Junky (20 page)

I fell into a routine of staying home with three or four shots a day. For something to do, I enrolled in Mexico City College. The students impressed me as a sorry-looking lot,
with a few ­exceptions
—but then, I wasn't looking at them very hard.

When you look back over a year on the junk, it seems like no time at all. Only the periods when you were sick stand out. You remember the first few shots of a habit and the shots when you were really sick.

(Even in Mexico there is always the day when everything goes wrong. The drugstore is closed or your boy is off duty, the croaker is out of town at some fiesta, and you can't score.)

Aside from junk itself
, what you experience during a habit is flat, almost two-dimensional. You can remember what happened if you take the trouble, but no memories come back spontaneously from a habit period—except for the intervals of sickness.

The end of the month
. I was out of junk and sick. Waiting for Old Ike to show with a morphine script. A junkie spends half his life waiting. There was a cat in the house we had been feeding, an ugly-looking gray cat. I picked the animal up and held it on my lap, petting it, and tightened my hold when it tried to jump down. The cat began to mew, looking for a way to escape.

I brought my face down to touch the cat's cold nose with mine, and the cat scratched at my face. It was a half-assed scratch, and it did not land. But it was all I needed. I held the cat out at arm's length, slapping it back and forth across the face with my free hand. The cat screamed and clawed me, then started spraying piss all over my pants. I went on hitting the cat, my hands bloody from scratches. The animal twisted loose and ran into the closet, where I could hear it groaning and whimpering with terror.

“Now I'll finish the bastard off,” I said, picking up a heavy painted cane. Sweat was running down my face. I was trembling with excitement. I licked my lips and started toward the closet, alert to block any escape attempt.

At this point my old lady intervened, and I put down the cane. The cat scrabbled out of the closet and ran down the stairs.

My old lady looked at me
, smiling. “Bill,” she said. “Aren't you ashamed of yoursel
f
? Sometimes I don't know. Sometimes I just don't know,” she said, shaking her head.

•

Ike brought me cocaine when he could score for it. C is hard to find in Mexico. I had never used any good coke before. Coke is pure kick. It lifts you straight up, a mechanical lift that starts leaving you as soon as you feel it. I don't know anything like C for a lift, but the lift only lasts ten minutes or so. Then you want another shot.
You can't stop shooting C—as long as it is there you shoot it
. When you are shooting C, you shoot more M to level the C kick and smooth out the rough edges. Without M, C makes you too nervous, and M is an antidote for an overdose. There is no tolerance with C, and not much margin between a regular and a toxic dose. Several times I got too much and everything went black and my heart began turning over. Luckily I always had plenty of M on hand, and a shot of M fixed me right up.

Junk is a biological necessity when you have a habit, an invisible mouth. When you take a shot of junk you are satisfied, just like you ate a big meal.
You don't want another shot right away
. But using C you want another shot as soon as the effect wears off. If you have C in the house, you will not go out to a movie or go out at all until the C is all gone. One shot creates an urgent desire for another shot to maintain the high. But once the C is out of your system, you forget about it. There is no habit to C.

•

Junk short-circuits sex. The drive to non-sexual sociability comes from the same place sex comes from, so when I have an H or M shooting habit I am non-sociable. If someone wants to talk, O.K. But there is no drive to get acquainted. When I come off the junk, I often run through a period of uncontrolled sociability and talk to anyone who will listen.

Junk takes everything and gives nothing but insurance against junk sickness. Every now and then I took a good look at the deal I was giving myself and decided to take the cure. When you are getting plenty of junk, kicking looks easy. You say, “I'm not getting any kick from the shots any more. I might as well quit.” But when you cut down into junk sickness, the picture looks different.

During the year or so I was on the junk in Mexico, I started the cure five times. I tried reducing the shots,
I tried the Chinese cure
with a solution of hop and Wampole's medicine. Every time you take some of the hop solution you add an equal amount of Wampole's medicine. In ten days or so you are drinking plain Wampole's Tonic, and the reduction was so slow you never noticed.

