Naked Lunch (9 page)

They just bring so-called lunch.… A hard-boiled egg with the shell off revealing an object like I never seen before.… A very small egg of a yellow-brown color … Perhaps laid by the duck-billed platypus.
The orange contained a huge worm and very little else.… He really got there firstest with the mostest.… In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to a enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid
gourmets esteem the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome.… An Interzone coroner known as Autopsy Ahmed
made a fortune trafficking The Worm.

The French school is opposite my window and I dig the boys with my eight-power field glasses.… So close I could reach out and touch them.… They wear shorts.… I can see the goose-pimples on their legs in the cold Spring morning.… I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

Did
I ever tell you about the time Mary and me pay two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each other? So I ask Mary, ‘Do you think they will do it?’

And he says, ‘I think so. They are hungry.’

And I say, ‘That’s the way I like to see them.’

Makes me feel sorta like a dirty old man but, ‘Son cosas de la vida,’ as Sobera de la Flor said when the fuzz upbraids him for blasting this cunt and
taking the dead body to the Bar O Motel and fucking it.…

‘She play hard to get already,’ he say … ‘I don’t hafta take that sound.’ (Sobera de la Flor was a Mexican criminal convict of several rather pointless murders.)

The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid.… I think they are using it for an operating room.…

nurse:
‘I can’t find her pulse, doctor.’

DR. BENWAY:
‘Maybe she got it
up her snatch in a finger stall.’

NURSE:
‘Adrenalin, doctor?’

D
R
. B
ENWAY:
‘The night porter shot it all up for kicks.’ He looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets.… He advances on the patient.…‘Make an incision, Doctor Limpf,’ he says to his appalled assistant.…‘I’m going to massage the heart.’

Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the
incision. Dr. Benway washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet-bowl.…

N
URSE:
‘Shouldn’t it be sterilized, doctor?’

D
R
. B
ENWAY:
‘Very likely, but there’s no time.’ He sits on the suction cup like a cane seat watching his assistant make the incision.…‘You young squirts couldn’t lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture.… Soon we’ll be
operating by remote control on patients we never see.… We’ll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery.… All the know-how and make-do.… Did I ever tell you about the time I performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once I was caught short without instrument one and removed a uterine tumor with my teeth. That was in the Upper Effendi, and besides …’

D
R
. L
IMPF:
‘The incision is ready, doctor.’

Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall … The cup makes a horrible sucking sound.

N
URSE:
‘I think she’s gone, doctor.’

D
R
. B
ENWAY:
‘Well, it’s all in the day’s work.’ He walks across the room to a medicine cabinet.…‘Some fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush!
Nurse! Send the boy out to fill this RX on the double!’

Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: ‘Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that.… You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from
the beginning.

‘Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his
patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second.… Did any of you ever see Dr. Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were
performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: “I don’t give them time to die,” he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. “Fucking undisciplined cells!” he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.’

A young man leaps down into the operating theatre and, whipping
out a scalpel, advances on the patient.

D
R
. B
ENWAY:
‘An espontaneo! Stop him before he guts my patient!’

(Espontaneo is a bull-fighting term for a member of the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the bull before he is dragged out of the ring.)

The orderlies scuffle with the espontaneo, who is finally ejected from the hall. The anesthetist
takes advantage of the confusion to pry a large gold filling from the patient’s mouth.…

I am passing room 10 they moved me out of yesterday.… Maternity case I assume … Bedpans full of blood and Kotex and nameless female substances, enough to pollute a continent … If someone comes to visit me in my old room he will think I gave birth to a monster and the State Department is trying to hush it up.…

Music from
I Am an American
… An elderly man in the striped pants and cutaway of a diplomat stands on a platform draped with the American flag. A decayed, corseted tenor – bursting out of a Daniel Boone costume – is singing the
Star Spangled Banner
, accompanied by a full orchestra. He sings with a slight lisp.…

T
HE
D
IPLOMAT
(reading from a great scroll of ticker tape that keeps growing and tangling
around his feet):
‘And we categorically deny that
any
male citizen of the United States of America …’

T
ENOR:
‘Oh thay can you thee …’ His voice breaks and shoots up to a high falsetto.

In the control room the Technician mixes a bicarbonate of soda and belches into his hand: ‘God damned tenor’s a brown artist,’ he mutters sourly. ‘Mike! rumph,’ the shout ends in a belch. ‘Cut that swish fart
off the air and give him his purple slip. He’s through as of right now.… Put in that sex-changed Liz athlete.… She’s a fulltime tenor at least…
.Costume
? How in the fuck should I know? I’m no dress designer swish from the costume department!
What’s that?
The entire costume department occluded as a security risk? What am I, an octopus? Let’s see … How about an Indian routine? Pocahontas or Hiawatha?
… No, that’s not right. Some citizen cracks wise about giving it back to the Indians.… A Civil War uniform, the coat North and the pants South like it show they got together again? She can come on like Buffalo Bill or Paul Revere or that citizen wouldn’t give up the shit, I mean the ship, or a G.I. or a Doughboy or the unknown Soldier.… That’s the best deal.… Cover her with a monument, that
way nobody has to look at her.…’

The Lesbian, concealed in a
papier maché
Arc de Triomphe fills her great lungs and looses a tremendous bellow.

