Needle Freak, page 3
Steve answered on the fifth ring and sounded annoyed and suspicious when he said, “Yeah?”
“Steve. Come get me,” Jack said.
Steve sighed. “What happened?”
“I got shoplifted.”
“Ah, shit, Jack,” Steve said. “How bad?”
“Pretty fucking bad. He broke my fingers. I think I need to go to the hospital and get them set. Might have broke a rib or two. Can you hurry?”
“Goddamn it. Fine. Where are you?”
Jack told him and Steve hung up. He sat there for a minute before making his pained and wobbly way to the bathroom.
In the mirror, he assessed some of the damage with a sinking feeling of disappointment. His jaw was bruised and swelling, his chest was bruised and there was a dark bruise forming down his side that turned him black and blue from his armpit to his thigh. He was still having difficulty breathing deeply and it hurt when he tried and that worried him. If one of his ribs had broken just right and was pressing on his lungs, he’d need surgery. He couldn’t afford surgery and it went without saying that he did not have medical insurance.
Jack took a shower and washed with a sliver of soap someone staying in the room before had left behind. The soap foam turned pinkish orange at first; his ass was bleeding. Something had been torn.
He was drying off with a threadbare over-bleached towel when Steve got there and walked right into the bathroom without knocking. He took one look at Jack, cursed and threw the spare roll of toilet paper on the toilet tank across the room.
“Who the fuck was this guy?” he demanded.
“Some john,” Jack said with a shrug. He put his pants on and picked up his shirt. “Guy was fucking my face and I couldn’t breathe. Started to gag and pulled off and he got pissed and started swinging. I tried to apologize, but he wasn’t listening. Didn’t want to hear it. Probably wanted something to hit. You know.”
Steve walked over and took hold of Jack’s chin, tilted his head back to the light and turned it to examine the bruise growing darker by the second on his face. “I mean what’s his fucking name?” he said, letting Jack go.
“Blake,” Jack said. “I dunno, probably not really his name. You know the fucker shorted me fifty bucks, too?”
“Jesus, Jack. You are so fucked up,” Steve muttered.
“You fuck dead girls, Steve. That trumps everything,” Jack said. It fell out of his mouth before he even thought about it. He’d had a rough day and he was not in the mood to hear it.
Steve looked mad for a second then his expression cleared and he laughed. “Guess so,” he said. “Get dressed. I’m going down to see if they got this Blake shithead’s information. I’ll be right back.”
Steve turned to leave and Jack yanked his shirt on. “You’re not my pimp. You don’t have to do that. I just needed a ride back.”
Steve turned and jabbed a finger at him, the anger flaring back to life in his eyes. “Sometimes whores need a goddamn pimp, Jack and this shit is why,” he said.
He slammed the door as he left the motel room and Jack sat down on the lowered toilet seat to put his shoes on. He felt better with Steve nearby and taking care of it, though he would never tell him so. It pleased him that Steve cared enough to be so mad about it even if Jack didn’t really give a damn. He felt safe because Steve was a monster, but he was Jack’s monster and you couldn’t ask for a meaner guard dog.
Steve returned ten minutes later and he was ready to go. He took Jack to the clinic where they set his fingers and wrapped them, but would not give him a prescription. They listened to him breathe with a stethoscope and told him he probably had some cracked ribs, but if he took it easy for a little while, they would heal. There wasn’t much else they could do for him—or would—without some kind of insurance.
Steve wouldn’t tell Jack what the person in the office at the Moon River Inn had told him, but after he dropped him at their room, he took off again and didn’t come back for a couple of hours. When he did, his knuckles were cracked and scabbed and he came in carrying a bag of groceries, a bottle of cheap whiskey and a pack of cigarettes for each of them. Jack surmised that he had found Blake, kicked the dog shit out of him, robbed him and then stopped to go shopping on his way back.
It was sweet in a Steve Walker-ish way.
