Dope by Sara Gran Read Free Book Online

dark circles underneath. Deep lines framed her mouth and ran across her forehead.
    Hank shook my hand. “So you’re Josephine Flannigan,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
    I didn’t know what he’d heard, so I didn’t answer.
    â€œWell,” Cora said. “Seeing as how we’re not having any luck with Paul, we better get to work somewhere else. Got any ideas, Joe?”
    I thought for a minute. “Gimbel’s isn’t too bad around this time,” I said. “They’ve only got a few dicks working in the afternoons, none of them too bright. If you get there around one, it’s pretty easy—all the secretaries are shopping, keeping the salesgirls tied up. If you can get to the jewelry counter, you can do pretty good.”
    Hank and Cora looked at each other, weighing their options.
    â€œJust a few weeks back I got a nice little gold ring from Gimbel’s,” I added. “But don’t even think about Macy’s. The junkies burned it down, they’re wise now. Got an undercover in every aisle. I won’t even step foot in that place unless I’ve got my best suit on and my hair done.”
    Hank and Cora looked at each other again and nodded. Gimbel’s it would be.
    After they decided where to boost from, they started on where to buy from. “Frank’s holding,” Cora said.
    Hank nodded. “Yeah. But there’s too much sugar in his stuff. Ben’s good, let’s go see him.”
    â€œBen?” Cora said, indignant. “I don’t care how good it is, I’m not paying three dollars for one damn paper. Let’s go to Jenny White.”
    â€œJenny White?” Hank threw up his hands. “She beat me good last time.”
    â€œThat wasn’t her fault! No one had anything ’cause of all that shit in Mexico. Besides, Mick told me she’s got some M . . .”
    This sparked off a lively debate on exactly how much M—morphine—was equal to how much H. Soon, I knew, they’d also have to bring in Dilaudid and opium into the comparison, even though no one was holding any, just to get all that squared away.
    I stopped listening. A junkie could talk about junk from sunup to sundown. It was like a conversation that began when you took your first shot and didn’t end until you’d had your last. Every junkie in New York, probably every addict in the world, could step into the conversation at any point and join in. There were a thousand and one topics, but they were all one topic: dope.
    And there was so much to talk about. Every junkie was an investor who could discuss whether three dollars was better spent on three heavily cut papers from Mary or two pure syrettes from Joseph, a politician who knew how events in Europe and the Far East were affecting the distribution and pricing of drugs in New York, a lawyer who knew the letter of the drug laws in every state, and a psychiatrist who could tell you just the right way to hit up their dealer for one on the cuff.
    But most of all, a junkie was a scientist. Everyone knew the business about your cells never being the same, of course. And everyone knew that dope addicts lived longer than anyone else, because dope preserved your cells, stopped them from aging—or they would live longer, if they didn’t die from overdoses and liver failure and that type of thing. Speaking of liver failure, it was a known fact that it wasn’t drugs that hurt your liver—it was the stuff the drugs were cut with. Pure dope wouldn’t do you any harm at all, if it was all you shot. But pure dope could be dangerous if you weren’t used to it. A junkie had to know exactly how much they could shoot of every form of opium there was, or risk shooting too much and overdosing.
    I tried not to listen to Hank and Cora. I thought, This was why I quit. The never-ending conversation about dope, always the same loop, around and around. There