New Orleans

New Orleans appears as a compact, openly trafficked stop in the narrator’s circuit of addiction and supply. The city’s small scale makes concealment seem almost beside the point: the narrator and his companion find a seller quickly, stock up on heroin, and retrace their route toward Mexico. Its brief appearance also places the city within a wider network in which narcotics connect distant places, bodies, and forms of waiting.

The Route to the City

The approach to New Orleans is marked by the physical work of securing and preparing drugs. In Houston, a druggist recognizes the narrator after five years, directs him to wait at the counter, and later hands him a package for fifteen dollars with a warning to be careful. The purchase is a quart of PG and a hundred nembutals. The narrator describes PG as difficult to prepare for injection: its alcohol must be burned off, its camphor frozen out, and the remaining brown liquid drawn off with a dropper. Injecting it risks an abscess, so drinking it with goofballs is presented as the better option.

The travelers pour the PG into a Pernod bottle and drive east toward New Orleans. The road passes iridescent lakes, orange gas flares, swamps, garbage heaps, alligators among broken bottles and tin cans, neon motel signs, and stranded pimps shouting at passing cars from islands of rubbish. This landscape makes the journey part of the drug economy rather than a neutral interval between transactions: drugs are carried, prepared, and consumed amid damaged roadside environments.

An Open Market

The narrator calls New Orleans a dead museum, then describes walking with his companion around Exchange Place while breathing PG. They find The Man right away. Because the city is small and the police already know who is selling, The Man reasons that it hardly matters whom he sells to; he serves anyone. The travelers stock up on heroin and backtrack toward Mexico.

That quick transaction contrasts with the elaborate risks and delays elsewhere in the same account. The druggist in Houston makes the narrator wait, while New Orleans offers immediate access through a seller who treats police knowledge as an established condition of business. The city’s apparent openness does not mean the trade is safe; rather, it shows how routine policing and illicit supply coexist in a market where both seller and authorities are presumed to know the arrangement.

New Orleans in the Wider Network

New Orleans also belongs to the narrator’s larger map of addiction. The book places it alongside Yemen, Paris, Mexico City, and Istanbul as one of the places linked by a worldwide network of users, sickness, and supply. In another image, the Connection is eating chop suey on Dolores Street in Mexico City, while the network extends across cities and draws the living and the dead into the same orbit of dependence. New Orleans is thus both a specific stop—Exchange Place, The Man, a heroin purchase—and part of a system that exceeds any single city.

The account’s other references to New Orleans sharpen its association with drug enforcement and its uncertain boundaries. The word People is identified as New Orleans slang for narcotics police, while an account of an overdose links death to time or the breathlessness of withdrawal. Later, the narrator’s reflections on junk time describe an existence in which the body serves as a clock and time matters chiefly in relation to need. Against that recurring pressure, the New Orleans episode is strikingly compressed: the travelers find a seller, buy what they need, and leave. Its brevity gives the city the character of a functioning link in the route, not a place where the dependence or pursuit comes to rest.