COLUMN ONE : A Room for Heroin and HIV : In a dank, burned-out building, addicts engage in microbiological roulette, sharing contaminated needles. Here, America’s drug war meets failure and AIDS is spread.

Heroin is his shepherd; he shall always want. And so Georgie Vega made his way toward the burned-out hollow of a house at 384 Melrose St., slogging through the trash heaps out front and stepping amid the crazed air dance of a thousand flies. He climbed seven rickety inside stairs into an eerie nether world that dope fiends know as a shooting gallery.

Georgie was a big man there, co-proprietor of a place that was stunning not only for its outlaw customs but also for its fertility for disease. A shooting gallery is a classic location for the passing of the AIDS virus, a spot where addicts--some knowingly and some not--take part in a kind of microbiological roulette, sharing the lethal hardware of contaminated needles.

America has long had a malign attitude toward its heroin addicts, alarmed by their crimes and intent on their punishments. In the age of AIDS, this sternness bears the heavy weight of self-destruction. The nation has an estimated 1 million injecting drug users, and in recent years they have not only been responsible for 34% of all newly reported AIDS cases, they have also been the main cause of the epidemic’s spread to the heterosexual population.

In the face of this mortal turn, society’s response has been confused and sluggish, allowing tens of thousands of additional infections and inevitable deaths.

“We’ve made it real hard for these people to survive,” said Dr. T. Stephen Jones, assistant director for substance abuse and HIV prevention at the federal Centers for Disease Control. “There’s too much of a feeling that drug addicts are excrement and we’d do well to be rid of them.”

The priority has been the War on Drugs and not emergency public health measures to convert addicts to safer needle practices. There is a hesitation to do anything that might appear to condone heroin use. Instead, addicts are urged to seek drug treatment. But while billions of extra dollars have poured into police work and prisons, money for treatment has lagged. Dope fiends, as they call themselves, are routinely turned away, left to fend for themselves in a caldron of plague.

Early this year, Georgie Vega tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus. This was not unexpected; he had shared a zillion needles long before he had ever heard of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. “I’ve seen lots of guys die already,” he said. “They turned into skeletons, and their teeth fell out and everything. I hope I die before I get that far. Maybe I’ll be lucky and just die one night up in the gallery.”

Upstairs, the cramped, blood-haunted room was almost always airless this past summer. Dirty bedsheets hung over the openings that once were windows. Traffic in and out was undisguised, a caravan of whores and street criminals and beautiful losers, each keeping the erratic schedule of a stray cat, all there to be immunized for a few hours against the sorry facts of their lives.

The ritual was most often a hurried one: the white powder shaken into a metal bottle cap, drops of water added, a small flame set beneath, the fluid drawn through a tiny wad of cotton into a syringe, a tourniquet pulled tight to make a vein bulge out, a thumb pressed against the plunger. Then, at last, a liquid warmth began to ripple through a grateful body, a dim light deepening to full glow, a feeling so nice it can take a person around the bend forever.

Georgie Vega, 38 years old and no dummy, had first gone around that bend 25 years ago when heroin seemed just another part of the onrush of manhood. The years then melted together, their possibilities shrunken small. When not in jail, he was homeless, with little going for him but a cunning born of the streets and a genuinely good heart that made people trust him.

This spring, Georgie and a drug acquaintance, “Lips” Santiago, ventured into the abandoned structure on Melrose. They did a quick bit of housekeeping and set up their makeshift gallery, a far better space than the empty lot near the Flushing Avenue whore stroll where they had shot dope during the winter. They charged the standard gallery entrance fee: $2 or a taste of drugs.

With this indoor spot, Georgie was a good man to know in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. He shot up as much as 30 or 40 times a day and could tell a person which dope was the best around. More than that, he hoarded hypodermics and could be counted on to sell them at $2 apiece.

On busy Knickerbocker Avenue, heroin was easier to buy than a can of soda, dozens of people calling out the local brands like vendors at a ballpark: Body Bag, Mambo King, TNT, Overtime, Al Capone. Tougher to get was a set of works. Unpredictably, the illegal trade in needles dried up for hours at a time, leaving junkies with dope in their pockets and none in their bloodstream.

