The Story Thus Far

Introduction
Before: Coffee, April 22, 1994
Before: Late Spring, 1994--Hickory Hills
Before: Summer 1994
Flight, Part One: August 31, 1994
Poem: October 1994
Liberation: November 16, 1994
Home: Late November 1994
Starting: Late December, 1994
JP and Gladys: Late December 1994
The Brown Kind: February 1995
First Shot: April 1995
Oklahoma City/Wicker Park: April 19, 1995
Dopesick: April 1995
May 1995 (partial)
Anticipation: Mid-May, 1995
Overdose, Part One: May 1995
Overdose, Part Two: May 1995
Strategy Session: June 1995
Waiting For My Man: June 1995
*NEW* The Vampire In This Tree: July 10, 1995
Dopesick, Part Two: July 13, 1995
West Town: Mid-Summer 1995
Sofia: August 1995
*NEW* Silver Van: August 1995
Love Song: Mid-August 1995
Wedding: Late August 1995
*NEW* Groceries: Late August 1995
Feminism, Part One: September 29, 1995
Feminism, Part Two: September 30, 1995
*NEW* Feminism, Part Three: September 30, 1995
*NEW* Like the Deserts Miss the Rain: Early October 1995
Cold Turkey: Early October 1995


Return: June 14, 1997
Sofia: October 1997
InDependence: March 1998

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.”

Feminism, Part 3--September 30, 1995

“Lou, wake up,” I say through the window, through to where he is asleep on the sofa. I say it quietly the first time and then my dopesick nerves just snap and I scream it: “Lou, wake up! They got JP, they got him, let me in, dammit…”

His face appears at the window, bleary, his hair tousled. “Got him? What? Who got him?”

“The cops, the motherfucking cops, Lou, there was a sting and they got him and he has the keys now let me IN…we gotta…we gotta…”I trail off because I am not entirely sure what we “gotta”—or rather, there is so much “gotta” that I don’t know which is the most important. Get JP out of jail, of course, but also fix the car, pack the house, get a shot…

Yep, that’s the one.

He looks at me. There’s a question in his eyes that we’re both a little scared to ask, because the answer means that one of us has to do something we’ve never needed to do before, neither of us, but finally he asks it: “How are we gonna score?”

I have no answer to that, so I answer a question different than the one he’s asked: “We have to fix the car,” I tell him. “We have to go get the tire fixed and…I guess we’re going to have to call a locksmith, too.” I am totalling up the numbers in my head: twenty dollars for a tire patch, ninety or a hundred for a locksmith, plus bail for JP…

We walk to Maplewood, to where JP and Lou and Reid had left the car the night before. It’s almost a mile and a half, and even though it’s early in the morning, still, the heat is rising already. I walk past an endless range of suspicious eyes and muttered Spanish words, and finally reach a little grocery store with a pay phone.

It’s hard to find a locksmith; none of them will come into this neighborhood, and the only one who says he’ll do it will take ninety minutes at least to get to us. Again the math begins in my head: ninety minutes for the locksmith to get there, plus whatever time it will take him to make the key, plus the time it will take to fix the tire plus however long it takes to get a fix…

When I get back to the car, Lou is sitting in the passenger seat, and I can see the signs of dopesickness in his face. But that’s not what concerns me.

“You left the car unlocked?” I say. “Jesus, Lou, I’m surprised it’s still here.”

“It’s a good thing we did,” he tells me. “We’d be fucked otherwise.”

“What do you mean? We’re fucked right now,” I say. “We have to wait til the locksmith gets here before we can even start to fix the tire, and…”

“Nope.”

He opens the back door and climbs in, then peels away the stiff carpet-covered hardboard that covers the trunk, crawls in through the opening, and comes up with the jack and the lug wrench. No spare tire, of course—the donut is already on the back passenger wheel—but it’s progress.

“Not bad,” I tell him.

I sit on the curb with the sun impaling me, yawning and sniffling, while Lou jacks the car and takes the tire off. “I’ll take this over to that tire-patch place on Western,” he says. “You call the locksmith again.”

I wander back to the little grocery store on the corner and call again at the pay phone. The locksmith has changed his mind and doesn’t want to come into “that neighborhood” as he calls it. We’re back to square one. Well, one-point-five, anyway. I call another locksmith. He says two hours. I’m not sure I’m going to hold together that long, but then again I have no choice. I give him the address and head back to the car to wait.

I crawl back into the front seat, lean my head against the passenger window, and try to sleep.

Like the Deserts Miss The Rain--Early October, 1995

Once we move out of the apartment and back to JP’s mother’s place, the routine changes.

We wake up in the morning full of good intentions and the need for dope. Fortunately we have provided for all contingencies and so we have a wake-up shot, held back from the previous night’s purchases. We shoot up and I get ready to take JP to work,.

Sometimes I say it first: I wish you didn’t have to go to work, I tell him as we walk off the elevator into the lobby.

Or he asks me: Will you miss me today?

Like the deserts miss the rain, I say, a quote that always makes him smile.

And then there is a longer moment of silence in which we both reach the same conclusion, one that barely even needs to be articulated.

“You know…” he begins.

“Yeah,” I say.

“But we shouldn’t,” he says.

“Probably not, no,” I reply.

“But we’re gonna, right?” he asks.

“Of course we are,” I tell him.

We turn around and go back upstairs, where he can call in “sick” and we can try to find anything among our few possessions that isn’t already in the pawnshop. Or we take the remains of his paycheck, or the money we were holding back for bills…Anything we can find, anything at all.

There are other considerations. Once we’ve prepared for the day—packed whatever we’re pawning into the trunk, tucked our needle-exchange cards into our wallets, then we need to work out the timing.

