to  him?  He  knows I'll  wait," Nick
laughed.
  I  spent  the  night  in  the Ever  Hard Baths  -- (homo-
sexuality is the best all-around cover story an  agent can
use)  -- where  a snarling  Italian attendant  creates such
an  unnerving  atmosphere  sweeping  the   dormitory  with
infra red see in the dark fieldglasses.
  ("All  right  in  the  North  East  corner! I  see you!"
switching on floodlights, sticking his head  through trap-
doors in the  floor and  wall of  the private  rooms, that
many a queen has been carried out in a straitjacket.... )
  I  lay  there  in my  open top  cubicle room  looking at
the  ceiling...  listened  to the  grunts and  squeals and
snarls  in  the  nightmare  halflight  of  random,  broken
lust....
  "Fuck off you!"
  "Put  on  two  pairs of  glasses and  maybe you  can see
something!"
  Walked  out  in  the  precise   morning  and   bought  a
paper....   Nothing....   I   called   from   a  drugstore
phone booth... and asked for Narcotics:
  "Lieutenant Gonzales... who's calling?"
  "I  want  to  speak  to  O'Brien."  A moment  of static,
dangling wires, broken connections...
  "Nobody of that name in this department..          . Who
are you?"
  "Well let me speak to Hauser."
  "Look, Mister, no O'Brien no  Hauser in  this bureau.
Now what do you want?"
  "Look, this is important.... I've got  info on  a big
shipment of H coming in....  I want  to talk  to Hauser
or  O'Brien....  I  don't  do  business   with  anybody
else...."
  "Hold on.... I'll connect you with Alcibiades."
  I began to wonder  if there  was an  Anglo-Saxon name
left in the Department....
  "I want to speak to Hauser or O'Brien."
  "How  many  times  I have  to tell  you no  Hauser no
O'Brien in this  department.... Now  who is  this call-
ing?"
  I hung up and took a taxi out of the area....  In the
cab  I  realized  what  had  happened....  I  had  been
occluded  from  space-time like  an eel's  ass occludes
when  he  stops  eating  on  the  way  to  Sargasso....
Locked  out....  Never  again  would  I  have a  Key, a
Point  of  Intersection....  The Heat  was off  me from
here  on out...  relegated with  Hauser and  O'Brien to
a landlocked junk past where  heroin is  always twenty-
eight dollars an ounce and you can score for yen pox in
the  Chink  Laundry  of  Sioux  Falls....  Far  side of
the world's mirror,  moving into  the past  with Hauser
and  O'Brien...  clawing  at  a  not-yet  of Telepathic
Bureaucracies,  Time  Monopolies, Control  Drugs, Heavy
Fluid Addicts:
  "I thought of that three hundred years ago."
  "Your  plan  was  unworkable  then  and  useless now.
...Like Da Vinci's Hying machine plans...."
  ATъOPHIED PъEFACE

                      WOULDN'T YOU?

  Why all this waste paper getting The People from
one place to another? Perhaps to spare The ъeader
stress of sudden space shifts and keep him Gentle? And
so a ticket is bought, a taxi called, a plane boarded. We
are allowed a glimpse into the warm peach-lined cave
as She (the airline hostess, of course) leans over us to
murmur of chewing gum, dramamine, even nembutal.
  "Talk paregoric, Sweet Thing, and I will hear."
  I am not American Express.... If one of my people
is seen in New York walking around in citizen clothes
and next sentence Timbuktu putting down lad talk on
a gazelle-eyed youth, we may assume that he ( the party
non-resident of Timbuktu) transported himself there
by the usual methods of communication..
  Lee The Agent (a double-four-eight-sixteen) is taking
the junk cure... space time trip portentously familiar
as junk meet corners to the addict... cures past and
future shuttle pictures through 'his spectral substance
vibrating in silent winds of accelerated Time.... Pick
a shot.... Any Shot....
  Formal knuckle biting, floor rolling shots in a precinct
cell.... "Feel like a shot of Heroin, Bill? Haw Haw
Haw."
  Tentative half impressions that dissolve in light .
pockets of rotten ectoplasm swept out by an old junky
coughing and spitting in the sick morning..
  Old violet brown photos that curl and crack like mud
in the sun: Panama City... Bill Gains putting down
the paregoric con on a Chinese druggist.
  "I've got these racing dogs... pedigree greyhounds.
    . All sick with the dysentery... tropical climate
    . the shits... you sabe shit?... My Whippets
Are Dying...." He screamed.... His eyes lit up
with blue fire.... The flame went out... smell of
burning metal.... "Administer with an eye dropper.
