CRUSHER

October 1983. The world is in desperate condition. It only looks like a mountain of cash. Honey just left here in tears, on her way to another party. She was upset about her breakup with her new boyfriend, Julius, an intellectual part-time dope dealer. Brown, like himself. He was Honey’s idea of a potential husband, a man who could build her a ladder to the straight world—an artist. He made rickety, columnar assemblages out of detritus he picked up from the street. “Space junk” he called it. He pleased her. They were together only a few months, long enough for Lute. She’s left town, she clicked her heels together and went straight to New Orleans, where she’s making a career in the blues and carrying on with a Cajun singer, genus: male. “I’m so jealous,” Honey said. “Lute always gets what I want.”

It’s all for the best. Julius was kind of a mess—a smart enough guy but he hardly ever took a bath. He said the dope kept him clean. “Junk doesn’t let you perspire,” he once told me. “There’s nothing to wash off.”

On Honey’s heels came Brooklyn Moe. He was very unhappy. Not because of me. Someone stole his Chevy Nova. It was parked across the street from here—a safe place, I thought. Not anymore, not for Chevy Novas. Moe says they’re collector’s items. I didn’t know that. Poor Moe. How’s he gonna get back to Brooklyn? Subway? Poor Moe.

Then came Rhonda Kay, a guitar player from a female blues band. This is a time of funk women and funk love. Rhonda Kay imagines herself a real hipster; her dad was into jazz. She came in drunk as all getout, squawking like a rooster, knocking things over, and babbling about the insane relationship she has with whoever the hell it is, I never did get the drift. She totally freaked out Kit, who was already on edge, troubled by the imminent demise of her own band.

And Vance, my madman dealer, he was here, too, bloody and bruised and stitched up in the face, his lower lip hanging off after some “accident” he had last night copping from Russians, he said.

Bo Brinks, now there’s a case, a painter who makes a living copping hard drugs for wealthy middle-aged women. He says he’s “building a collector-base,” and comes here with his boyfriend for comic relief. I accepted an air-conditioner from them in exchange for a tenth of D—my turn to laugh. At last.

Then Toni stopped in, very squirmy, stroking those long legs and brushing his/her hair while she/he asked if maybe I’d like to give her forty dollars worth of dope in return for this black moiré pantsuit she just modeled in Paris. She knows it’ll fit me—aren’t we the same size? Sure, give or take a few feet. Anyway, it’s divine. She was sorry she didn’t have money, they paid her in clothes.

Before you could say “designer dress,” Prescott was on the phone from an airport in Rome wanting to know will I have what he needs when he lands in New York seven hours from now? What have I got here? A home or a halfway house for the bummed? I’m surrounded by the wicked and the testy. Do normal people have days like this? I doubt it.

Then Honey comes back with Bert, a painter I know from the bar at Sticky’s. He’s a mineralist like Cal. I didn’t remember Bert ever being into dope. “Well, every now and then, you know—something different,” he says. I can’t believe Honey would have sex with him—he’s so bourgeois. Are they fucking? Well, none of my business. Some questions you just don’t ask. Most of them, really.

As soon as Bert has a snort, he starts speculating on the way Sticky died. He believed that story Angie was telling about me selling lethal dope. “I would have been here before,” Bert said, “but I never knew if I could trust you.”

Trust me? Trust me? How am I gonna control him? Loose of lip, he is, that one, Norbert, that’s his real name. Norbert Fluss. What a cheap bastard. He nickels-and-dimes me all over the place, slumping in the chair like he’s ducking blows.

While he’s grousing, Bo calls to say he’s run into some kind of major life-drama he can’t explain. Would I, could I, tide him over with something on credit? He did so much of the dope he copped for one of his rich lady-friends, he had nothing left to sell. He’ll tell them he was mugged and they’ll give him more money, and then he’ll pay me. Later.

How powerful must be a substance that turns otherwise well-behaved, levelheaded, hardworking professionals and loving sons into two-bit hustlers, liars, and thieves with disgusting personal hygiene and no sense of humor? Very powerful. And what happens to the person holding the strings?

Let’s see.

