W. Sorkin, like most psychosomatic-level neurotics, was spiteful to his enemies and overgenerous to his friends. Gately and Fackelmann each received 5 % vig on the 10 % vigorish Sorkin took on every bet, and Sorkin made over $200,000 worth of book all over the North Shore on a week’s pro ball alone, which for most diplomaless young Americans 1,000+ per pre-millennial week would have been a very handsome living, but for the Twin Towers’ rigid physical scheduling of narcotics needs was not even 60 % enough, weekly. Gately and Fackelmann moonlighted, and for a while separately — Fackelmann’s sideline with I.D.s and creative personal checking, Gately working freelance Security for large card games and small drug-deliveries — but even before they were a real crew they copped as a unit, as in together, plus once in a moon with poor old V. Nuccí, for whom Gately also occasionally held the rope on late-night Osco-and-Rite-Aid-skylight missions, his entree to formal burglary proper. The fact that Gately was devoted to Percocets and Barn-Bams and Fackelmann to Dilaudid allowed them a high level of trust with each other’s stashes. Gately would do Blues, which had to be injected, only when no oral narcs were to be got and he was face to face with early Withdrawal. Gately feared and despised needles and was terrified of the Virus, which in those days was laying out needle-jockeys left and right. Fackelmann would cook up for Gately and tie him off and let Gately watch closely as he took the plastic wrap off a mint-new syringe and needle-cartridge Fackelmann could get with a fake Medicaid Iletin[370] I.D. for diabetes mellitus. The worst thing about Dilaudid for Gately was that the hydromorphone’s transit across the blood-brain barrier created a terrible five-second mnemonic hallucination where he was a gargantuan toddler in an XXL Fisher-Price crib in a sandy field under a storm-cloudy sky that bulged and receded like a big gray lung. Fackelmann would loosen the belt and stand back and watch Gately’s eyes roll up as he broke a malarial sweat and stared up at the delusion’s respiritic sky while his huge hands throttled the air in front him just like a toddler shakes at the bars of his crib. Then after five or so seconds the Dilaudid would cross over and kick, and the sky stopped breathing and turned blue. A Dilaudid nod made Gately mute and sodden for three hours.
Besides the maddening itch behind the eyes, Fackelmann didn’t like oral narcotics because he said they gave him terrible sugar-cravings that his huge soft slumped weight wouldn’t tolerate indulging. Not exactly the swiftest ship in Her Majesty’s fleet in terms of like upstairs, Fackelmann was resistant to Gately’s pointing out that Dilaudid also gave the Faxman terrible sugar-cravings, as did actually just about everything. The plain truth was that Fackelmann just really liked Dilaudid.
Then good old Trent Kite got the administrative Shoe from Salem State, who informed him he’d never study in the industry again, and Gately brought Kite into the crew, and Kite threw together some old-time Quo-Vadis for a small crew-warming party, and Fackelmann introduced Kite to pharmaceutical-grade Dilaudid, and Kite found a new friend for life, he said; and Kite and Fackelmann swiftly fell into the I.D.-, credit-history-and-furnished-luxury-apartment-scam, in which by this time Gately involved himself pretty much only as a hobby, preferring bold nighttime merchandise-promotion to fraud, which fraud tended to involve meeting the people you stole from, which Gately found slimy and kind of awkward.