    Wouldn't you?... Menstrual cramps... my
wife... Kotex... Aged mother... Piles ..
raw... bleeding..." He nodded out against the
counter.... The druggist took a tooth-pick out of
his mouth and looked at the end of it and shook his
head....
  Gains and Lee burned down the ъepublic of Panama
from David to Darien on paregoric.... They Hew
apart with a shlupping sound.... Junkies tend to run
together into one body.... You have to be careful
especially in hot places.... Gains back to Mexico
City.... Desperate skeleton grin of chronic junk lack
glazed over with codeine and goof balls... cigarette
holes in his bathrobe... coffee stains on the floor...
smoky kerosene stove... rusty orange flame...
  The Embassy would give no details other than place
of burial in the American Cemetery....
  And Lee back to sex and pain and time and Yage,
bitter Soul Vine of the Amazon....
  I recall once after an overdose of Majoun (this is
Cannabis dried and finely powdered to consistency of
green powdered sugar and mixed with some confection
or other usually tasting like gritty plum pudding, but
the choice of confection is arbitrary...  ). I  am return-
ing  from  The  Lulu  or  Johny   or  Little   Boy's  ъoom
(stink  of  atrophied  infancy  and toilet  training) look
across the living room  of that  villa outside  Tanger and
suddenly  don't  know where  I am.  Perhaps I  have opened
the  wrong  door  and  at  any  moment  The  Man  In  Pos-
session,  The  Owner  Who  Got  There  First will  rush in
and scream:

  "What Are Yon Doing Here? Who Are You?"

  And  I  don't  know  what  I  am doing  there nor  who I
am. I decide  to play  it cool  and maybe  I will  get the
orientation   before  the   Owner  shows....   So  instead
of  yelling  "Where  Am I?"  cool it  and look  around and
you  will   find  out   approximately....  You   were  not
there for The  Beginning. You  will not  be there  for The
End....  Your  knowledge  of  what  is  going on  can only
be superficial  and relative....  What do  I know  of this
yellow  blighted  young  junky  face  subsisting   on  raw
opium?  I  tried  to  tell  him:  "Some  morning  you will
wake up with your liver in  your lap"  and how  to process
raw opium so it is not  plain poison.  But his  eyes glaze
over  and he  don't want  to know.  Junkies are  like that
most  of  them  they  don't  want   to  know...   and  you
can't  tell  them  anything....  A  smoker   doesn't  want
to  know  anything  but  smoke....   And  a   heroin  junky
same  way....  Strictly  the  spike  and  any  other route
is Farina....
  So I guess he is still sitting there in his 1920 Spanish
villa outside Tanger eating  that raw  opium full  of shit
and stones and straw... the  whole lot  for fear  he might
lose something....
  There is only one thing a writer can write about:
what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing.
. . .  I am a recording instrument.... I do not pre-
sume to impose "story" "plot" "continuity."...In
sofaras I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of
psychic process I may have limited function.... I am
not an entertainer....
  "Possession" they call it.... Sometimes an entity
jumps in the body -- outlines waver in yellow orange
jelly -- and hands move to disembowel the passing whore
or strangle the nabor child in hope of alleviating a
chronic housing shortage. As if I was usually there but
subject to goof now and again.... Wrong! I am never
here.... Never that is fully in possession, but some-
how in a position to forestall ill-advised moves....
Patrolling is, in fact, my principle occupation.... No
matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere
Outside giving orders and Inside this straight jacket of
jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead
of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the
seal of alien inspection....
  Writers talk about the sweet-sick smell of death
whereas any junky can tell you that death has no smell
    . at the same time a smell that shuts off breath and
stops blood... colorless no-smell of death... no
one can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions
and black blood filters of flesh... the death smell is
unmistakably a smell and complete absence of smell
    smell absence hits the nose first because all or-
ganic life has smell... stopping of smell is felt like
darkness to the eyes, silence to the ears, stress and
weightlessness to the balance and location sense....
  You always smell it and give it out for others to smell
during junk withdrawal.... A kicking junky can make
a whole apartment unlivable with his death smell...
but a good airing will stink the place up again so a body
can breathe.... You also smell it during one of those
oil burner habits that suddenly starts jumping geometric
like a topping forest fire....
  Cure is always: Let go! Jump1
  A friend of mine found himself naked in a Marrakech
hotel room second floor.... (He is after processing
by a Texas mother who dressed him in girl's clothes as
a child.... Crude but effective against infant proto-
plasm.... ) The other occupants are Arabs, three
Arabs... knives in hand... watching him .
glint of metal and points of light in dark eyes .
pieces of murder falling slow as opal chips through gly-
cerine... Slower animal reactions allow him a full
second to decide: Straight through the window and
down into the crowded street like a falling star his wake
of glass glittering in the sun... sustained a broken
ankle and a chipped shoulder... clad in a diaphanous
pink curtain, with a curtain-rod staff, hobbled away to
the Commissariat de Police....
