Marijuana Girl Page 12

  "That, and other, similar experiences, started another habit in Joyce. If you got in trouble, the way this other habit ran in her mind, it made people pay attention to you. So, that's what she did. She went out of her way to get in trouble."

  "She did that, all right," Tony said. "She was always doing things in school to put her in hot water."

  "Yes. But always with the hope of getting attention from her parents--the people who couldn't be bothered with her. I've got habits like that, too. So have you. You could probably notice mine, and I could notice yours. But neither of us can see his own. Joyce too. She isn't aware of these habits. But she has them. In psychology these would be called insecurity conflicts. But there's something else, too. Part of the urge to get into trouble is to punish her parents, because she's really angry with them for rejecting her. And that's another habit that she's carried over into her life with other people besides her parents. You were angry with her one day because she missed a date with you. So she punished you. She went out with me. And, from her habit point of view, she managed to get in trouble with me. She smoked marijuana that night for the first time. She did what her mind and emotions thought of as 'wrong things'--getting in trouble. That was because she wanted you. She has still another habit. Her parents failed to love and protect her. So she developed a habit of looking for love and protection--looking even harder than anyone else does--because we all do that. When she found love, any kind of love, she habitually tried to make a parent, a father, for herself out of the person who loved her. And the better the role fitted, the better she liked it She tried it first with you. Then, when you were angry with her, she tried me. I was older. I actually was a father. That was good. She could fit the pattern that she wanted on me more easily than on you. I was free enough of my parents--because I didn't have any around--to make a father figure for her, better than you could. Do you get all this?"

  "Yeah," Tony said, a shade of surprise in his voice. "It sort of makes sense."

  "Didn't you expect it to?"

  "Not at first. But now it does. It was like that with Jerry and Ginger? They sort of were parents for her, too? Right?"

  "That's it. Now the narcotics come into the picture. When Jerry broke up with Ginger, the shock was suddenly more than she could take. She needed something to cushion it--the way people have a drink when they're upset. For Joyce, heroin was really no different than marijuana--but it was stronger. Marijuana won't let you forget your troubles, unless they're very minor ones. But heroin will. So it was easy for her to go along with Ginger. Ginger was protecting her. Ginger was a kind of mother. She would see that nothing bad happened. But when the police took Ginger away, then she had to lean on the heroin itself. The heroin made her able to forget how desperately she needed love. The heroin let her feel good enough for herself. In a way the final step, her turning to prostitution to get the money for the heroin, was the same sort of thing. Every time a man paid her for love, he convinced her that she was worth something. Do you understand that, too?"

  "Yes. I get it. But a lot of these things go on at the same time. They kind of overlap. Several habits push her at once. Is that it?"

  "That's right. Now I'm one of these bad habits with her. I fit her role of a father figure too well. Jan--my wife--wouldn't object to my seeing Joy if it would save her from heroin. But I can only supply a temporary remedy. The real remedy isn't there anyway. She's a grown girl. She doesn't really want a father. She really wants a lover--a man of her own. And that's where you fit in, and I don't. Dig?"

  Tony grinned. "I dig. The normal-er it is, the better. And the thing I've got to do is convince her I really love her--no matter what, but more when she's good than when she's bad."

  "That's right. And it's slow. It won't happen right away. There's one other thing, too. I don't think--I'm not sure of this--but I don't think that Joyce is a full-fledged heroin addict. Not yet. Not in the physiological sense. From what Jerry could find out from one of the men who sells her heroin, she isn't taking enough for that. It hasn't been long enough for her to need that much. But if it goes on longer, then she will need it." He stood up. "If you want anything from me, any time, I'll do what's necessary."

  Tony got up to go. "I'll keep in touch," he said. He was suddenly very adult.

