Junky (22 page)

I asked, “How come I stink like this?”

The doctor shrugged. Ike said, “He says it's nothing serious. He says you have to stop drinking. He says better you go back to the other than drink like this.” The doctor nodded. I could hear Ike out in the hall, hitting the croaker for a morphine script.

“Ike, I don't think that doctor knows a thing. I want you to do this. Go to my friend Rollins—I'll write down his address—and ask him to send me over a good doctor. He will know because his wife has been sick.”

“Well, all right,” said Ike. “But I think you're wasting your money. This doctor is pretty good.”

“Yeah, he's got a good writing arm.”

Ike laughed and shrugged. “All right.”

He was back in an hour with Rollins and another doctor. When they walked into the apartment, the doctor sniffed and smiled and, turning to Rollins, nodded. He had a round, smiling, Oriental face. He made a quick examination and asked if I could urinate. Then, turning to Ike, he asked if I was subject to fits.

Ike told me, “He ask if you are ever crazy. I tell him, no, you just
play with the cat some time
.”

Rollins spoke in his halting Spanish, looking for each word.
“
Esto señor huele muy malo and quiere saber por qué.
”
(“This man smells very bad and he wants to know why.”)

The doctor explained it was an incipient uremia, but the danger was now past. I would have to stop drinking for a month. The doctor picked up an empty tequila bottle. “One more of these and you were dead.” He was putting away his instruments. He wrote out a prescription for an anti-acid preparation to take every few hours, shook hands with me and Ike and left.

Next day I had the chucks and ate everything in sight. I stayed in bed three days. The metabolic set-up of alcoholism had ceased operating. When I started drinking again, I drank normally and never before the late afternoon. I stayed off the junk.

•

At that time, the G.I. students patronized Lola's during the daytime and the Ship Ahoy at night. Lola's was not exactly a bar. It was a small beer and soda joint. There was a boxful of beer and soda and ice at the left of the door as you came in. A counter with tube metal stools, covered in yellow glazed leather, ran down one side of the room as far as the jukebox. Tables were lined along the wall opposite the counter. The stools had long since lost the rubber caps for the legs and made a horrible screeching noise when the maid pushed them around to sweep. There was a kitchen in back, where a slovenly cook fried everything in rancid fat. There was neither past nor future in Lola's. The place was a waiting room.

I was sitting in Lola's reading the papers. After a while I put the paper down and looked around. At the next table somebody was talking about lobotomy. “They sever the nerves.” At another table two young men were trying to make time with some Mexican girls.
“
Mi amigo es muy, muy . . .
”
He was looking for a word. The girls giggled. The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic inanity, random events in a dying universe
where everything is exactly
what it appears to be, and no other relation than juxtaposition is possible.

I had been off junk two months. When you quit junk, everything seems flat, but you remember the shot schedule, the static horror of junk, your life draining into your arm three times a day.
Every time exactly that much less
.

I picked up a comic section from the next table. It was two days old. I put it down. Nothing to do. No place to go. My wife was in Acapulco
with the children
. I started back to my apartment, and spotted Old Ike a block away.

Some people you can spot as far as you can see; others you can't be sure of until you are close enough to touch them. Junkies are mostly in sharp focus. There had been a time when my blood pressure rose with pleasure at the sight of Old Ike. When you are on the junk, the pusher is like the loved one to the lover. You wait for his special step in the hall, his special knock, you scan the approaching faces on a city street. You can hallucinate every detail of his appearance as though he were standing there in the doorway, going into the old pusher joke: “Sorry to disappoint you, but I couldn't score.” Watching the play of hope and anxiety on the other's face, savoring the feel of benevolent power, the power to give or withhold. Pat in New Orleans always pulled that routine. Bill Gains in New York. Old Ike would swear he didn't have anything, then slip the paper in my pocket and say, “Look, you had some all the time.”

