Junky (18 page)

Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move in. Whatever it is—orgones, life force—that we all have to score for all the time, there is not much of it in the Valley. Your food rots before you can get it home. Milk sours before you can finish the meal. The Valley is a place where the new anti-life force is breaking through.

Death hangs over the Valley like an invisible smog. The place exerts a curious magnetism on the moribund. The dying cell gravitates to the Valley:

Gary West came from Minneapolis. He had saved up twenty thousand dollars from operating a dairy farm during the War. With this money he bought a house and grove in the Valley. The place was on the far side of Mission, where irrigation stops and the desert begins. Five acres of Ruby Reds and a house in 1920 Spanish style. There he sat with his mother, his wife, and two children. In his eyes you could see the baffled, frightened, resentful looks of a man who feels the stirring in his cells of a fatal disease process. He was not sick at that time, but his cells were looking for death and West knew it. He wanted to sell out and leave the Valley.

“I feel closed in here. You have to go so far to get out of the Valley,” he would say.

He began running from one project to another. A plantation in Mississippi, a winter vegetable set-up in Mexico. He went back to Minnesota and bought into a cow-feed company. He did this with the down payment on the sale of his Valley property. But he couldn't keep away from the Valley. He would run like a hooked fish until the drag of his dying cells tired him out, and the Valley reeled him in. He tried out various illnesses. A throat infection settled in his heart. He lay in the McAllen Hospital and tried to see himself as a man of business impatient to get up and back to work. His projects became more and more preposterous.

“That man is crazy,” said Roy, the real estate man. “He don't know what he wants.”

Only the Valley was real to West now. There was no other place for him to go. The other places were fantasy. Listening to him talk, you got the uncanny feeling that places like Milwaukee didn't ­exist. West rallied and went to look over a fifteen-dollar-per-acre sheep-raising set-up in Arkansas. He came back to the Valley and started building a house on credit. Something went wrong with his kidneys, and his body swelled up with urine. You could smell urine on his breath and through his skin. “This is uremic poisoning,” exclaimed the doctor as the smell of urine filled the room. West went into convulsions and died. He left his wife a tangle of exchange notes between Milwaukee and the Valley that she will be ten years untangling.

All the worst features of America have drained down to the Valley and concentrated there. In the whole area, there is not one good restaurant. The food situation could only be tolerated by people who do not taste what they eat. In the Valley, restaurants are not operated by people who
are
cookers and purveyors of food. They are opened by somebody who decides that “people always eat” so a restaurant is a “good deal.” His place will have a glass front so people can see in, and chromium fixtures. The food is bad U.S. restaurant food. So there he sits in his restaurant and looks at his customers with puzzled, resentful eyes. He didn't much want to run a restaurant anyway. Now he isn't even making money.

A lot of people made quick easy money
during the War and for several years after. Any business was good, just as any stock is good on a rising market. People thought they were sharp operators, when actually they were just riding a lucky streak. Now the Valley is in a losing streak and only the big operators can ride it out. In the Valley economic laws work out like a formula in high school algebra, since there is no human element to interfere. The very rich are getting richer and all the others are going broke. The Big Holders are not shrewd or ruthless or enterprising. They don't have to say or think anything. All they have to do is sit and the money comes pouring in. You have to get up with the Big Holders or drop out and take any job they hand you. The middle class is getting the squeeze, and only one in a thousand will go up. The Big Holders are the house, and the small farmers are the players. The player goes broke if he keeps on playing, and the farmer has to play or lose to the Government by default. The Big Holders own all the Valley banks, and when the farmer goes broke the bank takes over. Soon the Big Holders will own the Valley.

The Valley is like an honest dice table where the players do not have the vitality to influence the dice and they win or lose by pure chance. You never hear anyone say, “It had to happen that way,” or when they do say it they are talking about a death. An event that “had to happen that way” may be good or bad, but there it is, and you cannot regret it or rehash it. Since everything that happens in the Valley—except death—happens by chance, the inhabitants are always tampering with the past like the two-dollar bettor on the return train from the track: “I should have hung on to that hundred acres on the lower lift; I should have took up them oil leases; I should have planted cotton instead of tomatoes.” A nasal whine goes up from the Valley, a vast muttering of banal regret and despair.

