The Story of Junk

by Linda Yablonsky

  I ask Dean to cut me a better deal. Impossible, he says. Why? I’m turning it over fast enough, building a regular clientele. “It is what it is,” he says. This is the way we talk now, the language of self-evidence: it is what it is, truth is truth, Ruth is Ruth. When you’re looking to get high, when you’re looking to get over, you don’t waste time looking for words.

  I have to find a way to keep our expenses down. If we didn’t indulge ourselves, this would be a piece of cake, but if we didn’t indulge, I wouldn’t be dealing in the first place. I’ll have to work harder. I can’t work any harder. I’m taking in more money in a day than I do in a week at my job, but it all goes back into buying more. Kit complains about this; half our investment is her money. What’s the point of dealing dope, she says, if you can’t get it when you want? We get it when we need, I say. Sometimes when we want.

  Finally, when the winter is nearly over, I make enough profit to buy a warm coat, which I don’t already happen to own. It’s a gangster-style thick navy wool with deep pockets and subtle red stripes in a windowpane pattern—sixty dollars at an East Side thrift store. Some profit. Now I really look like a dealer—good thing I have a job. But I don’t want to depend on drugs for a living. Dealing is just a sideline.

  “Listen,” Rico confides one night. We’re hanging out on his office couch. “Be nice to Sticky,” he says. “Okay? He’s having trouble at home. His wife is threatening to leave him and he’s really depressed. So be nice.”

  He lays a line of coke on my belly and snorts it. It tickles but it doesn’t turn me on. Rico doesn’t do much for me anymore, not since I’ve been with Kit. She does it all, and then some.

  “Nice?” I say. “I’m always nice, especially to Sticky. I love that guy.” And I do. We’ve never touched, not a hug, not a handshake, but for six years our lives have been lived in each other’s faces. He hasn’t just been tolerant. He’s been swell. Forget about the dealing. When I was sick, when I broke my foot on the job, when a former cook in a drug-induced rage punched me bloody in the face, Sticky was always there, paying the expenses, covering my ass. Unlike the grumpy Flint, Sticky never got temperamental, not with me. Fuck his wife—Angie is her name. She’s his second, and not much older than his oldest child. I’ll be nice to him, of course.

  Rico puts some coke on my tongue and sucks it. In spite of myself, this turns me on. “I don’t like Sticky doing dope,” he says. “Man his age, with his bad colon—he’s not up to it. But you know how it is. He says a little goes a long way.”

  “How long?” I say, reaching into his drawers. “In inches?”

  The next night business is very bad, nothing doing in the kitchen. Pedro and I amuse ourselves by creating new dishes no one is there to eat. Then I see Sticky by the coffee machine, glumly pouring himself a cup. His head is bowed, his shoulders slump. I follow him to the office, where I find him at his desk, a shot of brandy in front of him and a bag of dope in his hand.

  “Can I come in?” I ask.

  “Sure,” he says. “Have a seat.”

  “Sticky,” I say. “I don’t mean to get personal, but are you all right?”

  “I’m just bored,” he says. “If I could, I’d close this place and move on. Once I get bored with a joint, it’s time to go.”

  “It’s just boredom?”

  He picks up the brandy, looks through the glass. “You really want to hear this?”

  Not really. But I love this guy. I’ll listen to whatever he has to say.

  He hesitates. “I’m terribly shy around women,” he murmurs. Well, I knew that. In all the years I’ve known Sticky, this is the first time he’s ever looked at me.

  “How’d you manage two marriages?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. The wives—they helped. I was always kind of a nerd.” He strokes his hawklike nose and gives a smile. “It’s funny,” he snorts. Sticky’s asthmatic. “My restaurants have always attracted the crazies, the drunks, and the drug addicts, and I was never into any of it myself. But drug addicts are some of the best people I know. Sure, they’ve got problems, who doesn’t? They don’t take life the way it’s handed to them. They put on a show and the town comes to watch. And I make all the money. Or I did.” He flips through the receipts on his desk with a sigh.

  I wonder what’s happened to the money. “Oh, you know, two wives, four kids, alimony …” He lifts the glass of brandy. “I never expected to go into this business,” he goes on. “I have a law degree, but I never practiced. I tried it for about six months, and hated it.” He smiles as his eyes fall on the bag of dope still in his hand. I offer him a line of mine. He takes it.

