Naked Lunch (10 page)

The President is a junky but can’t take it direct because of his position. So he gets fixed through me.… From time to time we make contact, and I recharge him. These contacts look, to the casual observer, like homosexual practices, but the actual excitement is not primarily sexual, and the climax is the separation when the recharge is completed. The erect penises
are brought into contact – at least we used that method in the beginning, but contact points wear out like veins. Now I sometimes have to slip my penis under his left eyelid. Of course I can always fix him with an Osmosis Recharge, which corresponds to a skin shot, but that is admitting defeat. An O.R. will put the President in a bad mood for weeks, and might well precipitate an atomic shambles.
And the President pays a high price for the Oblique Habit. He has sacrificed all control, and is dependent as an unborn child. The Oblique Addict suffers a whole spectrum of subjective horror, silent protoplasmic frenzy, hideous agony of the bones. Tensions build up, pure energy without emotional content finally tears through the body throwing him about like a man in contact with high tension
wires. If his charge connection is cut off cold, the Oblique Addict falls into such violent electric convulsions that his bones shake loose, and he dies with the skeleton straining to climb out of his unendurable flesh and run in a straight line to the nearest cemetery.

The relation between an O.A. (Oblique Addict) and his R.C. (Recharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other’s company for brief and infrequent intervals – I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by the recharge process.

Reading the paper.… Something about a triple murder in the rue de la Merde, Paris: ‘An adjusting of scores.’… I keep slipping
away.…‘The police have identified the author …
Pepe El Culito … The Little Ass Hole, an affectionate diminutive.’ Does it really say that? … I try to focus the words … they separate in meaningless mosaic.…

Lazarus Go Home

Fumbling through faded tape at the pick up frontier, a languid grey area of hiatus miasmic with yawns and gaping goof holes, Lee found out that the young junky standing there
in his room at 10
A
.
M
. was back from two months skin diving in Corsica and off the junk.…

‘Here to show off his new body,’
Lee decided with a shudder of morning junk sickness. He knew that he was seeing – ah yes
Miguel
thank you – three months back sitting in the Metropole nodded out over a stale yellow eclair that would poison a cat two hours later, decided that the effort involved in seeing
Miguel at 10
A
.
M
. was enough without the intolerable chore of correcting an error – (‘what is this a fucking farm?’) which would also entail current picture of Miguel in much used areas like some great, inconvenient beast of an object on top in the suitcase.

‘You look marvellous,’ Lee said, wiping away the more obvious signs of distaste with a sloppy, casual napkin, seeing the grey ooze of junk
in Miguel’s face, studying patterns of shabbiness as if a man and clothes had moved for years through back alleys of time with never a space station to tidy up.…

‘Besides by the time I could correct the error … Lazarus go home.… Pay The Man and go home.… What I want to see your old borrowed meat for?’

‘Well it’s great to see you off.… Do yourself a favor.’ Miguel was swimming around the room
spearing fish with his hand.…

‘When you’re down there you never think about horse.’

‘You’re better off like this,’ said Lee, dreamily caressing a needle scar on the back of Miguel’s hand, following the whorls and patterns of smooth purple flesh in a slow twisting movement.…

Miguel scratched the back of his hand.… He looked out the window.… His body moved in little, galvanized jerks as junk
channels lit up.… Lee sat there waiting. ‘One snort never put anybody back on, kid.’

‘I know what I’m doing.’

‘They always know.’

Miguel took the nail file.

Lee closed his eyes: ‘It’s too tiresome.’

‘Uh thanks that was great.’ Miguel’s pants fell to his ankles. He stood there in a misshappen overcoat of flesh that turned from brown to green and then colorless in the morning light, fell off
in globs onto the floor.

Lee’s eyes moved in the substance of his face … a little, cold, grey flick.…‘Clean it up,’ he said. ‘Enough dirt in here now.’

‘Oh uh sure,’ Miguel fumbled with a dustpan.

Lee put the packet of heroin away.

