Junky

  We rode to the end of the line in Brooklyn without spotting a single flop. On the way back there was a drunk asleep in a car. I sat down beside him and opened my paper. I could feel Roy’s arm across my back. Once, the drunk woke up and looked at me sharply. But both my hands were clearly visible on the paper. Roy pretended to be reading the paper with me. The drunk went back to sleep.

  “Here’s where we get off,” Roy said. “We better go out on the street for a bit. Doesn’t pay to ride too long.”

  We had a cup of coffee at the 34th Street automat and split the last take. It was three dollars.

  “When you take a lush on the car,” Roy was explaining, “you got to gauge yourself to the movement of the car. If you get the right rhythm you can work it out even if the mooch is awake. I went a little too fast on that one. That’s why he woke up. He felt something was wrong, but he didn’t know what it was.”

  At Times Square we ran into Subway Mike. He nodded but did not stop. Mike always worked alone.

  “Let’s take a run out to Queens Plaza,” Roy said. “That’s on the Independent. The Independent has special cops hired by the company, but they don’t carry guns. Only saps. So if one grabs you, run if you can break loose.”

  Queens Plaza is another dangerous station where it is impossible to cover yourself from every angle. You just have to take a chance. There was a drunk sleeping full length on a bench, but we couldn’t risk taking him because too many people were around.

  “We’ll wait a bit,” Roy said. “Remember, though, never pass more than three trains. If you don’t get a clear chance by then, forget it no matter how good it looks.”

  Two young punks got off a train carrying a lush between them. They dropped him on a bench, then looked at Roy and me.

  “Let’s take him over to the other side,” said one of the punks.

  “Why not take him right here?” Roy asked.

  The punks pretended not to understand. “Take him? I don’t get it. What does our queer friend mean?” They picked up their lush and carried him to the other side of the platform.

  Roy walked over to our mark and pulled a wallet out of his pocket. “No time for finesse,” he remarked. The wallet was empty. Roy dropped it on the bench.

  One of the punks shouted across the tracks, “Take your hands out of his pockets.” And they both laughed.

  “Fucking punks,” said Roy. “If I catch one of them on the West Side line I’ll push the little bastard onto the tracks.”

  One of the punks came over and asked Roy for a cut.

  “I tell you he didn’t have nothing,” said Roy.

  “We saw you take out his wallet.”

  “There wasn’t nothing in it.”

  A train stopped and we got on, leaving the punk there undecided whether or not to get tough.

  “Fucking punks think it’s a joke,” Roy said. “They won’t last long. They won’t think it’s so funny when they get out on the Island doing five-twenty-nine.” We were in a run of bad luck. Roy said, “Well, that’s the way it goes. Some nights you make a hundred dollars. Some nights you don’t make anything.”

  •

  One night, we got on the subway at Times Square. A flashily dressed man, weaving slightly, was walking ahead of us. Roy looked him over and said, “That’s a good fucking mooch. Let’s see where he goes.”

  The mooch got on the IRT headed for Brooklyn. We waited standing up in the space between cars until the mooch appeared to be sleeping. Then we walked into the car, and I sat down beside the mooch, opening The New York Times. The Times was Roy’s idea. He said it made me look like a businessman. The car was almost empty, and there we were wedged up against the mooch with twenty feet of empty seats available. Roy began working over my back. The mooch kept stirring and once he woke up and looked at me with bleary annoyance. A Negro sitting opposite us smiled.

  “The shine is wise,” said Roy in my ear. “He’s O.K.”

  Roy was having trouble finding the poke. The situation was getting dangerous. I could feel sweat running down my arms.

  “Let’s get off,” I said.

  “No. This is a good mooch. He’s sitting on his overcoat and I can’t get into his pocket. When I tell you, fall up against him, and I’ll move the coat at the same time. . . . Now! . . . For Chris’ sake! That wasn’t near hard enough.”

  “Let’s get off,” I said again. I could feel the fear stirring in my stomach. “He’s going to wake up.”

  “No. Let’s go again . . . Now! . . . What in hell is wrong with you? Just let yourself flop against him hard.”

  “Roy,” I said. “For Chris’ sake let’s get off! He’s going to wake up.”

  I started to get up, but Roy held me down. Suddenly he gave me a sharp push, and I fell heavily against the mooch.

  “Got it that time,” Roy said.

  “The poke?”

  “No, I got the coat out of the way.”

  We were out of the underground now and on the elevated. I was nauseated with fear, every muscle rigid with the effort of control. The mooch was only half asleep. I expected him to jump up and yell at any minute.

  Finally I heard Roy say, “I got it.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  “No, what I got is a loose roll. He’s got a poke somewhere and I’m going to find it. He’s got to have a poke.”

  “I’m getting off.”

  “No. Wait.” I could feel him fumbling across my back so openly it seemed incredible that the man could go on sleeping.

  It was the end of the line. Roy stood up. “Cover me,” he said. I stood in front of him with the paper shielding him as much as possible from the other passengers. There were only three left, but they were in different ends of the car. Roy went through the man’s pockets openly and crudely. “Let’s go outside,” he said. We went out onto the platform.

