Junky (23 page)

He said, “Yes. An herb dealer here sells it. He invited all of us to come to his place and eat peyote with him. You can come along if you like. I want to see if he has anything I can take back to the States and sell there.”

“Why not take back peyote?”

“It doesn't keep. It rots or dries up in a few days and loses its kick.” We went to the herb dealer's house and he brought out a bowl of peyote, a grater and a pot of tea.

Peyote is a small cactus and only the top part that appears above the ground is eaten. This is called a button. The buttons are prepared by peeling off the bark and fuzz and running the button through a grater until it looks like avocado salad. Four buttons is the average dose for a beginner.

We washed down the peyote with tea. I came near gagging on it several times. Finally I got it all down and sat there waiting for something to happen. The herb dealer brought out some bark he claimed was like opium. Johnny rolled a cigarette of the stuff and passed it around. Pete and Johnny said, “Crazy! This is the greatest.”

I smoked some and felt a little dizzy and my throat hurt. But Johnny bought some of that awful-smelling bark with the intention of selling it to desperate hipsters in the U.S.

After ten minutes I began to feel sick from the peyote. Everyone told me, “Keep it down, man.” I held out ten minutes more, then headed for the W.C. ready to throw in the towel, but I couldn't vomit. My whole body contracted in a convulsive spasm, but the peyote wouldn't come up. It wouldn't stay down either.

Finally, the peyote came up solid like a ball of hair, solid all the way up, clogging my throat. As horrible a sensation as I ever stood still for. After that, the high came on slow.

Peyote high is something like benzedrine high. You can't sleep and your pupils are dilated. Everything looks like a peyote plant. I was driving in the car with the Whites and Cash and Pete. We were going out to Cash's place in the Lomas. Johnny said, “Look at the bank along the road. It looks like a peyote plant.”

I turned around to look, and was thinking, “What a damn silly idea. People can talk themselves into anything.” But it did look like a peyote plant. Everything I saw looked like a peyote plant.

Our faces swelled under the eyes and our lips got thicker through some glandular action of the drug. We actually looked like Indians. The others claimed they felt primitive and were laying around on the grass and acting the way they figured Indians act. I didn't feel any different from ordinary except high like on benny.

We sat up all night talking and listening to Cash's records. Cash told me about several cats from 'Frisco who had kicked junk habits with peyote. “It seems like they didn't want junk when they started using peyote.” One of these junkies came down to Mexico and started taking peyote with the Indians. He was using it all the time in large quantities: up to twelve buttons in one dose. He died of a condition that was diagnosed as polio. I understand, however, that the symptoms of peyote poisoning and polio are identical.

I couldn't sleep until the next morning at dawn, and then I had a nightmare every time I dozed off. In one dream, I was coming down with rabies. I looked in the mirror and my face changed and I began howling. In another dream, I had a chlorophyll habit. Me and about five other chlorophyll addicts are waiting to score on the landing of a cheap Mexican hotel. We turn green and no one can kick a chlorophyll habit. One shot and you're hung for life. We are turning into plants.

•

The young hipsters seem lacking in energy and spontaneous enjoyment of life. The mention of pot or junk will galvanize them like a shot of coke. They jump around and say, “Too much! Crazy! Man, let's pick up! Let's get loaded.” But after a shot, they slump into a chair like a resigned baby waiting for life to bring the bottle again.

I found that their interests were very limited. Particularly, I noticed they seemed less interested in sex than my generation. Some of them expressed themselves as not getting any kick out of sex at all. I have frequently been misled to believe a young man was queer after observing his indifference to women, and found out subsequently he was not at all homosexual, but simply disinterested in the whole subject.

•

Bill Gains threw in the towel and moved to Mexico. I met him at the airport. He was loaded on H and goof balls. His pants were spotted with blood where he had been fixing on the plane with a safety pin. You make a hole with the pin, and put the dropper over (not in) the hole, and the solution goes right in. With this method, you don't need a needle, but it takes an old-time junkie to make it work. You have to use exactly the right degree of pressure feeding in the solution. I tried it once and the junk squirted out to the side and I lost it all. But when Gains made a hole in his flesh, the hole stayed open waiting for junk.

Bill was an old-timer. He knew everybody in the business. He had an excellent reputation and he could score as long as anyone sold junk. I figured the situation must be desperate when Bill packed in and left the States.

