The Story of Junk

by Linda Yablonsky

  “Oh,” I say. “This is it?”

  He knocks to prove it is. No answer. “Not there!” he says, the smile taking over his face. If Honey’s not home, he says, she must be at a cafe down the hill. It’s where she goes to use the phone.

  “Can I drive there?” I ask.

  “You have a parking place?”

  “Not a legal one,” I answer.

  “No problem,” he tells me. “You … New York!”

  I start walking down the road in the direction he points me, picturing Kit sitting sick and alone in the car at the top, having a fit. I’ve been gone nearly an hour. I turn round a bend and there’s Honey walking toward me, barefoot, in a black skirt and black leather vest, her dog scampering on ahead.

  “Veni qua!” she’s saying to the dog. “Glory, va via! Va via!”

  “Your Italian sounds pretty good,” I say, relieved at the sound of her laugh.

  “Yeah, but I don’t think Glory knows it.”

  “I can’t believe I’m finally here!” I say.

  “What took you so long? Where’s Kit?”

  I tell her we have the car parked illegally at the top of the hill and that I’ve been looking for her house for an hour.

  “Gee, all you had to do was come to the bar,” she says. “Grigorio’s there now with Prescott.”

  “Can’t wait to meet him,” I say.

  “Maybe we should go rescue Kit.”

  I’m not sure what she means by “rescue,” not till we reach the car, where a smiling Kit is surrounded by three gorgeous boys fawning over her platinum hair.

  “I didn’t know you could speak Italian,” Honey tells her.

  “I didn’t say a word,” Kit says. “They don’t want me to talk.”

  “Let’s get your stuff,” Honey says, flashing teeth at the boys. “We can have a few drinks and get ready for dinner. Dinner’s at ten here. Plenty of time to relax.”

  “Where were you?” Kit asks as we shoulder our bags. We have trouble balancing their weight on the steps. Positano is all about walking and climbing. It was settled in 800 A.D. and the streets are the same as they were then—broad steps that take you up or down the mountain on either side of the road.

  “This was Vittorio De Sica’s summer house,” Honey says as we approach the door. “Not really his house. We have the upstairs apartment, the servant quarters. But we can at least use the garden, the garden’s great. You’ll love it.”

  It’s a beauty, all right, two levels of fragrance, herbs and vegetables below, a columned breezeway above, facing the sea, its pergola roof wound with grapevines, its lawn full of flowers. The apartment, on the other hand, is just a corridor leading to a small, narrow kitchen, three bathrooms and three bedrooms, all occupied. “We’re a little crowded here this week,” Honey says. “You’ll have to sleep in Mike’s bed till Prescott leaves. Davey Boxer’s here too. That’s okay, isn’t it? Mike can sleep with us or over at his girlfriend’s.” Her son had met an American girl who was here with her mother. “Two queer friends of hers pay for her school in Switzerland—you know the types. They’re here too. So’s Zeffirelli, you know, the director? They say Frank Sinatra is his house guest for the weekend. It’s that kind of town. Fabulous. Everyone comes here. I just wish we had the space downstairs. That’s what I thought we were getting when I rented this place, but the woman who bought the house keeps it for herself. She’s an Austrian but she’s never here. We think she might have been a Nazi. Want a beer? They’re in the fridge. Why don’t you get unpacked and I’ll go find Grigorio.”

  “Can’t wait to meet him,” I say again.

  She leaves us alone on Mike’s small bed. His clothes are lying scattered on the floor. There isn’t anyplace to put our things.

  “Wasn’t she expecting us?” Kit says.

  I don’t have an answer.

  “I’ve never wanted to get high so bad in my life.”

  “Let’s not think about it,” I say.

  “I’m out of meth,” she says.

  I can’t believe it. A month’s supply of five-milligram pills, the doctor had given us. I give her a tab and take another for myself. Before I put the vial away, I count four remaining.

  Grigorio arrives with a bottle of tequila, Prescott close behind.

  “Girls! Girls!” Prescott shouts and throws himself on the bed on top of us. He’s drunk. I want to kill him. “Buona sera!” he shrieks.

  “Prescott,” Kit says. “Get off.”

