A two-month-old poodle would waken looking like a debauched terrier: adhesive over a telltale marking on the left foot, dark circles under the eyes and the tip of one ear in the sink. Such a betrayed pup had passed for any breed the market might demand.
Sparrow had sold them, crossbred them, clipped their tails until each had emerged, no matter how many mongrel strains had brought him forth, a ‘pedigreed blood-typed turo-breed.’
His masterpiece, the unholy freak now making circles in the hope of a short beer, was a cross between ‘an English sheepy ’n a Division Street beagle – only I call him a square-snapper for short. What he’s best for is catchin’ squirrels ’n shakin’ the dirty walnuts out of ’em,’ the punk explained earnestly. ‘In his native hab’tat you got to have a dog like this if you’re out to pick up a sack of walnuts. But the trouble is he’s just trained to chase them one kind of squirrels ’n they’re gettin’ kind of rare over here account of the climate changin’ so fast. So he don’t have nothin’ to do but hang around taverns ’n wait for the climate to change back a little.’
Certainly Rumdum was the luckiest hound in Chicago. For he alone, of all the city’s countless dogs, had received Professor Saltskin’s postgraduate course in square-snapping. He had studied at the feet of the philosophers who lounged out their lives on the curb in front of the Tug & Maul waiting for a live one. He had earned his degree by snapping suspiciously at all uniformed toilers: mailmen, milkmen, Good Humor men on bicycles, streetcar conductors and anyone carrying a lunch bucket – everyone, indeed, who didn’t smell of beer or unemployment. Rumdum could tell a square with nostrils so clogged he had once mistaken molasses for beer.
‘He got a degree what I call D.D.S. – Doctor of Dirty Square-snapping,’ Sparrow liked to boast. ‘Here’s a dog got a better start in life than most humans. I named him Rumdum when he was two mont’s old ’n told him straight out, “I ain’t givin’ you no water ’cause I don’t want to raise you prej’diced against somethin’ better.” Too many dogs get offsteered onto water right off, they don’t get no chance to make up their own minds what they really like best, beer ’r water ’r just plain whisky. The people should let a helpless beast make up his own opinions, otherwise it’s croolty to our weak-minded friends, like takin’ advantage of little birds, they ain’t even learned how to fly yet. Today you could put Rummy in the bat’tub ’n he keeps his dirty snout up so’s he don’t have to taste that other stuff.
‘But he ain’t the kind to just beg beers off you ’n then go to sleep on you. Rummy, he’s a natural entertainer, he pays his own way – look – he’s dizzy but he’s still in there’ – Sparrow reached over and set the hound to circling in the opposite direction, which for some reason caused the dog to begin breaking wind again.
‘You wouldn’t hire no M.C. if you was needin’ a detective, would you? Well, Rumdum’s field is strictly entertainment. He don’t guard no cash register. He don’t even howl when somebody’s gonna croak. He just hiccups. He don’t care whether his hair is smood down or not, he don’t care how he looks or what becomes of him. He don’t even bark. He just whines when the brew’ry truck guys come to take back the empties, account he don’t know they’re empty. He figures they’re takin’ away all the beer in the world ’n there won’t be enough left for him. He sure looks sad when they do that on him. I tell him, “Look the other way, Rummy,” when I see ’em comin’. But he peeks ’n then that tail droops.’
‘He don’t bark is right,’ Frankie agreed. ‘He won’t even bark at a cat. I seen Antek’s deaf tom tree him wit’ my own eyes.’
‘Let’s face facts, Frankie,’ Sparrow protested. ‘It wasn’t no tree. He just jumped up on the bar to avoid a disturbment was all. He knew it wouldn’t look dignified, a big fat hound like him lickin’ a poor skinny little old deaf-’n-dumb cat. That dog got real pride, Frankie. He won’t fight out of his weight when there’s no principle involved.’
‘If there’s no bowl of beer involved, you mean. That’s the only time I ever seen him show his teeth – when somebody took his dirty beer away.’
‘He got no teet’,’ Sparrow reminded Frankie, ‘they got dissolved in beer bubbles.’
