- The Junky's Christmas
- Dr. Benway Operates
- The Heat Closing In
- Mason Jar of Morphine
- Unworthy Vessel
- No Horse Town
- Duty Calls
- Willy The Disk
- Tea Heads
- The Shoe
- No Glot...C'lom Fliday
- Earthbound Junk Ghost
- The Main Line
- Seven Souls
IT was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his worn, greasy black overcoat.
This beat benny wouldn't pawn for a deuce, he thought. He was in the West Nineties. A long block of brownstone rooming houses. Here and there a holy wreath in a clean black window. Danny's senses registered everything sharp and clear, with the painful intensity of junk sickness. The light hurt his dilated eyes.
He walked past a car, darting his pale blue eyes sideways in quick appraisal. There was a package on the seat and one of the ventilator windows was unlocked. Danny walked on ten feet. No one in sight. He snapped his fingers and went through a pantomime of remembering something, and wheeled around. No one.
A bad setup, he decided. The street being empty like this, I stand out conspicuous. Gotta make it fast.
He reached for the ventilator window. A door opened behind him. Danny whipped out a rag and began polishing the car windows. He could feel the man standing behind him.
"What're yuh doin'?"
Danny turned as if surprised. "Just thought your car windows needed polishing, mister."
The man had a frog face and a Deep South accent. He was wearing a camel's-hair overcoat.
"My caah don't need polishin' or nothing stole out of it neither."
Danny slid sideways as the man grabbed for him. "I wasn't lookin' to steal nothing, mister. I'm from the South too. Florida - "
"God dammed sneakin' thief!"
Danny walked away fast and turned a corner. Better get out of the neighborhood. That hick is likely to call the law.
He walked fifteen blocks. Sweat ran down his body. There was an ache in his lungs. His lips drew back off his yellow teeth in a snarl of desperation. I gotta score somehow. If I had some decent clothes...
Danny saw a suitcase standing in a doorway. Good leather. He stopped and pretended to look for a cigarette. Funny, he thought. No one around. Inside maybe, phoning for a cab.
The corner was only a few houses. Danny took a deep breath and picked up the suitcase. He made the corner. Another block, another corner. The case was heavy.
I got a score here all night, he thought. Maybe enough for a sixteenth and a room. Danny shivered and twitched, feeling a warm room and heroin emptying into his vein. Let's have a quick look.
He opened the suitcase. Two long packages in brown wrapping paper. He took one out. It felt like meat. He tore the package open at one end, revealing a woman's naked foot. The toenails were painted with purple-red polish. He dropped the leg with a sneer of disgust.
"Holy Jesus!" he exclaimed. "The routines people put down these days. Legs! Well I got a case anyway." He dumped the other leg out. No bloodstains. He snapped the case shut and walked away. "Legs!" he muttered.
HE FOUND the Buyer sitting at a table in Jarrow's Cafeteria.
"Thought you might be taking the day off." Danny said, putting the case down.
The Buyer shook his head sadly. "I got nobody. So what's Christmas to me?" His eyes traveled over the case, poking, testing, and looking for flaws. "What was in it?"
"Nothing."
"What's the matter? I don't pay enough?"
" I tell you there wasn't nothing in it."
" Okay. So somebody travels with an empty suitcase. Okay." He held up three fingers.
" For Christ's sake, Gimpy, give me a nickel."
" You got somebody else. Why don't he give you a nickel?"
" It's like I say, the case was empty."
Gimpy kicked at the case despairingly. "It's all nicked up and kinda dirty-looking. " He sniffed suspiciously. "How come it stink like that? Mexican leather?"
"So am I in the leather business?"
Gimpy shrugged- "Could be." He pulled out a roll of bills and peeled off three ones, dropping them on the table behind the napkin dispenser. "You want?"
"Okay." Danny picked up the money. "You see George the Greek?" he asked.
"Where you been? He got busted two days ago."
" Oh ...That's bad."
Danny walked out. Now where can I score? he thought. George the Greek had lasted so long, Danny thought of him as permanent. It was good H too, and no short counts.
Danny went up to 103rd and Broadway. Nobody in Jarrow's. Nobody in the Automat.
"Yeah, " he snarled. "All the pushers off on the nod someplace. What they care about anybody else? So long as they get in the vein. What they care about a sick junky?"
He wiped his nose with one finger, looking around furtively.
No use hitting those jigs in Harlem. Like as not get beat for my money or they slip me rat poison. Might find Pantapon Rose at Eighth and 23rd.