Sometimes, even Georgie ran out, and that turned the gallery tense. “Damn this thing!” he cried out, unable to inject with a dull needle. The veins in his arms had long ago collapsed; usually, he shot the dope into his neck, an awkward technique, staring into a jagged hand mirror to guide the pinprick.

But on that afternoon he only had works he had used before. The points had lost their bite, and when he tried to “hit” himself, he was only able to push a vein aside. “God, that hurts!” he moaned, a small bead of blood forming on his neck. He asked Lips to insert it for him.

“Bulge out that vein,” Lips said, and Georgie inflated his mouth with air until his cheeks and neck puffed out.

“You in yet?” Georgie asked anxiously.

“Be still,” Lips said, jiggling the spike.

“You in?”

“I’m in.”

A trickle of blood ran down Georgie’s neck, twisting like a river on a map. He then sat down. Four other addicts were nearby. Conversation meandered.

Suddenly, a sweaty face poked up the stairway that emptied into the room. Ray Morales was no regular, just a sometimes guy. “Give me a set of works,” he ordered.

“No got anything right now, Papi ,” Georgie answered in his friendly way.

“C’mon, man, c’mon!” Morales insisted. He thought Georgie might be trying some junkie con on him to jump the price.

“OK, here,” Georgie replied, handing over a used needle with some advice: “Bleach it out.” He nodded toward a small bottle on a round table.

“No time,” Morales said. He was on his way home from work. His ride was waiting. He was eager to shoot his dope and get out of Bushwick.

“I’m telling you, man, bleach it out,” Georgie repeated.

But the other addict was too impatient. “f--- it,” he said, and he jabbed the needle in, taking into his arm an urgent mixture of drugs and whatever disease might be living in the plastic barrel of that syringe.

Dope was thrilling; dope was drudgery. Dope was sanctuary and dope made all of them fugitives. Dope was a way of life and a shortcut to death. The best and the worst of it was its sheer everydayness, never a letup, 24-seven. It had the ability to free people, finally, from all their damned self-awareness, into a primitiveness, up-down, yes-no, just get to the next bag of dope. But the getting often got complicated, a daily mesh of alliances and betrayals.

Most common images of heroin addicts are wrong. They do not lie around in a gauzy euphoria. A serious habit is too demanding for that. These are people who wake up sick and broke, needing to hustle $50-$200 in drugs to make it to tomorrow. The pressure to produce is relentless. They must be disciplined, moving fast, alert to scams, theirs to pull off and theirs to suffer.

“You’ve got to know how to talk, to get over, be streetwise, a lot of things,” Georgie said, analyzing the life. “I’ll do anything to get high: lie, cheat, steal. I’ve even taken (stuff) from my mother. Now I’ve lost her trust. That’s screwed up; that hurts. But a dope fiend is a dope fiend.”

Still, it takes all kinds. The gallery filled over and over with humanity’s variations of gender, color and spirit, among them desolate angels and wicked predators, sometimes the one becoming the other in the panic for a shot.

A few of the customers only dabbled. For them, the dope was closer to a weekly kick than a daily compulsion. They had maintained roots in jobs and families, and were stingy with their names. One husky guy cursed himself for getting blood on the sleeve of a clean, pressed shirt; he’d have to lie to his wife about that, maybe “tell her he scratched a mosquito bite.”

Another occasional shooter was Herbie, the gabby butcher at a supermarket. “Not every junkie is a greasy thief,” he said, proud of career and family. And then there was Arthur, a $100-a-day dope fiend who somehow managed to maintain the well-scrubbed appearance of his last job, a trainee at a bank. “I can cross back over whenever I want,” he boasted. And before summer’s end, he landed a good position with an assets management company.

For addicts such as Georgie and Lips, the gallery was headquarters, home sweet home, their own special hustle. They provided a service to 100 or so people every day. Their place was a haven off the street, only minutes from where the dope was sold. A junkie could shoot up and cut out, lessening the danger of getting caught with a needle or a bag by some nosy cop on the beat.

That it attracted so many different kinds of users was the god-awful nightmare of AIDS experts who did mathematical models. A shooting gallery afforded what they called “efficient mixing”: high-risk behaviors across the lines of age, race, class and friendship groups. People left the gallery and went their separate ways, spinning microbiological roulette someplace else.

