WHEN WE BECAME NO ONE

Marc Turner WHEN I BECAME NO ONE Addicts - crack addicts specifically. I used to see them running around Chicago, and what would I feel? Bemused or disgusted or something. Not now, however. Now, I’m looking out the window of Berlin, not the city but the Chicago bar, watching people go by and I can’t stop thinking about Teresa. The people outside can’t see me because the black glass is the kind you can see out of but you can’t see in. I wonder where Teresa is now. Maybe if I were home she’d be there. But I can’t be home. Can’t be around her the way she is. On crack.

This part of Chicago, Belmont and Clark, someday soon it’ll be gentrified, but now it’s still a cool place. Skate punks doing tricks. Runaways begging money in front of the Duncan Donuts. And addicts jittery or drowsy, loitering. So cool. Now I look at it all in a different way.

Some baggy-pants kids push through a group of transvestites, but they step around three gay muscle boys who are still sweaty from their work out at either the Bally’s Gym or my old gym, The Sweat Shop. One homeless man leans against the window of Pink Boutique. He’s wearing a paper crown. A constant barrage of the tattooed, the pierced, the modern primitives, and the legion of glamourous pagans thread their way through the cake-walk. Drug dealers and whores - observing, ignoring or working the tourists. Always like a carnival, always something to look at. Now though, it’s like everything makes me sick

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What a beautiful May afternoon -the patches of sky over the army surplus, such a clear, bright blue, like a blue Hawaii poster or something. Shafts of light break through the underpinnings of the L tracks over Berlin and the army surplus. Life can be fierce, but the world is beautiful.

I’m at Berlin not just to have a beer and agonize, but also because Berlin has a clean bathroom, much cleaner than the community toilet at The Dorian, the SRO, the Single Room Occupancy hotel where I’m staying, situated between Berlin and the Chicago Tattoo Parlor. The bathroom at the Dorian? Not as bad as it could be, but...About a dozen rooms share the bathroom. A skinny junkie cleans it on Saturday mornings. I use the urinal, but I won’t shower there - or even go near the toilets.

So I have another beer and watch through the black glass, try not to think about my life, our lives, mine and Teresa’s lives. I focus on the beauties. Certainly they were easily recognizable, the best looking in whatever group they are in whether bottom-rung gutterpunk or old-moneyed club kid. Some possess this universal currency, beauty.

Anywhere they go, everyone understands, approves - covets them.

Teresa is beautiful. Other people call her other names. Her boyfriend Andy calls her China. I don’t know why. Maybe that’s her real name. I think she’s got another name that some of her family call her.

Names aside, Teresa is a beauty. I think that after a certain level, however, one beauty can’t be judged to be superior to another - the stupidity of beauty contests. A punishment to try to live up to, to be objectified, even for something as enviable as being beautiful. Teresa complains about people using her, but then, she uses people too. I guess there are worse fates than people liking you for the wrong reasons I suppose.

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Two crackheads keep pacing in front of Berlin. One stops and stands right on the other side of the glass and peers in, inches from me. Even though I know he can’t see me, it’s weird. It’s like he’s looking into his own eyes for seconds, and then he and his fiend woman-friend dart to the curb. They’re skinny, dirty - and nervous nervous nervous! The guy pounds his chest, some tormented mea culpa gesture. His fellow monster, a blonde with haphazardly chopped short hair and sunken, swollen red eyes, tries to trick, lifts up her filthy pink sundress and shows off. Is this going to be Teresa pretty soon?

“Why so deep in thought?” A drag queen is next to me. Probably in her thirties.

“My friend Teresa is on crack.”

She shakes her head. “Poor boy. You can’t have a girlfriend on crack.”

“She’s not exactly my girlfriend. It’s not so simple.”

“Nothing is simple. Crack is bad. Some boys think it’s a pussy drug. Of course, they’re into Tina. I’m drug free,” she says.

“Thanks for listening. I’ve got to go.”

She tries to cruise me. “I’m into straight guys,” she says.

This is awkward. I smile, probably blush - well, probably not. “Got to go,” I say.

She smiles. “Buy me a drink,” she says, so on my way out, I do.

I leave Berlin and come back home, my little room at the Dorian, home away from the home that doesn’t exist anymore. I wish I’d brought one of my lamps from the school I teach at, Vaughn High School. One is green, the other looks like a train engine.

I’ve had that one since I was a baby. With me at the Dorian I have my suitcase, my boom 3

box and my bag with stuff like my underwear, my music, a toothbrush and stomach medicine. Also, I have my book bag with reading material, and my weed and hitter. The bulb hanging from the ceiling bleeds shadows over the dirty walls and the bed that I’ve covered with blankets from The Salvation Army. My lamps would have added some comfort. I turn off the bulb and lay down on the mattress. I can feel the slats holding it in the frame. I use my jacket as a blanket.

You can hear the sounds of the L-trains passing: the blue line that goes from Oak Park to O’ Hare and the red line that goes from I don’t know where to Evanston. There are other lines like the purple to Linden, the yellow to Skokie and the green to somewhere else; they all pass through Belmont station. They make a shuffle-shuffle loud, shuffle-shuffle fading kind of sound. It’s soothing.

From somewhere, someone plays a radio broadcast of a night baseball game from Wrigley Field, about a mile from here. Don’t know who the Cubs are playing. I’m glad for the game being on. The sermon and the ball game. I pray, and it makes me feel safe.

TEN DAYS LATER I can hear the rain. At least I hope it’s rain. Could be the roaches in the walls who run around in a manner resembling raindrops. I set off another roach fogger a few days ago and haven’t seen any, but I know they’re deep in the guts of where I’m at now.

I’m not at the Dorian anymore. It’s a fond memory, not unlike the Hyatt Regency to my mind compared to my new place. The manager had moved me to a better room at the Dorian, from room 110 to 103, where I had a double bed, a dresser, and bars on the windows! There were even drapes, frilly blood red drapes.

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But that place was expensive, thirty-three dollars a night. I moved to a place that costs seventy five a week, an SRO called The Aristocrat. Lots of drug addicts here. The building is on Sheffield, around the corner from The Dorian on Belmont. I had to get out of The Dorian. Aside from it being too expensive, things got too freaky. But I’ll narrate that stuff in time after I say more about The Aristocrat.

As I mentioned, many crackheads are here. They yell at each other or cry out in anguish late - when they’re out of crack I guess. I spoke of the roaches. Weekly foggers drive them away; nevertheless, I keet my clothes tied up in black plastic garbage bags.

And while there is nothing that I can do about the crackheads, at least they’re outside my room.

My new room is covered in blankets too. I’ve got a blue blanket on my bed, and the others: yellow, orange and purple, I spread on the floor. There is a tiny sink in my room, but I suspect that more peeing than washing has taken place there.

Since all this began, I stay in touch with Susan. Susan was Teresa’s girlfriend in 93 or 94. After they broke up, Susan remained friends with Teresa and Teresa’s mom, JoAnn. JoAnn gives daily updates on Teresa to Susan, who tells me what Teresa is doing.

I call Susan from the phone booth in the entrance of Muskies, a hamburger place on the corner of Belmont and Sheffield, or from one of the booths in the Duncan Donuts. Susan had been with me to help drag Teresa to rehab, which you might have deduced did not work. More about Susan later.

Sure, this all happened because Teresa became addicted to crack, but I had first noticed things to go seriously adrift when I came back from visiting my mom during my school’s spring break. I was home. It was Easter morning.

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My mom had gone to early mass, and while she was gone, Teresa called. She was obviously ripped to the tits and wanted me to buy her a train ticket so she could visit me at my mom’s. She sounded so high that I couldn’t deal with her, and I made an excuse as to why it would not be a good idea. I think I told her that I was going to visit relatives for a few days. Some lie. She said ok and hung up.

Five minutes later, she called again, this time wanting me to help her make a three way call to my downstairs neighbor, some guy named Paul, and she wanted me to ask for him if his wife answered the phone. Just to get her to stop bugging me, I went along.

Teresa dialed the number. The wife answered. I asked for Paul. The wife spat out that he wasn’t there and hung up. Teresa said, “Oh well, worth a try.” This was strange even for the strange way Teresa had been behaving.

Even more than her behavior, which was certainly...peculiar, there was a quality in the timbre, the cadence or the tone of her voice - something that had changed or perhaps simply gone away. I noticed something not just bad but altogether evil occurring. She had told me that she was a cocaine addict about two years before this all happened. She had said, “Don’t look so stupid. You haven’t minded me being on coke when you’ve been fucking me.”

I hadn’t felt stupid, just surprised, scared, and ashamed.

So we had decided that there could be no more coke, and because drinking and cocaine go hand in hand, we decided she would attend AA. I went with her to a couple of meetings. They were in Lincoln Park, and the people there were what I guess you would call functional addicts and alcoholics.

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She didn’t like going and couldn’t relate to them, so after two meetings, she stopped, but even with her not going to meetings, things seemed to get better. She seemed okay. But it was a false ending. You see and you don’t see. When I look back, there were times when I understand now what I refused to acknowledge even when it was in my face.

One evening before that Easter, Teresa, Andy and I had rented a documentary on Nico, and we were planning on spending a quiet evening at Teresa and my place with Andy spending the night. We weren’t halfway through the movie when Teresa got a mysterious call. I’ll never forget the look on her face as she was on the phone, like she was so pleased. As she sat there on the edge of our couch in her capri jeans and pink sweater, she looked like a girl who wanted to keep a happy secret. She told us she had to go out for a minute. A friend needed a ride. She would be back before the movie was over. She wasn’t. She missed a great movie. Borderlands was the song that either opened or closed the movie. Nico sings and John Cale pummels a grand piano in an austere room. You should listen to Borderlands.

