The Story of Junk

by Linda Yablonsky

  “Come with me,” Dick beckons. He shows me through a door by the desk. It leads to a narrow corridor and two clean cells behind shiny black bars, each with a bare bulb and a bench. “In here,” he tells me, indicating a room at the hallway’s dead end. It’s about the same size as my office but even more of a tomb. One desk, two chairs, no windows.

  Over the next couple of hours, Dick continues to press me for names. He’s got the answering-machine tape and also my phone book, a regulation-dealer pocket computer gadget. A password accesses all the “important” numbers—the sources, the money owed, the money owing—they’re in a secret compartment Dick is not aware of. As we go through the names he does find, all I say is, That’s a friend, and that’s a friend. He presses harder. I say nothing.

  Finally we pass back through the fingerprint room into a large outer office, where a couple of dozen agents sit at computers and talk on phones. They all watch as Dick sits me down at his desk and has me dial Angelo’s hotel. My voice shaking, I ask Angelo to come by at seven. He can tell something’s not right. I pray he can tell. I try to think of some code to warn him off, but with so many eyes and ears on me, I jam up.

  We return to the big empty room. I’m clammy, a little dizzy, my calves twitch. My friend is sitting at the desk, toying with the black baseball cap in her hands. I wish we were both better dressed.

  Dick disappears. We sit there.

  Suddenly, he’s back, smiling. Why shouldn’t he smile? He’s having a very good day. He tells us we’re being released on our own recognizance, just for tonight. We’re to go home and fix ourselves up. We’re going to wait for Angelo.

  I stare at him, disbelieving. Go home? Go home?

  “You need cab money?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. I don’t want any favors. “I have cab money.” It’s all I have.

  In the taxi my friend turns her hat inside out, removes from the sweatband a bag of dope. My dope. She’d stolen it. She must have been keeping a stash all along. I’ve never been so grateful. I don’t know how she got away with it—not hiding it from me but keeping it from the cops. I think she’s crazy. We both are. We laugh, even though it hurts.

  Just before seven, I’m sitting in Dick’s brown government car, bundled in an old overcoat. Dick’s behind the wheel, walkie-talkie in hand. I’m on the passenger side. Two agents are in another car somewhere behind us. Others are at Angelo’s hotel. Still more are scattered elsewhere up and down the street, I can’t see where. It seems very dark tonight. I’ve never seen it so dark.

  We’re parked in the shadow of a twelve-story co-op across the street from my apartment. On the other side, benches bolted to the sidewalk face the stoop of my building between spindly, weed-like trees—my outer office, so to speak. My customers call it the “waiting room.” I’m the one waiting now.

  The walkie-talkie crackles to life. “Subject is leaving the hotel,” someone says. “He’s with another guy. Should we take him?”

  “No,” Dick says. “Let’s see where he goes.” Where who goes? What other guy?

  “Who’s the other guy?” Dick asks me. Who could it be? I don’t know anything. I’m shaking in my skin. “You okay?” Dick says.

  “Just cold.”

  He says he’ll turn on the heat and puts the key in the ignition. The engine sputters and dies. He tries it again. Same result. He floors it. With a shudder, the car roars to life. “Your tax dollars at work,” says Dick. Tax? I haven’t paid taxes in ages. “Better hurry,” he teases. “Them I.R.S. guys are much worse than us.”

  “Yeah? What’ll they do? Put me in jail?”

  “Ah, don’t be like that. You’ll be all right.”

  “Sure,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  Dick checks his watch, looks at the street. “He’s late, this guy.”

  “That’s nothing unusual. He’s often late. Sometimes days late.” I’ve waited on Angelo before.

  “Where are they now?” Dick says into his walkie-talkie.

  “In a deli,” comes the answer.

  “Jeez.”

  “These guys are splitting up,” we hear from the radio. “They’re taking separate cabs.”

  “Keep the tail.”

  “That walkie-talkie has a wide range,” I comment.

  “Latest model,” Dick notes with satisfaction. “Wish I could say the same for the car.” A quiet descends, dark as the night.

