The Story of Junk

by Linda Yablonsky

  The food comes fast; it seems warmed over. I try the Thai noodles but I don’t swallow well. Mary Motion can’t eat her rice either. Maybe when we’re in Singapore, we say. Maybe then we’ll eat. We watch the rain.

  Later, Mario says he’s paid for the stuff but he has to go back at six for the pickup. He wants me with him this time. A secret smile sneaks across my face—my private face, the one I never show the world, the one I keep under the skin, where this life can never betray it.

  At five-thirty I’m in the pedicab with Mario. The driver knows where to go. I worry about that, but Mario, of course, says not to. He’s paid off the driver, whose name is Chuck. We pedal onto a wide concrete bridge that crosses the River Ping. Chuck stops by a roadhouse sitting on the riverbank. Graceful trees hang low over water that appears still and glimmering in the late afternoon sun. “Wait for me here,” Mario says. “I won’t be long.”

  I’m the only customer in the bar, a rustic barnlike room with a few scattered picnic tables. The whole place is varnished knotty pine. It reminds me of the one Catskill Mountain hotel I ever went to, when I was fourteen, but without the Ping-Pong. The slight Thai barman is setting up for the evening, washing glasses, polishing the bar. I ask for a beer and go out on the back deck to wait. To pass the time I watch the traffic on the opposite shore, study the sun going down. I wish I knew where Mario was. “Three or four houses up the road,” he said when he left. I wish I could see which one, but the trees—

  I wish it were me making the pickup. I want to see who these people are, how they do it. Mario says it’s a family and that they’re very organized, very professional. Someday, I reflect, I might want to make this trip on my own. No, what am I thinking? I never want to come this way again. I want to get my dope, make my money, and get the hell out of this business, if there is a getting out. At the moment, it seems impractical.

  Mario hasn’t returned when I finish the beer. I’m restless. It must look strange, me sitting here drinking by the river, a white girl in black clothes, alone. I stare at my sneakers. I look to see where the barman is. He’s watching me through a window. I light a cigarette, signal for another beer.

  I wish I could like what I’m doing. It’s not so bad, really, I guess. I’m having a vacation, I’m out of New York. I smoke and drink the beer, watch the sun, the lilies floating on the water, the bicycles gliding slowly across the bridge. It looks like the Pont Neuf in Paris. I sit in the twilight, still as a Buddha. I feel calm inside, pleased I’ve been handed this good dope, this good day, this good hour. I’m on a mission, that’s what it is, this is important. I’m hauling back pleasure for a lot of worried people who need me.

  No, it’s not a mission, it’s just a job. I have a business and I’m doing my job. I’m doing the right thing—I’m lucky. I’m lucky to be here. Not everyone gets opportunities like this. For a fleeting moment, I remember my life, a tiny speck on the floor of my imagination. I don’t know where I am or what comes next, maybe never did. All I ever wanted was to feel swallowed whole. But in my dreams, I was always suffocating.

  Even as a child I was afraid of my dreams. My parents would tuck me in bed and turn out the light, and when the door closed I’d lie there and wait for sleep and push it away when it came. When I was five, my Uncle Jack died in a car crash, killed in an instant. I began having a recurrent dream. It was a Humpty Dumpty sort of dream that began at a mortared stone wall.

  My great-uncle Willie was there with me, leaning on his cane. He was my mother’s uncle, but she looked to him as a parent because her parents had both died young. He was old enough to be her father but, unlike my mother, he seemed young enough to be my friend.

  With Uncle Jack dead, Uncle Willie became my favorite relative. He was my favorite because we shared a secret. Whenever my family visited him and my parents went out, we stayed up late together and watched wrestling matches on TV. We didn’t have a TV yet in our house. Commercial TV was only about as old as I was then and most people didn’t have it. My great-aunt and -uncle had TV but no children—not counting my mother, who had been born to my great-aunt’s twin sister, probably a suicide. I don’t know that for sure, because my mother never told anyone how my grandmother died. “Of a broken heart” was all she ever said. “At least,” I told her once, in a fit of anger, “at least she had a heart that could be broken.”

