Junky

by William S. Burroughs

  Moishe showed about an hour later. He was a pretty obvious fruit and strictly on the mooch. He was a man of about sixty, with a smooth, pink face and white hair.

  Matty was all over the ward, talking to everybody, asking crude, blunt questions, describing his withdrawal symptoms in detail. He never complained. I don’t think he was capable of self-pity. Bob Riordan asked him what he did to get by and Matty replied, “I’m just a dumb fucking thief.” He told a story about a drunk asleep on a subway platform bench. “I knew he had a roll in his side pocket, but every time I got within ten feet of him, he’d wake up and say, ‘What do you want?’” It was easy to see how Matty’s vigorous, intrusive emanations would wake up the lush. “So I went and found a guy I knew. Some old goof-ball bum. He sat right down by the drunk, and in twenty seconds he had it. He cut the pocket.”

  “Why didn’t you shove him back against the wall and take the money?” said Riordan in his good-natured, condescending way.

  Matty had unlimited brass and there was no uncertainty behind it. He looked completely unlike a drug addict. If a drugstore refused to sell him a needle, he would say, “Why won’t you sell it to me? Do I look like a dope fiend?” A doctor had got Matty on stuff. “The Jew bastard,” Matty said, “he used to say to me, ‘Matty, you need a little shot. There’s no color.’ But I made him wish he’d never seen me.”

  I could see a fat old Jewish doctor trying to refuse Matty a shot on credit. Characters like Matty constitute one of the hazards of pushing. They usually have money. When they don’t, they expect credit. If you refuse, they will try to strong-arm you. They won’t listen to no when they want junk.

  The cure at Lexington is not designed to keep the addicts comfortable. It starts at one-quarter of a grain of M three times a day and lasts eight days—the preparation now used is a synthetic morphine called dolophine. After eight days, you get a send-off shot and go over in “population.” There you receive barbiturates for three nights and that is the end of medication.

  For a man with a heavy habit, this is a very rough schedule. I was lucky, in that I came in sick, so the amount given in the cure was sufficient to fix me. The sicker you are and the longer you have been without junk, the smaller the amount necessary to fix you.

  When the time came for my send-off shot, I was assigned to Ward B—“Skid Row,” it was called. There was nothing wrong with the accommodations, but the inmates were a sorry-looking lot. In my section, there were a bunch of old bums with the spit running out of their mouths.

  You are allowed seven days to rest in population after medication stops. Then you have to choose a job and go to work. Lexington has a complete farm and dairy. There is a cannery to put up the fruits and vegetables raised on the farm. The inmates run a dental laboratory where they make false teeth, a radio repair service, a library. They serve as janitors, they cook and serve food, and they act as assistants to the ward attendants. So there is a wide variety of jobs to select from.

  I did not figure to stay around long enough to work. After my send-off shot began to wear off, I got sick. Just a shadow of the way I felt when I came in, but bad enough. Even with the sedative, I did not sleep that night. Next day I was worse. I couldn’t eat anything, and it was an effort for me to move around. The dolophine suspends the sickness, but when the medication stops the sickness returns. “You don’t kick your habit in the shooting gallery,” an inmate told me. “You kick it over here in population.” When the night medication stopped, I checked out still sick. On a cold windy afternoon, five of us took a cab into Lexington.

  “The thing to do is get right out of Lexington,” my companions told me. “Go right to the bus station and stay there until your bus leaves. Otherwise you’re liable to get the Blue Grass.” This law was devised to protect the doctors and druggists of Kentucky against the importunities of addicts on their way to and from the Lexington Narcotics Farm. It is also intended to discourage addicts from lingering in the town of Lexington.

  In Cincinnati, I went around to several drugstores buying one-ounce bottles of paregoric. Two ounces of paregoric will fix an addict when his habit is reduced, as mine was at that time. I drank three ounces of paregoric, followed with a little warm water. In about ten minutes I could feel the junk take hold, and the sickness was gone. I felt hungry right away and went out of the hotel to eat.

  •

  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.

  There are people in New Orleans who have never been outside the city limits. The New Orleans accent is exactly similar to the accent of Brooklyn. The French Quarter is always crowded. Tourists, servicemen, merchant seamen, gamblers, perverts, drifters, and lamsters from every State in the Union. People wander around, unrelated, purposeless, most of them looking vaguely sullen and hostile. This is a place where you enjoy yourself. Even the criminals have come here to cool off and relax.

  But a complex pattern of tensions, like the electrical mazes devised by psychologists to unhinge the nervous systems of white rats and guinea pigs, keeps the unhappy pleasure-seekers in a condition of unconsummated alertness. For one thing, New Orleans is inordinately noisy. The drivers orient themselves largely by the use of their horns, like bats. The residents are surly. The transient population is completely miscellaneous and unrelated, so that you never know what sort of behavior to expect from anybody.

  New Orleans was a strange town to me and I had no way of making a junk connection. Walking around the city, I spotted several junk neighborhoods: St. Charles and Poydras, the area around and above Lee Circle, Canal and Exchange Place. 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!”

