Your dose of literature for today

"Selling is more of a habit than using," Lupita says...

Nonusing 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.
Baby 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 col-
leagues dunking pound cake. "Most distasteful thing I
ever stand still for," he says. "Some way he make him-
self 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 cantaloupe."
"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 recharged every half hour. Sometimes he cruises the
precincts and bribes the turnkey to let him in with a
cell of junkies. It get 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 rumors -- 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) com-
plaining 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 distasteful11 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 Bows 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 Dis-
trict 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 Com-
missioner 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.

-Naked Lunch (William Seward Burroughs)

Doc Parker: "a man don't have no secrets from God and his druggist"

-Naked Lunch

[That's when you find yourself in the pharmacy to get morphines and MSTs and sedatives on a private embossed Harley Street script and Germoloids hydrocortisone hemorrhoid spray and itchyrash ointment and contact lens eyedrops and three packets of ultrathin condoms.]

The full text of Naked Lunch can be found here also with title in Cyrillic (Russian letters look like if they were made out of sharp steel would be vicious weapons) http://lib.ru/INPROZ/BERROUZ/naked.txt

Here it is with the introduction - Deposition: testimony concerning a sickness, and with the afterword, but more difficult to read layout. Columns of text are easiest on the eye when reading on a computer screen.
http://ontario.indymedia.org/twiki/bin/view/Ontario/WilliamSBurroughssNAKEDLUNCHFree

The score today

or, a chance for R&B, who was curious, to pick up some English squatting law

Court judgements in my favour 2 - the Opposition 0

So o, I am not talking about the football. Nor is this a reference to drugs. This is the endless delaying game in what is always the eventual loss in a legal battle (no, a legal squirm) for the order of possession on a squatted "illegally occupied" or "reclaimed for the community" building. I have addressed the court in possession hearings in more houses than I've ever lived in. I am constantly volunteered to do this because I wear shirts with collars and silver jewellery rather than cowrie shells and tie-dye. I don't even squat these days.

We are dealing with semi-literate hippies here so the appeal form which has been filled in on my behalf is an illegible scrawl. I address the county court judge to outline our appeal for the right to make an appeal (yes, I think that's right). Mr Edgeley and Mr... whatever... oh yeah, Peter Serber, but you might recognise him as the malung, ("can you get arrested for giving a false name?" Pete hisses too loudly "no, of course not" says Mr Mike Anderson)... and... where was I? This is all a bit sneaky, as we are appealing a decision made on Thursday, meaning there has been no time for the hearing papers to be served to the claimant's (ie. the Opposition) lawyers, meaning they are not present for the morning hearing.

The judge is convinced and decides to grant a new hearing. How long will you need? The judge offers two weeks, maximum. "Ah, four weeks..." I suggest "We have to apply for legal aid... Mr E___," I say, turning to him, sitting at the back of the room. "You recently applied for legal aid... how long did the application take?" I am expecting Mr E____ to say "Yes, um, about four or five weeks at least" or something. He starts telling the judge his life story.

A date is fixed for the last day of June. Medium-good result. Now off to the High Court after a leisurely wander through central London punctuated by stops for food and beverages. Mr E_____ smokes a joint and loses consciousness in Leicester Square so Dave Bones, no, ah, Pete Serber or Sherbert or whatever (where did that come from?) and I, Mike Anderson continue to where the Strand meets Fleet Street (where the subterranean River Fleet, completely built over in Victorian times, emptied into the Thames, leaving only street names like Anglers' Lane and Fleet Road as memories, and water can be heard rushing through certain hidden gratings) to the Royal Courts of Justice, housing the High Court, Queen's Bench division.

In county courts, the judges are "your honour". In the High Court, I check with the primly spectacled and badly needing a vicious fuck opposition lawyer (solicitor, not barrister), they are "master". The solicitor is outraged at the underhanded trick we have played on her and kidnaps my case papers to "call her sister". Whatever that means.

Master Leslie is the second most intimidating judge I have ever faced, after HH Armon-Jones of the peery-downy glasses and icy forbidding stare. A face of the British establishment, here, in a magnificent old complex of buildings which are the embodiment of the power of the British state. Earlier, we have sat in the gardens of the Inner Temple of the inns of law, another more ancient place of a similar nature. Judges can do this. Or good judges I suppose, the really intimidating ones... reduce you to a stammering wreck by the power of mind alone. None of this today. I feel, strangely, almost in my element. The master has no choice but to stay the eviction by High Court sheriffs until the appeal has been disposed of. Ha haa!

Inner Temple court (inner temple of what?)

The whole jolly crew of Mr Anderson, Mr Malung, the claimant's solicitor, and the two pleasant representatives from the claimant's company or trust (both of whom incurred the wrath of the master with their mobile phone beeping) tramp around the Royal Courts of Justice, looking for a photocopy machine. An intricately bizarre photocopy-machine bureaucracy which must date to the reign of King George II, many centuries ago, defeats us and we leave to find a photocopy shop outside.

I and the malung discuss Lao Tzu's The Art of War on the walk in the scorching sun. I am not sure we have followed all of Lao Tzu's precepts today. I have been to civil to the devious lawyer bitch. Mr Anderson and the solicitor end up going to her chambers to copy the requisite documents. The depraved Mr Anderson thinks he would be doing the world a favour by... no but anyway, the others are waiting outside.

This narrative has been interrupted by the return of Mr E____. After parting company with us in the afternoon, he slept in the sun, woke up, and immediately took the bus to Camden and gambled all his money away. Then he caught a bus back to the West End. On the bus he met an American lady lawyer who took him back to where she was staying, at the Hilton. After copious drinks, they end up in her room. However, the inevitable doesn't happen. The situation, as I understand it, is something like I've come across in neurotic, career-obsessed women like the aforementioned Mr Anderson's lawyer. At the last moment, the industrious government economist or whoever puts their head in their hands and its no! I can't do it! I still love ___! Or whatever. (Then why the fuck did you bring me to this disabled toilet and pull up your skirt and jump up on the baby nappy-changing table with your legs open? What was this all meant to demonstrate?) No, she is just lonely and Mr E____ gives her a hug and puts his shoes on.

A jolly day has been had by all. The squatters are pleased with the verdict.

(update: the Claimants have appealed to have the appeal heard at an earlier date than first agreed. The witness statement in support of the appeal uses some of the strongest language I've come across in such a document: Mr Anderson has abused the court system by not serving notice of the ex parte Monday appeal with the Claimants - not my responsibility - he is in no way authorised to represent the occupants or to address the High Court, he has no locus standi in law, etc etc.)

The property in dispute