Medicinal work may have saved Rita from the daily travail of the corner world, but her ability to find a vein is a double-edged sword. She’s become an essential service at Blue’s, the only working appliance in the gutted rowhouse, and so, she’s cursed with far too much coke and dope.
A few years back, Rita was among the most beautiful girls in the neighborhood; every man along Fayette Street remembers the curve of her figure, the symmetry of her face, the charm and humor that she brought to any conversation. Rita was something then, but for her the needle wasn’t a part-time adventure. She didn’t cast the straight world aside lightly; she hurled it down. Rita loved dope, and when she learned to doctor, there was nothing that could stop her. Within months, her hands and feet were as cruelly bloated as Fat Curt’s, her skin, cratered and scabbed. But still she kept on until her left upper arm was little more than raw, rotting flesh, the stench strong enough to fill every room of the shooting gallery. A few of the fiends—Curt and Eggy, to name two—tried to warn her, to convince her to go to Bon Secours and give it a rest before she got gangrene. But the others, driven by self-interest, said nothing. Twenty-four, seven, they lined up at her table, though some offered pirated antibiotics and back-street remedies along with her share of the dope and coke.
Eventually, Rita couldn’t leave the shooting gallery. With her body a caricature and her will destroyed, she became a prisoner. She was no fool: all the dope in the world couldn’t kill Rita’s wit and intelligence, and there was never a waking moment when she didn’t face up to how far she had fallen. She was, in a word, ashamed—ashamed of the arm, of the smell, of the extremity of her condition. She wouldn’t bear the looks of emergency room nurses or interns, or the counter help at the corner store, or the children playing on Vine Street. Even the most jaded police couldn’t help but view her with amazement and revulsion; on the rare occasion when they raided the shooting gallery, they’d never include Rita in the lockups. They’d poke her into a back room with their nightsticks, cursing her for the stench, leaving her behind with the cookers and syringes.
Only Blue went beyond talk and acted to save her. It was his house, after all, and he felt some responsibility for the regulars. Time and again, he told Rita to get to the hospital and when every other approach failed, he actually put her out on the street, telling her not to come back until she got treatment. That was two weeks ago. Now, Blue is gone—he took a charge and was sent courtside to the jail on Eager Street—and Rita is back, no better than before.
One after another, they get the blast—the bystanders waiting patiently, focusing on Rita, watching the plunger fall, trying to gauge the rush. Whose dope is better? Who got shit? There’s little time or inclination in the shooting gallery for small talk or theoretical debates, little energy wasted on human relations, on current events or communication for its own sake. When you speak, you speak about dope, or coke, or that motherfucker Bob Brown, or what’s happening on what corner. Nothing else gets heard in this place, except from some rare bird like Gary McCullough, who gets his blast and then breaks etiquette by rambling on about Zen Buddhism. And fuck that shit, everyone else thinks: Shut up and shoot dope.
“What you get there?” Rita asks, ministering to Bread.
“Black-and-White,” says Curt.
“That’ll work, but Spider Bags better.”
Curt grunts disdain. “S’all bullshit out there nowadays,” he tells her. “Nothing but got-damn chemicals. Ain’t been no real dope out here for ten years.”
Curt has the same complaint every morning. Rita smiles and finishes with Bread, then it’s Curt’s turn. Just as she’s finishing up, all hell breaks loose on the second floor—someone up there raising some kind of racket.
Curt goes to the bottom of the stairs and listens. No voices, just scraping and banging sounds from the back bedroom. The tout hesitates, torn between a residual loyalty to Blue and the need to get out on the corner and make a living. Another loud metallic clang seals his decision.
“Damn,” he says, caning slowly up the battered stairs, stopping at the landing to catch his breath. “Got-damn.”
The noise grows louder as he struggles up the last steps, reaching the second floor to see some fiend he half-recalls from somewhere down around Hollins and Payson, a dusty-looking motherfucker who’s been coming to Blue’s for the last few weeks. Curt tries for a name, but comes up empty.
“Ah … hey.”
The fiend looks over, indifferent, then turns back to the business at hand. He rips another piece of aluminum guard from a rear window, stripping what’s left of Blue’s house for a few dollars at the United Iron scales.
“My man, I’m sayin’, you know, it ain’t like we ain’t living here,” Curt offers.
“This your house?”
“Naw, but, y’know …”
“Fuck you then,” says the fiend.
“Man, leave it rest.”
“What you gonna do?”
“I’m just sayin’ give it a rest. You know the man ain’t even home.”
The fiend pauses at that, looking first at the haul of twisted metal on the floor, then back at what’s left on the windows. Curt takes that as a truce of sorts, turns and canes his way back downstairs. It’s time, after all, to punch that clock.
Curt goes back up to the corner to find Dred. He picks up his package, canes down through the alley, down past the litter-strewn lot where the alley tees into Vine Street. He crosses Vine and goes behind a vacant house, and—satisfied that no crudballs are watching—he hides the stash against the crumbling wall of a brick garage. Good enough, he thinks.
He heads back up Vine to Monroe, where all around him the regulars at Blue’s are about the business, each one a small cog in a vast, indifferent machine. The fiends come in ones and twos, most on foot, a few pulling to the curb in cars and trucks; one white girl rides up to cop on a mountain bike. By a little after noon, Curt is halfway through his second bundle. He’s lucky; he’s selling Yellow Bag/Gold Star and it was good yesterday. Now fiends are coming out of the woodwork looking for more of the same, though if the product is anything like what Curt fired that morning, it’s now merely adequate. That’s the way it often is: A product gets a reputation at the beginning of its run, but by the end, the cut takes over and the quality drops precipitously. Still, today’s business on the Yellow Bag circuit is brisk.
A wraith of a woman wearing a torn army jacket, her hair shoveled under a do-rag, makes the turn from Lexington and heads at Curt. She’s yellow-eyed and listing hard to starboard, her feet swamped in heavy brown workboots at least a half-dozen sizes too large.
“What you got?”
“Yellows.”
She cocks an eyebrow.
“It’ll work,” Curt tells her. He won’t oversell. Curt tries to let a little truth into the game, especially with the fiends who are looking sick.
“Hmmm,” she says, picking up on the equivocation. “Who got them Black-and-Whites?”
Curt sends her down toward Fayette, watching as she steers herself past the knots of touts and slingers clustered along the strip. She gets as far as the mouth of the alley in the rear of Fayette. Bryan is there, leaning against the bricks, holding up the back corner of the store, looking for all the world like he’s gainfully employed. She stops and asks. Bryan starts nodding.
Aw shit, thinks Curt, a wrong turn for the little lady. Bryan has nothing at all to do with Black-and-Whites, and this poor girl thinks she’s on the path. Bryan is selling his Arm & Hammer, or baby powder, or whatever else looks pretty and white inside a glassine bag. Boy ought to know better as many times as he’s been shot up behind that lameass shit.
For the next couple of hours, Curt touts and slings and watches the intrigue play out around him. Variations on the