In Bushwick, entree into the drug world required no cult knowledge. Young children on two-wheelers steered buyers to heroin and crack. Drugs were the lyrics of merry singsongs, the chant of a little girl with an ice cream cone and a young boy skipping the lines on a sidewalk.

Georgie’s dope habit thrived in this ecology. He got by on personality. The streets were mostly Puerto Rican; blacks maneuvered them with ease, but white people had reason to feel edgy. Georgie was good at befriending these whites and acting as their broker and guide. In exchange for a taste, he would buy them premium drugs and set them up with a clean needle.

There are few pure heroin users these days. Georgie shot both heroin and cocaine--”the boy” and “the girl”--and smoked a little crack besides. The high of choice was the speedball, the mixing of one or more bags of heroin with a bag of cocaine: a “one-and-one” or a “two-and-one” and so on.

Bobby Dalziel, a 37-year-old junkie, 20 years older by looks and 40 older by world-weariness, said a speedball shot made him feel as if his system were going up and down at the same time: “The initial effect is the rush of the coke, like you’re taking off, and then all of a sudden the dope comes up through your stomach and overtakes it to make you feel relaxed.”

That coke rush is the treat they chase. A $10 bag (single shot) of heroin lasts four to six hours, but for longtime addicts it is only potent enough for “getting straight,” curing their dope-sickness so they are back to the even keel of normalcy. Cocaine is a launch beyond. Even some junkies in methadone maintenance programs--their need for heroin blocked by a synthetic narcotic--came to the gallery to feed their veins pure cocaine.

“You always need coke on top of your dope,” said an older addict named Ruben, who works at a hotel in housekeeping. “It’s the urge for the rush. If you shoot up and don’t get any rush, you’ve got to buy another bag. And if you buy and you do get the rush, it feels so good you go right out for more.” He laughed at his own pretzel logic. “Either way, you need another bag.”

Addicts were always trying to “make an angle,” one with heroin trying to find one with coke. They became “cooker friends,” in league for a while over glassine packets of powder and a bottle cap, a bond often too tenuous to survive the apportioning of the shots. Georgie was a matchmaker between the dopes and the cokes, taking a taste as commission. His internal chemistry was regulated by the happenstance of whoever and whatever came up the stairs.

It was an insane life, and he knew it. The contradictions sometimes amused him--and other times made him hate himself. The cocaine actually ate into the staying power of the heroin. “We wake up sick, get straight, then start using the coke until we get sick again,” he said. “Is that crazy or what?”

Georgie was ashamed of his life. Where had it gone? He was only 13 when he first tried the needle in the bathroom of a park in Brooklyn. Over the years, his soul then seemed to drain away through the tiny holes in his veins. Dope was his problem, his remedy, problem, remedy. He was in its loop.

Much of the time, Georgie was more the heroin than he was Georgie. “Dope has no conscience,” he said, and so sometimes neither did he. He had done awful things: burglaries, swindles. He had gone through people’s pockets while a bigger guy yoked them around the neck. His prison terms totaled eight years. The lockup was his second home, “the only time I eat a balanced meal.”

Now he was a middle-aged man with an incurable virus, his bed a moldy cot in a ratty gallery. His sister Rosie lived a few blocks away. Her 13-year-old, Mario, was Georgie’s godson. They hugged each other at his sister’s apartment, but he and the boy agreed never to acknowledge each other on the street.

Dope had won a long arm-wrestle. Georgie had gone through hospital detoxification programs five times, his last try in late 1991. Rosie had picked him up when he was released. He talked hopefully then about a job, a family, an actual life. He swore he knew better than to go back to Bushwick.

It was a reformation that lasted less than a day. He began to suffer the itch of a deadly boredom. It was accompanied by what seemed an obvious, predestined truth: He was what he was, and he’d be this decayed, addicted self for the rest of his years, however few years that was.

And he said, the hell with it.

Georgie and Lips believed a great junkie cliche: There are no friends, just associates. The gallery was strictly business. They did not like each other.

“Lips only cares about himself and drugs; to me, human beings come first, though I’m sometimes the same way,” Georgie said, trying to be fair. “I love drugs too. But I’d never put drugs before human life. I’ve seen guys OD, and people start going through their pockets without even trying to help them.”

