The Story of Junk

by Linda Yablonsky

  Even at eight a.m. the streets are crawling. Avenue B reminds me of a drag strip; transactions are a blur. By midafternoon, it’s a swarm, bodies slinking in and out of guarded doorways, diving through holes punched in concrete walls, wiggling into gaps in the sidewalk deep as wells, shooting up in empty lots, nodding on the hulks of abandoned cars. Everyone’s slumming. Everyone, from the unwashed to the unwed to the unbelievably rich. They’re not residents. These streets are home only to the cunning.

  “It’s the new Gold Rush,” I observe as we go. These derelict buildings with their broken windows and missing floors, these dank peeling shells with their dimly lit corridors to oblivion, these are our mines. “We’re not breaking laws,” I say. “We’re working the mines.”

  Kit gives me a look. “Try and tell that to the judge.”

  We know the cops can’t haul everyone in, but at random moments they load a hundred people in buses, take their drugs, book them, embarrass them, and let them go. When the police can’t handle it, the politicians campaign to tear the buildings down. Most of them are owned by the city. Some days we have to dodge bulldozers as often as we do the law.

  Cops aren’t the only hazard. If some desperado wants our stuff, he’ll get it. Around here they pull the rings right off your fingers—with their teeth, if they have to—if your money’s not good enough. If the thieves don’t get you, the beat artists will—sellers who tap out a hit for themselves and sell you a bag filled with sugar or baby powder, or worse. Then there are the undercovers. Every now and then a pair of them will pull you aside and snap on the handcuffs. If one of them wants a kick, he’ll trade your freedom for a suck-off in his car. If a cop doesn’t do it, one of the flacos will. A flaco is a cop-man, it’s what the dealers call themselves. They all have the same name, they do the same things. They take you.

  It’s all a stupid game run by creeps and fueled by assholes, but we accept it. The danger is part of the draw. Life isn’t easy, not for anyone. Heroin is a finger up its nose. It’s got a life of its own and that life is ours, we don’t have to plan or think it out. There lies the beauty: I’m done with thinking. All it ever did was make me cry.

  Kit is my guide on these daily excursions across town. Our safety depends on our sticking together, and we’re together most of the time, copping, getting high, going home to fool around. If sex is the main attraction in our friendship, heroin is the glue. Then food.

  One night I bring home a box of overripe strawberries and slip a few inside her while we’re in bed. “Here’s fresh fruit for dessert,” I say, giggling. “You can make the cream.” Usually, all I do with Kit is laugh. Not this time.

  “I don’t like dirty talk,” she says, her face white. “It makes me feel weird.” I shrug and eat the berries. It’s the only disagreement we’ve had.

  Over the summer, our routine falls into a certain rhythm. We hear it from boom boxes at every step. “Everything’s rap now,” Kit says one afternoon. We’re sitting in bed eating ice cream. “My band better write one or we’ll never get a record contract.”

  I pull out a notebook and hand her a pen. “They’re simple rhymes,” I say. “We can write one.”

  “I’m no writer.”

  “I’ll start,” I say, and it comes: I don’t want to stand in line, I don’t need to waste my time. Six flights up and no way down, so many creeps for just one town.

  “Your turn,” I say, and Kit writes:

  I watch TV from nine to noon, waiting for miracles that don’t exist. Up so high, lay down in bed. One day I’m gonna wake up dead.

  “That’s awful,” I say.

  Kit likes it.

  Back out we go to hunt for the dope du jour, the bigger bags, the better high. The dealers keep moving, like so many country doctors crisscrossing the fields to treat their neighbors. The police bust them out of business all the time, and then they turn up a day or so later in a new location, often in close proximity to the last, sometimes in the same place. One day we get over to a spot on Rivington in time to see a police bulldozer ram the front door of the building. Next day, business is brisk as before—there’s even a hot-dog stand parked in front. We keep walking.

  We walk past broken stoops, sealed doorways, and gaunt savages, looking to buy works—syringes. “Blue tips,” we call them, like the matches from Ohio. Works, kits, points, rigs, gimmicks, spikes—they’re a long way from the eyedroppers junkies used in the 1950s. Those were bebop; this is no jive, just more disposable. Except everyone uses them again and again, till they’re too dull to pop the skin.

