Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  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.”

  After parting company with the Army, I took a variety of jobs. You could have about any job you wanted at that time. I worked as a private detective, an exterminator, a bartender. I worked in factories and offices. I played around the edges of crime. But my hundred and fifty dollars per month was always there. I did not have to have money. It seemed a romantic extravagance to jeopardize my freedom by some token act of crime. It was at this time and under these circumstances that I came in contact with junk, became an addict, and thereby gained the motivation, the real need for money I had never had before.

  The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?

  The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.

  The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You can’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict.

  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 a 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 junky could keep himself in a constant state of kicking, he would live to a phenomenal age.

  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.

  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.

  SELECTIONS

  My first experience with junk was during the War, about 1944 or 1945. I had made the acquaintance of a man named Norton who was working in a shipyard at the time. Norton, whose real name was Morelli or something like that, had been discharged from the peacetime Army for forging a pay check, and was classified 4-F for reasons of bad character. He looked like George Raft, but was taller. Norton was trying to improve his English and achieve a smooth, affable manner. Affability, however, did not come natural to him. In repose, his expression was sullen and mean, and you knew he always had that mean look when you turned your back.

  Norton was a hard-working thief, and he did not feel right unless he stole something every day from the shipyard where he worked. A tool, some canned goods, a pair of overalls, anything at all. One day he called me up and said he had stolen a tommy gun. Could I find someone to buy it? I said, “Maybe. Bring it over.”

  The housing shortage was getting under way. I paid fifteen dollars a week for a dirty apartment that opened onto a companionway and never got any sunlight. The wallpaper was flaking off because the radiator leaked steam when there was any steam in it to leak. I had the windows sealed shut against the cold with a caulking of newspapers. The place was full of roaches and occasionally I killed a bedbug.

  I was sitting by the radiator, a little damp from the steam, when I heard Norton’s knock. I opened the door, and there he was standing in the dark hall with a big parcel wrapped in brown paper under his arm. He smiled and said, “Hello.”

  I said, “Come in, Norton, and take off your coat.”

  He unwrapped the tommy gun and we assembled it and snapped the firing pin.

  I said I would find someone to buy it.

  Norton said, “Oh, here’s something else I picked up.”

  It was a flat yellow box with five one-half grain syrettes of morphine tartrate.

  “This is just a sample,” he said, indicating the morphine. “I’ve got fifteen of these boxes at home and I can get more if you get rid of these.”

  I said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  At that time I had never used any junk and it did not occur to me to try it. I began looking for someone to buy the two items and that is how I ran into Roy and Herman.

  I knew a young hoodlum from upstate New York who was working as a short-order cook in Riker’s, “cooling off,” as he explained. I called him and said I had something to get rid of, and made an appointment to meet him in the Angle Bar on Eighth Avenue near 42nd Street.

  This bar was a meeting place for 42nd Street hustlers, a peculiar breed of four-flushing, would-be criminals. They are always looking for a “setup man,” someone to plan jobs and tell them exactly what to do. Since no “setup man” would have anything to do with people so obviously inept, unlucky, and unsuccessful, they go on looking, fabricating preposterous lies about their big scores, cooling off as dishwashers, soda jerks, waiters, occasionally rolling a drunk or a timid queer, looking, always looking, for the “setup man” with a big job who will say, “I’ve been watching you. You’re the man I need for this setup. Now listen . . .”

  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, setups 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. He was subject to sudden fluctuations in weight, like a diabetic or a sufferer from liver trouble. These changes in weight were often accompanied by an uncontrollable fit of restlessness, so that he would disappear for some days.

  The effect was uncanny. You would see him one time a fresh-faced kid. A week or so later he would turn up so thin, sallow and odd-looking, you would have to look twice to recognize him. His face was lined with suffering in which his eye
s 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.

  He slid into the booth where I was sitting and ordered a shot of whiskey. He tossed it off, put the glass down and looked at me with his head tilted a little to one side and back.

  “What’s this guy got?” he said.

  “A tommy gun and about thirty-five grains of morphine.”

  “The morphine I can get rid of right away, but the tommy gun may take a little time.”

  Two detectives walked in and leaned on the bar, talking to the bartender. Jack jerked his head in their direction. “The law. Let’s take a walk.”

  I followed him out of the bar. He walked through the door sliding sideways. “I’m taking you to someone who will want the morphine,” he said. “You want to forget this address.”

  We went down to the bottom level of the Independent Subway. Jack’s voice, talking to his invisible audience, went on and on. He had a knack of throwing his voice directly into your consciousness. No external noise drowned him out. “Give me a thirty-eight every time. Just flick back the hammer and let her go. I’ll drop anyone at five hundred feet. Don’t care what you say. My brother has two .30-caliber machine guns stashed in Iowa.”

  We got off the subway and began to walk on snow-covered sidewalks between tenements.

  “The guy owed me for a long time, see? I knew he had it but he wouldn’t pay, so I waited for him when he finished work. I had a roll of nickels. No one can hang anything on you for carrying U.S. currency. Told me he was broke. I cracked his jaw and took my money off him. Two of his friends standing there, but they kept out of it. I’d’ve switched a blade on them.”

