“You don’t just stab a person and leave,” I said.
But that morning, little Eddie wanted to split. He sat up in his bed, which was a cot really shoved next to my cot, and pulled the old, scratchy sheet up to his chin. Eddie stared straight ahead at himself in the cracked mirror on the far wall above the bureau, his smoke-gray eyes wide. He looked like an animal caught in the high beams crossing a country road.
“I don’t believe what I did,” he said.
By this time, more than a year had passed and we were back at the Mohican, three floors directly below my original suite.
The day Eddie went out and bought the knife, I knew that he meant it for me. I was with him, as a matter of fact, when he picked it out: a gravity knife with a blade about eight inches long, thin and double-edged. The whole time I kept shaking my head and telling him it was dangerous to carry a knife when we were both so drunk and stoned and generally violent, but it was his birthday.
It was the winter of ’78, a lot of snow on the ground. The routine now was to go down to Avenue D, cop six bags of heroin for a hundred dollars, cab it back to the Mohican, split the glycine envelopes, three each. First Eddie cooked up his three, and after he got off, he cooked up mine. He hardly used any water at all. He liked to boot it forever, which is why I preferred to have him get me off instead of doing it myself. I wouldn’t have had the guts to boot three barely diluted twenty-dollar bags of dope into my arm, over and over, until, as often as not, I swooned and sometimes overdosed. (The longest I was out was two hours once: Eddie hauling me, dragging me back and forth to the bathroom, throwing me in the tub, slapping me around, while my lips turned Kool-Aid electric blue and then dulled to a dead-leaf magenta.) He never missed either, never pierced the vein through to the other side. He had a touch; he knew the angle. Eddie was a master, he was a dope genie. And he was fervent, a purist, a passionate junkie. It was like living with a Talmudic Jew, or some other kind of religiously dedicated male, who has his purpose bent higher than love, higher than the mortal, petty concerns of everyday men.
I tried to be as single-minded as he was. For instance, I had come to the conclusion that it was immoral to read. Many people in the ghetto didn’t know how to read, so it wasn’t fair that I actually enjoyed it. I used to read with shame. That was the only thing I did in those days that made me feel ashamed. It was a bourgeois pastime, a luxury, like being a liberal or going to a Caribbean resort. If Eddie caught me with a book in my hand, I’d throw it down and say I was sorry. Otherwise, my policy was the standard street credo: never apologize.
And to whom would I apologize? To my father, poor, stoic Rayfield, who was now dying of cancer in the hospital a few blocks away? To my father, wheeling the saline solution plugged into his nose on its metal stand into the visitor’s room, while the puss oozed through the gauze bandage covering his tracheotomy, to join me so I could have a cigarette? I remember the day the pain was so bad the tears were streaming down his face, while I sat there trying not to nod on him. Should I apologize for that? I was his favorite, he told me so on his deathbed. Well yeah, I was the only one of his kids he even vaguely knew. But Rayfield and I understood each other. I think it was because, finally, I learned never to demand anything from him he couldn’t give. I sensed in the end that you had to be kind to Rayfield. He was a depressive. I didn’t try to get blood from a stone.
I happened to call, which is how I learned that Rayfield was right nearby at a local hospital. Watching him give me the slip once and for all, I felt the old unrequited longing kick in, but I just sat there by his bed, sometimes holding his hand, nodding on the dope that Eddie had minutes ago pumped into me. He never cried out. All the hair on his legs had disappeared, from the chaff of his riding boots, he said. I recognized my legs; we had the same-shaped legs, along with the same black eyebrows and the same wide-set green eyes, which were deeply set, belonging to two brooders, two solitary dreamers. My father, Rayfield, Ray, and me—he drifting on the fresh inroads of his morphine injection, I awash in cheap Mexican brown dope—in the twilight, that agonizing time of day in winter, when everyone in the city suddenly discovers that he or she is alone, abandoned. While we communed like this, the man with two stumps for legs in the wheelchair across the way poured forth an elegiac wail of curses, on and on, until it ceased to have meaning. Toward the end, when it hurt Rayfield to talk, he wrote slowly on his yellow pad in his meticulous backhand script, “Don’t worry, pet. We’re all waiting to die.”
That was part of the routine in the winter of ’78, checking in with my father, when I could make it, for a couple of hours. But those hospital visits ate up my high. I came out of there stripped and starving. I would join Eddie and we would hit the first bar on the corner on the way across town to the West Village and the refuge of Chester’s, where we passed every night drinking ourselves blotto, sometimes scoring a gram of coke and splitting that in half and shooting it all up in one shot, and then back out into the night, the after-hours joints, sometimes making love, too, maybe on very cold nights, or in the morning when the combination of withdrawal and a hangover made every nerve sing. That was the routine.
I can’t say I loved my life, but I loved Eddie so fiercely, it compensated; it was like being happy all the time, to love someone that obsessively and be able to hold him to you. Thanks to the money, I thought. Once I came into the $40,000, I had him. It didn’t even matter really whether he loved me. He used to love me, before I got the money. He loved me once, and now it didn’t matter. Oh, not to say that I wasn’t always whining and crying about it to him and everybody. In the middle of Chester’s I suddenly broke down.
“He only loves me for my money,” I wailed.
“That’s right,” our bar chums nodded agreeably.
“What money?” Eddie scowled. “You call those few lousy bucks you got money?”
On that bitter night in February when he stabbed me, we had been yelling, or I had, in Chester’s. I used to shake my index finger at him and harangue him. But why? We won’t ever find out now. No one remembers. We were at Chester’s. And then he just took a powder, silently slipping out into the night in his black leather jacket and his noiseless PF Flyers. Mid-sentence gone. It was too cold to look for him in the other gin mills, in the shooting gallery on Seventh and B. So I cabbed it to the Mohican. I’m sure I was really upset by that time, because I hated to lose him, even for a minute. He was so young and cagey. Graceful the way only streetwise boys can be. I missed him, I realized as I searched for my keys.
