it helped me. It just didn’t help enough. By 1992, real help came in the needle. There was nothing else. You don’t just wave a magic wand over that shit and make it gone.
Or so I believed.
• • •
I stayed in his Bounder for the best part of a week, living on soup, sandwiches, and nasally administered doses of heroin that were just enough to keep the worst of the shakes at bay. He brought my guitar and duffel. I kept a spare set of works in the duffel, but when I looked (it was the second night, and he was working the crowds at his Portraits in Lightning shy), the kit was gone. I begged him to give it back, along with enough heroin so I could cook and shoot up.
“No,” he said. “If you want to mainline—”
“I’ve only been skin-popping!”
He gave me an Oh, please look. “If you want that, you’ll have to find the proper equipment yourself. If you’re not well enough to do it tonight, you will be by tomorrow, and around this place I’m sure it wouldn’t take you long. Just don’t come back here.”
“When do I get this so-called miracle cure?”
“When you’re well enough to withstand a small application of electricity to your frontal lobe.”
I felt cold at that. I swung my legs out of his bed (he was sleeping on the pullout couch) and watched him take off his show clothes, hanging them up carefully and replacing them with a pair of plain white pajamas that looked like something inmate extras might wear in a horror movie set in an insane asylum. Sometimes I wondered if he might not belong in an asylum, and not because he was running what was essentially a carny wonder-show. Sometimes—especially when he talked about the curative powers of electricity—he got a look in his eyes that didn’t seem sane. It was not unlike the way he’d looked when he preached himself out of a job in Harlow.
“Charlie . . .” This was what I called him now. “Are you talking about shock treatment?”
He looked at me soberly, buttoning the top of his white inmate pajamas. “Yes and no. Certainly not in the conventional sense, because I don’t intend to treat you with conventional electricity. My spiel sounds unbelievable, because it’s what the customers want. They don’t come here for reality, Jamie, they come for fantasy. But there really is a secret electricity, and its uses are manifold. I just haven’t discovered all of them yet, and that includes the one that interests me most.”
“Want to share?”
“No. I gave several exhausting performances, and I need sleep. I hope you’ll still be here in the morning, but if you’re not, that’s your choice.”
“Once upon a time you would have said there are no real choices, only God’s will.”
“That was a different man. A young fellow with naïve beliefs. Will you wish me goodnight?”
I did, then lay in the bed he had given up so I could use it. He was no longer a preacher, but still of the Good Samaritan stripe in so many ways. I hadn’t been naked, like the man who had been set upon by robbers on his way to Jericho, but heroin had robbed me of plenty for sure. He had fed me, and given me shelter, and propped me up with just enough horse to keep me from going out of my fucking mind. The question now was whether or not I wanted to give him a chance to blast my brainwaves flat. Or outright kill me by shooting megavolts of “special electricity” into my head.
Five times, maybe ten or a dozen, I thought I would get up and drag the midway until I found somebody who’d sell me what I needed. That need was like a drillbit in my head, boring in deeper and deeper. Nasally administered sips of H didn’t cut it. I needed a big blast direct to the central nervous system. Once I actually swung my legs out of bed and reached for my shirt, determined to do it and get it done, but then I lay back down again, shaking and sweating and twitching.
Finally I began to drift off. I let myself go, thinking Tomorrow. I’ll leave tomorrow. But I stayed. And on my fifth morning—I think it was the fifth—Jacobs slipped behind the wheel of his Bounder, keyed the engine, and said, “Let’s take a ride.”
I had no choice about it, unless I wanted to open the door