•
I was in a cheap cantina off Dolores Street, Mexico City. I had been drinking for about two weeks. I was sitting in a booth with three Mexicans, drinking tequila. The Mexicans were fairly well dressed. One of them spoke English. A middle-aged, heavy-set Mexican with a sad, sweet face sang songs and played the guitar. He was sitting at the end of a booth in a chair. I was glad the singing made conversation impossible.
Five cops came in. I figured I might get a shake, so I slipped the gun and holster out of my belt and dropped them under the table with a piece of hop I had stashed in a cigarette package. The cops had a quick beer and took off.
When I reached under the table, my gun was gone but the holster was there.
I was sitting in another bar with the Mexican who spoke English. The singer and the other two Mexicans were gone. The place was suffused with a dim yellow light. A moldy-looking bullhead mounted on a plaque hung over the mahogany bar. Pictures of bullfighters, some autographed, decorated the walls. The word “saloon” was etched in the frosted-glass swinging door. I found myself reading the word “saloon” over and over. I had the feeling of coming into the middle of a conversation.
I inferred from the expression of the other man that I was in mid-sentence, but did not know what I had said or what I was going to say or what the discussion was about. I thought we must be talking about the gun. “I am probably trying to buy it back.” I noticed the man had the piece of hop in his hand, and was turning it over.
“So you think I look like a junkie?” he said.
I looked at him. The man had a thin face with high cheekbones. The eyes were a gray-brown color often seen in mixed Indian and European stock. He was wearing a light gray suit and a tie. His mouth was thin, twisted down at the corners. A junkie mouth, for sure. There are people who look like junkies and aren’t, just as some people look queer and aren’t. It’s a type that causes trouble.
“I’m going to call a cop,” he said, starting for a phone attached to a support pillar.
I jerked the telephone out of the man’s hand and pushed him against the bar so hard he bounced off it. The man smiled at me. His teeth were covered by a brown film. He turned his back and called the bartender over and showed him the piece of hop. I walked out and got a cab.
I remember going back to my apartment to get another gun—a heavy-caliber revolver. I was in a hysterical rage, though exactly why I cannot, in retrospect, understand.
I got out of a taxi and walked down the street and into the bar. The man was leaning against the bar, his gray coat pulled tight over his thin back and shoulders. He turned an expressionless face to me.
I said, “Walk outside ahead of me.”
“Why, Bill?” he asked.
“Go on, walk.”
I flipped the heavy revolver out of my waistband, cocking it as I drew, and stuck the muzzle in the man’s stomach. With my left hand, I took hold of the man’s coat lapel and shoved him back against the bar. It did not occur to me until later that the man had used my correct first name and that the bartender probably knew it too.
The man was perfectly relaxed, his face blank with controlled fear. I saw someone approaching from behind on my right side, and half turned my head. The bartender was closing in with a cop. I turned around, irritated at the interruption. I shoved the gun in the cop’s stomach.
“Who asked you to put in your two cents?” I asked in English. I was not talking to a solid three-dimensional cop. I was talking to the recurrent cop of my dreams—an irritating, nondescript, darkish man who would rush in when I was about to take a shot or go to bed with a boy.
The bartender grabbed my arm, twisting it to one side out of the cop’s stomach. The cop stolidly hauled out his battered .45 automatic, placing it firmly against my body. I could feel the coldness of the muzzle through my thin cotton shirt. The cop’s stomach stuck out. He had not sucked it in or leaned forward. I relaxed my hold on the gun and felt it leave my hand. I half-raised my hands, palm out in a gesture of surrender.
“All right, all right,” I said, and then added, “bueno.”
The cop put away his .45. The bartender was leaning against the bar examining the gun. The man in the gray suit stood there without any expression at all.
“Esta cargado,”—(“It’s loaded”)—said the bartender, without looking up from the gun.
