* * * * *
My place depressed me.
I poured myself half a tumbler of whiskey and walked around, holding
the drink in my hand. I opened the medicine cabinet in the bathroom
and looked at my works--the hypo, the eye-dropper and the old spoon,
blackened on the bottom, in which I'd cooked so many batches of heroin.
Sooner or later I'd go back to it, I knew, even though I kidded myself
into thinking I might be off the stuff for good.
Then the old round would begin again. The frantic search for a pusher
when my supply ran low. Setting up a meet in some cafeteria or lunch
counter to get the stuff. Rushing back to my place, with every stranger
looking like a copper ready to tap me. The search in my poor scarred
arm for a vein that hadn't withdrawn out of sight. Maybe even the
necessity for a messy skin injection. The fleeting relief.
And then the anxiety of no money. A dirty job, possibly washing
dishes in some greasy kitchen if the heat was on. Or risking a
stint of lush-working in the subway, haunted by copper jitters and
five-twenty-nine--five months and twenty-nine days in the workhouse--if
they nabbed me "jostling" a drunk.
I couldn't go back to that life. I couldn't--but I would. I always
had. You reach a point where you can't change any more. It's too
late--you're too old--you don't know anything else--you've got no
connections outside the squalid circle of users, pushers, teaheads,
queers and petty crooks who are nowhere and never will be anywhere.
It was a limbo, a hell on Earth.