Junky

  I asked Ike what the score was on pushing in Mexico City. He said it was impossible.

  “You wouldn’t last a week. Sure, you can get plenty customers that would pay you fifteen pesos for a shot of good M like we get with the scripts. But first time they wake up sick with no money, they go right to Lupita and tell her for a few papers. Or if the law grabs them, they open their mouth right away. Some of them don’t even have to be asked. Right away they say, ‘Turn me loose and I’ll tell you somebody pushing junk.’ So the law sends them up to make a buy with the marked money, and that’s it. You’re fucked right there. It’s eight years for selling this stuff and there’s no bail.

  “I have ’em come to me: ‘Ike, we know you get stuff on the scripts. Here’s fifty pesos. Get me one script.’ Sometimes they got good watches or a suit of clothes. I tell ’em I’m off. Sure, I could make two hundred pesos a day, but I wouldn’t last a week.”

  “But can’t you find like five or six good customers?”

  “I know every hip in Mexico City. And I wouldn’t trust one of ’em. Not one.”

  •

  At first we filled the scripts without too much trouble. But after a few weeks the scripts had piled up in the drugstores that would fill M scripts and they began packing in. It looked like we would be back with Lupita. Once or twice we got caught short and had to score with Lupita. Using that good drugstore M had run up our habits, and it took two of Lupita’s fifteen-peso papers to fix us. Now, thirty pesos in one shot was a lot more than I could afford to pay. I had to quit, cut down to where I could make it on two of Lupita’s papers per day, or find another source of supply.

  One of the script-writing doctors suggested to Ike that he apply for a government permit. Ike explained to me that the Mexican government issued permits to hips allowing them a definite quantity of morphine per month at wholesale prices. The doctor would put in an application for Ike for one hundred pesos. I said, “Go ahead and apply,” and gave him the money. I did not expect the deal to go through, but it did. Ten days later, he had a government permit to buy fifteen grams of morphine every month. The permit had to be signed by his doctor and the head doctor at the Board of Health. Then he would take it to a drugstore and have it filled.

  The price was about two dollars per gram. I remember the first time he filled the permit. A whole boxful of cubes of morphine. Like a junkie’s dream. I had never seen so much morphine before all at once. I put out the money and we split the stuff. Seven grams per month allowed me about three grains per day, which was more than I ever had in the States. So I was supplied with plenty of junk for a cost of thirty dollars per month as compared with about three hundred per month in the U.S.

  •

  During this time I did not get acquainted with the other junkies in Mexico City. Most of them make their junk money by stealing. They are always hot. They are all pigeons. Not one of them can be trusted with the price of a paper. No good can come from associating with these characters.

  Ike didn’t steal. He made out selling bracelets and medals that looked like silver. He had to keep ahead of his customers because this phony silver turned black in a matter of hours. Once or twice, he was arrested and charged with fraud, but I always bought him out. I told him to find some routine that was strictly legitimate, and he started selling crucifixes.

  Ike had been a booster in the States and claimed to have scored for a hundred dollars per day in Chicago with a spring suitcase he shoved suits into and the side sprang back in place. All the money went for coke and M.

  But Ike would not steal in Mexico. He said even the best thieves spend most of their time in the joint. In Mexico, known thieves can be sent to the Tres Marias penal colony without trial. There are no middle-class, white-collar thieves who make good livings, like you find in the States. There are big operators with political connections, and there are bums who spend half their time in jail. The big operators are usually police chiefs or other high officials. That is the set-up in Mexico, and Ike did not have connections to operate.

  One junkie I did see from time to time was a dark-skinned Yucatecan whom Ike referred to as “the Black Bastard.” The Black Bastard worked the crucifix routine. He was, in fact, extremely religious and made the pilgrimage to Chalma every year, going the last quarter mile on his knees over rocks with two people holding him up. After that, he was fixed for a year.

