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Authors: Sara Gran

Dope (7 page)

BOOK: Dope
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The old man was just getting ready to relieve the sailor closest to him of his wallet when the barker spotted him. The barker opened his mouth to say something when I stepped in and took the old man by the arm. “Grandpa!” I said, loudly. “I've told you a thousand times, I don't want you spending your relief check on the naked girls in the dime museum!”
The old man was Yonah Ross, probably the oldest living junkie in New York—he wasn't all that old but it was still a pretty big accomplishment. Part of it was due to the fact that he never sold it, like most do at one time or another, so no one ever had a beef with him. Instead he stuck to street cons, from pickpocketing and shoplifting to three-card monte, selling fake opium to tourists and leading sailors to fake hookers. He had lived with my mother for a while when I was a girl. A lot of men had lived with my mother but Yonah was different. He liked kids and he taught me a lot.
The sailors looked at each other and decided that naked girls
and
educated fleas were worth a dime. They went inside. The barker took their money and then turned around to hiss at Yonah. “You're lucky she showed up,” he said, “or I'd have the coppers here. Now beat it, and don't come back.”
Yonah looked glum as we walked away. “Jesus,” he said, after he thanked me for getting him out of there. “That son-of-a-bitch carney. Who's he think he is? You know I knew his old man, and him, he never gave me a hard time. I used to steer guys to the museum and they let me have the crowds out front. We used to work together back then, everyone in the Square. The hookers would let me know who had the rolls and I'd let them know who I'd already gotten to, so we wouldn't all be wasting our time. Now it's every man out for himself. It's a dog-eat-dog world out here.” He shook his head at the immorality of it all. We walked past Howard Johnson's. Yonah had his eye on a couple of out-of-town businessmen standing in front, but I walked him past them. He smiled at me. “Jesus, Joey, you look great, just great. How you feeling these days? You doin' good?”
“Great,” I said. “I'm doing great. But listen, Yonah, let me buy you a drink. Maybe you can help me with something.”
“Sure, doll, sure. But I gotta go back to my room for a bit just now. You want to come?”
I went along with him to his room on Forty-second and Ninth. We talked about the good old days on the way there. All the fun times we had when he taught me how to grind up oregano so it looked like weed, and you could sell it to suckers for a dollar or more. Those grand old times when he sat me down and explained to me what a badger was, and introduced me to a man who would pull it off with me—I'd pretend to be a hooker and the man would pretend to be my angry father. I'd find a trick and just before we did the deed Pa would bust in, and the trick would give Pa all the cash he had on him to stop him from calling the cops. Yonah had meant well, though, and I'd probably be a lot worse off now if I had never met him. You needed something to fall back on in this life.
He lived in a hotel called the Prince Alexander. It seemed like half the fleabag hotels in the world were called the Prince Something-or-Other. And all of them used to be nice. When you walked into the Prince Alexander there were marble floors covered in enough filth not to need rugs, and a wooden desk for registration that was wrapped up in a chicken wire cage. That was something you could count on in any Prince hotel. The desk would be wrapped in chicken wire.
Behind the desk was a skinny young guy reading a girlie magazine. He nodded at Yonah when we came in. In the lobby a group of men around Yonah's age, drunks and nutcases, hung around watching life go by, or at least the slice of it that came through the Prince Alexander. We stopped to say hello. I knew some of them: One-Eyed Fred and Fifty-third Street Jackson and Nuthouse Jim. It was hard to believe it now but once they'd really been something, the old men in the Prince Alexander—con men and hustlers and stick-up men. When I was a kid we all wanted to be just like them when we grew up. And now it was looking more and more like I would be.
Off to the side sat an old gent wearing a brown suit and a white shirt with a high collar and a bowler hat that looked like it was from 1915. He was tall and thin and sat perfectly straight, talking to himself softly without stopping. From what I heard it was about a woman named Emily.
“Emily said she would be home in five minutes but it wasn't five minutes it was six, six and a half, a half dozen doughnuts . . .”
