Junky by William S. Burroughs Page A

out for twenty years. Who gets the jobs over there in the NMU Hall? American white men like you and me? No. Dagos and Spiks and Niggers. Why? Because the union controls shipping, and Communists control the union.”
    â€œI’ll be around if you need me,” he said when I got up to leave.
    â€¢
    In the French Quarter there are several queer bars so full every night the fags spill out on to the sidewalk. A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. Fags are ventriloquists’ dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist. The dummy sits in a queer bar nursing his beer, and uncontrollably yapping out of a rigid doll face.
    Occasionally, you find intact personalities in a queer bar, but fags set the tone of these joints, and it always brings me down to go into a queer bar. The bring-down piles up. After my first week in a new town I have had about all I can take of these joints, so my bar business goes somewhere else, generally to a bar in or near Skid Row.
    But I backslide now and then. One night, I got lobotomized drunk in Frank’s and went to a queer bar. I must have had more drinks in the queer joint, because there was a lapse of time. It was getting light outside when the bar hit one of those sudden pockets of quiet. Quiet is something that does not often happen in a queer joint. I guess most of the fags had left. I was leaning against the bar with a beer I didn’t want in front of me. The noise cleared like smoke and I saw a red-haired kid was looking straight at me and standing about three feet away.
    He didn’t come on faggish, so I said, “How you making it?” or something like that.
    He said: “Do you want to go to bed with me?”
    I said, “O.K. Let’s go.”
    As we walked out, he grabbed my bottle of beer off the bar and stuck it under his coat. Outside, it was daylight with the sun just coming up. We staggered through the French Quarter passing the beer bottle back and forth. He was leading the way in the direction of his hotel, so he said. I could feel my stomach knot up like I was about to take a shot after being off the junk a long time. I should have been more alert, of course, but I never could mix vigilance and sex. All this time he was talking on in a sexy Southern voice which was not a New Orleans voice, and in the daylight he still looked good.
    We got to a hotel and he put down some routine why he should go in first alone. I pulled some bills out of my pocket. He looked at them and said, “Better give me the ten.”
    I gave it to him. He went in the hotel and came right out.
    â€œNo rooms there,” he said. “We’ll try the Savoy.”
    The Savoy was right across the street.
    â€œWait here,” he said.
    I waited about an hour and by then it occurred to me what was wrong with the first hotel. It’d had no back or side door he could walk out of. I went back to my apartment and got my gun. I waited around the Savoy and looked for the kid all through the French Quarter. About noon, I got hungry and ate a plate of oysters with a glass of beer, and suddenly felt so tired that when I walked out of the restaurant my legs were folding under me as if someone was clipping me behind the knees.
    I took a cab home and fell across the bed without taking off my shoes. I woke up around six in the evening and went to Frank’s. After three quick beers I felt better.
    There was a man standing by the jukebox and I caught his eye several times. He looked at me with a special recognition, like one queer looks at another. He looked like one of those terra-cotta heads that you plant grass in. A peasant face, with peasant intuition, stupidity, shrewdness and malice. He