The Story of Junk (11 page)

“Ladies,” Cal says as he brushes by.

Weems replies with a soigné drag on his Camel, blowing smoke through both his nostrils. There hasn't been any love lost between these two. Actually, there's been a lot of love lost. They both have a thing about Toni. Weems thinks Toni is a goddess. Cal, on the other hand, he says, is an ass.

“Where'd you go?” I ask. “What's happened to Toni?”

“Oh, darling,” says Weems. “Isn't it obvious? She has to be looking for a new pot to piss in.”

Cal presses my neck. “We got really high.”

“
No,
” Prescott says. “Really?”

“Heh heh.”

Well, well, I think. Another customer.

“I've never done heroin,” Magna confesses.

“Why not?”

“I'm afraid I'll like it.”

“Hello there,” says an unmistakable voice. It coughs.

“Why, Belle!” Prescott calls. “Do sit. Sit here, girl. Sit.” He swipes a chair from a nearby table.

“I'm not a dog, you know.” Belle sits.

Magna gives her a smoldering look. “I had no idea you were the mother of that delicious boy over there.”

“Oh, yes,” Belle replies, her eyes picking him out from the crowd.

“Do you happen to know if he has a girlfriend? He seems to have an eye on me.”

“I'll have to speak to him,” murmurs Belle.

The food has arrived, more drinks all around. Magna heads for the john, where we can see a crowd spilling out of the hallway. Belle mouths the words “Is she doing drugs?”

“Magna doesn't take drugs,” Honey notes.

“Nobody takes drugs anymore,” Belle says, peering into my drink. “We just sit around and pray for money.”

“Magna doesn't need money,” Lute points out. “She needs love.”

“Of course,” says Cal. “Money is love in action.”

“Magna takes drugs,” I say. “She doesn't do smack.”

“She doesn't need to,” Belle submits.

“We all need a little,” I say. “Now and then. That's why I'm going into the business.”

Belle looks at me, aghast. “You can't.”

“But I can.”

“But scag? It's so
sordid.
”

“It's the Lower East Side that's sordid,” I reply.

Belle's cough is so violent it startles the silverware. “The East Side isn't sordid. It's merely provincial.”

Hard to please, Belle is. She's a drug snob. If it was cocaine I wanted to sell, that would be all right—I could move to the head of the class. Cocaine is a social drug; it brings you such interesting people, such bright and radical ideas. But conversation on junk? That's something else. It lacks luster. Still, it would put a stop to that cough.

“Do be sure you have a good, safe connection,” Weems says, speaking barely above a whisper. He's in earnest. “A good connection can make you
rich.
”

Belle reaches in my pack for a smoke. “Let's not prattle on about this,” she says. “It's so boring.”

I think she protests too much. I think she's a customer.

The discussion turns, as it always does, to what's going on in the world of art: who's doing what, where, and to whom, and how much they got paid for it. As I listen, I realize what's left for me to do: to make an art of dealing. It's not such a foreign concept in this crowd. Always watch the artists, Sticky says.

So I'm watching.

THAT DICK

That Dick was here three days. Then he started calling.

“So,” he said. “What've you been doing?”

“Breathing.”

“I mean, you lookin' for names?”

“I thought I was lookin' at five to fifteen.”

“Not yet. We're still working on Angelo. It's taking longer than we thought. You might want to find yourself a job.”

“I'm kinda weak for that,” I said. Get a
job
? There isn't a soul on this earth that would hire me now. Except, maybe, that Dick.

“If you were legitimately employed,” he said, “it might sit well with a judge.”

“You're better legal aid than a lawyer.”

“You don't need a lawyer.”

Right. Then why do I need
him?

“Maybe you should think about going back to work at your restaurant.”

I shuddered at the thought. “No,” I said slowly. “It closed.”

“That's too bad, but you can get a job. Look in the papers. Restaurants are always hiring. Even my guys have a crew working one.”

Why tell me? Was he bragging?

“I'm not sure I know how to cook anymore,” I said, feeling weary. “I don't know what I can do. Everything I know is history.”

