Naked Lunch

telephone off the hook... Spent all day until 8 P.M. to score for two boxes of Eukodol.... Running out of veins and out of money.

Keep going on the nod. Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.... Fall asleep reading and the words take on code significance.... Obsessed with codes.... Man contracts a series of diseases which spell out a code message.... Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot.... Junkies have no shame.... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.... The junky's shame disappears with his non-sexual sociability which is also dependent on libido.... The addict regards his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader. 'No use trying to hit there.' Dead fish eyes flick over a ravaged vein.

Using a new type sleeping pill called Soneryl.... You don't feel sleepy.... You shift to sleep without transition, fall abruptly into the middle of a dream.... I have been years in a prison camp suffering from malnutrition....

The President is a junky but can't take it direct because of his position. So he gets fixed through me.... From time to time we make contact, and I recharge him. These contacts look, to the casual observer, like homosexual practices, but the actual excitement is not primarily sexual, and the climax is the separation when the recharge is completed. The erect penises are brought into contact --at least we used that method in the beginning, but contact points wear out like veins. Now I sometimes have to slip my penis under his left eyelid. Of course I can always fix him with an Osmosis Recharge, which corresponds to a skin shot, but that is admitting defeat. An O.R. will put the President in a bad 37

mood for weeks, and might well precipitate an atomic shambles. And the President pays a high price for the Oblique Habit. He has sacrificed all control, and is dependent as an unborn child. The Oblique Addict suffers a whole spectrum of subjective horror, silent protoplasmic frenzy, hideous agony of the bones. Tensions build up, pure energy without emotional content finally tears through the body throwing him about like a man in contact with high tension wires. If his charge connection is cut off cold, the Oblique Addict falls into such violent electric convulsions that his bones shake loose, and he dies with the skeleton straining to climb out of his unendurable flesh and run in a straight line to the nearest cemetery.

The relation between an O.A. (Oblique Addict) and his R.C. (Recharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other's company for brief and infrequent intervals --I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by the recharge process. Reading the paper.... Something about a triple murder in the rue de la Merde, Paris: 'An adjusting of scores.'...I keep slipping away.... 'The police have identified the author... Pepe El Culito... The Little Ass Hole, an affectionate diminutive.' Does it really say that?... I try to focus the words... they separate in meaningless mosaic....

38

LAZARUS GO HOME

Fumbling through faded tape at the pick up frontier, a languid grey area of hiatus miasmic with yawns and gaping goof holes, Lee found out that the young junky standing there in his room at 10 A.M. was back from two months skin diving in Corsica and off the junk....

' Here to show off his new body,' Lee decided with a shudder of morning junk sickness. He knew that he was seeing --ah yes Miguel thank you --three months back sitting in the Metropole nodded out over a stale yellow eclair that would poison a cat two hours later, decided that the effort involved in seeing Miguel at all 10 A.M. was enough without the intolerable chore of correcting an error --('what is this a fucking farm?') which would also entail current picture of Miguel in much used areas like some great, inconvenient beast of an object on top in the suitcase.

'You look marvelous,' Lee said, wiping away the more obvious signs of distaste with a sloppy, casual napkin, seeing the grey ooze of junk in Miguel's face, studying patterns of shabbiness as if man and clothes had moved for years through back alleys of time with never a space station to tidy up....

' Besides by the time I could correct the error... Lazarus go home.... Pay The Man and go home.... What I want to see your old borrowed meat for? '

'Well it's great to see you off....Do yourself a favor.' Miguel was swimming around the room spearing fish with his hand....

'When you're down there you never think about horse.'

'You're better off like this,' said Lee, dreamily caressing a needle scar on the back of Miguel's hand, following the whorls and patterns of smooth purple flesh in a slow twisting movement.... Miguel scratched the back of his hand.... He looked out the window.... His body moved in little, galvanized jerks as junk channels lit up.... Lee sat there waiting. 'One snort never put anybody back on, kid.'

'I know what I'm doing.'

'They always know.'

Miguel took the nail file.

Lee closed his eyes: 'It's too tiresome.'

'Uh thanks that was great.' Miguel's pants fell to his ankles. He stood there in a misshapen overcoat of flesh that turned from brown to green and then colorless in the morning light, fell off in globs onto the floor.