Junkie Love Read Online Free Page B

and I was in trouble, and three months after the split the stress of finding these amounts of money each day was beginning to tell: I had sold just about everything that my wife and I had bought together, was rapidly running out of friends and acquaintances that I could scrounge off, and my metabolism seemed to be undergoing some kind of miraculous transformation, absorbing the drugs I fed into it like a sponge, demanding yet another shot, first eight, then six, then four, then three hours later. It was a case of diminishing returns, and destitution beckoned.
    I was also running out of girlfriends who would help to look after me. According to the accepted wisdom, prolonged use ofheroin is supposed to lower, and eventually kill, the male sex drive, but in my particular case this unfortunately didn’t happen: I was still chasing after girls in almost as compulsive a fashion as I was looking for drugs. Cocaine, which is supposed to be something of an aphrodisiac, always failed to do anything at all for me in that department, and I always regarded it as an expensive waste of money, particularly if sniffed via the nose. I used to like the rush it gave when mixed together with heroin and injected as a speedball, but apart from this method of ingestion I always thought it was a big let-down; plus, after the initial euphoria had worn off, I was always left feeling nervous, dissatisfied and paranoid. I much preferred speed as a stimulant, both for everyday use and for extended all-night fucking sessions. I also loved having sex on heroin — it took away the desire to have an orgasm, but not to fuck, and you could keep going for hours in a deliciously sensuous dream state that eventually led to some kind of Nirvana when you did finally come. The endorphins would be coursing through your system by then, not only from the smack, but from the sex too, and the after-effects were akin to floating amongst pink, fluffy clouds high up in a Himalayan sky of purest blue — total euphoria, in other words.
    I must say, though, that the search for heroin took precedence over the girl-chasing, as the penalty for failing to connect and score was much more acute, and happened much more rapidly, than if I failed to get lucky with a girl. I could easily go without sex for three or four days, longer if necessary, but thirty six hours without a hit and I’d be throwing up and shitting all over the place. And so, in this distorted economy of pleasure and pain, the search for heroin was always predominant, taking precedence over every other area of existence whether it be food, drink, sex, friendship — even, sadly, love.
    Maybe my girlfriends picked up on this; maybe they sensed I was a man without a future; maybe it was the fact that myclothes stank and my personal habits of hygiene had atrophied to an almost non-existent state. Whatever the case, the impression I got all around was of possibilities receding, avenues of opportunity being closed, future possible means of support being withdrawn, and a general shrinking in the overall sphere of my miserable existence.
    I was also heartily sick of the whole rigmarole of copping each day: first the search for money, then the telephone calls, then the tramping around the streets, followed by the endless waiting in some obscure room filled with other chain-smoking, sweating, desperate people, who had nothing at all in common other than their need for a fix. My five years as an addict in New York had at least provided some sense of challenge and excitement. I was always getting knives and guns pulled on me as I entered or left the burned-out tenement buildings in the Lower East Side, South Bronx and Harlem that the dealers used to sell out of, and there was a constant aura of danger around the whole business that was somehow attractive to a fucked-up and perverse romantic such as myself. I enjoyed the hustling and the large, freely-available sums of money that came my way from the rich Uptown addicts I would