Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (51 page)

Rising to the occasion, I incanted a half-remembered fragment of the Catholic Mass that I’d heard once at a wedding or a funeral.

‘Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. Have mercy on me.’

I drove the plunger back home and waited. For what? I don’t know, some sort of sign, perhaps? A bolt from the blue? To have my hit supernaturally or spiritually enhanced, somehow? Or maybe be struck down dead by a phenomenal overdose? Maybe he’d do the loaves and fishes trick with the dope.

I think what I really expected was another appearance of the Virgin who had appeared at Lourdes, declaring: ‘I am the Immaculate Injection. This is what you must do with your lives.’

Instead, I got nothing. Just a normal fix in every way. I turned to Billy, who had also finished his shot, and had a beatific smile on his face. Well, he’d been brought up a Catholic. Perhaps it did work for him.

‘What was it like?’ I asked. ‘Did anything happen?’

‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘Just before I pushed the plunger home, I said a little prayer to the Virgin. I told her that I was going to close my eyes, and make a wish. And when I’d finished shooting the dope, I opened my eyes and my wish had come true.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ I snorted. ‘I don’t believe you. What did you wish for?’

He smiled slyly, and then he told me.

‘I wished that when I opened my eyes, I’d find myself in a room full of drugs. And praise be to God, take a look behind the couch and see what the Mother of Christ has gone and left for us . . .’

‘The Immaculate Injection’, 2001

T
HE SKY WENT
red. Slow rivulets defined themselves, mapping the insides of her eyelids. There was a change of light.

She rubbed her eyes and looked around. Fluorescent and ugly, the place was awake. It was 4 a.m. and one could no longer sell liquor. So the people had to leave.

As her pupils adjusted, contracting even more, above her head was something she had seen before.

The
mobile des mobiles
.

Round and round they spun, all the whys and wherefores. The good reasons and the real, balanced but never content. Bobbing now, her motives were marionettes with an invisible master. She couldn’t see him for there were no mirrors in the place. Subjects of torque, they twirled each on edge, off a roving axis. Prey to entropy and atrophy, empathy and apathy, they were hanged and hung as one, above her.

And faded away as the emptying club came up.

Nightclubs always look hideous at their middle-of-the-night morn. The floor was awash with alcohol, mud, drug cut and a jigger of vomit. Her footprints left brown-outlined imprints that soon would ebb away.

Like all patrons, she left quick, hand over eyes. Outside, it was night again.

She did not want to take a cab. But walk – where to?

Aha! The northwest Wind! An old joke, ever blowing her southeast. But she didn’t need to cop just now. Not quite yet. Something else was driving her downtown.

At the causeway of Astor Place she stopped, questioning her direction. But thoughts were no deterrent. These streets were, as she had remembered earlier that night, vertical not merely horizontal. So she wasn’t only travelling in length but also in depth. And though she could follow the map of those terrains, she had never been able to surface the guide at will. So where was she, really? She could only find out by arriving at her destination and then counting back. St. Mark’s was its usual carnival and she walked swiftly, collar up, eager to slip into the anonymity of the easterly blocks where her sole identity was that of someone vaguely recognizable as another one who might know what’s up.

Midway in longitude and midway in latitude, at the heart of it all, there is a dead end. In the cul-de-sac they once sold kick-ass bags, but now, as gentry forces draw lines to Avenue C, the escape route through a murky swampish backyard, complete with a sort of muddy stream, is a barren flatland. Dry and mowed into plain view, it is no cloak for your dagger. Many a time, just-copped, she had scattered herself through that mystery marshland, works poking into her thigh as she forded the sewer-brook and ran, not looking back till she was gone from the four-meter wilderness.

That land of Atlantis trees was now a nascent parking lot. The parking lot was a condo on the way.

Just a block away on Fourth Street, flat red-brick buildings had been put up, all in a row like those in down-heeled suburbia. She hadn’t been here in months.

The last time her need had been clear. It was 4 a.m. and she had come to cop. The police had been busy and the heat had taken its toll. All the spots had closed down early. Long overdue for a fix, she was crying with the sickness. If she hadn’t been so crazy-ill, she would never have allowed Mark, a freelance dopespot steerer whom she had never trusted, to show her where to go.