“Sure, I can score,” he told me. “But if I stay in the States I'll wind up doing about ten years.”

I took a shot with him, and the what-happened-to-so-and-so routine set in.

“Old Bart died on the Island. Louie the Bellhop went wrong. Tony and Nick went wrong. Herman didn't make parole. The Gimp got five to ten. Marvin the waiter died from an overdose.”

I remembered the way Marvin used to pass out every time he took a shot. I could see him lying on the bed in some cheap hotel, the dropper full of blood hanging to his vein like a glass leech, his face turning blue around the lips.

“What about Roy?” I asked.

“Didn't you hear about him? He went wrong and hanged himself in the Tombs.” It seems the law had Roy on three counts, two larceny, one narcotics. They promised to drop all charges if Roy would set up Eddie Crump, an old-time pusher. Eddie only served people he knew well, and he knew Roy. The law double-crossed Roy after they got Eddie. They dropped the narcotics charge, but not the two larceny charges. So Roy was slated to follow Eddie up to Riker's Island, where Eddie was doing pen indefinite, which is maximum in City Prison. Three years, five months, and six days. Roy hanged himself in the Tombs, where he was awaiting transfer to Riker's.

Roy had always taken an intolerant and puritanical view of pigeons. “I don't see how a pigeon can live with himself,” he said to me once.

I asked Bill about child addicts. He nodded and smiled, a sly gloating smile. “Yes,
Lexington is full of young kids now.
”

•

One day I was in the Opera Bar
in Mexico City and ran into a politician I knew. He was standing at the bar with a napkin tucked in his collar, eating a steak. Between mouthfuls he asked me did I know anyone who might be interested to buy an ounce of heroin.

I said, “Maybe. How much?”

He said, “They want five hundred dollars.”

I talked to Bill Gains and he said, “All right. If it's anywhere near pure I'll take it. But no sight unseen. I have to try the stuff first.”

So I arranged it with the politician and we went down to his office. He brought the stuff out of a drawer in a finger stall and laid it on the desk beside a .45 automatic.

“I don't know anything about this stuff,” he said. “All I use is cocaine.”

I poured some out on a piece of paper. It didn't look right to me. Sort of gray-black. I guess “they” had cooked it up some place on a kitchen stove.

Gains took a shot, but he was so loaded already on goof balls and M he couldn't tell one way or the other. So I took a shot and told him. “It's H, but there's something not exactly right about it.”

People meanwhile were walking in and out the office. Nobody paid us any mind sitting there on the couch with our sleeves rolled up, probing for veins with the needle. Anything can happen in the office of a Mexican politician.

Anyway Bill bought the H and I went somewhere and didn't see him until next day, eleven o'clock on a bright Mexican morning, standing by my bed, cadaverous in his blue-black overcoat, midnight blue, his eyes brighter than I ever saw them, gleaming in the darkness of the curtained room. He stood there with the impurities of amateur H in his brain like spirochetes.

“You just going to lie there on your bed?” he asked. “With all these shipments coming in?”

“Why not?” I said, annoyed. “This isn't any fuckin' farm . . . shipments of what?”

“Good, pure M,” he said. Then shoes, overcoat and all, he got right in bed with me.

“What's the matter with you?” I asked. “You crazy?” And looking into his bright blank eyes I saw that he was.

I got him back to his room and confiscated what was left of the piece of H.

Old Ike showed, and we poured ten centimeters of laudanum down Bill's gullet. After that he stopped raving about “shipments of good, pure M” and went to sleep.

“Maybe he die,” Old Ike said, “and they blame it onto me.”

“If he dies, you clear out,” I said. “Listen. He's got six hundred dollars cash in his wallet. Why leave it for some Mexican cop to steal?”

We shook the place down looking for the wallet, but could not find it. We looked everywhere except under the mattress where Bill was lying.

Next day Bill was good as new, but he couldn't find his money.

“You must have stashed it,” I said. “Look under the mattress.”

He turned up the mattress and the wallet sprung open, it was so full of crisp money.

•

At this time, I was not on junk, but I was a long way from being clean in the event of an unforeseen shake. There was always some weed around, and people were using my place as a shooting gallery. I was taking chances and not making centavo one. I decided it was about time to move out from under and head south.

When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junkies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junkie quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before. Like a man who has been away a long time, you see things different when you return from junk.

