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Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie: A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in the clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood.
My case came to trial in Special Sessions. I drew a four-month suspended sentence. After I gave up lush-work- ing I decided to push junk. There isn't much money in it. About all a street-peddler addict can expect to do is keep up his habit. But at least when you are pushing, you have a good supply of junk on hand and that gives a feeling of security. Of course, some people do make money pushing. I knew an Irish pusher who started out capping a 16th ounce envelope of H and two years later, when he took a fall and went away for three years, he had thirty thousand dollars and an apartment building in Brooklyn.
If you want to push, the first step is to find a whole-sale connection. I did not have a connection, so I formed a partnership with Bill Gains, who had a pretty fair Italian connection on the lower East Side. We bought the stuff for ninety dollars per quarter-ounce, cut it one-third with milk sugar and put it in one-grain caps. The caps sold for two dollars each, retail. They ran about ten to sixteen percent H, which is very high for retail capped stuff. There should be at least a hundred caps in one-quarter ounce of H before it is cut. But if the wholesaler is Italian he is almost sure to give a short count. We usually got about eighty caps out of these Italian quarter-ounces.
Bill Gains came from a "good family" - as I recall, his father had been a bank president somewhere in Maryland - and he had front. Gains' routine was stealing overcoats out of restaurants, and he was perfectly adapted to this work. The American uppermiddle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. Gains went further. He was not merelv negative. He was positively invisible; a vague respectable presence. There is a certain kind of ghost that can onlv materialize with the aid of a sheet or other piece of cloth to give it outline. Gains was like that. He materialized in someone else's overcoat.
Gains had a malicious childlike smile that formed a shocking contrast to his eyes which were pale blue, lifeless and old. He smiled, listening down into himself as if attending to something there that pleased him. Sometimes, after a shot, he would smile and listen and say slyly, "This stuff is powerful." With the same smile he would report on the deterioration and misfortunes of others. "Herman was a beautiful kid when he first came to New York. Tne trouble is, he lost his looks."
Gains was one of the few junkies who really took a special pleasure in seeing non-users get a habit. Many junky-pushers are glad to see a new addict for economic reasons. If you have a commodity you naturally want customers, provided they are the right kind. But Gains liked to invite young kids up to his room and give them a shot, usually compounded of old cottons, and then watch the effects, smiling his little smile. Mostly, the kids said it was a good kick, and that was all. Just another kick like nembies, or bennies, or lush, or weed. But a few stayed around to get hooked, and Gains would look at these converts and smile, a prelate of junk. A little later, you would hear him say, "Really, so-and-so must realize that I can't carry him any longer." The pledge was no longer being rushed. It was time for him to pay off. And pay off for the rest of his life, waiting on street corners and in cafeterias for the connection, the mediator between man and junk. Gains was a mere parish priest in the hierarchy of junk. He would speak of the higher-ups in a voice of sepulchral awe. "The connections say…"
His veins were mostly gone, retreated back to the bone to escape the probing needle. For a while he used arteries, which are deeper than veins and harder to hit, and for this procedure he bought special long needles. He rotated from his arms and hands to the veins of his feet. A vein will come back in time. Even so, he had to shoot in the skin about half the time. But he only gave up and "skinned" a shot after an agonizing half-hour of probing and poking and cleaning out the needle, which would clot up with blood.
I left New Orleans several days later and went to the Rio Grande Valley. The Rio Grande River runs into the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville. Sixty miles up river from Brownsville is the town of Mission. The Valley runs from Brownsville to Mission, a strip of ground sixty miles long and twenty miles wide. The area is irrigated from the Rio Grande River. Before irrigation, nothing grew here but rnesquite and cactus. Now it is one of the richest farm areas in the U.S.