But I was off the junk now. Still a shot of morphine would be nice later when I was ready to sleep, or, better, a speedball, half cocaine, half morphine. I overtook Ike at the door of the apartment. I dropped a hand on his shoulder and he turned, his toothless, old-woman, junkie face breaking into a smile as he recognized me.

“Hello,” he said.

“Haven't seen you in a dog's age,” I said. “Where you been?”

He laughed. “I was in the can,” he said. “Anyway, I didn't want to come around because I knew you was off. You off completely?”

“Yeah, I'm off.”

“You wouldn't want a shot, then?” Old Ike was smiling.

“Well . . .” I felt a touch of the old excitement like meeting someone you used to go to bed with and suddenly the excitement is there and you both know that you are going to go to bed again.

Ike made a deprecatory gesture. “I got about ten centogramos here. Not enough to do me any good. Got a little coke, too.”

“Come on in,” I said.

I opened the door. The apartment was dark and musty. Clothes, books, newspapers, dirty plates and glasses were scattered around on chairs and tables and on the dirty floor. I pushed a stack of magazines off a ratty-looking couch.

“Sit down,” I said. “You got the stuff on you?”

“Yeah, I got it planted.” He opened his fly and extracted a rectangular paper packet—the junkie fold, with one end fitting into another. Inside the packet were two smaller packets, each similarly folded. He placed the papers on the table. Ike watched me with his bright brown eyes. His mouth, toothless and tightly closed, gave the impression of being sewed together.

I went into the bathroom to get my works. Needle, dropper, and a piece of cotton. I fished a teaspoon out of a pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. Old Ike tore a long strip of paper and wet it with his mouth and wrapped it around the end of the dropper. He fitted the needle on over the wet paper collar. He opened one of the papers, with care not to flip the contents out by a spring motion of the waxed paper.

“This is the coke,” he said. “Be careful, it's strong stuff.”

I emptied the morphine paper into the spoon, adding a little water. About half a grain, I figured. Nearer four centogramos than ten. I held a match under the spoon until the morphine dissolved. You never heat coke. I added a little coke on the end of a knife blade and the coke dissolved instantly, like snow hitting water. I wrapped a frayed tie around my arm. My breath was short with excitement and my hands shook.

“Hit me, will you, Ike?”

Old Ike poked a gentle finger along the vein, holding the dropper poised between thumb and fingers. Ike was good. I hardly felt the needle slide in the vein. Dark, red blood spurted into the dropper.

“O.K.,” he said. “Let it go.”

I loosened the tie, and the dropper emptied into my vein. Coke hit my head, a pleasant dizziness and tension, while the morphine spread through my body in relaxing waves.

“Was that all right?” asked Ike, smiling.

“If God made anything better, he kept it for Himself,” I said.

Ike was cleaning out the needle, squirting water through it. “Well,” he said inanely, “when the roll is called up yonder we'll be there, right?”

I sat down on the couch and lit a cigarette. Old Ike went out into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. He began another installment in the endless saga of the Black Bastard. “The Black Bastard is putting out to three guys now. Pickpockets, all three of them, and they make pretty good in the market. Pay off the cops. He gives about four centogramos in a shot for fifteen pesos. He don't want to talk to me now he's doing good, the dirty bastard. He won't last a month, you wait and see. First time one of those guys gets caught he's going to stool like that!” Ike came to the kitchen door and snapped his fingers. “He won't last a month.” His toothless mouth was
twisted with hate
.

•

When I jumped bail and left the States, the heat on junk already looked like something new and special. Initial symptoms of nationwide hysteria were clear. Louisiana passed a law making it a crime to be a drug addict. Since no place or time is specified and the term “addict” is not clearly defined, no proof is necessary or even relevant under a law so formulated. No proof, and consequently, no trial. This is police-state legislation penalizing a state of being. Other states were emulating Louisiana. I saw my chance of escaping conviction dwindle daily as the anti-junk feeling mounted to a paranoid obsession, like anti-Semitism under the Nazis. So I decided to jump bail and live permanently outside the United States.