And practical because Jack could tell already that there was little chance he was going to be able to work for a little while. He was tore up and his sides hurt like hell and every time he breathed too deeply his chest felt like it was caving in. He might be able to swing some suck jobs, but if he had to fuck anyone he was afraid he might not make it out alive.
Steve made them ham and cheese sandwiches and made Jack eat before he fixed. Jack ate quickly because the heroin would make the pain go away as well as stop the oncoming jitter-jives. He was rationing himself though. Making himself wait until he couldn’t wait any longer. He didn’t know how he was going to get more when it was gone. He had seventy dollars when he added the fifty he’d made from Blake to what he’d already had. Zane might cut him a deal for a “poke,” but he wasn’t up to it right now and that was all the money he had until he was better and could go back to the street.
Steve was going to have to find the three hundred and fifty dollars to pay the rent himself for the month. There was no way around that.
When they were done eating, Jack cooked and shot up and Steve watched him do it. Sometimes he did that and Jack sometimes got the impression that he liked it in some weird, twisted way. He looked up and caught Steve’s eyes on him as he popped the needle in and depressed the plunger.
As the drug slid through his veins, filled him with warmth and entered his brain, Jack noticed Phineas’s reflection in the window glass. Phineas stood behind him watching them both. His green eyes danced and glowed like fireflies.
Jack sighed and slumped with his elbows on his knees and his head down. He tensed when he felt a hand on his forehead brushing his hair back, thinking it was the clown, but it was Steve. He relaxed and watched Steve with lazy interest as he petted his hair. Steve rarely touched him. Jack let him and felt like a man holding his breath so some wild, skittish creature wouldn’t startle and run away. If he moved, if he spoke, Steve would stop.
He did stop after a minute and got up, but he moved to Jack’s bed. “Come on, scoot on over and lay down,” he said.
Jack slid over to the side of the bed close to the wall and Steve stretched out on the bed next to him. “What are you doing?” Jack asked.
“Laying here. You’re hurt and all ass raped and shit. Thinking maybe you don’t need to be alone right now,” Steve said. He turned his head to look at him and smiled. “You’re my friend, Jack. It’s what friends do.”
“Oh. Okay,” Jack said.
It probably was something friends did, but it wasn’t something Steve made a habit of doing. Steve had probably read about it in an article from a magazine left at the Laundromat or while he waited for him at the hospital. 10 Ways To Be A Better Person.
“Whatcha smiling about?” Steve asked.
Jack shrugged. “Nothing.”
Steve crooked a finger at him. “Come here.”
Jack eyed him uncertainly, but then he did. He went. He couldn’t help it. He scooted back across the bed the short distance to Steve and lay down beside him with his head on the other pillow. He could feel Steve’s eyes on him even when he wasn’t looking back and it made him itch, but it made his pulse beat a little faster, too.
He licked his lips and found them dry and faintly painful.
Steve pushed himself up on one elbow and leaned over to kiss him. Jack made a startled sound in his throat and tensed, his eyes going wide in shock. It took a second for him to understand what was happening and respond, but when he kissed him back, Steve ended it.
Jack clenched his hand into a fist at his side in frustration.
Steve touched the bruised side of his face and frowned. He didn’t say anything about the kiss. He acted like nothing out of the ordinary at all had occurred and expected Jack to do the same. “You ain’t gonna be hooking no more for a while,” he said.
It wasn’t a question so much as a statement of the obvious.
“No,” Jack said. “Guys might ignore a few bruises, but not all this. And I can’t fuck no one with cracked ribs anyway.”
“Or a tore up ass,” Steve said. He smirked and dropped his hand from Jack’s cheek back to the coverlet. “Don’t need you getting yourself a prolapsed rectum or nothing like that.”
Jack laughed. “You saw that in a medical magazine, didn’t you?”
“Sure did. And there was pictures,” Steve said with relish. “Nasty fucking pictures. Read me some Cosmo, too. You were in there for a bit. That rectum thing though; that shit’s fucking disturbing. Like someone went and took a bean and cheese burrito and turned it inside out then yanked it through a doughnut hole.”