When I pushed open the door, he was hiding behind it, hiding there in monkish silence and had been for I don’t know how long. He jumped out, pushed me on the floor facedown, and stabbed me to the hilt in the back of my thigh, right up into the muscle. Pinned with my face to the floor, I felt, of all things, neutered. What I remember most was the humiliation. I remember thinking it would have been better if he had stabbed me in the stomach, so I could have contracted, thrown my head back, and fainted. Some dignity in that pose at least. This way, I felt like a kid in a schoolyard. It was funny how little blood there was. All gristle there, I guess. Didn’t hurt too much either, not a sharp pain, more like an ache.
The next day it was hard to walk, but after I convinced him not to leave me, Eddie held me up, and we made it over to Dr. Schrein’s office around the corner. Dr. Schrein, a man of true Aesculapian calling. Once my trick, now my friend, he administered vitamin shots and scripts for Dexosyn on a weekly basis. In the meantime, he continued to get fatter and fatter and suffered from gout. But he treated everything that came his way, like a good country doctor. He attended to the old, the outlaws, actual sick people. When I told him that I had been mugged, he simply nodded over his receptionist’s squeaky objections.
“Make her go to the police,” the properly horrified young receptionist said.
I think she wanted to hear me confess, but Dr. Schrein told her to mind her own business.
“She’s a big girl. She knows what she’s doing,” he said.
He put a bandage over the hole in my leg, told me it was clean, and lent me a cane.
For as long as I hobbled around, Eddie hovered by my side, solicitous. “I got to hand it to you, you got guts,” he said with love in his eyes. He walked me to the hospital, where he sat by himself in the lobby reading Creem, the rock ’n’ roll magazine, while I went upstairs to see my father. Eddie ran me hot bubble baths. We lay in our old sagging beds at the Mohican at night, attached to each other at the lips for hours, not moving. Funny what bonds you to someone.
All during our first year together, we had celebrated in public, staying very much on view, as if we were an enviable couple, paragon lovers. We wined and dined each other across Hudson Street, at Chester’s, where we ran an endless tab. Eddie could do that. He was the most disarming con man I’d ever met. He would stand at the bar, thumb hooked into the waist of his jeans, one leg on the brass footrail, and rub his face and the top of his close-cropped curly hair like a man who needed to feel something. He had a guileless way of getting intimate, as if he and the mark (which was anyone else) were on the inside track, hip to some kind of sacred knowledge that the world was not privileged to share. “Life’s tough,” he used to say. He had compassion.
Then, he rarely if ever lied. He would tell someone like Donna—the owner of Chester’s, who knew how to swagger like a man, with a real black beauty mark on her un-made-up face—he would tell her how he beat so and so out of such and such, and until the day he cleaned out her cash register in front of a pack of regulars two deep at the bar, she persisted in her belief that Eddie would never do that to her. Because Eddie was her friend. So, when he finally did take people, it had the effect of seeming like retribution. They had not heeded their neighbor’s misfortune.
Eddie was a marvelous master of betrayal. After years on the street, I still had not cultivated that kind of loner mind that distrusts and cons equally all of humanity. I tried to determine whether this was a skill that could be acquired or whether one had to be born with it.
“I just tell people what they want to hear, that’s how I get over,” Eddie would say.
He couldn’t explain how he did what he did because he was a natural. Grifting was all he had ever known. Eddie had one distinct advantage over most of us: he was born and raised outside the law.
That first spring, the spring of 1977, found us both out of work, my trust fund only months away. It got manic. He began to lend me his clothes: shirts, hats, scarves. My favorite article was the red-and-white broad-striped T-shirt, which I wore over his black jeans. He convinced me to dye my hair even lighter, which I did, but the cheap over-the-counter shade was too orange I decided. On top of the dye, then, I stripped big swatches of platinum. I was blond-on-blond.
Rather than try to resist each other, we stoked it, our neediness, the killing dependency. We twinned, merged with a vengeance. Eddie insisted that we smoke the same brand, said it would be cheaper that way, and we both switched to Kools. I let him take me over. I liked his taste in music. I stopped wearing makeup and heels. If we could mirror each other—better yet, become each other—then there was a chance we would stay together. Eddie’s gift for betrayal did not extend as far as our relationship. He gave and he demanded total fidelity. I began to warm to this other philosophy, this foreign ethos. When two people are willingly, enthusiastically monogamous, the result can be exciting, erotic. A revelation to me.
The first time I saw Eddie shoot up in the bathroom around Thanksgiving, he’d been clean (off heroin, anyway) for over a year. I watched him pass out, fall backward, banging his head on the porcelain sink, then the toilet, then the tub, before he hit the tile floor. It was a petite mort, the most erotic surrender I had ever seen a man make: total. His swollen lips, his eyes like empty white satin jewel boxes that had been robbed of their contents, and his prostrate, limp body reminded me of paintings I’d seen of a saint’s final passion. I couldn’t bear anyone getting higher than I did or Eddie going so far away without me, so I made him cop me a bag. Right away, it wasn’t enough.
After Michael and I split up, I assumed that I would have to destroy myself by myself. Apart from a certain animal hesitation—an appetite that would feed itself—the lower I fell through my haze of drugs and alcohol, the lonelier it got. Then, when it seemed as if the bottom were rising up to meet me, I found Eddie. He was like a benighted cleric who longed to perform last rites. Michael had been content to stand by and watch me drown, but Eddie was the whirlpool itself. He sucked me under with no warning and no regret.