The Story of Junk (2 page)

I don't answer. I can't. I look at the phone bills as if they're the Dead Sea Scrolls, cryptic and exalted.

“I have to ask you again: is this Angelo someone you know?”

“Maybe. I know a lot of people.” I take a drag on my cigarette, drag deep. Dick looks at me, I look at the bills. “Angelo,” I reflect. “I do know an Angelo,” I say then. “I don't know if he's the one you mean.”

“You get stuff from him, this Angelo?”

Time stops. There's no sound anywhere, no blood rushing in my ears, no sign from God, just heroin seeping through my pores. I need a bath. I need an out. There isn't one.

“Isn't Angelo your source for heroin?”

“I can't believe this is happening.” My voice is small. Is it my voice?

Dick shakes his head. “Everyone says that,” he tells me. “Every time. What about Angelo? You might as well tell me. It's going to come out, one way or another, in the end.”

Will it?

“Yes,” I say then, my voice smaller still. “Angelo.”

It's over.

I'm going to kick dope in a cell. I can't
believe
this is happening.

“Who else is there?” Dick asks.

“Nobody.”

“No one else?”

“No.”

I think of all the “guys” who've sat in this seat over the last four or five years, the runners and stumblers, the dealers and smugglers, the Angelos and Franks and Eds, the Moes and Vinnies. Good-looking guys, fat guys, wasted guys; teachers, artists, carpenters, fathers: junkies. Nobodies.

“So, how did you and Angelo meet?”

“I don't remember. Junkies have a way of finding each other.”

“How's that?”

“Listen,” I say. “I'm no criminal. I'm addicted, I have a habit, and it's bad. I admit it. I get stuff for myself and sell some of it to my friends. Otherwise I couldn't afford it.” Why am I talking like this? I can't stop talking. It must be the dope, the good pure dope. It isn't me. This isn't me. I don't do this. I've never done anything like this in my life.

“I don't expect you to give up your friends,” Dick tells me. He looks sincere. “I'm not asking you about your friends. I can understand your wanting to protect them. But let me tell you what's going to happen next. When we're done here, we'll take you and your roommate to our office uptown and book you. You'll be fingerprinted and have your picture taken. We'll have to fill out some papers. Then we'll put you in handcuffs and take you down to Centre Street, to be arraigned. If you need a lawyer, the court will appoint one. This is a serious charge. I want you to understand how serious. Do you understand?”

“I can't believe this is happening.”

“All you junkies seem to be on the same wavelength,” he sighs. “You all think getting caught is your whole problem. It's never the junk, it's the law that's the problem. The law and the police. Is that how it is?”

I say, “It's a form of sickness.”

“Do you want a doctor?”

A doctor? For years
I've
been the doctor, a medical dispenser. Not a crook.

“If you want a doctor, I can get you one. But let me ask you: if it was Angelo I was talking to now, do you think he'd be protecting you?”

“I don't know.”

“Is Angelo a friend?”

“In a way.”

“I don't think so. Do you know where he is?”

“No,” I say. “This Angelo doesn't live in New York.”

“Where then?”

“I don't know!” I insist. “I don't know where he is and I don't know where he lives. The guy shows up when he feels like it.”

“Where do you get your stuff otherwise?”

“The street.” I'm lying. I don't know if Dick believes me. He has to.

“When do you think you'll see Angelo again?”

“I don't know. I haven't heard anything from him in quite a long time.” I don't have to lie about this.

The phone rings again, the machine picks it up. It's Angelo.

Dick's eyes dart to the phone. His lips part as Angelo identifies himself, names his hotel. Says to call him.

Dick gets to his feet, straightens his tie. “We're finished here,” he says. “Time to go.”

I'm to make the call to Angelo, but not from this apartment. Dick lets me go in the bathroom to dress. The woman agent watches. I peel off my rags and pull on a sweater, climb into faded black jeans. There's dried blood spattered all over the bathroom walls. I've never noticed it before.

Dick takes my elbow and draws me to the door. He's going to forgo the handcuffs.

“Just pretend we're your dates,” he jokes.

