And always car trouble: in St. Louis traded the 1942 Studebaker in (it has a built-in engineering flaw like the Rube) on an old Packard limousine heated up and barely made Kansas City, and bought a Ford turned out to be an oil burner, packed it in on a Jeep we push too hard (they are no good for highway driving) – and burn something out inside, rattling around, went back to the old Ford V-8. Can’t beat that engine for getting there, oil burner or no.
And the U.S. drag closes around us like no other drag in the world, worse than the Andes, high mountain towns, cold wind down from postcard mountains, thin air like death in the throat, river towns of Ecuador, malaria grey as junk under black Stetson, muzzle loading shotguns, vultures pecking through the mud streets – and what hits you when you get off the Malmo Ferry in (no juice tax on the ferry) Sweden knocks all that cheap, tax free juice right out of you and brings you all the way down: averted eyes and the cemetery in the middle of town (every town in Sweden seems to be built around a cemetery), and nothing to do in the afternoon, not a bar nor a movie and I blasted my last stick of Tangier tea and I said, ‘K.E. let’s get right back on that ferry.’
But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can’t see it, you don’t know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street – every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore and market and liquorstore. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from?
Not the bartender, not the customers, nor the cream-colored plastic rounding the bar stools, nor the dim neon. Not even the TV.
And our habits build up with the drag, like cocaine will build you up staying ahead of the C bring-down. And the junk was running low. So there we are in this no-horse town strictly from cough syrup. And vomited up the syrup and drove on and on, cold spring wind whistling through that old heap around our shivering sick sweating bodies and the cold you always come down with when the junk runs out of you.… On through the peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road and vultures over the swamp and cypress stumps. Motels with beaverboard walls, gas heater, thin pink blankets.
Itinerant short con and carny hyp men have burned down the croakers of Texas.…
And no one in his right mind would hit a Louisiana croaker. State Junk Law.
Came at last to Houston where I know a druggist. I haven’t been there in five years but he looks up and makes me with one quick look and just nods and says: ‘Wait over at the counter.…’
So I sit down and drink a cup of coffee and after a while he comes and sits beside me and says, ‘What do you want?’
‘A quart of PG and a hundred nembies.’
He nods, ‘Come back in half an hour.’
So when I come back he hands me a package and says, ‘That’s fifteen dollars.… Be careful.’
Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper – have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls.… So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around on broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish.…
New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It’s a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. We stock up on H and backtrack for Mexico.
Back through Lake Charles and the dead slot-machine country, south end of Texas, nigger-killing sheriffs look us over and check the car papers. Something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico, and suddenly the landscape hits you straight with nothing between you and it, desert and mountains and vultures; little wheeling specks and others so close you can hear wings cut the air (a dry husking sound), and when they spot something they pour out of the blue sky, that shattering bloody blue sky of Mexico, down in a black funnel.… Drove all night, came at dawn to a warm misty place, barking dogs and the sound of running water.
‘Thomas and Charlie,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘That’s the name of this town. Sea level. We climb straight up from here ten thousand feet.’ I took a fix and went to sleep in the back seat. She was a good driver. You can tell as soon as someone touches the wheel.
Mexico City where Lupita sits like an Aztec Earth Goddess doling out her little papers of lousy shit.
‘Selling is more of a habit than using,’ Lupita says. Non-using pushers have a contact habit, and that’s one you can’t kick. Agents get it too. Take Bradley the Buyer. Best narcotics agent in the industry. Anyone would make him for junk. (Note: Make in the sense of dig or size up.) I mean he can walk up to a pusher and score direct. He is so anonymous, grey and spectral the pusher don’t remember him afterwards. So he twists one after the other.…
Well the Buyer comes to look more and more like a junky. He can’t drink. He can’t get it up. His teeth fall out. (Like pregnant women lose their teeth feeding the stranger, junkies lose their yellow fangs feeding the monkey.) He is all the time sucking on a candy bar. Babe Ruths he digs special. ‘It really disgust you to see the Buyer sucking on them candy bars so nasty,’ a cop says.
The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color. Fact is his body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within you might say. Or so he thinks. ‘I’ll just set in my room,’ he says. ‘Fuck ’em all. Squares on both sides. I am the only complete man in the industry.’
But a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones. So the Buyer hunts up a young junky and gives him a paper to make it.
‘Oh all right,’ the boy says. ‘So what you want to make?’
‘I just want to rub up against you and get fixed.’
‘Ugh.… Well all right.… But why cancha just get physical like a human?’
