Post by Chris Hedges on Sept 3, 2010 14:46:10 GMT -6
Boneyard Smack
By: G. N. Braun
By: G. N. Braun
The whole block stank of heroin….at least it did to me. Not literally, but I could sense its presence there as an undercurrent. A plethora of odors combined and assaulted my senses: dirty laundry, rubbish left too long in someone’s trashcan, Asian cooking with that distinctive ginger and lemongrass smell. Combined, it smelt like smack to me.
Or at least somewhere I could score.
There’s at least one neighborhood like this in every city. You just have to know what to look for. I knew.
I took the main street slowly, looking for someone who was holding, but there seemed to be no one around…maybe the pigs had just cruised the street and scared all the dealers away for a while. I sure didn’t need this to be a long search. Sometimes, most of the time, it was easy to find someone selling. Walk along the street with your sunglasses off, and within seconds, someone would look you in the eye and give a slight nod of the head, to ask if you were looking to score. I needed this to be one of those times.
I was sick. I was deep into withdrawal: cold sweats, shivering, that unique feeling like there was a million electric fleas crawling around under my skin…and my legs were aching something terrible. I had to score soon, or I’d be too sick to get out and keep looking.
I looked amongst the shoppers for the tell tale signs of junk addiction. Skinny, hunched over, bad skin, someone casting furtive glances both forward and to the rear while on the lookout for cops or dealers.
My junkie vision focused, drawing my attention to the group of people scurrying in the opposite direction, a conga line of marionettes, jerking and hustling their way down the street…junkies, all of them, obviously heading toward a score, so I hastened and caught up with them as unobtrusively as I could.
‘Hey bud, anyone holding?’ I asked the strung-out remnants of a man at the back of the pack.
‘There’s a dude in the cemetery, man. Good shit, too!’
‘How much for a cap?’ I queried.
‘Fifty bucks, man, and it’s worth it. It’ll hold you for half the day, this stuff.’
He looked excited as he spoke, so I had hopes that it wasn’t a rip.
I pulled a fifty out of my pocket as we approached the cemetery, wanting to try the gear before I spent any more on what could be nothing more than aspirin cut into little bricks and sold as smack. It wouldn’t be the first time I was ripped off, and surely wouldn’t be the last.
The cemetery looked weird, almost round in shape with a high brick and steel fence line. At the centre of the graveyard was a small, circular church. Headstones, both old and new, stood in exact circular rows radiating out from the church. It was weird.
As we shuffled through the gates of the small boneyard, I wondered why the cops hadn’t put in an appearance…any group of junkies heading for a score stands out like dogs balls on a canary. What I saw ahead soon answered that for me.
A cop car, parked inside the cemetery, had about eight junkies lined up at the window… the local cops were also the smack connection in this suburb. I had seen this before, but never as blatant as this was. Obviously, the cops in this area had all the drug dealing under control. They were dealing it themselves.
I shuffled forward as the line grew shorter in front of me. Eventually it was my turn.
‘Watcha want?’ The grizzled old pig in the passenger seat asked me as I got to the open window.
‘Gimme a cap, officer.’
‘Fifty bucks, son’ He held out his hand, and as I placed the money there he reached out with the other hand and gave a small, foil-wrapped parcel to me. It looked a good size, as long as there weren’t five layers of silver foil put there to disguise the tiny amount of drug contained therein.
I made my way to the back of a concrete headstone, and crouched down, pulling my fit, spoon and water from my sock. I opened the foil, taking a good look at the heroin inside. It looked real, and when I chipped a small piece away with my fingernail, it tasted the real deal too.
I mixed the smack in my spoon with thirty lines of water, sucked up the liquid through a small piece of cigarette filter, and slid the syringe into the vein in my left elbow joint.
As soon as I saw blood blossom in the fit, I pushed down the plunger, filling my vein with liquid death.
I knew straight away that I had had too much, my heart slowing down in my chest and my vision going grey around the edges, like looking at a dull, overcast day through a long tunnel. I slumped down to the ground, my back resting against the headstone I was crouched behind. A feeling of utter peace started to overcome me…a strange dichotomy when combined with the realization that I may well be dying.
I didn’t hear the cop come up from behind until he was standing over me.
‘Better call the morgue, Joe’ he called out to his partner. ‘This one’s on a one way trip to Hell.’
I vaguely heard his partner call out in answer ‘Best way I know to get rid of all the junkies…sell ‘em the good stuff, and watch ‘em drop!’
The last thing I saw was an image of other addicts overdosing in the circular boneyard, being stacked like cordwood by two cops, then the whole thing spiraling away to nothing as I drifted off to the last sleep I would ever know.
Nope…this sure as Hell wasn’t aspirin.
