Naked Lunch

by William Burroughs

  ‘You are frank, Carl.… This is good.… And now … Carl …’ He dragged the name out caressingly like a sweet con dick about to offer you an Old Gold – (just like a cop to smoke Old Golds somehow) and go into his act.…

  The con dick does a little dance step.

  ‘Why don’t you make The Man a proposition?’ he jerks a head towards his glowering super-ego who is always referred to in the third person as ‘The Man’ or ‘The Lieutenant.’

  ‘That’s the way the Lieutenant is, you play fair with him and he’ll play fair with you.… We’d like to go light on you.… If you could help us in some way.’ His words open out into a desolate waste of cafeterias and street corners and lunch rooms. Junkies look the other way munching pound cake.

  ‘The Fag is wrong.’

  The Fag slumps in a hotel chair knocked out on goof balls with his tongue lolling out.

  He gets up in a goof ball trance, hangs himself without altering his expression or pulling his tongue in.

  The dick is diddling on a pad.

  ‘Know Marty Steel?’ Diddle.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you score off him?’ Diddle? Diddle?

  ‘He’s skeptical.’

  ‘But you can score.’ Diddle diddle. ‘You scored off him last week didn’t you?’ Diddle???

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well you can score off him this week.’ Diddle … Diddle … Diddle … ‘You can score off him today.’ No diddle.

  ‘No! No! Not that!!’

  ‘Now look are you going to cooperate’ – three vicious diddles – ‘or does the … does the Man cornhole you???’ He raises a fay eyebrow.

  ‘And so Carl you will please oblige to tell me how many times and under what circumstances you have uh indulged in homosexual acts???’ His voice drifts away. ‘If you have never done so I shall be inclined to think of you as a somewhat atypical young man.’ The doctor raises a coy admonishing finger. ‘In any case …’ He tapped the file and flashed a hideous leer. Carl noticed that the file was six inches thick. In fact it seemed to have thickened enormously since he entered the room.

  ‘Well, when I was doing my military service … These queers used to proposition me and sometimes … when I was blank …’

  ‘Yes, of course, Carl,’ the doctor brayed heartily. ‘In your position I would have done the same I don’t mind telling you heh heh heh.… Well, I guess we can uh dismiss as irrelevant these uh understandable means of replenishing the uh exchequer. And now, Carl, there were perhaps’ – one finger tapped the file which gave out a faint effluvia of moldy jock straps and chlorine – ‘occasions. When no uh economic factors were involved.’

  A green flare exploded in Carl’s brain. He saw Hans’ lean brown body – twisting towards him, quick breath on his shoulder. The flare went out. Some huge insect was squirming in his hand.

  His whole being jerked away in an electric spasm of revulsion.

  Carl got to his feet shaking with rage.

  ‘What are you writing there?’ he demanded.

  ‘Do you often doze off like that? In the middle of a conversation …?’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep that is.’

  ‘You weren’t?’

  ‘It’s just that the whole thing is unreal.… I’m going now. I don’t care. You can’t force me to stay.’

  He was walking across the room towards the door. He had been walking a long time. A creeping numbness dragged his legs. The door seemed to recede.

  ‘Where can you go, Carl?’ The doctor’s voice reached him from a great distance.

  ‘Out … Away … Through the door …’

  ‘The Green Door, Carl?’

  The doctor’s voice was barely audible. The whole room was exploding out into space.

  Have You Seen Pantopon Rose

  Stay away from the Queen’s plaza, son.… Evil spot haunted by dicks scream for dope fiend lover.… Too many levels.… Heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia … like burning lions … fall on poor old lush worker scare her veins right down to the bone.… Her skin-pop a week or so do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.…

  So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware.… Look down, look down along that line before you travail there.…

  The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron.…

  – Queen’s Plaza is a bad spot for lush workers.… Too many levels and lurking places for subway heat, and impossible to cover when you put the hand out.…

  Five months and twenty-nine days: sentence given for ‘jostling,’ that is, touching a flop with obvious intent.… Innocent people may be convicted of murder but not of jostling.

  Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor, old time, junkies and lushingworkers of my acquaintance.… The old 103rd street klatch.… Sailor and Irish hanged themselves in the Tombs.… The Beagle is dead of an overdose and the Fag went wrong.…

  ‘Have you seen Pantopon Rose?’ said the old junky.…‘Time to cosq,’ put on a black overcoat and made the square.… Down skid road to Market Street Museum shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special.…

  The gangster in concrete rolls down the river channel.… They cowboyed him in the steam room.… Is this Cherry Ass Gio the Towel Boy or Mother Gilling, Old Auntie of Westminster Place?? Only dead fingers talk in Braille.…

  The Mississippi rolls great limestone boulders down the silent alley.…

  ‘Clutter the glind!’ screamed the Captain of Moving Land.…

  Distant rumble of stomachs.… Poisoned pigeons rain from the Northern Lights.… The reservoirs are empty: … Brass statues crash through the hungry squares and alleys of the gaping city.…

  Probing for a vein in the junk-sick morning.…

  Strictly from cough syrup …

  A thousand junkies storm the crystal spine clinics, cook down the Grey Ladies.…

  In the limestone cave met a man with Medusa’s head in a hat box and said, ‘Be Careful,’ to the Customs Inspector.… Frozen forever hand an inch from the false bottom.…