  Kit shows me how to sharpen our points on the side of a matchbox. We rinse them out with bleach. You can never be too careful. A man with one arm has sealed works for sale in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station on Avenue B, but he’s only there at night. Days, we stop into a bodega on Forsythe, where they sell cheap, under-the-counter wine to Bowery bums and clean blue-tips to dopers like us. Here, they cost only a dollar apiece. At most other spots, they’re two.

  We carry our money rolled up in our sleeves, pockets empty, walk close together at a steady pace, and watch all the faces that pass. I learn to differentiate the junkies from the users. Here’s the difference: users travel in packs; junkies are always alone.

  Big Guy calls. He’s back, and what’s-her-name—Spider’s—source has gone dry. Are we going out to cop today, and can I get a couple of bags for him? He’ll buy one for me, he’ll be glad to.

  Sure, I say. We’ll be out there. A couple of other friends want something too, so yeah, I’ll go. No problem.

  “I don’t know how y’all get away with it,” he says. “Goin’ over there. Just the idea gives me the shakes.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess someone out there likes me.”

  “It must be true,” he says, and I agree. It must be.

  The real truth is, I no longer stand out among the living ghosts in the streets. I like the look; it makes me interesting. I’m not the same person I was, and that’s the way I want it. Some days, though, it’s too much work—days we feel sick, days it rains, days when our money is low. Those are days to drink methadone.

  Methadone is legal, but only to those in a state-run program. It’s supposed to help you kick, but your body doesn’t know that. Kicking methadone is harder than heroin. There’s only one difference between the two drugs: methadone you can’t shoot up. If you do, they say, the sediment will clog your veins and kill you. If it doesn’t, you just want to throw yourself under a train.

  Kit has a private methadone connection, a white woman over on Tenth Street, across from the Russian Baths. She’s got a black jazzman husband and two schoolage kids. Every time we go there, she’s folding laundry or moving furniture. The apartment’s small. She sells the juice in two sizes: forty and eighty milligrams, twenty bucks for one, forty for the other. We figure her husband works in one of the clinics. He doesn’t seem to buy from junkies in the program. They’re supposed to drink the stuff on the spot and return for a refill each day, but many hold it in their mouths and spit it back in their bottles once they get outside.

  Our connection insists her juice is clean, no spit. It tastes so horrible I wouldn’t know the difference. Kit thinks the husband is really getting the “biscuits,” the orange meth tablets the clinics break up and dissolve in water or Tang. Kit would rather have the biscuits—easier to take on the road—but the woman says it’s juice or nothing. Her skin is the color of bone dust. With sharper teeth, she’d make a perfect vampire. Kit says it’s the effect of long-term meth use. It sucks your blood, rots your bones. “Shit,” I say. Shopping here may be safer than on the street, but the street, at least, has a life.

  As the weather heats up, so does the market. The police pressure, too. Nearly every day we get locked inside buildings while the cops pass by outside. Same thing happens while the sellers re-up—resupply the house. When traffic is thick, the houses sell out faster than the baggers can put bundles together and quicker than the runners can trade on th
e money, some say upward of eighty thousand dollars a day.

  That’s all anyone talks about on the drug lines—money and drugs. Sometimes sex or weather, but it always comes back to drugs: what brands are “on the money,” where else to cop. Sex, drugs, money—it’s all the same. It’s got the same look and it’s got the same hook, same same. We see it in telephone operators, Con Ed repairmen, shop owners, cabbies, and clerks. We see it in people who look like us, white middle-class users for whom copping is simply hip, avant-garde behavior; in hookers from Third Avenue, some of them women we used to know; and in no small number of drag queens, out of drag. Down here they don’t look too fabulous. Midday, it’s the lawyers and traders from Wall Street, out to lunch. Their partners have no idea, their wives and husbands can’t find them, their bosses are oblivious. We’re out there for the world to see but nobody knows what we’re up to. That’s what everyone thinks—that no one can tell. I know they can’t see it in me. Rico’s always saying how amazing it is I can “pass.”

