Needle Too: Junkies in Paradise

by Craig Goodman

  “No you’re not,” she says to me in a voice that makes my head spin around and see that fire in her eyes as she must’ve already been a few beers deep. “Dinner’s almost ready. Go wash your hands and tell your sister.”

  At that very moment I had the chance to be an amazing 11-year-old. I had the chance to be one of those kids you read about in the newspapers and admire—the kind of kid who goes against the grain and stands up for what’s right while staring into the face of opposition and the threat of injury. Instead, I let the fear take me.

  The next day was Saturday, the day I delivered newspapers for Greg Kirsch for $20, and as I headed out of the building I saw Marc on the pier throwing plastic bags of puppy into the river. So I delivered my newspapers and then in the afternoon returned home where I crawled into bed, pulled the covers over my head, and wept for so long I forgot to remember.

  Leo is my dog, my son, my kemo sabe and at 20 pounds—a true GIANT among Pomeranians. I truly believe that was it not for Leo I might have offed myself already. In fact, given my reputation for bandying about brutal honestly, I know for certain that when his time comes—something I think about incessantly—I’ll be reduced to a sniveling mound of mess for who-knows-how-long and will grieve the loss more thoroughly than any from the past, as well as any I might expect to in the future.

  In early 2008 Leo accidentally fell into my lap, and given the enormity of the impact he would soon have on my life it was virtually the last, viable, moment for him to do so. Since that day he has taught me things I never knew and things I needed to know in order to do the things I think I have to do—and those things have nothing to do with writing. Indeed, writing—in and of itself—is merely the vehicle and environment in which I am most comfortable and, more importantly, most persuasive.

  On January 12th in 2008—which was a Saturday I’ll never forget—I received a text message from Brent, a former coworker of Emily’s who had an uncle in the navy that travelled around the world meeting interesting people from exotic places, and when he wasn’t killing those people and incinerating their places he was exploring the local customs and fare. And, when the opportunity presented itself he would sample the local cannabis as well, and if it was something to write home about he’d send it instead and if he sent it he sent a lot of it in the safest way possible which, of course, meant stowing it away at the bottom of an 8000-ton destroyer.

  As a result, Brent was enlisted as an occasional pot dealer…a very paranoid occasional pot dealer dealing what, ironically, would soon become among the most popular, heavily sought after and expensive smoke in Southwest Florida—at least while it lasted which was never very long. Unfortunately, Brent’s occasional but extreme and rapidly increasing popularity among some of the area’s most notorious, discriminating and committed cannabis connoisseurs only escalated his paranoia and as a result—cryptic text-message drug-dealing alerts like ‘I’m ditching the dirt bike. Ready to ride?’ or ‘Delilah’s in the garden…wanna let her out?’ were hardly met with confusion or surprise. So, of course, on January 12th when I flipped open my phone and read ‘I’m getting rid of Leo for a hundred bucks…are you interested?’ I was like ‘Fuck yeah, man!! I usually spend two-hundred on that shit!’

  So I ended up spending 300.

  42

  Dear Craig,

  Thanks for giving me the chance to read A NEEDLE IN THE PAYSTACK. I'm not sure that's the right title for the book you've written, but I'd like to talk to you. Is there a good time on the weekend for me to call you? Saturday or Sunday morning, perhaps?

  The book is going to need some cutting, and in addition your technique (having a short comment or scene at the start of each chapter, followed by a break in the narrative) doesn't serve you well, and I found it somewhat confusing. Do you think you'd be able to keep the narrative more or less in a straight line? An occasional flashback or interruption might be okay, but we can judge that as we go along—if you decide you'd like to work with me on the manuscript before submitting it to a publisher. The good thing here is that you can write, and if you can take suggestions, then I believe I can sell the book. It's in a genre that's been getting a workout lately, so you need to be well prepared before you go into the marketplace.

  Again, thanks for letting me read NEEDLE.

