And Joselito who wrote bad, class-conscious poetry
began to cough. The German doctor made a brief ex-
amination, touching Joselito's ribs with long, delicate
fingers. The doctor was also a concert violinist, a math-
ematician, 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 eyebrow, 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. Hoch 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 Anoph-
eles mosquito. (Note: This is not a figure. Anopheles
mosquitoes are silent. ) Thickly carpeted, discreet nurs-
ing 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 Horoscope." He picks up
the knight and then replaces it thoughtfully. "Yes...
Both lungs... quite definitely." He replaces the re-
ceiver and turns to Carl. "I have observed these people
show amazingly quick wound recovery, with low in-
cidence 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 mis-
behavior of a child or an animal. He goes on smoothly
in his 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 Hat 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 learn-
ing 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 sani-
tarium 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 chemi-
cal versus sanitarium therapy? Are you a partisan?"
The doctor's liver sick Indian face was blank as a
dealer's.
"Completely modern, as you can see," he gestures
toward the room with the purple fingers of bad circu-
lation. "Bath... water... flowers. The lot." He fin-
ished in Cockney English with a triumphant smirk.
"I will write for you a letter."
"This letter? For the sanitarium?"
The doctor was speaking from a land of black rocks
and great, iridescent brown lagoons. "The furniture...
modern and comfortable. You find it so of course?"
Carl could not see the sanitarium owing to a false
front of green stucco topped by an intricate neon sign
dead and sinister against the sky, waiting for darkness.
The sanitarium was evidently built on a great lime-
stone promontory, over which flowering trees and vine
tendrils broke in waves. The smell of flowers was
heavy in the air.
The commandante sat at a long wooden trestle under
a vine trellis. He was doing absolutely nothing. He
took the letter that Carl handed him and whispered
through it, reading his lips with the left hand. He
stuck the letter on a spike over a toilet. He began tran-
scribing from a ledger full of numbers. He wrote on and
on.
Broken images exploded softly in Carl's head, and
he was moving out of himself in a silent swoop. Clear
and sharp from a great distance he saw himself sitting
in a lunchroom. Overdose of H. His old lady shaking
him and holding hot coffee under his nose.
Outside an old junky in Santa Claus suit selling
Christmas seals. "Fight tuberculosis, folks," he whis-
pers in his disembodied, junky voice. Salvation Army
choir of sincere, homosexual football coaches sings:
"In the Sweet Bye and Bye."
Carl drifted back into his body, an earthbound junk
ghost.
"I could bribe him, of course."
The commandante taps the table with one finger
and hums "Coming Through the Rye." Far away, then
urgently near like a foghorn a split second before the
grinding crash.
Carl pulled a note half out of his trouser pocket....
The commandante was standing by a vast panel of
lockers and deposit boxes. He looked at Carl, sick
animal eyes gone out, dying inside, hopeless fear re-
flecting the face of death. In the smell of flowers a note
half out of his pocket, the weakness hit Carl, shutting
of his breath, stopping his blood. He was in a great
cone spinning down to a black point.
"Chemical therapy?" The scream shot out of his flesh
through empty locker rooms and barracks, musty resort
hotels, and spectral, coughing corridors of T,B. sani-
tariums, the muttering, hawking, grey dishwater smell
of flophouses and Old Men's Homes, great, dusty cus-
tom sheds and warehouses, through broken porticoes
and smeared arabesques, iron urinals worn paper thin
by the urine of a million fairies, deserted weed-grown
privies with a musty smell of shit turning back to the
soil, erect wooden phallus on the grave of dying peoples
plaintive as leaves in the wind, across the great brown
river where whole trees float with green snakes in the
branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore out over
a vast plain (vulture wings husk in the dry air). The
way is strewn with broken condoms and empty H caps
and K.Y. tubes squeezed dry as bone meal in the sum-
mer sun.
"My furniture." The commandante's face burned like
metal in the Hash bulb of urgency. His eyes went out.
A whif of ozone drifted through the room. The "novia"
muttered over her candles and altars in one corner.
"It is all Trak... modern, excellent..." he is nod-
ding idiotically and drooling. A yellow cat pulls at
Carl's pant leg and runs onto a concrete balcony. Clouds
drift by.
"I could get back my deposit. Start me a little busi-
ness someplace." He nods and smiles like a mechanical
toy.
