Junky

  I told Pat we’d better stop serving Whitey.

  “Yes,” said Pat, “but he knows where I live. We ought to find another place.”

  Another occasional was Lonny the Pimp, who had grown up in his mother’s whorehouse. Lonny tried to space his shots so he wouldn’t get a habit. He was always beefing how he couldn’t clear anything now, he had to put out so much for hotel rooms, and the law kept him on the move. “See what I mean?” he said. “There’s no percentage.”

  Lonny was pure pimp. He was skinny and nervous. He couldn’t sit still and he couldn’t shut up. As he talked, he moved his thin hands which were covered on the backs with long, greasy, black hairs. You could tell by looking at him that he had a big penis. Pimps always do. Lonny was a sharp dresser and he drove a Buick convertible. But he wouldn’t hesitate to hang us up for credit on a two-dollar cap.

  After he took the shot he’d say, as he rolled down the sleeve of his striped silk shirt and fastened his cufflinks, “Look, boys, I’m a little short. You don’t mind putting this one on the cuff, do you? You know I’m good for it.”

  Pat would look at him with his little bloodshot eyes. A surly peasant look. “For Chris’ sake, Lonny, we have to put out for this stuff. How would you like it if people came in on you, laid your girls and then wanted to put it on the cuff?” Pat shook his head. “You’re like all of them. Once they get it in the vein that’s all they care. Here I have a cool place where they can come and shoot, and what consideration do I get? Once they get it in the vein that’s all they care.”

  “Well, look, Pat, I don’t want to hang you up. Now here’s a dollar and I’ll bring the rest this afternoon. O.K.?”

  Pat took the dollar and put it in his pocket without saying anything. He pursed his lips in disapproval.

  Seltzer Willy dropped by around ten o’clock on his route, took a cap and bought a cap for the night. Dupré came in around twelve when he got off work. He was on the night shift. The others came any time they had the inclination.

  Bob Brandon, our connection, was out on bail. He was charged in State Court with possession of junk, a felony under Louisiana law. The case against him was based on traces—that is, he got rid of the junk before the cops shook his place down. But he did not wash out the jar in which the junk had been kept. The Federals will not take a “traces” case, so the State took it. This is regular procedure in Louisiana. Any case too shaky for the Federal Courts passes to the State Courts who will prosecute anything. Brandon expected to beat the case. He had good connections with the political machine and in any event the State had a weak case. But the D.A. dragged in Brandon’s record, which included a murder conviction, and he drew two to five years.

  Pat found another connection right away and we went on pushing. A peddler named Jonkers began selling on the corner of Exchange and Canal. Pat lost a few customers to Jonkers. Actually, Jonkers’ stuff was better, and sometimes I scored from Jonkers, or Jonkers’ partner, an old one-eyed character named Richter. Pat always found out somehow—he was intuitive as a possessive mother—and then he would sulk for two or three days.

  Jonkers and Richter did not last long. Exchange and Canal is one of the hottest spots in New Orleans for junk. One day they were gone and Pat said, “Now you’ll see some of those guys come back to me. I told Lonny, ‘If you want to score off Jonkers, go ahead, but don’t come back here and expect me to serve you.’ You’ll see what I tell him if he comes back here. Whitey, too. He’s been scoring off Jonkers.” Pat gave me a long sullen look.

  One day the woman who managed Pat’s hotel stopped me in the lobby. “I just want to tell you to be careful,” she said. “The cops were here yesterday and made a thorough investigation of Pat’s room. And they arrested the boy with the seltzer truck. He’s in jail now.”

  I thanked her. A little later Pat came in. He told me the cops had grabbed Seltzer Willy as he left the hotel. They didn’t find any junk on him so they took him to the Third Precinct and booked him to “hold for investigation.” He was there seventy-two hours, which is the longest period they can hold anyone without placing charges.

  The cops searched Pat’s room, but he kept his junk stashed in the hall so they didn’t find it. Pat said, “They told me, ‘We have information you’re running a regular shooting gallery up here. You’d better pack in, because next time we’re going to come and take you, that’s all.’”

  “Well,” I said, “better pack in except for Dupré. No harm to serve him.”

  “Dupré lost his job,” Pat said. “He’s already into me for twenty dollars.”

  We were back looking for a score every day. We found out that Lonny was “the Man.” That is the way it went in New Orleans. You never knew who was going to be “the Man” next.

  About this time an anti-narcotics drive hit the town. The chief of police said, “This drive is going to continue as long as there is a single violator left in this city.” The State legislators drew up a law making it a crime to be a drug addict. They did not specify where or when or what they meant by drug addict.

  The cops began stopping addicts on the street and examining their arms for needle marks. If they found marks, they pressured the addict to sign a statement admitting his condition so he could be charged under the “drug addicts law.” The addicts were promised a suspended sentence if they would plead guilty and get the new law started. Addicts ransacked their persons looking for veins to shoot in outside the arm area. If the law could find no marks on a man they usually let him go. If they found marks they would hold him for seventy-two hours and try to make him sign a statement.

