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...The old mother is having an operation, and her daughter move right in to see the old gash receive proper service. Strange visitors, presumably relatives... One of them wears as glasses those gad- gets jewelers screw into their eyes to examine stones. ...Probably a diamond-cutter on the skids... The man who loused up the Throckmorton Diamond and was drummed out of the industry.... All these jewelers standing around the Diamond in their frock coats, wait- ing on The Man. An error of one thousandth of an inch ruins the rock complete and they have to import this character special from Amsterdam to do the job. ...So he reels in dead drunk with a huge air hammer and pounds the diamond to dust.... I don't check these citizens.... Dope peddlers from Aleppo?... Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Il- legal diamond buyers from Johannesburg?... Slave traders from Somaliland? Collaborators at the very least... Continual dreams of junk: I am looking for a poppy field.... Moonshiners in black Stetsons direct me to a Near East cafe.... One of the waiters is a connection for Yugoslav opium.... Buy a packet of heroin from a Malay Lesbian in white belted trenchcoat.... I cop the paper in Tibetan section of a museum. She keeps trying to steal it back. ...I am looking for a place to fix.... The critical point of withdrawal is not the early phase of acute sickness, but the final step free from the medium of junk....There is a nightmare interlude of cellular panic, life suspended between two ways of being.... At this point the longing for junk concen- trates in a last, all-out yen, and seems to gain a dream power: circumstances put junk in your way.... You meet an old-time Schmecker, a larcenous hospital at- tendant, a writing croaker.... A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper, adolescent- nordic-sun-tan slacks, sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted and tucked in the shirt. (Ash-brown is a color like grey under brown skin. You sometimes find it in mixed Negro and white stock, the mixture did not come of and the colors separated out like oil on water.... ) The Guard is a sharp dresser, since he has nothing to do and saves all his pay to buy fine clothes and changes three times a day in front of an enormous mag- nifying mirror. |
