Junky

  “That’s tough,” he said when I told him.

  Pat had given a wagon-chasing lawyer ten dollars to get him out in the morning.

  •

  I was in a cell with four strangers, three of them addicts. There was only one bench and that was occupied, so the rest of us stood up or lay down on the floor. I lay down on the floor beside a man named McCarthy. I had seen him around town. He had been in for almost seventy-two hours. Every now and then he would groan slightly. Once he said, “Isn’t this hell?”

  A junkie runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for nonjunk time to start. A sick junkie has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.

  Cole was talking about Yokohama. “All that good Henry and Charly. When you shoot Henry and Charly, you can smell it ­going in.”

  McCarthy groaned hollowly from the floor. “Man,” he said, “don’t talk about that stuff.”

  Next morning, we were taken to line-up. A kid with epilepsy was ahead of us on the stage. The cops took a long time wisecracking with this subnormal character.

  “How long you been in New Orleans?”

  “Thirty-five days.”

  “What have you been doing all that time?”

  “I’ve been in jail thirty-three days.”

  They thought that was funny and batted it around for another five minutes or so.

  When our turn came, the cop who ran the line-up read off the circumstances of the case.

  “How many times you been here?” they asked Pat.

  Some cop laughed and said, “About forty times.”

  They asked each of us how many times arrested and how much time done. When they came to me, they asked how much time I did on the New York script charge. I said, “None. I got a suspended sentence.”

  “Well,” said the cop in charge of the line-up. “You’ll get one here, too.”

  All of a sudden there was a tremendous slobbering and screaming off stage, and I thought for a minute the cops were working over the epileptic. But when I walked off the stage, I saw that he was flopping around on the floor in a fit while two detectives were hovering around trying to talk to him. Someone went for a doctor.

  We were locked in a cell. A fat dick who seemed to know Pat came and stood at the door. “The guy’s a psycho,” he said. “He’s saying now, ‘Take me to my captain.’ A psycho. I sent for the doctor.”

  After two hours or so, they took us back to the precinct where we waited some more hours. About noon, the guy with the pipe and another man came to the precinct and drove a bunch of us over to the Federal Building. The new man was young and fattish. He was chewing on a cigar. Cole, McCarthy, I and two Negroes piled into the back seat. The guy with the cigar was driving. He took his cigar out and turned to me.

  “What is it you do, Mr. Lee?” he asked politely, in the accents of an educated man.

  “Farm,” I answered.

  The man with the pipe laughed.

  “Corn with weed between the rows, eh?” he said.

  The man with the cigar shook his head. “No,” he said. “It won’t grow well in corn. It has to grow by itself.” He turned to McCarthy, speaking over his shoulder. “I’m going to send you up to the penitentiary at Angola,” he said.

  “Why, Mr. Morton?” asked McCarthy.

  “Because you’re a goddamned drug addict.”

  “Not me, Mr. Morton.”

  “What about those needle marks?”

  “I have syphilis, Mr. Morton.”

  “All junkies have syphilis,” said Morton. His voice was cool, condescending, amused.

  The guy with the pipe was making an unsuccessful attempt to kid one of the Negroes. The Negro was called Clutch because of a deformed hand.

  “Old monkey climbing up on your back?” asked the man with the pipe.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about now,” said Clutch. It was just a flat statement. There was no insolence. Clutch did not have a junk habit and he was saying so.

  They parked in front of the Federal Building and took us up to the fourth floor. Here we waited around in an outer office and were summoned to the inner office one at a time for questioning. When my turn came I walked in and the man with the cigar was sitting at a table. He motioned me to a chair.

  “I’m Mr. Morton,” he said. “A Federal narcotics agent. Do you want to make a statement? As you know, you have a Constitutional right to refuse. Of course, it takes more time for you to be charged in the event you do not make a statement.”

  I said I would make a statement.

  The man with the pipe was there.

  “Bill isn’t feeling very well today,” he said. “Maybe a little shot of heroin would help.”

  “Maybe,” I said. He began asking me questions, some of them so pointless that I could hardly believe what I heard. Clearly, he had no cop intuition. No way of knowing what was important and what was not.

  “Who are your connections in Texas?”

  “I don’t have any.” This was true.

  “Do you want to see your wife in jail?”

  I wiped the sweat off my face with a handkerchief. “No,” I said.

  “Well, she’s going to be in jail. She uses this benzedrine. That’s worse than junk. Are you and your wife legally married?”

  “Common law.”

  “I asked are you and your wife legally married?”

  “No.”

  “Have you studied psychiatry?”

  “What?”

  “I asked, have you studied psychiatry?”

  He had read a letter from a friend of mine who is a psychiatrist. In fact, he had taken all my old letters away with him after he searched the house.

  “No, I have not studied psychiatry. Just a hobby, you might say.”

  “You have some peculiar hobbies.”

  Morton leaned back in his chair and yawned.

  The man with the pipe suddenly doubled his fist and hit himself in the chest. “I’m a cop, see?” he said. “Wherever I go I associate with cops. Your business is narcotics. It stands to reason you know the other people in your line of business. We don’t deal with people like you once a month. We deal with them every day. You weren’t alone in this. You have connections in New York, Texas, and here in New Orleans. Now, you had some deal lined up, something was about to materialize.”

