Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays

dossier ONE

4 dossier ONEjonas MEKAS ian MACFADYEN Files Comprising: Deposition, Thomas And Charlie, High, Skip Tracer, Shamanic, Journey Of A Lost Soul, Amsterdam And A New York State Of Mind, City, White Masks, Smiling Damned, The Boulevard Of Crime, Paris Au Fils Du Temps, Paris Please Stay The Same, The Naked City, Lupita/Coatlicue, Death Candy, The Mexico Gimmick, The Final Shrug, Mexican Time, A Spectral Dimension. Deposition We’re in Paris, rue Git-le-Coeur, on the trail of Naked Lunch—looking for clues, checking out the key sites half a century down the line. Oliver frames another shot, attempting to homage a fifty-year-old photograph—but the figure in that picture, William Burroughs, has definitively quit the scene, walking away like his hero John Dillinger in Naked Lunch—“Don’t ever look back, kid . . .” (190). Still, that’s what we’re driven to do, though the London, Paris, and Tangier scenes are gone forever. The old Beat Hotel is now a smart hotel with a bidet in every suite, the Turkish toilets ripped out along with the artworks and the poems onthe walls.Whatare we looking for,and what is left to find? It appears a hopeless quest, but we have no choice, we’re hooked, and that book will never be done with us, as we will never be done with it. Check out the sources, pay calls on those few left who still remember, follow up all possible angles, then return once again to that text which is a Tantalus, seemingly forever beyond our reach. So, let the pieces H_M Ch2.indd 4 3/30/09 12:52:19 PM dossier ONE 5 fall where they may, these hunches and hints and guesses, snapshots and notes collected here in Dossiers which others may consult as they set off on their own readings, their own investigations, their spirited attempts to travel through time. This is a trail of some sort . . . and from it radiate the traces of an endless fascination. Thomas And Charlie “‘Thomas and Charlie,’ I said. / ‘What?’ / ‘That’s the name of this town. Sea level . . . ’” (14). This mysterious, oblique exchange refers to the town Tamazunchale, 220 miles north of Mexico City, pronounced “Thomas ’n’ Charlie.” But what is the significance of this name? Both “Thomas” and “Charlie” are slang expressions related to narcotics. Thomas comes from Tom Mix (signifying a fix), Tom becoming “Thomas” just as Charlie, a euphemism for cocaine (“C” for Cocaine) became “Charles” in Britain. The two words also have sexual connotations, Charlie meaning cunt, derived from Cockney rhyming slang (Charlie Hunt is “a right cunt”) while “Tom” means a prostitute, and the term was taken up by homosexuals to signify available trade through its reference to the penis (John Thomas=cock). The interlocutory “‘What?’” is a double take, pointing to the hidden significance of these two words, their multiple coded meanings encapsulating in an extraordinary way the operations of slang in narcotics parlance and sexual euphemism. High The writer Terry Wilson has made the connection between the Thomas and Charlie section of Naked Lunch and a passage in Alain Gheerbrant ’s 1953 book The Impossible Adventure: “We pressed on for several hours and Pierre and I kept our eyes on the mountain ahead which grew larger and larger. ‘Cierro Mono,’ said Catire” (185). Naked Lunch is an aberrant take on travel writing and the tale of adventure, and Burroughs’ geographical references contain secret, hip connotations. The reference to “Sea level” in the Thomas and Charlie episode designates physiological response to altitude, and immediately after providing this information, Lee takes a fix, making a correspondence—and also a demarcation—between barometer and syringe, between the equilibrium outside and inside the body, between current pressure and how “high” one is, or needs to be. Tamazunchale is high in the mountains, a place of rivers and lakes and forest, and it was an important stop for tourists driving from the U.S. border to Mexico City on the old Pan American Highway (MEX-85). Because of the hard H_M Ch2.indd 5 3/30/09 12:52:19 PM 6 ian MACFADYEN driving on the winding, two-lane road and the morning mists, drivers would often stop there, sixty-six miles from the border, before heading south to Mexico City. Lee and his partner have driven all night, and this is their stop-off point to swap driving duties and take...