He got a job as a salesman. He soon became a regional manager and found a luxury apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He had a sales staff that became his drinking crew. He would take them to his bar and buy them a few rounds – they all loved Stinky.
He had an unlimited bankroll. He was the toast of New York. He was invited to all the clubs, like Studio 54, The Palladium, and Limelight. He was action in an action-made town.
Everyone loved him. He would throw private parties were there were lots of alcohol and narcotics. At one of them, he was mesmerized by a Brazilian dancer who had an exotic way of dancing. She looked at him with her devilish eyes and said, “How bad do you want me?” He was smitten by her beauty. He thought about her day and night, and he had a feeling he never had about any woman. He started calling her. She wouldn’t answer, and he was perplexed.
[Read More: The Rise and Fall of Stinky: Part I]
One day she called him and said, “Would you like to come over?” At her place, there was a table with a razor blade and all kinds of lines. She took a hit off a little glass pipe and said, “Do you party?” He was confused. He was a drinker but he wasn’t interested in narcotics. But she was gorgeous and seductive and he wanted her, so he reached for the pipe. It was a crack pipe.
He took a blast and he felt something like no feeling he had ever felt before. They smoked all night but he had to go to work.
With bloodshot eyes, he went to his office. But his behavior changed. He was addicted, and he couldn’t stop even though he tried. He started embezzling from the company funds to pay for his crack habit. Computers went missing. He started missing work and cursing out his staff. He was completely miserable, and he did his best to make everyone around him feel as bad as he did.
His boss was worried about him, and suggested he go to rehab. He didn’t heed those warnings. He just wanted to get drunk and high. He couldn’t keep up with his bills, and his cable TV got cut off, and then his water and electric.
That didn’t stop him from smoking crack. He started stealing from his mama, who was sick. The relatives were embarrassed and frightened when he came over for Thanksgiving dinner and passed out at the table.
His day of shame came when he was walking on Ninth Avenue and saw a shapely person with long brown hair standing on a corner in a short skirt. She smiled at him and looked him right in the eye, and he felt a little high. She said, “Do you wanna date?” and he said, “Yes.” Something didn’t seem right, but he’d been up for two days smoking crack and he hardly knew what he was doing. He handed her 50 bucks and asked, “What’s your name?” She said, “Jonathan,” and soon the police sirens came. He got caught paying a transvestite hooker, and because he had crack in his pocket, he went to jail.
His career was over. They fired him – they had had enough. He lost his home, his family disowned him, and the friends he bought drinks for didn’t know him no more.
Now he was homeless. He only had a crack pipe, the clothes on his back and some liquor to keep him warm.
New York City is rough to people not familiar with the Street. He got robbed and beat up and he drank until he didn’t hurt and didn’t care.
Soon he was living in a subway tunnel infested with rats and sewage. He ate out of garbage cans because he was starving. He didn’t bathe or change his clothes. He stank. No one knew him, and he had no name any more. His name was Stinky.
Stinky stopped smoking crack because he was broke, but took up liquor to comfort himself. He was the first one at the liquor store every morning and he panhandled to keep drinking.
People complained about him. The neighborhood kids laughed and threw garbage at him.
Stinky had hit bottom, but he didn’t know it and didn’t care. He only cared about getting drunk, getting high, and getting over.
Stinky was lost to the Street. Maybe he could have been saved – if his parents had noticed he had begun to drink. Or could his high school have helped him? Could his college have realized the trouble he was in?
Or maybe those are the wrong questions, because no one can stop someone else’s addiction single-handed. And no one made him take that hit off that glass pipe, or that first swig of Night Train. Stinky did all that, all the way to the Street.
The Street is awful, and the street is hard. The Street had claimed another soul.