Teresa stayed out all night. Andy and I crashed. The next morning, we went to our respective jobs. When I got home, she still wasn’t there. I was sitting and listening to an old house-music mix when she rang the buzzer. I let her in.

She looked like death. I had to help her up the stairs. Her hair and clothes were disheveled and she was barefoot. She was crying as I led her to the couch. She kept babbling incoherently; her voice was broken and soft. I tried to take her hand, but she drew away. She wouldn’t say what had happened to her, where she’d been or with whom. What could she have been up to? You can imagine. I put a cool damp cloth her 7

forehead and told her that everything would be alright, and I told her what I had told her thousands of times. I reminded her of how beautiful she was. All she said in reply was, “Not anymore.”

Another time, she had been out partying all night, and when she came in, about the time I had to get up to go to work, she brought home some really poor looking nervous woman. As I was getting dressed, they came in and settled into the living room.

Teresa came in and asked me to go to this nervous girl and say, “It’s ok, Reba.

Everything is ok.” I was nonplused and asked Teresa why she wanted me to say this stupid shit to this poor woman. Teresa said, “Oh please do it. She’s a little scared of me.”

So I went in, said, “It’s ok Reba. Everything is ok.” And this girl looked at me goggle-eyed and kind of nodded her head. I said goodbye to them and started out the door, relieved to be escaping this unusual scene. Teresa followed me into the vestibule and said, “You should stay. We’ll have some fun.”

I loved Teresa, but this was too strange. The woman Teresa had brought home was a down-on-her-luck drug person. So I said, “No.” And Teresa got kind of mad, but I said, “I’m not going to do that. I can’t believe you’re serious,” and she turned her back to me and I left.

I went to school, worked hard and came home. When I arrived at my building, I came up the stairs. There outside our door were the crummy old boots belonging to Reba from the morning. I unlocked the door. Before I could enter, Teresa was blocking my way. She was in a red teddy, and she said, “I’ve got four girls in here. Come back in an 8

hour.” I left. Although a five-girl orgy certainly raised my interest, I didn’t know whether I believed her. She might have had some guys in there, or guys and girls.

She was wired. In my mind, I saw Teresa getting high and having sex with Reba and a couple of equally charismatic gentlemen. But who knows? I went to a coffee shop down the street and had a slice of German chocolate cake.

When I got home, she was gone. But our place looked different. The only lights on in the house were the lights in the bookcase, which were normally never on, and all of the curtains were drawn. There was also a pair of oily hand prints above the headboard of the bed. It was too bizarre for me to be angry. It was so out of character, even for Teresa, who by then was spending more time out of character than being who she was; by that I mean the person I knew her as. That’s what I thought at the time anyway. Now I’m thinking that by then she was already gone.

I might as well mention that awhile back, when Teresa and Andy went to couples counseling, it was discovered that Teresa is bi-polar. While the doctor told her that the marijuana that she and I smoked daily was benign, Teresa’s drinking and cocaine use had to stop immediately. The consequences of abusing these substances, particularly while under prescribed medication, would prove disastrous. And the doctor was on the money about that. I didn’t think she was doing cocaine again at first. I thought that if she could simply learn to moderate her drinking she would be fine. And weed; well... So. Then she started again. I noticed one night when she came in late and we were alone. After twenty minutes, she stopped what we were doing and ran into the bathroom.

When she came back, I tasted it when we kissed, that bitter taste. All this was before she started smoking crack.

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I simply kept hoping she would stop snorting. I told two of our friends not to give her any coke. I thought I knew what was happening, but I didn’t know how far things had gone, didn’t want to understand. I never brought it up or confronted her.

Even when she would do stupid things - bringing what seemed to be a street person into our home at five-thirty in the morning for example - even then I didn’t see.

And when I came home from spring break and found a burnt spoon and a crack pipe, I didn’t say to myself, “Now she’s on crack!” What did I think? I do recall a feeling of foreboding. By then the train was bearing down, the whistle was blowing and the light was in my eyes, but I did not see what was happening for what it was.

The crack people seem so extreme. Do they scare each other and themselves?

The most abject of them remind me of holy people - like the saints that you read about.

They do share some characteristics. Both groups are much despised, and both seem to have no regard for material possessions, the opinions of others, or even the comforts of shelter. Like the religious hermits of old, many who smoke crack disregard the demands of fashion and stop washing completely. Furthermore, crackheads, as well as saints, sacrifice and suffer for something transcendent in ways that alienate them from society, friends and family.

I’ve never known any saints, and until Teresa, I’d only known one person who had been addicted to crack. He was a nice guy who was an attendant at a school I taught at. He had lost all his weight, had horrible cocaine addict skin that looked like porous wax, came to work sporadically and finally died. On his funeral program had been a photo of a handsome young African American man in an Army Dress uniform.

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Now Theresa is in no way like a him, the stereotypic crack fiend, not yet anyway, and from what I’ve read, lots of people with this problem don’t fit the above profile. And I know my comparison further breaks down when you consider that saints aren’t known for the psychotic criminal mischief that people who smoke crack are famous for. Saints are scary, but nowhere near as scary as people who smoke cocaine.

Again, do they scare themselves and each other? Apparently not since they seem drawn to congregate at places like the Aristocrat. Before I moved in, when I came in to look at the place and I saw the tiny vials discarded in the corridors, I knew what the people who lived there were up to. Their type of partying involves no sleeping, plenty of knocking on various doors, lots of yelling and arguing, threats of violence as well as the occasional, “I’ll: A. call the police on you myself; B. kill you; C. kill myself if you don’t open this door, ” type of threat.

They smoke in their rooms sometimes. I’ve heard it described as minty tasting.

Teresa told me it tasted like roast beef to her. I don’t know what it tastes like, but to me it smells like a plastic jug burning. Sometimes they smoke in the bathroom. One night at The Aristocrat, I had to pee, so I was standing at the urinal, keeping an eye on the roaches on the walls, and a gentleman in one of the nearby stalls talked. I was guessing that he was naked in there because what was visible, his feet and lower legs, were bare. There was a ratty green towel on the floor around his dirty feet. His legs pumped like pistons of flesh and bone, and there was the telltale smell of crack that was thick in the bathroom and coming in occasional swirling bursts from his stall.

And he was yammering like a magpie. At first I hoped that he was talking on a cell phone. He said stuff like, “Well...(groan) I’m glad. I feel good - c’mon over here 11

now boy. Yeah, (groan) It’s hot in here. You ought to come in here. Whew, feel like my heart gonna go ...Damn hot ain’t it?(sound of him taking a hit)” At this point he whooped or hiccupped. I was starting to think that he wasn’t on a cell phone. That meant that he was either talking to himself or me. As you can guess, I was really hoping he was talking to himself. I finished peeing and ran. Now every time I have to pee late at night, I wonder if I’ll encounter that man again. Although I haven’t, I have seen people getting high in there.

Last night when I went to the liquor store to get some bottled water, an old looking alcoholic and a young crack woman, who was wearing a dirty azure nylon jacket as a micro-mini, stepped in front of me. I smiled, and the woman said to her beau, “We butted in line.”

He smiled, said, “Sorry, Boss.”

I chuckled and said, “Not at all. Go right ahead.” And they did.

I saw them about five minutes later in the lobby of my place. The night manager would not buzz them through the inner door separating the outer lobby from the inner lobby and the stairway to the rooms. This made them angry. The man said, “We can go to the Viscount Terrace then!”

I smiled in a way that I hoped would convey my good will and general bonamie, as if instead of passing them in the crumbling hallway, I was in actuality strolling down a moonlit lane in my childhood dream. And as the night manager buzzed me through, I said to the alky/crackhead couple, “Pardon me.”

Before they could respond, three soiled crackheads burst in the front door and sprinted down the hall to the inner-door, lickedy-split. By soiled, I mean that the girl was 12

only wearing a stained, crusty pink nylon jacket which stunk of puke. She was barefoot.

Her first male friend was only wearing pants, though from the smell, it was clear that he had plainly shit them. He was wearing duct taped sneakers. The third member of the party stood out because he was affluent looking. He was dressed in a very expensive looking suit. The only thing about him was that he, like the woman, was barefoot. Of course, aside from his dress, his wide eyed expression and frenetic movement screamed crack, and I remember his skin in the underwater-like lighting. His face held the waxy complexion of a cocaine addict. They were all sweating.

As they rushed in they grabbed the alky/crackhead couple by the elbows and said, “Come on,� and they pushed past me and the evening manager. I looked into the eyes of the guy who had shit himself. He had short, filthy dreads, and he looked like a crazy zombie warrior.

So they ran up the stairs. The manager shook his head. I followed the impetuous crew, giving them plenty of time to get to where they were going. I saw them stop and huddle around the door across the hall from me. One of them opened it. They were my neighbors.

I met Teresa in 92 or 93 when I was living in a garden apartment located on a shadey street of greystones on Briar street in the area known as Lakeview. I was sitting in my front room, smoking pot and watching Beevis and Butthead when I heard one of the two new girls who had moved into one of the apartments upstairs. She was singing something by Sade. It was Teresa.

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Teresa was living with her girlfriend, Betty. Teresa was nineteen, and Betty was in her mid to late twenties. Betty was a cute, stout girl with bull dagger affectations.

Teresa was super thin then, rather like she is now.

I used to sit on the shady steps of my building. I’d play my boom box, drink beer, smoke pot and play my harmonica. So one day I was doing just that when Teresa and Betty came out of their upstairs door. Teresa said, “Why don’t you go with us to the street fair.”

