Walgreens
“I am fucking this citizen so I think, ‘A straight John at last’; but he comes to a climax and turns himself into some kinda awful crab…. I told him, ‘Jack, I don’t hafta stand still for such a routine like this…. You can take that business to Walgreen’s.’”
Old Walgreens Matchbox
Walgreens — which Burroughs consistently misspelled “Walgreen’s” with an apostrophe — is one of the largest drugstore chains in the United States. More than just a pharmacy, Walgreens invented the malted milkshake, pioneered self-service counters and child-resistant containers, and proliferated like a virus across the land. Since its founding in 1902, Walgreens has spawned nearly 7,000 locations across North America. In 1945 it was at a Walgreens in Denver that Neal Cassady spotted a pretty teenager named LuAnne Henderson and announced, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.” Dubbed MaryLou in On the Road, Henderson accompanied Cassady and Jack Kerouac on their now notorious roadtrip to visit Burroughs in New Orleans. When you consider that the trip ultimately ran from pharmacy to drug den, it takes on yet another layer of meaning.
Like other stalwarts of American business such as McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, Walgreens achieves a sort of monumental stature not through the erection of grand edifices but through ubiquity and uniformity — many branches, each one the same. While its standardizations were probably well-intended, they helped to create the oppressive atmosphere of contemporary “monoculture.” This is how Burroughs, in a January 6, 1955 letter to Allen Ginsberg, describes a location in Florida:
Eight hour stop-over in Miami. I stood in the door of Walgreen’s feeling the air-conditioned chill hit my wet shirt back as the door opened and closed. I did not see The Thief, The Junkie, The Queer, The Dying Man. No face stood out sharp and distinct in the flash bulb of urgency. These faces were out of focus, a sun-tanned anonymous blur, moving to random doom and meets of juxtaposition without contact.
Evidently the chill was not just physical. Walgreens tacitly upheld the marginalization of criminals, addicts, and deviants — Burroughs’ kind of people — in favor of anonymity and alienation. When he wrote in the “Atrophied Preface” of Naked Lunch, “Take your business to Walgreen’s / We are not responsible / Steal anything in sight,” it was not just a literary provocation but a protest against the homogeneity deployed by corporate America. You can well imagine Burroughs trying to fill forged prescriptions at far-flung Walgreens stores and thinking, “Fuck ‘em all. Squares on both sides.”
Walgreens at the corner of Madison Avenue and 41st Street, New York, 1930s (Photograph from the NYPL Digital Gallery)
Of course, filling prescriptions is not what “take your business to Walgreens” means. The phrase is dismissive, contemptuous, practically an insult meaning something like “don’t bother me with your bullshit.” It first appears in Burroughs’ work in Junky:
When I complained about the wholesaler, Bill Gains got snappish and said I ought to cut the stuff more. “You’re giving a better cap than anybody in New York City. Nobody sells sixteen percent stuff on the street. If your customers don’t like it, they can take their business to Walgreen’s.”
If the phrase really did originate with Bill Gains, a junky named Bill Garver in real life, then Walgreens takes on another function in Naked Lunch. It’s not just a place. It’s an echo. By the time it enters into the book it has already become a bit of language, a linguistic readymade, and it reverberates with the other fragments of living discourse that Burroughs transported into the book. About “all a Jew wants to do is doodle a Christian girl,” Burroughs said to Victor Bockris, “I heard that line verbatim. I thought to myself, ‘Gooooooood Lord, now I’ve heard it all.’ But the line came in handy.”
Burroughs must have thought something similar when Bill Garver came out with the Walgreens line. Certainly it came in handy. It appears once in Junky and twice in Naked Lunch. In the cut-up novels, it appears with decreasing frequency, fidelity, and sense. Soft Machine: “We rigged their stupid tree limb and drop the alien corn — spot of business to Walgreen’s — ” Ticket That Exploded: “I’ve had every con in three galaxies pulled on me — All right, cover that old North pole or get out of the game — You can take your Big Fix to Walgreen’s — ” It’s a dying echo, a fading trace of New York that slowly disappears into Burroughs’ project to “write for the Space Age.”
(Text: Supervert)
