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berth and every night he came home to lay out those lines of heroin. The atmosphere changed for me, too. I grew sick of bars and sick of dope. I told Big Guy not to offer me any anymore, and he didn’t. I withdrew.
    After two weeks off the junk I felt more desolate than ever. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see anyone I liked. I saw a loser, a writer who couldn’t write, a cook who was out of control. I terrorized the wait-staff at Sticky’s, working six nights a week for very little money and spending most of the seventh asleep. I slept all day alone in a bed that wasn’t mine and drank my way till dawn. I didn’t see how I could go on.
    I had a small stash of knockout pills in a bedside drawer. On my day off I bought more in the park at Union Square and washed them all down with a pint of vodka. I went to bed with no intention of waking up, but wake up I did, late the next afternoon, and I answered the phone when it rang. It was a friend named Honey Cook, at whose apartment two years before I had taken my first sniff of heroin.
    Honey was not a pusher. She was another would-be writer and sometime actress, mother to an eight-year-old named Mike. She knew Jayne Mansfield’s life story by heart and never went anywhere without eyeliner. She worried about her looks, which only fascinated me: a toss of White Minx-tinted hair over blue-flame eyes that winked at the world; whore-pink painted lips under a Teutonic nose that snubbed it. One shoulder sported a moon-and-stars tattoo. Smaller tattoos graced the knuckles of both hands, which bore a number of filigreed silver rings.
    She lived in the Village with a blues singer named Lute, a tough, striking blonde out of a film-noir comedy, if there is such a thing. There ought to be. Theirs was a house of mirth—everything for a laugh. This one night, I needed a laugh. I was broke and depressed, between jobs and intimates. Lute was out.
    I sat in Honey’s kitchen, a wallpapered and chandeliered affair, listening to her ideas on the subject of personal hygiene. She was convinced yogurt had healed her chronic P.I.D. and that parsley juice induced a period. She had also developed a solution for problem skin. The treatment was a lot like salad dressing, a vinaigrette for the face. “This really works,” she told me. I thought maybe she should bottle it.
    Honey had trouble keeping up with the rent. Once, in her youth, she’d spent a few months on a funny farm, after an unfortunate night on LSD. It wasn’t the sort of thing that looked good on a résumé, so she collected disability and a few nights a week, after Mike had gone to bed, hired herself out as a topless dancer. “It’s good for the figure,” she said. Honey always looked at the bright side.
    â€œWhere’s Lute tonight?” I asked.
    â€œOh, umm,” Honey answered. “Visiting her mother.” She was concentrating on her work. To pick up extra cash, she’d started dealing MDA, a speedy hypnotic we called “the love drug.” This stuff was very Cloud Nine. It came in powder form, and packaging it for sale meant emptying vitamin caps and filling them with the drug. I was emptying the caps; she was filling them. “I never know how much of this stuff to put in,” she said, scratching her head. “I suppose it’s best to be conservative.”
    I didn’t care. All I wanted was company.
    She looked up. “You ever live with a woman, hon?”
    â€œIn college,” I said. “I had roommates.”
    â€œI mean, as a lover.”
    â€œNot yet,” I said. “Hasn’t come up.”
    â€œThis is going to sound weird—maybe I shouldn’t tell you—but I’ve been thinking about getting married. To a man, I mean. I mean, Lute’s really great and all. In bed she’s like, strong , like an animal. But Mike could really use a father figure.” She combed a hand through her hair.