Naked Lunch

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, terramycin 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 busses, 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 about 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.' 27

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 eyebrow, 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. Hoch 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 mosquitoes 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 watercolors 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 Horoscope.' 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.