The Story of Junk (21 page)

Kit says it hurts to move. She has to rest. We can talk about it later.

By nightfall, I'm going over the edge. I've been giving her dope all day, and when she's too high to argue, I get her dressed and into a cab to the hospital.

“You don't look well,” says the nurse at emergency admitting.

“I feel all right,” says Kit.

“Her arm's paralyzed,” I say.

“Are you a relative?”

“Friend,” I say. “Roommate.”

“Does your friend have insurance?”

Kit produces a card and calmly sits down to answer questions while the nurse fills out papers. It doesn't take long and they walk her inside.

Years of experience with knife cuts and other calamities incurred while cooking have made me familiar with the operations of this hospital. I know Kit might have to be there for hours, and I have business to conduct. Before I leave, I make sure the nurse knows to call me when they find out what the trouble is. I leave Paul's name for good measure. Kit will get better treatment because of it.

A block from home I see them: a half dozen of my favorite customers, sitting on the benches in front of my building, waiting. It makes me nervous to know they've all been out there pacing, but they do look happy to see me. I start to feel like the Pied Piper as they follow me down the street. I turn and look behind: a few couples, a few loners; long-legged guys, sexy girls. So this is what it's like, I say to myself, thinking about all our artist friends who were bums one day and stars the next, never able to go anywhere without an entourage of “guests.” I'm humbled.

Upstairs, I work up a sweat serving so many people all at once. “Kit's in the hospital,” I say. “I can't ask anyone to stay. I may have to go back any minute.” The truth is, I have to re-up but I don't want to cop till I know more about Kit. If I go up to see Vance, it may take a long time. I'll try Massimo. We still don't know each other well, but his apartment's in the Village, near the hospital. I call the emergency room first. The nurse says she was just about to call me.

“Your friend is very sick,” she says.

“How sick?”

“You'll have to talk to the doctor about that. I can't discuss a patient's diagnosis on the phone.”

I want to be prepared.

“I think it's best if you just come here. Your friend is a very sick young lady.”

Now I'm prepared. I know what that means. When my mother was dying, that's what everyone said, those were the words they used—my father, my parents' friends, the nurses. “Your mother is a very sick woman,” they said, and then their mouths would twist and their eyes would cloud up and their silence said the rest. If a person is ill, it means they'll get better. If they're sick, they're going to die.

The nurse ushers me in the moment I appear at her window. I don't find Kit right away. All I see is a maze of white-curtained hospital beds, thin sheets of muslin fluttering the antiseptic air. I see a guy wrestling with his bed, his wrists taped in bloody bandages. I see a woman who hasn't shit in a year. Where's Kit? Then she's walking toward me in one of those silly cornflower-print gowns, dragging an IV stand behind her.

“I'm not sure what to do,” she says. “I want to go home and be with you and the cats, but the doctor says if I leave now, I'll be dead within twenty-four hours.”

“You're not sure what to do? You're not sure?” I feel wild. Then I laugh. I live in a comic world. It's tragic. “Kit”—I have to steady my voice—“I think you have to stay.”

“I guess so.” Her bewilderment is somehow touching. “It's just, you know, I mean I understand I'm sick, but I don't feel all that bad. I don't see why they can't give me medicine and let me go home.”

I'm not surprised she doesn't feel bad. She's gone through five hundred dollars' worth of pure heroin in just a few hours. She's walking on air. I grasp her arm. I'm afraid she'll float away. “What is it they say you've got?”

“It's called endocarditis,” she says. I've never heard of it. She explains what the doctors have told her. It's a nasty infection of the heart, a bacteria that lives on the surface of the skin and enters the body when the prick of a syringe opens a passageway to the heart, where it lodges in the walls of a valve and nibbles its way through. That's when the valve collapses. That's when the heart explodes. Apparently, Kit is near detonation.

“Don't you want to sit down?” I say.

Then Doctor Paul appears, drawing up a gurney. “The standard treatment for endocarditis is six weeks of intravenous antibiotics,” he tells me.

Six weeks?

