William Lee was born and raised in a fashionable quiet suburb of one of the big cities of the Midwest. In childhood and adolescence, he did not stand out among peers, except that he read them much more. At the end of Harvard, William stumbled around pre-war Europe for a year, since the stable monthly income of one hundred and fifty dollars saved him from having to earn a living. When the war broke out, he volunteered to join the army, but he did not like it there, and he consulted with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. After the army, for the sake of curiosity, he tried many professions - from a private detective to a bartender, from a factory worker to an office clerk - and it was at this time, at the end of the war, that he first learned what drugs were.
A person tries drugs, and then addiction is developed. This happens, as a rule, when nothing else in life is of particular interest, really does not inspire at least such nonsense as getting up in the morning, shaving ... Nobody starts to inject with the intention of becoming an addict: just one fine morning you wake up in a heavy otodnyak, and that means - that's it, you're firmly hooked.
Unlike alcohol or grass, real nonsense is not a source of buzz and not a stimulant. Dope is a way of life.
William had a friend who worked in the port and regularly dragged everything that was lying badly from there. Once, this friend came to him with an assault rifle and a pack of five morphine ampoules — he had fifteen more packs at home — and asked for help finding a buyer for this “good”. The buyer was easily found on the machine, but he had to tinker with morphine. However, quite quickly through his other friend William went into two types, Roy and Herman, who took part of the goods. A few days later he injected himself with one of the remaining ampoules.
Following a wave of warm, unlike anything else, William was seized with wild fear - a terrifying image loomed nearby, not falling into sight and becoming even worse. And then a color cinema began: a huge bar filled with neon light and a waitress carrying a skull on a tray - the most vivid embodiment of the fear of death ... In the morning he woke up with the same feeling of horror; he vomited, half a day he felt completely overwhelmed.
Over the course of a month, William used little of all the remaining morphine; after the third dose, the horror attacks stopped. When the supply was exhausted, he began to buy a potion from Roy. The same Roy taught him all the technical tricks of drug addiction, including the ability to get prescriptions for morphine and buy them in pharmacies: some doctors were fond of simulating kidney stones, for others who had no other clientele, writing prescriptions for drug addicts was the main source of income. Gradually, William began to spend time in a bar, where mostly blue people and hangouts hung out, getting money for the next dose, rummaging through the pockets of the drunk in the subway.
Once Roy’s friend, Herman, suggested that William take a couple of kilograms of New Orleans marijuana for a couple. He agreed. They then sold the grass with the help of a lesbian from Greenwich Village, who appeared to be a poetess. The business was profitable, but too boring: unlike normal drug addicts, grass lovers, who usually took it for a couple of dollars at a time, certainly wanted the seller to smoke and have fun with them - not breaking off the buzz, in short. In general, grass is considered a drug in vain: there is no getting used to it, and it does not harm health. It’s just that behind the wheel, having smoked it, it’s better not to sit down, since the usual feeling of space and time from a jamb or two is completely lost.
As you would expect, over time, William finally sat on the needle, he now needed to inject three times a day to maintain normalcy. He settled with two of the same jerks; together they got money and recipes, bought nonsense, together expanded. The entire sphere of their interests was limited to the process of obtaining the drug and its consumption, the time interval between doses was filled exclusively with the expectation of the next.
The first time William got burnt and received a term of four months probation for the fact that his name and address were incorrectly indicated in the recipes for morphine. It was too risky to continue bombing the drunk, and he decided to do street trading, since one of his friends, Bill Heine, brought him to a good wholesale heroin seller. You will not get rich in this business, unless you always earn the amount of potion you need, and its constant supply of stock saves you from fear at one point not to get a dose. Soon, he and Bill acquired their clientele, and things went more or less normal with them. The trouble is that sooner or later among the clients there are unreliable types: some try to beg for a loan, others do not observe elementary caution, and others are ready to lay a seller at the slightest danger. Because of such unreliable types, the police eventually overlaid them with Bill on all sides. It was necessary to tear from New York.
Bill Heine went to Lexington for treatment, and William Lee went to Texas, where he owned a farm. He thought to break the addiction on his own, using the so-called Chinese method: after each injection, the bottle with the solution is added with distilled water, the dose is gradually reduced, and after some time you already drive clean water through the veins. This method did not work, wild breaking started. There are other unbearable pains - toothache or in the genitals - but they can’t even come close to those that you experience when you suddenly stop injecting. After all, withdrawal is the same death, the death of all drug-dependent cells; until these cells die, and healthy ones are born in their place, you writhe in hell.
Throwing the car in the parking lot, William took the train to Lexington. Treatment in this closed institution was reduced to a weekly course of a synthetic surrogate morphine, the dose of which was reduced from injection to injection; William avoided the next rehabilitation course following a complete abstinence from drugs and went out sick. With the help of wheels, he somehow interrupted and then lived without drugs for several weeks. Even having moved to New Orleans, he led the existence of a normal person there for the first time - he drank what drug addicts never do, wandered around the taverns, but somehow he got drunk once and again, and everything returned to normal. If you once had an addiction, you just need a little to return, and again, day after day, they went through the rhythm of doses and pauses between them, filled with fuss with clients, the same, in essence, scum as in New York .
The life of junkies and especially merchants became more and more dumb every day: the police were furious, and under the new law you could be screwed even for fingerprints in your hands. Once William and his partners thoroughly stuck. He had a long term, and the lawyer hinted that it would be prudent to spit on the bail on which he was released from prison and be on the other side of the Mexican border.
In Mexico City, it turned out that a certain person named Lupita, who got along so well with the police that kept her eyes on her business, and regularly eliminated her competitors, was holding all the foolishness trade here. So William had to not only abandon the thought of his own business, but also buy from Lupita a filthy quality and godlessly expensive potion. Over time, however, recipes began to help out.
During the year that he sat on the needle in Mexico City, William tried to tie it five times, but nothing came of it. The last time he got out on a mixture of alcohol and wheels, he got rid of drugs, but he drank incredibly for several weeks. Having heard one morning, he almost suffocated from the smell of urine and with horror realized that this stench comes from himself. How people die of uremia, William saw; the doctor who examined him said that one more bottle of tequila would be the end.
One way or another, but for several months William had not been injected. The buzz, which was given by just-fashioned cactus peyote, he somehow did not have. Returning to the United States was completely without war: there he was waiting for a court, and besides, the country was seized with real anti-drug paranoia, from old acquaintances who sat down, who disappeared somewhere, who rushed ... In short, it remained to move further south, to Colombia , where, they say, from some Amazonian greenery they learned how to make a new drug that exacerbates telepathic susceptibility - they were even interested in Russians and used to control millions of slaves in camps. William's problems of telepathy also always occupied.