  Yours sincerely,

  THERON RAINES

  So I got the dog I wanted and the literary agent I needed but I suppose it was really the other way around. Nonetheless, when a friend of a friend passed Needle along to Theron Raines and the world’s most accomplished literary agent offered to represent my work—it was clearly the shining moment of my writing career. To think that my name was on a short list of authors that included the likes of James Dickey, Winston Groom and Madeleine L’Engle—and that Needle could potentially follow in the footsteps of Deliverance, Forrest Gump and A Wrinkle in Time—made my head spin and become so INFLATED that I almost floated away. And of course, the fact that so many of the esteemed agent’s projects were eventually adapted for successful screenplays wasn’t lost on me either as Nothing Lasts Forever—another Raines project—ultimately became Die Hard in a franchise with seemingly no death in sight.

  To suggest Raines’ interest in Needle was met with complete elation would be an understatement difficult to describe the depth of, and in March when I handed Emily a copy of the agent’s missive she actually cried. We’d been through so much during the past year and now there was finally something positive to embrace and look forward to. However, beyond that things remained bleak as jobs were scarcer than ever, and it was becoming nearly impossible to meet my obligations as a father. As a result, it wasn’t long before we decided to leave Florida for greener employment pastures until the local economy recovered some.

  But where would those pastures be?

  Both of us were mesmerized by San Francisco and for a while we toyed with the idea of heading out west. Ultimately, however, given the precariousness of our situation we thought it best to go where at least one of us was familiar with the territory:

  New York.

  Certainly, deciding to return to the belly of the beast may once again seem like flawed decision-making to some—but I knew better. I was older now, and after so many years had passed it was clear that I’d left my fascination and obsession with heroin in the prior decade and it had since withered away because as I’ve already mentioned, distance lends perspective. Of course, had it been five years earlier I’m not sure such a move would have been prudent; however, by now the Romantic myth had long been dispelled while my addictive inclinations—like my musical aspirations—had completely disappeared. Besides, in New York I thought I might be able to parlay my agent’s reputation and my experience as a copywriter into some sort of a position in, perhaps, the marketing department of a publishing company. Regardless, we settled upon June 28th as the big departure date but for the next few months continued to work six-nights-a-week in Sanibel, while I also began editing Needle in accordance with the wishes of my famous agent.

  As the day of the big move was fast approaching we made final preparations which included selling one of our cars. Certainly, throughout most of the city a car is a nonessential item, and as a result we decided to sell Emily’s Nissan and take the roomier Accord which was a little larger but not nearly large enough to accommodate all of our belongings on a single trip. We also decided to temporarily leave Leo behind with Momma Marcott until the following month when we were settled in, at which point we would return to Florida to retrieve the Pomeranian and whatever else was left behind.

  By the time June 28th finally rolled around in Cape Coral it seemed as though everybody but the owls was packing up and getting the fuck out. And though we too would be gone by noon that very day, Momma Marcott was relieved to know that at least Leo would be there when she returned home from work; however, once the car was packed to capacity with only a small space remaining for a small television that had yet to be loaded, Leo realized exactly what was going on and couldn�
��t be extracted from that same small space.

  So momma got the television instead.

  43

  May 26th, 2010

  Brooklyn, New York: 9:28 a.m.

  It’s almost 9:30 and I’m on that train. You know—the one that appears just after the main thrust of rush hour recedes but is still full of standing commuters hanging on to handrails, a large portion of who seem to be running a little late. Of course—most of us are seated, and appear to work beyond the 9 to 5 scope of things in places like gift shops, department stores and restaurants in positions dealing directly with the public—perhaps even with some of those who are standing up and a little behind schedule. Fortunately—though due to unfortunate circumstances—I am indeed among the seated, and for the past several minutes have born witness to an amazing transformation under very adverse conditions.

