Naked Lunch

by William Burroughs

  I am waiting in front of a drugstore for it to open at nine o’clock. Two Arab boys roll cans of garbage up to a high heavy wood door in a whitewashed wall. Dust in front of the door streaked with urine. One of the boys bent over, rolling the heavy cans, pants tight over his lean young ass. He looks at me with the neutral, calm glance of an animal. I wake with a shock like the boy is real and I have missed a meet I had with him for this afternoon.

  ‘We expect additional equalizations,’ says the Inspector in an interview with Your Reporter. ‘Otherwise will occur,’ the Inspector lifts one leg in a typical Nordic gesture, ‘the bends is it not? But perhaps we can provide the suitable chamber of decompression.’

  The Inspector opens his fly and begins looking for crabs, applying ointment from a little clay pot. Clearly the interview is at an end. ‘You’re not going?’ he exclaims. ‘Well, as one judge said to the other, “Be just and if you can’t be just be arbitrary.” Regret cannot observe customary obscenities.’ He holds up his right hand covered with a foul-smelling yellow ointment.

  One’s Reporter rushes forward and clasps the soiled hand in both of his. ‘It’s been a pleasure, Inspector, an unspeakable pleasure,’ he says peeling off his gloves, rolling them into a ball and tossing them into the waste-basket. ‘Expense account,’ he smiles.

  Hassan’s Rumpus Room

  Gilt and red plush. Rococo bar backed by pink shell. The air is cloyed with a sweet evil substance like decayed honey. Men and women in evening dress sip pousse-cafés through alabaster tubes. A Near East Mugwump sits naked on a bar stool covered in pink silk. He licks warm honey from a crystal goblet with a long black tongue. His genitals are perfectly formed – circumcised cock, black shiny pubic hairs. His lips are thin and purple-blue like the lips of a penis, his eyes blank with insect calm. The Mugwump has no liver, maintaining himself exclusively on sweets. Mugwump push a slender blond youth to a couch and strip him expertly.

  ‘Stand up and turn around,’ he orders in telepathic pictographs. He ties the boy’s hands behind him with a red silk cord. ‘Tonight we make it all the way.’

  ‘No, no!’ screams the boy.

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  Cocks ejaculate in silent ‘yes.’ Mugwump part silk curtains, reveal a teak wood gallows against lighted screen of red flint. Gallows is on a dais of Aztec mosaics.

  The boy crumples to his knees with a long ‘OOOOOOOOH,’ shitting and pissing in terror. He feels the shit warm between his thighs. A great wave of hot blood swells his lips and throat. His body contracts into a foetal position and sperm spurts hot into his face. The Mugwump dips hot perfumed water from alabaster bowl, pensively washes the boy’s ass and cock, drying him with a soft blue towel. A warm wind plays over the boy’s body and the hairs float free. The Mugwump puts a hand under the boy’s chest and pulls him to his feet. Holding him by both pinioned elbows, propels him up the steps and under the noose. He stands in front of the boy holding the noose in both hands.

  The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet wall closing on the Last Erection.

  An old garbage collector, face fine and yellow as Chinese ivory, blows The Blast on his dented brass horn, wakes the Spanish pimp with a hard-on. Whore staggers out through dust and shit and litter of dead kittens, carrying bales of aborted foetuses, broken condoms, bloody Kotex, shit wrapped in bright color comics.

  A vast still harbor of iridescent water. Deserted gas well flares on the smoky horizon. Stink of oil and sewage. Sick sharks swim through the black water, belch sulphur from rotting livers, ignore a bloody, broken Icarus. Naked Mr. America, burning frantic with self bone love, screams out: ‘My asshole confounds the Louvre! I fart ambrosia and shit pure gold turds! My cock spurts soft diamonds in the morning sunlight!’ He plummets from the eyeless lighthouse, kissing and jacking off in face of the black mirror, glides oblique down with cryptic condoms and mosaic of a thousand newspapers through a drowned city of red brick to settle in black mud with tin cans and beer bottles, gangsters in concrete, pistols pounded flat and meaningless to avoid short-arm inspection of prurient ballistic experts. He waits the slow striptease of erosion with fossil loins.

  The Mugwump slips the noose over the boy’s head and tightens the knot caressingly behind the left ear. The boy’s penis is retracted, his balls tight. He looks straight ahead breathing deeply. The Mugwump sidles around the boy goosing him and caressing his genitals in hieroglyphs of mockery. He moves in behind the boy with a series of bumps and shoves his cock up the boy’s ass. He stands there moving in circular gyrations.

