by Sara Gran
“Sit down, Joey, let me set you up.” I looked down at the floor. Next to the girl was a pile of brown powder on a piece of paper. The pile was about as big as a half dollar and almost as high.
They say once you’ve been an addict your biology is never the same. All your cells are so used to junk that they’ll never quite get over it. They’ll always crave dope. I’d never believed that before but I believed it now. Because even though I’d been clean for two years, and I knew there wasn’t a trace of it left in my system, when I walked in that room it was like I had never left. My mouth was as dry as if I’d just swallowed cotton, and my nose started to run. I reached down and scratched my leg, which was suddenly itching like hell.
I didn’t want it at all. It wasn’t that. It was just those damn cells of mine. They wouldn’t give up. They still thought they needed it.
But if my cells wanted dope, let them want it all day. They weren’t getting any. I’d learned to ignore them. It wasn’t exactly easy, but it got closer to easy all the time.
After a minute I looked at Paul. “No, thanks. That’s not why I’m here.” I took out the photo of Nadine Nelson and Jerry McFall. “You ever see her?”
Paul looked at the photo and smiled. “Sure, I know her. Betty, right?” I shook my head. He frowned. “Well, I’m sure I know her. She’s come by here. Ask Nell—she’s in the front room with Jenny. Nell brought her around, I’m sure of it. And you know who the fellow is, right?”
“No,” I said. “Who is he?”
“Jerry something,” he said. He made a look on his face like he’d tasted something bad. “You don’t know him? He’s always been around.”
“What’s his story?” I asked.
Paul shrugged. “I don’t know. Don’t really know him. Just always struck me as a sleazy character, that’s all.”
That was like Einstein calling another man smart. I asked Paul if he had seen him lately and he said no, not for a few months.
The girl he just fixed crawled on her hands and knees over to a spot by the window where the sunlight was streaming in. Once she was in the sun, she curled up on the floor and dozed. I thanked Paul and went back to the two girls in the front room. They were in the same position they had been in before, but their eyes were open. I crouched down in front of them.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m a friend of Paul’s.”
“Mmmmm,” the girl with the black hair said. “Uhhuh.” The blonde looked at the floor.
I showed them the photo. “I need to find this girl. Either of you know her? Paul said one of you brought her around here.”
Slowly the girl with the black hair focused on the picture. “Hey,” she said. “I think I know that girl.”
“Good,” I said. “Do you know where she is?”
“No, really,” the girl said. “I think I know her. For real. She’s a friend of Jenny’s.”
“Great. How does Jenny know her?”
“I dunno.” She nudged her friend. “Hey, Jenny. Look. Who is that girl?”
Jenny slowly raised her head up to look at the photo. “Look,” she said. “It’s Jerry with that girl. What’s-her-name.” Her head fell back down and her eyes closed.
“You know him? Hey.” I reached my hand up and took her by the chin. “Hey, wake up. You know him?”
Jenny opened her eyes and laughed. “Sure I do. Who the hell do you think got me started on this shit? He said he was gonna get me in pictures. . . .”
Her eyes were falling shut again. I grabbed her shoulder and shook her awake. “How about the girl, do you know her? Look.” I put the photo in front of her face again. “This girl. Do you know her?”
“I think I used to work with her.”
Her eyes shut and her head rolled back. She turned and snuggled up against her friend—I guess she was Nell. Nell kept her eyes open, but nothing was behind them. “Come on,” I said to Nell. “You know where your friend works?”
She started to laugh. “She’s a call girl, lady. She works everywhere.”
That woke Jenny up. “I ain’t no call girl,” she muttered. “I’m a dancer.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Where do you dance?”
“I ain’t no whore,” she said. “I’m a dancer. Well, I used to be, but those bastards let me go on account of—”
“Come on,” I said. “Where were you a dancer?”
“At Rose’s. That’s a nice place. I was a dancer at Rose’s.”
