Naked Lunch (15 page)

‘And all them junkies sitting around in the lotus posture spitting on the ground and waiting on The Man.

‘So Buddha says: “I don’t hafta take this sound. I’ll by God metabolize my own junk.”

‘“Man you can’t do that. The Revenooers will
swarm all over you.”

‘“Over me they won’t swarm. I gotta gimmick, see? I’m a fuckin Holy Man as of right now.” ‘“Jeez, boss, what an angle.”

‘“Now some citizens really wig when they make with the New Religion. These frantic individuals do not know how to come on. No class to them … Besides, they is subject to be lynched like who wants somebody hanging around being better’n other folks? ‘What
you trying to do, Jack, give people a bad time? …’ So we gotta play it cool, you dig, cool.… We got a take it or leave it proposition here, folks. We don’t shove anything up your soul, unlike certain cheap characters who shall be nameless and are nowhere. Clear the cave for action. I’m gonna metabolize a speed ball and make with the Fire Sermon.”

‘Mohammed
? Are you kidding? He was dreamed up
by the Mecca Chamber of Commerce. An Egyptian ad man on the skids from the sauce write the continuity.

‘“I’ll have one more, Gus. Then, by Allah, I will go home and receive a Surah.… Wait’ll the morning edition hits the souks. I am blasting Amalgamated Images wide open.”

‘The bartender looks up from his racing form. “Yeah. And theirs will be a painful doom.”

‘“Oh … uh … quite. Now, Gus, I’ll
write you a check.”

‘“You are only being the most notorious paper hanger in Greater Mecca. I am not a wall, Mr. Mohammed.”

‘“Well, Gus, I got like two types publicity, favourable and otherwise. You want some otherwise already? I am subject to receive a Surah concerning bartenders who extendeth not credit to those in a needy way.”

‘“And theirs will be a painful doom. Sold Arabia.” He vaults
over the bar. “I’m not taking any more, Ahmed. Pick up thy Surahs and walk. In fact, I’ll help you. And
stay out.”

‘“I’ll fix your wagon good, you unbelieving cocksucker. I’ll close you up tight and dry as a junky’s asshole. I’ll by Allah dry up the Peninsula.” ‘“It’s a continent already.…”

‘Leave what Confucius say stand with Little Audrey and the shaggy dogs. Lao-Tze? They scratch him already.…
And enough of these gooey saints with a look of pathic dismay as if they getting fucked up the ass and try not to pay any mind. And why should we let some old broken-down ham tell us what wisdom is? “Three thousand years in show business and I always keep my nose clean.…”

‘First, every Fact is incarcerate along with the male hustlers and those who desecrate the gods of commerce by playing ball in the streets, and some old white-haired fuck staggers out to give us the benefits of his ripe idiocy. Are we never to be free of this grey-beard loon lurking on every mountain top in Tibet, subject to drag himself out of a hut in the Amazon, waylay one in the Bowery? “I’ve
been expecting you, my son,” and he make with a silo full of corn. “Life is a school where every pupil must learn a different lesson. And now I will unlock my Word Hoard.…”

‘“I do fear it much.”

‘“Nay, nothing shall stem the rising tide.”

‘“I can’t stem him, boys.
Sauve qui peut.”

‘“I tell you when I leave the Wise Man I don’t even feel like a human. He converting my life orgones into dead
bullshit.”

‘So I got an exclusive why don’t I make with the live word? The word cannot be expressed direct.… It can perhaps be indicated by mosaic of juxtaposition like articles abandoned in a hotel drawer, defined by negatives and absence.…

‘Think I’ll have my stomach tucked.… I may be old, but I’m still desirable.’

(The Stomach Tuck is surgical intervention to remove stomach fat at the same
time making a tuck in the abdominal wall, thus creating a Flesh Corset, which is, however, subject to break and spurt your horrible old guts across the floor.… The slim and shapely F.C. models are, of course, the most dangerous. In fact, some extreme models are known as O.N.S. – One Night Stands – in the industry.

Doctor ‘Doodles’ Rinderpest states bluntly: ‘Bed is the most dangerous place for
an F.C. man.’

