(How many coffees in an hour? ) A boy came in and sat at the counter in broken lines of long, sick junk-wait. The Sailor shivered. His face fuzzed out of focus in a shuddering brown mist. His hands moved on the table, reading the boy's Braille. His eyes traced little dips and circles, following whorls of brown hair on the boy's neck in a slow, searching move- ment. The boy stirred and scratched the back of his neck: "Something bit me, Joe. What kinda creep joint you run here?" "Coke bugs, kid," Joe said, holding eggs up to the light. "I was travelling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In Butte, state of Montany, her got the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chi sniff coke used to come in form of cry- stals, blue crystals. So her 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 her say, 'Get away or I shoot you! I got myself led good!' When the roll is called up yonder we'll be there, right?" Joe looked at the Sailor and spread his hands in the junky shrug. The Sailor spoke in his feeling voice that reassembles in your head, spelling out the words with cold fingers: "Your connection is broken, kid." The boy shied. His street-boy face, torn with black scars of junk, retained a wild, broken innocence; shy animals peering out through grey arabesques of terror. "I don't dig you, Jack." The Sailor leapt into sharp, junky focus. He turned back his coat lapel, showing a brass hypo needle covered with mold and verdigris. "Retired for the good of the service.... Sit down and have a blueberry crumb pie on the expense account. Your monkey loves it.... Make his coat glossy." The boy felt a touch on his arm across eight feet of morning lunch room. He was suddenly siphoned into the booth, landing with an inaudible shlup. He looked into the Sailor's eyes, a green universe stirred by cold black currents. "You are agent, mister?" "I prefer the word... vector." His sounding laughter vibrated through the boy's substance. "You holding, man? I got the bread...." "I don't want your money, Honey: I want your Time." "I don't dig." "You want fix? You want straight? You wanta, nooood?" The Sailor cradled something pink and vibrated out of focus. "Yeah." "We'll take the Independent. Got their own special heat, don't carry guns only saps. I recall, me and the Fag fell once in Queen's Plaza. Stay away from Queen's Plaza, son... evil spot... fuzz haunted. Too many levels. Heat Hares out from the broom closet high on ammonia like burning lions... fall on poor old lush worker, scare her veins right down to the bone. Her skin pop a week or do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.... So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware! Look down, look down along that line before you travel there...." The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron. THE EXTERMINATOR DOES A GOOD JOB The Sailor touched the door gently, following pat- terns of painted oak in a slow twist, leaving faint, iri- descent whorls of slime. His arm went through to the elbow. He pulled back an inside bolt and stood aside for the boy to enter. Heavy, colorless smell of death filled the empty room. "The trap hasn't been aired since the Exterminator fumigated for coke bugs," said the Sailor apologetically. The boy's peeled senses darted about in frenzied ex- ploration. Tenement Hat, railroad Hat vibrating with silent motion. Along one wall of the kitchen a metal trough -- or was it metal, exactly? -- ran into a sort of aquarium or tank half-filled with translucent green fluid. Moldy objects, worn out in unknown service, littered the Boor: a jock-strap designed to protect some delicate organ of Hat, fan-shape; multi-levelled trusses, supports and bandages; a large U-shaped yoke of porous pink stone; little lead tubes cut open at one end. Currents of movement from the two bodies stirred stagnant odor pools; atrophied boy-smell of dusty locker rooms, swimming pool chlorine, dried semen. Other smells curled through pink convolutions, touching un- known doors. The Sailor reached under the wash-stand and ex- tracted a package in wrapping paper that shredded and fell from his fingers in yellow dust. He laid out dropper, needle and spoon on a table covered with dirty dishes. But no roach antennae felt for the crumbs of darkness. "The Exterminator does a good job," said the Sailor. "Almost too good, sometimes." He dipped into a square tin of yellow pyretheum powder and pulled out a Hat package covered in red and gold Chinese paper. "Like a firecracker package," the boy thought. At fourteen lost two fingers.... Fourth of July fireworks accident... later, in the hospital, first silent proprietary touch of junk. "They go off, here, kid." The Sailor put a hand to the back of his head. He camped obscenely as he opened the package, a