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

from the bright lights, the tawdry novelties, human or otherwise, for sale in Times Square, it visibly sags under the weight of housing too many different kinds of people with too many different ideas of fun: immigrants, bikers, poets, punks, self-appointed priests, a decrepit bohemia buzzing with capitalist cheer.
    Big-time Latino drug entrepreneurs have built a model corporate structure in the body of the condemned. Every day new drug “stalls” sprout from the walls of abandoned buildings and the grasses of rubble-strewn lots. An incredible din fills the air: blaring sirens, running feet, lookouts shouting Bajando! (the Man), or Todo bien! (all clear). Hawkers stand on corners calling out the brand names of “houses” they represent: Poison, 57 Magnum, Colt 45, Toilet, Star, President, Executive. It’s big. To a tourist, it must look like a casbah from hell.
    Even at eight a.m. the streets are crawling. Avenue B reminds me of a drag strip; transactions are a blur. By midafternoon, it’s a swarm, bodies slinking in and out of guarded doorways, diving through holes punched in concrete walls, wiggling into gaps in the sidewalk deep as wells, shooting up in empty lots, nodding on the hulks of abandoned cars. Everyone’s slumming. Everyone, from the unwashed to the unwed to the unbelievably rich. They’re not residents. These streets are home only to the cunning.
    â€œIt’s the new Gold Rush,” I observe as we go. These derelict buildings with their broken windows and missing floors, these dank peeling shells with their dimly lit corridors to oblivion, these are our mines. “We’re not breaking laws,” I say. “We’re working the mines .”
    Kit gives me a look. “Try and tell that to the judge.”
    We know the cops can’t haul everyone in, but at random moments they load a hundred people in buses, take their drugs, book them, embarrass them, and let them go. When the police can’t handle it, the politicians campaign to tear the buildings down. Most of them are owned by the city. Some days we have to dodge bulldozers as often as we do the law.
    Cops aren’t the only hazard. If some desperado wants our stuff, he’ll get it. Around here they pull the rings right off your fingers—with their teeth, if they have to—if your money’s not good enough. If the thieves don’t get you, the beat artists will—sellers who tap out a hit for themselves and sell you a bag filled with sugar or baby powder, or worse. Then there are the undercovers. Every now and then a pair of them will pull you aside and snap on the handcuffs. If one of them wants a kick, he’ll trade your freedom for a suck-off in his car. If a cop doesn’t do it, one of the flacos will. A flaco is a cop-man, it’s what the dealers call themselves. They all have the same name, they do the same things. They take you.
    It’s all a stupid game run by creeps and fueled by assholes, but we accept it. The danger is part of the draw. Life isn’t easy, not for anyone. Heroin is a finger up its nose. It’s got a life of its own and that life is ours, we don’t have to plan or think it out. There lies the beauty: I’m done with thinking. All it ever did was make me cry.
    Kit is my guide on these daily excursions across town. Our safety depends on our sticking together, and we’re together most of the time, copping, getting high, going home to fool around. If sex is the main attraction in our friendship, heroin is the glue. Then food.
    One night I bring home a box of overripe strawberries and slip a few inside her while we’re in bed. “Here’s fresh fruit for dessert,” I say, giggling. “You can make the cream.” Usually, all I do with Kit is laugh. Not this time.
    â€œI don’t like dirty talk,” she says, her face white. “It makes me feel weird.” I shrug and eat the berries. It’s the only