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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 purged by Party Poops.
...Well, 'son cosas de la vida.' "
I reach Freeland, which is clean and dull]1 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 him-
self into a Latah trying to perfect A.O.P., Automatic
Obedience Processing. A martyr to the industry..."
( Latah is a condition occurring in South East Asia.
Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every mo-
tion once their attention is attracted by snapping the
fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive in-
voluntary 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 cleav-
age or metamorphosis. 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 Archi-
pelago. 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 some-
body 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 notwith-
standing... Spot of bother there. Scalpel fight with a
colleague in the operating room. And my baboon as-
sistant leaped on the patient and tore him to pieces.
Baboons always attack the weakest party in an alterca-
tion. 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 operation 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 pow-
dered 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 eon-
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 nar-
cotic drugs in the British Journal of Addiction ( see
Appendix ): "Convicts and sailors sometimes have re-
course to nutmeg. About a tablespoon is swallowed
with 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 convul-
sive 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, where-
upon 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 un-
speakable 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 'dumheits' 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 Sanifiush. Violet
did it actually. Had to protect her of course....
"So the wind-up is we are all drummed out of the
industry. Not that Violet was a bona fide croaker, nei-
ther 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 extraordi-
nary 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
cutrate 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 After Birth Tycoon. Made his in slunks during
the war. (Slunks are underage calves trailing afterbirths
and bacteria, generally in an unsanitary and unfit con-
dition. 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. Filiarisis, 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 failures," 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 meta-
bolism: 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 with-
drawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact.
"But that's only one angle. Mescaline, LSD6, deteri-
orated adrenaline, harmaline can produce an approxi-
mat~ schizophrenia. The best stuff is extracted from the
blood of schizos; so schizophrenia is likely a drug psy-
chosis. They got a metabolic connection, a Man Within
you might say. ( Interested readers are referred to Ap-
pendix. )
"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 stimu-
lation 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, hut they have no emo-
tional connotation and in consequence no interest. Re-
membering 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 un-
discharged 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 crimi-
nal 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?'
"No. Remember the Bismarck Archipelago. No overt
homosexuality. A functioning police state needs no po-
lice. Homosexuality does not occur to anyone as con-
ceivable behaviour.... Homosexuality is a political
crime in a matriarchy. No society tolerates overt re-
jection of its basic tenets. We aren't a matriarchy here,
Insh'allah. You know the experiment with rats where
they are subject to this electric shock and dropped in
cold water if they so much as move at a female. So they
all become fruit rats and that's the way it is with the
etiology. And shall such a rat squeak out, 'I'm queah
and I luuuuuuuuve it' or 'Who cut yours off, you two-
holed freak?' 'twere a square rat so to squeak. During
my rather brief experience as a psychoanalyst -- spot of
bother with the Society -- one patient ran amok in Grand
Central with a flame thrower, two committed suicide
and one died on the couch like a jungle rat ( jungle rats
are subject to die if confronted suddenly with a hope-
less situation). So his relations beef and I tell them, 'It's
all in the day's work. Get this stiff outa here. It's a
bring down for my live patients' -- I noticed that all my
homosexual patients manifested strong unconscious
heterosex trends and all my hetero patients uncon-
scious homosexual trends. Makes the brain reel, don't
it?"
"And what do you conclude from that?"
"Conclude? Nothing whatever. Just a passing obser-
vation."
We are eating lunch in Benway's office when he gets
a call.
"What's that?... Monstrous! Fantastic!... Carry on
and stand by."
He puts down the phone. "I am prepared to accept
immediate assignment with Islam Incorporated. It
seems the electronic brain went berserk playing six-
dimensional chess with the Technician and released
every subject in the R.C. Leave us adjourn to the roof.
Operation Helicopter is indicated."
