Naked Lunch (22 page)

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.’

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 we’ll 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.’

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 last 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 latches 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.’

‘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 we can relax in the cafés 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 pencillin 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 gang-fucked 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 von 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 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.

‘Everbody 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 Department 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.’

‘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 pre-surgery 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.’