Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl

  Eli started to stumble to his feet, his hand reaching out to use the mirror for leverage.

  “Sit down before you do something stupid.”

  Eliza, sure footed, headed to the kitchen, put the money on the breakfast nook. The idea grabbed her just as her fingers reached for the baggies.

  “Hey, Moses, can I grab a beer?”

  “What, I’m your hostess now? Just bring the fuckin’ bags.”

  “All right.”

  “Nah, just kidding, bring me one too.”

  She unhesitatingly dropped two bars of Xanax into his beer.

  “Thanks. Wanna line, chickie?”

  “Nah, not unless you’re gonna let me put that line in my arm.”

  “Whatever.”

  Eli’s hand moved like lightning to his back pocket. She rolled it over in her head; one shot and both these cunts will be out. She took nothing and stirred it into her spoon, preparing to shoot ice-cold water in her veins.

  “Baby, hold me.”

  Eliza grabbed the top of Eli’s arm. He went in for a spot. PRDD’s head sank toward the scattered two-foot line waiting for him. Eli was out. She’d deal with him later, right now she needed him out of the way for this to work. She sat back and waited. She watched the bringer’s head resting on the back of the couch, mind gone. Then he came to, swallowed down half the beer.

  “Moses, can we talk in the bedroom?”

  “What?”

  She smiled; nudged her head toward her drooling, dope-blessed seatmate.

  “Oh yeah, yeah.”

  She grabbed the bringer by the arm, led him to his bedroom. He pushed her up against the door, roughed up her tits. She moaned, and she passed her hands along his limp cock. They moved toward the bed. He plopped onto the corner, hard mattress protruding from between his legs, his head sagging down. She waited a few seconds, then pushed him back, started to unzip his pants. There was no need to take the charade any further; he was out.

  She raced to the front room, grabbed a freezer bag, shoveled the drugs in, ran to the bathroom, took the lid off the tank, and seized the double-wide freezer bag of cash floating there. She roused Eli. “Come on, baby. Let’s bounce.”

  “Where’s the bringer?”

  “Sleeping.”

  Eli didn’t notice the extra baggage she was toting. She shuffled him down the stairs and into the car, not looking back once. They’d have to leave to wherever now, or they’d be dead by tomorrow. One stop. They needed to go to the apartment to get clothes, a quick in-and-out.

  The car came to a screeching halt, half on the street, half on the walkway. “Wait here. I’ll grab our things. Be right back.”

  “Where’s our stash, baby?”

  “Not now. We gotta leave.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Come on, baby. I need it.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  She’d miss him when he was gone. He was so beautiful. She watched him stumble into the bathroom with a ridiculous scoop of drugs in his paw; ritual. The door closed.

  “I’ll be waiting in the car when you’re done.”

  Eliza walked out, got in the car, and headed for the highway.

  At least he’d be high when the bringer came. She’d be high, too, in a couple of hours. On some beach figuring out what was next. Fuck, maybe rehab was in her future. There had to be something beyond this, there had to be a better way to live. She turned up DNA’s “Not Moving” and let it screech through her speakers as she laughed and cried over the memory of the men she had just left behind; the looks that would be etched onto their faces when they finally came to.

  NATHAN LARSON is best known as an award-winning film music composer, having created the scores for over thirty movies, including Boys Don’t Cry, Dirty Pretty Things, and Margin Call. In the 1990s, he was lead guitarist for the influential prog-punk outfit Shudder to Think. He is the author of the novel The Dewey Decimal System and its sequel The Nervous System. Larson lives in Harlem, New York City, with his wife and son.

  dos mac + the jones

  by nathan larson

  Dos Mac, accomplished urban planner and the mind behind some heavy-duty military technology, is draining his first cup of coffee as he notes an ancient but absolutely unmistakable tug in his groin and stomach.

  Dos gives it a second. Player, please, he thinks. But there it is, that heat in his gut. If you’ve felt it once you couldn’t possibly misdiagnose it.

  Sets down his brown MTA mug on the metal gurney that now supports his piecemeal bachelor’s kitchenette. “Motherfucker,” says Dos into the stale air of his cavernous live/work laboratory.