The F.C. theme song is ‘Believe Me If All These Endearing Young Charms.’ An F.C. partner is indeed subject to ‘flee from your arms like fairy gifts fading away.’)

In a white museum room full of sunlight pink nudes sixty feet high. Vast adolescent muttering.

Silver guard rail … chasm a thousand feet down into the glittering sunlight. Little green plots of cabbage and lettuce. Brown
youths with adzes spied by the old queen across a sewage canal.

‘Oh dear, I wonder if they fertilize with human excrement.… Maybe they’ll do it now.’

He flips out mother of pearl opera glasses – Aztec mosaic in the sun.

Long line of Greek lads march up with alabaster bowels of shit, empty into the limestone marl hole.

Dusty poplars shake across the red brick Plaza de Toros in the afternoon
wind.

Wooden cubicles around a hot spring … rubble of ruined walls in a grove of cottonwoods … the benches worn smooth as metal by a million masturbating boys.

Greek lads white as marble fuck dog style on the portico of a great golden temple … naked Mugwump twangs a lute.

Walking down by the tracks in his red sweater met Sammy the Dock Keeper’s son with two Mexicans.

‘Hey, Skinny,’ he said,
‘want to get screwed?’

‘Well … Yeah.’

On a ruined straw mattress the Mexican pulled him up on all fours – Negro boy dance around them beating out the strokes … sun through a knot-hole pink spotlights his cock.

A waste of raw pink shame to the pastel blue horizon where vast iron mesas crash into the shattered sky.

‘It’s all right.’ The God screams through you three thousand year rusty load.…

Hail of crystal skulls shattered the greenhouse to slivers in the winter moon.…

The American woman has left a whiff of poison behind in the dank St. Louis garden party.

Pool covered with green slime in a ruined French garden. Huge pathic frog rises slowly from the water on a mud platform playing the clavichord.

A Sollubi rushes into the bar and starts polishing The Saint’s shoes with the oil
on his nose.… The Saint kicks him petulantly in the mouth. The Sollubi screams, whirls around and shits on the Saint’s pants. Then he dashes into the street. A pimp looks after him speculatively.…

The Saint calls the manager: ‘Jesus, Al, what kinda creep joint you running here? My brand new fishskin Dégagées …’

‘I’m sorry, Saint. He slipped by me.’

(The Sollubi are an untouchable caste in Arabia
noted for their abject vileness. De luxe cafés are equipped with Sollubi who rim the guests while they eat – holes in the seating benches being provided for this purpose. Citizens who want to be utterly humiliated and degraded – so many people do nowadays, hoping to jump the gun – offer themselves up for passive homosexual intercourse to an encampment of Sollubis.… Nothing like it, they tell
me.… In fact, the Sollubi are subject to become wealthy and arrogant and lose their native vileness. What is origin of untouchable? Perhaps a fallen priest caste. In fact, untouchables perform a priestly function in taking on themselves all human vileness.

A.J. strolls through the Market in black cape with a vulture perched on one shoulder. He stands by a table of agents.

‘This you gotta hear.
Boy in Los Angeles fifteen year old. Father decide it is time the boy have his first piece of ass. Boy is lying on the lawn reading comic books, father go out and say: “Son here’s twenty dollars: I want you to go to a good whore and get a piece of ass off her.”

‘So they drive to this plush jump joint and the father say, “All right, son. You’re on your own. So ring the bell and when the woman
come give her the twenty dollars and tell her you want a piece of ass.”

‘“Solid, pop.”

‘So about fifteen minutes later the boy comes out:

‘“Well, son, did you get a piece of ass?”

‘“Yeah. This gash comes to the door, and I say I want a piece of ass and lay the double sawski on her. We go up to her trap, and she remove the dry goods. So I switch my blade and cut a big hunk off her ass, she
raise a beef like I am reduce to pull off one shoe and beat her brains out. Then I hump her for kicks.’

Only the laughing bones remain, flesh over the hills and far away with the dawn wind and a train whistle. We
are not unaware of the problem, and the needs of our constituents are never out of our mind being their place of residence and who can break a ninety-nine year synapses lease?