"Joselito!!!" Boys look up from street ball games,
bull rings and bicycle races as the name whistles by
and slowly fades away.
"Joselito!... Paco!... Pepe!... Enrique!..." The
plaintive boy cries drift in on the warm night. The
Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast, and bursts into
blue flame.
THE BLACK MEAT
"We friends, yes?"
The shoe shine boy put on his hustling smile and
looked up into the Sailor's dead, cold, undersea eyes,
eyes without a trace of warmth or lust or hate or any
feeling the boy had ever experienced in himself or
seen in another, at once cold and intense, impersonal
and predatory.
The Sailor leaned forward and put a finger on the
boy's inner arm at the elbow. He spoke in his dead,
junky whisper.
"With veins like that, Kid, I'd have myself a time."
He laughed, black insect laughter that seemed to
serve some obscure function of orientation like a bat's
squeak. The Sailor laughed three times. He stopped
laughing and hung there motionless listening down
into himself. He had picked up the silent frequency
of junk. His face smoothed out like yellow wax over
the high cheek-bones. He waited half a cigarette. The
Sailor knew how to wait. But his eyes burned in a
hideous dry hunger. He turned his face of controlled
emergency in a slow half pivot to case the man who
had just come in. "Fats" Terminal sat there sweeping
the cafe with blank, periscope eyes. When his eyes
passed the Sailor he nodded minutely. Only the peeled
nerves of junk sickness would have registered a move-
ment.
The Sailor handed the boy a coin. He drifted over
to Fat's table with his floating walk and sat down.
They sat a long time in silence. The cafe was built
into one side of a stone ramp at the bottom of a high
white canyon of masonry. Faces of The City poured
through silent as fish, stained with vile addictions and
insect lusts. The lighted cafe was a diving bell, cable
broken, settling into black depths.
The Sailor was polishing his nails on the lapels of
his glen plaid suit. He whistled a little tune through
his shiny, yellow teeth.
When he moved an effluvia of mold drifted out of
his clothes, a musty smell of deserted locker rooms.
He studied his nails with phosphorescent intensity.
"Good thing here, Fats. I can deliver twenty. Need
an advance of course."
"On spec?"
"So I don't have the twenty eggs in my pocket. I
tell you it's jellied consomme, One little whoops and
a push." The Sailor looked at his nails as if he were
studying a chart. "You know I always deliver."
"Make it thirty. And a ten tube advance. This time
tomorrow.
"Need a tube now, Fats."
"Take a walk, you'll get one."
The Sailor drifted down into the Plaza. A street
boy was shoving a newspaper in the Sailor's face to
cover his hand on the Sailor's pen. The Sailor walked
on. He pulled the pen out and broke it like a nut in
his thick, fibrous, pink fingers. He pulled out a lead
tube. He cut one end of the tube with a little curved
knife. A black mist poured out and hung in the air
like boiling fur. The Sailor's face dissolved. His mouth
undulated forward on a long tube and sucked in the
black fuzz, vibrating in supersonic peristalsis disap-
peared in a silent, pink explosion. His face came back
into focus unbearably sharp and clear, burning yellow
brand of junk searing the grey haunch of a million
screaming junkies.
"This will last a month," he decided, consulting an
invisible mirror.
All streets of the City slope down between deepen-
ing canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of
darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by
dwelling cubicles and cafes, some a few feet deep,
others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and
corridors.
At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable
cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of
burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely
painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings,
arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly
bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging
insistence.
Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant
aquatic black centipede -- sometimes attaining a length
of six feet -- found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent,
brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in cam-
ouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat
Eaters.
Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling
in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black
marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic
sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of
infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players,
servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebe-
phrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of
the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers
of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensi-
tized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw mate-
rials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in
translucent amber of dreams.
The Meet Cafe occupies one side of the Plaza, a
maze of kitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, peril-
ous iron balconies and basements opening into the
underground baths.
On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mug-
wumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through
alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish
themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue
lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which
they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights
over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid
from their erect penises which prolongs life by slow-
ing metabolism. (In fact all longevity agents have
proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness
in prolonging life. ) Addicts of Mugwump fluid are
known as Reptiles. A number of these How over chairs
with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan
of green cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs
through which the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts
from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time
to time touched by invisible currents, serve also same
form of communication known only to Reptiles.
