The Story of Junk

by Linda Yablonsky

  She brought me to a closet and pulled out a black brushed-velvet pinstriped suit that she said didn’t fit her. Sylph, the singer in her band, had made it. She made a lot of their clothes. “Why don’t you try it on,” Kit said shyly. I thought it looked too small. “No, try it,” she said. I did and it was perfect: snug jacket, narrow legs, totally rock ’n’ roll.

  “Keep it,” she said. “I want you to have it.” This embarrassed me, too. From what I could see, she didn’t have much to give away, even if she was semi-famous.

  Kit had come on the scene sometime in the 1970s, with a band that set a new standard for New York punk rock. She hadn’t known much about playing guitar, but what she didn’t know she invented. I’d seen articles about her in the Times and write-ups in every punk news rag there was. She was given featured roles in a couple of underground movies too—arty, low-budget, feminist super-8s. People were watching her. She had fans. Great things were expected. Now I was wearing her suit. Who says fashion is frivolous? Putting on those clothes changed my life.

  JUST A CHIP

  It was hard to go straight home after work, every night, alone. I had to unwind, and in the after-hours bars a girl could get pretty loose. Sometimes I stayed in Sticky’s office, doing lines of coke while he and Rico counted money and talked about their wives. Their wives were always on their case; these guys were married to the store. Flint was a bachelor, but he had the cancer to deal with. It gave him moments of excruciating pain, so at closing time he’d give himself a poke in the rear with Dilaudid and go home to sleep it off.

  I was there to give Big Guy a little space at home, but a couple of nights a week he went to the Mineshaft and the Anvil and the Crow’s Nest, waterfront bars with steamy back rooms and unlit basements where a guy could get it on man-to-man. I never asked what actually went on there, I didn’t want to know. There are rules of privacy I think roommates should respect.

  On Saturday nights Big Guy and I went home together and sat up with the Sunday Times crossword, trading tales of the week about people at Sticky’s. “I love New York,” he’d say, whenever we called it a night. Then one day in the Post, there was a headline about the spreading “gay cancer,” an infection that attacked homosexual men who took it up the ass. It was killing them by the dozen. I was certain Big Guy was more the voyeur, but this story made him squirm. He grew remote and forgetful. “I’m shipping out,” he said at last. Every day he went to the union hall to wait for a berth and every night he came home to lay out those lines of heroin. The atmosphere changed for me, too. I grew sick of bars and sick of dope. I told Big Guy not to offer me any anymore, and he didn’t. I withdrew.

  After two weeks off the junk I felt more desolate than ever. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see anyone I liked. I saw a loser, a writer who couldn’t write, a cook who was out of control. I terrorized the wait-staff at Sticky’s, working six nights a week for very little money and spending most of the seventh asleep. I slept all day alone in a bed that wasn’t mine and drank my way till dawn. I didn’t see how I could go on.

  I had a small stash of knockout pills in a bedside drawer. On my day off I bought more in the park at Union Square and washed them all down with a pint of vodka. I went to bed with no intention of waking up, but wake up I did, late the next afternoon, and I answered the phone when it rang. It was a friend named Honey Cook, at whose apartment two years before I had taken my first sniff of heroin.

  Honey was not a pusher. She was another would-be writer and sometime actress, mother to an eight-year-old named Mike. She knew Jayne Mansfield’s life story by heart and never went anywhere without eyeliner. She worried about her looks, which only fascinated me: a toss of White Minx-tinted hair over blue-flame eyes that winked at the world; whore-pink painted lips under a Teutonic nose that snubbed it. One shoulder sported a moon-and-stars tattoo. Smaller tattoos graced the knuckles of both hands, which bore a number of filigreed silver rings.

  She lived in the Village with a blues singer named Lute, a tough, striking blonde out of a film-noir comedy, if there is such a thing. There ought to be. Theirs was a house of mirth—everything for a laugh. This one night, I needed a laugh. I was broke and depressed, between jobs and intimates. Lute was out.

