Bone in the Throat - Anthony Bourdain [39]
"What's the best schedule you can get?"
"One or two times a week, if it is felt that it's indicated, if it's approved by me. You screw around with your take-homes, we find out you're loitering in the neighborhood near the clinic, you have a dirty urine—you go right back to a six-day schedule, or worse."
"I understand," said the chef.
"Okay, Mr. Ricard," said Mr. James, consulting a calendar and a sheet of paper in the middle of a clipboard, "I can schedule you a doctor's appointment here in three weeks." He consulted a desk calendar. "That'll be the third, ten o'clock in the morning. You'll be examined by the doctor before you can be medicated. After the examination, you can get your methadone right away."
"Three weeks?"
"That's the best I can do," said Mr. James.
"But what do I do till then?"
"I can't tell you what to do or not to do."
"I have to keep scoring on the street till then? I have to keep doing dope?"
"I'm not saying that," said Mr. James.
"What should I do?"
"You should return here in three weeks. That's the soonest there's a place. You're still interested? You'll show up the third?"
"Yes," said the chef glumly. "I'll be here."
"Okay, then." Mr. James stood up and opened his office door. He let the chef out and closed and locked the door behind them. He walked the chef to the elevator and shook his hand.
"There's no way to get in sooner?" asked the chef.
"Sorry. See you the third."
Nineteen
THE CHEF TOOK the elevator down and walked out into the afternoon sun, soca music fading away behind him.
Across the street were a row of benches set alongside a small triangular park where office workers and students on lunch break sat munching Sabrett hot dogs or eating salads from plastic deli containers. Old men fed pigeons; a few of them, homeless, bare-chested, their shirts balled up as pillows, slept in the hot sun. The chef sat down, his legs tormenting him. He held his face in his hands and started to cry.
There was a voice behind him. "Hot sixty, hot sixty, got a hot sixty right here."
It was a skeletal black man with long, purple tracks on his neck. He had the pupilless cartoon bunny eyes and Popeye arms of a long-term junkie. He wore dirty gray sweatpants, loose at the hips, with his underpants pulled up near his navel. He didn't have a shirt. His filthy toes poked through holes in his high-top sneakers.
"What?" asked the chef.
"Hot sixty, B. Sixty milligrams, still warm," said the man. He held up a small screw-top bottle with orange liquid inside.
"How much?" asked the chef.
"Thirty dollar," said the man, putting the bottle back in a crumpled brown paper bag.
"I don't have it," said the chef dejectedly. "I just don't have it."
The man continued down the row of benches. "Hot sixty. Hot sixty."
The chef bent over and retrieved a twenty-dollar bill from inside his sock. He folded it up and held it tightly in his fist. His aching legs carried him east.
At Third Street, he crossed Avenue A, then B, then C. He heard the distant shout of "Open! Toilet's open!" A man holding a can waved at him and said "Green light. Got it good." He continued walking. A voice on a rooftop cried out, "Feo! Feo!" Someone asked him "Whassup, whassup?" "Yo, Flaco! Hey, Flaco!" He kept walking.
He passed a restless line of customers jostling each other outside a burned-out tenement. A heavily muscled Dominican holding a baseball bat was yelling, "Have your money out the long way. No singles. No talking on the line. Have your money ready."
Across the street, more junkies were lined up in an abandoned lot. Overhead, a rusting paint bucket on a string descended from a third-floor apartment. The bucket went down with the dope, was pulled back up again with the next customer's