Harlan Ellison. Gentleman Junkie
HE LOOKED DOWN from the fourth-floor window of the Professional Building, watching an old man in a junk wagon pulled by a spavined horse.
Even from the window he could see the milky white blindness of the horse’s left eye. It seemed fitting, somehow.
Walter Caulder turned away from the window, tasting the steel wool in his mouth. It was getting worse. A vagrant shiver flowed up from somewhere deep inside and he locked his arms about his body, trembling.
It was not going to get better, despite what Enid said. Trip-hammer pressures within his skull pistoned horizontally, threatening to cave his temples outward. A low, canine moan slid between his teeth, oily and hungry and lost in an instant
“Did you say something, Doctor?” Rita Berg turned her blonde head against the couch.
Caulder, an intense, short man with a heavy floss of prematurely grey hair, started abruptly at the sound of the woman’s voice.
“What?”
“I asked if you’d said something, Doctor Caulder?” she repeated, sitting up on one elbow.
Caulder lay his head against the cool window frame. “No, nothing. Go ahead, Mrs. Berg. Please, it’s getting late.”
The tone of incipient annoyance brought her to a sitting position on the consultation couch, animosity in the line of her body, the tilt of her chin. “Well, I’m sorry I asked you to see me this evening, Doctor, but after all, I did have a committee meeting all day at Mt. Sinai, and that is public service work, and …”
Wearily he broke in, “Yes, yes, I know, Mrs. Berg. I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry I snapped. Please go on.”
“ … and I am! paying you considerably more than your usual rate, there’s no need to be snippy, Doctor,” she concluded.
The wealthy woman: a tone.
Walter Caulder, who was a psychiatrist, who was a man of deep sensitivity and deeper perception, who was a drug addict desperately in need of a firestream shot in his body, turned away from the window with weariness.
“Mrs. Berg. I’m terribly sorry; I’ve been working very hard of late, and … and really. I’m very tired. Perhaps we had best conclude for this evening.”
Rita Berg smoothed the expensive shantung skirt over her hips and stood up. The chill that had descended over her interrupted stream of consciousness persisted as she gathered her bolero jacket and handbag, and cursorily said goodnight to the small psychiatrist.
He walked her to the office door, through the darkened reception room and said meaningless mouthings — “Please call Enid for your next appointment … We’ll add an extra twenty minutes to the next session.… You’ve been very kind, thank …” — then she was gone, and he locked the door.
Oh, God, God, rotten God in Heaven or Hell … it hurts!
He doubled over and lay on the deep pile rug, clutching his stomach. Oh, God, the withdrawal symptoms.
The shakes took him then.
Flinging him up and bending him terribly, a wild stallion, invisible and fire-snorting, tossing him, sending him down, shaking him with brutal ferocity.
Abruptly, it passed, and his mouth was pumice-filled. He rolled over and lay there, panting. He needed a fix!
After a long time, and it might have been a second, he climbed unsteadily to his feet and weaved to the heavy leather chair behind the desk. For a moment he thought he was through it (how like labor pains, spaced, growing closer together, more passionate) as he fell into the seat; then the black breakers hurled over him and he reached into the wastebasket.
There was water in the desk pitcher, but he could not take it. The effort was too great.
I’ve got to have a fix!
Night had settled slowly from above, like a great dusty radioactive curtain, filled with a million motes whose staggering numbers melted together to produce a sheet of dark. Now neons came alive outside and below the fourth floor window of the Professional Building.
Walter Caulder lifted the receiver of the phone and dialed a number from memory.
After a short space, during which beads of sickly, greasy perspiration had sprung to his upper lip and temples, he spoke into the mouthpiece.
“Nancy, that’s you?”
The familiar voice he had not heard for several months reversed his words.
“I — I want to see you,” he said.
“About what?” she inquired. There was calculated hardness in the way the words were spoken.
“I — I think I’d like to see you — … I — I need a … a fix.”
There was silence on the other end.
Then: “What’s a’matter, Doc, the boys from Shakesville got to ya?”
His voice became urgent, violently demanding. “Nancy! Don’t do this. I’m sick, Nancy. What can you do for me?”
“You been makin’ yourself a stranger lately, Doc. Been almost two months since I saw ya.” There was more than spite in her voice. There was hurt, and desire, and the need to hurt.
“Enid found out I was seeing you after she took my narcotics license, she — ”
The girl’s voice spat, even across the wires. “Enid! That goddam bitch! You still gonna marry her?”
“Nancy, she’s my nurse, we’ve known each other a long time — I, Nancy, I need a fix — ”
“Yeah, sure. When ya want a fix, it’s Nancy, good old Nancy, but when ya wanna — aw,crap! All right. I’ll meet you at Puffy’s Diner on East 50th, you know where it is?”
He said he didn’t, but he hastened to add he would find it. She said nine o’clock; his agreement was quick. It was now seven-thirty-seven.
At ten o’clock, hunched into a booth at the far end of Puffy’s Diner, 50th and the waterfront, Walter Caulder saw his life flaking to pieces. She had not come, and it was so bad, so terribly, so oh it hurts here bad.
A dozen cups of steaming, black coffee had gone down his tortured throat while he had waited, from eight o’clock till now. But she had not come.
She was punishing him.
He had known it was madness to involve himself with this girl, this acknowledged junkie, but when Enid had stumbled on the truth, that he was using his narcotics license to obtain drugs to feed his own habit, she had taken steps. Drastic steps. She had confiscated the license proper, and threatened to leave him if he did not turn himself over for medical aid.
Caulder remembered the night at her apartment when he had cried, and crawled on hands and knees to beg her. “Let me do it myself,” he had pleaded. “Let me go it cold turkey,” and her nostrils had flared, and contempt had shown in her eyes for a split instant.
“You’re even using the language of a dope addict,” she had observed, and it had cut worse than the knowledge that he was,yes, hooked!
But he had convinced her: it hadn’t taken much — merely a complete renunciation of his manhood. So he had started to “cold turkey” a cure. It had gone badly from the first. At least she had been nearby. He had called her many nights, and she had come to help him. But then, one night she had not been there, and he had needed it, and he had gone where he could find it — where he had found Nancy.
For a while she had sold him what he needed, and Enid had known nothing of it. But she had found out. The strange bird tracks that ran up the insides of his arms. Then he had stopped seeing Nancy.
It had taken more talking, more crying, more begging, and this was his last chance with Enid. She was too good, really, too sensitive, too understanding. She had given him his second, his last chance to “cold turkey” himself back to respectability.
Tonight.
Enid visiting her sister in Minnesota. The chills, the pains, the visions, and Rita Berg describing her inane frigidity. If she had not demanded a late appointment, if he had been allowed to go home, where he would have locked himself in and sunk into a hot bath — perhaps.