“If all I'm going to do is lie in bed for six weeks with a needle in my arm, I'd just as soon do it at home,” Kit pouts.

Paul shakes his head and sighs. “First we have to see if the treatment takes,” he says, sounding none too sure it will. “We'll be watching you for the next three days. We'll have to do a lot of tests. If the fever comes down, if the antibiotics kick in, you'll get better. If they don't, we'll have to operate—take out the valve and give you a new one. The success rate there is about fifty-fifty. Maybe a little more on the success side. There's something else. We aren't entirely sure if this
is
endocarditis—if it's only endocarditis. You're an intravenous user of heroin. I won't lie to you. Some of your symptoms … there's a possibility … you might have AIDS.”

Nobody moves. “I have symptoms?” Kit says.

I'm too shocked to speak.

“Maybe I shouldn't have said that, since I'm not sure,” Paul concedes. “But it is a possibility we have to face.”

It is. But we can't face it.

It's one a.m. before they have her in a bed upstairs. It's a private room. Paul thinks it's best. Most of the other patients on the floor are old, in a lot of pain, and all doped up. It's the quietest corridor in the hospital.

“Don't leave me,” Kit pleads, when we're alone.

“I won't.” She grips my hand and my eyes fill, and my heart. I'm not nearly as stoned as she is. This is all too real.

“I hope it isn't AIDS,” she says.

“I don't think it is.” I don't. I don't know much about it but I know what it looks like. Not this.

“I wish he hadn't told me that,” she says. “I'm depressed enough, what with the band breaking up and all. That would be a little too much.”

“It's not that.”

“But it could be. Betty's new girlfriend came to the studio the other day and told me Betty's sick. I shared needles with her, you know.”

“But that was before AIDS.”

“No. I'm sorry. I couldn't tell you before—I got high with her a couple of times when you were mad at me for—I don't know what for. Doing too much dope, probably. Not washing dishes.”

I'm holding my head in my hands, I'm putting them over my face. I don't want to scream. I don't want to cry. I don't want to know this is someone I love. How am I supposed to feel?

“You'd give me enough dope to OD if it was AIDS, wouldn't you? You would, right? No way I'm going through that.”

“Let's talk about you getting better,” I say.
Man, this life. Doom and gloom, no glory. I hate it
.

“Before you came back—why were you gone so long anyway?—Paul said they'll detox me on methadone while I'm here. The antibiotics might not work if I'm on all these other drugs.”

“I'll cut down too,” I say.
I hate it
.

“Promise me you'll stop using needles,” she says.

“I like smoking better anyway.”

“If I'm going to live, I can never shoot up again. If I see you do it, I will, too.”

“I don't need to use a needle. I don't need to do so much dope.”
If only it didn't love me
.

“Will you bring me something tomorrow?”

“You'll be on methadone.”

“Not right away. They say I can't have anything until they know if—if the antibiotics are working.”

“Kit,” I say, a sob swelling in my throat. “Please listen. Can you do what they ask? I'll come every day, I promise. I'll bring you whatever you want. But I can't bring you anything yet.”

“It's not bad enough I have to have these antibiotics every minute. It's not bad enough I have a fucked-up valve in my heart. It's not bad enough I'm facing surgery, or fucking AIDS. Now you want me to kick cold? Can you see sitting in this hospital bed, in this stupid gown, cold turkey? You can leave. You can go home and wear what you want. You can go back to the dope. I'm in here. I have to kick. You know what it's like for me. You know how sick I get. That's what you want for me?”

I don't want that. And I don't want this.

“I'm sorry,” I say. I'm no angel, no kind of saint. What am I supposed to
do?

“I'm scared.”

“I am, too.”

A nurse carrying a blood-sample basket comes in with two orderlies and an electrocardiogram contraption. They smear jelly over half a dozen places on Kit's torso and attach electrodes to each place.

“What's this rash?” asks the nurse.

“It's the fever,” Kit says. “I always break out in a rash when I have a fever.”

“You have fevers often?”

“Do you have to do this now?” I ask.

“I'm afraid so,” the nurse replies. “We have to take blood every four hours.”

