Sofia: October 1997

We are in my little red Dodge, Sofia and I, driving northbound on the Kennedy, a couple of junkies solving the world's problems on the way to get a fix.

"Standardized testing," I tell her. "That's the problem. When I was in North Carolina we spent two months getting the kids ready to take that test. Now when I was in school, it was just assumed--not only that we would be okay to take the test based just on what they taught us, but also that we had the common fucking sense to know HOW to take it. I remember when I was subbing in the city, they had at least a week of just how to fill in the bubbles!"

"Yeah, but you went to a decent school," she said.

I change lanes and aim for the Lawrence off-ramp. "I went to a middle-class white school, is what I went to. And that's exactly who those tests are designed for--middle-class white kids. There are concepts on there that would be totally foreign to a kid from the West Side."

"No doubt," she says. "Plus they don't even test what they know--they test whether or not they know how to take a certain type of test."

I make a left onto a curving one-way street, and Sofia scans the block expertly for undercover cars or other signs of danger. "Park here--I'll be out in a couple of minutes." She gets out, then taps the window to add a postscript. "Cut the engine off," she says, though my hand is already on the ignition key to do it.

She strolls off toward Cicero, then disappears down an alley behind a small apartment courtyard. This is galaxies away from the West Side's abandoned buildings and hard-eyed security men; this is a well-kept neighborhood filled with neat little single-family homes and two-flats with pretty little flower gardens in the front. During the day the streets are teeming with kids coming from the nearby school, young mothers with strollers and toddlers in tow on the way to the park on the corner, older Polish ladies on the way to church with pastel babushkas tied under their chins; at night it is quieter, but it is not a dangerous quiet.

Rocco, Sofia's connection, is by all accounts a strange and unsavory man. I only know this from what Sofia has told me, since she is the one he knows and he is very particular about who he allows in the apartment. He sells generously-sized thirty- and sixty-dollar bags; he also keeps his weekly pickups from the methadone clinic in the freezer and sells them for sixty dollars a bottle. And for those in more dire straits, in need of a clean sample for a probation officer or a pre-employment drug screen, he collects his children's urine and sells it in baby-food jars. Rocco is a born entrepreneur; he's created a one-stop shopping experience for heroin addicts.

The house is filthy, she says; his wife occasionally emerges from the back bedroom, stringy-haired and foul-mouthed, wearing a grimy bathrobe. Sofia says their two young children know exactly what is going on in that kitchen, why at all hours of the day and night the doorbell rings and thin, jumpy people ask to see their father. The girl in particular is getting to that age where she knows enough to be embarrassed, and though we are outraged by the child's predicament, our outrage is not enough to stop us from going there nearly every day and splitting a sixty-dollar bag.

I sit in the car and sing quietly along with Jimi Hendrix. The heroin that Rocco serves is not my favorite--I prefer the white heroin they sell on the West Side. Rocco's is the brown kind, and the rush is not as strong and it's harder to see the plume of blood as it flows back into the needle, so it's always a tossup as to whether or not you've hit the vein. But the simplicity of this score, especially at night, is infinitely preferable to the drama of trying to score on the West Side, where sometimes it seems as though there is a cop around every corner.

After about twenty minutes, I look in the rear-view mirror for the hundredth time, and this time I see Sofia coming down the back stairs into the courtyard.

I have the car started and in gear before she emerges from the alleyway. "We straight?" I ask her as she opens the passenger door. She nods, and I pull off.

As we turn onto Cicero, a police car creeps up next to us, and my stomach jumps a little. The officer gives us both a long look, then half-shrugs and turns onto a residential street.

We drive on. We are just two girls out on a Friday night, solving the problems of the world and listening to Nirvana, on our way to anywhere at all.

Cold Turkey: Early October 1995

Without the possibility of dope there doesn’t seem to be too much need to go to work.

We are not going to score, we tell each other. We are going to get clean, once and for all and then maybe once we know we’re clean, maybe then we can do it again. But until then we are on the straight and narrow. Until then there will be no more talk of spots, no more talk of scores and shots and needles. Until then there will be routine and saving money to get back all the things we pawned, and then to get a new apartment.

But those things are a long way off, and dopesick is here and now. I am freezing cold and it is no better outside; gray and rainy and getting dark early, now that it is October. And somehow I am expected to get through four hours of this—four hours in this kitchen, or on the road doing my deliveries, actually even getting out of the car into the cold and the rain and the chill that is not only on the outside anymore. I don’t know how I’m going to do it.

Since we’ve moved back to JP’s mother’s house, food is not a problem anymore. Even so, I make myself a little pizza just to have an excuse to stand near the oven as it cooks, just as a hope of something warm. I take a few bites and then throw it away; my stomach wants no part of it.

I page JP. He does not answer.