During the biennial Panics when the raw, pealed
Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take
refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing them-
selves in clay cubicles and remain for weeks in bio-
stasis. In those days of grey terror the Reptiles dart
about faster and faster, scream past each other at
supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black
winds of insect agony.
The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten
ectoplasm swept away by an old junky, coughing and
spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man
comes with alabaster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get
smoothed out.
The air is once again still and clear as glycerine.
The Sailor spotted his Reptile. He drifted over and
ordered a green syrup. The Reptile had a little, round
disk mouth of brown gristle, expressionless green eyes
almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The
Sailor waited an hour before the creature picked up
his presence.
"Any eggs for Fats?" he asked, his words stirring
through the Reptile's fan hairs.
It took two hours for the Reptile to raise three pink
transparent fingers covered with black fuzz.
Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to move.
(The Black Meat is like a tainted cheese, overpower-
ingly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat
and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.)
A painted youth slithered in and seized one of the
great black claws sending the sweet, sick smell curling
through the cafe.
HOSPITAL
Disintoxication Notes. Paranoia of early withdrawal.
. Everything looks blue.... Flesh dead, doughy,
toneless.
Withdrawal Nightmares. A mirror-lined cafe. Empty.
...Waiting for something.... A man appears in a side
door.... A slight, short Arab dressed in a brown jellaba
with grey beard and grey face... There is a pitcher of
boiling acid in my hand.... Seized by a convulsion of
urgency, I throw it in his face....
Everyone looks like a drug addict....
Take a little walk in the hospital patio.... In my
absence someone has used my scissors, they are stained
with some sticky, red brown gick.... No doubt that
little bitch of a criada trimming her rag.
Horrible-looking Europeans clutter up the stairs, in-
tercept the nurse when I need my medicine, empty
piss into the basin when I am washing, occupy the
toilet for hours on end -- probably fishing for a finger
stall of diamonds they have stashed up their asshole....
In fact the whole clan of Europeans has moved in
next to me....The old mother is having an operation,
and her daughter move right in to see the old gash
receive proper service. Strange visitors, presumably
relatives... One of them wears as glasses those gad-
gets jewelers screw into their eyes to examine stones.
...Probably a diamond-cutter on the skids... The man
who loused up the Throckmorton Diamond and was
drummed out of the industry.... All these jewelers
standing around the Diamond in their frock coats, wait-
ing on The Man. An error of one thousandth of an
inch ruins the rock complete and they have to import
this character special from Amsterdam to do the job.
...So he reels in dead drunk with a huge air hammer
and pounds the diamond to dust....
I don't check these citizens.... Dope peddlers from
Aleppo?... Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Il-
legal diamond buyers from Johannesburg?... Slave
traders from Somaliland? Collaborators at the very
least...
Continual dreams of junk: I am looking for a poppy
field.... Moonshiners in black Stetsons direct me to
a Near East cafe.... One of the waiters is a connection
for Yugoslav opium....
Buy a packet of heroin from a Malay Lesbian in
white belted trenchcoat.... I cop the paper in Tibetan
section of a museum. She keeps trying to steal it back.
...I am looking for a place to fix....
The critical point of withdrawal is not the early
phase of acute sickness, but the final step free from
the medium of junk....There is a nightmare interlude
of cellular panic, life suspended between two ways of
being.... At this point the longing for junk concen-
trates in a last, all-out yen, and seems to gain a dream
power: circumstances put junk in your way.... You
meet an old-time Schmecker, a larcenous hospital at-
tendant, a writing croaker....
A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck
jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic
pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper, adolescent-
nordic-sun-tan slacks, sandals from calloused foot soles
of young Malayan farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted
and tucked in the shirt. (Ash-brown is a color like
grey under brown skin. You sometimes find it in mixed
Negro and white stock, the mixture did not come of
and the colors separated out like oil on water.... )
The Guard is a sharp dresser, since he has nothing
to do and saves all his pay to buy fine clothes and
changes three times a day in front of an enormous mag-
nifying mirror. He has a Latin handsome-smooth face
with a pencil line mustache, small black eyes, blank
and greedy, undreaming insect eyes.