That is the theory of the Chinese cure. What generally happens is this: You start taking a little more hop solution than your schedule allows and that means you put in more Wampole's and dilute the hop that much quicker. After a few days you don't know how much is in there and you take it all to be sure. So you wind up with a worse habit than you had before the Chinese cure.

An eating habit is the worst habit you can contract. It takes longer to break than a needle habit, and the withdrawal symptoms are considerably more severe. In fact, it is not uncommon for a junkie with an eating habit to die if he is cut off cold turkey in jail. A junkie with an eating habit suffers from excruciating stomach cramps when he is cut off. And the symptoms last up to three weeks as compared to eight days on a needle habit.

When you kick the spike you get worse until you hit the third day and you think, this is it: You
couldn't
feel worse. But the fourth day is worse. After the fourth day relief is dramatic. And on the sixth day there is only a pale shadow of junk sickness.

But with an eating habit you can look forward to at least ten days of horrible suffering. So when you are taking a cure with hop you have to be careful not to get an eating habit. If you can't make it on schedule, best go back to the needle.

After my Chinese fiasco, I made up some papers and gave them to my wife to hide and dole out according to a schedule. I had Ike help me make up the papers, but he had an inaccurate mind, and his schedule was all top-heavy on the beginning and suddenly ended with no reduction. So I made up my own schedule. For a while I stayed with the schedule, but I didn't have any real push. I got stuff from Ike on the side and made excuses for the extra shots.

I knew that I did not want to go on taking junk. If I could have made a single decision, I would have decided no more junk ever. But when it came to the process of quitting, I did not have the drive. It gave me a terrible feeling of helplessness to watch myself break every schedule I set up as though I did not have
control over my actions
.

•

One morning in April
, I woke up a little sick. I lay there looking at shadows on the white plaster ceiling. I remembered a long time ago when I lay in bed beside my mother, watching lights from the street move across the ceiling and down the walls. I felt the sharp nostalgia of train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves.

A mild degree of junk sickness always brought me
the magic of childhood
. “It never fails,” I thought. “Just like a shot. I wonder if all junkies score for this wonderful stuff.”

I went into the bathroom to take a shot. I was a long time hitting a vein. The needle clogged twice. Blood ran down my arm. The junk spread through my body, an injection of death. The dream was gone. I looked down at the blood that ran from elbow to wrist. I felt a sudden pity for the violated veins and tissue. Tenderly I wiped the blood off my arm.

“I'm going to quit,” I said aloud.

I made up a solution of hop and told Ike to stay away for a few days. He said, “I hope you make it, kid. I hope you get off. May I fall down and be paralyzed if I don't mean it.”

In forty-eight hours the backlog of morphine in my body ran out. The solution barely cut the sickness. I drank it all with two nembutals and slept several hours. When I woke up, my clothes were soaked through with sweat. My eyes were watering and smarting. My whole body felt itchy and irritable. I twisted about on the bed, arching my back and stretching my arms and legs. I drew my knees up, my hands clasped between the thighs. The pressure of my hands set off the hair trigger orgasm of junk sickness. I got up and changed my underwear.

There was a little hop left in the bottle. I drank that, went out and bought four tubes of codeine tablets. I took the codeine with hot tea and felt better.

Ike told me, “You're taking it too fast. Let me mix up a solution for you.” I could hear him out in the kitchen crooning over the mixture: “A little cinnamon in case he starts to puke . . . a little sage for the shits . . . some cloves to clean the blood . . .”

I never tasted anything so awful, but the mixture leveled off my sickness at a bearable point, so I felt a little high all the time. I wasn't high on the hop; I was high on withdrawal tone-up. Junk is an inoculation of death that keeps the body in a condition of emergency. When the junk is cut off, emergency reactions continue. Sensations sharpen, the addict is aware of his visceral processes to an uncomfortable degree, peristalsis and secretion go unchecked. No matter what his actual age, the kicking addict is liable to the emotional excesses of a child or an adolescent.

