They say once you’ve been an addict your biology is never the same. All your cells are so used to junk that they’ll never quite get over it. They’ll always crave dope. I’d never believed that before, but I believed it now. Because even though I’d been clean for two years, and I knew there wasn’t a trace of it left in my system, when I walked in that room it was like I had never left. My mouth was as dry as if I’d just swallowed cotton, and my nose started to run. I reached down and scratched my leg, which was suddenly itching like hell.
I didn’t want it at all. It wasn’t that. It was just those damn cells of mine. They wouldn’t give up. They still thought they needed it.

I really loved this book – short and sweet about a former junkie who gets hired to act as a Private Eye and help find a missing daughter who had fallen in with the wrong crowd. It happens a lot in University (and all walks of life) – a sheltered girl meets a sweet – talking dude who offers her a taste. Next thing you know she’s hooked and goes from dancing in a strip joint to turning tricks to missing.

What I loved about this tale as old as time was the narrator – you felt like scratching when she was itching, you were craving a new hit when she was. Recovery from an addiction is 10 times worse when it’s about heroin. The book ticks all the junkie phases – selling property that you own, then stealing, then selling anything that’s not nailed down – tables, chairs, body too.

A junkie could talk about junk from sunup to sundown. It was like a conversation that began when you took your first shot and didn’t end until you’d had your last. Every junkie in New York, probably every addict in the world, could step into the conversation at any point and join in. There were a thousand and one topics, but they were all one topic: dope.

Set in the not-talked about and talked about parts of New York City, the novel follows Joey (Josephine) as she connects dot after dot, follows every lead, talks to pimps, drug pushers, strippers, girls who work the corners and the fallen ones – the junkies and addicts that populate the same space as us but that we don’t see (or chose not to).

“Hey,” I said to her, smiling. “Let’s have a drink.”
She nodded. I took her by the arm and led her over to a table a few yards away from the bar, where we sat across from each other. She didn’t resist. Her arm was soft and practically limp and it sort of made you feel like crying to touch her.

The women are the main talk of the show – they are strong but seem not able to function independently – He takes good care of me, they say. Allowing a beating here and there as long as the money and dope keeps flowing.

The dancers stood around the lobby in between their acts to lure the fellows inside. They stood up straight and flashed big smiles and wore shiny lipstick, but they weren’t pretty. It was a hard life, and it aged you fast. They still wore their stage dresses, spangly evening gowns rigged up to come off easy, and in the light you could see that they were stained, and half the sequins had fallen off. They smoked cigarettes and tried to look cheerful, enforced by a guy in a cheap tux about two inches shorter than me. Two of the girls whispered to each other about a third.

And it’s men too – Yonah, an old acquaintance of Joey’s is a good example. he’d been using for decades, so much that a new hit of heroin didn’t even make his eyes flutter.

He sat quietly for a minute. It wasn’t that being high felt so good, especially not when you’d been shooting as long as Yonah had. You could hardly even call it being high. It was that nothing else felt bad. There were no aches, no pains, no memories, no shame. Nothing mattered now. It was like junk took you up just a few feet above everybody else, just enough so you didn’t have to involve yourself in all the petty problems of the world. Those weren’t your problems anymore. Let someone else worry. You could watch it all and feel nothing. For that little piece of time you had everything you needed, everything you had ever wanted.

There was no retirement plan for hustlers and junkies and whores. Most of us wouldn’t live long enough to need one, anyway.

I think they should make this book a mandatory reading for high schoolers. Instead of the outdated “Don’t do drugs” promos, let them see (or read) about the dark side – it’s a hell of a lot better than experiencing it first hand.

There are a few twists and turns, a murder, an investigation, a betrayal and then another. I won’t spoil it too much but I must say the entitlement of the sister blew me away. I know there are people like that but still!..

I never knew how much she hated me until I saw her face right then. “You know, Joe, you never did a goddamned thing for me. You never did nothing for my whole damn life but cause trouble. You know what it was like, coming up, everyone knowing my sister was a whore?” She shook her head. “No, of course you don’t. Now for once you’re gonna be useful. You’re gonna disappear, and I won’t ever have to worry about you screwing things up for me again. You’re never gonna let me down again.”

All in all, a solid read and I can’t recommend it enough

Other books by Sara Gran: The Infinite Blacktop * Sara Gran and Saturn’s Return to New York by Sara Gran