West Town: Mid-Summer, 1995

We spend the summer nights with heroin and sex and music. We stay up til all hours with all the lights on, cutting pictures from magazines to hang on the wall, all our talismans of hope and fame. And we roam the neighborhood, JP and I, in the middle of the night.

We walk down Ashland, past Augusta down to Chicago and beyond, across the bridge over the expressway. We walk past an abandoned church, where JP stops and dreams about acoustics. “If we could get in there, we could record the album inside,” he says.

He wraps his arm around my shoulder and kisses me on top of my head. “Babygirl,” he says, “we’re going to be amazing.”

We come up over the rise of the expressway bridge and find a man approaching us, weaving a little as he walks. He is unshaven, drunk, obviously homeless, and instinctively I take a step back and hide behind JP, a little. The man starts to speak, going on about his family that left him, his car that got stolen, and by the way do we have eighty cents?

JP is completely at ease, and he hands the man a dollar and listens to him talk as I try to bury myself in his shadow. Not so much out of fear, but out of shame at my fear.

We walk away and I can feel JP’s silence, like the space where there used to be a rotten tooth.

“What were you afraid of?” he asks me in the end. And I have no answer.

Before: Coffee, April 22, 1994

I turn on to Maplewood from North Avenue and think this is probably not a good idea. The corners are populated with young Hispanic men who shout out “Park! Rocks! Park!” when they see me in my little gray Escort. I creep down the street watching the street numbers and my rearview mirror at the same time.

I pull up in front of the house and think Oh, this is definitely not a good idea. Just inside the fence, two brown pit bulls bark and tug at their leashes, and piles of dogshit strew the bare dirt yard. There are three black men on the front porch, and they watch me as I approach the gate and pause.

“They won’t hurt you,” one of the men says. “You can c’mon.”

But it’s not just the dogs, or the men, or the neighborhood. It’s not just that I’m married; it’s just that I’m here, that on some level I know I shouldn’t be. But I open the gate and it squeals shut behind me as I walk up the broken steps.

I can feel the weight of the men’s eyes on my body; their gazes are a mix of heat and curiosity. The curiosity makes perfect sense—what is this mousy white girl doing here?—but the heat is something I do not understand. I drop my gaze and hunch my shoulders as I pass between them through the door.

The stairs are dirty, bare and empty, and the old dark wood creaks as I climb. Third floor, JP told me, and as I reach the landing a door opens.

It has been almost a year since I saw him last, a year of acrimony and accusations passed through third parties, and I have forgotten how beautiful he is. His hair is long now, braids that hang down around his shoulders. He reaches for me; we always were huggers, he and I, back in the day when we were still friends. I realize how much I have missed those days, how much I have missed him, and I return his hug fiercely.

“Wow,” he says, and smiles down at me. “That was some hug.”

We have planned to go for coffee, he and I, and so when we sit down on the sofa it’s just a momentary diversion, just a few minutes taken to watch TV and chat for a bit. And then the television breaks in with a news bulletin saying that Richard Nixon is dead.

We watch the coverage and laugh at all the short memories, all the forgetting and forgiving that never came while he was still alive. We crack jokes and from our opposite ends of the couch we move closer together, and suddenly we are right up next to each other and he is whispering to me.

Remember? he asks me. Do you remember how we were? Do you remember when we used to stand out on that balcony and look out over the city and dream together, and you were so good and perfect and wanting to do right? I never told you what I used to think about when we were out there…I used to dream of taking you and putting you up against that big window…remember that little skirt you used to wear to all the parties? In this dream you were wearing that, and I would pin you up against that window and get inside you, all outside with the city right behind us in the dark…

And I am listening and barely breathing, holding my breath for fear of drowning out any single word of what he is saying to me, because I know it is the last time I will hear it and I want to remember. I want to remember that one night he told me, before I left and never came back, that he ever felt this way about me.

Come in here, he says, and leads me to his room off the living room. It is sparse and sparely furnished—a bed, an old console TV, a small table, and an old hutch that serves as his bookcase. I sit down on the bed knowing that this was a bad, bad, bad idea and he moves to kiss me, and finally I say it—this would be a bad idea—and he smiles his most irresistible smile because he knows it too, and he knows I know it, and he knows something which I do not know—that none of that matters, that this is what will happen. And he whispers just one kiss, he says to me, just one kiss and we can leave it at that. And even though I know that is a lie, it is not just his lie, and so I close my eyes and his mouth is against mine, sweet, as I remember. And one becomes two becomes five and when I open my eyes I look around the apartment and I think Nice place…it’s a shame I can never come back and something in me braces up hard, a frame of iron against my paper walls.

