Naked Lunch

I am not American Express.... If one of my people is seen in New York walking around in citizen clothes and next sentence Timbuktu putting down lad talk on a gazelle-eyed youth, we may assume that he (the party non-resident of Timbuktu) transported himself there by the usual methods of communication...

Lee The Agent (a double-four-eight-sixteen) is taking the junk cure... space time trip portentously familiar as junk meet corners to the addict... cures past and future shuttle pictures through 'his spectral substance vibrating in silent winds of accelerated Time.... Pick a shot.... Any Shot....

Formal knuckle biting, floor rolling shots in a precinct cell.... 'Feel like a shot of Heroin, Bill? Haw Haw Haw.'

Tentative half impressions that dissolve in light . pockets of rotten ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning..

Old violet brown photos that curl and crack like mud in the sun: Panama City... Bill Gains putting down the paregoric con on a Chinese druggist.

'I've got these racing dogs... pedigree greyhounds. . All sick with the dysentery... tropical climate . the shits... you sabe shit?... My Whippets Are Dying....' He screamed.... His eyes lit up with blue fire.... The flame went out... smell of burning metal.... 'Administer with an eye dropper. Wouldn't you?... Menstrual cramps... my wife... Kotex... Aged mother... Piles ..raw... bleeding...' He nodded out against the counter.... The druggist took a tooth-pick out of his mouth and looked at the end of it and shook his head....

Gains and Lee burned down the Republic of Panama from David to Darien on paregoric.... They flew apart with a shlupping sound.... Junkies tend to run together into one body.... You have to be careful especially in hot places.... Gains back to Mexico City.... Desperate skeleton grin of chronic junk lack glazed over with codeine and goof balls... cigarette holes in his bathrobe... coffee stains on the floor... smoky kerosene stove... rusty orange flame... The Embassy would give no details other than place of burial in the American Cemetery.... And Lee back to sex and pain and time and Yage, bitter Soul Vine of the Amazon.... I recall once after an overdose of Majoun (this is Cannabis dried and finely powdered to consistency of green powdered sugar and mixed with some confection or other usually tasting like gritty plum pudding, but the choice of confection is arbitrary... ). I am returning from The Lulu or Johnny or Little Boy's Room (stink of atrophied infancy and toilet training) look across the living room of that villa outside Tanger and suddenly don't know where I am. Perhaps I have opened the wrong door and at any moment The Man In Possession, The Owner Who Got There First will rush in and scream:

' What Are Yon Doing Here? Who Are You? '

And I don't know what I am doing there nor who I am. I decide to play it cool and maybe I will get the orientation before the Owner shows.... So instead of yelling 'Where Am I?' cool it and look 110

around and you will find out approximately.... You were not there for The Beginning. You will not be there for The End.... Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.... What do I know of this yellow blighted young junky face subsisting on raw opium? I tried to tell him:

'Some morning you will wake up with your liver in your lap' and how to process raw opium so it is not plain poison. But his eyes glaze over and he don't want to know. Junkies are like that most of them they don't want to know... and you can't tell them anything.... A smoker doesn't want to know anything but smoke.... And a heroin junky same way.... Strictly the spike and any other route is Farina....

So I guess he is still sitting there in his 1920 Spanish villa outside Tanger eating that raw opium full of shit and stones and straw... the whole lot for fear he might lose something.... There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. . . . I am a recording instrument.... I do not presume to impose 'story' 'plot'

'continuity.'...Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function.... I am not an entertainer....

'Possession' they call it.... Sometimes an entity jumps in the body --outlines waver in yellow orange jelly --and hands move to disembowel the passing whore or strangle the nabor child in hope of alleviating a chronic housing shortage. As if I was usually there but subject to goof now and again.... Wrong! I am never here.... Never that is fully in possession, but some-how in a position to forestall ill-advised moves.... Patrolling is, in fact, my principle occupation.... No matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this straight jacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection....

Writers talk about the sweet-sick smell of death whereas any junky can tell you that death has no smell . at the same time a smell that shuts off breath and stops blood... colorless no-smell of death... no one can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions and black blood filters of flesh... the death smell is unmistakably a smell and complete absence of smell... smell absence hits the nose first because all organic life has smell... stopping of smell is felt like darkness to the eyes, silence to the ears, stress and weightlessness to the balance and location sense.... You always smell it and give it out for others to smell during junk withdrawal.... A kicking junky can make a whole apartment unlivable with his death smell... but a good airing will stink the place up again so a body can breathe.... You also smell it during one of those oil burner habits that suddenly starts jumping geometric like a topping forest fire....

Cure is always: Let go! Jump!

A friend of mine found himself naked in a Marrakech hotel room second floor.... (He is after processing by a Texas mother who dressed him in girl's clothes as a child.... Crude but effective against infant protoplasm....) The other