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Junky

Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and peddling heroin and other drugs in the 1950s into a work that reads like a field report from the underworld of post-war America. The Burroughs-like protagonist of the novel, Bill Lee, see-saws between periods of addiction and rehab, using a panoply of substances including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, paregoric (a weak tincture of opium) and goof balls (barbiturate), amongst others.

Author: William S. Burroughs
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Audiobook: (FULL)Junky By William S. Burroughs Narrated by Andrew Garman, Mark Nelson, T. Ryder Smith - YouTube

current timestamp of audio book: 05:56:00

Resources

Thoughts

Like most people I've lost some friends to Junk. This is a novel that opens up the belly of the beast and peers inside at all its parasitic wonders. On the streets, the hotel rooms, dingy apartments, prison cells, and most notably inside the mind of the Junky.

Highlights

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Actually my earliest memories are colored by a fear of nightmares. I was afraid to be alone, and afraid of the dark, and afraid to go to sleep because of dreams where a supernatural horror seemed always on the point of taking shape. I was afraid some day the dream would still be there when I woke up. I recall hearing a maid talk about opium and how smoking opium brings sweet dreams, and I said: “I will smoke opium when I grow up.” 🔗

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When I was about seven my parents decided to move to the suburbs “to get away from people.” They bought a large house with grounds and woods and a fish pond where there were squirrels instead of rats. They lived there in a comfortable capsule, with a beautiful garden and cut off from contact with the life of the city. 🔗

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By accident I met some rich homosexuals of the international queer set who cruise around the world, bumping into each other in queer joints from New York to Cairo. I saw a way of life, a vocabulary, references, a whole symbol system, as the sociologists say. But these people were jerks for the most part and, after an initial period of fascination, I cooled off on the set-up. 🔗

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After being rejected on physical grounds from five officer-training programs, I was drafted into the Army and certified fit for unlimited service. I decided I was not going to like the Army and copped out on my nut-house record—I’d once got on a Van Gogh kick and cut off a finger joint to impress someone who interested me at the time. The nut-house doctors had never heard of Van Gogh. They put me down for schizophrenia, adding paranoid type to explain the upsetting fact that I knew where I was and who was President of the U.S. When the Army saw that diagnosis they discharged me with the notation, “This man is never to be recalled or reclassified.” 🔗

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You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. 🔗

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I have never regretted my experience with drugs. I think I am in better health now as a result of using junk at intervals than I would be if I had never been an addict. When you stop growing you start dying. An addict never stops growing. Most users periodically kick the habit, which involves shrinking of the organism and replacement of the junk-dependent cells A user is in continual state of shrinking and growing in his daily cycle of shot-need for shot completed.

Most addicts look younger than they are. Scientists recently experimented with a worm that they were able to shrink by withholding food. By periodically shrinking the worm so that it was in continual growth, the worm’s life was prolonged indefinitely. Perhaps if a junkie could keep himself in a constant state of kicking, he would live to a phenomenal age 🔗

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Junk is a cellular equation that teaches the user facts of general validity. I have learned a great deal from using junk: I have seen life measured out in eyedroppers of morphine solution. I experienced the agonizing deprivation of junk sickness, and the pleasure of relief when junk-thirsty cells drank from the needle. Perhaps all pleasure is relief. I have learned the cellular stoicism that junk teaches the user. I have seen a cell full of sick junkies silent and immobile in separate misery. They knew the pointlessness of complaining or moving. They knew that basically no one can help anyone else. There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you. 🔗

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I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life. 🔗

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Jack—through whom I met Roy and Herman—was not one of these lost sheep looking for the shepherd with a diamond ring and a gun in the shoulder holster and the hard, confident voice with overtones of connections, fixes, set-ups that would make a stickup sound easy and sure of success. Jack was very successful from time to time and would turn up in new clothes and even new cars. He was also an inveterate liar who seemed to lie more for himself than for any visible audience. He had a clean-cut, healthy country face, but there was something curiously diseased about him. 🔗

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His face was lined with suffering in which his eyes did not participate. It was a suffering of his cells alone. He himself—the conscious ego that looked out of the glazed, alert-calm hoodlum eyes—would have nothing to do with this suffering of his rejected other self, a suffering of the nervous system, of flesh and viscera and cells. 🔗