About the third day of using Ike's mixture, I started drinking. I had never been able to drink before when I was on the junk, or junk sick. But eating hop is different from shooting the white stuff. You can mix hop and lush.

At first I started drinking at five in the afternoon. After a week, I started drinking at eight in the morning, stayed drunk all day and all night, and woke up drunk the next morning.

Every morning when I woke up, I washed down benzedrine, sanicin, and a piece of hop with black coffee and a shot of tequila. Then I lay back and closed my eyes and tried to piece together the night before and yesterday. Often, I drew a blank from noon on. You sometimes wake up from a dream and think, “Thank God, I didn't really do that!” Reconstructing a period of blackout you think, “My God, did I really do it?” The line between saying and thinking is blurred. Did you say it or just think it?

A junkie does not ordinarily kick
of his own choice. I had never kicked before until I couldn't score for junk in any form and had to throw in the towel. No one can hit the skids harder or quicker than a self cured junkie.

After ten days of the cure I had deteriorated shockingly. My clothes were spotted and stiff from the drinks I had spilled all over myself. I never bathed. I had lost weight, my hands shook, I was always spilling things, knocking over chairs, and falling down. But I seemed to have unlimited energy and a capacity for liquor I never had before. My emotions spilled out everywhere. I was uncontrollably sociable and would talk to anybody I could pin down. I forced distastefully intimate confidences on perfect strangers. Several times I made the crudest sexual propositions to people who had given no hint of reciprocity.

Ike was around every few days. “I'm glad to see you getting off, Bill. May I fall down and be paralyzed if I don't mean it. But if you get too sick and start to puke—here's five centogramos of M.”

Ike took a severe view of my drinking. “You're drinking, Bill. You're drinking and getting crazy. You look terrible. You look terrible in your face. Better you should go back to stuff
than drink like this.
”

•

I was in a cheap cantina off Dolores Street, Mexico City. I had been drinking for about two weeks. I was sitting in a booth with three Mexicans, drinking tequila. The Mexicans were fairly well dressed. One of them spoke English. A middle-aged, heavy-set Mexican with a sad, sweet face sang songs and played the guitar. He was sitting at the end of a booth in a chair. I was glad the singing made conversation impossible.

Five cops came in. I figured I might get a shake, so I slipped the gun and holster out of my belt and dropped them under the table with a piece of hop I had stashed in a cigarette package. The cops had a quick beer and took off.

When I reached under the table, my gun was gone but the holster was there.

I was sitting in another bar with the Mexican who spoke En­glish. The singer and the other two Mexicans were gone. The place was suffused with a dim yellow light. A moldy-looking bullhead mounted on a plaque hung over the mahogany bar. Pictures of bullfighters, some autographed, decorated the walls. The word “saloon” was etched in the frosted-glass swinging door. I found myself reading the word “saloon” over and over. I had the feeling of coming into the middle of a conversation.

I inferred from the expression of the other man that I was in mid-sentence, but did not know what I had said or what I was going to say or what the discussion was about. I thought we must be talking about the gun. “I am probably trying to buy it back.” I noticed the man had the piece of hop in his hand, and was turning it over.

“So you think I look like a junkie?” he said.

I looked at him. The man had a thin face with high cheekbones. The eyes were a gray-brown color often seen in mixed Indian and European stock. He was wearing a light gray suit and a tie. His mouth was thin, twisted down at the corners. A junkie mouth, for sure. There are people who look like junkies and aren't, just as some people look queer and aren't. It's a type that causes trouble.

“I'm going to call a cop,” he said, starting for a phone attached to a support pillar.

I jerked the telephone out of the man's hand and pushed him against the bar so hard he bounced off it. The man smiled at me. His teeth were covered by a brown film. He turned his back and called the bartender over and showed him the piece of hop. I walked out and got a cab.

I remember going back to my apartment to get another gun—a heavy-caliber revolver. I was in a hysterical rage, though exactly why I cannot, in retrospect, understand.