Dope (10 page)

But I'd been to the library once, and I'd seen as much male anatomy in one day as I had in my whole life before. I thought I'd take up reading as a new hobby after I got off dope and had time on my hands. After my trip to the library I figured I'd stick to stealing. The perverts had settled into the library just like the junkies had settled into Bryant Park. The park was where they came to enjoy the sunshine and make deals and catch up on gossip. And now no one bothered to keep up the grass or trim the trees or plant any flowers. The whole place smelled like piss and the benches were crumbling away and no square in their right mind would dream of walking through it.

I used to spend a lot of time in Bryant Park, but I hadn't been around for a few years. When I showed up all the junkies looked at me, trying to get a read on who I was and what I was up to. The sun was bright and every one of them squinted at me through it like they had never seen daylight before.

I walked around until I saw someone I knew. Monte. He was sitting on a bench in the shade of a big tree, smoking a cigarette. He wore a tan summer suit with a few spots on it and a wide-brimmed hat that looked like it had passed through a dozen men before it had come to him. It had been a good three years since I'd seen him in person, but he'd aged about thirty, and in all the wrong ways. He couldn't have weighed much more than a hundred pounds. His hair had thinned out, he had misplaced one of his front teeth, and there was a new scar just by his ear on the left side from a knife fight.

He was my husband.

I watched him for a while before he saw me, and a funny thing happened. I didn't see an old junkie in a worn-out suit anymore. Instead I saw a man ten years younger and forty pounds heavier, and the forty extra pounds were all muscle. His suit was spotless, like it always was, pressed just that morning, with a fresh white handkerchief in his breast pocket. Thick blond hair fell into his eyes no matter how much he combed it back because he couldn't sit still, he was always up and doing something, even if it was just straightening out a stack of papers or tapping his fingers on the table, working out his new plan.

And there was always a plan, a new one every few weeks. At first the plans were always how we would make some money and get out of Hell's Kitchen. Monte was going to get a job in a factory somewhere, or a job in sales; sales was a good deal because the harder you worked, the more money you could make. He knew a fellow who worked in a Cadillac dealership in New Jersey, and Monte was sure that if the fellow got him a job he could be taking home a hundred dollars a week.

Then the plans were about getting money for dope. One big score, because he couldn't hold down a regular job anymore. There was a house on Eighty-second and Park that was just ripe for the picking. Old couple, rich as sin, and they always left the window open at night. The only problem was figuring out how to make it up to the third floor without anyone noticing. Or he was going to pull off a job with some boys from the neighborhood. These boys, they knew when the bagman made his pick-ups every week. It would be easy, all they had to do was get the bagman alone and the money was as good as theirs. A thousand dollars each, at least.

Soon the plans were all about kicking. The big plan was always for tomorrow, or next week. The plan was never for today. You mixed the dope with half water, shot it that way, and slowly increased the water until you were shooting plain water every day, and you'd never feel any pain at all. Or the plan was that Monte would go to Lexington, Kentucky, where there was a hospital that would give you a cure that'd make you never want to touch dope again. Next week, maybe. Or the week after.

And then the plan was just to get up in the morning. The plan was: today, I'll get out of bed. This afternoon, I'll take a bath. I'll comb my hair. By then the idea of putting on a clean suit was as far away as working at the Cadillac showroom had been.

We'd split up around five years before, during one of the other times I'd quit. It hadn't stuck that time—quitting dope—but I'd done the right thing and left the person who got me started on it. Not because I held it against him or wished him any ill will or because I didn't love him anymore, because none of that was true. Just because I had to. It was the only way.

“Monte.”

“Joe!” He smiled when he saw me, and stood up and hugged me. I hugged him back, feeling his shoulder blades and the bumps of his spine through his suit.

“Jesus, Monte, you're a rail.”

He laughed and we both sat down on the bench. “I know, I'm a little thin,” he said. He looked at me. “You look good, Joe. You really do. I can tell you're clean.”

“Yeah,” I said. “About two years now.”

Monte smiled. The teeth he had left were yellow and chipped, but it was still a good smile. He meant it. “I'm so happy, Joe. I mean, I never wanted—”

“I know,” I said. “I know. It's my own fault, my own and no one else's. How is everything? Life treating you good?”

“Sure,” he said. “It's okay. It's not too bad. How about you? What are you doing now?”

I shrugged. “A little of this and a little of that. I hit Tiffany's last week, did real good.”

“That's great,” Monte said. “So you're still up to your old tricks?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Good,” he said, nodding. “Good.”

“Hey. I saw Yonah the other day.”

“Oh yeah?” Monte asked. “How's that old son of a bitch holding up?”

“Oh, he's okay,” I answered. “He's the same. Same old Yonah.”

“Hey, how's Shelley doing? I saw her photograph in the paper this morning. An ad for soap or something like that.”

“She's good,” I said. “She's good.”

“She helping you out?” Monte asked. “Throwing a little money your way?”

“No,” I said. “Why would she?”

Monte shook his head. “If it wasn't for you that kid would be dead. Dead a hundred times over. If it wasn't for you—”

“All right,” I said. “All right. I know you don't like her. You never did.”

Monte shrugged. “Nah, it ain't that. I just think you did enough for her, that's all. When's she gonna do something for you?”

I stiffened. “What do you think, she's making a million bucks modeling for the paper? She probably makes less than you. Besides, she doesn't owe me anything.”

“Doesn't owe—”

I stopped him. “All right,” I said again. “Enough.”

We didn't say anything for a minute. Then Monte laughed. “It's like we're still married. Arguing about Shelley.”

I laughed, too. “Yeah. It is.”

We were quiet for another minute. Then I said, “Oh, I've got this new thing I'm working on. I'm looking for this girl. Her parents paid me to find her. I thought you might have seen her.”

