“George, I’d like you to meet my non-friend Bud, who is good enough to allow me the freedom of his four walls, twelve walls if you count the kitchen and the toilet. Best little non-friend I ever had. Shake hands, non-buddy.”
Oh, sure, you can joke about it. My mother always said there was no such thing as a true friend, anyway. “Never tell anyone your business,” she used to say, as if she were Barbara Hutton sitting on the Woolworth fortune. Man, why are small people full of such big ideas? But Bud and I were really friends, really and truly, and you shouldn’t joke about a good friendship, even though he’s a college boy now, because when you joke about a good friendship that’s now dead, it’s the same as joking about a good man who’s dead.
The apartment was very silent.
He could never stand the loneliness of silence. He never felt lonely when he was sitting in the center of a band, and he never felt lonely when he was high, either. We mustn’t think about getting high, must we, now must we? No, that’s all behind us, like the dead friendship between Bud and me. The friendship became a non-friendship, and now the addict is about to become a non-addict. If he could stick to it. Oh, he could stick to it, certainly he could stick to it. Was it any harder than busting double C? Well, to tell the truth, yes, it was a good deal harder, if you want to know.
There was only one real requisite for becoming a non-addict; you had to became an addict first.
What had his father called it? A dope fiend, yes.
A perfect word portrait, economical and precise. The picture of a man with his eyes feverish in his head, his lips dripping saliva, his teeth glinting, holding a needle full of (dum-dee-dum-dum)
That’s a dope fiend.
You use dope when you’re building model airplanes, too, so, using a college boy’s reasoning, we can assume that all kids who build model airplanes are dope fiends, dope.
Which reminds me a little of a tired gag I wrote back in 1492.
Morris Cohen, an intelligent little boy, says to his father upon hearing the Good Humor wagon outside, “I want an ice cream pop.”
Meyer Cohen, a man against modern development of any sort, including these newfangled ice creams on sticks, answers, “You’ll get an ice-cream cone.”
Whereupon: “You don’t understand. I want an ice-cream pop, Pop.”
Whereupon: “I understand. You’ll get an ice-cream cone, Cohen.”
Ah, the intricacies of the English language. Put that in your briar pipe and smoke it, Buddy-College-Boy.
You put opium in a pipe to smoke, you know. It’s a very gummy thing, and you ball it between your fingers and stuff it into the bowl of a pipe, and blooie, amigo, there goes your skull!
Well, not quite blooie. Blooie is for the comic books.
More like shhhhhhhlooie. A sort of sliding down, or up, but sliding anyway, just sliding away from all the petty garbage and into another world, like the world my non-friend Bud inhabits. Ah, that time on opium had been the end, but it’s really very dangerous stuff, opium, really very dangerous, so it’s better I steered away from that junk, but still it was the end, the laziest kind of high ever, not a slam like H, but that lazy, lazy, mother-loving... m-m-m, sweet.
Bud would never understand that world in a million years. No, Bud would never dig it. Nor I. Or me. Or whatever.
I don’t dig it any more either. Take that sixteenth of heroin in the coat pocket of my jacket, and take the syringe and spoon in the inside pocket of that same jacket, and take a book of matches to cook the junk with — take all that, pal, and welcome to it because I’m off that kick, dad.
And I don’t feel too bad this morning either. No breakfast, and maybe that’s the reason. Hell, you can’t throw up something you haven’t had yet. But nonetheless, and even so, I feel pretty good. Which just shows to go you can’t keep a good man down, even if you stick him in a prison and appoint a couple of dedicated jailers to guard him.
I need jailers like I need a hole in the head. Don’t they realize I’m off it for good this time? Can’t they see that I mean it this time? They must be blind if they can’t see that. What do I have to do to show them?
Damnit, that’s what burns my butt. Not a little knee-high fire, but that, just that. They should be able to see that I’m sincere this time. Didn’t I pass a fix by yesterday? Wasn’t I all set to shoot up, and didn’t I say no thanks, thanks a lot, but no thanks? Didn’t I have that needle all set, just, just... now don’t start thinking about needles and fixes because that doesn’t help the situation one bit. But still, it burns me up that they don’t trust me. If they don’t trust me, who the hell is going to trust me, when I can’t even trust myself, when I...
I can trust myself.
I’m all alone here. Where the hell is Carol? And there’s junk and the works in the closet across the room. How many steps to that outfit? Three, four, five? But I’m not making a move for it, am I? So doesn’t that prove I can trust myself? What the hell else does it prove? I’m not crippled, and I can get up any time I want to and walk right over to that closet, and how long does it take to ram a needle into my arm. Now get off that kick, Dick, because that’s the suicide kick. You’ve got the goddamn thing under control, so don’t think about the closet, or the jacket, or what’s in the jacket pockets. Screw that noise, boys.
Now just simmer down. That’s the biggest enemy, thinking about it. When Helen was kicking the habit, she wouldn’t even think about it. She wouldn’t let me come near her with the stuff, and she wouldn’t allow her mind to come anywhere near it either. So let’s forget whatever the hell is in that closet. There I’ve forgotten it already, I don’t even know what’s in that closet, let’s just forget it and think of something else.
There must be a lot of things to think about, so what shall we think about on this bright sunny morning?
Now there’s a bright sunny morning, so that should give us a bright sunny idea. And there it is: a bright sunny idea. Bottle it, cork it, and paint it green. And then march with it in the Saint Patty’s Day parade.
The trouble with Saint Patrick, in case anyone is interested, is that he drove the snakes out of Ireland, and all the bastards came here and became traffic cops.
Now we’re doing it. Now we’re beginning to think of other things. This is what the cartoonists call “snowballing.”
Cops, was it? All right, cops, why not cops? Of course, the cops and I are old friends, so we mustn’t speak of the cops disrespectfully. We’re even better old non-friends than Buddy and me — don’t you remember all the times with the cops, oh, you remember, surely you remember? Yes, I remember but we’re not supposed to think about things like... but this wouldn’t be thinking about things like that, this would be thinking about cops, like the time on the roof, don’t you remember, don’t you remember the time on the roof, don’t you remember every single line of that dialogue? Oh, Christ, you were pretty damn sharp that day, and you hadn’t even been fixed, don’t you remember that day?
It was very hot up there on the roof. The sun was just a hazy ball of yellow in the sky, and it shone down on the slick tar of the roof, and it glanced off the skylight and reflected from the badges on the chests of the two cops.
The second cop was leaning over the brick wall on the edge of the roof and looking down into the courtyard. He had a very fat backside, and the blue of his uniform stretched tight over his wide, abundant buttocks. The first cop was fat, too, but not so much as the second one was. He held my elbow in one beefy paw, and then he said, “All right, cokie, what’d you do with it?”