  The mooch woke up and put his hand in his pocket. Then he came out onto the platform and walked up to Roy.

  “All right, Jack,” he said. “Give me my money.”

  Roy shrugged and turned his hands out, palm up. “What ­money? What are you talking about?”

  “You know Goddamned well what I’m talking about! You had your hand in my pocket.”

  Roy held his hands out again in a gesture of puzzlement and deprecation. “Aw, what are you talking about? I don’t know anything about your money.”

  “I’ve seen you on this line every night. This is your regular route.” He turned and pointed to me. “And there’s your partner right there. Now, are you going to give me my dough?”

  “What dough?”

  “Okay. Just stay put. We’re taking a ride back to town and this had better be good.” Suddenly, the man put both hands in Roy’s coat pockets. “You sonofabitch!” he yelled. “Give me my dough!”

  Roy hit him in the face and knocked him down. “Why you—” said Roy, dropping abruptly his conciliatory and puzzled manner. “Keep your hands off me!”

  The conductor, seeing a fight in progress, was holding up the train so that no one would fall on the tracks.

  “Let’s cut,” I said. We started down the platform. The man got up and ran after us. He threw his arms around Roy, holding on stubbornly. Roy couldn’t break loose. He was pretty well winded.

  “Get this mooch off me!” Roy yelled.

  I hit the man twice in the face. His grip loosened and he fell to his knees.

  “Kick his head off,” said Roy.

  I kicked the man in the side and felt a rib snap. The man put his hand to his side. “Help!” he shouted. He did not try to get up.

  “Let’s cut,” I said. At the far end of the platform, I heard a police whistle. The man was still lying there on the platform holding his side and yelling “Help!” at regular intervals.

  There
was a slight drizzle of rain falling. When I hit the street, I slipped and skidded on the wet sidewalk. We were standing by a closed filling station, looking back at the elevated.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “They’ll see us.”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  We started to walk. I noticed that my mouth was bone dry. Roy took two goof balls from his shirt pocket.

  “Mouth’s too dry,” he said. “I can’t swallow them.”

  We went on walking.

  “There’s sure to be an alarm out for us,” Roy said. “Keep a lookout for cars. We’ll duck in the bushes if any come along. They’ll be figuring us to get back on the subway, so the best thing we can do is keep walking.”

  The drizzle continued. Dogs barked at us as we walked.

  “Remember our story if we get nailed,” Roy said. “We fell asleep and woke up at the end of the line. This guy accused us of taking his money. We were scared, so we knocked him down and ran. They’ll beat the shit out of us. You have to expect that.”

  “Here comes a car,” I said. “Yellow lights, too.”

  We crawled into the bushes at the side of the road and crouched down behind a signboard. The car drove slowly by. We started walking again. I was getting sick and wondered if I would get home to the M.S. I had stashed in my apartment.

  “When we get closer in we better split up,” Roy said. “Out here we might be able to do each other some good. If we run into a cop on the beat we’ll tell him we’ve been with some girls and were looking for the subway. This rain is a break. The cops will all be in some all-night joint drinking coffee. For Chris’ sake!” he rasped irritably. “Don’t round like that!”

  I had turned around and looked over my shoulder. “It’s natural to turn around,” I said.

  “Natural for thieves!”

  We finally ran into the BMT line and rode back to Manhattan.

  Roy said, “I don’t think I’m just speaking for myself when I say I was scared. Oh. Here’s your cut.”

  He handed me three dollars.

  Next day I told him I was through as a lush-worker.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “But you got a wrong impression. You’re bound to get some good breaks if you stick around long enough.”

  •

  My case came to trial in Special Sessions. I drew a four-month suspended sentence. After I gave up lush-working I decided to push junk. There isn’t much money in it. About all a using street-peddler can expect to do is keep up his habit. But at least when you are pushing, you have a good supply of junk on hand and that gives a feeling of security. Of course, some people do make money pushing. I knew an Irish pusher who started out capping a 1/16-ounce envelope of H and two years later, when he took a fall and went away for three years, he had thirty thousand dollars and an apartment building in Brooklyn.

  If you want to push, the first step is to find a wholesale connection. I did not have a connection, so I formed a partnership with Bill Gains, who had a pretty fair Italian connection on the Lower East Side. We bought the stuff for ninety dollars per quarter-ounce, cut it one-third with milk sugar and put it in one-grain caps. The caps sold for two dollars each, retail. They ran about ten to sixteen percent H, which is very high for retail capped stuff. There should be at least a hundred caps in one-quarter ounce of H before it is cut. But if the wholesaler is Italian he is almost sure to give a short count. We usually got about eighty caps out of these Italian quarter-ounces.

  Bill Gains came from a “good family”—as I recall, his father had been a bank president somewhere in Maryland—and he had front. Gains’ routine was stealing overcoats out of restaurants, and he was perfectly adapted to this work. The American upper-middle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. Gains went further. He was not merely negative. He was positively invisible; a vague respectable presence. There is a certain kind of ghost that can only materialize with the aid of a sheet or other piece of cloth to give it outline. Gains was like that. He materialized in someone else’s overcoat.

