Customer Reviews

The Panic in Needle Park

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"The heroin addict is a very busy man," soberly states the writer, "For those who would separate him from his heroin he has no use & no time."

A junkie literary classic, for sure. A great story, and a book that should be required reading for high school. It's about 1964, but it could be about today, like, y'know?

Helen & Bobby love & live & work with each other for junk in Needle Park like Bob & Diane love & live & work with each other for junk in Portland, OR in the novel Drugstore Cowboy by James Fogel. Helen & Bobby are a junkie couple in love in New York City, c. 1964. It's panic time for all heroin users & that means a lotta trouble copping. Not to mention trying to pay for it, cuz the price goes way, way up.

But when a panic is on - a shortage of the drug that's totally addicting & totally illegal narco stuff - just getting "straight" (high, but not nodding), can mean turning in your lover to the narco guys just cuz they're giving you some stuff on the side. Helen, a middle class girl from Denver, by profession a high class call girl turned junkie, has the incisive quotes in the book: "We're all animals in a world no one knows," says she, trying to put her lifestyle in perspective.

I've read it over & over because it's like a movie you can't get enough of (& it is a movie too). If reading other junkie novels, (Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, for instance) ain't easy, this may crack the code for you. It provides a lexicon of junky terms that don't make sense to any of us "squares", and that lexicon can be used for any other junkie classic.

Too bad those English teachers ain't there to listen in, dig?