“That sounds good,” Monte said. “You making some money?”

“Yeah. It's okay.”

I showed him the picture of Nadine and McFall. He made a look on his face, a look like he'd just stepped in shit, that I was starting to recognize as McFall's calling card.

“Sure, I know Jerry. A real piece of work.”

“Does he come around here?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” Monte answered. “Not often.”

“You know where he gets his stuff?” I asked.

Monte put his hand on my knee and we stopped talking for a second as a man in a neat gray suit walked by. You never knew who was the law. But you could tell he wasn't one of us.

After the man passed Monte shrugged. “It's funny—I don't know where he gets it. I mean, he's always got it, and as far as I know it's not from any of the regular guys, not the guys in Brooklyn or Harlem or anyone I know. But it's good.”

“You've bought from him?” I asked. Monte sold junk himself, usually. It was how he got by.

“Sure, when I was dry myself.”

“Well, how'd you get in touch with him? You got a phone number or something?”

“Nah.” He shrugged. “I just ran into him, that's all.”

“Can you tell me anything else about him, anything at all?”

Monte thought for a minute. When he did that he tilted his head to the right a little, just like he always had, and for a minute there I could have sworn it was fifteen years ago and we were kids, coming to Bryant Park for the first time. “Sometimes he hangs around with a guy you know,” Monte said. “Skinny Harry. I think McFall's got him running errands for him, making deliveries, that kind of thing.”

A big smile spread across my face.

“Jesus, Joe,” Monte said. “You look like the cat that just ate the canary.”

I felt like that cat, too. As far as I was concerned, the case was damn well over. The second thousand dollars was as good as mine.

“You know where I can find Harry?” I asked.

“Sure,” Monte said. “He's at the Red Rooster down on Fourteenth just about every night. Hey, speaking of Harry, remember that time in Buffalo—” He started to laugh.

I laughed, too. “Oh, sure. That weasel really thought he'd gotten over on us. . . .”

That was all Monte had to say on the topic of Jerry McFall. And he had never seen Nadine before. We talked for a while more, trading old stories and adding in a few new ones. I pretended that he was the same old Monte and he, I guess, pretended that I was the same old Joe. We'd been together for close to ten years, which made it easy. Easy to pretend that Monte was young and strong and smart as a whip. That he still had all of his teeth and all of his brains and that his years on junk hadn't hurt him at all. That he was sick of Bryant Park and all the junkies, that he was going to kick tomorrow—maybe not tomorrow, tomorrow was no good, but next week for sure. That this new method he had was really going to do the trick, he was going to taper off and he would hardly be sick at all. That he was going to get a job in a factory in Brooklyn, his cousin worked there, he'd set Monte up for sure. That this time was going to be different, that this time it was going to work.

And it was easy to pretend that I was still listening. I nodded my head when he talked about kicking. Sure, I believed him, of course I did. Why wouldn't I? I had never heard this before, not me. It wasn't like I had said it all myself, a thousand times before. Because the thing is, when you meant it, you stopped talking about it. When I finally kicked I didn't say a word. I just did it. It was like when you talked about it you got the whole idea out of your system, and you could forget about it for a while. Talking about kicking was just another stop in the long conversation, along with science and finance.

It wasn't the drug itself that held him back, that made it all impossible. He could talk about withdrawal until the cows came home, but in the end, it wasn't so bad. A week of hell wasn't long. What made it impossible was the awful loneliness of going
out there,
alone. Here, with the other dope fiends, Monte had a place for himself. People knew who he was.
He
knew who he was. If Monte wasn't an addict, he'd be just another poor schmuck from Hell's Kitchen who never did a damn thing with his life. Just a guy who went to a dumb job every day and drank beer every night.

That's why you start, and that's why you stick with it, so you can finally be someone: a junkie.

 

 

 

When I left Monte I went around to all the newsstands in Times Square until I found the newspaper with the soap ad. It was a photo of Shelley, from the neck up, soap bubbles covering her shoulders. Here she was easier to recognize. She had a sly look on her face, like she was getting away with something, that I had seen a hundred times before.
It's not JUST a bubble bath,
a fancy script spelled out beneath her picture.
It's also a BEAUTY TREATMENT!

At home I carefully cut out the picture and put it in Shelley's scrapbook next to the ad for the dress Yonah had given me. I only gave myself a few minutes to flip through the scrapbook before I went to find Harry.

T
alk about a joint. No band. No food. The Red Rooster was a long narrow room on Fourteenth Street with a bar and a few tables. A jukebox played some tinny-sounding swing. The place was half full and it was a rough enough crowd: one or two women who looked like streetwalkers, a dozen men in frayed suits and just as many in shirtsleeves, and a handful of young thugs in dungarees and undershirts.

Right off I spotted Skinny Harry, sitting alone at a table in the back. Skinny Harry wasn't really so skinny, now that he was reaching toward middle age. But he was still the same piece of trash he'd been since I first met him in 1939. His hair was thinning and slicked back from his head with grease, and he wore a shirt and slacks of no particular color and a red and black plaid hunting jacket. His beady little eyes were focused on a mug of beer. Harry's face turned blank when he spotted me, and he looked around for the nearest exit, but before he could make a run for it I reached his table and put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him back into his chair.

I sat down next to him, keeping a hand tight on his shoulder. “Harry,” I said. The look on his face told me this would be easy.

“Listen, Joe, I know you think I tore you off that time in Buffalo—”

I cut him off. “Harry, I
know
you tore me off that time in Buffalo. I know you set me up, I know you owe me a wad of cash like you're never gonna see again. And you know it, too. I heard you spent it all paying a girl to beat you with a whip. That's disgusting, Harry. But that's not why I'm here.”

He raised his eyebrows. “It's not?”