Vil'yam Berrouz. Golyj zavtrak (engl) William S.Burroughs. Naked lunch --------------------------------------------------------------- © Copyright William S.Burroughs Origin: http://www.bigtable.com/ ¡ http://www.bigtable.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------- I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train... Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, call the counterman in Nedick's by his first name. A real asshole. And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (im- agine tailing somebody in a white trench coat -- trying to pass as a fag I guess ) hit the platform. I can hear the way he would say it holding my outfit in his left hand, right hand on his piece: "I think you dropped some- thing, fella" But the subway is moving. "So long flatfoot!" I yell, giving the fruit his B produc- tion. I look into the fruit's eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the two hundred dollar sharkskin suit, the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and carrying The News as a prop. "Only thing I read is Little Abner." A square wants to come on hip.... Talks about "pod," and smoke it now and then, and keeps some around to offer the fast Hollywood types. "Thanks, kid," I say, "I can see you're one of our own." His face lights up like a pinball machine, with stupid, pink effect. "Grassed on me he did," I said morosely. ( Note: Grass is English thief slang for inform.) I drew closer and laid my dirty junky fingers on his sharkskin sleeve. "And us blood brothers in the same dirty needle, I can tell you in confidence he is due for a hot shot." ( Note: This is a cap of poison junk sold to addict for liquida- tion purposes. Often given to informers. Usually the hot shot is strychnine since it tastes and looks like junk. ) "Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit -- Kid, it was tasty.... "Recollect when I am traveling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi... We is working the fags in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigi- lante turns up for work in cowboy boots and a black vest with a hunka tin on it and a lariat slung over his shoulder. "So I says: 'What's with you? You wig already?' "He just looks at me and says: 'Fill your hand stran- ger' and hauls out an old rusty six shooter and I take off across Lincoln Park, bullets cutting all around me. And he hangs three fags before the fuzz nail him. I mean the Vigilante earned his moniker.... "Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con men? Like 'raise,' letting someone know you are in the same line? " 'Get her!' " 'Get the Paregoric Kid giving that mark the build up!' " 'Eager Beaver wooing him much too fast.' "The Shoe Store Kid (he got that moniker shaking down fetishists in shoe stores) say: 'Give it to a mark with K.Y. and he will come back moaning for more.' And when the Kid spots a mark he begin to breathe heavy. His face swells and his lips turn purple like an Eskimo in heat. Then slow, slow he comes on the mark, feeling for him, palpating him with fingers of rotten ectoplasm. "The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. That one stepped right off a Sator- day Evening Post cover with a string of bullheads, and preserved himself in junk. His marks never beef and the Bunko people are really carrying a needle for the Rube. One day Little Boy Blue starts to slip, and what crawls out would make an ambulance attendant puke. The Rube 8flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: 'Come back, kid!! Come back!l' and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded Hat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts." And the fruit is thinking: "What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark's about this one." He's a char- acter collector, would stand still for Joe Gould's seagull act. So I put it on him for a sawski and make a meet to sell him some "pod" as he calls it, thinking, "I'll catnip the jerk." ( Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or unin- structed. ) "Well," I said, tapping my arm, "duty calls. As one judge said to another: 'Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.' " I cut into the automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else's overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous, dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt. I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times, spectral janitors, grey as ashes, phantom porters sweep- ing out dusty halls with a slow old man's hand, cough- ing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk, patient and cautious and slow, dropped into their blood- less hands a few hours of warmth. I made the round with him once for kicks. You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will Hop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it. "Well, my boys will be like that one day," I thought philosophically. "Isn't life peculiar?" So back downtown by the Sheridan Square Station in case the dick is lurking in a broom closet. Like I say it couldn't last. I knew they were out there powowing and making their evil fuzz magic, putting dolls of me in Leavenworth. "No use sticking needles in that one, Mike." I hear they got Chapin with a doll. This old eunuch dick just sat in the precinct basement hanging a doll of him day and night, year in year out. And when Chapin hanged in Connecticut, they find this old creep with his neck broken. "He fell downstairs," they say. You know the old cop bullshit. Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by radar. "Not this street, the next, right... now left. Now right again," and there he is, toothless old woman face and cancelled eyes. I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune. So the customers come in on Smiles, or I'm in the 1Mood for Love, or They Say We're Too Young to Go Steady, or whatever the song is for that day. Sometime you can see maybe fifty ratty-looking junkies squealing sick, running along behind a boy with a harmonica, and there is The Man on a cane seat throwing bread to the swans, a fat queen drag walking his Afghan hound through the East Fifties, an old wino pissing against an El post, a radical Jewish student giving out leaflets in Washington Square, a tree surgeon, an exterminator, an advertising fruit in Nedick's where he calls the counterman by his first name. The world network of junkies, tuned on a cord of rancid jissom, tying up in furnished rooms, shivering in the junk-sick morning. (Old Pete men suck the black smoke in the Chink laundry back room and Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of time or cold turkey with- drawal of breath.) In Yemen, Paris, New Orleans, Mex- ico City and Istanbul -- shivering under the air hammers and the steam shovels, shrieked junky curses at one another neither of us heard, and The Man leaned out of a passing steam roller and I coped in a bucket of tar. (Note: Istanbul is being torn down and rebuilt, espe- cially shabby junk quarters. Istanbul has more heroin junkies than NYC. ) The living and the dead, in sick- ness or on the nod, hooked or kicked or hooked again, come in on the junk beam and the Connection is eating Chop Suey on Dolores Street, Mexico D.F., dunking pound cake in the automat, chased up Exchange Place by a baying pack of People. ( Note: People is New Orleans slang for narcotic fuzz. ) The old Chinaman dips river water into a rusty tin can, washes down a yen pox hard and black as a cinder. ( Note: Yen pox is the ash of smoked opium. ) Well, the fuzz has my spoon and dropper, and I know they are coming in on my frequency led by this blind pigeon known as Willy the Disk. Willy has a round, disk mouth lined with sensitive, erectile black hairs. He is blind from shooting in the eyeball, his nose and palate eaten away sniffing H, his body a mass of scar tissue hard and dry as wood. He can only eat the shit now with that mouth, sometimes sways out on a long tube of ectoplasm, feeling for the silent frequency of junk. He follows my trail all over the city into rooms I move out already, and the fuzz walks in some newlyweds from Sioux Falls. "All right, Lee! I Come out from behind that strap-on! We know you" and pull the man's prick off straight- away. Now Willy is getting hot and you can hear him always out there in darkness (he only functions at night) whimpering, and feel the terrible urgency of that blind, seeking mouth. When they move in for the bust, Willy goes all out of control, and his mouth eats a hole right through the door. If the cops weren't there to restrain him with a stock probe, he would suck the juice right out of every junky he ran down. I knew, and everybody else knew they had the Disk on me. And if my kid customers ever hit the stand: "He force me to commit all kinda awful sex acts in return for junk" I could kiss the street good-bye. So we stock up on H, buy a second-hand Studebaker, and start West. The Vigilante copped out as a schizo possession case: "I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers.... I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants -- a body -- after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is only the colorless no smell of death.... Nobody can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh." He stood there in elongated court room shadow, his face torn like a broken film by lusts and hungers of larval organs stirring in the tentative ectoplasmic flesh of junk kick ( ten days on ice at time of the First Hear- ing) flesh that fades at the first silent touch of junk. I saw it happen. Ten pounds lost in ten minutes stand- ing with the syringe in one hand holding his pants up with the other, his abdicated flesh burning in a cold yellow halo, there in the New York hotel room... night table litter of candy boxes, cigarette butts cas- cading out of three ashtrays, mosaic of sleepless nights and sudden food needs of the kicking addict nursing his baby flesh.... The Vigilante is prosecuted in Federal Court under a lynch bill and winds up in a Federal Nut House spe- cially designed for the containment of ghosts: precise, prosaic impact of objects... washstand... door... toilet... bars... there they are... this is it... all lines cut... nothing beyond... Dead End... And the Dead End in every face.... The physical changes were slow at first, then jumped forward in black chunks, falling through his slack tissue, washing away the human lines.... In his place of total darkness mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps for- ward to snap with transparent teeth... but no organ is constant as regards either function or position... sex organs sprout anywhere... rectums open, defecate and close... the entire organism changes color and con- sistency in split-second adjustments.... The Rube is a social liability with his attacks as he calls them. The Mark Inside was coming up on him and that's a rumble nobody can cool; outside Philly he jumps out to con a prowl car and the fuzz takes one look at his face and bust all of us. Seventy-two hours and five sick junkies in the cell with us. Now not wishing to break out my stash in front of these hungry coolies, it takes maneuvering and laying of gold on the turnkey before we are in a separate cell. Provident junkies, known as squirrels, keep stashes against a bust. Every time I take a shot I let a few drops fall into my vest pocket, the lining is stiff with stuff. I had a plastic dropper in my shoe and a safety-pin stuck in my belt. You know how this pin and dropper routine is put down: "She seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust, gouged a great hole in her leg which seemed to hang open like an obscene, festering mouth waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound. But her hideous galvanized need (hunger of insects in dry places) has broken the dropper off deep in the flesh of her ravaged thigh (looking rather like a poster on soil erosion). But what does she care? She does not even bother to remove the splintered glass, looking down at her bloody haunch with the cold blank eyes of a meat trader. What does she care for the atom bomb, the bed bugs, the cancer rent, Friendly Finance waiting to re- possess her delinquent flesh.... Sweet dreams, Panto- pon Rose." The real scene you pinch up some leg flesh and make a quick stab hole with a pin. Then fit the dropper over, not in the hole and feed the solution slow and careful so it doesn't squirt out the sides.... When I grabbed the Rube's