  The guests shush each other, nudge and giggle.

  Suddenly the Mugwump pushes the boy forward into space, free of his cock. He steadies the boy with hands on the hip bones, reaches up with his stylized hieroglyph hands and snaps the boy’s neck. A shudder passes through the boy’s body. His penis rises in three great surges pulling his pelvis up, ejaculates immediately.

  Green sparks explode behind his eyes. A sweet toothache pain shoots through his neck down the spine to the groin, contracting the body in spasms of delight. His whole body squeezes out through his cock. A final spasm throws a great spurt of sperm across the red screen like a shooting star.

  The boy falls with soft gutty suction through a maze of penny arcades and dirty pictures.

  A sharp turd shoots clean out of his ass. Farts shake his slender body. Skyrockets burst in green clusters across a great river. He hears the faint put-put of a motor boat in jungle twilight.… Under silent wings of the anopheles mosquito.

  The Mugwump pulls the boy back onto his cock. The boy squirms, impaled like a speared fish. The Mugwump swings on the boy’s back, his body contracting in fluid waves. Blood flows down the boy’s chin from his mouth, half-open, sweet, and sulky in death. The Mugwump falls with a fluid, sated plop.

  Windowless cubicle with blue walls. Dirty pink curtain cover the door. Red bugs crawl on the wall, cluster in corners. Naked boy in the middle of the room twang a two-string ouad, trace an arabesque on the floor. Another boy lean back on the bed smoking keif and blow smoke over his erect cock. They play game with tarot cards on the bed to see who fuck who. Cheat. Fight. Roll on the floor snarling and spitting like young animals. The loser sit on the floor chin on knees, licks a broken tooth. The winner curls up on the bed pretending to sleep. Whenever the other boy come near kick at him. Ali seize him by one ankle, tuck the ankle under the arm pit, lock his arm around the calf. The boy kick desperately at Ali’s face. Other ankle pinioned. Ali tilt the boy back on his shoulders. The boy’s cock extends along his stomach, float free pulsing. Ali put his hands over his head. Spit on his cock. The other sighs deeply as Ali slides his cock in. The mouths grind together smearing blood. Sharp musty odor of penetrated rectum. Nimun drive in like a wedge, force jism out the other cock in long hot spurts. (The author has observed that Arab cocks tend to be wide and wedge shaped.)

  Satyr and naked Greek lad in aqualungs trace a ballet in pursuit in a monster vase of transparent alabaster. The Satyr catches the boy from in front and whirls him around. They move in fish jerks. The boy releases a silver stream of bubbles from his mouth. White sperm ejaculates into the green water and floats lazily around the twisting bodies.

  Negro gently lifts exquisite Chinese boy into a hammock. He pushes the boy’s legs up over his head and straddles the hammock. He slides his cock up the boy’s slender tight ass. He rocks the hammock gently back and forth. The boy screams, a weird high wail of unendurable delight.

  A Javanese dancer in ornate teak swivel chair, set in a socket of limestone buttocks, pulls an American boy – red hair, bright green eyes – down onto his cock with ritual motions. The boy sits impaled facing the dancer who propels himself in circular gyrations, lending fluid substance to the chair. ‘Weeeeeeeeee!’ scream the boy as his sperm spurt up over the dancer’s lean brown chest. One gob hit the corner of the dancer’s mouth. The boy push it in with his finger and laugh: ‘Man, that’s what I call s
uction!’

  Two Arab women with bestial faces have pulled the shorts off a little blond French boy. They are screwing him with red rubber cocks. The boy snarls, bites, kicks, collapses in tears as his cock rises and ejaculates.

  Hassan’s face swells, tumescent with blood. His lips turn purple. He strip off his suit of banknotes and throw it into an open vault that closes soundless.

  ‘Freedom Hall here, folks!’ he screams in his phoney Texas accent. Ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots still on, he dances the Liquefactionist Jig, ending with a grotesque can-can to the tune of She Started a Heat Wave.

  ‘Let it be! And no holes barred!!!’

  Couples attached to baroque harnesses with artificial wings copulate in the air, screaming like magpies.

  Aerialists ejaculate each other in space with one sure touch.

  Equilibrists suck each other off deftly, balanced on perilous poles and chairs tilted over the void. A warm wind brings the smell of rivers and jungle from misty depths.

