The call he referred to was Doolie’s. That morning he had called me up. “I want to see you,” he yelled. “I’m sick. I’ll be over right away.”
I could feel the Federals moving steadily closer. It was a question of time. I did not trust any of the Village customers, and I was convinced that at least one of them was a rank stool pigeon. Doolie was my number one suspect, with Nick running a very close second, and Chris trailing in third place. Of course, there was always the possibility that Marvin might take the easy way of raising money to buy a pair of socks.
Nick also scored for some respectable working people in the Village who indulged in an occasional “joy bang.” This type person is a bad security risk because of timidity. They are afraid of the police, they are afraid of losing their responsible jobs. It does not occur to them that there is anything wrong about giving information to the law. Of course, they will not come forward with information because of their fear of being “involved.” But they will generally spill under police questioning.
Narcotics agents operate largely with the aid of informers. The usual routine is to grab someone with junk on him, and let him stew in jail until he is good and sick. Then comes the spiel:
“We can get you five years for possession. On the other hand, you can walk out of here right now. The decision is up to you. If you work with us, we can give you a good deal. For one thing, you’ll have plenty of junk and pocket money. That is, if you deliver. Take a few minutes to think it over.”
The agent takes out a few caps and puts them on the table. This is like pouring a glass of ice water in front of a man dying of thirst. “Why don’t you pick them up? Now you’re being sensible. The first man we want to get is—”
Some of them don’t need to be pressured. Junk and pocket money is all they want, and they don’t care how they get it. The new pigeon is given marked money and sent out to make a buy. When the pigeon makes a buy with this money, the agents close in right away to make the arrest. It is essential to make the arrest before the peddler has a chance to change the marked money. The agents have the marked money that bought the junk, and the junk it bought. If the case is important enough, the pigeon may be called upon to testify. Of course, once he appears in court and testifies, the pigeon is known to the trade and no one will serve him. Unless the agents want to send him to another town (some especially able pigeons go on tour), his informing career is finished.
Sooner or later, the peddlers get wise to a pigeon and the pigeon can’t score. When this happens, his usefulness to the agents is at an end, and they usually turn him in. Often he ends up doing more time than anybody he sent up.
In the case of young kids who would be no use as full-time pigeons, the procedure is different. The agent may come on with the old cop con: “I hate to send a young kid like you away. Sure you made a mistake. That can happen to anybody. Now listen. I’m going to give you a break, but you’ll have to cooperate with us. Otherwise I won’t be able to help you.” Or else they just belt him in the mouth and say, “Where did you get it?” With lots of people that’s all it takes. You could find an example of every type informer, overt or potential, among my customers.
After the hotel clerk spoke to me, I moved to another hotel and registered under another name. I stopped going to the Village and shifted all the Village customers to uptown meets.
When I told Gains what the hotel clerk said to me and how lucky we were he happened to be a right guy, he said, “We’ve got to pack in. We can’t last with this crowd.”
“Well,” I said, “they’re up there now, waiting for us in front of the automat. The whole lot of them. Shall we go today?”
“Yes. I’m going to Lexington for the cure and I need bus fare. I’m leaving tonight.”
As soon as we got in sight of the meet, Doolie broke from the others and ran up to us at full speed, pulling off a two-tone sports jacket. He was wearing some sort of sandals, or slippers.
“Give me four caps for this coat,” he said. “I’ve been in the can twenty-four hours.”
Doolie sick was an unnerving sight. The envelope of personality was gone, dissolved by his junk-hungry cells. Viscera and cells, galvanized into a loathsome insect-like activity, seemed on the point of breaking through the surface. His face was blurred, unrecognizable, at the same time shrunken and tumescent.
Gains gave Doolie two caps and took the coat.
“I’ll give you two more tonight,” he said. “Right here at nine o’clock.”
Izzy, who’d been standing by, silent, had been looking at Doolie with amazed disgust. “Holy Jesus!” he said. “Sandals!”
The others swarmed around, holding out their hands like a crowd of Asiatic beggars. None of them had any money.
I said, “No credit,” and we started walking down the street. They followed us, whining and clutching at our sleeves. “Just one cap.”
I said no and kept on walking. One after the other, they fell away. We walked down into the subway and told Izzy we were packing in.
“Jeez,” he said, “I don’t blame you. Sandals!”
Izzy bought six caps and we gave two caps to Old Bart, who was going out to Riker’s for the thirty-day cure.
Bill Gains was examining the sports coat with a practiced eye. “It should bring ten dollars easy,” he said. “I know a tailor who will sew up this rip for me.” One pocket was slightly torn. “Where did he get it?”
“He claims from Brooks Brothers. But he’s the kind of guy who would say anything he stole came from Brooks Brothers or Abercrombie & Fitch.”
“It’s too bad,” said Gains, smiling. “My bus leaves at six. I won’t be able to give him the other two caps I promised.”
“Don’t worry about it. He’s into us for a double sawski.”
“He is? Well, then, it doesn’t make any difference.”