thigh the flesh came up like wax and stayed there, and a slow drop of pus oozed out the hole. And I never touched a living body cold as the Rube there in Philly.... I decided to lop him off if it meant a smother party. (This is a rural English custom designed to eliminate aged and bedfast dependents. A family so afflicted throws a "smother party" where the guests pile mat- tresses on the old liability, climb up on top of the mat- resses and lush themselves out. ) The Rube is a drag on the industry and should be led out into the skid rows of the world. (This is an African practice. Official known as the "Leader Out" has the function of taking old characters out into the jungle and leaving them there. ) The Rube's attacks become an habitual condition. Cops, doormen, dogs, secretaries snarl at his approach. The blond God has fallen to untouchable vileness. Con men don't change, they break, shatter -- explosions of matter in cold interstellar space, drift away in cosmic dust, leave the empty body behind. Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.... I left the Rube standing on a corner, red brick slums to the sky, under a steady rain of soot. "Going to hit this croaker I know. Right back with that good pure drug- store M.... No, you wait here -- don't want him to rumble you." No matter how long, Rube, wait for me right on that corner. Goodbye, Rube, goodbye kid.... Where do they go when they walk out and leave the body behind? Chicago: invisible hierarchy of decorated wops, smell of atrophied gangsters, earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halstead, Cicero, Lincoln Park, pan- handler of dreams, past invading the present, rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses. Into the Interior: a vast subdivision, antennae of tele- vision to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long. (Through the bars of East St. Louis lies the dead frontier, riverboat days.) Illinois and Mis- souri, miasma of mound-building peoples, groveling worship of the Food Source, cruel and ugly festivals, dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru. America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting. And always cops: smooth college-trained state cops, practiced, apologetic patter, electronic eyes weigh your car and luggage, clothes and face; snarling big city dicks, soft-spoken country sheriffs with something black and menacing in old eyes color of a faded grey flannel shirt.... And always car trouble: in St. Louis traded the 1942 Studebaker in (it has a built-in engineering Haw like the Rube) on an old Packard limousine heated up and barely made Kansas City, and bought a Ford turned out to be an oil burner, packed it in on a jeep we push too hard (they are no good for highway driving) -- and burn something out inside, rattling around, went back to the old Ford V-8. Can't beat that engine for getting there, oil burner or no. And the U.S. drag closes around us like no other drag in the world, worse than the Andes, high mountain towns, cold wind down from postcard mountains, thin air like death in the throat, river towns of Ecuador, ma- laria grey as junk under black Stetson, muzzle loading shotguns, vultures pecking through the mud streets -- and what hits you when you get off the Malmo Ferry in (no juice tax on the ferry) Sweden knocks all that cheap, tax free juice right out of you and brings you all the way down: averted eyes and the cemetery in the middle of town (every town in Sweden seems to be built around a cemetery), and nothing to do in the afternoon, not a bar not a movie and I blasted my last stick of Tangier tea and I said, "K.E. let's get right back on that ferry." But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can't see it, you don't know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street -- every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore and market and liquorstore. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from? Not the bartender, not the customers, nor the cream- colored plastic rounding the bar stools, nor the dim neon. Not even the TV. And our habits build up with the drag, like cocaine will build you up staying ahead of the C bring-down. And the junk was running low. So there we are in this no-horse town strictly from cough syrup. And vomited up the syrup and drove on and on, cold spring wind whistling through that old heap around our shivering sick sweating bodies and the cold you always come down with when the junk runs out of you.... On through the peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road and vul- tures over the swamp and cypress stumps. Motels with beaverboard walls, gas heater, thin pink blankets. 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, ma- rooned 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 sud- denly the landscape hits you straight with nothing be- tween 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," I 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 col- leagues dunking pound cake. "Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for," he says. "Some way he make him- self 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) com- plaining 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 distasteful11 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 Bows forward.... "No! No!" screams the D.S. "Schlup... schlup 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 Dis- trict 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 Com- missioner 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 Ike who had spent most of his life in the States. "I was traveling with Irene Kelly and her was a sport- ing woman. In Butte, state of Montana, she gets the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chi- nese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chicago sniff coke used to come in form of cry- stals, 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 C on 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 C 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 C you eat, sleep and forget about it. This is a yen of the brain alone, a need without feel- ing and without body, earthbound ghost need, rancid ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spit- ting in the sick morning. One morning you wake up and take a speed ball, and feel bugs under your skin. 1890 cops with black mus- taches 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 GI M. 