Naked Lunch (26 page)

I could hear the desk clerk and the bell boy pounding
up the stairs. I took the self-service elevator down, walked through the empty lobby into the street.

It was a beautiful Indian Summer day. I knew I didn’t have much chance, but any chance is better than none, better than being a subject for experiments with ST (6) or whatever the initials are.

I had to stock up on junk fast. Along with airports,
R.R. stations and bus terminals, they would cover all junk areas and connections. I took a taxi to Washington Square, got out and walked along 4th Street till I spotted Nick on a corner. You can always find the pusher. Your need conjures him up like a ghost. ‘Listen, Nick,’ I said, ‘I’m leaving town. I want to pick up a piece of H. Can you make it right now?’

We were walking along 4th Street.
Nick’s voice seemed to drift into my consciousness from no particular place. An eerie, disembodied voice. ‘Yes, I think I can make it. I’ll have to make a run uptown.’

‘We can take a cab.’

‘O.K., but I can’t take you in to the guy, you understand.’

‘I understand. Let’s go.’

We were in the cab heading North. Nick was talking in his flat, dead voice.

‘Some funny stuff we’re getting lately.
It’s not weak exactly.… I don’t know.… It’s different. Maybe they’re putting some synthetic shit in it.… Dollies or something.…’

‘What!!!? Already?’

‘Huh? … But this I’m taking you to now is O.K. In fact it’s about the best deal around that I know of.… Stop here.’

‘Please make it fast,’ I said.

‘It should be a matter of ten minutes unless he’s out of stuff and has to make a run.… Better sit
down over there and have a cup of coffee.… This is a hot neighborhood.’

I sat down at a counter and ordered coffee, and pointed to a piece of Danish pastry under a plastic cover. I washed down the stale rubbery cake with coffee, praying that just this once, please God, let him make it now, and not come back to say the man is all out and has to make a run to East Orange or Greenpoint.

Well here
he was back, standing behind me. I looked at him, afraid to ask. Funny, I thought, here I sit with perhaps one chance in a hundred to live out the next 24 hours – I had made up my mind not to surrender and spend the next three or four months in death’s waiting room. And here I was worrying about a junk score. But I only had about five shots left, and without junk I would be immobilized.… Nick nodded
his head.

‘Don’t give it to me here,’ I said. ‘Let’s take a cab.’

We took a cab and started downtown. I held out my hand and copped the package, then I slipped a fifty-dollar bill into Nick’s palm. He glanced at it and showed his gums in a toothless smile: ‘Thanks a lot.… This will put me in the clear.…’

I sat back letting my mind work without pushing it. Push your mind too hard, and it will
fuck up like an overloaded switch-board, or turn on you with sabotage.… And I had no margin for error. Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.

Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.
Like one of those thinking machines, you feed in your question, sit back, and wait.…

I was looking for a name. My mind was sorting through names, discarding at once F.L. – Fuzz Lover, B.W. – Born Wrong, N.C.B.C. – Nice Cat But Chicken; putting aside to reconsider, narrowing, sifting, feeling for the name, the answer.

‘Sometimes, you know he’ll keep me waiting three hours. Sometimes I make it
right away like this.’ Nick had a deprecating little laugh that he used for punctuation. Sort of an apology for talking at all in the telepathizing world of the addict where only the quantity factor – How much $? How much junk? – requires verbal expression. He knew and I knew all about waiting. At all levels the drug trade operates without schedule. Nobody delivers on time except by accident. The
addict runs on junk time. His body is his clock, and junk runs through it like an hour-glass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need. Then he makes his abrupt intrusion into the time of others, and, like all Outsiders, all Petitioners, he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time.

‘What can I say to him? He knows I’ll wait,’ Nick laughed.

I spent the night in
the Ever Hard Baths – (homosexuality is the best all-around cover story an agent can use) – where a snarling Italian attendant creates such an unnerving atmosphere sweeping the dormitory with infrared see-in-the-dark fieldglasses.