  Lonny’s wholesale connection gave out and a character called Old Sam was “the Man.” Old Sam was after doing twelve years in Angola. He operated in the territory directly above Lee Circle, which is another hot spot in New Orleans for junk or anything.

  •

  One day I was broke and I wrapped up a pistol to take it in town and pawn it. When I got to Pat’s room there were two people there. One was Red McKinney, a shriveled-up, crippled junkie; the other was a young merchant seaman named Cole. Cole did not have a habit at this time and he wanted to connect for some weed. He was a real tea head. He told me he could not enjoy himself without weed. I have seen people like that. For them, tea occupies the place usually filled by liquor. They don’t have to have it in any physical sense, but they cannot have a really good time without it.

  As it happened I had several ounces of weed in my house. Cole agreed to buy four caps in exchange for two ounces of weed. We went out to my place, Cole tried the weed and said it was good. So we started out to score.

  Red said he knew a connection on Julia Street. “We should be able to find him there now.”

  Pat was sitting at the wheel of my car on the nod. We were on the ferry, crossing from Algiers, where I lived, to New Orleans. Suddenly Pat looked up and opened his bloodshot eyes.

  “That neighborhood is too hot,” he said loudly.

  “Where else can we score?” said McKinney. “Old Sam is up that way, too.”

  “I tell you that neighborhood is too hot,” Pat repeated. He looked around resentfully, as though what he saw was unfamiliar and distasteful.

  There was, in fact, no place else to score. Without a word, Pat started driving in the direction of Lee Circle. When we came to Julia Street, McKinney said to Cole, “Give me the money because we are subject to see him at any time. He walks around this block. A walking connection.”

  Cole gave McKinney fifteen dollars. We circled the block three times slowly, but McKinney did not see “the Man.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to try Old Sam,” McKinney said.

  We began looking for Old Sam above Lee Circle. Sam was not in the old frame rooming house where he lived. We drove around slowly. Every now and then Pat would see someone he knew and stop the car. No one had seen Old Sam. Some of the characters
Pat called to just shrugged in a disagreeable way and kept walking.

  “Those guys wouldn’t tell you nothing,” Pat said. “It hurts ’em to do anybody a favor.”

  We parked the car near Sam’s rooming house, and McKinney walked down to the corner to buy a package of cigarettes. He came back limping fast and got in the car.

  “The law,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We started away from the curb and a prowl car passed us. I saw the cop at the wheel turn around and do a double-take when he saw Pat.

  “They’ve made us, Pat,” I said. “Get going!”

  Pat didn’t need to be told. He gunned the car and turned a corner heading for Corondolet. I turned to Cole, who was in the back seat. “Throw out that weed,” I ordered.

  “Wait a minute,” Cole replied. “We may lose them.”

  “Are you crazy?” I said. Pat, McKinney and I yelled in chorus “Throw it out!”

  We were on Corondolet headed downtown. Cole threw the weed out and it skidded under a parked car. Pat took the first right turn into a one-way street. The prowl car was coming down the same street from the other end, going the wrong way. An old cop trick. We were boxed in. I heard Cole yell, “Oh, Lord, I’ve got another stick on me!”

  The cops jumped out with their hands on their guns, but they did not draw them. They ran up to my car. One of them, the driver who had spotted Pat, had a big smile on his face. “Where did you get the car, Pat?” he asked.

  The other cop opened the back door. “Everybody out,” he said.

  McKinney and Cole were in the back seat. They got out and the cops went through them. Right away the cop who spotted Pat found the stick of weed in Cole’s shirt pocket.

  “I’ve got enough here to hold the whole bunch of them,” he said. This cop had a smooth red face and he kept smiling all the time. He found my gun in the glove compartment. “This is a foreign gun,” he said. “Have you got it registered with the Internal Revenue Department?”

  “I thought that only applied to full automatic weapons,” I said, “that fire more than one shot with one pull of the trigger.”

  “No,” said the cop smiling, “it applies to all foreign automatics.” I knew he was wrong, but there was no percentage in telling him so. He looked at my arms. “You’ve been hooking that spot so much it’s about to get infected,” he said, pointing to a needle welt.

  The wagon arrived and we all got in. We were taken to the Second Precinct. The cops looked at my car papers. They couldn’t believe that the car was mine. I was searched at least six times by different people. Eventually, we were all locked in a cell about six by eight feet. Pat smiled and rubbed his hands together.

  “There’s going to be some sick fucking dope fiends in here,” he said.

  A little later the turnkey came and called my name. I was taken to a small room that opened off the reception room of the precinct. In the room were two detectives sitting at a table. One was tall and fat with a deep South frog face. The other was a middle-aged stocky Irish cop. He was missing some front teeth, which gave his face a suggestion of harelip. This type cop could just as well be an oldtime rod-riding thug. There was nothing of the bureaucrat about him.

  The frog-faced cop was obviously in charge of the interrogation. He told me to sit down and I sat down at the table opposite him. He pushed a package of cigarettes and a box of matches across the table. “Have a cigarette,” he said. The Irish cop was sitting at the end of the table to my left. He was close enough to reach me without getting up. The cop in charge was studying the papers of my car. Everything they had taken out of my pockets was spread on the table in front of him, a glasses case, identification papers, wallet, keys, a letter from a friend in New York, everything but my pocketknife, which the smooth-faced cop from the patrol car had put in his pocket.

