Stone Cold Fever

"Oh, Yeah," he says, laughing at the memory, pointing at the thin blue line of a vein in his leg, "I lost that one in Miami in Sixty-eight. Needle went right through it and fried it like a piece of beefsteak." He has less subtle trophies: milk-white rippled scars above both eyes from bones crushed and badly healed; silver-dollar-sized brands on both arms and his back; a flaring tattooed eagle arched huge on each skinny forearm, all-American wings hiding the beaded string of knots in the main veins; a lock and chain tattooed on one wrist. And then the prize: deep, red-healed scars from knives, many of them, on his stomach and abdomen, hieroglyph message from 17, maybe 18 operations--he doesn't remember the number exactly.

Not many people manage to collect that much strange history on their bodies in 33 years, but Gene Macey has had a little help from a heroin habit he picked up 12 years ago in Baltimore. And a little more from the occupational hazards of supporting his habit by working as a male hustler--not the easiest of professions, especially when you don't have that much to sell anymore. He's a lot older than he is.

With a jacket covering his tattooed plumage and surgical calligraphy, he looks like most of the other barbed-wire lean and gritty kids from the country who drifted into the Big City looking for action and finally got the shit kicked out of them for their trouble. He combs his thin sandy-brown hair in a lingering imitation of early Elvis, and his face seems like a skull barely covered, fragile and overchiseled like so many faces along the Mississippi Valley. He usually wears Levis, a colored T-shirt and black Woolworth's-style shoes--and he could be an unemployed meat packer with a wife and three kids in Kentucky.

Except for his eyes. Too big for his small face, ice-flecked arctic blue, they have flashing snakes lurking in them that say: There's not a fucking thing I won't do if I get uptight--and I've done most of it already. Which is not to say that he comes on evil. Just the opposite. He keeps the snakes out of sight, even from himself, most of the time. Except when he's speeding or completely stoned, he is into being cordial, quiet and street-gentle manly. The hustler's art, sifted through time spent among New York's upper-echelon gay set. But the snakes are there.

He lives, for the moment, in a run-down Transients Welcome by-the-week hotel on Superior Street in Chicago. It's handy to the white junkie strip where he hangs out on Clark Street--a mean and festering line of bars, inhabited by people rough and gray and stained as the sidewalks. But in the two years he's been in Chicago, Gene hasn't spent more than three weeks in any one place. That's because his money usually comes and goes in fast, fat jolts. If his welfare check comes, or he scores a trick at the Greyhound station, or an old lover comes up with $100, he finds a cheap hotel and holes up to rest or stay smashed. If he's going hungry, he sleeps on the beach, in abandoned cars, sometimes in jail.

It's a complicated life, with none of the long seasons most of us are used to. The changes are so abrupt and frequent that his past seems shattered into more pieces than even he can handle, and a week is a long way into the future. Now is all that counts, and with any luck tomorrow won't happen.

Survival, they call it.

• • •

Opportunities I've had in this life are out of sight. I've been with wealthy people, I've had penthouses, I've had cars. I've had diamonds on these fingers. I wore the best of clothes, I wore rags. I've eaten in the best restaurants, I've eaten in the worst flophouse joints, and each time I was glad to get what I got. I wasn't looking for the future, I was looking for the day. If I die right now from an overdose on a rooftop, there's one thing I can say: I have lived. I have lived more in my 33 years than most people live all their life.

• • •

The Mississippi is the main vein in America. Like Huck Finn, Gene Macey grew up watching it move past him, muddy in the summer, in winter the clay-blue color of used blood. His home town is a small, quiet place some miles upriver from Hannibal, Missouri, at a spot where the river bends in a wide shining swoop. Dylan's Highway 61 comes whistling down out of the north country right through it, hardly fluttering the ghosts of early military-fort days and flush side-wheeler times long gone. The center of town is movie Main Street, including a genuine egg-white gazebo in the old park, and only on the south end past a tiny honky-tonk strip are there many signs of today: a Holiday Inn and an Ortho fertilizer plant where there used to be bottom-land woods and fields. It's got a few good things. Sheaffer Pen, roundhouses before they got diesels, and they have the state penitentiary.

His family was big and poor. Eleven children, scrapingly supported by a father who could never quite find work that would keep everybody fed. Gene, still called Gin-Gin by the relatives who will talk to him, was the youngest. Until he was six, they lived in a strained frame farmhouse close to the river. My father was a commercial fisherman on the Mississippi River--and nobody's ever became rich fishing the Mississippi. It got to be if I wanted breakfast, I'd have to hide the bacon and eggs before I went to bed--and a lot of the time we didn't have the bacon. Late into World War Two they tried heading West but gave up after several disrupted years of living in California fruit-picker camps and moving with the growing season. They went back to Iowa--Muscatine for a while--where Gene's father worked as a button maker, and then again landed outside Fort Madison, still hungry some of the time.

Gene started running away from home when he was 14--just about Huck's age when he got tired of Pap's beating him silly and lit out. It was in the dead of winter, and one morning I was at the breakfast table, and instead of using a spoon to put the sugar on the oatmeal my mother cooked for me, I just shook it out of the sugar bowl. And my father, a very powerful man--he had to be to row those boats for years--he hit me. Knocked me literally up out of my chair, four, five feet. So my mother knew I was going to leave and hid my coat. So I pulled out three or four regular coats and a couple of sweaters and I begin to hitchhike. Truck driver picks me up and he says, "How far you going?" I look at him and say, "How far you going?" "Denver, Colorado." And I said, "That's how far I'm going."

But Gene was runaway Huck with a large twist: He had already been actively homosexual for two or three years. Instead of playing pirates with dumb Tom Sawyer, he was out cruising the pool hall and local highways looking for tricks, precocious for reasons he doesn't really care to understand. So I went to Denver. He wanted company, and I was getting sleepy, so he gave me a couple of pills, gave me a nice buzz. He was young and good-looking, and I kind of stretched out with my head in his lap and ... well, it took him a while to get to Denver, Colorado. He gave me a 20, and I went down to Curtis Street, to an all-night movie. This crippled guy picked me up, gave me another 20. Forty dollars. All of a sudden I'm rich, I'm the wealthiest person on earth. First thing I did was go looking for some marijuana; I'd heard about it.