When I get to the frontier the Guard rushes out
of his casita, a mirror in a wooden frame slung round
his neck. He is trying to get the mirror off his neck....
This has never happened before, that anyone reached
the frontier. The Guard has injured his larynx taking
of the mirror frame.... He has lost his voice.... He
opens his mouth, you can see the tongue jumping
around inside. The smooth blank young face and the
open mouth with the tongue moving inside are in-
credibly hideous. The Guard holds up his hand. His
whole body jerks in convulsive negation. I go over
and unhook the chain across the road. It falls with a
clank of metal on stone. I walk through. The Guard
stands there in the mist looking after me. Then he
hooks the chain up again, goes back into the casita and
starts plucking at his mustache.
They just bring so-called lunch.... A hard-boiled
egg with the shell of revealing an object like I never
seen it before.... A very small egg of a yellow-brown
color... Perhaps laid by the duck-billed platypus.
The orange contained a huge worm and very little
else.... He really got there firstest with the mostest....
In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows
to an enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a
thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem
the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It
is said to be unspeakably toothsome..., An Interzone
coroner known as Autopsy Ahmed made a fortune traf-
ficking The Worm.
The French school is opposite my window and I
dig the boys with my eight-power field glasses.... So
close I could reach out and touch them.... They wear
shorts.... I can see the goose-pimples on their legs
in the cold Spring morning.... I project myself out
through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the
morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.
Did I ever tell you about the time Marv and me pay
two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each
other? So I ask Marv, "Do you think they will do it?"
And he says, "I think so. They are hungry."
And I say, "That's the way I like to see them."
Makes me feel sorta like a dirty old man but, "Son
cosas de la vida," as Soberba de la Flor said when the
fuzz upbraids him for blasting this cunt and taking the
dead body to the Bar 0 Motel and fucking it....
"She play hard to get already," he say... "I don't
hafta take that sound." (Soberba de la Flor was a
Mexican criminal convict of several rather pointless
murders. )
The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid.
...I think they are using it for an operating room....
NURSE: "I can't find her pulse, doctor."
DR. BENWAY: "Maybe she got it up her snatch in
a finger stall."
NURSE: "Adrenalin, doctor?"
DR.. BENWAY: "The night porter shot it all up for
kicks." He looks around and picks up one of those
rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to
unstop toilets.... He advances on the patient....
"Make an incision, Doctor Limpf," he says to his ap-
palled assistant.... "I'm going to massage the heart."
Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the incision. Dr. Ben-
way washes the suction cup by swishing it around in
the toilet-bowl....
NURSE: "Shouldn't it be sterilized, doctor?"
DR. BENWAY: "Very likely but there's no time." He
sits on the suction cup like a cane seat watching his
assistant make the incision.... "You young squirts
couldn't lance a pimple without an electric vibrating
scalpel with automatic drain and suture.... Soon we'll
be operating by remote control on patients we never
see.... We'll be nothing but button pushers. All the
skill is going out of surgery.... All the know-how and
make-do... Did I ever tell you about the time I per-
formed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can?
And once I was caught short without instrument one
and removed a uterine tumor with my teeth. That
was in the Upper Effendi, and besides..."
DR. LYMPH F: "The incision is ready, doctor."
Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and
works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors,
the nurse and the wall.... The cup makes a horrible
sucking sound.
NURSE: "I think she's gone, doctor."
DR. BENWAY: "Well, it's all in the day's work." He
walks across the room to a medicine cabinet.... "Some
fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush!
Nurse! Send the boy out to fill this RX on the double!"
Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with
students: "Now, boys, you won't see this operation
performed very often and there's a reason for that....
You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one
knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had
a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic
creation from the beginning.
"Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge
extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked,
so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers
his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celer-
ity, rescues him from death at the last possible split
second.... Did any of you ever see Dr. Tetrazzini per-
form? I say perform advisedly because his operations
were performances. He would start by throwing a scal-
pel across the room into the patient and then make his
entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible:
'I don't give them time to die,' he would say. Tumors
put him in a frenzy of rage. 'Fucking undisciplined
cells!' he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a
knife-fighter."
A young man leaps down into the operating theatre
and, whipping out a scalpel, advances on the patient.
DR. BENWAY: "An espontaneo Stop him before he
guts my patient!"
