After they had taken their snorts, they would each fall back against the wall of the john and let the magic drip through them, saying things like “Oh, brother,” and “This has got to be the best.” Towns usually capped off the dreamily appreciative remarks by saying, “I'll always have to have this.” The stocky film cutter admitted one night that if it came to choosing between the drug and a beautiful girl, he would have to go with the coke. It seemed to be a painful admission for him to make, so Towns and the debonair fellow quickly assured him they both felt exactly the same way. Actually, Towns didn't see why one had to cancel out the other. He had heard that lovers would receive the world's most erotic sensation by putting dabs of coke on their genitals and then swiping it off. He tried this one night with a stewardess from an obscure and thinly publicized airline and found it all right, but nothing to write home about. As far as he could see, it was just a tricky way to get at the coke.
They would take about two tastes apiece and then bounce back into the bar with sly grins and the brisk little nose sniffs that distinguished the experienced coke user. Even if they scattered and sat with different people, the drug held them bound together in a ring. Later, when the evening took a dip, one of them would give a sign and they would return to the john to finish off the packet.
They kept their circle tightly closed, even though at least one fellow was dying to get into it. He was a writer who stood careful guard over his work and on more than one occasion had said, “I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone monkey around with my prose.” He also spoke of having “boffed” a great many girls. Towns took objection to that word “boffed” and so did his friends. They doubted that he had really done that much “bofling” and they didn't care that much for his prose either. So even though the fellow knew what they were doing in the john and gave them hungry, poignant looks, they would not let him into the group.
Sometimes, instead of waiting around at the bar, they would make forays into the night to round up some of the drug. They spent a lot of time waiting outside basement apartments in Chinatown, checking over their shoulders for the police. Towns owned the car and he had plenty of dents in the side to prove it. Somehow, tranquil and frozen by the drug, Towns felt that a little sideswipe here and there didn't matter much, but the dents were piling up and the car was pretty battered. The dapper, arrogant fellow sat in the back and seemed annoyed at having to ride around in such a disreputable-looking vehicle. He lived with his mother who supposedly did all his driving for him, after first propping him up beside her with blankets over his knees for warmth. Towns decided to have all the car dents fixed in one swipe and then start over.
Leaving his friends behind one night, Towns went on a drug-hunting foray with a hooker who had seemed beautiful in the saloon light, but turned out to be a heavy user of facial creams. He didn't object to a girl using creams in private, but felt she had an obligation to take them off when she was out and around. She said she knew of some great stuff just over the bridge in Brooklyn. Towns drove and drove and when he asked her if they were there yet, she said it was just a little bit farther. He felt he might as well be driving to Chicago. When they finally got the coke, she described herself, with some pride, as a “nose freak” —as though Towns would be thrilled to hear this. Then she got rid of most of the coke in the car, under a street lamp, leaving Towns with just a few grains. He felt it would be the right thing on his part to smack her around a little for her behavior, but he was worried about friends of hers running out of a nearby building with kitchen knives. So he let it pass. Besides, there had been something attractively illicit about snorting the drug with a heavily creamed hooker deep in the bowels of Brooklyn. And it was strong, too, even if there wasn't much of it. He would have something to say to his friends about “Brooklyn coke” and how it could tear your head off if you didn't watch it. So instead of smacking her around, he took her on a long, silent drive back to Manhattan where he let her out.
In the beginning, Towns and his friends would fool themselves into thinking that the nighttime get-togethers were for the purpose of having some dinner. They would polish off a Chinese dinner, and one of them would casually ask if the others felt like going after some coke. But after a while, they dropped all pretense, skipping the dinners and diving right into the business of getting at the drug. Towns soon discovered that he was throwing over entire evenings to phone calls, long waits, nervous foot-tapping, and great outbursts of relief when their man finally showed up with the prize. He wasn't sure if he felt the tension legitimately or if he was just playing at it. There weren't too many things in life he liked to do more than once in exactly the same way and he figured out that he was having the same kind of evening over and over. So one night he simply stopped, probably too cruelly and abruptly, the way he stopped most things. He decided to get a whole bunch of coke and have it just for himself. He invited the dealer with the collapsing face up to his apartment and told him to bring along an entire ounce. It was a very exciting and significant call for him to make, and he rated it right up there with such decisions as moving out on his wife and signing up for a preposterously expensive apartment. Both had worked out. As soon as he called the dealer, he became afraid of some vague unnameable violence. His way of handling it was to strip down to his waist and greet the dealer bare-chested. Towns had a strong body and this maneuver would indicate that he was loose and could take care of things, even stripped down that way and obviously having no weapons concealed in the folds of his clothing.
