Naked Lunch

by William Burroughs

  ‘And now gentlemen – I trust there are no transvestites present – he he – and you are all gentlemen by act of Congress it being only remain to establish you male humans, positively no Transitionals in either direction will be allowed in this decent hall. Gentlemen, present short arms. Now you have all been briefed on the importance of keeping your weapons well lubricated and ready for any action flank or rear guard.’

  STUDENTS: ‘Hear! Hear!’ They wearily unbutton their flies. One of them brandishes a huge erection.

  PROF: ‘And now, gentlemen, where was I? Oh yes, Ma Lottie … She wake shivering in the gentle pink dawn, pink as the candles on a little girl’s birthday cake, pink as spun sugar, pink as a sea-shell, pink as a cock pulsing in a red fucking light.… Ma Lottie … hurumph … if this prolixity be not cut short will succumb to the infirmities of age and join her daughter in formaldehyde.

  ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge the poet … I should like to call your attention to the symbolism of the Ancient Mariner himself.’

  STUDENTS: ‘Himself the man says.’

  ‘Thereby call attention to his own unappetizing person.’

  ‘That wasn’t a nice thing to do, Teach.’

  A hundred juvenile delinquents … switch blades clicking like teeth move at him.

  PROF: ‘Oh Lansakes!’ He tries desperately to disguise himself as an old woman with high black shoes and umbrella.…‘If it wasn’t for my lumbago can’t rightly bend over I’d turn them offering my Sugar Bum the way baboons do it.… If a weaker baboon be attacked by a stronger baboon the weaker baboon will either (a) present his hrump fanny I believe is the word, gentlemen, heh heh for passive intercourse or (b) if he is a different type baboon more extrovert and well-adjusted, lead an attack on an even weaker baboon if he can find one.’

  Dilapidated Diseuse in 1920 clothes like she sleep in them ever since undulates across dreary neonlighted Chicago street … dead weight of the Dear Dead Days hanging in the air like an earthbound ghost. Diseuse: (canned heat tenor). ‘Find the weakest baboon.’

  Frontier saloon: Fag Baboon dressed in little girl blue dress sings in resigned voice to tune of Alice Blue Gown: ‘I’m the weakest baboon of them all.’

  A freight train separates the Prof. from the juveniles.… When the train passes they have fat stomachs and responsible jobs.…

  STUDENTS: ‘We want Lottie!’

  PROF: ‘That was in another country, gentlemen.… As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by one of my multiple personalities … troublesome little beasts … consider the Ancient Mariner without curare, lasso, bulbocapnine or straitjacket, albeit able to capture and hold a live audience.… What is his hrump gimmick? He he he he … He does not, like so-called artists at this time, stop just anybody thereby inflicting unsent for boredom and working random hardship.… He stops those who cannot choose but hear owing to already existing relation between The Mariner (however ancient) and the uh Wedding Guest.…

  ‘What the Mariner actually says is not important.… He may be rambling, irrelevant, even crude and rampant senile. But something happens to the Wedding Guest like happens in psychoanalysis when it happens if it happens. If I may be permitted a slight digression … an analyst of my acquaintance does all the talking – patients listen patiently or not … He reminiscences … tells dirty jokes (old ones) achieves counterpoints of idiocy undreamed of by The Country Clerk. He is illustrating at some length that nothing can ever be accomplished on the verbal level.… He arrived at this method through observing that The Listener – The Analyst – was not reading the mind of the patient.… The patient – The Talker – was reading his mind.… That is the patient has ESP awareness of the analyst’s dreams and schemes whereas the analyst contacts the patient strictly from front brain.… Many agents use this approach – they are notoriously long-winded bores and bad listeners.…

  ‘Gentlemen I will slop a pearl: You can find out more about someone by talking than by listening.’

  Pigs rush up and the Prof. pours buckets of pearls into a trough.…

  ‘I am not worthy to eat his feet,’ says the fattest hog of them all.

  ‘Clay anyhoo.’

  A.J.’s Annual Party

  A.J. turns to the guests. ‘Cunts, pricks, fence straddlers, tonight I give you – that international-known impressario of blue movies and short-wave TV, the one, the only, The Great Slashtubitch!’

