The Heroine

I must tell you about Wednesday before it fades and turns unreal. I’m doing this thing about the sewers – the history, the illicit attraction in the undersmellybelly. I came across Jinx Magazine, a group of political explorers who adventure in sectioned-off New York. They climb bridges and see water tunnels – mainly dressed in cocktail suits and dark glasses. They have a monthly Athenaeum on the first Monday of the month in a bar on the lower east side and because I was late I took a taxi.

Now I need to tell you that the night was fretful. It was twanging like the string in some instrument. It was cold but the wind wasn’t blowing straight. I don’t know if the stars were inclined or disinclined or if the moon was hauling itself across men’s eyes. I couldn’t tell if the air was full of fortune or if I could hear the sound of dice rolling towards an unlikely series of malevolent coincidences. I make these gobbledygook words because this is what happened:

First, before the meeting, I forgot my shopping in the shop and had to go back. I nimbled down the steps of my building and was heading fast up the street because the water was boiling and the sauce was simmering. A man was walking along and he saw and me and turned. He was wearing a woollen hat and he said, “You got a cell phone bro because I think some brothers are chasing me, something about a girl…” I didn’t know what to say but put my hand on my phone and looked around for the running gang of thugs but there was none – just the campy men and well dressed women that rush up and down fourth street at any old time. I was in a hurry for my sauce but this man wasn’t. I was walking faster than him yet he was on the run. I went on and heard him ask a man who was darting into the cigar shop, he asked: “You got a razorblade, bro?” And the man said “What?” And went into the shop.

After the pasta and with many of my clothes on, I climbed into the taxi. The driver’s name was BYFIELD THEOPHILUS, and his picture showed a middle aged black guy looking straight, uncomplicatedly, at the camera. The name sounded like gold letters off the back of a leather book, I felt like I’d climbed into a taxi with Virgil. That he was going to spin off 4th street and plunge us down the nearest pothole and into the special circle of Manhattan hell, the fifth avenue inferno, with melting gold carpets and burning city fathers, the Rockefellers and Fricks, the Pulitzers and Tammany Halls. Byfield didn’t. He just drove and nearly crashed as a car came whizzing past our left hand side on Houston St. “Where you rushing to?” Asked Byfield. “Where you gonna get to? The next red light.” And then, in a mixture of anger and pity, “You sick son of a bitch.”

Byfield dropped me off and I crossed over Broome Street where I saw the electric purple light from the bar woozing out into Allen St. As I crossed Broome I had to wait on the island between the lanes of speedy traffic and their bright eyes. In these partitions in New York, especially on Broadway up near Columbia, they have built places to sit between the lanes of traffic, with benches and bushes to protect you from the worst of the clouds and flying grit. They have always struck as unpleasant places to sit, the sort of happy wish you see in white architects models where small plastic figures sit under the glass ceiling of the model, talking very quietly and minutely about their plastic lives. In New York, these places are not quiet but still you occasionally see people bravely eating their lunch in the raw and the maw, gobbling their tomato sandwiches in the fumes. Sometimes they make me feel dimly self-conscious, as I’m waiting for a gap in the traffic in their living room. All this to say that when I crossed Broome Street with a few minutes to spare before 8 o’clock as the wind blew cold and uncommon on Wednesday night, I did not necessarily expect to see anybody passing the time of day on that crossing. But I did.

Two cars backed up onto the partition. Lights on, blasting at the waiting pedestrian, windows down, music on, two men talking to each other from one car to the next. It was a very dominant way to hang out on a crossing. They ruled, no doubt, as they talked from car to car. It seemed so wasteful. Why didn’t they get into the same car? Turn the lights off? Relax? No. It was as if they were stuck into their cars, face it, like the shoepeople.

So across the road and I was early for the Athenaeum. I wanted some calm so I thought I would walk the block and relax before impinging on this session – I didn’t know if there would be secret knocks or tests of adventuring wildness in store and I wanted to be ready. I pulled up my coat and walked up just one block before I came upon a woman really just dragging a very small dog around the corner like a child’s train on a piece of string. Yet this small dog had a pink cast on its leg. The victim of an accident, “That’s my baby,” she said as she dragged. My friends the streets were varied. So I headed for the secrets of the bar.

Which was a presentation by a funny blond young normal woman about our age: “Heroin: The Hobby that Ruined My Life.” It was in a basement under blue lights, with her off-lit by a single bulb and the rest of the Jinx collective – really just wearing their camper shoes and black clothes like any other creative-urban-manifesto-riddle-group – sat on a bench up against the wall, drinking their beer and laughing. Because she was funny. Funny and frank and really I’m as naïve as a buffalo but I had never heard heroin addiction talked about in this way, with no particular heroic or tragic narrative. The same as this good blog here, by the way. Just a sort of: “Really the methadone doesn’t taste that good, it’s just like this cup of liquid and yeah, you can’t get high while you’re taking it.” She talked about how she got into heroin when she was sixteen and depressed (her basic thing was that a lot of addiction is self-medication for depression, which I find in-teresting) and then developed a substantial sniffing appetite before she thought, “Right I’m taking like 4 bags a day but when you sniff you waste loads of the drug, so maybe I should start injecting and then I can maybe cut down to one bag a day, I thought it was like a smart thing to do.”

So she got a needle from the neighbour’s diabetic cat and got going – and she rocketed, she zoomed in bliss to ten bags a day. Now that’s some scary heroin habit – a chippy as she told us they called it. $100 a day. In the loos at work, at home, in the morning, every couple of hours, take it or you get sick. That was the word she kept using, sick. When you’re high you feel normal, without it, you’re sick, like the flu but you’re twitching, they called it kicking because you’re legs kick, and your bones feel like they’re burning. After detox after retox after drug camp after being arrested, she got on methadone and stopped using. From the dates she gave I would guess she was addicted to heroin from 18-22, and now she was 23. God so young and so worldly, underworldly, standing in the East Village by a payphone with her coffee, talking to her crew – “You meet a lot of people through dope” – stealing from her home and all the jobs she did.

At the end a Spanish-sounding man said we had been laughing too much, some of his friends had been killed by heroin. And she said something like this in reply:

“I don’t mean any disrespect. I’ve had friends die as well but like, this is my way of talking about it, like it’s a normal thing. It fucked me up. I feel fucked up about it. I lost a bunch of time. But like, I’m better now, I’m doing other things, whatever. I could just think about how awful it all is all the time but like, I would end up shooting myself in the head. I’m better now.”

And today it started to snow.