given to informers. Usually the hot shot is strychnine since it tastes and looks like junk.)
'Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a oneway whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit --Kid, it was tasty....
'Recollect when I am traveling with the Vigilante, best Shake Man in the industry. Out in Chi...We is working the fags in Lincoln Park. So one night the Vigilante turns up for work in cowboy boots and a black vest with a hunka tin on it and a lariat slung over his shoulder.
'So I says: 'What's with you? You wig already?'
'He just looks at me and says: 'Fill your hand stranger' and hauls out an old rusty six shooter and I take off across Lincoln Park, bullets cutting all around me. And he hangs three fags before the fuzz nail him. I mean the Vigilante earned his moniker....
'Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con men? Like 'raise,' letting someone know you are in the same line?
' 'Get her!'
' 'Get the Paregoric Kid giving that mark the build up!'
' 'Eager Beaver wooing him much too fast.'
'The Shoe Store Kid (he got that moniker shaking down fetishists in shoe stores) say: 'Give it to a mark with K.Y. and he will come back moaning for more.' And when the Kid spots a mark he begin to breathe heavy. His face swells and his lips turn purple like an Eskimo in heat. Then slow, slow he comes on the mark, feeling for him, palpating him with fingers of rotten ectoplasm.
'The Rube has a sincere little boy look, burns through him like blue neon. That one stepped right off a
Boy Blue starts to slip, and what crawls out would make an ambulance attendant puke. The Rube flips in the end, running through empty automats and subway stations, screaming: 'Come back, kid!!
Come back!!' and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded flat to avoid the probing finger of prurient ballistic experts.' And the fruit is thinking: 'What a character!! Wait till I tell the boys in Clark's about this one.' He's a character collector, would stand still for Joe Gould's seagull act. So I put it on him for a sawski and make a meet to sell him some 'pod' as he calls it, thinking, 'I'll catnip the jerk.'(Note: Catnip smells like marijuana when it burns. Frequently passed on the incautious or uninstructed.)
'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 sweeping out dusty halls with a slow old man's hand, coughing 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 bloodless 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 flop 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. 'Not this street, the next, right... now left. Now right again,' and there he is, toothless old woman face and cancelled eyes.
I know this one pusher walks around humming a tune and everybody he passes takes it up. He is so grey and spectral and anonymous they don't see him and think it is their own mind humming the tune. So the customers come in on