  This great-uncle was a believer in physical culture. When he ran from the Nazis at the outbreak of World War II, he got out of Germany and went to England, where he worked in a cousin’s gymnasium. He taught swimming and weight lifting, and every day he shaved his head. He left a few hairs on top, which he would carefully comb and position with Brylcreem. At the gym he coached the wrestlers. He didn’t wrestle himself, because he’d come to England with a head injury. He also acquired a cane. I never knew why; his injuries were never apparent. A lot of the time he just let the cane hang over his arm, but he didn’t go anywhere without it.

  Under his mattress Uncle Willie kept a silver flask that was always filled with brandy. When we stayed up to watch wrestling on TV, we drank from the flask. That was our secret. We stayed up after hours and took nips of brandy, he from the mouth of the flask, me from the cap. Then I’d fall asleep.

  In my dream we stood before this high crumbling wall passing the flask. On one side of the wall thousands—thousands—of people were crowded together in the shadows, screaming for release from a pit behind the wall. They were badly dressed and many had crutches, like my great-aunt, who had a broken hip. Everyone was pushing against the wall, as if they could topple it with the sound of their screams and the weight of their agony—as if they could simply push it away, as I did the arrival of sleep.

  My uncle, because he needed a cane, couldn’t scramble over the wall. Also, he was too short. I, a child of five, was even shorter, but I had get-up-and-go. Also, because this was my dream, I could do anything that seemed like the right thing.

  I was able to boost my uncle to the top of the wall, and I, finding toeholds between the old stones, could lift myself up after him, above the screaming minions. Whenever we reached the top and knew we could jump over, I woke up, breathing hard. I had to sing myself back to sleep. I sang a lullaby to the crippled souls imprisoned behind the wall.

  Many years later, many, but before I found drugs, Uncle Willie was living in a home for the aged in the Bronx. Every now and then I’d hop a D train in the Village and go to see him. One of the last times I went, Uncle Willie wasn’t in his room. My aunt was dead by then and I knew he often wandered the halls of the home talking to the ladies. They all seemed to have a crush on him. One of them was his new girlfriend. They were both in their middle seventies.

  I went down the hall to the girlfriend’s room to see if he was in there. She hadn’t seen him since the morning. She wasn’t feeling well that day. I left her alone, went into the cafeteria and then out into the garden. No uncle. Finally I went to the desk in the lobby to look for a nurse. She disappeared a moment and returned with an administrator. The administrator told me my uncle’s rent had not been paid that month and what could I do about it? My uncle’s expenses were usually paid by checks that came from the German government—war reparations. If they hadn’t come, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. All I had was a token for the D train. I didn’t tell the woman about the token. I asked where my uncle was, but she didn’t know. She looked at the nurse. The nurse then said my uncle had gone out for a walk and hadn’t returned for lunch.

  A social worker appeared from an inner office. “Are you a relative of Mr. Winter’s?” she asked. I told her, Yes, I’m his niece. “Your uncle had an accident,” she said. “They just called from the V.A. hospital up the road. They have him over there. Someone found him collapsed in the street. They may not let you in, but maybe you should go on up there.”

  The V.A. hospital was at the top of a steep hill a few blocks away. It was an old building that smelled of urine and floor wax and antiseptic. As I walked down a hall past wa
rds of up to forty beds, I saw men without legs or teeth or eyes, lying on cots or sitting limply in wheelchairs, coughing, grunting, or staring. A lump formed in my throat and stayed there.

  I found my uncle in a room with six other men lying quiet in their beds. This was the cardiac intensive care unit; they thought he’d had a heart attack. His face was red with the effort of staying alive. The stubble on his head was visible. My first thought was, If he could see that, he would have a heart attack.

  As I sat down by his bed, a young East Indian doctor approached. They couldn’t really keep my uncle in the V.A. hospital, he explained, because my uncle was not a veteran. But, he said, they were afraid to move him. They were waiting for the home to decide if it would pay his expenses. I explained that my uncle received a hefty check from Germany every month and I was certain it would pay his expenses. Well, said the doctor, they wanted to perform a spinal tap, but they needed a family member’s written permission. Would I sign the form? I had just turned twenty-one. I could sign the form, but I didn’t want to. I’d never heard of a spinal tap. I called my mother.