(Espontaneo is a bull-fighting term for a member of
the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out
a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the
bull before he is dragged out of the ring. )
The orderlies scuffle with the espontaneo, who is
finally ejected from the hall. The anesthetist takes ad-
vantage of the confusion to pry a large gold filling
from the patient's mouth....
I am passing room 10 they moved me out of yester-
day.... Maternity case I assume... Bedpans full of
blood and Kotex and nameless female substances, enough
to pollute a continent... If someone comes to visit me
in my old room he will think I gave birth to a monster
and the State Department is trying to hush it up....
Music from I Am an American... An elderly man
in the striped pants and cutaway of a diplomat stands
on a platform draped with the American flag. A de-
cayed, corseted tenor -- bursting out of a Daniel Boone
costume -- is singing the Star S pangled Banner, accom-
panied by a full orchestra. He sings with a slight
lisp....
THE DIPLOMAT (reading from a great scroll of ticker
tape that keeps growing and tangling around his feet):
"And we categorically deny that any male citizen of
the United States of America..."
TENOR: "Oh thay can you thee..." His voice breaks
and shoots up to a high falsetto.
In the control room the Technician mixes a bicar-
bonate of soda and belches into his hand: "God damned
tenor's a brown artist1" he mutters sourly. "Mikel
rumph," the shout ends in a belch. "Cut that swish
fart off the air and give him his purple slip. He's
through as of right now.... Put in that sex-changed
Liz athlete.... She's a fulltime tenor at least....
Costume? How in the fuck should I know? I'm no
dress designer swish from the costume department!
What's that? The entire costume department occluded
as a security risk? What am I, an octopus? Let's see...
How about an Indian routine? Pocahontas or Hia-
watha?... No, that's not right. Some citizen cracks
wise about giving it back to the Indians.... A Civil War
uniform, the coat North and the pants South like it
show they got together again? She can come on like
Buffalo Bill or Paul Revere or that citizen wouldn't
give up the shit, I mean the ship, or a G.I. or a Dough-
boy or the Unknown Soldier.... That's the best deal.
...Cover her with a monument, that way nobody has
to look at her...."
The Lesbian, concealed in a paper mache Arc de
Triomphe fills her great lungs and looses a tremendous
bellow.
"Oh say do that Star Spangled Banner yet wave..."
A great rent rips the Arc de Triomphe from top
to bottom. The Diplomat puts a hand to his fore-
head....
The Diplomat: "That any male citizen of the
United States has given birth in Interzone or at any
other place...."
"O'er the land of the FREEEEEEEEEEE..."
The Diplomat's mouth is moving but no one can
hear him. The Technician clasps his hands over his
ears: "Mother of God!" he screams. His plate begins
to vibrate like a Jew's harp, suddenly flies out of his
mouth.... He snaps at it irritably, misses and covers
his mouth with one hand.
The Arc de Triomphe falls with a ripping, splinter-
ing crash, reveals the Lesbian standing on a pedestal
clad only in a leopard-skin jockstrap with enormous
falsie basket.... She stands there smiling stupidly and
flexing her huge muscles.... The Technician is craw-
pleasure to the head.... Ten minutes later you want
another shot.... The pleasure of morphine is in the
viscera.... You listen down into yourself after a shot.
...But intravenous C is electricity through the brain,
activating cocaine pleasure connections.... There is no
withdrawal syndrome with C. It is a need of the brain
alone -- a need without body and without feeling. Earth-
bound ghost need. The craving for C lasts only a few
hours as long as the C channels are stimulated. Then
you forget it. Eukodol is like a combination of junk
and C. Trust the Germans to concoct some really evil
shit. Eukodol like morphine is six times stronger than
codeine. Heroin six times stronger than morphine. Di-
hydro-oxy-heroin should be six times stronger than
heroin. Quite possible to develop a drug so habit-form-
ing that one shot would cause lifelong addiction.
Habit Note continued: Picking up needle I reach
spontaneously for the tie-up cord with my left hand.'
This I take as a sign I can hit the one useable vein
in my left arm, (The movements of tying up are such
that you normally tie up the arm with which you
reach for the cord. ) The needle slides in easily on the
edge of a callous. I feel around. Suddenly a thin column
of blood shoots up into the syringe, for a moment sharp
and solid as a red cord.
