Naked Lunch

An excerpt

by WILLIAM BURROUGHS

A waste of raw pink shame to the pastel blue horizon where vast iron mesas crash into the shattered sky, "It's all right." The God screams through you three thousand year rusty load....

Hail of crystal skulls shattered the greenhouse to slivers in the winter moon....

The American woman has left a whiff of poison behind in the dank St. Louis garden party. Pool covered with green slime in a ruined French garden. Huge pathic frog rises slowly from the water on a mud platform playing the clavichord.A Sollubi rushes into the bar and starts polishing The Saint's shoes with the oil on his nose....

The Saint kicks him petulantly in the mouth. The Sollubi screams, whirls around and shits on the Saint's pants. Then he dashes into the street. A pimp looks after him speculatively....

The Saint calls the manager: "Jesus, Al, what kinda creep joint you running here? My brand new fishskin Degagees..."

"I'm sorry, Saint. He slipped by me."

(The Sollubi are an untouchable caste in Arabia noted for their abject vileness. De luxe cafes are equipped with Sollubi who rim the guests while they eat -- holes in the seating benches being provided for this purpose. Citizens who want to be utterly humiliated and degraded -- so many people do, nowadays, hoping to jump the gun -- over themselves up for passive homosexual intercourse to an encampment of Sollubis.... Nothing like it, they tell me.... In fact, the Sollubi are subject to become wealthy and arrogant and lose their native vileness. What is origin of untouchable? Perhaps a fallen priest caste. In fact, untouchables perform a priestly function in taking on themselves all human vileness.)

A. J. strolls through the Market in black cape with a vulture perched on one shoulder. He stands by a table of agents.

"This you gotta hear. Boy in Los Angeles fifteen year old. Father decide it is time the boy have his first piece of ass. Boy is lying on the lawn reading comic books, father go out and say: 'Son, here's twenty dollars; I want you to go to a good whore and get a piece of ass off her.'

"So they drive to this plush jump joint, and the father say, 'All right, son. You're on your own. So ring the bell and when the woman come give her the twenty dollars and tell her you want a piece of ass.'

" 'Solid, pop.'

"So about fifteen minutes later the boy comes out:

" 'Well, son, did you get a piece of ass?'

" 'Yeah. This gash comes to the door, and I say I want a piece of ass and lay the double sawski on her. We go up to her trap, and she remove the dry goods. So I switch my blade and cut a big hunk off her ass, she raise a beef like I am reduce to pull off one shoe and beat her brains out. Then I hump her for kicks."

Only the laughing bones remain, flesh over the hills and far away with the dawn wind and a train whistle. We are not unaware of the problem, and the needs of our constituents are never out of our mind being their place of residence and who can break a ninety-nine year synapses lease?

Another installment in the adventures of Clem Snide the Private Ass Hole: "So I walk in the joint, and this female hustler sit at the bar, and I think, 'Oh God you're poule de luxe already.' I mean it's like I see the gash before. So I don't pay her no mind at first, then I dig she is rubbing her legs together and working her feet up behind her head shoves it down to give herself a douche job with a gadget sticks out of her nose the way a body can't help but notice."

Iris -- half Chinese and half Negro -- addicted to dihy-dro-oxy-heroin -- takes a shot every fifteen minutes to which end she leaves droppers and needles sticking out all over her. The needles rust in her dry flesh, which, here and there, has grown completely over a joint to form a smooth green brown wen. On the table in front of her is a samovar of tea and a twenty-pound hamper of brown sugar. No one has ever seen her eat anything else. It -is only just before a shot that she hears what anyone says or talks herself. Then she makes some flat, factual statement relative to her own person.

"My asshole is occluding."

"My cunt got terrible green juices."

Iris is one of Benway's projects. "The human body can run on sugar alone, God damn it.... I am aware that certain of my learned colleagues, who are attempting to belittle my genius work, claim that I put vitamins and proteins into Iris's sugar clandestinely.... I challenge these nameless assholes to crawl up out of their latrines and run a spot analysis on Iris's sugar and her tea. Iris is a wholesome American cunt. I deny categorically that she nourishes herself on semen. And let me take this opportunity to state that I am a reputable scientist, not a charlatan, a lunatic, or a pretended worker of miracles.... I never claimed that Iris could subsist exclusive on photosynthesis.... I did not say she could breathe in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen -- I confess I have been tempted to experiment being of course restrained by my medical ethics.... In short, the vile slanders of my creeping opponents will inevitably fall back onto them and come to roost like a homing stool pigeon."

Many an ill-starred actor has felt the icy blast of Slashtubitch's displeasure: "Get out of my studio, you cheap four-flushing ham! Did you think to pass a counterfeit orgasm on me! THE GREAT SLASHTU-BITCH! I could tell if you come by regard the beeg toe. Idiot! Mindless scum!! Insolent baggage!!! Go peddle thy ass and know that it takes sincerity and art, and devotion, to work for Slashtubitch. Not shoddy trickery, dubbed gasps, rubber turds and vials of milk concealed in the ear and shots of Yohimbine sneaked in the wings." ( Yohimbine, derived from the bark of a tree growing in Central Africa, is the safest and most efficient aphrodisiac. It operates by dilating the blood vessels on the surface of the skin, particularly in the genital area. )

Slashtubitch ejects his monocle. It sails out of sight, returns like a boomerang into his eye. He pirouettes and disappears in a blue mist, cold as liquid air...fadeout....