  Her response was just short of hysterical. I told her not to worry, Uncle Willie seemed safe and comfortable, and maybe the spinal tap wasn’t necessary. We decided to wait. When I returned from the phone, my uncle looked frightened. He squeezed my hand. He wanted to go back to the home. Would I take him? He was sure he could walk. The doctor warned me against moving him. I told Uncle Willie to sit tight, I’d be back the following day.

  Next day I was on the D train again, and by the time I reached my uncle, he was just this side of conscious. I still didn’t know what was wrong. The doctor handed me the permission form and I signed it. My uncle’s face was still flushed and his temples visibly pounded. I was scared. I knew we were back at the wall and I couldn’t help him over it. I went home.

  The next morning they called me to say he was dead. Would I pick up his things, sign a few more papers? First I went to the V.A. hospital. They handed me his cane. At the home they gave me his wallet and a receipt for the reparation check, which they said had finally arrived. My father was coming to get the rest of his belongings, which were collected in a few slender cartons. The silver flask was on top, so I took it. It was empty.

  At the funeral, my mother sat next to me. When the service ended, she gripped my arm. “There’s no one left,” she said.

  “I’m here,” I whispered.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said.

  Two years later, she died, too. According to Jewish ritual, a family member has to identify the body. A mortician took me to her casket. In the hospital, she’d been just skin and bones, her back riddled with tumors. I could hardly look at her then. Here, I simply stared.

  “Is this woman your mother?” the mortician asked. It was cold in the room and I shivered. It wasn’t the mother I’d known. Her face had been round and ruddy, eyes green. Her hair had once been wavy, on the thin side, sometimes dark, sometimes fair. There had been a slight furrow to her brow, a look of concern, or dread, or expectation, I never knew exactly. Her hands had seldom been at rest. Now they were folded on her chest, frozen in an attitude she never had. Her hair was bouffant, a rusty orange, her skin had a yellow cast. The furrow in her brow was filled with putty.

  “Is this your mother?” the mortician said again. I nodded, furious, a cramp forming in my belly. The mortician closed the casket.

  I’m the only one left, I thought at her funeral, though I kept the thought to myself. My father was there and so was my brother and a number of my mother’s friends, many of whom were weeping. They looked like the shadow people cowered at the wall in my dream. They kept calling me by my mother’s name. I left them standing there, and built a wall out of drugs, drugs to keep agony at arm’s length. Whenever I looked back, as I did, as I had to, those people were huddled there still, the same expressions on their faces, expectant and sad, but they had drug names and drug bodies, and when I looked back again, I saw them once more, unmoving and unmoved, in a place I couldn’t change or fill. Now here I sit, expectant and sad, where the river drifts in silence and my blood travels thick in my veins, pooling as it reaches the wall.

  A voice breaks my high. It’s Mario. “Hello,” he says, a Thai-style smile lifting his cheeks. He’s standing near the rail of the deck, two brown paper shopping bags in hand. My God, how much are we carrying? These bags are enormous, almost the size of the ones you get at Bloomingdale’s when you buy a full-length down coat. Mario’s eyes are twinkling. I’m not even halfway through my second beer. He walks toward me and casts an eye at the road-house windows. I move off the deck to a dirt path that runs along the embankment, and he slips one of the bags in my hand. I look down. “Don’t look yet,” he says, but I’ve already seen it—about a dozen red condoms sitting unconcealed in the bottom. They’re solid, stuffed with heroin packed tight into rocks. They look exactly like votive candles with little knots where the wicks would be.

  “Why do we need these huge bags?” I ask.

  Mario says he doesn’t know. “I wish you could have seen how they do this,” he says, still smiling.

  “Me, too,” I say.

  “Very professional operation,” he muses. “Very professional.”

  “Shouldn’t we get a cab?” I remind him. They must have given him a snort, I think. That’s why he took so long. Figures.

  “Let’s walk,” he says.