complex arrangement of slots and over- lays. "Pure, one hundred per cent H. Scarcely a man is now alive... and it's all yours." "So what you want off me?" "Time." "I don't dig." "I have something you want," his hand touched the package. He drifted away into the front room, his voice remote and blurred. "You have something I want... five minutes here... an hour someplace else... two ...four... eight... Maybe I'm getting ahead of my- self.... Every day die a little.... It takes up The Time...." He moved back into the kitchen, his voice loud and clear: "Five years a piece. Nobody gives a better deal on the street." He put a finger on the dividing line below the boy's nose. "Right down the middle." "Mister, I don't know what you're talking about." "You will, baby... in time." "OK. So what do I do?" "You accept?" "Yeah, like..." He glanced at the package. "What- ever... I accept." The boy felt a silent black clunk fall through his flesh. The Sailor put a hand to the boy's eyes and pulled out a pink scrotal egg with one closed, pulsing eye. Black fur boiled inside translucent flesh of the egg. The Sailor caressed the egg with nakedly inhuman hands -- black-pink, thick, fibrous, long white tendrils sprouting from abbreviated finger tips. Death fear and Death weakness hit the boy, shutting off his breath, stopping his blood. He leaned against a wall that seemed to give slightly. He clicked back into junk focus. The Sailor was cooking a shot. "When the roll is called up yonder we'll be there, right?" he said, feeling along the boy's vein, erasing goose-pimples with a gentle old woman finger. He slid the needle in. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. The Sailor pressed the bulb, watching the solution rush into the boy-vein, sucked by silent thirst of blood. "Jesus!" said the boy. "I never been hit like that be- fore!" He lit a cigarette and looked around the kitchen, twitching in sugar need. "Aren't you taking off?" he asked. "With that milk sugar shit? Junk is a one-way street. No U-turn. You can't go back no more." They call me the Exterminator. At one brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating in yellow pyre- theum powder ("Hard to get now, lady... war on. Let you have a little.... Two dollars.") Sluiced fat bed- bugs from rose wall paper in shabby theatrical hotels on North Clark and poisoned the purposeful Rat, occasional eater of human babies. Wouldn't you? My present assignment: Find the live ones and ex- terminate. Not the bodies but the "molds," you under- stand -- but I forget that you cannot understand. We have all but a very few. But even one could upset our food tray. The danger, as always, comes from defecting agents: A.J., the Vigilante, the Black Armadillo (carrier of Chagas vectors, hasn't taken a bath since the Argen- tine epidemic of '35, remember? ), and Lee and the Sailor and Benway. And I know some agent is out there in the darkness looking for me. Because all Agents defect and all Resisters sell out.... THE ALGEBRA OF NEED "Fats" Terminal came from The City Pressure Tanks where open life jets spurt a million forms, immediately eaten, the eaters cancelled by black time fuzz.... Few reach the Plaza, a point where The Tanks empty a tidal river, carrying forms of survival armed with defences of poison slime, black, flesh rotting, fungus, and green odors that sear the lungs and grab the stom- ach in twisted knots.... Because "Fats'" nerves were raw and peeled to feel the death spasms of a million cold kicks.... "Fats" learned The Algebra of Need and survived.... One Friday "Fats" siphoned himself into The Plaza, a translucent-grey, foetal monkey, suckers on his little soft, purple-grey hands, and a lamphrey disk mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow, black, erectile teeth, feeling for the scar patterns of junk.... And a rich man passed and stared at the monster and "Fats" rolled pissing and shitting in terror and ate his shit and the man was moved by this tribute to his potent gaze and clicked a coin out of his Friday cane (Friday is Moslem Sunday when the rich are supposed to distribute alms ). So "Fats" learned to serve The Black Meat and grew a fat aquarium of body.... And his blank, periscope eyes swept the world's sur- face.... In his wake of addicts, translucent-grey mon- keys Hashed like fish spears to the junk Mark, and hung there sucking and it all drained back into "Fats" so his substance grew and grew filling plazas, restaurants and waiting rooms of the world with grey junk ooze. Bulletins from Party Headquarters are spelled out in obscene charades by hebephrenics and Latahs and apes, Sollubis fart code, Negroes open and shut mouth to Hash messages on gold teeth, Arab rioters send smoke signals by throwing great buttery eunuchs -- they make the best