Naked Lunch Read online

  ‘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, flashing 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 stretches to the horizon. Complete silence – their speech centers are destroyed – except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

  ‘I digress as usual. Pending more precise knowledge of brain electronics, drugs remain an essential tool of the interrogator in his assault on the subject’s personal identity. The barbiturates are, of course, virtually useless. That is, anyone who can be broken down by such means would succumb to the puerile methods used in an American precinct. Scopolamine is often effective in dissolving resistance, but it impairs the memory: an agent might be prepared to reveal his secrets but quite unable to remember them, or cover story and secret life info might be inextricably garbled. Mescaline, harmaline, LSD6, bufotenine, muscarine successful in many cases. Bulbocapnine induces a state approximating schizophrenic catatonia … instances of automatic obedience have been observed. Bulbocapnine is a backbrain depressant probably putting out of action the centers of motion in the hypothalamus. Other drugs that have produced experimental schizophrenia – mescaline, harmaline, LSD6 – are backbrain stimulants. In schizophrenia the backbrain is alternately stimulated and depressed. Catatonia is often followed by a period of excitement and motor activity during which the nut rushes through the wards giving everyone a bad time. Deteriorated schizos sometimes refuse to move at all and spend their lives in bed. A disturbance of the regulatory function of the hypothalamus is indicated as the “cause” (causal thinking never yields accurate description of metabolic process – limitations of existing language) of schizophrenia. Alternate doses of LSD6 and bulbocapnine – the bulbocapnine potientiated with curare – give the highest yield of automatic obedience.

  ‘There are other procedures. The subject can be reduced to deep depression by administering large doses of benzedrine for several days. Psychosis can be induced by continual large doses of cocaine or demerol or by the abrupt withdrawal of barbiturates after prolonged administration. He can be addicted by dihydro-oxy-heroin and subjected to withdrawal (this compound should be five times as addicting as heroin, and the withdrawal proportionately severe).

  ‘There are various “psychological methods,” compulsory psychoanalysis, for example. The subject is requested to free-associate for one hour every day (in cases where time is not of the essence). “Now, now. Let’s not be negative, boy. Poppa call nasty man. Take baby walkabout switchboard.”

  ‘The case of a female agent who forgot her real identity and merged with her cover story – she is still a fricteuse in Annexia – put me onto another gimmick. An agent is trained to deny his agent identity by asserting his cover story. So why not use psychic jiu-jitsu and go along with him? Suggest that his cover story is his identity and that he has no other. His agent identity becomes unconscious, that is, out of his control; and you can dig it with drugs and hypnosis. You can make a square heterosex citizen queer with this angle … that is, reinforce and second his rejection of normally latent homosexual trends – at the same time depriving him of cunt and subjecting him to homosex stimulation. Then drugs, hypnosis, and –’ Benway flipped a limp wrist.

  ‘Many subjects are vulnerable to sexual humiliation. Nakedness, stimulation with aphrodisiacs, constant supervision to embarrass subject and prevent relief of masturbation (erections during sleep automatically turn on an enormous vibrating electric buzzer that throws the subject out of bed into cold water, thus reducing the incidence of wet dreams to a minimum). Kicks to hypnotize a priest and tell him he is about to consummate a hypostatic union with the Lamb – then steer a randy old sheep up his ass. After that the Interrogator can gain complete hypnotic control – the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if he but say Open Sesame. Needless to say, the sex humiliation angle is contraindicated for overt homosexuals. (I mean let’s keep our eye on the ball here and remember the old party line … never know who’s listening in.) I recall this one kid, I condition to shit at sight of me. Then I wash his ass and screw him. It was real tasty. And he was a lovely fellah too. And some times a subject will burst into boyish tears because he can’t keep from ejaculate when you screw him. Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden. I was just scratching that lovely surface when I am urged by Party Poops … Well, “son cosas de la vida.”’

  I reach Freeland, which is clean and dull my God. Benway is directing the R.C., Reconditioning Center. I drop around, and, ‘What happened to so and so?’ sets in like: ‘Sidi Idriss “The Nark” Smithers crooned to the Senders for a longevity serum. No fool like an old queen.’ ‘Lester Stroganoff Smuunn – “El Hassein” – turned himself into a Latah trying to perfect A.O.P., Automatic Obedience Processing. A martyr to the industry …’ (Latah is a condition occurring in Southeast Asia. Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every motion once their attention is attracted by snapping the fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive involuntary hypnosis. They sometimes injure themselves trying to imitate the motions of several people at once.)

  ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this atomic secret.…’

  Benway’s face retains its form in the flash bulb of urgency, subject at any moment to unspeakable cleavage or metamorphoses. It flickers like a picture moving in and out of focus.

  ‘Come on,’ says Benway, ‘and I’ll show you around the R.C.’

  We are walking down a long white hall. Benway’s voice drifts into my consciousness from no particular place … a disembodied voice that is sometimes loud and clear, sometimes barely audible like music down a windy street.

