The Story of Junk (7 page)

That was the dawn of my addiction; Kit was twenty-six and I was thirty-two. I gave up on my life and decided hers was the more important—she was the one with the budding career. In restaurant parlance, I was the back-of-the-house person, she was the front.

Kitchen work had given me pop-up veins in a couple of places on my arms, and Kit took pleasure in poking them with a spike—a syringe. I hated watching the blood, my blood, surge back into the chamber—it scared me—but the rush that came with the boot of the plunger was another story entirely.

ALL DRUGS ARE POISON

Dick again, day two. Can he really have nothing better to do than sit here and watch me kick? He's actually getting paid for this. I'm glad I didn't pay taxes.

My father called around the middle of the day. Now I know where he is—in a hospital. He needs an operation, a triple bypass. What did he want from me? Same thing he's always wanted: me. I can't worry about him right now, I have Kit. I have Dick, for God's sake. I have shit.

Still, I do worry. He's my father, after all. What would happen if I had to tell him about the bust? At least Dick already knows. In some respects he reminds me of my dad. Revolting.

Dick wasn't around for Dad's phone call, thank God. He was out for lunch. The agents downstairs got him a sandwich and they all ate together in the car. I could see them by going up on the roof; they were parked across the street. It's weird, the way they leave me alone. How soon will they take me away? Let them eat, I don't care. I hope they eat a lot. As long as I don't have to cook.

Dick was after me to talk about my drug connections. That's all he wanted to know—how a nice girl like me got mixed up in a dirty business like this.

It doesn't matter how I started on heroin. What matters is why I stayed. The answer to that is sex. Heroin made sex more exciting. No, exciting is too dull a word—this drug is not for the faint of heart. Once you've done it, there's no such thing as going too far. Heroin is a trip, an adventure in desire. When it smiles at you, you can't refuse it. I couldn't. I didn't. I don't. I have a large capacity for desire. Too large. Only heroin cut it down to size.

When I moved in with Kit, I no longer cared what the world found socially acceptable. Two girls together? Of course. Could we have sex standing up? Fine with me: heat rises—where's the fire? There was hardly a moment that didn't get us wet. Could she turn me on my head and prop me on a wall? I was down with it. Squat with my hands in restraints? I'd play.

It was the physical thing that hooked me. I wasn't looking for God. I thought I'd seen enough. But the prospect of a life of pure sensation—that, I liked. Heroin was another way to see the world, from the other side of the glass, another way to free it. It's a world you don't have to enter; it enters you. It makes you feel sexy—good for something. But this life isn't about feeling good; it's about feeling better. However good or bad you feel, heroin makes you feel better. It's a short leap from there to feeling nothing at all. For that you pay a price. Not five hundred dollars a gram—that's just money. For heroin, you pay with your life.

All drugs are poisons, my dad used to say. A necessary evil, he called them. He was talking about medicines. In his youth he had been a pharmacist's apprentice and then, after the war, a drug salesman—like father, like daughter, ho ho.

Dad pushed pharmaceuticals, eye, ear, nose, and throat. I grew up on a cough syrup made of two ingredients, codeine and alcohol—my first cocktail and still my favorite. Dad didn't know that, of course. When there's a poison in the body, he said, your best weapon is a stronger poison. The trick is to kill the intruder without killing yourself. I have yet to get the hang of it.

PART TWO

HEROIN HONEYMOON

HEROIN HONEYMOON

May 1981.

“I've been watching you sleep,” I hear Kit say. It's my first week in residence at her apartment. “I like watching you sleep,” she says. “You've been dreaming.”

I don't believe it. “I never dream,” I say.

Kit's kneeling on the floor beside me with a bent spoon and cotton, preparing a syringe. “You're on your heroin honeymoon,” she tells me. “You sleep with that heroin honeymoon smile. You don't wake up sick, like me.” She holds out a hand mirror lying by the bed. “Take a look and see.”

I sit up and take the mirror from her hand. I don't look.

“You went out and copped already?” I ask. I've been dead to the world. I can smell the coffee.

“I had to,” she says. “Rehearsal's in an hour.”