Okay, it’s nine o’clock now. The pawnshop opens at 11:00, so we can go there first. If we hurry up, we’ll have a chance to cop before noon, so you can get on the next delivery shift and then when you’re done we’ll have enough money for the night. He is pleased with this foresight, this leap of preparedness. We have both become adept at thinking ahead, at least within certain narrow and limited confines.

The trees on the West Side are just starting to turn, and the sky is that clear blue that only seems to come out in early October, on the morning after a rain.

Groceries--Late August 1995

There is a grocery store on Ashland just south of Chicago Avenue where we go to buy meat. It’s cheaper than the Jewel at Milwaukee and Division, an important consideration, and less haunted by the faux-hipsters of Wicker Park.

We walk out of the late-August heat through the automatic doors, Lou and JP and I, and into the cool bounty of the aisles.

We have eleven dollars, or—more accurately—eleven “extra” dollars. We need cat food and Kool-Aid and sugar and rice, and bread and some chicken legs if they’re cheap enough. There is nothing left over for niceties—butter or spices or cookies or eggs or milk. Cartons of ice cream are a memory. Fabric softener, hair conditioner, soda in bottles. Pancake syrup. Cheese. Cake mix. Fresh fruit. Cereal. The rows of neat bright packages, cans stacked in ranks and files, all mock us. These things are for other people. We remind ourselves that we are not like other people, people with desires and petty ambitions and brand loyalties. We are loyal only to ourselves, to each other, and to certain corners.

It has been three months, nearly, since the last time we filled up a grocery cart. We had bought so much food back in June, on the day I got my summer paychecks, that we couldn’t carry it home and had to have it delivered. Since that food has been gone, we have lived on fifty-cent treats from the ice-cream truck and two-bit cans of off-brand soda from the vending machine in the yard down the street. We’ve lived off grilled chicken legs and corn from Isaiah’s house and free meals from the soup kitchen at the church on Wolcott. We’velived off bowls of popcorn, peanut-butter-and-butterscotch sandwiches, and a self-developed blend of Kool-Aid flavors we refer to as “the pink shit”. Mostly we’ve lived off little foil packets, spoons and lighters, and fresh syringes. Hunger, at least of the traditional kind, has become incidental.

Silver Van--August 1995

The silver van stops on Wood and Division on Friday mornings.

We have timed our existence to the movements of the silver van. If we miss the Friday stop at Wood and Division, the next time we can turn in our needles is on Tuesday at the Humboldt Park stop. That leaves us a whole four days with no new needles, and those points go dull so fast.

So on Friday mornings we burst out the door, JP and Lou and I, and bound down Division Street four blocks to Wood. New needles are a bright spot in our routine, and so we are animated, laughing, teasing each other.

The syringes come in bags of ten, their tips sheathed in little orange caps. On the orange cap, as well as the white plastic shield over the other end, there is a burn-mark, a melted plastic indentation that shows the cap has never been removed. This is how you are supposed to know that you’re getting a new needle. We had, once or twice, bought needles off the street, and even though the burn-mark was there, we were still not taking any chances—each of those needles got a twenty-minute bath in pure Clorox. Within the confines of possibility, we are careful in our way. Each of us has their own set of works and their own separate storage place. Even JP and I, who have been fucking without protection for over a year now—since day one—still keep our works separate.

God, Lou says on the way. If I poked myself one more time with these dull-ass needles…

JP and I both nod; we know exactly what he’s talking about. Use Just Once And Destroy--so says the needle barrel and so said Kurt Cobain, and both of them had a point. The needles we are exchanging are so dull that some of them have burrs at the tip where the infinitesimally thin point of the metal has bent over. Where a fresh needle slides into the flesh and the vein, these needles tear and burrow, and it’s often impossible to get a clear shot.

We each have cards that say we are allowed to carry syringes, that we are participants in a harm-reduction program and we are legally allowed to have our works with us. Without this card, if we were stopped on the way to or from the silver van we could be charged with possession of paraphernalia. But now we’re safe. The card says. We know that if we ever are stopped, that story will not sit well. The Chicago Police have little patience with social-working hippy-dippy pro-drug harm reductionists, and outside the silver van we have heard stories that prove the point. Then again, the Chicago police have even less patience with Wicker Park junkies, particularly over on the West Side.

Each in turn, we walk up the steps of the van, show the little yellow card with our code on it.

“How many?”

“Fifty-seven,” I tell her.

“That will get you a hundred and fourteen,” she says.

Anything under ten or twenty they’ll count as we place them into the sharps container; however, when we’re turning in about fifty or sixty needles apiece, they just tell us to shove in the whole bag and wave us through to the next station.

The exchange rate is two fresh needles for one used one; ten-to-one if you’re turning in less than ten. I take five sets of ten, even though I’m entitled to more; a hundred and fourteen needles seems like overkill, a number only an incorrigible hype would need. I move on to the back of the van and help myself to the accoutrements—alcohol pads, bleach and water in small bottles, little cotton bb’s to filter particles out of the heroin as I draw it into the syringe, metal caps to hold the heroin while it’s cooking. I leave the literature alone—the rehab pamphlets, the warnings of AIDS, the hours for hepatitis testing.

We halfway know some of the staff at the van, by sight if not by name, but we know none of the other clients. We don’t associate with others like us—we are different, more enlightened. We have our reasons for shooting heroin, and we know what they are. The others are just getting high.

I walk down the steps at the back of the van, my bag full of works in hand, and I wait around the corner for JP and Lou to finish. Back at home , sitting on the kitchen table, there are three bags of heroin we’ve bought earlier that morning, in anticipation of fresh works.

JP and Lou and I walk back to our apartment, each with a bag in hand, three good friends on a beautiful August day.