I shrugged and wrote “James Conway” beneath the last of several John Smiths, feeling a vague satisfaction in not having to add another John Smith to the list. I picked up the key and went up the next flight of stairs.
The hall was long and narrow, lined on each side with closed doors about ten feet apart. Yellow light fell through dirty glass transoms above several doors. The worn rubber runner muffled my footsteps as I moved down the hall, pausing briefly to listen before each door with a lighted transom. Toward the end of the hall I found the door I wanted.
The light shone very dimly through the transom. I stood and listened for a full two minutes to the muted sounds in the room. I could distinguish at least five different voices engaged in a desultory conversation against the background of a steady, pleading monotone. Twice came the flat sound of an open palm striking bare flesh. Dropping to my hands and knees I sniffed at the crack beneath the door. The smell was of sweat and smoke and heroin.
As I climbed to my feet my heart began to beat faster. I took a deep breath and released it slowly before knocking on the flimsy, paneled door. There was a sudden silence in the room broken after a moment by a voice I remembered well.
“What the hell. Who is it?”
“Jim,” I answered, “open up, Bo.”
Another pause then a key rattled in the lock. The door opened a crack sending a thin line of light cutting across the hall and up the opposite wall. An eye peered through the narrow opening, squinted at the darkness, and the door opened wider. I put my shoulder against the door and shoved. The guy behind the door yelped and fell as I stepped into the room, closing the door behind me.
The room was so familiar that I gagged a little. It was a “shooting gallery”. One junkie gets a room and the word gets around. All his friends and their friends stream in. It’s somewhere to go.
The room was littered with the debris of addiction — bits of toilet paper and rags that had been used to wipe blood from arms and the soft inner sides of thighs; paper cups half-filled with pinkish fluid — water tinted with blood from the cleaning of needles; scraps of electric-light cord chopped up and separated into thin strands with which to unplug needles; charred metal bottle tops used to cook the heroin. Everywhere on the floor clothing, magazines and cigarette butts were strewn. There was a large burn in the bare mattress on the narrow bed. Nodding junkies sat and lay on the littered floor, dreaming.
A girl was being supported by two guys in the corner by the bed. She was wearing a thin slip, a strap down over one shoulder half-exposing her breast. When they saw that I was not the fuzz one of them turned back to her, begging in a crooning, desperate voice, “Come on, baby, get straight — you’ve got to meet that john in a half-hour. I’ve already got the room, baby, and you gotta be there. No play, no pay, and we got no wake-up fix. Come on, goddam it, get straight.” He slapped her face sharply.
The punk I had upended was crawling to his feet, cursing. He got a good look at me and shut up fast. I looked past him at the tall, thin, dark-haired figure standing barechested at the foot of the bed, a narrow belt pulled tight around a thin arm, its end swinging as if it had just been dropped.
“Hello, Bo,” I said softly.
Bo peered at me, trying to place my face in a past in which one day was the same as the last — one face pretty much the same as another — the next fix being the only, all-consuming reality. Then his eyes lighted as he remembered.
“Jim — Jim boy! Goddam! When did you get out?”
I stepped over a nodding addict sitting on the floor and took Bo’s outstretched hand. “This morning, Bo. How’ve you been?”
Bo shrugged his narrow shoulders. “You know how it is, man,” he said, dropping his eyes. “Excuse me a minute, Jim boy,” he added as he picked up the belt end and placed it between his teeth, drawing it tighter around his arm, forcing the veins to stand out.
I nodded and watched as Bo dumped the powder from a tiny bag of heroin into a bottle top already filled with water. He held a match under the “cooker” until the white powder dissolved. Then he placed the tip of a needle into the liquid, drawing it up from the bottom of the container. He stuck the needle into a vein and waited for the blood to start backing up into the syringe.
I waited while he squeezed in a few drops, let it back into the syringe again, squeezed in a little more, let it back up, squeezed in more, and continued the in and out process until the fluid was dark red with blood. Then he shot it all in and withdrew the needle.
Bo rubbed his arm with a dirty rag, his eyes closed, waiting for the drug to take effect. Then he opened his eyes and smiled. “Good stuff. Get it from Carlos. His stuff is always good. Hey, you want a fix, Jim boy?” he asked suddenly.
I shook my head not letting the old wanting that had began to churn up my insides as I had watched Bo mainline show in my face. “I’m not looking for junk, Bo,” I answered. “I came to find Carol. Do you know where she is?”
Bo raised his eyebrows and looked at me searchingly, his eyes bright, the pupils already pinpoints. Then he laughed — a short, nasty laugh — and jerked his grinning head sideways.
I turned, not understanding, as the two junkies sat the girl down on the edge of the bed. She fell back, anesthetized, face up to the light filtering down from a hanging bulb shaded by a pair of scorching shorts. Then recognition hit me and I must have shown the shock, because Bo laughed again, as if something were infinitely amusing.
I spun on him and hit him in his bare white belly with everything I had. He folded up on the floor making funny noises as he tried to force his paralyzed diaphragm to pull air back into his emptied lungs. I stepped past him and the two hop-heads standing over Carol crowded back into the corner out of my way as I walked over and looked down at her sprawled form.
I had seen Carol before, often when she needed a fix badly, but I had never imagined that I would ever see her looking like this. Her eyes were widely dilated from heroin withdrawal. She obviously had been without a fix for at least six or seven hours. Her face looked as if make-up had been laid on it with a trowel, and one side was red and swollen slightly from her boyfriend’s abortive attempts to slap sensibility into her. Her hair, which had been a rich, dark brown, was a ridiculous orange-red. One breast was fully exposed now and the dull red nipple stood out starkly against the flaccid, gray-tinged flesh. She was just barely conscious.
I became aware that I had been holding my breath and let it out slowly, closing my eyes on the pitiful wreck that was, still, Mrs. James Conway — whose memory had made me a model prisoner for three, long years; a model prisoner so I could get an early parole for good behavior and go to her and feel her soft, white throat under my hands and watch her face as I strangled the life from her lovely, rotten body.
And now her body was no longer lovely or even remotely desirable — and she wasn’t even aware that I was in the room.
I let the memories come welling up-memories which, along with the sweet contemplation of death, had been my sole mental activity for the last three years: Carol, Carol — the wild and beautiful girl whom I had met and married in my senior year at Columbia. Carol, so hungry for life and greedy for new experiences that I had flunked my finals in the effort to keep up with her.
At first it had been like a wonderful dream. We had eagerly explored each other’s bodies, dreaming up wild sexual variations and, exhausting our imaginations but not our desire, turning to illustrated pornography for new ideas. I had been enough for her sexually, but Carol needed new people and new experiences like a flower needs the sun.