Junky (19 page)

Angelo's face was Oriental, Japanese-looking, except for his copper skin. He was not queer, and I gave him money; always the same amount, twenty pesos. Sometimes I didn't have that much and he would say:
“
No importa.
”
(“It does not matter.”) He insisted on sweeping the apartment out whenever he spent the night there.

Once I connected with Angelo, I did not go back to the Chimu. Mexico or Stateside, queer bars brought me down.

•

The meaning of
“
mañana
”
is “Wait until the signs are right.” If you are in a hurry to score for junk and go around cracking to strangers, you will get beat for your money and likely have trouble with the law. But if you wait, junk will come to you if you want it.

I had been in Mexico City several months. One day I went to see the lawyer I had hired to get working and residence papers for me. A shabby middle-aged man was standing in front of the office.

“He ain't come yet,” the man said. I looked at the man. He was an old-time junkie, no doubt about it. And I knew he didn't have any doubts about me either.
A user may be
ten years off the junk, but you can still make him for a junkie. The mark of junk is indelible.

We stood around talking until the lawyer came. The junkie was there to sell some religious medals. The lawyer had told him to bring a dozen up to his office.

After I had seen the lawyer, I asked the junkie if he would
join me for supper and we went to a restaurant on San Juan Létran.

The junkie asked me what my story was and I told him. He flipped back his coat lapel and showed me a spike stuck in the underside of the lapel.

“I've been on junk for twenty-eight years,” he said. “Do you want to score?”

•

There is only one pusher in Mexico City
, and that is Lupita. She has been in the business twenty years. Lupita got her start with one gram of junk and built up from there to a monopoly of the junk business in Mexico City. She weighed three hundred pounds, so she started using junk to reduce, but only her face got thin and the result is no improvement. Every month or so she hires a new lover, gives him shirts and suits and wrist watches, and then packs him in when she has enough.

Lupita pays off to operate wide open, like she was running a grocery store. She doesn't have to worry about stool pigeons because every law in the Federal District knows that Lupita sells junk. She keeps outfits in glasses of alcohol so the junkies can fix in the joint and walk out clean. Whenever a law needs money for a quick beer, he goes over by Lupita and waits for someone to walk out on the chance he may be holding a paper. For ten pesos ($1.25) the cop lets him go. For twenty pesos, he gets his junk back. Now and then, some ill-advised citizen starts pushing better papers for less money, but he doesn't push long. Lupita has a standing offer: ten free papers to anybody who tells her about another pusher in the Federal District. Then Lupita calls one of her friends on the narcotics squad and the pusher is busted.

Lupita fences on the side. If anyone makes a good score, she puts out a grapevine to find out who was in on the job. Thieves sell to her at her price or she tips the law. Lupita knows everything that happens in the lower-bracket underworld of Mexico City. She sits there doling out her papers like an Aztec goddess.

Lupita sells her stuff in papers. It is supposed to be heroin. Actually, it is pantopon cut with milk sugar and some other crap that looks like sand and remains undissolved in the spoon after you cook up.

I started scoring for Lupita's papers through Ike, the old-time junkie I met in the lawyer's office. I had been off junk three months at this time. It took me just three days to get back on.

An addict may be ten years off
the junk, but he can get a new habit in less than a week; whereas someone who has never been addicted would have to take two shots per day for two months to get any habit at all. I took a shot daily for four months before I could notice withdrawal symptoms. You can list the symptoms of junk sickness, but the feel of it is like no other feeling and you can not put it into words. I did not experience this junk sick feeling until my second habit.

Why does an addict get a new habit so much quicker than a junk virgin, even after the addict has been clean for years? I do not accept the theory that junk is lurking in the body all that time— the spine is where it supposedly holes up—and I disagree with all psychological answers. I think the use of junk causes permanent cellular alteration. Once a junkie, always a junkie. You can stop using junk, but you are never off after the first habit.

When my wife saw I was getting the habit again, she did something she had never done before. I was cooking up a shot two days after I'd connected with Old Ike. My wife grabbed the spoon and threw the junk on the floor. I slapped her twice across the face and she threw herself on the bed, sobbing, then turned around and said to me: “Don't you want to do anything at all? You know how bored you get when you have a habit. It's like all the lights went out. Oh well, do what you want. I guess you have some stashed, anyway.”

I did have some stashed.

Lupita's papers cost fifteen pesos each—about two dollars. They are half the strength of a two-dollar Stateside cap. If you have any habit at all, it takes two papers to fix you, and I mean just fix. To get really loaded, you would need four papers. I thought this was an outrageous price considering everything is cheaper in Mexico and I was expecting bargain prices on junk. And here I was, paying above-U.S. prices for junk of lower quality. Ike told me, “She has to charge high because she pays off to the law.”

So I asked Ike, “What about scripts?”

He told me the croakers could only prescribe M in solution. The most they were allowed to prescribe in one script was fifteen centogramos, or about two and a half grains. I figured it would work out a lot cheaper than Lupita, so we started hitting the croakers. We located several who would write the script for five pesos, and five more would get it filled.

One script will last a day
if you keep the habit down. The trouble is, scripts are easier to get than to fill, and when you do find a drugstore that will fill the script, like as not the druggist steals all the junk and gives you distilled water. Or he doesn't have any M and puts anything on the shelf in the bottle. I have cashed scripts that came back full of undissolved powder. I could have killed myself trying to shoot this crap.

Mexican croakers are not like Stateside croakers. They never pull that professional man act on you. A croaker who will write at all will write without hearing a story. In Mexico City, there are so many doctors that a lot of them have a hard time making it. I know croakers who would starve to death if they didn't write morphine scripts. They don't have patient one, unless you call junkies patients.

I was keeping up Ike's habit as well as my own and it ran into money.

