William Burroughs

“I’m not queer,” he thought. “I’m disembodied.”

Lee walked on, thinking, “What can I do? Take them back to my hotel? They are willing enough. For a few sucres …” He felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. “Someday I am going to have things just like I want,” he said to himself. “And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river.”

I was afraid some day the dream would still be there when I woke up. I recall hearing a maid talk about opium and how smoking opium brings sweet dreams, and I said: “I will smoke opium when I grow up.”

You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction. Junk wins by default.

If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict.

They knew that basically no one can help anyone else. There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you.

Whitey was standing in the middle of the bar, his fists doubled up, tears streaming down his face. “I’m no good,” he said. “I’m no good. Can’t anyone understand I don’t know what I’m doing?”

If you say, “Look, Doc, I want an M.S. script and I’m willing to pay double price for it,” the croaker blows his top and throws you out of the office. You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.

“Why do you need narcotics, Mr. Lee?” is a question that stupid psychiatrists ask. The answer is, “I need junk to get out of bed in the morning, to shave and eat breakfast. I need it to stay alive.”

You seemed so sure it was all right, I didn’t want to bug you by bringing anything up.

It was time for him to pay off. And pay off for the rest of his life, waiting on street corners and in cafeterias for the connection, the mediator between man and junk.