PART THREE

THE ART OF DEALING

THE ART OF DEALING

It doesn't take a lot of know-how to know how to deal drugs. You learn as you go along. You buy, you mix, you weigh and measure; you bag, trade, and sell. It's a business, like any other religion: same dependence on faith and ritual, same promise of deliverance, same foundation in fear. Same flow of tax-free cash.

But this is not an easy business to profit by; the product can tempt more than the proceeds. It's all about turnover and control, same as restaurants. Restaurants can't depend on serving food alone. They have to have personalities. That's how it is in drugs: a dealer can't be too honest or too devious; attitude counts the most. It might be nice to have a patient, kind, and understanding nature, to be close-mouthed and mature, but none of that is really very useful. It takes a bitch to be a dealer.

Advertising is out, except by word of mouth, and that's a double-edged sword. The word can easily reach the wrong ears. I can't let myself sell to just anyone; that's the business of the street.

Besides, I'm no kind of pusher. Pushers are the “nifty Louie” types you see in movies, extortionists with an evil glint in their eyes and the monkey on a taut, stinking leash. Private dealers like me do not remotely resemble these Hollywood lowlifes. We're respectable, and selective. When I drop hints around Sticky's, it's all very furtive, very hush-hush. Kit does the same at her gigs. And before long, people start calling.

The needleheads come first. That's natural, I can't complain. They're the steady customers.
Knock-knock, ring-ring, beep-beep: Are you in now? Are you in? Okay to stop by now? Got anything to drink? How is this stuff? How much should I do?
This is the usual drill.
Can I pay you later? tomorrow? next week?

I prefer the less regular customers, chippers and partyheads, overachievers, friends—filmmakers, poets, painters, musician friends of Kit's. Not all of them are into drugs, but the ones who aren't have husbands or girlfriends or sisters who are, and they all come together and hang out. It's not a big scene but I enjoy it. I was always such a loner. I have a community now.

On nights I have to work, I deal the way I did for Big Guy, weighing out tenths and half-tenths of a gram from a green plastic miniscale that fits in the pocket of my grill jacket. The walk-in refrigerator is my place of business. Pedro calls it the Food and Drug Administration. Everything coming out of Sticky's, he says, is FDA-tested and approved.

At home I deal from the living room, salon-style. If they're very good friends, Honey and Magna, or Big Guy and Mr. Leather (Belle comes by only when no one will know), I work out of the bedroom, where Kit and I actually live. It's the one comfortable room in the apartment: a carpet and two armchairs, a small table and the bed, a raised platform. Kit and Betty had been sleeping on the floor, but I couldn't put up with that. Too slummy.

Dean's all right, though. He delivers, but he's slow, a little slow. He teaches shop in a high school downtown. Every day after class he comes by to pick up money, then he goes to his source while I wait. I wait and so do all my friends, outside on the benches, at home by the phone, in bars. I don't like to keep them waiting, but what can I do? When Dean finally arrives, he lays out a taste, then he wants to stay and talk and I have to listen.

It's the biggest part of my job, listening, or pretending to. Having a private dealership is like sitting in a confessional—that religious aspect again. Sometimes it's more like therapy. People are supposed to tell a shrink everything on their minds, but who ever actually does that? No one I know, not when they can spill to a dealer. A dealer has to keep mum.

I don't know what Dean thinks about besides drugs and money. Every now and then he mentions an ex-girlfriend, emphasizing the “ex,” but mostly all I hear are vague references to his supplier, and Rico.

Was it Rico who set him up with this connection, I wonder? Maybe it's someone Rico owes a favor and Dean is someone he promised a favor and now they're all making out, through me. They make the money and I do all the work. I work just as hard at this as I ever have in a kitchen. Then how can I be serving so many people and not come out ahead? I keep strict control of Kit's intake, am even harder on my own. The problem is the cost to me: I must not be close enough to the source. Yet the dope is pure, not stepped-on, not cut to shit by having passed through too many hands. Nobody's touching it but me, a little, I don't want to spoil anyone. This might not last.

