by Claude Brown
The slang was always changing for heroin. They called it duji or shit or stuff or poison. After about 1952, nobody called it horse any more. I always referred to it as the shit plague, because that had more meaning to me.
I ran into Danny in a hallway one night. He was down on his knees crying and holding his stomach. I said, “Danny, what’s wrong, baby?”
And he said, “I need some shit. I need some shit.”
It just stuck in my mind. I could always see heroin more vividly as shit than anything else, because it was real dirt. They would put it into their veins, and that was the same thing as putting dirt into it.
There was never a time that I could remember in Harlem when there were young girls who looked so bad as after the shit plague hit. You’d find strung-out fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old girls who didn’t look too bad at first. But then they got so bad that even cats with long cunt collars would get tired of screwing these cold junkie bitches. They couldn’t come, and it wasn’t much fun for a cat to screw them, even if they only wanted enough to get a three-dollar bag or a five-dollar bag. After a while, nobody wanted to screw a junkie bitch. Regardless of how fine a chick was, if cats knew she was on shit, they didn’t want her.
You could tell if a bitch was a junkie by the way she looked. Their skin just seemed a little faded. Even if they weren’t high, they looked dingy. If you saw a young girl up in Harlem, looking like she’d been living down on the Bowery, you’d know that she was strung out. And if she was strung out on shit, there just wasn’t much she could do in bed for anybody.
You might be going downtown or coming out of the Palm Café on 125th Street one night, or you might be coming out of the Apollo, just passing up 125th Street on your way to the Baby Grand, and you’d see the chicks lined up there. Most of them used to be older girls, a couple of years back, and you’d say, “There’s that same old whore.” You’d know them by sight. They might stop you and say, “Say, baby, you sportin’ tonight?” and you’d say, “Yeah, Mama, if I could find somebody to sport with.”
But then, one night, it happens. I suppose it has happened to everybody who has escaped the plague. One night, you hear a familiar voice and turn around. Perhaps she’ll see you and hide her face, something like that. It’s a friend or a friend of a younger sister or one of the girls you know from the neighborhood. You almost want to cry, and you snatch her and say, “C’mon, girl, git off this corner. What the hell is wrong with you? Come on over here and let me buy you some coffee and send you home.”
You want to tell them something like, “Do you know how your mother would feel?” You might get them into a restaurant to have a cup of coffee, or you might take them to a bar for a drink. You find out that it’s futile to say anything to them. She just isn’t supposed to be there. She hasn’t got any business being a junkie bitch turning tricks. That’s selling two-dollar pussy. That’s not even being a whore. The whores would look down on her behind this sort of thing.
You just sit there for a while and talk to her. You say, “Look, I’m gon take you home,” or “I’m gon take you down to the hospital tomorrow, and I want you to sign yourself in,” this sort of thing.
They look at you and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you really want to help me, you can give me five or ten dollars, so I won’t have to spend my night out here. I’m sick now.”
A chick might say she turned a trick with a cat who was too big, that she got hurt and really shouldn’t be out there, but that she needs some money and has to get high. The first time, you give them some money, but after you’ve heard that story a couple of times, you get hip. You begin to feel like a trick, like the cats out there buying that cunt.
I remember once I was talking to a little girl who used to live across the street from me on Eighth Avenue, a little girl named Sadie.
I saw her out there. She didn’t hide like some of the others had done. She just said, “Hi, Sonny, how you doin’?”
I said, “Hey, baby, like, what you doin’ out here?”
She looked at me, smiled, and said, “Now, isn’t that a silly question?”
I thought about it, and it was. Shit, I knew what she was doing out there. She was doing the same thing that all those other chicks were doing out there. She was trying to sell some cunt. This was the place for it, 125th Street, after midnight.
I took her into a bar, and we sat down and had a beer.
She said, “Now, look, I’ve got to make some money.”
I said, “I’ll give you the money. Don’t go back out there.”
“Okay, thanks, but tomorrow night it’s gon be the same thing.”
I tried to talk her out of it, but she said, “No, look, you can’t help me now. The only way anyone can help me is that they give me some money to get some shit and get that monkey off my back.”
I knew her family wasn’t too tight, because her mother used to run an after-hours joint, and she used to be a whore when she was younger. I used to sell stolen goods to her mother. I told her, “How would your mother feel if she saw you down here?”
She said, “Shit, it just doesn’t matter how she’d feel. Because after all the tricks I turned, it wouldn’t make any sense for her to feel any kinda way now.”
I knew she was right. I knew that a lot of mothers were learning that their daughters were becoming junkies and prostitutes to support their habits. I suppose this was a way many girls took to get even with their families, to get even for the way their mothers had lived. I thought this was the reason Sadie had done it. She was telling her mother she was going to be a worse whore than she’d ever been. I think she was succeeding at it too. Even if she wasn’t she was giving it a damn good try.
I started getting a little worried about Pimp, but not about Carole and Margie. Carole had started listening to a lot of that down-home nonsense that Mama had been telling all of us for so many years. I don’t know what it was, but she just got a whole lot of religion all of a sudden.
