Naked Lunch

by William Burroughs

  Room for one more inside, Sir.

  Well when that record starts around for the billionth light year and never the tape shall change us non-junkies take drastic action and the men separate out from the Junk boys.

  Only way to protect yourself against this horrid peril is come over HERE and shack up with Charybdis.… Treat you right kid.… Candy and cigarettes.

  I am after fifteen years in that tent. In and out in and out in and OUT. Over and Out. So listen to Old Uncle Bill Burroughs who invented the Burroughs Adding Machine Regulator Gimmick on the Hydraulic Jack Principle no matter how you jerk the handle result is always the same for given co-ordinates. Got my training early … wouldn’t you?

  Paregoric Babies of the World Unite. We have nothing to lose but Our Pushers. And THEY are NOT NECESSARY.

  Look down LOOK DOWN along that junk road before you travel there and get in with the Wrong Mob.…

  A word to the wise guy.

  – William S. Burroughs

  Afterthoughts on a Deposition

  When I say I have no memory of writing Naked Lunch, this is of course an exaggeration, and it is to be kept in mind that there are various areas of memory. Junk is a pain-killer, it also kills the pain and pleasure implicit in awareness. While the factual memory of an addict may be quite accurate and extensive, his emotional memory may be scanty and, in the case of heavy addiction, approaching affective zero.

  When I say ‘the junk virus is public health problem number one of the world today,’ I refer not just to the actual ill effects of opiates upon the individual’s health (which, in cases of controlled dosage may be minimal), but also to the hysteria that drug use often occasions in populaces who are prepared by the media and narcotics officials for a hysterical reaction.

  The junk problem, in its present form, began with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 in the U.S.A. Anti-drug hysteria is now worldwide, and it poses a deadly threat to personal freedoms and due-process protections of the law everywhere.

  – William S. Burroughs

  October 1991

  I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train … Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, call the counterman in Nedick’s by his first name. A real asshole. And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (imagine tailing somebody in a white trench coat – trying to pass as a fag I guess) hit the platform. I can hear the way he would say it holding my outfit in his left hand, right hand on his piece: ‘I think you dropped something, fella.’

  But the subway is moving.

  ‘So long flatfoot!’ I yell, giving the fruit his B production. I look into the fruit’s eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the two hundred dollar sharkskin suit, the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and carrying The News as a prop. ‘Only thing I read is Little Abner.’

  A square wants to come on hip.… Talks about ‘pod,’ and smoke it now and then, and keeps some around to offer the fast Hollywood types.

  ‘Thanks, kid,’ I say, ‘I can see you’re one of our own.’ His face lights up like a pinball machine, with stupid, pink effect.

  ‘Grassed on me he did,’ I said morosely. (Note: Grass is English thief slang for inform.) I drew closer and laid my dirty junky fingers on his sharkskin sleeve. ‘And us blood brothers in the same dirty needle. I can tell you in confidence he is due for a hot shot.’ (Note: This is a cap of poison junk sold to addict for liquidation purposes. Often given to informers. Usually the hot shot is strychnine since it tastes and looks like junk.)

  ‘Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don’t if the shot is right. That’s the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit – Kid, it was tasty.…

  ‘Recollect when I am travelling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi … We is working the fags in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigilante turns up for work in cowboy boots and a black vest with a hunka tin on it and a lariat slung over his shoulder.

  ‘So I says: “What’s with you? You wig already?”

  ‘He just looks at me and says: “Fill your hand stranger” and hauls out an old rusty six shooter and I take off across Lincoln Park, bullets cutting all around me. And he hang three fags before the fuzz nail him. I mean the Vigilante earned his moniker.…

  ‘Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con men? Like “raise,” letting someone know you are in the same line?

  ‘“Get her!”

  ‘“Get the Paregoric Kid giving that mark the build up!”

  ‘“Eager Beaver wooing him much too fast.”

  ‘The Shoe Store Kid (he got that moniker shaking down fetishists in the shoe stores) say: “Give it to a mark with K.Y. and he will come back moaning for more.” And when the Kid spots a mark he begin to breathe heavy. His face swells and his lips turn purple like an Eskimo in heat. Then slow, slow he comes on the mark, feeling for him, palpating him with fingers of rotten ectoplasm.

  ‘The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. That one stepped right off a Saturday Evening Post cover with a string of bullheads, and preserved himself in junk. His marks never beef and the Bunko people are really carrying a needle for the Rube. One day Little Boy Blue starts to slip, and what crawls out would make an ambulance attendant puke. The Rube flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: “Come back, kid!! Come back!!” and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded flat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts.’