“Yeah, right,” says my friend. “You look exactly like the kind of guys we'd go out with.”

The mailman-cop climbs behind the wheel of an unmarked car parked at the curb outside. It's brown and has a hole in the muffler. The driver's name is Tim. Dick puts me in back with my friend. She looks through me. I keep my eyes on the road.

We're going uptown by way of Tenth Avenue, under the ruin of the West Side Highway. It fronts the Hudson River and shields the greater city from view. Fire-ravaged piers stretch up the water side; transvestite hookers walk the other, past leather bars, auto-body shops, boarded-up warehouses, rusting diners. The sun looks cold on the water, traffic is light. Hardly any tourists at the Circle Line boat docks. Nobody talks much. We've seen it all before.

At Tenth and Fifty-seventh, we pull up before a white stone monolith too many floors to count, windows of blackest glass. “We made
awfully
good time,” I observe.

“After you,” says Dick. We get out of the car.

They take us in by a back door on Fifty-eighth adjoining a Pontiac showroom. “I figure you girls might not want anyone to see you,” Dick explains. “Am I right?” Yeah, right. The mailman giggles. They shuffle us into a freight elevator big enough to carry a tank. I wonder how they would be treating us if we happened not to be “girls”?

The elevator opens on a long, well-lit corridor lined with dull white doors you need a code and ID card to enter.
The last mile
, I think. We walk it. Halfway down, the mailman slides his card through a gatekeeper, punches its keys. No doors open.

He punches the keypad again and a moment later we're in a large windowless gray room, empty but for a Steelcase desk, three wooden swivel chairs, and a drafting-table-sized fingerprint stand next to an industrial aluminum sink. Dick moves us into an adjoining room, toward a camera on a tripod opposite a wall hung with white no-seam paper. All the walls need paint.

A female agent moves behind the camera. She's only a few feet away but seems almost beyond vision, blurred. She jokes, “Which is your good side?”

“The inside,” I say. I'm holding a slate clapboard with my name and a number on it under my chin.

I glare into the camera. White clamp lights glare back. I wonder if I should smile.

Dick sits me down at the desk. I have to sign papers now. One says I understand the charges against me: possession and sale of Schedule One narcotics. Another paper is, in Dick's words, “a kind of waiver.” He asks me for my father's name, address, and phone.

I shriek. “You're not going to tell
him
about this, are you?” My father has no idea. This'll kill him.

“Nah. Not unless we have to.”

“Have to?”

“In case something happens while you're in custody.”

My eyes grow wide. “In case something happens? What's going to happen?”

“Nothing, probably. But you never know. This is just in case.”

I fill in my brother's name. My father's moved, I don't know his address. I sign, feeling helpless.

The mailman-cop enters carrying my bag of pure, marked as evidence. It's the last time I'll ever see it; I feel like waving goodbye. Instead, I swallow. Hard. I'm sweating, the dope's wearing off, I'm going to cry. I look at my friend. She's pissed.

“Come with me,” Dick beckons. He shows me through a door by the desk. It leads to a narrow corridor and two clean cells behind shiny black bars, each with a bare bulb and a bench. “In here,” he tells me, indicating a room at the hallway's dead end. It's about the same size as my office but even more of a tomb. One desk, two chairs, no windows.

Over the next couple of hours, Dick continues to press me for names. He's got the answering-machine tape and also my phone book, a regulation-dealer pocket computer gadget. A password accesses all the “important” numbers—the sources, the money owed, the money owing—they're in a secret compartment Dick is not aware of. As we go through the names he does find, all I say is, That's a friend, and that's a friend. He presses harder. I say nothing.

Finally we pass back through the fingerprint room into a large outer office, where a couple of dozen agents sit at computers and talk on phones. They all watch as Dick sits me down at his desk and has me dial Angelo's hotel. My voice shaking, I ask Angelo to come by at seven. He can tell something's not right. I pray he can tell. I try to think of some code to warn him off, but with so many eyes and ears on me, I jam up.

We return to the big empty room. I'm clammy, a little dizzy, my calves twitch. My friend is sitting at the desk, toying with the black baseball cap in her hands. I wish we were both better dressed.

