Voices in My Head
Remembering Riding the Main Line Home
Editor’s Note: The following is a work of fiction based on real events, real people, and real places. The facts have been changed to protect the real guilty.
I don’t remember his name. It’s been lost to the dark corners of my memory. So deep that it’s been drowned out by the noise of too many other painful moments that would follow. But, I remember the moment but not his name. It’s been burned into my mind like a movie that will not stop.
His hands were smeared with too much pain, blood, and dirt. There was death waiting in that stairwell in the South Bronx. 1968. There was the smell of too much alcohol…too many cigarettes…too much pot…brown tipped fingers fumbling with the works. Improvised tools whose only job is to plunge heroin into your main vein crawling up your arm through your body into your brain. It is cold outside and inside that stairwell.
I was nineteen years old. This is not what my mother and father had wished for me. This is not what I dreamed of when I was a kid looking into the future.
Someone had thrown a grease-stained brown shopping bag out of their apartment. Its content spilling a trail of dead food…half-empty beer cans…old smelly rags from their door to the steps below me.
“I just wanna skin-pop. I don’t mainline,” I nervously said as the man with the lost name dug into a small paper. He pulled out the eyedropper. A small needle with a red cap that was supposed to protect you from being pricked. It’s a little funny now. Here I was getting ready to shove heroin…or what they claimed was heroin…into my body and I’m worried about my finger being pricked.
Up until that moment, I had been snorting or popping, injecting, under my skin Smack, H, Chiba, Junk, Skag, Dope. It takes a little longer to catch the rush but I had been assured by the best street dope experts that I wouldn’t get hooked, addicted, strung out, riding the white horse. No name wondered what the point was then. “Man, if you main, ya don’t have to use as much. Ya get high faster.” Main into the main vein. Main line. Direct to your brain.
There’s a ritual. There is always a ritual when preparing for death. First, don’t worry about sterile. Ignore the dirt on the stairs, the old blood dripping down walls that haven’t been washed since the building began, the smell of old piss and dying garbage on the landing below you or the smell that you swear is “Man, did someone shit up here?” This is not Good Housekeeping certified.
The man with the lost name had an old fifth bottle with water in it. “I cleaned the bottle man before I put water in it,” he assures me. I know he’s lying but I don’t care. He takes the rusting bottle cap off and sets it on those pissed on steps leftover from the last fool who overdosed crying for his mommy. If those stairs could only talk, I know they would warn me. “Don’t take this ride on the main line home.”
I’m starting to choke from the smell that’s floating up from below and above me and around me. There’s a small ball of cotton stuck to the inside of the cap like it’s permanently engraved there. “Gimme the bag,” no name practically begs me. I hand him the glassine envelope described in catalogs as “semi-transparent envelopes…ideal storage solution for stamp collectors, storage of negatives and plates from electron microscopes, and temporary storage of seeds.”
Today, they store a five-dollar shot of heroin. Ideal for one person but the man with no name has the works, the tools for the injection, so we’ll be sharing. “Yeah, since we be sharing one bag, you gotta main or you ain’t gonna get high.” That convinced me. See how easy it is. I needed to get high. Otherwise, why be there in that cesspool stairwell if I wasn’t going to get high with my last five dollars until payday Friday.
Into the bottle cap, he slowly shook the heroin. Careful that none fell outside the cap. Using the eye-dropper, he oh so carefully squeezed one, two, three drops of that “clean water” (I know he’s lying but like at this point who cares). You don’t want to over-dilute it. Just enough for two shots when all you had was a five-dollar bag. The water slowly mixes with the off-white specks of heroin or at least what the guy down the block in another garbage-strewn hallway on the first floor of an abandoned building swears that it’s heroin when he takes your five-dollar bill and digs into a crumpled up paper bag that he had scooped out of a garbage can full of rotting smells, “Cops ain’t going in there,” and hands it to me. “It’s all good shit.”
In the dope world, everyone lies, cheats. It’s the bargain with the devil. There’s a skill to prepare for that high that may or may not come because you’ve been beat. “Man, that ain’t no here-o-on.” Or it’s been so diluted with baby milk powder or rat poison and you’re going to die anyway so you don’t care. You cook it with a match underneath the cap until it all mixes into a muddy liquid.
Practice makes perfect as the man with no name wraps the belt around your upper arm looking for the main vein crying for the high that it knows must surely come and the muddy water sucks up through the thin needle from the bottle cap through the weeks old cotton ball up into the eyedropper back down through the needle that has invaded your bulging vein while your blood percolates back up into the eyedropper and down you plunge and the rush of warmth and you know it’s all real and authentic imported from some foreign country smuggled across thousands of miles hidden in suitcase bottoms to apartments where naked women mix it with baby milk powder (or worse) into glassine bags into the hands of Paco down the block in the human shit infected hallway into your hand into an overused rusting bottle cap with water you know ain’t clean into your main vein. This is not a trip home or into paradise.
The man with the lost name will not save you nor can you save yourself. You’re falling down those broken stairs. You swear you hear heavenly music crashing with the sounds of sirens and people screaming. Get up, dude! Get up!
Your back is thrust up against the wall. Your legs splayed in two different directions: down and up the stairs. You can see your soul falling. How is that even possible and then you realize you’re looking down on yourself. Shrinking ever smaller. Becoming a blurred memory. And suddenly you are very afraid but it is way too late for broken tears and regretful promises. You’re taking this ride on the mainline home to death’s door. Where this ain’t no fairy tale and you don’t live happily ever after.
Antonio Pedro Ruiz July 2020
