Marijuana Girl (12 page)

"I just want to know where Joy is, Mr. Burdette."

"Frank," Frank said, automatically. Then, "Don't you know?"

"Of course I don't. I wouldn't be asking if I did."

"I haven't seen her." The fright wag growing. What had happened to the kid? Had she been hurt?

"When was the last time you saw her?" Tony demanded.

"Not since the summer. What's the trouble?"

"Neither has anybody else."

"Sit down," Frank said. He dropped into a chair and extended a cigarette to the boy from a crumpled pack on the coffee table. "Let's get this straight now. I haven't seen her at all since the left the paper last summer. Sit down, fella." Tony sat down. Frank picked up the table lighter and fired both cigarettes.

"Now," he said, dragging deeply at the cigarette, "you tell me what happened and I'll tell you." Frank was getting some control of himself now.

"I had a fight with Joy just before she left. It was about you. Then, after that, we broke off. A few days later I noticed she was never around. See, I didn't really want to break off. I just thought that if I sort of blew up, well, it might bring her to her senses. Anyway, I called up a couple of times. Kind of disguised my voice so nobody would recognize it and asked for her. The maid, Estelle, said she'd gone out of town. And then, another time, she said, Miss Joyce has gone away. Nobody knows where. I let it go and let it go. But--but I couldn't get it out of my mind. I mean, Joy is very important to me. I know I'm still not of age and all that, but ..."

Frank said, "I know what you mean." Then he said, "I think we could both do with a drink, don't you?" He said, "Where ...?" Then he said, "Let's have the drink first." He went to the sideboard in the dining room and brought out a bottle and two glasses, placing them on the coffee table before the two chairs, and then poured out two stiff shots, all the time searching desperately for a way to begin.

Then he said, "I did have an affair with Joyce last summer. I know how that hurts you, but it's a thing we've got to get clear. And maybe I'm to blame for her going away. So we need to know that, too. What about her aunt--what's her name? Priscilla?"

"Her aunt only knows that Joy went away a few days after we had the quarrel. I don't know exactly when. She left a note that said not to try to find her. I didn't find out about it until just tonight. I thought--I thought you might know. I don't know. I thought you might have her in New York somewhere, or something."

"I don't," Frank said.

"Do you have any idea ...?"

"Not any. Has her aunt notified--oh, but of course she has."

"No. She hasn't. That's just it. I don't know what's happened to her. I don't know, even, if she's alive. I don't know what to do."

They talked for a long time, and after a while Janice came down and talked, too.

"Mostly," Janice said, "I don't think either of you were to blame. A lot of the blame belongs to the aunt. But it's hard to blame her, really, either. The ones really to blame are Joyce's parents. Somebody's got to notify them, of course. But I don't think it will help much. The only real thing anybody can do about Joyce is wait ..."

12 ~ Narcosis

After Joyce made the coffee, she set the pot on a tray with cups and saucers and spoons, and got some cookies from a box in the cupboard. These she arranged on a plate for maximum attractiveness. Then she laid out the cream and sugar, and carried the whole tray to the bedroom door. She listened for a moment and then tried the door. It was locked.

She knocked, gently, and then louder.

Ginger said, "Wait a second, honey." She heard Ginger getting up, heard the sound of a drawer being shut, and then the door opened. She carried in the tray, and Ginger watched her setting it down on the little night-table beside the bed.

"I thought you might like a little coffee or something." Joyce said.

She looked at the dark girl who stood there, her hand still on the knob of the door as though opening it had somehow frozen her to silence. In the light of the dim ceiling fixture Ginger's face looked strange, and there was something odd about her dark brown eyes that Joy couldn't quite place.

After a second the dark girl moved. "Gee, that's awful sweet of you, honey. That's the very sweetest. An' I hope you won't be awful mad if I don't drink the coffee right away, on account of I'm just a little upset to my stomach."

"No, Gin. Of course not. Is there anything I can get for you?"

"No, honey. Except you can sit down here with me."