The body knows what veins you can hit and conveys
this knowledge in the spontaneous movements you
make preparing to take a shot.... Sometimes the
needle points like a dowser's wand. Sometime I must
wait for the message, But when it comes I always hit
blood.
A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper.
He hesitated for a full second, then pressed the bulb,
watching the liquid rush into the vein as if sucked by
the silent thirst of his blood. There was an iridescent,
thin coat of blood left in the dropper, and the white
paper collar was soaked through with blood like a
bandage. He reached over and filled the dropper with
water. As he squirted the water out, the shot hit him
in the stomach, a soft sweet blow.
Look down at my filthy trousers, haven't been
changed in months.... The days glide by strung on
a syringe with a long thread of blood.... I am forget-
ting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body -- a grey,
junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hom-
bre Invisible -- the Invisible Man....
Twenty push ups every morning. Use of junk re-
moves fat, leaves muscle more or less intact. The addict
seems to need less tissue....Would it be possible to
isolate the fat-removing molecule of junk?
More and more static at the Drug Store, mutterings
of control like a 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 signifi-
cance.... 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 instru-
ment 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 Hick 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 mal-
nutrition....
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 ob-
server, like homosexual practices, but the actual ex-
citement 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 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 emo-
tional 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 convul-
sions 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 mur-
der 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....
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 spear-
ing fish with his hand....
"When you're down there you never think about
horse."
"You're better off like this," said Lee, dreamily caress-
ing a needle scar on the back of Miguel's hand, follow-
ing 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, gal-
vanized 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
Hesh that turned from brown to green and then color-
less in the morning light, fell off in globs onto the
floor.
Lee's eyes moved in the substance of his face... a
little, cold, grey Hick.... "Clean it up," he said. "Enough
dirt in here now."
"Oh uh sure," Miguel fumbled with a dustpan.
Lee put the packet of heroin away.
Lee lived in a permanent third-day kick, with, of
course, certain uh essential intermissions to refuel the
fires that burned through his yellow-pink-brown ge-
latinous substance and kept off the hovering flesh. In
the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that
he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents
and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors
and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound
healed in his soft, tentative flesh.... Long white ten-
drils of fungus curled round the naked bones. Mold
odors of atrophied testicles quilted his body in a fuzzy
grey fog....
During his first severe infection the boiling thermom-
eter Hashed a quicksilver bullet into the nurse's brain
and she fell dead with a mangled scream. The doctor
took one look and slammed steel shutters of survival.
He ordered the burning bed and its occupant immedi-
ately evicted from the hospital premises.
"Guess he can make his own penicillin!" snarled the
doctor.
But the infection burned the mold out... Lee lived
now in varying degrees of transparency... While not
exactly invisible he was at least difficult to see. His
presence attracted no special notice.... People covered
him with a project or dismissed him as a reflection,
shadow: "Some kinda light trick or neon advertise-
ment."
Now Lee felt the first seismic tremors of Old Faith-
ful the Cold Burn. He pushed Miguel's spirit into the
hall with a kind, firm tendril.
"Jesus!" said Miguel. "I gotta go!" He rushed out.
Pink fires of histamine spurted from Lee's glowing
core and covered his raw periphery. (The room was
fireproof, the walls of iron blistered and spotted with
moon craters.) He took a large fix and falsified his
schedule.
He decided to visit a colleague, NG Joe, who got
hooked during a Bang-utot attack in Honolulu.
(Note: Rang-utot, literally, "attempting to get up
and groaning..." Death occurring in the course of a
nightmare... The condition occurs in males of S.E.
Asiatic extraction.... In Manila about twelve cases of
death by Bang-utot are recorded each year.
One man who recovered said that "a little man"
was sitting on his chest and strangling him.
Victims often know that they are going to die, ex-
press the fear that their penis will enter the body and
kill them. Sometimes they cling to the penis in a state
of shrieking hysteria calling on others for help lest the
penis escape and pierce the body. Erections, such as
normally occur in sleep, are considered especially dan-
gerous and liable to bring a fatal attack.... One man
devised a Rube Goldberg contraption to prevent erec-
tion during sleep. But he died of Bang-utot.
