The Story of Junk (19 page)

Mr. Leather tells me not to worry, not about Betty or Angie, or Big Guy, or Kit. Everything's fine, where's a waitress?

At home, Kit tells me Vance has been calling every half hour. He's run dry, what can I do? I could call Dean, but I don't trust his tie to Rico. What I need is to develop an inventory and soon, find yet another source of supply.

As it turns out, I don't have to do anything. One of my customers has a friend with “work” for me to see. I look heavenward and think of the note from Big Guy, then toss the thought aside. If I wasn't doing the right thing by my friends, the right thing wouldn't be coming back to me.

AMSTERDAM BROWN

Maggie is the mother of a baby girl, Peter is the father. Maggie is the dealer. Peter is the mule. The baby is something of a passport.

Maggie's heroin is brown. She brings it from Amsterdam, where she lives. My customers don't like it at first. “But this is brown,” they say. “It's good,” say I. “You smoke it,” and I show them how.

You put the powder on a piece of aluminum foil, roll up a straw with another piece. That's your pipe. Holding a lighter under the foil, you angle the foil, put it to the pipe, and inhale. As the dope starts to bubble, you move the lighter under the foil and keep inhaling through the aluminum straw. The dope slides across the foil as it burns over the flame. This is called “chasing the dragon.” It's heaven. It even gives you a rush. Not like the one you get from a needle, but close enough. “I don't know,” Kit says. “Smoking this stuff seems wasteful.”

“You can shoot it,” Maggie tells her. “Just mix lemon juice into the water before you cook it.”

Kit tries it. I try it. We're back in business.

Some of the customers prefer the brown. They like that low-down, dirty-bottom feeling. They also like my price. Brown dope is cheaper than white and I've decided to pass on the savings. I make it up in volume sales to other dealers. Their money is always green.

Maggie comes over with Peter and the baby every day. She also brings cocaine. She smokes both drugs, so she doesn't have tracks, but her face, her hands, her forearms are mottled with dried scabs and festering sores. When Maggie's high, which is always, she thinks insects are crawling under her skin. She digs through it to get them out.

“Maggie, really. Please stop that,” I say one afternoon. My living-room table is littered with burnt foils and pipes, ashtrays, beer cans, and diapers. I can't bear watching her scratch. Can't she stop?

“No,” she says, ashamed. “I can't,” and commences to pick at a particularly ugly scab as if I'd said nothing at all.

Sometimes, while I'm doing other things, the image of Maggie's arms comes to mind, and it upsets me. That business of smoking the coke, freebasing it's called, is the most obsessive act I have ever seen anyone perform, but Kit finds it has a certain allure. She's started picking her face, too, and cutting off her hair. She's already shaved the sides of her head behind her ears and is slowly snipping away at the spikes on top. Onstage, it looks fabulous. At home, it looks insane.

In June, I begin to miss the white. This brown dope may cost less, but you have to do more of it to get the same effect. It's harder on the system, too. A couple of times, when Maggie is nowhere to be found, I get sicker than I've ever been in my life. More disgusted. It makes me sour, like the lemon.

Brown dope has also given me a hankering for brown food—chocolate milk, for instance. Days go by when that's all I can get down, chocolate milk and chocolate ice cream. I've never liked chocolate this much; I didn't eat candy as a child. I'm smoking more cigarettes, too. Something about this dope requires tobacco. I'm up to two packs a day, unfiltered. Periodically, I have to run to the sink or the toilet to spit. I'm coughing up green-and-black goo, but I don't want to give up smoking; it's keeping me off the needle. We know now how needles put us at risk for AIDS. I don't want the customers fixing here, either—one of them is already dying—but I can't really stop them, not with Kit banging away every few hours for all the world to see.

When Maggie and Peter go back to Amsterdam to re-up, I give the Lower East Side one more try, going directly to the projects on the river and buying quarter-grams or half-grams through a homeboy I've met in the street (I'm trying to save money). The dope's not as potent as Maggie's, but it's cleaner than the strychnine-laced bundles from the other buildings. White dope is like health food by comparison. Same poison, but no chemical additives. No fat.