  I’m careful how I look. Kit says it’s better not to appear too prosperous, but I put on my makeup and clean clothes and walk the streets as if I own them. God knows I’m spending enough money on them. No one bothers us. Oh, occasionally some jerk will yell at us, “Yo! Punk rock!” It’s better than “Fucking dikes!”

  “You’d think women weren’t allowed to be friends,” I say.

  “Do I look really dikey?” Kit asks.

  “No way,” I say. “You’re a star.”

  She says, “You look good to me, too.”

  We laugh together but we don’t hold hands, not on Avenue D. Not anywhere. Too tacky.

  By the middle of summer, the junkie grapevine has been usurped by working journalists. Every night on the news and every week on the front page of the Times there are detailed reports on the activity of the East Village drug trade. It’s as if the neighborhood had its own Dow Jones. They give the locations and the brand names and the best hours of the day to make the best buys. They cover the police activity, too.

  It bothers me to see the name Executive—my brand of choice—emblazoned on the front page of the paper. Executive is white dope. Now everyone will go there. The wait-lines are already excessively long.

  At the stairs, a bouncer asks to see our tracks. This guy always gives me grief. I don’t have tracks, only a few pricks in the crook of my arm, no larger than a bug bite. Kit rolls up her sleeves: she has scars from her knuckles to her elbows, and because I’m with her they let me in. Another creep stands at the “window,” the mail-type slot they’ve cut in the wall of a locked apartment on an upper floor, telling everyone to have their money ready. You put your money through the slot, and a minute later, out comes your stuff. You never see the guy inside. You don’t get to check the bags to see if they’re beat and you don’t read that in the Times. Reporters never get this far. Not unless they’re junkies.

  One very hot day we’re locked in at Executive two hours. “They must be re-upping,” says Kit, when we hear the all-clear and the line doesn’t move an inch. Suddenly, we see Lucky, Sticky’s house manager, races down the stairs and heads for the door.

  “This is too much for me, man,” he gasps. “I can’t take it.” He’s heard about a new place on Tenth Street and B called Lareda. He’ll see me at work. But in the middle of my shift, it’s Rico who runs in the kitchen, his eyes wild, snot running from his nose in glistening green strands. I don’t have to ask what the trouble is. I’ve seen this happen before.

  “You busy?” he says, checking the orders clothes-pinned to the line in front of me, switching his bony hips from side to side, wiping the sweat from his brow. He’s agitated.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Steady rush all night.” I cut a finger slicing a steak for a sandwich but it’s Rico’s appearance making me ill. “Wipe your nose, man, will you? Pick up, damn it!” I yell at a waitress.

  “Pipe down,” she says—one of my favorites, Tina. “This table’s too drunk to remember how to eat.”

  “What about Kit?” Rico mutters, giving Tina the once-over. “She home?”

  “No,” I say, wrapping my hand in a dish towel. “She’s playing a gig in New Jersey.”

  “I need you to go out there for me,” he says, nodding toward the Lower East Side. “Take a cab. Go quick.”

  “I gotta finish these orders.”

  “Don’t make me crazy,” he says. “Finish what you’re doing, then go. Quick.”

  I give Pedro the nod, lay a red snapper on a plate, turn some steaks, pop a French fry in my mouth, and duck out to run over to the spot on Tenth and B. It hasn’t yet made the news. I leave the cab at Avenue A and walk along the park, where I can watch the action in front of me. I see a renovated, fully occupied residence at the corner. A yellow-skinned guy with close-cropped hair is standing on a landing in front of it, wearing a sneer. At my approach, he gives a signal and disappears inside the glass-enclosed vestibule behind him. “Yeah?” he says, as I follow. “What’s up?”

  I hand him forty dollars, he goes inside. “Wait here,” he barks. A minute later he’s back with four bags folded into tiny rectangles of lined yellow legal-pad paper. No glassines here. I like that. Not so sleazy. In the park, I sit on a bench under a tree and undo one of the papers. I cup it to my face and take a snort. Baking soda!