I used to feel sorry for Carole, and I used to get mad at Mama, because I didn’t think she had any right to tell that girl all that old crazy shit that should have been left down there in the woods. She had Carole going around to all those old sanctified churches and all that old crazy kind of stuff. The girl lost all the self-confidence she used to have.
Carole used to be smart and never used to be afraid of anything. Now she was a different person. I used to look at her sometimes and wonder what the hell Mama had done to her all that time I was at Warwick and those places. I used to feel sorry for being away and not being able to tell her, “Look, all that shit Mama’s tellin’ you is nonsense and bullshit, so you don’t have to listen to it.” She really needed somebody to tell her that.
But now it was too late to do anything about it; she was good and sewed up in that religious bag. She was afraid not to be religious. I just could never figure out why she changed so much, what happened to her while I wasn’t around.
Margie was still young, and she had always been obedient, so there was nothing to worry about there.
Pimp was thirteen, and he had wanted to follow in my footsteps for some time, but Pimp couldn’t take the beatings that Dad gave him. He tried stealing—once. He tried playing hookey—once. Dad beat him nearly to death, and that was the end of that. Now he was thirteen, and he was getting in with a lot of other little boys who were also trying to come out of the house and act like they knew their way around in the street. It wasn’t too bad now, because there wasn’t too much expected of him. Tony Albee told me that he’d seen Pimp and another little boy drinking a bottle of wine in the hallway. I laughed at it, but I wondered to myself just how long it would be before Pimp and the other little boys he hung out with would be affected by the plague.
It was the time and the plague. Everybody knew they had to get away from something and get into something. I guess one of the reasons Tony Albee and I hung out together was that we had to get away from not having a groove. We had to get with somebody and something. We had a l
ot of expensive clothes, and we would go to parties. We’d party with a lot of the young girls, a lot of the whores. Every Friday and Saturday night, Tony and I would come uptown and go to a party or a dance, or we’d just get high off pot. And we would philisophize about what we were going to do one day, and about the junkies, and about the way the cops were carrying on, the way they were taking target practice on the junkies.
There was a cop up there called Schoolboy. Sometimes we’d stand on the corner and get high and talk about how the police department planned to let Schoolboy kill off all the junkies. Schoolboy was a white cop who had shot quite a few junkies. It didn’t make sense to shoot junkies, because they were sort of harmless people unless you were standing between them and drugs. But Schoolboy shot junkies just for running. I don’t know how true it is, but Wally said that when he had been caught on 146th Street, Schoolboy had told him to run. He said he lay down and refused to run, because he knew that Schoolboy liked to shoot junkies. He said when he lay down, Schoolboy shot him in the leg anyway.
I’d heard a lot of cats say they never were going to run from him. Sometimes cats who were stealing stuff would hear him. They’d get up close to a wall or something. He’d say, “Come over here.” They’d say, “No, you gon have to shoot me here if you gon shoot me.” People in the neighborhood complained about it: “They got this white cop around here killin’ all these young boys.” The old ladies would say this when the junkies weren’t robbing their houses. If the junkies were robbing their houses, the old ladies would say, “They ought to kill all them damn no good junkies.” This was the usual story with the junkies and the old ladies.
Nobody in the neighborhood liked Schoolboy, but nobody did anything. This was a sign that the neighborhood had changed. In the old days, somebody would have killed that cat. He couldn’t have gone around shooting everybody like that. People said, “Yeah, Schoolboy, he’s a nut, and somethin’ has to be done about that cat.” But right then, nothing was happening.
I heard that one lady said she saw Schoolboy shoot a young boy who was a junkie. Schoolboy had told him to stop, and the boy stopped and was just waiting for him. Schoolboy just walked up to him and shot him. The lady went down to the police station to complain about it. They told her, “Get the hell out of the precinct.” There was a big stink about it in the Amsterdam News, the colored newspaper, but nothing ever came of it. Everybody just started squawking, “Yeah, they ain’t gon do anything to a white cop for shootin’ a nigger, even if it is in New York.” Perhaps they had something there.
Tony felt that Schoolboy was going to be the one to get rid of all the junkies in Harlem. He was going to shoot them all. He had knocked up a colored girl up the block, and everybody knew he was going around there fucking the young girls and shooting the junkies.
I guess a lot of people felt that he should have been killed, because he was no good.
When people got high off pot and philosophized about it, it almost seemed unbelievably funny. But they were right. Nobody seemed to care much about Harlem, not the people who could do something about it, like the mayor or the police.
Some of the cats I knew had gone into the police department. They seemed to be exploiting Harlem too, once they got in there. These were the same cats who had come up in Harlem. They didn’t care any more either. They just wanted to go out there and get some of that money too.
Harlem was getting fucked over by everybody, the politicians, the police, the businessmen, everybody. There were a lot of things that we knew about but didn’t think about when we weren’t high: how nobody cared too much about cleaning up the junkies or making drugs legal so that they’d stop robbing people, since it was just Harlem and East Harlem; how nobody gave a fuck about some niggers and some Puerto Ricans, so that’s why nothing was going to be done about it. It seemed that when we got high off pot and stuff and started philosophizing, we really knew things. We understood this whole thing about Harlem, but we didn’t mind it too much then. You could get high, sit down, and talk about it, even laugh about it.