  ‘Isolated groups like natives of the Bismarck Archipelago. No overt homosexuality among them. God damned matriarchy. All matriarchies anti-homosexual, conformist and prosaic. Find yourself in a matriarchy walk don’t run to the nearest frontier. If you run, some frustrate latent queer cop will likely shoot you. So somebody wants to establish a beach head of homogeneity in a shambles of potentials like West Europe and U.S.A.? Another fucking matriarchy, Margaret Mead notwithstanding … Spot of bother there. Scalpel fight with a colleague in the operating room. And my baboon assistant leaped on the patient and tore him to pieces. Baboons always attack the weakest party in an altercation. Quite right too. We must never forget our glorious simian heritage. Doc Browbeck was party inna second part. A retired abortionist and junk pusher (he was a veterinarian actually) recalled to service during the manpower shortage. Well, Doc had been in the hospital kitchen all morning goosing the nurses and tanking up on coal gas and Klim – and just before the op
eration he sneaked a double shot of nutmeg to nerve himself up.’

  (In England and especially in Edinburgh the citizens bubble coal gas through Klim – a horrible form of powdered milk tasting like rancid chalk – and pick up on the results. They hock everything to pay the gas bill, and when the man comes around to shut it off for the non-payment, you can hear their screams for miles. When a citizen is sick from needing it he says, ‘I got the klinks’ or ‘That old stove climbing up my back.’

  Nutmeg. I quote from the author’s article on narcotic drugs in the British Journal of Addiction (see Appendix): ‘Convicts and sailors sometimes have recourse to nutmeg. About a tablespoon is swallowed in water. Result vaguely similar to marijuana with side effects of headache and nausea. There are a number of narcotics of the nutmeg family in use among the Indians of South America. They are usually administered by sniffing a dried powder of the plant. The medicine men take these noxious substances and go into convulsive states. Their twitchings and mutterings are thought to have prophetic significance.’)

  ‘I had a Yage hangover, me, and in no condition to take any of Browbeck’s shit. First thing he comes on with I should start the incision from the back instead of the front, muttering some garbled nonsense about being sure to cut out the gall bladder it would fuck up the meat. Thought he was on the farm cleaning a chicken. I told him to go put his head back in the oven, whereupon he had the effrontery to push my hand severing the patient’s femoral artery. Blood spurted up and blinded the anesthetist, who ran out through the halls screaming. Browbeck tried to knee me in the groin, and I managed to hamstring him with my scalpel. He crawled about the floor stabbing at my feet and legs. Violet, that’s my baboon assistant – only woman I ever cared a damn about – really wigged. I climbed up on the table and poise myself to jump on Browbeck with both feet and stomp him when the cops rushed in.

  ‘Well, this rumble in the operating room, “this unspeakable occurrence” as the Super called it, you might say was the blow off. The wolf pack was closing for the kill. A crucifixion, that’s the only word for it. Of course I’d made a few “dummheits” here and there. Who hasn’t? There was the time me and the anesthetist drank up all the ether and the patient came up on us, and I was accused of cutting the cocaine with Saniflush. Violet did it actually. Had to protect her of course.…

  ‘So the wind-up is we are drummed out of the industry. Not that Violet was a bona fide croaker, neither was Browbeck for that matter, and even my own certificate was called in question. But Violet knew more medicine than the Mayo Clinic. She had an extraordinary intuition and a high sense of duty.

  ‘So there I was flat on my ass with no certificate. Should I turn to another trade? No. Doctoring was in my blood. I managed to keep up my habits performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets. I even descended to hustling pregnant women in the public streets. It was positively unethical. Then I met a great guy. Placenta Juan the Afterbirth Tycoon. Made his in slunks during the war. (Slunks are underage calves trailing afterbirths and bacteria, generally in an unsanitary and unfit condition. A calf may not be sold as food until it reaches a minimum age of six weeks. Prior to that time it is classified as a slunk. Slunk trafficking is subject to a heavy penalty.) Well, Juanito controlled a fleet of cargo boats he register under the Abyssinian flag to avoid bothersome restrictions. He gives me a job as ship’s doctor on the S.S. Filariasis, as filthy a craft as ever sailed the seas. Operating with one hand, beating the rats offa my patient with the other and bedbugs and scorpions rain down from the ceiling.

  ‘So somebody wants homogeneity at this juncture. Can do but it costs. Bored with the whole project, me.… Here we are.… Drag Alley.’

  Benway traces a pattern in the air with his hand and a door swings open. We step through and the door closes. A long ward gleaming with stainless steel, white tile floors, glass brick walls. Beds along one wall. No one smokes, no one reads, no one talks.

  ‘Come and take a close look,’ says Benway. ‘You won’t embarrass anybody.’

  I walk over and stand in front of a man who is sitting on his bed. I look at the man’s eyes. Nobody, nothing looks back.

