the dope fiend and the artist

There he goes poking through his bathrobe pockets looking for a lost coidenetta, forgetting he already ate it the night before -- He has the typical bleak junkey dresser, with a full length mirror on each creaky door, inside which hang battered coats from New York with the lints of the pockets strong enough to boil down in a spoon after 30 years of drug addiction -- "In many ways," he says, "there's a great resemblance between the dope fiend so called and the artist so called, they like to be alone and comfortable provided they have what they want -- They don't go mad running and looking for things to do 'cause they got it all inside, they can sit for hours without movin'. They're sensitive, so called, and don't turn away from the study of good books. And look at those Orozcos I cut out of a Mexican magazine and put on my wall. I study those pictures all the time, I love 'em -- M-m-m-m-m."

He turns, tall and wizardly, preparing to begin a sandwich. With long thin white fingers he plucks a slice of bread out with the dexterity you might expect from tweezers. He then puts ham on the bread in a meditation that takes almost two minutes, carefully arranged and rearranged. Then he puts the other bread over it and carries the sandwich to his bed, where he sits on the edge, eyes closed, wondering if he can eat it and going hm-m-m-m. "Yes sir," he says, starting to search in his bedside drawer again for an old cotton, "the dope fiend and the artist have lots in common."

Jack Kerouac

Desolation Angels

1965