The Story of Junk (20 page)

“How long have you been taking these?”

“Not long,” I told him. “You want one?”

He looked at me intently. I was twitching. Actually, I was about to throw up.

“Listen,” he said, “do you want to go to a clinic?”

“I don't have insurance,” I said. “I can't pay.”

“That's no problem.” He smirked. “We can get you into any rehab, any institution. We do have good connections that way.”

Do you? I thought. Me, too!

Cal Tutweiler had sent over his doctor the night before, a balding man in his fifties, dressed in rumpled tweeds. Have 'scrip pad, will travel—that's him. He's helped
everybody
, Cal said, meaning the celebrity underground. My kind of people, he implied. The kind who deliver.

Kit could hardly wait for the doctor to arrive. She couldn't stand to be sick. She was in the customer chair, bouncing one of the cats on her knee. The other two were sleeping on my desk. I led the doctor in the office and began telling him our story. He didn't wait to hear it all.

“I suppose you know what you want?” he said, producing a prescription pad and a pen. “Or do you want me to recommend something?” He seemed very nice.

“I guess I know what works for me, yeah.”

“I want Valium,” Kit said gruffly. “Valium and codeine and methadone.”

“I'm sorry,” said the doctor, his eyes lighting on a drawing Cal had given me. “I can't write for methadone. You need a special license for that.”

“What I really want is heroin,” Kit remarked.

He chuckled. “Valium, Darvon, that I can give.” He scratched out the 'scrips with his pen. “I'm giving you three refills,” he told her with a very slight smile. “That should hold you awhile. Long enough.”

I ordered clonidine for myself, to relieve the leg cramps, sinusitis, and twitching, and some Ativan to calm my nerves. As an afterthought, I got some Lomotil, a bowel-binder whose composition nearly replicates morphine.

The doctor wrote the 'scrips and asked if we knew how to use them. We all had a laugh, low in the throat.
Do we know how
to
use them?

We hardly know anything else.

PART FIVE

CRUSHER

CRUSHER

October 1983. The world is in
desperate
condition. It only looks like a mountain of cash. Honey just left here in tears, on her way to another party. She was upset about her breakup with her new boyfriend, Julius, an intellectual part-time dope dealer. Brown, like himself. He was Honey's idea of a potential husband, a man who could build her a ladder to the straight world—an artist. He made rickety, columnar assemblages out of detritus he picked up from the street. “Space junk” he called it. He pleased her. They were together only a few months, long enough for Lute. She's left town, she clicked her heels together and went straight to New Orleans, where she's making a career in the blues and carrying on with a Cajun singer, genus: male. “I'm so
jealous
,” Honey said. “Lute always gets what I want.”

It's all for the best. Julius was kind of a mess—a smart enough guy but he hardly ever took a bath. He said the dope kept him clean. “Junk doesn't let you perspire,” he once told me. “There's nothing to wash off.”

On Honey's heels came Brooklyn Moe. He was
very
unhappy. Not because of me. Someone stole his Chevy Nova. It was parked across the street from here—a safe place, I thought. Not anymore, not for Chevy Novas. Moe says they're collector's items. I didn't know that. Poor Moe. How's he gonna get back to Brooklyn? Subway? Poor Moe.

Then came Rhonda Kay, a guitar player from a female blues band. This is a time of funk women and funk love. Rhonda Kay imagines herself a real hipster; her dad was into jazz. She came in drunk as all getout, squawking like a rooster, knocking things over, and babbling about the insane relationship she has with whoever the hell it is, I never did get the drift. She totally freaked out Kit, who was already on edge, troubled by the imminent demise of her own band.

And Vance, my madman dealer, he was here, too, bloody and bruised and stitched up in the face, his lower lip hanging off after some “accident” he had last night copping from
Russians
, he said.

Bo Brinks, now there's a case, a painter who makes a living copping hard drugs for wealthy middle-aged women. He says he's “building a collector-base,” and comes here with his boyfriend for comic relief. I accepted an air-conditioner from them in exchange for a tenth of D—my turn to laugh. At last.