That was when it really struck Joy--when she sat down on the bed beside Ginger and took the dark hand in her light one. It was as though Jerry had suddenly destroyed her home, ripping it out from under her. She thought of the things it was going to mean. No Christmas. No tree. No presents. No being together. No more evenings in the Golden Horn. No more lighting up together in the comfortable evenings, and no more going out together in the afternoons. No more feeling of safety--of being protected by the tall, handsome colored man with the small mustache; no more having a place to come home to, because it wouldn't be quite the same with just Ginger there. Her stomach seemed to be quivering with the idea, and her head ached with it

Then Ginger said, "You heard what the man said?"

Joyce nodded, holding back the tears.

"He's wrong, Joyce. This time the man is wrong."

"What do you mean?"

"What's so different about gauge and the white stuff? Nothing. You don't see him knocking off the gauge. He never put gauge down. Only reason he's so down on horse is on account of his old man."

"What do you mean?"

"What I say. His old man got on horse when Jerry was a kid. He didn't get on like a sensible guy. Not like I do. Not like other people. He used it till it was using him--till he was carrying a monkey bigger than he was."

"Who? What monkey?"

"Jerry's father. He had a bad habit. He was a real junkie. Used to get himself committed to the Government hospital for the cure, just so he could get the habit down small enough so he could afford to start all over again."

"Is that why Jerry's so down on it?"

"That's right. When he was a kid his old man used to sometimes send him out to make the contact for him. Finally they had a real hassle about it, when Jerry was in high school, and he left home."

"What's it like, Ginger?"

"It's like gauge--only a great big kick, like it takes you right through the ceiling. You get so high. You can really dig this kick." Then Joyce knew what she was going to do. She thought, I've got to find out so I'll know what to do about Ginger. And there was something else, too, that she thought. It was something fleeting, that made fleeting sense. If I know what it is, she thought, then I can tell Jerry about it and he'll come back, because we've got to get him back. Ginger and I do. She said, "Gin?"

"What's the matter, honey?"

"I want to try that stuff."

"Oh, no, honey. You don't want to get on that kick."

"Yes I do, Gin."

It went on like that, back and forth for a few minutes. Then Ginger went to the bureau drawer and took out the little packet Jerry had thrown on the couch. She opened it, unfastening the brown paper secured with scotch tape. Inside were a series of little packets, made of waxed paper and fastened with the tape. Each measured about one-and-a-half inches square. Carefully Ginger removed the tape from the packet and spread it out flat.

"Get yourself a dollar bill," Ginger said. Joyce went to her pocket book in the other room, thinking it was funny that Ginger wanted her to pay for it. When she came back, she saw that Ginger had split the little pile of powder on the wax paper into two tiny piles. Joyce thought, where's the needle? She had seen the needle when the drawer was opened. "Give me the bill, honey," Ginger said. She took the rectangle of paper and rolled it into a tiny tube--tight, so that the opening down the center was smaller than the thickness of a toothpick.

"You do it like this," she said. She put the waxed paper with its burden of white powder on the edge of the bureau, then inserted the dollar bill tube into one nostril and bent down. Holding the other nostril, she inhaled deeply through the tube, sucking up the white powder through the tube like a vacuum cleaner tucking cigarette ash from a rug. In a moment she had disposed of the one half of the white powder. Then she rose to her feet, still inhaling at the dollar bill. When she had taken the bill from her nostril she held both nostrils for a moment, as though to keep from sneezing, batting her eyes rapidly.

"You make like that, Joy, honey," she said.

Joyce followed the same detailed procedure, holding her nostrils when she had done. The inside of her nose felt strange, a funny, cool tingling. It wasn't like tea, this stuff.

Suddenly she heard Ginger rushing from the room and saw her run to the bathroom. Then she heard the dark girl being sick--and in a moment knew why and followed her.

She vomited, strangely without effort, and then was s-o-o-o-o happy.

The pain of Jerry's going had vanished, and a million reasons why it was a good, thing came swiftly flowing into her mind. How could he not understand about this? How could he be against this? What was a "hook" compared to this? Where was marijuana when you could get like this?