The Little Rock police stopped his first long road trip flat. They found out that I was only 14. I was held there until my family drove down to pick me up. They made kind of a vacation out of it. He got as far as California the next time and spent nearly a year in a Youth Authority detention clinic waiting to be sent back home. An uncle finally agreed to take custody and put Gene to work in his body shop. This body shop, well, me and work don't get along anyway, especially 16 hours a day for only five dollars a week. So I turned 17 and I took my mother up to the Army Recruiting Station and I joined the Service.

A year later he was hustling full time in the French Quarter, living on Benzedrine and tourists with a liking for teen-aged boys. He'd lasted six months in the Army. The routine bugged him so much that he took to beating his knee with a soda bottle until he could barely walk, much less pull guard duty or K.P. He finally just said, Hey, I'm homosexual, so he could get out. New Orleans seemed like the right direction to head, and it was: all-night bars and plenty of action.

Then one day I was walking down to the penny arcade, and two plainclothes-men walked up and said, "You're under arrest." I laughed. "I ain't done nothing." They said, "It's a crime against nature, and we've got a picture of it." So there wasn't very many ways I could tell the judge that ain't me. I laid three months in Orleans Parish Prison. Put me in the regular ward first, but people were forcing me to do things, so I wrote to the warden, told him people were making me such their dicks and suck, and if he didn't do something I was going to. So after three months he transferred me to the Federal tier. You got older men there, and they don't go pushing you around like the young punks on the other tier--Federal's more of a sedate tier. I was treated with respect. People gave me when I didn't have cigarettes. Robert Kraus, one of the greatest chess players in the world, taught me how to play chess. I could have sex with anybody I wanted, and nobody forced me. I didn't want for anything, including pills. Pay the guards, they'd bring them in. And I got all the ice cream and all the candy bars I wanted. My six months passed kind of easy. Fact when I got out, I really didn't want to leave.

On the day he got out, Gene aimed straight for the gay bar where he had hung out and scored two tricks in three hours, back to business as usual. For the next three years he rode the hustler's yo-yo, spinning out of New Orleans to anywhere that felt good--Dallas, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles--but always winding up back where he started. By the time he turned 21, he had worked practically every good street in the country. But all streets finally get to be the same street, and only the signs change. Even the long loops out of New Orleans started looking too much alike, so Gene jumped off in New York and signed as a deck hand on a Scandinavian merchant ship.

I was very content out there in the middle of the ocean. There's all that water out there, and when you get pissed you can't just tell the captain to stick the job up his ass and walk away. By the time you get the opportunity to quit, you've already forgotten about it. I was very happy; I sailed for eight months.

When he paid out in New York he had $1800, salary sweetened by a few poker games that went the right way. The plan was to drift loose to California, starting with a stop in D. C., until the money ran out. But the plan didn't include a date with his first hit of heroin in Baltimore--and she turned out to be a lady with silvery hands, who liked running them through his head as much as he liked feeling them there.

The bus he was on made a stop in Baltimore before hitting Washington. Gene got out to move around some and take a piss, carrying a suitcase full of tailored clothes he'd picked up in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong. It was a dumb-shit move. I left my suitcase and coat next to a seat, went to the bathroom. When I come back ten minutes later, everything was gone--and it's wintertime, really cold out. I ran outside looking, but I can't find nobody with my suitcase of clothes. So I went across the street to this little hamburger joint and had some coffee. And this little young, very beautiful Puerto Rican boy came in. He said he knew something that would make me warm if I had ten dollars. So I said sure and gave him the ten. I didn't really expect him to come back, but he did. Must have seen the 20s and 50s in my wallet. So we went to the bathroom. He gave me a belt and said, "Tie up your arm." "What are you gonna do?" He said, "I'm gonna hit you." And I'd heard about it, so I was, you know, curious. When he hit me with it ... I never really had the same feeling to this day as I had with that first shot. Rush didn't end, just kept comin' and comin'. It was beautiful, I mean it really was. I got beautiful.

• • •

When you shoot heroin it releases this feeling of complete aloofness, or complete self-righteousness. There is only you; the world doesn't exist. You are one, just everything. It gives you a feeling of greatness, a complete self-sense of being wanted. You could be a weakling and fire heroin and be the strongest man on earth. Lightness goes through my head, all of the pressures just lift off of me. I get calm, the kind of calm you have before a storm, when everything is real subtle, like just before a storm hits, when you can hear someone talking far away. And the only time the storm hits is when you don't have that needle in your vein. Miss that, partner, and the storm hits good.

• • •

Afterward, I took him around to have something to eat. My arms were turning purple, my ears was turning purple, but I didn't give a fuck. I was still warm. They spent that night high in a hotel room, and by morning Gene was into a new plan. Beautiful. We fucked all day, we fucked all night. The only time we got up out of bed was to go pop some more dope and buy some groceries to bring in. Stayed high with him for three months. Became very close.

But it sounds like the hustler hustled: Gene says he didn't know much about heroin back then, that nobody did--mainly, he thinks, because it wasn't a suburban drug yet, so nobody was writing about it. But the kid lit a row of bulbs in him that quickly cost $40 a day to keep shining. I didn't really know I had a habit for almost two months. I was using dope, but not all the time. Then once I was alone and started getting cramps and started getting sick, throwing up. I was stupid; I didn't realize why I was getting sick. When the kid came back I said I had to get to a hospital. He says, "You don't need a hospital, all you need is a shot. You've got a habit." So he gave me a ten-dollar bag and put it in the cooker and fired it in me--and as soon as the dope hit my system my cold chills went away, stomach went back into shape again and the aches and pains went away.

