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Artist Statement for Atanas Lyapchev
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p.4
Rube flips in the end, running through empty automats
and subway stations, screaming: 'Come back, kid!!
Come back!l' and follows his boy right into the East
River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic
of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze
with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded Hat to
avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts."
And the fruit is thinking: "What a character!! Wait
till I tell the boys in Clark's about this one." He's a char-
acter collector, would stand still for Joe Gould's seagull
act. So I put it on him for a sawski and make a meet to
sell him some "pod" as he calls it, thinking, "I'll catnip
the jerk." ( Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it
burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or unin-
structed. )
"Well," I said, tapping my arm, "duty calls. As one
judge said to another: 'Be just and if you can't be just,
be arbitrary.' "
I cut into the automat and there is Bill Gains huddled
in someone else's overcoat looking like a 1910 banker
with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous,
dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over
the dirt.
I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and
Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times,
spectral janitors, grey as ashes, phantom porters sweep-
ing out dusty halls with a slow old man's hand, cough-
ing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic
fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old
madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show
sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk,
patient and cautious and slow, dropped into their blood-
less hands a few hours of warmth.
I made the round with him once for kicks. You know
how old people lose all shame about eating, and it
makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the
same about junk. They gibber and squeal at sight of it.
The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles
and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook
up, dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect any
moment a great blob of protoplasm will Hop right out
and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it.
"Well, my boys will be like that one day," I thought
philosophically. "Isn't life peculiar?"
So back downtown by the Sheridan Square Station
in case the dick is lurking in a broom closet.
Like I say it couldn't last. I knew they were out there
powowing and making their evil fuzz magic, putting
dolls of me in Leavenworth. "No use sticking needles in
that one, Mike."
I hear they got Chapin with a doll. This old eunuch
dick just sat in the precinct basement hanging a doll of
him day and night, year in year out. And when Chapin
hanged in Connecticut, they find this old creep with his
neck broken.
"He fell downstairs," they say. You know the old cop
bullshit.
Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and
amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by
radar. "Not this street, the next, right... now left. Now
right again," and there he is, toothless old woman face
and cancelled eyes.
William S. Burroughs "Naked Lunch"
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