"Of course not. But what is it? Rollo tells me it's not the usual junk. I wondered if maybe it was _yage_." _Yage_ was something you kept hearing about but never saw yourself. It was always somebody who knew somebody else who'd tried it. _Yage_ was the junkie's dream. You never caught up with it, but you heard hints in conversation. An addict would give himself a fix of Henry, sliding the needle into the vein, and later, as his tension relaxed, he'd say to his connection, "I hear _yage_ is the real kick--they tell me that compared to _yage_, heroin is the least." And the connection would say, "That's what they tell me, but I never seen any of it myself. They have it in the Amazon or someplace, I hear." It's always hearsay. But after a while you hear so much about it that you believe it's got to be around somewhere, so you keep asking. I asked Jones. "I could show you _yage_," Jones said, and I felt a tingle, like a kid promised his first kiss. "But it would disappoint you." "Why?" "It is like _peyote_--just another herb. It has a similar effect to that of the Mescal cactus button, but since you would not seem to be a devotee of the Sun Dance I do not think it would interest you." I went into a slump again when I heard him run down _yage_. I knew what _peyote_ was. It might be all right for Indians, but it just made the average junkie sick to his stomach. "What would interest me, then?" I asked him. "I have a certain amount of a substance called _uru_," he said. "It is--and I do not exaggerate when I say this--the most." I couldn't help grinning. Jones had been speaking the store-bought English of the educated foreigner and then he came out with this hep expression. "Tell me more, professor," I said. "You're ringing my bell." "You tell _me_ more, my friend," he came back. "What is your great interest in this will-o'-the-wisp _yage_ that so excites you, although you claim to be 'off the stuff'?" I could almost hear the quotation marks he put around the phrase. "Okay," I said. "I'll tell you." So I went into the crazy old dream--the feeling that there's something better someplace, something you can take or leave alone, that doesn't leave you with that wrung-out, hopeless horror of junk sickness when you can't get the stuff. I told him about the other addicts--how they feel this kinship that's not like any other relationship anywhere--how you have that exalted feeling of mingled hope and despair when another junkie is coming with a fix for you--and how by just drifting around in a strange city you find yourself drawn to the right district to score the stuff. How it's almost telepathic.