Meet Me in Sargasso

(continuation of Naked Lunch)

and start occluding…

I can feel the shivers closing in, vaulting through virus variations like old-time kids playing hopscotch on the streets, picking up their mumbly-peg shurikens like dice, so they can toss the bones at evil strangers and spread the sickness far and wide, laughing and screaming all the while like Edvard Munch paintings come to life.

In the Zone these days, it’s best not to shiver without a mask on. You don’t want the prying eyes of those fussy-bucket samaritans to call the feds on you before you’ve scored whatever you Need to take the shivers away.

In my case, my mask was an old, gnarly tampon pad the color of dried vomit stretched beyond its limits over one ear and paperclipped in place on the other. I could barely see out of my smudged and scratched glasses, but that didn’t matter because the shivers had turned into deep contractions in my gut as I felt the Need bloom inside like an oriental sun.

This new junk on the streets was so strong it would pop your eyeballs out when you were feeling the high and then you’d be shivering and contracting as you felt it eke out of your system like some horrible, borrible partner in crime.

It was a crime: the Need. If you’ve never felt its pull, you didn’t belong in the Zone.

I ran down the alley and leapt over a construction barrier and almost ended up in the lap of old homeless geek named Sal, his face covered in bandages, scooping peanut butter out of a jar with his fingers.

His crib was made out of a shopping cart with a torn tarp over the back that somehow incorporated a rotting pink chaise lounge and a green sleeping bag, and he was wrapped in a dirty gray blanket that made him look like a deranged sultan.

I know street people, and Sal was a real asshole, but he wasn’t a mean asshole if you get my drift. He clutched the jar of nut butter tightly to himself and said, “Mine!”

“As it were indeed,” I mumbled as I passed Sal and made a beeline towards the alleyway downtown where my supplier hung, a chink named the Bluebonnet Kid (he got that moniker shaking down tourists wanting to go on wildflower tours in the spring, way back when the weather was predictable enough for that to happen).

Dr. Benway used the Bluebonnet Kid on those rare occasions when he visited Austin, and he kept him supplied with the best junk in town.

The Need was pulling at me now like a metal clamp on my ball sack. I had to stop for a moment and try to get a breath. I peeled away the tampon mask from one side of my mouth, and wouldn’t you know it that’s the precise moment when the heat showed up, lights and sirens blaring.

“Down on your knees! Hands behind your head!”

I took off as fast as my nubs would carry me, bullets nicking at my heels.

The world around me took on the visage of rotten ectoplasm. But I had an advantage: I could feel out both the heat and junk like a submarine with top-notch sonar. So I squirreled under prickly hedges and somehow got through a partially boarded-up window of a condemned building silently enough until I could hear the heat departing the scene.

Then I diverted around a couple more alleyways until, like dawn breaking over a bloody battlefield, I could see the Bluebonnet Kid, resting on a brick stairway playing “And I Love Her” on his harmonica.

So I stocked up on Benway’s latest, tamped down my Need enough to get a move on, and started towards the Western Lands.