On the day after Christmas, the streets of Harlem are buzzing with holiday cheer and the nervous energy of junkies trying to hustle the shit that Santa left and turn it into money that will procure the only gifts that ever, ever count:

Heroin.

Crack.

Coke.

Methadone.

Valium.

Ativan.

Xanax.

Percoset.

Hennessy.

And, for those that simply want some herbal cheer in their post-Christmas revelry,

Good, old-fashioned New York City dime bags of street weed, the smoke so nice you don’t even have to hit it twice. Unless you want to.

I must contend with the exchange and return thing tomorrow, having a gift certificate whose stated use is for purchasing sneakers. Turning the gift certificate into cash with which I can procure dope is a desirable use of the gift, even if it is a perversion of both the spirit in which it was given and the purpose for which it is intended.

I received the gift certificate because a close relative wanted to ensure that I buy a legitimate gift rather than drugs.

Bite me.

It is a creepy attempt at behavior modification.

I am a consenting adult.

A man with a brain.

I will do what I want. When I want. And, how I want.

Fifty dollars is fifty dollars, and those fifty bucks will be used to buy five-dime bags of Fuji Power or DOA or whatever brand is happening so that I can get a good dope buzz on. Tomorrow will be devoted to browbeating a store manager into giving me a cash refund on the gift certificate. If he or she refuses, citing unbending store policy, I will stomp and scream and shout about corporate robbery until (a). I get my way because the scene I am creating is bad for business or (b). Get escorted from the store by security.

I can always steal some sneakers or shoes when I need them, whereas dope is something I have to buy.

In the meantime, I have $250 in real dollars in my pocket, courtesy of cash Christmas gifts—the best present under the sun—and some shoplifted DVDs returned for cash refunds to a retail chain at which I worked before being fired for contributing to the store’s shrinkage rate and whose weaknesses I know intimately and can exploit with ease.

I am in the money, at least, by junkie standards.

(Important note to junkies who are not yet so smacked out they can not hold down a job: If you must work a low-paying job to feed your monkey, work retail and angle for a job at the register. While it’s impossible to support a respectable dope habit on minimum wage, it is quite possible to keep up a treading-water dope habit on minimum wage + the spoils of insider theft. An added benefit of supplementing slave wages with petty theft is that it allows you to wage a personal war of subversion against bloodsucking corporate capitalism. This, in turn, enables you to consider yourself a social activist and agent of change instead of being, well, just a junkie. Be sure only to work for and steal from especially odious human- and worker-rights abusing chains, big box retailers and multinationals to help you support your dope habit. Fuck Wal-Mart, not the little guy.)

Personally speaking, it has not been a bad Christmas. I did not have high overhead because I went Christmas shoplifting rather than Christmas shopping. All from the same store at the same suburban New Jersey shopping center. Walking right out the front door a half-dozen times with shopping bags stuffed full of shoplifted books, DVDs and CDs. I stripped the merchandise of security strips, alarm tags and other devices as I was comfortably seated in one of the chairs the retailer provides around the store, and I did not worry about store security, which I knew for a fact the retailer does not have, or the employees, who I also know for a fact wouldn’t care if you walked out pulling a trailer full of boosted goods.

Needless to say, I gave a lot of books, CDs and DVDs.

This may or may not say something about the point in life to which narcotics have delivered me, a formerly respectable reporter, but such underhandedness allows me get on with the obligations of life and keeps me in dope, and that’s all that matters.

I ponder these things, as the taxi in which I’m riding gets closer to my destination. We are on the upper, ass end of Park Avenue, a stretch of real estate that bears only the most distant of relationships with its Upper East Side cousin—i.e. they both exist on the same planet in the same country in the same city.

We drive past knots of people passing around merchandise.

In one sweep of my eyes around a windswept and chilly intersection beneath the elevated Metro North train tracks through which swirls an astounding amount of trash, one sees all of the abundance of the American consumer market on display:

Hats.

Shirts.

Gloves.

CDs.

CD players.

Electric shavers.

Blow dryers.

Etc.

It is like a Bad Karma Flea Market from Hell, a forlorn place in which the fruits of Christmas giving are turned into potential vehicles for a free high.

Most places in America, holiday returns are part of a timeworn ritual in which the recipient trades in the unwanted gift (atrocious tie, two sizes too small shirt, CD already in the collection), receives a store credit and, in turn, purchases something he or she really wants.

And so,

The Ugly Tie from Aunt Jessica = The Cool Shirt You Really Wanted.

Or,

The Boring Book about the Reagan Administration from Your Mother + The Huge Coffee Table Art Book of Monet Paintings from Your Big Sister = The Joy Division Box CD Set You Been Meaning to Get

Not in the Land of Refined Opiate Product Sold in Ten-Dollar Bags.

Nooooo.

Here, the cash return—or, at least, the dream that it can be so—rules.

It is a great day to get a bargain if you are not a junkie or if you are a junkie with cash that can be spent on something other than dope.

In New York City neighborhoods with above-average numbers of junkies from Harlem and East New York to the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, scenes such as the following are being replayed an average of once every four point five minutes:

Dope Fiend A: I got these jeans from my moms.

Store Clerk (Says nothing. Looks annoyed).

Dope Fiend B: His moms from Hollis, Queens. Anyways, she who the jeans from.

Dope Fiend A: Them jeans nice, but they don’t fit and I already got mad jeans. Got a closet full ah them shits. So, I be needin’ my money back, dog.

Store Clerk (Rolling his eyes): I’m sorry, no cash refunds. Do you have a receipt?

Dope Fiend A: My moms, she got the receipt.

Dope Fiend B: But, yo, moms in Hollis, not in Harlem. Dig?

