The Story of Junk (31 page)

I find Mary in the next stall, considering the heft and price of a lacquered human skull in her hand. It's speckled brown, like a quail's egg. There's a brass hinge at the nape of the neck, where it must have been torn off. She plunks down a hundred and twenty dollars, American. The skull drops in her bag with a thud. “This is a sacred object here,” she tells me as we merge back into the muddy road. “It's very precious.” Actually, she says, it's sort of illegal to remove. She'll have to smuggle it out.

Great. Dope up the ass, Thai stamp on the passport, skull in the bag. “How are you going to get that past customs?” I ask.

“Oh,” she says, “maybe this'll distract them—from the other thing.”

The sun's shining now, it's almost too bright. I ask to see the skull. It's heavy as a bowling ball. “How old d'you think this is?” I'm curious.

“Old,” she says. “I'll make some money on it when I get back home. There's a nice market in New York for antique skulls.” A born smuggler, this Mary Motion. I can learn a thing or two from her.

Mario is just waking up when we get back to the hotel. He wants a snort from the sample. “No needles,” I say, “no problem.”

“No problem,” he replies, dusting off his eyes. I go in the bathroom to retrieve the balloon. I dangle it in Mario's face. “Breakfast,” he says with a grin.

“
Buon appetito.
” I smile.

Just before two p.m., Mario cinches up the moneybelt and heads out in the pedicab. Mary and I pack our bags and walk around town looking for something to eat, something small and easy to digest. It's cloudy again, this is no fun. In a few more hours we'll be back in the pukable miasma of Bangkok. I hope the borders are open.

“Let's not stay in Bangkok,” I say. “Let's go straight to Singapore.”

“Okay by me,” Mary says.

We step into a fluorescent-lit Formica place that resembles a McDonald's but more plastic, if that's possible. Maybe four other people are there, one Caucasian hippie couple. It's raining again. Everyone looks out the windows at the rain. We order by pointing to pictures on the wall. Who took these pictures? How long ago? They don't look very new. What does that say about the food? I've been living on chocolate milk, heroin, cigarettes, vodka, and coffee for over a year. What do I care about freshness? I wish Kit was here. What am I doing with these people?

The food comes fast; it seems warmed over. I try the Thai noodles but I don't swallow well. Mary Motion can't eat her rice either. Maybe when we're in Singapore, we say. Maybe then we'll eat. We watch the rain.

Later, Mario says he's paid for the stuff but he has to go back at six for the pickup. He wants me with him this time. A secret smile sneaks across my face—my private face, the one I never show the world, the one I keep under the skin, where this life can never betray it.

At five-thirty I'm in the pedicab with Mario. The driver knows where to go. I worry about that, but Mario, of course, says not to. He's paid off the driver, whose name is Chuck. We pedal onto a wide concrete bridge that crosses the River Ping. Chuck stops by a roadhouse sitting on the riverbank. Graceful trees hang low over water that appears still and glimmering in the late afternoon sun. “Wait for me here,” Mario says. “I won't be long.”

I'm the only customer in the bar, a rustic barnlike room with a few scattered picnic tables. The whole place is varnished knotty pine. It reminds me of the one Catskill Mountain hotel I ever went to, when I was fourteen, but without the Ping-Pong. The slight Thai barman is setting up for the evening, washing glasses, polishing the bar. I ask for a beer and go out on the back deck to wait. To pass the time I watch the traffic on the opposite shore, study the sun going down. I wish I knew where Mario was. “Three or four houses up the road,” he said when he left. I wish I could see which one, but the trees—

I wish it were me making the pickup. I want to see who these people are, how they do it. Mario says it's a family and that they're very organized, very professional. Someday, I reflect, I might want to make this trip on my own. No, what am I thinking? I never want to come this way again. I want to get my dope, make my money, and get the hell out of this business, if there is a getting out. At the moment, it seems impractical.

Mario hasn't returned when I finish the beer. I'm restless. It must look strange, me sitting here drinking by the river, a white girl in black clothes, alone. I stare at my sneakers. I look to see where the barman is. He's watching me through a window. I light a cigarette, signal for another beer.