An hour into my shift an order is ready to go out, and so I pull my jacket tight around me and dash out to the little red Dodge. I pull onto the expressway, the fastest way downtown on a Saturday afternoon, and off onto the Ohio Street feeder ramp. As I pull up in front of the high-rise, I lean into the back seat to get the bag of food and a shudder tears through me. My skin is crawling and jumping, and my eyes are watery. I sit for a moment in the front seat with the engine running. On the radio, they are playing a new Cheap Trick song: a cover of John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey”.

I laugh, and the sound is raw and scary even to me.

I go upstairs and drop off the food, collecting my two-dollar tip. In the elevator on the way down I find myself sweating and shivering at once.

When I get back to the restaurant I page JP again. He does not answer.

I make myself a cup of tea and wait for the next delivery to go out. I don’t know if I can do this or not, I think, but I cannot let JP down. Not again; not this time. We’ve tried before and generally—though not always—I have been the first to crack. I have been the first to say let’s try this next weekend instead. Not always, but often enough. Often enough that I don’t want to do it again.

The next delivery is in Lincoln Park and so it takes a while; the streets are slick with the rain and the traffic is worse than usual, and it’s starting to get dark even though it’s only four o’clock. Two more hours, and I can go home and get into the bed and pull the blankets up around me and be with JP again, be safe again.

The delivery nets me a dollar-fifty tip and a long, strange look from the girl who answers the door. I can’t imagine how I must look to them, the normal ones, the ones who aren’t me. I have lost the ability to see myself clearly, if I ever even had it.

I get back to the restaurant and the cramps in my hands are starting, and my skin is all over goosebumps and I am yawning after almost every breath, and the panic is coming up in my throat and demanding solace, and so I pick up the phone to call JP and swallow my pride and tell him I can’t, I can’t do this, I know I’m weak but a few more days won’t hurt us, right? but when he answers the phone I know I can’t say it, not this time, and so I swallow down the panic just long enough to say ,”Hey baby.”

His voice is sleepy. “Hey,” he says. “I was just resting. Trying to, anyway. How is it for you?”

“Bad,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

I am tense and silent with the effort of not asking him whether we can put this off—til tomorrow, next week, forever—and I almost do not hear him saying “Sofia called, earlier.” And when I do hear it, I am first of all jealous, just a little; she is still beautiful and stronger and wilder than me, and I do not trust her entirely, but the next thing he says makes me forgive anything she ever does or did or might yet do, because he says “She says she found a new spot. I told her we were trying to go clean and everything…but, well… I was thinking…I mean, we don’t have to go sick this weekend, right? We could wait a couple more days…”

I put my forehead against the cool plaster wall, and I close my eyes and start to laugh.

“God bless Sofia,” I tell JP, through my laughter. “I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

Overdose, Part Two: May 1995

"Are you sure you still want to go?" JP asks me.

"Yeah," I tell him.

We are supposed to be at Isaiah's house already, not that anyone will miss us or comment on our lateness; Isaiah's place isn't like that. Crowds of people come and go as they please at Isaiah's; there's always someone sleeping on the sofa or staying on the floor in the back bedroom, and always something in a pot on the stove. We love Isaiah's house for a different reason, though; since the first night we were there, JP and I have used the place as a morale booster; a reminder, when we need one, of how out-of-the-ordinary we are.

I am still nauseated and wobbly from my overdose, but I haven't faded out completely for an hour or so now, and so I am fairly sure I will be okay. Still, it's a harsh, uncomfortable high, not at all what I would have expected.

We walk up Ashland to Division, then over to Blackhawk to where Isaiah lives. He comes to the gate when we ring the buzzer..."You look like shit," he informs me.

"Yeah," I say. Another wave of nausea has gripped me, and I duck out into the alley and puke into a garbage can.

Inside the party is in full swing, all the people we've met before; Roger and Reid, Sam and Wendy, Brianna and Monica. These, JP had told me the first night he had brough me here, these people are our competition. These are our peers. This is our generation, right here, smoking weed and drinking Milwaukee's Best and talking about nothing at all. And they think we're just like them, he said, but we're different. And someday, babygirl, everyone will know just how different we are.

On some level I had known even then that he was right. It wasn't so much that no one there had any personality or brilliance of their own; they just seemed unfocussed, not a goal among them. Where JP and I already had a plan, they had the next beer, the next joint, the next fuck. It wasn't a bad way to live, but none of them, we knew, would ever upstage us.

Tonight, though, there is someone we had never met. He is tall and blonde and tattooed and muscular, sexy in a way I would have responded to a few years earlier. Even though the night is young, he is clearly drunk already, and he carries a guitar everywhere he goes.

"That motherfucker," Isaiah says. JP and I are standing in the brick-walled corridor leading from the apartment to the backyard; I am leaning on the wall and trying to settle my stomach when Isaiah walks up behind us.

"Who is he?" JP asks.

