Junkie, by William S. Burroughs
I was surprised by how much I loved JUNKIE, considering I disliked EXTERMINATOR! And couldn’t even finish NAKED LUNCH, Burroughs’ supposed masterpiece. I thought both of those books tried too hard to be outrageous and just ended up being ridiculous. I felt the same way about Bukowski’s FACTOTUM at times, thinking he was desperate to further the myth of his status as a dirty old man.
NAKED LUNCH reminded me of “The Aristocrats” joke. If you haven’t heard it, here’s a paraphrase: a man goes into a promoter’s office to pitch a new act. He describes a scene where blood and semen spray all over the theatre, there’s dismemberment, animal abuse, trapeze accidents, sadism, sodomy—a deliberately offensive litany of activities, supposedly performed in front of a paying audience. The promoter asks: “what do you call this act?” and the man answers “The Aristocrats!”
I like the joke a lot, but if it's stretched out long enough, it eventually gets boring. I hit the wall after about 150 pages of NAKED LUNCH. Of course, there were lots of intriguing bits buried in that book. As a long-time Sci Fi fan, I liked characters sleeping with replicas of themselves and a character’s asshole taking over his body, but most of it just seemed silly, two grade eight boys trying to gross each other out.
JUNKIE felt different. It was still extremely weird, but adult-weird, philosophically serious and often poetic. (I disliked the ending, but more about that later)
In JUNKIE, a narrator named Bill Lee describes his life as a Morphine and Heroin addict in the 1940s and early 50s. The book has the feel of personal memoir, probably because Burroughs really was a heroin addict himself.
Drug abuse produces a flattened affect in Lee, so he reports outrageous events in a very deadpan style, as if they were no big deal. An assault: “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 . . .” A man is beaten with “the faucet end” of the makeshift weapon until his brains are exposed and blood spurts with every heartbeat.
Lee isn’t the assailant in this anecdote; it’s a character named Jack. But Lee offers no judgment when he re-tells the odd story. To my mind, the pipe-with-faucet weapon is random and unwieldy; it is familiar yet repurposed in a nightmarish way. The climax of the story seems to be Jack’s girlfriend calling him “a coldblooded killer” afterwards. Jack laughs so hard he can barely get those words out. He seems to be appreciating a private joke, although it’s hard to imagine what it is. Maybe there was some brain-damaged comic juxtaposition of a cold-water supply pipe and his girlfriend’s use of the phrase “cold-blooded,” but his laughter isn’t explained, just reported: Jack “laughed until his face was purple.”
You quickly get the impression Bill is moving through a very dangerous environment, one that doesn’t respect normal physical laws like cause and effect, or chronological progression.
I think what I like most about the book is its description of drug addiction as a condition of survival, rather than euphoria. Doctors and cops are mystified by addiction and can’t believe anyone would choose the degradation and filth that defines an addict’s life. They want Lee to explain himself. He can’t put it into words, so he tells them what they want to hear “it’s a good kick.” Really, addiction has changed the addict’s body at “the cellular level,” so that Junk isn’t a choice at all, and most of the time, it isn’t even fun.
There is only one brief passage where the act of drug-taking is attached to a positive comment: “If God made anything better, he kept it for Himself.” Usually, the codeine, morphine, heroin, Benzedrine, nembies, weed or booze, merely ward off the junk sickness, “the horrors” of hallucination and wracking physical pain.
The filth and humiliation that accompanies withdrawals and “cures” is a precursor to descriptive passages in TRAINSPOTTING.
There’s certainly nothing glamorous about drug use: “the paper gave off a sickening odor of menthol. Several people nearby sniffed and smiled. I nearly gagged on the wad of paper but finally got it down. Mary selected some gone numbers and beat on the table with the expression of a masturbating idiot.”
Lee undergoes several cures, and it seems like a sensible thing to do, given the unpleasant depiction of an addict’s life. But he always gets hooked again. And it isn’t in response to any particular trauma; someone asks Lee if he wants to shoot up and he says “okay.”
It’s easy to understand the power of addiction, once it’s established, but it’s harder to understand the impulse to begin the process. Lee’s first Morphine injection is an initial “relaxing wave,” but it is immediately followed by hallucinations of a waitress carrying a skull, an intense fear of dying, then a protracted spell of vomiting.
It doesn’t seem sufficiently pleasurable to make a second injection worthwhile.
I assume that Lee and the other addicts are so profoundly disaffected in their PRE-drug lives, they can easily abandon them.
A drug-free visit to New Orleans is particularly depressing: “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 . . . 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.”
Stoned or sober, Lee's life is full of superficial social interactions without any real intimacy. Lee’s wife is never named, for example, which seems especially odd.
The characters are emotionally empty, but there is poetry in the book, itself: “The feel of junk is still there. It hits you at the corner, follows along the block, then falls away like a discouraged panhandler.” And there’s lots of acidic insight: “pushing weed looks good on paper, like fur farming, or raising frogs.”
But the wit and sarcasm are always focused outward: “Fags are ventriloquist dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist.” Lee has frequent homosexual liaisons yet still heaps abuse on “fags.” There’s little introspection.
And that’s why I dislike the ending of the book. After brilliantly debunking the notion that drug addiction is all about the “kick,” Lee is determined to continue searching for an idealized high: “Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke, Yage may be the final fix.”
