I’ve been reading some of William S. Burroughs’ works, namely Naked Lunch and Junky, and I must agree with the blurb on Junky’s jacket, Junky is much more palatable than those who find ‘Naked Lunch’ tough going.
Burroughs’ writing is a dowser for extreme alienation, as a member of two despised social classes for almost his entire adult life, homosexuals and drug addicts, his prose is unpretentious and dryly didactic. In a word, simply marvellous. Without ever saying a word overtly, Burroughs damns God, the Establishment, the Government, the American Dream and a million other semi-mythical constructs that permeate our every day weltanschauung. There are no attempts to re-read Burroughs to try to understand him. Either you get him, or you don’t, I’m afraid it’s as simple as that.
In the grand tradition of Henry Miller, Burroughs ploughs through numb day after numb day in his accounts, with drugs as his best friend, as opposed to Miller’s considerably raunchier escapades. I suppose you could argue that Burroughs gets as seamy, but Miller still takes the cake, in my opinion.
Tea heads are not like junkies. A junkie hands you the money, takes his junk and cuts. But tea heads don’t do things that way. They expect the peddler to light them up and sit around talking for half an hour to sell two dollars’ worth of weed. if you come right to the point, they say you are a “bring down”. In fact, a peddler should not come right out and say he is a peddler. No, he just scores for a few good “cats” and “chicks” because he is viperish. Everyone knows that he himself is the connection, but it is bad form to say so. God knows why. To me, tea heads are unfathomable.
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When I jumped bail and left the States, the heat on junk already looked like something new and special. Initial symptoms of nationwide hysteria were cleasr. Louisiana passed a law making it a crime to be a drug addict. Since no place or time is specified and the term “addict” is not clearly defined, no proof is necessary or even relevant under a law so formulated. No proof, and consequently, no trial. This is police-state legislation penalizing a state of being. Other states were emulating Louisiana. I saw my chance of escaping conviction dwindle daily as the anti-junk feeling mounted to a paranoid obsession, like anti-Semitism under the Nazis. So I decided to jump bail and live permanently outside the United States.
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