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.