Chapter Six
After Pat and before Michelle there were four or five different girls. I never lived with anybody for any length of time. I didn’t trust people to live with me. When I dressed up, I was really dressed good and went out to the clubs. In the wintertime I would go out in a big beige cashmere overcoat with the hat. I dressed up playing the part of the pimp, the drug dealer, the whole fucking thing.
One time I was with a girl Pam, who was seventeen years old. She was from Avenue X down Coney Island Avenue, a short little Jewish girl with long brown hair who became a really good friend. She hung out up on the parkside, this “nice little Jewish girl,” who was attracted to this little wacko man. The funniest part about this is I went out with her for two years and never had sex with her. We never had sex. She hung out with me; I was like her idol or something and she just liked being with me. I could never do anything wrong.
She was a very smart girl. Her father had his own band and used to play in the Carlyle and the big hotels but she didn’t get along with him. She’d tell me she didn’t like me when I’d get beastie and angry. “I’m really getting scared and I don’t like the way you’re acting. I’m gonna go home.” And she would leave. I’d think, what’s the fucking problem, oh, fuck that. Then I would think, I know, I scared her, I scared her. I would feel bad that I scared her but I was in a scary business. I was doing scary things and she so wanted to tag along. Sometimes I couldn’t have her there because I was scared. I can’t watch over a girl like that all by myself. It was very hard.
Pam was always good to me, watching me, saying, “Take it easy. Don’t do this, don’t do that, you’re going to get in trouble.” And I’d to say to her, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shut up.” I didn’t treat her good at all. She once bought us tickets to Hair but we had a big fight and I took someone else. Then she disappeared and I didn’t see her. A year or so went by. I think she went to college or met some other guy. She really had to get away from me because I was getting bad. And she did. But just like Dottie, she was always on my mind.
Later I met a light-skinned black girl named Ray. I wasn’t no kid at the time. She was twenty-two years old and I was in my late twenties. I was still going to the afterhours clubs selling drugs and dealing. Actually, where I met her could have been at a club. Ray used to model children’s clothes for Sears & Roebuck’s catalog and she showed me all her pictures with the little tiny pink dresses, pigtails, and school clothes. She was such a little tiny thing so when she dressed up like that she looked nine or ten. Meanwhile she was twenty-two years old.
I guess it’s an attraction type of thing, the gangster, tough guy. Oh, he’s the leader, or he’s whoever the fuck they thought I was. I didn’t know who I was. There’s a lot of tough guys, tougher than me. There was a lot of guys that did a lot of things, but each and every one of us had a special territory or a special thing that we did, and we didn’t buck anybody else. She probably thought I was a really nice-looking guy but I think they really were attracted to me because I had money, drugs, whatever, or I was a little crazy. But not for being a nice-looking guy.
She rarely did drugs. It was amazing. One time she did some speed with me and after she did it she says, “Never again.” I was sure she was fucked up, because when people take drugs for the first time you can control them. I’d say, “Sit down, you’re going to be okay. Sit. Stay.” And you’re so fucked up you do every single thing I tell you to do. There were quite a few women like that who came to my house or came out with me and did drugs and just went way overboard with the amount of drugs they thought they could do.
She was another one that loved me. I did have a very good relationship with her and I liked her. I used to take her to the clubs, sit her at a table and let everybody know that she was with me. I’d say, “Listen, I’m gonna go out, I gotta do something. I’ll be back in an hour.” She knew how to take care of herself and knew when I came back not to be sitting with anybody because that would fuck me up. We were cool. We’d go over to the park and make love, we’d go to my apartment and make love and fill up the tub with bubbles and do some acid and get high. She never did a lot, I did a lot. She would do a speck, because she never really liked getting wacked out. During two years she only got high with me about six or seven times. She liked going out, naturally enough. The women I was with, I used to buy clothes and give them a lot of money. What do you need? Fifty dollars? A hundred dollars? I would give shit away.
Then one day I go to pick her up. She lived on Eighteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues in an apartment down by my mother’s house in the old Brooklyn neighborhood. She moved! And I never saw her since. She disappeared right out of my life. The landlord didn’t know where she went. I couldn’t find out where she moved. I tried to find out for six or seven months. I don’t even know her last name. All I know is she’s Ray. She was a beautiful black girl I was very much attracted to and still have a lot of feelings for. I had a picture of her but I can’t find it. When she saw me getting crazier, she just disappeared. I thought later on, why wouldn’t she get the fuck away from me? I was crazy! Why would you want to be in an apartment with me on acid, me talking crazy shit. You gotta get scared. What amazes me is she just wiped herself off the face of the earth. Not that I put out detectives to find her.