I intended to say, “Of course—what good is an unloaded gun?” but I did not say anything. The scene was unreal and flat and pointless, as though I had forced my way into someone else’s dream, the drunk wandering out on to the stage.
And I was unreal to the others, the stranger from another country. The bartender looked at me with curiosity. He gave a little shrug of puzzled disgust and slipped the gun into his waistband. There was no hate in the room. Perhaps they would have hated me if I had been closer to them.
The cop took me firmly by the arm. “Vámanos gringo,” he said.
I walked out with the cop. I felt limp and had difficulty controlling my legs. Once I stumbled, and the cop steadied me. I was trying to convey the idea that, while I had no money on my person, I could borrow some “de amigos.” My brain was numb. I mixed Spanish and English and the word for borrow was hidden in some filing cabinet of the mind cut off from my use by the mechanical barrier of alcohol-numbed connections. The cop shook his head. I was making an effort to reform the concept. Suddenly the cop stopped walking.
“Ándale, gringo,” he said, giving me a slight push on the shoulder. The cop stood there for a minute, watching as I walked on down the street. I waved. The cop did not respond. He turned and walked back the way he had come.
I had one peso left. I walked into a cantina and ordered a beer. There was no draft beer and bottle beer cost a peso. There was a group of young Mexicans at the end of the bar, and I got talking to them. One of them showed me a Secret Service badge. Probably a phony, I decided. There’s a phony cop in every Mexican bar. I found myself drinking a tequila. The last thing I remembered was the sharp taste of the lemon I sucked with the glass of tequila.
I woke up next morning in a strange room. I looked around. Cheap joint. Five pesos. A wardrobe, a chair, a table. I could see people passing outside, through the drawn curtains. Ground floor. Some of my clothes were heaped on the chair. My coat and shirt lay on the table.
I swung my legs out of the bed, and sat there trying to remember what happened after that last glass of tequila. I drew a blank. I got out of bed and took inventory of my effects. “Fountain pen gone. It leaked anyway . . . never had one that didn’t . . . pocketknife gone . . . no loss either . . .” I began putting on my clothes. I had the shakes bad. “Need a few quick beers . . . maybe I can catch Rollins home now.”
It was a long walk. Rollins was in front of his apartment, walking his Norwegian elk-hound. He was a solidly built man of my age, with strong, handsome features and wiry, black hair a little gray at the temples. He was wearing an expensive sports shirt, whipcord slacks, and a suede leather jacket. We had known each other for thirty years.
Rollins listened to my account of the previous evening. “You’re going to get your head blown off carrying that gun,” he said. “What do you carry it for? You wouldn’t know what you were shooting at. You bumped into trees twice there on Insurgentes. You walked right in front of a car. I pulled you back and you threatened me. I left you there to find your own way home, and I don’t know how you ever made it. Everyone is fed up with the way you’ve been acting lately. If there’s one thing I don’t want to be around, and I think no one else particularly wants to be around, it’s a drunk with a gun.”
“You’re right, of course,” I said.
“Well, I want to help you in any way I can. But the first thing you have to do is cut down on the sauce and build up your health. You look terrible. Then you’d better think about making some money. Speaking of money, I gues
s you’re broke, as usual.” Rollins took out his wallet. “Here’s fifty pesos. That’s the best I can do for you.”
I got drunk on the fifty pesos. About nine that night, I ran out of money and went back to my apartment. I lay down and tried to sleep. When I closed my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and nose eaten away by disease. The disease spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it.
I watched curiously. “I got the horrors,” I thought matter of factly.
I woke up with a start of fear. I lay there, my heart beating fast, trying to find out what had scared me. I thought I heard a slight noise downstairs. “There is someone in the apartment,” I said aloud, and immediately I knew that there was.
I took my 30-30 carbine out of the closet. My hands were shaking; I could barely load the rifle. I dropped several cartridges on the floor before I got two in the loading slot. My legs kept folding under me. I went downstairs and turned on all the lights. Nobody. Nothing.