"That's Lou. He's an asshole."

"Is he a musician?" JP is unconcerned about the newcomer's possible personality quirks. Anyone who carries a guitar can be all the asshole he wants to be, as far as JP is concerned, as long as he knows some power-chords.

Isaiah, on the other hand, has a different axe to grind. "Yeah, sorta. He does shows with Billy sometimes. Thinks he's hot shit. Don't let him fool you. And keep an eye on your girl, too."

"What do you mean?" JP asks.

"Let's just say that loyalty and friendship don't mean shit to him," Isaiah replies. "He knew Julie and I were together, but did that stop him?"

"Ah," JP says. There doesn't seem to be any more-appropriate response, and the silence becomes awkward after a moment. Fortunately I rescue him; obligingly, I dash down the corridor, through the yard, and out behind the garbage-bin to throw up again, and he follows me.

"That was good timing," he says. "You okay?"

I spit, then wipe my mouth. "Yeah," I say. "Think you could find me a glass of water, though? I've got major puke-breath."

When he doesn't come back, I go to look for him in the apartment. I find him sitting on the beat-up sofa in an animated conversation with the newcomer. "Hey baby," he says. "Oh...shit. I'm sorry." He hands me the cup of water in his hand. "I got...distracted. This is Lou. Lou, this is Gladys."

"Hey," he says, and smiles broadly. "You want a beer?"

"God, no," I say. "Thanks, though."

The door to the back bedroom opens, and Julie emerges, with Isaiah hot on her heels. Wordlessly, looking at none of us, she walks out the front door.

Isaiah stands, stricken, looking at the closed door for a moment. I watch him gather his anger around him, and after a moment he straightens. He looks right at the three of us sitting on the sofa, JP and Lou and I, and with pure malice in his eyes he turns the stereo up loud enough that conversation is no longer an option.

Lou rolls his eyes, and though I cannot hear him over the music, his lips form the word "asshole". JP motions me out into the courtyard again. As we leave, Lou leans his guitar up against the wall, and follows us, a moment later, out into the cool night air.

Waiting For My Man: June 1995

All right, where is he? It’s been almost two hours and it never takes this long and it looks like it’s gonna rain, besides; oh god, where is he?

Okay. Shhh, babygirl, it’s okay. It’s always been okay so far, hasn’t it? I mean, he’s done this a million times at least, and he’s always been fine before so he’ll be okay this time, right?

It never takes this long, though. He should be home by now. Maybe nobody was open. Maybe he had to wait. Maybe the cops were out today. Maybe somebody fucked him over and we’ll have to go sick because that was the last money we’ve got til payday. Maybe he got shot and he’s lying in a pool of….

All right. That’s just ridiculous. Now cut it out. You’re not gonna go sick, either, so quit thinking about it. You’re not. You’re not shivering; that’s just the air conditioner. No it isn’t either; I’m starting to go sick. Fuck fuck fuck.

Wait. I think I saved back a couple of cottons from the other night. No…shit. We shot those Sunday afternoon. Damn junkies and their instant-gratification thing, anyway…oh, man, does this suck.

Okay…so we’ve got to quit anyway, right? so we might as well start now. That’s it. Stretch out on the bed and brace yourself, Gladys baby; this is gonna be one motherfucker of a weekend. And then we can go back to it, if we want, but only once in a while. Once we get this habit off, that’s it. No more habits. It just complicates things.

Oh shit. What if he got caught? That would be fuckin’ great, wouldn’t it—me with no car and not a dollar to my name, trying to figure out a way to get his junkie butt out of jail while meanwhile I’m so dopesick I can barely stand up…oh, yeah, that would be fuckin’ priceless. And now it’s raining, too. Fuck.

Okay, okay. Slow down, Gladys. He’ll call if there’s a problem. And if there’s not a problem he’ll be home soon, and even if he doesn’t have anything when he gets home at least I’ll knowhe’s okay and we can try again later. That’s all that matters, right? that he’s okay? Wait…is that…

JP walks in the door, sheets of rain pouring down behind him. He is soaked to the skin, and as he steps into the living room he kicks off his sodden shoes. He hands me four foil packets as I unbutton his dripping flannel shirt.

I was worried about you, I tell him.

Home: Late November, 1994

JP loves the apartment the moment he sees it.

For nearly a month we have slept on the floor of his mother’s apartment, indignant and self-contained. My mother has put me out after another “discussion”, and his mother has taken me in because I seem like a nice girl. We sleep, smoke weed, call in sick to work. We fuck incessantly and fiercely and plan majestic conquests.

But there is no way we are going to conquer anything from JP’s old bedroom, and so we set out to get a place of our own. I am working three jobs in my vain attempt to get out from under David’s wreckage, but somehow once I am out of my mother’s house, the effort no longer seems as important. JP and I are together; that is the only thing that matters.