“Sure.”

Teresa was in cut-offs and a see through black mesh tank top. She was also wearing a black choker and a leather biker cap. What a picture she always made. And the three of us went to the street fair and looked at the jewelry booths and the craft tents.

Betty and I had some roasted goat and raisins wrapped in peta bread. Teresa wasn’t hungry. Then we drank some beer, walking until we stopped at an area where people were singing kareoke. Teresa sang something. I wonder what her voice sounds like now? But that night she was singing, her shoulders straight and her head thrown back so cool.

After that we were walking around and Teresa said, “Have you ever done acid?”

It had been about six years since the last time, and several years before that since the second to last. Long ago I did it a few dozen times. Acid is deep, and a lot of work because you’re experiencing new dimensions of reality, having all manner of wrongheaded delusions, epiphanies galore, and any manner of the heebie-jeebies. Teresa said, “I’ve never tripped, but I’ve got some acid. You and I can do it.”

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“Ok,” I told her. And that’s how Teresa and I became acquainted that night so long ago at the Belmont Street Fair one Saturday evening in May, with Betty acting as our chaperone. About an hour after we had eaten the hits of blotter acid, the lights started trailing. For awhile we talked. I told her funny stories about being a teacher. She told me sexy stories about being a lesbian. We were walking with our arms slung over each other’s shoulders, and Betty walked behind us.

About two hours or so into the trip, it became difficult not only to talk but also to process the now pulsating street fair. Betty was leading us both. There were so many faces, and we were in the crowd, carried along, and I felt it all closing in, but I couldn’t say anything, couldn’t speak right then. Teresa was talking She seemed to be having a marvelous time. Betty was smiling. I walked past one person who had a little zipper in her cheek, and one who had a perfectly square bald head. In all this vibrating, ever shifting color and shadow, I felt as if I were hiking up a steep incline.

We ran into another young woman who lived in one of the apartments of our greystone, and seeing her, Sherry, seemed to bring me back to reality a bit. Sherry and Betty led Teresa and me to the supermarket. If you must trip - and you shouldn’t so don’t - but if you just have to, I recommend going to supermarkets while dosed. The bright colors of the products stacked in the aisles, the jumbo boxes of detergent, the fruit and vegetables, it is all very heartening. With Betty and Sherry keeping an eye on us, Teresa and I looked at stuff, occasionally touching a bright, shiny surface, a box of cereal or a cut-out marketing display for soup. I don’t remember why we went there or what anybody got. I just remember being there.

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We all ended up back at our building in Sherry’s apartment. Sherry had two nervous greyhounds, which she closed in her bedroom before we entered. Sherry started playing music and waving her fingers in Teresa’s face in the traditional manner of nontripping folk who, for some reason, find it irresistible to try to freak out those of us who are tripping. It really is bad form I think.

But Teresa did not freak out. She did politely ask Sherry to stop, which Sherry did. Later, in Teresa and Betty’s apartment, we watched t.v. Teresa and Betty cuddled under a maroon comforter. Teresa and I were spaced and not overly talkative, and I went home about three. When I got back to my place, I looked in the mirror and my face looked big and red. I stopped looking in the mirror, lay down and thought of my new friend. I was impressed and infatuated.

After that night we started hanging out together. Teresa told me that she and Betty had terrible fights. One night during the summer Teresa brought me a slice of cherry pie that she had baked. Because it was summer and I was not yet teaching summer school, and she worked some evenings, we’d take long walks to the lakefront during the day. We’d read the tabloids together and work the crossword puzzles. I was always trying to get her to eat.

So you get the idea. Back then she only wore overalls. That changed after she went to modeling school. But back then, she wore her hair in braids, and both she and Betty had some sort of programming jobs at a research company.

Teresa kicked Betty out. They fought too much to live together. I was visiting Teresa when Betty came back by to pick up her boots. Teresa said, “No, not only can’t 16

you have the boots, but I want my ring back.” Betty didn’t want to give it back, but Teresa wouldn’t let her leave.

“I have to have a private conversation with Betty for a moment, so we’ll go into the other room. You please stay right where you are and watch t.v,.” Teresa said as she shoved Betty into the kitchenette. I was lying on their futon. I remember Teresa yelling at Betty, the harsh tone and violent, halting cadence of her voice against the backdrop of Betty’s sobs. Then Betty came in and said, “Teresa is going to cut me with a knife.”

Teresa was smirking as she entered. She said, “This stupid girl won’t give my ring back. And she wants the boots that she gave to me. Can you imagine that?”

I think I said something stupid and inexcusable, something phlegmatic like “Wow,” or “Gosh.” Because back then I had never seen Teresa behave like that and I figured that Betty was exaggerating so I played it off. Most of all I guess that even if I didn’t know it enough to articulate it at the time, I reckoned that no matter what Teresa did to others, she would never say or do anything bad to me. And that made me feel good. She used to say, “I can’t imagine you doing anything that would make me angry enough to even yell at you, or to ever be mean to you.”

Quite a contrast to her attitude these days, particularly two and a half weeks ago when Susan warned me not to go home because Teresa was waiting for me at our old apartment. She had checked herself out of the rehab hospital where she’d been for less than forty-eight hours, and was wait-wait-waiting for me to come home so that she could surprise me. With a knife I was warned.

I miss the gentle friend who treated me with patience. I wish you could see her dancing in our living room on a sunny afternoon and singing along with the music. It 17

hasn’t been so long since she was fine. I would call her Queen of the World. Queen of the Universe.

Now I would have to call her the Queen of Death, and I’m afraid of her. And her Mom hates me. And if Andy doesn’t hate me I would be surprised because he should.

Susan told me the harsh news as I gazed out the Duncan Donuts window on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon. She said, “Don’t go home. Her mom says she’s waiting for you there with a butcher knife to cut your throat. She told her mom that she’ll do it - and be there waiting for the police afterwards.” The blood was pounding in my ears. Perhaps you’re wondering why she would want to kill me. I blame Susan. Myself too, but her also.

Let me begin by telling about Teresa and me bailing her youngest brother Tom out of Cook County Jail. He was there for selling crack. It was March. Teresa was in Europe when Tom was busted. I was sitting at home when the phone rang. A recorded voice said, “We have a collect call from Cook County Jail...” I hung up.

But the phone rang again, and against every instinct, I answered. It was Tom. In jail. He asked if Teresa was at home. I explained that she was in Europe. He asked me to make a third-party phone patch from my phone to him and his mom. So I did.

I made patch calls for Tom to Jo Anne until Teresa got home from Europe. She might have been smoking crack or snorting too much coke by then, but that was all still unknown. Andy and I picked her up from O’Hare. To say she looked glad to see us would be to miss what she looked like when we met her. She looked broken and 18

desperately trying to appear to be happy. She stayed with Andy that night. We didn’t tell her about Tom yet. We left that for her Mom to do.

So the next day, Monday, I came home from work and found her crying in our bathroom. Though I suspected, I asked why she was crying, and she said, “Why do you think? My family.” I tried to hold her, but she didn’t want to be comforted. She was too sad. She murmured that she was going for a drive and would be back soon. She didn’t come back soon though. She came back late.

Teresa said, “I have something special that I want to share with you.”

She had come in around two, and had gotten in bed with me. She tried to introduce me to crack. She didn’t call it that, and I didn’t figure it out. She showed me the glass stem from the broken bong, and she said that she was smoking a new designer drug called “the brown stuff”. She held a lighter under the stem and hit it. That was the first time I ever smelled crack, the aroma of a plastic jug burning.

I did not want anything to do with whatever she was calling it. It creeped me out because...it really made her act weird, or not weird but different. No, actually very deeply weird. “Trust me,” she said and held the pipe to my lips. I pretended to hit it but didn’t pull it into my lungs. She asked me if I liked it, and I told her no. She took the stem back from me and hit it again.

I was almost as horrified as if she had come in and told me, “I had to kill someone tonight. Oh, don’t worry. He had it coming.”

She didn’t try to persuade me to smoke with her any more that evening, but she openly hit that pipe about every five or six minutes while we had sex. It freaked me out, 19

and I didn’t like how it made her act. She was beyond sexually crazed, like maybe possibly violent, out of control, unpredictable, scarey yet blissed-out. And after awhile, she would barely put the pipe aside while we were busy. She would rest it next to the pillow. My roommate for five years, the most important person in my little world was gone. She asked me if I wanted another hit, and when I said no, she said, “You have to learn to relax with it.” She sounded really happy.

“What is that?”

“Something this guy mixed in his apartment. They call it ‘the brown stuff’ but I don’t know why cause it isn’t brown. Excuse me a moment,” she said disengaging from me and bounding out of the room.

In about half a minute, she came back and she had a straw. She said, “Fuck me while I do a hit and blow it through this straw.”

“What will that do?” I asked her, and she said that it would increase her pleasure.

So that is what we did, and again I watched as she hit the glass stem, held the hit, then slowly blew it through the straw. Then she smiled most beatifically and was in drug-sexy dreamland. When I asked her what was in this “brown stuff”, she said dazedly, “heroin and meth.”

Undoubtedly there is a minority for whom drugs such as crack or heroin and meth are de- rigeur and they would view my horror as being quaint. To them, apologies or hats off or something. As for me, I was horrified by the thought that she was doing heroin and methamphetamine, and I would have been even more freaked had I known that “the brown stuff” was garden variety crack. I was (and am) sooooo glad that I did not hit “the brown stuff” that night 20

She was supposed to visit Tom that very next morning, but she’d been up all night smoking “the brown stuff” and having sex with me When I had to leave for work, she’d said, “I can’t wait to see Tom.” She’d told me that she was going to sleep a few hours before she went. I didn’t know what to think.

