Junky

  I was too weak to get out of bed. I could not lie still. In junk sickness, any conceivable line of action or inaction seems intolerable. A man might die simply because he could not stand to stay in his body.

  At six o’clock in the morning I got another shot, which seemed to have some effect. As I learned later, this shot was not demerol. I was even able to eat a little toast and drink some coffee.

  When my wife came to see me later in the day, she told me that they were using a new treatment in my case. The treatment had started with my morning shot.

  “I noticed a difference. I thought the morning shot was M.”

  “I talked to Dr. Moore on the phone. He told me this is the wonder drug they have been looking for to treat drug addiction. It relieves withdrawal symptoms without forming a new habit. It isn’t a narcotic at all. It is one of the antihistamines. Thephorin, I believe he said.”

  “Then it would seem withdrawal symptoms are an allergic reaction.”

  “That’s what Dr. Moore says.”

  The doctor who recommended this treatment was my lawyer’s doctor. He was not connected with the sanitarium and he was not a psychiatrist. In two days I could eat a full meal. The antihistamine shots lasted three to five hours and then the sickness came back. The shots felt like junk.

  When I was up and walking around, a psychiatrist came to interview me. He was very tall. He had long legs and a heavy body shaped like a pear with the narrow end up. He smiled when he talked and his voice was whiny. He was not effeminate. He simply had none of whatever it is that makes a man a man. This was Dr. Fredericks, head psychiatrist of the hospital.

  He asked the question they all ask. “Why do you feel that you need narcotics, Mr. Lee?”

  When you hear this question you can be sure that the man who asks it knows nothing about junk.

  “I need it to get out of bed in the morning, to shave and eat breakfast.”

  “I mean psychically.”

  I shrugged. Might as well give him his diagnosis so he will go. “It’s a good kick.”

  Junk is not a “good kick.” The point of junk to a user is that it forms the habit. No one knows what junk is until he is junk sick.

  The doctor nodded. Psychopathic personality. He stood up. Suddenly he moved his face into a smile that was obviously intended to be understanding and to dissolve my reticence. The smile took over and ended up an insane leer. He leaned forward and brought his smile close to my face.

  “Is your sex life satisfactory?” he asked. “Do you and your wife have satisfactory relations?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, “when I’m not on the junk.”

  He straightened up. He didn’t like my answer at all.

  “Well, I’ll see you again.” He blushed and lunged awkwardly for the door. I had made him for a faker when he walked in the room—obviously he was putting down a self-assured routine for himself and the others—but I had expected a deeper and tougher front.

  The doctor told my wife I had a very bad prognosis. My attitude towards junk was “so what?” A relapse was to be expected because the psychic determinants of my condition remained in operation. He could not help me unless I agreed to cooperate. Given cooperation, he apparently was ready to take down my psyche and reassemble it in eight days.

  •

  The other patients were a pretty square and sorry lot. Not another junkie in the place. The only patient in my ward who knew the score was a drunk who came in with a broken jaw and other injuries of the face. He told me all the public hospitals turned him away. At Charity they told him: “Get out of here. You’re dripping blood all over the floor.” So he came to this sanitarium where he had been before and they knew he was good for the bill.

  The others were a beat, nowhere bunch of people. The type psychiatrists like. The type Dr. Fredericks could impress. There was a thin, pale, little man with bloodless, almost transparent, flesh. He looked like a cold and enfeebled lizard. This character complained of nerves and spent most of the day wandering up and down the halls, saying, “Lord, Lord, I don’t even feel like a human.” He did not have the concentration of energy necessary to hold himself together and his organism was always on the point of disintegrating into its component parts.

  Most of the patients were old. They looked at you with the puzzled, resentful, stupid look of a moribund cow. A few never left their rooms. One young schizophrenic had both hands fastened in front with a bandage so he could not bother the other patients. A depressing place and depressing people.

  I was feeling the shots less all the time and after eight days I began to pass them up. When I had passed the shots for twenty-four hours, I decided it was time to leave.

  My wife went to see Dr. Fredericks and caught him in the hall outside his office. He said I should stay four or five days longer. “He doesn’t know it yet,” the doctor said, “but his shots are stopped from now on.”

  “He’s already passed up the shots for twenty-four hours,” my wife told him.

