Naked Lunch

by William Burroughs

  ‘No. Remember the Bismarck Archipelago. No overt homosexuality. A functioning police state needs no police. Homosexuality does not occur to anyone as conceivable behaviour…. Homosexuality is a political crime in a matriarchy. No society tolerates overt rejection of its basic tenets. We aren’t a matriarchy here, Insh’allah. You know the experiment with rats where they are subject to this electric shock and dropped in cold water if they so much as move at a female. So they all become fruit rats and that’s the way it is with the etiology. And shall such a rat squeak out, “I’m queah and I luuuuuuuuve it” or “Who cut yours off, you two-holed freak?” ’twere a square rat so to squeak. During my rather brief experience as a psychoanalyst – spot of bother with the Society – one patient ran amok in Grand Central with a flame thrower, two committed suicide and one died on the couch like a jungle rat (jungle rats are subject to die if confronted suddenly with a hopeless situation). So his relations beef and I tell them, “It’s all in the day’s work. Get this stiff outa here. It’s a bring down for my live patients” – I noticed that all my homosexual patients manifested strong unconscious heterosex trends and all my hetero patients unconscious homosexual trends. Makes the brain reel, don’t it?’

  ‘And what do you conclude from that?’

  ‘Conclude? Nothing whatever. Just a passing observation.’

  We are eating lunch in Benway’s office when he gets a call.

  ‘What’s that? … Monstrous! Fantastic! … Carry on and stand by.’

  He puts down the phone. ‘I am prepared to accept immediate assignment with Islam Incorporated. It seems the electronic brain went berserk playing six-dimensional chess with the Technician and released every subject in the R.C. Leave us adjourn to the roof. Operation Helicopter is indicated.’

  From the roof of the R.C. we survey a scene of unparalleled horror. IND’s stand around in front of the café tables, long streamers of saliva hanging off their chins, stomachs noisily churning, others ejaculate at the sight of women. Latahs imitate the passers-by with monkey-like obscenity. Junkies have looted the drugstores and fix on every street corner.… Catatonics decorate the parks.… Agitated schizophrenics rush through the streets with mangled, inhuman cries. A group of P.R.’s – Partially Reconditioned – have surrounded some homosexual tourists with horrible knowing smiles showing the Nordic skull beneath in double exposure.

  ‘What do you want?’ snaps one of the queens.

  ‘We want to understand you.’

  A contingent of howling simopaths swing from chandeliers, balconies and trees, shitting and pissing on passersby. (A simopath – the technical name for this disorder escapes me – is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge cures it.) Amoks trot along cutting off heads, faces sweet and remote with a dreamy half smile.… Citizens with incipient Bang-utot clutch their penises and call on the tourists for help.… Arab rioters yipe and howl, castrating, disembowelling, throw burning gasoline.… Dancing boys striptease with intestines, women stick severed genitals in their cunts, grind, bump and flick it at the man of their choice.… Religious fanatics harangue the crowd from helicopters and rain stone tablets on their heads, inscribed with meaningless messages.… Leopard Men tear people to pieces with iron claws, coughing and grunting.… Kwakiutl Cannibal Society initiates bite off noses and ears.…

  A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit, exclaiming, ‘Mmmm, that’s my rich substance.’

  A battalion of rampant bores prowls the streets and hotel lobbies in search of victims. An intellectual avantgardist – ‘Of course the only writing worth considering now is to be found in scientific reports and periodicals’ – has given someone a bulbocapnine injection and is preparing to read him a bulletin on ‘the use of neohemoglobin in the control of multiple degenerative granuloma.’ (Of course, the reports are all gibberish he has concocted and printed up.)

  His opening words: ‘You look to me like a man of intelligence.’ (Always ominous words, my boy … When you hear them stay not on the order of your going but go at once.)

  An English colonial, assisted by five police boys, has detained a subject in the club bar: ‘I say, do you know Mozambique?’ and he launches into the endless saga of his malaria. ‘So the doctor said to me, “I can only advise you to leave the area. Otherwise I shall bury you.” This croaker does a little undertaking on the side. Piecing out the odds you might say, and throwing himself a spot of business now and then.’ So after the third pink gin when he gets to know you, he shifts to dysentery. ‘Most extraordinary discharge. More or less of a white yellow color like rancid jism and stringy you know.’

  An explorer in sun helmet has brought down a citizen with blow gun and curare dart. He administers artificial respiration with one foot. (Curare kills by paralyzing the lungs. It has no other toxic effect, is not, strictly speaking, a poison. If artificial respiration is administered the subject will not die. Curare is eliminated with great rapidity by the kidneys.) ‘That was the year of the rindpest when everything died, even the hyenas.… So there I was completely out of K.Y. in the headwaters of the Baboonsasshole. When it came through by air drop my gratitude was indescribable.… As a matter of fact, and I have never told this before to a living soul – elusive blighters’ – his voice echoes through a vast empty hotel lobby in 1890 style, red plush, rubber plants, gilt and statues – ‘I was the only white man ever initiated into the infamous Agouti Society, witnessed and participated in their unspeakable rites.’

  The Agouti Society has turned out for a Chimu Fiesta. (The Chimu of ancient Peru were much given to sodomy and occasionally staged bloody battles with clubs, running up several hundred casualties in the course of an afternoon.) The youths, sneering and goosing each other with clubs, troop out to the field. Now the battle begins.

  Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description. Who can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed mandril, alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals? A beastly young hooligan has gouged out the eye of his confrere and fuck him in the brain. ‘This brain atrophy already, and dry as grandmother’s cunt.’

