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S. drag. You can't see it, you don't know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street -- every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore and market and liquorstore. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from? Not the bartender, not the customers, nor the cream- colored plastic rounding the bar stools, nor the dim neon. Not even the TV. And our habits build up with the drag, like cocaine will build you up staying ahead of the C bring-down. And the junk was running low. So there we are in this no-horse town strictly from cough syrup. And vomited up the syrup and drove on and on, cold spring wind whistling through that old heap around our shivering sick sweating bodies and the cold you always come down with when the junk runs out of you.... On through the peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road and vul- tures over the swamp and cypress stumps. Motels with beaverboard walls, gas heater, thin pink blankets. Itinerant short con and carny hyp men have burned down the croakers of Texas.... And no one in his right mind would hit a Louisiana croaker. State Junk Law. Came at last to Houston where I know a druggist. I haven't been there in five years but he looks up and makes me with one quick look and just nods and says: "Wait over at the counter...." So I sit down and drink a cup of coffee and after a while he comes and sits beside me and says, "What do you want?" "A quart of PG and a hundred nembies." He nods, "Come back in half an hour." So when I come back he hands me a package and says, "That's fifteen dollars.... Be careful." Shooting PG is a terrible hassle, you have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper -- have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls.... So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, ma- rooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish.... New Orleans is a dead museum. We walk around Exchange Place breathing PG and find The Man right away. It's a small place and the fuzz always knows who is pushing so he figures what the hell does it matter and sells to anybody. |