Overdose, Part One: May 1995

It is dark and in the middle of the darkness there is only a pinpoint. In the middle of the darkness is a pinpoint and it is in the far dark distance and only the dark and the pinpoint are the things that matter. And I am in the dark and I can stay in the dark and be happy forever, floating nearer to the pinpoint and the distance and through the warm and comforting dark.

“GLADYS!!” I have never heard such panic in JP’s voice,; it pierces the darkness and comes through to me. Whatever is making that panic sound in his voice, it must be important somehow, and I listen even though I resent his intrusion into my darkness for a moment.

Something is moving across my face, first to one side and then to the other, and through it all I hear him shouting my name, panicked still. In the darkness I sigh, annoyed—god, WHAT, JP? I think, and open my eyes.

JP is hovering over me and he looks terror-stricken. He throws down the phone and says “Babygirl—can you hear me? Are you okay?”

I move a little and realize where I am. JP pulls me up from the living-room floor, or tries to, but I am nearly dead weight. “What happened?” I slur, as he puts his arm under me and hoists me toward the bathroom.

He lifts me into the shower and turns on the cold water. “O.D., I think. ”

I lunge out from under the spray and toward the toilet, gagging. JP tries to hold my hair, but I wave him off. Between bouts of vomiting I manage to blurt out, “Don’t watch me.”

He does not move. “Please,” he says. “I saw Bethany do much worse than that.”

I retch again. “That doesn’t help,” I tell him.

Wiping my mouth, I sprawl boneless on the floor, my back against the bathtub. “How long was I out?” I ask him.

“Almost twenty minutes,” he said. “I tried to call 911 but I kept getting ‘all circuits are busy’.”

Looking up into his eyes for the first time, I see how closely he is watching me, how scared he is. “I only did one bag,” I say. “I’ve done way more than that before.”

“Yeah,” he says. “We haven’t done any in a few days, though.”

I hear this last through the fog; I am drifting again, nodding off, back towards the dark. JP comes and picks me up off the floor. “C’mon,” he says. “Walk.” As he picks me up I see myself in the bathroom mirror: pinpoint pupils, eyes watery from puking, and purple bruises coming up on either side of my face where JP has slapped me, trying to bring me around.

And even though I’d so much rather just drift away, I lean on him and together we walk out the door and down the block together, his arm around my shoulders, holding me up.

JP and Gladys: December 1994

Holograms float behind my eyes when he is inside me.

The heroin does not enhance sex, exactly, but it puts us in a space where anything is possible, all inhibitions are gone, time stretches and twists and there are no barriers between us. We fuse and melt together and he rides me, I straddle him, we thrash and writhe together and hours pass. We tear each other’s skin and leave bruises. We kiss, hours and hours. We whisper promises of eternity.

After a while we have a name for it—we call it the Zone.

Did you see it? he asks me.

What did you see?

It was like a black field of light, he tells me. And…

Shapes, I say.

Rings and squares and triangles. Glowing, like gray.

I saw them too.

In the Zone we share visions. In the Zone there is no boundary between us and there is nothing I cannot say,

Sofia: August, 1995

We sit in the car and wait.

On the corner of Drake and Iowa time is not just elastic; it is liquid. On the corner the language of waiting is understood blood-deep by the passing legions.

If the security man, standing near the alley, tells you “make the block”, you’ve got at least five minutes of making yourself scarce before the spot opens up again. If he tells you “one minute”, it’s probably closer to ten. “Five minutes” means twenty; “ten minutes” and you might as well go home.

We never go home; we always wait.

This day we have been waiting for what seems like a little too long, but that’s probably to be expected; the police have been swarming, nagging all the spots right out of business. From any other spot we might have let ourselves be chased away, but right now the three of us—JP, Lou, and me—are in complete agreement: there is no finer spot we know. The junk here is just perfect; reliable, strong, with no drama outside of the usual.

And after twenty minutes of driving around, the man on the corner has finally given us the signal, telling us to park. So we sit in the car and wait.

I am the driver. I am always the driver. JP has no license and I don’t know Lou well enough to trust him with my car. JP rides shotgun and plays radio pilot; Lou rides in the back and points out spots that don’t exist. JP and I indulge Lou because he can play guitar, and because he’s the strangest redneck we’ve ever met.