  “I was always more interested in art,” he says then, “but I wasn’t much good at making it. I already had a wife and two of my kids—I had to do something. We were living in a small apartment on East Tenth. A lot of artists had studios there, they were my neighbors. They wanted a place to hang out. There was an empty storefront on the block. The rent was cheap, so I took it. I built the place myself, poured the drinks, did the cooking. Hamburgers mostly. Peanuts on the bar. When it was busy, one of the artists or their girlfriends would come in and help out. A couple of them hung their paintings on the wall, so I gave them tabs. I wasn’t making any money anyway. But the word got around, and it drew people in. Good people. Nice paintings.” Now he’s smiling. He puts down his glass, lights a smoke.

  Soon, he says, he moved to a bigger space on the other side of town, a steak house in the Village, taking the artists and the peanuts with him. This place was a mess. The floor was bad so he threw sawdust and peanut shells all over it and they became a symbol, somehow, of the good life. When he got restless, he moved again, this time to an even bigger place, three glass-fronted stories on lower Park Avenue.

  It was at this place I first set eyes on Sticky. I was still in school, but his bar offered a better education, not to mention a higher life. Pop artists, poets, rockers, flaming queens and macho cowboys, black, white, gay, straight—you didn’t see that at the malls. I was dazzled. Reporters were always writing about the faces they saw there, the things people said other people had done. It had glamour—good bodies, big hair, wet lips. Especially on the waitresses. Half the guys in the bar came in just to pick up waitresses. Sticky got one, too. Angie.

  I offer him another line. He takes it.

  A week later Rico disappears. No one knows where he is for days. Then, suddenly, there’s a commotion by the coffee stand in the kitchen, where he’s yelling at a waitress for neglecting to freshen a pot. He stands there, one arm shaking behind him, as he waits for the liquid to drip in his cup. I almost duck when I see him turn in my direction.

  “I’m really worried about Sticky now,” he tells me from the other side of my prep table. He doesn’t speak so much as puff. The dark circles under his eyes are black as coal, his face a mass of competing sharp planes. I can hardly make out his form beneath his clothes. He’s wasted.

  “Well, I’m worried about you,” I say, though I don’t entirely mean it. “Where you been?”

  “I’m fine,” he says, swaying. I reach out to catch him but because I’ve been boning chickens, I’m holding a knife. It clatters to the table as he steadies himself, grips my arm.

  “I’m all right,” he assures me. “It’s that Agent Orange shit, comes and goes. I can deal with it.”

  Rico thinks he’s been affected by wartime exposure to toxic chemicals, but the stuff caked around his nose looks more like cocaine. He’s been in a blackout, he says, but he’s okay now. Woke up sitting in his car at a stoplight in a strange town in upstate New York. Doesn’t know how he got there. Isn’t sure how he got back. Drugs weren’t the only reason I ever climbed into bed with him, but right now I can’t remember what other reason there was.

  Next thing we know, Sticky ends up in the hospital. He’s got intestinal trouble complicated by a liver thing, don’t know what. He needs an operation. A pall falls over the dining room. Crowds keep coming, but they’re thinner. “How’s Sti
cky?” they say. “Is Sticky back yet?” The room’s the same, the food’s the same, or better, but the customers seem lost without him. Even after he recoups, slow nights run equal to busy ones. The art world’s not that big. New clubs are opening, new bistros. The same people are no longer in the same place at the same time. They come, they go. They go. Where the artists go, the world follows. And Sticky’s is no longer the only game in town.

  In April, with spring in the air, I ask Flint for a raise. He fires me. I’ll collect unemployment, I don’t care. Rico’s upset about it, though. He cares. After some discussion, back and forth, I agree to go back part-time, prepping on the day shift, doing lunches. I’m working with Big Guy again, but it’s not the same. I have a business of my own now. Drugs are no sideline. Mainline.

  MY NEW LIFE

  Morning. Well, noon. Kit’s making coffee. Her needle and spoon lie by the bed. “You awake?” she calls from the kitchen.

