Blood Oranges (9781101594858) Read Online Free Page B

seemed a small enough price to pay. Most of us kids turned tricks, whether in back alleys, parked cars, in motel rooms, or bedrooms. It was a good way to supplement the Dumpster diving, panhandling, and shoplifting. You did what you did to get by, and, more often than not, dignity was just something that got in the way of staying alive. The way we saw it, and the way I still do, dignity’s not a right, it’s a privilege.
    There was sour coffee from Cumberland Farms (sometimes the clerks let us have that for free), loads of Sweet’N Low, and those packets of salsa from Taco Bell. No one cared how much of that shit you stuffed into your pockets. There was vodka and beer when we got lucky. There were a hell of a lot of stale Dunkin’ Donuts.
    Later on, the vampire would remark that I seemed awfully literate for a street-junky dropout. Truth is, it’s usually pretty dull out there for Providence’s wretched refuse. There’s a whole lot of time on your hands between foraging and dodging the police and the gangs who want to fuck with you. A whole lot of boredom. You deal with it best you can: sex, drugs, conversation, walking the tracks. I knew two girls who decided they’d be hobos, both of them all full of Depression-Era romance of life of the rails. They jumped a boxcar headed for Manhattan, and we never heard from them again, so maybe they found something better. I can’t even remember their names. I like to think the two of them, they’re still out there somewhere and they’re okay.
    But me, for the first couple of years I dealt with the boredom by hanging out in the Providence Athenaeum on Benefit Street. The librarians didn’t mind, just so long as they didn’t catch me sleeping. They knew me by name, and every now and then, this one particular librarian, she’d recommend a book she thought I might like; usually, she was right. I couldn’t have a library card, of course, since I didn’t have a permanent address (never mind it cost a hundred bucks). Anyhow, there you have it, the mystery of my literacy solved. Also, the Athenaeum’s restroom was a good place to wash up every now and then.
    The heroin didn’t come along until three years after I took to the streets. Not a long story there, and I won’t try to make it one. It was a snowy day in November, and I was camped out in an old textile mill, wrapped in stolen U-Haul moving blankets and a sleeping bag I’d found somewhere. And Jim, this mostly Portuguese dude, with a green Mohawk and duct tape on his boots, he told me he could keep me warm. He cooked my first dose over his shiny silver Zippo, and shot it into my arm. Next day, he came back to the mill and taught me how to do the deed for myself, and sometimes he’d even get generous and slip me a free Baggie, if I’d blow him or jerk him off. He knew there was no turning back for me, and I knew it, too. Jim, he gave me wings (that was, by the way, drug slang a long time before Red Bull came along). He showed me how to fly.
    I stopped going to the library. I almost stopped eating. Whatever money I could scrounge went to smack. The days blurred together. But it was good. Or at least it was better. Lots of times I thought I’d get lucky and OD, or get a bad batch—a ten-cent pistol, in junk-speak. I never scored from anyone but Jim, and his junk was always clean. I took up with this chick from Wickford who was also a junky. We were both always too fucked up for sex, but it was good to be close to someone on the freezing nights. Her name wasn’t Lily, but that’s what she liked to be called, so that’s all I ever called her.
    And now, at long fucking last, I’m coming to what the vampire referred to as the “interesting portion” of my sad, sad tale of woe and misfortune. The night one of the nasties came creeping up from the sewers and the subbasement and the basement of our abandoned mill by the