Junky (11 page)

Several days after the Gene Doolie episode, I was coming out of the subway at Washington Square when a thin, blond kid walked up to me. “Bill,” he said, “I guess you don't know who I am. I've been scoring off you through Nick and I'm tired of having him steal the head off all my caps. Can't you take care of me directly?”

I thought,
What the hell? After Gene Doolie, why get particular?
“O.K., kid,” I said. “How many do you want?”

He gave me four dollars.

“Let's take a walk,” I said, and started towards Sixth Avenue. I had two caps in my hand and waited for one of the empty spaces you run into in a city. “Get ready to cop,” I said, and dropped the caps into his hands. I made a meet with him for the next day in the Washington Square Bickford's.

This blond kid's name was Chris. I heard from Nick that his folks had money and that he lived on an allowance from home. When I met him the next day in Bickford's, he immediately began to give me the let-me-warn-you-about-Nick routine. “Nick is followed all the time now. You know yourself when a guy is yenning, he doesn't look behind him. He's running. So you see who you picked out to give your address and phone number to.”

“I know all about that,” I said.

Chris pretended to be hurt. “Well, I hope you know what you're doing. Now listen, this is not a routine. I'm positively getting a check from my aunt this afternoon. Look at this.”

He pulled a telegram from his pocket. I glanced at it. There was some vague reference to a check. He went on explaining about the check. As he talked, he kept putting his hand on my arm and gazing earnestly into my face. I felt I could not stand any more of this sweet con. To cut him short, I handed him one cap before he could put it on me for two or three.

Next day he showed up with a dollar-eighty. He didn't say anything about the check. And so it went. He came up short, or not at all. He was always about to get money from his aunt, or mother-in-law, or somebody. These stories he documented with letters and telegrams. He got to be almost as much of a drag as Gene Doolie.

Another prize customer was Marvin, part-time waiter in a Village nightclub. He was always unshaved and dirty-looking. He had only one shirt, which he washed every week or so and dried out on the radiator. The final touch was that he wore no socks. I used to deliver stuff to his room, a dirty, furnished room in a red brick house on Jane Street. I figured it was better to deliver to his place than to meet him anywhere else.

Some people are allergic to junk. One time I delivered a cap to Marvin and he took a shot. I was looking out the window—it is nerve-racking to watch someone probe for a vein—and when I turned around I noticed his dropper was full of blood. He had passed out and the blood had run back into the dropper. I called to Nick and he pulled the needle out and slapped Marvin with a wet towel. He came around partly and muttered something.

“I guess he's O.K.,” I said. “Let's cut.”

He looked like a corpse slumped there on the dirty, unmade bed, his limp arm stretched out, a drop of blood slowly gathering at the elbow.

As we walked downstairs, Nick told me that Marvin had been after him for my address.

“Listen,” I said, “if you give it to him, you can find yourself a new connection. One thing I don't need is somebody dying in my apartment.”

Nick looked hurt. “Of course I won't give him your address.”

“What about Doolie?”

“I don't know how he got the address. I swear I don't.”

•

Along with these bums, I picked up a couple of good customers. One day, I ran into Bert, a character I knew from the Angle Bar. Bert was known as a muscle man. He was a heavy-set, round-faced, deceptively soft-looking young man who specialized in strong-arm routines and “shakes.” I never knew him to use anything but weed, and I was surprised when he asked me if I was holding any junk. I told him, yes, I was pushing junk, and he bought ten caps. I found out he had been hooked for about six months.

Through Bert, I met another customer. This was Louis, a very handsome type with a waxy complexion, delicate features, and a silky black moustache. He looked like an 1890 portrait. Louis was a pretty fair thief and was generally well-heeled. When he asked for credit, which was seldom, he always made good the next day. Sometimes he brought around a watch, or a suit, instead of cash, which was all right with me. I picked up a fifty-dollar watch from him for five caps.

Pushing junk is a constant strain on the nerves. Sooner or later you get the “copper jitters,” and everybody looks like a cop. People moving about in the subway seem to be edging closer so they can grab you before you have a chance to throw away the junk.

Doolie came around every day, impudent, demanding, insufferable. Usually he had some new bulletin on the Nick-Rogers situation. He didn't mind letting me know that he was in constant touch with Rogers.

“Rogers is shrewd, but he's corny,” Doolie told me. “He keeps saying, ‘I don't care about you damned junkies. I'm after the guys who make money out of it. When we find Nick, he's going to fink. He opened up for me once. He'll do it again.
'
”

Chris kept hounding me for credit, whining and pawing at me and talking about the money he was going to have for sure in a few days, or a few hours.