Lee lived in a permanent third-day kick, with, of course, certain uh essential intermissions to refuel the fires that burned through his yellow-pink-brown gelatinous
substance and kept off the hovering flesh. In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh.… Long white tendrils of fungus curled round the naked bones. Mold odors of atrophied testicles
quilted his body in a fuzzy grey fog.…

During his first severe infection the boiling thermometer flashed a quicksilver bullet into the nurse’s brain and she
fell dead with a mangled scream. The doctor took one look and slammed steel shutters of survival. He ordered the burning bed and its occupant immediately evicted from the hospital premises.

‘Guess he can make his own penicillin!’ snarled
the doctor.

But the infection burned the mold out.… Lee lived now in varying degrees of transparency.… While not exactly invisible he was at least difficult to see. His presence attracted no special notice.… People covered him with a project or dismissed him as a reflection, shadow: ‘Some kinda light trick or neon advertisement.’

Now Lee felt the first seismic tremors of Old Faithful the Cold
Burn. He pushed Miguel’s spirit into the hall with a kind, firm tendril.

‘Jesus!’ said Miguel ‘I gotta go!’ He rushed out.

Pink fires of histamine spurted from Lee’s glowing core and covered his raw periphery. (The room was fireproof, the walls of iron blistered and spotted with moon craters.) He took a large fix and falsified his schedule.

He decided to visit a colleague, NG Joe, who got hooked
during a Bang-utot attack in Honolulu.

(Note: Bang-utot, literally, ‘attempting to get up and groaning …’ Death occurring in the course of a nightmare … The condition occurs in males of S.E. Asiatic extraction.… In Manila about twelve cases of death by Bang-utot are recorded each year.

One man who recovered said that ‘a little man’ was sitting on his chest and strangling him.

Victims often
know that they are going to die, express the fear that their penis will enter the body and kill them. Sometimes they cling to the penis in a state of shrieking hysteria calling on others for help lest the penis escape and pierce the body. Erections, such as normally occur in sleep, are considered especially dangerous and liable to bring a fatal attack.… One man devised a Rube Goldberg contraption
to prevent erection during sleep. But he died of Bang-utot.

Careful autopsies of Bang-utot victims have revealed no organic reason for death. There are often signs of strangulation [caused by what?]; sometimes slight hemorrhages of pancreas and lungs – not sufficient to cause death and also of unknown origin. It has occurred to the author that the cause of death is a misplacement of sexual energy
resulting in a lung erection with consequent strangulation.…[See article by Nils Larsen M.D.,
The Men with the Deadly Dream
in the
Saturday Evening Post
, December 3, 1955. Also article by Erle Stanley Gardner for
True Magazine
.])

N G lived in constant fear of erection so his habit jumped and jumped. (Note: It is a well known tiresome fact, it is a notoriously dull and long winded fact, that anyone
who gets hooked because of any disability whatever, will be presented, during the periods of shortage or deprivation [such a thing as too much fun you know] with an outrageously padded, geometrically progressing, proliferating account.)

An electrode attached to one testicle glowed briefly and NG woke up in the smell of burning flesh and reached for a loaded syringe. He rolled into a foetal position
and slid the needle into his spine. He pulled the needle out with a little sigh of pleasure, and realized that Lee was in the room. A long slug undulated out of Lee’s right eye and wrote on the wall in iridescent ooze: ‘The Sailor is in the City buying up TIME.’

I am waiting in front of a drugstore for it to open at nine o’clock. Two Arab boys roll cans of garbage up to a high heavy wood door
in a whitewashed wall. Dust in front of the door streaked with urine. One of the boys bent over, rolling the heavy cans, pants tight over his lean young ass. He looks at me with the neutral, calm glance of an animal. I wake with a shock like the boy is real and I have missed a meet I had with him for this afternoon.

‘We expect additional equalizations,’ says the Inspector in an interview with
Your Reporter. ‘Otherwise will occur,’ the Inspector lifts one leg in a typical Nordic gesture, ‘the bends is it not? But perhaps we can provide the suitable chamber of decompression.’