When I was on my way out I saw a man and a woman whispering together in the hallway on the ground floor. They were both skinny. The man wore an old suit with no hat or tie and the woman wore a black dress that had seen its best days ten years ago. They were probably plotting how to rip Paul off. People were always trying to rip Paul off. It never worked because no one could ever figure out where he kept his stash. It was in that big empty place somewhere but no one had ever figured out exactly where. It could drive you crazy. It drove me up the wall until I finally figured it out: in a glass jar under the floorboards in the bathroom.
The couple heard me coming down the stairs. The man nudged the woman and they stopped whispering. I
was about to tell them not to worry, I wouldn’t rat them out, when the woman looked up at me and I realized who it was. It took her a minute to recognize me and when she did she stared at me with a mean, sour look on her face.
I reached the bottom of the stairs and walked toward them.
“Josephine Flannigan,” the woman said, with a voice to match her face. “What the hell are you doing here? If I find out you’ve been—”
I smiled. “Don’t you worry, Cora. I’m just here to visit.”
“Visit Paul?” she said sarcastically. “For the conversation? Give me a break, Joe.”
“I swear it, Cora. Go up and ask him, if you like.”
“Oh, I’ll ask him,” she said. “You can be sure of that. I’ll ask every goddamned dope dealer in this town what you’ve been up to. And if I find out you’ve been using again, I’m gonna call the damn cops myself and have you locked up again.”
“Come on,” I said. “Take a good look. I’m clean, and I’ve been clean. And you ought to talk, lady.”
She looked me up and down, saw that I was plump and that my hair was clean—that I didn’t look anything like her—and decided I was telling the truth. “Okay,” she finally said, her voice calmer now. “So come over here and give old Cora a kiss.”
I did as she said. The man next to her ignored us both. “Jesus,” I said. “If you’re old, what does that make me?”
She smiled for the first time. “Ancient,” she said, and laughed. “Anyway, don’t talk about me. I’m hopeless. I’m hopeless and you know it.”
She was right, so I didn’t talk about her. “Figure out yet where Paul’s keeping it?” I asked.
Cora stamped her foot and the man spat on the floor. “No, dammit,” she said. “Joey, you must have an idea. Come on.”
I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
Cora stamped her foot again. “Goddamn!” she said. “By the way, this is Hank. Hank, meet Joe. I’ve known Joe since I was young and pretty.”
I laughed, but Cora didn’t, because she wasn’t kidding. She was my age, thirty-six, give or take a few years, but she hadn’t aged well. She was too thin and her eyes were sunk deep in her head, with dark circles underneath. Deep lines framed her mouth and ran across her forehead.
Hank shook my hand. “So you’re Josephine Flannigan,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
I didn’t know what he’d heard, so I didn’t answer.
“Well,” Cora said. “Seeing as how we’re not having any luck with Paul, we better get to work somewhere else. Got any ideas, Joe?”
I thought for a minute. “Gimbel’s isn’t too bad around this time,” I said. “They’ve only got a few dicks working in the afternoons, none of them too bright. If you get there around one, it’s pretty easy—all the secretaries are shopping, keeping the salesgirls t
ied up. If you can get to the jewelry counter, you can do pretty good.”
Hank and Cora looked at each other, weighing their options.
“Just a few weeks back I got a nice little gold ring from Gimbel’s,” I added. “But don’t even think about Macy’s. The junkies burned it down, they’re wise now. Got an undercover in every aisle. I won’t even step foot in that place unless I’ve got my best suit on and my hair done.”
Hank and Cora looked at each other again and nodded. Gimbel’s it would be.
After they decided where to boost from, they started on where to buy from. “Frank’s holding,” Cora said.
Hank nodded. “Yeah. But there’s too much sugar in his stuff. Ben’s good, let’s go see him.”
“Ben?” Cora said, indignant. “I don’t care how good it is, I’m not paying three dollars for one damn paper. Let’s go to Jenny White.”
“Jenny White?” Hank threw up his hands. “She beat me good last time.”
