Naked Lunch (25 page)

‘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 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.

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 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.…

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 defenses 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 lamprey 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, translucent-grey 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 Pan pipes of humpbacked beggar,
cold wind sweeps down from post card Chimborazi, 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, convicted 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 mother fucker 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 each 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, tuned 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 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 of halitosis. That grippy feeling brother? Sore throat persistent and disquieting as the hot afternoon wind? Welcome to the International Syphilis Lodge – ‘Methodith Epithcopal God damn ith’ (phrase used to test for 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.…

Hauser and O’Brien

When they walked in on me that morning at 8 o’clock, I knew that 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. 103rd just off Broadway.’

‘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. Oldtimers 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 conman, 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.

‘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 filed 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.