Yonah led me through the lobby to the elevator, which he ran himself to take us up to the third floor. At the end of a long hallway lined with peeling wallpaper and dim bare-bulb lights and locked doors was Yonah's room. It pretty much made my room at the Sweedmore look like a suite at the Plaza. There was just enough room for a single bed—a cot, really—and an old green chair with the stuffing poking out. The cot had dirty grayish sheets on it, tangled up with each other in a knot. Clothing hung from nails on the wall.
“Sit, doll.” Yonah smiled and took off his hat and coat and put them on the bed. I sat on the chair. The room smelled awful. On the floor was an overflowing ashtray. “I'll be right back,” he said.
Yonah left the room to get his works and his dope, probably hidden in the hall somewhere. It was safer there. If the cops tossed his room it'd be clean, and if anyone found his stuff in the hall they couldn't prove it was his. I looked around. A yellowed sheet was hung over the window but it sagged on one side, and I could see that the sun had come out just in time for it to go down, turning the sky yellow and gray. A minute later Yonah came back with his kit, wrapped in a dirty white handkerchief, in his hand.
“Excuse me for a minute, Josephine,” he said. He sat down at the head of the bed, facing the door. His back was to me but I could hear everything he was doing. First he took off his right shoe and let it drop to the ground, and then his sock. Then he measured a little junk from a paper envelope into a spoon. Next he used his works to suck up a few drops of water from a glass I guessed he kept under the bed and squirted it into the spoon. Then he lit a match and heated up the mixture in the spoon until it was a good smooth gold-colored liquid. Finally he pulled the whole mixture up into his works through a little piece of cotton. Then he poked around for a while, cursing a few times as he looked for a good vein. “Ah, all right, here we go,” he said as he found a good one. Then he injected into a vein in his foot. The veins in his arms were probably gone twenty years ago, collapsed from overuse. He was lucky to still have his feet left—for most of the old-timers it was the crotch or the neck.
He sat quietly for a minute. It wasn't that being high felt so good, especially not when you'd been shooting as long as Yonah had. You could hardly even call it being high. It was that nothing else felt bad. There were no aches, no pains, no memories, no shame. Nothing mattered now. It was like junk took you up just a few feet above everybody else, just enough so you didn't have to involve yourself in all the petty problems of the world. Those weren't your problems anymore. Let someone else worry. You could watch it all and feel nothing. For that little piece of time you had everything you needed, everything you had ever wanted.
He put his sock and shoe back on and turned around to face me, swinging his legs over to the side of the bed.
“Jesus, Joe, are you okay?”
I realized I had been holding my breath. My jaw was clenched so tight it hurt to let it go. I took a deep breath.
“Yeah, I'm fine, thanks.” Yonah hadn't taken a big shot, just enough to maintain, and so he was good for a couple of questions. I showed him the picture of Nadine Nelson and Jerry McFall and asked if he knew them.
Yonah thought for a moment, nodding his head. Then he got a look on his face, like he had just tasted a quart of milk and found out that it had spoiled. “Yeah. Him I know. Her, no, I don't think so—maybe I seen her, but I ain't sure. But him, I know who he is. Jerry McFall.”
“What's he all about?”
Yonah shifted position on the bed, making himself comfortable. He sighed with contentment. “He's an ass-hole. A pimp.”
I had guessed as much, but I hadn't been sure. I didn't know exactly where Nadine was now, but at least I knew what she was doing. “Does he use?” I asked.
Yonah nodded. “Yeah, he's been a junkie for years. But he's a real swell, you know,” he said sarcastically. “Goes out on the town, hangs out with all the punk hustlers trying to make good. Wears fancy suits, makes like a real big shot. Says he's in pictures.” Yonah laughed. “Sometimes he takes pictures of the girls to sell to magazines. You know what I mean. But how the guy makes a living is, he's got girls working for him. All on dope. And he sells, too. Not much. Just to the girls mostly, the girls he's got working for him. You know how it is. He's gotta take care of 'em or they'd find someone else.”
“Does he sell good stuff?” I asked.
Yonah shrugged. “I don't know. I don't buy from him. He's got a whole crowd, young folks, I don't really mix with them.”
“Seen him around lately?” I asked Yonah.
“I ain't seen him,” Yonah said. “But I'll keep my eyes open. What do you want with a punk like that, anyways?”