Jack winced. “Gross, Steve.”
“Yeah. Sure is gross. Don’t go getting yourself none of that,” Steve said.
“I wasn’t planning to,” Jack said, amused.
“No, but unplanned shit like Blake the rapist with a pocket protector, that shit happens. Ain’t no planning for it then. Next time you could go and get yourself one of those juicer guys. Those self-hating homos, you know? And maybe he ain’t satisfied just raping the shit outta you, maybe he looks around the room and thinks to himself, you know what I could do with that there shampoo bottle to this little whore boy’s ass?”
Jack made a disgusted face, but he was laughing, too and Steve grinned at him.
“Oh, yeah,” Steve said, pleased with his reaction. “Then you got yourself an inconvenient as shit case of prolapsed rectum. The rest of you may go on being pretty, but ain’t no one gonna want to look too long at that inside out hole of yours, let alone play around in there.”
“Jesus, stop it,” Jack said, more revolted than amused the more he kept talking about it. Steve had latched onto the subject with real interest the more it disgusted Jack. “Just quit. I get it. Be careful or I’ll end up with a prolapsed rectum. I got it.”
“Well, that’s good,” Steve said.
He continued to smile for a time and they lapsed into silence. Jack watched Steve and Steve stared thoughtfully up at the popcorn ceiling. In not too long, Jack fell asleep and Steve stayed with him.
Chapter 3
Steve was gone the next morning again, leaving behind a note scribbled on a piece of paper bag that told him to stay there and take care of himself. That Steve would have the rent money by Saturday and Jack shouldn’t worry about it.
Jack folded up the note and put it in his pocket. He stayed in that day and watched TV. No cartoons and no Vietnam movies. He watched some reruns of Seinfeld, then some reruns of M*A*S*H, one of the many remakes of Planet of the Apes, fixed himself a shot a little after 3 p.m. and watched a nature show then fell asleep.
The next day, much as Jack would have liked to stay in and be lazy, heal himself and watch bad TV, he couldn’t. He was out of heroin. Completely tapped out. He fixed another hit with the last of it that morning, but it wasn’t even a whole shot. It was a tide-me-over shot and if he didn’t score before dinner time, he was going to be a real mess. It had happened many times before, but not in a long time. He was careful about that. He watched it; he rationed himself because withdrawal was the worst kind of hell imaginable. Jack’s was a uniquely terrible kind of hell because Phineas would be there to keep him company.
He didn’t have enough money though and he couldn’t even offer to cover the rest in trade in the state he was in. Steve had left as was his wont early in the morning and Jack hadn’t even thought to ask him for the cash the night before. Steve probably would have given it to him if he had it, but Steve wasn’t the kind of person who thought of such things on his own, so he hadn’t offered.
Jack thought about catching the bus into the slums again, trying his hand at turning a few blowjobs into fifties, but his face looked even worse than it had that first day. The bruise had spread and though it was the yellowish color at the edges that indicated healing in progress, it was swollen and hideous. It was one thing to tell a prospective john that all he could have was his dick sucked, but with a mangled face like Jack’s, no one was even going to ask.
He had to go see Zane and hope the guy was feeling exceptionally charitable. There was nothing else for it. Zane liked Jack a lot, Jack had not failed to notice it and he probably took advantage of it a little bit because he knew Zane liked him, but Zane was also a drug dealer and Jack was a junkie and a prostitute. There was a good chance that, like him or not, Zane would tell him to fuck off.
Jack rode the bus out to Zane’s. It didn’t go all the way to the house so Jack had to walk a few blocks, but he could walk fine. He couldn’t do much running yet, but there wasn’t much chance he was going to need to do that. If the cops decided to hassle him now, he would just have to let them take him in. He couldn’t run far or fast and he didn’t want the beating that was likely to occur on top of the one he was still recovering from should the cops decide to give chase.
He still looked around for cops everywhere he went. It was a long-standing habit.