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After Joey went out I noticed another man who was standing there looking at me. Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed out from his large brown eyes like some sort of television broadcast. The effect was almost like a physical impact. The man was small and very thin, his neck loose in the collar of his shirt. His complexion was fading from brown to a mottled yellow, and pancake make-up had been heavily applied in an attempt to conceal a skin eruption. His mouth was drawn down at the corners in a grimace of petulant annoyance. 🔗

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Jack began telling a story.
“My partner was going through the joint. The guy was sleeping, and I was standing over him with a three-foot length of pipe I found in the bathroom. The pipe had a faucet on the end of it, see? All of a sudden he comes up and jumps straight out of bed, running. I let him have it with the faucet end, and he goes on running right out into the other room, the blood spurting out of his head ten feet every time his heart beat.” He made a pumping motion with his hand. “You could see the brain there and the blood coming out of it.” Jack began to laugh uncontrollably. “My girl was waiting out in the car. She called me—ha-ha-ha!—she called me—ha-ha-ha!—a cold-blooded killer.”
He laughed until his face was purple. 🔗

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Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie: A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in a clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood. 🔗

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Subway Mike had a large, pale face and long teeth. He looked like some specialized kind of underground animal that preys on the animals of the surface. He was a skillful lush-worker, but he had no front. Any cop would do a double-take at sight of him, and he was well known to the subway squad. So Mike spent at least half of his time on the Island doing the five-twenty-nine for jostling. 🔗

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The boys sat there silent and gloomy under the fluorescent lights. They were all afraid of Whitey, all except Roy. Roy sipped his beer grimly. His eyes shone with their peculiar phosphorescence. His long asymmetrical body was draped against the bar. He didn’t look at Whitey, but at the opposite wall where the booths were located. Once he said to me, “He’s no more drunk than I am. He’s just thirsty.” 🔗

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I looked around. The bric-a-brac had gone. The place looked like a chop suey joint. There were black and red lacquered tables scattered around, black curtains covered the window. A colored wheel had been painted on the ceiling with little squares and triangles of different colors giving a mosaic effect.
“Jack did that,” Mary said, pointing to the wheel. “You should have seen him. He stretched a board between two ladders and lay down on it. Paint kept dripping into his face. He gets a kick out of doing things like that. We get some frantic kicks out of that wheel when we’re high. We lay on our backs and dig the wheel and pretty soon it begins to spin. The longer you watch it, the faster it spins.”
This wheel had the nightmarish vulgarity of Aztec mosaics, the bloody, vulgar nightmare, the heart throbbing in the morning sun, the garish pinks and blues of souvenir ashtrays, postcards and calendars. The walls were painted black and there was a Chinese character in red lacquer on one wall. 🔗

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There was something boneless about her, like a deep-sea creature. Her eyes were cold fish eyes that looked at you through a viscous medium she carried about with her. I could see those eyes in a shapeless, protoplasmic mass undulating over the dark sea floor. 🔗

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Tea heads are not like junkies. A junkie hands you the money, takes his junk and cuts. But tea heads don’t do things that way. They expect the peddler to light them up and sit around talking for half an hour to sell two dollars’ worth of weed. If you come right to the point, they say you are a “bring down.” In fact, a peddler should not come right out and say he is a peddler. No, he just scores for a few good “cats” and “chicks” because he is viperish. Everyone knows that he himself is the connection, but it is bad form to say so. God knows why. To me, tea heads are unfathomable. 🔗

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As a habit takes hold, other interests lose importance to the user. Life telescopes down to junk, one fix and looking forward to the next, “stashes” and “scripts,” “spikes” and “droppers.” The addict himself often feels that he is leading a normal life and that junk is incidental. He does not realize that he is just going through the motions in his non-junk activities. It is not until his supply is cut off that he realizes what junk means to him. 🔗

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Of course, junkies don’t as a rule die from the withdrawal of junk. But in a very literal sense, kicking a habit involves the death of junk-dependent cells and their replacement with cells that do not need junk. 🔗

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Once, in Texas, I kicked a habit on weed, a pint of paregoric and a few Louis Armstrong records. 🔗

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Almost worse than the sickness is the depression that goes with it. One afternoon, I closed my eyes and saw New York in ruins. Huge centipedes and scorpions crawled in and out of empty bars and cafeterias and drugstores on Forty-second Street. Weeds were growing up through cracks and holes in the pavement. There was no one in sight. 🔗

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This is junk territory. Junk haunts the cafeteria, roams up and down the block, sometimes half-crossing Broadway to rest on one of the island benches. A ghost in daylight on a crowded street. 🔗