I wish I could like what I'm doing. It's not so bad, really, I guess. I'm having a vacation, I'm out of New York. I smoke and drink the beer, watch the sun, the lilies floating on the water, the bicycles gliding slowly across the bridge. It looks like the Pont Neuf in Paris. I sit in the twilight, still as a Buddha. I feel calm inside, pleased I've been handed this good dope, this good day, this good hour. I'm on a mission, that's what it is, this is important. I'm hauling back pleasure for a lot of worried people who need me.

No, it's not a mission, it's just a job. I have a business and I'm doing my job. I'm doing the right thing—I'm lucky. I'm lucky to be here. Not everyone gets opportunities like this. For a fleeting moment, I remember my life, a tiny speck on the floor of my imagination. I don't know where I am or what comes next, maybe never did. All I ever wanted was to feel swallowed whole. But in my dreams, I was always suffocating.

Even as a child I was afraid of my dreams. My parents would tuck me in bed and turn out the light, and when the door closed I'd lie there and wait for sleep and push it away when it came. When I was five, my Uncle Jack died in a car crash, killed in an instant. I began having a recurrent dream. It was a Humpty Dumpty sort of dream that began at a mortared stone wall.

My great-uncle Willie was there with me, leaning on his cane. He was my mother's uncle, but she looked to him as a parent because her parents had both died young. He was old enough to be her father but, unlike my mother, he seemed young enough to be my friend.

With Uncle Jack dead, Uncle Willie became my favorite relative. He was my favorite because we shared a secret. Whenever my family visited him and my parents went out, we stayed up late together and watched wrestling matches on TV. We didn't have a TV yet in our house. Commercial TV was only about as old as I was then and most people didn't have it. My great-aunt and -uncle had TV but no children—not counting my mother, who had been born to my great-aunt's twin sister, probably a suicide. I don't know that for sure, because my mother never told anyone how my grandmother died. “Of a broken heart” was all she ever said. “At least,” I told her once, in a fit of anger, “at least she had a heart that could be broken.”

This great-uncle was a believer in physical culture. When he ran from the Nazis at the outbreak of World War II, he got out of Germany and went to England, where he worked in a cousin's gymnasium. He taught swimming and weight lifting, and every day he shaved his head. He left a few hairs on top, which he would carefully comb and position with Brylcreem. At the gym he coached the wrestlers. He didn't wrestle himself, because he'd come to England with a head injury. He also acquired a cane. I never knew why; his injuries were never apparent. A lot of the time he just let the cane hang over his arm, but he didn't go anywhere without it.

Under his mattress Uncle Willie kept a silver flask that was always filled with brandy. When we stayed up to watch wrestling on TV, we drank from the flask. That was our secret. We stayed up after hours and took nips of brandy, he from the mouth of the flask, me from the cap. Then I'd fall asleep.

In my dream we stood before this high crumbling wall passing the flask. On one side of the wall thousands—thousands—of people were crowded together in the shadows, screaming for release from a pit behind the wall. They were badly dressed and many had crutches, like my great-aunt, who had a broken hip. Everyone was pushing against the wall, as if they could topple it with the sound of their screams and the weight of their agony—as if they could simply push it away, as I did the arrival of sleep.

My uncle, because he needed a cane, couldn't scramble over the wall. Also, he was too short. I, a child of five, was even shorter, but I had get-up-and-go. Also, because this was my dream, I could do anything that seemed like the right thing.

I was able to boost my uncle to the top of the wall, and I, finding toeholds between the old stones, could lift myself up after him, above the screaming minions. Whenever we reached the top and knew we could jump over, I woke up, breathing hard. I had to sing myself back to sleep. I sang a lullaby to the crippled souls imprisoned behind the wall.

Many years later, many, but before I found drugs, Uncle Willie was living in a home for the aged in the Bronx. Every now and then I'd hop a D train in the Village and go to see him. One of the last times I went, Uncle Willie wasn't in his room. My aunt was dead by then and I knew he often wandered the halls of the home talking to the ladies. They all seemed to have a crush on him. One of them was his new girlfriend. They were both in their middle seventies.

