The New Year starts off like the old one—blurry, driven and desperate.

It doesn’t skip a beat. All of life erodes into a featureless terrain of hustling up money, hunting down drugs and getting off when you’re deep into dope. I was in deep in the Old Year. And, I’m in super deep in the New.

I’m standing on a rooftop in East Harlem with my Puerto Rican friend Gavi, looking at a New York City winter vista of Yankee Stadium across the Harlem River in the South Bronx. It’s a picture postcard of cold and depressing urban shit.

Gavi’s Pekingese, Nanni, is a few feet away, squatting to take a crap on the roof.

Gavi passes me a bottle full of coquito, a Puerto Rican rum-based holiday concoction he brewed up on New Year’s Eve using three bottles of rum I brought him and his wife Madeleine as a present for their East Harlem dope fiend hospitality.

I hang out in their apartment so much that people in the neighborhood no longer give me strange Who’s the White Boy? looks when I drive up in my old sky blue BMW. The kids on the block keep an eye on the car. The Yemeni guy who runs the bodega on the corner of East 143^rd and Lenox Avenue fronts me packs of Marlboros on credit. And the neighbors think I’ve moved into the building, which is midway between a slum dwelling and being abandoned.

Half the apartments are seriously slummy. And half are very abandoned.

The hallways smell like crack, piss and Spanish cooking—Eau d’East Harlem. Half of the time, the only heat comes from the kitchen stove because the ancient boiler in the basement only works occasionally. The trash goes out the window into the alley below. The roaches are exemplary New York City ghetto bugs—astounding in size, bold in attitude and awesome in number. And the neighborhood rats are as fearless and brazen as they are monstrously big.

I look at Nanni the Pekingese. Having completed taking a dump, the dog is dancing in proud little circles. It is displaying the gratitude a junkie feels after a successful clearing of the bowels because opiates induce constipation that is Biblical in nature.

“Nanni,” Gavi says in his New Yorican accent.

The dog runs over. Gavi pulls some toilet paper from his pocket, bends over and carefully wipes the dog’s ass.

“Good girl,” he says.

I consider the bottle of coquito. It’s cooked up with rum, coconut milk, egg yolks, sugar and vanilla extract. The way Gavi makes it, the coquito packs the punch of a freight train.

“Day like this is when the chit good,” Gavi says. “Chit need a day to marinate so all the flavor come out.”

I take a hit and nod.

Good chit, indeed.

The coquito has definitely matured and filled out in the last forty-eight hours.

I give the bottle back to Gavi. I’m on a lunch break from my telemarketing job, having just sped across the George Washington Bridge and down the Harlem River Drive from Jersey. The plan is to cop and do some dope before I go back to work.

Dope takes the edge off my job. I’m spending my nine-to-fives calling gas stations, machine shops and garages all over the United States trying to sell them huge drums of degreaser.

All I know about degreaser is it degreases things and that I could use a serious degreasing myself right about now, metaphysically if not literally.

They call the basement room where I work in Fort Lee north of the George Washington Bridge, “the boiler room.” It contains a dozen tables with two phones each and is presided over by a 5’10”, 395-pound Jewish guy from Long Island with four chins named Lou. They call him Jabba the Hutt behind his back. Jabba’s second in command is a slight guy with gray hair and a gray beard named Jack. Jack sounds a little like Elmer Fudd and claims to have been a classical musician before he starting pimping industrial cleaners for Lou.

No doubt, it’s a long and winding road from Carnegie Hall to a basement office in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

My co-workers are a bunch of dope users and drunks (current and former), with one recovering dope fiend and still active degenerate gambler—the guy that hooked me up with the job—thrown in for good measure.

I am, apparently, a big disappointment to the bosses, who shake their heads and tell me every payday that they’re going to let me go unless I start moving more degreaser. Jack and Lou keep a chalkboard on the boiler room wall upon which they tally everyone’s daily and weekly sales figures. Every time they fire the person whose results are worse than mine, I end up dead last on the board, until an even bigger degreaser slacker comes along.

I am not a good salesman, especially of degreasers.

Me: “May I speak to Earl.”

Guy on the Phone: “This is Earl.”

Me (Reading script): “Hi, Earl, my name’s Bob. I’m calling from United Chemical Corporation about your order of degreaser!”

Guy on the Phone (Annoyed and vaguely hostile): “What degreaser?”

Elmer Fudd (Pointing at me and whispering): “Stick to the script.”