  How long had it been? Three years plus, but Dos knows this is irrelevant. The Jones is an eternal flame. The Jones is terminal. The Jones rides shotgun in your lizard brain toward the infinite night, its soft tendrils tickling your prostate. Into the grave, perhaps beyond.

  Dos rocks an off-off-white Puma tracksuit, flip flops. Clothes he fled his apartment in, over six months ago, when they blew up the bridge nearby. Everything is outsized, he is shrinking, drying up. The loose flesh of a once stocky man hangs off him like a shitty suit. His hair is untended, or natural, or “nappy,” shooting skyward from his scalp in a salt-and-pepper afro. He places his hand on his cheek, calculates the length of his beard to be just shy of a centimeter. A yellowed plastic breathing apparatus hangs loose around his neck, from which a thin tube dangles freely.

  Dos Mac is not the name he was born with.

  “Motherfucker,” the man repeats. For there is no doubt as to what he must do.

  He envisions his “day” with growing horror and annoyance. Plans for further microscopic tweaking of the 3-D model of the reconstructed subway system (which, admittedly, he has been tweaking for weeks on end) are now fucked. He would need his oxygen tank and hand cart. He would need …

  Problems present themselves to the man, with respect to securing some heroin. Dos Mac has no idea what day or time it could possibly be. And more to the point: he has no idea where to look in New York City, his hometown rendered alien to him after the “attacks” of February 14, the island of Manhattan a decimated void, now in an endless state of rebuilding, seemingly leading nowhere, one massive semi-abandoned construction site. He has no clue as to who would have the good stuff on hand. Or if shaking some loose is even a remote possibility.

  He shuffles sideways, turns a bit. Blinks at the wall of computer monitors, stacked willy-nilly, closed-circuit cameras showing Times Square, barren save a tractor, a couple NYPD vans, and a loose grouping of soldiers in black ninja suits. Another screen shows the corner of Hester and Broome, and forty feet east of that, yet another camera is trained on the sidewalk outside his front door, which is virtually traffic free.

  The fluorescent light over the right-hand side of the rear of the gigantic room flickers. Once that goes, simply getting a bulb for the shit will be a serious, likely a very dangerous, task. And suddenly he has the fucking stones to fancy he can saunter out, pick up some smack, and be back before lunch? Dos Mac is kidding no one.

  His regular NA posse would be disgusted with him. His sponsor would wobble his head at the staggering waste of it all. All that work. The breakthroughs and milestones, the weepy mea culpas and poker chips, all for naught.

  But there is no more NA. Finito. No more meetings. The “rooms” sitting silent and derelict, or buried under rubble and ash. Either way, that crutch is history.

  As addicts go, Dos had been more than highly functional. In this and in all things, the Mac excelled. Some labeled him an overachiever, perhaps attempting to compensate for his bleak roots in the housing projects of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Dos found this insulting, simplistic. Everybody’s got their scene. His scene was that he was black and poor in America, but damn, haven’t we done away with the stereotypes and all that bullshit? Apparently not.

  At what point do you stop being a prodigy? When you hit eighteen? At twelve? When is it no longer charming? At wh
at juncture do you become just another annoying brain clogging the coffee shops and microbreweries near MIT?

  The thing with Dos and the smack was never an issue of health or well-being. Nor did anybody aware of his habit do more than whine at him for being fucking lazy. Or for not sharing. Most of his trashy ex-boyfriends, with their nonstop waxing and bulimia, most of these trifling faggots he wouldn’t wish on his most hated enemy.

  No, the issue was money. As in, he spent it all on drugs and therefore had none. That was what got him, eventually.

  At the absolute height of his game, Dos floated untouchable through space and time, his habit and his career tracking parallel, neither affecting the other in the slightest. He had a long good run: as a youngster Dos had fast-tracked it through Brooklyn Tech. By night, he mainlined and freebased it through as much junk as his body could handle. Somehow his sense of how much was too much was very finely honed, and Dos Mac made sure to stay on the right side of that line.