‘You better start him the other way round again,’ Frankie suggested.
But Rumdum had given out, with one final windbreaking roar. He dropped the bottle at Frankie’s feet and stood looking up for a refill, his great bloodshot eyes swimming in the melancholy hope that only chronic alcoholics know.
‘He thinks you’re the bartender ’cause you got on a tie,’ Sparrow explained.
‘Take him up to the room,’ Frankie ordered, ‘I got to case out of here.’
Sparrow took off his glasses to see Frankie better. ‘Can’t I case out wit’ you, Frankie? Where you goin’?’ He hadn’t been left out of any fast hustle of Frankie’s since they’d been together. ‘Maybe I could help like before.’
‘Do like I said.’ Frankie’s knuckles shown whitely where he pressed them to his temples.
‘I don’t get what you’re salty about,’ Sparrow began – then gathered up Rumdum in both arms and shuffled out past Louie and Blind Pig.
‘The dealer ain’t hisself, that Zosh is stonin’ him too hard,’ he decided. ‘I’ll have to speak to her.’ Yet Frankie had been stoned up there before, hard and often, and had always been able to forget it in the back booth at Antek’s. ‘He don’t act like the booze helps him no more,’ Sparrow realized.
He waited in Frankie’s doorway, with the hound whining against his legs, without knowing just what he was waiting for. Frankie had told him what to do, it was up to him to do it.
As he turned toward the stairs he saw Frankie heading across the street toward the Safari.
Behind him Blind Pig waited on the curb for someone, anyone, to help him across.
Inadvertently Sparrow looked around for Fomorowski.
The clock in the room above the Safari told only Junkie Time. For every hour here was Old Junkie’s Hour and the walls were the color of all old junkies’ dreams: the hue of diluted morphine in the moment before the needle draws the suffering blood.
Walls that went up and up like walls in a troubled dream. Walls like water where no legend could be written and no hand grasp metal or wood. For Nifty Louie paid the rent and Frankie knew too well who the landlord was. He had met him before, that certain down-at-heel vet growing stooped from carrying a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back. Frankie remembered that face, ravaged by love of its own suffering as by some endless all-night orgy. A face forged out of his own wound fever in a windy ward tent on the narrow Meuse. He had met Private McGantic before: both had served their country well.
This was the fellow who looked somehow a little like everyone else in the world and was more real to a junkie than any real man could ever be. The projected image of one’s own pain when that pain has become too great to be borne. The image of one hooked so hopelessly on morphine that there would be no getting the monkey off without another’s help. There are so few ways to help old sad frayed and weary West Side junkies.
Frankie felt no pity for himself, yet felt compassion for this McGantic. He worried, as the sickness rose in himself, about what in God’s name McGantic would do tomorrow when the money and the morphine both gave out. Where then, in that terrible hour, would Private M. find the strength to carry the monkey through one more endless day?
By the time Frankie got inside the room he was so weak Louie had to help him onto the army cot beside the oil stove. He lay on his back with one arm flung across his eyes as if in shame; and his lips were blue with cold. The pain had hit him with an icy fist in the groin’s very pit, momentarily tapering off to a single probing finger touching the genitals to get the maximum of pain. He tried twisting to get away from the finger: the finger was worse than the fist. His throat was so dry that, though he spoke, the lips moved and made no sound. But Fomorowski read such lips well.
‘Fix me. Make it stop. Fix me.’
‘I’ll fix y
ou, Dealer,’ Louie assured him softly.
Louie had his own bedside manner. He perched on the red leather and chrome bar stool borrowed from the Safari, with the amber toes of his two-tone shoes catching the light and the polo ponies galloping down his shirt. This was Nifty Louie’s Hour. The time when he did the dealing and the dealer had to take what Louie chose to toss him in Louie’s own good time.
He lit a match with his fingertip and held it away from the bottom of the tiny glass tube containing the fuzzy white cap of morphine, holding it just far enough away to keep the cap from being melted by the flame. There was time and time and lots of time for that. Let the dealer do a bit of melting first; the longer it took the higher the price. ‘You can pay me off when Zero pays you,’ he assured Frankie. There was no hurry. ‘You’re good with me any time, Dealer.’