On Screen. Red-haired, green-eyed boy, white skin with a few freckles... kissing a thin brunette girl in slacks. Clothes and hair-do suggest existentialist bars of all the world cities. They are seated on low bed covered in white silk. The girl opens his pants with gentle fingers and pulls out his cock which is small and very hard. A drop of lubricant gleams at its tip like a pearl. She caresses the crown gently: "Strip, Johnny." He takes off his clothes with swift sure movements and stands naked before her, his cock pulsing. She makes a motion for him to turn around and he pirouettes across the floor parodying a model, hand on hip. She takes off her shirt.

Her breasts are high and small with erect nipples. She slips off her underpants. Her pubic hairs are black and shiny. He sits down beside her and reaches for her breast. She stops his hands.

"Darling, I want to rim you," she whispers.

"No. Not now."

"Please, I want to."

"Well, all right. I'll go wash my ass."

"No, I'll wash it."

"Aw shucks now, it ain't dirty."

"Yes it is. Come on now, Johnny boy."

She leads him into the bathroom. "All right, get down." He gets down on his knees and leans forward, with his chin on the bath mat. "Allah," he says. He looks back and grins at her. She washes his ass with soap and hot water sticking her finger up it.

"Does that hurt?"

"Noooooooooo."

"Come along, baby." She leads the way into the bedroom. He lies down on his back and throws his legs back over his head, clasping elbows behind his knees. She kneel down and caress the backs of his thighs, his balls, running her fingers down the perennial divide. She push his cheeks apart, lean down and begin licking the anus, moving her head in a slow circle. She push at the sides of the asshole, licking deeper and deeper. He close his eyes and squirm. She lick up the perennial divide. His small, tight balls.... A great pearl stands out on the tip of his circumcised cock. Her mouth closes over the crown. She sucks rhythmically up and down, pausing on the up stroke and moving her head around in a circle. Her hand plays gently with his balls, slide down and middle finger up his ass. As she suck down toward the root of his cock she tickle his prostate mockingly. He grin and fart. She is sucking his cock now in a frenzy. His body begins to contract, pulling up toward his chin. Each time the contraction is longer.

"Wheeeeeeee!" the boy yell, every muscle tense, his whole body strain to empty through his cock. She drinks his jissom which fills her mouth in great hot spurts. He lets his feet Hop back onto the bed. He arches his back and yawns. Mary is strapping on a rubber penis: "Steely Dan III from Yokohama," she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room.

"Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don't go giving me some kinda awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa...."

"When I was a transvestite Liz in Chi used to work as an exterminator. Make advances to pretty boys for the thrill of being beaten as a man. Later I catch this one kid, overpower him with supersonic judo I learned from an old Lesbian Zen monk. I tie him up, strip off his clothes with a razor and fuck him with Steely Dan I. He is so relieved I don't castrate him literal he come all over my bedbug spray."

"What happen to Steely Dan II"

"He was torn in two by a bull dike. Most terrific vaginal grip I ever experienced. She could cave in a lead pipe. It was one of her parlor tricks."

"And Steely Dan II"

"Chewed to bits by a famished candiru in the Upper Baboonsasshole. And don't say 'Wheeeeeeee!' this time."

"Why not? It's real boyish."

"Barefoot boy, check thy bullheads with the madame."

He looks at the ceiling, hands behind his head, cock pulsing.

"So what shall I do? Can't shit with that dingus up me. I wonder is it possible to laugh and come at the same time? I recall, during the war, at the Jockey Club in Cairo, me and my asshole buddy, Lu, both gentlemen by act of Congress... nothing else could have done such a thing to either of us.... So we got laughing so hard we piss all over ourselves and the waiter say: 'You bloody hash-heads, get out of here!' I mean, if I can laugh the piss out of me I should be able to laugh out jissom. So tell me something real funny when I start coming. You can tell by certain premonitory quiverings of the prostate gland...."

She puts on a record, metallic cocaine be-bop. She greases the dingus, shoves the boy's legs over his head and works it up his ass with a series of corkscrew movements of her fluid hips. She moves in a slow circle, revolving on the axis of the shaft. She rubs her hard nipples across his chest. She kisses him on neck and chin and eyes. He runs his hands down her back to her buttocks, pulling her into his ass. She revolves faster, faster. His body jerks and writhes in convulsive spasms.

"Hurry up, please," she says. "The milk is getting cold."

He does not hear. She presses her mouth against his. Their faces run together. His sperm hits her breast with light, hot licks.

Mark is standing in the doorway. He wears a turtleneck black sweater. Cold, handsome, narcissistic face. Green eyes and black hair. He looks at Johnny with a slight sneer, his head on one side, hands on his jacket