  17 ~ Resolution

  She was asleep when the telephone rang. Asleep, but not undressed. Her skirt had worked up around her waist, and her blouse was open and the bra unfastened at the back. Her shoes lay on the chenille coverlet beside her feet, and she had unhooked her nylons from their panty supporter so they had fallen around her slender ankles to give them an elephantine look. The lipstick had smeared about her mouth, and made a gory display on the rumpled pillow case. Her coat lay on the floor where it had fallen when she came in, and there deep grooves from the wrinkled cloth pressed into the soft flesh of her cheeks. She had a damaged soiled look as she dragged herself up from sleep and stumbled toward the clattering instrument.

  She held the open blouse together as she bent to the phone, though there was no one to see.

  "Hello?" Her voice was soggy and hoarse.

  "Joy? Is that you Joy?"

  "Who's this?" Her head ached and there was a fierce pressure in her chest.

  "Tony, Joy. It's Tony. Tony Thrine."

  Her mind refused to take in the words.

  "Tony! Joy. Don't you know who I am? Honeybun, what's the matter?"

  She didn't answer. Her nerves crawled under her skin, and there was a fierce itching.

  "Can't you hear me?"

  "I hear you."

  "Joy, I've got to see you."

  "Look," Joy said. "I can't talk now. Call me back in an hour." She dropped the phone into its cradle and dragged her wretched body to the bureau, yanking open the drawer. Her hands shook with a fierce ague as she spilled the capsule into the bent spoon, and then were so uncontrollable that the white powder fell to the floor.

  Frantically, as though her very life depended upon it, she scraped it up with a torn fragment of paper, disregarding the dust and lint that clung to the precious particles.

  Then, in an easy routine that was complicated by the unmanageability of her hands, she followed the ritual formula of the junkie, slipping the needle into the scarred vein, and sucking the blood up again and again to flush out the last vital drop.

  Then, with a great sigh, she sank into the worn armchair, letting her body relax against the shabby fabric, feeling herself come alive in one great tidal wave of relief.

  After a few minutes the phone call floated, like disembodied words without meaning, into her mind. She tried to attach meanings to them, with little hooks that slipped from the letters and slid away before the whole thing could be decoded. Then, by and by, the meanings began to stick. "Tony." "Honeybun." "I've got to see you."

  And with the meanings came panic. Not Tony! Never Tony! He must never see this,

  She couldn't remember what she had said, she couldn't recall what she had told him. It was so ordinary to say, "I'll meet you in the bar at Fifty-second and Sixth in half and hour." Was that what she had told Tony? How did he know where she was? Had he traced her? Was he outside the front door of the house, waiting in case she came out? Had she left such an easy trail? What if he came in, now, and found her like this?

  Joyce got to her feet and went over to the mirror. The fabric wrinkles had gone from her face, but the thinness had given it an artificial maturity, shearing off the roundness of youth, molding the young skin to the bone structure.

  Joyce saw nothing of that, only the wild hair, the mussed and gaping blouse, the slipped bra, the smeared cosmetics, the deep-shadowed eyes.

  Got to get cut of here. Got to leave before Tony finds me. Hit the road, tart!

  She pulled the blouse from her shoulders and dropped it on the floor, then reached behind her and hooked the band of the bra. She went to the washbowl and scrubbed frenziedly at her face with a damp cloth. An irritated color rose sullenly to her cheeks. Got to get out of
here.

  She went to the closet to look for a dress--and the phone rang again. For a long time--seven or eight rings--she stood it, and then she went and picked up the instrument. "Hello."

  "Hiya, honeybun." Tony's voice was tense, as though the enthusiasm he injected into it was costly and hard gained.

  "Hello, Tony. How are you?" That was the attitude. Friendly. Cool. Polite.

  "I'm fine. How is everything with you?"

  The conversation was becoming more strained. Already. Joyce said, "How is everybody in Paugwasset?"

  "Look, baby," Tony said. "I didn't call to talk to you about everybody back home. I want to see you. I didn't want to bust in on you, or anything. But can't we meet somewhere?"

  And suddenly she wanted nothing else. It would be, almost, like--she didn't know what it would be like. But it would be wonderful. "All right, Tony. Where shall we meet?"

  "Down here. In the Village?"

