Free The Story of Junk by Linda Yablonsky Page A

doesn’t, you just want to throw yourself under a train.
    Kit has a private methadone connection, a white woman over on Tenth Street, across from the Russian Baths. She’s got a black jazzman husband and two schoolage kids. Every time we go there, she’s folding laundry or moving furniture. The apartment’s small. She sells the juice in two sizes: forty and eighty milligrams, twenty bucks for one, forty for the other. We figure her husband works in one of the clinics. He doesn’t seem to buy from junkies in the program. They’re supposed to drink the stuff on the spot and return for a refill each day, but many hold it in their mouths and spit it back in their bottles once they get outside.
    Our connection insists her juice is clean, no spit. It tastes so horrible I wouldn’t know the difference. Kit thinks the husband is really getting the “biscuits,” the orange meth tablets the clinics break up and dissolve in water or Tang. Kit would rather have the biscuits—easier to take on the road—but the woman says it’s juice or nothing. Her skin is the color of bone dust. With sharper teeth, she’d make a perfect vampire. Kit says it’s the effect of long-term meth use. It sucks your blood, rots your bones. “Shit,” I say. Shopping here may be safer than on the street, but the street, at least, has a life.
    As the weather heats up, so does the market. The police pressure, too. Nearly every day we get locked inside buildings while the cops pass by outside. Same thing happens while the sellers re-up—resupply the house. When traffic is thick, the houses sell out faster than the baggers can put bundles together and quicker than the runners can trade on the money, some say upward of eighty thousand dollars a day.
    That’s all anyone talks about on the drug lines—money and drugs. Sometimes sex or weather, but it always comes back to drugs: what brands are “on the money,” where else to cop. Sex, drugs, money—it’s all the same. It’s got the same look and it’s got the same hook, same same. We see it in telephone operators, Con Ed repairmen, shop owners, cabbies, and clerks. We see it in people who look like us, white middle-class users for whom copping is simply hip, avant-garde behavior; in hookers from Third Avenue, some of them women we used to know; and in no small number of drag queens, out of drag. Down here they don’t look too fabulous. Midday, it’s the lawyers and traders from Wall Street, out to lunch. Their partners have no idea, their wives and husbands can’t find them, their bosses are oblivious. We’re out there for the world to see but nobody knows what we’re up to. That’s what everyone thinks—that no one can tell. I know they can’t see it in me. Rico’s always saying how amazing it is I can “pass.”
    I’m careful how I look. Kit says it’s better not to appear too prosperous, but I put on my makeup and clean clothes and walk the streets as if I own them. God knows I’m spending enough money on them. No one bothers us. Oh, occasionally some jerk will yell at us, “Yo! Punk rock!” It’s better than “Fucking dikes!”
    â€œYou’d think women weren’t allowed to be friends,” I say.
    â€œDo I look really dikey?” Kit asks.
    â€œNo way,” I say. “You’re a star.”
    She says, “You look good to me, too.”
    We laugh together but we don’t hold hands, not on Avenue D. Not anywhere. Too tacky.
    By the middle of summer, the junkie grapevine has been usurped by working journalists. Every night on the news and every week on the front page of the Times there are detailed reports on the activity of the East Village drug trade. It’s as if the neighborhood had its own Dow Jones. They give the locations and the brand names and the best hours of the day to make the best buys. They cover the police