We’d laugh about how when the big snowstorms came, they’d have the snowplows out downtown as soon as it stopped, but they’d let it pile up for weeks in Harlem. If the sun didn’t come out, it might have been there when April came around. Damn sending snowplows up there just for some niggers and people like that!
Many times we would think we had found the way to get the junkies out, but we could never have taken it down to City Hall and gotten people to listen to it. Especially since we were high. If we’d gone down there and said, “Look, Mr. Mayor, you take a stick-a this, and, baby, when you get up there off this joint, you’ll see all this shit out here just the way it is. Like, you get some-a this and come to Harlem and just dig it. You got to be high off some good pot.” That’s all we needed. They would have said, “These niggers are crazy. Let’s call up Bellevue.”
We knew we couldn’t do that, but we could squawk about the snow. Somebody’d say, “Yeah, this is the last place they git with the snow plows,” and somebody else’d say, “Would you listen to that nigger? He must think he’s livin’ down on Park Avenue. You better go and take another look in the mirror. Shit, ain’t nobody gon be sendin’ no damn snowplows up to Eighth Avenue and 145th Street. Shit, they probably ain’t got enough people up here who can vote.”
There was a lot of sense to this. Even though cats get high off pot, they’re not crazy. Most of the men from our community had some kind of bust on them, even if it was just for something petty. The average cat around our neighborhood in Harlem had a sheet on him, so he couldn’t vote. Even most of the young cats around there who weren’t strung out owed some time for something. A lot of the older people who went to work every day had sheets on them from way back for killing some other nigger in Georgia or running some moonshine.
The women, with their votes, just ran the community. They’d elect the councilmen. They’d elect our same old light, bright, damn-near-white Congressman who was always making those pretty promises that never amounted to anything, those bullshit promises. He was going to keep on doing this, and we knew it even though we were young and high. We could stand around and talk this shit, and we knew we were right, because just about the only people who could vote were the women. So this light, bright, damn near white and full of shit cat was going to be in there just as long as women had most of the vote. As Johnny D. once said, a woman’s brain is between her legs, and some pretty nigger who was suave, like our good Congressman, could get up there and say, “Look, baby, I’m going to do this and that for you.” The women would go right out and vote for him, because the nigger was too pretty for them not to. We kept on getting the same treatment because the women were running Harlem.
Most of the people didn’t know it, and this was one of the great truths that we discovered. When you got high, you’d discover a whole lot of answers to many questions. This was one of them. We knew that the women were running Harlem. The women didn’t know it themselves, but we knew it. Anyway, we knew it when we got high.
We’d get high, and we’d solve all the problems of Harlem. When it wore off, we would just have to live with them all over again.
The real reason I wanted to be in Harlem was to spend more time with Pimp. But I couldn’t. There just wasn’t enough time. I couldn’t take him to live with me. He was still too young. I couldn’t have him hang out with me. I couldn’t go back home. I’d just see him sometimes and talk to him.
He got in trouble once with some kids, something childish like snatching a pocketbook. It didn’t seem too important at the time. I was a little bothered about it, and I spoke to him. He said they’d just done it for kicks. I was trying real hard to keep a check on him from a distance. I knew what he was doing.
He had started shooting craps, but this was nothing, really. All the young boys shot craps and gambled. This was what they were supposed to do. But Mama was worried about it. I suppose she and Dad were getting kind of old. She used to tell me, “Oh, that boy, h
e stays out real late.” It seemed as though they were trying to throw their burden of parenthood on me, and I kind of resented that, but I cared about Pimp. I wanted to do something for him.
The only trouble was that I had set such a high standard for him, such a bad example, it was hard as hell to erase. People knew him as my brother. The boys his age expected him to follow in my footsteps. He was my brother, and I had done so much, I had become a legend in the neighborhood. They expected him to live up to it.
I used to try to talk to him. I’d say, “Look, Pimp, what do you want to do, man?” I tried to get him interested in things. He used to like to play ball and stuff like that, but he wasn’t interested in anything outside of the neighborhood. He wasn’t interested in getting away. He couldn’t see life as anything different. At fourteen, he was still reading comic books. He wasn’t interested in anything except being hip.
I was real scared about this, but I knew that I couldn’t do anything. He was doing a whole lot of shit that he wasn’t telling me about. I remember one time I asked him, just to find out if he had started smoking yet, if he wanted some pot. He said, “No, man, I don’t want any, and if I wanted some, I’d have it. I know where to get it.” I was kind of hurt, but I knew that this was something that had to come. He would’ve known, and I suppose he should’ve known. When I was his age, even younger, I knew.
I couldn’t feel mad about it, but I felt kind of hurt. I wanted to say, “Look, Pimp, what’s happenin’, man? Why aren’t we as tight as we were before?” He still admired me, but something had happened. It was as though we had lost a contact, a closeness, that we once had, and I couldn’t tell him things and get him to listen any more the way he used to do. I felt that if I couldn’t control him, nobody could, and he’d be lost out there in the streets, going too fast, thinking he was hip enough to make it all by himself.