“That wasn’t her fault! No one had anything ’cause of all that shit in Mexico. Besides, Mick told me she’s got some M . . .”
This sparked off a lively debate on exactly how much M—morphine—was equal to how much H. Soon, I knew, they’d also have to bring in Dilaudid and opium into the comparison, even though no one was holding any, just to get all that squared away.
I stopped listening. A junkie could talk about junk from sunup to sundown. It was like a conversation that began when you took your first shot and didn’t end until you’d had your last. Every junkie in New York, probably every addict in the world, could step into the conversation at any point and join in. There were a thousand and one topics, but they were all one topic: dope.
And there was so much to talk about. Every junkie was an investor who could discuss whether three dollars was better spent on three heavily cut papers from Mary or two pure syrettes from Joseph, a politician who knew how events in Europe and the Far East were affecting the distribution and pricing of drugs in New York, a lawyer who knew the letter of the drug laws in every state, and a psychiatrist who could tell you just the right way to hit up their dealer for one on the cuff.
But most of all, a junkie was a scientist. Everyone knew the business about your cells never being the same, of course. And everyone knew that dope addicts lived longer than anyone else, because dope preserved your cells, stopped them from aging—or they would live longer, if they didn’t die from overdoses and liver failure and that type of thing. Speaking of liver failure, it was a known fact that it wasn’t drugs that hurt your liver—it was the stuff the drugs were cut with. Pure dope wouldn’t do you any harm at all, if it was all you shot. But pure dope could be dangerous if you weren’t used to it. A junkie had to know exactly how much they could shoot of every form of opium there was, or risk shooting too much and overdosing.
I tried not to listen to Hank and Cora. I thought, This was why I quit. The never-ending conversation about dope, always the same loop, around and around. There was no aspect of junk that could go unexamined for more than twenty-four hours. I couldn’t stand it anymore. A few minutes ago I had craved a shot like I was dying for one. And now more than anything else I hoped I would never have to speak to another junkie again. I liked Cora. I really did. I just wished there was something else she could talk about.
We had said goodbye and I was about to go when Cora pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Joe?” she said. “Because I swear, if you’re using again, after all you went through to get clean—”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d lie to you. But not about that.”
When I left Cora and Hank I walked through the Lower East Side and went to Katz’s on Ludlow Street for lunch. Jim would have approved. I got my ticket and went up to the counter, where old Abe was cutting up a pastrami with a two-foot-long knife that would have scared the hell out of me if anyone else had been holding it.
“Joey,” Abe said, smiling under his white hat. “Joey, you look good.” I knew what he meant. What everyone meant when they said that. Not that my outfit was pretty or that my hair looked nice. They meant that I looked like I was off junk. It’d been two years now and I got a little tired of hearing it, but I guess I couldn’t blame people for being surprised.
“Thanks, Abe. I feel good. How’re the kids?”
“Real good,” Abe said, slicing away with his knife. “The oldest, he’s in college now. He’s gonna be a doctor.”
Right. He’d been saying the kid was going to be a doctor since the kid was knee high. He put my sandwich up on the counter and we talked some more. He told me the youngest was going to be a lawyer and the girl in the middle was going to marry a nice Jewish banker she’d met at temple. The fellow was all right but Abe was a little disappointed because he’d only gone to City College.
“You know how it is,” he said. “He’s a nice guy. But everyone wants the best for their kids, right? So I don’t know why she couldn’t find a fellow from Harvard.” He shook his head. “At least NYU.”
“Sure.”
“Hey,” Abe said, suddenly serious. “Did I tell you about Saul? Old Saul from Ludlow Street?”
I shook my head. I was sure I knew a Saul from somewhere, but . . .
“Sure,” Abe said. “You know Saul. Old Saul on Ludlow Street. See, Saul, he was in the schmata business. Lived right here on Ludlow Street. Then he retires and he goes down to Florida. And every day he sits on the beach and he reads the anti-Semitic newspapers. You know the type. All about how the Jews are taking over the world.”