A three-lane highway runs from Brownsville to Mission, and the towns of the Valley string out along this highway. There are no cities in the Valley, and no country. Tle area is a vast suburb of flimsy houses. The Valley is flat as a table. Nothing grows there but crops, citrus and palms brought from California. A hot dry wind starts every afternoon and blows until sundown. The Valley is citrus country. Pink and red grapefruit grow there that will not grow anywhere else. Citrus country is real-estate-promoted country, country of "Bide-A-Wee" tourist courts and old people waiting around to die. The whole Valley has the impermanent look of a camp, or carnival. Soon the suckers will all be dead and the pitchmen will go somewhere else.
During the Twenties, real estate operators brought trainloads of prospects down to the Valley and let them pick grapefruit right off the trees and eat it. One of these pioneer promoters is said to have constructed a large artificial lake and sold plots all around it. "The lake will sub-irrigate your groves." As soon as the last sale closed, he turned off the water and disappeared with his lake, leaving the prospects sitting there in a desert.
As put down by the realtor, citrus is a flawless set-up for old people who want to retire and take life easy. The grove owner does nothing. A citrus association cares for the grove and markets the fruit, and hands the owner a check. Actually, citrus is a risky deal for the small investor. Over a period of time the average return is high, especially on the pink and ruby red fruit. But a small operator cannot ride out the years when the prices are low, or the yield of fruit small.
A premonition of doom hangs over the Valley. You have to make it now before something happens, before the black fly ruins the citrus, before support prices are taken off the cotton, before the flood, the hurricane, the freeze, the long dry spell when there is no water to irrigate, before the Border Patrol shuts off your wetbacks. The threat of disaster is always there, persistent and disquieting as the afternoon wind. The Valley was desert, and it will be desert again. Meanwhile you try to make yours while there is still time.
Old men sitting in real estate offices say, "Well, this is nothing new. I've seen all this before. I remember back in '28. .."
But a new factor, something that nobody has seen before, is changing the familiar aspect of disaster like the slow beginnings of a disease, so that no one can say just when it began.
Death is absence of life. Wherever life withdraws, death and rot move in. Whatever it is-orgones, life force -that we all have to score for all the time, there is not much of it in the Valley. Your food rots before you can get it home. Milk sours before you can finish the meal. Tle Valley is a place where the new anti-life force is breaking through.
Death hangs over the Valley like an invisible smog. The place exerts a curious magnetism on the moribund. The dying cell gravitates to the Valley:
Gary West came from Minneapolis. He had saved up twenty thousand dollars from operating a dairy farm during the War. With this money he bought a house and grove in the Valley. The place was on the far side of Mission, where irrigation stops and the desert begins. Five acres of Ruby Reds and a house in I920 Spanish style. There he sat with his mother, his wife, and two children. In his eyes you could see the baffled, frightened, resentful looks of a man who feels the stirring in his cells of a fatal disease process. He was not sick at that time, but his cells were looking for death and West knew it. He wanted to sell out and leave the Valley.
"I feel closed in here. You have to go so far to get out of the Valley," he would say.
He began running from one project to another. A plantation in Mississippi, a winter vegetable set-up in Mexico. He went back to Minnesota and bought into a cow feed company. He did this with the down payment on the sale of his Valley property. But he couldn't keep away from the Valley. He would run like a hooked fish until the drag of his dying cells tired him out, and the Valley reeled him in. He tried out various,illnesses. A throat infection settled in his heart. He lay in the McAllen Hospital and tried to see himself as a man of business impatient to get up and back to work. His projects became more and more preposterous.
"That man is crazy," said Roy, the real estate man. "He don't know what he wants."
Only the Valley was real to West now. There was no other place for him to go. 'The other places were fantasy. Listening to him talk, you got the uncanny feeling that places like Milwaukee didn't exist. West rallied and went to look over a fifteen-dollar-per-acre sheep-raising set-up in Arkansas. He came back to the Valley and started building a house on credit. Something went wrong with his kidneys, and his body swelled up with urine. You could smell urine on his breath and through his skin. "This is uremic poisoning," exclaimed the doctor as the smell of urine filled the room. West went into convulsions and died. He left his wife a tangle of exchange notes between Milwaukee and the Valley that she will be ten years unraveling.