Gene was supporting two habits, paying (continued on page 174)Stone Cold Fever(continued from page 150) the rent and feeding them both--so the $1800 melted fast. He remembers a deep affection between himself and the kid, but it didn't survive the end of the money. No question that the kid would be gone when it was. So when he got down to the last couple of hundred, Gene started thinking about New York, where, word had it, dope was cheap and tricks were easy.

I bought enough dope in Baltimore to last a day or two after I got to New York. Eight bags, $80 worth. But I was always used to having the hid hit me. I'd always tie and he'd always hit me. So once I was on the bus I had to hit myself the first time. Luckily I had good veins then. But I realized I didn't have him to depend on. And I'd been in New York before, but it was weird to realize I was going to a strange place to get narcotics cheaper. You don't have nobody going out and buying it for you. You gotta make the money yourself. You gotta buy it yourself. You gotta hit yourself. And it worried me.

Springtime in New York, sweet Central Park, April 1961. But Gene was thinking about things other than the weather and the Bay of Pigs. He had to figure out a tough town, and he had to do it fast. No trouble finding out where to hustle--it doesn't get more obvious than 42nd Street--but turning up a new connection before the lady left him in knots was another story. I was running almost completely out of dope. In five or six hours I had to find more. When you're not known in New York it's hard to score, especially if you're white--because most of your dope is controlled by your Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Negroes. But finally I met a few hustlers and offered them $20 to introduce me to a connection. This one person took me on 56th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenue, which at that time was dope heaven in mid-Manhattan, and I bought a bundle--25 five-dollar bags for $75.

It turned out New York wasn't such a tough game to play--not at first, anyway. He had a connection, and since he was fresh meat for the rack on 42nd Street, keeping ahead of the habit just amounted to scoring a couple of tricks every day. So life was mainly hanging out: in marked-down gadget-store door ways, watching every eye that passed for the right look; in Times Square Fascination parlors, long dead hours of red rubber balls and flashing lights; in 50-cent moviehouses, filling up holes with reruns of reruns.

Most days, if I had the bread, I'd buy my dope and go to the Keystone Hotel, which is a cheap flophouse. I'd take my works and go up there and take off around 11 at night. That means I've got the room until nine o'clock in the morning. So I'd nod out for a while, but then I had to think about my wake-up. Which means I've got to get out on the street and make enough money before four or five in the morning--that's when the pushers go home--because before going to sleep I've got to take off again. Also when I wake up.

Down to 42nd Street. If there ain't no tricks, a lot of times the way I made my money is stand in front of a movie. "Excuse me, sir, I need a quarter to get into the movie." Couple of hours there and you usually have enough for half a half, which is $15, and you get eight bags of heroin.

But if it's a really slow night and I'm getting uptight, I'd have to resort to getting with somebody and taking some body off. If I'm going to be sick in a couple of hours, I'll find somebody in the same shape I'm in. And then we'll prowl the city like a couple of cats. I'm a follower, not a leader. But I always have a straight razor slashed someplace.

Usually people use a K-5 knife that you can buy in New York. Myself, I prefer straight razors. They look wicked. I cut the person a little bit, I don't cut them that bad. I let the blood run down their little throat a little bit and I put it to them: "Baby, I'm a junkie. I'm sick, me and my partner are sick; now if you don't come up with some cash I'll cut your throat from ear to ear." In the meantime, they go to their throat and see the blood--it could be just a little nick--and they'll come up with their socks, their shoes, their shorts, anything before they let themselves get cut.

I used to use a blank pistol until a guy challenged me one time. He said, "I don't give a fuck if you got a pistol or not, you ain't takin' me off," and started toward me. But my partner, he had a knife, and he didn't fuck around. Guy started coming, and my buddy stabbed him good right in the leg. "Well, now what are you going to do? Next stab I'll cut your fucking throat." When the guy went down, my buddy hit him alongside of the head, reached in his pockets and helped himself--not only the money, took his watch, credit cards, rings. We stomped him a couple of times and left him there. The guy was stupid. If an addict gets sick enough to take you off, what's more important? A few dollars that you can make back or your life? I figure your life is. But some guys are a little nutty upstairs. They ain't coming up with that fucking money until they get hurt. Then after they get hurt they're meek as a lamb. You know, "Here, take it, please don't hurt me no more." Tears, all that shit.

That sort of thing didn't happen very often. Gene says, but he has enough stories to make you wonder. And the other stories he tells about the time until his first dope bust in 1968 fall together into a mostly broken picture of Gene riding the street roller coaster, zapped through plenty of levels and across lots of space. He is vague about it now, probably because there were few of the bright terrible moments that string together as his memory. He tells about more down times than he realizes, but even if it came to taking somebody off once in a while, he always made enough to stay straight--fine junkie slang for having enough heroin in you to feel good. For a while anyway, Gene had figured out the system and it worked.

• • •

Instead of being like the other kids on 42nd Street, wearing a tight pair of Levis and a shirt, I'd be standing dressed in a suit out front of the Astor. I'd stand there and somebody would walk up and ask me if I'd like to go out to eat--and they didn't take me to no cheap place, they took me to a nice place. Sometimes I would wind up going to plays with them. I'd very seldom get less than half a hundred. Plus the education and the food and the drinks I was obtaining from them was worth a lot more. I have a fifth-grade education, but my speech and the way I want to talk and the way I know how to order at a restaurant--know how to conduct myself like a person with a college education would want to. And I learned this from being with older people who has taste and who has an education. I picked it up.