I was very sad when she left. It’s amazing but I have these feelings for people who were nice to me. When I think about leaving Dottie I get sad. I think about some of the girls I passed up in my life and I would love to be in a room hanging out and just talking to them now that they are women, telling them what they meant to me. I could never say I was proud to be with them or I really felt good walking down the block with them or you always were very nice to me and you’re one of the people that just kept up my esteem. All these women did this for me at one point or another. I could never say it at the time, I was too nuts.
After I got separated from my wife, I was hanging out with Junior’s wife Cathy R. and all them at her house, and in the bars. I started mixing speed and acid. I was a real drug mixer. Bennies was speed, uppers, and we were getting these bennies in the drug store. You go down and buy hundreds of them for nothing at that time, a couple of bucks. It wasn’t illegal. We knew guys that sold them over the counter. They made a fortune.
Sometimes we’d take gorilla biscuits—they make you nuts, sluggish, out of it, totally. You couldn’t do that and be a good dealer or a drug addict because you’d get ripped off all the time. I’d seen guys take these things and die right on the beach at Coney Island. The sun would bake them. They’d be there for a day or two and somebody would say, “Hey, wasn’t that fucking guy there yesterday?” People would die. Just go out like a light. Can you imagine ninety degrees, somebody coming over and putting a blanket on you because of the sun? Meanwhile you’re dead. You’re dead under the fucking blanket. And on the beach everybody thinks you’re sleeping, they can think you’re sleeping for two days! They really could! Until the machines come around and they say, “Hey, this fucking guy was here yesterday.” He’s dead. People don’t take gorilla biscuits to die. They take one, then two, and if they don’t get high in half an hour they take two more. They won’t wait.
Other times we’d take pills and stay up on Friday night right up until Monday getting high and then go to work. There were times when I was shooting speed where I stayed up for thirty days, totally and completely buzzed out. I would shoot speed in what we called “speedtrific.” I would fill up six or seven sets of works, needles, and put them all lined up on a towel. It was the only thing that was in my refrigerator. I would cold shake all the speed, meaning that I put in a little water, powder, crystal, shake it up, make it all liquid, then draw it up into the sets of works. Sometimes I’d have ten sets of works laying out in the refrigerator and one at a time, in a matter of an hour and a half, I would shoot every one of them in my arm, inject it into my vein. One after the other.
Sometimes when we broke open the Tuinals and mixed the powder it would clog up the works. I see myself going nuts in apartments. I would be shooting dope and the works would clog up. I’d rip somebody’s air conditioner cord out of the wall and cut the cord to get a little piece of copper wire to clean the needle out and they’d say, “Oh, what is my mother going to do about the air conditioner?” “Fuck the air conditioner! I don’t need the air conditioner. I need this fucking needle unclogged, that’s what I need. Shut up.” I’d pull wires down from the ceiling, I didn’t care. You got a vacuum cleaner? You got a hair dryer?
I would shoot speed and acid and dope all at the same time. Cook them all up, make frisco speedballs. I could do ten, fifteen tabs of LSD, one at a time for an hour. Every ten minutes I would do another tab of acid. One night I did this with a girl and we ate twenty-seven or twenty-eight Strawberry Fields each. “For every one you eat, I’ll eat two.” It was a game. You played these silly fucking games, like some big shot. One time I was making love and all of a sudden the girl turned into this big pile of fucking seaweed. She got so ugly I freaked out. Another time, my friend Eddie drove this girl Carol nuts for days. She woke up in the corner of the room sucking her thumb. I couldn’t figure it out. Your mind is gone.
I used drugs like a psychopath. The backs of my arms used to get so sore that I couldn’t lay them on the counter. I couldn’t sleep at night because the sheets would hurt them. There were so many needle marks going up and down my arms. I’d lose twenty pounds. Then I would go to the steam baths and take vitamin E to make them better and lift weights. I was nuts, lifting weights. But I would get better and put on ten pounds. Then a month later you’d see me and go, “What the fuck happened to you?” I just loved it. I loved it. I loved shooting stuff and going to the edge. I used to sit on the floor of the bathroom by myself and shoot half an ounce. Then I’d put my feet near the door and just sit there and be in Oz for the night. Or I’d sit in the bathtub with a girl, naked, and just shoot cocaine and dream.