Later the boy is sitting in a Waldorf with two colleagues dunking pound cake. ‘Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for,’ he says. ‘Some way he make himself all soft like a blob of jelly and surround me so nasty. Then he gets wet all over like with green slime. So I guess he come to some kinda awful climax.… I come near wigging with that green stuff all over me, and he stink like a old rotten canteloupe.’
‘Well it’s still an easy score.’
The boy sighed resignedly; ‘Yes, I guess you can get used to anything. I’ve got a meet with him again tomorrow.’
The Buyer’s habit keeps getting heavier. He needs a recharge every half hour. Sometimes he cruises the precincts and bribes the turnkey to let him in with a cell of junkies. It gets to where no amount of contact will fix him. At this point he receives a summons from the District Supervisor:
‘Bradley, your conduct has given rise to rumours – and I hope for your sake they are no more than that – so unspeakably distasteful that … I mean Caesar’s wife … hrump … that is, the Department must be above suspicion … certainly above such suspicions as you have seemingly aroused. You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation.’
The Buyer throws himself on the ground and crawls over to the D.S. ‘No, Boss Man, no … The Department is my very lifeline.’
He kisses the D.S.’s hand thrusting his fingers into his mouth (the D.S. must feel his toothless gums) complaining he has lost his teeth ‘inna thervith.’ ‘Please Boss Man, I’ll wipe your ass, I’ll wash out your dirty condoms, I’ll polish your shoes with the oil on my nose.…’
‘Really, this is most distasteful! Have you no pride? I must tell you I feel a distinct revulsion. I mean there is something, well, rotten about you, and you smell like a compost heap.’ He put a scented handkerchief in front of his face. ‘I must ask you to leave this office at once.’
‘I’ll do anything,
Boss, anything.’ His ravaged green face splits in a horrible smile. ‘I’m still young, Boss, and I’m pretty strong when I get my blood up.’
The D.S. retches into his handkerchief and points to the door with a limp hand. The Buyer stands up looking at the D.S. dreamily. His body begins to dip like a dowser’s wand. He flows forward.…
‘No! No!’ screams the D.S.
‘Schlup … schlup schlup.’ An hour later they find the Buyer on the nod in the D.S.’s chair. The D.S. has disappeared without a trace.
The Judge: ‘Everything indicates that you have, in some unspeakable manner uh … assimilated the District Supervisor. Unfortunately there is no proof. I would recommend that you be confined or more accurately contained in some institution, but I know of no place suitable for a man of your caliber. I must reluctantly order your release.’
‘That one should stand in an aquarium,’ says the arresting officer.
The Buyer spreads terror throughout the industry. Junkies and agents disappear. Like a vampire bat he gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anesthetizes his victims and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence. And once he has scored he holes up for several days like a gorged boa constrictor. Finally he is caught in the act of digesting the Narcotics Commissioner and destroyed with a flame thrower – the court of inquiry ruling that such means were justified in that the Buyer had lost his human citizenship and was, in consequence, a creature without species and a menace to the narcotics industry on all levels.
In Mexico the gimmick is to find a local junky with a government script whereby they are allowed a certain quantity every month. Our Man was Old Ike who had spent most of his life in the States.
‘I was travelling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In Butte, state of Montany, she gets the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chicago sniff coke used to come in form of crystals, blue crystals. So he 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 he say, “Get away or I shoot you. I got myself hid good.”’
We are getting some C or RX at this time. Shoot it in the mainline, son. You can smell it going in, clean and cold in your nose and throat then a rush of pure pleasure right through the brain lighting up those C connections. Your head shatters in white explosions. Ten minutes later you want another shot … you will walk across town for another shot. But if you can’t score for C you eat, sleep and forget about it.
This is a yen of the brain alone, a need without feeling and without body, earthbound ghost need, rancid ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning.
One morning you wake up and take a speed ball, and feel bugs under your skin. 1890 cops with black mustaches block the doors and lean in through the windows snarling their lips back from blue and bold embossed badges. Junkies march through the room singing the Moslem Funeral Song, bear the body of Bill Gains, stigmata of his needle wounds glow with a soft blue flame. Purposeful schizophrenic detectives sniff at your chamber pot.
It’s the coke horrors.… Sit back and play it cool and shoot in plenty of that GIM.
Day of the Dead: I got the chucks and ate my little Willy’s sugar skull. He cried and I had to go out for another. Walked past the cocktail lounge where they blasted the Jai Lai bookie.