• • •

I found Jaime, this Spanish boy, in the middle of 111th Street and Park Avenue, where they'll cut your fucking throat for a dime, if they think you've got a dime on you. I used to hide my money in my shorts and keep a five or ten in my pocket--so if I got robbed I could say, "Hey, man, this is all I got. I was on my way to score." They make you take off your shoes, but most times they won't look in your shorts. So I got took off a couple of times up there, and after one time I met Jaime and told him about it. He said, "I'll cop for you," and for some reason I just trusted him. I told him I didn't have no place to take off except way downtown, and he said, "That's all right--I live right here in the projects." So we went over to his apartment. His mother was setting there, and his younger brother, and we went right to his bedroom and I fired there and I got very high. In fact I got so high I couldn't leave. So I stayed. Ended up living there for a long time. I supported his habit and everything else. He never had to go out and worry about where his next bag of dope was gonna come from. Baltimore revisited, only this time for six years.

• • •

I saw that movie "Midnight Cowboy." A lot of it is very phony. The guy basically wasn't that bad-looking, and if he had a brain in his head he could have made it. It showed the guy wasn't lazy, because he worked as a dishwasher before he got on that bus. And if you get uptight in New York there's always a job to find. Anybody that wants to work in this country can work. They might not get the best job, but they'll get enough. In New York a dishwasher makes $16 a day. Now, that will buy you eight bags of heroin. And unless you got a habit a mile long, eight bags is gonna straighten you out.

• • •

I was tending bar in Chicago, somewhere around 1965. I'd stay in New York in the apartment with Jaime for eight or nine months, and then I'd gel a wild hair up my ass, I gotta get out. You get to feeling like the city wants to cave in on you. Sometimes I'd go alone and sometimes Jaime and I'd take some narcotics and get on a bus, take a vacation. This one time in Chicago was when I first started out in leather. And sadism and masochism. By maintaining male prostitution and everything, life started getting kind of dull to me. So I was looking for something different in sexual relationships. And I got the reputation of being what you call a very far-out masochist. Tie me down and hit me a couple of times with a belt just didn't do it for me. Plus I was firing narcotics at the same time, so I could take more pain and more torture and punishment than the average person, even the average masochistic type. I dug it and I was gelling paid for it at the same time. The rates were great. I made six brand-new motorcycles in two years.

• • •

The roller coaster started down the long last hill in 1968. Because his years on the street were beginning to show, Gene couldn't count on making it hustling anymore. So he got a job as a waiter for a New York restaurant chain that doesn't ask too many questions, pays by the day and takes its chances. In the one where Gene worked, near Times Square, several other waiters and the cook were also junkies, which meant that customers frequently found waiters standing over them too zonked to take their order or were handed food overcooked by at least a healthy nod. The connection was in a pool hall upstairs, and it was all pretty cozy--until a new manager showed up who decided this was not the way to run a restaurant and fired everybody. Gene is still a little indignant about it.

• • •

As far as getting into hospitals to get drugs, I think I originated the swallowing-razor-blades bit.

• • •

He was back to making all the same old moves, but they weren't enough to support two habits. And then one empty night after the bars were all closed, broke, nobody around to hustle, nobody even to take off, Gene started going sick, bowels threatening to explode, cramps like little vicious fish swimming through his stomach. He sat down in a doorway to think it out. There wasn't much time before he'd be a shuddering mess, and the city was too dead to work any of the usual hustles. A new one was needed, quick. Where can you get dope when you're broke? There's got to be a place. Sure: hospitals.

He went to an all-night drugstore and bought a package of razor blades. Outside, he stopped under a light and unwrapped them. He took a few, dulled the edges against a brick wall, snapped them in pieces and swallowed them. And headed straight for the nearest emergency room. He was moving to a new level.

As soon as a surgeon looks at it in an X ray he says, "Oh, oh, we have to operate." I say, "Doc, I don't give a fuck what you do, just give me a shot, you know, straighten me out." And you know that doctor is going to order that shot. But this is what puzzles me, even after talking to psychiatrists: After I got that first shot, knowing it would last six or eight hours, all I would have had to done was get up off the fucking table and put on my clothes. Turn around and say, "See you later, Doc," and walk out. Because I knew I dulled the razor blades. But something made me lay on that table.

A few days later, detoxed--brought down from his habit by smaller and smaller daily doses of morphine--and wearing his first long scar, Gene was on the street again and looking to score. A week later his habit found him again, and one night a few weeks after that he was strung out enough to try the razor-blade trick again. This time he showed up at St. Vincent's in Lower Manhattan and they put him in the psychiatric ward. As soon as they discharged me, I went to Welfare, picked up a $75 emergency check, went down to 56th Street and copped half a bundle, 12 five-dollar bags, for $35, which was very cheap at that time, because I knew the dealer. OK. I picked up this guy because I had no place to go and no outfit--no needles, no nothing--and we went to his place. I put two bags in a cooker, we fired it, I didn't get too much of a rush or anything, so I says, "Hell, I'll give us a thrill," and put four bags in. I threw up a nice shot and I hit and I fell out. I woke up with him rubbing my chest, me gasping for air, and I said, "I've O.D.ed." He said, "That's all right, you can rest here and come out of it." And I said, "No, man, I'll die. Get me out of here, get me to St. Vincent's Hospital."

He tells a different version in which he came to in an ambulance with some one rubbing his chest, but in both, his shooting buddy dragged him down to the street and left him out cold on the sidewalk until a squad car came along and called the ambulance. Smelling a bust, one of the patrolmen tagged along on the way to French Polyclinic, and it didn't take him long to come up with the two bags of dope Gene had tucked away in his Jockey shorts. At the hospital they pumped him full of glucose and put him on a ward, handcuffed to the bed. He woke up in the morning weaving ways to beat the case. Tell the doctor something to get out of it. Easy: I tried to commit suicide. Life is so very hard. The doctors swallowed it and shuffled him off to Bellevue for observation--but not before the cop pressed charges against him. Gene was a little late but learning a new game: bugging out.

Bugging out means acting crazy. Getting the doctors to say you're a mental case. Incompetent to stand trial. But that was my first bust, I didn't know much about that back then. So this big doctor comes in and says, "You know you're on charges. Why don't you go to court and get these charges off your back, and we'll take care of you." Well, stupid me says all right. I didn't really have to go. In the meantime, I was in withdrawal. And the fucking judge gave me 60 days.