I read about a drug called
yage
, used by Indians in the headwaters of the Amazon. Yage is supposed to increase telepathic sensitivity. A Colombian scientist isolated from yage a drug he called
telepathine
.

I know from my own experience that telepathy is a fact. I have no interest in proving telepathy or anything to anybody. I do want usable knowledge of telepathy. What I look for in any relationship is contact on the nonverbal level of intuition and feeling, that is, telepathic contact.

Apparently, I am not the only one interested in yage. The Russians are using this drug in experiments on slave labor. They want to induce states of automatic obedience and literal thought control. The basic con. No build-up, no routine, just move in on someone's psyche and give orders. The deal is certain to backfire because telepathy is not of its nature a one-way set-up, or a set-up of sender and receiver at all.

I decided to go down to Colombia and score for yage. Bill Gains is squared away with Old Ike. My wife and I are separated. I am ready to move on south and look for the uncut kick that opens out instead of narrowing down like junk.

Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh. Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke. Yage may be the final fix.

GLOSSARY

“Jive talk” is used more in connection with marijuana than with junk. In the past few years, however, the use of junk has spread into “hip,” or “jive talking” circles, and junk lingo has, to some extent, merged with “jive talk.” For example, “Are you anywhere?” can mean “Do you have any junk or weed on your person?” Jive talk always refers to more than one level of fact. “Are you anywhere?” can also refer to your psychic condition: “Are you holding psychically?”

Are you anywhere? Are you holding?
Do you have any junk or weed on you?

Beat
To take someone's money. For example, addict A says he will buy junk for addict B but keeps the money instead. Addict A has “beat” addict B for the money.

Benny
Benzedrine. It can also mean overcoat.

Bring down, Drag
The opposite of high. Depressing.

Brown Stuff, or Mud
Opium.

Burn Down
To overdo or run into the ground. Certain restaurants are used so much by junkies as meeting-places that the restaurant gets known to the police. Then the restaurant is “burned down.”

Burning Down Habit, an Oil Burner Habit
A heavy habit.

C, Coke, Charge, Charly
Cocaine.

Caps
Capsules of heroin.

Cat
A man.

Chick
A woman.

Chucks
Excessive hunger, often for sweets. This comes on an addict when he has kicked his habit far enough so that he starts to eat. When an addict is cut off the junk, he can't eat for several days. I have seen addicts who did not eat for a month. Then he gets the “chucks” and eats everything in sight.

Clean
A user is clean if he does not have any junk on his person or premises in the event of a search by the law.

Cold Turkey
To quit using suddenly and completely with no gradual reduction of the dose. Almost always involuntary.

Collar
Strip of paper wrapped around a dropper to make a tight fit with a needle.

Come on
The way someone acts, his general manner and way of approaching others.

Come up
A lush waking up while he is being robbed.

Cook
To dissolve junk in water heated in a spoon or other container.

Cop
To pass a cap of junk to someone; to hold out a hand for a cap.

Copper Jitters
Exaggerated fear of cops. When you have the Copper Jitters, everybody looks like a cop.

Croaker
A doctor.

Dig
To size up, to understand, to like, or enjoy.

Fey
White.

Five-Twenty-Nine
Five months and twenty-nine days. This is the term in the workhouse that a lush-worker receives for “jostling.” If a detective sees a lush-worker approach or touch a lush, he places a “jostling” charge.

Flop
Drunk passed out on a subway station bench.

G
One grain. Morphine is the standard for junk measurement. One-half grain of morphine is one “fix.” A capsule of heroin should contain at least the equivalent of ½ grain of morphine. Heroin is seven times as strong as morphine.

Gold
Money.

H, Horse, Henry
Heroin.

Habit
A junk habit. It takes at least a month of daily use to get a needle habit, two months for a smoking habit, four months for an eating habit.

Heat
, Fuzz
Law, cops, the police.

Heavy
Junk, as opposed to marijuana.

Hep or Hip
Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands “jive talk.” Someone who is “with it.” The expression is not subject to definition because, if you don't “dig” what it means, no one can ever tell you.

High
Feeling good, in a state of euphoria. You can be “high” on benny, weed, lush, nutmeg, ammonia (The Scrubwoman's Kick). You can be high without any chemical boot, just feeling good.

Hog
Anyone who uses more junk than you do. To use over five grains per day puts a user in the hog class.