The dealer didn't notice any of this. He swept right in and began to carry on about some new moisture-proof bottles he had found for the coke. If you closed them after snorts, no moisture would get in and the drug would not cake up. He was terribly proud of the bottles and told Towns to hang on to them; when they were empty, he would come by with refills. After he had left, Towns sank back on a leather chair and didn't even try any of the coke. He just lit a cigar and richly enjoyed having bottles of it up there on the thirtieth floor with him. The idea fell into his head that if you had a lot of it, you were relieved of the pressure of always having to get it and as a result you didn't take that much. But he got on to himself in a second and knew it wasn't going to work out that way. He'd take more. The next time he saw his friends they tried to start up the coke-hunting apparatus and he excused himself by saying, “I don't think I'm in the mood for any tonight.” He felt very sorry for them; they would have to go to all that trouble for just a little packet of it that would be sniffed up in an evening. Somehow they sensed he had a whole bunch of coke of his own and were snappish with him, but they stopped that quickly because they weren't that way. The stylish fellow's eyes began darting all over the place and Towns sensed he was making plans to lay in a giant supply of his own. He would be all right. But the film cutter's head drooped and when he was alone with Towns, he admitted for the first time that even though he had many children, he hated his wife. The evenings of hunting down coke had been terribly important to him. He said he always knew Towns was afraid to get close to people and amazingly he started to cry for a few seconds. At that moment, Towns would have taken him up to the apartment and given him half of the huge amount of coke. It was a close call, and the next day he was thrilled that he hadn't. As to Towns's inability to stay close to people, the fellow probably had him dead right. He had gone with a girl for three years and then brutally chopped off the affair, practically overnight. When it came to girls, if there was going to be any chopping off, he wanted to be the one to do it. Once it had been the other way. He saw himself as a man who had gotten off to a shaky start, then patched himself together and now had tough scar tissue at the seams. Chopping … getting chopped off … what he hoped for in life was to work his way back to some middle path.
Meanwhile, he had all that coke and a whole new style of evening set up. He would spread some of the drug on a dark surface, a pretzel box as a matter of fact, snort some, rub a little on his gums, and then take a long time getting dressed, returning f
rom time to time to the pretzel box for additional sniffs. The feeling in coke circles was that your aim in returning to the drug throughout an evening was to chase that original high. Speaking for himself, Towns saw his repeat trips to the pretzel box as a means of making sure his feet never got back on the ground. It may have added up to the identical thing. He had some special phonograph records that seemed to go with the coke, ones that he rarely changed. They seemed to deepen the effects of the drug; cigars helped to string out the sensation, too, and he felt he was the only one who knew this. When he was ready to go out, he would sprinkle some coke in tinfoil and try to figure out the best pocket to put it in, one he wouldn't forget and the least likely one for a federal agent to suddenly thrust his hand into and nail him on the spot. (A dealer once told him “There's no good pocket.”) He would be able to return to the tinfoil for little tastes throughout the night and there would be enough in there, too, for friends he might run across. Doling out coke from the thin little packet would make him seem generous; at the same time, no one had to know about the moisture-proof bottles lined up and waiting for him back at his apartment.