smoke, hangs black and shit-solid in the air -- onto gasoline fires in a rubbish heap, mosaic of melo- dies, sad Panpipes of humpbacked beggar, cold wind sweeps down from post card of Chimborazzi, flutes of Ramadan, piano music down a windy street, mutilated police calls, advertising leaflet synchronize with street fight spell SOS. Two agents have identified themselves each to each by choice of sex practices foiling alien microphones, fuck atomic secrets back and forth in code so complex only two physicists in the world pretend to understand it and each categorically denies the other. Later the receiving agent will be hanged, convict of the guilty possession of a nervous system, and play back the mes- sage in orgasmal spasms transmitted from electrodes attached to the penis. Breathing rhythm of old cardiac, bumps of a belly dancer, put put put of a motorboat across oily water. The waiter lets fall a drop of martini of the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, who lams for the 6:12 knowing that he has been spotted. Junkies climb out the lavatory window of the chop suey joint as the El rumbles past. The Gimp, cowboyed in the Waldorf, gives birth to a litter of rats. (Cowboy: New York hood talk means kill the mother fucker wherever you find him. A rat is a rat is a rat is a rat. Is an informer. ) Foolish virgins heed the English colonel who rides by brandishing a screaming on his lance. The elegant fag patronizes his bar to receive a bulletin from Dead lives on in synapses and will evoke the exciting Beater. Boys jacking off in the school toilet know other as agents from Galaxy X, adjourn to a night spot where they sit shabby and por- drinking wine vinegar and eating lemons to the tenor sax, a hip Arab in blue glasses sus- to be Enemy Sender. The world network of junkies, on a cord of rancid jissom... tying up in fur- rooms... shivering in the sick morning... Old Pete men suck the Black Smoke in a Chink laun- back room. Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose Time or cold turkey withdrawal of breath -- in Arabia Paris -- Mexico City -- New York -- New Orleans -- ) The and the dead... in sickness or on the nod... or kicked or hooked again... come in on the beam and The Connection is eating Chop Suey Dolores Street... dunking pound cake in Bickfords . . chased up Exchange Place by a baying pack of Malarials of the world bundle in shivering Fear seals the turd message with a cunei- account. Giggling rioters copulate to the screams a burning Nigra. Lonely librarians unite in soul kiss halitosis. That grippy feeling, brother? Sore throat and disquieting as the hot afternoon wind? to the International Syphilis Lodge -- "Meth- Epithcopal God damn ith" (phrase used to test speech impairment typical of paresis ) or the first touch of chancre makes you a member in good The vibrating soundless hum of deep forest orgone accumulators, the sudden silence of cities when the junky cops and even the Commuter buzzes clogged lines of cholesterol for contact. Signal flares of orgasm burst over the world. A tea head leaps up screaming "I got the fear!" and runs into Mexican night bringing down backbrains of the world. The Execu- tioner shits in terror at sight of the condemned man. The Torturer screams in the ear of his implacable victim. Knife fighters embrace in adrenalin. Cancer is at the door with a Singing Telegram.... HAUSER AND O'BRIEN When they walked in on me that morning at 8 o'clock, I knew it was my last chance, my only chance. But they didn't know. How could they? Just a routine pick-up. But not quite routine. Hauser had been eating breakfast when the Lieu- tenant called: "I want you and your partner to pick up a man named Lee, William Lee, on your way down- town. He's in the Hotel Lamprey. 103 just off B way." "Yeah I know where it is. I remember him too." "Good. Room 606. Just pick him up. Don't take time to shake the place down. Except bring in all books, letters, manuscripts. Anything printed, typed or written. Ketch?" "Ketch. But what's the angle.... Books... " "Just do it." The Lieutenant hung up. Hauser and O'Brien. They had been on the City Nar- cotic Squad for 20 years. Oldtimers like me. I been on the junk for 16 years. They weren't bad as laws go. At least O'Brien wasn't. O'Brien was the con man, and Hauser the tough guy. A vaudeville team. Hauser had a way of hitting you before he said anything just to break the ice. Then O'Brien gives you an Old Gold -- just like a cop to smoke Old Golds somehow... and starts putting down a cop con that was really bottled in bond. Not a bad guy, and I didn't want to do it. But it was my only chance. I was just tying up for my morning shot when they walked in with a pass key. It was a special kind you can use even when the door is locked from the inside with