From the roof of the R.C. we survey a scene of un-
paralleled horror. IND's stand around in front of the
cafe tables, long streamers of saliva hanging off their
chins, stomachs noisily churning, others ejaculate at the
sight of women. Latahs imitate the passers-by with
monkey-like obscenity. Junkies have looted the drug-
stores and fix on every street corner.... Catatonics deco-
rate the parks.... Agitated schizophrenics rush through
the streets with mangled, inhuman cries. A group of
P.R.'s -- Partially Reconditioned -- have surrounded some
homosexual tourists with horrible knowing smiles show-
ing the Nordic skull beneath in double exposure.
"What do you want?" snaps one of the queens.
"We want to understand you."
A contingent of howling simopaths swing from chan-
deliers, balconies and trees, shitting and pissing on
passers-by. (A simopath -- the technical name for this
disorder escapes me -- is a citizen convinced he is an ape
or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army,
and discharge cures it.) Amoks trot along cutting off
heads, faces sweet and remote with a dreamy half smile.
...Citizens with incipient Bang-utot clutch their penises
and call on the tourists for help.... Arab rioters yipe
and howl, castrating, disembowelling, throw burning
gasoline.... Dancing boys strip-tease with intestines,
women stick severed genitals in their cunts, grind, bump
and Hick it at the man of their choice.... Religious
fanatics harangue the crowd from helicopters and rain
stone tablets on their heads, inscribed with meaningless
messages.... Leopard Men tear people to pieces with
iron claws, coughing and grunting.... Kwakiutl Canni-
bal Society initiates bite off noses and ears....
A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the
shit, exclaiming, "Mmmm, that's my rich substance."
A battalion of rampant bores prowls the streets and
hotel lobbies in search of victims. An intellectual avant-
gardist -- *'Of course the only writing worth considering
now is to be found in scientific reports and periodicals"
-- has given someone a bulbocapnine injection and is
preparing to read him a bulletin on "the use of neo-
hemoglobin in the control of multiple degenerative
granuloma." ( Of course, the reports are all gibberish he
has concocted and printed up. )
His opening words: "You look to me like a man of
intelligence." (Always ominous words, my boy ..
When you hear them stay not on the order of your
going but go at once. )
An English colonial, assisted by five police boys, has
detained a subject in the club bar: "I say, do you know
Mozambique?" and he launches into the endless saga
of his malaria. "So the doctor said to me, 'I can only
advise you to leave the area. Otherwise I shall bury
you.' This croaker does a little undertaking on the side.
Piecing out the odds you might say, and throwing him-
self a spot of business now and then." So after the third
pink gin when he gets to know you, he shifts to dysen-
tery. "Most extraordinary discharge. More or less of a
white yellow color like rancid jism and stringy you
know."
An explorer in sun helmet has brought down a citizen
with blow gun and curare dart. He administers artificial
respiration with one foot. (Curare kills by paralyzing
the lungs. It has no other toxic effect, is not, strictly
speaking, a poison. If artificial respiration is admin-
istered the subject will not die. Curare is eliminated
with great rapidity by the kidneys.) "That was the year
of the rindpest when everything died, even the hyenas.
...So there I was completely out of K.Y. in the head-
waters of the Baboonsasshole. When it came through
by air drop my gratitude was indescribable.... As a
matter of fact, and I have never told this before to a
living soul -- elusive blighters" -- his voice echoes through
a vast empty hotel lobby in 1890 style, red plush, rubber
plants, gilt and statues -- "I was the only white man
ever initiated into the infamous Agouti Society, wit-
nessed and participated in their unspeakable rites."
(The Agouti Society has turned out for a Chimu
Fiesta. (The Chimu of ancient Peru were much given
to sodomy and occasionally staged bloody battles with
clubs, running up several hundred casualties in the
course of an afternoon. ) The youths, sneering and goos-
ing each other with clubs, troop out to the field. Now
the battle begins.
Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers
description. Who can be a cringing pissing coward,
yet vicious as a purple-assed mandril, alternating these
deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can
shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and
screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and
catch his sperm in mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle
reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath
its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a
scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these
scandals? A beastly young hooligan has gouged out the
eye of his confrere and fuck him in the brain. "This
brain atrophy already, and dry as grandmother's cunt."
He turns into Rock and Roll hoodlum. "I screw the
old gash -- like a crossword puzzle what relation to me
is the outcome if it outcome? My father already or not
yet? I can't screw you, Jack, you is about to become
my father, and better 'twere to cut your throat and
screw my mother playing it straight than fuck my
father or vice versa mutatis mutandis as the case may
be, and cut my mother's throat, that sainted gash,
though it be the best way I know to stem her word
horde and freeze her asset. I mean when a fellow be
caught short in the switches and don't know is he to
over up his ass to 'great big daddy' or commit a torso
job on the old lady. Give me two cunts and a prick
of steel and keep your dirty finger out of my sugar
bum what you think I am a purple-assed reception
already fugitive from Gibraltar? Male and female
castrated he them. Who can't distinguish between the
sexes? I'll cut your throat you white mother fucker.
Come out in the open like my grandchild and meet thy
unborn mother in dubious battle. Confusion hath fuck
his masterpiece. I have cut the janitor's throat quite by
mistake of identity, he being such a horrible fuck like
the old man. And in the coal bin all cocks are alike."
So leave us return to the stricken field. One youth
hath penetrate his comrade, whilst another youth does
amputate the proudest part of that cock's quivering
beneficiary so that the visiting member projects to fill
the vacuum nature abhors and ejaculate into the Black
Lagoon where impatient piranha snap up the child
not yet born nor -- in view of certain well established
facts -- at all likely. )
Another bore carries around a suitcase full of trophies
and medals, cups and ribbons: "Now this I won for the
Most Ingenious Sex Device Contest in Yokohama. (Hold
him, he's desperate.) The Emperor gave it to me him-
self and there were tears in his eyes, and the runners-up
all castrated theirselves with harakiri knives. And I won
this ribbon in a Degradation Contest at the Teheran
meeting of Junkies Anonymous."
"Shot up my wife's M.S, and her down with a kidney
stone big as the Hope Diamond. So I give her half a
Vagamin and tell her, "You can't expect too much re-
lief.... Shut up awready. I wanta enjoy my medica-
tions.
"Stole an opium suppository out of my grandmother's
ass."
The hypochondriac lassoes the passer-by and admin-
isters a straitjacket and starts talking about his rotting
septum: "An awful purulent discharge is subject to How
out... just wait till you see it."
He does a strip tease to operation scars, guiding the
reluctant fingers of a victim. "Feel that suppurated
swelling in my groin where I got the lymphogranu-
lomas.... And now I want you to palpate my internal
hemorrhoids."
(The reference is to lymphogranuloma, "climactic
i
buboes." A virus venereal disease indigenous to Ethio-
pia. "Not for nothing are we known as feelthy Ethi-
opians," sneers an Ethiopian mercenary as he sodomizes
Pharaoh, venomous as the King's cobra. Ancient Egyp-
tian papyrus talk all the time about them feelthy
Ethiopians.
So it started in Addis Ababa like the Jersey Bounce,
but these are modern times, One World. Now the cli-
mactic buboes swell up in Shanghai and Esmeraldas,
New Orleans and Helsinki, Seattle and Capetown. But
the heart turns home and the disease shows a distinct
predilection for Negroes, is in fact the whitehaired
boy of white supremacists. But the Mau Mau voodoo
men are said to be cooking up a real dilly of a VD for
the white folks. Not that Caucasians are immune: five
British sailors contracted the disease in Zanzibar. And
in Dead Coon County, Arkansas ("Blackest Dirt, Whit-
est People in the U.S.A.-- Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set
On You Here") the County Coroner come down with
the buboes fore and aft. A vigilante committee of
neighbors apologetically burned him to death in the
Court House privy when his interesting condition came
to light. "Now, Clem, just think of yourself as a cow
with the aftosa." "Or a poltroon with the fowl pest."