Me: “The 300-gallon drum you ordered, Earl. It’s back in stock and I’m shipping it as soon as you give me the authorization number.”

Guy on the Phone (Sounding Southern, rural and overtly hostile): “I didn’t order no degreaser.”

Elmer Fudd (Gesturing wildly at me): “Of course, he did. Tell him!”

Me: “Of course you did, Earl, but that’s not important. I’m giving you an incredible deal on our citrus degreaser.”

Guy on the Phone: “You talkin’ about that orange shit?”

Me: “Yes, sir. Great! You remember! It’s the all-purpose, heavy-duty, citrus degreaser.”

Guy on the Phone (Very agitated): “That shit don’t clean nuthin’. I ordered a thousand dollars ah the shit last year an’ almost lost mah job.”

Me (Departing from approved script): “Oh. I’m so sorry. Wow.”

Guy on the Phone: “Don’t call no more.”

Click.

Elmer Fudd (Shaking his head): “No!!! That’s not how you do it! Never let them hang up.”

Me: “I’m sorry, Jack. I was on point until the guy said he almost lost his job.”

At which point, I head for the john and shoot another bag of dope.

You would too.

I’m a writer—I’ve even won awards for my journalistic work—but I haven’t written a single publishable word in nearly a year. For a while, I was working for a big book chain—using the logic that it’s better to be near the printed word if you’ve got to do shit work at minimum wage—but that gig went down in flames when I was discovered relieving the cash register of excess cash by ringing up phony returns.

Then, I worked for a big record chain for a while—using the logic that I might as well be near music because I really dig it and I once worked in radio—until the store manager finally caught on that I was taking beaucoup CDs, which I would sell at a used CD place on my lunch hour.

Hence, the degreaser gig, which involves neither a cash register to pillage nor merchandise to pilfer. It has resulted in a somewhat more honest lifestyle, except on the occasions when I shoplift because the minimum wage and a dope habit are natural enemies.

I should be grateful for the job, because I’m not exactly a model employee, but I’m not.

I’m bitter and know it will only be a matter of time before I’m busted leaving a CD store with my pants stuffed full of CDs.

Gavi takes another swallow of coquito and passes the bottle back to me, but I decline.

“Wha’s a matter?” he says. “You dun’ like it?”

“I like it,” I say. “But I’ve got to get back to work after we score.”

“You still wanna’ go score?”

“Yeah. I’ll be sick if I wait until later.”

“You mus’ be gettin’ some kinda’ long lunch. You dun’ care about gettin’ fire?”

“It’s just a job.”

“Whatchu gonna’ do, you get fire?”

“Get another job. Hustle some more.”

“You chould write again, a guy like you.”

“I can’t,” I say. “Not right now. I need a break. I’m burned out.”

“You chould do less dope, brother.”

Jesus Christ. Why do people lecture me about how much dope I do?

Gavi did eight years in Attica prison on a dope charge. He goes to a methadone clinic every morning at nine o’clock. His wife’s a methadone addict and on welfare. And I should do less dope?

“I like dope,” I say. “It makes me happy.”

“Make me happy too,” Gavi says. “Butchu gotta’ watch it, if it fucks thins up for you.”

“It’s not fucking anything up.”

“You use ta make lotta’ money, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You ain’t makin’ chit now, right?”

“I’m getting by.”

“You chopliftin’ for money, brother.”

“So?” I say.

“You chus gotta’ think about it is all I’m sayin’, you know?”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“I’m serious, man. You a nice guy. You gotta’ good head. You chould use it.”

“We can talk later. Why don’t we go score? I’ll be back after work.”

We go back downstairs. Gavi puts Nanni in the apartment. The dog is whining when we leave. It associates me with going for rides in my car.

We drive down to 123^rd and First Avenue. Gavi hops out. I double-park a half block away. He comes back two minutes later and hands me two dimes of Fuji Power dope.

“I’m gonna’ stay down here,” Gavi says. “I still gotta’ sell my bottles.”

Like everybody else, Gavi sells the methadone he gets at the clinic to get money to buy real drugs.

“All right, my friend,” I say. “I’ll see you later.”

I head for a deserted East Harlem street so I can shoot up before another afternoon of pushing degreaser.

Robert Guskind has been writing for a long time. An award-winning Washington-based journalist and contributor to major national magazines and newspapers, he now lives very close to Manhattan, where he continues to write, shoot photographs and work on a book based on his travels and experiences as a reporter and formerly disreputable dope fiend. He is all better now and is a regular contributor to Cherrybleeds.