The Story of Junk (3 page)

“You okay?” Dick asks.

Nothing I can do.

“Is that the guy?”

I glance up and shrink from my bones. He's close.

“Is that the guy?”

“I've never done anything like this in my life.”

“Really?” says Dick. “I do this every day.”

Bully for you, I want to say. Then I see Angelo enter my building. I choke on my tongue, nod yes. Fall to the floor of the car in a heap.

“GO!” Dick shouts in the walkie-talkie. “Move in.”

Nothing happens for a minute. Then, static.

“Is he carrying?” Dick says.

“Affirmative.”

“Stay down a minute,” he tells me.

I no longer have eyes or ears; my mouth is twisted. I'm raging. I'm weeping. Then I'm like stone.

“Okay,” Dick says. “Coast's clear.”

I'm ready to go downtown.

“No,” he says. His head wags. “I gotta deal with this guy tonight. You go home and I'll be back bright and early. Get some sleep.”

Sleep? He thinks I'll sleep? He thinks I'm too sick to run, but I might.

I can never tell anyone about any of this, I think, as I crawl on hands and knees up the stairs. Six flights. I could be climbing Mount Everest. My friend is waiting at the top, watching me crawl. When I see her face I know it for real: I can never say anything, not about this. I can never say anything, ever.

My friend backs into the apartment as I pass through the door. Our coats and hats hang double on their hooks in the hall—getting by is always a squeeze.

My friend's name is Kit. I can see her hands are trembling. Her hair is white, her eyes are red, black in the center, all pupil. Usually, they're blue, light blue, very light. You can always see the pins in them. Not now.

I toss myself into a chair at the table in the living room, next to the corner window. I pull the coat to my ears. My throat feels thick, like I've swallowed poison. “How does it feel to live with a rat?” I say hoarsely.

Kit's looking into the fireplace. It's cold, too. There's no mantel over its white brick, only a painting Kit made before I knew her. Her boot traces a path through soot that has fallen through the chimney. “Was it bad?” she asks.

“Awful,” I say. “I can't believe this is happening.”

“Did Angelo see you?”

I say no, I didn't see him either, I hid on the floor of the car.

“I saw the whole thing from the roof next door.”

“All of it?” I'm astounded.

“Almost. I couldn't make out what happened in the doorway. I saw them take him away.”

Oh God, I think. Angelo.

“I cried,” Kit says. “I couldn't help it.”

I stare straight ahead. Kit never cries.

I fix my eyes on the painting, a pair of cartoony green-and-yellow sea dragons scratched onto a splat of black paint like graffiti on a backyard fence. Purple drips inch down their middles, yellow beads radiate from their spines. They face off parallel to the surface, electric blue, their tongues unfurled, their tails curled into whips. It's impossible to know if they're dancing or just making eyes, if they're evil or good. They remind me of the way Kit plays guitar, how the sound creeps over your body and under your feet, inside your bones and out your mind. I miss that sound. There's been no real music at our house in over two years. The cats purr and meow, the phone rings, and the door buzzer bleats, but that's about it. People knock.

“I always kind of liked Angelo,” Kit says then.

“Me, too,” I allow. “Most of the time.”

“Doesn't he have a kid?”

“Yeah, a girl. Three years old.”

Kit slumps into a chair opposite, looks past my shoulder out the window. “Why did you do it?” she says.

“Why did he?” I counter. “I don't know. Don't ask me.”

“I mean, why did you hand all our dope over like that?”

“They were gonna find it anyway,” I mutter.

“You could have kept
some
. At least we'd have something now.”

“Well, it didn't happen that way, did it?” I feel my toes curl.

Kit looks at her boots, twists a few hairs around her ear, a familiar gesture. “Well, are we gonna get anything tonight?”

“Are you nuts? We just got arrested! How can we?”

She shoots me a steely look. “I'm not going to jail feeling like this.”

I'm too weary to argue. “Let's not fight,” I say.

“Then call Philippe,” she says. “He might have something.”

