Jeanine found him slumped over his desk in the study. She went from elated that he might be dead to disgusted when she realized he was crying to himself.

“Darling! They’ve finally done it.” He moaned as she approached. “Those damn orthodoxy bastard, they’ve killed my business! They won’t let me sell cocaine. Not like I used to. All that income – it’s going to disappear!”

Her slap came out of nowhere, catching him mid-sob.

“Murray, you are a terrible husband, an absent father and a pathetic lover. And, so help me God, if you don’t keep me comfortable, I’ll let all your new country club friends know that you bought your way up to their level by selling drugs to the negroes.”

Pulling her new mink stole tight, she stepped back from him.

“So, if they won’t let you sell it like you used to, find a new way to sell it. The demand isn’t going to go away, prices are just going to go up. Time to be big, Murray, bigger than you’ve ever been.”

She planted a cold, hard kiss on his cheek then left him alone in the darkened study.

He’d never felt so small before.

Memphis Note
At first, Memphis’s cocaine laws were as lax as its liquor laws. But then, racism was introduced into the anti-drug equation, and attitudes began to change. The first big step toward prohibition of the drug was when the city voted to ban the sale of less than a pound of cocaine to anyone with out a prescription. A pound being much more than any normal addict could hope to afford. Sadly, all this did was push the drug underground and create even more crime around it.

In the empty dark beyond his window, nothing moved.

He tapped foot against the floorboards, impatiently awaiting his unwelcome guest. The hungering ache of addiction growing worse with each passing moment.

She came in through the back, the smell of cheap perfume and pipe tobacco announcing her presence.

“Have it?” She asked.

“On the table.” He said, nodding to a black medical bag. “Instruments. Some medicine. Everything on the list.”

She opened the bag and poked through its contents. Satisfied, she pulled a small bundle from her bodice and held up it. “Then I guess this belongs to you.”

Immediately his eyes lit up. “Damn my sickness for forcing me to associate with amoral wretches like you and yours.”

“There’s no moral failing that leads those girls to me. Or any catharsis once their child is gone. There’s guilt. Enough guilt to last a lifetime.”

“You’re taking innocent lives.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Seems like I might be saving a fair number, too, judging by the way your hands shake without a bit of my ‘medicine’. I don’t judge you. Don’t you judge them.”

She dropped the drugs on the ground, then turned to leave. “See you next week, doctor.”

Memphis Note
In the years before abortion was decriminalized, women were forced to rely on illegal procedures performed by those who were not doctors. In Memphis, this role often fell to the elders in the sex-worker community. I’ve found several stories in old news papers recounting the arrest and prosecution of these women, and many more decrying them as a plague on the morality of Memphis.

“Hello, Mister…Carlton, isn’t it?” The doctor in the white coat extended his arthritic hand and a warm smile.

Thomas Carlton stood up from the overstuffed sofa, nodded and shook the proffered hand. “Yes sir, that’s right. Thomas Carlton.”

His smile never wavering, the doctor sat down behind his simple writing desk. “Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”

“It’s my wife, sir. She’s so deep down in the bottle that I don’t think she’ll ever find her way out of it. And I hate to be this way, but I don’t think I can take any more of it.” Thomas could feel a tightness in his throat. He had to fight to keep going. “I don’t know how many calls I can get from strangers at all-night diners where she’s passed out in the bathroom.”

“You’ve come to the right place, son. The James Sanatorium has an absolutely impeccable reputation for curing all manner of addictions and nervous diseases.”

The smile held, it was starting to make Thomas uneasy.

“You’re not going to hurt her are you?” He asked, shifting nervously.

“She’s already hurt herself. All that’s left is healing.” The doctor said, his rictus beaming.

Memphis Note
The James Sanatorium originally occupied the old Raleigh Springs Hotel, a beautiful red and white painted building that looked like something transplanted from the Alps. The sanatorium had one of the best reputations of any medical facility in the South for curing people of their addictions. If some one was unable to travel to the sanatorium, the institution had its own line of mail order medicines and cure-alls. The old hotel burned down in 1912, and the sanatorium moved closer to downtown Memphis. I can’t find a record of when it finally closed or what happened to the second building, now replaced by boarded over homes.

“…under arrest for the illegal distribution of an illicit substance.” Were the words Doctor Ben Friedman heard when his brain finally engaged again. He knew this moment was coming, but he still wasn’t quite ready for when it did.

The two detectives standing on his front porch looked at each other awkwardly when he didn’t respond immediately.

“You know, I considered gobbing down a whole handful of the things when I heard about what happened down in New Orleans,” Friedman said to the pair.

“Probably best you didn’t do that, Doctor Freidman.” The one that spoke gestured past Friedman, through the open door behind him. “You’ve got a family to think about, after all.”

Friedman shook his head. “I’ll have my license revoked for this. I won’t be able to practice medicine. If I’d been a man, killed myself, with the life insurance, they might’ve been able to keep the house…”

The other detective took his arm, leading him down toward the car. “Don’t ever think I’ve heard ‘been a man’ and ‘killed myself’ in the same breath before,” he said as they walked. “Less of course if it was saying how he’d never been one.

“A man that is.”

Memphis Note
In 1917, an opiate drug ring was busted in New Orleans. It lead back to a group in Memphis that was illegally distributing opium tablets, and at the heart of that group was our Doctor Friedman. He was writing thousands of false prescriptions for the drugs. The bust put an end to the largest drug operation in Memphis until the start of Prohibition.

The sawbones had finished with her and waved the two lawmen in.

She was laid up in bed, a thick wrap of fresh gauze around her head, holding a mass of bandages against where the bullet had grazed her skull. Sawbones had said if it had been any closer, she’d be blind. Or dead.

The two men gave her a curt nod and started right in with their questions.

“Ma’am. Would you care to state your name for the record?” began the taller of the pair.

“I’m Big Mary.”

“That your given name?” asked the shorter one.

“No, it ain’t,” she snorted. “But, that’s what folks know me as.”

“What happened here earlier this evening? Looks like someone took a shot at you.”

“Oh, nothin’ much.” She gave a grin, even though it hurt her to do so. “Just one man comin’ home to find another man takin’ advantage of a privilege he thought was his alone.”

“And what might that privilege be?”

“Me.” She widened her grin as far as the pain would allow.

The lawmen gave each other awkward looks.

“And these men, what were their names?”

“John.” And then, before they could ask, “Yes, they’re both Johns.”

Memphis Note
This story of a fictionalized account of what actually happened in February of 1862. According to the reporting paper, Big Mary was a woman of the worst sort of reputation. Me? I don’t know, I think she’s pretty much the epitome of everything Memphis.