  I sat in Honey’s kitchen, a wallpapered and chandeliered affair, listening to her ideas on the subject of personal hygiene. She was convinced yogurt had healed her chronic P.I.D. and that parsley juice induced a period. She had also developed a solution for problem skin. The treatment was a lot like salad dressing, a vinaigrette for the face. “This really works,” she told me. I thought maybe she should bottle it.

  Honey had trouble keeping up with the rent. Once, in her youth, she’d spent a few months on a funny farm, after an unfortunate night on LSD. It wasn’t the sort of thing that looked good on a résumé, so she collected disability and a few nights a week, after Mike had gone to bed, hired herself out as a topless dancer. “It’s good for the figure,” she said. Honey always looked at the bright side.

  “Where’s Lute tonight?” I asked.

  “Oh, umm,” Honey answered. “Visiting her mother.” She was concentrating on her work. To pick up extra cash, she’d started dealing MDA, a speedy hypnotic we called “the love drug.” This stuff was very Cloud Nine. It came in powder form, and packaging it for sale meant emptying vitamin caps and filling them with the drug. I was emptying the caps; she was filling them. “I never know how much of this stuff to put in,” she said, scratching her head. “I suppose it’s best to be conservative.”

  I didn’t care. All I wanted was company.

  She looked up. “You ever live with a woman, hon?”

  “In college,” I said. “I had roommates.”

  “I mean, as a lover.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Hasn’t come up.”

  “This is going to sound weird—maybe I shouldn’t tell you—but I’ve been thinking about getting married. To a man, I mean. I mean, Lute’s really great and all. In bed she’s like, strong, like an animal. But Mike could really use a father figure.” She combed a hand through her hair. Her nails were sharp as teeth. “Oh, never mind,” she said then, licking her fingertips. “Marriage is so middle-class. Still, I wish I could have it both ways.” She looked me in the eye. “Do I sound really awful?”

  “You sound modern, that’s all. Is there someone you want to marry?”

  “Modern? Not really. I was just thinking. It must be this drug, it’s so toxic. Seeps through your fingers, gets under your skin. Want to try some?”

  “Sure,” I said. Fine with me.

  She scraped up some loose powder and rolled it in toilet paper balls to put under our tongues. She said it dissolved faster that way. Then she wanted to spike it with heroin.

  I remember how I snubbed it at first. I had already tried all the other drugs, but heroin, I felt, was out of my control. I didn’t want to be an addict.

  Honey batted her eyes at this. “One line doesn’t make you an addict.”

  She was right. One line did not make me an addict. But one line once a week for two years did. Especially one of Big Guy’s, not once a week but a little every day. I still wasn’t hooked. I only had a chip—the beginning of a habit not yet matured. If I stopped now, I could kick it. It wasn’t too late.

  So Honey came over and made coffee. She sat with me for hours. She instructed me to drink a brewer’s-yeast concoction she said I needed to keep up my spirits. It tasted like chalk. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re not depressed. You’re just strung out.”

  “I’m not strung out,” I protested. “It’s just a chip.”

  “You can kick it,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I can kick it.”

  The next day I was back at work, where they plied me with drinks and kept me too busy to think. I didn’t feel sick but I didn’t feel happy. I worked and watched TV and went to sleep. I was waiting for the chip to pass. I knew it would. I knew it would. It was just a matter of time.

&n
bsp; BELLE

  On the afternoon I started feeling better, I happened to see my friend Belle. She was moving to a new loft in SoHo. I went over and she made the coffee. I wore the pinstriped suit.

  “That’s a good outfit,” she said.

  I bragged about its being a present. Who from? Kit’s name produced a frown.

  “Isn’t she a junkie?” Belle asked me right off.

  “I don’t know,” I said, deliberately vague. “I mean, I know she does drugs, but so does everyone.”

  “But I think she’s a real junkie,” Belle declared. “Not like us.”

  I never argued with Belle. She wouldn’t have heard me if I tried. Her mind was never at rest, in one mood and out the other, like quicksilver, the color of her hair. It set her apart, like her voice, a precision instrument marred by a consumptive cough.