When I arrived in the Valley, I was still in the post-cure drag. I had no appetite and no energy. All I wanted to do was sleep, and I slept twelve to fourteen hours a day. Occasionally I bought two ounces of paregoric, drank it with two goof balls and felt normal for several hours. You have to sign for P.G. when you buy it, and I did not want to burn down the drugstores. You can only buy P.G. so often, or the druggist gets wise. Then he packs in, or ups the price.

I had gone into partnership
with a friend named Evans to buy machinery, hire a farmer and raise a cotton crop. We had a hundred and fifty acres in cotton. Good cotton land will pick a bale to an acre, and the U.S. support price guaranteed us a hundred and fifty dollars to a bale. So we stood to gross about $22,000. The farmer did all the actual work. Evans and I would drive around every few days to see how the cotton was looking. It took us about an hour to look at all our cotton because the fields were scattered around from Edingburg to the lower lift, almost on the river. There was no particular point in looking at the cotton since neither of us knew the first thing about it. We just drove around to pass the time until five p.m., when we started drinking.

There were five or six regulars who gathered every afternoon at Evans' house. Exactly at five, someone would bang a tin pan and yell “Drinking time!” and the others would jump up like fighters coming out at the bell. We made our own gin from Mexican alcohol as a measure of economy. Martinis mixed with this gin had a terrible taste, and you had to fill the cocktail with pieces of ice or it would be warm before you could get it down. I cannot drink even good martinis in hot weather, so I made myself a long drink with sugar and lime and seltzer and a tiny pinch of quinine to approximate gin and tonic.
No one in the Valley had ever heard of quinine water
.

All that summer was perfect cotton weather. Hot and dry, day after day. We started picking after the Fourth of July and all our cotton was off by the September 1st deadline. We broke a little better than even. High operating costs and the high cost of living—I figured it was costing me about seven hundred a month to live in that valley without a maid or a car—took most of the profit. I decided it was time to pull out of the Valley.

Early in October, I got a letter from the bonding company saying my case was coming up in four days. I called Tige and he said, “Pay no attention. I will get a continuance.” A few days later I got a letter from Tige saying that he had scored for a three-week continuance, but was doubtful of getting the trial put off again.

I called him on the phone and told him I was taking a trip to Mexico. He said, “Fine. You just have as good a time as you can in three weeks and be back here for the trial.”

I asked him how were the chances of another continuance.

He said, “Frankly, not good. I can't do a thing with this judge. His ulcers are bothering him.”

I decided to take steps to
remain in Mexico when I got there.

•

As soon as I hit Mexico City, I started looking for junk. At least, I always had one eye open for it. As I said before, I can spot junk neighborhoods. My first night in town I walked down Dolores Street and saw a group of Chinese junkies standing in front of an Exquisito Chop Suey joint. Chinamen are hard to make. They will only do business with another Chinaman. So I knew it would be a waste of time trying to score with these characters.

One day I was walking down San Juan Létran and passed a cafeteria that had colored tile set in the stucco around the entrance, and the floor was covered with the same tile. The cafeteria was unmistakably Near Eastern. As I walked by, someone came out of the cafeteria. It was a type character you see only on the fringes of a junk neighborhood.

As the geologist looking for oil is guided by certain outcrop-pings of rock, so certain signs indicate the near presence of junk. Junk is often found adjacent to ambiguous or transitional districts: East Fourteenth near Third in New York; Poydras and St. Charles in New Orleans; San Juan Létran in Mexico City. Stores selling artificial limbs, wig-makers, dental mechanics, loft manufacturers of perfumes, pomades, novelties, essential oils. A point where dubious business enterprise touches Skid Row.

