veins right down to the bone. ...Her skin-pop a week or do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.... So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware.... Look down, look down along that line before you travail there....
The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron....
--Queens Plaza is a bad spot for lush workers.... Too many levels and lurking places for subway heat, and impossible to cover when you put the hand out.... Five months and twenty-nine days: sentence given for 'jostling,' that is, touching a flop with obvious intent.... Innocent people may be convicted of murder but not of jostling. Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor, old time, junkies and lush-workers of my acquaintance.... The old 103rd street klatch.... Sailor and Irish hanged themselves in the Tombs.... The Beagle is dead of an overdose and the Fag went wrong....
'Have you seen Pantopon Rose?' said the old junky. ...'Time to cosq,' put on a black overcoat and made the square.... Down skid road to Market Street Museum shows all kinds masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special....
The gangster in concrete rolls down the river channel.... They cowboyed him in the steam room.... Is this Cherry Ass Gio the Towel Boy or Mother Gillig, Old Auntie of Westminster Place?? Only dead fingers talk in Braille....
The Mississippi rolls great limestone boulders down the silent alley....
'Clutter the glind!' screamed the Captain of Moving Land.... Distant rumble of stomachs.... Poisoned pigeons rain from the Northern Lights.... The reservoirs are empty.... Brass statues crash through the hungry squares and alleys of the gaping city.... Probing for a vein in the junk-sick morning....
Strictly from cough syrup...
A thousand junkies storm the crystal spine clinics, cook down the Grey Ladies.... In the limestone cave met a man with Medusa's head in a hat box and said, 'Be Careful,' to the Customs Inspector.... Freezed forever hand an inch from the false bottom.... Window dressers scream through the station, beat the cashiers with the fairy hype.... (The Hype is a short change con.... Also known as The Bill....)
'Multiple fracture,' said the big physician.... 'I'm very technical....' Conspicuous consumption is rampant in the porticos slippery with Koch spit.... The centipede nuzzles the iron door rusted to thin black paper by the urine of a million fairies.... This is no rich mother load, but vitiate dust, second run cottons trace the bones of a fix.... 99
COKE BUGS
The Sailor's grey felt hat and black overcoat hung twisted in atrophied yen-wait. Morning sun outlined The Sailor in the orange-yellow flame of junk. He had a paper napkin under his coffee cup - mark of those who do a lot of sitting over coffee in the plazas, restaurants, terminals and waiting rooms of the world. A junky, even at the Sailor's level, runs on junk Time and when he makes his importunate irruption into the Time of others, like all petitioners, he must wait. (How many coffees in an hour?)
A boy came in and sat at the counter in broken lines of long, sick junk-wait. The Sailor shivered. His face fuzzed out of focus in a shuddering brown mist. His hands moved on the table, reading the boy's Braille. His eyes traced little dips and circles, following whorls of brown hair on the boy's neck in a slow, searching movement.
The boy stirred and scratched the back of his neck: 'Something bit me, Joe. What kinda creep joint you run here?'
'Coke bugs, kid,' Joe said, holding eggs up to the light. 'I was travelling with Irene Kelly and her was a sporting woman. In Butte, state of Montany, her got the coke horrors and run through the hotel screaming Chinese coppers chase her with meat cleavers. I knew this cop in Chi sniff coke used to come in form of crystals, blue crystals. So her go nuts and start screaming the Federals is after him and run down this alley and stick his head in the garbage can. And I said, 'What you think you are doing? and her say, 'Get away or I shoot you! I got myself led good!' When the roll is called up yonder we'll be there, right?'
Joe looked at the Sailor and spread his hands in the junky shrug. The Sailor spoke in his feeling voice that reassembles in your head, spelling out the words with cold fingers: 'Your connection is broken, kid.'
The boy shied. His street-boy face, torn with black scars of junk, retained a wild, broken innocence; shy animals peering out through grey arabesques of terror.
'I don't dig you, Jack.'
The Sailor leapt into sharp, junky focus. He turned back his coat lapel, showing a brass hypo needle covered with mold and verdigris. 'Retired for the good of the service.... Sit down and have a blueberry crumb pie on the expense account. Your monkey loves it.... Make his coat glossy.' The boy felt a touch on his arm across eight feet of morning lunch room. He was suddenly siphoned into the booth, landing with an inaudible shlup. He looked into the Sailor's eyes, a green universe stirred by cold black currents.
'You are agent, mister?'
'I prefer the word... vector.' His sounding laughter vibrated through the boy's substance.
'You holding, man? I got the bread....'
