Drug Addiction Theme Analysis

Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by radar.

“I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants—a body—after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death…”

The Vigilante is prosecuted in Federal Court under a lynch bill and winds up in a Federal Nut House specially designed for the containment of ghosts: precise, prosaic impact of objects… washstand… door… toilet… bars… there they are… this is it… all lines cut… nothing beyond… Dead End… And the Dead End in every face…

But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can’t see it, you don’t know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street—every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore and market and liquor store. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from? Not the bartender, not the customers, nor the cream-colored plastic rounding the bar stools, nor the dim neon. Not even the TV.

And our habits build up with the drag, like cocaine will build you up staying ahead of the C bring-down.

“Want to cure anybody of anything, find out who doesn’t have it. So who don’t got it? Junkies don’t got it. Oh, incidentally, there’s an area in Bolivia with no psychosis. Right sane fold in them hills. Like to get in there, me, before it is loused up by literacy, advertising, TV and drive-ins.”

“And why don’t junkies got schizophrenia? Don’t know yet. A schizophrenic can ignore hunger and starve to death if he isn’t fed. No one can ignore heroin withdrawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact.”

Look down at my filthy trousers, haven’t been changed in months… The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood… I am forgetting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body—a grey, junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hombre Invisible—the Invisible Man…

Junkies have no shame… They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido… The junky’s shame disappears with his nonsexual sociability which is also dependent on libido… The addict regards his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader.

“Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind., until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet the needs of people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.)

“…You see control can never be a means to any practical end… It can never be a means to anything but more control… Like junk…”

He had a paper napkin under his coffee cup—mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffee in the plazas, restaurants, terminals and waiting rooms of the world. A junky, even at the Sailor’s level, runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption into the Time of others, like all petitioners, he must wait. (How many coffees in an hour?)

In the cab I realized what had happened… I had been occluded from space-time like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso… Locked out… Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection… The Heat was off me from here on out… relegated with Hauser and O’Brien to a landlocked junk past […].