When my runner is busted and ends up in Rikers, I'm forced to turn again to Dean. In a way, I'm relieved. I'll never have to set foot in the East Village again. Except that someone's decided it's a great place to open an art gallery—Belle—and it's not “provincial” anymore. It's
posh
.

How does this happen? One day a neighborhood's a war zone; the next it's a fucking town square. Dozens of new shops and galleries have opened in spaces where, not so long ago, people shot dope, not art. Here, women and minority artists can be the stars, they're creating a whole new market. Openings are like parties at hip-hop clubs—paintings in the front room, drugs in the back, art dealers in the alleyways with money in their hats. Collectors are coming from all over town. The street-dope sellers have had to move south a few blocks but they haven't disappeared. If anything, they're more numerous than ever.

I worry about the competition this scene is stirring up. If everyone's on the Lower East Side every day, who will bother coming to Sixth Avenue? Everyone, as it turns out, thanks to Prescott Weems. I don't mind giving Weems a line now and then. He's a scene all his own, twittering through the door with a parade of artists and anglers for whom heroin is a medium of discovery, succulent and boundless. Business is almost too good; Weems never brings the same person twice. Most nights I hardly have time to get out of my chair, and Kit has to take over the door.

One of Weems's pals is a pizza-faced guy by the name of Davey Boxer. He offers Kit a fall show in his gallery, another new spot on a corner near the Bowery. His family's in real estate and they've bought him the space. All of his artists are people he gets high with, and most of them buy their stuff from me. The rest see a tiny blonde named Sylvia, who's no stranger here, either.

Kit is consumed with work, making new photos, running to the lab with one of our customers, a color expert, printing through the night. She's going through massive quantities of drugs, which we happen to have on hand. Bebe's coke is always just around the corner and Dean has gone to Europe for an extended vacation, leaving me with a summer's worth of dope. There's money stashed all over the apartment; I have to pay up on his return. I'm more nervous about the money than the drugs. The money takes up more space.

I run out of stuff long before Dean gets home. So does Vance. He's waiting for a fresh supply. We can get by a few days on pills, but I can't let the business slide. That's out of the question. I find a new alternative in a guy named Massimo, I don't remember how—through somebody someone else I know knows, most likely.

Massimo's an ex-skier from Switzerland, comes from the Alps—born to be high. His connection's small-time but at least it's Italian—on the money. In September, Maggie returns without Peter—they've split. Now she's always in the company of suspicious men. I don't like her scene at all, but Kit's and mine really isn't much better.

We've both developed a tolerance for dope that's hardly cost-effective. Every week we need more and more. We ought to get away, bring the tolerance down. Anywhere will do—a beach, a hot tub, a hotel room, anything. Trouble is, Massimo can't extend me much credit and I'm low on ready cash. Who's gonna front us a vacation?

I remember a place in Montauk where the off-season rates aren't bad. It's the farthest place on Long Island we can go and still be on dry land. The beach is beautiful this time of year, let's go. Kit agrees. “Sounds good to me,” she says, but she can't leave till after her gallery show. That's not soon enough for me, so when Sylph suddenly books a five-day tour for the band, I go along for the ride.

WE HIT THE ROAD

With my customers and dope from Massimo temporarily in Honey's hands, we hit the road. We're going north, to Boston, Detroit, Montreal, Toronto, and Buffalo. Toast is used to these one-night stands; I'm depending on pills and nerve. I've offered to help drive the van—the only way I can get a comfortable seat. Otherwise, I have to make do on an amp like the rest. We're seven all told: four band members, a roadie, a road manager, and me.

The band has to keep touring to make any money. They're still taking offers for a record contract but they can never agree on terms. Meanwhile, there's no getting away from the fact that their audience isn't growing—it's been too long since they put out a record. Some of the places they have to play are god-awful clubs that smell of beer and sweat. Boston doesn't give them a bad reception but Detroit is a ghost town—some diehard fans and a few dozen stragglers who happen to be drinking in the bar. The band still puts out at every show and their humor never flags. At each gig they play better than at the one before—in Montreal, to a crowd of Quebecois punks who can't get enough of their music. Spirits are so high I don't even notice the edge I've got on, not till we reach Toronto. That's where I run out of pills and Kit finishes the last of her dope.