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The hipster-bebop junkies never showed at 103rd Street. The 103rd Street boys were all oldtimers—thin, sallow faces; bitter, twisted mouths; stiff-fingered, stylized gestures. (There is a junk gesture that marks the junkie like the limp wrist marks the fag: the hand swings out from the elbow stiff-fingered, palm up.) They were of various nationalities and physical types, but they all looked alike somehow. They all looked like junk. There was Irish, George the Greek, Pantopon Rose, Louie the Bellhop, Eric the Fag, the Beagle, the Sailor, and Joe the Mex. Several of them are dead now, others are doing time. 🔗

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the feel of junk is still there. It hits you at the corner, follows you along the block, then falls away like a discouraged panhandler as you walk on. 🔗

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The Fag was a brilliantly successful lush-worker. His scores were fabulous. He was the man who gets to a lush first, never the man who arrives on the scene when the lush is lying there with his pockets turned inside out. A sleeping lush—known as a “flop” in the trade—attracts a hierarchy of scavengers. First come the top lush-workers like the Fag, guided by a special radar. They only want cash, good rings, and watches. Then come the punks who will steal anything. They take the hat, shoes, and belt. Finally, brazen, clumsy thieves will try to pull the lush’s overcoat or jacket off him.

The Fag was always first on a good lush. One time he scored for a thousand dollars at the 103rd Street Station. Often his scores ran into the hundreds. If the lush woke up, he would simper and feel the man’s thigh as though his intentions were sexual. From this angle he got this moniker.

He always dressed well, usually in tweed sport coats and gray flannels. A European charm of manner and a slight Scandinavian accent completed his front. No one could have looked less like a lush-roller. He always worked alone. His luck was good and he was determined to avoid contamination. Sometimes, contact with the lucky can change a man’s run of bad luck, but generally it works out the other way. Junkies are an envious lot. 103rd Street envied the Fag his scores. But everyone had to admit he was a right guy, and always good for a small touch. 🔗

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The American upper-middle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. Gains went further. He was not merely negative. He was positively invisible; a vague respectable presence. There is a certain kind of ghost that can only materialize with the aid of a sheet or other piece of cloth to give it outline. Gains was like that. He materialized in someone else’s overcoat. 🔗

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Gains was a mere parish priest in the hierarchy of junk. He would speak of the higher-ups in a voice of sepulchral awe. “The connections say . . .” 🔗

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Doolie sick was an unnerving sight. The envelope of personality was gone, dissolved by his junk-hungry cells. Viscera and cells, galvanized into a loathsome insect-like activity, seemed on the point of breaking through the surface. His face was blurred, unrecognizable, at the same time shrunken and tumescent. 🔗

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Eventually, I got to Texas and stayed off junk for about four months. Then I went to New Orleans. New Orleans presents a stratified series of ruins. Along Bourbon Street are ruins of the 1920s. Down where the French Quarter blends into Skid Row are ruins of an earlier stratum: chili joints, decaying hotels, oldtime saloons with mahogany bars, spittoons, and crystal chandeliers. The ruins of 1900. 🔗

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I don’t spot junk neighborhoods by the way they look, but by the feel, somewhat the same process by which a dowser locates hidden water. I am walking along and suddenly the junk in my cells moves and twitches like the dowser’s wand: “Junk here!” 🔗

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The man with the pipe looked at me. “We want it all,” he said. His eyes did not want anything very much. He was standing under the light. His face had not only aged, it had decayed. He had the look of a man suffering from a fatal illness. 🔗

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A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for nonjunk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait. 🔗

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I lay on the narrow wood bench, twisting from one side to the other. My body was raw, twitching, tumescent, the junk-frozen flesh in agonizing thaw. I turned over on my stomach and one leg slipped off the bench. I pitched forward and the rounded edge of the bench, polished smooth by the friction of cloth, slid along my crotch. There was a sudden rush of blood to the genitals at the slippery contact. Sparks exploded behind my eyes; my legs twitched—the orgasm of a hanged man when the neck snaps. 🔗

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It is possible to detach yourself from most pain—injury to teeth, eyes, and genitals present special difficulties—so that the pain is experienced as neutral excitation. From junk sickness there seems to be no escape. Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junk time and junk metabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness any more than you can escape from junk kick after a shot. 🔗

