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 vour 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 Montanv, she gets the coke horors 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

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 intohis mouth ( 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 of my nose . . . ”                                                                                   ” Really , this is most distasteful ! Have you no pride ? I must tell you I fell a distict revulsion . I mean there is something ,well, rotten about you , and you smell like a compost cheap .” He put a scented handkerchief  in fornt of his face . ” I must ask you to leave this office at once .”                                                                                                                        ” I’ll we 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 dowsers 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

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 guesss you can get used to anything. Tve 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 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

“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 . Ypu 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 that using. ” Lupita says.Nonusing pushers have a contact habit and that’s one you can 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 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 anonymous 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

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 abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink 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 in broken bottles and  tin cans, neon arabesques at motels ,marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from island 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.

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 e neon. Not even the TV. And our habits build up with the drag, like cocaine d will build you up staying ahead of the C bring-down. h And the junk was running low. So there we are in this d 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 l  with when the junk runs out of you. . . . On through the w peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road and vultures over the swamp and cypress stumps. Motels with a beaverboard walls, gas heater, thin pink blankets. Itinerant short con and carny hyp men have burned – down the croakers of Texas… .in And no one in his right mind would hit a Louisiana at croaker. State Junk Law.ill Came at last to Houston where I know a druggist. I ae haven’t been there in five years but he looks up and ae makes me with one quick look and just nods and says: lie “Wait over at the counter.. . . ” So I sit down and drink a cup of coffee and after a ck while he comes and sits beside me and says, “What do you want?” it, “A quart of PG and a hundred nembies.” se He nods, “Come back in half an hour.” So when I come back he hands me a package and ire says, “That’s fifteen dollars. . . . Be careful.”

dicks,soft- spoken country sheriffs with something black and menacing in old eyes color of faded grey flannel shirt. . .                                                                                                       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 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 postcards mountains , thin air like death in the throat , river towns of Ecuador , malaria grey as junk under black Stetson , muzzle loading shotguns , vultures pecking trhough the mud street- and what hits you when you get of 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 in the cemetery in the middle of the town (every town in Sweden seems to be built around a cemetery ) , and nothing to do in the afternoon ,not a bar not a movie and I blaste 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

world,there is one Mark you cannot beat : The Mark Inside…                                                   I left the Rube standing on a corner , red brick slums to the sky , under a steady rain of soot. “Going to hit this croaker I know. Right back with that good pure drugstore M. . . No,you wait here – don’t want him to rumble you .”No matter how long Rube . goodbye kid.. Where do they go when they walk out and leave the body behind ?                                    Chicago : invisible hierarchy of decorticate wops,smell of atrophied gangsters,earthbound ghost hits you at North and Halstead,Cicero,Lincoln Park,panhendler of dreams,past invading the present,rancid magic of slot machines and roadhouses.                                   Into the interior : a vast subdivision,antennae of television to meaningless sky . In lifeproof houses they hover over the young , sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young  bring anything in,and they are not very long. ( Through the bars of East ST. Louis lies the dead frontier , riverboat days. ) Illinois and Missouri ,miasma of mound-bulding peoples , groveling worship of the Food Source , cruel and ugly festivals . dead-end horror of the Centipede God reaches from Moundville to the lunar deserts of coastal Peru. America is not a young land : It is old and dirty and evil before the settlers , before the Indians. The evil is there waiting .                                                                                                                      And always cops : smooth college-trained state cops,practiced,apologetic patter,electronic eyes weigh your car and luggage, clothes and face ;snarling big city

erosion.) But what does she care ? She does not even bother to remove the splintered glass , looking down her bloody haunch with the cold blank eyes of a meat trader. what does she care for the atom bomb, the bed bugs , the cancer rent , Friendly Finance waiting to repossess her delinquent flesh …Sweet dreams, Pantopon Rose. ”                    The real scene you pinch up some leg flesh and make a quick stab hole with a pin . Then fit the dropper over not in the holle and feed the solution slow and careful so it doesen’t squirt out the sides… When i grabbed the Rube’s thigh the flesh came up like  wax and stayed there, and a slow drop of pus oozed out the hole . And I never touched a living body cold as the Rube there in Philly…                                                                                              I decided to lop him off it meant a smother party . (This is a rural English custom designed to eleminate aged and bedfast dependents . A family so afflicted throws a smother party where the guests pile matresses and lush themselves out.) The Rube is a drag on the industry and should be led out into the skd rows of the world. (This is an african practice . Official known as ” The Leader out ” has the fuction of taking old characters out into the jungle and leaving them there .) The Rube’s attacks become an abitual condition. Cops, doormen , dogs, secretaries snarls at his approach. The blond God has fallen to untouchable vileness . Con men don’t change, they break , shatter-explosion of matter in cold interstellar space,drift away in cosmic dust , leave the empty body behind. Hustlers of the

The phisical changes were slow at first, then jumped forward in black klunks , falling trhough his slack tissue, washing away the human lines …In his place of total darkness mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps forward to snap with transparent teeth … but no organ is constant as a regards either fuction or position … sex organs sprout anywhere … rectums open , defecate and close … the entire organisme changes color and consistency in split-second adjustment …

The Rube is a social liability with his attacks as he calls them.The Mark Inside was coming up on him and that’s a rumble nobody can cool; outside Philly he jumps out to con a prowl car and the fuzz takes one look at his face and bust all of us.                                               Seventy-two hours and five sick junkies in the cell with us . Now not wishing to break out my stash in front of these hungry coolies , it takes maneuvering and laying of gold on the turkney before we are separate cell. Provident junkies , known as squirrels, keep slashes against a bust. Every time I take a shot I let  a few drops fall into my vest pocket, the lining is stiff with stuff . I had a plastic drobber in my shoe and a safety-pin stuck in my belt . You know how this pin and dropper routine is put down : ” She seized a safety pin caked with blood and rust , gouged a great hole in her leg wich seemed to be opened like an obscene , festering mouth  waiting for unspeakable congress with the dropper which she now plunged out of sight into the gaping wound. But her hideous  galvanized need ( hunger of insects in dry places) has broken the dropper off deep in the flesh of her ravaged thigh ( looking rather like a poster on soil