  “Grigorio,” he says, rolling up against the wall. “Pour the drinks. Tonight, we paint the town.”

  “Very amusing,” says Grigorio. “The whole town’s scared of him. They think he’s kidnapped all the young boys, and the women are furious.”

  “Yes,” Prescott says. “It is amusing.”

  Grigorio’s not what I expected, though I’m not sure what that was. Italian royalty, Honey had said in New York. A Neapolitan count. Could be. He’s slight of frame with flowing dark curls past his ears and the grand sort of nose you get on certain types of nobility. The kind of guy who’s relaxed around men and women alike—a dear. His dark eyes are large and have very long lashes. It’s not hard to tell what Honey sees in him, especially when, after our baths, we saunter in her room. It’s a salon that offers a view of the sea through two windows with double French doors. She’s lying on the bed and Grigorio has a needle to her arm. They look comfortable.

  Grigorio is a registered morphine addict. He gets a weekly supply of glass ampules that each contain a dose of the amber liquid. The box they come in is open on the bed. Kit can’t take her eyes off it. We explain our situation. “No problem,” he says and offers to fix us up with a doctor in Sorrento who runs the methadone program there. I accept this information with a sinking heart, but Kit’s mood rapidly improves. We all sit on the balcony of their room, passing the bottle of tequila and watching the harbor. A few small boats bob on the surface of the water. One is rocking more violently than the rest. “They’re having a good time on that boat, all right,” says Honey. “It’s a good town to fuck in, for sure.”

  But we haven’t come here to fuck. We don’t even do that in New York. We came here to get away from drugs. So far, we’re batting zero.

  The next day is Sunday and the doctor we’re supposed to see in Sorrento is off. Instead, we drive to Naples. I’m returning the rental car and Grigorio wants to cop. Because he shares his prescription with Honey, his supply of morphine is running low. I split the rest of my methadone with Kit and we pile into the car, Honey at the wheel.

  “You have to see Pompeii while you’re here,” she says as we pass it.

  “Sounds good,” I say, watching it go by without interest. I’m more tantalized by the prospect of touring the cop-spots of Napoli. Anyone can do the guidebook thing; I want to know the real Italy.

  We walk through the casbah in the center of town. It seems ancient. No tourists here. These shops sell no souvenirs, no postcards. People seem to be living in the narrow, hilly streets running between small stone apartment houses that are closed to the sun and dusty sidewalks that let it in. They’re neither friendly nor hostile and include an unusual number of dwarfs. It’s odd. We walk up and down until Grigorio spots a kid with a dirty sweet face who looks stoned. He takes us to the hospital, where we find junkies selling their morphine to get money for dope, same as they do at the meth clinics in New York. Same same.

  We shoot up in the car a block from the hospital, Honey and Grigorio still in the front. The sun is beating on my neck. I’m nervous, but not about getting caught. This is the first time Kit or I have used a needle since the endocarditis, and the first time I’ve ever tried morphine. My entire body tingles—shooting morphine turns up the heat. We’re all red as beets. Not Grigorio.

  We sit quiet for a while, watching a funeral procession pass—a horse-drawn cortege laden with flowers and followed by dozens of mourners carrying hankies and more flowers, moaning to the sound of a melancholy brass band. “Just like New Orleans,”
I say. I was there once for a weekend with the Toast, just after the burns on my arms had healed. Those were the days. Days gone.

  We drive to a café on the dock and watch the boats to Capri and the traffic around the bay. Mount Vesuvius is visible in the distance. “I’d love to go up there,” I say.

  “Oh sure,” Honey says. “That’s easy.” It’s a quick ride on the Circumvesuviana, she explains, the commuter train that goes from Naples to Sorrento and back.

  “Yes,” Grigorio says, holding a cigarette to his mouth. “It’s amusing.”

  Grigorio speaks perfect English but he relies on certain words as a kind of spoken shorthand. “Amusing” is one of the words. “Dummy” is another. Everything absurd or repellent is dummy, everything else amusing. He’s a treasury of Italian folklore, regaling us with stories about the Camorra, whose cigarette boats are in the harbor, and how Jesus really became God.