Careful autopsies of Bang-utot victims have revealed
no organic reason for death. There are often signs of
strangulation (caused by what?); sometimes slight
hemorrhages of pancreas and lungs -- not sufficient to
cause death and also of unknown origin. It has oc-
curred to the author that the cause of death is a mis-
placement of sexual energy resulting in a lung erection
with consequent strangulation.... [See article by Nils
Larsen M.D., The Men with the Deadly Dream in the
Saturday Evening Post, December 3, 1955. Also ar-
ticle by Erle Stanley Gardner for Time Magazine.] )
NG lived in constant fear of erection so his habit
jumped and jumped. (Note: It is a well known tire-
some fact, it is a notoriously dull and long winded fact,
that anyone who gets hooked because of any disabil-
ity whatever, will be presented, during the periods of
shortage or deprivation [such a thing as too much fun
you know] with an outrageously padded, geometrically
progressing, proliferating account. )
An electrode attached to one testicle glowed briefly
and NG woke up in the smell of burning flesh and
reached for a loaded syringe. He rolled into a foetal
position and slid the needle into his spine. He pulled
the needle out with a little sigh of pleasure, and re-
alized that Lee was in the room. A long slug undulated
out of Lee's right eye and wrote on the wall in iri-
descent ooze: " The Sailor is in the City buying up
TIME."
I am waiting in front of a drugstore for it to open
at nine o'clock. Two Arab boys roll cans of garbage
up to a high heavy wood door in a whitewashed wall.
Dust in front of the door streaked with urine. One of
the boys bent over, rolling the heavy cans, pants tight
over his lean young ass. He looks at me with the neu-
tral, calm glance of an animal I wake with a shock
like the boy is real and I have missed a meet I had
with him for this afternoon.
"We expect additional equalizations," says the In-
spector in an interview with Your Reporter. "Otherwise
will occur," the Inspector lifts one leg in a typical
Nordic gesture, "the bends is it not? But perhaps we
can provide the suitable chamber of decompression."
The Inspector opens his fly and begins looking for
crabs, applying ointment from a little clay pot. Clearly
the interview is at an end. "You're not going?" he ex-
claims. "Well, as one judge said to the other, 'Be just
and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot
observe customary obscenities." He holds up his right
hand covered with a foul-smelling yellow ointment.
One's Reporter rushes forward and clasps the soiled
hand in both of his. "It's been a pleasure, Inspector, an
unspeakable pleasure," he says peeling off his gloves,
rolling them into a ball and tossing them into the
wastebasket. "Expense account," he smiles.
HASSAN'S RUMPUS ROOM
Gilt and red plush. Rococo bar backed by pink shell.
The air is cloyed with a sweet evil substance like
decayed honey. Men and women in evening dress sip
pousse-cafes through alabaster tubes. A Near East Mug-
wump sits naked on a bar stool covered in pink silk.
He licks warm honey from a crystal goblet with a long
black tongue. His genitals are perfectly formed -- cir-
cumcised cock, black shiny pubic hairs. His lips are
thin and purple-blue like the lips of a penis, his eyes
blank with insect calm. The Mugwump has no liver,
maintaining himself exclusive on sweets. Mugwump
push a slender blond youth to a couch and strip him
expertly.
"Stand up and turn around," he orders in telepathic
pictographs. He ties the boy's hands behind him with
a red silk cord. "Tonight we make it all the way."
"No, no!" screams the boy.
"Yes. Yes."
Cocks ejaculate in silent "yes." Mugwump part silk
curtains, reveal a teak wood gallows against lighted
screen of red Hint. Gallows is on a dais of Aztec
mosaics.
The boy crumples to his knees with a long
"OOOOOOOOH," shitting and pissing in terror. He
feels the shit warm between his thighs. A great wave
of hot blood swells his lips and throat. His body con-
tracts into a foetal position and sperm spurts hot into
his face. The Mugwump dips hot perfumed water from
alabaster bowl, pensively washes the boy's ass and
cock, drying him with a soft blue towel. A warm wind
plays over the boys body and the hairs float free. The
Mugwump puts a hand under the boy's chest and
pulls him to his feet. Holding him by both pinioned
elbows, propels him up the steps and under the noose.
He stands in front of the boy holding the noose in
both hands.
The boy looks into Mugwump eyes blank as obsidian
mirrors, pools of black blood, glory holes in a toilet
wall closing on the Last Erection.