  Gains had a malicious childlike smile that formed a shocking contrast to his eyes which were pale blue, lifeless and old. He smiled, listening down into himself as if attending to something there that pleased him. Sometimes, after a shot, he would smile and listen and say slyly, “This stuff is powerful.” With the same smile he would report on the deterioration and misfortunes of others. “Herman was a beautiful kid when he first came to New York. The trouble is, he lost his looks.”

  Gains was one of the few junkies who really took a special pleasure in seeing non-users get a habit. Many junkie-pushers are glad to see a new addict for economic reasons. If you have a commodity you naturally want customers, provided they are the right kind. But Gains liked to invite young kids up to his room and give them a shot, usually compounded of old cottons, and then watch the effects, smiling his little smile.

  Mostly, the kids said it was a good kick, and that was all. Just another kick like nembies, or bennies, or lush, or weed. But a few stayed around to get hooked, and Gains would look at these converts and smile, a prelate of junk. A little later, you would hear him say, “Really, So-and-so must realize that I can’t carry him any longer.” The pledge was no longer being rushed. It was time for him to pay off. And pay off for the rest of his life, waiting on street corners and in cafeterias for the connection, the mediator between man and junk. Gains was a mere parish priest in the hierarchy of junk. He would speak of the higher-ups in a voice of sepulchral awe. “The connections say . . .”

  His veins were mostly gone, retreated back to the bone to escape the probing needle. For a while he used arteries, which are deeper than veins and harder to hit, and for this procedure he bought special long needles. He rotated from his arms and hands to the veins of his feet. A vein will come back in time. Even so, he had to shoot in the skin about half the time. But he only gave up and “skinned” a shot after an agonizing half-hour of probing and poking and cleaning out the needle, which would stop up with blood.

  •

  One of my first customers was a Village character named Nick. Nick painted when he did anything. His canvasses were very small and looked as if they had been concentrated, compressed, misshapen by a tremendous pressure. “The product of a depraved mind,” a narcotics agent pronounced solemnly, after viewing one of Nick’s pictures.

  Nick was always half sick, his large, plaintive brown eyes water­ing slightly and his thin nose running. He slept on couches in the apartments of friends, existing on the precarious indulgence of neurotic, unstable, stupidly suspicious individuals who would suddenly throw him out without reason or warning. For these people he also scored, hoping that he would receive in return at least the head off a cap to take the edge off his constant junk-hunger. Often, he got nothing but a casual thanks, the purchaser having convinced himself that Nick had somehow got his on the other end. As a result, Nick began stealing a small amount from each cap, loosening up the junk so that it filled the cap.

  There was not much left of Nick. His constant, unsatisfied hunger had burned out all other concerns. He talked vaguely about going to Lexington for the cure, or shipping out in the merchant marine, or buying paregoric in Connecticut and tapering off on it.

  Nick introduced me to Tony, who tended bar in a Village bar and restaurant. Tony had been pushing and nearly got nailed when the Federals rushed into his apartment. He barely had time to throw a 1/16-ounce packet of H under the piano. The Federals found nothing but his works and they let him go. Tony was scared and quit pushing. He was a young Italian who obviously knew his way around. He looked capable of keeping his mouth shut. A good type customer.

  I went to Tony’s bar every day and ordered a Coca-Cola. Tony would tell me how many caps he wanted, and I would go into the phone booth or the W.C. and wrap his caps up in silver paper. When I go
t back to my Coke, the money for the caps was there on the bar like change. I dropped the caps into an ashtray on the bar and Tony emptied the ashtray under the bar, taking out his caps. This routine was necessary because the owner knew Tony had been a user and told him to stay off stuff or get another job. In fact, the owner’s son was a user—at this time in a sanitarium taking the cure. When he got out, he came straight to me to buy stuff. He said he couldn’t stay off.

  A young Italian hipster named Ray used to come to this bar every day. He seemed O.K. so I took care of him, too, dropping his caps in the ashtray with Tony’s. This bar where Tony worked was a small place down several steps from street level. There was only one door. I always felt trapped when I went in there. The place gave me such a feeling of depression and danger that I could hardly bring myself to go through the door.

  After taking care of Tony and Ray, I generally met Nick in a cafeteria on Sixth Avenue. He always had the price of a few caps on him. I knew, of course, that he was scoring for other people, but I did not know who they were. I should have known better than to have dealings with anybody like Nick, who was sick and broke all the time and therefore liable to pick up anybody’s money. Some people need an intermediary to score for them because they are strangers in town, or because they have not been on junk long enough to get acquainted. But the pusher has reason to be wary of people who send someone else to score. By and large, the reason a man can’t score is because he is known to be “wrong.” So he sends someone else to score who may not be “wrong” himself, but simply desperate for junk. To score for a pigeon is definitely not ethical. Often a man goes on from scoring for pigeons to become a pigeon himself.

  I was not in a position to turn money down. I had no margin. Every day I had to sell enough caps to buy the next ¼-ounce, and I was never more than a few dollars ahead. So I took whatever money Nick had and asked no questions. I knew Nick was a bad security risk, but I could not afford to pack him in.