  Window dressers scream through the station, beat the cashiers with the fairy hype.…(The Hype is a short change con.… Also known as The Bill.…)

  ‘Multiple fracture,’ said the big physician.… ‘I’m very technical.…’

  Conspicuous consumption is rampant in the porticos slippery with Koch spit.…

  The centipede nuzzles the iron door rusted to thin black paper by the urine of a million fairies.…

  This is no rich mother load, but vitiate dust, second run cottons trace the bones of a fix.…

  Coke Bugs

  The Sailor’s grey felt hat and black overcoat hung twisted in atrophied yen-wait. Morning sun outlined. The Sailor in the orange-yellow flame of junk. He had a paper napkin under his coffee cup – mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffee in the plazas, restaurants, terminals and waiting rooms of the world. A junky, even at The Sailor’s level, runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption into the Time of others, like all petitioners, he must wait. (How many coffees in an hour?)

  A boy came in and sat at the counter in broken lines of long, sick junk-wait. The Sailor shivered. His face fuzzed out of focus in a shuddering brown mist. His hands moved on the table, reading the boy’s Braille. His eyes traced little dips and circles, following whorls of brown hair on the boy’s neck in a slow, searching movement.

  The boy stirred and scratched the back of his neck: ‘Something bit me, Joe. What kinda creep joint you run here?’

  ‘Coke bugs, kid,’ Joe said, holding eggs up to the light. ‘I was travelling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In Butte, state of Montany, her got the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chi sniff coke used to come in form of crystals, blue crystals. So he go nuts and start screaming the Federals is after him and run down this alley and stick his head in the garbage can. And I said, “What you think you are doing?
” and her say, “Get away or I shoot you! I got myself hid good!” When the roll is called up yonder we’ll be there, right?’

  Joe looked at The Sailor and spread his hands in the junky shrug.

  The Sailor spoke in his feeling voice that reassembles in your head, spelling out the words with cold fingers: ‘Your connection is broken, kid.’

  The boy shied. His street-boy face, torn with black scars of junk, retained a wild, broken innocence; shy animals peering out through grey arabesques of terror.

  ‘I don’t dig you, Jack.’

  The Sailor leapt into sharp, junky focus. He turned back his coat lapel, showing a brass hypo needle covered with mold and verdigris. ‘Retired for the good of the service.… Sit down and have a blueberry crumb pie on the expense account. Your monkey loves it.… Make his coat glossy.’

  The boy felt a touch on his arm across eight feet of morning lunch room. He was suddenly siphoned into the booth, landing with an inaudible shlup. He looked into The Sailor’s eyes, a green universe stirred by cold black currents.

  ‘You are agent, mister?’

  ‘I prefer the word … vector.’ His sounding laughter vibrated through the boy’s substance.

  ‘You holding, man? I got the bread.…’

  ‘I don’t want your money, Honey: I want your Time.’

  ‘I don’t dig.’

  ‘You want fix? You want straight? You wanta, nooood?’

  The Sailor cradled something pink and vibrated out of focus.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We’ll take the Independent. Got their own special heat, don’t carry guns only saps. I recall, me and the Fag fell once in Queen’s Plaza. Stay away from Queen’s Plaza, son … evil spot … fuzz haunted. Too many levels. Heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia like burning lions … fall on poor old lush worker, scare her veins right down to the bone. Her skin pop a week or do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.… So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware, Look down, look down along that line before you travel there.…’

  The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron.

  The Exterminator Does a Good Job

  The Sailor touched the door gently, following patterns of painted oak in a slow twist, leaving faint, iridescent whorls of slime. His arm went through to the elbow. He pulled back an inside bolt and stood aside for the boy to enter.

  Heavy colorless smell of death filled the empty room.

  ‘The trap hasn’t been aired since the Exterminator fumigated for coke bugs,’ said The Sailor apologetically.

  The boy’s peeled senses darted about in frenzied exploration. Tenement flat, railroad flat vibrating with silent motion. Along one wall of the kitchen a metal trough – or was it metal, exactly? – ran into a sort of aquarium or tank half-filled with translucent green fluid. Moldy objects, worn out in unknown service, littered the floor: a jockstrap designed to protect some delicate organ of flat, fan-shape; multi-levelled trusses, supports and bandages; a large U-shaped yoke of porous pink stone; little lead tubes cut open at one end.

  Currents of movement from the two bodies stirred stagnant odor pools; atrophied boy-smell of dusty locker rooms, swimming pool chlorine, dried semen. Other smells curled through pink convolutions, touching unknown doors.

  The Sailor reached under the wash-stand and extracted a package in wrapping paper that shredded and fell from his fingers in yellow dust. He laid out dropper, needle and spoon on a table covered with dirty dishes. But no roach antennae felt for the crumbs of darkness.

  ‘The Exterminator does a good job,’ said The Sailor. ‘Almost too good, sometimes.’

  He dipped into a square tin of yellow pyretheum powder and pulled out a flat package covered in red and gold Chinese paper.

  ‘Like a firecracker package,’ the boy thought. At fourteen lost two fingers.… Fourth of July fireworks accident … later, in the hospital, first silent proprietary touch of junk.

  ‘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, feelin
g 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.…