Zane was in the kitchen when Jack got there. His housekeeper, Sasha let him in. Zane had several different kinds of melon on the countertop and was cutting one in half as Jack walked into the kitchen. He cut off a slice, cut the rind off it and ate a piece of white, juicy fruit before he looked up and saw Jack standing there.
“You hungry, Jack?”
Jack shook his head and scratched his left arm with his right hand—the one without the broken fingers. “I’m… No, thanks, Zane.”
“You sure? This honeydew melon’s real sweet.” Zane went back to cutting it into wedges. “So, how’s things? You looking like hell, you don’t mind me saying, Handy.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. He shifted his weight from his left foot to his right and back. “Zane, I need…” He swallowed. He hated to do this. Hated it. He was not a freeloader. He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t one of those junkies. “I need…”
“Looks like you need some help,” Zane said. He popped a piece of cantaloupe into his mouth and looked at Jack across the counter. “You’re out, ain’t you?”
Zane knew he was. He knew just how much he’d sold Jack and how long it typically lasted him. He knew that about most junkies he sold to.
“Yeah,” Jack said.
And he was ashamed because not only was he not a freeloader, he tried not to let himself ever be that junkie who would do anything for a fix, because that made you vulnerable and when you would do anything, anything could happen. He had seen it plenty enough to know how bad things could get if he ever became one of those whores. Those whores agreed to shit no one in their right mind would agree to and their market value had a horrible tendency to plummet. They fell right down the rabbit hole, but there wasn’t much Wonderland waiting for them at the end of that tunnel. No one paid good money for a trick like that when there were others just a few feet away without any visible broken and cracked parts.
He wouldn’t meet Zane’s eyes and Zane didn’t say anything more to him for several minutes while he went on slicing up melon and arranging fruit on a plate. Then he took the plate and a big mug of coffee across the kitchen to the little breakfast nook by the window and set it down.
“You want coffee?” he asked Jack.
Jack swallowed and shook his head. “I need… I’m gonna be sick, Zane. I don’t…” He let out a deep, shaky breath and looked up at him. “Please?”
Zane’s eyes narrowed on his face as he considered it. Then he smiled. “Sure, Jack. I got you covered. Just sit down there at the table and I’ll be right back. You go ahead and eat some of that if you want to. Had me a craving for melon this morning and Sasha, well she got a little carried away at the market. Think she don’t know what the fuck I’m saying to her half the goddamn time, tell you the truth, but damn can that woman clean house. Anyway, relax. I’ll be just a minute.”
Jack nodded and a wave of relief washed over him. This was going to cost him. Zane didn’t have to say it, Jack knew it would. No matter how much he liked him, Zane wasn’t a junkie charity, he was a dealer. But Jack didn’t think too much about that and he wasn’t worried. He could do it, whatever it was, and he would do it because for right now he was that junkie and he was desperate. He was already shaking and itching, he could already feel his pulse in this throat pounding, tickling, and in not too long he was going to be vomiting and shitting himself and climbing the walls crazy if he didn’t get something.
That was how they got you if you weren’t careful.
Jack promised himself that he would go back to being careful from now on. This would not happen again. He would not let himself fall into the habit of running low and scraping the bottom because it was easy, but it was also how you died.
And Jack didn’t have much to his name, but he still had his looks. His face hadn’t always been something that got him anywhere he wanted to go, but he didn’t like to think about what would become of him when he no longer had that. If he lost it, he’d be done for. If he lost it, Steve wouldn’t have any use for him either and Jack didn’t fool himself that Steve would keep him around.
“You look like you’re thinking some deep thoughts, Handy,” Zane said, coming back into the kitchen.
He had the cloth pouch he kept his personal stash in and he put it on the table and sat down. Jack glanced at it and chewed his bottom lip. Zane smiled to himself and ate a piece of pineapple. With one hand, he picked up his coffee and sipped and with the other he unrolled the cloth and plucked a small sandwich bag of powder out of it. He tossed it across the table to Jack, who snatched it up.
