Got caught soaking Benzedrine cotton inhalers in coffee and drinking it with the other degenerates in Times Square… That yegg Huncke picked my pocket. We was both high on bennies. The bastard stole my teeth. Had to dangle back to Cleveland, minus choppers… Night before I made tracks I saw Huncke teach that pale fairy William Burroughs how to tear the cotton out of Benzedrine inhalers and soak them in coffee. WB was like a funny mortician. The three of us went buzzing out to watch the squarejohns come to test their eyes on us Times Square Denizens. “Look Ma, a tranny!” Left the Automat and watched Huncke troll for dip-bait. Speedwalkin’ through the street, left shoulder low, right hand in pocket, eyes going in three directions, on the sniff for purses, packages, put-down-for-a-moment-by-a-phone-booth overnight bag. But this night, with yours truly, they boost an overnight bag from a stewardess on Broadway, pulling the Lost Ohio Scam. Burroughs, looking sober as a judge, sidles over to the Pan Am beauty, says, “Pardon me, Miss,” while Huncke, who had perfected the art of looking invisible, blending in like soot on brick, slouches by and slides a hand under the blue leather handle of the blue and white Pan Am carry on and saunters off. They all meet back at Huncke’s hotel, the Perrin, a junkie paradise on Tenth. One well-placed slip of a hairpin pops the lock not just open but clear out of its casting on the luggage. Revealing, as Huncke summed it up, the three categories of stewardess matter. Underwear, makeup, and diet pills. She’s even got a little Desoxyn ad from LIFE Magazine showing Sleepy Plumpies transformed Whiz-bang Slender Deb, Befores and Afters over upbeat copy: “Shed Those Pounds With Plenty of Pep To Spare!”

They divided up the Desoxyn three ways—there were three fresh-cracked prescriptions, which made it easy—and settled in a Fascination booth in a Times Square arcade where sailors watched them playing non stop for twenty-seven hours. Methezen, Huncke says. How’s that, Double H? At 0900 we stagger out. Into daylight—what’s that stuff? It hoits! On a day none of us could easily name. And low and be-holy! Who do we see but that poor bedraggled stew. Am I the only man with a conscience? Bill and Huncke regard me with curiosity. Like I’ve sprung a goiter. I am not made for this life. Can I describe the poor stewardess we’d left high and dry? No longer fresh as an airborne cheerleader. Feature the betty forlorn, missing one shoe. Her Chignon gone. “Looks like she been rolled in an alley. Or worse,” Burroughs says, like it’s a punchline of a joke just for him and Huncke. “Bet Princess needs them speedies now,” Huncke chuckles. We stare long enough for the sky to open up and drizzle. “She needs something,” Burroughs agrees. I play the sap. “How many anythings we got left?” Huncke feels in the pockets of his too-big coat, lifted from a dime-a-dance on 47th, and says, “what do you mean we?” Then Huncke turns to Burroughs and says, “We got twenty-four.” “Should be enough,” Burroughs smiles with a mouth like a tight cunt. “Until it ain’t. Let’s drift.”