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" ( Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or unin- structed. ) "Well," I said, tapping my arm, "duty calls. As one judge said to another: 'Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.' " I cut into the automat and there is Bill Gains huddled in someone else's overcoat looking like a 1910 banker with paresis, and Old Bart, shabby and inconspicuous, dunking pound cake with his dirty fingers, shiny over the dirt. I had some uptown customers Bill took care of, and Bart knew a few old relics from hop smoking times, spectral janitors, grey as ashes, phantom porters sweep- ing out dusty halls with a slow old man's hand, cough- ing and spitting in the junk-sick dawn, retired asthmatic fences in theatrical hotels, Pantopon Rose the old madam from Peoria, stoical Chinese waiters never show sickness. Bart sought them out with his old junky walk, patient and cautious and slow, dropped into their blood- less hands a few hours of warmth. I made the round with him once for kicks. You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will Hop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it. "Well, my boys will be like that one day," I thought philosophically. "Isn't life peculiar?" So back downtown by the Sheridan Square Station in case the dick is lurking in a broom closet. Like I say it couldn't last. I knew they were out there powowing and making their evil fuzz magic, putting dolls of me in Leavenworth. "No use sticking needles in that one, Mike." I hear they got Chapin with a doll. This old eunuch dick just sat in the precinct basement hanging a doll of him day and night, year in year out. And when Chapin hanged in Connecticut, they find this old creep with his neck broken. "He fell downstairs," they say. You know the old cop bullshit. Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by radar. |