Back then, the red-brick buildings were still under construction, and to access the cul-de-sac she had to cut through the building site, passing by the silhouettes of worker-guards who gave not a shit for a passing copper. ‘They won’t care unless we start breaking the new windows they just installed,’ said her guide. Mark was smiling too much and she didn’t like it. By the occasional worker’s flashlight beam, his long black face glistened in the dark. Except where his beard was. She didn’t like most beards. It takes a very honest man to wear a beard for pure aesthetics. She hadn’t thought anyone sold dope anymore in the cul-de-sac, but Mark had convinced her otherwise. He led her into a hallway in one of the buildings at the very dead end. A white girl of twelve or so gave her dope for good money. And she gave Mark the obligatory tip. That meant that she would have to walk home even though she could hardly stand up.

Just before the exchange she had started to cry again. ‘I’m so sick, Mark,’ she’d said. ‘This is good, right? It’s good. Right? I don’t have a penny more after this. It’s good, right?’

‘Yeah, sure. Hey. Of course it’s good,’ said Mark.

Walking home with the stuff in her pants, she’d felt it burn against her belly. She tried to measure the degree of heat that the bags gave off against her skin. To perform alchemical analysis as she walked. Arriving home, she knew.

It was flour. ‘Beat.’

Now she was back. Alone and with no motive. She had a scratchy, nude feeling at the nape of her neck. Like she had an unknown cunt there that she had never noticed. And autonomous, it had made a rendezvous the day that she was born. For now. To be deflowered. But her terrible lover was unknown.

To her right was the rubble-strewn plateau that had been the woodsy exit. All was now in evidence. No more dealers stood at the mouth of the forest, no more junkies scurried into the brush. It was a stage without a curtain. Naked and obscene, she felt her neck getting wet. It was then that she first heard voices. Men speaking. One was engagingly familiar, the other she recognized but it made her want to run. She understood when she heard a third voice. The squawk of a walkie-talkie.

She was clean, so she looked for the voices’ dark source.

On an overlooking roof, two figures were gesticulating. She could observe their shadow-play while remaining, herself, in darkness. One, complete with regulation fat ass, was in blue. The other, diminutive and agile, was a friend. A Hispanic of considerable and evident life-competence, Joey had remained a street-life recidivist. He was certainly aware that he could ‘cross over,’ but she gathered he would rather die. Her friend pleaded his case while the cop registered his find in the walkie-talkie.

She moved closer to the building but remained out of sight. Knee-deep in rubble, she wondered how to help.

By the time she could climb a fire escape, the incident would be long over. If she shouted, she’d be taken for a loon. She caught words as they fell off the roof.

‘This time you’re out of luck cause I’m clean. But I know what you do. Every day you stake out this roof. When you see people copping, you radio their descriptions to your guys on the corner and they pick them up and take them to jail. Why do you do it, man? Yeah, you. Personally you. Why? So you can tell your wife that you put seventeen junkies in jail for buying a powder that eases their pain and hurts no one else? Do you realize that a junkie’s body doesn’t let him not cop? And in jail we go through cold turkey – cruel and unusual punishment for an utterly victimless act that we can’t not commit. If you busted a non-junkie mass murderer and somehow put him through the symptoms of heroin withdrawal while he was awaiting arraignment, his lawyer would have an easy time throwing out the case and hanging a rap on you for torture!’

The cop had been silent through all this and did not speak even now. It was Joey whom she heard speak up again.

‘What the fuck is this? I did not come uphere to shoot up! The proof is that I have no works on me. You know that. You just searched me. Why are you doing this?’

‘Come on, asshole,’ said the cop.

‘I came up here to look at the fucking sky, man. Is that a crime now too?’

The silhouettes merged for an instant, then separated again.

‘Hey!’ shouted the cop. ‘Don’t touch the evidence. That’ll be another count.’

‘Evidence my ass!’ It was Joey. ‘You just planted that shit on me! You know it and I know it!’

‘And no one else,’ said the cop.

