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
grooves at the same time. The only word to describe it was a timelessness. A day might have
seemed to me five minutes. Or a half-hour might have seemed a week.
I can't imagine how I looked when I got to the hotel. When the Lesbian and her girl friend saw me,
they helped me to a bed; I fell across it and passed out.
That night, when they woke me up, it was half a day beyond West Indian Archie's deadline. Late, I
went back uptown. It was on the wire. I could see people who knew me finding business
elsewhere. I knew nobody wanted to be caught in a crossfire.
But nothing happened. The next day, either. I just stayed high.