  For all his scag consumption, Dos had always been a bit of a health nut, with an emphasis on the nut. No alcohol, no over-the-counter painkillers … plus, a strictly meat-, gluten-, and dairy-free diet. Even in these current conditions. And trust, this regime is not easy to maintain in the best of circumstances. Try keeping it up in a husk of a town like this one.

  After his creation of the missile guidance system (originally conceived as an attempt to increase efficiency in the NYC subway), and Mac’s subsequent courtship by the government, his stint in naval intelligence made maintaining his smack hobby a touch trickier. The pop drug-testing, the security screening. He’s positive that brass willfully ignored some serious red flags. And although folks can get used to anything, it wasn’t exactly comfortable, smuggling clean urine around the academy grounds, plastic test tube shoved up his ass.

  Yeah, it was trickier in the navy; that is, until he got deployed to the Motherland. That depopulated hole, where the poppy fields grow wild and unchecked. Manna, in unending supply. Dos even toyed with the notion of investing in the thriving export operation, whose participants and actors were countless within the ranks of the military and private contractors. It seemed safe enough, but in the end, Dos, content in his role as a user, wanted only to get high and play with his models. He was no businessman and certainly not an enthusiastic risk-taker.

  Now Dos Mac catches himself itching his arm, in anticipation. For a dude of extreme caution and calculation, what he’s contemplating would have to count as one of the most reckless acts he’s ever undertaken.

  He’ll have to go Out.

  It’s just that way, that’s just the way it is. Damn.

  How long, how long since he’s been outside? He glances at his monitors again, anxiously, as if they might hold some crucial information. Weeks? A month? If anything has changed it will have been for the worse, that much is for sure. Fucked up as it all is.

  Tells himself: one last time. It’s been a stressful year, to say the least. Isn’t a man entitled to a little relaxation, having survived what some might describe as an apocalypse? And having bounced back in fine style to boot …

  Even so, he’ll have to go Out.

  Where will he even begin? It’s sure to have all been shaken up. Have to start locally, hope it’s easier than anticipated. Maybe he’ll luck out. He’d never bought in Chinatown, but seeing as everything else has been turned on its head, Dos sees no reason why the drug market will be any different. Then he’ll turn to spots he knew well and see what that might render.

  He’ll need goods to barter with. That’s the way folks do now.

  Dos dusts off a largish nylon sports bag, which bears the faded word Modell’s. Tosses his desk drawers, not knowing what he’s looking for. What do people need anymore?

  Keys to the big locker—beside the hydroponic lighting, useless now as the plants have been dry and lifeless for ages (how did he allow that to happen?), here is his stock of premium items with which to barter: his seitan jerky, a couple cases of Fiji water, four Zippos, lighter fluid, several packs of rechargeable batteries, and the main event, a pair of Motorola Talkabout two-way radios. Dumps a sampling of everything into the bag, then pauses at the radios. This would be blowing his wad. Other than his generator, without which he would quickly find himself dead, these radios are the most valuable objects he has. The computer shit, the cameras, they’d be useless to most people. In giving up the radios he’d be severely limiting his options, in the likely event his generator fails.

  At the moment, however, anything that might bring him closer to drugs must be put into play.

  Extreme times, extreme measures, says the Jones, from behind his inner ear. It’s the voice of his former sponsor, Charles Morgan, for reasons Dos doesn’t care to explore, a voice island-tinged, disciplinarian, prone to faux-profundity and platitudes, probably to lay down cover for the workings of a simple mind.

  Dos takes a long, truly loving gander at his lab, his cell, his womb, his asylum. The amount of sweat and effort he’s put into making it safe, making it a proper workshop. February 14 was a blessing in this way; he’d never felt as secure anywhere else. So much of him is here. His plans, his model of the perfect subway system, with its flat-zero carbon footprint, a version of the jammie he’d set up in Washington, D.C., writ large …

  If you love something, set it free, says the Jones, which apparently is going to persist uttering goofy clichés that don’t even apply to the situation at hand.

  Regardless, Dos figures, making a final scan of his improvised safe house, he has little choice but to set out, because sometimes a brother simply has got to get high.

  That smack won’t be coming to him. He’ll have to go to the smack. He tosses the radios in with the rest of his crap, and shoulders the bag.