Ginger arrives with the left side of her face under gauze. She’s had surgery. Her boyfriend got drunk and beat her up in a hotel room in Germany, where she was having a show. She had to fly all the way across the Atlantic with her eye hanging half out and now she’s feeling vengeful. In certain circumstances vengeance is a girl’s best friend, better than diamonds ever were. Maybe not better than heroin.

Ginger could lose her eye. She won’t say what the fight with the boyfriend was about, but it doesn’t matter here; none of us thinks it’s cool to beat up a lady. She has some painkillers but they don’t do much for humiliation. She wants dope. My dope. She also wants female company, so she’s brought along a quiet woman-friend who has huge and sympathetic watery blue eyes. Now that she has what she wants, Ginger goes back to being jolly, sort of. When she isn’t making jokes, she’s making a list of fifty ways to kill a lover.

That’s when Claude Ballard stops by with his head in the clouds and wanting to go higher. Last year he was doing graffiti in the subways; this year he’s the most celebrated artist in town. And the most stoned.

What do ordinary people do for fun? Do they come home from work, buss the spouse, plop themselves in front of the tube, and feel that their lives are complete? For me, it just goes on and on.

At five a.m. the phone blows again, three, four times, junkies in trouble. One’s half out of his mind on cocaine, another has a sick friend on his hands, can I do something?

Bo shows up with the money he owes. Now he needs some weight to take to a party in the Hamptons. He has to get there before breakfast. He doesn’t want to rush me, but hurry, hurry. Can’t talk now. See me later.

Nearly everyone who comes talks about cutting down, getting out of this life once and for all. They’ve gotta come up for air. Oh really? What’s the air got to offer? No, it’s too hard, they say, really too, too hard. What, this life? This is my life. What about that?

Kit crawls home from a gig with bone-crusher symptoms, mild but scary. A bone-crusher is what you get when a piece of cotton from the spoon slips inside your vein. It induces cold-turkey chills, fever, cramping, and retching, but feels even more intense, as if your bones are crumbling and you’re going to die, soon. Only another shot can put you out of your misery. If you’re steady enough to hold the needle and have something left to shoot.

“It’s not a bone-crusher,” Kit says. “It could be arthritis.” Her mother has arthritis. She knows what it’s like. “It’s in my shoulder,” she says. “I need to get some sleep.”

Her left arm hangs limply at her side, it hurts to move it. The fingers on her right hand are numb, she has a splitting headache and a fever. She downs half a dozen aspirin but has trouble getting out of her clothes. I give her a line to help her nod off. She looks sort of all right but not really quite. Her eyes are dull glass. I want her to see a doctor. She turns to the wall and says, “Mmf.”

I don’t like this, not at all, but I don’t know what to do. Suddenly the apartment feels empty. No, not the apartment. Our life. From now on I’m going to have business hours—must I be on call around the clock?

Tomorrow, everything will be different. Its promise fills me with hope. I wish I could wake Kit. This will come as good news. I’m sure she’ll feel better when she hears it. Maybe I’ll go for a walk. But Kit’s lying so still, I can’t leave her. And I can’t stand being with myself.

I decide to shoot myself up, I ought to know how by now. In spite of everything, or because, I want to try it. I pick up the spoon, add dope, add water. I’m careful with the flame. I tie off, hit a vein in my wrist, except I miss it. My skin balloons out the size of a Ping-Pong ball. An abscess—ugh. Good thing I deal. Good thing I have more. Good thing I have plenty.

I load up another spoon, take another shot, this time in one of my usual places. Bingo, a rush—not of chemicals but ideas. My head floods with stories, characters, speeches. I envision an entire scenario, beginning, middle … I’ll know the end when I come to it.

I move to my desk and start scribbling in my notebook, scratch, scratch. I have to work to keep up with my mind. I light a cigarette and scrawl out a paragraph. My pen suspended over the page, my head swinging like a trapeze, I sit at my desk and bless my night and feel the heat drain out of me, going, gone. It’ll be back in a minute. Concentrate.

When Kit wakes up, we talk about kicking. It’s time to cut down, cut back, clean up—we’re no different than anyone else. We promise ourselves a few days off. We’ll go somewhere nice and chill, but not today—tomorrow. Tonight, Kit’s flying to Washington to play a gig. She dreads it. No one’s getting along in her band. They bicker all the time: over money, managers, bookings, arrangements, set lists. It never stops. She’s afraid of what’s coming. Oh well, she says. She’s getting too old for rock and roll, anyway. Time she went back to painting.

