Социолект: структура и семантика

Itinerant short con and carny hyp men have burned down the croakers of Texas....

And no one in his right mind would hit a Louisiana croaker. State Junk Law.

Came at last to Houston where I know a druggist. I haven't been there in five years but he looks up and makes me with one quick look and just nods and says: "Wait over at the counter...."

So I sit down and drink a cup of coffee and after a while he comes and sits beside me and says, "What do you want?"

"A quart of PG and a hundred nembies."

He nods, "Come back in half an hour."

So when I come back he hands me a package and says, "That's fifteen dollars.... Be careful."

Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper - have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls.... So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish....

New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It's a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico.

Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, nigger-killing sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel.... Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water.

"Thomas and Charlie," 1 said.

"What?"

"That's the name of this town. Sea level. We climb straight up from here ten thousand feet." I took a fix and went to sleep in the back seat. She was a good driver. You can tell as soon as someone touches the wheel.

Mexico City where Lupita sits like an Aztec Earth Goddess doling out her little papers of lousy shit.

"Selling is more of a habit than using," Lupita says. Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that's one you can't kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. (Note: Make in the sense of dig or size up.) I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct. He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don't remember him afterwards. So he twists one after the other....

Well the Buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can't drink. He can't get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.) He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Baby Ruths he digs special. "It really disgust you to see the Buyer sucking on them candy bars so nasty," a cop says.

The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks. "I'll just set in my room," he says. "Fuck 'em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry."

But a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the Buyer hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it.

"Oh all right," the boy says. "So what you want to make?"

"I just want to rub up against you and get fixed."

"Ugh... Well all right... But why cancha just get physical like a human?"

Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. "Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for," he says. "Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets wet all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax.... I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like a old rotten cantaloupe."

"Well it's still an easy score."

The boy sighed resignedly; "Yes, I guess you can get used to anything. I've got a meet with him again tomorrow."

The Buyer's habit keeps getting heavier. He needs a recharged every half hour. Sometimes he cruises the precincts and bribes the turnkey to let him in with a cell of junkies. It get to where no amount of contact will fix him. At this point he receives a summons from the District Supervisor:

"Bradley, your conduct has given rise to rumors - and I hope for your sake they are no more than that -- so unspeakably distasteful that... I mean Caesar's wife...hrump... that is, the Department must be above suspicion... certainly above such suspicions as you have seemingly aroused. You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation."

The Buyer throws himself on the ground and crawls over to the D.S. "No, Boss Man, no... The Department is my very lifeline."

He kisses the D.S.'s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the D.S. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost his teeth "inna thervith." "Please Boss Man. I'll wipe your ass, I'll wash out your dirty condoms, I'll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose....

"Really, this is most distasteful!! Have you no pride? I must tell you I feel a distinct revulsion. I mean there is something, well, rotten about you, and you smell like a compost heap." He put a scented handkerchief in front of his face. "I must ask you to leave this office at once.

"I'll do anything, Boss, anything." His ravaged green face splits in a horrible smile. "I'm still young, Boss, and I'm pretty strong when I get my blood up."

The D.S. retches into his handkerchief and points to the door with a limp hand. The Buyer stands up looking at the D.S. dreamily. His body begins to dip like a dowser's wand. He flows forward....

"No! No!" screams the D.S.

"Schlup... schiup schlup." An hour later they find the Buyer on the nod in the D.S.'s chair. The D.S. has disappeared without a trace.

The Judge: "Everything indicates that you have, in some unspeakable manner uh... assimilated the District Supervisor. Unfortunately there is no proof. I would recommend that you be confined or more accurately contained in some institution, but I know of no place suitable for a man of your caliber. I must reluctantly order your release."

"That one should stand in an aquarium," says the arresting officer.

The Buyer spreads terror throughout the industry. Junkies and agents disappear. Like a vampire bat he gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anesthetizes his victims and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence. And once he has scored he holes up for several days like a gorged boa constrictor. Finally he is caught in the act of digesting the Narcotics Commissioner and destroyed with a flame thrower ~ the court of inquiry ruling that such means were justified in that the Buyer had lost his human citizenship and was, in consequence, a creature without species and a menace to the narcotics industry on all levels.

In Mexico the gimmick is to find a local junky with a government script whereby they are allowed a certain quantity every month. Our Man was Old Dee who had spent most of his life in the States.