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Junk is not a “good kick.” The point of junk to a user is that it forms the habit. No one knows what junk is until he is junk sick. 🔗

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There was a thin, pale, little man with bloodless, almost transparent, flesh. He looked like a cold and enfeebled lizard. This character complained of nerves and spent most of the day wandering up and down the halls, saying, “Lord, Lord, I don’t even feel like a human.” He did not have the concentration of energy necessary to hold himself together and his organism was always on the point of disintegrating into its component parts. 🔗

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I looked at him a long three seconds before I recognized Dupré. He looked older and younger. The deadness had gone from his eyes and he was twenty pounds thinner. His face twitched at intervals like dead matter coming alive, still jerky and mechanical. When he was getting plenty of junk, Dupré looked anonymous and dead, so you could not pick him out of a crowd or recognize him at a distance. Now, his image was clear and sharp. If you walked fast down a crowded street and passed Dupré, his face would be forced on your memory—like in the card trick where the operator fans the cards rapidly, saying, “Take a card, any card,” as he forces a certain card into your hand. 🔗

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Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move in. Whatever it is—orgones, life force—that we all have to score for all the time, there is not much of it in the Valley. Your food rots before you can get it home. Milk sours before you can finish the meal. The Valley is a place where the new anti-life force is breaking through.
Death hangs over the Valley like an invisible smog. The place exerts a curious magnetism on the moribund. The dying cell gravitates to the Valley: 🔗

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He was not sick at that time, but his cells were looking for death 🔗

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All the worst features of America have drained down to the Valley and concentrated there. In the whole area, there is not one good restaurant. The food situation could only be tolerated by people who do not taste what they eat. In the Valley, restaurants are not operated by people who are cookers and purveyors of food. They are opened by somebody who decides that “people always eat” so a restaurant is a “good deal.” His place will have a glass front so people can see in, and chromium fixtures. The food is bad U.S. restaurant food. So there he sits in his restaurant and looks at his customers with puzzled, resentful eyes. He didn’t much want to run a restaurant anyway. Now he isn’t even making money. 🔗

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The Valley is like an honest dice table where the players do not have the vitality to influence the dice and they win or lose by pure chance. You never hear anyone say, “It had to happen that way,” or when they do say it they are talking about a death. An event that “had to happen that way” may be good or bad, but there it is, and you cannot regret it or rehash it. Since everything that happens in the Valley—except death—happens by chance, the inhabitants are always tampering with the past like the two-dollar bettor on the return train from the track: “I should have hung on to that hundred acres on the lower lift; I should have took up them oil leases; I should have planted cotton instead of tomatoes.” A nasal whine goes up from the Valley, a vast muttering of banal regret and despair. 🔗

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As the geologist looking for oil is guided by certain outcrop-pings of rock, so certain signs indicate the near presence of junk. Junk is often found adjacent to ambiguous or transitional districts: East Fourteenth near Third in New York; Poydras and St. Charles in New Orleans; San Juan Létran in Mexico City. Stores selling artificial limbs, wig-makers, dental mechanics, loft manufacturers of perfumes, pomades, novelties, essential oils. A point where dubious business enterprise touches Skid Row. 🔗

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There is a type person occasionally seen in these neighborhoods who has connections with junk, though he is neither a user nor a seller. But when you see him the dowser wand twitches. Junk is close. His place of origin is the Near East, probably Egypt. He has a large straight nose. His lips are thin and purple-blue like the lips of a penis. The skin is tight and smooth over his face. He is basically obscene beyond any possible vile act or practice. He has the mark of a certain trade or occupation that no longer exists. If junk were gone from the earth, there might still be junkies standing around in junk neighborhoods feeling the lack, vague and persistent, a pale ghost of junk sickness.
So this man walks around in the places where he once exercised his obsolete and unthinkable trade. But he is unperturbed. His eyes are black with an insect’s unseeing calm. He looks as if he nourished himself on honey and Levantine syrups that he sucks up through a sort of proboscis.
What is his lost trade? Definitely of a servant class and something to do with the dead, though he is not an embalmer. Perhaps he stores something in his body—a substance to prolong life—of which he is periodically milked by his masters. He is as specialized as an insect, for the performance of some inconceivably vile function. 🔗

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Why does an addict get a new habit so much quicker than a junk virgin, even after the addict has been clean for years? I do not accept the theory that junk is lurking in the body all that time— the spine is where it supposedly holes up—and I disagree with all psychological answers. I think the use of junk causes permanent cellular alteration. Once a junkie, always a junkie. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit. 🔗