There was no one he knew in the 23rd Street Thompson's. Jesus, he thought. Where is everybody?
He clutched his coat collar together with one hand, looking up and down the street. There's Joey from Brooklyn. I'd know that hat anywhere.
Joey was walking away, with his back to Danny. He turned around. His face was sunken, skull-like. The gray eyes glittered under a greasy felt hat. Joey was sniffing at regular intervals and his eyes were watering.
No use asking him, Danny thought. They looked at each other with the hatred of disappointment.
" Guess you heard about George the Greek, " Danny said.
" Yeah. I heard. You been up to 103rd?"
" Yeah. Just came from there. Nobody around."
"Nobody around anyplace, " Joey said. "I can't even score for goofballs."
"Well, Merry Christmas, Joey. See you."
"Yeah. See you."
DANNY WAS walking fast. He had remembered a croaker on 18th Street. Of course the croaker had told him not to come back. Still, it was worth trying.
A brownstone house with a card in the window: P. H. Zunniga, M.D. Danny rang the bell. He heard slow steps. The door opened, and the doctor looked at Danny with bloodshot brown eyes. He was weaving slightly and supported his plumb body against the doorjamb. His face was smooth, Latin, the little red mouth slack. He said nothing. He just leaned there, looking at Danny.
God dammed alcoholic, Danny thought. He smiled.
" Merry Christmas, Doctor."
The doctor did not reply.
" You remember me, Doctor. " Danny tried to edge past the doctor, into the house. "I'm sorry to trouble you on Christmas Day, but I've suffered another attack."
" Attack? "
" Yes. Facial neuralgia." Danny twisted one side of his face into a horrible grimace. The doctor recoiled slightly, and Danny pushed into the dark hallway.
Better shut the door or you'll be catching cold, " he said jovially, shoving the door shut.
The doctor looked at him, his eyes focusing visibly. "I can't give you a prescription, " he said.
" But Doctor, this is a legitimate condition. An emergency, you understand."
" No prescription. Impossible. It's against the law."
" You took an oath, Doctor. I'm in agony. " Danny's voice shot up to a hysterical grating whine.
The doctor winced and passed a hand over his forehead.
" Let me think. I can give you one quarter-grain tablet. That's all I have in the house."
" But, Doctor - a quarter G ...."
The doctor stopped him. "If your condition is legitimate, you will not need more. If it isn't, I don't want anything to do with you. Wait right here."
The doctor weaved down the hall, leaving a wake of alcoholic breath. He came back and dropped a tablet into Danny's hand. Danny wrapped the tablet in a piece of paper and tucked it away.
" There is no charge. " The doctor put his hand on the doorknob. "And now, my dear ..."
"But, Doctor - can't you object the medication?"
"No. You will obtain longer relief in using orally. Please not to return. " The doctor opened the door.
Well, this will take the edge off, and I still have money to put down on a room, Danny thought.
He knew a drugstore that sold needles without question. He bought a 26-gauge insulin needle and eyedropper, which he selected carefully, rejecting models with a curved dropper or a thick end. Finally he bought a baby pacifier, to use instead of the bulb. He stopped in the Automat and stole a teaspoon.
Danny put down two dollars on a six-dollar-a-week room in the West Forties, where he knew the landlord. He bolted the door and put his spoon, needle and dropper on a table by the bed. He dropped the tablet in the spoon and covered it with a dropper of water. He held a match under the spoon until the tablet dissolved. He tore a strip of paper, wet it and wrapped it around the end of the dropper, fitting the needle over the wet paper to make an airtight connection. He dropped a piece of lint from his pocket into the spoon and sucked the liquid into the dropper through the needle, holding the needle in the lint to take up the last drop.
Danny's hands trembled with excitement and his breath was quick. With a shot in front of him, his defenses gave way, and junk sickness flooded his body. His legs began to twitch and ache. A cramp stirred in his stomach. Tears ran down his face from his smarting, burning eyes. He wrapped a handkerchief around his right arm, holding the end in his teeth. He tucked the handkerchief in, and began rubbing his arm to bring out a vein.
Guess I can hit that one, he thought, running one finger along a vein. He picked up the dropper in his left hand.
Danny heard a groan from the next room. He frowned with annoyance. Another groan. He could not help listening. He walked across the room, the dropper in his hand, and inclined his ear to the wall. The groans were coming at regular intervals, a horrible inhuman sound pushed out from the stomach.