“How is it?” I nod toward the spoon. Sun fills the room. I feel pale.

“Put out your arm.”

I pump it. She ties me off with one of her scarves. “You have such good veins,” she says. “I used to have veins like yours.”

“Don't give me too much,” I say. “I'm not ready.”

Her eyes graze my arm, her voice is gentle. “It's only one bag, don't worry.”

I hear music coming from the living room, it's jarring. “I don't like loud music so early in the morning,” I say.

“I do,” Kit retorts. “Anyway, it isn't morning.” She holds a lighter under the spoon, dissolves the dope in the water. This is tricky. If the water boils, she's lost it.

“What
is
that you're playing?” I ask. Don't know why I'm so irritable. “Can't we listen to your music, at least? This is dreadful.”

“This,” she says quietly, “is a tape of yesterday's rehearsal.”

I'm still nervous about the needle. I don't know how to inject myself. I don't want to know. I like the way Kit does it. I like her touch. My eyes lock onto her hands as she draws the liquid into the barrel of the syringe, taps out the air. Here it comes. I don't want to watch but can't help it.

“There's that smile again,” she says after a moment. I look in the mirror. There it is, right on my face, a smile of saintly serenity. It's odd to see—I never smile. I've been pissed off about something or other all my life. Now I look like a dark Ophelia floating in her pale river of dreams, all my worries over, love sealed in my heart at last.

I lie back on the pillows and take in the sun. The bedroom windows at the rear avail a view to the east, a maze of rooftop water towers wide as the horizon in the sky. I'm in heaven. My legs curl under me. I'm warm, my skin tingles. I listen to my heart beat. It's slow and easy. I don't move but I can see myself dancing. My mind races. I'm excited. The music—I wonder if I did the right thing, giving up Big Guy's apartment. Well, it wasn't mine to keep. Isn't it better not to pay two rents? After all, we're a couple now, Kit and I, aren't we a couple? High time I tried something new. New life, new kind of sex, new apartment. This place is big, filled with light. The cats are happier here, too. One of them is pregnant. I've cleaned the house, everything neat and tidy, but there's one thing I missed: Betty's presence. It's here. I can smell it. I can feel her eyes at my back. Then, in my mind, I see a grave. It's covered in weeds and sits near a road down a slope beside a bridge. I kneel at the grave, pull at the weeds. I hear a voice say my name. It's my mother's. Then my mind empties, and everything is different.

It's not easy to describe this euphoria—a sublime nausea, a flushed meeting of mortal and immaterial all at once, a leap beyond fate, a divine embrace. Heroin gives the impression you've gained a level of self-knowledge closed to other pursuits, and the moment you recognize the place where you stand, it blots you out as if you'd never existed. Nothing in the world can hurt you then. Nothing can touch you. And nothing can satisfy your hunger for more: more love, more pain, more sex, more excitement. More
more
.

Everything happens, if you let it, sooner or later, all the things you've left undone come back to claim you. I feel safe here. Heroin doesn't rattle any skeletons. It's sweet. It can't get any sweeter than this. Everything is as I remember it, as I want it, as I need. I own it, the great, the pure, the impossible. All mine.

“Which dope is this?” I ask. I sound far away.

“Something new,” Kit says. “Black Mark,” she reads from the stamp on the glassine paper. “I'll walk you over there later.”

She lies down beside me, her face pressed to mine, my lizard, my lover, my waking dream. Isn't this love? It must be.

COPPING

With Betty out of the picture and no one else to run, Kit has to go out on the Lower East Side to cop drugs for herself. “Come with me,” she says, pulling on her boots. They're black velvet suede, cut low, pointy-toe—very King's Road, London.

I'm not interested in buying from the street. Too risky. And the stuff itself is dirty—cut with quinine and strychnine and God knows what else. It's the color of wet sand. White dope is much more refined, closer to pure. Like me.

“You're such a snob,” Kit teases.

“You think I'll put any old shit in this body?” I challenge her. I don't eat processed food, or animal fat, either. I like feeling lean.

“Come on,” she pleads. “I don't like going out there alone.”