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 con- tinually 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 teaheads 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, con- veying his restaurant and store orders to male personnel through a female intermediary. And no Man ever in- vaded 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. B E N W A Y So I am assigned to engage the services of Doctor Benway for Islam Inc. Dr. Benway had been called in as advisor to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens are well adjusted, co- operatives, honest, tolerant and above all clean. But the invoking of Benway indicates all is not well behind that hygienic facade: Benway is a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control. I have not seen Benway since his precipitate departure from An- nexia, where his assignment had been T.D.-- Total Demoralization. Benway's first act was to abolish con- centration camps, mass arrest and, except under certain limited and special circumstances, the use of torture. "I deplore brutality," he said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physi- cal violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a de- liberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct." Every citizen of Annexia was required to apply for and carry on his person at all times a whole portfolio of documents. Citizens were subject to be stopped in the street at any time; and the Examiner, who might be in plain clothes, in various uniforms, often in a bathing suit or pyjamas, sometimes stark naked except for a badge pinned to his left nipple, after checking each paper, would stamp it. On subsequent inspection the citizen was required to show the properly entered stamps of the last inspection. The Examiner, when he stopped a large group, would only examine and stamp the cards of a few. The others were then subject to arrest because their cards were not properly stamped. Arrest meant "provisional detention"; that is, the pris- oner would be released if and when his Affidavit of Explanation, properly signed and stamped, was ap- proved by the Assistant Arbiter of Explanations. Since this official hardly ever came to his o%office, and the A%fidavit of Explanation had to be presented in person, the explainers spent weeks and months waiting around in unheated offices with no chairs and no toilet facilities. Documents issued in vanishing ink faded into old pawn tickets. New documents were constantly required. The citizens rushed from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet impossible deadlines. All benches were removed from the city, all fountains turned off, all flowers and trees destroyed. Huge electric buzzers on the top of every apartment house (every- one lived in apartments) rang the quarter hour. Often the vibrations would throw people out of bed. Search- lights played over the town all night (no one was permitted to use shades, curtains, shutters or blinds). No one ever looked at anyone else because of the strict law against importuning, with or without verbal approach, anyone for any purpose, sexual or otherwise. All cafes and bars were closed. Liquor could only be obtained with a special permit, and the liquor so ob- tained could not be sold or given or in any way trans- ferred to anyone else, and the presence of anyone else in the room was considered prima facie evidence of conspiracy to transfer liquor. No one was permitted to bolt his door, and the police had pass keys to every room in the city. Accompanied by a mentalist they rush into someone's quarters and start "looking for it." The mentalist guides them to whatever the man wishes to hide: a tube of vaseline, an enema, a hand- kerchief with come on it, a weapon, unlicensed alcohol. And they always submitted the suspect to the most humiliating search of his naked person on which they make sneering and derogatory comments. Many a latent homosexual was carried out in a straitjacket when they planted vaseline in his ass. Or they pounce on any object. A pen wiper or a shoe tree. "And what is this supposed to be for?" "It's a pen wiper." "A pen wiper, he says." "I've heard everything now." "I guess this is all we need. Come on, you." After a few months of this the citizens cowered in corners like neurotic cats. Of course the Annexia police processed suspected agents, saboteurs and political deviants on an assembly line basis. As regards the interrogation of suspects, Ben- way has this to say: "While in general I avoid the use of torture-torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance-the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be em- ployed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punish- ment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as The Switchboard. Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject's teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine. "The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets. Ever pop coke in the mainline? It hits you right in the brain, activating connections of pure pleasure. The pleasure of morphine is in the viscera. You listen down into yourself after a shot. But C is electricity through the brain, and the C yen is of the brain alone, a need without body and without feeling. The C-charged brain is a berserk pinball machine, flash- ing blue and pink lights in electric orgasm. C pleasure could be felt by a thinking machine, the first stirrings of hideous insect life. The craving for C lasts only a few hours, as long as the C channels are stimulated. Of course the effect of C could be produced by an electric current activating the C channels.... "So after a bit the channels wear out like veins, and the addict has to find new ones. A vein will come back in time, and by adroit vein rotation a junky can piece out the odds if he don't become an oil burner. But brain cells don't come back once they're gone, and when the addict runs out of brain cells he is in a terrible fucking position. "Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stre