  The doctor got very red in the face. When he could talk, he said, “Anyway, he might develop withdrawal symptoms.”

  “It isn’t likely after ten days, is it?”

  “He might,” said the doctor, and walked away before she could say anything else.

  “To hell with him,” I told her. “We don’t need his testimony. Tige wants to use his own doctor as a witness to my condition. No telling what this jerk might say on the stand.”

  Dr. Fredericks had to sign my discharge from the hospital. He stayed in his office and a nurse took the paper in so he could sign it. Of course, he wrote “against medical advice” on the discharge.

  •

  It was five in the afternoon when we left the hospital and took a cab to Canal Street. I went into a bar and drank four whisky sodas and got a good lush kick. I was cured.

  As I walked across the porch of my house and opened the door, I had the feel of returning after a long absence. I was coming back to the point in time I left a year ago when I took that first “joy bang” with Pat.

  After a junk cure is complete, you generally feel fine for a few days. You can drink, you can feel real hunger and pleasure in food, and your sex desire comes back on you. Everything looks different, sharper. Then you hit a snag. It is an effort to dress, get out of a chair, pick up a fork. You don’t want to do anything or go anywhere. You don’t even want junk. The junk craving is gone, but there isn’t anything else. You have to sit this period out. Or work it out. Farm work is the best cure.

  Pat came around as soon as he heard I was out. Did I want to “pick up”? Just one wouldn’t hurt any. He could get a good price on ten or more. I said no. You don’t need will power to say no to junk when you are off. You don’t want it.

  Besides, I was charged in State, and State junk raps pile up like any other felony. Two junk raps can draw you seven years, or you can be charged in State on one and Federal on the other so that when you walk out of the State joint the Federals meet you at the door. If you do your Federal time first, then the State is waiting for you at the door of the Federal joint.

  I knew the law was out to hang another on me because they had messed up the deal by coming on like Federals and by searching the house without a warrant. I had a free hand to arrange my account of what happened since there was no statement with my signature on it to tie me down. The State could not introduce the statement I had signed for the Federals without bringing up the deal I had made with that fair-play artist, the fat captain. But if they could hang another charge on me, they would have a sure thing.

  Usually, a junkie makes straight for a connection as soon as he leaves any place of confinement. The law would expect me to do this and they would be watching Pat. So I told Pat I was staying off until the case was settled. He borrowed two dollars and went away.

  A few days later I was drinking in the
bars around Canal Street. When a junkie off junk gets drunk to a certain point, his thoughts turn to junk. I went into the toilet in one bar, and there was a wallet on the toilet-paper box. There is a dream feeling when you find money. I opened the wallet and took out a twenty, a ten and a five. I decided to use some other toilet in some other bar and walked out leaving a full martini.

  I went up to Pat’s room.

  Pat opened the door and said, “Hello, old buddy, I’m glad to see you.”

  There was another man sitting on the bed who turned his face to the door as I came in. “Hello, Bill,” he said.

  I looked at him a long three seconds before I recognized Dupré. He looked older and younger. The deadness had gone from his eyes and he was twenty pounds thinner. His face twitched at intervals like dead matter coming alive, still jerky and mechanical. When he was getting plenty of junk, Dupré looked anonymous and dead, so you could not pick him out of a crowd or recognize him at a distance. Now, his image was clear and sharp. If you walked fast down a crowded street and passed Dupré, his face would be forced on your memory—like in the card trick where the operator fans the cards rapidly, saying, “Take a card, any card,” as he forces a certain card into your hand.

  When he was getting plenty of junk, Dupré was silent. Now he was garrulous. He told me how he finally got so deep in the till, he lost his job. Now he had no money for junk. He couldn’t even raise the price of P.G. and goof balls to taper off. He talked on and on.

  “It used to be, all the cops knew me before the War. Many’s the seventy-two hours I put in right over in the Third Precinct. It was the First Precinct then. You know how it is when you start to come off the stuff.” He indicated his genitals, pointing with all his fingers, then turning the hand palm up. A concrete gesture as though he had picked up what he wanted to talk about and was holding it in his palm to show you. “You get a hard-on and shoot off right in your pants. It doesn’t even have to get hard. I remember one time I was in with Larry. You know that kid Larry. He was pushing a while back. I said, ‘Larry, you got to do it for me.’ So he took down his pants. You know he had to do that for me.”

