She heard the click-click of the hammers falling on empty chambers. Then she put the gun away, as carefully as ever, lit a cigarette and went out to join the others on the lawn.
The Gold Ring
by Mann Rubin
Only Harold The Pusher knew what was in the smokes he sold — but the reaction they got was really gone!
The pusher’s name was Harold. He was a small, ugly guy, always grinning and wearing thick glasses and smelling bad underneath a dirty tweed coat. We’d meet him every Friday afternoon behind the Soldiers’ Monument on Riverside Drive. He kept the cigarettes in a tin box he carried in a pocket of his coat. The price was twenty-five cents apiece. He wouldn’t talk much, just the grin on his face and a hand with dirty fingernails, collecting the money quick.
Me and Arnie Kraft discovered him. Me and Arnie Kraft gave him his start in the neighbourhood. Up to the time we began doing business with him, he was nothing. Nobody else in the crowd knew he existed. Most of the kids just talked about marijuana, and a few pretended they knew junkies, but it was me and Arnie Kraft who created action.
Only it wasn’t like we talked them into anything — that wasn’t so! Everybody wanted to ride the broomstick. It was the fad of the times, the natural thing. The papers were running daily editorials, and boards were being set up all over the city to combat juvenile delinquency, and everybody wanted in on the act. The summer was coming, and the girls were wearing tight dresses again, and there had to be something. Hell, we were sixteen!
The first time, it was me and Arnie Kraft alone. We bought two butts each and went to his apartment. Arnie lived on West End Avenue. He was eighteen floors up, with big rooms, deep carpets and a television set. Another good thing was that his mother was ah ways out playing mah-jongg.
We pulled the shades down and kicked off our shoes and sat on the soft couch in his living room and lit the stems and waited. At first there was nothing, only a crazy smell and thick, grey smoke coming out in every puff. We kept inhaling and looking at each other and wanting the good things to happen.
After awhile, I started to laugh, and I thought that was it, but I was wrong. It was just that I was nervous and cued up and anxious to meet the pitch. Arnie put on some jazz records, and we listened to Fats Waller wrestling with a fast piano. We watched each other and smiled, and the grey smoke gathered and circled against the ceiling.
It was Arnie who reached it first. He was beating his hand against the side of the couch in time to the music. It was a thing he always did when he heard music because he’s a rhythmic kid, and sometimes, when he wants to, he can Lindy as good as any professional. Only now he was beating a little too fast, and his voice was wailing off key, and his eyes were moving all over his head. Suddenly he stopped and began inhaling real fast on the butt and rubbing at his cheeks.
“Zazu Pitts,” he said. He got up and stood over me, with the cigarette hanging from his mouth and some ashes spilled on his sweater. He rubbed at his cheeks and said, “Zazu Pitts, Zazu Pitts,” over and over. Suddenly he slapped with his hands and screamed at the music and closed his eyes tight so they wrinkled.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’ve got it!” He screamed. “I’ve connected. I’m linked.” He dropped to the floor and tried a somersault across the carpet, but he couldn’t get his legs over. He flopped on his stomach and lay there scratching his fingers into the fuzz.
Right then, I started receiving my own joys. With me, it came with a dizziness and then cleared into a beautiful technicolor movie. Everything was technicolor — Arnie, the apartment, even the music draining out of the phonograph. I sat and waited for something else to come on. The technicolor stayed and became locked.
I jumped up on the couch and began swaying back and forth, because I knew I had it good and nothing could take it away. Arnie joined me, and we started laughing and pounding each other on the back and being very proud of our common bond. In between congratulations, we described sensations and chain-smoked into our second cigarettes.
It was a mad afternoon. First we raided the ice-box and ate dill pickled with our fingers and drew pictures of women on the kitchen floor with a whip-cream sprayer. We tossed a baseball around his living room and then flung it down his courtyard to see how many stories it would bounce. We also made phone calls. I called a girl I hated and disguised my voice and made a date for a formal dance I never intended to go to.
Arnie tried getting hold of a French teacher in our high school who was going to flunk him. We were going to tell her she was fired, but Arnie got a hard time from the information operation, and we had to give up in desperation. It would have been a scream if he got through, because Arnie is very talented, and he can change his voice to any range. The old woman would never have gotten wise, but, like I said, we couldn’t get through.
That was the first time. We talked about it the rest of the week and told a lot of guys who didn’t believe us. By the time Friday rolled around again, we had four new fellows interested. We met Harold at the same spot and gave his business an increase. The shindig was repeated at Arnie’s house, and this time the kicks were even greater.
After that, it became the rage. Everybody in the neighbourhood knew about Harold, and soon all the girls were pestering like hell to be included. We brought five girls along on our third excursion. They added a lot of colour. They were all regular except for one deadhead, who smoked three butts and said she didn’t feel a thing.
All she did was sit in a corner, complaining about the smoke and calling it nonsense when anyone reached a peak. The rest of the girls were swell and took to the weed like ducks to water, but the other one was never invited again. Nobody likes a wet blanket.
We formed a club after the fifth session — nothing social or fancy with dues or jackets or secret handshakes. Just a fraternity among ourselves when we held our regular Friday smokes. Someone suggested calling ourselves the “Junkies” and the name stuck almost immediately.
The girls organised too and branded themselves the “Junkettes.” Pretty soon, there were as many girls at the smokes as there were guys. We tried to meet at a different house each week, so that every one had to kick in a little service, like soda and music and a living room where we could dance and have fun.
No one was ever sick from the butts — that was the best part of it. You could go home to your own house and do your homework or watch television or listen to your parents quarrel, and nobody would ever know what you had done or how high you had gotten so quickly.
Harold never let us down. He would be at the Monument each Friday, the grin pressed on his face and his hand in his pocket ready for business. Usually, only one of us, either me or Arnie, would buy the cigarettes for the whole crowd. He always has as much as we wanted, and then he would ask how it was going and how the girls enjoyed his products.
You could see the hard-up way he was about girls by the way he spoke and the way he looked after them whenever one passed. You could see he spent his profits on sexy magazines.
Then, toward the end of school, someone brought up the idea for a big farewell party before we scattered for the summer. The idea spread like soft margarine, and, before long, everyone was discussing the feats, and some girls were going around collecting a dollar from each standard member. It was going to be up at Arnie’s house.
Arnie was pretty good that way. His mother was on vacation in Canada, and he had the whole apartment for himself, except for a maid who never bothered anyone. He wasn’t handsome, but he had a lot of personality, and everybody liked being around him, and anyway his house was the birthplace of our kicks.