Bud nodded blankly.
“We’re all of us addicts,” Helen said.
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“We all have fears, and hopes, and disappointments. And we all compensate for them in one way or another.”
“Sure, but the normal devices—”
“That’s just it,” Helen said. “The addict turns to a more drastic means, but he achieves the same end. What’s he trying to do, when you get right down to it? Nothing but deaden the pain of frustration. He can’t compensate in the real world, so he invents his own world, and he runs into it to hide. Why is there so much addiction in slum areas? Only because the drug is more readily available there?”
“I imagine it is,” Bud said.
“Hell, I can make a buy in five minutes right on Times Square,” Helen said. “No, it’s because so many people in those areas are trying to bridge the gap, trying to make the dream the reality.”
“Andy doesn’t come from a slum area,” Bud reminded her.
“No, he doesn’t,” Helen agreed. “And neither do I. What are you asking? Our excuse?”
“Well...”
“How can you make a blanket observation on all drug addicts, when each one will have his own unique case history? The why and the how, don’t you see? Sometimes they’re similar, sometimes they vary. The cops concentrate on the how. How does a man get hooked? How does he get to know pushers? How can we stamp it out? The psychologists concentrate on the why, and the junkie himself concentrates on that same problem whenever he gives enough of a damn to question his motives at all. Why? The big why? Insecurity? A feeling of inferiority? Life too big? Life too small? Life too sordid? Why?”
“But if he reaches the point where he’s begun to question himself, shouldn’t he know the answers?”
“Sometimes,” Helen said. “Usually not. He just knows that he needs something, and the Something makes him feel all right. It happens that the Something is drugs. It could have been alcohol. It could have been snuff. It could have been sweets. That’s where the how enters. The why is there, and something is needed, and then the how offers narcotics, and the problem is solved. Stir well, heat to boiling, and you have a drug addict. Lord have mercy on his soul.”
“Then if drugs weren’t available—”
“But they are. In all shapes and all sizes and to fit every pocketbook. From cheap bammies you can pick up at about three for a quarter—”
“Bammies?”
“Low-grade marijuana,” Helen said. “You can get the better muggles, the bombers, for about a dollar each. You can get a cap of heroin for the same price, but it’ll be cut stuff. A deck of hoss might cost you a dollar, or it might cost you five. I’ve paid as much as five for a deck when I was real low, even though that’s an incredibly high price. It depends on what the traffic will bear, you see. Once a pusher’s got you hooked, he can do whatever he wants with you. A junkie likes to deal with the same pusher usually. He knows him, and he can trust him, and he’s reasonably certain he won’t get beat stuff from him, stuff that’s cut down to practically nothing but milk sugar. The pusher sets the price, and he knows just what he can get from you. He can tell at a glance. Sometimes he’ll show a burst of generosity and lay it on you practically free. Other times you’ll pay through the nose. Sometimes he’ll extend credit. Sometimes he’ll serve as a fence for stolen goods. But the pusher is boss, and pushers aren’t exactly honorable men.”
“No, I wouldn’t think so.”
“It’s a business, a multimillion-dollar business, and the men who run it happen to be vicious. You have to be vicious to put something like the speedball on the market. Do you know what a speedball is?”
“No,” Bud said.
“It’s a little capsule of mixed cocaine and heroin. Cocaine is an excitant, and heroin is a depressant. You put them together in one pellet and you get a speedball, and it’s just that, a red-hot speedball that rips the insides out of a junkie. You’re hyped up one minute, and you’re ready to nod the next. When the jag starts wearing off, you begin shaking and sweating and heaving out your guts, and you can’t stop until you get either a shot of C or a shot of H.”
“Jesus,” Bud said.
“A speedball is only one of the more uncivilized means of torture the drug bastards are selling.” Something bitter had crept into Helen’s voice. Her eyes were hard and bright now. “They should catch them all,” she said. “They should catch them all, and then they should hang them by their thumbs, and every junkie in the world should have a turn at kicking their brains out. Death should be the penalty for trading in drugs, Bud, the way it’s the penalty for kidnaping. Death, because these men are kidnaping lives, and usually they’re kidnaping young lives.”
“Well, that’s a little strong,” Bud said.
“Is it? Is it? Look at your friend in there.” She gestured toward the bathroom door. “He’s going through hell to break it, and if he doesn’t break it, he’ll still be in hell. He’s given up everything, even his talent, for heroin. He’s a slave to the bastard who makes ten cents on a reefer, and a slave to the bastard up the line who buys a kilo of eighty-five-percent pure heroin in Italy for about five thousand dollars and then sells it to a wholesaler here for about fifteen thousand. And the wholesaler is another bastard who’ll cut the drug all the way down, shove it into capsules or decks, and gross six hundred thousand on it. Bud, you can get a pound of M in Mexico for something like ten dollars, and by the time it’s sold as reefers in New York you’re realizing sixteen hundred on it. So don’t ask how or why somebody gets started. It’s too easy to start, believe me.”
“Do you know why... why you started?”
“Yes,” Helen answered. He waited for more, but she was silent now.
“Well,” he said weakly, “let’s hope Andy can break it, too.”
“It doesn’t mean breaking it for now alone, Bud,” she said. “It means breaking it forever. That’s not as easy as it sounds.”
Andy came out of the bathroom, his face shining. He looked much better, and he seemed to feel much better, too. “What’s not as easy as it sounds?” he asked.
“You look human,” Helen said, smiling.
“I feel human. What were you talking about?”
“The monkey.”
“Oh. That again.”
“It’ll always be that, Andy. You might as well face it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think this is the hardest part, don’t you? The kicking it now. This isn’t the hardest part at all, Andy.”
Andy smiled. “Hell, it can’t get much worse.”
“Ah, but it can. And long after you’ve kicked it, or after you think you’ve kicked it. Because you always remember it. It’s very hard to forget it, especially when things take a rough turn. You remember how easy it was to escape then. You look at what you’ve got, and what you’ve got seems almost impossible to bear. And you think of how it was when you had no real worries, nothing to plague you. And it can be a very simple thing that sets you off thinking desperately about it again. Your mother can be sick, or an aunt you loved can die, or... or you can have a run in your last pair of stockings, something as damn foolish as that, and all at once it’ll seem like too much for you, all at once life will have closed in and you can’t take it any more. You’ll stare at the railroad tracks on the tom stocking, and you’ll wonder how you can ever meet this situation, how you can possibly solve it, and there’ll seem to be no solution whatever. And it can happen with anything that suddenly upsets you emotionally, anything that disturbs the careful balance you’re trying to maintain.