Then Toni stopped in, very squirmy, stroking those long legs and brushing his/her hair while she/he asked if maybe I'd like to give her forty dollars worth of dope in return for this black moiré pantsuit she just modeled in
Paris
. She knows it'll fit me—aren't we the same size? Sure, give or take a few feet. Anyway, it's divine. She was sorry she didn't have money, they paid her in clothes.

Before you could say “designer dress,” Prescott was on the phone from an airport in Rome wanting to know will I have what he needs when he lands in New York seven hours from now? What have I got here? A home or a halfway house for the bummed? I'm surrounded by the wicked and the testy. Do normal people have days like this? I doubt it.

Then Honey comes back with Bert, a painter I know from the bar at Sticky's. He's a mineralist like Cal. I didn't remember Bert ever being into dope. “Well, every now and then, you know—something different,” he says. I can't believe Honey would have sex with him—he's so bourgeois.
Are
they fucking? Well, none of my business. Some questions you just don't ask. Most of them, really.

As soon as Bert has a snort, he starts speculating on the way Sticky died. He believed that story Angie was telling about me selling lethal dope. “I would have been here before,” Bert said, “but I never knew if I could trust you.”

Trust me? Trust me? How am I gonna control
him?
Loose of lip, he is, that one, Norbert, that's his real name. Norbert Fluss. What a cheap bastard. He nickels-and-dimes me all over the place, slumping in the chair like he's ducking blows.

While he's grousing, Bo calls to say he's run into some kind of major life-drama he can't explain. Would I, could I, tide him over with something on credit? He did so much of the dope he copped for one of his rich lady-friends, he had nothing left to sell. He'll tell them he was mugged and they'll give him more money, and then he'll pay me. Later.

How powerful must be a substance that turns otherwise well-behaved, levelheaded, hardworking professionals and loving sons into two-bit hustlers, liars, and thieves with disgusting personal hygiene and no sense of humor? Very powerful. And what happens to the person holding the strings?

Let's see.

Ginger arrives with the left side of her face under gauze. She's had surgery. Her boyfriend got drunk and beat her up in a hotel room in Germany, where she was having a show. She had to fly all the way across the Atlantic with her eye hanging half out and now she's feeling vengeful. In certain circumstances vengeance is a girl's best friend, better than diamonds ever were. Maybe not better than heroin.

Ginger could lose her eye. She won't say what the fight with the boyfriend was about, but it doesn't matter here; none of us thinks it's cool to beat up a lady. She has some painkillers but they don't do much for humiliation. She wants dope. My dope. She also wants female company, so she's brought along a quiet woman-friend who has huge and sympathetic watery blue eyes. Now that she has what she wants, Ginger goes back to being jolly, sort of. When she isn't making jokes, she's making a list of fifty ways to kill a lover.

That's when Claude Ballard stops by with his head in the clouds and wanting to go higher. Last year he was doing graffiti in the subways; this year he's the most celebrated artist in town. And the most stoned.

What do ordinary people do for fun? Do they come home from work, buss the spouse, plop themselves in front of the tube, and feel that their lives are complete? For me, it just goes on and on.

At five a.m. the phone blows again, three, four times, junkies in trouble. One's half out of his mind on cocaine, another has a sick friend on his hands, can I do something?

Bo shows up with the money he owes. Now he needs some weight to take to a party in the Hamptons. He has to get there before breakfast. He doesn't want to rush me, but hurry, hurry. Can't talk now. See me later.

Nearly everyone who comes talks about cutting down, getting out of this life once and for all. They've gotta come up for air. Oh really? What's the
air
got to offer? No, it's too hard, they say, really too, too hard. What, this life? This is my life. What about that?

Kit crawls home from a gig with bone-crusher symptoms, mild but scary. A bone-crusher is what you get when a piece of cotton from the spoon slips inside your vein. It induces cold-turkey chills, fever, cramping, and retching, but feels even more intense, as if your bones are crumbling and you're going to die, soon. Only another shot can put you out of your misery. If you're steady enough to hold the needle and have something left to shoot.

