The Casino Payphone (Part 2)

(Part 2)

I dumped the fistful of change into my pocket and jogged across the street. The wood park-bench I was on earlier was still blazing hot, and again I burned my legs as I sat and counted my pocket change with shaky fingers. Upon standing up with a smile that only comes from knowing you’ve got a-dollar-twenty more than you thought you had, I reached into my leg-pocket and pulled out two more dollar-bills folded into a square, that I didn’t know was in there. It had taken me a little over three hours to gather what money I needed for the morning’s heroin.

I walked in a hail of sweat back to the University Red & White grocery store and bought a two-dollar sack of potatoes and a few packs of Ramen noodles. There was a finger-sized bottle of Tabasco sauce that somehow ended up in my pocket. I had been driven by ‘need’ to pick it up and consider it… but decided it smarter to spend my money on Ramen noodles instead. So, what happened to the bottle once it left my hand is hardly my responsibility when compared to a force as strong as something like Gravity. Anyone looking logically at the situation could only conclude it was a matter of gravity that the tiny hot-sauce bottle happened to fall into my pocket once I’d let go of it. I didn’t just steal it… like a common thief. There were forces of nature involved.

Then it was back to the corner of Park and Elm, where I soaked my curly black hair in the cold water sprouting from the fountain that was no more than a few spurts of mist rising from a ring in the concrete that probably had rich kids running through it a hundred years back, cooling off as I was now. These days, I wondered if I might be able to sneak a pre-dawn shower in it if I ended up homeless and taking bird baths in public restrooms.

On the sidewalk, along the vast open grass of Wick Park, I hobbled toward the ornate stone pillars of Stambaugh Auditorium, which looked like a Greek structure built atop the Acropolis, sitting proudly at the top of Park Avenue. This area was the gem of the city around the turn of the 1900’s. Many mansions built around Wick Park were since abandoned, boarded up, and eventually torn down. As were the rusty skeletons of the steel mills that once lit the skies of Youngstown up a fiery orangish-red, then clouded them out in a soot-stained black.

Looking back, I remember the empty shells of those abandoned steel mills lining the Mahoning Valley, as huge ribcages of dinosaur bones must have lied in the mud for centuries, reminding anything with eyes of a time that was different than the one they were in. Now, only neatly trimmed grass lots remained as tombstones to the once great stature those mansions along the perimeter of Wick Park once held.

I was in the business of walking through homes for banks and mortgage companies before I strung myself out enough to be too embarrassed to show my face around the office. I appraised the value of homes all over the Mahoning Valley, and I knew the area well. Some of those mansions were selling for as low as forty and fifty-grand now. The housing-values plunged as the food-costs rose. I imagined how many groceries two-dollars would have bought a century ago as I lugged my two-dollar sack of spuds up a wooden staircase to my rented room above what was once a carriage house and a stable for horses a decade before the First War, before automobiles were a common commodity.

For three-hundred bucks a month, I rented a single room that was once the servant’s quarters for the mansion I lived behind… a mansion whose majestic white columns once held up the home of Youngstown’s most successful last names. There were three small bedrooms around a shared-kitchen and a full bath above what’s probably now used as a garage and workshop. I imagine the cook/maid, the butler, and the stable hand probably lived up there and worked for the owner to pay off their rent, just like I was forced to do since the head-gasket blew on my blood-red Ford and I couldn’t get back and forth to work anymore.

In my room was a single mattress on the floor, and a desk in the corner with a wooden chair. A small green-painted dresser held my clothes, and a torn, worn and orange easy chair, that Benzo had spotted on the curb and insisted we pull over and pick up, sat in the middle of the room, in front of a small wicker table with a round mirrored top. Other than that, the room was empty, because there wasn’t much room for anything else. The ceiling on one side of the servant’s quarters slanted severely with the roofline. The mattress and dresser were nestled along this wall since the low slant didn’t allow for standing straight up underneath it. On the adjoining wall was a wide, open window looking out over a horseshoe shaped driveway, that I stood staring out the window at, still holding the sack of potatoes in one hand and pleading with my eyes for someone to come pulling into the driveway in a cloud of tailpipe fumes and offer to hook me up if I copped for them.