In Cuernavaca or was it Taxco? Jane meets a pimp trombone player and disappears in a cloud of tea smoke. The pimp is one of these vibration and dietary artists – which is a means he degrades the female sex by forcing his chicks to swallow all this shit. He was continually enlarging his theories … he would quiz a chick and threaten to walk out if she hadn’t memorized every nuance of his latest assault on logic and the human image.
‘Now, baby. I got it here to give. But if you won’t receive it there’s just nothing I can do.’
He was a ritual tea smoker and very puritanical about junk the way some teaheads are. He claimed tea put him in touch with supra blue gravitational fields. He had ideas on every subject: what kind of underwear was healthy, when to drink water, and how to wipe your ass. He had a shiny red face and great spreading smooth nose, little red eyes that lit up when he looked at a chick and went out when he looked at anything else. His shoulders were very broad and suggested deformity. He acted as if other men did not exist, conveying his restaurant and store orders to male personnel through a female intermediary. And no Man ever invaded his blighted, secret place.
So he is putting down junk and coming on with tea. I take three drags, Jane looked at him and her flesh crystallized. I leaped up screaming, ‘I got the fear!’ and ran out of the house. Drank a beer in a little restaurant – mosaic bar and soccer scores and bullfight posters – and waited for the bus to town.
A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead.
Benway
So I am assigned to engage the services of Doctor Benway for Islam Inc.
Dr. Benway had been called in as advisor to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens are well adjusted, co-operative, honest, tolerant and above all clean. But the invoking of Benway indicates all is not well behind that hygienic façade: Benway is a manipulator and co-ordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control. I have not seen Benway since his precipitate departure from Annexia, where his assignment had been T.D. – Total Demoralization. Benway’s first act was to abolish concentration camps, mass arrest and, except under certain limited and special circumstances, the use of torture.
‘I deplore brutality,’ he said. ‘It’s not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an antihuman enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct.’
Every citizen of Annexia was required to apply for and carry on his person at all times a whole portfolio of documents. Citizens were subject to be stopped in the street at any time; and the Examiner, who might be in plain clothes, in various uniforms, often in a bathing suit or pyjamas, sometimes stark naked except for a badge pinned to his left nipple, after checking each paper, would stamp it. On subsequent inspection the citizen was required to show the properly entered stamps of the last inspection. The Examiner, when he stopped a large group, would only examine and stamp the cards of a few. The others were then subject to arrest because their cards were not properly stamped. Arrest meant ‘provisional detention’; that is, the prisoner would be released if and when his Affidavit of Explanation, properly signed and stamped, was approved by the Assistant Arbiter of Explanations. Since this official hardly ever came to his office, and the Affidavit of Explanation had to be presented in person, the explainers spent weeks and months waiting around in unheated offices with no chairs and no toilet facilities.
Documents issued in vanishing ink faded into old pawn tickets. New documents were constantly required. The citizens rushed from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet impossible deadlines.
All benches were removed from the city, all fountains turned off, all flowers and trees destroyed. Huge electric buzzers on the top of every apartment house (everyone lived in apartments) rang the quarter hour. Often the vibrations would throw people out of bed. Searchlights played over the town all night (no one was permitted to use shades, curtains, shutters or blinds).
No one ever looked at anyone else because of the strict law against importuning, with or without verbal approach, anyone for any purpose, se
xual or otherwise. All cafés and bars were closed. Liquor could only be obtained with a special permit, and the liquor so obtained could not be sold or given or in any way transferred to anyone else, and the presence of anyone else in the room was considered prima facie evidence of conspiracy to transfer liquor.
No one was permitted to bolt his door, and the police had pass keys to every room in the city. Accompanied by a mentalist they rush into someone’s quarters and start ‘looking for it.’
The mentalist guides them to whatever the man wishes to hide: a tube of vaseline, an enema, a handkerchief with come on it, a weapon, unlicensed alcohol. And they always submitted the suspect to the most humiliating search of his naked person on which they make sneering and derogatory comments. Many a latent homosexual was carried out in a straitjacket when they planted vaseline in his ass. Or they pounce on any object. A pen wiper or a shoe tree.
‘And what is this supposed to be for?’
‘It’s a pen wiper.’
‘A pen wiper, he says.’
‘I’ve heard everything now.’
‘I guess this is all we need. Come on, you.’
After a few months of this the citizens cowered in corners like neurotic cats.
Of course the Annexia police processed suspected agents, saboteurs and political deviants on an assembly line basis. As regards the interrogation of suspects, Benway has this to say:
‘While in general I avoid the use of torture – torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance – the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as The Switchboard. Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject’s teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard, to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the switchboard and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine.