The Story of Junk

by Linda Yablonsky

  “Well, these drugs get expensive,” she said, her voice quiet. “I wish I could quit. Maybe if Betty moved out, I could.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed.

  “She’ll never move.”

  “I’ve never known her to stay anyplace long.”

  Kit stared into space, scratching her ear with a few strands of hair. “Was Betty always this fucked up?”

  “I hate to say it, but yes.”

  “You know,” Kit told me, “she’s really a nice kid, but she left home too soon. Her parents were always fighting. She ran away. I’d feel pretty bad if I kicked her out now.”

  “Are you lovers?”

  She nodded slowly. “I think big women are really attractive,” she said. “Betty was sort of a groupie, you know? Always hanging out at our rehearsal studio. My apartment was sublet and I was living with two people from my first band. All we had was a shower in the kitchen and I wanted a bath. Betty said I could use her place. It was right across the street. While I was in the tub she shot me up. You know the feeling. The warm water and that rush? It was the best thing I ever felt. Ever. Then she told me it wasn’t her apartment we were in. She was just staying there. I told her she could come live at my place and we moved back in. What a mistake.” Kit looked truly miserable. “What a mistake.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “She’ll never move. I know she won’t.”

  “Well,” I said, before I thought it through, “if you want to stay over here some night, it’s all right with me.”

  “You really wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all. I’ve been kind of lonesome lately, to tell you the truth.”

  “All right if I stay tonight?”

  “I work till three,” I said.

  “I’ll pick you up at the restaurant,” she said. “Will you make me dinner?”

  “Anytime,” I laughed. There were worse things I could do than feed people.

  She woke me at seven the next morning. Her pupils were unnaturally large, her hands shook. Her skin was clammy, the color of the sky before a snow. Immediately she was on the phone to Betty, ordering a couple of bags of D. At seven-forty-five the girl was back from the street, putting a needle in Kit’s waiting arm. I felt sick, too, but for a different reason. The long red tracks on Kit’s arm, the degree of her sickness, the girl’s willing servitude—all of it turned me off.

  Betty had to go to her job in the photo lab. When she came into the kitchen, she looked so hurt and angry, I felt ashamed. “Nothing happened,” I told her. “Really.”

  Betty tossed her head toward the bedroom. “Then why is she here?”

  “I think she just wanted a break.”

  “You know,” Betty started in, her whine rising to a full-moon pitch, “I was really glad that you and Kit were getting to be friends. I was really glad. I always thought you were one of the best people around. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Chill out, Betty,” Kit called from the bedroom. She still had the needle in her arm.

  “I’ll see you later!” Betty yelled, and stormed out the door.

  I pulled aside the curtain leading to the bedroom, a vintage 1950s palm print Big Guy had brought from Texas. “I feel bad,” I said.

  “So do I,” Kit sighed. “But I’m not going back home with all of them there.”

  “If you’re going to stay here,” I told her, “I’m going to get you off this needle.”

  “I hope you can,” Kit said. I remember she said that.

  Before I knew it, Kit’s clothes were hanging in my closet and her cats were fucking in my kitchen. So were we. That’s where it happened—in the kitchen. In the tub.

  I’d had a hard week on the job and was taking a long steamy soak. I must have been high. We were both feeling giddy. Kit was splashing me, then she was rubbing my neck. Before I knew it, she was in the water on top of me, and I was getting hot. It wasn’t a very big tub.

  Somehow, with all our splashing around, the plug in the drain came loose and let the water out, but we didn’t get out of the tub. As Kit moved against me, she bumped a faucet and turned the water on. It poured out behind me. It was scalding. When I cried out, Kit thought it was from pleasure and kept on at me harder. By the time I got her off me, I’d been badly burned—my back, an elbow, a hand, completely scorched.

  At the emergency room they gave me a burn cream and sent me home without anything for the pain. My skin grew hotter with every passing minute; it hurt like hell. There wasn’t any way to get comfortable. Kit handed me a hairbrush.

  “What’s this for?” I said.

  “Spank me,” she said. “I’ve been bad.”

  “I can’t do that!” I said, appalled. “It was an accident.”

  “Go ahead, spank me,” she said again. “It turns me on.”

  You never know what a person’s really like until you’ve showered together, I thought. It’s even more binding than sex. I took the brush in my good hand while Kit dropped her jeans. I felt ridiculous doing it, but I spanked her. After a moment, the pain in my burned arm seemed to subside. “You really like this?” I said.

  “It must have meant something to me when I was little,” she said. “Right now, I don’t care.”

  I laughed. Looking at Kit’s body was like seeing my own, same narrow hips, same champagne-glass breasts, same sex, except she was blond and I was dark. It was easy to get familiar.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  “You hurt me,” I said.

  “Same thing,” she retorted. We’ve hardly been separated since.

  THE DAWN

  In the weeks that followed, the hairbrush took up residence in the bedroom. Whenever Betty called to ask when Kit was coming home, Kit explained she had to stick around to “nurse” me. Betty’s calls were troublesome, but we put them out of mind.

  We had sex every day and went shopping. I brought Kit to clothing stores on Prince Street and she took me to guitar shops on Forty-eighth. It was exhilarating, having a woman friend who wasn’t a rival, who didn’t compete. A new world opened up, a world of music and art, a universe of private delight, whose orbit inevitably converged on Sticky’s.

  To make me presentable for work, Kit ripped up one of her scarves and tied a remnant around my wrist to hide the bandages. It was a junkie’s fashion ploy. Many addicts wear wrist bands to hide their tracks, but mine were Kit’s stagewear. At Sticky’s, they did me proud.

  She also brought me a daily bag of dope, dope Betty thought she had bought for Kit, with whom she was certain she would soon be reunited. I knew she was hurting while I had no pain, but standing in front of a 500-degree broiler for eight hours was no picnic, even without an injury. If it wasn’t for that heroin in my blood, I wouldn’t have been able to work. No work, no pay. No painkiller.

  As the days went by, the burn on my arm became infected. I didn’t go back to the doctor, though; doctors don’t know shit. I went up to two bags a day. Six months later, Betty and her roommates were gone and my old needle habit was back. So was Big Guy. It was May 1981.

  I moved in here. This is two three-room apartments put together, really, a shower in the kitchen, toilet in a narrow water closet that once opened onto the outside hall. The walls have been knocked out in one half of the place, to make one large room and three smaller ones, not counting the kitchen, windows in every room. The largest room, the living room, is where I sleep. The corner window overlooks Sixth Avenue and down a side street to a piece of the Hudson River. The Hoboken waterfront lies beyond, the World Trade Center towers to the south. The small bedroom next to the toilet we use as a walk-in closet. It has the same view. The little room I call the office, next to the kitchen on the other side of the hall, has a window on an air shaft, a desk and two chairs, a side table under a clothes rack, and bookshelves up two of the walls. The room behind the kitchen is Kit’s. When I first came here, I slept in there too.

  That was the dawn of my addiction; Kit was twenty-six and I was thirty-two. I g
ave up on my life and decided hers was the more important—she was the one with the budding career. In restaurant parlance, I was the back-of-the-house person, she was the front.

  Kitchen work had given me pop-up veins in a couple of places on my arms, and Kit took pleasure in poking them with a spike—a syringe. I hated watching the blood, my blood, surge back into the chamber—it scared me—but the rush that came with the boot of the plunger was another story entirely.

  ALL DRUGS ARE POISON

  Dick again, day two. Can he really have nothing better to do than sit here and watch me kick? He’s actually getting paid for this. I’m glad I didn’t pay taxes.

  My father called around the middle of the day. Now I know where he is—in a hospital. He needs an operation, a triple bypass. What did he want from me? Same thing he’s always wanted: me. I can’t worry about him right now, I have Kit. I have Dick, for God’s sake. I have shit.

  Still, I do worry. He’s my father, after all. What would happen if I had to tell him about the bust? At least Dick already knows. In some respects he reminds me of my dad. Revolting.

  Dick wasn’t around for Dad’s phone call, thank God. He was out for lunch. The agents downstairs got him a sandwich and they all ate together in the car. I could see them by going up on the roof; they were parked across the street. It’s weird, the way they leave me alone. How soon will they take me away? Let them eat, I don’t care. I hope they eat a lot. As long as I don’t have to cook.

  Dick was after me to talk about my drug connections. That’s all he wanted to know—how a nice girl like me got mixed up in a dirty business like this.

  It doesn’t matter how I started on heroin. What matters is why I stayed. The answer to that is sex. Heroin made sex more exciting. No, exciting is too dull a word—this drug is not for the faint of heart. Once you’ve done it, there’s no such thing as going too far. Heroin is a trip, an adventure in desire. When it smiles at you, you can’t refuse it. I couldn’t. I didn’t. I don’t. I have a large capacity for desire. Too large. Only heroin cut it down to size.

  When I moved in with Kit, I no longer cared what the world found socially acceptable. Two girls together? Of course. Could we have sex standing up? Fine with me: heat rises—where’s the fire? There was hardly a moment that didn’t get us wet. Could she turn me on my head and prop me on a wall? I was down with it. Squat with my hands in restraints? I’d play.

  It was the physical thing that hooked me. I wasn’t looking for God. I thought I’d seen enough. But the prospect of a life of pure sensation—that, I liked. Heroin was another way to see the world, from the other side of the glass, another way to free it. It’s a world you don’t have to enter; it enters you. It makes you feel sexy—good for something. But this life isn’t about feeling good; it’s about feeling better. However good or bad you feel, heroin makes you feel better. It’s a short leap from there to feeling nothing at all. For that you pay a price. Not five hundred dollars a gram—that’s just money. For heroin, you pay with your life.

  All drugs are poisons, my dad used to say. A necessary evil, he called them. He was talking about medicines. In his youth he had been a pharmacist’s apprentice and then, after the war, a drug salesman—like father, like daughter, ho ho.

  Dad pushed pharmaceuticals, eye, ear, nose, and throat. I grew up on a cough syrup made of two ingredients, codeine and alcohol—my first cocktail and still my favorite. Dad didn’t know that, of course. When there’s a poison in the body, he said, your best weapon is a stronger poison. The trick is to kill the intruder without killing yourself. I have yet to get the hang of it.

  PART TWO

  HEROIN HONEYMOON

  HEROIN HONEYMOON

  May 1981.

  “I’ve been watching you sleep,” I hear Kit say. It’s my first week in residence at her apartment. “I like watching you sleep,” she says. “You’ve been dreaming.”

  I don’t believe it. “I never dream,” I say.

  Kit’s kneeling on the floor beside me with a bent spoon and cotton, preparing a syringe. “You’re on your heroin honeymoon,” she tells me. “You sleep with that heroin honeymoon smile. You don’t wake up sick, like me.” She holds out a hand mirror lying by the bed. “Take a look and see.”

  I sit up and take the mirror from her hand. I don’t look.

  “You went out and copped already?” I ask. I’ve been dead to the world. I can smell the coffee.

  “I had to,” she says. “Rehearsal’s in an hour.”

  “How is it?” I nod toward the spoon. Sun fills the room. I feel pale.

  “Put out your arm.”

  I pump it. She ties me off with one of her scarves. “You have such good veins,” she says. “I used to have veins like yours.”

  “Don’t give me too much,” I say. “I’m not ready.”

  Her eyes graze my arm, her voice is gentle. “It’s only one bag, don’t worry.”

  I hear music coming from the living room, it’s jarring. “I don’t like loud music so early in the morning,” I say.

  “I do,” Kit retorts. “Anyway, it isn’t morning.” She holds a lighter under the spoon, dissolves the dope in the water. This is tricky. If the water boils, she’s lost it.

  “What is that you’re playing?” I ask. Don’t know why I’m so irritable. “Can’t we listen to your music, at least? This is dreadful.”

  “This,” she says quietly, “is a tape of yesterday’s rehearsal.”

  I’m still nervous about the needle. I don’t know how to inject myself. I don’t want to know. I like the way Kit does it. I like her touch. My eyes lock onto her hands as she draws the liquid into the barrel of the syringe, taps out the air. Here it comes. I don’t want to watch but can’t help it.

  “There’s that smile again,” she says after a moment. I look in the mirror. There it is, right on my face, a smile of saintly serenity. It’s odd to see—I never smile. I’ve been pissed off about something or other all my life. Now I look like a dark Ophelia floating in her pale river of dreams, all my worries over, love sealed in my heart at last.

  I lie back on the pillows and take in the sun. The bedroom windows at the rear avail a view to the east, a maze of rooftop water towers wide as the horizon in the sky. I’m in heaven. My legs curl under me. I’m warm, my skin tingles. I listen to my heart beat. It’s slow and easy. I don’t move but I can see myself dancing. My mind races. I’m excited. The music—I wonder if I did the right thing, giving up Big Guy’s apartment. Well, it wasn’t mine to keep. Isn’t it better not to pay two rents? After all, we’re a couple now, Kit and I, aren’t we a couple? High time I tried something new. New life, new kind of sex, new apartment. This place is big, filled with light. The cats are happier here, too. One of them is pregnant. I’ve cleaned the house, everything neat and tidy, but there’s one thing I missed: Betty’s presence. It’s here. I can smell it. I can feel her eyes at my back. Then, in my mind, I see a grave. It’s covered in weeds and sits near a road down a slope beside a bridge. I kneel at the grave, pull at the weeds. I hear a voice say my name. It’s my mother’s. Then my mind empties, and everything is different.

  It’s not easy to describe this euphoria—a sublime nausea, a flushed meeting of mortal and immaterial all at once, a leap beyond fate, a divine embrace. Heroin gives the impression you’ve gained a level of self-knowledge closed to other pursuits, and the moment you recognize the place where you stand, it blots you out as if you’d never existed. Nothing in the world can hurt you then. Nothing can touch you. And nothing can satisfy your hunger for more: more love, more pain, more sex, more excitement. More more.

  Everything happens, if you let it, sooner or later, all the things you’ve left undone come back to claim you. I feel safe here. Heroin doesn’t rattle any skeletons. It’s sweet. It can’t get any sweeter than this. Everything is as I remember it, as I want it, as I need. I own it, the great, the pure, the impossible. All mine.

  “Which dope is this?” I ask. I sound far away.

  �
�Something new,” Kit says. “Black Mark,” she reads from the stamp on the glassine paper. “I’ll walk you over there later.”

  She lies down beside me, her face pressed to mine, my lizard, my lover, my waking dream. Isn’t this love? It must be.

  COPPING

  With Betty out of the picture and no one else to run, Kit has to go out on the Lower East Side to cop drugs for herself. “Come with me,” she says, pulling on her boots. They’re black velvet suede, cut low, pointy-toe—very King’s Road, London.

  I’m not interested in buying from the street. Too risky. And the stuff itself is dirty—cut with quinine and strychnine and God knows what else. It’s the color of wet sand. White dope is much more refined, closer to pure. Like me.

  “You’re such a snob,” Kit teases.

  “You think I’ll put any old shit in this body?” I challenge her. I don’t eat processed food, or animal fat, either. I like feeling lean.

  “Come on,” she pleads. “I don’t like going out there alone.”

  What the hell, I think. The exercise will do me good. Muscles gather strength with repetition; so does mettle. I have to sharpen my wits—it’s New York. A flabby spirit never cut it around here. My mother grew up in a Second Avenue tenement; my father was born on Avenue D. I’m just going back to my roots.

  From SoHo, it’s a twenty-minute walk across town, maybe thirty, every day to a different spot. The Lower East Side’s made a comeback. It even has a new name: Alphabet City. It’s no less wretched than when it was the Lower East Side, just more colorful and illicit. Away from the splendor of upper Fifth Avenue, removed from the bright lights, the tawdry novelties, human or otherwise, for sale in Times Square, it visibly sags under the weight of housing too many different kinds of people with too many different ideas of fun: immigrants, bikers, poets, punks, self-appointed priests, a decrepit bohemia buzzing with capitalist cheer.

  Big-time Latino drug entrepreneurs have built a model corporate structure in the body of the condemned. Every day new drug “stalls” sprout from the walls of abandoned buildings and the grasses of rubble-strewn lots. An incredible din fills the air: blaring sirens, running feet, lookouts shouting Bajando! (the Man), or Todo bien! (all clear). Hawkers stand on corners calling out the brand names of “houses” they represent: Poison, 57 Magnum, Colt 45, Toilet, Star, President, Executive. It’s big. To a tourist, it must look like a casbah from hell.