It was amazing how little he worried about the illegality of what he was doing. Only once did this come home to him with any force. He was in a cocktail lounge in Vegas with two girls and for the life of him he couldn't figure out if they were hookers. He was only fair at determining things like that. Sometimes his actions were sudden and dramatic, and on this occasion, he reached out and stuck a fingerful of coke in each of their mouths, as if this would smoke them out and tell him if they were joy dolls. They both sucked on the fingers and loved what was happening, but Towns looked around the lounge and became aware of a number of men with white socks, shaved necks, and even expressions who appeared not to approve of his having traipsed in with more than one girl. They probably didn't go for his beard much, either. At least that's the impression he got. All of this shook him up. What if one of the girls suddenly hollered out, “He shoved coke in my mouth” Towns had a lawyer who was terrific in the civil liberties department, but he wasn't sure he could count on the fellow dashing out to Nevada on his behalf. He told the girls to wait for him, he had a lucky roulette hunch, and then he sneaked out of the casino and went to another one.
He didn't feel the danger much in the city, though. “Rich” is the only word to describe how he felt. When he started out of his apartment, high and immunized, he felt that nothing great had to happen. He didn't even have to wind up with a girl. The way he figured it, enough that was great had already happened. Right around the pretzel box. He knew there must be a dark side to all this, but he would worry about that later.
One of the smart things he did was not use his car. He had had enough of the sideswipes. In his new routine, going about on foot and using cabs, he would hit a few warm-up places where he knew some people and felt cozy and secure; then he would head for a drugged and adventurous bar that could always be counted on for packs of long-haired girls, each of whom for some reason had just left her “old man” or walked out on a waitressing job that very day. In the drugged atmosphere of this bar, it was possible to slip into these packs of girls and on occasion, to pick one off. All of a sudden he would be talking to one, and if her eyes looked right, asking if she would like to have a little coke in the John. If she said yes, he knew the battle was over and he was going to wind up in bed with her. The two went together. In his way, he was using the coke to push people around. One night, at one of the early bars, he stood next to two black men; one liked him, the other, whose glasses gave him the look of an abstract educational puzzle, didn't. He said that even though Towns was bigger than he was, he was positive he could take him outside and beat the shit out of him. Unlike liquor, the coke always had a defusing effect on Towns, who simply shrugged and said, “No way.” Then, perhaps to teach the puzzle man a lesson, he invited the other black man into the John for some coke. They took some together and then the angry abstracted fellow appeared. Towns hesitated long enough to make his point and then gave him some, too. He put his arm around Towns and hugged him and Towns felt a little sad about how easy it had been to peel away his anger. Back at the bar, he got angry again and finally walked out in what seemed to be a flash of hot abstract lightning. His renewed fury made Towns feel a little easier. But you certainly could do things with that coke. One night, when Towns had failed to pry any of the girls loose from her pack, he went looking for a hooker and found a terrific one on the street who looked like a high-school cheerleader. She had a tough style and needled him, saying she had balled every guy in the city, so why not him? At one time this would have been a threat to Harry Towns, but it wasn't now. What did all those other guys have to do with him? She said they could go upstairs to a tragic-looking little hotel across the street and Towns said no deal, he wanted to take her to his place. She said there was no way on earth she would go to a stranger's apartment, and then he mentioned the coke. “Jesus, do you really have some?” she wanted to know. “Pounds of it,” he said, “at my place.” It was amazing. As tough and streetwise as she was, she jumped in a cab with him and off they went. And all he had done was say he'd had the coke. It was a weapon all right.