I had the shakes bad, and on top of that I was junk sick! “How long since I’ve had a shot?” I asked myself. I couldn’t remember. I began ransacking the apartment for junk. Some time before, I had stashed a piece of hop in a hole in one corner of the room. The hop had slid under the floorboards, out of reach. I had made several abortive attempts to recover it.
“I’ll get it this time,” I said grimly. With shaking hands, I made a hook out of a coat-hanger and began fishing for the hop. The sweat ran down my nose. I skinned my hands on the jagged wood edges of the hole. “If I can’t get to it one way, I will another,” I said grimly, and began looking for the saw.
I couldn’t find it. I rushed from one room to the other, throwing things around and emptying drawers on the floor in a mounting frenzy. Sobbing with rage, I tried to rip the boards up with my hands. Finally, I gave up and lay on the floor panting and whimpering.
I remembered there was some dionin in the medicine chest. I got up to look. Only one tablet left. The tablet cooked up milky and I was afraid to shoot it in the vein. A sudden involuntary jerk of my hand pulled the needle out of my arm and the shot sprayed over my skin. I sat there looking at my arm.
I finally slept a little and woke up next morning with a terrific alcohol depression. Junk sickness, suspended by codeine and hop, numbed by weeks of constant drinking, came back on me full force. “I have to have some codeine,” I thought.
I looked through my clothes. Nothing, not a cigarette, not a centavo. I went into the living room and reached into the sofa, where the sofa back joined the seat. I ran my hand along it. A comb, a piece of chalk, a broken pencil, one ten-centavo piece, one five. I felt a sickening shock of pain and pulled my hand out. I was bleeding from a deep cut in my finger. A razor blade, evidently. I tore off a piece of towel and wrapped it around my finger. The blood soaked through and dripped on the floor. I sent my wife out to try and borrow some money. She said, “We have about burned everybody down. But I will try.” I went back to bed. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t read. I lay there looking at the ceiling, with the cellular stoicism that junk bestows on the user.
A matchbox sailed past the door into the bathroom. I sat up, my heart pounding. “Old Ike, the pusher!” Ike often sneaked into the house and manifested his presence like a poltergeist, throwing something or knocking on the walls. Old Ike appeared in the doorway.
“How you getting along?” he asked.
“Not so good. I got the shakes. I need a shot.”
Ike nodded. “Yeah,” he began, “M is the thing for the shakes. I remember once in Minneapolis—”
“Never mind Minneapolis. Have you got any?”
“I got it, but not with me. Take me about twenty minutes to get it.” Old Ike was sitting down, leafing through a magazine. He looked up. “Why? You want some?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll get it right away.” Ike was gone two hours.
“I had to wait for the guy to get back from lunch to open the safe in the hotel. I keep my stuff in the safe so nobody makes me for it. I tell ’em at the hotel it’s gold dust I use—”
“But you got it?”
“Yes, I got it. Where is your works?”
“In the bathroom.”
Ike came back from the bathroom with the works and began cooking up a shot. He kept talking. “You’re drinking and you’re getting crazy. I hate to see you get off this stuff and on something worse. I know so many that quit the junk. A lot of them can’t make it with Lupita. Fifteen pesos for a paper and it takes three to fix you. Right away they start in drinking and they don’t last more than two or three years.”
“Let’s have that shot,” I said.
“Yes. Just a minute. The needle is stopped.” Ike began feeling along the edge of his coat lapel, looking for a horsehair to clean out the needle. He went on talking: “I remember once out by Mary Island. We was on the boat and the Colonel got drunk and fell in the water and come near drowning with his two pistolas. We had a hell of a time to get him out.” Ike blew through the needle. “Clear now. I see a guy used to be a hip down by Lupita’s. They called him El Sombrero because he makes it grabbing people’s hats and running. Comes up by a streetcar just when it starts. Reaches in and grabs a hat and pfut—he’s gone. You should see him now. His legs all swelled up and covered with sores and dirty, oh my God! The people walk around him like this.” Ike was standing with the dropper in one hand and the needle in the other.