  Belle took drugs for the sake of entertainment, which was also the approach she took to sex. Her specialty was gay male erotica; the idea of fist-fucking gave her a charge. “Come on,” she’d say. “Let’s go up to that googoomaplex, or whatever it’s called, on Eighth Avenue. They’re showing a film about slave-training.” Belle could never remember the name of anything and insisted on calling porno flicks “films.” She thought they were “artful.” I went along, but I’d go anywhere. I shared her sense of adventure.

  It was Belle who first put a needle in my arm—speed, back in those days, we skin-popped. Now she was close to forty and sharp as the bones in her cheeks. Sexy too, in an eccentric sort of way. Her mouth had a certain intelligence. She carried herself tall in very high heels and didn’t wear underwear after dark. “One shouldn’t disguise the crease in one’s buttocks,” she would say. Hers were round and firm.

  “Nice place,” I said, looking around the near-empty loft. Belle wasn’t the type to surround herself with clutter. As a young girl she’d had two sons by different fathers, but only one boy lived with her and only part of the time. Even her clothes were spare, but she didn’t need help from decor. Her smile alone could light up a room.

  At Sticky’s, Belle drew people to her side like a magnet, sometimes just so they could talk about her later. She never ordered anything but fried zucchini and a side of broccoli with lots of butter. “I don’t eat flesh,” she always said. She was thin. She had a hunger for living, though, especially for living on the edge. She carried three vials of cocaine in her purse, one to share in the bathroom, one to sell to pay for the first one. The third was a backup in case she lost the other two before she got home. Belle was a study.

  She coughed and waved a hand as if to shoo me away. “I thought you liked Kit’s band,” I said. We had similar tastes in music.

  “I do,” she agreed. “But that’s not the issue. We’re speaking of her purpose. Why would someone you hardly know want to give you their best clothes?”

  I tasted envy in the air. “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s just a nice person. Really.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But she’s a junkie, too. I know how easy it is to get swept up … in that sort of thing …” Her voice trailed off, her eyes staring into the distance. They were brown and set wide apart, so deep I was afraid to look into them. At their bottom was one giant slice of grief.

  “Coffee ready?” I chirped.

  She drew herself up, suddenly impatient. “You must have some better idea why Kit’s been this nice to you. She must want something.”

  “She just wants a friend. I think that life of hers has her a little isolated.”

  “I don’t think that’s all she wants,” Belle muttered.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. I felt like I was talking to my mother. My mother resisted everything I ever did. We were never confidantes. She died young.

  “Well, be careful.”

  “I’m careful,” I said. “One thing I’ve always been is careful.” The minute I heard myself say it, I knew it was a lie.

  BETTY

  Kit liked my cooking. She and Betty started coming into Sticky’s just as Big Guy sailed for a six-month hitch in the North Atlantic. They offered me a bag of dope.

  “I kicked it,” I said, wiping the blood from a steak off my cutting board.

  “Really?” Kit replied dully. “I wish I could. With Betty around, it’s impossible.”

  “Hey!” Betty cried. “That’s not fair.”

  “Pick up!” I yelled at a waitress. Kit stepped back. Betty fell down. We set her on a step. Pedro, a slight fellow with a long French braid who worked the station next to mine, asked if we shouldn’t do something. I told him to turn up the radio.

  Betty came to—the station we had on was playing a Toast song. When it ended, the DJ announced a gig the band had scheduled for the following night at Roseland. Kit asked if I would come as their guest. I would, but I had to work. Sticky’s never closed, not for Thanksgiving, not for Christmas, not for anything. Not even when the previous cook was D.O.A. after a grease-fire explosion in the kitchen. Repairs were going on while Sticky was at the funeral, which he paid for. That’s when he hired me. He was open for business that night.

  Pedro wasn’t just my kitchenmate; he was also Mr. Leather’s companion. We were buddies. He volunteered to work in my place. “Go on,” he said. “See the show.” He didn’t have to say it twice.

  The old ballroom was jammed that night. Bodies in black leather draped along the chrome rails of the dance floor in haunting neon light, a bigger crowd in the middle, in the dark, dancing, jumping up and down. I found Betty by the stage, hovering near the dressing-room door. When the band went on, she kept yelling in my ear, “Doesn’t Kit sound great? She’s great tonight, isn’t she?”