When I got home, she was crashed on the couch in our front room. She didn’t want to wake up or go to bed, but she had seen her brother. I had to tip-toe and not play the t.v. or stereo. It was like living with an invalid.

And she was still sleeping Thursday morning when I left for work the next day.

When I came home, a drug dealer named William was hanging out in our apartment with her. William told me that I should always keep my stash rolled up in my collar because when the police search you, that is one place they frequently miss. Lovely. I thanked him for the helpful hint.

Teresa told me that the previous day when she’d gone to see Tom, the guards had not allowed her inside. “They told me to get out,” she said, perplexed that they would be able to tell what she’d been up to. “This one guard said, ‘I know what you’re about. You make me sick.’” I told her I was sorry that she had been treated badly, and she said that it didn’t matter. Then she said that she and William had to go out for awhile. She took a half empty jug of dark rum with her. After they left, when I went to the bathroom, I found a condom floating in the toilet.

Teresa was gone until Saturday morning when she rolled in to bail her brother out of jail. She was toting her glass stem another her jug of rum. She said that she had been

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raising money for his bail, but had only come up with half. She needed another grand to have the full amount.

I called Sandy.

He was one of the two friends whom I mentioned earlier. When I called him, he came told me to come by.

When I got there, I explained about Tom being busted, and Sandy gave me the money. When I got back, Teresa was ready to spring her brother. She wanted to drive, so I gave her the keys. I went with her. She took the stem of brown stuff.

Teresa has always been a fast driver, and since she had bought her car, she had averaged one wreck a year. Not only did she drive too fast all of the time, but late at night, she would often drive drunk and, now, high on crack. Incredibly, she never got a DUI, nor even been ticketed for any of her wrecks. None of the rides I’d taken with her were as wild as the one we took on that day.

We drove past the downtown area, weaving around cars which were themselves going about sixty to sixty-five miles an hour; then we cut west to get to the jail. I remember her accelerating on a sharply curving exit as she hit that pipe. I gave my fate over to God. I suggested we go to church the next morning in thanks of getting Tom out of jail. It had been a couple of years since Teresa and I had gone to church. She was high and absently agreed to the church idea.

The last time we’d gone, she’d started crying during the service, and when they’d called people to come up, she did. After church, she’d met with some of the church people who’d talked to her, and when I saw her again, she’d told me that she had been saved and that her name was in The Book Of Life. Unfortunately neither of us had 22

continued to go to weekly services at that or any other church. If I’d kept going, Teresa would have gone, and she would have been okay, instead of driving over eighty in the city and hitting a crack pipe with me in the passenger seat.

The jail was a really depressing place, even though it and the surrounding area were modern and not unpleasing architecturally. Teresa was in a buoyant mood. She actually took the pipe with us to the outside of the jail, where she stashed it in a bush.

Then she went inside to give the clerk Tom’s bail money. She wasn’t in there that long.

When she came out, she went straight to the bush, retrieved the pipe and on our way to the car did a hit before she told me what had happened.

After she had paid the clerk, she had asked if she might see her brother, and the clerk had told her that–well, that she knew that Teresa was seriously fucked up and would not allow her inside to see anyone. Much like her previous visit, although this time she had turned over his bail money. It would take many hours for him to be processed and released. We drove home. Teresa said that he would have to find a ride home. She had done more than her share in getting him out, and it was true I guess. The ride back was another mad dash. This time, after Teresa had done yet another hit, as we were barreling down Lake Shore Drive at some outlandish speed, she took my hand and stuck it down the front of her pants. “You have no idea how relieved I am that Tom’s getting out. I’m just looking forward to a quiet night at home,” she’d said.

When we got home, she went out for awhile and when she came back she had brought with her a fellow she called Big Daddy Z. Teresa had a new half gallon bottle of dark rum. She sent Big Daddy Z into her room. To me she said in a conspiratorial tone that he had some of the brown stuff, as he sold it in Cabrini Green, and that she meant to 23

get him to turn her on. “He can’t have sex cause he’s so fat, but I’m going to cuddle with him awhile. Then I’m going to fuck your brains out. Hey, don’t look like that.” That was strange and awful.

Nothing against Big Daddy Z, but I didn’t like it that Teresa was ‘cuddling’ with him to get this drug she was now in thrall to. And the thought of her messing with this fellow, getting super high and guzzling dark rum to balance out the buzz, then coming to me for sex was less than enticing. It wasn’t the first time that she had brought home someone and ended up messing around with me while that person would be in the other room - but in the past it had been either women she would once in awhile pick up or it would be when Andy would stay overnight after he would fall asleep. She didn’t bring home strange men to fuck, and she had never had friends who sold drugs out of Cabrini either to the best of my recollection. I didn’t sleep well, and when she came to my room, I performed.

And it was much like it had been earlier in the week. Her hitting the pipe then having me fuck her in various holes in various positions. At one point she said, “I haven’t showered since Tuesday.” She didn’t smell. Thankfully she did not ask me to go down on her. How sad that I used to love to kiss her everywhere. All that was gone.

Now I was joylessly fucking her, stopping so she could do a hit, now changing positions, on bottom, on top, on the side. What had been making love to the person I’d loved the most in life was now an act of profound sorrow performed with someone whom I still loved but who now frightened me.

She exhausted the supply of rocks she had brought into my room, and she said, “I’ll be right back.” It was probably a little after five. She didn’t come right back 24

As soon as it was light I got ready to leave the house, and when Teresa heard me she emerged from her room. I announced that I was going to go to church, which as you might imagine, caused Teresa to become angry. “You’re really going to fuck me all night then pass judgement one me cause you don’t like my friend? Could it be that you don’t like him cause instead of being a rich white coke dealer like your friend Sandy, Daddy G works in Cabrini Green and is black. How dare you,” and on and on in that vein, in one hand her pipe and in the other the two thirds empty half gallon of dark rum, and her standing there naked. But maybe she had something of a point. My rich white dealing friend Sandy had gone out partying with her, given her coke and had sex with her. She told me about it.

Circumstances were different. She hadn’t been like she is now.

So I walked down Devon Avenue until I reached a church. It was a sunny day, really not that long ago, but a million years gone is how it seems now. I’d passed the church so many times. There were daffodils and beds of iris in bloom, and as anguished as I was, I couldn’t help but note the glory of the day. I was struck by the radiant brilliance, the cool and forgiving feel of spring sun in the air. Then I went inside the church figuring I would catch the early mass.

There wasn’t an early mass, but I could hear the priest saying a prayer. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that in the front was the priest, and in the first pew was a nun. The priest was speaking in Polish, so I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying, but I stayed there for awhile. I prayed and listened to the priest murmuring the prayer.

When I left, the sun hurt my eyes. I didn’t want to go home, so I took the bus to my old neighborhood in Lakeview. I attended a mass on Belmont. After, I walked to The 25

Unabridged Bookstore and bought a book on substance abuse. Then I went home. The bus ride home seemed to take a long time. I didn’t want to go there.

When I got home, Teresa came out of her room where I guess she might still have been cuddling with Big Daddy G or, judging from the way she glared at me, maybe not. When I tried to give her the book she threw it across the room, so I left. I went out, got back on the bus and saw a movie. I sure do not remember a thing about it. When I got back, it was late and she was gone. I went to bed hoping she would stay away.

When she came home she went straight to bed. I was so relieved when she crashed. She slept for a day and a half, and during that time I wrote her a long letter about “the brown stuff”.

How did she take it? Quite well; in fact, she agreed with me and told me then that she had been smoking crack, not heroin and meth, not some designer drug called the brown stuff at all, and that she had gotten about sixteen hundred dollars out of my account in the last two weeks. I had suspected that she had been doing just that although I hadn’t checked. I was not angry because I figured that she was sick. Maybe another reason that I wasn’t angry is that it seemed so unreal, like a movie about someone else or a bad dream. Then we discussed her going to rehab, how to pay for it and how Andy would react to the news. He was due home Tuesday evening.

Teresa felt compelled to tell me all about crack. She told me of getting high with obese crackheads and crackheads who would do crazy shit like freeze up or talk backwards when they would take a hit. She told me of an architect she’d met at a crackhouse. He’d broken up with his girlfriend and had been up for five days, out of character for him she told me.

Fascinating stuff really, but after a couple of hours of nothing but her unending monologue 26

about crack I was asking for us to talk about something, anything else, preferably something wholesome, bunnies and clouds...anything except crack, crackheads, crackho’s, or crackhouses.

I don’t remember much else that happened that evening before the incident. I mean by that when the monologue turned to urgent requests, then demands for fifty dollars for crack.

No, actually by the incident I guess I mean when the demands graduated to Teresa attacking me. I do recall that it was way past my bedtime. I’d listened to Teresa’s tales of crack as long as I could. My pleas for another topic of conversation had gone unheeded. I was in bed when she came in with her demands. I said, “I’m not giving you any money for drugs!”

She went for my pants, which had my wallet where I kept my ATM card. I jumped out of bed, and we started grappling over my pants and wallet. I remember making some ugly faces while I was holding her wrists. I was trying to shock her or something.

Instead, she managed to wrench her hand free and started punching me in the face. She fucked up my new glasses and drew blood on my forehead. She got my wallet. I said, “Fuck it. Just bring my ATM card back before you cop because I’m out of money and I need some to get to work and get some lunch tomorrow.”