That kind of stuff went on for a couple of years. We spent a lot of time going to the Electric Circus on St. Mark’s Place where I used to get high and slide down the cable off the balcony. There was sex upstairs and sex over here and sex over there, sex with guys, sex with girls—it was just what everybody was doing, wasn’t nothing bad about it, wasn’t nothing freaky about it. If you weren’t high enough, if you weren’t fucked up enough, you couldn’t come in. To go into the club you had to be whacked because everybody in there was whacked. The music wouldn’t stop and everybody would dance for days.
We went on like that until around 1969 when the speed ran out and I came in touch with heroin. Eddie was a genius guy who drank twelve cups of coffee a day and never worked, a drug freak who had connections. Eddie gave me some heroin with Cathy. They were doing it and he said, “Do you wanna do some?” I says, “All right, let me get a hit.” So they shot me up with some dope and I threw up my guts. I started doing dope for a little while and went back to the speed; the dope, the speed, the dope, the speed. But once I started doing heroin, I started calming down. I got into a whole different world of drug dealing. It became more treacherous, more people died. People weren’t dying so much in the psychedelic days. If they did, they froze to death in the winter, getting high and being left out in the cold. Well, people would kill themselves on acid trips jumping out a window here and there, jumping in front of a truck, but I never heard of anybody OD’ing, not like with heroin. Some people died from speed, they blew their hearts apart. Too much coke just blew their fucking heads off and they would die. I always played a game. How much could I put in the cooker and not die.
One time on Eleventh Avenue I put so much cocaine in the cooker that I was crazy. I ran around the house making a set of works from a set that was from when the doctor gives you vitamins. There was a syringe that was wide as a nickel and I had a nipple from a baby’s bottle that was the “pacifier.” I cut it with a knife and put the pacifier over the top of the syringe. I had a big 2.5-inch-long coke spike, a long needle that was a big fat piece of stainless steel. I put about an eighth of an ounce of coke in a spoon, added a whole bunch of water, and drew it up into the syringe.
Eddie, Brian, and a few other guys were there. I don’t know if there were any girls there that night. I was doing this because I was so fucking mad. There was some stuff missing and nobody would fess up to it. There was a lot of money lying around the house; thousands of dollars lying on the table in a box. I tied up the wrist of my left hand; I was getting off on my left wrist. I put the needle with this big spike into my wrist and when I went to squeeze the pacifier, which was the bubble—we called it Bobo—as I squeezed this thing thinking a little bit would go in, but it was so big that it all went up in my arm. I freaked out and pulled the whole thing out and threw it at the wall. All this blood came down the wall and all this shit went into my body and I couldn’t do anything. I overamped. I flipped over backwards in the chair, bit the bottom of my lip and my tongue. There was blood coming out of my ears, my nose, my eyes, and my ass. There was blood coming from all over. My friend Eddy put a pillow underneath my head and tried to revive me with some cold water, but he couldn’t do anything but stay with me and hold onto the money in the box. If I was dead I was just going to be left there and they were going to leave me in the apartment with the door open. But about twenty minutes or half an hour into this I came to. When I came out of it I looked up at everybody and I said, “Wow, I can see right through my hands.” I was looking at all the veins in my arms and my hands. I was seeing everybody as skeletons. I could see everything moving in their bodies. I was on such a fucking trip from the coke that it blew me away. When I got up I saw that all of them shot the rest of the dope while I was lying on the floor, breathing so lightly I was almost dead. But when you do heroin everybody is out for themselves and themselves only. I went on to get high like that for another fourteen or fifteen years.
When I got into the heroin the first time, I OD’d and almost went out. Heroin took all your troubles away. So did coke and so did speed and stuff like that, but when you got into heroin it turned you into a bum, into a derelict. It turned you into the person you don’t want to be, into a beast because it makes you rob anybody and everybody around you and there’s nothing you can do about it. You want to be in outer space. You want to be where all responsibilities in your life are relinquished. You don’t have any when you’re on heroin. You can be waiting to go to the electric chair, okay, and not be worried. If the living room was on fire and you were getting off on some dope, the fire would have to wait till you got off. I see myself on the Lower East Side getting high in the back of the lots and some people saying, “The cops are coming” before I got the hit. I pulled the needle out of the main vein of my arm and skin popped it directly into the muscle of my arm before the cops came into the yard. This way if I got caught and went to jail, at least I was high for that day.