  “I think we’ve lost them,” an agent reports half an hour later.

  Dick grips the wheel. “What?”

  “I don’t see them,” the voice says. “They must be down there somewhere.”

  Two men are walking south on the other side of the street, coming our way. Dick asks, “Is that the guy?”

  I’m slumped in the seat. Peering over the bottom edge of the window frame, I look through the dark. “No,” I say. “Not him.”

  Static from the walkie-talkie. “Is this him?”

  “No,” says Dick. “Hold your places. We don’t know who’s carrying what.”

  I close my eyes.

  While other drugs work to alleviate pain, excite the mind, or otherwise trick the senses, heroin plays with the soul—or whatever it is makes a person uniquely appealing and distinguishable. Like an enveloping shadow dissolving day into night, it sneaks across your vision and tries to put it out, whatever that joy is by which you live, it creeps inside and pushes you down, making you smaller and smaller, a tiny flame burning down. And when you’re so small you’re barely an ember, something happens, something comes at you and—

  I’ve never felt so small as I do at this moment, in the car with Dick. Yet this thing, this drug that has brought me lower than I ever thought I could go, is the one thing I want to salve my soul. Just for a minute. Just for this minute. Not even a minute. Time’s up.

  “Is that the guy?”

  I look again. Another stranger. And then, about a block away, I see him walking fast and alone, hands in pockets, head bent into the March wind. Go away! I want to shout. I’m screaming inside, Just keep going!

  “You okay?” Dick asks.

  Nothing I can do.

  “Is that the guy?”

  I glance up and shrink from my bones. He’s close.

  “Is that the guy?”

  “I’ve never done anything like this in my life.”

  “Really?” says Dick. “I do this every day.”

  Bully for you, I want to say. Then I see Angelo enter my building. I choke on my tongue, nod yes. Fall to the floor of the car in a heap.

  “GO!” Dick shouts in the walkie-talkie. “Move in.”

  Nothing happens for a minute. Then, static.

  “Is he carrying?” Dick says.

  “Affirmative.”

  “Stay down a minute,” he tells me.

  I no longer have eyes or ears; my mouth is twisted. I’m raging. I’m weeping. Then I’m like stone.

  “Okay,” Dick says. “Coast’s clear.”

  I’m ready to go downtown.

  “No,” he says. His head wags. “I gotta deal with this guy tonight. You go home and I’ll be back bright and early. Get some sleep.”

  Sleep? He thinks I’ll sleep? He thinks I’m too sick to run, but I might.

  I can never tell anyone about any of this, I think, as I crawl on hands and knees up the stairs. Six flights. I could be climbing Mount Everest. My friend is waiting at the top, watching me crawl. When I see her face I know it for real: I can never say anything, not about this. I can never say anything, ever.

  My friend backs into the apartment as I pass through the door. Our coats and hats hang double on their hooks in the hall—getting by is always a squeeze.

  My friend’s name is Kit. I can see her hands are trembling. Her hair is white, her eyes are red, black in the center, all pupil. Usually, they’re blue, light blue, very light. You can always see the pins in them. Not now.

  I toss myself into a chair at the table in the living room, next to the corner window. I pull the coat to my
ears. My throat feels thick, like I’ve swallowed poison. “How does it feel to live with a rat?” I say hoarsely.

  Kit’s looking into the fireplace. It’s cold, too. There’s no mantel over its white brick, only a painting Kit made before I knew her. Her boot traces a path through soot that has fallen through the chimney. “Was it bad?” she asks.

  “Awful,” I say. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Did Angelo see you?”

  I say no, I didn’t see him either, I hid on the floor of the car.

  “I saw the whole thing from the roof next door.”

  “All of it?” I’m astounded.

  “Almost. I couldn’t make out what happened in the doorway. I saw them take him away.”

  Oh God, I think. Angelo.

  “I cried,” Kit says. “I couldn’t help it.”

  I stare straight ahead. Kit never cries.