"Don't crowd too close, boys. His intestines is subject
to explode in the fire." The disease in short arm hath
a gimmick for going places unlike certain unfortunate
viruses who are fated to languish unconsummate in
the guts of a tick or a jungle mosquito, or the saliva
of a dying jackal slobbering silver under the desert
moon. And after an initial lesion at the point of infee-
tion the disease passes to the lymph glands of the groin,
which swell and burst in suppurating fissures, drain
for days, months, years, a purulent stringy discharge
streaked with blood and putrid lymph. Elephantiasis
of the genitals is a frequent complication, and cases of
gangrene have been recorded where the amputation
in medio of the patient from the waist down was indi-
cated but hardly worth while. Women usually suffer
secondary infection of the anus. Males who resign
themselves up for passive intercourse to infected part-
ners like weak and soon to be purple-assed baboons,
may also nourish a little stranger. Initial proctitis and
the inevit4ble purulent discharge -- which may pass un-
noticed in the shuRe -- is followed by stricture of the
rectum requiring intervention of an apple corer or its
surgical equivalent, lest the unfortunate patient be
reduced to fart and shit in his teeth giving rise to
stubborn cases of halitosis and unpopularity with all
sexes, ages and conditions of homo sapiens. In fact a
blind bugger was deserted by his seeing eye police
dog -- copper at heart. Until quite recently there was
no satisfactory treatment. "Treatment is symptomatic"
-- which means in the trade there is none. Now many
cases yield to intensive therapy with aureomycin, ter-
ramycin and some of the newer molds. However a
certain appreciable percentage remain refractory as
mountain gorillas.... So, boys, when those hot licks
play over your balls and prick and dart up your ass
like an invisible blue blow torch of orgones, in the
words of I. B. Watson, Think. Stop panting and start
palpating... and if you palpate a bubo draw your-
self back in and say in a cold nasal whine: "You think
I am innarested to contact your horrible old condition?
I am not innarested at all.")
Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets
of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw
acid in the Mona Lisa's face. They open zoos, insane
asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers,
chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot
out lighthouses, file elevator cables to one thin wire,
turn sewers into the water supply, throw sharks and
sting rays, electric eels and candiru into swimming
pools (the candiru is a small eel-like fish or worm
about one-quarter inch through and two inches long
patronizing certain rivers of ill repute in the Greater
Amazon Basin, will dart up your prick or your asshole
or a woman's cunt faute de mieux, and hold himself
there by sharp spines with precisely what motives is
not known since no one has stepped forward to observe
the candiru's life-cycle in sito), in nautical costumes
ram the Queen Mary full speed into New York Harbor,
play chicken with passenger planes and busses, rush
into hospitals in white coats carrying saws and axes and
scalpels three feet long; throw paralytics out of iron
lungs (mimic their suffocations flopping about on the
floor and rolling their eyes up), administer injections
with bicycle pumps, disconnect artificial kidneys, saw
a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw, they
drive herds of squealing pigs into the Curb, they shit
on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass
with treaties, pacts, alliances.
By plane, car, horse, camel, elephant, tractor, bicycle
and steam roller, on foot, skis, sled, crutch and pogo-
stick the tourists storm the frontiers, demanding with
inflexible authority asylum from the "unspeakable con-
ditions obtaining in Freeland," the Chamber of Com-
merce striving in vain to stem the debacle: "Please
to be restful. It is only a few crazies who have from
the crazy place outbroken."
And Joselito who wrote bad, class-conscious poetry
began to cough. The German doctor made a brief ex-
amination, touching Joselito's ribs with long, delicate
see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths
in a great big beautiful garden. I was just scratching
that lovely surface when I am purged by Party Poops.