The rental agent takes us to a long cul-de-sac full of crumbling frame houses and sparkly-new cinderblock yuppie-havens. This is Wicker Park, barely a mile from Six-Corners. The fact that these names are both sloppy geographical abstractions has done nothing to calm the ardor of the nouveau-hipsters, the ones frenzied by talk of a “Chicago Scene” that might one day rival Seattle. We don’t buy into it ourselves, of course, but JP is starting a band, after all, and we concede that it might be wise to stack the odds in our favor.

The house she takes us to is in the middle of the block, with a vacant lot just to the east off the bedroom window. The siding on the house is the sort of patchy tar-and-gravel sheeting that covers my mother’s garage back home, and the picture window is covered with steel mesh, to keep out burglars and bullets.

But inside, the floors are sparkling hardwood, the carpet in the bedroom is new, and the apartment is airy and light. There is a walk-in closet just off the kitchen, and best of all, a little den where JP can play guitar, where I can write poetry. The apartment itself is an old storefront, isolated from the rest of the building; perfect for late nights of loud guitars and wild beatnik brilliance. And at four hundred dollars a month, I can quit two of my jobs and have time to actually be brilliant, instead of just talking about it.

“It’s perfect,” JP says. “Absolutely perfect.”

Love Song: Mid-August 1995

In my dream there is music.

Having nothing else to do between fixes—no job, no artistic motivation, no television worth watching—I have taken to long naps in the afternoons. My dreams are strange and vivid, full of ephemeral dangers and memories of things that never happened.

This afternoon there is some sort of crowd in my dream, some sort of willful looming mass of people in which I am only one insignificant soul, unnoticed and tiny. I am on some nameless downtown street, I sense, although I recognize no landmarks, and there is nothing there to guide me home.

And then in the middle of this crushing mass of indifference, a tiny strain of music rises. It is the prettiest thing I’ve ever heard; sparse and mournful, a little, and wise; just single notes and small chords, hesitant but growing stronger. I am amazed by this song in a way I have not been amazed by anything in a very long time.

My eyes open and the song is still there. I lie there listening for a moment, not sure of whether I’m sleeping or awake, and finally I realize where the song is coming from.

I move the bedroom curtain aside. JP is sitting in the living room on the blue couch, playing his guitar, and the song is his. I stand in the doorway and watch him; he does not look up although he knows I’m there. And I am listening to this incredible song, knowing that the man who is making this wonderful music is also in love with me, and for no reason at all I start to weep.

He plays for a while longer, then looks up at the door to see me standing there, crying.

“Awww, baby,” he says, and motions me over to the couch beside him. “Come here. What’s wrong?” he asks.

And I cannot even begin to tell him, exactly, how much nothing is wrong.

Independence: March 1998

Lou isn’t speaking to me anymore, not since he found out I am seeing CR. And Sofia is out of town, and I need a fix. I’m in trouble.

I’ve been an addict for three years, nearly, and in all that time I’ve never once had to score for myself. JP had always done it, or Lou, or Sofia; it was a well-considered plan that took into account simple economic realities. Lou and Sofia already had criminal records, and between JP and I, I was the one who made more money. If I got caught I would lose my job; therefore, it had been decided early on that I would be protected at all costs, for the good of everyone.

Which had been fine, when JP had been around, or Lou, or Sofia; now, however, I am sick and alone, and there is no one to make the buy….no one except me.

I drive to the West Side, past some of the spots we’ve used before. Most of them are closed now; Drake and Iowa is gone, and no one is calling out blows along Chicago Avenue . I finally find something going on at Ferdinand and Harding, a spot where Lou and I had once gotten a fix a few months before.

“Park,” they tell me, and so I do; I cut off the engine and wait, feeling absolutely naked and obvious.

The narrow street seems perfect for dope deals, but it makes me nervous. Harding runs up against the railroad embankment, a nearly-dead end street except for an alley in the back that connects it to Springfield, one street to the east. It’s half an escape route, half a trap; a police cruiser could easily conceal itself behind one of the garages that front on that alley.

Apparently that thought has never occurred to the workers, or else they’ve decided it doesn’t matter; as I sit there, six or seven other cars, and a few pedestrians, come into the street on the same mission I’m on. It takes a few minutes, but I get what I came for and speed away in triumph.

I go back to that spot every day. The dope is good, and I get used to the rhythms of the spot itself; I learn to tell when something is going on, a bad deal or rumors of police.

I am sitting waiting one day, the engine shut off as always, when a tap at my passenger window makes me jump.

“Jesus!” I yell. “God, you scared me.”

The white girl smiles sheepishly. “Sorry, “ she says, passing me three bags and taking a twenty and a ten from me. “RayRay told me to bring these over.” She gestures to a house fronting on Ferdinand. “I live over there. I’ve seen you out here a few times…I’m Paula.”