  Pat was looking for a vein. He pursed his lips in disapproval. “You guys talk like degenerates.”

  “What the matter, Pat?” I said. “Can’t you hit it?”

  “No,” he said. He moved the tie-up down to his wrist to hit a vein in his hand.

  Later, I stopped by my lawyer’s office to talk about the case and to ask whether I could leave the State and go to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where I owned farm property.

  “You’re hot as a firecracker in this town,” Tige told me. “I have permission from the judge for you to leave the State. So you can go on to Texas any time you like.”

  “I might want to take a trip to Mexico,” I said. “Would that be okay?”

  “So long as you are back here when your case comes up. There are no restrictions on you. One client of mine went to Venezuela. So far as I know, he’s still there. He didn’t come back.”

  Tige was a hard man to figure. Was he telling me not to come back? When he seemed to come on clumsy or irrelevant, he was often following a plan. Some of his plans extended far into the future. Often he would take up a plan, see that it was nowhere, and drop it. For an intelligent man, he could get some amazingly silly ideas. For example, when I told him I had studied medicine in Vienna (six months), he said:

  “That’s fine. Now suppose we say this. That you, having studied medicine yourself, had confidence that with your medical knowledge you could administer a cure to yourself, and that it was for this purpose of giving yourself a cure that you acquired the drugs that were found in your possession.”

  I thought this was too thick for anyone to swallow. “Not a good idea to come on too educated. Juries don’t like people who study in Europe.”

  “Well, you could easily loosen your tie and lapse into a broad Southern accent.”

  I could see myself coming on like plain folks in a phony Southern accent. I gave up trying to be one of the boys twenty years ago. I told him this sort of act wasn’t in my line at all, and he never mentioned the idea again.

  Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else’s luck. The luck of most people is strictly nontransferable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.

  •

  I left New Orleans several days later and went to the Rio Grande Valley. The Rio Grande River runs into the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville. Sixty miles up river from Brownsville is the town of Mission. The Valley runs from Brownsville to Mission, a strip of ground sixty miles long and twenty miles wide. The area is irrigated from the Rio Grande River. Before irrigation, nothing grew here but mesquite and cactus. Now it is one of the richest farm areas in the U.S.

  A three-lane highway runs from Brownsville to Mission, and the towns of the Valley string out along this highway. There are no cities in the Valley, and no country. The area is a vast suburb of flimsy houses. The Valley is flat as a table. Nothing grows there but crops, citrus and palms brought from California. A hot dry wind starts every afternoon and blows until sundown. The Valley is citrus country. Pink and red grapefruit grow there that will not grow anywhere else. Citrus country is real-estate-promoted country, country of flimsy houses, “Bide-A-Wee” tourist courts and old people waiting around to die. The whole Valley has the impermanent look of a camp, or carnival. Soon the suckers will all be dead and the pitchmen will go somewhere else.

  During the Twenties, real estate operators brought trainloads of prospects down to the Valley and let them pick grapefruit right off the trees and eat it. One of these pioneer promoters is said to have constructed a large artificial lake and sold plots all around it. “The lake will sub-irrigate your groves.” As soon as the last sale closed, he turned off the water and disappeared with his lake, leaving the prospects sitting there in a desert.

  As put down by the realtor, citrus is a flawless set-up for old people who want to retire and take life easy. The grove owner does nothing. A citrus association cares for the grove and markets the fruit, and hands the owner a check. Actually, citrus is a risky deal for the small investor. Over a period of time the average return is high, especially on the pink and ruby red fruit. But a small operator cannot ride out the years when the prices are low, or the yield of fruit small.

  A premonition of doom hangs over the Valley. You have to make it now before something happens, before the black fly ruins the citrus, before support prices are taken off the cotton, before the flood, the hurricane, the freeze, the long dry spell when there is no water to irrigate, before the Border Patrol shuts off your wetbacks. The threat of disaster is always there, persistent and disquieting as the afternoon wind. The Valley was desert, and it will be desert again. Meanwhile you try to make yours while there is still time.

  Old men sitting in real estate offices say, “Well, this is nothing new. I’ve seen all this before. I remember back in ’28 . . .”

  But a new factor, something that nobody has seen before, is changing the familiar aspect of disaster like the slow beginnings of a disease, so that no one can say just when it began.

  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 s
ide 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.