[books] WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS - Junky

Apparently one goes through a Burroughs phase in high school. I did, but it was only on the basis of some spoken-word recordings that had entranced me; when I tried reading Cities Of The Red Night, pulled at random off a library shelf, I briefly slid around among the incomprehensible phrases and gave up.

I found Junky, as I find many books, on a Somerville curb, then kept it for maybe two years before I read any of it. It's good, and not what I expected. I had figured it would contain loopy, fragmented descriptions of how heroin feels, but in fact Burroughs almost never mentions it. Instead you get an account of how it feels to be an addict, your lifestyle compelled by the need to get more opiates in you.

He loves relating quantities, prices, margins (when he's selling, which turns out to be unappealing despite the prospect of always having junk on hand), and dosages. At one point, telling a rehab doctor his 'addiction history', he mentions that at one time he regularly bought it in some particular amount (quarter-ounces, I think) and the doctor says, "Ah, selling a bit to support your habit, I assume." The question of how much a junky shoots each day clearly means something to Burroughs, but he relates his habit only in terms of the personal junk economy that he's tied to.

Anyway, I liked it. Burroughs' clipped narrative sometimes brought me up short, such as when a hundred pages into the book he turned out to have a wife that had been hopping from city to city with him, or when he described his dislike of 'queers' so offhandedly that I wasn't sure I had interpreted passages about earlier hookups with other men correctly. That last thing may just be about the 1940s more than about Burroughs or the heroin culture, which is another reason the book fascinated me; I have some context for the teens and twenties through my interest in modernist art, and starting with the mid-60s I can plug events into my mental pop-music timeline, but for several decades in the middle there I barely have stereotypes about people were like, let alone a real sense of them. Except that I believe they liked kissing each other in Times Square and watching Humphrey Bogart movies.