“Gladys,” I say. “You LIVE here?”

“Yeah, me and RayRay. You can come in, if you want…”

“Actually, I gotta go right now, but I’ll be back tomorrow…Which house?”

“That white one. Come around to the back door and up the stairs,” she says.

The next day I stop at the spot and walk up the stairs, my three bags under my tongue in case I get stopped. I walk in the door and spit the bags into my hand.“You guys get high?” I ask Paula.

“Oh, yeah. RayRay works the spot at night, and they give him a bag or two when he’s finished. We both do it.” She pauses, looking at the backs of my hands. “You toot or shoot?” she asks, even though the answer is pretty obvious.

“Shoot,” I tell her.

“Damn,” she says. “You’re the only one I know who shoots it.”

I pull out an old glasses case, with my works concealed inside. “Mind if I do it here?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says, and hands me a lighter.

I calmly shoot myself up, and Paula, RayRay, their roommate James, and a couple of crackheads watch me as the shot hits my blood.

Return: June 14, 1997

Lou and I storm into Chicago with a U-Haul and a little red Dodge full of cats and trappings.

I know when I come home for Christmas, when Sofia and I go to the Tribe Called Quest concert on New Year’s Eve, when Roger flirts with me and buys me drinks as I sit in the bar in the building where Sam and Wendy used to live, a few blocks from the old apartment—I know then that I will come back to Chicago as soon as I can, as soon as the school year is over.

My year in North Carolina has been an escape, a place to go to get away from my addiction and the memories of JP. I’ve avoided the addiction by the simple expedient of not asking where heroin might be found; the memories of JP, on the other hand, are unavoidable. The whole first three months I am there, I drink heavily and constantly, spending nights on the computer in chatrooms while surrounded by empty Corona bottles in the kitchen of Cara’s apartment. She is gone for the summer, and so I have plenty of time to drink, plenty of time to embroil myself in chatroom drama; plenty of time to play Alice in Chains over and over again, til eventually I pass out.

Halfway through that summer my mother gets sick, and I come home for a week to make sure she is okay. Never one to stay down for long, she is up and around two days later, and so I take advantage of what I thought would be my last few days in the city by tracking down Lou at his father’s place in Rockford, driving him back to the city, and shooting up in the car. We get away with it, both of us, and later that night while we play pool in some bar he knows, he tells me that he loves me, that he’d wanted me even when I was with JP.

That has been food for thought throughout a very lonely winter in North Carolina, and so when spring comes around I call him in Virginia, where he is living with his grandmother, and I tell him I am going back to the city and he is welcome to come along. I pick him up from a bus station in Charlotte about two days before I plan to leave, and that night we get drunk and sleep together for the first time.

He drives my car and I drove the U-Haul, and we drive through the winding mountain roads for hours. After two days we pull up, exhausted, in front of my mother’s house. He unloads the U-Haul, and we take off for the West Side, where Lou knows someone who knows someone.

Afterwards I drop him off at his mother’s house and promise I will pick him up tomorrow. I drive home, in love with my city, a bag of heroin in my pocket, and shoot up in the bedroom of my mother’s house for the first time.

Before: Poem, October 1994

In My Defense

The art, you see
is everything.

I do not come here
to hide from my demons;
they are
at times
the only voice I have.

I am not here
to flaunt my mastery
over dark dominions;
I only dare them
one last time
to claim me.

You do not see
the unholy vision
the moment when all is clear
or if you do,
you treat clarity
as only a trifle.

I know only
that I need to know;
what I need to know
I don't know. I only know

it is there to be known.
I want to see. I need to see.
If, seeing, I collapse
and die, then
so be it

i and my visions
will be there
waiting
never judging
and having seen, at last
what lies behind that door.
--1994, G.C

Flight, Part One: August 31, 1994

The phone rings, and for no reason I feel a little chill.

It is late on a beautiful August night and I am watching Archie Bunker in the den of my mother-in-law’s house. I know I will be leaving here soon; I just don’t know when, exactly, and my brain and my body are both screaming, keyed up to the highest possible pitch.

I have spent most of the night in the room at JP’s mother’s house, where we go to be together when his roommates are around. They don’t approve of me, ever since they figured out that I was married; they have told JP that they don’t want me around, in case David finds out and shows up at their front door. “We have a baby to think about, you know,” they finally tell him, and so we abandon the room where everything started. He still lives there, technically, but each night I pick him up out front and we move on to the room at his mother’s house.

We have agreed, JP and I, to try to suspend our affair for now. I want to make sure I’m leaving David for the right reasons, I tell him. I don’t want to feel like I’m leaving one man to go straight to another. He agrees with me, and so that’s all settled, and it lasts exactly and precisely until the moment when we are alone together. Reason and resolve are abstract words, powerless against lips and tongues and hands on skin.