  Our Lady of Chalma seems to be the patron saint of junkies and cheap thieves because all Lupita’s customers make the pilgrimage once a year. The Black Bastard rents a cubicle in the church and pushes papers of junk outrageously cut with milk sugar.

  I used to see the Black Bastard around from time to time, and I heard a great deal about him from Ike. Ike hated the Black Bastard only as one junkie can hate another. “The Black Bastard burned down that drugstore. Going up there saying I sent him. Now the druggist won’t fill no more scripts.”

  So I drifted along from month to month. We were always a little short at the end of the month and had to fill a few scripts. I always had an insecure feeling when I was out of stuff and a comfortable feeling of security when I had those seven gramos stashed safely away.

  Once, Ike got fifteen days in the city prison—the Carmen, they call it—for vagrancy. I was short and could not pay the fine, and it was three days before I got in to see him. His body had shrunk; all the bones stuck out in his face; his brown eyes were bright with pain. I had a piece of hop covered with cellophane in my mouth. I spit the hop on half an orange and handed it to Ike. In twenty minutes, he was loaded.

  I looked around and noticed how the hips stood out as a special group, like the fags who were posturing and screeching in one corner of the yard. The junkies were grouped together, talking and passing the junkie gesture back and forth, the arm swinging out from the elbow palm up, a gesture of separateness and special communion like the limp wrist of the fag.

  Junkies all wear hats, if they have hats. They all look alike, as if wearing a costume identical in some curious way that escapes exact tabulation. Junk has marked them all with its indelible brand.

  Ike told me that the prisoners often steal the pants off a newcomer. “Such a lousy people they got in here.” I did see several men walking around in their underwear. The Commandante would catch wives and relatives bringing junk to the prisoners, and shake them down for all they had.

  He caught one woman bringing a paper to her husband, but she only had five pesos. So he took her dress and sold it for fifteen pesos and she went home wrapped in an old lousy sheet.

  The place was crawling with pigeons. Ike was afraid to hold any of the hop I brought him for fear the other prisoners would take it or turn him over to the Commandante.

  •

  I fell into a routine of staying home with three or four shots a day. For something to do, I enrolled in Mexico City College. The students impressed me as a sorry-looking lot, with a few ­exceptions—but then, I wasn’t looking at them very hard.

  When you look back over a year on the junk, it seems like no time at all. Only the periods when you were sick stand out. You remember the first few shots of a habit and the shots when you were really sick.

  (Even in Mexico there is always the day when everything goes wrong. The drugstore is closed or your boy is off duty, the croaker is out of town at some fiesta, and you can’t score.)

  Aside from junk itself, what you experience during a habit is flat, almost two-dimensional. You can remember what happened if you take the trouble, but no memories come back spontaneously from a habit period—except for the intervals of sickness.

  The end of the month. I was out of junk and sick. Waiting for Old Ike to show with a morphine script. A junkie spends half his life waiting. There was a cat in the house we had been feeding, an ugly-looking gray cat. I picked the animal up and held it on my lap, petting it, and tightened my hold when it tried to jump down. The cat bega
n to mew, looking for a way to escape.

  I brought my face down to touch the cat’s cold nose with mine, and the cat scratched at my face. It was a half-assed scratch, and it did not land. But it was all I needed. I held the cat out at arm’s length, slapping it back and forth across the face with my free hand. The cat screamed and clawed me, then started spraying piss all over my pants. I went on hitting the cat, my hands bloody from scratches. The animal twisted loose and ran into the closet, where I could hear it groaning and whimpering with terror.

  “Now I’ll finish the bastard off,” I said, picking up a heavy painted cane. Sweat was running down my face. I was trembling with excitement. I licked my lips and started toward the closet, alert to block any escape attempt.

  At this point my old lady intervened, and I put down the cane. The cat scrabbled out of the closet and ran down the stairs.

  My old lady looked at me, smiling. “Bill,” she said. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes I just don’t know,” she said, shaking her head.