  “I think we’ll let this farmer do his farming up at Angola if he can’t give us any information,” said Morton.

  “What about this hot-car ring?” said the man with the pipe, turning his back to me and walking across the room.

  “What hot-car ring?” I asked, really surprised. It was sometime later I remembered a letter five years old that contained a reference to stolen cars. He went on and on. He mopped his brow and stalked around the room. Finally, Morton cut him short.

  “As I see it, Mr. Lee,” he said, “you are prepared to admit your own guilt, but not to involve anybody else, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct,” I said.

  He shifted his cigar. “Well,” he said, “that’s all for the present. How many more out there?” he called.

  A cop stuck his head in. “About five.”

  Morton made a movement of exasperation. “There’s no time. I have to be in court at one o’clock. Bring them all in.”

  All the others came in and stood around in front of the table. Morton leafed through a stack of papers. He looked at McCarthy and turned to a young agent with a crewcut.

  “Have you got anything on him?” he asked.

  The agent shook his head and smiled. He raised one foot. “See this foot?” he said to McCarthy. “I’m going to put it right down your throat.”

  ?
??I’m not fooling with stuff, Mr. Morton,” said McCarthy, “because I don’t want to go to the penitentiary.”

  “What were you doing standing on the corner with those other junkies?”

  “I just walked by. I was Regaling up, Mr. Morton.” (The reference is to Regal Beer, a New Orleans product.) “I Regal up every chance I get. Look here.” He took some cards out of his wallet and showed them around like a magician about to do a card trick. Nobody looked at the cards. “I work as a waiter, and here’s my union card. I can get on at the Roosevelt over the weekend. There’s a convention stopping there. It’s a good deal if you guys will let me go.”

  He walked over to Morton and held out his hand. “Give me a dime, Mr. Morton, for carfare.”

  Morton slapped a coin into his hand.

  “Get your cotton-picking ass out of here,” he said.

  “We’ll get you next time,” the agents shouted in chorus, but McCarthy was out the door.

  The young agent with the crewcut laughed. “I’ll bet he took the stairs.”

  Morton was gathering up his papers and shoving them into a briefcase. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t take any more statements now. I have to go to court. If I possibly can, I’ll take statements from the rest of you this afternoon.”

  “I sent for the wagon,” said the guy with the pipe. “We’ll take them over to the Third Precinct and put them on ice.”

  At the Third Precinct, Cole and I had a cell to ourselves. I lay down on the bench. There was a raw ache through my lungs. People vary in the way junk sickness affects them. Some suffer mostly from vomiting and diarrhea. The asthmatic type, with narrow and deep chest, is liable to violent fits of sneezing, watering at eyes and nose, in some cases spasms of the bronchial tubes that shut off the breathing. In my case, the worst thing is lowering of blood pressure with consequent loss of body liquid, and extreme weakness, as in shock. It is a feeling as if the life energy has been shut off so that all the cells in the body are suffocating. As I lay there on the bench, I felt like I was subsiding into a pile of bones.

  We were in the Third Precinct about three hours and then the laws put us in the wagon and took us to Parish Prison, for no reason that I could see. The man with the pipe met us at Parish and took us to the Federal Building.

  A middle-aged, faceless bureaucrat told me he was head of the New Orleans office. Did I want to make a statement?

  “Yes,” I said. “You write it and I’ll sign it.”

  His face wasn’t blank or expressionless. It simply wasn’t there. The only thing I remember about his face is that he wore glasses. He called in a stenographer and got ready to dictate a statement. He turned to the man with the pipe who was sitting there on a desk, and asked if there was anything special he wanted to put in the statement.

  The man with the pipe said, “Well, no, that’s the whole story.”

  The head bureaucrat seemed to think of something. “Wait a minute,” he said. He led the man with the pipe into another office. They came back after a few minutes and the bureaucrat went on with his statement. The statement admitted possession of the weed and heroin found in my house.

  He asked how I acquired the heroin.

  I said I went to Exchange and Canal and contacted a street peddler.

  “What did you do then?” he asked.

  “I drove home.”

  “In your own car?”

  I saw what he was getting at, but did not have the energy to say, “I changed my mind. I don’t want to make any statement.” Besides, I was afraid of spending another day sick in the precinct. So I said, “Yes.”

  Finally, I signed a separate statement to the effect that it was my intention to plead guilty to these charges in Federal Court. I was taken back to the Second Precinct. The agents assured me I would be charged first thing the next morning.

  Cole said, “You’ll feel better in five days. Only time, or a shot, will take away the bad feeling.”

  I knew this, of course. No one will stand still for junk sickness unless he is in jail or otherwise cut off from junk. The reason it is practically impossible to stop using and cure yourself is that the sickness lasts five to eight days. Twelve hours of it would be easy, twenty-four possible, but five to eight days is too long.