An old garbage collector, face fine and yellow as
Chinese ivory, blows The Blast on his dented brass
horn, wakes the Spanish pimp with a hard-on. Whore
staggers out through dust and shit and litter of dead
kittens, carrying bales of aborted foetuses, broken con-
doms, bloody Kotex, shit wrapped in bright color
comics.
A vast still harbor of iridescent water. Deserted gas
well flares on the smoky horizon. Stink of oil and
sewage. Sick sharks swim through the black water,
belch sulphur from rotting livers, ignore a bloody,
broken Icarus. Naked Mr. America, burning frantic
with self bone love, screams out: "My asshole con-
founds the Louvre! I fart ambrosia and shit pure gold
turds! My cock spurts soft diamonds in the morning
sunlight!" He plummets from the eyeless lighthouse,
kissing and jacking off in face of the black mirror,
glides oblique down with cryptic condoms and mosaic
of a thousand newspapers through a drowned city of
red brick to settle in black mud with tin cans and beer
bottles, gangsters in concrete, pistols pounded Hat and
meaningless to avoid short-arm inspection of prurient
ballistic experts. He waits the slow striptease of erosion
with fossil loins.
The Mugwump slips the noose over the boy's head
and tightens the knot caressingly behind the left ear.
The boy's penis is retracted, his balls tight. He looks
straight ahead breathing deeply. The Mugwump sidles
around the boy goosing him and caressing his genitals
in hieroglyphs of mockery. He moves in behind the
boy with a series of bumps and shoves his cock up the
boy's ass. He stands there moving in circular gyrations.
The guests shush each other, nudge and giggle.
Suddenly the Mugwump pushes the boy forward into
space, free of his cock. He steadies the boy with hands
on the hip bones, reaches up with his stylized hiero-
glyph hands and snaps the boy's neck. A shudder passes
through the boy's body. His penis rises in three great
surges pulling his pelvis up, ejaculates immediately.
Green sparks explode behind his eyes. A sweet tooth-
ache pain shoots through his neck down the spine to
the groin, contracting the body in spasms of delight.
His whole body squeezes out through his cock. A
final spasm throws a great spurt of sperm across the
red screen like a shooting star.
The boy falls with soft gutty suction through a maze
of penny arcades and dirty pictures.
A sharp turd shoots clean out his ass. Farts shake
his slender body. Skyrockets burst in green clusters
across a great river. He hears the faint put-put of a
motor boat in jungle twilight.... Under silent wings
of the anopheles mosquito.
The Mugwump pulls the boy back onto his cock.
The boy squirms, impaled like a speared fish. The
Mugwump swings on the boy's back, his body con-
tracting in fluid waves. Blood flows down the boy's
chin from his mouth, half-open, sweet, and sulky in
death. The Mugwump falls with a fluid, sated plop.
Windowless cubicle with blue walls. Dirty pink
curtain cover the door. Red bugs crawl on the wall,
cluster in corners. Naked boy in the middle of the room
twang a two-string ouad, trace an arabesque on the
floor. Another boy lean back on the bed smoking keif
and blow smoke over his erect cock. They play game
with tarot cards on the bed to see who fuck who.
Cheat. Fight. Roll on the floor snarling and spitting like
young animals. The loser sit on the floor chin on knees,
licks a broken tooth. The winner curls up on the bed
pretending to sleep. Whenever the other boy come
near kick at him. Ali seize him by one ankle, tuck
the ankle under his arm pit, lock his arm around the
calf. The boy kick desperately at Ali's face. Other
ankle pinioned. Ali tilt the boy back on his shoulders.
The boy's cock extends along his stomach, float free
pulsing. Ali put his hands over his head. Spit on his
cock. The other sighs deeply as Ali slides his cock in.
The mouths grind together smearing blood. Sharp
musty odor of penetrated rectum. Nimun drive in like
a wedge, force jism out the other cock in long hot
spurts. (The author has observed that Arab cocks
tend to be wide and wedge shaped.)
Satyr and naked Greek lad in aqualungs trace a
ballet of pursuit in a monster vase of transparent
alabaster. The Satyr catches the boy from in front
and whirls him around. They move in fish jerks. The
boy releases a silver stream of bubbles from his mouth.
White sperm ejaculates into the green water and floats
lazily around the twisting bodies.
Negro gently lifts exquisite Chinese boy in