...Well, 'son cosas de la vida.' "
I reach Freeland, which is clean and dull]1 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 him-
self into a Latah trying to perfect A.O.P., Automatic
Obedience Processing. A martyr to the industry..."
( Latah is a condition occurring in South East Asia.
Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every mo-
tion once their attention is attracted by snapping the
fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive in-
voluntary 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 cleav-
age or metamorphosis. 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 Archi-
pelago. 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 some-
body 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 notwith-
standing... Spot of bother there. Scalpel fight with a
colleague in the operating room. And my baboon as-
sistant leaped on the patient and tore him to pieces.
Baboons always attack the weakest party in an alterca-
tion. 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 operation 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 pow-
dered 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 eon-
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 nar-
cotic drugs in the British Journal of Addiction ( see
Appendix ): "Convicts and sailors sometimes have re-
course to nutmeg. About a tablespoon is swallowed
with 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 convul-
sive 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, where-
upon 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 un-
speakable 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 'dumheits' 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 Sanifiush. Violet
did it actually. Had to protect her of course....
"So the wind-up is we are all drummed out of the
industry. Not that Violet was a bona fide croaker, nei-
ther 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 extraordi-
nary 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
cutrate 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 After Birth Tycoon. Made his in slunks during
the war. (Slunks are underage calves trailing afterbirths
and bacteria, generally in an unsanitary and unfit con-
dition. 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. Filiarisis, 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 failures," 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 meta-
bolism: 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 with-
drawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact.
"But that's only one angle. Mescaline, LSD6, deteri-
orated adrenaline, harmaline can produce an approxi-
mat~ schizophrenia. The best stuff is extracted from the
blood of schizos; so schizophrenia is likely a drug psy-
chosis. They got a metabolic connection, a Man Within
you might say. ( Interested readers are referred to Ap-
pendix. )
"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 stimu-
lation 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, hut they have no emo-
tional connotation and in consequence no interest. Re-
membering 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 un-
discharged 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 crimi-
nal 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?'
"No. Remember the Bismarck Archipelago. No overt
homosexuality. A functioning police state needs no po-
lice. Homosexuality does not occur to anyone as con-
ceivable behaviour.... Homosexuality is a political
crime in a matriarchy. No society tolerates overt re-
jection of its basic tenets. We aren't a matriarchy here,
Insh'allah. You know the experiment with rats where
they are subject to this electric shock and dropped in
cold water if they so much as move at a female. So they
all become fruit rats and that's the way it is with the
etiology. And shall such a rat squeak out, 'I'm queah
and I luuuuuuuuve it' or 'Who cut yours off, you two-
holed freak?' 'twere a square rat so to squeak. During
my rather brief experience as a psychoanalyst -- spot of
bother with the Society -- one patient ran amok in Grand
Central with a flame thrower, two committed suicide
and one died on the couch like a jungle rat ( jungle rats
are subject to die if confronted suddenly with a hope-
less situation). So his relations beef and I tell them, 'It's
all in the day's work. Get this stiff outa here. It's a
bring down for my live patients' -- I noticed that all my
homosexual patients manifested strong unconscious
heterosex trends and all my hetero patients uncon-
scious homosexual trends. Makes the brain reel, don't
it?"
"And what do you conclude from that?"
"Conclude? Nothing whatever. Just a passing obser-
vation."
We are eating lunch in Benway's office when he gets
a call.
"What's that?... Monstrous! Fantastic!... Carry on
and stand by."
He puts down the phone. "I am prepared to accept
immediate assignment with Islam Incorporated. It
seems the electronic brain went berserk playing six-
dimensional chess with the Technician and released
every subject in the R.C. Leave us adjourn to the roof.
Operation Helicopter is indicated."
