

"The river is served, sir."

Dead leaves fill the fountain and geraniums run wild with mint, spill a vending machine route across the lawn....

The aging playboy dons his 1920 autograph slicker, feeds his screaming wife down the garbagedisposal unit.... Hair, shit and blood spurt out 1963 on the wall.... "Yes sir, boys, the shit really hit the fan in '63," said the tiresome old prophet can bore the piss out of you in any space-time direction....

"Now I happen to remember because it was just two year before that a strain of human aftosa developed in a Bolivian lavatory got loose through the medium of a Chinchilla coat fixed an income tax case in Kansas City.... And a Liz claimed Immaculate Conception and give birth to a six-ounce spider monkey through the navel.... They say the croaker was party to that caper had the monkey on his back all the time..."

I, William Seward, captain of this lushed up hashhead subway, will quell the Lock Ness monster with rotenone and cowboy the white whale. I will reduce Satan to Automatic Obedience, and sublimate subsidiary fiends. I will banish the candiru from your swimming pools.--I will issue a bull on Immaculate Birth Control....

"The oftener a thing happens the more uniquely wonderful it is," said the pretentious young Nordic on the trapeze studying his Masonic home work.

"The Jews don't believe in Christ, Clem.... All they want to do is doodle a Christian girl...." Adolescent angels sing on shithouse walls of the world.

"Come and jack off..."

"Gimpy push milk sugar shit..." Johnny Hung Lately 1952. (Decayed corseted tenor sings Deeve Danny in drag...)

Mules don’t foal in this decent county and on hooded dead gibber in the ash pits... Violation Public Health Law 334.

So where is the statuary and the percentage? Who can say? I don't have The Word.... Home in my douche bag... The King is loose with a flame thrower and the king killer, tortured in effigy of a thousand bums, slides down skid row to shit in the limestone ball court. Young Dillinger walked straight out of the house and never looked back....

"Don't ever look back, kid.... You turn into some old cow's salt lick." 113

Police bullet in the alley... Broken wings of Icarus, screams of a burning boy inhaled by the old junky... eyes empty as a vast plain... ( vulture wings husk in the dry air). The Crab, aged Dean Of Lush Workers, puts on his crustacean suit to prowl the graveyard shift... with steel claws pulls the gold teeth and crowns of any flop sleep with his mouth open.... If the flop comes up on him The Crab rears back claws snapping to offer dubious battle on the plains of Queens.

The Boy Burglar, fucked in the long jail term, ousted from the cemetery for the non-payment, comes gibbering into the queer bar with a moldy pawn ticket to pick up the back balls of Tent City where castrate salesmen sing the IBM song.

Crabs frolicked through his forest... wrestling with the angel hard-on all night, thrown in the homo fall of valor, take a back road to the rusty limestone cave. Black Yen ejaculates over the salt marshes where nothing grows not even a mandrake.... Law of averages... A few chickens... Only way to live....

"Hello, Cash."

"You sure it's here?"

"Of course I'm sure.... Go in with you."

Night train to Chi... Meet a girl in the hall and I see she is on and ask where is a score?

"Come in sonny."

I mean not a young chick but built... "How about a fix first?"

"Ixnay, You wouldn't be inna condition."

Three times around... wake up shivering sick in warm Spring wind through the window, water burns the eyes like acid....

She gets out of bed naked.... Stash in the Cobra lamp.... Cooks up....

"Turn over.... I'll give it to you in the ass."

She slides the needle in deep, pulls it out and massages the cheek.... She licks a drop of blood off her finger.

