Victor and I were sitting in front of a little cafe in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego when this middle-aged Mexican walked by, and Victor gasped: 'My God, that's a harmless looking person!' I'd noticed him around town, and spotted him as a real M.O.B.ist: which is nothing special, just minds his own business of staying alive and thinks that what other people do is other people's business.
The old hop-smoking rod-riding underworld has a name for it: 'a member of the Johnson family.' Wouldn't rush to the law if he smelled weed in the hall, doesn't care what fags in the back room are doing, stands by his word. Good man to do business with. They are found in all walks of life. The cop who slipped me a joint in a New Orleans jail, for instance. Or when I was pushing junk in Juarez, the hotel clerk who stopped me in the lobby: 'I don't know how to say this, but there is something wrong about the people who come to your room.' (Something wrong is putting it softly; ratty junkies with no socks, dressed in three boosted jackets puffing out, carrying radios torn from the living car, trailing wires like entrails. 'This isn't a hock shop!' I scream. 'Get this shit out of here!' Regaining my composure I say severely, 'You are lowering the entire tone of my establishment.) 'So I just wanted to warn you to be careful and tell those people to watch what they say over the phone ... if someone else had been at the switchboard ...'
And a hotel clerk in Mazatlan; I handed him some money to put in the safe. He put the money away and looked at me: 'You do not need a receipt Senor.' I looked at him and saw that he was a Johnson, and knew that I didn't need a receipt.
Yes, this world would be a pretty easy and pleasant place to live in if everybody could just mind his own business and let others do the same. But a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: 'Some people are shits, darling.' I was never able to forget it.
Mexican druggist throwing a script back at me: 'We do not serve dope fiends.' It's like Mr. Anslinger said: 'The laws must express society's disapproval of the addict.'
Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a HIV virus has ...