Life, Death, Birth and Love Twisted by Heroin’s Power : Addicts: A pregnant hooker frets over an HIV test. It’s the only thought that competes with the call of dope.

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — She was five months pregnant, and her belly had not yet outgrown her streetwalker’s skirts. Lourdes Pabon, 28 and comely, made more money than most on the Flushing Avenue stroll. “The angels come down from the sky for me,” she would say after a good night. And by “angels,” she meant the men who paid her enough to satisfy her needs for heroin and crack.

The baby would be her fourth. Two were living in Puerto Rico, and the third, born addicted to cocaine, was in foster care here. “This one will be the same, maybe worse,” she said of the child-to-come, feeding on narcotics in her womb. “If I had Medicaid, I would have gotten an abortion a long time ago.”

Drugs kept her from her gloominess. She could shoot up and then there she was, in the broad daylight of simply being, without a messy life to muddle things. Heroin was such a relief that way, and so nice generally, except that it always wore off and the scramble for more seemed to go on forever.

Lourdes was immersed in the pharmacology of estrangement, one of a million injecting drug users in America. Opiates were the religion of these masses. They were possessed. They practiced their own rituals--rites of craving and duties without morals--each aimed at getting to the next bag of dope.

Lourdes paid the customary prices for this life, poverty and family exile, though there could be an even more awful cost. AIDS was being passed in dirty needles. Lourdes tried not to think about this, but one day last summer she impulsively took an HIV test--and for three crazy weeks awaited the results.

“I’ve always been scared of death,” she said, as the fateful day came near. “I don’t like funerals and none of that. But now it’s like I’m walking in a cemetery all the time, waiting for a hand to reach out and grab me.”

Lourdes was confident of little but her looks. She liked to have a steady man around, someone to help her out when she was dope sick and too achy to hustle for a wake-up shot. When her lover--the father of the baby inside her--was sent away to prison, she needed someone new. It was then she happened upon the hole-in-the-wall “shooting gallery” here in Brooklyn at 384 Melrose St.

One of the two dope fiends who ran the place was Joseph (Lips) Santiago. He had this oddball tattoo of a female pair of lips on his neck, which was no wonder, the way the hookers fussed over him. He had once been quite a ladies’ man, before the heroin had shorn away his style. He now defied the heat in a smelly pair of discarded wool suit pants, rolled three turns at the cuff.

Lourdes liked him, and he her, cautiously at first, then with a little more give. Some women were only after free tastes of the drugs that came his way, though she seemed less greedy than most. She brought him breakfast in the mornings.

Lourdes was new to the neighborhood known as Bushwick, and Lips filled her in on the scene. There was a place a few blocks away doing research on acquired immune deficiency syndrome. They paid $30 to any addict who took a test for the human immunodeficiency virus. It was a one-time deal, enough for three bags of dope. And it sure beat working the stroll.

*

Lips, 33, found himself amid a flurry of emotions. At times, it seemed that something close to love was scooping at his heart. “I like her a lot,” he said. “I can see us being together a long time, you know, a real couple.”

He had vague plans for their escape from that ratty gallery. Lourdes, after all, was a pregnant addict and probably HIV-positive. The city had special programs for people like her, welfare checks, even rent-free apartments.

“I’m tired of this,” Lips said, nodding toward the burnt-out shell of a place where he lived. “This is not for us, stuck here, always doing the same thing, chasing the drug, killing ourselves little by little.”

This was strange talk for him. Usually, Lips was a straight-ahead fiend, conniving without remorse, guilty of all the fiend malpractices. He had the virus and barely gave it a thought. “I’m going to die high,” he pledged.

But Lourdes had pried open a new part of him. Around her, he was “an old-fashioned papa,” protective, even a little domineering. He had a junkie’s bias against crack-heads and yelled at her whenever he saw her with a pipe.

Heroin was his preference. If Lourdes was dope sick, he tried to make sure she had a shot. “I got to take care of the baby,” he said, shouldering his manly burden. “The baby’s inside her. It needs that stuff too.”

*

Lips had a partner at the gallery, Georgie Vega. For use of their place, they charged people $2 or a taste of drugs. It was strictly a business arrangement. Lips did not like Georgie and vice versa, especially with him letting Lourdes hang around there to share in the heroin and cocaine.

“Lips is a game player; her too--not that well, but she plays,” Georgie said of the situation. “They don’t love each other; they just need each other. She needs a place to sleep and get off, and he’s working her for down the line, maybe to get an apartment from welfare with her and the baby.”

The two men bickered about who took the tastes. One day, an addict came to Georgie, asking for a clean needle. “I got him,” Lips said, moving between them and trading a syringe for a shake or two of dope. Then Lips shot up into his muscular forearm as Georgie stalked out, muttering about greediness.

“Look at him go, leaving like a bitch,” Lips said. “He’s the greedy one. People can see it. They let him taste and taste, and he doesn’t share. They say, ‘Hey, Georgie, I got you off seven times. What about giving to Lips?’ ”

A few hours later, another of Georgie’s customers came upstairs and Lips took care of him. “Tell Georgie, Luis was here,” the man said as he left.

“I don’t give a damn about Georgie,” Lips said.

“He’s a brother.”

“He’s a selfish bastard.”

This struck Luis as such an odd remark. “Isn’t everyone?” he asked.

*

Lourdes’ skin seemed rubbery and lifeless. She had fevers. Was this the beginning of AIDS? Was this already the end? She could not stop worrying about what her test might show--and she mixed too much thinking with her dope.