From the roof of the R.C. we survey a scene of un-
paralleled horror. IND's stand around in front of the
cafe tables, long streamers of saliva hanging off their
chins, stomachs noisily churning, others ejaculate at the
sight of women. Latahs imitate the passers-by with
monkey-like obscenity. Junkies have looted the drug-
stores and fix on every street corner.... Catatonics deco-
rate the parks.... Agitated schizophrenics rush through
the streets with mangled, inhuman cries. A group of
P.R.'s -- Partially Reconditioned -- have surrounded some
homosexual tourists with horrible knowing smiles show-
ing the Nordic skull beneath in double exposure.
"What do you want?" snaps one of the queens.
"We want to understand you."
A contingent of howling simopaths swing from chan-
deliers, balconies and trees, shitting and pissing on
passers-by. (A simopath -- the technical name for this
disorder escapes me -- is a citizen convinced he is an ape
or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army,
and discharge cures it.) Amoks trot along cutting off
heads, faces sweet and remote with a dreamy half smile.
...Citizens with incipient Bang-utot clutch their penises
and call on the tourists for help.... Arab rioters yipe
and howl, castrating, disembowelling, throw burning
gasoline.... Dancing boys strip-tease with intestines,
women stick severed genitals in their cunts, grind, bump
and Hick it at the man of their choice.... Religious
fanatics harangue the crowd from helicopters and rain
stone tablets on their heads, inscribed with meaningless
messages.... Leopard Men tear people to pieces with
iron claws, coughing and grunting.... Kwakiutl Canni-
bal Society initiates bite off noses and ears....
A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the
shit, exclaiming, "Mmmm, that's my rich substance."
A battalion of rampant bores prowls the streets and
hotel lobbies in search of victims. An intellectual avant-
gardist -- *'Of course the only writing worth considering
now is to be found in scientific reports and periodicals"
-- has given someone a bulbocapnine injection and is
preparing to read him a bulletin on "the use of neo-
hemoglobin in the control of multiple degenerative
granuloma." ( Of course, the reports are all gibberish he
has concocted and printed up. )
His opening words: "You look to me like a man of
intelligence." (Always ominous words, my boy ..
When you hear them stay not on the order of your
going but go at once. )
An English colonial, assisted by five police boys, has
detained a subject in the club bar: "I say, do you know
Mozambique?" and he launches into the endless saga
of his malaria. "So the doctor said to me, 'I can only
advise you to leave the area. Otherwise I shall bury
you.' This croaker does a little undertaking on the side.
Piecing out the odds you might say, and throwing him-
self a spot of business now and then." So after the third
pink gin when he gets to know you, he shifts to dysen-
tery. "Most extraordinary discharge. More or less of a
white yellow color like rancid jism and stringy you
know."
An explorer in sun helmet has brought down a citizen
with blow gun and curare dart. He administers artificial
respiration with one foot. (Curare kills by paralyzing
the lungs. It has no other toxic effect, is not, strictly
speaking, a poison. If artificial respiration is admin-
istered the subject will not die. Curare is eliminated
with great rapidity by the kidneys.) "That was the year
of the rindpest when everything died, even the hyenas.
...So there I was completely out of K.Y. in the head-
waters of the Baboonsasshole. When it came through
by air drop my gratitude was indescribable.... As a
matter of fact, and I have never told this before to a
living soul -- elusive blighters" -- his voice echoes through
a vast empty hotel lobby in 1890 style, red plush, rubber
plants, gilt and statues -- "I was the only white man
ever initiated into the infamous Agouti Society, wit-
nessed and participated in their unspeakable rites."
(The Agouti Society has turned out for a Chimu
Fiesta. (The Chimu of ancient Peru were much given
to sodomy and occasionally staged bloody battles with
clubs, running up several hundred casualties in the
course of an afternoon. ) The youths, sneering and goos-
ing each other with clubs, troop out to the field. Now
the battle begins.
Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers
description. Who can be a cringing pissing coward,
yet vicious as a purple-assed mandril, alternating these
deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can
shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and
screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and
catch his sperm in mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle
reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath
its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a
scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these
scandals? A beastly young hooligan has gouged out the
eye of his confrere and fuck him in the brain. "This
brain atrophy already, and dry as grandmother's cunt."
He turns into Rock and Roll hoodlum. "I screw the
old gash -- like a crossword puzzle what relation to me
is the outcome if it outcome? My father already or not
yet? I can't screw you, Jack, you is about to become
my father, and better 'twere to cut your throat and
screw my mother playing it straight than fuck my
father or vice versa mutatis mutandis as the case may
be, and cut my mother's throat, that sainted gash,
though it be the best way I know to stem her word
horde and freeze her asset. I mean when a fellow be
caught short in the switches and don't know is he to
over up his ass to 'great big daddy' or commit a torso
job on the old lady. Give me two cunts and a prick
of steel and keep your dirty finger out of my sugar
bum what you think I am a purple-assed reception
already fugitive from Gibraltar? Male and female
castrated he them. Who can't distinguish between the
sexes? I'll cut your throat you white mother fucker.
Come out in the open like my grandchild and meet thy
unborn mother in dubious battle. Confusion hath fuck
his masterpiece. I have cut the janitor's throat quite by
mistake of identity, he being such a horrible fuck like
the old man. And in the coal bin all cocks are alike."
So leave us return to the stricken field. One youth
hath penetrate his comrade, whilst another youth does
amputate the proudest part of that cock's quivering
beneficiary so that the visiting member projects to fill
the vacuum nature abhors and ejaculate into the Black
Lagoon where impatient piranha snap up the child
not yet born nor -- in view of certain well established
facts -- at all likely. )
Another bore carries around a suitcase full of trophies
and medals, cups and ribbons: "Now this I won for the
Most Ingenious Sex Device Contest in Yokohama. (Hold
him, he's desperate.) The Emperor gave it to me him-
self and there were tears in his eyes, and the runners-up
all castrated theirselves with harakiri knives. And I won
this ribbon in a Degradation Contest at the Teheran
meeting of Junkies Anonymous."
"Shot up my wife's M.S, and her down with a kidney
stone big as the Hope Diamond. So I give her half a
Vagamin and tell her, "You can't expect too much re-
lief.... Shut up awready. I wanta enjoy my medica-
tions.
"Stole an opium suppository out of my grandmother's
ass."
The hypochondriac lassoes the passer-by and admin-
isters a straitjacket and starts talking about his rotting
septum: "An awful purulent discharge is subject to How
out... just wait till you see it."
He does a strip tease to operation scars, guiding the
reluctant fingers of a victim. "Feel that suppurated
swelling in my groin where I got the lymphogranu-
lomas.... And now I want you to palpate my internal
hemorrhoids."
(The reference is to lymphogranuloma, "climactic
i
buboes." A virus venereal disease indigenous to Ethio-
pia. "Not for nothing are we known as feelthy Ethi-
opians," sneers an Ethiopian mercenary as he sodomizes
Pharaoh, venomous as the King's cobra. Ancient Egyp-
tian papyrus talk all the time about them feelthy
Ethiopians.
So it started in Addis Ababa like the Jersey Bounce,
but these are modern times, One World. Now the cli-
mactic buboes swell up in Shanghai and Esmeraldas,
New Orleans and Helsinki, Seattle and Capetown. But
the heart turns home and the disease shows a distinct
predilection for Negroes, is in fact the whitehaired
boy of white supremacists. But the Mau Mau voodoo
men are said to be cooking up a real dilly of a VD for
the white folks. Not that Caucasians are immune: five
British sailors contracted the disease in Zanzibar. And
in Dead Coon County, Arkansas ("Blackest Dirt, Whit-
est People in the U.S.A.-- Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set
On You Here") the County Coroner come down with
the buboes fore and aft. A vigilante committee of
neighbors apologetically burned him to death in the
Court House privy when his interesting condition came
to light. "Now, Clem, just think of yourself as a cow
with the aftosa." "Or a poltroon with the fowl pest."