•
Bill Gains left for Lexington, and I started for Texas in my car. I had 1/16-ounce of junk with me. I figured this was enough to taper off, and I had a reduction schedule carefully worked out. It was supposed to take twelve days. I had the junk in solution, and in another bottle distilled water. Every time I took a dropper of solution out to use it, I put the same amount of distilled water in the junk solution bottle. Eventually I would be shooting plain water. This method is well known to all junkies. A variation of it is known as the Chinese cure, which is carried out with hop and Wampole’s Tonic. After a few weeks, you find yourself drinking plain Wampole’s Tonic.
Four days later in Cincinnati, I was out of junk and immobilized. I have never known one of these self-administered reduction cures to work. You find reasons to make each shot an exception that calls for a little extra junk. Finally, the junk is all gone and you still have your habit.
I left the car in storage and took a train to Lexington. I did not have the papers that are required for admittance, but I was relying on my Army discharge to get me in. When I got to Lexington I took a taxi out to the hospital, which is several miles from the town. The taxi took me to the gate-house of the hospital. In the gate-house was an old Irish guard. He looked at my Army discharge.
“Are you addicted to the use of habit-forming drugs?”
I said yes.
“Well, sit down.” He pointed to a bench.
He called the main building. “No, no papers. . . . Got an Army discharge.” He looked over from the phone. “You ever been here before?” he asked.
I said no.
“Says he hasn’t been here before.” The guard hung up. “A car will be down for you in a few minutes,” he told me. “Have you got any drugs or needles or droppers on your person? You can surrender them here, but if you take them up to the main building you are liable to prosecution for introducing contraband articles into a Government reservation.”
“I’ve got nothing.”
After a short
wait, a car came down to the gate and drove me up to the main building. A heavy, barred, iron door opened automatically to let the car in, then closed after it. A polite guard took my addiction history.
“You’re doing a sensible thing to come here,” he told me. “There’s one man in here now who’s spent every Christmas for the past twenty-five years locked up somewhere.”
I checked my clothes into a basket and took a shower. The next step was a physical examination. I had to wait about fifteen minutes for the doctor. The doctor apologized for keeping me waiting, gave me a physical examination and took my addiction history. His manner was courteous and efficient. He listened to my addiction history, interrupting with an occasional comment or question. When I mentioned buying junk by the ¼-ounce, he smiled and said, “Selling some of it to keep up the habit, eh?”
Finally he leaned back in his chair. “As you know,” he said, “you can leave here on twenty-four hours’ notice. Some people leave after ten days, and stay off permanently. Some stay six months and go back two days after they get out. But, statistically speaking, the longer you stay the better chance you have of staying off. The procedure here is more or less impersonal. The cure lasts about eight or ten days, depending on severity of addiction. You can put on that dressing gown now.”
He pointed to pajamas and dressing gown and slippers that were laid out for me. The doctor was speaking rapidly into a dictaphone. He gave a brief account of my physical condition and addiction history. “Patient seems secure and states his reason for seeking cure is necessity of providing for his family.”
A guard took me to my ward.
“If you want to get off drugs,” he said, “this is the place to do it.”
The ward attendant asked me if I really wanted to get off drugs. I said yes. He assigned me to a private room.
About fifteen minutes later the attendant called, “Shot line!” Everyone in the ward lined up. As our names were called, we put an arm through a window in the door of the ward dispensary, and the attendant gave the shots. Sick as I was, the shot fixed me. Right away, I began to get hungry.
I walked up to the middle of the ward, where there were benches, chairs and a radio, and got in conversation with a thuggish-looking young Italian. He asked if I had much of a record. I said no.
“You ought to be up with the Do-Rights,” he said. “You get a longer cure there and better rooms.”
The Do-Rights were people in Lexington for the first time, who were considered to be especially good prospects for a permanent cure. Evidently, the doctors in Reception didn’t think too much of my prospects.
Others drifted out and joined the conversation. The shot had made them feel sociable. First came a Negro from Ohio.
“How much time you bringing with you?” the Italian asked him.
“Three years,” the Negro said. He was in for forging and selling scripts. He began telling about a stretch he did in Ohio State. “That’s a fuck of a place to do time. A bunch of kids in there, rough little bastards. You get your stuff at the commissary and some punk comes up to you and says, ‘Give it to me.’ If you don’t give it to him, he belts you one in the kisser. Then they all gang up on you. You ain’t going to whip all of them.”
A gambling-house dealer from East St. Louis was describing a method for cooking the carbolic acid out of a phenol, sweet oil and tincture of opium script.
“I tell the croaker I’ve got an aged mother and she uses this prescription for piles. After you get the sweet oil drained off, you put the stuff in a tablespoon and hold it over a gas flame. That burns the phenol right out. It’ll hold you twenty-four hours.”
A handsome, powerfully built man of forty or so, with a tan complexion and iron-gray hair, was telling how his girl smuggled stuff to him in an orange. “So there we were in County. Goddamn both of us shitting in our pants like a goose. Hell, when I bit into that orange it was so bitter. Must have been fifteen or twenty grains in it, shot in with a hypo. I didn’t know she had that much sense.”