Sometimes, when he got finessed into drinking a lot, the liquor and drug combination left him shaky the next day. He had to make sure to let entire days go by without using any of the drug. On the off days, it would be like having a terrific date to look forward to. One night, a fellow with a beltful of tools walked up to Towns and said that if he ever saw him with his wife again, he would kill him in an alley. “We can do it now,” said the fellow, with surprising politeness, “or at a time of your convenience.” Towns could not pinpoint the wife in question, but he had a pretty good inkling of who she was. He felt weak and anesthetized, his limbs sluggish, caught in heavy syrup. He mumbled something and hoped the fellow wouldn't use the tools on him. So it wasn't all roses. He had to watch that sort of thing. Then, too, the moisture-proof bottles emptied out after a while and he had to get them filled up again. He made an appointment to go to the dealer's apartment this time, and when he got there, the fellow snatched up his money and sat him down next to a young blonde carhop-style girl who looked as though she had just given up thumb-sucking. Then he slid a huge switchblade with a capsule of amyl nitrite on it between them, and excused himself, saying he had to get the coke, which was a few blocks away. Towns knew about the capsule; it was for cracking open and sniffing. You got a quick high-voltage sexual rush out of it. He had graduated from it some time back and felt it was small potatoes next to coke. But what about having it on a switchblade with a yellow-haired teenager on the other side? It reminded Towns of a religious ceremony in which a hotly peppered herb was placed beside something delicious to remind worshippers of the hard and easy times of their forebears. But this seemed to be a kind of drug ritual, and he couldn't decide what his next move was supposed to be. Was he supposed to make a quick grab for the capsule and crack it open before she got at him with the switchblade? He decided to stick to light conversation.
A bit later, Towns excused himself to go to the John and by mistake opened the door to a closet; rifles and handguns came pouring out on him in a great metallic shower—as well as a few bullwhips. “Look what you did,” said the girl, coming over in a pout, as though the cat had spilled some milk. Towns helped her to gather up the weapons; it seemed important to get them back in before the dealer returned. He showed up half an hour later, telling Towns that he was in great luck because he had come up with some pure coke rocks, much more lethal than anything Towns had been involved with before. This type of coke came in around once a year, something like softshell crabs; rich Peruvians sat around on their ranches and shaved slivers of it from a huge rock, inhaling these slivers for weeks on end and getting heart trouble in their thirties. But Towns wasn't to worry about this, since he would only be getting this one shipment and maybe never get a shot at it again. Another thing that wasn't to bother Towns was that the moisture-proof bot
tles would not be filled to the top this time. That was because the Peruvian coke rocks were so pure. Towns wasn't so sure about this. “Oh well,” said the dealer, disdainfully, “if you want me to fluff them up.” Towns thought of the weapons closet and decided to pass on this and get going. In a kind of furious between-the-acts blur of activity, the dealer and his girl whipped out armloads of equipment, and before Towns could make a move toward the door, the dealer had wound a rubber coil around his arm and was straining to make a vein pop up. Meanwhile, the girl was melting down a Peruvian rock, probably one that belonged to Towns, in a tiny pan. They were like a crack surgical team. So this was the famous shooting-up routine. Towns had never seen it and had always been curious about it. The dealer, one side of his face not only collapsing but running down, like oil on a canvas, plunged a hypodermic into his vein and went into a series of ecstatic shivers, at the same time keeping up a surprisingly sober running commentary for Towns: “What's happening is that I'm getting a rush twenty times more powerful than you get taking it up through your nose. This is really something. The only trouble is, it will stop in about five minutes and I'll have to do it again. I've gotten so I can do it ten, twenty times, all through the night.” None of this was appealing to Towns. He realized that the tableau was for his benefit, to hook him into the team so that he would wind up melting rocks with them in the tiny frying pan. It wasn't going to happen. There were certain things that he could say for sure he wasn't ever going to do—like skydiving—and this was one of them. When the dealer finished up his shivers, it was time for the girl to take her turn; that's what Towns wanted to be on hand to see. She stuck some equipment under her arm and said she was going off to do it privately. Towns felt around in his bottle and pulled out a good-sized rock, saying it was hers if he could watch her in action. “No way,” she said, giving him an infuriated look, “that's one thing no one in the world is ever going to see.” What she seemed to want to get across was that she had been through a thousand assorted hells but was going to keep this one area stubbornly cordoned off to herself. Towns shrugged good-naturedly as if to say, “Oh well, win some, lose some,” but he felt the loss sharply and didn't even wait around to see her when she got back. That wasn't what he wanted. He thanked the shivering fellow for the Peruvian rocks and sauntered outside, deciding to hunt down another arrangement, one with less danger in the air.
About Harry Towns Page 7