Danny listened for a full minute. He returned to the bed and sat down. "Why don't someone call a doctor?" he thought indignantly. "It's a bring down." He straightened his arm and poised the needle. He tilted his head, listening again.
Oh, for Christ's sake! He tore off the handkerchief and placed the dropper in a water glass, which he hid behind the wastebasket. He stepped into the hall and knocked on the door of the next room. There was no answer. The groans continued. Danny tried the door. It was open. The shade was up and the room was full of light. He had expected an old person somehow, but the man on the bed was very young, eighteen or twenty, fully clothed and doubled up, with his hands clasped across his stomach.
" What's wrong, kid?" Danny asked.
The boy looked at him, his eyes blank with pain. Finally he got one word: "Kidneys."
" Kidney stones?" Danny smiled. " I don't mean it's funny, kid. It's just ... I've faked it so many times. Never saw the real thing before. I'll call an ambulance."
The boy bit his lip. " Won't come. Doctor's won't come. " The boy hid his face in the pillow.
Danny nodded. "They figure it's just another junky throwing a wingding for a shot. But your case is legit. Maybe if I went to the hospital and explained things... No, I guess that wouldn't be so good."
Don't live here, " the boy said, his voice muffled. " They say I'm not entitled."
" Yeah, I know how they are, the bureaucrat bastards. I had a friend once, died of snakebite right in the waiting room. They wouldn't even listen when he tried to explain a snake bit him. He never had enough moxie. That was fifteen years ago, down in Jacksonville..."
Danny trailed off. Suddenly he put out his thin, dirty hand and touched the boy's shoulder.
" I - I'm sorry, kid. You wait. I'll fix you up."
He went back to his room and got the dropper, and returned to the boy's room.
"Roll up your sleeve, kid." The boy fumbled his coat sleeve with a weak hand.
"That's okay. I'll get it." Danny undid the shirt button at the wrist and pushed the shirt and coat up, baring a thin brown forearm. Danny hesitated, looking at the dropper. Sweat ran down his nose. The boy was looking up at him. Danny shoved the needle in the boy's forearm and watched the liquid drain into the flesh. He straightened up.
The boy lay down, stretching. "I feel real sleepy. Didn't sleep all last night." His eyes were closing.
Danny walked across the room and pulled the shade down. He went back to his room and closed the door without locking it. He sat on the bed, looking at the empty dropper. It was getting dark outside. Danny's body ached for junk, but it was a dull ache now, dull and hopeless. Numbly, he took the needle of the dropper and wrapped it in a piece of paper. Then he wrapped the needle and dropper together. He sat there with the package in his hand. Gotta stash this someplace, he thought.
Suddenly a warm flood pulsed through his veins and broke in his head like a thousand golden speedballs.
For Christ's sake, Danny thought. I must have scored for the immaculate fix!
The vegetable serenity of junk settled in his tissues. His face went slack and peaceful, and his head fell forward.
Danny the Car Wiper was on the nod.
The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid... I think they're using it for an operating room...
NURSE:" Adrenalin, doctor?"
DR. BENWAY:"The night porter shot it all up for kicks." He looks around and picks up a toilet plunger... He advances on the patient..."Make and incision Dr. Limpf," he says to his appalled assistant..."I'm going to massage the heart."
Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the incision. Dr. Benway washes the suction cup by swishing it around the toilet bowl...
NURSE: "Shouldn't it be sterilized, doctor?"
DR. BENWAY:"Very likely but there's no time." He sits on the toilet plunger like a can seat watching his assistant make the incision..."You young squirts couldn't lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture...Soon we'll be operating by remote control on patients we never see...We'll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery...All the know how and make-do...Did I ever tell you about the time I performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once I was caught short without instrument one and removed a uterine tumor with my teeth. That was in the Upper Effendi, and besides...the wench is dead."
DR.LIMPF: "The incision is ready doctor."
Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall...The cup makes a horrible sucking sound.
NURSE:" I think she's gone, doctor."
DR.BENWAY: "Well, it's all in a days work." He walks across the room to a medicine cabinet..."Some fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush! Nurse! Send the boy out to fill this RX on the double!"
