I don’t like this. Selling drugs to people with money is one thing; taking their things when they run out of it, another. I’m not going to be responsible for anyone’s sad life—I don’t want it on my mind. Kit doesn’t, either. “Thanks,” she says, “but the neck’s too big for me. I’ll never be able to play it.”
I’m impressed: that Strat is equipment she’d die for. I seem to be only just getting to know her. In the weeks that follow, I come to know her band better, too. They’re an amusing bunch, and they’ve taken a liking to me. They even invite me on a tour.
I don’t explain why it’s so hard for me to get away. Impossible, really, but I can go out on the town. There are lots of new clubs. The best one isn’t far from where Kit and I live and we go there a few nights a week.
The doorman waves us through the crowd stalking the entrance, hands me a pass to the lounge for VIPs. It’s like this wherever we go—red carpet. It’s Kit’s celebrity, my private cachet. Drinks don’t cost me, either. One of the bartenders is a customer. So’s the DJ and some of the crowd. “Oh,” Belle will whisper, or Honey, or Cal. “You holding?” But I never carry anything in the clubs. I’m there to drink and dance.
When I do go home, the party comes along. Sometimes Vance is in it. He can’t get enough of our scene. First I think he’s looking to steal my action, but all he wants to do is hang out. When Kit plays in one of the rock clubs, we invite the other bands on the bill. Vance wants to know them, too. They come from England, Australia, California; white hair, black hair, blue. Neither Kit nor I sleeps much or eats much but I don’t seem to care. I’m not tired and I don’t feel hungry. I don’t feel anything. That’s the idea.
TRUST ME
On a night in late December I get a call from Ginger Snaps, a photographer I know from the clubs. She wants to stop by with her friends Duke and Earl. Earl’s okay but he ODs a lot and Duke’s into total nodding. They bore me. Ginger’s a little more responsible. She’ll make them behave. “Don’t you trust me?” she squeals. “We’ve been getting so close—aren’t we friends? I live for my friends. You can trust me.”
Trust? This is the first time I’ve ever had Ginger in my house. She’s usually tending bar in a saloon near Times Square—that’s how she pays the rent. I like Ginger well enough, but sometimes she gets too personal. She’s making a photographic record of her life and wants everyone in it to play themselves—fucking, shooting up, looking for love, and acting natural. That’s her thing—naturalism. Spontaneity. Ginger goes for the gut. There’s no telling where she’ll turn up: at your party, on your blanket at the beach, in your bedroom. She takes that camera everywhere, like the family dog. She makes me feel exposed. I don’t want my picture taken by Ginger or anyone else. That’s all I need—proof of my existence.
We sit in the living room, listening to music. I do the thing, and Duke and Earl tie off. Ginger whips out her camera.
“I can’t have pictures,” I tell her.
“I can,” she says, and takes one.
“Not here,” I say. “Please. I have to keep the profile low.”
She wanders into the dressing room next to the john. “Can I try some of this?” she says. My new lipstick. I go into the room and Kit follows, so does Duke. “Oh, let me see,” he says. He wants to try some, too. Earl stays in the living room.
“Gorgeous,” says Ginger as she tries the various cosmetics on my bureau. Then she starts rooting through my jewel case. “What are these?” she breathes, picking up an oversize ring with a gargantuan paste diamond and a glittery bracelet I wore last New Year’s Eve. She stands in the mirror to fluff her frizzy red hair, tucks in her ample boobs. She’s distracting. Then I remember I’ve left the dope tin lying out on the coffee table. I turn, but Duke’s standing in my way. I make a move to pass but he’s thumbing through my clothes, lost in thought.
“Can I get by?” I strain to see over him. He looks at me as if he doesn’t understand. “I want to change the record,” I say.
“But I like this one,” he says.
“I have a better one,” I tell him and push past. Nothing seems amiss in the living room. Earl’s looking through the records on the floor, the tin is where I left it. I pick it up, slip it in a pocket. When I turn, they have their coats on, then they’re gone.