She takes her guitar into bed and forces one hand across the strings; the other falls off the fret board. “How can you do anything with your arm like that?” I say, the voice of reason. She calls Sylph to gauge the reaction to her possible cancellation. They’re all broke, Sylph says. They can’t do without the money from this gig. They’re counting on Kit to play. There’s no chance of finding a replacement.

Early the next morning, I’m sleeping when the doorbell sounds. It’s Kit, back from D.C. She needs help getting up the stairs, please come down. I find her just inside the downstairs door, slumped over her bags. “Kit!”

“I’m all right,” she says, straightening. “I can’t carry all this stuff by myself is all.”

I pick up the guitar, the duffel, the bag of effects boxes and cords. “What happened?” I ask.

“Bad gig,” she says. “We broke up.” We mount the steps in silence.

“What about the arm?” I say, once we’re inside.

“Don’t ask.”

“How did you play?”

“I got as high as I could and let my hands do it without me. Anyway, it was a very short set. Gloria threw a fit and stomped offstage in the middle of a song. Then, of course, the club didn’t want to pay us. Give me something. Please.”

I cook it for her while she ties off, the rig in her teeth. “Got any coke?” she asks.

“No.”

Will I get some?

“In a minute,” I say, but as soon as she’s finished I take her head in my hands and tell her it’s time she saw a doctor. This can’t wait.

She won’t go.

I wait.

Kit’s sure whatever’s causing the paralysis in her arm will pass. She doesn’t feel sick or anything. It’s just a … just a thing.

“It’s not a thing,” I say. “You can’t move your arm. You have pain in your shoulder. You play guitar and you can’t use your hand. This is something.”

I call Doctor Paul, but he’s out of the office. He may not be back all day. I leave a message, say it’s an emergency. “If it’s an emergency,” the service says, “perhaps you should go straight to the hospital.”

Kit says it hurts to move. She has to rest. We can talk about it later.

By nightfall, I’m going over the edge. I’ve been giving her dope all day, and when she’s too high to argue, I get her dressed and into a cab to the hospital.

“You don’t look well,” says the nurse at emergency admitting.

“I feel all right,” says Kit.

“Her arm’s paralyzed,” I say.

“Are you a relative?”

“Friend,” I say. “Roommate.”

“Does your friend have insurance?”

Kit produces a card and calmly sits down to answer questions while the nurse fills out papers. It doesn’t take long and they walk her inside.

Years of experience with knife cuts and other calamities incurred while cooking have made me familiar with the operations of this hospital. I know Kit might have to be there for hours, and I have business to conduct. Before I leave, I make sure the nurse knows to call me when they find out what the trouble is. I leave Paul’s name for good measure. Kit will get better treatment because of it.

A block from home I see them: a half dozen of my favorite customers, sitting on the benches in front of my building, waiting. It makes me nervous to know they’ve all been out there pacing, but they do look happy to see me. I start to feel like the Pied Piper as they follow me down the street. I turn and look behind: a few couples, a few loners; long-legged guys, sexy girls. So this is what it’s like, I say to myself, thinking about all our artist friends who were bums one day and stars the next, never able to go anywhere without an entourage of “guests.” I’m humbled.

Upstairs, I work up a sweat serving so many people all at once. “Kit’s in the hospital,” I say. “I can’t ask anyone to stay. I may have to go back any minute.” The truth is, I have to re-up but I don’t want to cop till I know more about Kit. If I go up to see Vance, it may take a long time. I’ll try Massimo. We still don’t know each other well, but his apartment’s in the Village, near the hospital. I call the emergency room first. The nurse says she was just about to call me.

“Your friend is very sick,” she says.

“How sick?”

“You’ll have to talk to the doctor about that. I can’t discuss a patient’s diagnosis on the phone.”

I want to be prepared.

“I think it’s best if you just come here. Your friend is a very sick young lady.”

