I never will again. But it's a good thing I was then. I'm positive if I'd seen West Indian Archie
come in, I'd have shot to kill.
The next thing I knew West Indian Archie was standing before me, cursing me, loud, his gun on
me. He was really making his public point, floor-showing for the people. He called me foul names,
threatened me.
Everyone, bartenders and customers, sat or stood as though carved, drinks in mid-air. The
jukebox, in the rear, was going. I had never seen West Indian Archie high before. Not a whisky
high, I could tell it was something else. I knew the hustlers' characteristic of keying up on dope to
do a job.
I was thinking, "I'm going to kill Archie... I'm just going to wait until he turns around-to get the
drop on him." I could feel my own .32 resting against my ribs where it was tucked under my belt,
beneath my coat.
West Indian Archie, seeming to read my mind, quit cursing. And his words jarred me.
"You're thinking you're going to kill me first, Red. But I'm going to give you something to think
about. I'm sixty. I'm an old man. I've been to Sing Sing. My life is over. You're a young man. Kill
me, you're lost anyway. All you can do is go to prison."
I've since thought that West Indian Archie may have been trying to scare me into running, to save
both his face and his life. It may be that's why he was high. No one knew that I hadn't killed
anyone, but no one who knew me, including myself, would doubt that I'd kill.
I can't guess what might have happened. But under the code, if West Indian Archie had gone out
of the door, after having humiliated me as he had, I'd have had to follow him out. We'd have shot
it out in the street.
But some friends of West Indian Archie moved up alongside him, quietly calling his name, "Archie
... Archie."
And he let them put their hands on him-and they drew him aside. I watched them move him past
where I was sitting, glaring at me. They were working him back toward the rear.
Then, taking my time, I got down off the stool. I dropped a bill on the bar for the bartender.
Without looking back, I went out.
I stood outside, in full view of the bar, with my hand in my pocket, for perhaps five minutes. When
West Indian Archie didn't come out, I left.
It must have been five in the morning when, downtown, I woke up a white actor I knew who lived
in the Howard Hotel on 45th Street, off Sixth Avenue.
I knew I had to stay high.
The amount of dope I put into myself within the next several hours sounds inconceivable. I got
some opium from that fellow. I took a cab back up to my apartment and I smoked it. My gun was
ready if I heard a mosquito cough.
My telephone rang. It was the white Lesbian who lived downtown. She wanted me to bring her
and her girl friend fifty dollars worth of reefers.
I felt that if I had always done it, I had to do it now. Opium had me drowsy. I had a bottle of
benzedrine tablets in my bathroom; I swallowed some of them to perk up. The two drugs working
in me had my head going in opposite directions at the same time.
I knocked at the apartment right behind mine. The dealer let me have loose marijuana on credit.
He saw I was so high that he even helped me roll it-a hundred sticks. And while we were rolling it,
we both smoked some.
Now opium, benzedrine, reefers.
I stopped by Sammy's on the way downtown. His flashing-eyed Spanish Negro woman opened
the door. Sammy had gotten weak for that woman. He had never let any other of his women hang
around so much; now she was even answering his doorbell. Sammy was by this time very badly
addicted. He seemed hardly to recognize me. Lying in bed, he reached under and again brought
out that inevitable shaving mirror on which, for some reason, he always kept his cocaine crystals.
He motioned for me to sniff some. I didn't refuse.
Going downtown to deliver the reefers, I felt sensations I cannot describe, in all those different