Store Clerk: Best I can do is a store credit, and we don’t even normally do that without a receipt, ‘cept at Christmas.

Dope Fiend A: Whatchu mean by a credit, dog?

Store Clerk: You can use it to buy anything in the store you want.

Dope Fiend A: I don’t want nothin’ like money. I want money.

Dope Fiend B: My man wanna’ get his self some CDs an’ shit.

Store Clerk: Do you want a store credit?

Dope Fiend A: Shiznit.

Dope Fiend B: Come on, dog, we gonna’ sell the shiznit ourselves.

Dope Fiend A: Right out front. Cracker muthfucka.

Store Clerk: Can I help the next customer?

Dope Fiend C: Yeah, I don’t got no receipt neither. You sayin’ I can’t get my money back on these Nikes? They too small and I got a pair just like ‘em.

And so it goes. Over and over and over.

I tell the driver to pull over, walk a couple of blocks and quickly find Sal, my dope fiend connection from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

“Yo, Bobby,” he says. “Merry Christmas! Fuckin’ A!”

Instantly, by the volume of his voice, I can tell that Sal is loaded. Generally, Sal is only truly wasted on the First of the Month, when the Social Security disability check he receives for being a junkie arrives, or when I purchase dope for him.

“Hey, Sal,” I say. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, Bobby!” Sal says, wiping crud from around his mouth with the sleeve of the battered brown leather jacket that he wears winter, spring, summer and fall. “My mutha wuz askin’ fawh youz yestahday. She wuz hopin’ youz wuz comin’ ovah fawh some canoli awh sfolgliatelle.”

Of all the junkies in New York, I’ve got to find an Italian one from Brooklyn with a mother that invites me over for holiday pastry.

“I told you I couldn’t come for Christmas,” I say.

“I know. But she really wantsa meet youz, Bobby. Yawh, like, special to her.”

“We’ve only talked on the phone, Sal.”

“But she appreciates what youz do fawh me. I tawhk about youz awhl the time.”

“I know, Sal.”

Sal’s mutha believes that he works for me and that I am paying him to be my research assistant. She is on the right track, but very much on the wrong train. I am paying Sal a modest amount, in either cash or dope, to purchase dope for me so that I don’t get ripped off or busted on the streets of Harlem.

“I got a Christmas treat fawh youz, Bobby,” Sal says.

“What’s that?”

“I awhlready got us sum rock. We don’t gotta worry about coppin’ right now. Shit’s crazy anyways. Too many people walkin’ around wit too much money tahday. Some ah the muthafuckin’ dope spots got lines right now.”

New York City is the only place in all of America where junkies line up for dope the same way people line up to buy mega million dollar jackpot lottery tickets. And no one, first and foremost the police, pay the dope lines any mind. As though, 100 junkies standing in line in the dead of winter in Harlem are lined up for a Bill Clinton book signing.

I look at Sal incredulously and say, “You bought some rock for us?”

If Sal has money to get drugs without getting money from me first, Santa Claus really must have come knocking yesterday.

“Don’t look so fuckin’ surprised,” Sal says. “Yawh hurtin’ my feelings.”

“Sorry. You have rock?”

“I had some Christmas presents. My mutha gave me shit like sweatahs and shirts and she’ll get upset if I sell ‘em. But I told youz about my Uncle Richie, my fatha’s brutha who went to jail wit him?”

“Yeah.”

“Uncle Richie gave me a hundred bucks fawh Christmas and told me tah use it tah buy myself sumtin’ nice. So, I got fahwty deuces in my pocket.”

Sal’s got 40 $2 vials of crack? Dude.

“You want to go someplace to smoke?” I say. “I mean, I’ll pay you back with more rock later. I could use a blast.”

“Sure, Bobby,” he says. “Kyeisha, this chick on 122^nd Street, is home. She gotta place. It’s cool as lawhng as you don’t let her dawtuh hit youz up fawh no rock.”

We walk four blocks to a somewhat scabrous block of 122^nd Street. Sal stops in front of four-story apartment buildings and screams, “Kyeisha, yo! Yo, Kyeisha! Yo! It’s Sal! Yo! Open dah window! Yo, Kyeisha!”

A window opens and a twentysomething black female pokes her head out the window.

“Yo, you bettah stop screamin’ like dat,” she says.

“Sawhry,” Sal shouts. “I got my friend Bobby wit me. Can we chill wit youz?”

The head disappears. A minute later, she is standing at the front door. We follow her up four flights of stairs redolent of piss and greasy fried food into her apartment.

Sade is on the CD player. There is a Christmas tree near the window. The apartment smells of crack cocaine and fried chicken.

“Bobby’s a writah,” Sal says by way of introduction.

I sit down on a battered chair.

“Oh yeah?” Kyeisha says. “You wanna’ write a book ‘bout me?”

“Where’s T-Bone?” Sal says, and tells me that T-Bone, so-called, is Kyseisha’s male partner.

“He out on the street tryin’ to sell Christmas shit and hustle up sum cash, but now that you and you friend here, Sal, we be chillin’ anyways, right?”

An 18-or-so-year-old female comes from another room. She looks me up and down and nods at Sal.

“Who you friend be, Sal?” she says.

“Dat’s Bobby,” he says. “He’s a writuh.”

“Oh, yeah, you gonna’ write ‘bout us?” she says.

“Fuck no,” Sal says. “We’re here tah do sum blasts.”

“Now you tawhkin’,” the younger female, whose name is Crystal, says. “You wanna’ sell me sum blasts for this Tupac CD I got yesterday? I don’t know why people givin’ me Tupac. I don’t like no Tupac.”

And, so it goes, on the day after the holiday that came before.

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.