  I fix my eyes on the painting, a pair of cartoony green-and-yellow sea dragons scratched onto a splat of black paint like graffiti on a backyard fence. Purple drips inch down their middles, yellow beads radiate from their spines. They face off parallel to the surface, electric blue, their tongues unfurled, their tails curled into whips. It’s impossible to know if they’re dancing or just making eyes, if they’re evil or good. They remind me of the way Kit plays guitar, how the sound creeps over your body and under your feet, inside your bones and out your mind. I miss that sound. There’s been no real music at our house in over two years. The cats purr and meow, the phone rings, and the door buzzer bleats, but that’s about it. People knock.

  “I always kind of liked Angelo,” Kit says then.

  “Me, too,” I allow. “Most of the time.”

  “Doesn’t he have a kid?”

  “Yeah, a girl. Three years old.”

  Kit slumps into a chair opposite, looks past my shoulder out the window. “Why did you do it?” she says.

  “Why did he?” I counter. “I don’t know. Don’t ask me.”

  “I mean, why did you hand all our dope over like that?”

  “They were gonna find it anyway,” I mutter.

  “You could have kept some. At least we’d have something now.”

  “Well, it didn’t happen that way, did it?” I feel my toes curl.

  Kit looks at her boots, twists a few hairs around her ear, a familiar gesture. “Well, are we gonna get anything tonight?”

  “Are you nuts? We just got arrested! How can we?”

  She shoots me a steely look. “I’m not going to jail feeling like this.”

  I’m too weary to argue. “Let’s not fight,” I say.

  “Then call Philippe,” she says. “He might have something.”

  “That frog?” I say, with too much disdain. Philippe is another smuggler—“importer,” he likes to say. A friend. He never moved on Angelo’s scale, but his stuff was about the same. “Well, maybe,” I say. “Let me think.”

  We drift into the office without thinking. The cats follow us, settle into their customary places, under the lamp on my desk. They seem to think this is business as usual, but there isn’t any business to do—no scale, no customers, no dope.

  I sit in my chair and stare at my empty hands. Why did I give up so easily? Who is this sitting in my skin? That D, that devil D, it got in my life and it got in my mouth and threw itself over my senses. It thinks for me, it breathes for me, it fucks for me. Master and servant, it lives for me. It lives. It has no passion, except for me. Everything I want, it gives me, but it doesn’t give enough. I want that devil to die. But how do you kill a devil? There’s no part of you that doesn’t belong to it. Everything you do to it, you do to you.

  “We have to get something,” Kit says again. “We have to. If we’re gonna have to kick this stuff, we’d better get something to cut down with.”

  She sounds remotely reasonable. “All right.” I relent, my defenses down.

  She asks how much money we have left.

  “I don’t know.” I shrug, though I know to the penny. “Enough,” I say and swivel my chair around, ruffle through the pages of an old book on the shelf, a family heirloom, a prayer book. From between its leaves I pick out five crisp hundred-dollar bills, then button my coat. I’ll have to make this call from outside. Kit goes with me. Up the street there’s a pay phone on an alley, where I can watch the traffic in four directions. I don’t spot any government cars, but I don’t look too closely.

  A couple of hours later, we’re home, holding a gram. It’s good stuff, not great. We take tiny snorts from the bag, just enough to put us straight. The rest we measure into a week’s supply. By morning, it’s almost gone.

  Dick comes early. He sits in my living room and waits to see what gives. He’s curious about me; I pretend to be flattered. Maybe I am. Dick’s my new best friend. We talk about ourselves all day long while I sweat and jerk around, dopesick as hell. Somehow the idle chatter keeps me steady; otherwise I’d be screaming.

  Kit slips out to go to “work” at a friend’s studio over on Lafayette, where she’s been designing costume jewelry. It’s really a front for a coke house. She’s really dealing base for the friend. Dick lets her go; he doesn’t want her to lose her “job.” He thinks our dope business was mine alone, that she doesn’t know a thing.

  It won’t help to put us both away, but Kit’s freedom makes me furious. Some friend of Angelo’s could show up any minute, attack rifle in hand. Dick’s stolid presence is no comfort. He’s hoping another of my sources will stop by. The horrible thing is, one might.