  “Mmmm,” I say, reaching for the tobacco tin where I keep the dope. Kit comes in and picks up the needle. I put a little dope in the spoon, she adds a little coke. I’ve never done a speedball. Kit says I have to try it. What kind of dealer am I, doesn’t know her drugs?

  Kit cooks the coke in the spoon with the dope. It bubbles and foams. She taps my arm and finds a vein. What a feeling! Like the downhill run of a roller-coaster, like mountains rising suddenly out of a mist—whoosh! The top of my head seems to rise, my limbs grow strong, my feet tingle: I’m weightless. My heart pounds, my eyes snap to attention. I’ve never known such excitement. It’s too good.

  The phone rings. It’s Ridley, a woodworker, somebody’s boyfriend. Okay, I say, c’mon by. The phone again—Matthew. He works in an office across the street, it’s his lunch hour. Can he “eat” with us? Sure. The phone rings. This is Steve. Which Steve? Steve who? Steve we-met-at-CB’s-last-night. Am I in? I pull on a bathrobe. I’m in. I pour a cup of coffee.

  “Who’s coming?” Kit asks. I tell her. “I hope they don’t stay,” she says. “I have to take a shower.”

  “They won’t stay. It’s their lunch hour.”

  “They always want to stay.” And they do.

  My day, my new life, begins. I stop, once, to consider its merit. I look out the window and watch people with jobs disappear into the subway, their postures defensive, their faces empty of expression, jaws set. Not for me, the weekly pay check. You have to take bigger risks to call your life your own. I’ll take one. I’ll answer the phone and open the door and then I’ll take up my pen. Why should I worry? I have my wits. Cunning alone has brought me to this day. No, not cunning. Cash.

  VANCE

  June 1982: I quit the job at Sticky’s and go into business full-time. My cover is gone. I’m a drug dealer with no visible means of support. I know it’s madness: if the cops don’t get me, the customers will. Their claim on my confidence is monumental. So’s the cost. But heroin buffers pain and stress same as it works for pleasure—fast. That’s the drug’s finest point: its efficiency—how quickly the world falls away. Poof! And the unbearable becomes entertainment.

  I dispense with store-bought papers and glassines (I’m watching my expenses), and in my idle hours, such as they are, I make my own bindles by cutting up the pages of art magazines, something my customers can appreciate. I trim all the cutouts into triangles, which I then fold into envelopes and seal with decorative press-tape. I found a whole store of it in a carton Betty left behind. When I run out of art stock, Prescott brings me fashion magazines from Europe, circa 1965.

  “That is so cool,” Magna says, opening a package I made from the crotch shot of a yellow vinyl mini. I know it’s cool. If I’m going to make an art of dealing, I’m going to do it right. Heaven knows I had a good teacher.

  My father wasn’t the only one in my family pushing palliatives and pills. My mother dealt in mail-order vitamins. She bought capsules from a wholesaler and printed labels of her own. I glued them on the bottles myself. She took ads in the back of selected magazines and rented a post box. Then she went about her usual household affairs, talking on the phone and waiting for mail.

  Her business got off to a very slow start. Even family friends and neighbors needed convincing. At the time, most people thought of vitamins as a late form of witchery, suspect and useless. This was when fast food was just taking hold of the nation. You could hardly find a community uninfected by the smell of cheap burgers and fries. Pizza was practically table d’hôte. At school, my friends ate “lunch meat,” whatever that was. Talk about suspicious. Most kids I knew went to school skipping breakfast, but I was never allowed to leave the house until I’d had my egg and downed my multiple.

  The vitamin business failed, but my habit certainly stayed with me. I’ve hardly begun a day of my life without some kind of pill or powder. It’s no different now, but I could use an alternative source of supply—Dean isn’t always available, and the way he does business is a chore. I’m tired of all the waiting. Kit wants to call Sylph’s friend Dickie Howard. Maybe, she says, he can turn us on to his connection.

  “That’s easier said than done,” I brood.

  “Want me to call?”

  I call. I let him know I’m holding. Soon, he’s at our kitchen table.

  I weigh out a thirty-dollar fix and he boots it. “Yeah,” he says. “Oh, yeah.”