The Inspector opens his fly and begins looking for crabs, applying ointment from a little clay pot. Clearly the interview is at an end. ‘You’re not going?’ he exclaims. ‘Well, as one judge said to the other, “Be
just and if you can’t be just be arbitrary.” Regret cannot observe customary obscenities.’ He holds up his right hand covered with a foul-smelling yellow ointment.

One’s Reporter rushes forward and clasps the soiled hand in both of his. ‘It’s been a pleasure, Inspector, an unspeakable pleasure,’ he says peeling off his gloves, rolling them into a ball and tossing them into the waste-basket. ‘Expense
account,’ he smiles.

Hassan’s Rumpus Room

Gilt and red plush. Rococo bar backed by pink shell. The air is cloyed with a sweet evil substance like decayed honey. Men and women in evening dress sip pousse-cafés through alabaster tubes. A Near East Mugwump sits naked on a bar stool covered in pink silk. He licks warm honey from a crystal goblet with a long black tongue. His genitals are perfectly
formed – circumcised cock, black shiny pubic hairs. His lips are thin and purple-blue like the lips of a penis, his eyes blank with insect calm. The Mugwump has no liver, maintaining himself exclusively on sweets. Mugwump push a slender blond youth to a couch and strip him expertly.

‘Stand up and turn around,’ he orders in telepathic pictographs.
He ties the boy’s hands behind him with a red
silk cord. ‘Tonight we make it all the way.’

‘No, no!’ screams the boy.

‘Yes. Yes.’

Cocks ejaculate in silent ‘yes.’ Mugwump part silk curtains, reveal a teak wood gallows against lighted screen of red flint. Gallows is on a dais of Aztec mosaics.

The boy crumples to his knees with a long ‘OOOOOOOOH,’ shitting and pissing in terror. He feels the shit warm between his thighs. A great wave of
hot blood swells his lips and throat. His body contracts into a foetal position and sperm spurts hot into his face. The Mugwump dips hot perfumed water from alabaster bowl, pensively washes the boy’s ass and cock, drying him with a soft blue towel. A warm wind plays over the boy’s body and the hairs float free. The Mugwump puts a hand under the boy’s chest and pulls him to his feet. Holding him
by both pinioned elbows, propels him up the steps and under the noose. He stands in front of the boy holding the noose in both hands.

The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection.

An old garbage collector, face fine and yellow as Chinese ivory, blows The Blast on his dented brass horn, wakes the Spanish
pimp with a hard-on. Whore staggers out through dust and shit and litter of dead kittens, carrying bales of aborted foetuses, broken condoms, bloody Kotex, shit wrapped in bright color comics.

A vast still harbor of iridescent water. Deserted gas well flares on the smoky horizon. Stink of oil and sewage. Sick sharks swim through the black water, belch sulphur from rotting livers, ignore a bloody,
broken Icarus. Naked Mr. America, burning frantic with self bone love, screams out: ‘My asshole confounds the Louvre! I fart ambrosia and shit pure gold turds! My cock spurts soft diamonds in the
morning sunlight!’ He plummets from the eyeless lighthouse, kissing and jacking off in face of the black mirror, glides oblique down with cryptic condoms and mosaic of a thousand newspapers through a
drowned city of red brick to settle in black mud with tin cans and beer bottles, gangsters in concrete, pistols pounded flat and meaningless to avoid short-arm inspection of prurient ballistic experts. He waits the slow striptease of erosion with fossil loins.

The Mugwump slips the noose over the boy’s head and tightens the knot caressingly behind the left ear. The boy’s penis is retracted, his
balls tight. He looks straight ahead breathing deeply. The Mugwump sidles around the boy goosing him and caressing his genitals in hieroglyphs of mockery. He moves in behind the boy with a series of bumps and shoves his cock up the boy’s ass. He stands there moving in circular gyrations.

The guests shush each other, nudge and giggle.

Suddenly the Mugwump pushes the boy forward into space, free
of his cock. He steadies the boy with hands on the hip bones, reaches up with his stylized hieroglyph hands and snaps the boy’s neck. A shudder passes through the boy’s body. His penis rises in three great surges pulling his pelvis up, ejaculates immediately.