Everyone should read these books before they go to that great rehab in the sky.
Dopefiend by Donald Goines
Goines didn’t just write street life — he lived it. He wrote 16 novels in five years, at times cranking out a book a week on heroin. He died at 35 after fleeing an L.A. drug debt to Detroit, where — legend has it — the dealers he burned tracked him down and blew his head off. Dopefiend is the downest, dirtiest, and rawest of Goines' ultra down ’n’ dirty books. Among other things, when his customers don’t have the money to pay, Porky, the heroin dealer, makes them do things with dogs that would make Cesar Millan rip his eyes out and burn them. DMX made a movie of another Goines novel, Never Die Alone, and hip-hop’s debt to the author is undeniable. To steal a line from 2Pac in Tradin’ War Stories, “Machiavelli was my tutor, Donald Goines my father…”
Via Holloway House
Junkie by William S. Burroughs
Originally published as an Ace paperback, meant for reading on the subway, Junkie was written under the pseudonym “William Lee,” with the subtitle “Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict.” The novel takes readers on a needle ride from Manhattan to Mexico City to New Orleans and back again. This is pre-Naked Lunch Burroughs, written in prose so hard-boiled you could crack your teeth on it. Junk, our narrator tells us, is not a drug — it’s a way of life. As ever, William Burroughs is the perfect tour guide in hell.
ELVIS: The Last 24 Hours by Albert Goldman
Elvis Presley did so many drugs, the America Pharmaceutical Association should put a plaque on his grave. And thanks to Lenny and Lennon biographer Albert Goldman’s tiny tome on the subject, we know exactly which ones he did. Think quaaludes, amphetamines, liquid Valium, codeine, Demerol, Dilaudid. (And that’s just breakfast.) By the end, narcotics took the worst thing narcotics can take from a man: bowel control — leaving us with the image of the drug-addled King chowing down on his last peanut butter-bacon-and-banana sandwich in a King-sized diaper. Goldman’s dignity-be-damned chronicle of sunset at Graceland may not be everybody’s cup of Elvis. But drug-lit lovers will eat it up.
Via amazon.co.uk
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
The ultimate junky outsider saga. Eleven linking stories, all told by Johnson’s broke, strung-out narrator, the funny/tragic misfit whose unhinged experience of the world permeates our own until his most crazed utterance begins to make absolute sense. Johnson’s people survive the nonstop hells they make of their lives in a kind of staggered enchantment. This is the real, un-chic junkie life: petty crime, car wrecks, abortions, routine lying, and (of course) death. All rendered in dead-on Junky-Vision, which turns the grimmest situation into occasions for deranged humor and - weirdly more menacing — sweetness. Did I mention the main character’s name is “Fuckhead”? (Side note: Will Patton’s reading of the text may be the most perfect book on tape of all time.)
Via blogger.com
No comments:
Post a Comment