a key in the lock. On the table in front of me was a packet of junk, spike, syringe -- I got the habit of using a regular syringe in Mexico and never went back to using a dropper -- alcohol, cotton and a glass of water. "Well well," says O'Brien.... "Long time no see eh?" "Put on your coat, Lee," says Hauser. He had his gun out. He always has it out when he makes a pinch for the psychological effect and to forestall a rush for toilet, sink or window. "Can I take a bang first, boys?" I asked.... "There's plenty here for evidence...." I was wondering how I could get to my suitcase if they said no. The case wasn't locked, but Hauser had the gun in his hand. "He wants a shot," said Hauser. "Now you know we can't do that, Bill," said O'Brien in his sweet con voice, dragging out the name with an oily, insinuating familiarity, brutal and obscene. He meant, of course, "What can you do for us, Bill?" He looked at me and smiled. The smile stayed there too long, hideous and naked, the smile of an old painted pervert, gathering all the negative evil of O'Brien's ambiguous function. "I might could set up Marty Steel for you," I said. I knew they wanted Marty bad. He'd been pushing for five years, and they couldn't hang one on him. Marty was an oldtimer, and very careful about who he served. He had to know a man and know him well before he would pick up his money. No one can say they ever did time because of me. My rep is perfect, but still Marty wouldn't serve me because he didn't know me long enough. That's how skeptical Marty was. "Marty?" said O'Brien. "Can you score from him?" "Sure I can." They were suspicious. A man can't be a cop all his life without developing a special set of intuitions. "O.K.," said Hauser finally. "But you'd better deliver, Lee." "I'll deliver all right. Believe me I appreciate this." I tied up for a shot, my hands trembling with eager- ness, an archetype dope fiend. "Just an old junky, boys, a harmless old shaking wreck of a junky." That's the way I put it down. As I had hoped, Hauser looked away when I started probing for a vein. It's a wildly unpretty spectacle. O'Brien was sitting on the arm of a chair smoking an Old Gold, looking out the window with that dreamy what I'll do when I get my pension look. I hit a vein right away. A column of blood shot up into the syringe for an instant sharp and solid as a red cord. I pressed the plunger down with my thumb, feel- ing the junk pound through my veins to feed a million junk-hungry cells, to bring strength and alertness to every nerve and muscle. They were not watching me. I filled the syringe with alcohol. Hauser was juggling his snub-nosed detective special, a Colt, and looking around the room. He could smell danger like an animal With his left hand he pushed the closet door open and glanced inside. My stomach contracted. I thought, "If he looks in the suitcase now I'm done." Hauser turned to me abruptly. "You through yet?" he snarled. "You'd better not try to shit us on Marty." The words came out so ugly he surprised and shocked himself. I picked up the syringe full of alcohol, twisting the needle to make sure it was tight. "Just two seconds," I said. I squirted a thin jet of alcohol, whipping it across his eyes with a sideways shake of the syringe. He let out a bellow of pain. I could see him pawing at his eyes with the left hand like he was tearing off an invisible bandage as I dropped to the floor on one knee, reaching for my suitcase. I pushed the suitcase open, and my left hand closed over the gun butt -- I am righthanded but I shoot with my left hand. I felt the concussion of Hauser's shot before I heard it. His slug slammed into the wall behind me. Shooting from the floor, I snapped two quick shots into Hauser's belly where his vest had pulled up showing an inch of white shirt. He grunted in a way I could feel and doubled forward. Stiff with panic, O'Brien's hand was tearing at the gun in his shoulder holster. I clamped my other hand around my gun wrist to steady it for the long pull -- this gun has the hammer Bled off round so you can only use it double action -- and shot him in the middle of his red forehead about two inches below the silver hairline. His hair had been grey the last time I saw him. That was about 15 years ago. My first arrest. His eyes went out. He fell off the chair onto his face. My hands were already reaching for what I needed, sweeping my notebooks into a brief- case with my works, junk, and a box of shells. I stuck the gun into my belt, and stepped out into the corridor putting on my coat. I could hear the desk clerk and the bell boy pound- ing up the stairs. I took the self-service elevator down, walked through the empty lobby into the street. It was a beautiful Indian Summer day. I knew I didn't have much chance, but any chance