… And this is how I really supported my habit that summer… on the strength of my connections, which, for once, I had a solitary grasp on. This meant everyone had to come through me. Not everyone, but people like Morphine Johnny (not to be confused with the Shoestring variety), Roy Gillis, Chris, Jennifer Bexley, Roxanne, and some kid that looked like somebody sucked all the air out of Buddy Holly all started coming to me to cop for them, either because I’d gotten them started on it and they had nowhere else to go on their own, or because my guy had better shit than theirs did… and right then, my guy did.

There was a bit of treachery involved with my rationalization that was made easier by the unavoidable fact that I would, without exception, be sick every morning by ten if I didn’t get something going by seven a.m., since my employment fell through but my habit still demanded to be fed, and it took a long time to gather twenty-dollars together by collecting pocket change. My treachery took on a different view if I twisted it up like a clown’s balloon to look like something else… something that it wasn’t.

See, instead of buying a bunch of heroin from my guy, stepping on it, and reselling it to my friends, I was offering my availability, regardless of the hour, to run to the dopehouse and cop for them… all they had to do was drive and hook me up with a hit… not much… just a taste. Just enough to get the sick off my back, as they had their own backs to worry about back then. And then there was the bit that I tapped out into a fold of paper which I’d slip into my pocket for later… not much… just a flick from each sack, I told myself. I often copped for a handful of people at once, and a bit of a hit, plus a bit more, makes a hit of its own. Those hits I’d save in secrecy for bathroom trips away from those people who might suspect I was in there shooting the cap I pinched off their dose.

It was a system of survival based on deception, driven by the need to not be sick, and I knew if no one else I knew was able to get their hands on my connections, I would be able to at least stay well… and that, sadly, is pretty much industry standard when it comes to heroin addicts. One favor deserves another, because we all run out, and we all need favors sooner or later. We do onto others what has been done to us, until they get wise and do onto someone else what was done to them. I’m not proud of it, but I ripped off my friends to survive. Not a lot, little pinches, here and there, but when it seemed as if there was no other way around a sick night in withdrawal, I had no problem supporting my habit on the backs of my connections. If my own back was broken, what else was there for me to do? They were, after all, my connections.

Besides, if you ignore the fact that I had no money to buy a bunch of dope to cut up in the first place, and focus solely on the fact that I was offering them heroin that hadn’t been stepped on any further by me, it really starts to look like I’m the nice guy in the situation. And if it’s ignored that I didn’t have a way to get to the dopehouse on my own, and that I’d waited under buckets of sweaty chills by the window for hours for someone to show up, like I was doing now, standing motionless and pleading the driveway to produce me a car and a needy friend to kick me down a hit for the inconvenience of having to do the thing that I so desperately wanted to do, it almost looks like I’m doing them the favor.

If I wanted to stay well, that’s how I’d have to present the situation.

It was a matter of survival, a mindset governed by desperation and kept alive by deceit. It was the bed I had made for myself, the one on the bottom of everything. Different than the bed I slept on every night, that dirty striped mattress on the floor. That one, I could escape every morning. The bed that I’ve made for myself, and that I’m forced to lie in because of my own bad decisions, I’d carry with me the way one’s blood carries disease, or a body odor that won’t leave. That bed, I lie on like a whore, spent and needy.

On my dirty mattress on the floor, I dropped the sack of potatoes, and peeled off my sweat-sogged tee-shirt and threw it into a pile of sweaty tee-shirts. I towel-dried my prickly skin under horrible waves of shoulder shivering goosebumps.

From a dresser drawer, I pulled a clean shirt, similar to the one I’d just taken off, but smelling of detergent and fabric softener. Usually, the smell of clean laundry was appealing to me, but under the duress of dopesickness, the senses are hyper-heightened. The hair stands on the back of the neck with a nervous electricity and the nose reels from anything chemical or aerosol. I pulled my arms into the shirt, breathing stiffly from my nostrils to avoid the smell, then stood freezing cold, by the window and rubbed my arms with my arms wrapped around myself.

Nicotine dripped down the walls and stained the window glass. An ashtray on the mirrored table top was a blossoming flower of cigarette filters. The whole room reeked of stale addiction, and I imagined from the street, I must have looked like something that crawled out of the well in the movie The Ring, as I stood in the hazy yellow window of my servant’s quarters, a slave to the window, a slave to waiting, to those around me, to the junk that rotted the veins in the arms I had wrapped around my skeleton frame. Starving, shivering cold in the summer heat, I gritted my teeth and my whole body ached for someone to pull into the driveway that would let me do them a fucking favor, for fuck’s sake.