"I was traveling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In Butte, state of Montana, she gets the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chicago sniff coke used to come in form of crystals, blue crystals. So he go nuts and start screaming the Federals is after him and run down this alley and stick his head in the garbage can. And I said, 'What you think you are doing?” and he say, 'Get away or I shoot you. I got myself hid good.'"

We are getting some С or RX at this time. Shoot it in the mainline, son. You can smell it going in, clean and cold in your nose and throat then a rush of pure pleasure right through the brain lighting up those С connections. Your head shatters in white explosions. Ten minutes later you want another shot... you will walk across town for another shot. But if you can't score for С you eat, sleep and forget about it.

This is a yen of the brain alone, a need without feeling and without body, earthbound ghost need, rancid ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning.

One morning you wake up and take a speed ball, and feel bugs under your skin. 1890 cops with black mustaches block the doors and lean in through the windows snarling their lips back from blue and bold embossed badges. Junkies march through the room singing the Moslem Funeral Song, bear the body of Bill Gains, stigmata of his needle wounds glow with a soft blue flame. Purposeful schizophrenic detectives sniff at your chamber pot.

It's the coke horrors.... Sit back and play it cool and shoot in plenty of that GIM.

Day of the Dead: I got the chucks and ate my little Willy's sugar skull. He cried and I had to go out for another. Walked past the cocktail lounge where they blasted the Jai Lai bookie.

In Cuernavaca or was it Taxco? Jane meets a pimp trombone player and disappears in a cloud of tea smoke. The pimp is one of these vibration and dietary artists -- which is a means he degrades the female sex by forcing his chicks to swallow all this shit. He was continually enlarging his theories... he would quiz a chick and threaten to walk out if she hadn't memorized every nuance of his latest assault on logic and the human image.

"Now, baby. I got it here to give. But if you won't receive it there's just nothing I can do."

He was a ritual tea smoker and very puritanical about junk the way some tea heads are. He claimed tea put him in touch with supra blue gravitational fields. He had ideas on every subject: what kind of underwear was healthy, when to drink water, and how to wipe your ass. He had a shiny red face and great spreading smooth nose, little red eyes that lit up when he looked at a chick and went out when he looked at anything else. His shoulders were very broad and suggested deformity. He acted as if other men did not exist conveying his restaurant and store orders to male personnel through a female intermediary. And no Man ever invaded his blighted, secret place.

So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming "I got the fear" and ran out of the house. Drank a beer in a little restaurant - mosaic bar and soccer scores and bullfight posters -- and waited for the bus to town.

A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead.

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 movement.

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 disappeared 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 deepening 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 camouflage 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 hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials 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, perilous iron balconies and basements opening into the underground baths.

On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mugwumps 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 slowing 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 flow 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 themselves in clay cubicles and remain for weeks in biostasis. 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, overpoweringly 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.

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 spearing fish with his hand....

"When you're down there you never think about horse."

"You're better off like this," said Lee, dreamily caressing a needle scar on the back of Miguel's hand, following 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, galvanized 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 flesh that turned from brown to green and then colorless 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 flick.... "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 gelatinous substance and kept off the hovering flesh. In the beginning Ms 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 tendrils 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 thermometer flashed 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 immediately 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 advertisement."

Now Lee felt the first seismic tremors of Old Faithful 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: Bang-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, express 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 dangerous and liable to bring a fatal attack.... One man devised a Rube Goldberg contraption to prevent erection 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 occurred to the author that the cause of death is a misplacement 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 tire Saturday Evening Post, December 3, 1955. Also article by Erie Stanley Gardner for True Magazine.})

NG lived in constant fear of erection so his habit jumped and jumped. (Note: It is a well known tiresome fact, it is a notoriously dull and long winded fact, that anyone who gets hooked because of any disability 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 realized that Lee was in the room. A long slug undulated out of Lee's right eye and wrote on the wall in iridescent 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 neutral, 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 Inspector 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 exclaims. "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 rashes 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.

I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive. The Sickness... Most survivors do not remember the delirium in detail. I apparently took detailed notes on sickness and delirium. I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch. The title was suggested by Jack Kerouac. I did not understand what the title meant until my recent recovery. The title means exactly what the words say: NAKED Lunch -- a fimen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.

The Sickness is drug addiction and I was an addict for fifteen years. When I say addict I mean an addict to junk (generic term for opium and/or derivatives including all synthetics from demerol to palfium). 1 have used junk in many forms: morphin, heroin, dilaudid, eukodol, pantopon, diocodid, diosane, opium, demerol, dolophine, palfium. I have smoked junk, sniffed it, injected it in vein-skin-muscle, inserted it in rectal suppositories. The needle is not important. Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up you ass the result is the same: addiction. When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Bannisteria Caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drug of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence. The action of these drugs is physiologically opposite to the action of junk. A lamentable confusion between the two classes of drugs has arisen owing to the zeal of the U.S. and other narcotic departments.