  I didn’t see anybody around, and besides I wanted to stay off, or at least I thought I wanted to stay off.

  •

  One night, I was in Frank’s Bar off Exchange Place drinking a rum and Coke. It was an equivocal place; seamen and longshoremen, queers, dealers from the all-night poker game next door, and some characters who could not be classified. Standing next to me was a middle-aged man with a long, thin face and gray hair. I asked him if he would join me in a beer.

  He said, “I would, but unfortunately . . . unfortunately I am not in a condition to reciprocate.” Clearly a man who made his living by physical work, self-educated, a terrific bore once he has spotted you as “a man of intelligence.”

  I ordered two beers, and he went on telling me how he was accustomed to reciprocate. When the beers came, he said, “Shall we find a table where we can discuss the state of the world and the meaning of life without being disturbed?” We took our glasses to a table. I was preparing an excuse to leave. The man said, suddenly, “Now, for example, I know that you are interested in narcotics.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “I know,” he said, smiling. “I know that you are here to investigate narcotics. I’ve done a lot of work in that line myself. I’ve been up to the FBI here fifty times to tell them what I know. You know, of course, how narcotics ties right in with Communism? I shipped out with the C and A line last year. That line is Communist-­controlled. The chief engineer was one of them. I spotted him right away. He used to smoke a pipe and light it with a cigarette lighter. He used the lighter to signal.” He showed me how the engineer lighted his pipe with a cigarette lighter and covered and uncovered the lighter to signal. “Oh, he was smooth.”

  “Signal to whom?” I asked.

  “I don’t kno
w exactly. There was a plane that followed us for a while. I could hear it every time he went out to light his pipe. Let me tell you something that may save you a lot of time. The place to look for the information you want is the Frontier Hotel. The same people that run the Frontier Hotel here control the Standish Hotel in Philadelphia. They are in on narcotics, and they are connected with Communism.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous for you to talk this way? You don’t know who I am. Suppose I was on the other side.”

  “I know who I’m talking to,” he said. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be dead. Out of all the people in this bar I picked you, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, but why?”

  “There is something that tells me what to do.” He showed me a religious medal he wore around his neck. “If I didn’t carry this I would have stopped a knife or a bullet long ago.”

  “Why are you concerned about narcotics?”

  “Because I don’t like what it does to people. I had a shipmate who used it.”

  “Tell me,” I said, “exactly what is the tie-up between narcotics and Communism?”

  “You know the answer to that one a lot better than I do. I see you are trying to find out how much I know. All right. The same people are in both narcotics and Communism. Right now they control most of America. I’m a seaman. I’ve been shipping out for twenty years. Who gets the jobs over there in the NMU Hall? American white men like you and me? No. Dagos and Spiks and Niggers. Why? Because the union controls shipping, and Communists control the union.”

  “I’ll be around if you need me,” he said when I got up to leave.

  •

  In the French Quarter there are several queer bars so full every night the fags spill out on to the sidewalk. A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. Fags are ventriloquists’ dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist. The dummy sits in a queer bar nursing his beer, and uncontrollably yapping out of a rigid doll face.

  Occasionally, you find intact personalities in a queer bar, but fags set the tone of these joints, and it always brings me down to go into a queer bar. The bring-down piles up. After my first week in a new town I have had about all I can take of these joints, so my bar business goes somewhere else, generally to a bar in or near Skid Row.

  But I backslide now and then. One night, I got lobotomized drunk in Frank’s and went to a queer bar. I must have had more drinks in the queer joint, because there was a lapse of time. It was getting light outside when the bar hit one of those sudden pockets of quiet. Quiet is something that does not often happen in a queer joint. I guess most of the fags had left. I was leaning against the bar with a beer I didn’t want in front of me. The noise cleared like smoke and I saw a red-haired kid was looking straight at me and standing about three feet away.

  He didn’t come on faggish, so I said, “How you making it?” or something like that.

  He said: “Do you want to go to bed with me?”

  I said, “O.K. Let’s go.”

  As we walked out, he grabbed my bottle of beer off the bar and stuck it under his coat. Outside, it was daylight with the sun just coming up. We staggered through the French Quarter passing the beer bottle back and forth. He was leading the way in the direction of his hotel, so he said. I could feel my stomach knot up like I was about to take a shot after being off the junk a long time. I should have been more alert, of course, but I never could mix vigilance and sex. All this time he was talking on in a sexy Southern voice which was not a New Orleans voice, and in the daylight he still looked good.

  We got to a hotel and he put down some routine why he should go in first alone. I pulled some bills out of my pocket. He looked at them and said, “Better give me the ten.”

  I gave it to him. He went in the hotel and came right out.

  “No rooms there,” he said. “We’ll try the Savoy.”

  The Savoy was right across the street.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  I waited about an hour and by then it occurred to me what was wrong with the first hotel. It’d had no back or side door he could walk out of. I went back to my apartment and got my gun. I waited around the Savoy and looked for the kid all through the French Quarter. About noon, I got hungry and ate a plate of oysters with a glass of beer, and suddenly felt so tired that when I walked out of the restaurant my legs were folding under me as if someone was clipping me behind the knees.