Lips Santiago, 33, was a former stickup man, not long out of the lockup himself. He also had the AIDS virus, though his immune system still seemed resistant. Muscles defined his arms and shoulders; he had been a body builder at Sing Sing, even as he kept up his heroin habit behind bars. His real first name was Joseph. A pink pair of female lips were tattooed to his neck.

Lips was a lady’s man, a peculiar trait since heroin dulls the sex drive. “Dope is the only girlfriend I got time for,” he declared. Still, the female admirers came around. Moneymakers too. He’d finagle cash off them from time to time, offering to cop them some dope, then running off. “You do that when you’re stressing,” he explained, comfortable with his own excuse.

When “stressing” for a shot, it was OK to “fiend”--or cheat another addict--and the dope gods would grant absolution. Lies were part of the game, though it was a good idea to later make some gesture of amends.

Every show of friendship had good purpose if it somehow led to dope down the road. Memory kept a ledger: “Remember that time I got you straight when you were sick?” The gallery was a theater of manipulation, of tactical begging and bullying.

One of Lips’ acquaintances was Carmen Contreras, a slight, slender-faced woman better known as Shorty. She usually worked the corner of St. Nicholas and Flushing. She was HIV-positive, a fact left unmentioned to her “dates.”

Depression was afloat in her big eyes. She had lost a child to crib death, a husband to divorce and her trust in men to a rape and beatings. Shorty was a “needle freak” who loved to let the spike linger after it entered her arm.

One week, she persuaded Lips and Georgie to let her help out in the gallery and collect some of what was owed “the house.” Even in a den of connivers, her slyness was special. She would shoot up between parked cars, then minutes later come upstairs complaining she had not had a taste of dope all day.

“I’m sick, so sick,” she moaned, her ashen face bleeding sweat.

And Georgie and Lips gave her what they had.

The gallery looked worse to some than others, depending on how far they had wandered along dope’s withering journey. It was an 11-by-11 space with charred beams at its top. The walls were gouged and moist. The furnishings were a cot, two small tables and two stuffed chairs, the fabric frayed and discolored.

The odor made some addicts gag. An adjoining, debris-filled room had buckets to use as toilets. Who knew what germs hung in the stale air? Jo-nice Williams, one of the regulars, was tubercular. So was Benny De Jesus. “They say I’m real contagious,” he reported one morning, back from the hospital. No one cared as he slept off the last of a fever in one of the big chairs.

As galleries go, this was a decent place. It may not have been as elaborate as some in Harlem--actual apartments with running water and electricity. But at least Georgie and Lips had a thin carpet on the floor and a fire hydrant across the street. It sure beat “the condos,” the under-part of a deserted loading dock off Jefferson Avenue. Junkies had shot up there for years.

This block on Melrose was notorious. The cops hated to patrol it. At one corner was a wide-open crack trade, at the other a cluster of small apartment buildings. Young kids often wandered over to the drug side, playing in the trash in front of the gallery. Georgie scolded them all the time. “Get outta here!” he’d yell. “There are needles down there. You’re gonna get stuck!”

By its broadest definition, a shooting gallery does not require much. While some are set up in homes, most are merely guerrilla settings, in the rusted hulks of abandoned cars or the cardboard lean-tos of weedy lots. They are everywhere and nowhere, their presence thinly concealed, obvious once seen. They have traditionally been hothouses of diseases, particularly hepatitis.

In New York, most injecting drug users (IDUs) were doomed to AIDS before medical spotters even had it in sight. Historical studies of the epidemic--using serum samples taken for other purposes--show the infection rate among IDUs went from virtually zero in 1978 to 29% in 1979, to 44% in 1980, to 52% in 1981. A decade ago, the virus was already ticking inside 100,000 IDUs here.

No one had to tell dope fiends that something had been loosed. They eroded before each other’s eyes, walking the slow motion of the fevered, erupting with cancers. Bobby Dalziel recalled: “One of the guys I shared with had this milky-white thrush crap in his mouth; the doctors didn’t even know what it was. So he died, this guy who used to give me a taste of whatever (drugs) he had. Then three more of my buddies dropped dead. And, of course, then I got it.”

Word was getting out through the addicts’ crude networks, though the talk was as much hearsay as science. By 1984, more than half of the city’s IDUs were worried enough about the virus to change their injection routines, said Don Des Jarlais, a highly regarded drug researcher who serves on the National Commission on AIDS. But unfortunately, the changes usually were things that only reduced, and did not eliminate, risks, such as refusing to share needles with obviously ill people.