  “That’s a gift,” I say to a woman standing up and ignoring me on a train that continues to pull in and out of stations as it accelerates and then slows to a sudden stop, and in the midst of a breathtaking balancing act she applies mascara with one hand while holding a compact mirror with the other—paying zero heed to her safety or the handrails and stripper polls strategically located around the subway car to help keep the upright upright. I am at once amazed by her impenetrable equilibrium…not to mention the length of her lashes. But I’m still not giving her my fucking seat.

  “If you can do that on a skateboard I think we can make some money,” I try again as she momentarily looks away from her mirror and peers at me from the corner of an eye—but then immediately resumes ignoring me because I think she’s a little pissed about the seat. But I’m gonna be standing all day…so fuck her.

  I’d been back in New York for two years, and though I’d successfully avoided relapse, little else had turned out the way I expected. I had been sure that while my written words were being shopped around to powerful publishers by my powerful agent, I could somehow use our professional relationship as leverage to secure copywriting work within the industry, while simultaneously field the many lucrative offers his representation was sure to generate. But the recession seemed to have followed us up to New York and as a result, neither was the case and I was foolish to assume otherwise. Consequently I had no choice but to once again resume the restaurant career until something materialized.

  “Gobledee goobledee gobledee goobledee gobledee goobledeegoo!” a female conductor’s voice with a thick Indian accent is suddenly trumpeted through the train’s typically discernable P.A. system as I’m rudely ripped from my reflections and I’m like What the fuck did she just say? to these two Mexican guys and they’re like What the fuck did he just say? to each other.

  Indeed, with overwhelmingly overcrowded and deplorably filthy subway conditions, a megalomaniac mayor and now amazingly—a never-ending parade of expensive but subpar pizza in Manhattan, New York is a very different place than it was when I left and though it’s always had a proud and storied tradition of welcoming newcomers from faraway places, it seems as though things are finally becoming a bit…confused.

  As far as the book was concerned, my famous agent continued to cite the recession as his primary obstacle to getting Needle published because times were still difficult in 2010, especially for an unknown writer, but he seemed confident that as the economic crisis eventually receded it would be replaced by a wave of good tidings in the not too distant future. Besides, the editing process wasn’t even completed until the prior summer and even during prosperous times, unpublished writers could supposedly expect to wait at least a year regardless of whether they were being represented by Theron Raines or not. Nonetheless, after arriving in Brooklyn and trying to find copywriting work in a corporate climate that was competitive beyond anything I’d ever known, I realized I was just too old to compete with the horde of twenty-somethings from around the country with degrees from private universities and money from mommy and daddy to help feed the city’s new and improved greed machine. Consequently, from almost the moment I returned to New York I found myself an overgrown starving artist once again looking for restaurant work; however, I was now a reluctant relic from the past, a ghost from long ago and an obsolete period piece from a period that ended the moment Bloomberg began and launched his campaign to attract cheap foreign labor for unscrupulous business owners interested in exploiting the city’s most abundant international resource:

  “Can you speaka zee Spanish?” asked the French proprietor of a dingy-looking French bistro just south of SoHo that I happened upon while job hunting during my third week back in the city.

  “Huh?”

  Actually, in retrospect, this shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise as I’d already stepped into over 200 restaurants by this point and been confronted almost exclusively by foreign employees working in all capacities.

  “Spanish! You has to speaka zee Spanish!” snapped the agitated bistro owner as he butchered English with a French accent and the reality of the situation became clear. I not only realized I probably wasn’t getting the job, but that my inability to speak Spanish was now a barrier to getting one as if besides my advancing age and bad attitude I needed another obstacle to overcome. So, of course, a little exasperated, I had to ask the obvious:

  “Why in the world would I have to speak Spanish to work in a shitty French restaurant two blocks from fucking Chinatown?”

  “Because you has to communicate wit zee kitchen!!” he said angrily and in a tone that gave me the impression I definitely wasn’t getting the job.