  Boys by the hundred plummet through the roof, quivering and kicking at the end of ropes. The boys hang at different levels, some near the ceiling and others a few inches off the floor. Exquisite Balinese and Malays, Mexican Indians with fierce innocent faces and bright red gums. Negroes (teeth, fingers, toe nails and pubic hair gilded), Japanese boys smooth and white as China, Titian-haired Venetian lads, Americans with blond or black curls falling across the forehead (the guests tenderly shove it back), sulky blond Pollacks with animal brown eyes, Arab and Spanish street boys, Austrian boys pink and delicate with a faint shadow of blond pubic hair, sneering German youths with bright eyes scream ‘Heil Hitler!’ as the trap falls under them. Sollubis shit and whimper.

  Mr. Rich-and-Vulgar chews his Havana lewd and nasty, sprawled on a Florida beach surrounded by simpering blond catamites:

  ‘This citizen have a Latah he import from Indo-China. He figure to hang the Latah and send a Xmas TV short to his friends. So he fix up two ropes – one gimmicked to stretch, the other the real McCoy. But that Latah get up in feud state and put on his Santa Claus suit and make with the switcheroo. Come the dawning. The citizen put one rope on and the Latah, going along the way Latahs will, put on the other. When the traps are down the citizen hang for real and the Latah stand with the carny-rubber stretch rope. Well, the Latah imitate every twitch and spasm. Come three times.

  ‘Smart young Latah keep his eye on the ball. I got him working in one of my plants as an expeditor.’

  Aztec priests strip blue feather robe from the Naked Youth. They bend him back over a limestone altar, fit a crystal skull over his head, securing the two hemispheres back and front with crystal screws. A waterfall pour over the skull snapping the boy’s neck. He ejaculate in a rainbow against the rising sun.

  Sharp protein odor of semen fills the air. The guests run hands over twitching boys, suck their cocks, hang on their backs like vampires.

  Naked lifeguards carry in iron-lungs full of paralyzed youths.

  Blind boys grope out of huge pies, deteriorated schizophrenics pop from under a rubber cunt, boys with horrible skin diseases rise from a black pond (sluggish fish nibble yellow turds on the surface).

  A man with white tie and dress shirt, naked from the waist down except for black garters, talks to the Queen Bee in elegant tones. (Queen Bees are old women who surround themselves with fairies to form a ‘swarm.’ It is a sinister Mexican practice.)

  ‘But where is the statuary?’ He talks out of one side of his face, the other is twisted by the Torture of a Million Mirrors. He masturbates wildly. The Queen Bee continues the conversation, notices nothing.

  Couches, chairs, the whole floor begins to vibrate, shaking the guests to blurred grey ghosts shrieking in cockbound agony.

  Two boys jacking off under railroad bridge. The train shakes through their bodies, ejaculate them, fades with distant whistle. Frogs croak. The boys wash semen off lean brown stomachs.

  Train compartment: two sick young junkies on their way to Lexington tear their pants down in convulsions of lust. One of them soaps his cock and works it up the other’s ass with a corkscrew motion. ‘Jeeeeeeeeeeeeesus!’ Both ejaculate at once standing up. They move away from each other and pull up their pants.

  ‘Old croaker in Marshall writes for tincture and sweet oil.’

  ‘The piles of an aged mother shriek out raw and bleeding for the Black Shit … Doc, suppose it was your mother, rimmed by resident leaches, squirming around so nasty.… De-active that pelvis, mom, you disgust me already.’

  ‘Let’s stop over and make him for an RX.’

  The train tears on through the smoky, neon-lighted June night.

  Pictures of men and women, boys and girls, animals, fish, birds, the copulating rhythm of the universe flows through the room, a great blue tide of life. Vibrating, soundless hum of deep forest – sudden quiet of cities when the junky copes. A moment of stillness and wonder. Even the Commuter buzzes clogged lines of cholesterol for contact.

  Hassan shrieks out: ‘This is your doing, A.J.! You poopa my party!’

  A.J. looks at him, face remote as limestone: ‘Uppa your ass, you liquefying gook.’

  A horde of lust-mad American women rush in. Dripping cunts, from farm and dude ranch, factory, brothel, country club, penthouse and suburb, motel and yacht and cocktail bar, strip off riding clothes, ski togs, evening dresses, levis, tea gowns, print dresses, slacks, bathing suits and kimonos. They scream and yipe and howl, leap on the guests like bitch dogs in heat with rabies. They claw at the hanged boys shrieking: ‘You fairy! You bastard! Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!’ The guests flee screaming, dodge among the hanged boys, overturn iron lungs.