  And the fruit is thinking: ‘What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark’s about this one.’ He’s a character collector, would stand still for Joe Gould’s seagull act. So I put it on him for a sawski and make a meet to sell him some ‘pod’ as he calls it, thinking, ‘I’ll catnip the jerk.’ (Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or uninstructed.)

  ‘Well,’ I said, tapping my arm, ‘duty calls. As one judge said to another: “Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.”’

  I cut into the automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else’s overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous, dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt.

  I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times, spectral janitors, grey as ashes, phantom porters sweeping out dusty old halls with a slow old man’s hand, coughing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk, patient and cautious and slow, dropped into their bloodless hands a few hours of warmth.

  I made the round with him once for kicks. You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body’s decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it.

  ‘Well, my boys will be like that one day,’ I thought philosophically. ‘Isn’t life peculiar?’

  So bac
k downtown by the Sheridan Square Station in case the dick is lurking in a broom closet.

  Like I say it couldn’t last. I knew they were out there powowing and making their evil fuzz magic, putting dolls of me in Leavenworth. ‘No use sticking needles in that one, Mike.’

  I hear they got Chapin with a doll. This old eunuch dick just sat in the precinct basement hanging a doll of him day and night, year in year out. And when Chapin hanged in Connecticut, they find this old creep with his neck broken.

  ‘He fell downstairs,’ they say. You know the old cop bullshit.

  Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by radar. ‘Not this street, the next, right … now left. Now right again,’ and there he is, toothless old woman face and cancelled eyes.

  I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don’t see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune. So the customers come in on Smiles, as I’m in the Mood for Love, or They Say We’re Too Young to Go Steady, or whatever the song is for that day. Sometime you can see maybe fifty ratty-looking junkies squealing sick, running along behind a boy with a harmonica, and there is The Man on a cane seat throwing bread to the swans, a fat queen drag walking his Afghan hound through the East Fifties, and old wino pissing against an El post, a radical Jewish student giving out leaflets in Washington Square, a tree surgeon, an exterminator, an advertising fruit in Nedick’s where he calls the counterman by his first name. The world network of junkies, tuned on a cord of rancid jissom, tying up in furnished rooms, shivering in the junk-sick morning. (Old Pete men suck the black smoke in the Chink laundry back room and Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of time or cold turkey withdrawal of breath.) In Yemen, Paris, New Orleans, Mexico City and Istanbul – shivering under the air hammers and the steam shovels, shrieked junky curses at one another neither of us heard, and the Man leaned out of a passing steam roller and I coped in a bucket of tar. (Note: Istanbul is being torn down and rebuilt, especially shabby junk quarters. Istanbul has more heroin junkies than NYC.) 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, Mexico D.F., dunking pound cake in the automat, chased up Exchange Place by a baying pack of People. (Note: People is New Orleans slang for narcotic fuzz.)

  The old Chinaman dips river water into a rusty tin can, washes down a yen pox hard and black as a cinder. (Note: Yen pox is the ash of smoked opium.)

  Well, the fuzz has my spoon and dropper, and I know they are coming in on my frequency led by this blind pigeon known as Willy the Disk. Willy has a round, disk mouth lined with sensitive, erectile black hairs. He is blind from shooting in the eyeball, his nose and palate eaten away sniffing H, his body a mass of scar tissue hard and dry as wood. He can only eat the shit now with that mouth, sometimes sways out on a long tube of ectoplasm, feeling for the silent frequency of junk. He follows my trail all over the city into rooms I move out already, and the fuzz walks in some newlyweds from Sioux Falls.

  ‘All right, Lee!! Come out from behind that strap-on! We know you,’ and pull the man’s prick off straightaway.

  Now Willy is getting hot and you can hear him always out there in darkness (he only functions at night) whimpering, and feel the terrible urgency of that blind, seeking mouth. When they move in for the bust, Willy goes all out of control, and his mouth eats a hole right through the door. If the cops weren’t there to restrain him with a stock probe, he would suck the juice right out of every junky he ran down.

  I knew, and everybody else knew they had the Disk on me. And if my kid customers ever hit the stand: ‘He force me to commit all kinda awful sex acts in return for junk’ I could kiss the street good-bye.

  So we stock up on H, buy a second-hand Studebaker, and start West.