  No. It must be, now, on neutral ground. Somewhere she had not been. Under other circumstances. She was silent, thinking.

  "Or anywhere else. It doesn't matter," Tony said.

  They met in a cafeteria on Lexington Avenue, where the continual tidal flow of people assured a paradoxical privacy. He was waiting for her when she came in, watched her walking across the table-littered floor, saw her looking about for him from behind dark green glasses, and finally caught her eye.

  She came over and sat down at the table, letting the coat slip from her shoulders onto the chair back.

  Tony knew enough about clothing to see that this was a different Joyce. She looked older in a way that he could not define. She made him seem almost kiddish.

  For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Tony reached over and took her hand. "Joy, I've been trying so hard to find you--all this time."

  "I didn't really want to be found," Joyce said. "How did you find out about me? Through Jerry?"

  "Uh-hunh. He saw you at the Stuyvesant, wherever that is, and then he came out to see Frank, and Frank called me over and--well, here I am. I saw you once on the street. In Washington Square. You went uptown on a bus and I tried to follow you in a cab, but I lost you."

  "How is Frank?" Joyce asked.

  "All right." He had managed to keep that one under control, though it had plucked a chord of jealousy.

  Joyce reassured him. "Don't look like that," she said. "He's a wonderful guy, but--not for me."

  "What about us?"

  "What do you mean, us?"

  "I mean I want to see you. I want to be with you."

  "Easy does it, baby," Joyce said. "You don't know about me anymore. I'm not Joyce Taylor from Paugwasset any more, I'm somebody else."

  "Oh, stop it, honeybun. You just think you're different."

  "Aren't people what they think they are?"

  "Not if what they think is wrong."

  "Look, Tony," Joyce said, "I'm not a good local talent any more. I've changed. And if you don't know about it, Jerry can tell you. Even Frank can. They know what happened. Especially Jerry. I'm bad, now. I'm different." There was a sort of a pleasure for Joyce in hearing the words coming out of her mouth--in hearing herself say these things. "You don't know what's happened to me. You don't know how I live. What I am. What I do."

  "Yes, I do." He said it softly, not trying to keep the injury from showing in his face. "I know about the whole thing. About your--work. About the dope. I know all about you."

  Then, because some inner feeling told him that it was the thing to do, he searched out the past in his mind and brought it up and drew it all there, in words, at the little table in the cafeteria. About Paugwasset, and boats, movies, and the Senior play in which they had appeared together. About Chester's and about Harry Reingold going to N.Y.U. with Tony. And then--more cautiously--about how Joyce's parents had come back from Europe, and how they were looking for her, and how he and Frank, with Jerry's information, had decided that whether they should be told, or not, was something for Joyce, herself to decide.

  Then he said, "Honeybun, you've got to come back home. We all want you to come back. Honest."

  It was as though he had pierced some kind of armor in which she had been girded. He saw she was crying and held out a handkerchief to her. She shook her head. Then she stood up. "I have to go, now," she said. "I can't stay any longer."

  He didn't try to hold her. "When can I see you again?"

  "I don't know. Where can I call you?"

  He tried desperately to think of some place where he could be reached. But the N.Y.U. student is a transient in the Village. There is no center of communication. Frantically he searched his mind. There had to be some place, and it was clear that she didn't want him to call her. He didn't know why it was important for her that it be this way--that she call him and not he call her--but some intuition told him that it was.

  Then he thought of a little craft shop on West Fourth Street. He would arrange it there, and then see them once a day. Maybe pay them something to take messages for him. He told her the name of the place, and then, because he wanted to be sure, went to a phone booth and looked up the number.

  "All right," Joyce said. "I'll remember." And he watched her as she went out through the wheeling door into the hurrying avenue.

  Tony saw Frank again. They sat in the livingroom of Burdette's house and drank rye with beer chasers, and Tony felt adultness coming into him as they talked--and as the soft tentacles of intoxication reached up into his mind.

