The Connection. Opium is the religion of the people in this picture. As it begins eight heroin addicts are flobbing around a dismal flat in Manhattan, neither drunk nor asleep, neither dead nor alive. They lean against the walls, they stare with empty eyes. Sometimes they splutter obscenities at each other for no reason sometimes they babble mindlessly about themselves. They are waiting. Waiting to make The Connection, "waiting for The Cowboy to gallop in on a white horse."
The Cowboy appears as a Negro dressed entirely in white—that is to say, as a union of opposites, as a completeness possible perhaps...