  He points to a red velvet curtain sixty feet high. Lightning rends the curtain from top to bottom. The Great Slashtubitch stands revealed. His face is immense, immobile like a Chimu funeral urn. He wears full evening dress, blue cape and blue monocle. Huge grey eyes with tiny black pupils that seem to spit needles. (Only the Coordinate Factulist can meet his gaze.) When he is angered the charge of it will blow his monocle across the room. Many an ill-starred actor has felt the icy blast of Slashtubitch’s displeasure: ‘Get out of my studio, you cheap four-flushing ham! Did you think to pass a counterfeit orgasm on me! THE GREAT SLASHTUBITCH! I could tell if you come by regard the beeg toe. Idiot! Mindless scum!! Insolent baggage!!! Go peddle thy ass and know that it takes sincerity and art, and devotion, to work for Slashtubitch. Not shoddy trickery, dubbed gasps, rubber turds and vials of milk concealed in the ear and shots of Yohimbine sneaked in the wings.’ (Yohimbine, derived from the bark of a tree growing in Central Africa, is the safest and most efficient aphrodisiac. It operates by dilating the blood vessels on the surface of the skin, particularly in the genital area.)

  Slashtubitch ejects his monocle. It sails out of sight, returns like a boomerang into his eye. He pirouettes and disappears in a blue mist, cold as liquid air … fadeout.…

  On Screen. Red-haired, green-eyed boy, white skin with a few freckles … kissing a thin brunette girl in slacks. Clothes and hairdo suggest existentialist bars of all the world cities. They are seated on low bed covered in white silk. The girl opens his pants with gentle fingers and pulls out his cock which is small and very hard. A drop of lubricant gleams at its tip like a pearl. She caresses the crown gently: ‘Strip, Johnny.’ He takes off his clothes with swift sure movements and stands naked before her, his cock pulsing. She makes a motion for him to turn around and he pirouettes across the floor parodying a model, hand on hip. She takes off her shirt. Her breasts are high and small with erect nipples. She slips off her underpants. Her pubic hairs are black and shiny. He sits down beside her and reaches for her breast. She stops his hands.

  ‘Darling, I want to rim you,’ she whispers.

  ‘No. Not now.’

  ‘Please, I want to.’

  ‘Well, all right. I’ll go wash my ass.’

  ‘No, I’ll wash it.’

  ‘Aw shucks now, it ain’t dirty.’

  ‘Yes it is. Come on now, Johnny boy.’

  She leads him into the bathroom. ‘All right, get down.’ He gets down on his knees and leans forward, with his chin on the bath mat. ‘Allah,’ he says. He looks back and grins at her. She washes his ass with soap and hot water sticking her finger up it.

  ‘Does that hurt?’

  ‘Noooooooooo.’

  ‘Come along, baby.’ She leads the way into the bedroom. He lies down on his back and throws his legs back over his head, clasping elbows behind his knees. She kneel down and caress the backs of his thighs, his balls, running her fingers down the perennial divide. She push his cheeks apart, lean down and begin licking the anus, moving her head in a slow circle. She push at the side of the asshole, licking deeper and deeper. He close his eyes and squirm. She lick up the perennial divide. His small, tight balls.… A great pearl stands out on the tip of his circumcised cock. Her mouth closes over the crown. She suck rhythmically up and down, pausing on the up stroke and moving her head around in a circle. Her hand plays gently with his balls, slide down and middle finger up his ass. As she suck down toward the root of his cock she tickle his prostate mockingly. He grin and fart. She is sucking his cock now in a frenzy. His body begins to contract, pulling up toward his
chin. Each time the contraction is longer. ‘Wheeeeeeee!’ the boy yell, every muscle tense, his whole body strain to empty through his cock. She drinks his jissom which fills her mouth in great hot spurts. He lets his feet flop back onto the bed. He arches his back and yawns.

  Mary is strapping on a rubber penis: ‘Steely Dan III from Yokohama,’ she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room.

  ‘Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don’t go giving me some kinda awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa.…’

  ‘When I was a transvestite Liz in Chi used to work as an exterminator. Make advances to pretty boys for the thrill of being beaten as a man. Later I catch this one kid, overpower him with supersonic judo I learned from an old Lesbian Zen monk. I tie him up, strip off his clothes with a razor and fuck him with Steely Dan I. He is so relieved I don’t castrate him literal he come all over my bedbug spray.’

  ‘He was torn in two by a bull dike. Most terrific vaginal grip I ever experienced. She could cave in a lead pipe. It was one of her parlor tricks.’

  ‘And Steely Dan II?’

  ‘Chewed to bits by a famished candiru in the Upper Baboons-asshole. And don’t say “Wheeeeeeee!” this time.’

  ‘Why not? It’s real boyish.’

  ‘Barefoot boy, check thy bullheads with the madame.’