  •

  Ike brought me cocaine when he could score for it. C is hard to find in Mexico. I had never used any good coke before. Coke is pure kick. It lifts you straight up, a mechanical lift that starts leaving you as soon as you feel it. I don’t know anything like C for a lift, but the lift only lasts ten minutes or so. Then you want another shot. You can’t stop shooting C—as long as it is there you shoot it. When you are shooting C, you shoot more M to level the C kick and smooth out the rough edges. Without M, C makes you too nervous, and M is an antidote for an overdose. There is no tolerance with C, and not much margin between a regular and a toxic dose. Several times I got too much and everything went black and my heart began turning over. Luckily I always had plenty of M on hand, and a shot of M fixed me right up.

  Junk is a biological necessity when you have a habit, an invisible mouth. When you take a shot of junk you are satisfied, just like you ate a big meal. You don’t want another shot right away. But using C you want another shot as soon as the effect wears off. If you have C in the house, you will not go out to a movie or go out at all until the C is all gone. One shot creates an urgent desire for another shot to maintain the high. But once the C is out of your system, you forget about it. There is no habit to C.

  •

  Junk short-circuits sex. The drive to non-sexual sociability comes from the same place sex comes from, so when I have an H or M shooting habit I am non-sociable. If someone wants to talk, O.K. But there is no drive to get acquainted. When I come off the junk, I often run through a period of uncontrolled sociability and talk to anyone who will listen.

  Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness. Every now and then I took a good look at the deal I was giving myself and decided to take the cure. When you are getting plenty of junk, kicking looks easy. You say, “I’m not getting any kick from the shots any more. I might as well quit.” But when you cut down into junk sickness, the picture looks different.

  During the year or so I was on the junk in Mexico, I started the cure five times. I tried reducing the shots, I tried the Chinese cure with a solution of hop and Wampole’s medicine. Every time you take some of the hop solution you add an equal amount of Wampole’s medicine. In ten days or so you are drinking plain Wampole’s Tonic, and the reduction was so slow you never noticed.

  That is the theory of the Chinese cure. What generally happens is this: You start taking a little more hop solution than your schedule allows and that means you put in more Wampole’s and dilute the hop that much quicker. After a few days you don’t know how much is in there and you take it all to be sure. So you wind up with a worse habit than you had before the Chinese cure.

  An eating habit is the worst habit you can contract. It takes longer to break than a needle habit, and the withdrawal symptoms are considerably more severe. In fact, it is not uncommon for a junkie with an eating habit to die if he is cut off cold turkey in jail. A junkie with an eating habit suffers from excruciating stomach cramps when he is cut off. And the symptoms last up to three weeks as compared to eight days on a needle habit.

  When you kick the spike you get worse until you hit the third day and you think, this is it: You couldn’t feel worse. But the fourth day is worse. After the fourth day relief is dramatic. And on the sixth day there is only a pale shadow of junk sickness.

  But with an eating habit you can look forward to at least ten days of horrible suffering. So when you are taking a cure with hop you have to be careful not to get an eating habit. If you can’t make it on schedule, best go back to the needle.

  After my Chinese fiasco, I made up some papers and gave them to my wife to hide and dole out according to a schedule. I had Ike help me make up the papers, but he had an inaccurate mind, and his schedule was all top-heavy on the beginning and suddenly ended with no reduction. So I made up my own schedule. For a while I stayed with the schedule, but I didn’t have any real push. I got stuff from Ike on the side and made excuses for the extra shots.

  I knew that I did not want to go on taking junk. If I could have made a single decision, I would have decided no more junk ever. But when it came to the process of quitting, I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up as though I did not have control over my actions.

  •

  One morning in April, I woke up a little sick. I lay there looking at shadows on the white plaster ceiling. I remembered a long time ago when I lay in bed beside my mother, watching lights from the street move across the ceiling and down the walls. I felt the sharp nostalgia of train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves.