What the hell, I think. The exercise will do me good. Muscles gather strength with repetition; so does mettle. I have to sharpen my wits—it's New York. A flabby spirit never cut it around here. My mother grew up in a Second Avenue tenement; my father was born on Avenue D. I'm just going back to my roots.

From SoHo, it's a twenty-minute walk across town, maybe thirty, every day to a different spot. The Lower East Side's made a comeback. It even has a new name: Alphabet City. It's no less wretched than when it was the Lower East Side, just more colorful and illicit. Away from the splendor of upper Fifth Avenue, removed from the bright lights, the tawdry novelties, human or otherwise, for sale in Times Square, it visibly sags under the weight of housing too many different kinds of people with too many different ideas of fun: immigrants, bikers, poets, punks, self-appointed priests, a decrepit bohemia buzzing with capitalist cheer.

Big-time Latino drug entrepreneurs have built a model corporate structure in the body of the condemned. Every day new drug “stalls” sprout from the walls of abandoned buildings and the grasses of rubble-strewn lots. An incredible din fills the air: blaring sirens, running feet, lookouts shouting
Bajando!
(the Man), or
Todo bien!
(all clear). Hawkers stand on corners calling out the brand names of “houses” they represent: Poison, 57 Magnum, Colt 45, Toilet, Star, President, Executive. It's big. To a tourist, it must look like a casbah from hell.

Even at eight a.m. the streets are crawling. Avenue B reminds me of a drag strip; transactions are a blur. By midafternoon, it's a swarm, bodies slinking in and out of guarded doorways, diving through holes punched in concrete walls, wiggling into gaps in the sidewalk deep as wells, shooting up in empty lots, nodding on the hulks of abandoned cars. Everyone's slumming. Everyone, from the unwashed to the unwed to the unbelievably rich. They're not residents. These streets are home only to the cunning.

“It's the new Gold Rush,” I observe as we go. These derelict buildings with their broken windows and missing floors, these dank peeling shells with their dimly lit corridors to oblivion, these are our mines. “We're not breaking laws,” I say. “We're working the
mines
.”

Kit gives me a look. “Try and tell that to the judge.”

We know the cops can't haul everyone in, but at random moments they load a hundred people in buses, take their drugs, book them, embarrass them, and let them go. When the police can't handle it, the politicians campaign to tear the buildings down. Most of them are owned by the city. Some days we have to dodge bulldozers as often as we do the law.

Cops aren't the only hazard. If some desperado wants our stuff, he'll get it. Around here they pull the rings right off your fingers—with their teeth, if they have to—if your money's not good enough. If the thieves don't get you, the beat artists will—sellers who tap out a hit for themselves and sell you a bag filled with sugar or baby powder, or worse. Then there are the undercovers. Every now and then a pair of them will pull you aside and snap on the handcuffs. If one of them wants a kick, he'll trade your freedom for a suck-off in his car. If a cop doesn't do it, one of the
flacos
will. A
flaco
is a cop-man, it's what the dealers call themselves. They all have the same name, they do the same things. They take you.

It's all a stupid game run by creeps and fueled by assholes, but we accept it. The danger is part of the draw. Life isn't easy, not for anyone. Heroin is a finger up its nose. It's got a life of its own and that life is ours, we don't have to plan or think it out. There lies the beauty: I'm done with thinking. All it ever did was make me cry.

Kit is my guide on these daily excursions across town. Our safety depends on our sticking together, and we're together most of the time, copping, getting high, going home to fool around. If sex is the main attraction in our friendship, heroin is the glue. Then food.

One night I bring home a box of overripe strawberries and slip a few inside her while we're in bed. “Here's fresh fruit for dessert,” I say, giggling. “You can make the cream.” Usually, all I do with Kit is laugh. Not this time.

“I don't like dirty talk,” she says, her face white. “It makes me feel weird.” I shrug and eat the berries. It's the only disagreement we've had.

Over the summer, our routine falls into a certain rhythm. We hear it from boom boxes at every step. “Everything's rap now,” Kit says one afternoon. We're sitting in bed eating ice cream. “My band better write one or we'll never get a record contract.”

I pull out a notebook and hand her a pen. “They're simple rhymes,” I say. “We can write one.”