  He looks at the ceiling, hands behind his head, cock pulsing. ‘So what shall I do? Can’t shit with that dingus up me. I wonder is it possible to laugh and come at the same time? I recall, during the war, at the Jockey Club in Cairo, me and my asshole buddy, Lu, both gentlemen by act of Congress … nothing else could have done such a thing to either of us.… So we got laughing so hard we piss all over ourselves and the waiter say: “You bloody hash-heads, get out of here!” I mean, if I can laugh the piss out of me I should be able to laugh out jissom. So tell me something real funny when I start coming. You can tell by certain premonitory quiverings of the prostate gland.…’

  She puts on a record, metallic cocaine be-bop. She greases the dingus, shoves the boy’s legs over his head and works it up his ass with a series of corkscrew movements of her fluid hips. She moves in a slow circle, revolving on the axis of the shaft. She rubs her hard nipples across his chest. She kisses him on the neck and chin and eyes. He runs his hands down her back to her buttocks, pulling her into his ass. She revolves faster, faster. His body jerks and writhes in convulsive spasms. ‘Hurry up, please,’ she says. ‘The milk is getting cold.’ He does not hear. She presses her mouth against his. Their faces run together. His sperm hits her breast with light, hot licks.

  Mark is standing in the doorway. He wears a turtle-neck black sweater. Cold, handsome, narcissistic face. Green eyes and black hair. He looks at Johnny with a slight sneer, his head on one side, hands on his jacket pockets, a graceful hoodlum ballet. He jerk his head and Johnny walk ahead of him into the bedroom. Mary follow. ‘All right, boys,’ she says, sitting down naked on a pink silk dais overlooking the bed. ‘Get with it!’

  Mark begin to undress with fluid movements, hip rolls, squirm out of his turtle-neck sweater revealing his beautiful white torso in a mocking belly dance. Johnny deadpan, face frozen, breath quick, lips dry, remove his clothes and drop them on the floor. Mark lets his shorts fall on one foot. He kick like a chorus-girl, sending the shorts across the room. Now he stand naked, his cock stiff, straining up and out. He run slow eyes over Johnny’s body. He smile and lick his lips.

  Mark drop on one knee, pulling Johnny across his back by one arm. He stand up and throw him six feet onto the bed. Johnny land on his back and bounce. Mark jump up and grab Johnny’s ankles, throw his legs over his head. Mark’s lips are drawn back in a tight snarl. ‘All right, Johnny boy.’ He contracts his body, slow and steady as an oiled machine, push his cock up Johnny’s ass. Johnny give a great sigh, squirming in ecstasy. Mark hitches his hands behind Johnny’s shoulders, pulling him down onto his cock which is buried to the hilt in Johnny’s ass. Great whistles through his teeth. Johnny screams like a bird. Mark is rubbing his face against Johnny’s, snarl gone, face innocent and boyish as his whole liquid being spurt into Johnny’s quivering body.

  A train roar through him whistle blowing … boat whistle, foghorn, sky rocket burst over oily lagoons … penny arcade open in a maze of dirty pictures … ceremonial cannon boom in the harbor … a scream shoots down a white hospital corridor … out along a wide dusty street between palm trees, whistles out across the desert like a bullet (vulture wings husk in the dry air), a thousand boys come at once in out-houses, bleak public school toilets, attics, basements, treehouses, Ferris wheels, deserted houses, limestone caves, rowboats, garages, barns, rubbly windy city outskirts behind mud walls (smell of dried excrement) … black dust blowing over lean copper bodies … ragged pants dropped to cracked bleeding bare feet … (place where vultures fight over fish heads) … by jungle lagoons, vicious fish snap at white sperm floating on black water, sand flies bite the copper ass, howler monkeys like wind in the trees (a land of great brown rivers where whole trees float, bright colored snakes in the branches, pensive lemurs watch the shore with sad eyes), a red plane traces arabesques in blue substance of sky, a rattlesnake strike, a cobra rear, spread, spit white venom, pearl and opal chips fall in a slow silent rain through air clear as glycerine. Time jump like a broken typewriter, the boys are old men, young hips quivering and twitching in boy-spasms go slack and flabby, draped over an outhouse seat, a park bench, a stone wall in Spanish sunlight, a sagging furnished room bed (outside red brick slum in clear winter sunlight) … twitching and shivering in dirty underwear, probing for a vein in the junk-sick morning, in an Arab café muttering and slobbering – the Arabs whisper ‘Medjoub’ and edge away – (a Medjoub is a special sort of religious Moslem lunatic … often epileptic among other disorders). ‘The Moslems must have blood and jissom.… See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the spermament,’ howls the Medjoub.… He stand up screaming and black blood spurt solid from his last erection, a pale white statue standing there, as if he had stepped whole across the Great Fence, climbed it innocent and calm as a boy climb the fence to fish in the forbidden pond – in a few seconds he catch a huge catfish – The Old Man will rush out of a little black hut cursing, with a pitchfork and the boy run laughing across the Missouri field – he find a beautiful pink arrowhead and snatch it up as he runs with a flowing swoop of young bone and muscle – (his bones blend into the fields, he lies dead by the wooden fence a shotgun by his side, blood on frozen red clap seeps into the winter stubble of Georgia).… The catfish billows out behind him.… He come to the fence and throw the catfish over into blood-streaked grass … the fish lies squirming and squawking – vaults the fence. He snatch up the catfish and disappear up a flint-studded red clay road between oaks and persimmons dropping red-brown leaves in a windy fall sunset, green and dripping in summer dawn, black against a clear winter day … the Old Man scream curses after him … his teeth fly from his mouth and whistle over the boy’s head, he strain forward, his neckcords tight as steel hoops, black blood spurt in one solid piece over the fence and he fall a fleshless mummy by the fever grass. Thorns grow through his ribs, the windows break in his hut, dusty glass-slivers in black putty – rats run over the floor and boys jack off in the dark musty bedroom on summer afternoons and eat berries that grow from his body and bones, mouths smeared with purple-red juices.…

