Naked Lunch

by William Burroughs

  DR. LIMPF: ‘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.

  NURSE: ‘I think she’s gone, doctor.’

  DR. BENWAY: ‘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.

  DR. BENWAY: ‘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.…

  THE DIPLOMAT (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 …’

  TENOR: ‘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.…

  THE DIPLOMAT: ‘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!’

  THE DIPLOMAT (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.

  THE DIPLOMAT (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.

  Gave proof through the night

  That our flag was still there.…

  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 t
he 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.…

  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 i
n 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.’