Naked Lunch (7 page)

He turns into Rock and Roll hoodlum. ‘I screw the old gash – like a crossword puzzle what relation to me is the outcome if it outcome? My father already or not yet? I can’t
screw you, Jack, you is about to become my father, and better ’twere to cut your throat and screw my mother playing it straight than fuck my father or
vice versa mutatis mutandis
as the case may be, and cut my mother’s throat, that sainted gash, though it be the best way I know to stem her word horde and freeze her asset. I mean when a fellow be caught short in the switches and don’t know is he
to offer up his ass to ‘great big daddy’ or commit a torso job on the old lady. Give me two cunts and a prick of steel and keep your dirty finger out of my sugar bum what you think I am a purple-assed reception already fugitive from Gibraltar? Male and female castrated he them. Who can’t distinguish between the sexes? I’ll cut your throat you white mother fucker. Come out in the open like my grandchild
and meet thy unborn mother in dubious battle. Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece. I have cut the
janitor’s throat quite by mistake of identity, he being such a horrible fuck like the old man. And in the coal bin all cocks are alike.’

So leave us return to the stricken field. One youth hath penetrate his comrade, whilst another youth does amputate the proudest part of that cock’s quivering beneficiary
so that the visiting member projects to fill the vacuum nature abhors and ejaculate into the Black Lagoon where impatient piranha snap up the child not yet born nor – in view of certain well established facts – at all likely.

Another bore carries around a suitcase full of trophies and medals, cups and ribbons: ‘Now this I won for the Most Ingenious Sex Device Contest in Yokohama. (Hold him, he’s
desperate.) The Emperor gave it to me himself and there were tears in his eyes, and the runners-up all castrated theirselves with harakiri knives. And I won this ribbon in a Degradation Contest at the Teheran meeting of Junkies Anonymous.’

‘Shot up my wife’s M.S. and her down with a kidney stone big as the Hope Diamond. So I give her half a Vagamin and tell her, “You can’t expect too much relief.…
Shut up awready. I wanta enjoy my medications.”

‘Stole an opium suppository out of my grandmother’s ass.’

The hypochondriac lassoes the passer-by and administers a straitjacket and starts talking about his rotting septum: ‘An awful purulent discharge is subject to flow out … just wait till you see it.’

He does a striptease to operation scars, guiding the reluctant fingers of a victim ‘Feel
that suppurated swelling in my groin where I got the lymphogranulomas.… And now I want you to palpate my internal haemorrhoids.’

(The reference is to lymphogranuloma, ‘climactic buboes.’ A virus venereal disease indigenous to Ethiopia. ‘Not for nothing are we known as feelthy Ethiopians,’ sneers an Ethiopian mercenary as he sodomizes Pharaoh,
venomous as the King’s cobra. Ancient Egyptian papyrus
talk all the time about them feelthy Ethiopians.