She was about to yell ‘I know, I know!’ when the cop burst out, ‘Cut it out, motherfucker, or I’ll get you for assault!’ Somehow she knew her friend had spat in his face. It came back to her like an instant replay. It was then that things took a wicked turn.

Only a few days before, Joey had told her that he had drugs and switchblades stashed in various places around the eastside so they wouldn’t be on him but would be retrievable in case of need. She had taken it as flamboyance but realized now that this roof must have been one of those places because—

‘Put it down!’ shouted the cop.

‘Not until you throw the dope off the roof. Get rid of your fucking “evidence”.’

She cursed her monkey as he chirped, ‘Wow! If it falls I’ll get it!’

‘Too late, asshole,’ said the cop. ‘Now you’re really up for assault.’ He paused for effect. ‘Of a police officer.’

Joey was hurricane-eye calm. Each word was measured and she felt a tingle at the back of her neck. ‘I don’t give a fuck. At least I
am
assaulting you and you
are
a police officer.’ Even more softly he added, ‘Throw it over. Ditch that bullshit evidence. Now.’

Both figures were near the edge and she could see them clear against the sky. Joey whipped out of the eye and into the fury of the storm. ‘Throw it over!’ he screamed. ‘Throw it over or I’ll kill you!’

‘I’ll throw you over first, you fuck!’

‘Then we both go.’

She lunged at their shadows as Joey made for cop and cop-gun at once. The knife, the gun, the man and the cop spiraled on the edge. She arced to a white-hot chant as her medulla vagina quaked and howled and wind tore into the chamber that could never be hymened again.

Tears welled up and blurred her vision. In that second of blindness her hearing was more acute. It seemed someone until then invisible had taken a step behind her. She turned and saw. He hadn’t even screamed.

Joey lay on the ground, face up and unscathed, eyes open.

Looking at the sky. A crime.

She bent over him but heard the words, ‘I’m dead.’

His knife was in his hand. Before she noticed having reached for it, his knife was in her own. She flattened herself against the building whose roof had hidden the weapon that was now hers. And she waited, knowing he would come.

It seemed like an hour before he did. Bent slightly at the ass, he walked toward the body, slow, eyes pinioned to her friend. Silent, she stood behind him. Two good yards, a long way to leap. In order for her to do it, he would have to be distracted. Her mind conjured a pigeon shitting a bullseye from on high. But that wouldn’t work because the bastard wouldn’t feel it. He hadn’t even taken off his cap.

The cop was looking into Joey’s eyes. His back radiated fear but he seemed certain he was alone. She could see that Joey’s eyes bore twin tunnels through the sky. Toward something. What? Unable to resist, the cop’s head made a slow tilt skyward. She felt the warmth of flower-blood at the nape of her neck.

The knife slipped through the blue cloth and deep into the cop’s back. She had often heard that it takes a lot to kill with a knife, so she turned him round and face to face, in a rush of mad need to perfect the act, had him see her while she saw him. Yes, we live on after, she thought, and ‘He lives’ was what she said and then slit his throat.

She dropped him fast for the blood was spurting rapidly, ageyser to fill a mighty needle.

For a moment all was still and then it broke. Though city silence met the death of Joey, sirens rose to greet the cop’s demise.

They’ll find me. That she knew. Fast and hard.

It came to her, then. With nowhere to run, she could only stay here. Right here. Until they took her on a stretcher, herself the victim of a crime.

Her friend would be indicted post-mortem for her wound. But that didn’t matter. Judges’ opinions were of no consequence. Such things had not even practical import, unless you were alive. So it was a little joke between friends. A last laugh.

She thought of the fertile wound at the nape of her neck but knew that the blood that poured from that gash was only visible to the naked eye and so they wouldn’t see it. She had to penetrate herself again, in the language that they knew.

The knife was dripping with the dead cop’s blood. The thought flashed that she wanted to wipe it off, for that blood contained the most contagious disease of all. But there was no time. Anyhow, she knew she had the antibodies to fight off the blue plague.

She rolled up her sleeve. Now that she wasn’t running, she had time, lots of it, to do things right. She took care and blessed the echo of each move.