"Don't crowd too close, boys. His intestines is subject
to explode in the fire." The disease in short arm hath
a gimmick for going places unlike certain unfortunate
viruses who are fated to languish unconsummate in
the guts of a tick or a jungle mosquito, or the saliva
of a dying jackal slobbering silver under the desert
moon. And after an initial lesion at the point of infee-
tion the disease passes to the lymph glands of the groin,
which swell and burst in suppurating fissures, drain
for days, months, years, a purulent stringy discharge
streaked with blood and putrid lymph. Elephantiasis
of the genitals is a frequent complication, and cases of
gangrene have been recorded where the amputation
in medio of the patient from the waist down was indi-
cated but hardly worth while. Women usually suffer
secondary infection of the anus. Males who resign
themselves up for passive intercourse to infected part-
ners like weak and soon to be purple-assed baboons,
may also nourish a little stranger. Initial proctitis and
the inevit4ble purulent discharge -- which may pass un-
noticed in the shuRe -- is followed by stricture of the
rectum requiring intervention of an apple corer or its
surgical equivalent, lest the unfortunate patient be
reduced to fart and shit in his teeth giving rise to
stubborn cases of halitosis and unpopularity with all
sexes, ages and conditions of homo sapiens. In fact a
blind bugger was deserted by his seeing eye police
dog -- copper at heart. Until quite recently there was
no satisfactory treatment. "Treatment is symptomatic"
-- which means in the trade there is none. Now many
cases yield to intensive therapy with aureomycin, ter-
ramycin and some of the newer molds. However a
certain appreciable percentage remain refractory as
mountain gorillas.... So, boys, when those hot licks
play over your balls and prick and dart up your ass
like an invisible blue blow torch of orgones, in the
words of I. B. Watson, Think. Stop panting and start
palpating... and if you palpate a bubo draw your-
self back in and say in a cold nasal whine: "You think
I am innarested to contact your horrible old condition?
I am not innarested at all.")
Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets
of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw
acid in the Mona Lisa's face. They open zoos, insane
asylums, prisons, burst water mains with air hammers,
chop the floor out of passenger plane lavatories, shoot
out lighthouses, file elevator cables to one thin wire,
turn sewers into the water supply, throw sharks and
sting rays, electric eels and candiru into swimming
pools (the candiru is a small eel-like fish or worm
about one-quarter inch through and two inches long
patronizing certain rivers of ill repute in the Greater
Amazon Basin, will dart up your prick or your asshole
or a woman's cunt faute de mieux, and hold himself
there by sharp spines with precisely what motives is
not known since no one has stepped forward to observe
the candiru's life-cycle in sito), in nautical costumes
ram the Queen Mary full speed into New York Harbor,
play chicken with passenger planes and busses, rush
into hospitals in white coats carrying saws and axes and
scalpels three feet long; throw paralytics out of iron
lungs (mimic their suffocations flopping about on the
floor and rolling their eyes up), administer injections
with bicycle pumps, disconnect artificial kidneys, saw
a woman in half with a two-man surgical saw, they
drive herds of squealing pigs into the Curb, they shit
on the floor of the United Nations and wipe their ass
with treaties, pacts, alliances.
By plane, car, horse, camel, elephant, tractor, bicycle
and steam roller, on foot, skis, sled, crutch and pogo-
stick the tourists storm the frontiers, demanding with
inflexible authority asylum from the "unspeakable con-
ditions obtaining in Freeland," the Chamber of Com-
merce striving in vain to stem the debacle: "Please
to be restful. It is only a few crazies who have from
the crazy place outbroken."
And Joselito who wrote bad, class-conscious poetry
began to cough. The German doctor made a brief ex-
amination, touching Joselito's ribs with long, delicate
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