Naked Lunch

How in the fuck should I know? I'm no dress designer swish from the costume department! What's that? The entire costume department occluded as a security risk? What am I, an octopus? Let's see... How about an Indian 35

routine? Pocahontas or Hiawatha?... No, that's not right. Some citizen cracks wise about giving it back to the Indians.... A Civil War uniform, the coat North and the pants South like it show they got together again? She can come on like Buffalo Bill or Paul Revere or that citizen wouldn't give up the shit, I mean the ship, or a G.I. or a Doughboy or the Unknown Soldier.... That's the best deal.

...Cover her with a monument, that way nobody has to look at her....' The Lesbian, concealed in a papier mache Arc de Triomphe fills her great lungs and looses a tremendous bellow.

'Oh say do that Star Spangled Banner yet wave...' A great rent rips the Arc de Triomphe from top to bottom. The Diplomat puts a hand to his forehead....

The Diplomat: 'That any male citizen of the United States has given birth in Interzone or at any other place....'

'O'er the land of the FREEEEEEEEEEEE...' '

The Diplomat's mouth is moving but no one can hear him. The Technician clasps his hands over his ears: 'Mother of God!' he screams. His plate begins to vibrate like a Jew's harp, suddenly flies out of his mouth.... He snaps at it irritably, misses and covers his mouth with one hand. The Arc de Triomphe falls with a ripping, splintering crash, reveals the Lesbian standing on a pedestal clad only in a leopard-skin jockstrap with enormous falsie basket.... She stands there smiling stupidly and flexing her huge muscles.... The Technician is crawling around on the control room looking for his plate and shouting unintelligible orders : 'Thess thupper thonic !!Thut ur ith thu thair !!'

THE DIPLOMAT (wiping sweat from his brow): 'To any creature of any type or description...'

'And the home of the brave.'

The diplomat’s face is grey. He staggers, trips in the scroll, sags against the rail, blood pouring from eyes, nose and mouth, dying of cerebral hemorrhage.

THE DIPLOMAT (barely audible): 'The Department denies... un-American... It’s been destroyed... I mean it never was... Categor..' Dies. In the Control Room instruments panels are blowing out... great streamers of electricity crackle through the room... The Technician, naked, his body burned black, staggers about like a figure in Gotterdammerung, screaming: 'Thubber Thonic! Oth thu thair!!' A final blast reduces the Technician to a cinder.

Gave proof through the night

That your flag was still there.

Habit Notes. Shooting Eukodol every two hours. I have a place where I can slip my needle right into a vein, it stays open like a red, festering mouth, swollen and obscene, gathers a slow drop of blood and pus after the shot...

Eukodol is a chemical variation of codeine – dihydroxy-codeine.

This stuff comes on more like C than M... When you shoot Coke in the mainline there is a rush of pure pleasure to the head.... Ten minutes later you want another shot.... The pleasure of morphine is in the viscera.... You listen down into yourself after a shot. ...But intravenous C is electricity through the brain, activating cocaine pleasure connections.... There is no withdrawal syndrome with C. It is a need of the brain alone --a need without body and without feeling. Earthbound ghost need. The craving for C lasts only a few hours as long as the C channels are stimulated. Then you forget it. Eukodol is like a combination of junk and C. Trust the Germans to concoct some really evil shit. Eukodol like morphine is six times stronger than codeine. Heroin six times stronger than morphine. 36

Di-hydro-oxy-heroin should be six times stronger than heroin. Quite possible to develop a drug so habit-forming that one shot would cause lifelong addiction.

Habit Note continued: Picking up needle I reach spontaneously for the tie-up cord with my left hand. This I take as a sign I can hit the one useable vein in my left arm, (The movements of tying up are such that you normally tie up the arm with which you reach for the cord.) The needle slides in easily on the edge of a callous. I feel around. Suddenly a thin column of blood shoots up into the syringe, for a moment sharp and solid as a red cord.

The body knows what veins you can hit and conveys this knowledge in the spontaneous movements you make preparing to take a shot.... Sometimes the needle points like a dowser's wand. Sometime I must wait for the message, but when it comes I always hit blood. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. He hesitated for a full second, then pressed the bulb, watching the liquid rush into the vein as if sucked by the silent thirst of his blood. There was an iridescent, thin coat of blood left in the dropper, and the white paper collar was soaked through with blood like a bandage. He reached over and filled the dropper with water. As he squirted the water out, the shot hit him in the stomach, a soft sweet blow.

Look down at my filthy trousers, haven't been changed in months.... The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood.... I am forgetting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body --a grey, junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hombre Invisible --the Invisible Man.... Twenty push ups every morning. Use of junk removes fat, leaves muscle more or less intact. The addict seems to need less tissue....Would it be possible to isolate the fat-removing molecule of junk? More and more static at the Drug Store, mutterings of control like a