On bright mornings and rainy mornings, come what may, at least three times a week, I took a cab uptown to my branch of Banker’s Limited at Fifty-Seventh and Park, where I would first have to see Ms. Greyson, VP, to get her to OK the checks I cashed for $500 each. I had no other identification besides her brisk, urbane signature. She did not make it part of her business to pass judgment. She dressed in suits with tight skirts and high heels. Her nails were short and bright red. Her hair was frozen in an irreproachable upsweep. She had known me all of my life. She smiled from the other side of her desk like someone handing the potential suicide victim the rope.
“There you go,” she always said as she returned my check.
It would never have occurred to either Eddie or me to resist. The money I came into—lucked into—on my thirtieth birthday, the trust fund that couldn’t be rescinded, was like blue money. It had to be spent, and it had to be spent on dope. We went about this inexorable business, this joyless ritual, with the air of two bowed workers on a tough and boring mission, two bullocks yoked together in the rice paddy. Bad enough to be handed the unearned dough, money you didn’t even have to con someone out of, but to revel in it, that would have been too much. Eddie and I suffered from an aching conscience, which we defied with a teeth-clenching sense of purpose. We were exploring this groove. It would never have occurred to us not to follow it down. Anywhere, so long as it was down.
While I was out there hooking, I stayed free of pimps. I was a maverick, screwing for kicks and running away. I was too slithery, too wide-awake to be worth the bother. Now it had caught up with me. The other side: sooner or later you search out the balance. What had I been selling anyway? The lure of open cupidity. The humiliation that comes from knowing you’re the mark and still you can’t resist. Lascivious pleasure—one-sided, intense pleasure—the essence of anonymous sex. This is what men crave. The whore’s contempt teases below the surface like scratchy sackcloth. Satisfaction runs correspondingly deep.
Jasmine, the redheaded Hispanic from the Sultan’s Retreat, understood this. She was soft-spoken, calm, ever the lady, even when she was jerking off that young Japanese boy while several of us stood around and watched. He lay on his back on the massage table in the tiny cubicle like a patient about to go under the knife. We stood there because he had paid us all. She pulled on his penis (too hard, I thought, making it difficult, surely) and repeated over and over again, “Come on, honey, come, come. You can do it. Come on, baby...” Hurry up, in other words. And he held back, out of fear, out of pleasure, out of shame. That’s what it was like, that second year with Eddie. Responding to his quick friction-stroke, I took his passion, even what might have been his uncertainty, for impatience. I heard Jasmine: “C’mon, baby, c’mon, you can do it.”
Disgust, contempt, self-loathing, and, under that, curiosity. Where does this go? Where will it take us? Is it irrevocable, the damage we’re doing? So much the better. Make it count, make it tell.
But in the flat, still hours before dawn, when the bravado had vanished like the illusion it was, Jasmine’s stone cold rhythm would haunt me. I couldn’t shake the image of us standing around the boy lying prostrate on the massage table as if he were some kind of ritual sacrifice. When this and other stark memories muscled their way in, I would reach for Eddie, throw my arms around him, lock myself against him, stripped of everything but need. Eddie always turned and faced me and hugged me back. He’d stroke my face, look into my eyes, and whisper, “It’s OK, doll. Everything is OK. Go back to sleep.”
He understood; he knew about demons. After comforting me, he’d lie there staring into the darkness as if he’d been awake all along. We’d lie there together in some kind of vigil, staring at the old cracked-plaster ceiling becoming visible in the dawn light.
When I turned thirty, he was a month away from twenty-four, after all this time still so young. I was captivated by that. I have an image of Eddie: his shining junkie-white skin, his heavy-lidded eyes, his full mouth drooping. On the nod, he is sitting with his back against the wall in the dust on the floor of our suite at the Mohican, plucking at the steel strings of his Stratocaster—temporarily out of hock—which he never bothered to plug in.
Or Eddie wheeling around the room in hophead mode searching for our works. The windows are covered with blankets. The bedroom is dark and hot and airless. Eddie is oblivious; he is about to get off.
“Here they are, honey, on the windowsill.”
He never called me “honey” except in that heightened moment of anticipation.
Heroin was the most glamorous drug I ever did, in the sense that death, sister of the night, is glamorous, because it truly was a sojourn with the sacred dead—it was incandescent silver-blue forever twilight on the horizon of nowhere: painlessness. Speed was a Western escape. It vivified; it enhanced everything. Heroin was an Eastern good-bye to even the light. The drug put you on the other side, beyond speculation.
And meanwhile, I had descended into the pool of disease, into bloated flesh and uncharacteristic summer pallor. I was glistening white, with rippling flanks and, for the first time, a weak belly. When I looked at myself in the old, flaked mirror of the Mohican, I saw this buried thing. The eyes peered out of watery flesh, as if I were a baby at a christening wrapped up and bewildered inside blankets. Eddie’s body grew flaccid and weak as well. But his green tone seemed to belong to him. I understood that he owned it. He might not be passing through as I was. I was always just passing through.
“You’re so young,” he said to me on the street one day, when he caught me laughing, still laughing.
He took my open face in his hands and looked into it as if my expression had betrayed something, a basic soundness, a whole-someness that nothing, no punishing detail of this sordid life, could completely smother.
“You’ll always be younger than I am,” he said.
And it’s true that Eddie indulged me, played with me, as if I were a child whom he was being paid to keep amused. He led me into strange bars that suited his whim. Sometimes he deliberately took me to gin mills in unfashionable neighborhoods, devoid of any kind of appeal, except the allure of old men drinking boilermakers. Worse even, we would go to some obscure Chinese restaurant in midtown and pour down sweet, warm vodka martinis.
I thought that he must be ashamed to be seen with me, who wore rags now, ill-fitting unfashionable clothes that were a far cry from the all-black uniform of jeans and T-shirt of the winter before. I had begun to dress myself in a methadone-clinic-waiting-room series of outfits: khaki cotton pants from Hudson’s Sporting Goods and acrylic T-shirts in those cheap opaque shades of acid green and yellow, a canvas pocketbook, dirty sneakers. The pants might be too tight, the crack of my ass showing through the heavy, shiny material, or they might be too loose, hanging down at the crotch. My haircut had lost its shape, and I parted it in the middle, tucking the wisps behind my ears. The bleached patches were starting to break off now in strange places. I looked poor, and the worst thing about looking poor is that it renders you invisible. But I was nodding, on the nod; my eyes were delicate pins. I might be invisible, but then so was the world.