She did drop my card off. She only got fifty dollars. For someone in her state, that is commendable. Then she went off to pursue further crack related adventures. I went to work, where I told my colleagues and my students that I’d tripped and hit my head going up some stairs. If they didn’t believe me, they were courteous enough to keep it to themselves, at least within my earshot. She called me near the end of the school day. She said she guessed it was useless to say how sorry she was, and I told her that she was sick and needed help. She said that she was going to spend the night at her Mom’s.

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When I got home, she was there. I almost cried. She was still beautiful, but I could see how far inside herself she had gone. She didn’t want to go to her mom’s. She was ashamed.

She said that she’d soon be in rehab and asked me to treat her like a human being and to love her. She said she wanted to have a pleasant evening, and she told me how much swhe needed for me to treat her normally.

Sounded innocent and real. I said that nothing would make me happier, and I asked her not to get high on crack, but she wouldn’t agree to that condition; after all, soon she would be in rehab. Tonight, please just treat her like a friend She suggested that I run out, get some beer, rent a few videos.

So I went out, got beer and rented a movie.

She was in bed when I got home, and I joined her. We hadn’t kissed for even a minute when she started getting high, maybe she was already high when I got home. And when she came back to me, she said, “Don’t look like that.”

Again with the blowing her hits through a straw. She explained again how it increased the rush. Go figure. Anyway, when she wasn’t looking, I threw away her straw. Perhaps that sounds mean. I know I would hate for someone to throw away my weed or bong, but that’s what I did because she was freaking me out.

We stopped having sex for her to look for that fucking straw for twenty minutes. She eventually came up with another straw and we resumed. So she was hitting this crack stem and wanting to change positions about every minute or so or stop to carry out some crack related maneuver.

Again she wanted me to hit the pipe, and I said no thanks, and she said well then I’ll do a hit. And she hit the rock, hit it long and hard like she were trying to do a tremendously big 28

hit of pot. She gently rolled the stem between her fingers while she pulled in the smoke.

But this time, instead of blowing the smoke through a straw, she twisted around, grabbed me by a shoulder, pressed her mouth against mine and tried to give me a shot-gun of her hit.

As she pushed this fucked-up chemical from deep inside her into my mouth, I also exhaled to prevent my getting her hit. I blew the smoke sideways into the air as she attempted to bestow upon me her gift. It was like making love to someone who repeatedly insists on setting themselves on fire and telling you that they’re really ok. And to not look that way.

With my history, I think that I if I had accepted that shot-gun, I wouldn’t be writing this.

I’d be fucked up somewhere getting high on crack. If it had been any other drug, I would have probably done it with her, and maybe gone on and become addicted and suffered horrible consequences or maybe not, but I would never ever use crack. I’ve never done peyote or heroin, but I might consider doing either. But crack? I have had dreams about crack. In one, there was an old high school friend trying to talk me into smoking it, and I remember telling him that I was afraid. He said, “It’s only bad if you think of it like it’s crack.”

I said, “But it is crack.” I don’t remember his riposte to this brilliant insight.

In the second dream, I had taken a wrong turn somewhere in life and was a crackhead in an abandoned car getting high. Nothing else to that dream except the feeling not of being high but of being homeless in an abandoned car smoking rocks. Not good. So, because of those dreams and because of having seen crackheads running around the city like crazy people for fourteen years I’ve decided that I never want to smoke crack.

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But who aspires to smoke crack? Even the cognitively challenged kids I teach know not to smoke crack for God’s sake. Over the years, in other schools, I’ve had dozens of students who’ve sold crack, and they’ve known not to smoke it themselves. They tend to look down their noses at the pathetic people who come around buying the shit. Many of them have lost family to crack. Tom knows not to do it, and Steve, the middle sibling, who should have been smart enough to avoid crack, served as an example of what not to do, not by selling it but by becoming addicted to it.

Steve was a wonderful young guy. He had been a hard worker as well as a part time student. He had been one to save his money. When he would stay with us sometimes, I would see him kneel and say his prayers before he would go to bed. He had a steady girl, and she was a very nice and down to earth young woman. Then one time, when he was staying with us for a few days, I had suspected that he was doing cocaine because of unusual mood swings where he’d basically act like he was coked up, talking a mile a minute, too happy.

As the next few years went by, Steve’s cocaine use increased until at some point, he and his pals started smoking crack. The girl left. Although Steve said he was still working and going to school, I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. When he would visit, it would seem like he was high on cocaine. Too happy to see me. I felt guilty suspecting him because I liked him, and it really seemed unfair to accuse him of being high just because he was glad to see me or maybe simply in a good mood.

I still love the guy, but if I ran into him and he seemed excited to see me, I would figure that it was more because he was high and excited by everything than because we’re friends

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and he hadn’t seen me for awhile. Much later, when his addiction became out in the open, Teresa was pissed at his stupidity. But Teresa did exactly what her brother did.

Now, smoking crack isn’t just smoking crack. It’s pretty much the same thing as freebasing, and Teresa was first exposed to free-basing by a group of models and hair stylists that she was hanging with when she worked at one of the bigger salons in town. There they were, a bunch of gorgeous people free-basing. What a bunch of misguided assholes.

Andy has never done cocaine. He smoked weed with us, and he had taken ecstacy several times years back, but he didn’t use substances, and he had warned Teresa that he would leave her if she got too deeply into drugs, specifically cocaine. As far as how to pay for rehab...well, unbeknownst to Andy, sometimes Teresa would see this rich old guy, Mr. Freemen. She’d met him at the salon, where he’d come in for haircuts and finally he’d asked her out. He cared for her, gave her things when they’d hook up, money and presents, and she was very fond of him. She figured that he would certainly want to help her. If not, she would blackmail him by threatening to tell his wife about their arrangement. Before cocaine, Teresa would never have had an arrangement like that, nor would she have ever have considered blackmailing anyone.

Anyway, Andy was due to get back to Chicago early evening, and he was supposed to come by our place and spend the night with Teresa. I spent a few hours bolstering her confidence, and then around nine thirty, I went to bed. I guess Andy got to our place around ten. I didn’t hear the first part of her confession, but I did hear the end, where she started yelling and he stormed out of our apartment. By that time Teresa came into my room yelling to me that she hated me and that he had bolted. “Go find him,” she wailed.

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I ran out of our apartment and toward where he lived. I found him sitting dazed by the wall of a used car lot, his head in his hands. I talked to him. I told him that we both loved Teresa for very good reasons. She is a wonderful person, and at present she was ill. I talked and talked about us getting her help, how we owed it to her as well as to ourselves, that she could get better. I told him about Mr. Freeman, but I lied about the nature of their relationship. I told him that they were old friends. Andy listened to me as I spun my words.

I needed him to help get her help. She listened to him sometimes. He seemed calm and went home. I went home too. When I got there, Teresa wasn’t home. Our back screen door was open. I went back to bed.

The plan was to get Teresa into rehab as soon as possible. That meant that she had to meet with Mr. Freeman, who at that time was on some sort of vacation in the Carribean with his wife. Teresa told us that he was due home next Monday, about five and a half days away. Furthermore, Andy was due to go out of town again in a few days She stayed at his apartment until he had to leave, then she came back to our place. I don’t know if she got high when she was over there, but when she came back home, she immediately went out and started again. Mostly she was out somewhere those days.

Andy came home. I don’t remember how we made it to the weekend. Andy stayed with us that night. Normally we would all watch a movie and play music, but I don’t remember a thing about what we did that evening except that I was on pins and needles the entire time.

I went to bed at about eleven because I was supposed to work Saturday at a part time job I had working for my coke dealing pal Sandy at his legitimate antique retail business. The 32

problem was that once Andy and Teresa crashed and he fell asleep, he was out for the count, and she would leave. That is what she did that Friday night. I heard her go.

She was gone several hours. I heard her come back home. She stayed in our front room getting high for about an hour or so. Then she came in my room. She was freaked out very badly. She stretched herself out on my body. I had never seen her like that, and she made a soft screaming noise. I held her, and when she was able to tell me, she related how she had spent the last few hours. Apparently she had a cab driving crackhead pal. They copped and were getting high in his cab when he smacked her and snatched some of her rocks. She told me that she didn’t blame him.

Teresa drifted into a restless sleep, and I got out of bed. In our front room was the glass stem and a bunch of rocks. I threw them away and went to work.

33

While I was at work, I started calling rehab centers. I found out that admittance for people addicted to cocaine can be different than it is for people with different substance problems. For instance, if you are on heroin or booze, they will admit you immediately; whereas if you are on coke, you have to detox on your own, You can’t come in high or jonesing. Maybe you can if you have connections. I don’t know. Also, rehab is extraordinarily expensive. Furthermore, the places I called either didn’t have an opening or had very limited space and wanted her there right then. The people I talked to were not very encouraging about her prognosis. They all told me that I would probably have to leave her. If she was not ready to quit, she would either drive me crazy or persuade me to take up the drug with her was what counselor after counselor told me.

She would not quit because me or anyone else wanted or needed her to stop.

Some of the people that I talked to were recovering crack addicts. One woman told me that she had started doing crack and had then gotten her husband into it.

Although they had both tried to quit, only she had been able to. Finally, she told me, she had to put her husband out, even though she had gotten him started. Didn’t matter. Now she sees him on the street and he begs her to let him back into her life, blames her for getting her started. It’s all bullshit as he doesn’t quit. Or can’t quit. Though he says he wants to, will. Won’t or can’t. Doesn’t matter. Can’t let him back in or he will drag her down, even though she dragged him down.