By and large, the addicts were on their own against the tide. In those early years, society spun in place, its public officials immobile against a blood-born contagion. It was clear that IDUs were in for a slaughter; after all, they received a mini-blood transfusion every time they shared a needle. But a determined rescue of such pariahs was hard to gear up. AIDS had little voice against the ongoing din of the War on Drugs.

“Our response was inadequate,” reflected Dr. James R. Allen, director of the National AIDS Program Office of the U.S. Public Health Service. “The decision to emphasize law enforcement was being made by people whose concern was not the health of the nation.”

The epidemic was lowering its scythe among gay men and IDUs. “Certain folks saw this as a comeuppance,” said Jones of the CDC. “There was a lack of compassion that was fairly broad-based, in particular for the (drug) injectors, who tended to be poor, black, Puerto Rican and other Hispanics.”

At the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), government publications were forbidden to mention that heroin users were at a special risk for AIDS. “There was a sense of prudishness,” said Dr. Marvin Snyder, acting deputy director. “The idea was that it was unseemly to talk about dirty needles.”

The late Mel Rosen was the first director of the state of New York’s AIDS Institute. In 1985, he wanted to send outreach teams into the city’s shooting galleries to instruct people how to clean syringes. “(City officials) told me they would arrest me and my entire staff,” Rosen recalled recently, just before his death. “I was dumbfounded.”

The gay community rallied to help itself, but this was not likely among drug addicts, their ache for the next shot so dominating, their social isolation so great. They did not have a voting bloc, good jobs, organizations. There was no IDU pride week and no insistent marches up the boulevards.

In August of 1988, for the first time, new AIDS cases among IDUs and their sex partners outnumbered those of homosexual and bisexual men in New York City. By then, it was becoming common around the nation to refer to intravenous drug use and AIDS as the “twin epidemics,” the one madly feeding the other. Public health experts were insisting that more be done. But what?

There was no way to herd more addicts into existing drug programs. Snyder, of NIDA, said the treatment system had not improved in 20 years: “We have compassion for heart patients, but nothing but contempt for drug users. That’s very sad. Addicts basically have a brain disease. Their brains have been modified so they can no longer make free choices when it comes to heroin.”

If dope fiends were continuing to shoot up, maybe the risks for infection could be reduced by dispensing bleach kits and needles. Many other nations were doing that, but America by and large balked. How would it look, the government providing junkies the means to antiseptically shoot up narcotics?

Eventually, the distribution of bleach did become common nationwide, though the Los Angeles County supervisors did not permit it until last year. Several “needle exchanges” came into being, but while some are legal, most--as in Los Angeles--are the out-of-a-car-trunk operations of a dedicated underground.

For the most part, the IDUs remain a neglected million. In 1990, the AIDS working group of the American Public Health Assn. warned that more delays in drug treatment and HIV prevention “will mean suffering and death for thousands of high-risk individuals, their sex partners and offspring.”

At present, the infection rate among IDUs is generally stable, which is both the good news and the bad. In New York, the percentage has leveled off at that ghastly 50%. There are 4,000 to 5,000 new infections each year to replace the people who quit using drugs or who die, Des Jarlais said; nationally, there are 15,000 to 35,000 infections annually that are related to injecting drug use.

Some cities are faring better than others. This depends on the number of heroin addicts they have and their rate of infection. Newark, N.J., and San Juan, Puerto Rico, endure problems as bad as New York’s.

In Los Angeles County, there are an estimated 80,000 to 190,000 drug injectors, but the HIV infection rate is only around 6%. No one is sure why the percentage is so low, though some reasons have been suggested. The virus came later to the city, arriving after most junkies had begun taking precautions.

Then there is the matter of the automobile culture. In Los Angeles, people are more inclined to drive home and hit up alone or use their cars for privacy. Either way, they are less likely to play the fateful roulette of the gallery.

If many Americans thought AIDS more a solution than a problem--a way to rid society of human parasites crazed on junk--then that attitude should have been shaken by the spread of the virus from IDUs to their sex partners.

About 335,000 IDUs are believed to be infected with HIV. It is estimated that they have passed the AIDS virus to 50,000 to 75,000 non-injectors, mostly through unprotected sex, though also perinatally, mother to unborn child.