I asked Ike what the score was on pushing in Mexico City. He said it was impossible.

“You wouldn't last a week. Sure, you can get plenty customers that would pay you fifteen pesos for a shot of good M like we get with the scripts. But first time they wake up sick with no money, they go right to Lupita and tell her for a few papers. Or if the law grabs them, they open their mouth right away. Some of them don't even have to be asked. Right away they say, ‘Turn me loose and I'll tell you somebody pushing junk.' So the law sends them up to make a buy with the marked money, and that's it. You're fucked right there. It's eight years for selling this stuff and there's no bail.

“I have 'em come to me: ‘Ike, we know you get stuff on the scripts. Here's fifty pesos. Get me one script.' Sometimes they got good watches or a suit of clothes. I tell 'em I'm off. Sure, I could make two hundred pesos a day, but I wouldn't last a week.”

“But can't you find like five or six good customers?”

“I know every hip in Mexico City. And I wouldn't trust one of 'em. Not one.”

•

At first we filled the scripts without too much trouble. But after a few weeks the scripts had piled up in the drugstores that would fill M scripts and they began packing in. It looked like we would be back with Lupita. Once or twice we got caught short and had to score with Lupita. Using that good drugstore M had run up our habits, and it took two of Lupita's fifteen-peso papers to fix us. Now, thirty pesos in one shot was a lot more than I could afford to pay. I had to quit, cut down to where I could make it on two of Lupita's papers per day, or find another source of supply.

One of the script-writing doctors suggested to Ike that he apply for a government permit. Ike explained to me that the Mexican government issued permits to hips allowing them a definite quantity of morphine per month at wholesale prices. The doctor would put in an application for Ike for one hundred pesos. I said, “Go ahead and apply,” and gave him the money. I did not expect the deal to go through, but it did. Ten days later, he had a government permit to buy fifteen grams of morphine every month. The permit had to be signed by his doctor and the head doctor at the Board of Health. Then he would take it to a drugstore and have it filled.

The price was about two dollars per gram. I remember the first time he filled the permit. A whole boxful of cubes of morphine. Like a junkie's dream. I had never seen so much morphine before all at once. I put out the money and we split the stuff. Seven grams per month allowed me about three grains per day, which was more than I ever had in the States. So I was supplied with plenty of junk for a cost of thirty dollars per month as compared with about three hundred per month in the U.S.

•

During this time I did not get acquainted with the other junkies in Mexico City. Most of them make their junk money by stealing. They are always hot. They are all pigeons. Not one of them can be trusted with the price of a paper. No good can come from associating with these characters.

Ike didn't steal. He made out selling bracelets and medals that looked like silver. He had to keep ahead of his customers because this phony silver turned black in a matter of hours. Once or twice, he was arrested and charged with fraud, but I always bought him out. I told him to find some routine that was strictly legitimate, and he started selling crucifixes.

Ike had been a booster in the States and claimed to have scored for a hundred dollars per day in Chicago with a spring suitcase he shoved suits into and the side sprang back in place. All the money went for coke and M.

But Ike would not steal in Mexico. He said even the best thieves spend most of their time in the joint. In Mexico, known thieves can be sent to the Tres Marias penal colony without trial. There are no middle-class, white-collar thieves who make good livings, like you find in the States. There are big operators with political connections, and there are bums who spend half their time in jail. The big operators are usually police chiefs or other high officials. That is the set-up in Mexico, and Ike did not have connections to operate.

One junkie I did see from time to time was a dark-skinned Yucatecan whom Ike referred to as “the Black Bastard.” The Black Bastard worked the crucifix routine. He was, in fact, extremely religious and made the pilgrimage to Chalma every year, going the last quarter mile on his knees over rocks with two people holding him up. After that, he was fixed for a year.

Our Lady of Chalma
seems to be the patron saint of junkies and cheap thieves because all Lupita's customers make the pilgrimage once a year. The Black Bastard rents a cubicle in the church and pushes papers of junk outrageously cut with milk sugar.

I used to see the Black Bastard around from time to time, and I heard a great deal about him from Ike. Ike hated the Black Bastard only as one junkie can hate another. “The Black Bastard burned down that drugstore. Going up there saying I sent him. Now the druggist won't fill no more scripts.”

So I drifted along from month to month. We were always a little short at the end of the month and had to fill a few scripts. I always had an insecure feeling when I was out of stuff and a comfortable feeling of security when I had those seven gramos stashed safely away.

Once, Ike got fifteen days in the city prison—the Carmen, they call it—for vagrancy. I was short and could not pay the fine, and it was three days before I got in to see him. His body had shrunk; all the bones stuck out in his face; his brown eyes were bright with pain. I had a piece of hop covered with cellophane in my mouth. I spit the hop on half an orange and handed it to Ike. In twenty minutes, he was loaded.

I looked around and noticed how the hips stood out as a special group, like the fags who were posturing and screeching in one corner of the yard. The junkies were grouped together, talking and passing the junkie gesture back and forth,
the arm swinging out
from the elbow palm up, a gesture of separateness and special communion like the limp wrist of the fag.

Junkies all wear hats, if they have hats. They all look alike, as if wearing a costume identical in some curious way that escapes exact tabulation. Junk has marked them all with its indelible brand.

Ike told me that the prisoners often steal the pants off a newcomer. “Such a lousy people they got in here.” I did see several men walking around in their underwear. The Commandante would catch wives and relatives bringing junk to the prisoners, and shake them down for all they had.

He caught one woman bringing a paper to her husband, but she only had five pesos. So he took her dress and sold it for fifteen pesos and she went home wrapped in an old lousy sheet.

The place was crawling with pigeons. Ike was afraid to hold any of the hop I brought him for fear the other prisoners would take it or turn him over to the Commandante.

•