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train... Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, call the counterman in Nedick's by his first name. A real asshole. And right on time this narcotics dick in a white trench coat (imagine tailing somebody in a white trench coat -- trying to pass as a fag I guess) hit the platform. I can hear the way he would say it holding my outfit in his left hand, right hand on his piece: "I think you dropped something, fella" But the subway is moving. "So long flatfoot!" I yell, giving the fruit his B production. I look into the fruit's eyes, take in the white teeth, the Florida tan, the two hundred dollar sharkskin suit, the button-down Brooks Brothers shirt and carrying The News as a prop. "Only thing I read is Little Abner." A square wants to come on hip.... Talks about "pod," and smoke it now and then, and keeps some around to offer the fast Hollywood types. "Thanks, kid," I say, "I can see you're one of our own." His face lights up like a pinball machine, with stupid, pink effect. "Grassed on me he did," I said morosely. (Note: Grass is English thief slang for inform.) I drew closer and laid my dirty junky fingers on his sharkskin sleeve. "And us blood brothers in the same dirty needle, I can tell you in confidence he is due for a hot shot." (Note: This is a cap of poison junk sold to addict for liquidation purposes. Often given to informers. Usually the hot shot is strychnine since it tastes and looks like junk.) "Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit -- Kid, it was tasty....
"Recollect when I am traveling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi.. We are working the fags in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigilante turns up for work in cowboy boots and a black vest with a hunka tin on it and a lariat slung over his shoulder. "So I says: 'What's with you? You wig already?' "He just looks at me and says: 'Fill your hand stranger' and hauls out an old rusty six shooter and I take off across Lincoln Park, bullets cutting all around me. And he hangs three fags before the fuzz nail him. I mean the Vigilante earned his moniker.... "Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con men? Like 'raise,' letting someone know you are in the same line? " 'Get her!' " 'Get the Paregoric Kid giving that mark the build up!' " 'Eager Beaver wooing him much too fast.' "The Shoe Store Kid (he got that moniker shaking down fetishists in shoe stores) say: 'Give it to a mark with K.Y. and he will come back moaning for more.' And when the Kid spots a mark he begins to breathe heavy. His face swells and his lips turn purple like an Eskimo in heat. Then slow, slow he comes on the mark, feeling for him, palpating him with fingers of rotten ectoplasm.
"The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. That one stepped right off a Saturday Evening Post cover with a string of bullheads, and preserved him in junk. His marks never beef and the Bunko people are really carrying a needle for the Rube. One day Little Boy Blue starts to slip, and what crawls out would make an ambulance attendant puke. The Rube flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: 'Come back, kid!! Come back' and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded Hat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts." And the fruit is thinking: "What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark's about this one." He's a character collector, would stand still for Joe Gould's seagull act. So I put it on him for a sawski and make a meet to sell him some "pod" as he calls it, thinking, "I'll catnip the jerk." ( Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or uninstructed. ) "Well," I said, tapping my arm, "duty calls. As one judge said to another: 'Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.' " I cut into the automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else's overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous, dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt. I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times, spectral janitors, grey as ashes, phantom porters sweep ing out dusty halls with a slow old man's hand, coughing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk, patient and cautious and slow, dropped into their bloodless hands a few hours of warmth. I made the round with him once for kicks. You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will Hop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it.
"Well, my boys will be like that one day," I thought philosophically. "Isn't life peculiar?" So back downtown by the Sheridan Square Station in case the dick is lurking in a broom closet. Like I say it couldn't last. I knew they were out there powowing and making their evil fuzz magic, putting dolls of me in Leavenworth. "No use sticking needles in that one, Mike." I hear they got Chapin with a doll. This old enouch dick just sat in the precinct basement hanging a doll of him day and night, year in year out. And when Chapin hanged in Connecticut, they find this old creep with his neck broken. "He fell downstairs," they say. You know the old cop bullshit. Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by radar. "Not this street, the next, right... now left. Now right again," and there he is, toothless old woman face and cancelled eyes.