There is a type person occasionally seen in these neighborhoods who has connections with junk, though he is neither a user nor a seller. But when you see him the dowser wand twitches. Junk is close. His place of origin is the Near East, probably Egypt. He has a large straight nose. His lips are thin and purple-blue like the lips of a penis. The skin is tight and smooth over his face. He is basically obscene beyond any possible vile act or practice. He has the mark of a certain trade or occupation that no longer exists. If junk were gone from the earth, there might still be junkies standing around in junk neighborhoods feeling the lack, vague and persistent, a pale ghost of junk sickness.

So this man walks around in the places where he once exercised his obsolete and unthinkable trade. But he is unperturbed. His eyes are black with an insect's unseeing calm. He looks as if he nourished himself on honey and Levantine syrups that he sucks up through a sort of proboscis.

What is his lost trade? Definitely of a servant class and something to do with the dead, though he is not an embalmer. Perhaps he stores something in his body—a substance to prolong life—of which he is periodically milked by his masters. He is as specialized as an insect, for the performance of some inconceivably vile function.

•

The Chimu Bar
looks like any cantina from the outside, but as soon as you walk in you know you are in a queer bar.

I ordered a drink at the bar and looked around. Three Mexican fags were posturing in front of the jukebox. One of them slithered over to where I was standing, with the stylized gestures of a temple dancer, and asked for a cigarette. There was something archaic in the stylized movements, a depraved animal grace at once beautiful and repulsive. I could see him moving in the light of campfires, the ambiguous gestures fading out into the dark. Sodomy is as old as the human species. One of the fags was sitting in a booth by the jukebox, perfectly immobile with a stupid animal serenity.

I turned to get a closer look at the boy who had moved over. Not bad. “
¿Por qué triste
?
” I asked. (“Why sad?”) Not much of a gambit, but I wasn't there to converse.

The boy smiled, revealing very red gums and sharp teeth far apart. He shrugged and said something to the effect that he wasn't sad or not especially so. I looked around the room.

“
Vámonos a otro lugar
,” I said. (“Let's go some place else.”)

The boy nodded. We walked down the street into an all-night restaurant, and sat down in a booth. The boy dropped his hand onto my leg under the table. I felt my stomach knot with excitement. I gulped my coffee and waited impatiently while the boy finished a beer and smoked a cigarette.

The boy knew a hotel. I pushed five pesos through a grill. An old man unlocked the door of a room and dropped a ragged towel on the chair.
“
¿Llevas pistola
?
”
—(“You carry a pistol?”)—asked the boy. He had caught sight of my gun. I said yes.

I folded my pants and dropped them over a chair, placing the pistol on my pants.
I dropped my shirt and shorts on the pistol
. I sat down naked on the edge of the bed and watched the boy undress. He folded his worn blue suit carefully. He took off his shirt and placed it around his coat on the back of a chair. His skin was smooth and copper-colored. The boy stepped out of his shorts and turned around and smiled at me. Then he came and sat beside me on the bed. I ran one hand slowly over the boy's back, following with the other hand the curve of the chest down over the flat brown stomach.
The boy smiled and lay down on the bed
.

Later we smoked a cigarette, our shoulders touching under the covers. The boy said he had to go. We both dressed. I wondered if he expected money. I decided not. Outside, we separated at a corner, shaking hands.

•

Some time later
I ran into a boy named Angelo in the same bar. I saw Angelo off and on for two years. When I was on junk I wouldn't meet Angelo for months, but when I got off I always ran into him on the street somewhere. In Mexico your wishes have a dream power. When you want to see someone, he turns up.

Once I had been looking for a boy and I was tired and sat down on a stone bench in the Alameda. I could feel the smooth stone through my pants, and the ache in my loins like a toothache when the pain is light and different from any other pain. Sitting there looking across the park, I suddenly felt calm and happy, seeing myself in a dream relationship with The City, and knew I was going to score for a boy that night. I did.