  I ask Dickie about his dealer. He’s sort of living with the guy, part-time, doing housework to pay for his dope. He’ll ask if we can meet. Later on, he calls with the address. There’s no bell, he says. We have to call from the corner and he’ll come down to let us in.

  We cab it to a building in the flower district, where Dickie’s dealer holds court in a second-floor loft beneath a massage parlor. Dickie leads us through a clutter of cameras, tripods, light racks, and rolls of no-seam paper at the front of the space, most of which is covered in a carpet of dust. Taller ceilings open up the back, but it’s dark there. The windows are all in the front, and they’re shaded.

  The dealer’s name is Vance. He’s about my age, good-looking, black hair, Italian, but sexless. I have a weakness for Italians, nonetheless—look at Rico. Vance claims to be a filmmaker. Up to now, he says, he’s only made commercials, but he’s working on getting himself a feature. The dope, I gather, is his banker.

  A galley kitchen with a potted palm and a six-foot cat scratch leads up a couple of steps to Vance’s living quarters: a bed, a TV, a pitted wooden table, and a couple of modular armchairs. In an L-shape behind the bed are bookcases filled with videocassettes. Dickie stays in the kitchen, earning his keep, talking to Vance’s girlfriend, Marcy, and two Abyssinian cats. Kit coos over the cats. She says she would have been a veterinarian if she hadn’t gone to art school. She loves animals. At this, I have to laugh. “I’m sorry,” I say. “But we live in a zoo.”

  Vance moves to the table and lays out a sample taste for us to snort. He squirms when Kit wants to shoot it. We snort. The dope is just like Dean’s, but it’s a hundred dollars a gram less. I buy one and we get acquainted, stay another couple of hours to watch one of the movies in Vance’s collection. Videocassette players are still a new thing. No one else I know has one—this is a treat. But Vance has a suspicious vibe—too friendly. Vibes are very important in this business. Intuition pays off. Nevertheless, when I sell everything I’ve bought, I call him again to re-up.

  He’s pleased I turned the stuff around so quickly. Now he advances me a gram on the one I pay for. I hesitate. Vance is a pusher, I think. Go slow. He wants us to watch another movie, but no. Time I was getting back.

  I go home to mix the dope with a little mannitol, not too heavy, just enough to give it some stretch. The phone rings, the door buzzes, it moves. By nightfall, I’m glad I quit the job. I’ll have more time to myself now, more time for my friends and for Kit. Now I can go to her gigs. I love Kit in a lot of ways, but she’s never more impressive than she is onstage, when I love her all the more.

  At a show in a college hall uptown, Poop breaks one of
his skins in midset. People mill around; I’m on the nod. A screeching guitar run raises my head. Kit’s improvising a melody. I’ve never heard her play a melody; her job is rhythm and fills. Sylph stands off to the side, smiling, wondering where this will go. It goes into what sounds like a rocket in reverse, thunderous, grinding, propulsive. Gloria isn’t sure what to do. She’s looking for a place to go in. The crowd hollers and Kit soars. She drops her pick and plays her guitar with maracas, with Poop’s drumsticks, with her feet. It’s wild. Poop goes back into action, finds her rhythm, and Gloria picks him up. Sylph moans into the microphone and they jam, picking up speed and taking off into one of their hits.

  “That was beautiful,” I say to Kit when they come offstage.

  “Really? Was it?” she says. She’s so modest. “I was just fooling around.”

  We go home and dye our hair, both of us. I need a new look. Then Kit wants to play with her toys. I watch her arrange plastic trolls, beads, and lights on her work table and busy herself taking pictures. I try to write, but nothing comes. I play with my makeup, redesign my face. We listen to music and dance, move slow.

  I like the way Kit dances. She’s funny. Her head bobs like a dashboard doll, her fingers mark the beat as if she were testing the wind, north-south, east-west. “You’re a goof,” I say and take her in my arms while the cats pad around us and snuggle. The dawn breaks. Then the bell rings. It’s Vance.

  “I thought you might be up,” he says. He’s brought a guitar, a pre-CBS Fender Stratocaster, worth plenty to a collector. Vance has taken it in trade from some hard-luck customer. “What d’you think?” he asks Kit. “Can you use it?” She can have the guitar, he says, if it’ll help make us better friends. Consider it a permanent loan.