  We were walking up tenement stairs. The stairs were made of worn black metal. We stopped in front of a narrow, metal-covered door, and Jack gave an elaborate knock inclining his head to the floor like a safecracker. The door was opened by a large, flabby, middle-aged queer, with tattooing on his forearms and even on the backs of his hands.

  “This is Joey,” Jack said, and Joey said, “Hello there.”

  Jack pulled a five-dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to Joey. “Get us a quart of Schenley’s, will you, Joey?”

  Joey put on an overcoat and went out.

  In many tenement apartments the front door opens directly into the kitchen. This was such an apartment and we were in the kitchen.

  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 faded from brown to a mottled yellow, and pancake makeup 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.

  “Who’s this?” he said. His name, I learned later, was Herman.

  “Friend of mine. He’s got some morphine he wants to get rid of.”

  Herman shrugged and turned out his hands. “I don’t think I want to bother, really.”

  “Okay,” Jack said, “we’ll sell it to someone else. Come on, Bill.”

  We went into the front room. There was a small radio, a china Buddha with a votive candle in front of it, pieces of bric-a-brac. A man was lying on a studio couch. He sat up as we entered the room and said hello and smiled pleasantly, showing discolored, brownish teeth. It was a Southern voice with the accent of East Texas.

  Jack said, “Roy, this is a friend of mine. He has some morphine he wants to sell.”

  The man sat up straighter and swung his legs off the couch. His jaw fell slackly, giving his face a vacant look. The skin of his face was smooth and brown. The cheekbones were high and he looked Oriental. His ears stuck out at right angles from his asymmetrical skull. The eyes were brown and they had a peculiar brilliance, as though points of light were shining behind them. The light in the room glinted on the points of light in his eyes like an opal.

  “How much do you have?” he asked me.

  “Seventy-five half-grain syrettes.”

  “The regular price is two dollars a grain,” he said, “but syrettes go for a little less. People want tablets. Those syrettes have too much water and you have to squeeze the stuff out and cook it down.” He paused and his face went blank: “I could go about one-fifty a grain,” he said finally.

  “I guess that will be okay,” I said.

  He asked how we could make contact and I gave him my phone number.

  Joey came back with the whiskey and we all had a drink. Herman stuck his head in from the kitchen and said to Jack, “Could I talk to you for a minute?”

  I could hear them arguing about something. Then Jack came back and Herman stayed in the kitchen. We all had a few drinks and 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 off the 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.

  A few nights after meeting Roy and Herman, I used one of the syrettes, which was my first experience with junk. A syrette is like a toothpaste tube with a needle on the end. You push a pin down through the needle; the pin punctures the seal; and the syrette is ready to shoot.

  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 the clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood.

  I dozed off and woke up with a start of fear. Next morning I vomited and felt sick until noon.

  Roy called that night.

  “About what we were discussing the other night,” he said. “I could go about four dollars per box and take five boxes now. Are you busy? I’ll come over to your place. We’ll come to some kind of agreement.”

  A few minutes later he knocked at the door. He had on a glen plaid suit and a dark, coffee-colored shirt. We said hello. He looked around blankly and said, “If you don’t mind, I’ll take one of those now.”

  I opened the box. He took out a syrette and injected it into his leg. He pulled up his pants briskly and took out twenty dollars. I put five boxes on the kitchen table.

  “I think I’ll take them out of the boxes,” he said. “Too bulky.”

  He began putting the syrettes in his coat pockets. “I don’t think they’ll perforate this way,” he said. “Listen, I’ll call you again in a day or so after I get rid of these and have some more money.” He was adjusting his hat over his asymmetrical skull. “I’ll see you.”

  Next day he was back. He shot another syrette and pulled out forty dollars. I laid out ten boxes and kept two.

  “These are for me,” I said.

  He looked at m
e, surprised. “You use it?”

  “Now and then.”

  “It’s bad stuff,” he said, shaking his head. “The worst thing that can happen to a man. We all think we can control it at first. Sometimes we don’t want to control it.” He laughed. “I’ll take all you can get at this price.”

  Next day he was back. He asked if I didn’t want to change my mind about selling the two boxes. I said no. He bought two syrettes for a dollar each, shot them both, and left. He said he had signed on for a two-month trip.

  One night, Roy and I got on the subway at Times Square. A flashily dressed man weaving slightly was walking ahead of us. Roy looked him over and said, “That’s a good fucking mooch. Let’s see where he goes.”

  The mooch got on the IRT headed for Brooklyn. We waited standing up in the space between cars until the mooch appeared to be sleeping. Then we walked into the car, and I sat down beside the mooch, opening The New York Times. The Times was Roy’s idea. He said it made me look like a businessman. The car was almost empty, and there we were, wedged up against the mooch with twenty feet of empty seats available. Roy began working over my back. The mooch kept stirring and once he woke up and looked at me with bleary annoyance. A Negro sitting opposite us smiled.

  “The shine is wise,” said Roy in my ear. “He’s O.K.”

  Roy was having trouble finding the poke. The situation was getting dangerous. I could feel sweat running down my arms.

  “Let’s get off,” I said.

  “No. This is a good mooch. He’s sitting on his overcoat and I can’t get into his pocket. When I tell you, fall up against him, and I’ll move the coat at the same time. . . . Now! . . . For Chris’ sake! That wasn’t near hard enough.”