“I was around people who were using it. Then I started, you know, taking an occasional shot. It is, for most people, I think, a very pleasurable experience. After I’d had these experiences as an addict—I guess it was in 1950—I was living in Mexico City and someone suggested to me that I simply write up my experiences with heroin addiction, which I did. And that was my first book, Junkie. ”

Originally published in 1953 under the pseudonym “William Lee,” Junkie (or J-unk, its original title) is a harrowing document of William Burroughs’ 14year-old addiction to heroin—a document that still stands today, almost a quarter of a century later, as the definitive statement on that subject.

Whereas the original edition of Junkie contained a number of disclaimers by the publisher (“For the protection of the reader, we have inserted occasional parenthetical notes to indicate where the author clearly departs from accepted medical fact or makes other unsubstantiated statements in an effort to justify his actions”), the recently reissued edition of Junkie (now spelled Junkey) by Penguin Books is devoid of any such pronouncements. In Toronto recently on a promotional tour for the book, Burroughs explained why : “The original edition had a number of disclaimers, a number of expurgations—they expurgated all the four letter words and so on. So we decided to bring out an unexpurgated edition—as it was originally written.”

In Junkey’spreface, Burroughs writes, “I have never regretted my experience with drugs.” Twenty-five years later, does he still hold the same view?

“Yes, I’ll go along with that because it gave me.. .you see, a writer qan profit from things that may be just unpleasant or boring to someone else because he uses those things subsequently as material for writing. And I would say that the experience I had with heroin as described in Junkey later led to my subsequent books like Naked Lunch, so I don’t regret it.”

“Incidentally, the damage to health from heroin addiction is minimal—no matter what the American Narcotics Department may say. If you read one of the early authorities like DeQuincey—for one thing, he would never have lived to be 72 unless he had taken opium because he had tuberculosis. And Ithink he would say the same as I say; that he wouldn’t regret his experience with drugs. ”

Isn’t this, however, in direct contradiction with another statement made in Junkey that “Junk causes permanent cellular alteration. Once a junkie, always a junkie. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit”?

“I would question that statement now. At that time I had not taken the apomorphine cure, which was the way I finally got off junk—through Dr. Dent in London. And now, after that cure, I would question the statement whether there is a permanent cellular alteration.”

What about the effects of heroin on the user’s ability to cope with the normal day to day stress of living?

“Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. I’ve been in England where addicts obtained their heroin quite legally through doctors. Many of the addicts were lawyers, doctors, bank tellers, et cetera. So far as creative work goes, I say very definitely it can’t be indicated—and I would never’ve been able to write Naked Lunch, for example, unless I’d been off heroin. But, so far as any kind of routine work goes; you can do it as well as someone who is not addicted.

“The context I was talking about when I wrote Junkey was in the 1940’s when heroin was extremely illegal and under very heavy pressure from the American Narcotics Department. So you never knew from one day to the next whether or not you were able to get your necessary dose of drugs or not. And that, of course, creates a tremendous feeling of insecurity and fear.

“Addiction is a metabolic illness—a metabolic illness like alcoholism or diabetes, for that matter. It is also an illness that can be cured without too much difficulty.”

Including William Burroughs?

“Absolutely. I haven’t used or been addicted to opiates for years...”

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Bob Dylan... Even If You Didn’t

RENALDO AND CLARA

A Film by Bob Dylan

(Lombard St. Films, Inc.)_

The day Renaldo And Clara, a four-hour film written, co-edited, directed by and starring Bob Dylan, opened in New York, there were no less than seven negative reviews of the movie in the Village Voice... Such betrayal by the hallowed neighborhood which gave the minstrel his first mouthpiece and introduced him to almost every performer whom he enlisted for the Rolling Thunder Review! Yet even uptown, a brick’s throw from Gucci’s showroom windows on 57th Street, patrons who had shelled out their four bucks were busily asking each other, “Tell me if I missed something. Why do I think it’s garbage?”, holding their heads in agonized disgrace.