Another
installment in the adventures of Clem Snide the Private Ass Hole: ‘So I walk in the joint, and this female hustler sit at the bar, and I think, “Oh God, you’re poule de luxe already.” I mean it’s like I see the gash before. So I don’t pay her no mind at first, then I dig she is rubbing her legs together and working her feet up behind her head shoves it down to give herself a douche job with a gadget
sticks out of her nose the way a body can’t help but notice.’

Iris – half Chinese and half Negro – addicted to dihydro-oxy-heroin – takes a shot every fifteen minutes to which end she leaves droppers and needles sticking out all over her. The needles rust in her dry flesh, which, here and there, has grown completely over a joint to form a smooth green brown wen. On the table in front of her is
a samovar of tea and a twenty-pound hamper of brown sugar. No one has ever seen her eat anything else. It is only just before a shot that she hears what anyone says or talks herself. Then she makes some flat, factual statement relative to her own person.

‘My asshole is occluding.’

‘My cunt got terrible green juices.’

Iris is one of Benway’s projects. ‘The human body can run on sugar alone,
God damn it.… I am aware that certain of my learned colleagues, who are attempting to belittle my genius work, claim that I put vitamins and proteins into Iris’s sugar clandestinely.… I challenge these nameless assholes to crawl up out of their latrines and run a spot analysis on Iris’s sugar and her tea. Iris is a wholesome American cunt. I deny categorically that she nourishes herself on semen.
And let me take this opportunity to state that I am a reputable scientist, not a charlatan, a lunatic, or a pretended worker of miracles.… I never
claimed that Iris could subsist exclusive on photosynthesis.… I did not say she could breathe in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen – I confess I have been tempted to experiment being of course restrained by my medical ethics.… In short, the vile slanders
of my creeping opponents will inevitably fall back onto them and come to roost like a homing stool pigeon.’

Ordinary Men and Women

Luncheon of Nationalist Party on balcony overlooking the Market. Cigars, scotch, polite belches.… The Party Leader strides about in a jellaba smoking a cigar and drinking Scotch. He wears expensive English shoes, loud socks, garters, muscular, hairy legs – overall effect of successful gangster in drag.

P.L. (pointing dramatically): ‘Look out there. What do you see?’

L
IEUTENANT:
‘Huh? Why, I see the Market.’

P.L.: ‘No you don’t. You see men and women.
Ordinary
men and women going about their ordinary everyday tasks. Leading their ordinary lives. That’s what we need.…’

A street boy climbs over the balcony rail.

L
IEUTENANT:
‘No we do not want to buy any used condoms! Cut!’

P.L.: ‘Wait! … Come in, my boy. Sit down.… Have a cigar.… Have a drink.’

He paces around
the boy like an aroused tom cat.

‘What do you think about the French?’

‘Huh?’

‘The French. The Colonial bastards who is sucking your live corpuscles.’

‘Look mister. It cost two hundred francs to suck my corpuscle. Haven’t lowered my rates since the year of the rindpest when all the tourists died, even the Scandinavians.’

P.L.: ‘You see? This is pure uncut boy in the street.’

‘You sure can
pick’em, boss.’

‘M.I. never misses.’

P.L.: ‘Now look, kid, let’s put it this way. The French have dispossessed you of your birthright.’

‘You mean like Friendly Finance? … They got this toothless Egyptian eunuch does the job. They figure he arouse less antagonism, you dig, he always take down his pants to show you his condition. “Now I’m just a poor old eunuch trying to keep up my habit. Lady,
I’d like to give you an extension on that artificial kidney, I got a job to do is all.… Disconnect her, boys.” He shows his gums in a feeble snarl.…“Not for nothing am I known as Nellie the Repossessor.”

‘So they disconnect my own mother, the sainted old gash, and she swell up and turn black and the whole souk stink of piss and the neighbours beef to the Board of Health and my father say: “It’s
the will of Allah. She won’t piss any more of my loot down the drain.”

‘Sick people disgust me already. When some citizen start telling me about his cancer of the prostate or his rotting septum make with that purulent discharge I tell him: “You think I am innarested to hear about your horrible old condition? I am not innarested at all.”’

P.L.: ‘All
right.
Cut … You hate French, don’t you?’