The Vampire In This Tree--July 10, 1995

It has been ninety degrees, it feels like, for about a month. Before we bought the window unit off one of our neighbors for fifty bucks, we’d had only the cross-breeze between the den and the bedroom and the open door to cool us. All through June we’d slept on a bare mattress dragged into the den, where the night breeze was strongest and we could reach up and change CDs, or the station on the radio, without getting up from the bed. Even though we’ve put the mattress back in the bedroom, we still spend the hours before sleep in the den to save on the electric bill.

We are sprawled on opposite ends of the couch when Lou taps at the front door.

“Isaiah says I have to move out all my shit,” he says. “He got drunk and started in about the Julie shit again and I told him to fuck off…okay, well, I said more than that, but you get the idea—and he told me to take my shit and go or he’d throw everything out on the curb tomorrow.”

JP listens to this in silence, then looks at me with a question in his eyes. I nod.

“You wanna stay here?” he asks.

“Yeah,” he says.

JP and I exchange glances again. “Okay…but there’s something you should probably know first,” he says.

Lou does not seem surprised when JP tells him about our habit. The expression on his face is more…interested.

“You ever try coke?” he asks.

JP and I both shake our heads no.

“You want to?”

I shake my head no again; JP nods enthusiastically. I raise my eyebrows at him.

“Give me ten bucks,” he says. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

I wait til the screen door slams. “Cocaine??” I say. “Seriously?”

“Why not?” JP says.

I have my own litany of reasons why not, but as I open my mouth to rattle them off, I realize they’re the same why-nots I listed off the night I chickened out on trying heroin for the first time. And look how that turned out, I think.

“No reason, I guess,” I say, and shrug and look away.

Lou is back in half an hour, and he and JP snort lines off the Cobain book as I watch. Nothing much seems to happen, and Lou is disappointed. “Man, that was shit,” he says. “Sorry about that.”

“How about you?” JP asks Lou. “You wanna try some junk?”

The sentence is barely out of JP’s mouth when Lou answers. “Sure. You got some?”

As a matter of fact, we do. JP pulls out a clean needle, and I cook up the shots for the three of us. “Don’t give him too much,” JP warns me, even though I already know.

“You sure about this?” he asks Lou, but Lou has his mind made up already and won’t be backing down now.

So JP ties him off, just like he did for me the first time, and waits for the vein to rise. And just like he did for me, he puts the needle into Lou’s arm, draws back the blood, and pushes the plunger.

And we watch, JP and I, and laugh a little as Lou’s eyes go from curiosity to amazement, widening as the first shot hits. “Shhhhhit!” he breathes. “Goddamn.”

“Yeah,” JP replies. “That’s what she said.”

“Goddamn,” Lou says again. “Goddamn.”