I went down the hall to the girlfriend's room to see if he was in there. She hadn't seen him since the morning. She wasn't feeling well that day. I left her alone, went into the cafeteria and then out into the garden. No uncle. Finally I went to the desk in the lobby to look for a nurse. She disappeared a moment and returned with an administrator. The administrator told me my uncle's rent had not been paid that month and what could I do about it? My uncle's expenses were usually paid by checks that came from the German government—war reparations. If they hadn't come, there wasn't anything I could do about it. All I had was a token for the D train. I didn't tell the woman about the token. I asked where my uncle was, but she didn't know. She looked at the nurse. The nurse then said my uncle had gone out for a walk and hadn't returned for lunch.

A social worker appeared from an inner office. “Are you a relative of Mr. Winter's?” she asked. I told her, Yes, I'm his niece. “Your uncle had an accident,” she said. “They just called from the V.A. hospital up the road. They have him over there. Someone found him collapsed in the street. They may not let you in, but maybe you should go on up there.”

The V.A. hospital was at the top of a steep hill a few blocks away. It was an old building that smelled of urine and floor wax and antiseptic. As I walked down a hall past wards of up to forty beds, I saw men without legs or teeth or eyes, lying on cots or sitting limply in wheelchairs, coughing, grunting, or staring. A lump formed in my throat and stayed there.

I found my uncle in a room with six other men lying quiet in their beds. This was the cardiac intensive care unit; they thought he'd had a heart attack. His face was red with the effort of staying alive. The stubble on his head was visible. My first thought was, If he could see that, he
would
have a heart attack.

As I sat down by his bed, a young East Indian doctor approached. They couldn't really keep my uncle in the V.A. hospital, he explained, because my uncle was not a veteran. But, he said, they were afraid to move him. They were waiting for the home to decide if it would pay his expenses. I explained that my uncle received a hefty check from Germany every month and I was certain it would pay his expenses. Well, said the doctor, they wanted to perform a spinal tap, but they needed a family member's written permission. Would I sign the form? I had just turned twenty-one. I could sign the form, but I didn't want to. I'd never heard of a spinal tap. I called my mother.

Her response was just short of hysterical. I told her not to worry, Uncle Willie seemed safe and comfortable, and maybe the spinal tap wasn't necessary. We decided to wait. When I returned from the phone, my uncle looked frightened. He squeezed my hand. He wanted to go back to the home. Would I take him? He was sure he could walk. The doctor warned me against moving him. I told Uncle Willie to sit tight, I'd be back the following day.

Next day I was on the D train again, and by the time I reached my uncle, he was just this side of conscious. I still didn't know what was wrong. The doctor handed me the permission form and I signed it. My uncle's face was still flushed and his temples visibly pounded. I was scared. I knew we were back at the wall and I couldn't help him over it. I went home.

The next morning they called me to say he was dead. Would I pick up his things, sign a few more papers? First I went to the V.A. hospital. They handed me his cane. At the home they gave me his wallet and a receipt for the reparation check, which they said had finally arrived. My father was coming to get the rest of his belongings, which were collected in a few slender cartons. The silver flask was on top, so I took it. It was empty.

At the funeral, my mother sat next to me. When the service ended, she gripped my arm. “There's no one left,” she said.

“
I'm
here,” I whispered.

“That's not what I meant,” she said.

Two years later, she died, too. According to Jewish ritual, a family member has to identify the body. A mortician took me to her casket. In the hospital, she'd been just skin and bones, her back riddled with tumors. I could hardly look at her then. Here, I simply stared.

“Is this woman your mother?” the mortician asked. It was cold in the room and I shivered. It wasn't the mother I'd known. Her face had been round and ruddy, eyes green. Her hair had once been wavy, on the thin side, sometimes dark, sometimes fair. There had been a slight furrow to her brow, a look of concern, or dread, or expectation, I never knew exactly. Her hands had seldom been at rest. Now they were folded on her chest, frozen in an attitude she never had. Her hair was bouffant, a rusty orange, her skin had a yellow cast. The furrow in her brow was filled with putty.