The phone wakes me in the morning. It’s Ridley. He’s just back from California, where he used to be a surfer. Even his hair is wavy, kissed by the sun; his voice speaks of coastal mists and easy living. He wants to come by right away. Okay, I say, but I’m not dressed.
“So?” he says in his misty way. “That’s exactly how I like you.”
I go into the tin for our a.m. dose. My heart stops. It’s empty. “What’s the matter?” Kit says. I don’t answer. My brain pushes against itself. When Ginger left with Duke and Earl, we watched the end of two movies on TV and fell out. Where did I put the stuff? Did I stash it? Yeah, that’s what I did. I’m always hiding it somewhere. You never know if the cops are going to surprise you in the night. You never know who may walk in. Better safe than sorry.
I go back in the closet and look through everything I own. I look in the oven and under the floor. Then it dawns. Those creeps. Those fuckers. What a sucker I am, what a fool. How could I not have known? They’re a tight little clique, almost a ménage. It’s a conspiracy, they did it together. Earl took the dope and the other two provided cover. I’m furious.
Now Ridley’s at the door. I let him in and tell him what’s gone down. “I know those guys,” he says. “Never liked them much. They’re slick.”
“They’re junkies,” says Kit.
“They’re friends,” I insist. “They know I’m not rich. I have nothing.”
“You have drugs,” Ridley says.
“Call them,” says Kit.
“Call them? What are they going to say? Oh yeah, we were stoned, we didn’t know what we were doing? They knew.”
“You’re too trusting, maybe,” Ridley says. “Too nice. They’re not.”
“I thought they were.” I think of the time I gave Earl a kitchen job, when he was on the skids. He’s always saying how much I mean to him. Ginger’s friend or no, I’ll kill him.
“You did leave the dope lying out in the open,” says Kit. “In a way, I can’t blame them.”
“Maybe they didn’t do it,” Ridley says. “Maybe it’ll still turn up.”
I call Ginger. “Wake up,” I say. “We have to talk.”
She doesn’t know a thing about it. This is shocking. She can’t believe Earl would steal with her there. She’d be over him in a minute, and they’ve been friends since childhood. He worships her. She’ll speak to him, she says. She’ll call me back. Keep looking, she says. Maybe I put it somewhere and forgot.
Vance calls. “I gotta see you,” I say, knowing I do, but what’ll I tell him? Yesterday we were eating popcorn together and watching movies. Now I owe him a thousand bucks.
Kit’s feeling sick now, she won’t stop grumbling. She wants me to go back on the street. Ridley offers me money to go. “I’d come with you,” he says, “but I’m a sissy out there.” I look him up and down, six feet four inches of milksop. I should specialize in macho wimps, I think. I’d be in clover.
I look out the window. It snowed during the night. I look for my clothes. They feel gummy. “Don’t go away,” I say to Ridley.
“I’ll make coffee,” Kit sniffs. It’s cold in the apartment.
“Just keep looking,” I say. “That stuff has to be here somewhere.”
I get a cab and head over to Eighth and C. There aren’t many people out, it’s too cold. Even the dealers are lying low, not all the houses are open. The sky is gray. As more snow begins to fall, I follow a couple of likely prospects across an empty lot and into the back of a building missing all its doors and windows, no protection from the wind. The interior’s been gutted, but parts of the top floor are visible, mostly the beams. There’s a guy up there straddling a rafter, holding a bucket attached to a rope. A
dozen or so shivering fools like me are waiting on the ground below. There’s no floor under us, dirt and rubble only. The only light comes from a single emergency bulb and whatever daylight penetrates the gloom from outside.
I watch the people in front of me put money in the basket. The guy on the beam hauls it up and sends it back down to a “spotter,” who tips the basket just enough to let the customer take out the dope.
How does the guy get up there? Talk about no visible means of support! I marvel at this enterprise for a minute, then it’s my turn. I put my money in the basket and watch it rise. After too long a wait, the basket descends. I lift out the dope. “Next,” growls the spotter. I move on.
