Drug culture often gives great things bad names. Bob Marley, The Grateful Dead, hippies, the whole gang. If I had a dollar for every time someone was mentioning Exodus without talking about smoking, I'd be rich. So hear's to every jerk that marketed pictures of perhaps the world's most peaceful man, and then plastered a nice big cannabis right next to him. But I'm over it. I don't even like reggae, and for all I know the Grateful Dead did sort of play into the conception of the LSD movement, but I digress. However, I can't let them take my Beatniks. Can't do it.
Of course, the first image on Google Image search.
Nowhere in any of Ginsberg's writing, or anyone's does it say: "abusing hallucinogenic drugs will make you a beatnik" so I'd appreciate it if everyone in the entire world stopped thinking that Beatniks were self absorbed, freewheeling writers that shot up, toked up and popped pills from one rush to the next. I understand that most of the prominent Beatnik writers were users in some way, wether it was heavy addiction to Junk (beware, segwey imminent) or recreational usage of various opiates; but that shouldn't typify a generation.
Now, that's most likely a bad way to introduce a discussion of William Burroughs' "Junky," which is by far the most prolific, in-depth, physically disturbing and generally graphic depiction of drug habits. I mean, schools ought to stop wasting money on the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) Program, and just teach "Junky" around the fourth or fifth grade level. Or not. I know I don't plan on starting a habit any time soon (not to toot your horn Bill, I wasn't planning on it anyhow) but jeeze, this book is....honest.
"My first experience with junk was during the War, about 1944 or 1945. I had made the acquaintance...who was working in a shipyard at the time...one day he called me up and said he had stolen a Tommy gun...[he] said, 'Oh here's something else I picked up" (1). It is in this nonchalant and very disattached manner, that Bill Burroughs' nameless protagonist first encounters heroin.
The book goes on in the form of an almost stream of consciousness narration of the main character (who we can believe to be Bill Burroughs, at least for most of the text) from occasionally sampling the junk to "needs junk to get out of bed in the morning, to shave and eat breakfast" (19). Eventually, the narrator finds himself dodging the law, after an indictment in New Orleans, in Mexico.
"When you give up junk, you give up a way of life," (127) lectures Burroughs during the final pages of the book, "Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke. Yage may be the final fix," (128) concludes the novel. But we as readings can see through this druggie delusion: the entire book has been a chronicle of instant gratification that holds no longevity.
And in this way, a feeling or spirit of the Beat Generation is captured in Burroughs' text. It is NOT the lifestyle that is typified, but that failed reach towards some kind of definitive meaning or purpose. Look at Pollock, "On the Road," or "Howl," elements of this struggle to invent purpose runs through and through.
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