“It’s an old building,” I say. “I like living in a place that has a history.”
“History, we’ve had. Give me the modern, give me the new.”
“Look, it flushes and everything,” I say.
“But where’s the sink?”
“In the kitchen.”
“What a setup,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t see how you put up with it.”
HONEY
March 1983. Another night, just Honey and me in the office. I can’t believe it—she’s written a book! It’s kind of a beauty book. Sixty pages, illustrated, stories that culminate in her recipe for a healthy complexion. Ginger has taken the pictures. I’m trying not to be jealous.
“I wish we could write a book together,” I say, knowing this might be the only way I’ll ever write one.
She looks uncertain. “What kind of book?”
“We could write a manual for drug dealers,” I say then. “About the art of dealing.”
She claps her hands. “That could work!” she exclaims. Her bracelets jingle. “That could happen.” She still looks unsure.
Well, I say, all in a rush, look: we both know the same people, don’t we? Share the same customers? All day long they beat a path between her house and mine, or Bebe’s, another coke-dealing friend who lives around the corner—Kit’s over there now. Between us, we know all there is to know on the subject; what’s more, I’ve already taken notes, in my journal, enough to get us started, anyway … So, what does she say?
“I think I hate writing,” she tells me. She says it doesn’t pay.
“It’ll pay, it’ll pay,” I insist. “Lots of people are dealing,” I say, passing her half a tenth—that’s her usual—“but hardly anyone does it right. We need to establish working guidelines. Living with these drugs is hard enough.”
“Yeah,” she says. “There oughta be a law!”
“I’m working on that one,” I hear myself say. “I’m writing the book that will legalize heroin.”
“Really!” She regards me with awe. I’m kind of surprised to hear it myself.
“If anyone can do it,” she says, “it’s you.” I’ve just published a two-page story in a downtown anthology—one of my customers was the editor. Honey’s got a story in it, too. Hers is about a road trip to Florida in search of some phantom cocaine. Mine’s about unrequited love on dope. We both believe in writing what we know. Collaborating should be easy.
“I don’t know how you make anything on dope,” she says, taking a snort from the bag I’ve just sold her. “It’s so much easier with coke. You get much more volume for the money.”
“I don’t make anything much,” I tell her. (I never say I turn a profit—people take advantage.) “But,” I say, “it gives me material, you know, for writing. People do this dope, and suddenly everything that’s ever gone through their minds is coming out their mouths.”
“It’s interesting, sometimes,” she says.
“I don’t know about that. There’s such a thing as knowing too much about a person.”
“It’s ten times worse on coke,” she tells me. “A hundred times worse. People never shut up, and then they repeat themselves, endlessly, the same shit over and over. I don’t do that, do I?”
“I wasn’t talking about us,” I assure her.
“We should get Bebe in on this too,” she suggests.
I’m not sure I like that. We don’t exactly compete, the three of us, and we don’t exactly not. Honey sends me some of her coke customers when they want a different high and I do the same for her with mine, some of them.
“Bebe’s my main connection,” Honey says with a shrug. “She’s the only one who’ll give me any credit.”
“All right,” I say. “We’ll ask her.”
“Maybe that’s not such a good idea,” she says then. “Keep it simple. Bebe won’t have all that much to add and then we’d have to split everything. It’s so insane—we’ve all got the same people, the same stuff. Bebe deals Downtown sometimes, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say, though this is news to me. “It’s really the same?”
“Well,” she says, watching me, “maybe not exactly the same.”
I ponder this. If Bebe’s dealing dope, she must be getting it cheaper than I am. She’s got that coke over there, too, and a boyfriend who ships pot by the bale. It’s one-stop shopping at her house. This could cost me. And Bebe is Kit’s best friend.
“Don’t you think women make better dealers than men?” Honey says, freshening her lipstick. “Let’s put that in the manual. Men have no guts when it comes to drugs. Nothing but ego, you know what I mean? No pride of purpose. Men are so needy, especially when they’re on drugs.”