Dick disappears. We sit there.

Suddenly, he's back, smiling. Why shouldn't he smile?
He
's having a very good day. He tells us we're being released on our own recognizance, just for tonight. We're to go home and fix ourselves up. We're going to wait for Angelo.

I stare at him, disbelieving. Go home? Go home?

“You need cab money?” he asks.

“No,” I say. I don't want any favors. “I have cab money.” It's all I have.

In the taxi my friend turns her hat inside out, removes from the sweatband a bag of dope. My dope. She'd stolen it. She must have been keeping a stash all along. I've never been so grateful. I don't know how she got away with it—not hiding it from me but keeping it from the cops. I think she's crazy. We both are. We laugh, even though it hurts.

Just before seven, I'm sitting in Dick's brown government car, bundled in an old overcoat. Dick's behind the wheel, walkie-talkie in hand. I'm on the passenger side. Two agents are in another car somewhere behind us. Others are at Angelo's hotel. Still more are scattered elsewhere up and down the street, I can't see where. It seems very dark tonight. I've never seen it so dark.

We're parked in the shadow of a twelve-story co-op across the street from my apartment. On the other side, benches bolted to the sidewalk face the stoop of my building between spindly, weed-like trees—my outer office, so to speak. My customers call it the “waiting room.” I'm the one waiting now.

The walkie-talkie crackles to life. “Subject is leaving the hotel,” someone says. “He's with another guy. Should we take him?”

“No,” Dick says. “Let's see where he goes.” Where who goes? What other guy?

“Who's the other guy?” Dick asks me. Who could it be? I don't know anything. I'm shaking in my skin. “You okay?” Dick says.

“Just cold.”

He says he'll turn on the heat and puts the key in the ignition. The engine sputters and dies. He tries it again. Same result. He floors it. With a shudder, the car roars to life. “Your tax dollars at work,” says Dick. Tax? I haven't paid taxes in ages. “Better hurry,” he teases. “Them I.R.S. guys are much worse than us.”

“Yeah? What'll they do? Put me in jail?”

“Ah, don't be like that. You'll be all right.”

“Sure,” I say. “I'm fine.”

Dick checks his watch, looks at the street. “He's late, this guy.”

“That's nothing unusual. He's often late. Sometimes days late.” I've waited on Angelo before.

“Where are they now?” Dick says into his walkie-talkie.

“In a deli,” comes the answer.

“Jeez.”

“These guys are splitting up,” we hear from the radio. “They're taking separate cabs.”

“Keep the tail.”

“That walkie-talkie has a wide range,” I comment.

“Latest model,” Dick notes with satisfaction. “Wish I could say the same for the car.” A quiet descends, dark as the night.

“I think we've lost them,” an agent reports half an hour later.

Dick grips the wheel. “What?”

“I don't see them,” the voice says. “They must be down there somewhere.”

Two men are walking south on the other side of the street, coming our way. Dick asks, “Is that the guy?”

I'm slumped in the seat. Peering over the bottom edge of the window frame, I look through the dark. “No,” I say. “Not him.”

Static from the walkie-talkie. “Is this him?”

“No,” says Dick. “Hold your places. We don't know who's carrying what.”

I close my eyes.

While other drugs work to alleviate pain, excite the mind, or otherwise trick the senses, heroin plays with the soul—or whatever it is makes a person uniquely appealing and distinguishable. Like an enveloping shadow dissolving day into night, it sneaks across your vision and tries to put it out, whatever that joy is by which you live, it creeps inside and pushes you down, making you smaller and smaller, a tiny flame burning down. And when you're so small you're barely an ember, something happens, something comes at you and—

I've never felt so small as I do at this moment, in the car with Dick. Yet this thing, this drug that has brought me lower than I ever thought I could go, is the one thing I want to salve my soul. Just for a minute. Just for this minute. Not even a minute. Time's up.

“Is that the guy?”

I look again. Another stranger. And then, about a block away, I see him walking fast and alone, hands in pockets, head bent into the March wind.
Go away
! I want to shout. I'm screaming inside,
Just keep going!