Nick looked harried and desperate. I guess he didn't waste any money on food. He looked like the terminal stages of some wasting disease.

When I delivered to Marvin, I left before he took his shot. I knew he would die from junk sooner or later and I didn't want to be around when it happened.

On top of all this, I was just barely scraping by. The short counts we kept getting from the wholesaler, the constant nibbles of credit, and customers coming up twenty-five, fifty, or even a dollar short, plus my own habit, cut profits to bare subsistence.

When I complained about the wholesaler, Bill Gains got snappish and said I ought to cut the stuff more. “You're giving a better cap than anybody in New York City. Nobody sells sixteen percent stuff on the street. If your customers don't like it, they can
take their business to Walgreen's
.”

We kept moving our uptown meets from one cafeteria to another. It doesn't take the manager long to spot a bookie or a junk pusher. There were about six regular uptown customers now, and that means quite a bit of traffic. So we kept moving.

Tony's bar still gave me the horrors. One day it was raining very hard, and I was on my way to Tony's about a half hour late. Ray, the young Italian hipster, stuck his head out of the door of a restaurant and called me over. It was a lunch counter with booths along one wall. We sat down at a booth and I ordered tea.

“There's an agent outside in a white trenchcoat,” Ray told me. “He followed me over here from Tony's and I'm afraid to go out.”

The table was made of tube metal, and Ray showed me, guiding my hand under the table, where there was an open end to one of the tubes. I sold him two caps. He wrapped them in a paper napkin and stuffed the napkin into the tube.

“I'm going out clean first in case I get a shake,” he said.

I drank my cup of tea, thanked him for the information, and left ahead of him. I had the stuff in a package of cigarettes and was ready to throw it in the water-filled gutter. Sure enough, there was a burly young man in a white trenchcoat standing in a doorway. When he saw me he started sauntering up the street ahead of me. Then he turned a corner, waiting for me to walk past so he could fall in behind. I turned and ran back in the opposite direction. When I reached Sixth Avenue, he was about fifty feet behind me. I vaulted the subway turnstile and shoved the cigarette package into the space at the side of a gum machine. I ran down one level and got a train up to the Square.

Bill Gains was sitting at a table in the cafeteria. He was wearing one stolen overcoat, and another lay on his lap. He looked sly and satisfied. Old Bart was there and an unemployed cab driver named Kelly, who hung around 42nd Street and sometimes picked up a few dollars peddling condoms and with a routine of hitting commuters for fifty cents, which is one variety of the “short con.” I told them about the agent, and Old Bart went down to pick up the stuff.

Gains looked annoyed and said pettishly, “For God's sake, watch whose money you pick up.”

“If I hadn't picked up Ray's money, I'd be on my way to the Federal building.”

“Well, be careful.”

We waited around for Bart, and Kelly began telling a long story about how he told off a guard in the Tombs.

Bart was back soon with the stuff. He reported that a guy in a white trenchcoat was still walking around on the station platform. I gave Bart two caps under the table.

Gains and I walked over to his room to take a shot. “Really,” he said, “I'm going to have to tell Bart I can't carry him any longer.” Gains lived in a cheap rooming house in the West Forties. He opened the door to his room. “You wait here,” he said. “I'm going to get my works.” Like most junkies, he kept his “works” and caps stashed somewhere outside his room. He came back with the works and we both took a shot.

Gains was aware of his talent for invisibility, and at times he felt the need for holding himself together so he would at least have enough flesh to put a needle in. At these times he would assemble all his claims to reality. Now he began rummaging around in the bureau and brought out a worn manila envelope. He showed me a discharge from Annapolis “for the good of the service,” an old, dirty letter from “my friend, the captain,” a card to the Masons and a card to the Knights of Columbus.

“Every little bit helps,” he said, indicating these credentials. He sat for a few minutes, silent and reflective. Then he smiled. “Just a victim of circumstances,” he said. He stood up and carefully put away his envelope. “I've about burned down all the pawnshops in New York. You don't mind pawning these coats for me, do you?”

•

After that, things got worse and worse. One day, the hotel clerk stopped me in the lobby. “I don't know how to say this,” he said, “but there's something wrong about the people who come up to your room. I used to be in illegitimate business myself years ago. I just wanted to warn you to be careful. You know, all calls come through the office. I heard one this morning and it was pretty obvious. If someone else had been at the switchboard . . . So be careful and tell these people to watch what they say over the phone.”

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.