is better than none, better than being a subject for experiments with ST (6) or whatever the initials are. I had to stock up on junk fast. Along with airports, R.R. stations and bus terminals, they would cover all junk areas and connections. I took a taxi to Washington Square, got out and walked along 4th Street till I spotted Nick on a corner. You can always find the pusher. Your need conjures him up like a ghost. "Listen, Nick," I said, "I'm leaving town. I want to pick up a piece of H. Can you make it right now?" We were walking along 4th Street. Nick's voice seemed to drift into my consciousness from no particu- lar place. An eerie, disembodied voice. "Yes, I think I can make it. I'll have to make a run uptown." "We can take a cab." "O.K., but I can't take you in to the guy, you under- stand." "I understand. Let's go." We were in the cab heading North. Nick was talking in his Bat, dead voice. "Some funny stuff we're getting lately. It's not weak exactly.... I don't know.... It's different. Maybe they're putting some synthetic shit in it.... Dollies or something...." "What!!!? Already?" "Huh?... But this I'm taking you to now is O.K. In fact it's about the best deal around that I know of. . Stop here." "Please make it fast," I said. "It should be a matter of ten minutes unless he's out of stuff8 and has to make a run.... Better sit down over there and have a cup of coffee.... This is a hot neighborhood." I sat down at a counter and ordered coffee, and pointed to a piece of Danish pastry under a plastic cover. I washed down the stale rubbery cake with coffee, praying that just this once, please God, let him make it now, and not come back to say the man is all out and has to make a run to East Orange or Green- point. Well here he was back, standing behind me. I looked at him, afraid to ask. Funny, I thought, here I sit with perhaps one chance in a hundred to live out the next 24 hours -- I had made up my mind not to surrender and spend the next three or four months in death's waiting room. And here I was worrying about a junk score. But I only had about five shots left, and without junk I would be immobilized.... Nick nodded his head. "Don't give it to me here," I said. "Let's take a cab." We took a cab and started downtown. I held out my hand and copped the package, then I slipped a fifty- dollar bill into Nick's palm. He glanced at it and showed his gums in a toothless smile: "Thanks a lot.... This will put me in the clear... I sat back letting my mind work without pushing it. Push your mind too hard, and it will fuck up like an overloaded switch-board, or turn on you with sabotage. And I had no margin for error. Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out. Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer. Like one of those thinking machines, you feed in your question, sit back, and wait.... I was looking for a name. My mind was sorting through names, discarding at once F.L.-- Fuzz Lover, B.W.-- Born Wrong, N.C.B.C.-- Nice Cat But Chicken; putting aside to reconsider, narrowing, sifting, feeling for the name, the answer. "Sometimes, you know, he'll keep me waiting three hours. Sometimes I make it right away like this." Nick had a deprecating little laugh that he used for punc- tuation. Sort of an apology for talking at all in the telepathizing world of the addict where only the quan- tity factor -- How much $P How much junk? -- requires verbal expression. He knew and I knew all about wait- ing. At all levels the drug trade operates without sched- ule. Nobody delivers on time except by accident. The addict runs on junk time. His body is his clock, and junk runs through it like an hour-glass. Time has mean- ing for him only with reference to his need. Then he makes his abrupt intrusion into the time of others, and, like all Outsiders, all Petitioners, he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time. "What can I say 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...." ATROPHIED PREFACE WOULDN'T YOU? Why all this waste paper getting The People from one place to another? Perhaps to spare The Reader 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 Republic 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 Room (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 Rube, 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 Recognition: 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 Reactionary 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 Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse.... Robert Christie knew The Answering Service.. Kill the old cunts... keep pubic hairs in his locket ...wouldn't you? Robert Christie, mass strangler of women -- sounds like a daisy chain -- hanged in 1953. Jack The Ripper, 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 m