Социолект: структура и семантика

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.

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