In Toronto, they sell smack in vitamin capsules the way Honey used to sell MDA. We can't get many—the kids who take us around don't know the scene well enough to score. I let Kit have the pills but I do take a taste. It's nasty. But there's over-the-counter codeine for sale in every drugstore. Not to worry.

None of us have had much sleep when we get to the border. Customs agents order us out of the van while they search it. They look under the seats, in the engine, in the instrument cases and amps. They read every word of the band's working papers, the fine print on the tax forms. When they start on the luggage, we're confined to an office, can't even get permission to go to the bathroom. Sylph sits on a bench clutching her kidneys, a pained expression on her face. The rest of us stand aside and smoke.

Two hours go by before they get to Kit's duffel. That's where she packs her electronics. Her shoulder bag contains twin black nylon makeup cases. One holds her makeup, the other a few cotton swabs, a blackened bent spoon, and a syringe—enough to get us all arrested. We hold our collective breath as an agent unzips the first bag. It's the makeup. He examines the compact, removing the mirror and tasting the powder. It's hard not to laugh. Kit's foot taps the floor. The guard picks up the other bag, then looks at his watch. “All right,” he says. “I've seen enough. You're gone.”

We scramble back in the van and peel out. I'm behind the wheel. “Shit man,” says Poop. “Was I sweating bullets or what?”

“Really, Kit,” Gloria says. “That was too close.”

Kit wants to know where she was hiding her stuff all that time.

“They didn't look in
my
bags.”

“You mean, you do have drugs on you?”

Gloria looks out the window. “Pretty landscape,” she says. “Isn't it?”

“Pull over,” says Sylph. “I've really got to take this piss.”

We arrive in Buffalo with only enough time for a sound check and a quick bite to eat before showtime. The club is a skanky bar that smells of varnished vomit, the stage in a small back room. “Jesus,” says Poop. “Who booked this gig?”

“You did,” Sylph reminds him. Buffalo is Poop's hometown.

“Oh, yeah—sorry,” he says with a sheepish grin. “This ain't the way I remember it.”

It's a gray, depressing town, nothing but smokestacks and dull red brick, hardly anyone on the street. We're beat, but there's no place to rest. After the border search, we decided to cancel our hotel and drive back to New York after the show. Sylph lies down on the stage to catch a few winks while Poop stays at the bar; he's found a girl to make out with. Kit can't do anything but stew. Gloria's shot the rest of her dope and is floating on a cloud of superiority. “Fucking Gloria,” Kit says through her teeth. “Why couldn't she save me a line?”

“Sorry, Kit,” she says. “It's just not the kind of thing you share.”

“I can't play,” Kit says. “We'll have to cancel.”

Sylph's eyes flutter open. “Kit, you're not serious.”

“I can't play. I'm too sick. I'm sorry, this place is a hole. We're not gonna make any money here. Let's get in the van and go home.”

“There must be
someone
around who has
something
,” Gloria reflects. “There's
always
someone.”

There is—a derelict who's been watching us from an unlit doorway at the back. He sidles up to Kit, who can barely tune her guitar, much less play it. He tells her he has some pills that are something like methadone. They won't get her high but they'll straighten her out. He quotes an outrageous price. I pay it.

There are barely fifty people in the bar when the band begins their set—the smallest crowd they've ever played to. Kit turns up the volume on her amp. The sound is nearly deafening. I sit in the back with the road manager, listening in awe. I've never seen Kit look so grim onstage and never heard her sound better. She makes pain seem almost desirable. I don't care what Honey says:
this
is art. Too bad no one's around to hear it. Damn shame.

GOOD CONNECTIONS

Dick just threw me a curve. He showed up without any warning. “What's that you're taking?” he asked, indicating a prescription bottle in my hand.

“Clonidine,” I answered, licking my lips. Clonidine gives you dry mouth. “Or Catapres, for high blood pressure.”