  I race over to Executive, blood dripping from my nose. I still have money for a deuce. On my way out, the door to a shooting gallery under the first-floor stairs swings open and I look inside. It’s a dirty cubicle of a room with a ratty mattress on the floor and a bunch of hard-assed junkies with spikes in their arms, their legs, their necks, their cocks. It’s sickening.

  When I get home that night, Kit tells me she’s had an awful gig. Gloria, the bass player, showed up only minutes before showtime, so high she could barely play. She’d been arrested, copping on Eighth Street. Kit’s disgusted. I show her my folds of yellow paper. “You went there?” she says. “Alone?”

  NOT THE USUAL THING

  As the seasons change, Kit gets sick. It’s not the usual thing. Do I know a doctor? Kit wants a doctor. Doctors have pills. I call my friend Paul who used to be a resident at the local hospital. “Doctor Paul,” I say, one professional to another. “Kit has hepatitis.” I know what it is. I’ve had it.

  He wants to see for himself. We go to his office. I’m right, it’s hepatitis. Paul tells Kit she has to get off the needle. He knows better than to suggest she get off the drugs. The medical profession has the highest incidence of drug addiction of any in the country. But the needle has to go, he makes it clear. Gay cancer has been identified as AIDS and junkies are at risk. Kit is slow to give in. To her, snorting drugs isn’t even getting high. She’ll listen to Paul, though. He’s got stories.

  “I’ll never forget the night an ambulance brought a woman to the E.R. complaining of severe pain in her uterus,” he says. “She’d been masturbating with a light bulb—the three-way kind, you know, the large size? She tried to pull it out but it wouldn’t budge. Too slippery, she said. She tried applying pressure through abdominal contractions—still no go. She contorted herself into all kinds of crazy positions to get it out, but just as she got a firm hold on it, the bulb exploded inside her. She was bleeding quite a lot.”

  “That sounds really bad,” says Kit. “I don’t know why I’m laughing.”

  Paul smiles. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things we see. The things we do. That was nothing.”

  “Tell us.”

  “Well,” he answers slowly, “I probably shouldn’t, but I’ve got to tell someone. Did you know that old cook at Sticky’s—Mr. Blue?”

  “I remember him,” I say. “Died in the kitchen fire. Very sad. Everyone liked him.”

  “It wasn’t the fire that killed him.”

  Kit sits forward. She nudges my foot. It’s pointing toward a counter behind Paul, where I see an open box of syringes. The label says it’s a gross.

  “The paramedics,” Doctor Paul continues. “Th
ey made an error. A serious error. They inserted a catheter in the wrong pipe. Blue wasn’t burned, he choked to death.”

  I can’t believe this.

  Paul’s shaking his head. “No reason that man had to die. We tried to tell the family. I tried. The hospital hushed it up. I thought the family would sue, but all they wanted was to bury him and let it rest. I felt so bad, I went to the funeral. They were a very religious family. They said it must have been God’s will.”

  “God’s will.”

  “That is totally fucked up,” Kit says. “It makes me wonder about my brother.”

  Kit’s older brother had died of cancer in San Francisco a few years before. He was barely thirty. She was with him at the time. Afterward, she collapsed. The family doctor prescribed Valium. By the time she came back to New York, she was hooked. She takes Valium every day now, I don’t know how many. She’s not as open about it as she is about the dope.

  “Most cases aren’t this bad,” Paul explains. “Believe it or not, we’ve got the best E.R. in the city.”

  I clear my throat. “Now you know why we prescribe our own drugs—you have to be stoned just to go there.”

  “I take them now and then, to relax me,” Paul admits.

  “Gee, I take them every day and I’m a wreck.”

  “But you’re an addict.”

  It shocks me to hear him say it. No one’s ever said that before.

  Hepatitis is supposed to lay you up, but Kit spends most of her convalescence on the road with her band. Several times I have to send her drugs in the mail. They go overnight express in cassette boxes to various clubs and motels in the west, wherever she happens to be. When she gets home, the hep is gone. “It wasn’t so bad,” she says. “Nothing to it.”