(‘All right in the North East corner! I see you!’ switching on floodlights, sticking his head through trapdoors in the floor and wall of the private rooms, that many
a queen has been carried out in a straitjacket.…)

I lay there in my open top cubicle room looking at the ceiling … listened to the grunts and squeals and snarls in the nightmare halflight of random, broken lust.…

‘Fuck off you!’

‘Put on two pairs of glasses and maybe you can see something!’

Walked out in the precise morning and bought a paper.… Nothing.… I called from a drugstore phone booth
… and asked for Narcotics:

‘Lieutenant Gonzales … who’s calling?’

‘I want to speak to O’Brien.’ A moment of static, dangling wires, broken connections …

‘Nobody of that name in this department.… Who are
you?’

‘Well let me speak to Hauser.’

‘Look, Mister, no O’Brien no Hauser in this bureau. Now what do you want?’

‘Look, this is important.… I’ve got info on a big shipment of H coming in.…
I want to talk to Hauser or O’Brien.… I don’t do business with anybody else.…’

‘Hold on.… I’ll connect you with Alcibiades.’

I began to wonder if there was an Anglo-Saxon name left in the Department.…

‘I want to speak to Hauser or O’Brien.’

How many times I have to tell you no Hauser no O’Brien in this department.… Now who is this calling?’

I hung up and took a taxi out of the area.… In the
cab I realized what had happened.… I had been occluded from space-time like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso.… Locked out.… Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection.… The Heat was off me from here on out … relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past where heroin is always twenty-eight dollars an ounce and you can score for yen pox
in the Chink Laundry of Sioux Falls.… Far side of the world’s mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O’Brien … clawing at a not-yet of Telepathic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid Addicts:

‘I thought of that three hundred years ago.’

‘Your plan was unworkable then and useless now.… Like Da Vinci’s flying machine plans.…’

WOULDN’T YOU?

Why all this waste paper getting The People from one place to another? Perhaps to spare The Reader stress of sudden space shifts and keep him Gentle? And so a ticket is bought, a taxi called, a plane boarded. We are allowed a glimpse into the warm peach-lined cave as She (the airline hostess, of course) leans over us to murmur of chewing gum, dramamine, even nembutal.

‘Talk paregoric, Sweet Thing, and I will hear.’

I am not American Express.… If one of my people is seen in New York walking around in citizen clothes and next sentence Timbuktu putting down lad talk on a gazelle-eyed youth, we may assume that he (the party non-resident of Timbuktu) transported himself there by the usual methods of communication.…

Lee The Agent (a double-four-eight-sixteen) is
taking the junk cure … space time trip portentously familiar as junk meet corners to the addict … cures past and future shuttle pictures through his spectral substance vibrating in silent winds of accelerated Time.… Pick a shot.… Any Shot.…

Formal knuckle biting, floor rolling shots in a precinct cell.…‘Feel like a shot of
Heroin
, Bill? Haw Haw Haw.’

Tentative half impressions that dissolve
in light … pockets of rotten ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning.…

Old violet brown photos that curl and crack like mud in the sun: Panama City … Bill Gains putting down the paregoric con on a Chinese druggist.

‘I’ve got these racing dogs … pedigree greyhounds.… All sick with the dysentery … tropical climate … the shits … you sabe shit? …
My Whippets
Are Dying
.…’ He screamed.… His eyes lit up with blue fire.… The flame went out … smell of burning metal.… ‘Administer with an eye dropper.… Wouldn’t you? … Menstral cramps … my wife … Kotex … Aged mother … Piles … raw … bleeding …’ He nodded out against the counter.… The druggist took a toothpick out of his mouth and looked at the end of it and shook his head.…