“All junkies are needy,” I say. “There isn’t a time when they don’t have a need.”
“And then they want to sit around and get high with you,” she sighs. “I just don’t have the time. Of course,” she adds, “that depends on who they are.”
“You mean,” I say crisply, “they could be Duke or Earl.”
“Oh,” she says. “I heard about that time they ripped off your stash. Earl even brags about it, if you want to know the truth.”
“He brags about it?”
“I know you think Ginger had something to do with it, but I don’t think she knew what was going on. She’s embarrassed she was with them.”
“She knew,” I insist.
“You really think so?”
“I didn’t see any of them bring any of it back.”
“Well,” Honey says, carefully reopening her packet and peeking in. “No one does that.” I watch as Honey slips a fingernail inside the bag and lifts the powder to her nose. “I don’t want to get into this stuff too much tonight,” she says. “I’m sure I’ll need it tomorrow.” She searches my face. “I’m getting my eyes done,” she confesses.
Here’s a touchy subject; I smoke a line myself. I usually don’t get high with the customers, but Honey isn’t just any customer. We’ve been getting high together for years, one drug or another, this night or that. There isn’t much I’ve done she hasn’t been a part of.
“You can’t talk me out of it,” she says. “Don’t even try.”
There is some puffiness under her eyes, but to me it’s just part of her face. It doesn’t look bad. Well, maybe it looks a little bad right now, but it’s the end of a weekend, she’s tired. She picks up the mirror I keep on the desk for shaping lines and gives herself a glance. “I’ve had these bags since I was little,” she says. “God, they’re hideous!” She brushes a finger across the mirror, checks it for powder. “I’ll never have to wake up to these hideous bags again. We’ll all be better off.”
“Honey, you’re gorgeous. You don’t need surgery.” I’m wondering how she’s gonna pay for this. With the kid and all, even with the sideline in coke, Honey’s just scraping by. She’s a junkie, like the rest of us—nothing to spare. “How can you afford it?” I ask. She was facing eviction the month before.
“I found a place that does it cheap. I mean, they don’t do cheap work or anything, I checked. They’re licensed. It’s all right, believe me. I’ve done a lot of research. I went to this one place yesterday and talked to the doctor and he showed me exactly what he’d do. It’s like liposuction for the eyes—it’s no big deal. He agreed I was doing the right thing.”
“Of course he agreed!” I say. “It’s how he makes money.” I sneak a look at myself in the mirror. I’ve got bags, too.
“Sometimes I think you’re too cynical,” she says. “It’s not healthy, you know? Anyway,” she says, tossing back her hair, “it takes, like, twenty minutes, hardly anything, but it changes everything. I’ve read about it. All these women say their lives improved after plastic surgery. Not just their appearance—their whole lives. Every single one. If you feel better about your looks, it gives you confidence. You make more money. They all say it happened to them.”
“I guess it makes sense,” I concede.
“I wish I could buy a little more of this,” she starts to say, peeking again in her package, then closing it. “But I don’t want to get strung out. If only I’d been a painter instead of a writer!” she says, gathering up her papers. “It’s so much easier, don’t you think? Painters have all the fun, especially now. They’re all getting rich. It’s taken me a year and a half to put together even this little book and all I’m getting is a few hundred dollars. You can make a painting in a few hours and sell it for thousands.”
“Honey, come on. Most artists aren’t rich at all. You’re talking about a handful.”
“You don’t get out enough, hon!” She opens her package, takes a snort. “Oh, I don’t know why I had to be a writer! Art is where it’s at.”
Art? I don’t want to hear about art. The most important thing happening in our culture is drugs, that’s what I say. Drugs rule the world, because drugs rule the mind, and drugs are the law of the body.
She looks at me strangely. “Is this what you’re putting in your book?”