These sexual transmissions are generally male to female, Des Jarlais said. About 75% of IDUs are men, and it is common for males who inject drugs to have sex with females who do not. While most women IDUs are prostitutes, their purchased favors are usually oral, a far less likely means of infection.

HIV eventually becomes the full-blown syndrome. The CDC has recorded 24,323 cases of AIDS among adult women. Of those, 71% are considered IDU-related (50% are drug injectors themselves and 21% are women who had sex with IDUs). By the same token, 57% of 3,898 pediatric AIDS cases have been tied to IDUs (40% were children of IDU mothers and 17% were born to women who had drug injectors as sex partners).

Heterosexual sex is the chief means of HIV transmission worldwide. As the plague years go on, that seems certain to be true in the United States as well. The AIDS link to drug use is undeniable here. About two-thirds of U.S.-born heterosexual AIDS patients have reported sexual contact with an IDU.

“Why hasn’t more been done?” asked Des Jarlais. “A big factor has to be race. Illegal drug use has always been associated with minorities.”

African-Americans and Latinos make up 46% of all AIDS cases in the United States, but 72% of those that are related to injecting drug use. In New York City, among female adults, 85% of the AIDS cases are minorities; among pediatric cases, the number is 90%.

The poor are the most beset. Epidemiologist Ernest Drucker, a noted tracker of the plague’s lethal path, writes that in New York, 20,000 children have already lost one or both parents. “By the year 2000, if the trend continues, the number of AIDS orphans will exceed 100,000, and nearly every family in the South Bronx, Harlem and Bushwick will have lost several members.”

To many, this seems too carefully targeted for a mindless virus. Polls show that many blacks believe AIDS was deliberately created in a laboratory. “You can’t disassociate the conspiracy theories; the data is too startling,” said Ronald Johnson, an activist recently named New York’s coordinator for AIDS policy. “Society only gets concerned when something hits middle-class suburbia. Its will to protect marginal people is, as you’d expect, marginal.”

Conspiracy talk went on at the gallery all the time. In many a dope fiend’s view, AIDS looked like a major-league hustle, a way for rich white people to clear the streets of undesirables and make some fast money in the process, providing medical care and whatever.

One of the regulars was a well-groomed guy named Joe. He had the grim look of a cynical Irish cop who knew the score. His roots were in white, middle-class Queens, so his life had straddled two distant worlds and he thought he understood the chasm: “This AIDS thing is too removed for most white people. It’s over there with the niggers and spics: Let ‘em die.

“But it’s lives up here. These are people with lives--Lips, Georgie, Benny and the rest. And we’re forcing them into a room where they share works and cotton and water, passing the virus. It’s always them, them, them.”

The gallery itself was a model of racial harmony. The miseries of dope and the exigencies of hustling were blind to color. Wooed by the needle, the addicts were all part of the greater brotherhood of getting straight. It was them against the world--at least up to a limit. That limit was the onset of the aches of dope sickness. Once there, it was one fiend against another.

Lips and Georgie had begun to wise up to that little liar Shorty Contreras. She was spending less and less time working the streets and was now mooching most of her drugs off the gallery trade. She scraped all the empty glassine bags for residue, which was something Georgie liked to save for himself. And she even reached between Lips and a guy about to give him a taste.

“It’s my turn,” she said boldly.

“This ain’t your place!” Lips shouted. “You ain’t got a turn.”

“I’m sick, Lips,” Shorty said, retreating.

“Who do you think you’re kidding? I’ve been in this game too long.”

“I’m sick.”

“You screwed up. If you’re sick, you’re gonna stay sick!”

For a few seconds Shorty was silent, trying to keep her composure against a seepage of tears. Then she gathered the paper sack that held her sexy underwear and stalked off toward the Flushing Avenue stroll.

The men said the women had it easier because they could always sell their bodies. And indeed, most of the women conceded that the wages were reliable, though they scoffed at any notion of ease in the labor.

“I’d like to see men go out and do what we do,” complained Jo-nice Williams. “I hate all men, gut down inside, and I automatically hate them if they pick me up. Every time I get dope sick and need to hustle, I never get a regular but always some guy who’s fat and disgusting.”