  A mild degree of junk sickness always brought me the magic of childhood. “It never fails,” I thought. “Just like a shot. I wonder if all junkies score for this wonderful stuff.”

  I went into the bathroom to take a shot. I was a long time hitting a vein. The needle clogged twice. Blood ran down my arm. The junk spread through my body, an injection of death. The dream was gone. I looked down at the blood that ran from elbow to wrist. I felt a sudden pity for the violated veins and tissue. Tenderly I wiped the blood off my arm.

  “I’m going to quit,” I said aloud.

  I made up a solution of hop and told Ike to stay away for a few days. He said, “I hope you make it, kid. I hope you get off. May I fall down and be paralyzed if I don’t mean it.”

  In forty-eight hours the backlog of morphine in my body ran out. The solution barely cut the sickness. I drank it all with two nembutals and slept several hours. When I woke up, my clothes were soaked through with sweat. My eyes were watering and smarting. My whole body felt itchy and irritable. I twisted about on the bed, arching my back and stretching my arms and legs. I drew my knees up, my hands clasped between the thighs. The pressure of my hands set off the hair trigger orgasm of junk sickness. I got up and changed my underwear.

  There was a little hop left in the bottle. I drank that, went out and bought four tubes of codeine tablets. I took the codeine with hot tea and felt better.

  Ike told me, “You’re taking it too fast. Let me mix up a solution for you.” I could hear him out in the kitchen crooning over the mixture: “A little cinnamon in case he starts to puke . . . a little sage for the shits . . . some cloves to clean the blood . . .”

  I never tasted anything so awful, but the mixture leveled off my sickness at a bearable point, so I felt a little high all the time. I wasn’t high on the hop; I was high on withdrawal tone-up. Junk is an inoculation of death that keeps the body in a condition of emergency. When the junk is cut off, emergency reactions continue. Sensations sharpen, the addict is aware of his visceral processes to an uncomfortable degree, peristalsis and secretion go unchecked. No matter what his actual age, the kicking addict is liable to the emotional excesses of a child or an adolescent.

&n
bsp; About the third day of using Ike’s mixture, I started drinking. I had never been able to drink before when I was on the junk, or junk sick. But eating hop is different from shooting the white stuff. You can mix hop and lush.

  At first I started drinking at five in the afternoon. After a week, I started drinking at eight in the morning, stayed drunk all day and all night, and woke up drunk the next morning.

  Every morning when I woke up, I washed down benzedrine, sanicin, and a piece of hop with black coffee and a shot of tequila. Then I lay back and closed my eyes and tried to piece together the night before and yesterday. Often, I drew a blank from noon on. You sometimes wake up from a dream and think, “Thank God, I didn’t really do that!” Reconstructing a period of blackout you think, “My God, did I really do it?” The line between saying and thinking is blurred. Did you say it or just think it?

  A junkie does not ordinarily kick of his own choice. I had never kicked before until I couldn’t score for junk in any form and had to throw in the towel. No one can hit the skids harder or quicker than a self cured junkie.

  After ten days of the cure I had deteriorated shockingly. My clothes were spotted and stiff from the drinks I had spilled all over myself. I never bathed. I had lost weight, my hands shook, I was always spilling things, knocking over chairs, and falling down. But I seemed to have unlimited energy and a capacity for liquor I never had before. My emotions spilled out everywhere. I was uncontrollably sociable and would talk to anybody I could pin down. I forced distastefully intimate confidences on perfect strangers. Several times I made the crudest sexual propositions to people who had given no hint of reciprocity.

  Ike was around every few days. “I’m glad to see you getting off, Bill. May I fall down and be paralyzed if I don’t mean it. But if you get too sick and start to puke—here’s five centogramos of M.”

  Ike took a severe view of my drinking. “You’re drinking, Bill. You’re drinking and getting crazy. You look terrible. You look terrible in your face. Better you should go back to stuff than drink like this.”