  "I don't know, Frank," he said. "I couldn't seem to reach her. It was like meeting somebody you haven't seen in a long time and you're still anxious to talk to them, but things have changed so much with them that everything you say has lost any kind of meaning. I couldn't even see her face, really, on account of those sunglasses."

  "Sunglasses?"

  "She even wore them indoors."

  "She was high when you talked to her, then."

  "How do you know?"

  "Well, it wouldn't be surprising, anyway. The first thing that would happen when she knew she was going to meet you would be for her to get on, because she'd be afraid to face you unprotected. I imagine that for that one time, at least, it was a good thing. Because if she hadn't she would probably have run away, and hidden, and we'd never find her again."

  "But what do I do?"

  "Nothing."

  "I've got to do something."

  "Don't press her. Don't call her. Try not even to think about her. Just make sure that you get any message she does leave for you. And no matter what happens, meet her exactly when and where she tells you to. Understand?"

  "Okay. I hope you know what I'm doing. I don't."

  Tony waited.

  Joyce went to see a doctor, somewhere in this period. She didn't expect him to be much help, and he wasn't. He recommended the substitution of ordinary sedation. Barbiturates. And gradual reduction of dosage with heroin. Even more strongly he recommended commitment to a private hospital, where all this would be seen to by medical authorities. And, as a last alternative, he suggested voluntary entrance in the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky.

  Joyce knew that much herself.

  She tried the ex-junkies of her acquaintance. They knew more. "You got to make it cold turkey. There's no other way. You stop. You quit. The end. You can't make it otherwise. You can't cut down. You'll flip. You'll flip anyway. But you get it done."

  And then there were the "Johns." She still needed the money, as she always had. Day after day, always money. Money to get straight. Money for food. Money for clothes. Always money.

  She was making up her mind. You had to make up your mind. Even Roy Mallon told her, "Nothing does it, Joy, without you make up your mind. When you do, it's licked. You got to kick it--cold turkey. No tapering. No messing. Cold turkey."

  But she didn't believe them. She cut it out for one day. Two days. And the third day she had to hit it again. And the next day was a postponement of stopping. And so was the next.


  She wanted to call Tony. Sometimes in the morning, she lay on the sweat-damp sheets thinking of Tony, thinking how he was no farther from her than the telephone sitting there on the small table against the wall. She thought about that. And then she thought about the "Johns." Good guys, too. A little rigid. A little frightened--even of Joyce. Feeling guilty whenever they saw her, and, at the same time, wanting her, even wanting the fright and guilt of being with her. Not like Eric. With Eric it was love--of a sort--and braggadocio. He wanted to be able to talk about her. He wanted to be able to tell his friends how he had cured a bad girl of drugs, how he had made her over. He felt, somehow, that it would make for prestige. And then he would think to himself that, having done this, he had possession of her.

  And that had to be avoided, too. Because of Tony.

  Always Tony. And if she saw Tony again, it was the end of the "Johns." It had to be, because, even now, the thought of them and their possession of her--her ceaseless seduction of them--made the mornings harder, made the need for horse greater, made it that much harder ever to call Tony.

  And then, one day, she did.

  She met him in the cafeteria at N.Y.U., that second time. She was wearing sunglasses, and when she took them off her eyes looked like hard little balls, as though nothing were getting through them to her mind.

  He kept telling her, "Joy, I love you. I really do. But you've got to get off this damned habit of yours."

  It was all right when he didn't press. She could talk about getting off heroin, then. But if he tried to force her, tried to insist, she hardened up. That day she said, "Why should I? I'm no good to anybody. Not to anybody. I'm what they call a fallen woman. Really, that's what I am. A no good, down and out, rotten harlot." Her voice rose, and he had to take her out of the cafeteria. And then she said, "See, you're ashamed of me, aren't you?"

  Tony shook his head.

  She said, "Yes, you are. And you're right." Then she ran away from him, and it was another week before he saw her again.

  When he did, she looked ill. Her eyes were sunken, and she seemed to have a cold. She kept yawning and sighing as he spoke to her.