Read Online The Story of Junk by Linda Yablonsky - Free Book Online Page A

pale river of dreams, all my worries over, love sealed in my heart at last.
    I lie back on the pillows and take in the sun. The bedroom windows at the rear avail a view to the east, a maze of rooftop water towers wide as the horizon in the sky. I’m in heaven. My legs curl under me. I’m warm, my skin tingles. I listen to my heart beat. It’s slow and easy. I don’t move but I can see myself dancing. My mind races. I’m excited. The music—I wonder if I did the right thing, giving up Big Guy’s apartment. Well, it wasn’t mine to keep. Isn’t it better not to pay two rents? After all, we’re a couple now, Kit and I, aren’t we a couple? High time I tried something new. New life, new kind of sex, new apartment. This place is big, filled with light. The cats are happier here, too. One of them is pregnant. I’ve cleaned the house, everything neat and tidy, but there’s one thing I missed: Betty’s presence. It’s here. I can smell it. I can feel her eyes at my back. Then, in my mind, I see a grave. It’s covered in weeds and sits near a road down a slope beside a bridge. I kneel at the grave, pull at the weeds. I hear a voice say my name. It’s my mother’s. Then my mind empties, and everything is different.
    It’s not easy to describe this euphoria—a sublime nausea, a flushed meeting of mortal and immaterial all at once, a leap beyond fate, a divine embrace. Heroin gives the impression you’ve gained a level of self-knowledge closed to other pursuits, and the moment you recognize the place where you stand, it blots you out as if you’d never existed. Nothing in the world can hurt you then. Nothing can touch you. And nothing can satisfy your hunger for more: more love, more pain, more sex, more excitement. More more .
    Everything happens, if you let it, sooner or later, all the things you’ve left undone come back to claim you. I feel safe here. Heroin doesn’t rattle any skeletons. It’s sweet. It can’t get any sweeter than this. Everything is as I remember it, as I want it, as I need. I own it, the great, the pure, the impossible. All mine.
    â€œWhich dope is this?” I ask. I sound far away.
    â€œSomething new,” Kit says. “Black Mark,” she reads from the stamp on the glassine paper. “I’ll walk you over there later.”
    She lies down beside me, her face pressed to mine, my lizard, my lover, my waking dream. Isn’t this love? It must be.

COPPING
    With Betty out of the picture and no one else to run, Kit has to go out on the Lower East Side to cop drugs for herself. “Come with me,” she says, pulling on her boots. They’re black velvet suede, cut low, pointy-toe—very King’s Road, London.
    I’m not interested in buying from the street. Too risky. And the stuff itself is dirty—cut with quinine and strychnine and God knows what else. It’s the color of wet sand. White dope is much more refined, closer to pure. Like me.
    â€œYou’re such a snob,” Kit teases.
    â€œYou think I’ll put any old shit in this body?” I challenge her. I don’t eat processed food, or animal fat, either. I like feeling lean.
    â€œCome on,” she pleads. “I don’t like going out there alone.”
    What the hell, I think. The exercise will do me good. Muscles gather strength with repetition; so does mettle. I have to sharpen my wits—it’s New York. A flabby spirit never cut it around here. My mother grew up in a Second Avenue tenement; my father was born on Avenue D. I’m just going back to my roots.
    From SoHo, it’s a twenty-minute walk across town, maybe thirty, every day to a different spot. The Lower East Side’s made a comeback. It even has a new name: Alphabet City. It’s no less wretched than when it was the Lower East Side, just more colorful and illicit. Away from the splendor of upper Fifth Avenue, removed