Junky Read Free Page B

of fear. After six weeks or so I gave Roy a ring, not expecting him to be back from his trip, but then I heard his voice on the phone.
    I said, “Say, do you have any to sell? Of the material I sold you before?”
    There was a pause.
    â€œYe-es,” he said, “I can let you have six, but the price will have to be three dollars per. You understand I don’t have many.”
    â€œOkay,” I said. “You know the way. Bring it on over.”
    It was twelve one-half grain tablets in a thin glass tube. I paid him eighteen dollars and he apologized again for the retail rate.
    Next day he bought two grains back.
    â€œIt’s mighty hard to get now at any price,” he said, looking for a vein in his leg. He finally hit a vein and shot the liquid in with an air bubble. “If air bubbles could kill you, there wouldn’t be a junkie alive,” he said, pulling up his pants .
    Later that day Roy pointed out to me a drugstore where they sold needles without any questions—very few drugstores will sell them without a prescription. He showed me how to make a collar out of paper to fit the needle to an eyedropper. An eyedropper is easier to use than a regular hypo, especially for giving yourself vein shots.
    Several days later Roy sent me to see a doctor with a story about kidney stones, to hit him for a morphine prescription. The doctor’s wife slammed the door in my face, but Roy finally got past her and made the doctor for a ten-grain script.
    The doctor’s office was in junk territory on 102nd, off Broadway. He was a doddering old man and could not resist the junkies who filled his office and were, in fact, his only patients. It seemed to give him a feeling of importance to look out and see an office full of people. I guess he had reached a point where he could change the appearance of things to suit his needs and when he looked out there he saw a distinguished and diversified clientele, probably well-dressed in 1910 style, instead of a bunch of ratty-looking junkies come to hit him for a morphine script.
    Roy shipped out at two- or three-week intervals. His trips were Army Transport and generally short. When he was in town we generally split a few scripts. The old croaker on 102nd finally lost his mind altogether and no drugstore would fill his scripts, but Roy located an Italian doctor out in the Bronx who would write.
    I was taking a shot from time to time, but I was a long way from having a habit. At this time I moved into an apartment on the Lower East Side. It was a tenement apartment with the front door opening into the kitchen.
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    I began dropping into the Angle Bar every night and saw quite a bit of Herman. I managed to overcome his original bad impression of me, and soon I was buying his drinks and meals, and he was hitting me for “smash” (change) at regular intervals. Herman did not have a habit at this time. In fact, he seldom got a habit unless someone else paid for it. But he was always high on something—weed, benzedrine, or knocked out of his mind on “goof balls.” He showed up at the Angle every night with a big slob of a Polack called Whitey. There were four Whities in the Angle set, which made for confusion. This Whitey combined the sensitivity of a neurotic with a psychopath’s readiness for violence. He was convinced that nobody liked him, a fact that seemed to cause him a great deal of worry.
    One Tuesday night Roy and I were standing at the end of the Angle bar. Subway Mike was there, and Frankie Dolan. Dolan was an Irish boy with a cast in one eye. He specialized in crummy scores, beating up defenseless drunks, and holding out on his confederates. “I got no honor,” he would say. “I’m a rat.” And he would giggle.
    Subway Mike had a large, pale face and long teeth. He looked like some specialized kind of underground animal that preys on the animals of the surface. He was a skillful lush-worker, but he had no