Junkie Love

Ziggy and Doreen  

4

 

That summer William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch came out in paperback for the first time. I bought it and devoured it. It was the culmination of my reading that first summer in the Haight that included Burroughs’ Junky, Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers, George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Jean Cocteau’s Opium, and other explorer’s journals.

Like Genet, Burroughs was a homosexual and criminal, but more than Genet, Burroughs was also a junky and also had accidentally killed his wife in a William Tell stunt gone awry, shooting her instead of the glass on her head.

I left the Sierra mill town where I grew up as though shot from a cannon. Destination: as far as possible from rednecks. Burroughs was already there. His books were messages from an interstellar outpost. He was the “objective correlative” of my alienation, and I identified with him immediately and completely. He also had a romantic appeal for an eighteen year old eager to be one of those guys who’s seen too much.

At that time, before the full emergence of psychedelics, junkies were the aristocrats of the drug culture. Surrounded by consumer zombies, the junky had guts enough to lock himself in a cage with utter need and accept social ranking near the child molester. He stood alone like an upraised middle finger at the world. From physical necessity, he lived a day at a time, determined to give meaning and direction to the neurosis of being civilized, the chronic low-grade emergency, at any cost to himself or anybody else. He ran red lights.

Ziggy was my opportunity to study one. He lived an urban version of living off the land. One day he would have several hundred dollars, the next day be broke. And if he needed food then, he’d go to the farthest aisle in the nearest store and stuff whatever was available under his belt, then walk out. He got his clothes from garbage cans, people’s closets, or stole them from stores. He was a carnivore among herbivores. He may have gotten away with much of his shoplifting because he was capable of murder and it showed on his face.

When he wasn’t using his wife for recreational torture, they might lapse into playing house; she the mommy, and he the spoiled brat, complete with tantrums and baby talk. Ziggy: the six foot tall baby with the mind of a cobra. Once he threw a loud tantrum in a supermarket aisle during rush hour when she wouldn’t agree to his flavor of ice cream. They were exhibitionists who flaunted, instead of immoral body parts, grotesque deformities: themselves. When they would perform one of their routines in public, it seemed as if they were mugging passers-by for their attention.