It reminds me of Robert Crumb’s underground cartoon “Where it’s at,” where stoners fruitlessly search for something external to validate their lives. Hippies latch onto heroes like Bob Dylan or Timothy Leary and adopt counter-culture lifestyles like surfing or dropping acid, but none of it is “where it’s at.”
The characters just keep mumbling the worn out catch phrase.
NAKED LUNCH reminded me of “The Aristocrats” joke. If you haven’t heard it, here’s a paraphrase: a man goes into a promoter’s office to pitch a new act. He describes a scene where blood and semen spray all over the theatre, there’s dismemberment, animal abuse, trapeze accidents, sadism, sodomy—a deliberately offensive litany of activities, supposedly performed in front of a paying audience. The promoter asks: “what do you call this act?” and the man answers “The Aristocrats!”
I like the joke a lot, but if it's stretched out long enough, it eventually gets boring. I hit the wall after about 150 pages of NAKED LUNCH. Of course, there were lots of intriguing bits buried in that book. As a long-time Sci Fi fan, I liked characters sleeping with replicas of themselves and a character’s asshole taking over his body, but most of it just seemed silly, two grade eight boys trying to gross each other out.
JUNKIE felt different. It was still extremely weird, but adult-weird, philosophically serious and often poetic. (I disliked the ending, but more about that later)
In JUNKIE, a narrator named Bill Lee describes his life as a Morphine and Heroin addict in the 1940s and early 50s. The book has the feel of personal memoir, probably because Burroughs really was a heroin addict himself.
Drug abuse produces a flattened affect in Lee, so he reports outrageous events in a very deadpan style, as if they were no big deal. An assault: “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 . . .” A man is beaten with “the faucet end” of the makeshift weapon until his brains are exposed and blood spurts with every heartbeat.
Lee isn’t the assailant in this anecdote; it’s a character named Jack. But Lee offers no judgment when he re-tells the odd story. To my mind, the pipe-with-faucet weapon is random and unwieldy; it is familiar yet repurposed in a nightmarish way. The climax of the story seems to be Jack’s girlfriend calling him “a coldblooded killer” afterwards. Jack laughs so hard he can barely get those words out. He seems to be appreciating a private joke, although it’s hard to imagine what it is. Maybe there was some brain-damaged comic juxtaposition of a cold-water supply pipe and his girlfriend’s use of the phrase “cold-blooded,” but his laughter isn’t explained, just reported: Jack “laughed until his face was purple.”
You quickly get the impression Bill is moving through a very dangerous environment, one that doesn’t respect normal physical laws like cause and effect, or chronological progression.
I think what I like most about the book is its description of drug addiction as a condition of survival, rather than euphoria. Doctors and cops are mystified by addiction and can’t believe anyone would choose the degradation and filth that defines an addict’s life. They want Lee to explain himself. He can’t put it into words, so he tells them what they want to hear “it’s a good kick.” Really, addiction has changed the addict’s body at “the cellular level,” so that Junk isn’t a choice at all, and most of the time, it isn’t even fun.
There is only one brief passage where the act of drug-taking is attached to a positive comment: “If God made anything better, he kept it for Himself.” Usually, the codeine, morphine, heroin, Benzedrine, nembies, weed or booze, merely ward off the junk sickness, “the horrors” of hallucination and wracking physical pain.
The filth and humiliation that accompanies withdrawals and “cures” is a precursor to descriptive passages in TRAINSPOTTING.
There’s certainly nothing glamorous about drug use: “the paper gave off a sickening odor of menthol. Several people nearby sniffed and smiled. I nearly gagged on the wad of paper but finally got it down. Mary selected some gone numbers and beat on the table with the expression of a masturbating idiot.”
Lee undergoes several cures, and it seems like a sensible thing to do, given the unpleasant depiction of an addict’s life. But he always gets hooked again. And it isn’t in response to any particular trauma; someone asks Lee if he wants to shoot up and he says “okay.”
It’s easy to understand the power of addiction, once it’s established, but it’s harder to understand the impulse to begin the process. Lee’s first Morphine injection is an initial “relaxing wave,” but it is immediately followed by hallucinations of a waitress carrying a skull, an intense fear of dying, then a protracted spell of vomiting.
It doesn’t seem sufficiently pleasurable to make a second injection worthwhile.
I assume that Lee and the other addicts are so profoundly disaffected in their PRE-drug lives, they can easily abandon them.
A drug-free visit to New Orleans is particularly depressing: “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 . . . 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.”
Stoned or sober, Lee's life is full of superficial social interactions without any real intimacy. Lee’s wife is never named, for example, which seems especially odd.
The characters are emotionally empty, but there is poetry in the book, itself: “The feel of junk is still there. It hits you at the corner, follows along the block, then falls away like a discouraged panhandler.” And there’s lots of acidic insight: “pushing weed looks good on paper, like fur farming, or raising frogs.”
But the wit and sarcasm are always focused outward: “Fags are ventriloquist dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist.” Lee has frequent homosexual liaisons yet still heaps abuse on “fags.” There’s little introspection.
And that’s why I dislike the ending of the book. After brilliantly debunking the notion that drug addiction is all about the “kick,” Lee is determined to continue searching for an idealized high: “Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke, Yage may be the final fix.”
It reminds me of Robert Crumb’s underground cartoon “Where it’s at,” where stoners fruitlessly search for something external to validate their lives. Hippies latch onto heroes like Bob Dylan or Timothy Leary and adopt counter-culture lifestyles like surfing or dropping acid, but none of it is “where it’s at.”
The characters just keep mumbling the worn out catch phrase.
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