  Sooner or later The Vigilante, The ъube, Lee The
Agent, A. J., Clem and Jody The Ergot Twins, Hassan
O'Leary the After Birth Tycoon, The Sailor, The Exter-
minator, Andrew Keif, "Fats" Terminal, Doc Benway,
"Fingers" Schafer are subject to say the same thing in
the same words to occupy, at that intersection point,
the same position in space-time. Using a common vocal
apparatus complete with all metabolic appliances that
is to be the same person -- a most inaccurate way of
expressing ъecognition: The junky naked in sunlight...
  The writer sees himself reading to the mirror as
always... He must check now and again to reassure
himself that The Crime Of Separate Action has not, is
not, cannot occur....
  Anyone who has ever looked into a mirror knows
what this crime is and what it means in terms of lost
control when the reflection no longer obeys.... Too
late to dial P o l i c e....
  I personally wish to terminate my services as of now
in that I cannot continue to sell the raw materials of
death.... Yours, sir, is a hopeless case and a noisome
one....
  "Defense is meaningless in the present state of our
knowledge, said The Defense looking up from an elec-
tron microscope....
  Take your business to Walgreen's
  We are not responsible
  Steal anything in sight
  I don't know how to return it to the white reader
  You can write or yell or croon about it... paint
about it... act about it... shit it out in mobiles.
    . So long as you don't go and do it, .
  Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with
inflexible authority of virus yen.... Death for dope
fiends, death for sex queens (I mean fiends) death for
the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless
flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe move-
ment....
  The black wind sock of death undulates over the
land, feeling, smelling for the crime of  separate life,
movers of the  fear-frozen flesh  shivering under  a vast
probability curve....
  Population  blocks  disappear  in  a  checker  game of
genocide.... Any number can play....
  The Liberal  Press and  The Press  Not So  Liberal and
The Press  ъeactionary Scream  approval: "Above  all the
myth of other-level  experience must  be eradicated...."
And  speak  darkly  of  certain harsh  realities... cows
with the aftosa... prophylaxis....
  Power  groups of  the world  frantically cut  lines of
connection....
  The Planet drifts to random insect doom....
  Thermodynamics has won at a crawl..             Orgone
balked at the post.... Christ bled..            Time ran
out....
  You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection
point.... I have written many prefaces. They atrophy
and amputate spontaneous like the little toe amputates
in a West African disease confined to the Negro race
and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a mani-
cured toe bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and
laid at her feet by her Afghan Hound....
  Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book..
Black insect lusts open into vast, other planet land-
scapes.... Abstract concepts, bare as algebra, narrow
down to a black turd or a pair of aging cajones..
  How-To extend levels of experience by opening the
door at the end of a long hall.... Doors that only
open in Silence.... Naked Lunch demands Silence
from The ъeader. Otherwise he is taking his own
pulse....
  ъobert Christie knew The Answering Service..
Kill the old cunts... keep pubic hairs in his locket
...wouldn't you?
  ъobert Christie, mass strangler of women -- sounds
like a daisy chain -- hanged in 1953.
  Jack The ъipper, Literal Swordsman of the 1890s
and never caught with his pants down... wrote a
letter to The Press.
  "Next time I'll send along an ear just for jolly..
Wouldn't you?"
  "Oh be careful! There they go again!" said the old
queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the
floor.... 'Stop them will you, James, you worthless
old shit! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls
roll into the coal-bin!"
  Window   dressers  scream   through  the   station,  beat
the cashiers with the Fairy Hyp.
  Delaudid  deliver  poor  me   (Delaudid  is   souped  up,
dehydrate morphine).
  The  sheriff  in black  vest types  out a  death warrant:
"Gotta make it legal and exempt narcotic...."
  Violation   Public   Health   Law  334...   Procuring  an
orgasm by the use of fraud....
  Johnny  on  all  fours  and  Mary  sucking  him  and run-
ning  her  fingers  down  the  thigh  backs  and  light over
the outfields of the ball park....
  Over  the  broken  chair and  out through  the tool-house
window  whitewash  whipping  in  a  cold  Spring   wind  on
a  limestone  cliff over  the river...  piece of  moon smoke
hangs in China blue  sky... out  on a  long line  of jissom
across the dusty floor....

    Motel... Motel .            Motel .     broken neon
arabesque...  loneliness   moans  across   the  continent
like fog horns over still oily water of tidal rivers....
  Ball squeezed  dry lemon  rind pest  rims the  ass with
a  knife  cut  off  a piece  of hash  for the  water pipe-
bubble bubble -- indicate what used to be me..
