"Until we meet again," he said.
I walked out into the street, pondering my choice.
My place depressed me.
I poured myself half a tumbler of whiskey and walked around, holding the drink in my hand. I opened the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and looked at my works—the hypo, the eye-dropper and the old spoon, blackened on the bottom, in which I'd cooked so many batches of heroin. Sooner or later I'd go back to it, I knew, even though I kidded myself into thinking I might be off the stuff for good.
Then the old round would begin again. The frantic search for a pusher when my supply ran low. Setting up a meet in some cafeteria or lunch counter to get the stuff. Rushing back to my place, with every stranger looking like a copper ready to tap me. The search in my poor scarred arm for a vein that hadn't withdrawn out of sight. Maybe even the necessity for a messy skin injection. The fleeting relief.
And then the anxiety of no money. A dirty job, possibly washing dishes in some greasy kitchen if the heat was on. Or risking a stint of lush-working in the subway, haunted by copper jitters and five-twenty-nine—five months and twenty-nine days in the workhouse—if they nabbed me "jostling" a drunk.
I couldn't go back to that life. I couldn't—but I would. I always had. You reach a point where you can't change any more. It's too late—you're too old—you don't know anything else—you've got no connections outside the squalid circle of users, pushers, teaheads, queers and petty crooks who are nowhere and never will be anywhere.
It was a limbo, a hell on Earth.
I swallowed my drink in burning gulps.