Junkie Love |
Ziggy and Doreen were married. She was an ex-nurse and in her mid thirties and about eight or ten years older than him. He was the precocious son of a professional family in New York whom he hated and avoided. Doreen usually wore a faded cotton dress. She had a tired, wrinkleless face framed by bobbed, brown hair. Incongruously girlish charm shown through puffy eyes over brown trenches. I calculated that she would have been starting high school when I was born. I found her attractive though and could tell that she liked me by her lingering gaze and her touching me at every opportunity. Ziggy’s hair was closer to orange than red. A mangled, kinky bush tapered to nothing by ear level. An auburn crescent of moustache tightly framed bulging pink lips. His skin was pale and cheesy. His spine was so concave that it seemed sometimes as he walked that the top half of him was trying to catch up with the bottom half. The day after they moved in, after I returned from my part-time file-clerk job, I discovered Ziggy and Doreen were junkies. “Hey,” Ziggy asked shortly after I got in the door, “will ya drive me somewheuh. It’s very impohtant or I wouldn’t ask ya.” I drove him to an elegant white Victorian with stained glass windows and turrets, at the corner of Page and Clayton, where he left me in a room for a few minutes. When we got back to my apartment, Ziggy went straight into the bathroom. I changed clothes and was fixing a sandwich when Doreen came in with a bag of groceries. “Did he get some?” she asked me. “He got some, didn’t he?” She shouted, “Ziggy! Did you get some stuff?!” She put the bag on the table and ran to the locked bathroom door and gave it a few desperate tugs. “Ziggy, baby, please honey, please save me some, please,” she cajoled softly. She pressed her cheek to a square panel of the translucent glass door. “C’mon honey, pleeeeeze…” He was conspicuously silent. “Ziggy!!!” she screeched. “You gimme some! That’s not fair.” “OK, OK” he said, his voice echoing in the tub. “You’re taking it all yourself,” she whined. “Ziggy, baby, please honey, please save me some, please. Ziggy !!! ” She grabbed a broom and banged the handle on a square section of glass on the door cracking it. Ziggy pulled the door open and came out. In his left hand he held over his head, beyond the reach of his straining wife, an eyedropper full of a syrup-tinted liquid with a needle attached. He led her into the living room. “Awright, awright, I toldjya I’d give ya some, heeuh, heeuh.” He handed her the prize in the middle of the room. She took it, pulled up her dress, pushed panty off a buttock and slid the needle in just under the skin. I got a hard–on of course from the sight of the buttock. I had followed them from the bathroom, shocked, repulsed, and fascinated. Ziggy could hardly stand up. He stepped backward and forward in a fitful rhumba as if trying to get his balance on the deck of a rolling ship. With his left hand he would yank up his pants while his right hand ran down from the top of his head over the drooping eyes, over the tiny blood-filled craters of picked scabs, and over the gaping mouth. “We’uh. . . we’uh. . .we’uh. . . we’uh gonna make soooo much money. .. with yuh cah. . . I’m. . . gonna. . . make yoooouu money. .. I’m gonna make you money. . . make you . . .”
|
|
 |
 |
|||||
 |
||||||