Now I’m prepared. I know what that means. When my mother was dying, that’s what everyone said, those were the words they used—my father, my parents’ friends, the nurses. “Your mother is a very sick woman,” they said, and then their mouths would twist and their eyes would cloud up and their silence said the rest. If a person is ill, it means they’ll get better. If they’re sick, they’re going to die.

The nurse ushers me in the moment I appear at her window. I don’t find Kit right away. All I see is a maze of white-curtained hospital beds, thin sheets of muslin fluttering the antiseptic air. I see a guy wrestling with his bed, his wrists taped in bloody bandages. I see a woman who hasn’t shit in a year. Where’s Kit? Then she’s walking toward me in one of those silly cornflower-print gowns, dragging an IV stand behind her.

“I’m not sure what to do,” she says. “I want to go home and be with you and the cats, but the doctor says if I leave now, I’ll be dead within twenty-four hours.”

“You’re not sure what to do? You’re not sure?” I feel wild. Then I laugh. I live in a comic world. It’s tragic. “Kit”—I have to steady my voice—“I think you have to stay.”

“I guess so.” Her bewilderment is somehow touching. “It’s just, you know, I mean I understand I’m sick, but I don’t feel all that bad. I don’t see why they can’t give me medicine and let me go home.”

I’m not surprised she doesn’t feel bad. She’s gone through five hundred dollars’ worth of pure heroin in just a few hours. She’s walking on air. I grasp her arm. I’m afraid she’ll float away. “What is it they say you’ve got?”

“It’s called endocarditis,” she says. I’ve never heard of it. She explains what the doctors have told her. It’s a nasty infection of the heart, a bacteria that lives on the surface of the skin and enters the body when the prick of a syringe opens a passageway to the heart, where it lodges in the walls of a valve and nibbles its way through. That’s when the valve collapses. That’s when the heart explodes. Apparently, Kit is near detonation.

“Don’t you want to sit down?” I say.

Then Doctor Paul appears, drawing up a gurney. “The standard treatment for endocarditis is six weeks of intravenous antibiotics,” he tells me.

Six weeks?

“If all I’m going to do is lie in bed for six weeks with a needle in my arm, I’d just as soon do it at home,” Kit pouts.

Paul shakes his head and sighs. “First we have to see if the treatment takes,” he says, sounding none too sure it will. “We’ll be watching you for the next three days. We’ll have to do a lot of tests. If the fever comes down, if the antibiotics kick in, you’ll get better. If they don’t, we’ll have to operate—take out the valve and give you a new one. The success rate there is about fifty-fifty. Maybe a little more on the success side. There’s something else. We aren’t entirely sure if this is endocarditis—if it’s only endocarditis. You’re an intravenous user of heroin. I won’t lie to you. Some of your symptoms … there’s a possibility … you might have AIDS.”

Nobody moves. “I have symptoms?” Kit says.

I’m too shocked to speak.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, since I’m not sure,” Paul concedes. “But it is a possibility we have to face.”

It is. But we can’t face it.

It’s one a.m. before they have her in a bed upstairs. It’s a private room. Paul thinks it’s best. Most of the other patients on the floor are old, in a lot of pain, and all doped up. It’s the quietest corridor in the hospital.

“Don’t leave me,” Kit pleads, when we’re alone.

“I won’t.” She grips my hand and my eyes fill, and my heart. I’m not nearly as stoned as she is. This is all too real.

“I hope it isn’t AIDS,” she says.

“I don’t think it is.” I don’t. I don’t know much about it but I know what it looks like. Not this.

“I wish he hadn’t told me that,” she says. “I’m depressed enough, what with the band breaking up and all. That would be a little too much.”

“It’s not that.”

“But it could be. Betty’s new girlfriend came to the studio the other day and told me Betty’s sick. I shared needles with her, you know.”

“But that was before AIDS.”

“No. I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell you before—I got high with her a couple of times when you were mad at me for—I don’t know what for. Doing too much dope, probably. Not washing dishes.”

I’m holding my head in my hands, I’m putting them over my face. I don’t want to scream. I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to know this is someone I love. How am I supposed to feel?

“You’d give me enough dope to OD if it was AIDS, wouldn’t you? You would, right? No way I’m going through that.”