“Not much,” I said. “Someone just asked me to find him, that's all.”
“Eh,” Yonah said. “It won't be too hard. Guys like that, they're always out and about, painting the town red.” He closed his eyes for a minute. I looked down at the floor. There was a newspaper, two weeks old, open to an advertisement for a ladies' dress shop.
I picked it up. Yonah heard the paper rustle and opened his eyes. He smiled. “Hey, did you see? That's Shelley, in the paper. You can have it if you want.”
“No,” I started. “That's not—” But then I looked again. He was right, it was Shelley. I hadn't recognized her. She was wearing a black dress that was tight at the waist and full on the bottom. Just two little straps held it up on top. Her hair was combed so smooth it shone, done up in a big
thing
on the top of her head, and she had on more makeup than a hooker, although somehow it didn't look whorish at all. Under the picture was printed:
Just in time for spring!
In the photo with the jewelry she had looked pretty enough, but I had recognized her right away. Here, though, she looked like some kind of movie star, the way they did her hair and makeup. Like a girl who had money. A girl who'd been all over the world. A girl who could get whatever she wanted just by snapping her fingers, who was used to the best of everything, who'd never had to beg, borrow, or steal a damn thing in her life.
Of course, she had always kind of looked like that. Shelley had never been like the rest of us. Like how most girls in our neighborhood never wore a new dress, just hand-me-downs from their mothers and sisters. Shelley wouldn't go to school in an old dress. If I wanted her to go to school I had to take her to Mabel's Ladies' Wear and buy her a new dress every September. But it had always been like playacting before. She could wear all the new dresses she wanted, but she was still Shelley. It was still the same girl, who didn't go to a better school or have a better mother or a better home than the rest of us. If she wanted a piece of pie from the Automat she didn't have a nickel to buy one unless I gave it to her, because I wouldn't let her hang around there and wait for a man to come along. I didn't want her to think it was all right for her to hang around and wait for a man to buy her something she should have been able to buy herself.
But when I looked at her now, it was like she really was someone else. Like she had never lived in Hell's Kitchen at all. She was about as far away from the Prince Alexander hotel as you could get.
Something about seeing Shelley like that spooked me. “Thanks,” I said. I folded the paper up, careful not to crease the picture, and put it in my purse.
“Maybe she knows this McFall.” Yonah shrugged. “She's young, she knows that whole crowd.” His eyes slowly fell closed again.
I frowned. “Why? You've seen her lately?” I liked Yonah. In a way, you could say I loved him. But that didn't mean I wanted Shelley hanging around him.
“I don't know, doll,” he answered, leaning back against the wall. “When you're old, sometimes you just don't know anymore—I mean, you see someone last year and it seems like last week.” He sighed. “Nothing's the same anymore. In those days it was money for nothing. I tell you, doll, I didn't know how good we had it. Now it's always a hassle, hassle from the cops, from the squares, even the other fellows on the deuce. It's like a person don't even have the right to exist anymore, just 'cause he likes a taste of dope once in a while.” He shook his head. “Hey, remember when we used to go out and get cab fare together?”
“Sure.” Yonah would dress up like a businessman and I'd be his daughter. We'd go to Grand Central Station and pretend like his wallet had been lifted. All the other businessmen would give us cab fare to get home.
Yonah smiled. “Was your mother mad when we got home.”
“She took the money just the same,” I said. She hadn't been mad because of what we did. It was because we went without her, and she was scared we'd hold out on her.
He laughed, coughing a little. “Yeah, she sure did. She was something, wasn't she? I know she wasn't much of a mother, but she was a hell of a lot of fun. And Shelley, too. She was pissed as hell, you going out without her. You never let that girl do nothin'. But you always took good care of them. You always took care of them good. Your mother, money used to go through her hands like water. . . .”
His voice trailed off and he started to doze. I stared for a while at his works, lying on the floor next to him. Next to the needle and syringe was a little cloth pouch. I was sure the dope was in there. He'd have a nice amount, with his habit. He wouldn't even miss a little taste. He wouldn't even know it was gone.
BOOK: Dope
12.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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