In the shadows along the edges of the space, I can make out a few lurking figures heating their cookers over low-burning candles. I walk to a wall and open one of the bags. I can’t wait to get out of this frozen cave but I can’t stand the way I feel. I snort a line, fast, some of it misses my nose. Damn. I start to walk. It tastes all right, may even be good. At least it’s not beat. I find another cab and run up the stairs to the apartment.
Ridley and Kit are in the kitchen, exactly where I left them, both of them jiggling their limbs.
“How is it?” Kit asks.
“Not bad,” I say. “It’s the new Black Mark.”
“Maybe we should get more.”
“You go.”
“Let me get straight first.”
“I really admire you girls, copping like this,” Ridley says. God, he’s smarmy. “I don’t know why, I just can’t.”
“All you big guys say that,” I tease. A lighter mood has hit me. “You’re nothing but chickenshits in gorilla clothing.”
He offers to stake me to a bigger buy so I can make up some of the money I owe Vance. “I may be chickenshit,” he admits, “but you can’t say I’m not a good guy.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I agree. But you never know.
Kit leaves to go cop and Ridley goes with her, to a bank machine for the cash. I don’t keep money in the bank, only enough to cover the bills—no paper trail for me. I sit in bed and answer the phone. By afternoon I’ve made up a third of the money, but we haven’t enough dope to get us through the night and I can’t keep this up much longer. My business is young and Vance isn’t going to wait while it grows. He needs what I owe him to buy more material for himself. He’s already called three times. I keep hoping the stuff from last night will turn up. Sometimes things like that happen.
It sort of happened to my father once, I tell Kit later, when he was in Paris during the Second World War. He told me the story on one of our drives to see my mother, who was then in the hospital and not doing well. Neither my dad nor I wanted to think about what might happen next, so I asked him about the war—the only other time he’d been separated from my mother. A funny thing happened while he was at the front. There had been a lot of killing at Bastogne, but Paris had been liberated and Dad was given a three-day pass.
Before he left camp, he said, the men in his company who had to stay behind gave him money for things to send home. Nine thousand dollars, it was, all told. “Combat pay piles up!” he said. He didn’t say he was bright. Dad had lost his wallet some time before and had picked up a European-style billfold. He stuffed the money into it and pushed it into a back pocket.
Somewhere between Verdun and Paris, bouncing along in a troop truck, the wallet must have fallen out. Dad didn’t notice until they were driving into the city. He’d been infiltrating enemy territory for some time but he never felt as afraid as now. If I go back and tell them I’ve lost their money, they’ll kill me, he said to himself. They’ve got guns, after all. They’ll kill me.
Some of the guys on the truck owed him money. They paid up then, so Dad wouldn’t have to be in Paris without a sou. Two thousand dollars, he collected. He could still recall the dinner he had that night: bottle of wine, soup, salad, main course, dessert, all for twenty francs. A franc was worth two cents, American, then. He said it was fantastic.
After dinner, he was strolling down the boulevard with two of the other men, when someone approached from behind and slapped him on the back. He wheeled around swearing, “You S.O.B.!”
“Well,” Dad explained, “it was Jacques Perrier. He and I had worked the hedgerows in Normandy together, after the beach. We did sniper patrols. He was with the underground, the F.F.I.—you know, the Cross of Lorraine? He wants to show me a good time while I’m in Paris. I says, Thanks, but I don’t have any money, and I tell him the story of losing the wallet. Gee, he says, you have anything? I says, Yes, and I show him the two thousand, which, out of nine, isn’t enough. So he says, Look, leave it to me. I’ll get you some money.
“He takes me to a gambling house. Pick out whatever game you want, he says. I look around. I don’t know what to do, I never gambled. Just look around, he says. So, I’m lookin’. And I’m lookin’ at the roulette wheel.
“Now, these gambling houses were not legit. They were an open secret, like a little underground. So, this character goes and talks to another guy and comes back and says, Why don’t you play some? I realize I’ll be shot dead for what I’ve got left anyway, what’s the difference? I put some money down. And I win.
“They’re letting me win, of course. When I’d won another two thousand bucks, I quit. I probably could have stayed there all night and won all I needed but I’d had enough, I’m just not a gambler. I says to Jacques: Look. You literally gave me this money. I know what you’ve been up to. But now, I’m out.