“Let’s talk about you getting better,” I say. Man, this life. Doom and gloom, no glory. I hate it.

“Before you came back—why were you gone so long anyway?—Paul said they’ll detox me on methadone while I’m here. The antibiotics might not work if I’m on all these other drugs.”

“I’ll cut down too,” I say. I hate it.

“Promise me you’ll stop using needles,” she says.

“I like smoking better anyway.”

“If I’m going to live, I can never shoot up again. If I see you do it, I will, too.”

“I don’t need to use a needle. I don’t need to do so much dope.” If only it didn’t love me.

“Will you bring me something tomorrow?”

“You’ll be on methadone.”

“Not right away. They say I can’t have anything until they know if—if the antibiotics are working.”

“Kit,” I say, a sob swelling in my throat. “Please listen. Can you do what they ask? I’ll come every day, I promise. I’ll bring you whatever you want. But I can’t bring you anything yet.”

“It’s not bad enough I have to have these antibiotics every minute. It’s not bad enough I have a fucked-up valve in my heart. It’s not bad enough I’m facing surgery, or fucking AIDS. Now you want me to kick cold? Can you see sitting in this hospital bed, in this stupid gown, cold turkey? You can leave. You can go home and wear what you want. You can go back to the dope. I’m in here. I have to kick. You know what it’s like for me. You know how sick I get. That’s what you want for me?”

I don’t want that. And I don’t want this.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I’m no angel, no kind of saint. What am I supposed to do?

“I’m scared.”

“I am, too.”

A nurse carrying a blood-sample basket comes in with two orderlies and an electrocardiogram contraption. They smear jelly over half a dozen places on Kit’s torso and attach electrodes to each place.

“What’s this rash?” asks the nurse.

“It’s the fever,” Kit says. “I always break out in a rash when I have a fever.”

“You have fevers often?”

“Do you have to do this now?” I ask.

“I’m afraid so,” the nurse replies. “We have to take blood every four hours.”

Kit looks miserable. Her temperature’s a hundred four.

“We’re going to watch you very closely for a while,” says the nurse, starting to pack her in ice. “You’re one very sick young lady.”

I stay another hour, when Kit finally falls asleep. I’m tired, too, but I’m afraid to leave. “Are you the family?” the nurse asks me. I say yes. She tells me to stay as long as I like. I should call Kit’s parents but what can I say? Your daughter might be dying? How can I say that? I’ve never even met them. I’ll call later. Bad news is always easier to take when it doesn’t come in the middle of the night.

Kit’s eyes open. “I’m freezing,” she whispers. “I’m freezing to death.”

I tiptoe down the hall to find the nurse. Kit has sweated through her sheets, they’re soaking. I help the nurse lift Kit out of bed. She leans heavily against me, her arm dangling by her side, the IV tube from it. She grasps my hand. What’s that she’s saying? I can’t make it out. The Toast set list? She must be delirious; she thinks I’m Sylph, that we’re about to go onstage. I put my free hand to her head. It’s burning.

“Let me know if this happens again,” says the nurse as she repacks Kit in thermal blankets and the bed in bags of dry ice. I feel drained. I need sleep, but I’m restless. Then I remember: Massimo. Can I call him now? Why not? Nobody cares what time it is when they want to call me.

“Are you up?” I say timidly.

“I believe so,” he says. His cat just had kittens he’d love me to see. I let the nurse know I’m going home to get some sleep, to call if there’s a crisis. She’s been amazingly kind, considering she knows Kit’s a junkie. She never said, “Well, what did you expect?” or “You made this bed, now lie in it.” She made the bed. And now she’ll sit beside it. A jewel, she is. A real gem. She loves Toast, thinks Kit’s the best. The nurse gives me a hug. I don’t know why, but I want to kick her.

I ring Massimo’s bell with Gestapo-like force. He answers the door holding two of his kittens.

“How’s your Kit?” he asks, smiling, a proud father of five, three black ones, two gray, half Persian, half Russian Blue. I start to crumble.

“Not so good,” I say and stammer when I tell him what’s happened. He’s worried. Of all the dealers I know, Massimo comes closest to human.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “That sounds bad. I’ll go over and see Kit tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” I say. “She’d like that.” But then I have second thoughts. Massimo’s too good a guy to stand up to Kit’s craving. I know she’ll ask him for drugs. I beg him to wait. He can’t bring her anything, no matter what she says.