Safe in Mexico, I watched the anti-junk campaign. I read about child addicts and Senators demanding the death penalty for dope peddlers. It didn't sound right to me. Who wants kids for customers? They never have enough money and they always spill under questioning. Parents find out the kid is on junk and go to the law. I figured that either Stateside peddlers have gone simpleminded or the whole child-addict set-up is a propaganda routine to stir up anti-junk sentiment and pass some new laws.

Refugee hipsters trickled down into Mexico. “Six months for needle marks under the vag-addict law in California.” “Eight years for a dropper in Washington.” “Two to ten for selling in New York.” A group of young hipsters dropped by my place every day to smoke weed.

There was Cash, a musician who played trumpet. There was Pete, a heavy-set blond, who could have modeled for a clean-cut American Boy poster. There was Johnny White, who had a wife and three children and looked like any average young American. There was Martin, a dark, good-looking kid of Italian stock. No zoot-suiters. The hipster has gone underground.

I learned the new hipster vocabulary: “pot” for weed, “twisted” for busted, “cool,” an all-purpose word indicating anything you like or any situation that is not hot with the law. Conversely, anything you don't like is “uncool.” From listening to these characters I got a picture of the situation in the U.S. A state of complete chaos where you never know who is who or where you stand. Old-time junkies told me: “If you ever see a man take a shot in the arm, you know he is not a Federal agent.”

This is no longer true. Martin told me: “This cat fell in and says he's sick. He had the names of some friends of ours in 'Frisco. So these two other cats turned him on H and he was fixing right with them for over a week. And then they got busted. I wasn't along when it happened because I didn't dig this cat and I wasn't on H at the time. So the lawyer for these two cats that got twisted found out the cat was a Federal narcotics agent. An
agent
, not a pigeon. Even found out his name.”

And Cash told me of cases where two hips take a fix together and then one pulls out his badge.

“How can you beat it?” Cash said. “I mean these guys are hips themselves. Guys just like you and me with one small difference— they work for Uncle.”

Now that the Narcotics Bureau has taken it upon itself to incarcerate every addict in the U.S., they need more agents to do the work. Not only more agents, but a different type agent. Like during prohibition, when bums and hoodlums flooded the Internal Revenue Department, now addict-agents join the department for
free junk and immunity
. It is difficult to fake addiction. An addict knows an addict. The addict-agents manage to conceal their addiction, or, perhaps, they are tolerated because they get results. An agent who has to connect or go sick will bring a special zeal to his work.

Cash, the trumpet player, who did six months on the vag-addict rap, was a tall, skinny young man with a ragged goatee and dark glasses. He wore shoes with thick crepe leather soles, expensive camel-hair shirts, and a leather jacket you tie with a belt in front. You could see he had about a hundred dollars in haberdashery on his person. His old lady had the money and Cash was spending it. When I met him, the money was about gone. Cash told me: “Women come to me. I don't care about women. The only thing gives me a real kick is playing trumpet.”

Cash was a junk mooch on wheels. He made it difficult to refuse. He would lend me small amounts of money—never enough to cover the junk he used—and then say he had given me all his money and had no money left to buy codeine pills. He told me he was getting off the junk. When he arrived in Mexico, I gave him half a grain of M and he went on the nod. I guess the stuff they sell now Stateside is cut right down to the paper.

After that, he would drop around every day and ask me for “half a fix.” Or he would mooch junk off Old Ike, who couldn't turn down anyone sick. I told Old Ike to pack him in, and explained to Cash I wasn't in the junk business.
I kept a little on hand
for emergencies like when out of town friends dropped in sick, and Old Ike wasn't really in the business either. Certainly he wasn't in the business for nothing. In short, we were not the junkies' benevolent society. From then on, I didn't see much of Cash.

•

Peyote is a new kick in the States. It isn't under the Harrison Act, and you can buy it from herb dealers through the mail. I had never tried peyote, and I asked Johnny White if he could score for peyote in Mexico.