  So, we wait. Dick wants to know more about Kit. That’s a story in itself. I tell it.

  It’s 1980, I say. I’m working nights in a restaurant, cooking. Kit’s playing guitar in a rock band, her star is rising.

  “What band?” says Dick. “I thought you said she was an artist.” He’s looking through her photographs now. At the moment we were popped, she was studying them too.

  I sneeze, multiple eruptions in quick succession. “She is an artist,” I say through a Kleenex, “and a musician.” Kit’s band has broken up, but I don’t want to let Dick know about that. I have to convince him we do something besides junk. “A lot of artists are musicians,” I explain.

  “Are they all junkies, too?”

  I struggle to fend off the yawns. “I told you,” I say. “Anyone can be a junkie.”

  “That’s right, you did.” Dick nods, drumming his fingers on the table. “Is she any good?”

  “Is who good?”

  “Your roommate, Kit.”

  “What do you mean?” I say. “What do you mean, ‘good’?”

  “As a musician. You know, I like these pictures,” he says and rubs his chin.

  He likes the pictures. “Kit has a gift” is all I say. “Yeah, she’s good.” With her band, I tell him, she plays rhythm guitar, gets an itchy-jangly, nervous sound that catches your ear and doesn’t let go. “It can be mesmerizing at times,” I say. “Even if you’re not on drugs.”

  “That so?” says Dick, wagging his head again, tsk-tsk. “Go on.”

  I go on. I don’t know what else to do. I want the line of dope still tucked in the drawer of my bedside table. I want something else to think about—I sure don’t want to think about Angelo—but it’s hard keeping up this stupid chatter. I wish night would fall. Dick works only till five in the field, then he goes back to his office—to listen to his taps on my phone, I bet.

  “This is still 1980,” I say, sifting my thoughts for words that won’t jail me. “No, that’s not right. It’s 1981. Where were you in 1981?” I need to buy a little time.

  “I was working for the I.R.S,” Dick tells me, a half smile sneaking toward my gaze. “Timmy, my partner, was delivering mail. That’s how come he had the uniform.”

  “Oh,” I reply. “How clever.”

  “We’re all lifetime civil service,” he explains.

  “I wouldn’t want to do what you do.”

  “It’s more secure than your line of work.�
�� He chuckles.

  “Writing, you mean? Or cooking?”

  “You know what I mean,” he says, loosening his tie. “So, it’s 1981.”

  No, it isn’t. It’s 1986 and I’ve run out of steam. I don’t have to feign illness. My joints ache something fierce, I might have rickets. My nose runs like a river, my head’s full of noise.

  “We don’t have to keep talking now,” Dick says, unconcerned. “I’ll be around again tomorrow.” He reaches for his wallet.

  Is he going to pay for my cooperation now?

  I’m not taking money from any cop. Forget it.

  “This is the number for my radio phone and Tim’s,” he says, scribbling on some kind of card. “If you run into problems, call. If you know anyone besides Angelo who can lead us up the chain. Someone the government will find useful. I’ll be calling you. The United States attorney will want another name. I’m going there now. I’ll speak to the assistant. I’ll tell him you’re working on names. I’m giving you the number at the office, too. You can call it twenty-four hours a day.” He tears the card in half and hands me the part with his scribble.

  I look at the card. The words “right four fingers taken simultaneously” appear at the bottom. I’m chilled.

  I let Dick out and lock the door.

  I stare at the numbers scrawled on the card.

  Another name?

  I put the card away. You don’t want to know names in this business; the less you know, the better. That was my big mistake. I had to know it all.

  ABOUT DICK

  It’s a funny thing about Dick. Dick is a funny kind of cop. He didn’t bust in with a crew of toughs and batter down the door. Nobody shouted, “Police! Open up!” Nobody put us in handcuffs. I have to admit, Dick was a gent. It worries me.

  What did I tell him in that cell of a room in the federal building uptown? How much more will I have to say? If I tell him too much, I’ll never live it down. If I say too little, he’ll never let me be.

  I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t visit Angelo—how could I explain? I can’t even look at Kit. But the customers, they still need me.