Blueschild Baby
Page 21
From there my fall from grace was swift. Junk, it was what I’d been born for, waiting for all my life. There are no accidental junkies, nobody can tie you up and string you out. You have to work hard to get hooked, takes too much time and effort to be an accident. You have to like and want it long before you need and crave it. It is not till many fixes pass that your desire is need. You’re given many warnings along the road to hell. Turn back, danger ahead they say but you plunge recklessly on cause you’re different, stronger than the others already hooked. You alone have something all the others don’t that’ll keep you from being a slave. Laugh, cause junk don’t give a fuck bout nothing or none of ya’ll, don’t discriminate a bit, try it and can’t nothing save you from the conclusion, addiction.
HAVE GONE FAR AS I CAN, exhausted the file on myself. The rest occurred during my wanderings in the desert when I raged out of my mind and cannot be sure of what did and didn’t happen. There were no landmarks or guideposts. Only the addiction pushing me after the next fix. All those dead wasted years from which I recall nothing but the pain. The sun is up and I watch one-two-five, 125th below me. It’s near noon, Nandy’s washing, getting ready to go eat. Look at myself in the mirror to see any change in my face, the skin and eyes—pupils are larger than ever. Moving around, feel and hear my bones scraping against one another, thirsty, the body has passed out all liquids to remove the poison. My skin is dry and grainy, funny to touch. Stench of junk clinging to it. Afraid to bathe and open my pores, would make me more vulnerable to sickness. Junk is a boss medicine and preservative. During its tenure remarkably free from the common illnesses that plague man, but the moment it is gone, everything comes down on you, cold, toothaches, everything.
“How you feel baby?”
“Hurt all over. Everything hurts.”
“Coming down with me to eat?”
Sit up in the restaurant while she eats, drinking coffee and glasses of water. See myself in the mirror, outwardly calm and normal, nobody would suspect the intense pain of my detoxification. Finished we walk the streets, and everywhere I see the demon, on every corner dealers with pockets full of poison. We stop at a stand selling all sorts of African jewelry and I spot this necklace with a monkey’s head. Just like the monkey that haunts me. I buy it and throw it on. He hangs round my neck and the hunger shall always be a threat. The streets make me feel better, they’re part of my addiction, not the junk alone. Spy a clock, one-thirty, seventy-two hours, three days have passed, have beaten the monkey. Look up and everything looks different somehow. Like I’m seeing the world for the first time in a long time. I hold Nandy tight, handcuffed so I don’t break away.
About the Author
GEORGE CAIN was born in New York in 1943. He entered Iona College on scholarship but left in his junior year to travel, spending time in California, Mexico, and Texas. He started writing in 1966. Blueschild Baby was his only book. He died in New York in 2010.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BLUESCHILD BABY. Copyright © 1970, 1994, 2019 by George Cain. Foreword copyright © 1994 by Gerald Early. Introduction © 2019 by Leslie Jamison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Parts of the Introduction appeared in The New Yorker piece Why George Cain’s Blueschild Baby should be in the Addiction Canon (March 2018), which was excerpted from Leslie Jamison’s book The Recovering (Little, Brown and Company, 2018).
Originally published in 1987 by Ecco Press.
FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2019.
The Ecco Press and the author would like to acknowledge Jeanne Wilmot Carter for helping to bring this book back into print.
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph © Simone Golob/Offset
Digital Edition MARCH 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-291318-0
Version 02112019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-291316-6
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