I ask Dean to cut me a better deal. Impossible, he says. Why? I'm turning it over fast enough, building a regular clientele. “It is what it is,” he says. This is the way we talk now, the language of self-evidence: it is what it is, truth is truth, Ruth is Ruth. When you're looking to get high, when you're looking to get over, you don't waste time looking for words.

I have to find a way to keep our expenses down. If we didn't indulge ourselves, this would be a piece of cake, but if we didn't indulge, I wouldn't be dealing in the first place. I'll have to work harder. I can't work any harder. I'm taking in more money in a day than I do in a week at my job, but it all goes back into buying more. Kit complains about this; half our investment is her money. What's the point of dealing dope, she says, if you can't get it when you want? We get it when we need, I say. Sometimes when we want.

Finally, when the winter is nearly over, I make enough profit to buy a warm coat, which I don't already happen to own. It's a gangster-style thick navy wool with deep pockets and subtle red stripes in a windowpane pattern—sixty dollars at an East Side thrift store. Some profit. Now I really look like a dealer—good thing I have a job. But I don't want to depend on drugs for a living. Dealing is just a sideline.

“Listen,” Rico confides one night. We're hanging out on his office couch. “Be nice to Sticky,” he says. “Okay? He's having trouble at home. His wife is threatening to leave him and he's really depressed. So be nice.”

He lays a line of coke on my belly and snorts it. It tickles but it doesn't turn me on. Rico doesn't do much for me anymore, not since I've been with Kit. She does it all, and then some.

“Nice?” I say. “I'm always nice, especially to Sticky. I love that guy.” And I do. We've never touched, not a hug, not a handshake, but for six years our lives have been lived in each other's faces. He hasn't just been tolerant. He's been swell. Forget about the dealing. When I was sick, when I broke my foot on the job, when a former cook in a drug-induced rage punched me bloody in the face, Sticky was always there, paying the expenses, covering my ass. Unlike the grumpy Flint, Sticky never got temperamental, not with me. Fuck his wife—Angie is her name. She's his second, and not much older than his oldest child. I'll be nice to him, of course.

Rico puts some coke on my tongue and sucks it. In spite of myself, this turns me on. “I don't like Sticky doing dope,” he says. “Man his age, with his bad colon—he's not up to it. But you know how it is. He says a little goes a long way.”

“How long?” I say, reaching into his drawers. “In inches?”

The next night business is very bad, nothing doing in the kitchen. Pedro and I amuse ourselves by creating new dishes no one is there to eat. Then I see Sticky by the coffee machine, glumly pouring himself a cup. His head is bowed, his shoulders slump. I follow him to the office, where I find him at his desk, a shot of brandy in front of him and a bag of dope in his hand.

“Can I come in?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says. “Have a seat.”

“Sticky,” I say. “I don't mean to get personal, but are you all right?”

“I'm just bored,” he says. “If I could, I'd close this place and move on. Once I get bored with a joint, it's time to go.”

“It's just boredom?”

He picks up the brandy, looks through the glass. “You really want to hear this?”

Not really. But I love this guy. I'll listen to whatever he has to say.

He hesitates. “I'm terribly shy around women,” he murmurs. Well, I knew that. In all the years I've known Sticky, this is the first time he's ever looked at me.

“How'd you manage two marriages?” I ask.

“I don't know. The wives—they helped. I was always kind of a nerd.” He strokes his hawklike nose and gives a smile. “It's funny,” he snorts. Sticky's asthmatic. “My restaurants have always attracted the crazies, the drunks, and the drug addicts, and I was never into any of it myself. But drug addicts are some of the best people I know. Sure, they've got problems, who doesn't? They don't take life the way it's handed to them. They put on a show and the town comes to watch. And I make all the money. Or I did.” He flips through the receipts on his desk with a sigh.

I wonder what's happened to the money. “Oh, you know, two wives, four kids, alimony …” He lifts the glass of brandy. “I never expected to go into this business,” he goes on. “I have a law degree, but I never practiced. I tried it for about six months, and hated it.” He smiles as his eyes fall on the bag of dope still in his hand. I offer him a line of mine. He takes it.