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Beauvoir,
    from
American Day by Day
    February 21st, 1947 47

VII.
    “H OW DID YOU GET ON STUFF IN THE first place?” the judge would like to know. “There was so many little troubles floatin’ around,” the girl not yet twenty explains, “I figured why not roll them all up into one big trouble?”
    “
Why
a young girl like you should want to live like this I simply fail to understand,” his honor simply fails to understand.
    “Don’t bother me with why I got to live any way at all,” not-yet-twenty begs off, “Just tell me
how
for God’s sake.”
    “Don’t you
care
what happens to you?”
    “Why should I?” she warns the courtroom quietly, “All I have to do is shove a paper of strychnine into my next hype, then you’ll all die.”
    Next case.
    “What do you do all day?” the judge wants to know of a sixteen-year-old boy who was, until six months ago, a high-school sophomore.
    “I just lean,” the kid from Cloudland, still adrift, answers dreamily, “I just find a hallway or washroom ’n’ take a shot. Then I lean. Just lean ’n’ dream.”
    “Don’t you care what happens to you?”
    “It don’t matter what happens to me. Because all the time it’s really happening to someone else.”
    Somebody else’s somebody else who doesn’t matter at all.
    Watching a jackal from Dallas having a breakfast consisting of five bennies, five Nembutals and two and a half grains of morphine—“How can you walk with all that stuff in you?” is what I’d like to know.
    “How can I walk without it?” is what Dallas would like to know.
    “I don’t believe in them squares,” a woman heroin peddler warns me just for my own good, “I’m scared to death of the way they live. I don’t even know what they’re laughin’ at. ’Specially when they
laugh
at Johnny Ray. 48 He makes me cry. I don’t mean real tears of course. People on Stuff are too dry-eyed to cry like squares. But I cry when they laugh at him all the same.”
    The twisted anguish of the singer, too lonesome for real tears—“He may not be a cat hisself, but he know how us cats got to suffer.”
    Blame it on the comic books, blame it on the Communists. Blame it on Costello or Lucky Luciano. 49 Blame it on the people who peddle if that makes you feeleasier. Blame it on the police or the passing of the old-fashioned Sunday School.
    But these are all results and not causes at all: only names we employ to exculpate ourselves. We are willing, in our right-mindedness, to lend money or compassion—but never so right-minded as to permit ourselves to be personally involved in anything so ugly. We’ll pay somebody generously to haul garbage away but we cannot afford to admit that it belongs to us. We have deported the high-school sprout to Cloudland by right-mindedness.
    “You think The Nab don’t want the traffic to go on as it is?” another pusher challenges me, “with the loot that’s in it for them? They never had it so good. If the squares didn’t want people to be on stuff nobody would be on it. Who do you think The Nab is working for—them or us?
    “It’s the squares make the laws that make it so hard on us cats—but all them laws do is to make it that much harder on their own fool selves in the end. When they bear down they make our risk bigger, so the payoff goes higher. It costs just that much more to stay in business. So the junkie got to come up with more gold than ever, and there’s only one place he can get it. Off the square. Why shouldn’t we get to them?
    “We do without family or friends, we give up everything. When The Nab catches us broke, the only lawyer we can get is one who’s on the other side. Ain’t nobody on the junkie’s side. Not even other junkies.
    “Them squares, they walk around free. But us cats got to suffer.”
    “How’d you get on stuff in the first place, pusher?”
    “Too much vitality, cat. Vitality was runnin’ away with me. I’d go three days without sleep ’n’ knock off two hours