Junky by William S. Burroughs Page B

dollars per quarter-ounce, cut it one-third with milk sugar and put it in one-grain caps. The caps sold for two dollars each, retail. They ran about ten to sixteen percent H, which is very high for retail capped stuff. There should be at least a hundred caps in one-quarter ounce of H before it is cut. But if the wholesaler is Italian he is almost sure to give a short count. We usually got about eighty caps out of these Italian quarter-ounces.
    Bill Gains came from a “good family”—as I recall, his father had been a bank president somewhere in Maryland—and he had front. Gains’ routine was stealing overcoats out of restaurants, and he was perfectly adapted to this work. The American upper-middle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. Gains went further. He was not merely negative. He was positively invisible; a vague respectable presence. There is a certain kind of ghost that can only materialize with the aid of a sheet or other piece of cloth to give it outline. Gains was like that. He materialized in someone else’s overcoat.
    Gains had a malicious childlike smile that formed a shocking contrast to his eyes which were pale blue, lifeless and old. He smiled, listening down into himself as if attending to something there that pleased him. Sometimes, after a shot, he would smile and listen and say slyly, “This stuff is powerful.” With the same smile he would report on the deterioration and misfortunes of others. “Herman was a beautiful kid when he first came to New York. The trouble is, he lost his looks.”
    Gains was one of the few junkies who really took a special pleasure in seeing non-users get a habit. Many junkie-pushers are glad to see a new addict for economic reasons. If you have a commodity you naturally want customers, provided they are the right kind. But Gains liked to invite young kids up to his room and give them a shot, usually compounded of old cottons, and then watch the effects, smiling his little smile.
    Mostly, the kids said it was a good kick, and that was all. Just another kick like nembies, or bennies, or lush, or weed. But a few stayed around to get hooked, and Gains would look at these converts and smile, a prelate of junk. A little later, you would hear him say, “Really, So-and-so must realize that I can’t carry him any longer.” The pledge was no longer being rushed. 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 . Gains was a mere parish priest in the hierarchy of junk. He would speak of the higher-ups in a voice of sepulchral awe. “The connections say . . .”
    His veins were mostly gone, retreated back to the bone to escape the probing needle. For a while he used arteries, which are deeper than veins and harder to hit, and for this procedure he bought special long needles. He rotated from his arms and hands to the veins of his feet. A vein will come back in time. Even so, he had to shoot in the skin about half the time. But he only gave up and “skinned” a shot after an agonizing half-hour of probing and poking and cleaning out the needle, which would stop up with blood.
    â€¢
    One of my first customers was a Village character named Nick. Nick painted when he did anything. His canvasses were very small and looked as if they had been concentrated, compressed, misshapen by a tremendous pressure. “The product of a depraved mind,” a narcotics agent pronounced solemnly, after viewing one of Nick’s pictures.
    Nick was always half sick, his large, plaintive brown eyes water­ing slightly and his thin nose running. He slept on couches in the apartments of friends, existing on the precarious indulgence of neurotic, unstable, stupidly suspicious individuals who would suddenly throw him out without reason or warning. For these people he also scored,