“Sure,” I said. I started to laugh already. It was a joke. “One pastrami shop at a time.” I took another taste of corned beef.
But Abe kept it completely deadpan. “So Saul’s reading the papers every day,” he said. “Finally his wife, Sadie, she says, ‘Saul. Saul,’ she says. ‘What are you reading this crap for?’ And Saul smiles and he says, ‘’Cause I like to see how good we’re doing. See, Sadie, right here, it says Jews control the banks, we own all the diamonds, we’re running the government. . . . What more could we ask for?’”
I laughed so hard I almost spit out my corned beef.
“Sorry,” Abe said to the man behind me. We’d been talking too long. “What can I get for you?”
I turned around and I got a start. I knew him, the man on line behind me. I couldn’t place the face, but I
was sure I’d seen him before. I got a strange feeling, like when Abe had first mentioned old Saul from Ludlow Street—I was supposed to know who it was, but . . .
Then I realized: it was the man who had been waiting across the street from Paul’s. Guess he didn’t have any luck finding his girl. I wasn’t surprised. Once a girl spent a little time in Paul’s, it was hard to get her out.
Chapter Six
After lunch I took the subway up to Midtown and then walked a few blocks to Fifty-third between Broadway and Sixth. There in the middle of the block was a door between a theater and an office building with a sign painted on it: “ROSE’s—Hi Class Lounge—COCKTAILS—Dancing—Right Upstairs!” The door opened up into a small, narrow staircase that reeked of booze and marijuana and cigarette smoke. The stairs took you into a room ten times the size you would have guessed—it was built on top of the theater next door.
In Rose’s, taxi dancers would dance with a guy for a small fee; for a bigger fee they’d dance a little closer, although no one took their pants off and Tony, the manager, made sure everyone kept their hands where he could see them. It was a tough job, dancing in a dive like Rose’s. But it paid okay and it beat the hell out of Wool-worth’s. It was close enough to Times Square to get the tourist trade and close enough to the better part of Midtown to get the local businessmen.
I worked there when I was hooked on dope. It was my husband who got me into it. Easy money, he said. Wear a low-cut dress with long sleeves to cover the track marks and the sores on your arms and they’ll never know. You dance with a guy, spend some time with him, and then whatever
happens after the club closes is your own business. Yours and your husband’s. Except after a while, even with the long sleeves, they do know. And even the men who come to Rose’s don’t want to hang around a junkie. She might be good for one thing, but they’re not going to pay her to dance and make conversation.
The place hadn’t changed at all. Tony was right up at the cash register, like always, sitting on a stool, scowling over a pile of papers. Toward the left side of the room was a tiny stage where a three-piece band played “Blue Moon.” It seemed like every joint in the world like Rose’s played “Blue Moon,” over and over again. The musicians looked like they were having trouble keeping their eyes open. There wasn’t much else to the place; a dozen tables and two dozen chairs, a bar along the back wall, long red curtains keeping out the light, and a big open space for dancing. The lights were down almost low enough to make the girls look pretty and the men look handsome. Almost.
It was a slow day. There were more girls than customers, and only three couples were grinding away on the dance floor. The rest of the girls were up at the bar drinking cocktails.
“Joey!”
Tony stood up and came toward me with a smile. “Joey! Look at you! You look great, Joe, you really do.”
“Thanks, Tony. How’s everything around here?”
“Eh . . .” He had a list of complaints. The girls didn’t look good, the guys were cheap, and the price of liquor was up. “So what brings you by,” he finally asked. “Looking for a job?”
“Sure,” I said, laughing. “How do you think I’d look in that?” I nodded my head toward a girl in a tight blue number I was around ten years too old for.
“Gorgeous,” Tony said. And something about the way he said it choked me up a bit. But only for a second. I showed him the picture of Nadine and McFall.
“You ever see her in here?”
Tony took a good long look. “She looks like a girl who might have worked here for a couple of months. Not for long.” He squinted at the picture. “Raquel?”
I shrugged. None of the girls at a spot like this used their real names.