  "The river is served, sir."
  Dead leaves fill  the fountain  and geraniums  run wild
with  mint,  spill  a  vending  machine route  across the
lawn....
  The  aging  playboy  dons  his 1920  autograph slicker,
feeds  his  screaming  wife  down   the  garbage-disposal
unit....  Hair,  shit  and  blood spurt  out 1963  on the
wall.... "Yes sir, boys, the shit really  hit the  fan in
'63," said 'the tiresome  old prophet  can bore  the piss
out of you in any space-time direction....
  "Now  I  happen  to  remember because  it was  just two
year  before  that  a  strain  of human  aftosa developed
in a Bolivian lavatory  got loose  through the  medium of
a  Chinchilla  coat fixed  an income  tax case  in Kansas
City....   And  a   Liz  claimed   Immaculate  Conception
and  give  birth  to  a  six-ounce spider  monkey through
the  navel....  They say  the croaker  was party  to that
caper had the monkey on his back all the time..
  I,  William  Seward,  captain of  this lushed  up hash-
head  subway,  will  quell  the  Lock  Ness  monster with
rotenone  and  cowboy  the  white  whale.  I  will reduce
Satan  to  Automatic  Obedience,  and  sublimate subsidi-
ary fiends. I will banish the candiru from  your swimming
pools.--  I  will issue  a bull  on Immaculate  Birth Con-
trol....
  "The  oftener  a  thing   happens  the   more  uniquely
wonderful it is," said the  pretentious young  Nordic on
the trapeze studying his Masonic home work.
  "The Jews don't believe in  Christ, Clem....  All they
want to do is doodle a Christian girl...."
  Adolescent  angels  sing  on  shithouse  walls  of the
world.
  "Come and jack off..." 1929.
  "Gimpy push milk sugar shit...         " Johnny Hung
Lately 1952
  (Decayed   corseted  tenor   sings  Danny   Deever  in
drag.... )
  Mules don't foal in this decent  county and  on hooded
dead gibber in the ash pits.... Violation  Public Health
Law 334.
  So  where  is  the  statuary  and the  percentage? Who
can  say?  I  don't  have  The   Word....  Home   in  my
douche  bag...  The King  is loose  with a  flame thrower
and the  king killer,  tortured in  effigy of  a thousand
bums, slides down skid row to shit in the limestone ball
court.
  Young Dillinger walked straight out  of the  house and
never looked back....
  "Don't  ever  look  back, kid....  You turn  into some
old cow's salt lick."
  Police bullet in the alley... Broken wings  of Icarus,
screams of  a burning  boy inhaled  by the  old junky...
eyes empty as a  vast plain...  ( vulture wings  husk in
the dry air).
  The  Crab,  aged  Dean  Of Lush  Workers, puts  on his
crustacean  suit  to prowl  the graveyard  shift... with
steel claws pulls the gold teeth and  crowns of  any Hop
sleep  with  his  mouth  open....  If  the Hop  comes up
on  him  The  Crab  rears  back  claws snapping  to offer
dubious battle on the plains of Queens.
    The Boy Burglar, fucked in the long jail term, ousted
from  the  cemetery  for  the non-payment,  comes gibber-
ing into the queer bar with a moldy  pawn ticket  to pick
up the back balls  of Tent  City where  castrate salesmen
sing the IBM song.
    Crabs frolicked through his forest...  wrestling with
the angel hard-on all night, thrown in  the homo  fall of
valor, take a back road to the rusty limestone cave.
    Black  Yen  ejaculates  over  the salt  marshes where
nothing grows not even a mandrake....
    Law  of  averages...  A  few  chickens...   Only  way
to live....
    "Hello, Cash."
    "You sure it's here?"
    "Of course I'm sure.... Go in with you."
    Night train to Chi... Meet a girl in  the hall  and I
see she is on and ask where is a score?
    "Come in sonny."
  I mean not a young chick but built...       "How about
a fix first?"
    "Ixnay, You wouldn't be inna condition."
    Three  times  around...  wake  up  shivering  sick in
warm  Spring  wind  through   the  window,   water  burns
the eyes like acid....
    She  gets  out of  bed naked....  Stach in  the Cobra
lamp.... Cooks up....
    "Turn over.... I'll give it to you in the ass."
    She slides the needle in deep, pulls it out  and mas-
sages the cheek....
    She licks a drop of blood off her finger.
  He  rolls  over with  a hard-on  dissolving in  the grey
ooze of junk.
  In  a  vale  of  cocaine  and innocence  sad-eyed youths
yodel for a lost Danny Boy....
  We  sniffed  all  night  and made  it four  times... fin-
gers  down  the  blac