Manhattan House of Detention. They put me on the snake floor, 300 addicts on one floor. You get them in there that are sicker than a fucking dog, hollering, yelling, coughing, throwing up, bowels breaking. I looked around and said this place ain't for me, I got to get out of this fucking joint. The only thing I had was a comb. So I sharpened it up on the bars and everything. I ran that in this vein I had a hole in anyway, from using a large needle, and once I got it in I closed my eyes and ripped. Guards come by and see me shooting blood out all over the place. They put a tourniquet on my arm, and I tried to take the tourniquet off and they slapped me around a little bit. Took me down and the doctor says, "You could lose your feeling in your whole arm." I say, "I ain't got no feeling in it now." But I really had feeling.

The doctor who sewed him up sent him to Bellevue for X rays, and he was then delivered again to the House of Detention, where they intended to deal with the problem by putting him right back where he started, on the snake floor. I said this shit's just gotta cease, I ain't going back there. Hard to say where he got a sharp pencil, but he put it to his temple and threatened to shove if anybody even tried coming into the cell. The guard called the captain, who called a social worker, who called a lady psychiatrist--and she made out a court order that bounced him back to Bellevue.

It took them seven days to detox me. I went from there to Rikers Island, and, they put me on what they call C-76. Which is a motherfucker. It's like a medieval jail. Locked up in what they call the homo ward, in a cell all by yourself. You have nothing to read. No cigarettes. All you got is four blankets. And a fucking cell. You have to go there before you're transferred, to the rock, the prison, which is a lot better. But I says, I ain't going to stay here either.

All it took was a trustee, serving food from the kitchen, who looked, as Gene puts it, a little happy. Nothing to lose by trying, so when he walked into the cell with the tray, Gene gave him the number-one heavy come-on, hands all over him, pure hooker in a hurry. It was a good guess; the trustee decided not to rush off. But what I was feeling for was cigarettes, and I found the pocket and kept fucking around, and when the cigarettes came out this razor blade fell on the floor, so I put my foot on it. I took his matches, too. And then I said, "You want to call the guard, call him. I'll tell him you came in here to rape me and this is what you gave me--and we'll see who gets in more trouble." He was very mad, but what could he do? He kind of kicked my food at me, but I didn't give a fuck because I had my way out. I ate my food very slowly and laid back, and ohhhhh, I was on top of the world.

He dulled the razor blade on the bars, and when a guard came by shouted to get his attention. Grinning at the guard, he snapped the razor blade in two and dropped it down his throat, a fat goose swallowing corn. "Now keep my ass in here," I says. He ran his ass up, and about five seconds later my cell was cracked and up came the captain. He said, "Oh, you like to swallow razor blades, huh?" I said, "Yeah, I've had a few operations, and if you want to, Captain, you can hit me. I'm all wired up inside--maybe you'll be lucky and I'll hemorrhage and die before I get to the hospital." So he slapped me a couple of times in the face and said, "Get the fucker out of here to the doctor."

The institutional pinball machine bumped him first to Bellevue. When he told them the blade was dulled, they found no need to operate, and he bounced to the prison mental-observation ward and bounced from there to a ward called 1-A, the prison's homosexual row. In his terms, he had won the game. Somewhere in a file the prison had Suicidal Tendencies written under his name, and just to be careful that they didn't end up with a dead junkie, they were keeping him under heavy sedation on 1-A. On three occasions so far--with many more to come--he had shown the institutions that mattered--hospitals, cops, the courts--that he was out to kill himself. So he was Officially Suicidal and therefore needed sedation. But all three cases were hustles: desperate hustles, may be, hustles that come from a long flirtation with pain and no special reason to love being alive, but hustles still. He was getting this bugging-out thing down, leaving behind a black cartoon of himself in the official records. In a way, it was lucky for the prison; to keep him calm, they were giving him Nembutals and Seconals, but Gene was trading them for cigarettes to other inmates who were into shooting them. Gene says he doesn't like a cheap high.

• • •

Basically I do it for narcotics, for the attention I get from the doctors and everybody, or to beat my cases in court--but shall we say most of all to have a lot of attention from other people. And if the razor blades fuck me up where I might die, I'm not going to worry about it that much. And it gets you a bug-out record. Once you get that, once your attorney knows you've been certified mentally incompetent four or five times, it gives him a loophole to have you evaluated again by a psychiatrist. And I'm always able to make a psychiatrist believe there's something wrong with me or that I'll kill myself. But I'm not idly joking when I say it; they can tell when you're idly joking.

• • •

Downhill: Ten days after he got out, he was copping some dope in a midtown hamburger joint, the kind with spoiled yellow-porcelain walls that started out white. Copping in a diner under 1000 watts of fluorescent light isn't the smartest way to work, and a narcotics cop who happened to be watching proved it by busting them both. Gene got dumped in the M. O. ward, but he took out a razor blade, sliced a vein in his arm and put the pinball machine in action again: to Bellevue, to jail, back to Bellevue, to court, and out on the street--all in a week and a half, on a charge that would have earned the average junkie six months to a year. The kicker was that he had to sign up to be detoxed in a state hospital right away. So he went back to Bellevue and laid up there for three weeks, getting some rest and losing another habit.

He wasn't without it long. As soon as he was released, Jaime turned him on again. Too chopped up and drained to hustle, and with two habits to handle, Gene went back to the restaurant chain, working double shifts to keep up with what they were firing. But then one day in the Spanish Harlem apartment, Gene O.D.ed slightly and fell onto a hot radiator, burning himself so badly he couldn't work.

Seared and going sick, he called an old lover named Kevin in Chicago. They'd met in 1960, in a North Side gay bar, and Gene moved right in with him. He says he stayed for a few months and then split for New York; that they lived together off and on after that. It doesn't quite go with his portrait of constant family life with Jaime, but Kevin did start sending him money--and, between long suits, still does.