All the worst features of America have drained down to the Valley and concentrated there. In the whole area there is not one good restaurant. 'The food situation could only he tolerated by people who do not taste what they eat. In the Valley, restaurants are not operated by people who are cookers and purveyors of food. 'They are opened by somebody who decides that "people always eat" so a res- taurant is a "good deal." His place will have a glass front so people can see in, and chromium fixtures. 'The food is bad U.S. restaurant food. So there he sits in his restaurant and looks at his customers with puzzled, resentful eyes. He didn't much want to run a restaurant anyway. Now he isn't even making money.
Tlere is a type person occasionally seen in these neighborboods who has connections with junk, though he is neither a user nor a seller. But when you see him the dowser wand twitches. Junk is close. His place of origin is the Near East, probably Egypt. He has a large straight nose. His lips are thin and purple-blue like the lips of a penis. The skin is tight and smooth over his face. He is basically obscene beyond any possible vile act or practice. He has the mark of a certain trade or occupation that no longer exists. If junk were gone from the earth, there might still be junkies standing around in junk neighborboods feeling the lack, vague and persistent, a pale ghost of junk sickness.
So this man walks around in the places where he once exercised his obsolete and unthinkable trade. But he is unperturbed. His eyes are black with an insect's unseeing calm. He looks as if he nourished himself on honey and Levantine syrups that he sucks up through a sort of proboscis.
What is his lost trade? Definitely of a servant class and something to do with the dead, though he is not an embalmer. Perhaps he stores something in his body-a substance to prolong life-of which he is periodically milked by his masters. He is as specialized as an insect, for the performance of some inconceivably vile function.
The Chirnu Bar looks like any cantina from the outside, but as soon as you walk in you know you are in a queer bar.
I ordered a drink at the bar and looked around. Three Mexican fags were posturing in front of the jukebox. One of them slithered over to where I was standing, with the stylized gestures of a temple dancer, and asked for a cigarette. There was something archaic in the stylized movements, a depraved animal grace at once beautiful and repulsive. I could see him moving in the light of campfires, the ambiguous gestures fading out into the dark. Sodomy is as old as the human species. One of the fags was sitting in a booth by the jukebox, perfectly immobile with a stupid animal serenity.
I turned to get a closer look at the boy who had moved over. Now bad. "por que triste?" I asked. ("Why sad?") Not much of a gambit, but I wasn't there to converse.
Tle boy smiled, revealing very red gums and sharp teeth far apart. He shrugged and said something to the effect that he wasn't sad or not especially so. I looked around the room.
"Vamonos a otro lugar," I said. ("Lets go some place else.")
'The boy nodded. We walked down the street into an all-night restaurant, and sat down in a booth. The boy dropped his hand onto my leg under the table. I felt my stomach knot with excitement. I gulped my coffee and waited impatiently while the boy finished a beer and smoked a cigarette.
The boy knew a hotel. I pushed five pesos through a grill. An old man unlocked the door of a room and dropped a ragged towel on the chair. "Llevas pistola?" - ("You carry a pistol?")--asked the boy. He had caught sight of my gun. I said yes.
I folded my pants and dropped them over a chair, placing the pistol on my pants. I dropped my shirt and shorts on the pistol. I sat down naked on the edge of the bed and watched the boy undress. He folded his worn blue suit carefully. He took off his shirt and placed it around his coat on the back of a chair. His skin was smooth and copper-colored. The boy stepped out of his shorts and turned around and smiled at me. Then he came and sat beside me on the bed. I ran one hand slowly over the boy's back, following with the other hand the curve of the chest down over the flat brown stomach. The boy smiled and lay down on the bed.
Later we smoked a cigarette, our shoulders touching under the cover. The boy said he had to go. We both dressed. I wondered if he expected money. I decided not. Outside, we separated at a corner, shaking hands.
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 inj'ection 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 paralysed 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 Ieveled 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 junky 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 thatl" 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?
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.