DEMONOLOGY
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("junk takes everything and gives nothing"). And the people who
live off other people's needs and addictions, even in the "realistic"
world of this early book, are described as being peculiarly monstrous
and repulsive. Thus one vague type who somehow lives off junk
without actually selling it or taking it: "This man walks around in
the places where he once exercised
his
obsolete and unthinkable trade.
But he is unperturbed. His eyes are black with an insect's unseeing
calm. He looks as if he nourished himself on honey and Levantine
syrups that he sucks up through a proboscis."
The world into which Burroughs wandered in his flight from
suburban unreality provided him not only with the sensations and
sufferings connected with addiction and withdrawal; it introduced
him to a whole gallery of living grotesques, to the unspeakable things
that can happen to a human being. Subway Mike: "He looked like
some specialized kind of underground animal that preys on the ani–
mals of the surface." Mary: "Her eyes were cold fish-eyes that
looked at you through a viscous medium she carried about with her.
I could see those eyes in a shapeless, protoplasmic mass undulating
over the dark sea floor." Lee's friend, Bill Gains: "He was not
merely negative. He was positively invisible." There are many
others, most of whom seemed to have returned to some lower animal
form of life. Not that the figures of ordinary society present an
attractive alternative: faceless bureaucrats, stupid and bullying police–
men, a lethal bore (who reappears in
Naked Lunch),
lifeless hos–
pital patients, and a moribund psychiatrist who "was ready to take
down my pysche and reassemble it in eight days." The "normal"
world is scarcely more pleasing than the junk world.
While moving through those areas where "junk is often found
adjacent to ambiguous or transitional districts ... a point where
dubious business enterprise touches Skid Row," Burroughs was ab–
sorbing the atmosphere and assembling the cast of his future work.
He mentions other experiences which clearly contributed to the
shaping of his fictional world: the continual "moving on"; rubbing
along with dubious company but never establishing meaningful
human relationships; feeling the police close in; moving through a
dream world; the ever renewed search for "the Man" who can
provide the junk; attempted cures at institutions like Lexington; and
of course the various effects of junk itself. The junkie has a com-
