Naked Lunch

SUBJECT: 'A mark?'

TECHNICIAN: 'Well, not exactly a mark. Not enough larceny in this citizen. He is after light concussion....You know the type. Telepathic sender and receiver excised. The Service Man Look... Action, camera.'

SUBJECT: 'Yes, we like apple pie.' His stomach rumbles loud and long. Streamers of saliva hang off his chin....

69

Dr. Berger looks up from some notes. He look like Jewish owl with black glasses, the light hurt his eyes: 'I think he is an unsuitable subject.... See he reports to Disposal.' TECHNICIAN: 'Well, we could cut that rumble out of the sound track, stick a drain in his mouth and...'

DR. BERGER: 'No... He's unsuitable.' He looks at the subject with distaste as if he commit. some terrible faux-pas like look for crabs in Mrs. Worldly's drawing room. TECHNICIAN (resigned and exasperated): 'Bring in the cured swish.' The cured homosexual is brought in.... He walks through invisible contours of hot metal. He sits in front of the camera and starts arranging his body in a countrified sprawl. Muscles move into place like autonomous parts of a severed insect. Blank stupidity blurs and softens his face: 'Yes,' he nods and smiles, 'we like apple pie and we like each other. It's just as simple as that.' He nods and smiles and nods and smiles and –

'Cut!...' screams the Technician. The cured homosexual is led out nodding and smiling.

'Play it back.'

The Artistic Adviser shakes his head: 'It lacks something. To be specific, it lacks health.' BERGER (leaps to his feet): 'Preposterous! It's health incarnate!...' ARTISTIC ADVISER (primly): 'Well if you have any-thing to enlighten me on this subject I'll be very glad to hear it, Doctor Berger.... If you with your brilliant mind can carry the project alone, I don't know why you need an Art Adviser at all.' He exits with hand on hip singing softly: 'I'll be around when you're gone.'

TECHNICIAN: 'Send in the cured writer.... He's got what? Buddhism?... Oh, he can't talk. Say so at first, whyncha?' He turns to Berger: 'The writer can't talk. ...Overliberated, you might say. Of course we can dub him....'

BERGER (sharply): 'No, that wouldn't do at all.... Send in someone else.' TECHNICIAN: 'Those two was my white- haired boys. I put in a hundred hours overtime on those kids for which I am not yet compensate....'

BERGER: 'Apply triplicate.... Form 6090.'

TECHNICIAN: 'You telling me how to apply already? Now look, Doc, you say something once. 'To speak of a healthy homosexual it's like how can a citizen be perfectly healthy with terminal cirrhosis.' Remember?'

BERGER: 'Oh yes. Very well put, of course,' he snarls viciously. 'I don't pretend to be a writer.' He spits the word out with such ugly hate that the Technician reels back appalled.... TECHNICIAN (aside): 'I can't bear the smell of him. Like old rotten replica cultures.... Like the farts of a maneating plant.... Like Schafer's hurumph' (parodies academic manner) 'Strange Serpent... What I'm getting at, Doc, is how can you expect a body to be healthy with its brains washed out?... Or put it another way. Can a subject be healthy in abstentia by proxy already?' BERGER (leaps up): 'I got the health!... All the health! Enough health for the whole world, the whole fuckin world! t I cure everybody!'

The Technician looks at him sourly. He mixes a bicarbonate of soda and drinks it and belches into his hand. 'Twenty years I've been a martyr to dyspepsia.' Lovable Lu your brainwashed poppa say: 'I'm strictly for fish, and I luuuuuve it.... Confidentially, girls, I use Steely Dan's Yokohama, wouldn't you? Danny Boy never lets you down. Besides it's more hygienic that way and avoids all kinda awful contacts leave a man paralyzed from the waist down. Women have poison juices....

'So I told him, I said: 'Doctor Berger, don't think you can pass your tired old brainwashed belles on me. I'm the oldest faggot in the Upper Baboon's Asshole....'' 70

Switch envelopes in clip clap joint where fraudulent girls put the B on you in favor of the House 666 and there is no health in them clap broads rotten to the apple corer of my unconsummate cock. Who shot Cock Robin?... The sparrow falls to my trustful Webley, and a drop of blood gathers at his beak....

Lord Jim has turned bright yellow in the woe withered moon of morning like white smoke against the blue stuff, and shirts whip in a cold spring wind on limestone cliffs across the river, Mary, and the dawn is broken in two pieces like Dillinger on the lamster way to the Biograph. Smell of neon and atrophied gangsters, and the criminal manque nerves himself to crack a pay toilet sniffing ammonia in a bucket.... 'A caper,' he says. 'I'll pull this capon I mean caper.' PARTY LEADER (mixing another scotch): 'The next riot goes off like a football play. We have imported a thousand bone fed, blue ribbon Latahs from Indochina. ...All we need is one riot leader for the whole unit.' His eyes sweep the table.

LIEUTENANT: 'But, chief, can't we get them started and they imitate each other like a chained reaction?' The Diseuse undulate through the Market: 'What's a Latah do when he's alone?'

P.L.: 'That a technical point. We'll have to consult Benway. Personally, I think someone should follow through on the whole operation.'