He rolls over with a hard-on dissolving in the grey ooze of junk. In a vale of cocaine and innocence sad-eyed youths yodel for a lost Danny Boy.... We sniffed all night and made it four times... fingers down the black board... scrape the white bone. Home is the heroin home from the sea. and the hustler home from The Bill.... The Pitchman stirs uneasily: "Take over here will you, kid? Gotta see a man about a monkey." The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth, in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement. This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes and the slamming steel shutters of commerce, screams of pain and pathos and screams plain pathic, copulating cats and outraged squawk of the displaced bull head, prophetic mutterings of brujo in nutmeg trances, snapping necks and screaming mandrakes, sigh of orgasm, heroin silent as dawn in the thirsty cells, Radio Cairo screaming like a berserk tobacco auction, and flutes of Ramadan fanning the sick junky like a gentle lush worker in the grey subway dawn feeling with delicate fingers for the green folding crackle... This is Revelation and Prophecy of what I can pick up without FM on my 1920 crystal set with antennae of jissom.... Gentle reader, we see God through our assholes in the flash bulb of orgasm.... Through these orifices transmute your body.... The way OUT is the way IN.... Now I, William Seward, will unlock my word horde. . My Viking heart fares over the great brown river where motors put put put in jungle twilight and whole trees float with huge snakes in the branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore, across the Missouri field (The Boy finds a pink 114

arrowhead) out along distant train whistles, comes back to me hungry as a street boy don't know to peddle the ass God gave him... Gentle Reader, The Word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and toes like an opportunist land crab, it will hang you and catch your jissom like a scrutable dog, it will coil round your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of rancid ectoplasm.... And why a scrutable dog?

The other day I am returning from the long lunch thread from mouth to ass all the days of our years, when I see an Arab boy have this little black and white dog know how to walk on his hind legs.... And a big yaller dog come on the boy for affection and the boy shove it away, and the yaller dog growl and snap at the little toddler, snarling if he had but human gift of tongues: "A crime against nature right there."

So I dub the yaller dog Scrutable.... And let me say in passing, and I am always passing like a sincere Spade, that the Inscrutable East need a heap of salt to get it down... Your Reporter bang thirty grains of M a day and sit eight hours inscrutable as a turd.

"What are you thinking?" says the squirming American Tourist.... To which I reply: "Morphine have depressed my hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion, and since the front brain acts only at second hand with backbrain titillation, being a vicarious type citizen can only get his kicks from behind, I must report virtual absence of cerebral event. I am aware of your presence, but since it has for me no affective connotation, my affect having been disconnect by the junk man for the non-payment, I am not innarested in your doings.... Go or come, shit or fuck yourself with a rasp or an asp --tis well done and fitting for a queen --but The Dead and The Junky don't care.... " They are Inscrutable.

"Which is the way down the aisle to the water closet?" I asked the blonde usherette.

"Right through here, sir.... Room for one more inside."

"Have you seen Pantopon Rose?" said the old junky in the black overcoat. The Texas sheriff has killed his complicit Vet., Browbeck The Unsteady, involved in horse heroin racket. . A horse down with the aftosa need a sight of heroin to ease his pain and maybe some of that heroin take off across the lonesome prairie and whinny in Washington Square.... Junkies rush up yelling: "Heigh oOO Silver."

"But where is the statuary?" This arch type bit of pathos screeched out in tea-room cocktail lounge with bamboo decorations, Calle Juarez, Mexico, DF.... Lost back there with a meatball rape rap... a cunt claw your pants down and you up for rape that's statutory, brother.... Chicago calling... come in please... Chicago calling... come in please.... What you think I got the rubber on for goulashes in Puyo? A mighty wet place, reader....

"Take it off! Take it off!"

The old queen meets himself coming round the other way in burlesque of adolescence, gets the knee from his phantom of the Old Old Howard... down skid row to Market Street Museum shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse... young boys need it special.... They was ripe for the plucking forgot way back yonder in the corn hole... lost in little scraps of delight and burning scrolls....

Read the metastasis with blind fingers.

Fossil message of arthritis...

"Selling is more of a habit than using." --Lola La Chata, Mexico, DF. Sucking terror from needle scars, underwater scream mouthing numb nerve warnings of the yen to come, throbbing bite site of rabies...