  The old junky has found a vein … blood blossoms in the dropper like a Chinese flower.…he push home the heroin and the boy who jacked off fifty years ago shine immaculate through the ravaged flesh, fill the outhouse with the sweet nutty smell of young male lust.…

  How many years threaded on a needle of blood? Hands slack on lap he sit looking out at the winter dawn with the cancelled eyes of junk. The old queer squirm on a limestone bench in Chapultepec Park as Indian adolescents walk by, arms around each other’s necks and ribs, straining his dying flesh to occupy young buttocks and thighs, tight balls and spurting cocks.

 
; Mark and Johnny sit facing each other in a vibrating chair, Johnny impaled on Mark’s cock.

  ‘All set, Johnny?’

  ‘Turn it on.’

  Mark flips the switch and the chair vibrate.… Mark tilt his head looking up at Johnny, his face remote, eyes cool and mocking on Johnny’s face.… Johnny scream and whimper.… His face disintegrates as if melted from within.… Johnny scream like a mandrake, black out as his sperm spurt, slump against Mark’s body an angel on the nod. Mark pat Johnny’s shoulder absently.… Room like gymnasium.… The floor is foam rubber, covered in white silk.… One wall is glass.… The rising sun fills the room with pink light. Johnny is led in, hands tied, between Mary and Mark. Johnny sees the gallows and sags with a great ‘Ohhhhhhhhhhh!’ his chin pulling down towards his cock, his legs bending at the knees. Sperm spurts, arching almost vertical in front of his face. Mark and Mary are suddenly impatient and hot.… They push Johnny forward onto the gallows platform covered with moldy jockstraps and sweat shirts. Mark is adjusting the noose.

  ‘Well, here you go.’ Mark starts to push Johnny off the platform.

  Mary: ‘No, let me.’ She locks her hands behind Johnny’s buttocks, puts her forehead against him, smiling into his eyes she moves back, pulling him off the platform into space.… His face swells with blood.… Mark reaches up with one lithe movement and snaps Johnny’s neck … sound like a stick broken in wet towels. A shudder runs down Johnny’s body … one foot flutters like a trapped bird.… Mark has draped himself over a swing and mimics Johnny’s twitches, closes his eyes and sticks his tongue out.… Johnny’s cock springs up and Mary guides it up her cunt, writhing against him in a fluid belly dance, groaning and shrieking with delight … sweat pours down her body, hair hangs over her face in wet strands. ‘Cut him down, Mark,’ she screams. Mark reaches over with a snap knife and cuts the rope, catching Johnny as he falls, easing him onto his back with Mary still impaled and writhing.… She bites away Johnny’s lips and nose and sucks out his eyes with a pop.… She tears off great hunks of cheek.… Now she lunches on his prick.… Mark walks over to her and she looks up from Johnny’s half-eaten genitals, her face covered with blood, eyes phosphorescent.… Mark puts his foot on her shoulder and kicks her over on her back.… He leaps on her, fucking her insanely.…they roll from one end of the room to the other, pinwheel end-over-end and leap high in the air like great hooked fish.