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune. So the customers come in on Smiles, or I'm in the Mood for Love, or They Say We're Too Young to Go Steady, or whatever the song is for that day. Sometime you can see maybe fifty ratty-looking junkies squealing sick, running along behind a boy with a harmonica, and there is The Man on a cane seat throwing bread to the swans, a fat queen drag walking his Afghan hound through the East Fifties, an old wino pissing against an El post, a radical Jewish student giving out leaflets in Washington Square, a tree surgeon, an exterminator, an advertising fruit in Nedick's where he calls the counterman by his first name. The world network of junkies, tuned on a cord of rancid jissom, tying up in furnished rooms, shivering in the junk-sick morning. (Old Pete men suck the black smoke in the Chink laundry back room and Melancholy Baby dies from an overdose of time or cold turkey with- drawal of breath.) In Yemen, Paris, New Orleans, Mexico City and Istanbul -- shivering under the air hammers and the steam shovels, shrieked junky curses at one another neither of us heard, and The Man leaned out of a passing steam roller and I coped in a bucket of tar. (Note: Istanbul is being torn down and rebuilt, especially shabby junk quarters. Istanbul has more heroin junkies than NYC. ) The living and the dead, in sickness or on the nod, hooked or kicked or hooked again, come in on the junk beam and the Connection is eating Chop Suey on Dolores Street, Mexico D.F., dunking pound cake in the automat, chased up Exchange Place by a baying pack of People. ( Note: People is New Orleans slang for narcotic fuzz. ) The old Chinaman dips river water into a rusty tin can, washes down a yen pox hard and black as a cinder. ( Note: Yen pox is the ash of smoked opium. ) Well, the fuzz has my spoon and dropper, and I know they are coming in on my frequency led by this blind pigeon known as Willy the Disk. Willy has a round, disk mouth lined with sensitive, erectile black hairs. He is blind from shooting in the eyeball, his nose and palate eaten away sniffing H, his body a mass of scar tissue hard and dry as wood. He can only eat the shit now with that mouth, sometimes sways out on a long tube of ectoplasm, feeling for the silent frequency of junk. He follows my trail all over the city into rooms I move out already, and the fuzz walks in some newlyweds from Sioux Falls. "All right, Lee! I Come out from behind that strap-on! We know you" and pull the man's prick off straight-away. Now Willy is getting hot and you can hear him always out there in darkness (he only functions at night) whimpering, and feel the terrible urgency of that blind, seeking mouth. When they move in for the bust, Willy goes all out of control, and his mouth eats a hole right through the door. If the cops weren't there to restrain him with a stock probe, he would suck the juice right out of every junky he ran down. I knew, and everybody else knew they had the Disk on me. And if my kid customers ever hit the stand: "He force me to commit all kinda awful sex acts in return for junk" I could kiss the street good-bye.
"Well', Doc says, 'there was a feller in here this morning. City feller. Dressed kinda flashy. So he's got him an RX for a mason jar of morphine...Kinda funny looking prescription writ out on toilet paper. And I told him straight out: "Mister, I suspect you to be a dope fiend."'
"'"I got ingrowing toe nails, Pop. I'm in agony"' he says.
"'"Well," I says,"I gotta be careful. But as long as you got a legitimate condition and an RX from a certified bony feedy M.D., I'm honored to serve you."'
"'"That croaker's really certified," he say... Well, I guess one hand didn't know what the other was doing when I give him a jar of Saniflush by error...So I reckon he's had his too.'
"'Just the thing to clean a man's blood.'
" 'Daddy Longlegs' looked like Uncle Sam on stilts and he ran this osteopath clinic outside East St. Louis and took in a few junky patients. For two notes a week they could stay on the nod in green lawn chairs and look at the oaks and grass stretching down to a little lake in the sun and the nurse moved around the lawn with her silver trays feeding the junk in- We called her 'Mother'- Wouldn't you?- Doc Benway and me was holed up there after a rumble in Dallas involving this aphrodisiac ointment and Doc goofed on ether and mixed in too much Spanish Fly and burned the prick off the Police Commissioner straight away- So we come to 'Daddy Longlegs' to cool off and found him cool and casual in a dark room with potted rubber plants and a silver tray on the table where he like to see a week in advance- The nurse showed us to a room with rose wallpaper and we had this bell any hour of the day or night ring and the nurse charged in with a loaded hypo- Well one day we were sitting out in the lawn chairs with lap robes and it was a fall day trees turning and the sun cold on the lake- Doc picks up a piece of grass- "Junk turns you on vegetable- It's green, see?- A green fix should last a long time."
We checked out of the clinic and rented a house and Doc starts cooking up this green junk and the basement was of tanks smelled like a compost heap of junkies- So finally he draws off this heavy green fluid and loads it into a hypo big as a bicycle pump- "Now we must find a worthy vessel," he said and we flush out this old goof ball artist and told him it was pure Chinese H from the Ling Dynasty and Doc shoots the whole pint of green into the main line and the Yellow Jacket turns fibrous grey green and withered up like an old turnip and I said: "I'm getting out of here, me", and Doc said: "An unworthy vessel obviously- I withdraw from the case."
"So here we are in this no -horse town strictly from cough syrup. And vomited up the syrup and drove on and on, cold spring wind whistling through that old heap around our shivering sick sweating bodies and the cold you always come down with when the junk runs out of you... On through the peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road and the vultures over the swamp and cypress stumps.
