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the needle, and all I could do was shake my head and swear that it wouldn’t happen to me. Sometimes in the middle of the night I saw myself in a dreamworld of rubber walls and straitjackets, crying and trying to free myself from insects that crawled all over me and nibbled at my privates. My hands would be so covered with ants and spiders that I couldn’t determine the fingers. My hair was infested with lice and leeches. I would wake up screaming and run to the liquor cabinet, where I sat up for the remainder of the night with a drink in my hand, trembling.
    It was a Thursday in August. I had worked for fifteen straight nights, and Zinari sent Smoky with a message to take a four-day weekend. He also sent a fifty-dollar bonus.
    That’s how I happened to be in the coffee shop on Ninth Avenue when John Lee came in. There had been very few words between us since the party. There was no static in the air. It was just that our new roles seldom crossed paths. We both mingled with the night people in different sections of town. When I was off, John was working, and vice versa.
    Hot days like this gave a man an idea of what life in hell itself would be like, and made a lot of wishy-washy people think seriously about trying to find God. Inside, the air-conditioner was keeping everything together, and I kept the jukebox playing, so Tommy, the owner, said next to nothing to me.
    My job had been running as Smoky predicted. The pushers I met nightly were no trouble. They were people of darkness who wanted to spend very little of their time under the streetlights where I met them. There was seldom any conversation. Maybe once in a while they would try a ‘Whuss happnin’?’ But after a while they saw that my answer would be ‘You,’ and no more. Our relationship was entirely business. I wasn’t really as cold as all that, but in the eyes of the junkies there were always too many things being reflected. The death of men and women without a burial. It was as though death had paid his call and left without stamping his usual notice on the forehead of his victim. He took the heart and soul, but he left the shell of the listless survivor, discarded as worthless. The bulging facial expression,bloated features, and shaggy clothes that often disguised blue veins filled with pus in scrawny arms. The silly smiles that met your inquiring stare when they snapped out of a nod leaning on an impossible angle. All of these things were a part of the cats I had been with and of. There was no running away from the faces that were often transformed into familiarity by the dim light. There was no denying that this was an old friend with a different name and a different reason for dying before his time.
    ‘ain’ nothin’ persnal ‘bout nothin’,’ Smoky whistled through his beard.
    There were often evenings when I came through the door at Harvey’s near the witching hour and saw Smoky rapping with the women who frequented the place in the late evening. They were all nurses and librarians and social workers, lonely women in general who knew that respectable men often came in to eat at Harvey’s because it was the nicest cafe in Harlem.
    I would fall in about ten of twelve or so, and more often than not the game between Smoky and the women was already under way. I would come over, be introduced, and then lay and listen through the hum-and-giggle conversation. Smoky would say things like, ‘yeah, well dadadadada,’ and the chicks would ‘Hee Hee!’ Harvey would come out of the kitchen in the back occasionally and make up fantastic tales about the service, where he always turned out to be at least the indirect hero by pulling a fast one on some white officer. Harvey’s wife would look out from behind her perch in the kitchen and wink at me as her mate rambled on.
    The women who sat with us always seemed to strike a chord somewhere in the back of my mind. They were always reasonably intelligent women, with a secret storm boiling between their