  He turns into Rock and Roll hoodlum. ‘I screw the old gash – like a crossword puzzle what relation to me is the outcome if it outcome? My father already or not yet? I can’t screw you, Jack, you is about to become my father, and better ’twere to cut your throat and screw my mother playing it straight than fuck my father or vice versa mutatis mutandis as the case may be, and cut my mother’s throat, that sainted gash, though it be the best way I know to stem her word horde and freeze her asset. I mean when a fellow be caught short in the switches and don’t know is he to offer up his ass to ‘great big daddy’ or commit a torso job on the old lady. Give me two cunts and a prick of steel and keep your dirty finger out of my sugar bum what you think I am a purple-assed reception already fugitive from Gibraltar? Male and female castrated he them. Who can’t distinguish between the sexes? I’ll cut your throat you white mother fucker. Come out in the open like my grandchild and meet thy unborn mother in dubious battle. Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece. I have cut the janitor’s throat quite by mistake of identity, he being such a horrible fuck like the old man. And in the coal bin all cocks are alike.’

  So leave us return to the stricken field. One youth hath penetrate his comrade, whilst another youth does amputate the proudest part of that cock’s quivering beneficiary so that the visiting member projects to fill the vacuum nature abhors and ejaculate into the Black Lagoon where impatient piranha snap up the child not yet born nor – in view of certain well established facts – at all likely.

  Another bore carries around a
suitcase full of trophies and medals, cups and ribbons: ‘Now this I won for the Most Ingenious Sex Device Contest in Yokohama. (Hold him, he’s desperate.) The Emperor gave it to me himself and there were tears in his eyes, and the runners-up all castrated theirselves with harakiri knives. And I won this ribbon in a Degradation Contest at the Teheran meeting of Junkies Anonymous.’

  ‘Shot up my wife’s M.S. and her down with a kidney stone big as the Hope Diamond. So I give her half a Vagamin and tell her, “You can’t expect too much relief.… Shut up awready. I wanta enjoy my medications.”

  ‘Stole an opium suppository out of my grandmother’s ass.’

  The hypochondriac lassoes the passer-by and administers a straitjacket and starts talking about his rotting septum: ‘An awful purulent discharge is subject to flow out … just wait till you see it.’

  He does a striptease to operation scars, guiding the reluctant fingers of a victim ‘Feel that suppurated swelling in my groin where I got the lymphogranulomas.… And now I want you to palpate my internal haemorrhoids.’

  (The reference is to lymphogranuloma, ‘climactic buboes.’ A virus venereal disease indigenous to Ethiopia. ‘Not for nothing are we known as feelthy Ethiopians,’ sneers an Ethiopian mercenary as he sodomizes Pharaoh, venomous as the King’s cobra. Ancient Egyptian papyrus talk all the time about them feelthy Ethiopians.

  So it started in Addis Ababa like the Jersey Bounce, but these are modern times, One World. Now the climactic buboes swell up in Shanghai and Esmeraldas, New Orleans and Helsinki, Seattle and Capetown. But the heart turns home and the disease shows a distinct predilection for Negroes, is in fact the whitehaired boy of white supremacists. But the Mau Mau voodoo men are said to be cooking up a real dilly of a VD for the white folks. Not that Caucasians are immune: five British sailors contracted the disease in Zanzibar. And in Dead Coon County, Arkansas (‘Blackest Dirt, Whitest People in the U.S.A. – Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Set On You Here’), the County Coroner come down with the buboes fore and aft. A vigilante committee of neighbors apologetically burned him to death in the Court House privy when his interesting condition came to light. ‘Now, Clem, just think of yourself as a cow with the aftosa.’ ‘Or a poltroon with the fowl pest.’ ‘Don’t crowd too close, boys. His intestines is subject to explode in the fire.’ The disease in short arm hath a gimmick for going places unlike certain unfortunate viruses who are fated to languish unconsummate in the guts of a tick or a jungle mosquito, or the saliva of a dying jackal slobbering silver under the desert moon. And after an initial lesion at the point of infection the disease passes to the lymph glands of the groin, which swell and burst in suppurating fissures, drain for days, months, years, a purulent stringy discharge streaked with blood and putrid lymph. Elephantiasis of the genitals is a frequent complication, and cases of gangrene have been recorded where the amputation in medico of the patient from the waist down was indicated but hardly worth while. Women usually suffer secondary infection of the anus. Males who resign themselves up for passive intercourse to infected partners like weak and soon to be purple-assed baboons, may also nourish a little stranger. Initial proctitis and the inevitable purulent discharge – which may pass unnoticed in the shuffle – is followed by stricture of the rectum requiring intervention of an apple corer or its surgical equivalent, lest the unfortunate patient be reduced to fart and shit in his teeth giving rise to stubborn cases of halitosis and 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, teramycin 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 buses, 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 out 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.’

  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 eyebrows, 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. Koch 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 mosquitos 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 water-colors 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 fluoroscope.’ 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 h
is 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.

  Carl saw Joselito in a big clean room full of light, with private bath and concrete balcony. And nothing to talk about there in the cold empty room, water hyacinths growing in a yellow bowl and the China blue sky and drifting clouds, fear flickering in and out of his eyes. When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light, lurked enigmatically in the high cool corners of the room. And what could I say feeling death around me, and the little broken images that come before sleep, there in the mind?

  ‘They will send me to the new sanitarium tomorrow. Come and visit me. I will be there alone.’

  He coughed and took a codeineeta.

  ‘Doctor I understand, that is I have been given to understand, I have read and heard – not a medical man myself – don’t pretend to be – that the concept of sanitarium treatment has been more or less supplanted or at least very definitely supplemented by chemical therapy. Is this accurate in your opinion? What I mean to say is, Doctor, please tell me in all sincerity, as one human being to another, what is your opinion of chemical versus sanitarium therapy. Are you a partisan?’