Junky by William S. Burroughs Page B

years locked up somewhere.”
    I checked my clothes into a basket and took a shower. The next step was a physical examination. I had to wait about fifteen minutes for the doctor. The doctor apologized for keeping me waiting, gave me a physical examination and took my addiction history. His manner was courteous and efficient. He listened to my addiction history, interrupting with an occasional comment or question. When I mentioned buying junk by the ¼-ounce, he smiled and said, “Selling some of it to keep up the habit, eh?”
    Finally he leaned back in his chair. “As you know,” he said, “you can leave here on twenty-four hours’ notice. Some people leave after ten days, and stay off permanently. Some stay six months and go back two days after they get out. But, statistically speaking, the longer you stay the better chance you have of staying off. The procedure here is more or less impersonal. The cure lasts about eight or ten days, depending on severity of addiction. You can put on that dressing gown now.”
    He pointed to pajamas and dressing gown and slippers that were laid out for me. The doctor was speaking rapidly into a dictaphone. He gave a brief account of my physical condition and addiction history. “Patient seems secure and states his reason for seeking cure is necessity of providing for his family.”
    A guard took me to my ward.
    â€œIf you want to get off drugs,” he said, “this is the place to do it.”
    The ward attendant asked me if I really wanted to get off drugs. I said yes. He assigned me to a private room.
    About fifteen minutes later the attendant called, “Shot line!” Everyone in the ward lined up. As our names were called, we put an arm through a window in the door of the ward dispensary, and the attendant gave the shots. Sick as I was, the shot fixed me. Right away, I began to get hungry.
    I walked up to the middle of the ward, where there were ­benches, chairs and a radio, and got in conversation with a thuggish-looking young Italian. He asked if I had much of a record. I said no.
    â€œYou ought to be up with the Do-Rights,” he said. “You get a longer cure there and better rooms.”
    The Do-Rights were people in Lexington for the first time, who were considered to be especially good prospects for a permanent cure. Evidently, the doctors in Reception didn’t think too much of my prospects.
    Others drifted out and joined the conversation. The shot had made them feel sociable. First came a Negro from Ohio.
    â€œHow much time you bringing with you?” the Italian asked him.
    â€œThree years,” the Negro said. He was in for forging and selling scripts. He began telling about a stretch he did in Ohio State. “That’s a fuck of a place to do time. A bunch of kids in there, rough little bastards. You get your stuff at the commissary and some punk comes up to you and says, ‘Give it to me.’ If you don’t give it to him, he belts you one in the kisser. Then they all gang up on you. You ain’t going to whip all of them.”
    A gambling-house dealer from East St. Louis was describing a method for cooking the carbolic acid out of a phenol, sweet oil and tincture of opium script.
    â€œI tell the croaker I’ve got an aged mother and she uses this prescription for piles. After you get the sweet oil drained off, you put the stuff in a tablespoon and hold it over a gas flame. That burns the phenol right out. It’ll hold you twenty-four hours.”
    A handsome, powerfully built man of forty or so, with a tan complexion and iron-gray hair, was telling how his girl smuggled stuff to him in an orange. “So there we were in County. Goddamn both of us shitting in our pants like a goose. Hell, when I bit into that orange it was so bitter. Must have been fifteen or twenty grains in it, shot in with a hypo. I didn’t know she had that much sense.”
    â€œThe guard says to me,