Why, you could do anything, make anything, be anything. There was nothing impossible. If it were cloudy, you could make the sun shine. This was really grooving. This was being right at the top.

She followed Ginger into the living room and sat down. You could do anything, except that it was so wonderful not to do anything--just to think and feel the fine sensation of blood rushing through your veins, and hear the thoughts ticking off inside your head, and follow the thoughts as they dashed swiftly about the room, thinking things out for themselves.

After a while she said, "Ginger? Isn't the light pretty bright?" And Ginger got up, very slowly, and turned it off. Then the peace and beauty was suddenly perfect.

The great thing about it was, it was so mental. Everything was so mental, now. You could go back and relive every wonderful moment of your life, skipping all the bad parts and all the little things that had gone wrong at the time. And you could live them better than you had before, because now there was only pleasure and nothing but pleasure.

Ginger had turned on the radio, and the little dial light in the corner of the room became a friendly, protective eye. Then out came music--visible music, music that darted about the room in little blue bolts of lighting, in little colors of sound. It came so slowly, now--so much more slowly than with gauge--that every separate note had time to be counted in its individual vibrations and colors, and to develop an overlay of meanings on meanings on meanings.

Joyce let herself sink deeper into the soft armchair that felt like caressing paternal arms clasped about her body--that seemed to pick her up and carry her, like a little girl, with kisses, to bed ...

13 ~ Tolerance

The answer to the cable that Priscilla had decided to send instead of making a telephone call--perhaps because it deferred the evil day of having to hear her brother's angry voice--came the following morning. It read:

CAN CONCLUDE BUSINESS HERE IN TWO MORE DAYS THEN WILL TAKE PLANE LANDING AT IDLEWILD THURSDAY NITE--EDWARD

She thought, you're in a great hurry about your own daughter, aren't you, Edward. But then she remembered how slowly she herself had hurried ...

Christmas got by, somehow, and so did New Year's. Joyce spent both holidays with Ginger at the Golden Horn, where a mixed band of somewhat indifferent skill played under a white leader who served mainly to provide a background for Ginger's easy talent. Then, before Jerry came back with his anger and his storms, Ginger had a new offer from a mid-town club--a big club with a big all-colored show. And after that things began to roll faster and faster for Ginger. There were record dates and radio shows and guest appearances.

Joyce meanwhile, was learning a new language. The language of the heroin user was deeper and more occult than that of the "viper", as was determined by the relative illegality of the narcotic heroin compared to the intoxicant, marijuana. Sniffing and popping replaced blowing and lighting up or turning on, though the latter two might on occasion be used interchangeably with the former. Then there was shooting it and mainlining it--when you drove deep into a vein with a hypodermic needle and a solution of the white powder. There was nothing comparable to that in marijuana. But you got high on the big charge. You hit the horse, and when the stuff was real gone, you, sometimes blew your top.

You had to be careful with it. You couldn't let the habit get out of hand. A three cap habit, now, that was bad, because when you started making it with three capsules, you could get in deeper, and when it got up to six caps, suddenly, one day, you were liable to wake up all of a sudden carrying the monkey on your shoulders.

That was what they called it when it had you--when you really felt the hook. That was when you had to go out and get it, no matter what.

It didn't get like that with Joyce for a long time, and the time seemed even longer because there was so much happening in it.

After a while Ginger had shown her about the needle and taught her how to shoot the white stuff, because the other way, sniffing it, was so wasteful.

There was no money problem, because Ginger was making all the money in the world. It came rolling in, faster and faster, and you could find her voice calling to you from juke boxes, chanting at you from radios, shouting out those blues from the doorways of bars and from the windows of apartment houses, from televisions.

Then the spring began to roll in from somewhere in the Southland--but it was hard to notice the spring when there was so much happening in the little apartment on Twelfth Street.

Joyce had made some sort of peace, too, with Eugene Tip and his machine-tooled colleagues. That is, the job no longer appalled her as it had. And it was great not to be bugged just because the job was something you could do with your eyes shut.