  Grigorio gets a kick out of making fun of the Church, which he holds in affectionate disdain. He makes a living with political cartoons. He draws a few for us. They’re unlike any cartoons I’ve seen before. They’re not funny, not comic. They’re amusing.

  Honey gives me a nudge. “D’you think I should marry him?”

  I say yes.

  We get on the train and head back to Pompeii. It’s only twenty minutes before closing time, but Honey insists. It’s too late in the day for a look at the city; instead we tour the Villa dei Misteri on the outskirts. It’s all of Pompeii I’ll ever see. In the eight weeks Kit and I spend in southern Italy, we never have a moment to return. We’re always going to Torre del Greco, a train stop or two beyond Pompeii. Torre del Greco’s at the bottom of Vesuvius. I never get to the top.

  The train station opens on a tree-filled park not unlike Washington Square but without the fountain, and I come to know it well. Hundreds of dissipated couples and lone hustlers hang out there every day, to buy and sell ampules of morphine. A pharmacy across the street sells the needles—perfectly legal here. Everyone’s hospitable. One couple we meet takes us back to their apartment to shoot up, so we don’t have to use the station john. They live in a tiny cottage with their baby, exactly at the foot of Vesuvius. It’s so small we don’t want to stay, but they insist on making espresso. Each of us gets a spoonful.

  Soon Positano begins to feel just as small. Kit and I want to travel—first stop, Sorrento. The doctor there signs papers that will get us daily doses of methadone from hospitals wherever in Italy we go. I’m detoxing, she’s maintaining. In Venice, Florence, Siena, Genoa, Pisa, and Rome, we visit beautiful churches, beaches, museums, bars, and restaurants, but mostly what we see are emergency and hotel rooms. When we return to Rome for the trip back to New York, I’ve been off drugs for a week. I’ve grown fluent in Italian and learned quite a bit about wine. Life without drugs now seems possible. I’m fine. Then we bump into Prescott at the Pantheon. He’s courting a young half-Vietnamese, half-black American named Clay who has all-too-familiar eyes, but he also has a certain je ne sais quoi and I give him money to cop. The dope he brings looks like cocoa, or the stuff they call Mexican mud, a brown shale. This isn’t the way I was planning to leave the country, but it gets us home safe and sound.

  As I open the door to our apartment in New York, the phone rings. I answer it. “Oh,” someone says. “You are there! Okay to stop by?”

  I cannot believe this. We haven’t even kicked off our shoes. The other line beeps. “Wow, am I ever glad you’re back!” says another voice. I put them both off and call Bebe. She’s had all my customers for two months—I want to collect my commission. And I wouldn’t mind a line to unpack with.

  “You home?” I say. “I have to see you.”

  “Come right over,” she answers. I can hear the relief in her voice. “How are you?” she says. “You good? I can’t wait to see you, either.”

  Bebe’s place is up three flights on Prince Street. Kit leads the way—she could find it blind. “Buona sera,” I say when Bebe comes to the door.

  “Here,” she replies, handing me a package. “Take it.”

  It doesn’t feel like cash. I step inside. “What’s this?” I ask, dreading the answer.

  “There isn’t a lot of money,” she says, looking away. “That Daniel,” she says.

  “Did he do something?”

  “He’s all right, I guess, but he had trouble keeping in stock. Your customers,” she says.

  “I thought they were okay,” I say. Aren’t they?

  “I like them all right,” she tells me. “But I have my own thing to deal with, you know. Daniel’s stuff just wasn’t that good and everyone kept complaining. You know how druggies complain. Actually, I haven’t seen Daniel for a while.”

  “So what’s this?”

  “Oh, I know this guy, he has a friend—you know. I’m sorry there isn’t more money, but that’s the dope I have left.”

  But I don’t want the business back. I only came to get a line.

  “You mean, you really got clean over there?”

  “Not exactly,” I say. “But kind of.”

  “You have to take back the business. I told your customers to call you.”

  “They’ve already started.”

  “You’ll be okay,” she says.

  “Honey told me you were dealing D for some time before we left.”

  “She said that? She shouldn’t of.”

  “It’s okay, I don’t care. Is this it?”

  “Yeah. It’s good.”

  It is. She says I already know the guy she gets it from. Not the dealer, but the friend—Mark Murano? I don’t know him. She offers to bring him by. I would rather buy from her, but she doesn’t want to be involved. She has the other thing.

  She brings Mark to see me that night. He’s a slight, soft-spoken guy who lives in the Village and works in a recording studio as an engineer. He’s making a record of his own, he says. He’s really a musician. Sounds like a junkie to me. I buy the gram he has on him, but I know I’m going to need more. A lot more.

  “Oh well,” he says. “Let’s see how this goes first.”

  “Oh well,” the guy says again a couple of days later, after his third or fourth trip up my stairs. “I don’t really have time for this. I can’t always take off from work—sometimes I’m in the studio all night. I’m probably not doing myself any favors, but if you want, I’ll speak to my friend. Maybe you should deal with him directly.”

  I’m down with that. There’s no escaping this business now. I’m too good at it.

  Mark returns with his friend, a pleasant pixie of a guy with curly black hair and an easy smile. His eyes dance as he holds out his hand.

  “Hello,” he says. “I’m Angelo.”

  ANGELO

  Angelo is a very cagey guy. He keeps a certain distance. It’s his dope that seems like family, and it grows. I need deliveries every day, sometimes more than once. By the end of the year, I’m bringing in a couple of thousand dollars a day, at least. Angelo gets most of it.

  My people who buy by the gram get a discount. My profit is all in the little stuff, in tenths and quarters of grams, so tedious. Most of the quantity customers are other dealers—Vance, Massimo, Sylvia, sometimes Dean. There’s a coke dealer named Jerome whose clients like to boost a little dope, and a small-time frog with dyed hair named Jean-Paul. The others are the regulars who can afford it, like Magna, and Claude, whose paintings are selling so well he’s now, at twenty-five, a rich man.

  Angelo brings me the stuff the way he gets it, in uncut ounces pressed into rock—excellent for smoking. It’s so hard I have to spend a good hour each evening grinding it into powder for the customers, banging it open with a heavy hammer, shaving it down and chopping. For myself, I keep a rock.

  “Mama mia,” I say as Angelo watches me work. “This stuff is harder than diamonds.”

  He wets his lips. “You speak Italian?”

  “Poco poco,” I reply, under my breath.

  He smiles. His mouth is small but his li
ps are full and inviting. His hair curls around his head like thick black smoke. I like his eyes. They’re steady and open, happier than the abandoned, bashed-in look you usually see on a junkie. Angelo looks sort of normal.

  In time, we find another bond—Angelo comes from the restaurant trade, too. He once owned a couple of places on an island in the West Indies, where he now lives on a houseboat. He bought those establishments with money earned from smuggling drugs and sold them for money to buy more drugs. Soon he’ll buy another restaurant, maybe start a chain—maybe I’ll be his chef. Ha-ha.

  Angelo doesn’t do drugs in the Islands. He goes down there to relax on his boat, he says, with his wife and baby daughter. Otherwise, he’s in his hometown in northern Italy. But now he’s in New York and this is business. He picks up a pebble that’s flown off my desk, chops it with a razor. His hands are tough as a streetfighter’s.

  “I wish I could speak more of your language,” I confess. “I love Italy.” I tell him about our trip, the art-and-hospital tour of the provinces, copping in Torre del Greco’s town square.

  “That’s very dangerous,” he says, regarding me with interest.

  “So is smuggling,” I reply. “Anyway, once you’ve lived in New York, nothing’s dangerous.”

  “We’re going to make a lot of money,” he tells me, smiling again. Sounds good to me.

  As the months go by, our relationship never changes. We never break bread together, we don’t go to movies or clubs. I never feel much closer to him than I did on the day we met. He brings the dope and I hand over the cash. We get high and talk. His English is nearly perfect but our common language is dope. Mostly, we just count money.

  Sometimes I make a pickup at his hotel, where I meet an Italian friend of his or two, handsome guys with sly smiles and darting eyes who also have digs in the Islands. We talk about our drugs, our girlfriends, or the weather, how to get an apartment in New York. We never discuss the economy or politics or culture, whether what we’re doing is good or bad. That’s beside the point.