Thankfully there were few customers at Sandy’s antique store. There usually weren’t and I believe my pal used the store to launder money. It was between calls to rehab facilities that I received a call from Teresa. She told me that she was missing her crack, and I told her that I had thrown it away when I had gotten up. This prompted her 34

to yell, “Asshole,” into the receiver and slam it. She called back and said she was sorry and that we were all going to move camp to Andy’s apartment for Saturday night and Sunday.

When I got home from work, we packed up some things and went to Andy’s. It was me, Andy and Teresa’s brother Tom, out on bail. On the way there, we stopped at a Walmart and bought snacks and a Monopoly game. We were hoping on spending the evening playing the child’s game and keeping Teresa from thinking about crack.

Andy, Tom and I conspired to let Teresa win, but even with us working to push her ahead, she still lost her temper repeatedly when things didn’t go exactly her way. At one point she screamed at Andy and me to the point that we left the room, and when we did, she asked if we were licking each other’s asses. Haven’t played Monopoly since.

Ultimately, it was futile also. We played three games, and Teresa won every one, but finally Andy, Tom and I were exhausted. We all went to bed, and after about fortyfive minutes, when both Andy and Tom were asleep, I heard Teresa leave.

She came back ripped and wanted to have sex. I was crashing on Andy’s couch in his front room, and I just told her I couldn’t, didn’t want to, wasn’t into it. Rather than have an explosion, Teresa muttered that she would be back and she left again. This time she wasn’t gone very long, and when she came back she told me she had just fucked a total stranger. “You cut me off,” she informed me. I told her that it was ok, and to try to get some sleep if she could. Mr. Freeman was supposed to be coming home, and he was supposed to meet with Teresa for lunch. It was to be at lunch where Teresa would spring the unwelcome news of her addiction and her need for his money to put her into rehab immediately.

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Teresa couldn’t sleep, but she did want to continue to get high. “It’s helping me relax,” she explained. She stopped long enough to not get high when Andy and Tom got up and left, but once they were out the door, she was back at the pipe and the bottle of now nearly empty dark rum.

I was relieved when she was finally off in a cab on her way downtown to lunch with Mr. Freeman, although I doubted that she would be eating much. I had taken the day off from work to make sure that she got to her meeting with Mr. Freeman. I was hoping that he would make arrangements that afternoon and have her in hospital by evening.

I couldn’t relax, couldn’t concentrate on t.v. or anything except the endless loop of thoughts about our ruined lives. In the past, before she was on the pipe, when she would meet with Mr. Freeman, she would always bring home for me all the expensive leftovers from the fancy restaurants he would take her to before they’d go to some nice hotel room to have sex. I remember once I had been pissy when Teresa came home from a rendevous with Mr. Freeman. She had wanted to have sex, and I had been kind of angry for her fucking this old guy for gifts and money. She’d found my attitude amusing, which only pissed me off more. She told me to stop being judgmental. And although I didn’t fuck her that day, I got over having an attitude about Mr. Freeman fucking her then giving her stuff. He was a nice man. She liked him. It was their business. That’s what I told myself.

After two or three hours, Teresa called from our apartment. She seemed really high, and instead of telling me that with one call Mr. Freeman had arranged to have her in the best rehab in the country, she told me that she would go into treatment soon. She’d 36

had lunch with Mr. Freeman, but had not broached the subject. She would be meeting with him in a few days. “Now come home and love me,” Teresa said.

I told her that I wouldn’t be coming home until she was in rehab, and that I would be by our place to pick up a few things. I wrote Andy a note and went to my old place.

When I got there she was in a see-through teddy. Even though she had lost some weight, she was still so beautiful. I didn’t know if her using was even a choice for her, or if her addiction was so strong that she had no choice. Won’t or can’t? And love her or not, it couldn’t matter. Or simply didn’t matter enough. I put some things into a laundry bag and left. That was the first time I checked into The Dorian. I loved her, but I didn’t think I had any other choice.

Normally, when someone is sick, you stick with them even if they don’t want to get help or whatever, but when the disease is crack addiction and the person doesn’t want to stop or get help, the symptoms of this particular disease are lying, violence, stealing and forming fleeting sexual, drug and emotional relationships with other sick addicts.

These symptoms can drive away people who aren’t afflicted, even if they love the sick person. I’d never thought anything could make me want to not be around Teresa. This did though.

While at my job during my prep period, I found a hospital with a rehab facility not too far from where we lived in Edgewater. It was in Roger’s Park and was called Lakeside. When, after a day, Teresa broke down and called me at school and agreed to go to rehab. She met again with Mr. Freeman and told him that she was addicted to cocaine.

She told me that he was pretty ignorant about drug addiction, but he genuinely cared for Teresa, and he immediately agreed to do whatever he could to help her. I called him and 37

we talked. He seemed like a nice man, and he told me that he would have the check delivered to me. And that is what he did. A messenger rung the buzzer at our apartment and handed me an envelop with a blank check inside.

By then Andy was on another business trip, and it was up to me to get Teresa checked in. The day that she was scheduled to enter finally arrived, and Teresa did not want to go. She was guzzling the dark rum and smoking her glass stem steadily - to calm her nerves. She was extremely irritable. I think that Teresa told me to call Susan, who would drive us to Lakeside and also provide moral support. Now Susan did not know that Teresa had graduated from snorting cocaine to smoking crack. She only thought that Teresa wanted some innocuous ride somewhere.

While we were waiting for Susan to get there, Teresa made a call to a woman crack dealer named Shella. Teresa said she was getting one last blast, and told me that she owed Shella two hundred dollars. She asked me to pay the debt off and assured me that once that was done and she was in rehab there would be no more drug debts. Teresa said that if she couldn’t get high before leaving for rehab, she would be too afraid and paranoid to go. I went to the grocery where there was an ATM. When I got back, Shella and Teresa were talking at the back gate. Shella had her name in lovely script tattooed on her neck. I gave her two hundred dollars, and she said that Teresa owed her another three hundred. Teresa told her that I would get it to her soon. Shella gave me her number and told me to call her in the within the next day. When Shella left, Teresa told me that she had no intention for me to pay Shella. “She overcharged me cause she knew I was desperate. What you gave them is enough.�

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About that time, Susan drove up and parked. I went to meet her while Teresa went back upstairs to pack and get high. Later Susan told me that as soon as she got out of her truck and saw my face, she knew things were seriously bad. When I explained the situation, like anyone else, she was dumbfounded. We went upstairs to find a wired Teresa.

Susan and I talked her into the truck and we were on our way. We were all trying to keep things light, but Teresa was so afraid. I felt so sorry for her. When we got there, she refused to go in and sat in the parking lot sneaking hits.

It would have been nice for Susan and I if once we’d persuaded Teresa to set foot in the rehab proper, a net would have dropped from the ceiling on her and they would have trundled her off for her cure, but things aren’t like that. Instead, there is a long wait before the jonesing junkie can be admitted, a wait that frequently results in the intended patient bolting from the premises. Susan and I held hands and prayed in the waiting room, as Teresa paced in one of the admitting rooms.

After over an hour had passed, Teresa asked to use the bathroom. Well, once she was in there, she did not want to come out. Can you guess what she was doing? The staff found her in one of the stalls doing hits. One of the orderlies said, “Darling, if you’re going to quit crack, you’re going to have to let go of the pipe for a minute.” Then, gently they took away her crack and led her back to the admittance room. After a few minutes, she called me over.

She told me that she was going to need some shampoo, toothpaste, a toothbrush and some other items and she asked to borrow my credit card for a minute. Like an idiot, I handed it over thinking that she had told me the truth. “Here you are, dear,” was what I 39

said. I still thought that she was just Teresa and that I could trust her. I didn’t think of her as a constantly lying crackhead.

About five minutes later, Teresa announced that she needed to smoke a cigarette.

She left the admittance room and vanished out the door. Susan and I gave her the benefit of a doubt and waited about ten minutes, until it was obvious that she hadn’t stepped out to have a cigarette but to escape. I went out looking for her. Reading this now, I wonder why I was so gullible.

By now it was dark, and the neighborhood had changed. By day the streets in Rogers Park looked pretty nice for the most part. Every now and then there would be a block that would appear to be uncared for, but mostly it looked nice. It still looked nice, but now on every corner there were all sorts of people involved in either buying drugs, selling drugs, whoring or hustling. Not a hundred feet from the entrance of the hospital there were runners and buyers doing a brisk business.

And there was the attendant scarey stuff too, the screamed threats, the crazy laughter, the beautiful women on the cusp of ruination. In the deepest shadows lurked pimps, thugs and crackheads who had been out there too long, abandoned souls. I went around the block and went around the next block. I looked for her until I became disoriented. It was awhile before I got back my bearings and made my way back to the hospital.

She wasn’t back. One of the doctors there suggested that I cancel my credit card, so I did that over the phone. Susan and I got in her car and headed back toward my apartment. I was going to pick up a few things and have her drop me off at the Dorien because I didn’t want to be home if Teresa came in high or looking for me to give her 40

money. As we drove, we discussed her. I told Susan about Teresa having attacked me, told her of Teresa’s having maxed out my credit card for cash. Susan told me about a party she had invited Teresa to about a month ago. When Teresa had shown up, she was ridiculously high, like not on weed high but on hard, sympathetic-nervous-system stimulant high. Heart and respiration. She tried to get other people to go out to her car with her and party. No one did.

While we were heading north on Lake Shore Drive, Teresa called Susan. She was at Andy’s apartment. No, she had not used my credit card. Yes, if we picked her up she would go back with us. So we drove to Andy’s apartment which was on Sheridan next to Lake Michigan. And when we parked, I could see the second story light shining through the sheer curtains of the bay window of Andy’s place. I thought I could see the curtains rustle and part.