Finally I call a halt. I should go, I tell him. I don’t think I’m going to be able to stick to the plan if I stay here any longer.

Yeah, I know, he says.

We have allowed ourselves one more small indulgence before we make this temporary break: the Nine Inch Nails/Hole concert on the third of September. I had bought the tickets the day they went on sale; there had never been any question of whether or not we would go together. So as I leave I know I will see him in a few more days, spend a few more hours with him, and then I will be on my own to find a way back to him. I have no job; I have no savings, and even my old gray Escort is sitting on two flats over a puddle of oil in my mother-in-law’s driveway. I kiss JP goodbye, one long lingering last kiss, and drive David’s Nissan back to the North Side, park it on the street, and go inside.

David is out with his new business partner, Marco, and so when the phone rings a little before 11:00, I ignore that momentary chill and answer the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hey baby,” David says. “How are you doing?”

“Not bad,” I say. “How about you?”

“Pretty good,” he says. “Listen, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Did you at least use a condom when you fucked him???”

My stomach drops and freezes. “What are you talking about?” I ask. I try to sound convincing and innocent, but even to my own ears it rings completely false.

He recites a very familiar address. “Ring any bells?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

“Where were you tonight, then?” he asks.

“I was out with Carissa,” I tell him. She has been a faithful alibi all summer long.

“Yeah, well, I found the disk you left in the computer downstairs,” he says. “And I’ve put it away in a very safe place, in case I need any more evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” I ask. “It’s FICTION, Dave. God.” Finally the panic has abated for a second. He has my disk? How dare he? I think of the hours and hours of work I’ve put into the stories on that disk. "I want that disk back," I tell him.

“Whatever. Listen, I’m coming home now. We’re going to talk about this when I get there.”He hangs up.

I stand shaking in the kitchen of my mother-in-law’s house and ponder my next move.

Strategy Session: June 1995

The center never holds for long. There is rent to pay and bills—cable and gas and electric and phone, along with my enormous debt payment left from my 18 months with David. But both JP and I are working, and so there is enough for bills and food and rent, with enough left over for CDs and books and heroin.

All year our paydays are staggered and so there is always money, there is always something to eat until suddenly it is summer and there are no more paydays and suddenly we have an empty refrigerator and full syringes. Hunger is inconsequential; it is only when there is no fix money that we become galvanized, and the negotiations begin.

“The stereo.”

“Are you crazy?” he says. “Absolutely not. What about the TV?”

“We won’t get anything for that piece of crap.”

“We could take the CDs to Reckless and see if they’ll buy them…”

“We took all of them already. The ones we still have are the ones they wouldn’t take. But they’re super-picky about scratches. Maybe Disc-Go-Round will take them.”

“Yeah, but how much will we get? Maybe $20 or so…:”

“There’s a place on Belmont that buys cassettes…”

“Yeah? We could try that,” he says. “What about books—have we got any books we could sell?”

“I’ll go look.” Our library has dwindled. Not that we don’t still have a lot of books, but a lot of the books from the summer before are gone now. I don’t think about it—not because it hurts to think about it, but because it doesn’t matter. Last summer is long ago. Last summer was chaos and fear and trying to prove my worth to him—that I could be the golden hipster girl, a worthy partner on his grand adventure. I would be the Courtney to his Kurt, the Nancy to his Sid, but unlike them we are going to triumph. JP and I are going to live happily ever after.

Wedding: Late August, 1995

I have never seen JP in a suit before. Just the very fact of it is an amazement, even though it’s not a suit-and-tie suit and even though he looks flat-out miserable and out of his element.

We drive out to some far suburb for the wedding of one of my college friends. Adele had been a bridesmaid at my wedding to David, but we’d fallen out of touch til I got the invitation, sent to my mother’s house. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, but Adele and Cara and Maria and I had been inseparable for a time, and so I asked JP if he was willing to go along. It’ll be easy, I tell him. Adele’s mom and dad are interracial too. I am not sure whether this fact adds to his willingness or detracts from it, but either way he agrees, and a few days before the wedding he turns up from a visit to his grandmother’s carrying this new suit.

And he looks good. Different, but good, and wearing an expression of stoic sacrifice. You realize I wouldn’t do this for anyone else, he warns me, tugging at his collar.

We show up at the reception and nibble at the food and mingle not at all; our closed circle is a little too tight to admit the presence of strangers. The bride, of course, and her parents and her sister whom I’d met several times before; the groom, who I’d met once or twice. But all this table full of people we didn’t know, in an unfamiliar place and with the last shots wearing off a little too fast for comfort…

Twice, once before and once after dinner, I sneak off to a pay phone and call Lou.

“Well?” I ask him in the first call. He knows what I’m calling for.

“I went out there once already and the spot was just WAY too hot,” he tells me. “I’ll go back later.”