A girl walks along Iowa, tall and slim and white and obvious, and walks up to JP’s window. “Hey,,” she says. “Can I get in? The cops are really hot today, and…”

“Sure,” JP says. I feel a momentary pang of jealousy as she climbs in next to Lou—this girl is really beautiful, and I’ve grown accustomed to being the alpha female of the group. In the rearview mirror I notice Lou eyeing her already.

“Mama on C.P!” comes the cry from behind us, and instantly we are gone. “Mama” is the police; “C.P” is Central Park, the street just west of where we are. The spot, in the middle of opening up, shuts back down again, and it will be another fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, maybe longer.

“So what’s your name?” JP asks her.

“Sofia,” she says. “So do you all get high, or…”

“Yeah,” JP says. “That’s Lou back there with you, and I’m JP, and that’s Gladys.”

“’sup,” she says, and her reflection nods at me in the mirror. “I figured you guys were probably safe—you know, black guy, white girl, white guy—I mean, I figured you were okay.”

We drive around. Once we score, Sofia comes back with us to the house, sprawls across our bed reading my books. And now there are four.

First Shot: April, 1995

I sit on the bed and he puts the needle into my arm again.

For someone as pale as I am, with veins so visible just under her skin, it has been remarkably difficult to pierce them. My terror of the needle does nothing to ease the process, and so my forearms are spotted with the beginnings of bruises, perfectly round with a pinpoint at their center. We have been working at this for nearly an hour.

He puts the needle in my arm as I look away. I feel the sharp jab and his soft words of reassurance. “Okaaaaay,” he breathes. “Do NOT move. Got it,” he says.

I look back at my arm, at the tiny plume of blood sliding up through the barrel of the syringe , graceful, like a stormcloud in a quiet sky. “Ready?” he asks me, looking deep into my eyes.

“Ready,” I say. My stomach hangs suspended at the top of the roller-coaster hill.

He pushes the plunger.

I am not new to heroin. It has been four months since my first line and I have come to love this drug; but this is beyond love. When I close my eyes I can see my body dark in afterimage, and the heroin tracing through my veins in a ball of yellow light,. I am lit from within by my own internal comet, watching myself from above as it twists and winds its way towards my heart. Beyond love, beyond sex, beyond death, beyond any other mystery is the plume of blood and the ball of light and it is coming….

I fall back onto the bed as the rush hits. I am above, below, beyond. Every drum-tight string inside me has loosened at last, for the first time in twenty-four years, and I am free.

JP, kneeling beside the bed, laughs low. “Now do you see?” he asks. And I do.

Before: Summer 1994

Humboldt Park: The Summer Before

I sneak away every day to see him. At night I sleep in the day’s t-shirt, to smell his scent. My husband, enmeshed in a pipe-dream business venture, notices nothing. He does not listen when I tell him that we need to change things. He barely listens when I tell him I am unhappy enough that I might leave,.

My arms are marked with bruises, blue and black fading to yellow-green around the edges. I tell myhusband they came from a mosh pit, the continuance of my eternal “hanging out with Sara” alibi. They are not from a mosh pit.

JP is only my third lover. There was Chris, from high school, a boy with good prospects and a scientist’s soul. There was David, who I married, a self-proclaimed bad boy, self-proclaimed musician. At the time he had seemed to be a great improvement over Chris’s post-virginal self-consciousness.

And now JP. We are still in love enough with our own myth to admire the contrasts of our skin in the sunlight. We amaze ourselves for hours at a time with histories and confessions, improbable coincidences. My great-uncle, a police sergeant in the thick of the 1968 Democratic Convention, turning the clubs and the hoses on JP’s mother’s cousin, a Black Panther.

We build our myth, backstory to eventual fame and majesty. Our ancestors spin in their graves, their descendants writhing naked on a bare mattress in August heat. We nullify every soul, living or past, with our hunger.

JP inside me is a revelation. He kisses me deep and whispers my name. He tells me that I am beautiful. He tells me that we will be together forever, that he would die for me. His hands twine into my hair and pull, yanking my head back as he drives forward into me. He pins me to the bed with all his weight against my struggling; his hands close tight around my throat. I gasp out our safeword, and his hands relax. I sink my fingernails deep into the skin of his back, feeling them sinking through the flesh. “Harder,” he whispers. “Harder.”

Afterwards, as we lie nearly sleeping, I tell him that I am falling in love with him.

The sun beats in through his bedroom window, over a Humboldt Park street. Below, the streets throb with the sounds of a busy crack spot. Sometimes men call from him from below the window, and he gets up and hangs outside to answer them. Sometimes he goes downstairs. Always, he comes back.

