The Brown Kind--February, 1995

We never buy for ourselves. Only addicts buy it for themselves, and we're not addicts. We're just....experimenting. We just want to see.

So every Friday afternoon, every Saturday morning, every Saturday afternoon, every Sunday morning, every Sunday afternoon--we call Cam.

Cam lived in the building next door to where JP lived when we first got together. His brother Chris was the one who used to sell JP his fix, before I knew anyone was selling JP his fix--when I would call him in the middle of the day from work and he would be "asleep", as his roommates put it. Chris was in jail now.

So we'd call and call and call, Cam's number still on a little scrap of paper in my day-planner, until finally we would reach him. Then we would pile into my hand-me-down Ford Taurus, drive to Humboldt Park, and pick him up from his apartment.

We would drive to the spots he knew, first. The first spot we scored at was on Maypole and Kildare; a northbound one-way street where Cam would hop out of the car and we would circle the block. Up Kildare to Lake, over to Keeler, down Keeler to West End, back up to Maypole. At first they wouldn't sell to us; a white girl with two black men in a nondescript Ford of recent vintage looked too much like the police. But after a while they got to know us, by sight at least.

One Thursday night we decide we want to play a little, JP and I, even though it's a work night. It's late in the month; we're nearly out of money, but we manage to scrape together $30. We always manage.

So we call Cam and drive to pick him up. He tells us "I was over there today to buy a rock, and there was nobody out at all--there was a sting or something. But don't worry. I know a guy over in Humboldt Park, over by California. A Mexican. But it's brown. You don't mind the brown stuff, do you?"

"It's heroin. We don't mind ANY kind of heroin."

We take him to the house and he comes out. I put the baggie in my bra and we drop Cam off, after giving him his $10 to get a rock. We drive back to our little storefront apartment with the metal grille on the window, and we get out the razor blades and pour the double-strength Kool-Aid--the only thing that cuts the aspirin-bitter taste of heroin in the back of the throat.

I open the bag.

"JP," I say. "Come tell me if this looks right to you."

I've never had brown heroin before, but I've been cooking since I was a small small girl--and I know cinnamon when I see it. I stick the tip of my finger into the bag and lick it. "Yep," I say. "That's cinnamon."

That was the last time we called Cam to buy our fix for us.