Dreams die hard and the mythology of the figure of Mr. Elusive, Bob Dylan, dies harder than most'. Says historical raconteur David Blue, shown having an endless meaningful relationship with a poolside pinball machine: “You know what a miss is, it’s a miss. ” However, Dylan is a human being with a former family, a house and three squares a day. When Renaldo And Clara concentrates its considerable energies on portraying the human Dylan and his entourage beset with mental aches and pains, it’s embarrassing, but it works. When the film shows the Dylan mythology we’re all used to, mainly the Rolling Thunder Revue in performance, it provides many triumphant minutes of concrete vintage, all peaks and clarity. Unfortunately, when Dylan uses the movie to draw parallels between his star identity and absurdly pure religious statuary, he is grabbing at holy straws. ,

Despite its excesses of length and false heroics, Renaldo And Clara is not the ego-tripping nightmare most critics have made it out to be. The film certainly focuses around the life of one star, but haven’t we been bitching all this time that Dylan’s reclusiveness was one of the music scene’s most frustrating question marks? For God’s sake, it wasn’t that long ago that his garbage was being stolen and analyzed for relevance. So when Dylan decides to sit behind the camera as well as in front of it, at least a certain amount of built-up curiosity is bound to be satisfied. See it now—Joan Baez and Sara Dylan facing off over the skinny hunk of Renaldo (Dylan), though Baez is called the “Woman In White” and Sara is “Clara. ” Forget all the funny names which are among the most transparent guises Dylan has ever concocted. The philosophy and life-style to which his songs elude are given ample opportunity to clearly unfold in technicolor. If Renaldo And Clara was supposed to be some sort of existential statement about the human condition —to which the critics have pointed while they yell failure, then they’re right. Plato he ain’t. But if Dylan is using his traveling show as a framework for his own perspective on his life and the people important to it, Renaldo And Clara is an insightful slice of documentary gossip answering more questions than it raises.

The movie is far too long. A four-hour stretch does little but make the tush ache and the mind wander over to the candy counter. If it were half as long, the fanciful images would not be repeated to an unnecessary extent. Admittedly, some of the music would have to go as well, but most of the high points like a Dylan-Baez duet on “Diamonds And Rust” or a rip-roaring version of “Hard Rain” scream for attention while others have already been forgotten one day after viewing. Since Dylan is never gonna sit down and explain the significance of the red rose or tell what leopard skin pill box hat really means, Dylan’s road reality ought to be enough for the man to show his most devoted voyeurs just who he is.

Toby Goldstein

Ten Good Reasons To Miss The Second Season

by Rick Johnson

There are at least ten good reasons to avoid anything you might get an urge to do (TOO DOO). Say you want to “let yourself go” to Pizza Hut and eat stuff that looks like a semi-conscious mouth on a plate. Stop first and think of any ten of the ingredients and their respective half-lives. Soon you will understand how people starve to death in dark, unheated apartments. Or say you want to run out and buy yourself a copy of Chicago XI. First, sit yourself down and think of their previous ten LPs, one at a time. This will cure you of your youth if nothing else.

Television’s second season can be treated in the same e-z manner. Not that there really is a second season to speak of this year. The sensory bombers in the programming departments have been totally unnerved by the viewing public (four fish arrangers in Tucson) reaction to the last fall’s new shows, a response somewhere to the left of amnesia. Past blank expressions. Every new program except Soap, Love Boat (“periscope’s up, commander”) and On Our Own—which exists strictly on Rhoda s coattails—has already been recycled into rug film, so most of the new program inventors have returned to their previous occupations as egg taxidermists and record editors.

A few newies have meandered into the schedule like the ghosts of garden slugs however, and each one is a better reason than the next to avoid them all. Talk about “Seven Rooms Of Gloom,” the second season is as drowsed-out as the intensive care area of a Ramada Inn. Picking out the “worst” from the “best” here is like choosing how high a ladder you’d like to fall off of and break your neck. So eyeball these taste sensations at your own risk and don’t forget what channel the cartoons are on.