  Outside.

  The air, the air crackles and pops with toxins, chemicals, fumes. The air is visible, a permanent fog. It’s gotten much worse, worse than even a month or two back. Dos sucks at his oxygen, glad for the mask. Behind his chunky glasses his eyes burn, tear up. Would def not want to wipe at them with his bare hands; he learned that lesson early on.

  On the corner of Chrystie and Delancey he squats, blinking rapidly. Feeling that inner drug-tug in his stomach. Thinking, can’t believe I’m actually doing this.

  Thinking, goddamn, peep all this. It’s all Chinese now.

  It was nearly all Chinese prior to 2/14 anyway, but given their resilience, economic superiority, and their steady access to bodies/cheap labor, they seem to be doubly thriving in this new environment. Dos is well aware that the Chinese have been awarded a fair number of Reconstruction contracts. And with that seems to have come a new energy, a new confidence. A palpable sense of Chinese superiority cuts through the nasty fog. What limited bustle can be observed seems purposeful, competent.

  Glances that Dos has had at evil-looking Chinese military units leave him humbled. Wouldn’t want to come to those dudes’ attention. So, in this sense, the impression that he is completely invisible is a positive thing.

  There’s a trickle of rickshaws, electric vans, and sporadic drifts of workers on foot. Nobody loiters or appears remotely shady, with the exception of himself, reckons Dos; so he wouldn’t dare approach any of these folks. No uniform, no proper ID … Where are the hustlers, the freaks, the lesser criminals? It’s a rhetorical question. If he understood the Chinese even a little, such human debris would not be exactly welcome.

  Oh snap. With discomfort, Dos recalls the Chinese government’s posture of zero tolerance regarding narcotics. Given that these various neighborhoods have been all but handed over to the dominant group’s rule of law, this area is looking less and less score-friendly.

  Rising to his feet, ridiculous in his gas mask and flip flops, Dos Mac figures he’ll have to press on. Head north, into Christ knows what.

  Stepping around an open manhole, he trudges up Chrystie, dragging his oxygen tank behind him, clanking and top heavy on its rickety cart.

  Ludlow between Houston and St
anton.

  Third Street at Avenue C.

  Avenue B between 7th and 6th Streets.

  The “laundry” on 7th Street between B and C.

  Nothing but blank spaces, in some cases the entire façade having been cemented over if not removed wholesale.

  Near the former site of the “laundry,” a work crew crouches, uniform gray coveralls, silently engaged in some kind of mah-jongg–like game. Dos Mac is positively ignored. Which is a good thing.

  Dos realizing he’s reaching as far back as the late 1980s, which is fucking sad, and that by the second address his wanderings have become nothing more than a masturbatory nostalgia jag. The Jones doesn’t mind. It seems to only intensify the thirst, as the muscle/body memory is as strong as the perfume of a former lover. He digs on it, digs the internal heat.

  Dos doubles down on this, his righteous mission to score. He’s strong enough to make it this far? Motherfucker, he’s strong enough to complete this simple task. The tug in his sphincter is, if anything, amplified as he moves through this neighborhood.

  Does a nigger have to go uptown? Never comfortable around the dealers in Harlem … not that he expected to find anybody still hustling. What’s going on uptown? Maybe, just maybe, an abandoned lab, somebody looking to unload weight for which there is no longer a market … but Dos knows he’s just pipe-dreaming. Anything worth anything has been stolen, swapped, or sold.

  Here, just look at his sorry ass. Dos Mac should be a subject for derision, should be attracting gawkers despite the thin population. But not so; not a solitary soul registers his movements. Dos makes no attempt at stealth, but he gets the sense that he’s resonating ghostly, shadelike.

  Besides appearing pathetic, and besides the fact that he’s aware that a low profile is what will keep him standing, Dos Mac starts to question his own solidity; is he simply being snubbed, or has he somehow slipped into another dimension of being? Some sort of high-level physics at play here? Is he less real than the tire on the flatbed pickup that slows to collect the group of men, not pausing as they chase the vehicle and haul themselves up and onto the back of the truck, disappearing into the dirty fog?