I have seen the exact manner in which the junk virus operates through fifteen years of addiction. The pyramid of junk, one level eating the level below (it is no accident that junk higher-ups are always fat and the addict in the street is always thin) right up to the top or tops since there are many junk pyramids feeding on peoples of the world and all built on basic principles of monopoly:

1 Never give anything for nothing.

2 Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait).

3 Always take everything back if you possibly can.

The Pusher always get it all back. The addict needs more and more junk to maintain a human form... buy off the Monkey.

Junk is the mold of monopoly and possession. The addict stands by while his junk legs carry him straight in on the junk beam to relapse. Junk is quantitative and accurately mesurable. The more junk you use the less you have and the more you have the more you use. All the hallucinogen drugs are considered sacred by those who use them - there are Peyote Cults and Bannisteria Cults, Hashish Cults and Mushroom Cults - "the Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico enable a man to see God" - but no one ever suggested that junk is sacred. There are no opium cults. Opium is profane and quantitative like money. I have heard that there was once a beneficent non-habit-forming junk in India. It was called soma and is pictured as a beautiful blue tide. If soma ever existed the Pusher was there to bottle it and monopolize it and sell it and it turned into plain old time JUNK.

Junk is the ideal product... the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy... The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk.

Junk yields a basic formula of evil virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of evil is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: Wouldn 't you? Yes you would. You would lie, cheat inform on your fiends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite. Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the purpose unless your purpose is to keep the junk virus: in operation. And junk is a big industry. I recall talking to an American who worked for the Aftosa Commission in Mexico. Six hundred a month plus expense account:

"How long will the epidemic last ?" I enquired.

'As long as we can keep it going.... And yes... maybe the aftosa will break in South America," he said dreamily.

If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in die Street, arid stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.

Addicts can be cured or quarantined - that is, allowed a morphine ration under minimal supervision like typhoid carriers. When this is done, the junk pyramids of the world will collapse. So far as I know, England is the only country to apply this method to the junk problem. They have about five hundred quarantined addicts in the U.K. In another generation when the quarantined addicts die off and pain killers operating on a non-junk principle will be discovered, the junk virus will be like smallpox, a closed chapter- a medical curiosity.

The vaccine that can relegate the junk virus to a land-locked past is in existence. This vaccine is the Apomorphine Treatment discovered by an English doctor whose name I must withhold pending his permission to use it and to quote from his book covering thirty years of apomorphine treatment of addicts and alcoholics. The compound apomorphine is formed by boiling morphine with hydrochloric acid. It was discovered years before it was used to treat addicts. For many years the only use for apomorphine was an emetic to induce vomiting in cases of poisoning. It acts directly on the vomiting center in the back brain.

I found this vaccine at the end of the junk line. I lived in one room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year of changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction. I never cleaned or dusted the room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled up to the ceiling. Light and water had been long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. 1 was only roused to action when the hourglass of junk ran out. If a friend came to visit -- and they rarely did since who or what was left to visit ~ I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision - a grey screen always blanker and fainter - and not caring when he walked out of it. If he had died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn't you? Because I never had enough junk - no one ever does. Thirty grains of morphine a day and it still was not enough. And long waits in front of a drugstore. Delay is a rule in the junk business. The Man is never on time. This is no accident. There are no accidents in the junk world. The addict is taught again and again exactly what will happen if he does not score for his junk ration. Get up that money or else. And suddenly my habit began to jump and jump. Forty, sixty grains a day. Aid it still was not enough. And I could not pay.

I stood there with my last check in my hand and realized that it was my last check. I took the next plane to London.

The doctor explained to me that apomorphine acts on the back brain to regulate the metabolism and normalize the blood stream in such a way that the enzyme system of addiction is destroyed over a peiiod of four or five clays. Once the back brain is regulated apomorphine can be discontinued and only used in case of relapse.(No one would take apomorphine for kicks. Not one case of addiction to apomorphine has ever been recorded). I agreed to undergo treatment and entered a nursing home. For the first twenty-four hours I was literally insane and paranoid as many addicts are in severe withdrawal. This delirium was dispersed by twenty-four hours of intensive apomorphine treatment. The doctor showed me the chart. I had received minute amounts of morphine that could not possibly account for; my lack of the more severe withdrawal symptoms such as leg and stomach cramps, fever and my own special symptom, The Cold Burn, like a vast hives covering the body and rubbed with menthol. Every addict has his own special symptom that cracks all control. There was a missing factor in the withdrawal equation - that factor could only be apomorphine.