May 1995 (partial)

We count the money again. Not because we need to; we know what we have, down to the penny, and what bills we have to pay. $400 for the rent, $60 for the phone, $50 for the gas and $30 for the electric. That leaves us almost $600 for food, for music, for our own amusement. Our own amusement has narrowed down considerably since December.
“You ready?” I ask JP.
He walks to the door, chceking for the necessities. Money, housekeys, ID in case the cops stop him. “I miss that car,”he says.
“We’ll get another,” I promise. I have no idea how or where, but the past year has taught me how well things work out. We are charmed, JP and I; money comes to us unbidden when we need it, luck jumps into our laps like a well-loved old cat. In the meantime we’ll make do.
JP makes lists of his fears and sets fire to them in a ceramic bowl at night after I’ve gone to sleep. I found the ashes one morning and asked him what had happened; at first he was shy about telling me. I don’t know why; I already know almost everything that’s on the list.

Dopesick, Part Two: July 13, 1995

The House: mid-summer

Tiger and Foof, the two cats, sit outside our bedroom door like the lions at the Art Institute. Inside the sanctuary of the pin-striped curtain, the window unit has cooled the air to a chilly 85 degrees. The city is in the grip of the worst heat wave in its history;

It’s four in the morning, and JP and I are in the grip of something else entirely.
JP is sprawled on the orange chair, staring at the flickering TV.
I am stretched, curled, sprawled on the bed, tossing and turning. My skin hurts, my muscles cramping and twitching. Cartoon themes whirl through my head but his voice pierces the mad calliope…
“I’m sorry,” he says,
I look at him.. A year ago we had talked about this, true enough—but the infinite difference between a fantasy habit and this skin-crawling humid reality is magnified even more by the darkness, the heat, the blue light from the broken television.
“For what?”
He gestures toward the room. ‘For this,” he says. “My god, look at us.”
“It’s not that much longer,:” I remind him. “This is 48 hours right now…tomorrow by this time we should be over the worst of it.” Pure conjecture, that; we’ve never made it this far, even. But between us we have our months of reading—all the heroin stories we could get our hands on, Naked Lunch, Cobain’s biography—and all the stories say 72 hours and we’re out of the woods. Or at least, that’s what they say the way we read them.
The real agony of dopesickness isn’t just the aches, the cramps, the Tilt-a-Whirl brain; the real agonies are twofold. There’s nothing to do, and there’s no way to sleep. In my younger years I was the master of the nap—give me a spare hour and I’d be out like a light, the presumed legacy of a nearly-narcoleptic father. And of course, on junk there was almost no way not to sleep, bored or otherwise; we’d nodded off in the middle of sex, in the middle of intense life-changing conversations.
But when there’s no dope and no sleep, and when moving is misery and the thought of touch is repulsive…there’s nothing but your yowling, whirling brains and the broken TV, the one that won’t hold a channel for more than ten or fifteen minutes.
“I’m sorry,” JP says again. He is crying now. “Look what I’ve done to you. I’m so sorry, babygirl.”
The night moves on toward morning. Outside the heat rises. Over the next three days, 700 people die in the city of Chicago, and we do not.

Oklahoma City/Wicker Park: April 19, 1995

I watch the disaster at the Murrah Federal Building with a syringe in my arm.

It is the first day of our spring break, JP and I, and I’ve been paid the Friday before. Free from work and flush with cash, we have spent the weekend in our eternal pursuits—planning and scoring and shooting and fucking, again and again. It is April and spring is in full gear in Wicker Park, and JP has his guitar and I have my computer and we have amps and four-tracks and CDs and music and poetry and smack, and there is nothing else we need.

We turn on the TV this morning and watch the first bulletins, nodding between shots, shooting between speculations. It is all horrible, of course, but we have heroin and each other.

We watch the newscasters searching for the story—and we measure water.

We watch the graphics of a pancaking building—and we hold the spoon over the flame.

We listen to speculations about Arab terrorists—and we tie off, looking for veins.

We watch footage of tearful rescuers and bloody babies—and we press the plunger.

The coverage goes on for a week. And for a week we plan and score and shoot and fuck, again and again, and watch.

There is a world outside—but it is not our world. In our world the only things that can go wrong are missed shots and overdoses, going broke or getting burned, going sick or getting busted. Bombs and buildings, blood and babies, suicidal Arabs or gun-mad white men with the taste of Waco and Ruby Ridge at the back of their throats—they can move us, maybe, but they can never touch us. We are young and brilliant and going-to-be-famous, and we are invincible, and safe.