As I walked by, someone came out of the cafeteria. The cafeteria was unmistakably Near Eastern. One day I was walking down San Juan Létran and passed a cafeteria that had colored tile set in the stucco around the entrance, and the floor was covered with the same tile.

Burroughs’s first novel is a cult classic and a critical part of his oeuvre.

From the tenements of New York to the queer bars of New Orleans, Junky takes the reader into a world at once long-forgotten and still deeply resonant today. As he navigates the crime-ridden streets of New York, trying to convince doctors to give him a prescription for opiates and doing his best to avoid the “pigeons” who are given a steady supply of heroin by the police in exchange for informing on drug dealers, the narrator describes the physical experience of getting high, and the visceral need for another hit that haunts him every day. The Burroughs-like protagonist of the novel, Bill Lee, seesaws between periods on junk and off junk, using a panoply of substances including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, paregoric (a weak tincture of opium), and goof balls (barbiturate). Troma Entertainment hails Story of a Junkie as one of the company's best films it's one of the most well known outside of the films directed by Troma founders Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz.In his raw debut novel, Junky, Burroughs fictionalized his experiences using and dealing heroin and other drugs in the 1940s, turning them into a work that reads like a field report from the underworld of postwar America.

His final moments are chronicled in yet another Lech Kowalski film, 'Born to Lose: The Last Rock & Roll Movie', a documentary about deceased former New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders. Lead actor Spacely died in the early 1990s, reportedly from AIDS, which he contracted through intravenous drug use. Perhaps even more notable than the cinéma vérité structure is the almost total lack of moralizing on the part of the producers or its characters. The numerous shooting-up sequences are reportedly entirely real, as are many of the drug dens and their denizens. Many of the cast members, including leading man John Spaceley, are actual junkies. The movie has amassed quite a reputation in certain circles for its depictions of hard drug usage in New York City's East Village area. Filmed in documentary-style, the film follows the character of Gringo, a young man looking for fortune in New York City, only to fall into heroin addiction. Story of a Junkie is a 1987 drama film directed by Lech Kowalski and starring John Spacely.

Junkie by George C. Richardson