I saw the apomorphine treatment really work. Eight days later I left the nursing home eating and sleeping normally. I remained completely off the junk for two full years - a twelve years record. I did relapse for some months as a result of pain and illness. Another apomorphine cure has kept me off junk through this writing.

The apomorphine cure is qualitatively different from other methods of cure. I have tried them all. Short reduction, slow nxluction, cortisone, anthihistaminics, tranquillizers, sleeping cures, tolserol, reserpine. None of these cures lasted beyond the first opportunity to relapse. I can say definitely that I was never metabolically cured until I took the apomorphine cure. The overwhelming relapse statistics from the Lexington Narcotic Hospital have led many doctors to say that addiction is not curable. They use a dolophine reduction cure at Lexington and have never tried apomorphine as far as I know. In fact, this method of treatment has been largely neglected. No research has been done with variations of the apomorphine formula or with synthetics. No doubt substances fifty times stronger man apomorphine could be developed and the side effect of vomiting eliminated.

Apomorphine is a metabolic and psychic regulator that can be discontinued as soon as it has done its work. The world is deluged with tranquillizers and energizers but this unique regulator has not received attention. No research has been done by any of the large pharmaceutical companies. I suggest that research with variations of apomorphine and synthesis of it will open a new medical frontier extending far beyond the problem of addiction.

The smallpox vaccine was opposed by a vociferous lunatic group of anti-vaccinationists. No doubt a scream of protest will go up from interested or unbalanced individuals as the junk virus is shot out from under them. Junk is big business; there are always cranks and operators. They must not be allowed to interfere with the essential work of inoculation treatment and quarantine. The junk virus is public health problem number one of the world today.

Since «Naked Lunch» treats this health problem, it is necessarily brutal, obscene and disgusting. Sickness has often repulsive details not for weak stomachs.

Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic were written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift's «Modest Proposal». These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is. As always the lunch is naked. If civilized countries want to return to Druid Hanging Rites in the Sacred Grove or to drink blood with the Aztecs and feed their Gods with blood of human sacrifice, let them see what they actually eat and drink. Let them see what is on the end of that long newspaper spoon.

As I write, I have almost completed a sequel to «Naked Lunch». A mathematical extension of the Algebra of Need beyond the junk virus. Because there are many forms of addiction I think that they all obey basic laws. In the words of Heisenberg: 'This may not be the best of all possible universes but it may well prove to be one of the; simplest." If man can see.