‘Oh say do that Star Spangled Banner yet wave …’

A great rent rips the Arc de Triomphe from top to bottom. The Diplomat puts a hand to his forehead.…

T
HE
D
IPLOMAT:
‘That any male citizen of the United States has given birth in Interzone or at any other
place.…’

‘O’er the land of the FREEEEEEEEEEE …’

The Diplomat’s mouth is moving but no one can hear him. The Technician clasps his hands over his ears: ‘Mother of God!’ he screams. His plate begins to vibrate like a Jew’s harp, suddenly flies out of his mouth.… He
snaps at it irritably, misses and covers his mouth with one hand.

The Arc de Triomphe falls with a ripping, splintering crash, reveals
the Lesbian standing on a pedestal clad only in a leopard-skin jockstrap with enormous falsie basket.… She stands there smiling stupidly and flexing her huge muscles.… The Technician is crawling around on the control room floor looking for his plate and shouting unintelligible orders: ‘Thess thupper thonic!! Thut ur oth thu thair!’

T
HE
D
IPLOMAT
(wiping sweat from his brow): ‘To any creature of
any type or description …’

‘And the home of the brave.’

The diplomat’s face is grey. He staggers, trips in the scroll, sags against the rail, blood pouring from eyes, nose and mouth, dying of cerebral hemorrhage.

T
HE
D
IPLOMAT
(barely audible): ‘The Department denies … un-American … It’s been destroyed … I mean it never was … Categor …’
Dies.

In the Control Room instrument panels are blowing
out … great streamers of electricity crackle through the room.… The Technician, naked, his body burned black, staggers about like a figure in Götterdämmerung, screaming: ‘Thubber thonic!! Oth thu thair!!!’ A final blast reduces the Technician to a cinder.

Habit Notes.
Shooting Eukodol every two hours I have a place where I can
slip my needle right into a vein, it stays open like a red, festering mouth, swollen and obscene, gathers a slow drop of blood and pus after the shot.…

Eukodol is a chemical variation of codeine – dihydroxycodeine.

This stuff comes on more like C than M.… When you shoot Coke in the mainline there is a rush of pure pleasure
to the head.… Ten minutes later you want another shot … The pleasure
of morphine is in the viscera.… You listen down into yourself after a shot.… But intravenous C is electricity through the brain, activating cocaine pleasure connections.… There is no withdrawal syndrome with C. It is a need of the brain alone – a need without body and without feeling. Earthbound ghost need. The craving for C lasts only a few hours as long as the C channels are stimulated. Then you
forget it. Eukodol is like a combination of junk and C. Trust the Germans to concoct some really evil shit. Eukodol like morphine is six times stronger than codeine. Heroin six times stronger than morphine. Dihydro-oxy-heroin should be six times stronger than heroin. Quite possible to develop a drug so habit-forming that one shot would cause lifelong addiction.

Habit Note continued:
Picking up
needle I reach spontaneously for the tie-up cord with my left hand. This I take as a sign I can hit the one useable vein in my left arm. (The movements of tying up are such that you normally tie up the arm with which you reach for the cord.) The needle slides in easily on the edge of a callous. I feel around. Suddenly a thin column of blood shoots up into the syringe, for a moment sharp and solid
as a red cord.

The body knows what veins you can hit and conveys this knowledge in the spontaneous movements you make preparing to take a shot.… Sometimes the needle points like a dowzer’s wand. Sometimes I must wait for the message. But when it comes I always hit blood.

A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. He hesitated for a full second, then pressed the bulb, watching the liquid
rush into the vein as if sucked by the silent thirst of his blood. There was an iridescent, thin coat of blood left in the dropper, and the white paper collar was soaked through with blood like a bandage. He reached over and filled the dropper with water. As he squirted the
water out, the shot hit him in the stomach, a soft sweet blow.

Look down at my filthy trousers, haven’t been changed in
months.… The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood.… I am forgetting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body – a grey, junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hombre Invisible – the Invisible Man.…

Twenty push ups every morning. Use of junk removes fat, leaves muscle more or less intact. The addict seems to need less tissue.… Would it be possible to isolate the fat-removing
molecule of junk?

More and more static at the Drug Store, mutterings of control like a telephone off the hook.… Spent all day until 8
P. M
. to score for two boxes of Eukodol.…

Running out of veins and out of money.

Keep going on the nod. Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.… Fall asleep reading and the words take on code significance.… Obsessed with codes.…
Man contracts a series of diseases which spell out a code message.…

Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot.… Junkies have no shame.… They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.… The junky’s shame disappears with his non-sexual sociability which is also dependent on libido.… The addict regards
his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader. ‘No use trying to hit there.’ Dead fish eyes flick over a ravaged vein.

Using a new type sleeping pill called Soneryl.… You don’t feel sleepy.… You shift to sleep without transition,
fall abruptly into the middle of a dream.… I have been years in a prison
camp suffering from malnutrition.…