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.
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.
posted by GJC at 12:19 AM
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