Burroughs' junkies aren't going to be spared either; in that respect, they resemble those we had (our own generation) and those who have followed. Defenseless fodder, people wandering the streets, the bars, seeing what happens, seeing what they can score. Robbing drunks on the subway, believing they've kicked the habit for good while they hit their final fix. Because junkies live each day to the fullest. Every generation contributes its addicts. The one Burroughs portrays in this novel is doubly a survivor, since it's made up of people who came out of World War II alive (I was going to say unscathed, what a silly thing to say). They carry their own minefields on their arms. It's the corrupt brotherhood that also appears in other works from that era, for example, in *The Man with the Golden Arm*, Algren's novel and Sinatra's film adaptation. Junkies in white shirts and old blazers. Ours wore tracksuits and fanny packs—well, that was towards the end, when they were wasted and on their mothers' arms. But when I read this novel, they still wore leather jackets and pulled strings.

In Burroughs's junkies—I mean, in his way of telling the story—flows a kind of literature that isn't Burroughs's own, but rather that of his time. Burroughs would soon move on to another kind of writing; he wouldn't let himself be trapped by anything but himself and what already had him in its grip. This book is closer to his friends than to him. It's inhabited by the people from Kerouac's On the Road and Ginsberg's Howl. But a junkie doesn't have friends, and Burroughs was a solitary writer.