Gains and Lee burned down the Republic
of Panama from David of Darien on paregoric.… They flew apart with a shlupping sound.… Junkies tend to run together into one body.… Gains back to Mexico City.… Desperate skeleton grin of chronic junk lack glazed over with codeine and goof balls … cigarette holes in his bathrobe … coffee stains on the floor … smoky kerosene stove … rusty orange flame …

The Embassy would give no details other than
place of burial in the American Cemetery.…

And Lee back to sex and pain and time and Yage, bitter Soul Vine of the Amazon.…

I recall once after an overdose of Majoun (this is Cannabis dried and finely powdered to consistency of green powdered sugar and mixed with some confection or other usually tasting like gritty plum pudding, but the choice of confection is arbitrary …). I am returning from
The Lulu or Johnny or Little Boy’s Room (stink of atrophied infancy and toilet training) look across the living room of that villa outside Tanger and suddenly don’t know where I am. Perhaps I have opened the wrong door and at any moment The Man In Possession, The Owner Who Got There First will rush in and scream:

‘What Are You Doing Here? Who Are You?’

And I don’t know what I am doing there
nor who I am.
I decide to play it cool and maybe I will get the orientation before the Owner shows.… So instead of yelling ‘Where Am I?’ cool it and look around and you will find out approximately.… You were not there for
The Beginning.
You will not be there for
The End
… Your knowledge of what is going on can be superficial and relative.… What do I know of this yellow junky face subsisting on
raw opium? I tried to tell him: ‘Some morning you will wake up with your liver in your lap’ and how to process raw opium so it is not plain poison. But his eyes glaze over and he don’t want to know. Junkies are like the most of them they don’t want to know … and you can’t tell them anything.… A smoker doesn’t want to know anything but smoke.… And a heroin junky same way.… Strictly the spike and any
other route is Farina.…

So I guess he is still sitting there in his 1920 Spanish villa outside Tanger eating that raw opium full of shit and stones and straw … the whole lot for fear he might lose something.…

There is only one thing a writer can write about:
what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing
.… I am a recording instrument.… I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity.’
… Insofaras I succeed in
Direct
recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function.… I am not an entertainer.…

‘Possession’ they call it.… Sometimes an entity jumps in the body – outlines waver in yellow orange jelly – and hands move to disembowel the passing whore or strangle the neighbor child in hope of alleviating a chronic housing shortage. As if I was usually there
but subject to goof now and again….
Wrong! I am never here
.… Never that is
fully
in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill-advised moves.… Patrolling is, in fact, my principal occupation.… No matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere
Outside
giving orders and
Inside
this strait jacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms
ahead of every movement, thought,
impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection.…

Writers talk about the sweet-sick smell of death whereas any junky can tell you that death has no smell … at the same time a smell that shuts off breath and stops blood … colorless no-smell death … no one can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions and black blood filters of flesh … the death smell is unmistakeably a smell and complete
absence of smell … smell absence hits the nose first because all organic life has smell … stopping of smell is felt like darkness to the eyes, silence to the ears, stress with weightlessness to the balance and location sense.…

You always smell it and give it out for others to smell during junk withdrawal.… A kicking junky can make a whole apartment unlivable with his death smell … but a good
airing will stink the place up again so a body can breathe.… You also smell it during one of those oil burner habits that suddenly starts jumping geometric like a topping forest fire.…

Cure is always:
Let go! Jump!

A friend of mine found himself naked in a Marrakesh hotel room second floor.…(He is after processing by a Texas mother who dressed him in girl’s clothes as a child.… Crude but effective
against infant protoplasm.…) The other occupants are Arabs, three Arabs … knives in hand … watching him … glint of metal and points of light in dark eyes … pieces of murder falling slow as opal chips through glycerine … Slower animal reactions allow him a full second to decide: Straight through the window and down into the crowded street like a falling star his wake of glass glittering in the
sun … sustained a broken ankle and a chipped shoulder … clad in a diaphanous pink curtain, with a curtain-rod staff, hobbled away to the Commissariat de Police.…