“I understand,” he says slowly, gesturing toward his brood. “I’ve got my hands full here anyway.” Kittens are crawling over every piece of furniture. One catches my eye and I pick it up, the sweetest little kitten I’ve ever seen: fluffy dark gray with deep jade eyes, a square head, and pointy ears. It purrs the moment I touch it.

“I have dibs on this guy,” I say, pulling it to my chest. I need to put something there.

“I can’t decide which is cutest,” he says. “That one, or his sister.” He cups her in his hand and we stand together there a minute with these babies in our arms, not sure whether to laugh or weep. At this point, it all feels the same.

When I call the hospital in the morning, I take it as a good sign they haven’t called me. Kit’s about the same, or worse; she’s in withdrawal. Her chest hurts, she says. Her arm’s completely useless. She’s having trouble breathing. They come in at all hours and stick her with needles. She can’t sleep. “These people,” she says. “I have to show them where to find my veins. I do it better than they do.”

Vance seems upset by the news of Kit’s illness. “What about you?” he says. “You all right?”

“I guess.”

“Six weeks she’ll be in there?”

“Yeah.”

“No drugs?”

“They’re putting her on methadone.”

“Well, you’ll make some money.” I know what he means. There are some advantages to this situation. For one, I no longer have to stick around and watch movies with this crazy man. Kit’s the real reason he wanted us around—he’s star-struck. But he wants to make it easy on me, and he wants me coming back. Vance knows I have other connections now. Whenever his source runs dry, he comes over to buy from me.

He advances me a larger quantity than usual and insists I take home one of his VCRs as well—movies will keep me company for the time I have to be alone. There’s a laugh. When am I ever alone? It’s an occupational hazard.

I don’t stay long in the hospital that night—Kit’s out of it and things are busy at home. When finally all is quiet, I sit in bed with the cats and feel afraid. Her bed, her cats, her apartment. She saved me from myself once. How often can a person count on that? I don’t want to lose her. This is hard.

I retire to my blade and mirror. With a small jeweler’s hammer, I pound the white rocks and crush them, chop them into powder fine as Turkish coffee. I take my time. I’ve hooked up the VCR, but this is my evening’s real amusement. I like the blade. I like the feel of it on my tongue. It tastes of dope, bitter and sweet. I think casually about infection as I chop. I think about my health, my sanity, the shape of my kidneys, the possibility of my getting AIDS. I watch the rise and fall of my chest, visualize my lungs. They don’t look so good. I chop and push the powder into decorative lines, abstract doodles. Wish I could draw. I try to read the lines, between them, as a fortune-teller does a palm. I pick up a spike I’ve been saving—haven’t had time to toss it. I put a pebble of dope on my belly and wait for it to melt. I’m wasting it. It’s wasting me. I consider the blade, reflect on its affinity for my tongue. I consider the edge of night, the razors at my elbow. I tie off, load the spike, find the vein.

Blood. Blood everywhere. A gusher. I forgot to loosen the tie, so it doesn’t last long. While I’m cleaning up the mess, the phone rings. It’s Kit.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Thinking about you.”

“I want to come home.” Her melancholy tone feels threatening.

“I guess that’s not possible,” I say.

“I know, I know. But I wish. Are you high?”

“Not especially.”

“Don’t lie. You sound stoned. Is anybody with you?”

“No, I’m alone.”

“I don’t like the idea of you being with someone else.”

“I’m not with anyone,” I say. Just the dope.

Back in the days of my heroin honeymoon, I happened to see a man I knew in college. “How do you stay so young-looking?” he asked. “Heroin” was my answer. He was a newspaper reporter and was accustomed to asking questions. He wanted to know what the drug did for me. I told him it calmed my nerves, relaxed my features, and lifted my spirits—in other words, kept the aging process at bay. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you telling me heroin is the fountain of youth?” “Well, yes,” I said. “Heroin cures everything.” “What’s it really like?” he asked. “What does it feel like to be on heroin?” “What’s it like?” I said.

This is what it’s like.