Most people called her J.J. She was 33, a widow with two teen-age daughters and a long run of woe. Dope and tuberculosis had straightened the curves of her figure. She suffered fevers that seemed to be making her dissolve.

J.J. scuttled around the neighborhood, familiar to everyone, touting and hustling. A deep gash in her foot had become infected. She persuaded herself that it smelled bad and she could no longer command worthwhile money for sex.

“It don’t make that much difference anyway, the way things have gotten,” she said. The low end of prostitution had become dominated by crack-heads who would do whatever for $5, only half of what a heroin addict needs. “How can you compete against all these bitches who’s giving it away?”

J.J. did not tell men she had HIV. “Ninety-nine percent of the girls out here got the virus, so a guy ought to expect it,” she said. But it had become fairly standard practice to ask a man to wear a condom. Sometimes, this paid a bonus. A trick would peel off a few extra bucks to forgo the protection.

Other, more-miserly men would simply threaten to take their business elsewhere. “Then what are you going to do?” J.J. asked hypothetically. “You’re an addict.”

There were many other kinds of moneymaking schemes. Some of the men enjoyed the action. This was their chance to be on top, them in control and society on the cement, telling people to give it up, give it up, their fingers on people’s shelves, in their pockets, against their bodies.

Harry Hocknell seemed the gallery’s most expert shoplifter. A former Army paratrooper, he was an amiable Norman Rockwell-looking American who entered stores with smudges of paint on his arms and a hard hat on his head. He shot dope into his neck, sucking his thumb to make the veins show.

“Krazy Glue, pens, shampoo, razor blades, batteries, film--you can always get half-price for those,” Harry said. “I take auto parts, a lot of tools. You know what else is good? Video movies . . . I fence them off to whoever: store owners, gas stations, an auto dealer who lets me sleep in his cars.”

At the gallery, scavengers talked of their dreary foraging for scrap metal. Panhandlers exchanged techniques of begging: what subway lines were easy to work and which lamentations were going over. Gossip was traded: who got busted and who got sprung and who had been rushed to the hospital saying they wished it had all been different and wouldn’t someone please tell their kids.

The easiest way to earn money, of course, was selling drugs, but this came with big risks. “Undercover guys are all over,” said Lips, who occasionally peddled crack. “I’m well set up for a bust. Catch me, they read my sheet and tell me I’m looking at five in the joint and 12 on parole. Then we start to bargain and they offer 3 1/2 and nine, and tell me if you don’t like it, you can go to court and (lose). If you (lose), you can end up at 7 1/2 and 15.”

Shorty Contreras had also begun to deal--heroin of all things. Usually, the young drug managers would not front an addict a $100 bundle of dope. They might as well trust a rabbit to deliver a leaf of lettuce. What protection did they have, except the teen-age leg-breakers on their payroll?

But in her convincing way, Shorty had persuaded them. “You can trust me,” she had said. “Honestly, you can.”

Shorty was welcomed back to the gallery, all hard feelings set aside for a few free tastes. The dope was good, until it ran out. Then it became clear she had used up two bundles she still owed on. Lips did not like this situation, but Georgie took pity. He let Shorty sleep upstairs.

When the managers asked for their money, she wrapped herself in a cloak of fictions, though these lies were threadbare by her usual standards. She simply told them she had lost the dope and begged them to let her work it off, selling more without commission. Their answer was: No way.

The young enforcers came charging in through the darkness at 4 a.m., people recalled. Who could tell how many there were, maybe eight, nine? The gallery was a jumble of bodies. Lips wasn’t there, but Georgie was. They punched him in the face. Then they went after Shorty.

“I’ll pay you when I get my SSI check,” she pleaded, but they began to pound on her. She rolled face down between the cot and the wall as the beating went on. Some unzipped their pants and made her perform.

When the attack finally ended, the tiny woman just wanted to lie there. But Georgie and another addict were furious with her for “fouling the nest,” bringing this kind of trouble to the gallery. They made her get out.

For hours, Shorty sat on the curb, heaving great sobs as if something was pulling them from deep inside her. That is how Georgie found her in the morning when he left the gallery, ready to fiend his way to a wake-up shot.

She was badly bruised and obviously shaken, but he had not seen her in several hours and did not know what drugs might have come her way in the meantime.

So Georgie went ahead and asked, “You got anything for me?”

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue assisted in the reporting of this story.