There are cures for addiction, but they tend not to last. If those excuses fail, try facial neuralgia. A user who robs drunks on the subway to support his habit is a “lush-worker” a junkie’s eyedropper, spoon, and hypodermic needle constitute his “works” doctors are “croakers.” The easiest way to convince a croaker to write a “script” for morphine is to fake gallstones or kidney stones. Junkies have their own look (emaciated, haunted, sallow) and their own junk names: Doolie, Cash, and Dupré. A heroin addiction in 1953 cost about $15 a day, or the equivalent of $125 in today’s dollars. Junk, he says, “is a way of life.” And it’s an expensive one at that. “Junk,” we learn, refers to opium and its derivatives: morphine, heroin, pantopon, Dilaudid, codeine. More than anything else, Junky reads like a field guide to the American underworld. Along the way we meet a largely interchangeable cast of dealers, users, thieves, and con artists. The story follows the development of his addiction, his attempts to quit, and his travels in search of cheaper, better drugs. Junky is Bill’s life story, but only in a sense, for he discusses only the parts of his life that relate to junk. Although Bill, Junky’s narrator, mentions reading Oscar Wilde, Anatole France, Baudelaire, and Gide as a young boy, the tone owes more to Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. The approach is journalistic, pedagogical, often clinical, bearing little resemblance to novels for which Burroughs is now better remembered, like Naked Lunch and Nova Express. Unlike Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (also published in 1953), Junky eschews allegory for scrupulous realism. Junky-as his novel is now known-combines all these interests. He first took up anthropology, at both Harvard and later Mexico City College then medicine, in Vienna and finally heroin. Burroughs’s inheritance left the young scion free to pursue education and drugs at his leisure. Burroughs, Harvard graduate and heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine fortune.

Junky burroughs