Book discussion: Speed (William S. Burroughs Jr., 1970)

"I first ran into Chad there at the Hut one night when I was kind of drunk... His whole attitude was full of fear, I could see that right off, and I always respect scared people who know what they're up against. We started hanging out right then, and it turned out that he was playing some sort of ultimate ping-pong too. All he could see ahead was himself wandering around the country visiting friends of his and getting drunk, and the idea scared him pretty bad. So we used to sit around philosophizing and we turned on [shot up] together a lot."

"Billy" Burroughs was the son of famed Beat writer William S. Burroughs, who killed Billy's mother while drunkenly attempting to shoot a glass off her head. He grew up surrounded by countercultural chaos, spending time with his father's famous friends such as Allen Ginsberg as a child. As he entered adulthood he turned to IV drugs to cope with his pain, and struggled with addiction for the rest of his short life. He died in 1981 at age 33; his father outlived him by 16 years.

This autobiographical novel can be seen as a followup/compare/contrast to the previous book we read (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), with the difference in the characters' drug of choice affecting the lens through which they view the 1960s!