“The guard says to me, ‘Drug addict! Why you sonofabitch, you mean you’re a dope fiend! Well, you’ll get no medicine in here!’”
“Sweet oil and tincture. The oil floats to the top and you can draw it off with a dropper. Cooks up black as tar.”
“So I hit Philly sick as a sonofabitch.”
“Well, the croaker says, ‘Okay, how much do you use?’”
“Ever used powdered Dilaudid? Lots of guys killed themselves with it. About as much as you can put on the end of a toothpick. The big end, that is, no more.”
“Cook it up and shoot it.”
“On the nod.”
“Loaded.”
“That was back in ’33. Twenty-eight dollars an ounce.”
“We used to make a pipe out of a bottle and a rubber tube. When we got through smoking, we’d break the bottle.”
“Cook it up and shoot it.”
“On the nod.”
“Sure you can shoot cocaine in the skin. It hits you right in the stomach.”
“H and coke. You can smell it going in.”
Like hungry men who can talk about nothing but food. After a while the shot began to wear off. Conversation slackened. People drifted off to lie down, read or play cards. Lunch was served in the ward room and was an excellent meal.
There were three shots a day. One at seven a.m., when we got up, one at one p.m., and one at nine p.m. Two old acquaintances had come in during the afternoon, Matty and Louis. I ran into Louis as we were lining up for the evening shot.
“Did they get you?” he asked me.
“No. Just here for the cure. How about you?”
“Same with me,” he answered.
With the evening shot, they gave me some chloral hydrate in a glass. Five new arrivals were brought to the ward during the night. The ward attendant threw up his hands. “I don’t know where I’m going to put them. I’ve got thirty-one dope fiends in here now.”
Among the new arrivals was a dignified, white-haired man of seventy named Bob Riordan, an old-time con man, junk pusher, and pickpocket. He looked the way bankers looked around 1910. He had come with two friends in a car. On the way to Lexington, they had called the Surgeon General in Washington and asked him to wire ahead to the gate that they were coming and should be let right in. They referred to the Surgeon General as Felix and seemed to know him from ’way back. But only Riordan got in that night. The other two drove to a town near Lexington, where they knew a croaker, to get fixed before they were immobilized for lack of junk.
They both came in about noon the next day. Sol Bloom was a fat man with a heavy Jewish face. Con man stuck out all over him. With him was a little thin man called Bunky. Bunky might have been an old farmer or any dried-up skinny old man except for his gray eyes, serene and cold behind steel-rimmed spectacles. These were Riordan’s two friends. All of them had done a lot of time, mostly Federal time for pushing junk. They were affable, but maintained a certain reserve. The story they put down was that they really wanted to get off junk because the Federals bothered them all the time.
As Sol said, “Hell, I love junk and I can get a room full of it. But if I can’t use without I get static all the time from the law, I’ll get off junk and stay off.” He went on talking about some old acquaintances who got their start in junk and later turned respectable. “Now they say, ‘Don’t have anything to do with Sol. He’s a shmecker.’”
I don’t think they expected anyone to believe the getting-off-junk routine. It was just a way of saying, “Why we came here is our own business.”
Another new arrival was Abe Green, a long-nosed Jew with one leg. He was almost a ringer for Jimmy Durante. He had pale blue birdlike eyes. Even junk sick, he radiated a fierce vitality. His first night in the ward, he was so sick a doctor came down to examine him and gave him an extra ½ grain of mor
phine. In a few days he was stumping around the ward, talking and playing cards. Green was a well-known pusher from Brooklyn, one of the few independent operators in the business. Most pushers have to work for the syndicate or quit, but Green had so many connections he could stay in business on his own. At the time, he was out on bail, but expected to beat the rap on the grounds of illegal seizure. “He (the agent) wakes me up in the middle of the night and starts beating me over the head with his gun. Wants me to give him my connection. I told him, ‘I’m fifty-four years old and I’ve never given you guys anything yet. I’ll be dead first.’”
Telling about a stretch in Atlanta, where he kicked a habit cold: “Fourteen days I was beating my head against the wall and blood came out of my eyes and nose. When the screw came, I’d spit in his face.” Coming from him, these narratives had an epic quality.
Benny was another oldtime Jewish shmecker from New York. He had been in Lexington eleven times and was in on the Blue Grass this trip. According to the Blue Grass Law of Kentucky, any “known user of narcotic drugs can be sentenced to the county jail for one year, with the alternative of taking the cure in Lexington.” He was a short, fat, little Jew with a round face. I would never have made Benny for junk. He had a fair singing voice in a loud way, and his best number was “April Showers.”
One day Benny came into the day-room all excited.
“Moishe just checked in,” he said. “He’s a panhandler and a fruit. A disgrace to the Jewish race.”
“But, Benny,” someone said, “he’s got a wife and kids.”
“I don’t care if he’s got ten kids,” Benny said. “He’s still a fruit.”
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