Cain's Book Quotes

“It provides the police with something to do, and as junkies and potheads are relatively easy to apprehend because they have to take so many chances to get hold of their drugs, a heroic police can make spectacular arrests, lawyers can do a brisk business, judges can make speeches, the big pedlars can make a fortune, the tabloids can sell millions of copies. John Citizen can sit back feeling exonerated and watch evil get its deserts. That's the junk scene, man. Everyone gets something out of it except the junkie. If he's lucky he can creep round the corner and get a fix. But it wasn't the junk that made him creep. ”
― Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book

“It occurred to me often that to be a user in New York was to lay oneself open to a whole system of threats, not only legal; for my mind always came back as I looked down at the little heap of whitish powder to wonder what an analyst would find there. The horse is cut with all manner of adulterous powders, until, at the average user's end, there remains 3% heroin. You can usually count on 3%. But there are times when codeine or even a barbiturate is substituted for the real thing. . . so long as they stun you, they calculate. And so you look to cop again, at once, and so it goes on. To administer an overdose a pusher has only substantially to raise the percentage of heroin in what he gives you. When you turn blue your friends try to bring you round and if they cannot they discuss how to have your body discovered elsewhere, away from their pad so as not to bring the heat on them. An occasional corpse is found in a parking lot.”
― Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book

“For a long time I have suspected there is no way out. I can do nothing I am not. I have been living destructively towards the writer in me for some time, guiltily conscious of doing so all along”
― Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book

“Don’t talk like an alcoholic.” But it’s like telling a man inflicted with infantile paralysis to run a hundred yards. Without the stuff Tom’s face takes on a strained expression; as the effect of the last fix wears off all grace dies within him. He becomes a dead thing. For him, ordinary consciousness is like a slow desert at the centre of his being; his emptiness is suffocating. He tries to drink, to think of women, to remain interested, but his expression becomes shifty. The one vital coil in him is the bitter knowledge that he can choose to fix again. I have watched him. At the beginning he’s over-confident. He laughs too much. But soon he falls silent and hovers restlessly at the edge of a conversation, as though he were waiting for the void of the drugless present to be miraculously filled. (What would you do all day if you didn’t have to look for a fix?) He is like a child dying of boredom, waiting for promised relief, until his expression becomes sullen. Then, when his face takes on a disdainful expression, I know he has decided to go and look for a fix.”
― Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book