Kit looks miserable. Her temperature's a hundred four.

“We're going to watch you very closely for a while,” says the nurse, starting to pack her in ice. “You're one very sick young lady.”

I stay another hour, when Kit finally falls asleep. I'm tired, too, but I'm afraid to leave. “Are you the family?” the nurse asks me. I say yes. She tells me to stay as long as I like. I should call Kit's parents but what can I say? Your daughter might be dying? How can I say that? I've never even met them. I'll call later. Bad news is always easier to take when it doesn't come in the middle of the night.

Kit's eyes open. “I'm freezing,” she whispers. “I'm freezing to death.”

I tiptoe down the hall to find the nurse. Kit has sweated through her sheets, they're soaking. I help the nurse lift Kit out of bed. She leans heavily against me, her arm dangling by her side, the IV tube from it. She grasps my hand. What's that she's saying? I can't make it out. The Toast set list? She must be delirious; she thinks I'm Sylph, that we're about to go onstage. I put my free hand to her head. It's burning.

“Let me know if this happens again,” says the nurse as she repacks Kit in thermal blankets and the bed in bags of dry ice. I feel drained. I need sleep, but I'm restless. Then I remember: Massimo. Can I call him now? Why not? Nobody cares what time it is when they want to call
me
.

“Are you up?” I say timidly.

“I believe so,” he says. His cat just had kittens he'd love me to see. I let the nurse know I'm going home to get some sleep, to call if there's a crisis. She's been amazingly kind, considering she knows Kit's a junkie. She never said, “Well, what did you expect?” or “You made this bed, now lie in it.” She made the bed. And now she'll sit beside it. A jewel, she is. A real gem. She loves Toast, thinks Kit's the best. The nurse gives me a hug. I don't know why, but I want to kick her.

I ring Massimo's bell with Gestapo-like force. He answers the door holding two of his kittens.

“How's your Kit?” he asks, smiling, a proud father of five, three black ones, two gray, half Persian, half Russian Blue. I start to crumble.

“Not so good,” I say and stammer when I tell him what's happened. He's worried. Of all the dealers I know, Massimo comes closest to human.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “That sounds bad. I'll go over and see Kit tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” I say. “She'd like that.” But then I have second thoughts. Massimo's too good a guy to stand up to Kit's craving. I know she'll ask him for drugs. I beg him to wait. He can't bring her anything, no matter what she says.

“I understand,” he says slowly, gesturing toward his brood. “I've got my hands full here anyway.” Kittens are crawling over every piece of furniture. One catches my eye and I pick it up, the sweetest little kitten I've ever seen: fluffy dark gray with deep jade eyes, a square head, and pointy ears. It purrs the moment I touch it.

“I have dibs on this guy,” I say, pulling it to my chest. I need to put something there.

“I can't decide which is cutest,” he says. “That one, or his sister.” He cups her in his hand and we stand together there a minute with these babies in our arms, not sure whether to laugh or weep. At this point, it all feels the same.

When I call the hospital in the morning, I take it as a good sign they haven't called me. Kit's about the same, or worse; she's in withdrawal. Her chest hurts, she says. Her arm's completely useless. She's having trouble breathing. They come in at all hours and stick her with needles. She can't sleep. “These people,” she says. “I have to show them where to find my veins. I do it better than they do.”

Vance seems upset by the news of Kit's illness. “What about you?” he says. “You all right?”

“I guess.”

“Six weeks she'll be in there?”

“Yeah.”

“No drugs?”

“They're putting her on methadone.”

“Well, you'll make some money.” I know what he means. There are some advantages to this situation. For one, I no longer have to stick around and watch movies with this crazy man. Kit's the real reason he wanted us around—he's star-struck. But he wants to make it easy on me, and he wants me coming back. Vance knows I have other connections now. Whenever his source runs dry, he comes over to buy from me.

He advances me a larger quantity than usual and insists I take home one of his VCRs as well—movies will keep me company for the time I have to be alone. There's a laugh. When am I ever alone? It's an occupational hazard.