When we got to the apartment, she had with her a stuffed Scooby Doo that Andy had bought for her. He was on the phone with her, and they talked a long time. God bless Andy, when they were done talking, she went back with us and allowed herself to be checked in. She took Scooby Doo with her. Her knuckles were white from where she gripped him. Again, we all tried to keep things light, but seeing her like that was so bad.

Helpless. We took her back , and this time got her checked in. It was very late when I got to The Dorien, nearly one. Not late in party time. It was chilly. I used my coat as a blanket.

The next afternoon I called her from our apartment and listened to her voice her fears and give expression to whatever that is, the void in the soul, the broken heart, the craving, the thirst. Restlessness gelling to anxiety. She did not like rehab and could not 41

relate to the other patients. The staff was needlessly harsh, the meetings horrible. She missed Andy and I. She missed our home. She wanted to leave, and was unhappy when I talked and talked trying to persuade her to stay. There was such despondency in her voice as she tried to tell me that she would be better off trying to quit at home. Andy and Susan and I could watch her. She would continue rehab as an outpatient going to meetings. Didn’t I miss her? Also she was now afraid that her Mom would find out.

“Don’t tell my Mom,” she told me.

After work I went back to my apartment. Thankfully, she was not there. Also, Andy was coming back to Chicago that afternoon, and he would be in to visit her that evening along with me. Susan said that she would stop by on her way to work..

Being back in my apartment was so sad. Until this, my home had always been my refuge from the stress of being a teacher. Our apartment on Thome was on the third floor of a complex that took up half a city block. We had a balcony and hardwood floors. Our rooms were filled with natural light year round. We had plants galore. On the balcony I had flower boxes mounted on the rails that voluptuously spilled clusters of petunia, sheeps ear and strands of vine that grew to the ground. Behind those plants I grew our marijuana and tomatoes. Inside we had houseplants and cut flowers in the red glass vase on our table. The walls throughout were white, and we had dark blue curtains and furniture. Before we moved into that place we lived in a dingy garden apartment in Lakeview.

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I was happy on Thome with Teresa. It was like I grew into a state of contentment that had evaded me until then. Teresa and I lived there five years before she smoked crack.

My wonderful home was a mausoleum now. I was always afraid that Teresa would impulsively check herself out of Lakeshore Hospital and show up. I can almost hear the click of her key in our door. I used to awaken to that sound and wait for her.

Now I would jump every time I’d hear someone come into the vestibule downstairs.

Safety was gone. I can remember long ago, stormy nights with the wind and rain knocking our doors and windows. It seemed like some sort of unsuccessful intruder. I would listen to the buffeting of the glass and metal in their frames and the thunder of the storm, and feel like I was high up in my third floor castle where the burglar could never intrude.

The next day, Teresa’s Mom called asking for her. Remembering what Teresa had asked of me, I lied to Jo Anne and told her that I thought she was at Andy’s apartment. Jo Anne asked me to have Teresa call her.

When I went to visit Teresa that day, I met Andy there. It was another beautiful day in May, and Teresa was in a better mood, a much better mood. It seemed as if she were her old self. The hospital itself was very nice. Teresa had a roommate, a woman in her forties named Jane. Jane was a very nice person. Teresa said that she got up at seven, usually when she went to bed. Her day was filled with meetings and lectures and films, some exercise. She held both Andy’s hand and my hand and promised us that she was through with drugs. Everything was wonderful, and I was filled with hope.

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One of the things that was part of her therapy, was that she keep a journal recounting the history of her substance abuse. She let us read it. It was fascinating.

Her journal started when she was in high school when a friend persuaded her to go to a party where a couple of men gave her some sort of drug that made her black out. She also described dreams that she had about sex and crack. I think she would be having sex with someone, and then she would take a pierce of green looking crack out of her vagina and...I don’t remember, perhaps look at it, maybe smoke it. That was as far as she had gotten.

When visiting hours were over, Andy and I stopped at a Mexican place in Rogers Park that he knew about. It was a great meal. Andy was really a wonderful guy. The guilt that I had once ignored or channeled as an aphrodisiac now grated my conscience.

Andy had gone from being a rival to being a friend. Now it was more important than ever that all of the people in Teresa’s circle of friends stick together. I used to think that if he found out about Teresa and me, it would not be so big a deal. In fact, I think that a part of him must have known, but it was more comfortable to be in denial. Now he would have to be kept in the dark at all costs. He simply could not find out now.

When I got home, Jo Anne called again. This time, she was angry. “I want to know where my daughter is.” The tone in her voice told me that she knew something was up, possibly Teresa’s brother Tom or maybe even Susan had said something. I told her the truth, and she said, “I’m coming over right now. You’d better not go anywhere.”

When she came over, Jo Anne had me tell her where Teresa was, why she was there, what had happened...She stopped being angry. She said, “You know, you don’t love my daughter more than I do.” Tom was with her. I think he might have been the 44

one who said that something was wrong and that something was being withheld from Jo Anne. So then Jo Anne told me something quite shocking.

She told me that about a year and a half ago, Teresa had come to her house crying, saying that she wanted to move back in with her. She told her Mom what she had told me about that time, that she was addicted to cocaine, but she also told her Mom that I was a big reason that she was into it. She didn’t say that she had used it when we had sex. Her Mom didn’t know about that. Evidently, she told Jo Anne that I was getting it for her regularly. As I put down earlier, I had only copped for her a handful of times, no more that four or five times at most, and although I feel guilty about having done that, at the time she had told me that if I didn’t get it for her, she would find someone who would.

Also, when I got it for her, we didn’t know that she was bi-polor, nor did we know that she had a problem with cocaine. Of all the people who were my friends, probably all of them had used cocaine at one time or another. Most had stopped. Some of them had developed problems, but none except Teresa and her brother Steve had ended up addicted to crack. Her Mom figured out pretty quickly that I wasn’t the dope man, and I gave her all the information about where Teresa was, visiting hours, and the phone numbers of her doctor, whom I never met, and Mr. Freemen.

That late afternoon, when I went to see her, Andy was already there. She was again in a docile mood, and she asked Andy to bring her several cd’s and me to bring her small portable sound system. Mr. Freemen had sent her a lovely plant, some sort of white lily I think. She told me that she was learning much about herself in her sessions and that she was helpful to others in seeing insights and communicating observations...So around

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then I told her that her Mom had called and that she’d demanded to know where she was, so that I’d had to tell her.

Teresa’s bubble of serenity dissipated instantly. Her brow furrowed; her countenance darkened. Her eyes flashed anger my way, and she said, “I told you to keep all this from my Mom. How the fuck could you tell her? How would you like it if I told shit that you didn’t want me to tell?” I felt the threat implied. More than once since she had developed an addiction, she had threatened to tell Andy about us. Now Andy calmed her down. I forget what he told her; perhaps he reasoned with her. Maybe he told her that eventually her Mom would have to know. I don’t remember. Teresa never listened to me. In the past, when she would piss me off, I would take a walk, and when I’d get back, she would usually be calm and more often than not apologetic.

When I got back in my neighborhood, I stopped at the bar on Clark and Thome and I swallowed a double shot of tequila. It burned, but it helped take the edge off my anguish and guilt better than even pot. Now I have gone through periods where I have drank every night as well as up to a year when I wouldn’t drink anything. Mostly I have been a faithful pothead with a few short periods of abstinence. But dealing with Teresa’s addiction called for booze, not pot. Alcohol has anaesthetizing properties whereas weed can cause one to think too much, and I didn’t want to think of the person I’d lost, the home that was still there but that was gone forever. I didn’t want to think that I had abandoned her or that if I’d stayed with her she’d have used my presence as an endorsement of her addiction and manipulated me for more and more money and parts of my soul. I didn’t want to think of her as a crack whore sucking dicks or getting gangbanged up the ass in a crackhouse. I didn’t want to think of the times I’d gotten coke for 46

her or gone along with her getting high during sex. So while I didn’t quit weed, I did cut down, and I did up my liquor intake to a nightly thing.

Still, like I said, Teresa seemed to be making progress, and I was cautiously hopeful that she would quit. I mean, It hadn’t even been a month, so I hoped that because she hadn’t been at it a long time that it would be easier to stop, that the short duration would make a difference in her recovery. What I didn’t take into account is that I truly do not know when she began. I know when she told me, but that may or may not have been true. One of the counselors I talked to suggested that she might have been smoking rock longer than she said but that up until about three weeks ago she might have been able to keep it under control. Whatever had been the scenario, I only knew that I wanted her to quit. I had taken to walking daily to the lake front at Loyola University where there is a white statue of Jesus. I’d pray that God help her to quit. It was so beautiful there, the gentle Jesus set against a strip of green, and beyond that Lake Michigan. Prayer was help to me, maybe to her too somehow, but it was hard to tell how my prayers were being answered for my friend. I was probably just praying for what would be convenient for me.

Her rehab started to go wrong. We’d brought to her the requested cd’s and sound system. The next day she called. Her voice and tone were no longer charged with recovery enthusiasm. She was no longer on the wing she had been on but was now on the restricted wing. The staff had thrown a net over her, she said. At first I thought she was speaking figuratively, but no, she meant that the staff had literally dropped the net over her. They were wrong. They had thought that she had been smoking crack in her 47

room because they smelled something burning, but it had not been crack, no. She had been working on an art project in her room and had been burning the ends of pieces of string that she’d glued to her drugs are bad poster. She’d tried to explain, but they’d simply thrown a net over her and hauled her off to this other ward which she did not like at all. Furthermore, she told me that the staff thought that Andy and I had stashed crack in her sound system. Also, she asked about her car.