  Now he’s dreaming. “Walk? With these? I don’t think so.” I’m not about to parade around the streets of Chiang Mai with a big bag of heroin knocking at my side. My eyes shift around in my head, searching for cops and possible informers. I don’t see anyone, but it’s dark now and this isn’t my country. I don’t know what to look for or where.

  “They want us to get the nine-o’clock bus to Bangkok,” Mario tells me.

  “Bus? We’re taking a bus?” I’m mystified. “What’s wrong with the plane?”

  Mario shrugs. The movement makes a sound in his bag as his bundles shift. “They gave me the bus tickets,” he says, patting the pocket of his linen shirt. “All paid for,” he smiles, pleased. “They say it’s safer than the airport.” He takes my hand and we stroll along on the banks of the Ping, just two romantics of no special interest, tourists with shopping bags, hunting for bargains.

  “I’m not going on any bus,” I tell him. “That’s crazy. What do they care how we leave?”

  Mario shoots me the darkest look I’ve seen on him yet. “I think we better do what they say,” he tells me.

  “How much is here?” I ask then.

  “Fifteen ounces,” he whispers.

  Fifteen ounces? At seven to ten thousand dollars each, they’re going to turn a pretty penny in New York. It’s four hundred an ounce here, less than what I get for a gram, twenty-eight to the ounce. Not bad, I think. Maybe I could do this again. “Okay,” I say. “We’ll take the bus.”

  We go to my hotel room, where Mary Motion is waiting with the K-Y and the luggage. “Fifteen ounces,” she says. “Three of us. We’ll divide it.” We wrap the bundles in double layers of condoms, then separate to insert them.

  For years, I’ve been hearing about this. They say once you push the stuff in far enough, the bundles travel naturally into your small intestines, where you can’t feel them, safe from the stomach acids that kill cocaine swallowers, virtually undetectable by the Feds. Customs inspectors have probes, of course, but they don’t reach up that high, and even if they x-ray the stomach, no one sees a thing. When we get to New York, all we have to do is take the laxatives we bought, and the loot will come tumbling down. These laxatives are German, much stronger than what we can get in the States. Even so, it could take a few days, or a week, even two, to bring it all back home.

  In the bathroom I discover the packing to be not so different than putting in any other suppository, except these are bigger, really like wearing a candle in your ass. When the first two are in, I realize I’m going to have trouble with the rest. I apply a g
enerous portion of the K-Y jelly, and the third ounce goes in, but no matter what I do, I can’t get the fourth to stay. It looks like I’m going to need help. I don’t know what to do. I can’t exactly ask Mario or Mary Motion to bugger me; that would really be too weird. After I struggle a few minutes more, I pull on my jeans and knock on Mary Motion’s door.

  “How you makin’ out?” I ask.

  “I’m ready,” she says, opening the door. “You?”

  “I can only get three to stay in,” I confess. “What do you think I should do?”

  “Want me to help you?”

  “Uh,” is all I can say.

  She offers to try to take one of my bundles inside her. We rewrap an ounce and she goes in the bathroom to try it. “Nope,” she calls out a minute later. “Sorry. I’m full up.”

  Very businesslike then, she demonstrates a position that should help accommodate me to the process. I wish I hadn’t tried to eat; I really could use a little more room. I go back in the bathroom and start again. I have to relax, I tell myself. I’m too tense. I finger myself for a while, hoping to lubricate myself naturally, but I’m too stressed to make it work. Finally, after a lot of pushing and grunting and praying, I get the fourth ounce up inside but I know there’s no hope for the last.

  Mario knocks on the door, says we have to get going or we’ll miss the bus. In desperation, I jam the last ounce up my ass but it doesn’t go in very far. I can feel it hanging, fucking turd. Well, it’s not visible. I watch myself walk around in the bedroom mirror. I know I look stiff but so do a lot of tourists. There’s nothing so unusual about me.

  In the lobby we pay our bill and walk to the bus stop. It’s not very far. Darkness has fallen and Chiang Mai is gearing up for another night of shopping. We walk close to the houses that line the road. We’re afraid of running into Okay Joe. As we near the bus stop, we spot the back of a man who looks just like him. Oh, no, I think. Oh no.