I light a cigarette. “It’s as good a place to start as any.”
“I can’t say I agree with you,” she says, looking me in the eye, her voice firm. Her lisp has disappeared. “People everywhere are buying art, and they’re not all on drugs. Not that many are. Some.” She takes another look in the mirror. “Do you have any eyeliner I can use? I have to get ready to go out.”
“What are we talking about?” I say. I want to keep her mind on the manual. “Art is a very small corner of the world, just another business. Books are the real foundation of ideas. Not art. It just seems like it here, ’cause that’s what everyone around us does.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Everything that happens, happens here first. New York is the center of the world and the art world’s the center of that, and that’s where we happen to be. What we do, the whole world watches.”
“The world,” I say—are we having an argument?—“is focused on the price of beans. It’s about money, not art. Money. And wherever there’s money, there’s drugs. And wherever there are drugs, there’s more money. Drugs are where it’s at.”
“You gotta get out more, hon! See more different kinds of people. When was the last time you went anywhere?”
“I haven’t,” I admit. “I see the news on TV.”
“Don’t watch,” she says. “It’s not real.”
I want to change the subject. “What about your eyes? They’re real. Is this surgery going to be painful?”
“Not on your stuff, it won’t be,” she laughs. “Your dope is the best.” I’m proud of this, I have to admit.
“You want a line?” I say, laying it out on the mirror. I can see her bindle’s empty.
Her eyes go wide. “Really?” she says.
“Mmm … don’t tell Kit.”
The next night, Honey’s back early, her face swathed in a wide silk scarf. She’s had the operation. Ginger comes with her. Prescott, too.
“How was it?” I ask. “A success?”
Honey takes off the scarf and starts to peel the bandages.
“Oh,” Prescott says, spinning through the kitchen, waving his hands in the air. “This is so exciting! Just like the movies. It’s like a movie, isn’t it, Kit? Let’s have some music! We must have music! Come,” he says with a sobering stare. “This is a major moment.”
“It’s a party!” Ginger shouts. She’s acting pretty friendly, but I’m keeping an eye on her anyway. Kit guards the bedroom door.
“Darling,” Prescott calls to Ginger. “Where’s the camera?”
“I’m way ahead of you,” she says, a strobe in her hand. “Okay, Hon, let ’er rip.”
Honey moves to the mirror over the sink and delicately lifts the gauze.
She looks the same as she ever did.
“Gorgeous,” says Ginger.
“I can hardly see the stitches,” I say, admiring.
“There’s still some swelling,” Honey explains. “But you can see the difference, can’t you? I can. This is a face I can love—don’t you love me?” She flashes us her Hollywood grin.
“Oh, Honey,” says Ginger. “Oh, baby.”
Honey’s eyes mist over. She shakes her head. “This mascara,” she says. “It always makes me cry.”
ALLOVER DRUGS
Ever since I came to this city, it’s been the same: drugs all over, allover drugs. Once they find you, they stalk you, like Dick. The city’s full of them, drugs and dicks, they chase you, and that’s the truth. The search for bliss never ends. There’s no better high than rapture, except the ability to sustain it. Each return to the spoon or the straw holds that promise, or that threat. Enterprise is all it takes to access this condition—dollars and cents, which by the spring of 1983 are in ever greater supply.
A junk-bond boom on Wall Street is flooding the underground economy with a steady flow of disposable cash. “Discretionary income,” they call it, and some of it trickles down here. The world seems made of junk: junk money, junk food, junk stores, junk powder. I got into junk at just the right time. Boning chickens never earned me any bonuses, that’s for sure. High time I did something real.
In the daytime and early evening, I deal to the customers. Nights the suppliers come in. I pay for one with money from another—I’m always juggling books. Not that I keep records. As long as money keeps changing hands, everyone’s happy. Everyone but Kit.
“We never do anything together anymore,” she complains.
“We live together,” I say.
“But we don’t do anything.”