“Go now,” I tell him. “I’ll call you in an hour.”

The second call goes better. “We’re straight,” he says.

“We’ll be there in an hour.”

We make our excuses, JP and I, and drive back to the city just as fast as we can. We are both starting to crumble just a little bit, just a few shards from around our edges, but we have learned that once this avalanche begins, there is nothing in the world short of heroin that can stop it.

We find Lou sitting in the kitchen chair, his works at the ready, with five little foil packets arrayed before him.

“We left you sixty,” I remind him.

“I had to break one of the tens for bus fare and a pack of smokes,” he says. It may be the truth or it may be a lie; god knows we’ve each been running our own scams on the others since Lou moved in. Holding back a little on his shot, or telling him we have four bags to split when we really have five; little deceptions we’ve formulated, JP and I, comfortable and solid in our illusion of control. We have agreed, JP and I; we may cheat Lou from time to time, but never each other.

JP hangs up the suit, and our life goes back to normal. I will see him in this suit only one more time.

Feminism, Part 2: September 29, 1995

I wake up the next morning and I can feel the flutter of panic just beneath the surface, the quiver in my stomach, the nerves jumping in my body, and JP does not believe me when I tell him I AM GOING SICK. JP is not going sick. Lou is not going sick, or at least Lou hasn’t said anything—he is in the den, on the sofa under the window, sprawled on his back and fast asleep. So I am the only one GOING SICK and I explain this to him, patiently, and feel my skin start to crawl and jump. I yawn, jaw-crackingly.

“I need a shot,” I tell him.
“It’s all in your mind,” he tells me. And that may be, but whatever is in my mind is also GOING SICK because there was no shot last night before bed and there is no shot this morning for waking up and there is nothing at all, except this stubborn man in front of me who will not listen when I tell him: I AM GOING SICK.

After the tenth or fiftieth or ten-thousandth repetition of the facts of the situation, he sighs sharply and says “Fine. I’ll go out there on the bus.”

Every nerve relaxes and prepares for the shot.

“But you’re coming with me,” he finishes.

“What??” I ask him. “Are you crazy?”

“You’re coming with me,” he repeats. “You’re the one who says you’re going sick, so you can come with me.”

We walk down to the bus stop at Chicago and Ashland, get off at Hamlin., and walk up towards Division. I have never done this before—always JP and Lou were the ones who actually made the score. I have driven here in the car so many times, but I have never gotten out, never actually walked these streets. I feel naked, my purpose here obvious.

“You shoppin’?”

A young black woman is sitting on a red plastic milk crate, her back braced against the bricks of a building.

“Yeah,” JP says.

“Over there.” She waves us in the general direction of the corner. We walk past the other security man, sitting further down the side of the same building, to where several men mill around, talking and laughing. One of them points JP over to an abandoned two-flat, around to the gangway. He is gone for what seems to be a very long time.

I try to stay out of sight as best I can, flattening myself against a corner of a building, waiting for JP. Finally I can stand it no longer and I walk over to the man who showed JP where to go.

“So…is it good today?” I ask him.

He looks me up and looks me down, smiling broadly. “Baby,” he says, “this shit’s the BOMB!”

I grin back at him and he gives me another long, evaluative look. “How ‘bout if you and me go over there and…well, you know…and I’ll give you a free bag?”

“Nah,” I say. “I’m with him,” and gesture toward the gangway where JP disappeared.

“How about if I give you the whole pack?” He smiles again.

And even though I would never hurt JP and would never cheat on him or compromise what we have in any way, some small rogue part of my mind begins a session of Advanced Junkie Algebra. One pack equals twelve bags divided by three people equals… As this calculation is going on, my mouth opens and says again, “Nah—I’m with him.”

The man’s smile snaps shut like a Venus flytrap as he reaches around his neck and pulls out a badge on a chain. “Well he’s with US now,” he tells me. “Now get your white ass home.”

I stand there, staring at the badge uncomprehending for a moment, my mouth hanging open. “Oh. Shit,” I say, and back slowly down Thomas Street as the undercover man laughs. Behind me a police wagon rolls up and into the alley behind the building where they sent JP.

As I walk back toward Hamlin I pass again the “security man” we’d passed on the way. He beckons me over.

“So,” he says. “Now you know, right?”

I nod.

“Where you live?” he says.

“Division and Ashland,” I tell him.

“I didn’t ASK you for an intersection, I ASKED you for an ADDRESS,” he says. I recite the address like an obedient child, and he scoffs. “That ain’t no Division and ASHland,” he says. “Get out of here. Go on, now.”

I do not argue. I walk up Hamlin to Division, to catch the #70 bus back home. On the way home I realize: JP was carrying the keys—not just the housekeys, but the keys to the car, now parked on a flat tire over near Maplewood and North. As I walk back to the house, the sickness comes in loud and clear over the shout of adrenaline and I realize: this has the makings of a very, very long day.

