"Oh, hello, Jones. Creepin' up on people again. Sit down. This is Barry."
I acknowledged the introduction. I was sure Jones wasn't his real name any more than Barry was mine. I asked him if I could buy him a cup of coffee and he said no, and then Rollo left. Rollo'd mumbled something about business, but I got the feeling he didn't like being around Jones any more than he had to.
"I understand you are interested in my product," Jones said. He had dark brown eyes, almost black. He didn't talk like a pusher, but you can't always make generalizations.
"I don't want to score any," I said. "At least not right now. I'm off the stuff, but I take a sort of philosophical interest in it, you might say."
"I could not sell you any at the moment, in any case," Jones said. "I do not make a practice of carrying it on my person."
"Of course not. But what is it? Rollo tells me it's not the usual junk. I wondered if maybe it was yage."
Yage was something you kept hearing about but never saw yourself. It was always somebody who knew somebody else who'd tried it. Yage was the junkie's dream. You never caught up with it, but you heard hints in conversation.
An addict would give himself a fix of Henry, sliding the needle into the vein, and later, as his tension relaxed, he'd say to his connection, "I hear yage is the real kick—they tell me that compared to yage, heroin is the least." And the connection would say, "That's what they tell me, but I never seen any of it myself. They have it in the Amazon or someplace, I hear."
It's always hearsay. But after a while you hear so much about it that you believe it's got to be around somewhere, so you keep asking. I asked Jones.
"I could show you yage," Jones said, and I felt a tingle, like a kid promised his first kiss. "But it would disappoint you."