“He walks me back to my hotel, it’s pretty late, and then he says, You have any cigarettes? Any salt? Chocolates? So I says, Yeah—I’d purposely brought these things for trading—I had a carton of Luckies, a dozen Hershey bars, and four bars of Lux soap from the Army PX, which travels with you. You can get anything in combat, it’s all free. So he takes the stuff, everything I have. I says, Jacques, don’t get me in trouble for this. He says, No, no—I won’t get you in any trouble. I’ll get you more money.
“Cigarettes were going for a dollar-fifty on the black market—they were supposed to cost twenty cents. So fifteen dollars a carton was a lot of money. I don’t know what he got for the soap and the rest—I gave him some tobacco and a box of cigars, too. I figured, well, he helped with the gambling thing. Let him keep it. I didn’t expect to see him again.
“Next morning, after breakfast, I’m walking down the boulevard, you know how wide they are in Paris, and this guy across the road is waving a fistful of money and yelling at me. Yelling my name! I’m pretending not to see or hear—MPs are everywhere. I can’t be caught doing business on the black market. He comes running over, shoving money in my face. Don’t bother me, I says. Just walk behind me, willya?
“So he gets behind me and follows me back to the hotel. He pulls money out of a bag and I take it, peel off about a third, and give him the rest. No, he doesn’t want it. I says, Look, how much do you make? He’s a captain in the French army and the guy’s getting a lousy twenty dollars a month. I says, Look, I’m a lot wealthier than you are. Take it. I had to shove it in his pocket and throw him outta my room!”
So Dad went shopping in Paris. He bought perfume for Mom, a new wallet for himself, and as many of the items on his company’s list as he had money for. He went back to his outfit expecting to be flayed, if not killed, and distributed the goods, explaining what had happened to the money. “I knew they didn’t believe me,” he said, “but they didn’t say anything, not a word. That disturbed me.” He said he still remembers that silence.
A few weeks went by, during which he earned the rank of lieutenant. This made the situation worse. Not only did the men distrust him because of the money, now he was their superior and they had to salute him.
“Well,” he said, “they ‘sirred’ me to death, but before we went on another mission, I explained that if anything went wrong, it was my ass, I’d take the blame. That’s all the lieutenant’s bar means. Otherwise, I’m eating and sleeping with them as
before, probably dying with them, too. So, anyway, it worked out. They warmed up.
“Two weeks later, I get a letter from an MP detachment outside of Verdun: a wallet has been found on the road. Will I please reply by describing the contents and how they should dispose of it? Who would return a wallet with all its contents? I mean, I grew up on Avenue D. It must be a chaplain, I think—one of some stripe. I ran around the whole outfit showing off that letter. See, I says, I really lost it!
“I returned a letter with a description of the wallet’s contents and asked that the finder be given a reward, returning the balance by money order.
“Then we’re on a drive, and I’m in my jeep at the end of the column as usual—tanks first, jeeps and trucks in the rear—and a mail jeep comes rolling along and tosses me a bundle. I open it. There’s my wallet, with everything in it. They never took anything out.”
“This is a true story,” I say to Kit, who doesn’t believe me, and though I know I’m my father’s daughter, I also know nothing like this will ever happen to me.
IT SUCKS
This sucks. I’m lying in bed, knees to my chest, staring out the window. It’s night. My genitals pound, I’m swimming in jelly. Kit lies coiled beside me, rolling from side to side.
“Must you jerk around like that?” I say.
“Oh, leave me alone. Why do you think they call it kicking?”
I know why. I sit up, legs over the side, feet on the floor. My knees leap into my face. A sour odor finds its way to my nose. B.O.
I stand beside the bed, tear at my clothes. My skin feels like papier-mâché. I have hot flashes, then I’m chilled to the bone. My calves twitch inconsolably.
A venomous rage snakes through my veins and lodges in my throat. I can’t contain it. “I don’t know how you talked me into dealing,” I tell Kit. “If it weren’t for you, I would never be like this.”
The Story of Junk Page 10