  Suddenly I remembered about that letter. The friend in New York who’d written it was a tea head and he pushed weed from time to time. He’d written to me asking the price of good weed in New Orleans. I asked Pat, who quoted me a tentative price of forty dollars per pound. In the letter on the table my friend made reference to the forty-dollar per pound price and said he wanted some at that figure.

  At first I thought they might pass over the letter. They were Stolen Car Squad and they wanted a stolen car. They kept looking at the papers and asking questions. When I couldn’t remember exact dates on the car, that was the clincher. They seemed on the point of getting tough.

  Finally, I said, “Well, it’s just a question of checking. When you check, you’ll find out that I’m telling the truth and the car is mine. But there is no way I can convince you by talking. Of course, if you want me to say I stole the car, I will. But when you check, you will find out that the car is mine.”

  “We’ll check, all right.”

  The frog-faced cop folded the car papers carefully and put them aside. He picked up the envelope and looked at the address and the postmark. Then he took the letter out. He read the letter to himself. Then he read aloud, skipping where there was no reference to weed. He put the letter down and looked at me.

  “Not only do you use weed,” he said, “you peddle it, too, and you’ve got a batch of this weed stashed somewhere.” He looked at the letter. “About forty pounds.” He looked at me. “You’d better straighten yourself out.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  The old Irish cop said, “He’s like all these guys. He ain’t talking. Till they get their fucking ribs kicked in. Then they’ll talk, and be glad to talk.”

  “We’re going out and search your house,” the frog-faced cop said. “If we find anything, your wife will be put in jail, too. I don’t know what will happen to your children. They’ll have to go to some home.”

  “Why don’t you make the man a proposition?” the old Irish cop said.

  I knew that if they searched the house they would find the stuff. “Call in the Federals and I’ll show you where the stuff is,” I said. “But I want your word that the case will be tried in Federal, and that my wife will not be molested.”

  The frog-faced cop nodded. “All right,” he said. “I accept your proposition.” He turned to his partner. “Go call Rogers,” he said.

  A few minutes later the old cop was back. “Rogers is out of town and won’t be back until morning, and Williams is sick.”

  “Well, call Hauser.”

  We went out and got in the car. The old cop was driving, and the captain was sitting in back with me.

  “This is it here,” said the captain.

  The old cop stopped the car and honked. A man with a pipe came out of a house and got in the back seat. He looked at me and then looked away, puffing on his pipe. The man looked young in the dark, but when we passed under a street light I saw that his face was wrinkled, and he had black circles under the eyes. It was a clean-cut, American Boy face, a face that had aged but could not mature. I assumed that he was a Federal agent.

  After smoking in silence for several blocks, the agent turned to me and took out his pipe. “Who are you scoring off now?” he asked.

  “It’s hard to find a score now,” I said. “Most of them have gone away.”

  He began asking me who I knew, and I mentioned a number of people who had already gone away. He seemed pleased with this worthless information. If you dummy up on cops they will slap you around. They want you to give them something, even if what you give has no conceivable use.

  He asked what record I had, and I told him about the script case in New York.

  “How much time did you do on that?” he asked.

  “None. It’s a misdemeanor in New York. Public Health law. Health Law Number 334, as I remember.”

  “He’s pretty well versed,” said the old cop.

  The captain was explaining to the agent that I seemed to have a particular fear of the S
tate Courts, and that he had made a deal with me to turn the case over to the Federals.

  “Well,” said the agent, “that’s the way the captain is. He’ll treat you right if you treat him right.” He smoked for a while. We were on the ferry to Algiers. “There’s an easy way and a hard way of ­doing things,” he said finally.

  When we got to the house the captain grabbed me by the back of the belt. “Who’s in there besides your wife?”

  I said, “Nobody.”

  We came to the door, and the guy with the pipe showed my wife his hunk of tin and opened the door. I showed them the weed I had in the house which was not more than a pound, and a few caps of junk. This didn’t satisfy the captain. He wanted forty pounds of weed.

  “You’re not coming up with all of it, Bill,” he kept saying. “Come on, now. We’ve shown you every courtesy.”

  I told them there wasn’t any more.

  The man with the pipe looked at me. “We want it all,” he said. His eyes did not want anything very much. He was standing under the light. His face had not only aged, it had decayed. He had the look of a man suffering from a fatal illness.

  I said, “You’ve got it all.”

  He looked vaguely away and began poking about in drawers and closets. He found some old letters which he read sitting on his heels on the floor. I wondered why he didn’t sit in a chair. Evidently, he did not want to be comfortable while reading someone else’s mail. The two cops from Stolen Cars were getting bored. Finally, they collected the weed, the caps, and a .38 revolver I kept in the house, and got ready to leave.

  “He belongs to Uncle, now,” said the captain to my wife as they left the house.

  They drove back to the Second Precinct and I was locked in. This time I was locked in a different cell. Pat and McKinney were in the next cell over. Pat called to me and asked what happened.