  ‘IND’s,’ says Benway, ‘Irreversible Neural Damage. Overliberated, you might say … a drag on the industry.’

  I pass a hand in front of the man’s eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ says Benway, ‘they still have reflexes. Watch this.’ Benway takes a chocolate bar from his pocket, removes the wrapper and holds it in front of the man’s nose. The man sniffs. His jaws begin to work. He makes snatching motions with his hands. Saliva drips from his mouth and hangs off his chin in long streamers. His stomach rumbles. His whole body writhes in peristalsis. Benway steps back and holds up the chocolate. The man drops to his knees, throws back his head and barks. Benway tosses the chocolate. The man snaps at it, misses, scrambles around on the floor making slobbering noises. He crawls under the bed, finds the chocolate and crams it into his mouth with both hands.

  ‘Jesus! These ID’s got no class to them.’

  Benway calls over the attendant who is sitting at one end of the ward reading a book of J. M. Barrie’s plays.

  ‘Get these fucking ID’s outa here. It’s a bring down already. Bad for the tourist business.’

  ‘What should I do with them?’

  ‘How in the fuck should I know? I’m a scientist. A pure scientist. Just get them outa here. I don’t hafta look at them is all. They constitute an albatross.’

  ‘But what? Where?’

  ‘Proper channels. Buzz the District Coordinator or whatever he calls himself … new title every week. Doubt if he exists.’

  Doctor Benway pauses at the door and looks back at the IND’s. ‘Our failure,’ he says. ‘Well, it’s all in the day’s work.’

  ‘Do they ever come back?’

  ‘They don’t come back, won’t come back, once they’re gone,’ Benway sings softly. ‘Now this ward has some innarest.’

  The patients stand in groups talking and spitting on the floor. Junk hangs in the air like a grey haze.

  ‘A heart-warming sight,’ says Benway, ‘those junkies standing around waiting for the Man. Six months ago they were all schizophrenic. Some of them hadn’t been out of bed for years. Now look at them. In all the course of my practices, I have never seen a schizophrenic junky, and junkies are mostly of the schizo physical type. Want to cure anybody of anything, find out who doesn’t have it. So who don’t got it? Junkies don’t got it. Oh, incidentally, there’s an area in Bolivia with no psychosis. Right sane folk in them hills. Like to get in there, me, before it is loused up by literacy, advertising, TV and drive-ins. Make a study strictly from metabolism: diet, use of drugs and alcohol, sex, etc. Who cares what they think? Same nonsense everybody thinks, I daresay.

  ‘And why don’t junkies got schizophrenia? Don’t know yet. A schizophrenic can ignore hunger and starve to death if he isn’t fed. No one can ignore heroin withdrawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact.

  ‘But that’s only one angle. Mescaline, LSD6, deteriorated adrenalin, harmaline can produce an approximate schizophrenia. The best stuff is extracted from the blood of schizos; so schizophrenia is likely a drug psychosis. They got a metabolic connection, a Man Within you might say. (Interested readers are referred to Appendix.)

  ‘In the terminal stage of schizophrenia the backbrain is permanently depressed, and the front brain is almost without content since the front brain is only active in response to backbrain stimulation.

  ‘Morphine calls forth the antidote of backbrain stimulation similar to schizo substance. (Note similarity between withdrawal syndrome and intoxication with Yage or LSD6.) Eventual result of junk use – especially true of heroin addiction where large doses are available to the addict – is permanent backbrain depression and a state much like terminal schizophrenia: complete lack of affect, autism, virtual absence of cerebral event. The addict can spend eight hours looking at a wall. He is conscious of his surroundings, but they have no emotional connotation and
in consequence no interest. Remembering a period of heavy addiction is like playing back a tape recording of events experienced by the front brain alone. Flat statements of external events. “I went to the store and bought some brown sugar. I came home and ate half the box. I took a three grain shot etc.” Complete absence of nostalgia in these memories. However, as soon as junk intake falls below par, the withdrawal substance floods the body.

  ‘If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.

  ‘Some of my learned colleagues (nameless assholes) have suggested that junk derives its euphoric effect from direct stimulation of the orgasm center. It seems more probable that junk suspends the whole cycle of tension, discharge and rest. The orgasm has no function in the junky. Boredom, which always indicates an undischarged tension, never troubles the addict. He can look at his shoe for eight hours. He is only roused to action when the hourglass of junk runs out.’

  At the far end of the ward an attendant throws up an iron shutter and lets out a hog call. The junkies rush up grunting and squealing.

  ‘Wise guy,’ says Benway. ‘No respect for human dignity. Now I’ll show you the mild deviant and criminal ward. Yes, a criminal is a mild deviant here. He doesn’t deny the Freeland contract. He merely seeks to circumvent some of the clauses. Reprehensible but not too serious. Down this hall … We’ll skip wards 23, 86, 57 and 97 … and the laboratory.’

  ‘Are homosexuals classed as deviants?’