  I lay on the narrow wood bench, twisting from one side to the other. My body was raw, twitching, tumescent, the junk-frozen flesh in agonizing thaw. I turned over on my stomach and one leg slipped off the bench. I pitched forward and the rounded edge of the bench, polished smooth by the friction of cloth, slid along my crotch. There was a sudden rush of blood to the genitals at the slippery contact. Sparks exploded behind my eyes; my legs twitched—the orgasm of a hanged man when the neck snaps.

  The turnkey opened the door of my cell. “Your lawyer is here to see you, Lee,” he said.

  The lawyer looked at me quite a while before he introduced himself. He had been recommended to my wife, and I had not seen him before. The turnkey led the way to a large room above the cell block where there were benches.

  “I can see you don’t feel much like talking now,” the lawyer began. “We’ll go into the details later on. Did you sign anything?”

  I told him about the statement.

  “That was to get your car,” he said. “You’re charged in State. I talked to the Federal D.A. an hour ago on the phone and asked if he was going to take the case. He said, ‘Absolutely no. There’s an illegal seizure involved, and under no circumstances will this office prosecute the case.’ I think I can get you over to the hospital for a shot,” he said, after a pause. “The man at the desk now is a good friend of mine. I’ll go down and talk to him.”

  The turnkey took me back to my cell. A few minutes later he opened the door again and said, “Lee, do you want to go to the hospital?”

  Two cops took me over to Charity Hospital in the wagon. The nurse at the receiving desk wanted to know what was wrong with me.

  “Emergency case,” said one of the cops. “He fell off a building.”

  The cop walked away and came back with a heavy-set young doctor with reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses. The doctor asked a few questions and looked at my arms. Another doctor with a long nose and hairy arms walked up to put in his two cents.

  “After all, doctor,” he said to his colleague, “there is the moral question. This man should have thought of all this before he started using narcotics.”

  “Yes, there is the moral question, but there is also a physical question. This man is sick.” He turned to a nurse and ordered half a grain of morphine.

  As the wagon jolted along on the way back to the precinct, I felt the morphine spread through all my cells. My stomach moved and rumbled. A shot when you are very sick always starts the stomach moving. Normal strength came back to all my muscles. I was hungry and sleepy.

  •

  About eleven the next morning, a bondsman came around so I could sign the bond. He had the embalmed look of all bondsmen; as though paraffin had been injected under the skin. My lawyer, Tige, showed up around twelve to check me out. He had made arrangements for me to go directly to a sanitarium to take a cure. He told me the cure was necessary from a legal point of view. We drove to a sanitarium in a police car with two detectives. This was part of the lawyer’s plan, and the detectives fitted in as possible witnesses.

  When we stopped in front of the sanitarium, the lawyer pulled some bills out of his pocket and turned to one of the cops. “Put this on that horse for me, will you?” he said.

  The dick’s frog-eyes bugged out with indignation. He made no move to take the money. “I’m not going to put any money on a horse,” he said.

  The lawyer laughed and tossed the money onto the seat of the car. “Mack will,” he said.

  This apparent tactlessness in paying off the cops in front of me was deliberate. When they as
ked him later what was the idea, he said, “Why, that boy was too sick to notice anything.” So if these two cops were called as witnesses they would say I seemed in very bad shape. The point was, the lawyer wanted witnesses who would testify I was in bad shape at the time I signed the statement.

  An attendant took my clothes and I lay down on the bed waiting for a shot. My wife came to see me and reported that the management did not know anything about junk or junkies.

  “When I told them you were sick, they said, ‘What’s the matter with him?’ I told them you were sick and that you needed a shot of morphine, and they said, ‘Oh, we thought it was just a question of a marijuana habit.’”

  “A marijuana habit!” I said. “What in hell is that? Find out what they plan to give me,” I told her. “I need a reduction cure. If they aren’t going to give me one, check me out of here right now.”

  She came back shortly and told me she finally got a doctor on the phone who seemed to know what the score was. This was the lawyer’s doctor who was not connected with the sanitarium.

  “He seemed surprised when I told him you hadn’t had anything. He said he would call the hospital right away and see that you were taken care of.”

  A few minutes later a nurse came in with a hypo. It was demerol. Demerol helps some, but it is not nearly as effective as codeine in relieving junk sickness. A doctor came that evening to give me a physical examination. My blood was thick and concentrated by loss of body fluid. During the forty-eight hours I had been without junk, I lost ten pounds. It took the doctor twenty minutes to draw a tube of blood for a blood test because the thick blood kept clotting in the needle.

  At nine p.m., I got another shot of demerol. This shot had no effect. The third day and night of junk sickness are generally the worst. After the third day, the sickness begins to recede. I felt a cold burn over the whole surface of my body as though the skin was one solid hive. It seemed like ants were crawling around under the skin.

  It is possible to detach yourself from most pain—injury to teeth, eyes, and genitals present special difficulties—so that the pain is experienced as neutral excitation. From junk sickness there seems to be no escape. Junk sickness is the reverse side of junk kick. The kick of junk is that you have to have it. Junkies run on junk time and junk metabolism. They are subject to junk climate. They are warmed and chilled by junk. The kick of junk is living under junk conditions. You cannot escape from junk sickness any more than you can escape from junk kick after a shot.