  A.J.: ‘Call out my Sweitzers, God damn it! Guard me from these she-foxes!’

  Mr. Hyslop, A.J.’s secretary, looks up from his comic book: ‘The Sweitzers liquefy already.’

  (Liquefaction involves protein cleavage and reduction to liquid which is absorbed into someone else’s protoplasmic being. Hassan, a notorious liquefactionist, is probably the beneficiary in this case.)

  A.J.: ‘Gold-bricking cocksuckers! Where’s a man without his Sweitzers? Our backs are to the wall, gentlemen. Our very cocks at stake. Stand by to resist boarders, Mr. Hyslop, and issue short arms to the men.’

  A.J. whips out a cutlass and begins decapitating the American Girls. He sings lustily:

  Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest

  Yo Ho Ho and a bottle of rum.

  Drink and the devil had done for the rest

  Yo Ho Ho and a bottle of rum.

  Mr. Hyslop, bored and resigned: ‘Oh Gawd! He’s at it again.’ He waves the Jolly Roger listlessly.

  A.J., surrounded and fighting against overwhelming odds, throws back his head and makes with the hog-call. Immediately a thousand rutting Eskimos pour in grunting and squealing, faces tumescent, eyes hot and red, lips purple, fall on the American women.

  (Eskimos have a rutting season when the tribes meet in short Summer to disport themselves in orgies. Their faces swell and lips turn purple.)

  A House Dick with cigar two feet long sticks his head in through the wall: ‘Have you got a menagerie in here?’

  Hassan wrings his hands: ‘A shambles! A filthy shambles! By Allah I never see anything so downright nasty!’

  He whirls on A.J. who is sitting on a sea chest, parrot on shoulder, patch over one eye, drinking rum from a tankard. He scans the horizon with a huge brass telescope.

  Hassan: ‘You cheap Factualist bitch! Go and never darken my rumpus room again!’

  Campus of Interzone University

  Donkeys, camels, llamas, rickshaws, carts of merchandise pushed by straining boys, eyes protruding like strangled tongues – throbbing red with animal hate. Herds of sheep and goats and long-horned cattle pass between the students and the lecture platform. The students sit around on rusty park benches, limestone blocks, outhouse seats, packing crates, oil drums, stumps, dusty leather hassacks, moldy gym mats. They wear Levis – djellabas … h
ose and doublet – drink corn from mason jars, coffee from tin cans, smoke gage (marijuana) in cigarettes made of wrapping paper and lottery tickets … shoot junk with a safety pin and dropper, study racing forms, comic books, Mayan codices.…

  The Professor arrives on a bicycle carrying a string of bull heads. He mounts the platform holding his back (crane swings a bellowing cow over his head).

  PROF: ‘Fucked by the Sultan’s Army last night. I have dislocate the back in the service of my resident queen.… Can’t evict that old gash. Need a licensed brain electrician disconnect her synapse by synapse and a surgical bailiff put her guts out on the sidewalk. When Ma move in on a boy bag and buggage he play Hell dispossess that Gold Star Boarder.…’

  He looks at the bull heads humming tunes from the 1920s. ‘The nostalgia fit is on me boys and will out willy silly … boys walk down the carny Midway eating pink spun sugar … goose each other at the peep show … jack off in the Ferris Wheel throw sperm at the moon rising red and smoky over the foundries across the river. A Nigra hangs from a cotton wood in front of The Old Court House … whimpering women catch his sperm in vaginal teeth.…(Husband looks at the little changeling with narrow eyes the color of a faded grey flannel shirt.…“Doc, I suspect it to be a Nigra.”

  The Doctor shrugs: ‘It’s the Old Army Game, son. Pea under the shell … Now you see it now you don’t.…’)

  ‘And Doc Parker in the back room in his drugstore shooting horse heroin three grains a jolt – “Tonic,” he mutters. “It’s always Spring.”

  ‘“Hands” Benson Town Pervert has took up a querencia in the school privy. (Querencia is bullfight term.… The bull will find a spot in the ring he likes and stay there and the bullfighter has to go in and meet the bull on his bull terms or coax him out – one or the other.) Sheriff A.Q. “Flat” Larsen say, “Some way we gotta lure him outa that querencia.”… And Old Ma Lottie sleep ten years with a dead daughter and home cured too, wakes shivering in the East Texas dawn … vultures out over the black swamp water and cypress stumps.…