Naked Lunch

hear them stay not on the order of your going but go at once.) An English colonial, assisted by five police boys, has detained a subject in the club bar: 'I say, do you know Mozambique?' and he launches into the endless saga of his malaria. 'So the doctor said to me, 'I can only advise you to leave the area. Otherwise I shall bury you.' This croaker does a little undertaking on the side. Piecing out the odds you might say, and throwing himself a spot of business now and then.' So after the third pink gin when he gets to know you, he shifts to dysentery.

'Most extraordinary discharge. More or less of a white yellow color like rancid jism and stringy you know.'

An explorer in sun helmet has brought down a citizen with blow gun and curare dart. He administers artificial respiration with one foot. (Curare kills by paralyzing the lungs. It has no other toxic effect, is not, strictly speaking, a poison. If artificial respiration is administered the subject will not die. Curare is eliminated with great rapidity by the kidneys.) 'That was the year of the rindpest when everything died, even the hyenas. ...So there I was completely out of K.Y. in the head-waters of the Baboonsasshole. When it came through by air drop my gratitude was indescribable.... As a matter of fact, and I have never told this before to a living soul --elusive blighters' --his voice echoes through a vast empty hotel lobby in 1890 style, red plush, rubber plants, gilt and statues --'I was the only white man ever initiated into the infamous Agouti Society, witnessed and participated in their unspeakable rites.'

The Agouti Society has turned out for a Chimu Fiesta. (The Chimu of ancient Peru were much given to sodomy and occasionally staged bloody battles with clubs, running up several hundred casualties in the course of an afternoon.) The youths, sneering and goosing each other with clubs, troop out to the field. Now the battle begins.

Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description. Who can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed mandril, alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals? A beastly young hooligan has gouged out the eye of his confrere and fuck him in the brain. 'This brain atrophy already, and dry as grandmother's cunt.' 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 25

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 over 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 hemorrhoids.'

(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. 26

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 medio 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