“I am better. Must have been one of those twenty-four-hour things.”
“It’s not a twenty-four-hour thing, it’s the flu, and if you try leaving here for the bus station, it’ll be back full blast by noon. Stay here and yes, I think you’ll probably be better in a few days. But it’s not the flu I’m talking about.”
“I’m okay,” I said, but now it was my turn to look away. What brought my eyes back front and center was the little brown bottle. He was holding it by the spoon and swinging it on its little silver chain like a hypnotist’s amulet. I reached for it. He held it away.
“How long have you been using?”
“Heroin? About three years.” It had been six. “I had a motorcycle accident. Smashed the hell out of my hip and leg. They gave me morphine—”
“Of course they did.”
“—and then stepped me down to codeine. That sucked, so I started chugging cough syrup to go with the pills. Terpin hydrate. Ever heard of it?”
“Are you kidding? On the circuit they call it GI Gin.”
“My leg healed, but it never healed right. Then—I was in a band called the Andersonville Rockers, or maybe they’d changed the name to the Georgia Giants by then—this guy introduced me to Tussionex. That was a big step in the right direction, as far as pain control went. Listen, do you really want to hear this?”
“Absolutely.”
I shrugged as if it didn’t matter much to me one way or the other, but it was a relief to spill it out. Before that day in Jacobs’s Bounder, I never had. In the bands I played with, everyone just shrugged and looked the other way. As long as you kept showing up, that was, and remembered the chords to “In the Midnight Hour”—which, believe me, ain’t rocket science.
“It’s another cough syrup. More powerful than terpin hydrate, but only if you knew how to get at the good stuff. To do that, you tied a string around the neck of the bottle and twirled it like a mad bastard. The centrifugal force separated the syrup into three levels. The good stuff—the hydrocodone—was in the middle. You used a straw to suck it up.”
“Fascinating.”
Not very, I thought. “After awhile, when I was still having pain, I started scoring morphine again. Then I discovered heroin worked as well, and at half the price.” I smiled. “There’s a kind of drug stock market, you know. When everybody started using rock cocaine, horse took a nosedive.”
“Your leg looks fine to me,” he said mildly. “There’s a bad scar, and there’s obviously been some muscle loss, but not that much. Some doctor did a fine job on you.”
“I can walk, yeah. But you try standing on a leg that’s full of metal clips and screws for three hours a night, under hot lights and with a nine-pound guitar strapped on. Lecture all you want, you picked me up when I was down and I guess I owe you that, but don’t tell me about pain. Nobody knows unless they’re on the inside.”
He nodded. “As someone who’s suffered… losses… I can relate to that. But here’s something I bet you already know, deep down. It’s your brain that’s hurting, and blaming it on your leg. Brains are crafty that way.”
He put the bottle back in his pocket (I watched it go with deep regret) and leaned forward, his eyes locked on mine. “But I believe I can take care of you with an electrical treatment. No guarantees, and the treatment might not cure your mental craving forever, but I believe I can give you what the football players call running room.”
“Cure me the way you did Connie, I suppose. When that kid clotheslined him with a ski pole.”
He looked surprised, then laughed. “You remember that.”
“Of course! How could I forget it?” I also remembered how Con had refused to go with me to see Jacobs after the Terrible Sermon. It wasn’t exactly like Peter denying Jesus, but it was in the same ballpark.
“A dubious cure at best, Jamie. More likely the placebo effect. I’m offering you an actual cure, one that will—or so I believe—short-circuit the painful withdrawal process.”
“Well of course you’d say that, wouldn’t you?”
“You’re judging me by my carny persona. But that’s all it is, Jamie—a persona. When I’m not wearing my show suit and making a living, I try to tell the truth. In fact, I mostly tell the truth when I’m working. That picture will amaze Miss Cathy Morse’s friends.”
“Yeah,” I said. “For two years, anyway. Give or take.”
“Stop dodging and answer my question. Do you want to get better?”
What came to mind was the PS of the note Kelly Van Dorn had slid under my door. In prison a year from now if I didn’t clean up my act, he’d written. And that was if I struck lucky.
“I got straight three years ago.” Sort of true, although I had been on the Marijuana Maintenance Program. “Did it righteous, went through the shakes and sweats and the Hershey squirts. My leg was so bad I could barely hobble. It’s some kind of nerve damage.”
“I believe I can take care of that, too.”
“What are you, some kind of miracle worker? Is that what you want me to believe?”
He had been sitting on the carpet beside the bed. Now he got up. “That’s enough for now. You need to sleep. You’re still quite a long way from well.”
“Then give me something that will help me.”
He did so without argument, and it helped me. It just didn’t help enough. By 1992, real help came in the needle. There was nothing else. You don’t just wave a magic wand over that shit and make it gone.
Or so I believed.
I stayed in his Bounder for the best part of a week, living on soup, sandwiches, and nasally administered doses of heroin that were just enough to keep the worst of the shakes at bay. He brought my guitar and duffel. I kept a spare set of works in the duffel, but when I looked (it was the second night, and he was working the crowds at his Portraits in Lightning shy), the kit was gone. I begged him to give it back, along with enough heroin so I could cook and shoot up.
“No,” he said. “If you want to mainline—”
“I’ve only been skin-popping!”
He gave me an Oh, please look. “If you want that, you’ll have to find the proper equipment yourself. If you’re not well enough to do it tonight, you will be by tomorrow, and around this place I’m sure it wouldn’t take you long. Just don’t come back here.”
“When do I get this so-called miracle cure?”
“When you’re well enough to withstand a small application of electricity to your frontal lobe.”
I felt cold at that. I swung my legs out of his bed (he was sleeping on the pullout couch) and watched him take off his show clothes, hanging them up carefully and replacing them with a pair of plain white pajamas that looked like something inmate extras might wear in a horror movie set in an insane asylum. Sometimes I wondered if he might not belong in an asylum, and not because he was running what was essentially a carny wonder-show. Sometimes—especially when he talked about the curative powers of electricity—he got a look in his eyes that didn’t seem sane. It was not unlike the way he’d looked when he preached himself out of a job in Harlow.
“Charlie…” This was what I called him now. “Are you talking about shock treatment?”
He looked at me soberly, buttoning the top of his white inmate pajamas. “Yes and no. Certainly not in the conventional sense, because I don’t intend to treat you with conventional electricity. My spiel sounds unbelievable, because it’s what the customers want. They don’t come here for reality, Jamie, they come for fantasy. But there really is a secret electricity, and its uses are manifold. I just haven’t discovered all of them yet, and that includes the one that interests me most.”