  She was awesome. The sound washed over the hall in waves, electronic arpeggios sailing over sudden squawks and harmonic bleats. She could have been playing three guitars, not one.

  “How does she get that sound?” I asked Betty.

  “Effects boxes!” she yelled. “Special effects!” She was in motion.

  The sound of hip-swaying, finger-popping funk alternated with percussive, foot-stomping rock. I worked my body into it, but I didn’t want to dance with Betty and I didn’t like dancing by myself. I stood still on the dance floor and let other bodies bump against me, propel me where they might.

  I fell into a distant region of my mind, where I saw my mother in her hospital bed, watching a teen dance show on TV. During the last months of her illness, she tuned it in every Saturday afternoon. For her, this was peculiar—my mother had cultivated her ears for opera. Every now and then, when I was growing up, I’d find her standing by the radio listening to jazz, but she always hated pop.

  “Is this how you dance?” she asked me one Saturday near the end.

  My mother knew how much I liked dancing. As a child, I went to dance parties every week, begged for opportunities to throw my own. Dancing was my first addiction. When I was dancing, I never had to tell anyone I loved them and no one had to say those words to me. The body said it all. Every turn of the head, every shrug, every sway, every snap of the spine was a buzz, the vocabulary of desire in the flesh.

  “I enjoy watching these kids,” my mother said. “Someday I’d like to watch you.”

  “I’ll dance for you,” I said. “When you’re not so ill and can join me.”

  She said, “I’m getting better every day.”

  I shook the memory off and elbowed my way toward the stage. A string of beer bottles sat on Kit’s amp and between songs she took quick, jerky swigs from one or two of them. She wore shiny tight purple jeans and long striped scarves. Strands of black ribbon hung from her wrists. She played with her back to the audience, all you saw was her arms moving and her legs. That’s all you needed to see. She had a great ass—everyone said so. It was part of her celebrity.

  As the band finished their encore, Kit set her guitar against her amp and turned up the volume. A high-pitched wail pierced the air. My hair stood on end. Sylph waved and said, “Goodnight, New York! We’re Toast!” and the signal from Kit’s amp g
rew louder. I couldn’t stand it and I didn’t want it to end, but a roadie came onstage and turned it off. The stage went dark and the DJ put on a record. My ears were ringing. I loved it.

  After the show, Kit and Betty came home to my place and didn’t want to leave. “The roommates,” they said. “Too obnoxious.” Kit had two roommates besides Betty, a man and a woman, not a couple, always drunk and stoned, she said, nothing but a shouting match, all confusion.

  We sat on my bed watching a late movie on TV. I told them they could sleep in Big Guy’s bed in the other room but they somehow never left mine. I didn’t want to do the bag of dope they offered, but they were so sweet. One bag, I thought. A street bag. What harm could it do? I was used to stronger stuff.

  Next morning I wanted to kill myself. My whole body ached, I could hardly bend my knees. I vomited for hours. “I’m sorry,” Kit said. “I guess that wasn’t a very nice gift.” She still seemed to be high. Normal, I mean. Junkies don’t get high. They get “straight.” I wasn’t, but I was no junkie. I didn’t have a name for what I was. I didn’t want one.

  Later, on her way home from rehearsal, Kit stopped by my place again. She had another bindle of dope for me, if I wanted it. The name “Toilet” was rubber-stamped on the glassine bag. “This’ll take the edge off,” she said. I knew it would but I turned it down. She said she would save it. She stayed a few minutes more to talk about Betty, whom she didn’t think she could live with any longer. They’d had another fight.

  “You could ask her to leave,” I said.

  “I know. But she makes herself so useful.”

  “Maybe there are too many people living in your apartment,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Kit nodded. “I know, but that’s how I pay the rent. Usually, I sublet and move out. I’ve had that place for five years, but I’ve hardly lived there at all.”

  “You’re making money now,” I pointed out. “You don’t need roommates.”