Kevin kept him warm for a while, but then, angry or hurt, shut him down for the first of many times. Gene saw everything getting ahead of him, way ahead of him, and finally in resigned panic went to Odyssey House--a therapeutic community designed to help junkies kick their habits for good, working on the assumption that junkies want to kick their habits for good. He had to threaten suicide to get in--swallowing rat poison in this case--but they took him. After two months, though, he couldn't handle it anymore--the responsibility of keeping himself clean, the feeling they were trying to tear his roots out of junk and plant them elsewhere--and one night late he ran out, straight to Jaime's apartment and a good hit.

Down: Less than a month later he was on an operating table in Harlem Hospital, paying the heavy admission price for three weeks of dope and attention. Jaime had split for parts unknown, leaving him sick and lonely in their apartment, so he went back to a game that worked. The doctor took out ten blades this time and carted Gene off to be detoxed. He turned out to be so generous and understanding that Gene went back for more of the same when he got uptight a month later.

Then I got on this methadone program they had. Had to go down there every day and drink methadone. And they got me on welfare, $140 every two weeks, to pay for apartments. I was supposed to be living at the Court Hotel on 21st Street, but I no more lived there than the man in the moon. I had a deal with the owner, who was an ex-junkie, give him a few dollars and he'd hold my checks for me. In the meantime, I was staying with Jaime, and sometimes shooting galleries and rooftops and different apartments and flop houses, you name it, I've been there. And I'd take the welfare money, and what did I do, I'd go right down to Jaime's place and say, "Well, I can't shoot heroin because I'm drinking methadone, but I sure can shoot a lot of cocaine and amphetamines."

• • •

Gene celebrated the arrival of 1969 at an s & m party in Queens, auld lang syne with the whips-and-chains set. It was a mistake. Without bothering to ask first, someone slipped him acid early on, and a few hours later, in the first false dawn of the new year, he was out in the snow nearly naked, doubled over in pain, half walking, half crawling to a hospital a few blocks away from the house. The night comes back to him only as an unstrung series of melted acid flashes--but at some point, during an inspired tableau that involved chaining him to the floor, one of the participants badly ruptured Gene's intestinal tract. Then, in keeping with the tone of the party, he left Gene there to deal with it as best he could. Gene had three or four bags of heroin with him, so he fired that to dull the teeth tearing at him inside. But he still hurt so much when he tried getting dressed that he just said fuck it and headed out into the cold.

I remember that somebody opened up the front door of the hospital, and then I was on a stretcher, screaming out of my mind for painkiller, with four or five doctors wheeling me someplace, and they were running, not walking. They gave me something, but it didn't faze me, so I told them I was a narcotic addict and how much I was shooting. They brought out another shot, it must have been something to knock you out, because that's the last thing I can remember. When I woke up again, the doctor said I had to have an emergency operation or I'd die from hemorrhaging inside, so I signed a piece of paper for the operation. I was in a coma for three weeks afterward. Nurse said later they almost gave me up for dead, had the chaplain in giving me last rites and everything. But they gave me another operation, and luckily with God's help I woke up from it. But in the meantime I went down from 180 pounds to 124 pounds.

Not long after that Gene realized that he couldn't handle New York any more. Only rarely could he afford the lady, and even her gaudy friends were getting harder and harder to come by. Most of the time, he was stuck staying straight with methadone, and having to show up every day to drink the stuff was one of those inflexible duties that made him crazy. To make walking-around money, since he was too butchered and weak to work, much less hustle, he picked up a Navy uniform and a crew-cut and panhandled full time. But it wasn't enough; he'd been around too long. Too many people--cops, pushers, doctors, tricks--knew him too well. Time to move the act.

• • •

I was uptight when I got into Chicago. I took the last methadone I had on the bus, and it started to wear off. I started to get sick, and I didn't know what sick was until I started getting sick on a methadone sick. It's twice as bad as ... you ache, man, you ache all over. The stuff gets in your bones or some thing. So I was uptight. I started going around, went to about 15 hospitals, and nobody would help me. You know, "We're sorry about that, we're not allowed to give it out, we don't have no beds." This was before I was on welfare here, so I didn't have no green card, medical card. Finally found my way over to Cook County Hospital and I talked to a doctor who was going to head a methadone program they were starling. So I was accepted right away, and he wrote me out a scrip for two days. But when I came back for more it was late one night, and I got another scrip, but it was on the wrong blank, and the guy said the doctor wasn't there, nothing he could do. So I ran it down to Henrotin Hospital and did a lot of fast talking to a doctor there. He gave me 100 milligrams and made me drink it on the spot. I went back to Cook County next day, and they told me they didn't have the Class A narcotics scrips they needed, and it would be a while before they could initiate the program. So I said, "Doctor, you got to do something for me or I'm going to swallow some razor blades or something to get in the hospital." He said, "Well, I'm a great believer in letting people do what they want to do. If you want to swallow razor blades, go right ahead." Well, I was getting sick, I had no place to go, my money was getting thin and I was getting desperate--so I said, fuck it, if that's what he wants me to do, that's what I'll do.

So Gene's new start in Chicago began with three weeks in a hospital bed, getting detoxed and recovering from an operation that took 19 razor blades out of his stomach. But three years of scalpels cutting at him were beginning to add up; his body was tired of forever healing itself and this one put him through more slow days of pain than any of the others had. Figuring it with his own special brand of logic, though, it wasn't his fault. If that's what he wants me to do. The doctor had practically told him to do it. That's how it seemed to Gene later, anyway, and when he got transferred to psychiatric after three weeks, he wasn't happy to discover that the same doctor had been assigned to him.

