Junky

by William S. Burroughs

  One final point is worth noting. This only hints at the efforts Ginsberg made to promote Burroughs’ novel, at a time when few were willing. Planning to have it appear under the names of Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes (both already recognized as Beat Generation figures), Ginsberg even wrote a gossip column piece to coincide with publication, intended for David Dempsey in The New York Times—only to have Kerouac angrily refuse to lend his name to it (either out of fear of guilt-by-association with narcotics, or because of his on-off literary rivalry with Holmes). Ginsberg’s tireless support for Junky cannot be overstated.

  The last three appendices are reprinted here to complete the publishing record, since each appeared as an introductory text to the three main previous editions. The first of Carl Solomon’s two pieces, an anonymous Publisher’s Note that preceded the first edition of Junkie, is the more revealing of the two and of clear historical interest. Ginsberg’s introduction to the 1977 Penguin edition accurately describes Solomon’s involvement in the Ace edition, just one part of its very instructive and still valuable narrative of events. The account is not entirely reliable, however. Ginsberg implies, for example, that the Rio Grande Valley section was blue-penciled by Ace, when the evidence shows it was cut by Burroughs. More importantly, his claim that Burroughs wrote Junky, in effect, for Ginsberg, sending him chapters as part of their long-distance correspondence, is contradicted by all the evidence (a correction that has far-reaching implications within the larger history I have related). The alternative account of how Burroughs began the novel, given by both his biographers, is that when his oldest friend, Kells Elvins, moved to Mexico City in January 1950 he simply encouraged Burroughs to write up like a diary his past experiences as an addict, which, although it’s partial and inadequate, is what he probably did.

  But it would be wrong to end this introduction to Junky with a quibble about Ginsberg’s accuracy as an historian of its writing. He was the one who was there, and there when it mattered, making sure Burroughs’ novel got published in the first place—and besides, who can ever truly say, “Here are the facts”? This is the peculiar interest of Junky; that it began at a point when Burroughs seemed to believe he could say this, and was finished at a time when he knew that he couldn’t. If Burroughs never demystified the origins of his writing, this may be because incomplete or inaccurate accounts suited someone with things to hide (which he certainly had), but also because he doubted the value and suspected the power of claims to true knowledge. Even so, the novel itself points to the unaccountable, to that which, like the junkie identity, “escapes exact tabulation” and so remains irresistibly elusive, leading us on but always slipping away. “There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you”—Burroughs leaves us with a paradoxical key, a perverse secret, a confession perhaps, and most definitely a warning.

  Oliver Harris

  September 2002

  1 Ginsberg to A. A. Wyn, April 12, 1952 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

  2 Burroughs to Peter Matson, August 25, 1976, and Matson to Burroughs, September 10, 1976 (Matson Collection, Columbia University).

  3 Apart from those referenced in footnotes, all quotations from Burroughs’ letters are from The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945–1959 (Penguin, 1993), edited by Oliver Harris.

  4 See David W. Maurer, The Big Con: The Classic Story of the Confidence Man and the Confidence Trick (1940: London: Century, 1999).

  5 Quoted in Jill Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs (New York: Scribner, 1996).

  6 Burroughs to Ginsberg, June 15, 1952 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

  7 Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940–1956 (New York: Viking, 1995), edited by Ann Charters, 333.

  8 See David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  9 The Adding Machine (London: Calder, 1985), 2.

  10 See Caroline Jean Acker, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

  11 See William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003).

  12 Burroughs to Ginsberg, August 20, 1952 (Ginsberg Collection, Columbia University).

  13 Burroughs to Carl Solomon, October 11, 1964 (New York University).

  Prologue

  I was born in 1914 in a solid, three-story, brick house in a large Midwest city. My parents were comfortable. My father owned and ran a lumber business. The house had a lawn in front, a back yard with a garden, a fish pond and a high wooden fence all around it. I remember the lamplighter lighting the gas streetlights and the huge, black, shiny Lincoln and drives in the park on Sunday. All the props of a safe, comfortable way of life that is now gone forever. I could put down one of those nostalgic routines about the old German doctor who lived next door and the rats running around in the back yard and my aunt’s electric car and my pet toad that lived by the fish pond.

  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.”

  I was subject to hallucinations as a child. Once I woke up in the early morning light and saw little men playing in a block house I had made. I felt no fear, only a feeling of stillness and wonder. Another recurrent hallucination or nightmare concerned “animals in the wall,” and started with the delirium of a strange, undiagnosed fever that I had at the age of four or five.

  I went to a progressive school with the future solid citizens, the lawyers, doctors and businessmen of a large Midwest town. I was timid with the other children and afraid of physical violence. One aggressive little Lesbian would pull my hair whenever she saw me. I would like to shove her face in right now, but she fell off a horse and broke her neck years ago.

  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.

  I went to a private suburban high school. I was not conspicu­ously good or bad at sports, neither brilliant nor backward in studies. I had a definite blind spot for mathematics or anything mechanical. I never liked competitive team games and avoided these whenever possible. I became, in fact, a chronic malingerer. I did like fishing, hunting and hiking. I read more than was usual for an American boy of that time and place: Oscar Wilde, Anatole France, Baudelaire, even Gide. I formed a romantic attachment for another boy and we spent our Saturdays exploring old quarries, riding around on bicycles and fishing in ponds and rivers.

  At this time, I was greatly impressed by an autobiography of a burglar, called You Can’t Win. The author claimed to have spent a good part of his life in jail. It sounded good to me compared with the dullness of a Midwest suburb where all contact with life was shut out. I saw my friend as an ally, a partner in crime. We found an abandoned factory and broke all the windows and stole a chisel. We were caught, and our fathers had to pay the damages. After this my friend “packed me in” because the relationship was endangering his standing with the group. I saw there was no compromise possible with the group, the others, and I found myself a good deal alone.

  The environment was empty, the antagonist hidden, and I drifted into solo adventures. My criminal acts were gestures, unprofitable and for the most
part unpunished. I would break into houses and walk around without taking anything. As a matter of fact, I had no need for money. Sometimes I would drive around in the country with a .22 rifle, shooting chickens. I made the roads unsafe with reckless driving until an accident, from which I emerged miraculously and portentously unscratched, scared me into normal caution.

  I went to one of the Big Three universities, where I majored in English literature for lack of interest in any other subject. I hated the University and I hated the town it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The University was a fake English set-up taken over by the graduates of fake English public schools. I was lonely. I knew no one, and strangers were regarded with distaste by the closed corporation of the desirables.

  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.

  When I graduated without honors, I had one hundred fifty dollars per month in trust. That was in the depression and there were no jobs and I couldn’t think of any job I wanted, in any case. I drifted around Europe for a year or so. Remnants of the postwar decay lingered in Europe. U.S. dollars could buy a good percentage of the inhabitants of Austria, male or female. That was in 1936, and the Nazis were closing in fast.

  I went back to the States. With my trust fund I could live without working or hustling. I was still cut off from life as I had been in the Midwest suburb. I fooled around taking graduate courses in psychology and Jiu-jitsu lessons. I decided to undergo psychoanalysis, and continued with it for three years. Analysis removed inhibitions and anxiety so that I could live the way I wanted to live. Much of my progress in analysis was accomplished in spite of my analyst who did not like my “orientation,” as he called it. He finally abandoned analytic objectivity and put down an out-and-out con. I was more pleased with the results than he was.

  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 don’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 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.

  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.

  •

  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 per 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 “set-up man,” someone to plan jobs and tell them exactly what to do. Since no “set-up 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 “set-up man” with a big job who will say, “I’ve been watching you. You’re the man I need for this set-up. 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, 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. 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.