So it started in Addis Ababa like the Jersey Bounce, but these are modern times, One World. Now the climactic buboes swell up in Shanghai and Esmeraldas, New Orleans and Helsinki, Seattle and Capetown. But the heart turns home and the disease shows a distinct predilection for Negroes, is in fact the whitehaired boy of white supremacists. But the
Mau Mau voodoo men are said to be cooking up a real dilly of a VD for the white folks. Not that Caucasians are immune: five British sailors contracted the disease in Zanzibar. And in Dead Coon County, Arkansas (‘Blackest Dirt, Whitest People in the U.S.A. – Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You Here’), the County Coroner come down with the buboes fore and aft. A vigilante committee of neighbors apologetically
burned him to death in the Court House privy when his interesting condition came to light. ‘Now, Clem, just think of yourself as a cow with the aftosa.’ ‘Or a poltroon with the fowl pest.’ ‘Don’t crowd too close, boys. His intestines is subject to explode in the fire.’ The disease in short arm hath a gimmick for going places unlike certain unfortunate viruses who are fated to languish
unconsummate in the guts of a tick or a jungle mosquito, or the saliva of a dying jackal slobbering silver under the desert moon. And after an initial lesion at the point of infection the disease passes to the lymph glands of the groin, which swell and burst in suppurating fissures, drain for days, months, years, a purulent stringy discharge streaked with blood and putrid lymph. Elephantiasis of
the genitals is a frequent complication, and cases of gangrene have been recorded where the amputation
in medico
of the patient from the waist down was indicated but hardly worth while. Women usually suffer secondary infection of the anus. Males who resign themselves up for passive intercourse to infected partners like weak and soon to be purple-assed baboons, may also nourish a little
stranger.
Initial proctitis and the inevitable purulent discharge – which may pass unnoticed in the shuffle – is followed by stricture of the rectum requiring intervention of an apple corer or its surgical equivalent, lest the unfortunate patient be reduced to fart and shit in his teeth giving rise to stubborn cases of halitosis and unpopularity with all sexes, ages and conditions of
homo sapiens.
In fact
a blind bugger was deserted by his seeing eye police dog – copper at heart. Until quite recently there was no satisfactory treatment. ‘Treatment is symptomatic’ – which means in the trade there is none. Now many cases yield to intensive therapy with aureomycin, teramycin and some of the newer molds. However a certain appreciable percentage remain refractory as mountain gorillas.… So, boys, when
those hot licks play over your balls and prick and dart up your ass like an invisible blue blow torch of orgones, in the words of I. B. Watson,
Think.
Stop panting and start palpating … and if you palpate a bubo draw yourself back in and say in a cold nasal whine: ‘You think I am innarested to contact your horrible old condition? I am not innarested at all.’)

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums
storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa’s face. They open zoos, insane asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers, chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot out lighthouses, file elevator cables to one thin wire, turn sewers into the water supply, throw sharks and sting rays, electric eels and candiru into swimming pools
(the candiru is a small eel-like fish or worm about one-quarter inch through and two inches long patronizing certain rivers of ill repute in the Greater Amazon Basin, will dart up your prick or your asshole or a woman’s cunt
faute de mieux
, and hold himself there by sharp spines with precisely what motives is not known since no one has stepped forward to observe the candiru’s life-cycle
in situ
), in nautical costumes ram the
Queen Mary
full speed into New York Harbor, play chicken with passenger planes and buses, rush into hospitals in white coats carrying saws and axes and scalpels three feet long; throw paralytics out of iron lungs (mimic their suffocations flopping out on the floor and rolling their eyes up), administer injections with bicycle pumps, disconnect artificial kidneys,
saw a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw, they drive herds of squealing pigs into the Curb, they shit on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass with treaties, pacts, alliances.

By plane, car, horse, camel, elephant, tractor, bicycle and steam roller, on foot, skis, sled, crutch and pogo-stick the tourists storm the frontiers, demanding with inflexible authority asylum from
the ‘unspeakable conditions obtaining in Freeland,’ the Chamber of Commerce striving in vain to stem the debacle: ‘Please to be restful. It is only a few crazies who have from the crazy place outbroken.’

Joselito

And Joselito who wrote bad, class-conscious poetry began to cough. The German doctor made a brief examination, touching Joselito’s ribs with long, delicate fingers. The doctor was also
a concert violinist, a mathematician, a chess master, and a Doctor of International Jurisprudence with license to practice in the lavatories of the Hague. The doctor flicked a hard, distant glance across Joselito’s brown chest. He looked at Carl and smiled – one educated man to another smile – and raised his eyebrows, saying without words:

‘Alzo for the so stupid peasant we must avoid use of
the word is it not? Otherwise he shit himself with fear. Koch and spit they are
both
nasty words I think?’

He said aloud: ‘It is a catarro de los pulmones.’

Carl talked to the doctor outside under the narrow arcade with rain bouncing up from the street against his pant legs, thinking how many people he tell it to, and the stairs, porches, lawns, driveways, corridors and streets of the world
there in the doctor’s eyes … stuffy German alcoves, butterfly trays to the ceiling, silent portentous smell of uremia seeping under the door, suburban lawns to sound of the water sprinkler in calm jungle night under silent wings of the Anopheles mosquito. (Note: This is not a figure. Anopheles mosquitos
are
silent.) Thickly carpeted, discreet nursing home in Kensington: stiff brocade chair and
a cup of tea, the Swedish modern living room with water hyacinths in a yellow bowl – outside the China blue Northern sky and drifting clouds, under bad water-colors of the dying medical student.

