Free Naked Lunch by William Burroughs Page B

the Throckmorton Diamond and was drummed out of the industry.… All these jewelers standing around the Diamond in their frock coats, waiting on The Man. An error of one thousandth of an inch ruins the rock complete and they have to import this character special from Amsterdam to do the job.… So he reels in dead drunk with a huge air hammer and pounds thediamond to dust.…
    I don’t check these citizens.… Dope peddlers from Aleppo? … Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Illegal diamond buyers from Johannesburg? … Slave traders from Somaliland? Collaborators at the very least.…
    Continual dreams of junk: I am looking for a poppy field.… Moonshiners in black Stetsons direct me to a Near East café.… One of the waiters is a connection for Yugoslav opium.…

    Buy a packet of heroin from a Malay Lesbian in white belted trenchcoat.… I cop the paper in Tibetan section of a museum. She keeps trying to steal it back.… I am looking for a place to fix.…
    The critical point of withdrawal is not the early phase of acute sickness, but the final step free from the medium of junk.… There is a nightmare interlude of cellular panic, life suspended between two waysof being.… At this point the longing for junk concentrates in a last, all-out yen, and seems to gain a dream power: circumstances put junk in your way.… You meet an old-time Schmecker, a larcenous hospital attendant, a writing croaker.…
    A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirtin burnished Indian copper, adolescent-nordic-sun-tanslacks, sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted and tucked in the shirt. (Ash-brown is a color like grey
under
brown skin. You sometimes find it in mixed Negro and white stock, the mixture did not come off and the colors separated out like oil on water.…)
    The Guard is a sharp dresser, since he has nothing to do and saves all his pay to buy fine clothesand changes three times a day in front of an enormous magnifying mirror. He has a Latin handsome-smooth face with a pencil line mustache, small black eyes, blank and greedy, undreaming insect eyes.
    When I get to the frontier the Guard rushes out of his casita, a mirror frame slung round his neck. He is trying to get the mirror off his neck.… This has never happened before, that anyone reachedthe frontier. The Guard has injured his larynx taking off the mirror frame.…He has lost his voice.… He opens his mouth, you can see the tongue jumping around inside. The smooth blank young face and the open mouth with the tongue moving inside are incredibly hideous. The Guard holds up his hand. His whole body jerks in convulsive negation. I go over and unhook the chain across the road. It falls witha clank of metal on stone. I walk through. The Guard stands there in the mist looking after me. Then he hooks the chain up again, goes back into the casita and starts plucking at his mustache.
    They just bring so-called lunch.… A hard-boiled egg with the shell off revealing an object like I never seen before.… A very small egg of a yellow-brown color … Perhaps laid by the duck-billed platypus.The orange contained a huge worm and very little else.… He really got there firstest with the mostest.… In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to a enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepidgourmets esteem the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome.… An Interzone coroner known as Autopsy Ahmedmade a fortune trafficking The Worm.
    The French school is opposite my window and I dig the boys with my eight-power field glasses.… So close I could reach out and touch them.… They wear shorts.… I can see the goose-pimples on their legs in the cold Spring morning.… I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with