“That frog?” I say, with too much disdain. Philippe is another smuggler—“importer,” he likes to say. A friend. He never moved on Angelo's scale, but his stuff was about the same. “Well, maybe,” I say. “Let me think.”

We drift into the office without thinking. The cats follow us, settle into their customary places, under the lamp on my desk. They seem to think this is business as usual, but there isn't any business to do—no scale, no customers, no dope.

I sit in my chair and stare at my empty hands. Why
did
I give up so easily? Who is this sitting in my skin? That D, that devil D, it got in my life and it got in my mouth and threw itself over my senses. It thinks for me, it breathes for me, it fucks for me. Master and servant, it lives for me.
It lives
. It has no passion, except for me. Everything I want, it gives me, but it doesn't give enough. I want that devil to die. But how do you kill a devil? There's no part of you that doesn't belong to it. Everything you do to it, you do to you.

“We have to get
something
,” Kit says again. “We have to. If we're gonna have to kick this stuff, we'd better get something to cut down with.”

She sounds remotely reasonable. “All right.” I relent, my defenses down.

She asks how much money we have left.

“I don't know.” I shrug, though I know to the penny. “Enough,” I say and swivel my chair around, ruffle through the pages of an old book on the shelf, a family heirloom, a prayer book. From between its leaves I pick out five crisp hundred-dollar bills, then button my coat. I'll have to make this call from outside. Kit goes with me. Up the street there's a pay phone on an alley, where I can watch the traffic in four directions. I don't spot any government cars, but I don't look too closely.

A couple of hours later, we're home, holding a gram. It's good stuff, not great. We take tiny snorts from the bag, just enough to put us straight. The rest we measure into a week's supply. By morning, it's almost gone.

Dick comes early. He sits in my living room and waits to see what gives. He's curious about me; I pretend to be flattered. Maybe I am. Dick's my new best friend. We talk about ourselves all day long while I sweat and jerk around, dopesick as hell. Somehow the idle chatter keeps me steady; otherwise I'd be screaming.

Kit slips out to go to “work” at a friend's studio over on Lafayette, where she's been designing costume jewelry. It's really a front for a coke house. She's really dealing base for the friend. Dick lets her go; he doesn't want her to lose her “job.” He thinks our dope business was mine alone, that she doesn't know a thing.

It won't help to put us both away, but Kit's freedom makes me furious. Some friend of Angelo's could show up any minute, attack rifle in hand. Dick's stolid presence is no comfort. He's
hoping
another of my sources will stop by. The horrible thing is, one might.

So, we wait. Dick wants to know more about Kit. That's a story in itself. I tell it.

It's 1980, I say. I'm working nights in a restaurant, cooking. Kit's playing guitar in a rock band, her star is rising.

“What band?” says Dick. “I thought you said she was an artist.” He's looking through her photographs now. At the moment we were popped, she was studying them too.

I sneeze, multiple eruptions in quick succession. “She is an artist,” I say through a Kleenex, “and a musician.” Kit's band has broken up, but I don't want to let Dick know about that. I have to convince him we do something besides junk. “A lot of artists are musicians,” I explain.

“Are they all junkies, too?”

I struggle to fend off the yawns. “I told you,” I say. “Anyone can be a junkie.”

“That's right, you did.” Dick nods, drumming his fingers on the table. “Is she any good?”

“Is who good?”

“Your roommate, Kit.”

“What do you mean?” I say. “What do you mean, ‘good'?”

“As a musician. You know, I like these pictures,” he says and rubs his chin.

He likes the pictures. “Kit has a gift” is all I say. “Yeah, she's good.” With her band, I tell him, she plays rhythm guitar, gets an itchy-jangly, nervous sound that catches your ear and doesn't let go. “It can be mesmerizing at times,” I say. “Even if you're not on drugs.”

“That so?” says Dick, wagging his head again, tsk-tsk. “Go on.”

I go on. I don't know what else to do. I want the line of dope still tucked in the drawer of my bedside table. I want something else to think about—I sure don't want to think about Angelo—but it's hard keeping up this stupid chatter. I wish night would fall. Dick works only till five in the field, then he goes back to his office—to listen to his taps on my phone, I bet.