‘A schnaps I think Frau Underschnitt.’

The doctor was talking into a phone with a chess board in front of him. ‘Quite a severe lesion I think … of course without to see the fluoroscope.’ He picks up
the knight and then replaces it thoughtfully. ‘Yes.…both lungs … quite definitely.’ He replaces the receiver and turns to Carl. ‘I have observed these people show amazingly quick wound recovery, with low incidence of infection. It is always the lungs here … pneumonia and, of course, Old Faithful.’ The doctor grabs Carl’s cock, leaping into the air with a coarse peasant guffaw. His European smile ignores
the misbehavior of a child or an animal. He goes on smoothly in his eerily unaccented, disembodied English. ‘Our Old Faithful Bacillus Koch.’ The doctor clicks his heels and bows his head. ‘Otherwise they would multiply their stupid peasant asshole into the sea, is it not?’ He shrieks, thrusting his face into Carl’s. Carl retreats sideways with the grey wall of rain behind him.

‘Isn’t there some
place where he can be treated?’

‘I think there is some sort of
sanitarium,’
he drags out
the word with ambiguous obscenity, ‘up at the District Capital. I will write for you the address.’

‘Chemical therapy?’

His voice falls flat and heavy in the damp air.

‘Who can say. They are all stupid peasants, and the worst of all peasants are the so-called educated. These people should not only be prevented
from learning to read, but from learning to talk as well. No need to prevent them from thinking; nature has done that.’

‘Here is the
address,’
the doctor whispered without moving his lips.

He dropped a pill of paper into Carl’s hand. His dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt, rested on Carl’s sleeve.

‘There is the matter of my fee.’

Carl slipped him a wadded banknote … and the doctor faded into
the grey twilight, seedy and furtive as an old junky.

Carl saw Joselito in a big clean room full of light, with private bath and concrete balcony. And nothing to talk about there in the cold empty room, water hyacinths growing in a yellow bowl and the China blue sky and drifting clouds, fear flickering in and out of his eyes. When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light, lurked
enigmatically in the high cool corners of the room. And what could I say feeling death around me, and the little broken images that come before sleep, there in the mind?

‘They will send me to the new sanitarium tomorrow. Come and visit me. I will be there alone.’

He coughed and took a codeineeta.

‘Doctor I understand, that is I have been given to understand, I have read and heard – not a medical
man myself – don’t pretend to be – that the concept of sanitarium treatment has been more or less supplanted or at least very definitely supplemented by chemical therapy. Is this
accurate in your opinion? What I mean to say is, Doctor, please tell me in all sincerity, as one human being to another, what is your opinion of chemical versus sanitarium therapy. Are you a
partisan
?’

The doctor’s liver
sick Indian face was blank as a dealer’s.

‘Completely modern, as you can see,’ he gestures toward the room with the purple fingers of bad circulation. ‘Bath … water … flowers. The lot.’ He finished in Cockney English with a triumphant smirk. ‘I will write for you a letter.’

‘This letter? For the sanitarium?’

The doctor was speaking from a land of black rocks and great, iridescent brown lagoons.
‘The furniture … modern and comfortable. You
find
it so of course?’

Carl could not see the sanitarium owing to a false front of green stucco topped by an intricate neon sign dead and sinister against the sky, waiting for darkness. The sanitarium was evidently built on a great limestone promontory, over which flowering trees and vine tendrils broke in waves. The smell of flowers was heavy in the
air.

The commandante sat at a long trestle under a vine trellis. He was doing absolutely nothing. He took the letter that Carl handed him and whispered through it, reading his lips with the left hand. He stuck the letter on a spike over a toilet. He began transcribing from a ledger full of numbers. He wrote on and on.

Broken images exploded softly in Carl’s head, and he was moving out of himself
in a silent swoop. Clear and sharp from a great distance he saw himself sitting in a lunchroom. Overdose of H. His old lady shaking him and holding hot coffee under his nose.