115

"If God made anything better he kept it for himself," the Sailor used to say, his transmission slowed down with twenty goof balls.

(Pieces of murder fall slow as opal chips through glycerine. )

Watching you and humming over and over "Johnny's So Long At The Fair." Pushing in a small way to keep up our habit..

"And use that alcohol," I say slamming a spirit lamp down on the table.

"You fucking can't --wait --hungry junkies all the time black up my spoons with matches.... That's all I need for pen Indef. the heat rumbles a black spoon in the trap....

"I thought you was quitting.... Wouldn't feel right fucking up your cure.

"Takes a lot of guts to kick a habit, kid."

Looking for veins in the thawing flesh. Hour-Glass of junk spills its last black grains into the kidneys....

"Heavily infected area," he muttered, shifting the tie up.

"Death was their Culture Hero," said my Old Lady looking up from the Mayan Codices.... "They got fire and speech and the corn seed from death.... Death turns into a maize seed." The Ouab Days are upon us

raw pealed winds of hate and mischance

blew the shot.

"Get those fucking dirty pictures out of here," I told her. The Old Time Schmecker supported himself on a chair back, juiced and goof-balled... a disgrace to his blood.

"What are you one of these goof-ball artists?"

Yellow smells of skid row sherry and occluding liver drifted out of his clothes when he made the junky gesture throwing the hand out palm up to cope...

smell of chili houses and dank overcoats and atrophied testicles.... He looked at me through the tentative, ectoplasmic flesh of cure... thirty pounds materialized in a month when you kick... soft pink putty that fades at the first silent touch of junk.... I saw it happen... ten pounds lost in ten minutes... standing there with the syringe in one hand... holding his pants up with the other.

sharp reek of diseased metal.

Walking in a rubbish heap to the sky... scattered gasoline fires... smoke hangs black and solid as excrement in the motionless air... smudging the white film of noon heat... D.L. walks beside me... a reflection of my toothless gums and hairless skull . flesh smeared over the rotting phosphorescent bones consumed by slow cold fires... He carries an open can of gasoline and the smell of gasoline envelopes him. .Coming over a hill of rusty iron we meet a group of Natives... Hat two-dimension faces of scavenger fish....

"Throw the gasoline on them and light it....

QUICK...

white flash... mangled insect screams .

I woke up with the taste of metal in my mouth back from the dead trailing the colorless death smell

afterbirth of a withered grey monkey

phantom twinges of amputation...

"Taxi boys waiting for a pickup," Eduardo said and died of an overdose in Madrid.... 116

Powder trains burn back through pink convolutions of tumescent flesh... set off flash bulbs of orgasm... pin-point photos of arrested motion smooth brown side twisted to light a cigarette....

He stood there in a 1920 straw hat somebody gave him... soft mendicant words falling like dead birds in the dark street....

"No... No more... No mas..."

A heaving sea of air hammers in the purple brown dusk tainted with rotten metal smell of sewer gas... young worker faces vibrating out of focus in yellow halos of carbide lanterns... broken pipes exposed....

"They are rebuilding the City."

Lee nodded absently.... "Yes... Always..."

Either way is a bad move to The East Wing..

If I knew I'd be glad to tell you....

"No good... no bueno... hustling myself...."

"No glot... C'lom Fliday"

Tangier, 1959.

117

APPENDIX

The British Journal of Addiction

Vol.53, n°2

LETTER FROM A MASTER ADDICT

TO DANGEROUS DRUGS

August 3rd, 1956.

Venice.

Dear Doctor,

Thanks for your letter. I enclose that article on the effects of various drugs I have used. I do not know if it suitable for your publication. I have no objection to my name being used. No difficulty with drinking. No desire to use any drug. General health excellent. Please give my regards to Mr------. I use his system of exercises daily with excellent results. I have been thinking of writing a book on narcotic drugs if I could find a suitable collaborator to handle the technical end.

Yours,