  The Vigilante copped out as a schizo possession case:

  ‘I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers.… I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants – a body – after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is only the colorless no smell of death.… Nobody can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh.’

  He stood there in elongated court room shadows, his face torn like a broken film by lusts and hungers of larval organs stirring in the tentative ectoplasmic flesh of junk kick (ten days on ice at time of the First Hearing) flesh that fades at the first silent touch of junk.

  I saw it happen. Ten pounds lost in ten minutes standing with the syringe in one hand holding his pants up with the other, his abdicated flesh burning in a cold yellow halo, there in the New York hotel room … night table litter of candy boxes, cigarette butts cascading out of three ashtrays, mosaic of sleepless nights and sudden food needs of the kicking addict nursing his baby flesh.…

  The Vigilante is prosecuted in Federal Court under a lynch bill and winds up in a Federal Nut House specially designed for the containment of ghosts: precise, prosaic impact of objects … washstand … door … toilet … bars … there they are … this is it … all lines cut … nothing beyond … Dead End … And the Dead End in every face.…

  The physical changes were slow at first, then jumped forward in black klunks, falling through his slack tissue, washing away the human lines.… In his place of total darkness mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps forward to snap with transparent teeth … but no organ is constant as regards either function or position … sex organs sprout anywhere … rectums open, defecate and close … the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments.…

  The Rube is a social liability with his attacks as he calls them. The Mark Inside was coming up on him and that’s a rumble nobody can cool; outside Philly he jumps out to con a prowl car and the fuzz takes one look at his face and bust all of us.

  Seventy-two hours and five sick junkies in the cell with us. Now not wishing to break out my stash in front of these hungry cookies, it takes maneuvering and laying of gold on the turnkey before we are in a separate cell.

  Provident junkies, known as squirrels, keep stashes against a bust. Every time I take a shot I let a few drops fall into my vest pocket, the lining is stiff with stuff. I had a plastic dropper in my shoe and a safety-pin stuck in my belt. You know how this pin and dropper routine is put down: ‘She seized a safety-pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound. But her hideous galvanized need (hunger of insects in dry places) has broken the dropper off deep in the flesh of her ravaged thigh (looking rather like a poster on soil erosion). But what does she care? She does not even bother to remove the splintered glass, looking down at her bloody haunch with the cold blank eyes of a meat trader. What does she care for the atom bomb, the bed bugs, the cancer rent, Friendly Finance waiting to repossess her delinquent flesh.… Sweet dreams, Pantopon Rose.’

  The real scene you pinch up some leg flesh and make a quick stab hole with a pin. Then fit the dropper over, not in the hole and feed the solution slow and careful so it doesn’t squirt out the sides.… When I grabbed the Rube’s thigh the flesh came up like wax and stayed there, and a slow drop of pus oozed out the hole. And I never touched a living body cold as the Rube there in Philly.…

  I decided to lop him off if it meant a smother party. (This is a rural English custom designed to eliminate aged and bedfast dependants. A family so afflicted throws a ‘smother party’ where the guests pile mattresses on the old liability, climb up on top of the mattresses and lush themselves out.) The Rube is a drag on the industry and should be led out into the skid rows of the world. (This is an African practice. Official known as the ‘Leader Out’ has the function of taking old characters out into the jungl
e and leaving them there.)

  The Rube’s attacks become an habitual condition. Cops, doormen, dogs, secretaries snarl at his approach. The blond God has fallen to untouchable vileness. Con men don’t change, they break, shatter – explosions of matter in cold interstellar space, drift away in cosmic dust, leave the empty body behind. Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.…

  I left the Rube standing on a corner, red brick slums to the sky, under a steady rain of soot. ‘Going to hit this croaker I know. Right back with that good pure drugstore M.… No, you wait here – don’t want him to rumble you.’ No matter how long, Rube, wait for me right on that corner. Goodbye, Rube, goodbye kid.… Where do they go when they walk out and leave the body behind?

  Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorticated wops, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halstead, Cicero, Lincoln Park, panhandler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses.

  Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long. (Through the bars of East St Louis lies the dead frontier, riverboat days.) Illinois and Missouri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru.

  America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.

  And always cops: smooth college-trained state cops, practised, apologetic patter, electronic eyes weigh your car and luggage, clothes and face; snarling big city dicks, soft-spoken country sheriffs with something black and menacing in old eyes color of a faded grey flannel shirt.…