In those nights he was living on Mission Street because so many people swarmed there that he could hope someone might actually smash through his soul-eye's smooth flat window to kill him or make him free, but instead the people just flowed down his pane like gray rain. That afternoon there'd been a carnival with fat ladies moving their bottoms in the streets, black-eyed Asian schoolgirls cooling their teeth in the hissing streams of each other's breath, brown girls in black and silver skirts working their lips into kisses; and he'd never forget that coffeeskinned girl on the parade float, swinging her gold-spangled crotch in sharp bursting arcs; now that that was ended and the police had stacked the barricades back into rented vans there remained only the same threateners and bottle-smashers, and above them the same smell of doughnuts in the hallways because the hotel was right over a bakery — preferable to the adjoining hotel, which had married a Chinese fish market for so many do-us-parts that the slime of rotting seafood had leached its way through the wall and summoned the same slow fat evil flies that Lucifer kept under his tongue; no, give me doughnuts, please. Well, he had his doughnuts — the sweet soggy smell of them, anyway, a smell as weary as being alone at ten-o'-clock on a rainy Sunday night in a sleazy hotel.
A voice was saying: He said he was gonna gimme twenty bucks but I need thirty.
He unlocked the door. The old lady was kneeling on the floor, looking up at him in terror while her very dark blood crept slowly down her arm, the hypodermic needle which was stuck in it wine-colored with blood. Her grayish-blonde hair was drawn back tight against her head to make her younger. Her arm had doubled up as if to thrust the elbow forward in defense of her life. She held a bloody paper towel in her hand.
She wasn't such an old lady, actually. She was just a whore who only got her periods when she went to jail, because she couldn't shoot her speedballs in there. She disliked getting periods, but what she positively hated was being forced to sleep at night. (Everyone knows that whores are nocturnal while Johns and prison guards [with some exceptions] are diurnal, which proves at least one difference between the species.) And because he lived with her, because he tried to sleep at night, he dreaded the night, dreaded the smell of old cigarettes and old age, the sound of moaning and coughing in the bed beside him.
He sat down on the bed, and she came and sat next to him. She turned up her half-dead lips to be kissed. — Oh, that feels wonderful, she said.
There was a knock.
Who is it? she cried ferociously.
It's me, said a sad shy voice.
Grunting, the old lady popped her hernia back in and opened the door. It was the whore who'd been raped with a vacuum cleaner. (Two days afterward, her stomach had suddenly swelled up, and she fainted from the pain.)
You get it? said the old lady.
Got it right here, the girl whispered.
They heated the bottlecap with the old lady's lighter, untwisted the paper, added water from the brandy bottle (the white stuff in the cap was already fizzing), stirred it lovingly with the needle end.
Just draw it up, the old lady snarled.
I'm tryin' to.
The girl peered down at the mosquito-striped needle. — I left seventy-five, she said. Twenty-five for me, fifty for you.
Let's make it eighty.
OK, said the girl guiltily.
They were almost ready now to bare their arms to the needle, like children who didn't have a ticket to a carnival, stretching their hands out from so far behind the fence.
Well, that came out right, said the old lady with satisfaction.
I'll come back. Where's the restroom? I gotta stick myself in a personal place.
The old lady shot her a glare. — You'd better come back, or I'll hunt you down and kill you.
The girl cringed in terror. — I'm sorry, I'm sorry, she said almost inaudibly. I'll do it here.
Go to the restroom if you want. You heard what I said.
I'll do it here.
Well, stop whining and do it here, then. You need me to hit you? Which personal place is it today?
My pussy.
That's where the happy veins are, the old lady laughed, the needle already in her wrist, the smelly pantyhose knotted around her upper arm. .
At midnight, after the girl had gone out to make more money (her pussy was already abscessed, but one time when he was with her she'd spread herself with pride and told him: You can always tell if a woman's got a disease by smelling her vagina. If it's not healthy she's got a bad odor. See, I don't smell, do I?), he killed the light. He awoke an hour later to see the old lady kneeling on the carpet, trying to stick herself, walking on her knees to the sink so that she wouldn't wake him when she washed the blood from arm and sleeve.
