Without a Badge [antikvár]

The Junkie I'm standing on the comer of 119th Street and Park Avenue in Spanish Harlem, anxiously awaiting the 1:00 a.m. opening of a shooting gallery. My clothes, rescued from a Salvation Army bin, are smeared with dog feces. My hair, long and braided in comrows, is dotted with dirty beads. My arms are pocked with track marks. It's the middle of the night, but it's rush hour on this dark comer beneath the El platform, on a street reeking with urine and teeming with junkies. Every ear is tuned to the moment when somebody whis-des, signaling the opening of the shooting gallery. I'm hopping up and down, hands in my sweatshirt, asking everybody, "What's out?" Meaning what variety of heroin, coke, or crack will be served up when the gallery opens. "Yo, dude, when they gonna bust this door open?" I ask. "How much longer we gotta wait?" The other junkies gather round. They know me as Crazy Jerry from Jersey, a loud, in-your-face guy who's always screaming obscenities, picking through garbage, and generally acting deranged, and they're hoping that maybe I'll share my bag with them. But once that whistle cuts through the night, it's every man for himself. We all msh toward the graffiti-covered door of a dilapidated tenement. "Line up! Line up!" commands a grimy, rail-thin Spanish ghetto guy in a dirty T-shirt. We all do as told, fifty suddenly obedient junkies