Starting--Late December, 1994

I have seen him do it before.

I have seen him cut the powder into lines, seen him roll up a dollar bill, seen him breathe the lines back into his nostrils, eyes watering. He does not understand why, exactly, I am afraid. Nothing bad has ever happened; he has done this before, he tells me, and I have even seen him do it. This was part of the plan, he says. He is only telling me what I already know.

I have never done it myself. I have never done anything myself. It is only in the past six months that I have even smoked weed for the first time; I never drank as a teenager, never smoked a cigarette after my first. I have always been in control. Control is the only thing I have, the only thing I know.

The past eight months have taken that from me, and all I have left is JP and my anger. JP is a known quantity; he and I have fused together somehow, finishing each other's sentences and sleeping tangled together like puppies in a basket. My anger, on the other hand, is something new and searing. There were nights in the summer when I had feared it was going to slip its reins completely and lead me somewhere I didn't want to go; it had taken all my will to marshal it and force it somewhere safe, into poems and rambling journal entries laced with Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails lyrics.

It is hard to explain that I am afraid of what I will do, given the excuse of heroin. I am afraid that it will take that control from me, though I do not know what I will do if it does. I am afraid, in short, that I will lose my mind. Months later, blood dripping down the crook of my elbow, I will look back on this moment and laugh; just now, though, there is only that fear, mixed with the wanting: to see, I have told him. I want to see, I'd written.

I grab a piece of paper and I write.

"What are you writing?" he asks me.

I read to him. "If anything happens to me because of this, please know that I did it of my own free will." JP laughs a little.

I sign my name and write the date. Then I pick up a ten-dollar bill from the coffee table, roll it into a cylinder as I've seen JP do before. I bend to the glass of the table, where the lines are laid out neatly, hold the tube to my nostril, and draw the powder in.

Before: Late Spring, 1994--Hickory Hills

David sits at the computer desk and ignores everything around him.

He surrounds himself with bits and pieces of wire and hardware, ashtrays overflowing with Marlboro Light butts and dozens of dirty dishes--cups crusted with dried milk, plates with ends and remnants, empty soda cans. I get up in the morning and he is sitting at the desk as I leave for work; I come home in the early evening and he is back at the desk. Somewhere in between, he sleeps and--allegedly--showers.

I have given up on cleaning the apartment, at least that part of it. There are papers to grade and lessons to plan, and now my new obsession-that-is-not-an-obsession.

"Call me," JP tells me one night as I am leaving. We are still platonic, if passionate kissing can be considered platonic; if seismic wanting can hide behind that quiet, classical word. "Call me EVERY DAY," he clarifies. "I mean it. Promise." There is an urgency in his voice that has nothing to do with me, and so I promise even though I know that the real world will get in the way, and that I have no right to promise such a thing.

For over a week I keep the promise. I sneak into a closet-sized office during my planning period and dial his number and dream my dreams. Once or twice his roommates answer the phone and tell me JP is "sleeping" and can't be woken; most days he comes to the phone and talks to me for the full forty minutes, and I go back to work smiling a little.

I go home to David every day, watching him in his fog of computers and self-deceit. He and his friend have started a business, he says, to anyone who will listen; he tells people they are equal partners and will share equally in the spoils. If that ever happens, I know, it will be Jason's largesse that brings it about; far from being a partner, David is more of a stubborn hindrance to the progress of the business. Jason is the one with the business sense and his feet on the ground; David is...David is David, all big ideas and bigger boasts, a truculent child when he does not get his way.

And yet. I am married to this man. Somewhere in there is someone I fell in love with, the silly, funny side of David, the creative side; somewhere in there is the man with whom I've made an entire language and what seems to be a fairly-stable life, looking in from the outside. I have not been angry enough long enough to abandon those memories completely, and so I try.

I cook and clean for him, and do his laundry. I invite his friends and my friends over for dinner parties where I make elaborate meals and try my best to be the scintillating hostess, a role which goes entirely against my nature. And I try to forget JP, try not to call him, try not to dwell on what might have been.

One night it all comes crashing in somehow, some tiny simple thing that sends me spinning. An unpaid bill or an overdrawn checking account; some small meaningless argument about dishes unwashed or trash left sitting. My normal calmative--a walk to the White Hen for a soda--does nothing to heal my indignation, and so I glare at David's back when I return, put on my headphones, and flop belly-down on the carpet to listen to Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine.

At track 9 it all breaks loose, all the confusion and the anger and the fear and the rage and the pain, all the might-have-beens and never-will-be's all coagulate with Trent Reznor's voice into a poison ball in my throat, and I lay my head down on the carpet and cry, gasping sobs with no falsity or drama or even real reason behind them.

Sitting at the computer, David turns for a moment. He gives me a blank, gray look, then goes back to his chatroom.