Not together. I see most of my clients alone. She stays in the bedroom, or she’s out. Her public image makes her self-conscious, though most of our friends are just as visible. She doesn’t think of so many of them as her friends. This is my territory and it’s taking up space in hers. What can I do? I had a life before junk, and some of these people are holdovers. One of them is Bill, an old non-drug friend of Belle’s who also befriended me.
Bill’s sick. Bill has AIDS. Bill’s dying. Belle sees him now and then, brings him food, gets him medicine. I’ve been meaning to go but my hours are so strange and he has to rest; I just haven’t found the time. Belle keeps me up on his devolving condition while I dial in occasional visits by phone, but one day while Kit’s at rehearsal, he gives me a call on his own.
“You know my situation,” he begins.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m sorry you’re so sick. I hope you’re not too uncomfortable.”
“I have some money,” he says. “I was hoping maybe you could help me.”
“What do you mean ‘help you’?” I’m sitting at the scale, there’s someone with me—Belle. Out of the corner of my eye, I spy one of the cats, my skinny tiger, perched high on a shelf near the ceiling. He’s listing to one side, eyes half-closed—I can’t believe it. He’s nodding! How did he get into the stuff? What a question. How could he avoid it?
“I want to sleep,” Bill says. His voice is muffled. “I want to sleep a long time. You know what I mean. I don’t want to say it on the phone. Can you help me out? How much to put me out of my misery? You don’t have to come here, I’m not a pretty sight. I can send someone. There’s someone here now. That all right?”
This is more than I bargained for. Do I really have to do this? This stuff that turns men into monsters and monsters to mush, this drug that makes shadows look like dreams and desire feel like loathing, what does it make of me? An angel of mercy or an executioner?
I lower my voice to speak. I don’t want Belle to know who this is. She’ll turn on me, she’ll freak. “I’m sorry,” I whisper to Bill. “I can’t have anyone I don’t know coming here right now. I just can’t.”
“You know me.”
My God, this is difficult. The guy’s in terrible pain. I can hear it. When I got into this business, I knew I was taking my own life in my hands. I didn’t know how many others would give me theirs.
“Let me think about it a bit,” I say.
/> “Will you call me?”
“Yes.”
“Soon?”
“Well, I’m working right now—”
“Please, can’t I send my friend? I can’t even describe how awful this is.”
“Isn’t there someone else you can call?” There has to be someone.
“Not Belle,” he says. “Please don’t tell her, okay? I know this is a hard thing to do. I wouldn’t ask you but … I’m asking.”
“Can I call you back? I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now. I’ll try to come see you later myself.”
“Not too much later, okay?”
I hang up and turn back to Belle with a shiver, spilling the dope in my hand on the table. Some of it falls to the floor. Belle moves to catch it, her eyes meet mine. “I’ll get it,” I say. But I don’t.
She sits back in the chair. “What’s up?”
“This guy,” I say, busying myself at the scale. “Friend of a friend, has AIDS. I think he’s dying. Wants some of this,” I tap the table, “to die with.”
“How awful,” she says, her mouth active, her breathing long. “This horrid disease. Deeply sad. And frightening. It’s not always possible to know what you need to about a person, is it? And always to remember where you’ve been—there are so many reasons one might not want to.”
“I suppose we ought to get tested,” I say.
“I suppose,” she concurs, and purses her lips. “Have you heard anything about Honey?”
“I heard she had her eyes done.”
“Well, I heard she has HIV.”
“Why would anyone say a thing like that?” I feel my temperature rise.
Belle lays a hand on mine, the hand now holding the dope. “Because of that guy,” she says, in her fill-in-the-blank way. “You know who it is. The one who made that devotional movie, what’s it called—?”
“Thrill Sucker?”
“That’s the one. He died the other week.”
“Did Honey have an affair with him?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t ask. I think she shot up with him or something.”
The Story of Junk Page 13