  I took a cab home and fell across the bed without taking off my shoes. I woke up around six in the evening and went to Frank’s. After three quick beers I felt better.

  There was a man standing by the jukebox and I caught his eye several times. He looked at me with a special recognition, like one queer looks at another. He looked like one of those terra-cotta heads that you plant grass in. A peasant face, with peasant intuition, stupidity, shrewdness and malice. He couldn’t have been anything but Irish.

  The jukebox wasn’t working. I walked over and asked him what was wrong with it. He said he didn’t know. I asked him to have a drink and he ordered Coke. He told me his name was Pat. I told him I had come up recently from the Mexican border.

  He said, “I’d like to get down that way, me. Bring some stuff in from Mexico.”

  “The border is pretty hot,” I said.

  “I hope you won’t take offense at what I say,” he began, “but you look like you use stuff yourself.”

  “Sure I use.”

  “Do you want to score?” he asked. “I’m due to score in a few minutes. I’ve been trying to hustle the dough. If you buy me a cap, I can score for you.”

  I said, “O.K.”

  We walked around the corner past the NMU hall.

  “Wait here a minute,” he said, disappearing into a bar. I half-expected to get beat for my four dollars, but he was back in a few minutes. “O.K.,” he said, “I got it.”

  I asked him to come back to my apartment to take a shot. We went back to my room, and I got out my outfit that hadn’t been used in five months.

  “If you don’t have a habit, you’d better go slow with this stuff,” he cautioned me. “It’s pretty strong.”

  I measured out about two-thirds of a cap.

  “Half is plenty,” he said. “I tell you it’s strong.”

  “This will be all right,” I said. But as soon as I took the needle out of the vein, I knew it wasn’t all right. I felt a soft blow in the heart. Pat’s face began to get black around the edges, the blackness spreading to cover his face as though it were actually changing color. I could feel my eyes roll back in their sockets.

  I came to several hours later. Pat was gone. I was lying on the bed with my collar loosened. I stood up and fell to my knees. I was dizzy and my head ached. Ten dollars were missing from my watch-pocket. I guess he figured I wasn’t going to need it any more.

  Several days later I met Pat in the same bar.

  “Holy Jesus,” he said, “I thought you was dying! I loosened your collar and rubbed ice on your neck. You turned all blue. So I says, ‘Holy Jesus, this man is dying! I’m going to get out of here, me!’”

  A week later, I was hooked. I asked Pat about the possibilities of pushing in New Orleans.

  “The town is et up with pigeons,” he said. “It’s really tough.”

  •

  So I drifted along, scoring through Pat. I stopped drinking, stopped going out at night, and fell into a routine schedule: a cap of junk three times per day, and the time in between to be filled somehow. Mostly, I spent my time painting and working around the house. Manual work makes the time pass fast. Of course, it often took me a long time t
o score.

  When I first hit New Orleans, the main pusher—or “the Man,” as they say there—was a character called Yellow. Yellow was so named because his complexion was yellow and liverish-looking. He was a thin little man with a dragging limp. He operated out of a bar near the NMU hall and occasionally choked down a beer to justify sitting in the bar several hours a day. He was out on bail at the time, and when his case came to trial he drew two years.

  A period of confusion followed, during which it was difficult to find a score. Sometimes I spent six or eight hours riding around in the car with Pat, waiting and looking for different people who might be holding. Finally, Pat ran into a wholesale connection, a dollar-fifty per cap, no less than twenty. This connection was Bob Brandon, one of the few pushers I ever knew who didn’t use the stuff himself.

  Pat and I began pushing in a small way, just enough to keep up our habits. We only took care of people that Pat knew well and was sure of. Dupré was our best customer. He was a dealer in a gambling joint and always had money. But he was a hog for junk and so couldn’t keep his hand out of the till. Eventually, he lost his job.

  Don, an old neighborhood friend of Pat’s, had a city job. He inspected something, but was off half the time sick. He never had money for more than one cap, and most of the money he did have was given him by his sister. Pat told me Don had cancer.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess he’ll die soon.”

  He did. He took to his bed, vomited for a week, and died.

  “Seltzer Willy” owned a seltzer truck, and had a seltzer delivery route. This business brought him two caps a day, but he was not a very enterprising seltzer pusher. He was a thin, red-haired, mild-mannered man, the type described as harmless.

  “He’s timid,” said Pat. “Timid and stupid.”

  There were a few others who dropped by for an occasional bang. One was called Whitey—I never found out why, because he was dark—a fattish, stupid man who worked as a waiter in one of the big hotels. He figured that if he paid for one cap he was entitled to the next cap on credit. Once, after Pat turned him down, he rushed to the door in a rage and held up a nickel. “See this nickel,” he said. “You’re going to be sorry you turned me down. I’m going to call ‘the People’ on you.”