Cain’s Book Read Online Free PDF Page A

the pier, mostly those who were going out at once.
    I went back to the scow. In the cabin I stowed away some things that were lying about, my hashish pipe, a bottle of Benzedrine, locked the cabin and climbed over four scows and onto the pier. I
walked along the huge beam which provides the narrow footpath parallel to the shed as far as the dock. I walked slowly, using a flashlight to guide my feet. On my left the corrugated iron of the
shed, on my right, about fourteen feet below me, the still dark water of the basin reflecting a few naked lights. Its surface was smeared with oil and dust. Finally I reached the dock and walked
between some parked boxcars to the street under the elevated road. I cut diagonally across town and at 23rd Street on 8th Avenue I took a taxi to Sheridan Square. I telephoned Moira from the
drugstore that sells all the paperbacks. She told me to come over.
    She was glad to see me. We hadn’t seen one another for over two weeks. – Have you taken dope? Nope. – Our conversation was sometimes limited. She had smoked pot for some years
but her attitude towards heroin was rigid. It made our relationship tense and hysterical. Sometimes I wondered why I bothered to go to see her, and that was the way it was with most of my friends
who didn’t use junk. “It’s none of my business,” Moira said. “I’ve got no sympathy for them.”
    It would make me very angry when she said that. I wanted to shake her. “
You
say that! Sometimes I think of all those ignorant cops, all those ignorant judges, all those ignorant
bastard people committing bloody murder like they blow their noses! They think it so fucking easy they can stamp it out like syphokles, whatever it is, jewry, heroin addiction, like some kind of
streptococcus, and getting high an un-American rabies, Jesus, to a healthy paranoid like me who likes four walls and police locks on all doors and a couple of good Frankensteins to draw off the mob
with their flaming torches, it looks like anyone who depicts you, dear Saviour, with a beard will be dealt with cold turkey until they take him before a judge and then, because it can’t
stand, being bestial, scarcely human, the quivering, blubbering, vomiting mass is given half a grain of morphine ten minutes before he is arraigned so that they won’t have to take him in on a
stretcher and run the risk of having some irresponsible goon send for a doctor!”
    “It’s none of my business!” Moira screamed.
    “Whose business is it? What are you going to do? Leave it to the experts? Tomorrow, the Age of the Doctors! They’re already challenging the taxmen and the FBI for a profitable
monopoly. Let’s put it on prescription, eh? Confine it to the laboratories for more tests. They’re always talking about a lack of scientific evidence, about its being unsafe to make it
public! They’re scared the public will find out it ain’t that fucking horse after all!”
    “
They’re
scared! Who’s
they
?”
    “You! Dammit to hell, Moira! You!”
    “I don’t want to discuss it! I won’t argue with you!”
    At that moment the telephone rang. She was grateful for the distraction. But it was Tom Tear. As welcome as a newborn Mongolian idiot. He had heard I was in town and wanted to know if I wanted
to score. She held her hand over the mouthpiece of the receiver and her face became angry as she became aware of my hesitation. She spoke coldly into the telephone: “He’s here now.
You’d better speak to him yourself.” As she handed me the telephone she said she didn’t want him telephoning me there. She avoided my disbelieving eyes and her face became set and
hard. I could see only the back of her head now, the long blonde hair in a smooth bell. – I remember the first time I smelt it; her cheek was cold; it was the middle of winter and in Glasgow
there was snow in the streets. By the time I turned my attention to the telephone I knew I would score, that it was only a question of arranging