Frankie moaned like an animal that cannot understand its own pain. His shirt had soaked through and the pain had frozen so deep in his bones nothing could make him warm again.
‘Hit me, Fixer. Hit me.’
A sievelike smile drained through Louie’s teeth. This was his hour and this hour didn’t come every day. He snuffed out the match’s flame as it touched his fingers and snapped the head of another match into flame with his nail, letting its glow flicker one moment over that sieve-like smile; then brought the tube down cautiously and watched it dissolve at the flame’s fierce touch. When the stuff had melted he held both needle and tube in one hand, took the dealer’s loose-hanging arm firmly with the other and pumped it in a long, loose arc. Frankie let him swing it as if it were attached to someone else. The cold was coming up from within now: a colorless cold spreading through stomach and liver and breathing across the heart like an odorless gas. To make the very brain tighten and congeal under its icy touch.
‘Warm. Make me warm.’
And still there was no rush, no hurry at all. Louie pressed the hypo down to the cotton; the stuff came too high these days to lose the fraction of a drop. ‘Don’t vomit, student,’ he taunted Frankie to remind him of the first fix he’d had after his discharge – but it was too cold to answer. He was falling between glacial walls, he didn’t know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-colored walls of Private McGantic’s terrible pit.
He couldn’t feel Louie probing into the dark red knot above his elbow at all. Nor see the way the first blood sprayed faintly up into the delicate hypo to tinge the melted morphine with blood as warm as the needle’s heated point.
When Louie sensed the vein he pressed it down with the certainty of a good doctor’s touch, let it linger a moment in the vein to give the heart what it needed and withdrew gently, daubed the blood with a piece of cotton, tenderly, and waited.
Louie waited. Waited to see it hit.
Louie liked to see the stuff hit. It meant a lot to Louie, seeing it hit.
‘Sure I like to watch,’ he was ready to acknowledge any time. ‘Man, their eyes when that big drive hits ’n goes tinglin’ down to the toes. They retch, they sweat, they itch – then the big drive hits ’n here they come out of it cryin’ like a baby ’r laughin’ like a loon. Sure I like to watch. Sure I like to see it hit. Heroin got the drive awright – but there’s not a tingle to a ton – you got to get M to get that tingle-tingle.’
It hit all right. It hit the heart like a runaway locomotive, it hit like a falling wall. Frankie’s whole body lifted with that smashing surge, the very heart seemed to lift up-up-up – then rolled over and he slipped into a long warm bath with one long orgasmic sigh of relief. Frankie opened his eyes.
He was in a room. Somebody’s dust-colored wavy-walled room and he wasn’t quite dead after all. He had died, had felt himself fall away and die but now he wasn’t dead any more. Just sick. But not too sick. He wasn’t going to be really sick, he wasn’t a student any more. Maybe he wasn’t going to be sick at all, he was beginning to feel just right.
Then it went over him like a dream where everything is love and he wasn’t even sweating. All he had to do the rest of his life was to lie right here feeling better and better with every beat of his heart till he’d never felt so good in all his life.
‘Wow,’ he grinned gratefully at Louie, ‘that was one good whan.’
‘I seen it,’ Louie boasted smugly. ‘I seen it was one good whan’ – and lapsed into the sort of impromptu jargon which pleases junkies for no reason they can say – ‘vraza-s’vrazas’vraza – it was one good whan-whan-whan.’ He dabbed a silk handkerchief at a blob of blood oozing where the needle had entered Frankie’s arm.
‘There’s a silver buck and a buck ’n a half in change in my jacket pocket,’ Frankie told him lazily. ‘I’m feelin’ too good to get up ’n get it myself.’
Louie reached in the pocket with the handkerchief bound about his palm and plucked the silver out. Two-fifty for a quarter grain wasn’t too high. He gave Frankie the grin that drained through the teeth for a receipt. The dealer was coming along nicely these days, thank you.