“This is still 1980,” I say, sifting my thoughts for words that won't jail me. “No, that's not right. It's 1981. Where were you in 1981?” I need to buy a little time.

“I was working for the I.R.S,” Dick tells me, a half smile sneaking toward my gaze. “Timmy, my partner, was delivering mail. That's how come he had the uniform.”

“Oh,” I reply. “How clever.”

“We're all lifetime civil service,” he explains.

“I wouldn't want to do what you do.”

“It's more secure than your line of work.” He chuckles.

“Writing, you mean? Or cooking?”

“You know what I mean,” he says, loosening his tie. “So, it's 1981.”

No, it isn't. It's 1986 and I've run out of steam. I don't have to feign illness. My joints ache something fierce, I might have rickets. My nose runs like a river, my head's full of noise.

“We don't have to keep talking now,” Dick says, unconcerned. “I'll be around again tomorrow.” He reaches for his wallet.

Is he going to
pay
for my cooperation now?

I'm not taking money from any cop. Forget it.

“This is the number for my radio phone and Tim's,” he says, scribbling on some kind of card. “If you run into problems, call. If you know anyone besides Angelo who can lead us up the chain. Someone the government will find useful. I'll be calling you. The United States attorney will want another name. I'm going there now. I'll speak to the assistant. I'll tell him you're working on names. I'm giving you the number at the office, too. You can call it twenty-four hours a day.” He tears the card in half and hands me the part with his scribble.

I look at the card. The words “right four fingers taken simultaneously” appear at the bottom. I'm chilled.

I let Dick out and lock the door.

I stare at the numbers scrawled on the card.

Another name?

I put the card away. You don't want to know names in this business; the less you know, the better. That was my big mistake. I had to know it all.

ABOUT DICK

It's a funny thing about Dick. Dick is a funny kind of cop. He didn't bust in with a crew of toughs and batter down the door. Nobody shouted, “Police! Open up!” Nobody put us in handcuffs. I have to admit, Dick was a gent. It worries me.

What did I tell him in that cell of a room in the federal building uptown? How much more will I have to say? If I tell him too much, I'll never live it down. If I say too little, he'll never let me be.

I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't visit Angelo—how could I explain? I can't even look at Kit. But the customers, they still need me.

When Dick was gone, I started calling them from the pay phone up the street. “There's been a little trouble,” I said. They asked if I'd deliver.

“No,” I said. “Don't call me for this anymore, I'm done. I'm out of business for good.” They all claimed I'd said that before. So the calls keep coming and the cops keep watching, and the days pass, slow and empty, and long.

KIT

When did drugs get to be a problem instead of a pastime? I'm trying to recall. Exactly when did I cross that line? I know it didn't happen in a day.

In 1980 I was sharing an apartment with a merchant marine I called Big Guy. He was six feet four and
big
, not skinny like most guys I knew then. He wasn't fat, he just had a lot of meat on him, a solid kind of guy with a sweet disposition.

Big Guy towered over everything in our little apartment, a tub-in-kitchen studio with a tiny bedroom at the back. He gave me the bedroom to sleep in, and when he wasn't at sea, he gave me heroin, too—long lines of clean white powder we snorted through sawed-off plastic straws. To him, it was a party drug. Big Guy didn't like getting high alone.

One of his pals was a pre-op transsexual who looked to be more woman than I—she didn't even need eye makeup. Her name was Toni. Men loved her jutting chin and easy pout, her extra-long limbs and baby-fine blond hair. Big Guy was dazzled by her whole situation, which he thought was too glamorous for words. She ran with the boho artists and rockers, worked a few seasons in Paris as a runway model. She had a mystique. She mystified me. Probably I was jealous.

The others in Big Guy's gang were waiters, cooks, bartenders, or doormen at clubs. His best friend, a waiter, was a lanky, dissipated longhair with the sloping gait of a practiced drunk. They had come from the same town in Texas. We called him Mr. Leather, even though he never wore any. He was a jeans-and-plaid-shirts kind of guy, with a nice set of lips and a droopy lemon-yellow mustache. Kind of handsome, really.