# 2 The Other Side of Time Square

The McDonald’s on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, between 34th and 35th Streets, is a throwback to a seedier era in New York City. Credit Hilary Swift/The New York Times

We’ve all heard the calls for reform when it comes to our growing opioid addiction in the US. We covered it a few weeks ago. Though the problem is ravaging our country it still feels easy to turn a blind eye.

I liked this piece in the New York Times because it reminds me how the addicts are in plain sight. We all think of Time Square today as the Disney Land of New York, the bright lights the store displays, there’s practically candy falling from the sky. This piece profiles the McDonalds around the corner, seemingly out of place while right at home to drug addicts who call the iconic chain’s location their base. The story is rich with detail and good reporting. A look at the counter culture of users:

Another regular, Joey, also usually comes back inside after the guard leaves. On a recent Monday, at 2:30 p.m., he sat at a front table, drinking a King Cobra malt liquor and wearing a red T-shirt proclaiming “Drunknmunky.” He stepped outside for a cigarette and then started to cry.

“I did detox. I did rehab. I did everything,” said Joey, who said he sleeps on the nearby post office’s steps. “Nothing worked. I have one drink and I can’t stop, I can’t stop, I can’t stop.”

It was his 39th birthday. Within 20 minutes, he went back inside and popped open another beer.

After the security guard leaves, it is much easier to do business. Almost anything is for sale. Loose cigarettes are sold for 50 cents each. An iPod is $40. A six-pack of white socks goes for $3. Fancy headphones, still in their packaging from a nearby Duane Reade, run $8. On a recent afternoon, a man in a neon-green traffic-safety vest and an otherwise bare torso peddled a new Norelco razor, still in the box, from table to table. He would take what he could get.

One regular said a bag of heroin runs $10 in the bathroom. A stick costs $5. A pin is $2 or $2.50. But all those prices vary, depending on the customer. A man from Wall Street regularly paid $25 a bag.

Other types of regulars, the so-called normals, frequent this McDonald’s, like the TV newsman in a suit who goes there only because it is near the office. And the nun of 70 years who sometimes sits in the back, where she likes to watch the scene unfold like a Broadway show.

“I get an ice cream cone for a dollar,” said the nun, Elaine Goodell, 89, who lives in a nearby convent and works as a hospital chaplain. “Then I will usually buy a medium French fries. I love the salt and the sweet. And that’s what you get here too — the salt and sweet of humanity.”

It is hard to know what the tourists make of the mix. They come from Pennsylvania Station, just off the train; from Times Square; and from the Big Bus New York double-deckers that stop outside for passengers to use the bathroom.

At various times over the last few months, two young people speaking French were observed sitting next to a slurring couple arguing loudly about how neither of them needed this relationship; three people from Australia with two suitcases studied a map of the city, oblivious to anything going on around them because it was pretty much what they expected in New York, this Gotham City they have seen in the movies; and an Israeli mother clung to her daughter in the bathroom, as a regular knocked on a stall with two other regulars inside, telling them to hurry up because there was a line.

In the women’s bathroom on a recent Tuesday afternoon, one of the stalls reeked like a blend of burned marshmallows and plastic — possibly from someone smoking synthetic marijuana, known as “K2” or “spice,” or crack cocaine. A woman who walked into the stall said it smelled like K2. “Let me tell you,” she said. “My boyfriend did it. He was up all night. He thought he was gonna die.”

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