The dealer didn’t know that yet, of course. That first fix had only cost him a dollar, it had quieted the everlasting dull ache in his stomach and sent him coasting one whole week end. So what was the use of spending forty dollars in the bars when you could do better at home on one? That was how Frankie had it figured that week end. To Louie, listening close, he’d already talked like a twenty-dollar-a-day man.
Given a bit of time.
And wondered idly now where in the world the dealer would get that kind of money when the day came that he’d need half a C just to taper off. He’d get it all right. They always got it. He’d seen them coming in the rain, the unkjays with their peculiarly rigid, panicky walk, wearing some policeman’s castoff rubbers, no socks at all, a pair of Salvation Army pants a size too small or a size too large and a pajama top for a shirt – but with twenty dollars clutched in the sweating palm for that big twenty-dollar fix.
‘Nothing can take the place of junk – just junk’ – the dealer would learn. As Louie himself had learned long ago.
Louie was the best fixer of them all because he knew what it was to need to get well. Louie had had a big habit – he was one man who could tell you you lied if you said no junkie could kick the habit once he was hooked. For Louie was the one junkie in ten thousand who’d kicked it and kicked it for keeps.
He’d taken the sweat cure in a little Milwaukee Avenue hotel room cutting himself down, as he put it, ‘from monkey to zero.’ From three full grains a day to one, then a half of that and a half of that straight down to zero, though he’d been half out of his mind with the pain two nights running and was so weak, for days after, that he could hardly tie his own shoelaces.
Back on the street at last, he’d gotten the chuck horrors: for two full days he’d eaten candy bars, sweet rolls and strawberry malteds. It had seemed that there would be no end to his hunger for sweets.
Louie never had the sweet-roll horrors any more. Yet sometimes himself sensed that something had twisted in his brain in those nights when he’d gotten the monkey off his back on Milwaukee Avenue.
‘Habit? Man,’ he liked to remember, ‘I had a great big habit. One time I knocked out one of my own teet’ to get the gold for a fix. You call that bein’ hooked or not? Hooked? Man, I wasn’t hooked, I was crucified. The monkey got so big he was carryin’ me.’ Cause the way it starts is like this, students: you let the habit feed you first ’n one mornin’ you wake up ’n you’re feedin’ the habit.
‘But don’t tell me you can’t kick it if you want to. When I hear a junkie tell me he wants to kick the habit but he just can’t I know he lies even if he don’t know he does. He wants to carry the monkey, he’s punishin’ hisself for somethin’ ’n don’t even know it. It’s what I was doin’ for six years, punishin’ myself for things I’d done ’n thought I’d forgot. So I told myself how I wasn’t to blame for what I done in the first place, I was only tryin’ to live like everyone
else ’n doin’ them things was the only way I had of livin’. Then I got forty grains ’n went up to the room ’n went from monkey to nothin’ in twenny-eight days ’n that’s nine-ten years ago ’n the monkey’s dead.’
‘The monkey’s never dead, Fixer,’ Frankie told him knowingly.
Louie glanced at Frankie slyly. ‘You know that awready, Dealer? You know how he don’t die? It’s what they say awright, the monkey never dies. When you kick him off he just hops onto somebody else’s back.’ Behind the film of glaze that always veiled Louie’s eyes Frankie saw the twisted look. ‘You got my monkey, Dealer? You take my nice old monkey away from me? Is that my monkey ridin’ your back these days, Dealer?’
The color had returned to Frankie’s cheeks, he felt he could make it almost any minute now. ‘No more for me, Fixer,’ he assured Louie confidently. ‘Somebody else got to take your monkey. I had the Holy Jumped-up-Jesus Horrors for real this time –’ n I’m one guys knows when he got enough. I learned my lesson but good. Fixer – you just give the boy with the golden arm his very lastest fix.’
‘What time you have to be by Schwiefka?’ Louie wanted to know.
Frankie brushed the hair, matted by drying sweat, off his forehead and glanced at his watch. Sweat had steamed the crystal, he couldn’t read the hands. He dried it on the bedcover, for his shirt was still wringing damp. ‘Nine-thirty – I got an hour and a half. I’ll make it.’
‘Crawl your dirty gut over to the table,’ Louie advised him. ‘Can you take coffee?’