“It's not a bone-crusher,” Kit says. “It could be arthritis.” Her mother has arthritis. She knows what it's like. “It's in my shoulder,” she says. “I need to get some sleep.”

Her left arm hangs limply at her side, it hurts to move it. The fingers on her right hand are numb, she has a splitting headache and a fever. She downs half a dozen aspirin but has trouble getting out of her clothes. I give her a line to help her nod off. She looks sort of all right but not really quite. Her eyes are dull glass. I want her to see a doctor. She turns to the wall and says, “Mmf.”

I don't like this, not at all, but I don't know what to do. Suddenly the apartment feels empty. No, not the apartment. Our life. From now on I'm going to have business hours—must I be on call around the clock?

Tomorrow, everything will be different. Its promise fills me with hope. I wish I could wake Kit. This will come as good news. I'm sure she'll feel better when she hears it. Maybe I'll go for a walk. But Kit's lying so still, I can't leave her. And I can't stand being with myself.

I decide to shoot myself up, I ought to know how by now. In spite of everything, or because, I want to try it. I pick up the spoon, add dope, add water. I'm careful with the flame. I tie off, hit a vein in my wrist, except I miss it. My skin balloons out the size of a Ping-Pong ball. An abscess—ugh. Good thing I deal. Good thing I have more. Good thing I have plenty.

I load up another spoon, take another shot, this time in one of my usual places. Bingo, a rush—not of chemicals but ideas. My head floods with stories, characters, speeches. I envision an entire scenario, beginning, middle … I'll know the end when I come to it.

I move to my desk and start scribbling in my notebook, scratch, scratch. I have to work to keep up with my mind. I light a cigarette and scrawl out a paragraph. My pen suspended over the page, my head swinging like a trapeze, I sit at my desk and bless my night and feel the heat drain out of me, going, gone. It'll be back in a minute. Concentrate.

When Kit wakes up, we talk about kicking. It's time to cut down, cut back, clean up—we're no different than anyone else. We promise ourselves a few days off. We'll go somewhere nice and chill, but not today—tomorrow. Tonight, Kit's flying to Washington to play a gig. She dreads it. No one's getting along in her band. They bicker all the time: over money, managers, bookings, arrangements, set lists. It never stops. She's afraid of what's coming. Oh well, she says. She's getting too old for rock and roll, anyway. Time she went back to painting.

She takes her guitar into bed and forces one hand across the strings; the other falls off the fret board. “How can you do anything with your arm like that?” I say, the voice of reason. She calls Sylph to gauge the reaction to her possible cancellation. They're all broke, Sylph says. They can't do without the money from this gig. They're counting on Kit to play. There's no chance of finding a replacement.

Early the next morning, I'm sleeping when the doorbell sounds. It's Kit, back from D.C. She needs help getting up the stairs, please come down. I find her just inside the downstairs door, slumped over her bags. “Kit!”

“I'm all right,” she says, straightening. “I can't carry all this stuff by myself is all.”

I pick up the guitar, the duffel, the bag of effects boxes and cords. “What happened?” I ask.

“Bad gig,” she says. “We broke up.” We mount the steps in silence.

“What about the arm?” I say, once we're inside.

“Don't ask.”

“How did you play?”

“I got as high as I could and let my hands do it without me. Anyway, it was a very short set. Gloria threw a fit and stomped offstage in the middle of a song. Then, of course, the club didn't want to pay us. Give me something. Please.”

I cook it for her while she ties off, the rig in her teeth. “Got any coke?” she asks.

“No.”

Will I get some?

“In a minute,” I say, but as soon as she's finished I take her head in my hands and tell her it's time she saw a doctor. This can't wait.

She won't go.

I wait.

Kit's sure whatever's causing the paralysis in her arm will pass. She doesn't feel sick or anything. It's just a … just a
thing
.

“It's not a
thing,
” I say. “You can't move your arm. You have pain in your shoulder. You play guitar and you can't use your hand. This is
something.
”

I call Doctor Paul, but he's out of the office. He may not be back all day. I leave a message, say it's an emergency. “If it's an emergency,” the service says, “perhaps you should go straight to the hospital.”