Hook
Lush-workers usually work in pairs. One lush-worker covers his partner with a newspaper, while the other goes through the lush's pockets. The one who covers the other is the “hook.”

Hooked
To get a habit.

Hot, Uncool
Somebody liable to attract attention from the law. A place watched by the law.

Hot Shot
Poison, usually strychnine, passed to an addict as junk. The peddler sometimes slips a hot shot to an addict because the addict is giving information to the law.

The Hype, The Bill
A short-change racket.

John
Someone who keeps a woman and spends money on her.

Joy Bang
An occasional shot by someone who does not have a habit.

Kick
A word with several meanings. It can mean the effect of a drug or a mood brought on by some place, or person. “This bar gives me bad kicks.” “This bar depresses me.” You can also be on “good kicks.” A kick is also a special way of looking at things so that the man who is “on kicks” sees things from a special angle.

Kick a Habit
To quit using junk and get over a habit.

Lay on
Give.

Loaded, On the Nod
Full of junk.

Lush-worker
A thief who specializes in robbing drunks on the subway.

M, M.S.
Morphine. M.S. stands for Morphine Sulphate, which is the morphine salt most commonly used in the U.S.

Main Line
Vein, a vein injection.

Making Cars
Breaking into parked cars and stealing the contents.

Mark
Someone easy to rob, like a drunk with a roll of money.

Meet
An appointment, usually between peddler and customer.

Nembies
, Goof Balls, Yellow Jackets
Nembutal capsules. Nembutal is a barbiturate used by junkies “to take the edge off” when they can't get junk.

P.G.
Paregoric. A weak, camphorated tincture of opium, two grains to the ounce. Two ounces will fix a sick addict. It can be bought without prescription in some states. P.G. can be injected intravenously after burning out the alcohol and straining out the camphor.

The People
Narcotics agents. A New Orleans expression.

Pickup
To use. Generally refers to weed. But you can “pickup” on nembies, lush, or junk.

Piece
Gun.

Pigeon, Fink, Rat
Informer.

Plant, Stash
To hide something, usually junk, or an “outfit.”

Poke
Wallet.

Pop, Bang, Shot, Fix
Injection of junk.

Pop Corn
Someone with a legitimate job, as opposed to a “hustler” or thief.

Pusher, Peddler, “The Man”
Junk seller. “The Man” is another New Orleans expression, and can also refer to a Narcotics Agent.

Put Down a Hype or Routine
To give someone a story, to persuade, or con someone.

Put Your Hand Out
To go through a lush's pockets.

Score
To buy junk or marijuana.

Serve, Take Care Of
To sell junk to a user.

Shake, Rumble
Search by the law.

Skin
Skin injection.

Sick, Gaping, Yenning
Sickness caused by lack of junk.

Smash
Change, money, coins.

Square
The opposite of hip. Someone who does not understand the jive.

Spade
A Negro.

Speed Ball
Cocaine mixed with morphine or heroin.

Spike
Needle.

Stuff, Junk
General terms for opium and all derivatives of opium: morphine, heroin, Dilaudid, pantopon, codeine, dionine.

Take a Fall
To get arrested.

Tea head, Head, Viper
User of marijuana.

Tie-up
Tie, or handkerchief, used as a tourniquet for a vein shot.

User, Hyp, Junkie, Junker, Shmecker
Junk addict.

Weed, Tea, Gage, Grass, Greefa, Muggles, Pot, Hash
Marijuana, hashish.

White stuff
Morphine, or heroin, as opposed to “brown stuff.”

Working the Hole
Lush-working.

Works, Outfit, Joint
A user's outfit for injecting junk. Consists of an eyedropper, hypodermic needle, strip of paper to fit the dropper tight into the needle, and a spoon or other container in which to dissolve the junk.

Write
To write a narcotic prescription. To “make a Croaker for a Script” means to persuade a doctor to write a prescription for junk.

Wrong
Term used to describe an informer.

Yen Pox
Ash of opium after the opium has been smoked. Yen Pox contains about the same morphine content as opium before smoking. It can be eaten with hot coffee, or dissolved in water and injected intravenously.

It should be understood that the meanings of these words are subject to rapid changes, and that a word that has one hip meaning one year may have another the next. The hip sensibility mutates.
For example, “Fey”
means not only white, but fated or demoniac. Not only do the words change meanings but meanings vary locally at the same time. A final glossary, therefore, cannot be made of words whose intentions are fugitive.