1. Lucan:: The premise behind this one is really a howl: Lucan is lost in the forest as a babe but luckily enough is found by a pack of friendly timber wolves who raise him in their cozy cave. By the time he gets back to scenic Society, he’s acquired amazing animal instincts and a deep-set urge to suck wolf tit. The Ted Nugent Story, right? Too bad the kid looks like David Brenner disguised as a member of Redbone. Call this one Pucan.

2. Tabitha:: Potential hormone pep talk giver Lisa Hartman plays Sam’s daughter from Bewitched grown up into an actual secretary in ABC’s plot to make five-year-old boys stop mentally undressing grasshoppers and understand emissions. Big laughs here are the same as in the earlier show: Tabby contorts her face into a guitar-solo grimace and gorillas suddenly appear in the boss’s coffee pot. Houdini got dumped in the icewater for this?

3. Class Of ’65:: A spinoff from the bestseller, this anthology series covers a gimmick/issue weekly. So far they’ve only done drugs, sex and success, but important topics like gardening with pits, mirror care and how long to talk on the phone are still to come.

4. Fighting Nightingales: : All the new shows have more sex than before, and while the first televised donkey-fuck may still be a ways off, this version of M*A *S*H with tits will do for now. Adrienne Barbeau has developed her completely bland girl-next-door with GIGANTIC TITS character into an art form so exacting that she can actually laugh deadpan. She should skip the thermometer jokes and take over from Helen Reddy in Disney flicks... a remake of Dumbo perhaps.

5. Beach Girls: : This sand-andglands winner probably won’t make the schedule, but if it does, TV repairmen everywhere will make a fortune removing tongue-stains from sullied screens. Full of Scheming Blondes and Unwitting Dupes, this could easily be the worst show since scalp-crawl first appeared.

6. Fantasy Island: : One of those vombuster TV-movies that multiplied and spread into a weekly pain pool. Adrienne Barbell again plus an all-TV mo vie reject cast including Ricardo xMontalbaln, Georges Chakiris and

Maharis, Karen Valentine and everybody’s hero, Herve Villechaize, as a coral reef. The show itself is kind of a Love Boat minus laughtrack that takes place on a resort island somewhere in Lake Arnie & Edna. Hope they find Rodan in their rec room.

7. Another Day : : This sitcom with David Groh and Joan Hackett may not move into Betty White’s vacated slot (so to fucking speak) after all. Groh says it’s been postponed because it’s too good for TV, which is like saying that rabies has been postponed because it’s too good for dogs. Insiders point to the time Dave hithis co-star over the noggin with a picnic table as the Real Story, and all just because she kept calling him David Groh-up. Joan’s so irrepressible.

8. When Havoc Struck: : A syndicated feffort, Havoc covers a new disaster each week* such as Ill-Fated Airships, Raging Forest Fires, Rat Scabies’ Childhood, and the time Herve Villechaize’s washer broke down and nervy Herve just went scurvy.

9. James At 15: : I thought of everything on this one; leukemia jokes, stupid teenage stories, insights on Jim Dandy, you name it. But this show is so goddamn heartwarming is makes Family look like Kojak, and that’s more angel dribble than any one person should have to consider.

10. The Jim Nabors Show:: This' talk-and-sing number is the syndicated doubletake of the year. The sight of Jim bending his soggy-prophylactic-in-thesun features into insightful questioning ala Dinah is almost as funny as the very idea of having Susan Ford as his Ed McMahon. They could have gotten Suzy Chapstick for all the thumblike thoughts Ford adds, and Nabors is just. so disgusting beyond previously recognizable standards of disgust that you owe it to yourself to catch this one. Remember, children are starving in India and watching reruns of the Far Out Space Nuts.