Now, I've already got an attitude against him. He's already got an attitude against me. So basically we accomplished nothing together. If they would have gave me a different psychiatrist I might have wound up in completely different circumstances than what I am now. I believe I was stupid at the time because I believe I had a hell of a good case against them. I had a case because they pressed me and almost forced me into doing what I had to do to get into the hospital. I could have sued them.

Chicago, it seemed, wasn't about to treat him any better than New York had. The next eight months--until September of 1971--were an accelerating bummer, so many frantic moments that he can't even put them in order, too many hospitals and operations and therapeutic programs to sort out anymore. Every time he got detoxed, if he could afford it, he went right back to the lady. Rehabilitation wasn't on his mind. But, except for living a few easy weeks with a Clark Street heroin dealer who liked his sex strange and paid for it with dope, Gene was finding the streets colder and colder. Cold enough, in fact, that he went through seven more operations in as many months. He was running a lot harder to stand still.

The instincts that had kept him alive this long must have been shouting at him to quit, hang it up and stay clean; but Gene wasn't having any. All the hassles and scrambling and trips to the desperate edge seemed finally worth it, every time he felt the clear magic swirl of heroin in his head. Something about that drug. He had been detoxed, completely clean, more times than he could remember, but the habit always sputtered back to life again, a gleam that would leave his blood but never stopped glowing in his mind.

• • •

I could kick a habit cold turkey. Physically. But I cannot kick a habit cold turkey mentally. Doctors have observed me after I got off, with no physical need. But I'd be climbing the walls. They can take away the physical part, but they can't take away up here in my brain, what it does for me. It's like what I don't find in love and affection on the outside, I get a complete substitute out of heroin. When I'm on heroin I can say fuck all you pretty young boys out there that don't like me, I don't need you no more. That's the difference between methadone and heroin. Methadone will get me stoned, but it doesn't give me the same psychological effect as heroin. The only thing I get out of it is body peace. It appeases the wants and desires of my body. And rather than get out and fight in the rat-race to get body appeasement plus mind appeasement, you have to settle for one or the other. So I settle for the body appeasement. But it still doesn't bring that inner peace you get from a shot of heroin.

• • •

It was a miserable period, lightened somewhat by the discovery of a doctor he could hit for methadone prescriptions. The object, of course, was to get enough to stay smashed, not just straight. He'd show up a day early to pick up his weekly batch of pills, shaving a day off how long they had to last; he'd con the doctor into raising his dosage by claiming to have shot his maintenance level a few notches higher; and he'd invent any elaborate lies necessary to string the doctor along and still squeeze more pills out of him. One that worked involved a fake long-distance call from Iowa, where Gene was supposedly visiting his family. I have to come back to Chicago right away, and I need another scrip because my sister is ill, she's dying of cancer, and I gave her some of my medication to ease the pain. He had in fact been shooting killer dosages of methadone, flopping around zonked and hallucinating in a foul little hotel room on Superior Street, but the story nudged him into thinking: Why not? Why not really go home?

• • •

Through his reflection he watched the cold November fields flashing past, the train plunging into the Illinois country side like a vast iron rush. It would be another of those homecomings. Smiles and glad hands as long as his money held, moral lectures and slammed doors as soon as it was gone. But fuck them: At least he'd score some dope. Just one visit to that doctor he scared shitless the last time: Boo! Order me all the dope in the world. Then they couldn't touch him. He'd have plenty to shoot, plenty to take back and sell. But LaVerne always liked him; she'd be nice. He stared out the window at the dark ground, shoving home out of his head with a delicious shopping list for the doctor: morphine, Dilaudid, Ritalin, methadone....

It was already dark when the train crossed the cramped steel trestle over the Mississippi and pulled up at the clean little Fort Madison station. Gene got off and hardly looked around; he'd seen it too many times. In front of him, the lights of town dimming and thinning as they spilled up the uneven hills; and behind him the river, nothing but an empty black presence in the moon less night.

He took a cab to the Cape Cod Motel, which is fancy by Fort Madison standards: Midwest Colonial, white aluminum siding frosted with Sears wrought ironwork. After checking in and cleaning up some, he went over to the little strip of roadhouses strung out along Highway 61 on the south end of town. A couple more had died since the last time, but the Lone Star was still open, so he went in. Two guys shooting pool back in the corner, people scattered like a Morse-code message along the bar. The bartender recognized him. "Hey, Genie, how you doin', thweetie?"

He brought Gene a beer and told him that one of the guys at the pool table was looking for a game, if Gene was in the mood. He was. They started with eight ball at two dollars a game, but two hours later Gene had leased him up to ten dollars a round, and was up $70 or $80 on the night. His sucker was smelling a hustle in the air and not liking it, but Gene didn't notice. The bartender did. He took me aside and said, "Walk out the back and keep walking and don't come back before tomorrow." He said the guy was getting very irritated and had a gun and might kill me. So I told the guy that I had to lake a piss. The exit is back there by the John, so while he wasn't watching I went on out the back door and around to my motel. Left an eight-o'clock call for the morning.

Scoring the dope was almost too easy to be believed. He took a cab over to the doctor's office, walked in and told him what he wanted. All the doctor wanted was to get him out of there fast, so he wrote a scrip as ordered and sent him away. Gene took it over to Baum's Rexall and had it filled. No trouble. For $20 he bought enough dope to sell for $1500 in Chicago. Not bad. As soon as I got it, I went back to the motel and put some Dilaudid and some morphine in the cooker and I fired, you know, and I fired some more, but it seemed like the methadone just kept gobble, gobble, gobble. I fired enough morphine to kill ten people, and enough Dilaudid to kill another ten, and all it did was just take my sickness away. So I went back to the Lone Star and ran into my cousin Eunice there. I bought a couple of drinks and she said, "Are you still on dope?" I said yes, and she gave me a cuss you wouldn't believe.

While they were sitting there, Eunice's son Steve, a good-looking kid in his early 20s, came in with his head all bandaged, escorted by two cops. He said he needed $50 for bond; otherwise he was on his way to jail. Something about a bar fight over a lady whose boyfriend caught her being overly friendly to Steve in the parking lot.

