“Benzedrine is a good kick,” she said. “Three strips of the paper or about ten tablets. Or take two strips of benny and two goof balls. They get down there and have a fight. It’s a good drive.”
Three young hoodlums from Brooklyn drifted in, wooden-faced, hands-in-pockets, stylized as a ballet. They were looking for Jack. He had given them a short count in some deal. At least, that was the general idea. They conveyed their meaning less by words than by significant jerks of the head and by stalking around the apartment and leaning against the walls. At length, one of them walked to the door and jerked his head. They filed out.
“Would you like to get high?” Mary asked. “There may be a roach around here somewhere.” She began rummaging around in drawers and ashtrays. “No, I guess not. Why don’t we go uptown? I know several good connections we can probably catch about now.”
A young man lurched in with some object wrapped in brown paper under one arm. “Ditch this on your way out,” he said, putting it down on the table. He staggered into the bedroom on the other side of the kitchen. When we got outside I let the wrapping paper fall loose revealing the coin box of a pay toilet crudely jimmied open.
In Times Square we got in a taxi and began cruising up and down the side streets, Mary giving directions. Every now and then she would yell “Stop!” and jump out, her red hair streaming, and I would see her overhaul some character and start talking. “The connection was here about ten minutes ago. This character’s holding, but he won’t turn loose of any.” Later: “The regular connection is gone for the night. He lives in the Bronx. But just stop here for a minute. I may find someone in Kellogg’s.” Finally: “No one seems to be anywhere. It’s a bit late to score. Let’s buy some benny tubes and go over to Ronnie’s. They have some gone numbers on the box. We can order coffee and get high on benny.”
Ronnie’s was a spot near 52nd and Sixth where musicians came for fried chicken and coffee after one p.m. We sat down in a booth and ordered coffee. Mary cracked a benzedrine tube expertly, extracting the folded paper, and handed me three strips. “Roll it up into a pill and wash it down with coffee.”
The paper gave off a sickening odor of menthol. Several people nearby sniffed and smiled. I nearly gagged on the wad of paper, but finally got it down. Mary selected some gone numbers and beat on the table with the expression of a masturbating idiot.
I began talking very fast. My mouth was dry and my spit came out in round white balls—spitting cotton, it’s called. We were walking around Times Square. Mary wanted to locate someone with a “piccolo” (victrola). I was full of expansive, benevolent feelings, and suddenly wanted to call on people I hadn’t seen in months or even years, people I did not like and who did not like me. We made a number of unsuccessful attempts to locate the ideal piccolo-owning host. Somewhere along the line we picked up Peter and finally decided to go back to the Henry Street apartment where there was at least a radio.
Peter and Mary and I spent the next thirty hours in the apartment. From time to time we would make coffee and swallow more benzedrine. Mary was describing the techniques she used to get money from the “Johns” who formed her principal source of revenue.
“Always build a John up. If he has any sort of body at all say, ‘Oh, don’t ever hurt me.’ A John is different from a sucker. When you’re with a sucker you’re on the alert all the time. You give him nothing. A sucker is just to be taken. But a John is different. You give him what he pays for. When you’re with him you enjoy yourself and you want him to enjoy himself, too.
“If you want to really bring a man down, light a cigarette in the middle of intercourse. Of course, I really don’t like men at all sexually. What I really dig is chicks. I get a kick out of taking a proud chick and breaking her spirit, making her see she is just an animal. A chick is never as beautiful after she’s been broken. Say, this is sort of a fireside kick,” she said, pointing to the radio which was the only light in the room.
Her face contorted into an expression of monkey-like rage as she talked about men who accosted her on the street. “Sonofabitch!” she snarled. “They can tell when a woman isn’t looking for a pickup. I used to cruise around with brass knuckles on under my gloves just waiting for one of those peasants to crack at me.”
•
One day Herman told me about a kilo of first-class New Orleans weed I could pick up for seventy dollars. Pushing weed looks good on paper, like fur farming or raising frogs. At seventy-five cents a stick, seventy sticks to the ounce, it sounded like money. I was convinced, and bought the weed.
Herman and I formed a partnership to push the weed. He located a Lesbian named Marian who lived in the Village and said she was a poetess. We kept the weed in Marian’s apartment, turned her on for all she could use, and gave her fifty percent on sales. She knew a lot of tea heads. Another Lesbian moved in with her, and every time I went to Marian’s apartment, there was this huge red-haired Lizzie watching me with her cold fish eyes full of stupid hate.
One day, the red-haired Lizzie opened the door and stood there, her face dead white and puffy with nembutal sleep. She shoved the package of weed at me. “Take this and get out,” she said. “You’re both mother fuckers.” She was half asleep. Her voice was matter-of-fact as if referring to actual incest.
I said, “Tell Marian thanks for everything.”
She slammed the door. The noise evidently woke her up. She opened the door again and began screaming with hysterical rage. We could still hear her out on the street.
Herman contacted other tea heads. They all gave us static. In practice, pushing weed is a headache. To begin with, weed is bulky. You need a full suitcase to realize any money. If the cops start kicking your door in, there you are like with a bale of alfalfa.