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The scene was unreal and flat and pointless, as though I had forced my way into someone else’s dream, the drunk wandering out on to the stage. 🔗

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I got drunk on the fifty pesos. About nine that night, I ran out of money and went back to my apartment. I lay down and tried to sleep. When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and nose eaten away by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it. 🔗

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I had the shakes bad, and on top of that I was junk sick! “How long since I’ve had a shot?” I asked myself. I couldn’t remember. I began ransacking the apartment for junk. Some time before, I had stashed a piece of hop in a hole in one corner of the room. The hop had slid under the floorboards, out of reach. I had made several abortive attempts to recover it.
“I’ll get it this time,” I said grimly. With shaking hands, I made a hook out of a coat-hanger and began fishing for the hop. The sweat ran down my nose. I skinned my hands on the jagged wood edges of the hole. “If I can’t get to it one way, I will another,” I said grimly, and began looking for the saw.
I couldn’t find it. I rushed from one room to the other, throwing things around and emptying drawers on the floor in a mounting frenzy. Sobbing with rage, I tried to rip the boards up with my hands. Finally, I gave up and lay on the floor panting and whimpering.
I remembered there was some dionin in the medicine chest. I got up to look. Only one tablet left. The tablet cooked up milky and I was afraid to shoot it in the vein. A sudden involuntary jerk of my hand pulled the needle out of my arm and the shot sprayed over my skin. I sat there looking at my arm. 🔗

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I went back to bed. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t read. I lay there looking at the ceiling, with the cellular stoicism that junk bestows on the user. 🔗

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At that time, the G.I. students patronized Lola’s during the daytime and the Ship Ahoy at night. Lola’s was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer and soda joint. There was a boxful of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube metal stools, covered in yellow glazed leather, ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made a horrible screeching noise when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither past nor future in Lola’s. The place was a waiting room. 🔗

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I was sitting in Lola’s reading the papers. After a while I put the paper down and looked around. At the next table somebody was talking about lobotomy. “They sever the nerves.” At another table two young men were trying to make time with some Mexican girls. “Mi amigo es muy, muy . . .” He was looking for a word. The girls giggled. The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic inanity, random events in a dying universe where everything is exactly what it appears to be, and no other relation than juxtaposition is possible. 🔗

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“You wouldn’t want a shot, then?” Old Ike was smiling.
“Well . . .” I felt a touch of the old excitement like meeting someone you used to go to bed with and suddenly the excitement is there and you both know that you are going to go to bed again. 🔗

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I know from my own experience that telepathy is a fact. I have no interest in proving telepathy or anything to anybody. I do want usable knowledge of telepathy. What I look for in any relationship is contact on the nonverbal level of intuition and feeling, that is, telepathic contact. 🔗

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Possibly all pleasure is basically relief from a condition of need, or tension. Junk is the medium in which the junk-dependent cells live. When junk is cut off junk cells die, and excess histamine is produced to carry away the dead cells. The function of allergic sneezing, running at the nose and eyes, vomiting and diarrhea, is to get rid of something. During addiction, junk is a biologic necessity, like food, water or sex. There is no other substance that becomes in this way a part of the biologic rhythm of the body. When you are junk sick you dream about junk. A curious fact about junk dreams is that something always happens to prevent you from getting a shot. The cops rush in, the needle stops up, the dropper breaks. Anyway, you never get it. I have talked to other users, and I have never known anyone who ever got fixed in a dream. Junk seems to displace the sex drive. When you are on junk the sex drive virtually disappears. When you start to kick you experience sex feelings of adolescent intensity, often spontaneous orgasms. 🔗

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Perhaps the reason for the short life of the American business man is that he experiences no cycle of shrinking and growth. He does not exercise, he is never hungry. His life is a one-way process. When his organism reaches maturity it can only start dying. 🔗

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Opium is formed in the unripe seed pods of the poppy plant. Its function is to protect the seeds from drying out until the plant is ready to die and the seeds are mature. Junk continues to function in the human organism as it did in the seed pod of the poppy. It protects and cushions the body like a warm blanket while death grows to maturity inside. When a junkie is really loaded with junk he looks dead. Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.
Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life. 🔗

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APPENDIX 1 🔗

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Junk needs a host before it can take on its special junk qualities, because junk is a parasite that can live only in the blood of a user. 🔗