Lips did not want her working the streets anymore, though he never minded the money. Men in big cars picked her up and gave her good tips to go with the standard $10 for oral sex. They told her she had a pretty face, even though she had a few scabs where she picked at herself during binges on cocaine.

A lot of her “dates” would ask her to go cop them some drugs. One guy thought she shorted him and began to beat her. He kicked her hard in the stomach, and she stumbled back to the gallery, holding herself as if shot.

Lourdes lay down on the one cot, rolling herself in a dirty quilt. Addicts kept filing in, doing their dope and asking her about her moaning. Maybe they should call an ambulance, they asked. But Lourdes did not want to go to the hospital until she had some heroin. “Please, give me,” she pleaded.

Lips was dope sick too. He was taking all the tastes for himself, and it was a few hours before he was willing to share any with Lourdes. Then they sent someone to call 911 on the pay phone at the corner. An ambulance came 90 minutes later, and Lourdes was carried away on a stretcher.

One of the people at the gallery was Lips’ 28-year-old nephew, Edwin. He told his uncle, “Go with her, man, she needs you.”

“I got to stay here,” Lips insisted.

“C’mon, this woman brings you food, coffee, a few dollars when she’s got it--and you won’t even go with her?”

But Lips was already heading back upstairs, gone before the ambulance even pulled away. He was preoccupied with the whereabouts of his next shot, though, in a passing moment, he did admit he would miss having Lourdes around.

He began to mimic the way she pronounced his name in her thick Puerto Rican accent, theatrically calling out, “Le-e-e-ps, Le-e-e-eps, oh my Le-e-e-ps.”

*

Few junkies enjoy the life. The dope is fine; it is the chasing of it that stinks. They each propose various ways of escape, some as wild-eyed as winning the lottery, others as sensible as getting treatment. The virus is another answer. Feared as it is, it at least places some time limit on their pain.

Georgie was talking again about getting into a drug program, which Lips thought silly. “First of all, it’s not that easy; you just don’t say I’m going to stop and then stop,” Lips said. “Even if you do get into a program, then you get out and get high all over again. So what’s the use?”

That described Georgie’s pattern all right. At age 38, he had gone through detoxification five times, but it never stuck for long. “I need help up here,” he said, pointing to his forehead. “I been on dope 25 years. It’s like getting lost in a forest. It may take me another 25 years to get out.”

Sometimes, he simply longed for a rest. Even jail could be better than the drug life: all the head games, all the hustles. He himself was in trouble. He owed money to a dealer and had to work it off. The dealer gave him eight bags--$80 worth--of dope to sell. A warning came with it: Don’t screw up.

Georgie’s plan was to sell the heroin and then go into treatment. First, he went over to his younger sister’s apartment to let her know what was up. She was always after him to get help. “You really gonna do it?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, I’m going, no doubt about it,” he said and meant it.

Rosie Linares stared at her brother, this grungy, homeless man with the AIDS virus, living his life inside a drug habit. It was all so stunning, the enormity of his troubles.

“You’ve got to take care,” she said as Georgie nodded. “You don’t want to die looking like that.”

His next stop was his mother’s house. She would let him sleep there, and the dope would be safe. But he woke up during the night and decided to shoot up one of the bags before going out to peddle the rest.

That, of course, was a mistake. “One bag didn’t do anything for me,” he said. “I started rationalizing: ‘I’ll do two more bags, then sell two packs of (syringes) to make up the money.’ So I did the two more.”

As he got high, the urge for treatment started to wither. What were his chances of getting clean, anyway? He did the calculations in his head, multiplying all the maybes, then subtracting the sum of his previous failures.

There he was, with five more bags of dope in his pocket and a safe, quiet place to use them up. Georgie Vega began to sing himself the junkie national anthem, which goes: Who gives a damn, who gives a damn, who gives a damn.

*

Lourdes got out of the hospital; she and the fetus were OK. The nurses gave her a slip for a prenatal checkup, which she threw out. She was no good about health precautions, though she did remember when her HIV test results were due back. She pretended not to care--and she could not think of anything else.

On the appointed day, Lourdes was quaking as she went inside. She told them her name, and they asked her for the yellow card they had given her. Results were confidential: no names, just numbers. Lourdes had lost the card. All at once, she felt dizzying crosswinds of frustration and relief.

But then the lab technician fingered through some files. She had remembered Lourdes and found the report. “I’ve got it,” the woman said and smiled, which seemed reassuring. They walked back to a rear office and sat down.

Lourdes expected some prelude, a little small talk before the big announcement. But the other woman was direct. “It’s positive,” she said flatly.

Air flooded into Lourdes in a single inhale. Then the fear in her eyes turned to warm water. The woman repeated herself: “HIV positive.”

Lourdes jumped up. “I have to get the hell out of here,” she cried.

“No, I have to give you some referrals,” the technician said. Eventually, she was able to coax Lourdes back and tell her “this is no death sentence” and that “people have lived for 15-16 years with HIV and never come down with AIDS.”

Lourdes listened without hearing, feeling only the hand that was grabbing her in the cemetery. She sobbed all the way back to the gallery.

The place was crowded. Lourdes caught Lips in the beam of her eyes, and he led her off to an adjacent, trash-filled room, the one with buckets used as toilets. She told him her news and waited for him to offer his comfort.

“I’ll stick with you,” he said, genuine sincerity rich in his face.

“Really?” she asked. She wanted to hear him say it again.

“We both have it,” Lips said. “I’ll help you, and you’ll help me.”

And with that, he embraced her, though even the warmth of his body did not seem quite enough. In such a treacherous world, there was only one way to give his soothing promises the proper ceremony.

Lips cooked up a shot. And he put the needle in her vein.