Tea heads are not like junkies. A junkie hands you the money, takes his junk and cuts. But tea heads don’t do things that way. They expect the peddler to light them up and sit around talking for half an hour to sell two dollars’ worth of weed. If you come right to the point, they say you are a “bring down.” In fact, a peddler should not come right out and say he is a peddler. No, he just scores for a few good “cats” and “chicks” because he is viperish. Everyone knows that he himself is the connection, but it is bad form to say so. God knows why. To me, tea heads are unfathomable.
There are a lot of trade secrets in the tea business, and tea heads guard these supposed secrets with imbecilic slyness. For example, tea must be cured, or it is green and rasps the throat. But ask a tea head how to cure weed and he will give you a sly, stupid look and come-on with some double-talk. Perhaps weed does affect the brain with constant use, or maybe tea heads are naturally silly.
The tea I had was green so I put it in a double boiler and set the boiler in the oven until the tea got the greenish-brown look it should have. This is the secret of curing tea, or at least one way to do it.
Tea heads are gregarious, they are sensitive, and they are paranoiac. If you get to be known as a “drag” or a “bring down,” you can’t do business with them. I soon found out I couldn’t get along with these characters and I was glad to find someone to take the tea off my hands at cost. I decided right then I would never push any more tea.
In 1937, weed was placed under the Harrison Narcotics Act. Narcotics authorities claim it is a habit-forming drug, that its use is injurious to mind and body, and that it causes the people who use it to commit crimes. Here are the facts: Weed is positively not habit-forming. You can smoke weed for years and you will experience no discomfort if your supply is suddenly cut off. I have seen tea heads in jail and none of them showed withdrawal symptoms. I have smoked weed myself off and on for fifteen years, and never missed it when I ran out. There is less habit to weed than there is to tobacco. Weed does not harm the general health. In fact, most users claim it gives you an appetite and acts as a tonic to the system. I do not know of any other agent that gives as definite a boot
to the appetite. I can smoke a stick of tea and enjoy a glass of California sherry and a hash house meal.
I once kicked a junk habit with weed. The second day off junk I sat down and ate a full meal. Ordinarily, I can’t eat for eight days after kicking a habit.
Weed does not inspire anyone to commit crimes. I have never seen anyone get nasty under the influence of weed. Tea heads are a sociable lot. Too sociable for my liking. I cannot understand why the people who claim weed causes crime do not follow through and demand the outlawing of alcohol. Every day, crimes are committed by drunks who would not have committed the crime sober.
There has been a lot said about the aphrodisiac effect of weed. For some reason, scientists dislike to admit that there is such a thing as an aphrodisiac, so most pharmacologists say there is “no evidence to support the popular idea that weed possesses aphrodisiac properties.” I can say definitely that weed is an aphrodisiac and that sex is more enjoyable under the influence of weed than without it. Anyone who has used good weed will verify this statement.
You hear that people go insane from using weed. There is, in fact, a form of insanity caused by excessive use of weed. The condition is characterized by ideas of reference. The weed available in the U.S. is evidently not strong enough to blow your top on and weed psychosis is rare in the States. In the Near East, it is said to be common. Weed psychosis corresponds more or less to delirium tremens and quickly disappears when the drug is withdrawn. Someone who smokes a few cigarettes a day is no more likely to go insane than a man who takes a few cocktails before dinner is likely to come down with the D.T.’s.
One thing about weed. A man under the influence of weed is completely unfit to drive a car. Weed disturbs your sense of time and consequently your sense of spatial relations. Once, in New Orleans, I had to pull over to the side of a road and wait until the weed wore off. I could not tell how far away anything was or when to turn or put on the brakes for an intersection.
•
I was shooting every day now. Herman had moved into my apartment on Henry Street, since there was no one left to pay the rent for the apartment he had shared with Jack and Mary. Jack had taken a fall on a safe job and was in the Bronx County jail waiting for trial. Mary had gone to Florida with a “John.” It would not have occurred to Herman to pay the rent himself. He had lived in other people’s apartments all his life.
Roy was giving himself a long shore leave. He located a doctor in Brooklyn who was a writing fool. This croaker would go three scripts a day for as high as thirty tablets a script. Every now and then he would get dubious on the deal, but the sight of money always straightened him out.
There are several varieties of writing croakers. Some will write only if they are convinced you are an addict, others only if they are convinced you are not. Most addicts put down a story worn smooth by years of use. Some claim gallstones or kidney stones. This is the story most generally used, and a croaker will often get up and open the door as soon as you mention gallstones. I got better results with facial neuralgia after I had looked up the symptoms and committed them to memory. Roy had an operation scar on his stomach that he used to support his gallstone routine.
There was one oldtime doctor who lived in a Victorian brownstone in the West Seventies. With him it was simply necessary to present a gentlemanly front. If you could get into his inner office you had it made, but he would write only three prescriptions. Another doctor was always drunk, and it was a matter of catching him at the right time. Often he wrote the prescription wrong and you had to take it back for correction. Then, like as not, he would say the prescription was a forgery and tear it up. Still another doctor was senile, and you had to help him write the script. He would forget what he was doing, put down the pen and go into a long reminiscence about the high class of patients he used to have. Especially, he liked to talk about a man named General Gore who once said to him, “Doctor, I’ve been to the Mayo Clinic and you know more than the whole clinic put together.” There was no stopping him and the exasperated addict was forced to listen patiently. Often the doctor’s wife would rush in at the last minute and tear up the prescription, or refuse to verify it when the drugstore called.