  Indeed, a cherished New York City institution had largely become extinct when at some point a drastic shift in staffing occurred in restaurants throughout the city as so many aspiring artists, struggling actors and fucked-up musicians were culled from their positions as waiters, waitresses and bartenders to accommodate cheap, undocumented, labor hailing mostly from Mexico and Latin America. But the dramatic shift in staffing amongst the industry’s least expensive employees was really just a measure intended to help facilitate a dramatic shift in staffing amongst the industry’s most expensive employees, and as a result kitchen pay rates at virtually every restaurant in the city were effectively slashed to levels not seen since the 1990’s.

  Alas, one of New York’s most endearing and enduring traditions was thrown away in the interest of profit and a more cost-effective kitchen; however, it came at the expense of not only creative endeavor, but the quality of life as corrupt landlords also expanded their bottom lines by renting-out dilapidated apartments, ignoring occupancy limitations and illegally partitioning their properties to accommodate greater numbers of low-wage workers. Obviously, it goes without saying that the melting-pot workforce that traditionally existed throughout the city’s restaurant industry was dismantled, and the ethnic mosaic composed of newcomers and old-timers alike—in virtually every creed, color and aspiration—was no more. However, the undocumented replacements were hardly limited to restaurants, as tip cups suddenly began appearing on countertops well beyond that of the baristas’ and in waiter-less establishments like pizza shops, delis and bagel stores as greedy business owners around the city decided that besides charging customers top dollar for their offerings, they also expected them to pad their below minimum-wage payrolls.

  Although Emily had been able to find a bartending job at the Bloody Bass in Hell’s Kitchen within weeks of us landing in Brooklyn, my quest for work would require a Herculean effort that continued on through the end of 2008 with a resume comprised of piecemeal restaurant experience mostly in Florida, as my New York experience was not only ancient history—but tainted by the fallout from my addiction. Nonetheless, each day I pounded the pavement like a chicken scaloppini while looking for a job in Manhattan. I roamed the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Chelsea and Murray Hill and when I made it to the East Village I was touched in a terrible way as I noticed a few older buildings, which at one time housed some of my musician friends, were transformed into luxury rentals and condominiums. Hence, modest Manhattan rent
al units that a decade ago cost only 30 to 50% more than similar spaces in the outer boroughs—were at some point replaced by revamped properties now fetching roughly 200 to 300% more than their bridge and tunnel counterparts as the tiny island became less a hub of civilization, innovation and inspiration and more an amusement park for rich bankers and spoiled celebrities.

  Finally, in January of 2009 I’d received a call from Trattoria Trecolori on 47th Street in the Theater District, where I’d dropped off a resume several months prior. Trattoria Trecolori was an Italian restaurant owned and operated by Marco, Phil and Victor—three brothers—all of whom looked and sounded like ginzos from Long Island but were really of Spanish descent, which of course was convenient as it enabled them to communicate with the undocumented staff. Although Marco—the oldest—ran the show, the three siblings inherited the restaurant and the small building it did business in from their deceased father, and with a fairly robust pre-theater rush it seemed to do pretty well. But pretty well wasn’t pretty enough, and Marco was a maverick when it came to cutting payroll corners and getting around that pesky $3.85 an hour that the city so generously afforded its tipped employees:

  “I pay my waiters $10 a day,” I remember he mentioned before handing me $50 in cash shift-pay after my very first week before departing the dining room and heading downstairs to the kitchen.

  This was a new low, even for a restaurateur, and if he was willing to skimp on the measly mandated shift pay afforded the wait staff, Lord knows what he was paying those poor bastards slaving away in the dungeon-like kitchen carved out of the building’s basement.

  “Man—in the 90’s you couldn’t get ANYONE to do ANYTHING in a Manhattan kitchen for less than ten bucks-an-hour,” I said to Pablo who was standing nearby.

  “Well you can now,” he replied with absolute certainty and in virtually perfect English. “Even in the outer boroughs.”