I said, “How about that shot?”
“O.K. How much you want? About five centogramos? Better make it five.”
The shot was a long time taking effect. It hit slowly at first, then with mounting force. I lay back on the bed like I was in a warm bath.
•
I kept on drinking. Several days later, I passed out in the Ship Ahoy after drinking tequila for eight hours steadily. Some friends carried me home. Next morning I had the worst hangover of my life. I began vomiting at ten-minute intervals until I brought up green bile.
Then Old Ike was around. “You got to quit drinking, Bill. You’re getting crazy.”
I had never been so sick. Nausea wracked my body like a convulsion. Old Ike was holding me up as I vomited a few spoonfuls of bile into the toilet. He put an arm around my shoulder and hugged me and helped me back to bed. About five in the afternoon, I stopped vomiting and managed to keep a bottle of grape juice and a glass of milk down.
“It stinks like piss in here,” I said. “One of them cats must have pissed under the bed.”
Ike began sniffing around the bed. “No, nothing there.” He sniffed some more near the head of the bed, where I was lying propped up on pillows. “Bill, it’s you smells like piss!”
“Huh?” I began smelling my hands, with mounting horror, as if I was discovering leprosy. “Good Lord!” I said, my stomach cold with fear. “I got uremic poisoning! Ike, go out and get me a croaker.”
“O.K., Bill, I’ll get you one right away.”
“And don’t come back with one of them five-peso script-writing bums!”
“O.K., Bill.”
I lay there trying to control the fear. I did not know much about uremic poisoning. A woman I knew slightly in Texas died of it after drinking a bottle of beer every hour, night and day, for two weeks. Rollins had told me about it. “She swelled up and turned sorta black and went into convulsions and died. The whole house smelled like piss!”
I relaxed, trying to tune in on my viscera and find out what the score was. I did not feel death or indication of grave illness. I felt tired, battered, languid. I lay there with my eyes closed in the darkening room.
Old Ike came i
n with the doctor and turned on the light. A Chinese doctor—one of Ike’s script-writers. He said there was no uremia since I could piss and did not have a headache.
I asked, “How come I stink like this?”
The doctor shrugged. Ike said, “He says it’s nothing serious. He says you have to stop drinking. He says better you go back to the other than drink like this.” The doctor nodded. I could hear Ike out in the hall, hitting the croaker for a morphine script.
“Ike, I don’t think that doctor knows a thing. I want you to do this. Go to my friend Rollins—I’ll write down his address—and ask him to send me over a good doctor. He will know because his wife has been sick.”
“Well, all right,” said Ike. “But I think you’re wasting your money. This doctor is pretty good.”
“Yeah, he’s got a good writing arm.”
Ike laughed and shrugged. “All right.”
He was back in an hour with Rollins and another doctor. When they walked into the apartment, the doctor sniffed and smiled and, turning to Rollins, nodded. He had a round, smiling, Oriental face. He made a quick examination and asked if I could urinate. Then, turning to Ike, he asked if I was subject to fits.
Ike told me, “He ask if you are ever crazy. I tell him, no, you just play with the cat some time.”
Rollins spoke in his halting Spanish, looking for each word. “Esto señor huele muy malo and quiere saber por qué.” (“This man smells very bad and he wants to know why.”)
The doctor explained it was an incipient uremia, but the danger was now past. I would have to stop drinking for a month. The doctor picked up an empty tequila bottle. “One more of these and you were dead.” He was putting away his instruments. He wrote out a prescription for an anti-acid preparation to take every few hours, shook hands with me and Ike and left.
Next day I had the chucks and ate everything in sight. I stayed in bed three days. The metabolic set-up of alcoholism had ceased operating. When I started drinking again, I drank normally and never before the late afternoon. I stayed off the junk.