Motels with beaverboard walls, gas heater, thin pink blankets.
Interant short con and carny hype men have burned down the croakers of Texas."
" "Well," I said, tapping my arm, "duty calls. As one judge said to another: 'Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.' " I cut into the automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else's overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous, dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt. I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times, spectral janitors, gray as ashes, phantom porters sweep in out dusty halls with a slow old man's hand, coughing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk, patient and cautious and slow, dropped into their bloodless hands a few hours of warmth. I made the round with him once for kicks. You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will hop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it. "Well, my boys will be like that one day," I thought philosophically. "Isn't life peculiar?" "
" Well, the fuzz has my spoon and dropper, and I know they are coming in on my frequency led by this blind pigeon known as Willy the Disk. Willy has a round, disk mouth lined with sensitive, erectile black hairs. He is blind from shooting in the eyeball, his nose and palate eaten away sniffing H, his body a mass of scar tissue hard and dry as wood. He can only eat the shit now with that mouth, sometimes sways out on a long tube of ectoplasm, feeling for the silent frequency of junk. He follows my trail all over the city into rooms I move out already, and the fuzz walks in some newlyweds from Sioux Falls.
"All right, Lee! I come out from behind that strap-on! We know you" and pull the man's prick off straightaway. Now Willy is getting hot and you can hear him always out there in darkness (he only functions at night) whimpering, and feel the terrible urgency of that blind, seeking mouth. When they move in for the bust, Willy goes all out of control, and his mouth eats a hole right through the door. If the cops weren't there to restrain him with a stock probe, he would suck the juice right out of every junky he ran down. I knew, and everybody else knew they had the Disk on me. And if my kid customers ever hit the stand: "He force me to commit all kinda awful sex acts in return for junk" I could kiss the street good-bye.
"Tea [marijuana] heads are not like junkies. A junky hands you the money, takes his junk and cuts. But tea heads don't do things that way. The expect the peddler to light them up and sit around talking for half an hour to sell two dollars' worth of weed... If you come right to the point, they say you are a "bring down". In fact, a peddler should not come right out and say he is a peddler. No, he just scores for a few good "cats" and "chicks" because he is viperish. Everyone knows that he himself in the connection, but it is bad form to say so. God knows why. To me, tea heads are unfathomable. I decided right then I would never push any more tea...
"Some of my learned colleagues (nameless assholes) have suggested that junk derives its euphoric effect from direct stimulation of the orgasm center. It seems more probable that junk suspends the whole cycle of tension, discharge and rest. The orgasm has no function in the junky. Boredom, which always indicates an un-discharged tension, never troubles the addict. He can look at his shoe for eight hours. He is only roused to action when the hourglass of junk runs out."
Note: Old time, veteran Schmeckers, faces beaten by grey junk weather, will remember...In 1920's a lot of Chinese pushers around found The West so unreliable, dishonest, and wrong, they all packed in, so when Occidental junky came to score the say: "No glot...C'lom Fliday..."
Broken images exploded softly in Carl's head, and he was moving out of himself in a silent swoop. Clear and sharp from a great distance he saw himself sitting in a lunchroom. Overdose of H. His old lady shaking him and holding hot coffee under his nose. Outside an old junky in Santa Claus suit selling Christmas seals. "Fight tuberculosis, folks," he whispers in his disembodied, junky voice. Salvation Army choir of sincere, homosexual football coaches sings: "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." Carl drifted back into his body, an earthbound junk ghost. Broken images exploded softly in Carl's head, and he was moving out of himself in a silent swoop. Clear and sharp from a great distance he saw himself sitting in a lunchroom. Overdose of H. His old lady shaking him and holding hot coffee under his nose. Outside an old junky in Santa Claus suit selling Christmas seals. "Fight tuberculosis, folks," he whispers in his disembodied, junky voice. Salvation Army choir of sincere, homosexual football coaches sings: "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." Carl drifted back into his body, an earthbound junk ghost.
"We are getting some C on RX at this time. Shoot it in the mainline, son. You can smell it going in, clean and cold in your nose and throat then a rush of pure pleasure right through the brain lighting up those C connections. Your head shatters in white explosions. Ten minutes later you want another shot... you will walk across town for another shot. But if you can't score for C you eat, sleep and forget about it. This is a yen of the brain alone, a need without feeling and without body, earthbound ghost need, rancid ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning. "