Generally speaking, old doctors are more apt to write than the young ones. Refugee doctors were a good field for a while, but the addicts burned them down. Often a doctor will blow his top at the mention of narcotics and threaten to call the law.
Doctors are so exclusively nurtured on exaggerated ideas of their position that, generally speaking, a factual approach is the worst possible. Even though they do not believe your story, nonetheless they want to hear one. It is like some Oriental face-saving ritual. One man plays the high-minded doctor who wouldn’t write an unethical script for a thousand dollars, the other does his best to act like a legitimate patient. If you say, “Look, Doc, I want an M.S. script and I’m willing to pay double price for it,” the croaker blows his top and throws you out of the office. You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.
Roy was such a junk hog that Herman and I had to shoot more than we needed to keep up with him and get our share. I began shooting in the main line to save stuff and because the immediate kick was better. We were having trouble filling the scripts. Most drugstores will only fill a morphine script once or twice, many not at all. There was one drugstore that would fill all our scripts anytime, and we took them all there, though Roy said we ought to spread them out so they would be harder for the inspector to find. It was too much trouble to walk around from drugstore to drugstore, so we usually ended up taking them to the same place. I was learning to hide my stuff carefully—“stash it,” as they say in the trade—so Roy and Herman couldn’t find it and take some.
Taking junk hidden by another junkie is known as “making him for his stash.” It is difficult to guard against this form of theft because junkies know where to look for a stash. Some people carry their junk around with them, but a man who does that is subject to a charge of possession in the event of search by the law.
As I began using stuff every day, or often several times a day, I stopped drinking and going out at night. When you use junk you don’t drink. Seemingly, the body that has a quantity of junk in its cells will not absorb alcohol. The liquor stays in the stomach, slowly building up nausea, discomfort, and dizziness, and there is no kick. Using junk would be a sure cure for alcoholics. I also stopped bathing. When you use junk the feel of water on the skin is unpleasant for some reason, and junkies are reluctant to take a bath.
A lot of nonsense has been written about the changes people undergo as they get a habit. All of a sudden the addict looks in the mirror and does not recognize himself. The actual changes are difficult to specify and they do not show up in the mirror. That is, the addict himself has a special blind spot so far as the progress of his habit is concerned. He generally does not realize that he is getting a habit at all. He says there is no need to get a habit if you are careful and observe a few rules, like shooting every other day. Actually, he does not observe these rules, but every extra shot is regarded as exceptional. I have talked to many addicts and they all say they were surprised when they discovered they actually had the first habit. Many of them attributed their symptoms to some other cause.
As a habit takes hold, other interests lose importance to the user. Life telescopes down to junk, one fix and looking forward to the next, “stashes” and “scripts,” “spikes” and “droppers.” The addict himself often feels that he is leading a normal life and that junk is incidental. He does not realize that he is just going through the motions in his non-junk activities. It is not until his supply is cut off that he realizes what junk means to him.
“Why do you need narcotics, Mr. Lee?” is a question that stupid psychiatrists ask. The answer is, “I need junk to get out of bed in the morning, to shave and eat breakfast. I need it to stay alive.”
Of course, junkies don’t as a
rule die from the withdrawal of junk. But in a very literal sense, kicking a habit involves the death of junk-dependent cells and their replacement with cells that do not need junk.
Roy and his old lady moved into the same tenement building. Every day we would meet in my apartment after breakfast to plan the day’s junk program. One of us would have to hit the croaker. Roy always tried to put it on someone else. “I can’t go myself this time, I had a beef with him. But listen, I’ll tell you just what to say.” Or he would try to get Herman or me to try a new croaker. “You can’t miss. Just don’t let him say no, because he will write. I can’t go myself.”
I had one of his sure-thing croakers reach for a telephone on me. I told Roy and he said, “Oh, I guess the guy’s burned. Somebody made him for his bag a few days ago.” After that, I kept away from strange croakers. But our Brooklyn boy was getting balky.
•
All croakers pack in sooner or later. One day when Roy came for his script, the doctor told him, “This is positively the last, and you guys had better keep out of sight. The inspector was around to see me yesterday. He has all the R-xes I wrote for you guys. He told me I’ll lose my license if I write any more, so I’m going to date this one back. Tell the druggist you were too sick yesterday to cash it. You guys gave some wrong addresses on those scripts. That’s a violation of Public Health Law 334, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. For God’s sake, cover up for me if they question you. This could mean my whole professional career. You know I’ve always been right with you boys. I wanted to stop months ago. I just couldn’t leave you guys stranded. So give me a break. Here’s the script and don’t come back.”
Roy went back the next day. The doctor’s brother-in-law was there to protect the family honor. He grabbed Roy by the coat collar and the back of the belt and threw him out onto the sidewalk.