Gene looked him over and decided it was worth the full treatment. They went down to the police station, where Gene paid the bail. Then he insisted on buying Steve dinner at The Tradewinds, a steakhouse with a good country band out on 61. I got a bottle of champagne, my cousin never tasted it in his life, but he didn't know. Halfway through dinner, Steve's head began hurting, and Gene offered him some methadone. Steve refused, seriously afraid of getting hooked; but Gene kept after him until he took one pill. They bar-hopped after that, starting with the Lone Star and ending at a dingy place in the black section of town. By the time they got there, the methadone was hitting Steve, he was getting pretty woozy. So Gene aimed him back to his motel room and moved into high gear: feeding him Jim Beam laced with sex stories told in loving microscopic detail. Cousin or no cousin, sex is sex. No way he was going to miss this chance. And he didn't.

In the morning, nothing was said. It hadn't happened. Gene rolled out of bed and cooked up his morning shot. In the chill air his veins seemed to shrink, become elusive, and most of the good ones were collapsed or clogged with beads of old scar tissue anyway, so he had a hard time finding a hit. I was shooting here and shooting there and I was getting mad because I couldn't get a goddamn hit. Steve woke up to the sight of him jabbing the needle into every vein that might work; it made his hung-over stomach churn, and he pleaded with Gene to stop. No chance. Finally I got a hit on this one leg. I shot the stuff in, but the fucking needle plugged and I had to use another one. Pain in the ass.

After breakfast, Steve drove him over to see Gene's sister LaVerne, a kind, middle-aged factory worker who continues to think of him as her brother, not as a junkie. Her husband wasn't thrilled to find Gene at his door, but LaVerne gave him the warmest welcome he'd had in a while. They talked for two hours, staying with the safe things, old times, who's doing what now, carefully stepping around the sharp edges of the painful subjects--Gene's dope habit, his father. It was a comfortable morning. After she fed them lunch--for Gene, Swiss steak with wild mushrooms--they drove out to visit Gene's brother Virgil, a weathered construction worker in his late 40s. To him, Gene is a junkie who used to be his brother. They stuck it out for a couple of hours, Midwestern politeness at its worst, strained and cold. Virgil wouldn't talk much about the family and didn't want to hear anything about Gene's life. Finally they gave up and left. On the way out to the pickup, Steve couldn't keep it inside anymore. "Gene, there's something they're not telling you, and you should know. Your father is pretty sick, with cancer, and he's in a hospital in Keokuk." I said, "Why in hell didn't anybody tell me? I would of gone down there a long time ago."

• • •

Lying there on the hospital bed, his father looked to Gene like an old skeleton draped with skin. But nothing else had changed. He was the same man who had slammed him across the kitchen 18 years earlier. Cranky old son of a bitch. Mean as ever. He wouldn't react; it was like I was living there. No reaction of joy or of disgust. It was a blank. But finally he broke down and told me he wasn't feeling too good and all this bullshit, and that he didn't know what was wrong with him. So I called our doctor and found out the cancer was in his lung. I went back in and told him they wanted to take him to Quincy to operate, but he flat refused, so I let it drop for a while. They tried talking about the good old days, but it didn't quite work. "Remember that time we went out on the river and I lost that big catfish and you hit me on the head with an oar--and I almost drowned?" "Well, you son of a bitch, you should have drowned, you would have been better off than being on narcotics and dope." Whatever we talked about, he kept coming back to the dope thing. So I finally said, "Listen, you stubborn motherfucker, if you don't get to Quincy and have this taken care of, you're gonna know what a dope fiend is. You're on Darvon now, and the pain is going to get a lot worse. By the time you get through with narcotics you will be a worse dope fiend than I am." He just said, "They still ain't going to operate on me. I hope I'll die."

• • •

Flat-out and depressed, Gene drove the pickup back from Keokuk. shooting along 61 in the pale early-winter twilight. Half-drunk, the dope really coming on, sad and down, full of that old ache for better times to remember. He drove hardly watching the road, feeling instead for the pieces of his past that didn't cut him when he touched them. He thought of the old farmhouse by the river. I remembered going over to the riverbank, taking off my shoes and just propping myself up against a tree, you know, and throwing a line from a cane pole in. It made me want to take my shoes off again and walk in the sand and just look at the old place.

• • •

He found the gravel section road in the fading gray light and turned off 61. The same fields full of Guernseys, the same ancient crusted barbed-wire fences, rotten posts pointing everywhere but up. It was right. It felt good. He tried to get Steve to look, but Steve stayed slumped down in the seat, sick from the liquor and methadone. He wasn't interested. Gene bumped along slowly over the section road, past two or three farms with splayed barns that told a losing story. He turned onto a little dirt road that dropped unevenly but gently down to the river. Less than a mile now. And it was all just right.

But then up ahead through a break in the grove of trees lining the road he saw something that definitely was not right: a yellow teardrop of flame floating above a thin white smokestack. He didn't have to drive much farther to be sure: Sitting exactly where he remembered a willow grove and riverbank fields was a fertilizer plant, smoking and flaming, a tangled metallic clump of outer-space technology sitting in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. Gene's Iowa cornfield.

He drove to the house anyway; fuck it, he'd come this far, might as well see it all. It was still there, barely. He pulled up in front and got out to take a look. Dead, cleaned: standing empty to the wind, doors all gone, windows torn out, rooms stripped to the baseboards, leaves and field-mouse droppings on the floors. He turned his back on the house and went to the pickup. Reaching the window, he pulled out a beer and popped it open. The taste almost made him gag, and he leaned against the truck to let it pass. Inside Steve was shuddering against the urge to puke, moaning when he could manage it. Gene stared for a long minute at the dark sky, and then looked down hard again at the abused old house. He took another stomach-turning sip of beer. He was home.