All opiates cause constipation. The old opium smokers used to talk about a 'yen-shee baby'. 'Yen-shee' was the concentrated residue of opium that formed inside the pipe bowl after smoking. A yen-shee baby was what was produced with much travail after a long period of constipation. 'Wrap it up in a towel and it'll live, it's a yen-shee baby.'

Then the Big Hurt pushed aside all thinking and Joe could only lie hugging his cramped middle and suffer the agony that gnawed on itself, metastasised, grew like a cold malignant fetus in him. A reeking viscous sweat like cold bacon drippings filled him. The jailhouse stinks... dizzied him with nausea.

Orgasm after electric hairtrigger orgasm convulsed his groin. His entire being became the shortcircuiting terminus of a billion scraped and shrieking nerves. And then came ripping down from his intestines that glacial fecal boulder compacted by months of bowel paralysis, and through gritted teeth he cried: 'Christ! The Yenshee baby.'

He bailed out of his bunk and staggered to a rear toilet where he sat bent double for minutes or hours, he didn't know, trying to pass this bowel monster; until sudden pain flashed the darkness and he felt himself tearing in two. Blood vomited into the toilet. His sweatslick buttocks slipped off and he was on the floor, shrieks percussing his skull; and from a great distance heard Smoothbore shouting at the bars: 'MAN DOWN!'

He could be vulgar and cynical beyond belief. One day he was passing through his dressing room with two important courtiers who stopped to admire his famous silver bath. "If you can excrete enough to fill it," said Potemkin to one of them, "I will give it to you." The courtier turned to his companion, who was notorious for his voracity, and said: "How about attempting this business on a fifty-fifty basis?"