Глоссарий

rathole	притон
hit list	чёрный список
ten-spot	десятидолларовая банкнота
stash bag	коробка для хранения марихуаны
hooker	коробка для хранения марихуаны
blackbirds	капсулы амфетаминов
blank	продавать кому-либо поддельный героин
big -- O	опиум
downtown	героин
go	доза наркотика
heavy soul	героин
kid stuff	марихуана
stuff	любой наркотик
o.d.	передозировка
skag	героин
gluer	подросток, нюхающий клей
King Kong pills	барбитураты
cokaholic	человек употребляющий кокаин
pot brownies	пирожные с коноплёй
monolithic	опьянённый наркотиком человек
flashback	переживания опыта ЛСД через долгое время после принятия наркотика
rat fink	доносчик
snop	марихуана
guru	опытный наркоман
pee	очень чистый героин
crack	кристалический кокаин
M.J.	марихуана
skank	сканк
smeared	опьянённый наркотиком
speed head	наркоман колющийся амфетамином
thrill-pills	таблетки барбитурата
X	иньекция наркотика
twist	сигарета с марихуаной
snapper	ампула с амилнитритом
L.A. turnabouts	амфетамины
laughing grass	марихуана
bad grass	фенциклидин
jive	наркотики
lay	опиумная курильня
muggle	марихуана
lid poppers	амфетамины
dirt grass	низкокачественная конопля
eater	наркоман принимающий наркотики через рот
courage pill	таблетка героина в виде пилюли
crack	крэк
equalizer	ружьё, пистолет
over the hump	под действием наркотиков
Jamaikan (gold)	крепкая марихуана
session	запой, время, проведённое под действием наркотического вещества
weed	марихуана
Q	качество наркотика
spike	игла для иньекций
chocolate	гашиш
headfucker	мощный психоделик
poke	затяжка сигаретой с марихуаной
shit	наркотики вообще
schwag	слабая марихуана
mids	средняя марихуана
dank	сильная марихуана
kind bud	сильная марихуана
speed	амфетамин
crystal meth	метамфетамин
ghetto, bluff, hood	район города, где продаются наркотики
under-fucking-cover cop	человек, работающий на полицию, информатор
dime	порция наркотика на 10 долларов
quarter	порция наркотика на 25 долларов
rig	шприц
point	шприц
needle	шприц
rolls	экстази
rocks	крэк
to sling	Продавать наркотики
tits	героин
boy	героин
girl	кокаин
rip off	Кинуть, обмануть
angel dust	фенциклидин
PCP	фенциклидин
dropper	шприц
asshole	груб.ругательство
dick	агент из отдела по борьбе с наркотиками
fag	полицейский
outfit	набор
piece	пистолет
falatfoot	полицейский
grass	настучать
hot shot*	инъекция отравленного наркотика, которую делают человеку, которого хотят устранить, так как он является полицейским осведомителем.
junky	наркоман
fags	гомосексуалисты
wig	передознуться
six shooter	револьвер
fags	гомосексуалисты
fuzz	полицейский
nail	арестовывать
queers	гомосексуалисты
con men	мошенники
mark	жертва ограбления
shake down	надувать
mark
mark	потенциальная жертва ограбления
bullheads	упрямец
junk	героин
to beef	жаловаться
to carry	носить при себе
puke	тошнить
pot	марихуана
to catnip*	продавать мяту вместо марихуаны
hop	опиум
fence	продавец краденного
cook up	кипятить
fuzz	полицейский
junk	героин
drag	подруга
wino	пьяница
fruit	гомомсексуалист
junk-sick	в состоянии ломки
cold turkey	ломка
in sickness	ломка
on the nod	под действием наркотиков
hooked	имеющий зависимость
kicked	соскочивший с зависимости
hooked	имеющий зависимость
people	сотрудники полиции из антинаркотического отдела
yen pox*	пепел, остающийся в курительном приспособлении после курения с его помощью опиума
shooting	колоться
sniffing	нюхать
stock up	заполучить
ice	кристаллический кокаин
bust	арестовывать
stash	запас наркотиков на случай какой-либо экстремальной ситуации
stuff	наркотик
con men	жулик
blast	зажигать
tea	марихуана
stick	сигарета с наркотиком
bring-down	неприятные ощущения, возникающие, когда действие наркотика заканчивается
C	кокаин
horse	героин
come down	отходить от действия наркотика
hyp	шприц
croaker	врач
P.G.	болеутоляющие таблетки
nembies	немобутал
heat	полицейский
coke	кокаин
connection	продавец наркотиков
to fix	уколоться
pusher	продавец наркотиков
to raise	начинать что-либо делать
line	криминальное мероприятие
to get someone	совершить половой акт с кем-либо
eager beaver	энтузиаст
to flip	сходить с ума от наркотиков
kick	кайф
hooked	находящийся в зависимости от наркотиков
kicked	не находящийся в зависимости от наркотиков
creep	негодяй
exchange place	место, где продаются наркотики
get hot	попасть в неприятную ситуацию, остаться ьез наркотиков
squirrel	запасливый человек
the man	продавец наркотиков
M	морфин
rumble	стычка, драка
to make	опознать
to tail	следить
fella	парень
prop	реквизит
to shake-down	грабить, отбирать деньги
bullhead	глупый человек
tie up	пережимать жгутом вену
deliver	приносить купленные наркотики
egg	ампула
monkey	наркотическая зависимость
script	рецепт
to get the horrors	испытывать чувство страха после принятия наркотков
pimp	сутенёр
drag	затяжка
to hang	застрелить
jerk	мерзавец
hit the stand	предстать перед судом
old character	старик
wop	итальянец
blast	зажигать (сигарету с марихуаной)
paper	рецепт
twist	арестовывать
Recharge	следующая доза наркотиков, требующаяся если человек находится в наркотической зависимости
industry	область
script	рецепт
to get the chucks	испытывать чувство голода после принятия наркотиков
chick	проститутка
teahead	наркоман, употребляющий марихуану
nod out	находиться под действием наркотиков
habit	наркотическая зависимость
loaded	заполненный (шприц)
snort	порция наркотиков

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