She asked if William had brought it back and parked it on our street. No he had not. Also, I had gone ahead and paid Shella the other two hundred and fifty dollars that Teresa had wanted to burn her on. Shella was William’s sister I think. Anyway, Teresa had let William use her car in exchange for crack. The last time I’d seen Teresa get it back, it had looked like it had been driven down muddy alleys. Anyway, no, it was not on the street. Teresa suggested that she was going to have William set it on fire so that she could collect the insurance. I told her that I would rather not hear about such plans.

Teresa got pissed. She mentioned checking herself out. She started yelling about me bringing a pair of low cut, sexy, tight pants that she had in her closet.

When I got there after school that day, Andy was already there. Although Jane was no longer Teresa’s roomie, she was visiting Teresa on the restricted wing. I don’t remember why Teresa was berating Andy, but as soon as she saw me, she grabbed her pants and started complaining that she was being unjustly punished for something she hadn’t done, and somehow Andy and I were suspect of being on their side. I’m not sure.

She was showing us the art project she had been working on, burning the end strands of a hanging that said something like DRUGS ARE POISON. Jane advised Teresa to calm down and enjoy the love of the people who were trying to help with her recovery. Jane 48

said, “You should stop before you drive these two away. Do you see anybody coming here to visit me? I drove everybody who loved me away, and I wish they were here now.

Don’t be like me, Tika!”

I was afraid that Teresa would spit out the true nature of our relationship in front of Andy, so I said as little as possible. When Jo Anne showed up, I soon left. I wanted to get the fuck away from Teresa before she said something like, “So, Andy, you think he’s your friend? Well...” I waited in the lobby. It was not yet dark outside, but the long afternoon shadows were creamily dim through the tinted glass giving the lobby a night in the day feel. I watched a guy that looked like a businessman pace as he waited for someone to take him in hand.

His wife and child were there too. They weren’t fucked up on dope; perhaps he wasn’t either. Guess not or he wouldn’t have been so jittery. He’d walk back and forth and was watched directly by his wife and peripherally by his son, who was pretending to play with toy cars. Every now and then, he’d say something to his wife, some sort of complaint about admittance or some instruction about what to do about something while he was gone. The wife said very little, but the expression on her face, which he never looked at, said it all. She was quietly seething. Perhaps I could be projecting, but I feel that she was disgusted with him, and out of patience with his illness. I still only felt sorry for Teresa.

When Andy and Jo Anne entered the lobby, they both looked as if they’d been in a race. Jo Anne took me to task for not trying to check Teresa’s behavior. “I know you’re friends, but really, why the hell can’t you stand up to Teresa? You’re not doing her any favors by letting her say and get away with anything she feels like, you know?” Yeah I 49

knew, but I didn’t want her to choose that moment to reveal all. I shouldn’t have worried, you know... I think to Jo Anne I replied that my role in Teresa’s recovery team would be as sounding board for Teresa to vent to. In other words, rationalizing bullshit. Andy didn’t say anything like that though.

He had been allowed to talk to her doctor. The doctor had told Andy that the previous night, one of the nurses smelled crack coming from Teresa’s room. They said she was combative, so they dropped the net on her and moved her to where she was now.

They hadn’t found any crack, but they took a urinalysis. The truth would out either tomorrow or the next day. Jo Anne drove off, and Andy and I decided to see a movie, Perros Amore. The theme of betrayal between the two brothers was not lost on me as we sat in the dark Century Mall theater.

After the movie, right before I went to my apartment, I had a double shot of tequila and followed it with a beer. When I got upstairs, I smoked several hits and watched the comedy channel. South Park was on. It didn’t sooth me. I wondered if Teresa would come bursting in, having decided to check herself out because of the setback of being put on the restrictive ward. I turned off the t.v. and put on some soothing music, The Sons of the Pioneers. It didn’t help. Needles and pins.

The next day, Andy had to leave on business. Also, Teresa was supposed to get back to her original ward. Andy did make his trip, but Teresa did not make it back to her ward. I hadn’t gotten there yet, but as soon as I walked into the apartment, the phone was ringing. It was her. In a conspiratorial tone, she told me another tale of being wronged, this time not only by the staff, which she expected, but this time also from Susan.

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It was because Susan no longer believed in Teresa. See, Jane, Teresa’s original room mate, was going to be released. She had no one to go to and no where to go.

Teresa felt sorry for her, so she decided to help Jane by giving her some money, but she had none on hand. Teresa called Susan. Since Teresa knew that Susan wouldn’t give her any money if she told her the truth, that it was for Jane, Teresa told Susan that she needed thirty dollars cash for a field trip. After their call, Susan made a call of her own to the hospital, and when the staff heard of Teresa’s tale of a bogus field trip; well, they assumed the worst. When she protested her innocence, they dropped a net on her again.

So she was going to sue them. They also claimed that they found crack in her sound system and blamed Andy and me. They had gawked at her while she was in her panties, she said. They’d see, she crowed. We’d all see.

Tom wanted to visit Teresa. I’d known Tom since he was thirteen. As I’ve previously mentioned, Tom, as well as his brother Steve, would stay with us every now and then, and because I had two single beds in my room, the guests would bunk with me.

Tom was a great kid. He loved Teresa dearly. He stayed with his grandmother mostly because Jo Anne couldn’t handle him. Although his grandmother loved him, she couldn’t handle him very well either. He grew up wild. Flunked out of high school.

Tom was a tall and gangly boy who was just growing out of gawkiness and becoming a powerfully big man, but he was still the same sweet young fellow who would stay with us. What he did on the streets he never brought to Teresa and my apartment.

He was so quiet, and as a kid all he would do for days was play his video games, either

51

basketball or shooting games. Before getting anything from our refrigerator, he would politely ask.

When he would stay with us, Teresa would often be off somewhere, and it would be just me and Tom, and we would sometimes go for long walks, either to get something to eat, to rent a video or check out the video games at the gaming store, or to just walk.

He didn’t laugh often, when he did, it was a kind of rueful laugh. Once while we were out, we bought a mixed bouquet for Teresa.

I remember him sitting in our living room later that day, and I noticed that tears were streaming down his face. I said, “Tom, what’s wrong?” And he murmured, “I’m having a migraine.” All he could do was lie down in a dark quiet room. I just loved Tom. He got busted for selling crack when he was still a minor. I think he’d dropped out of school by then. Teresa had gone to his school several times to try to get him back in, but Tom didn’t want to go. Teresa adored here littlest brother, but she couldn’t control him either. Control or help. We talked of having him move in with us, thinking that a change of scenery would help keep him out of trouble. He didn’t come. They tried to get him to go to a boot camp. Didn’t work.

But he’d stayed out of trouble until recently. It was May when Teresa went into rehab. Tom hadn’t seen Teresa since our Monopoly game from the seventh circle of hell.

And he wanted to visit her that day. I’d just finished hearing Teresa’s tirade when he rang the buzzer. I was afraid it was some dealer claiming Teresa owed money for crack. Tom brought a joint with him, and we smoked before we went. I tried to warn him that Teresa was in a bad mood and apt to be quite irritable, and Tom assured me that he knew how to deal with his sister. He reminded me that he loved Teresa. On the way 52

there, he told me how shocked he’d been at seeing this happen to his sister, and he told me of growing up in different households where relatives were addicted to crack. At times he’d sold it to them. He said he felt bad, but at the time he figured that if he didn’t get it for them they’d get it somewhere else.

I don’t remember the reason, probably because she was such a problem that they didn’t trust her or anyone associated with her, but Teresa could only have one visitor at a time by then. So Tom went in first. When he came out, I knew it had not gone well.

His face was red. He told me that she had called him a killer because of his selling crack. He seemed flustered, sputtering that, that, that no one put a pipe in her or anybody else’s mouth. I wasn’t looking forward to going in to see her.

She gave me hell for bringing him. She claimed that he had insulted her cruelly, all but calling her a crack whore. “Hypocrite!” Teresa spat, “Passing judgement on me like he’s any better. And you too, you fucking hypocrite!” and on and on in that way. “If I go down, you’re going down too, motherfucker,” she informed me. In reply, I guess I sat there looking stupid. All in all, it was a miracle that she did not leave that very night.

I expected her to do just that. When I got back to my apartment, I figured that she would either call or show up.

No, she left rehab the next day. She informed me of her decision during the early afternoon while I was trying to teach. No time to try to persuade her to stay; furthermore, Andy was in Philadelphia. She wouldn’t listen to her Mom. She was mad at Susan. Oh, and the hospital, she was going to sue them and get a big monetary settlement. Her urine test results had come in, and she was vindicated, had been clean! Odd as she sounded 53

extraordinarily high during the telling of this. All of her words were pouring into one ear while I stood at the wall phone and gazed at my class. I agreed to come and pick her up after work.

I cannot articulate the trepidation and anxiety that I felt as I arrived at the hospital that afternoon. There at the check out desk were two people. One was a heroin addict in the beginning stages of withdrawl, a man with an immediate future involving constant nausea, body aches, shits and unending chills and sweats. Doleful but still standing. The other person at the desk was Teresa. She was holding court, being decidedly unpleasant.

Now it seemed that the staff had stolen a bracelet, a ring and two necklaces. “That’s alright, I want it noted in a formal report that I’m charging you people with having stolen my shit, folks. That’s right, in addition to wrongly accusing me of being high when I wasn’t.” She was waving a piece of paper that I figured was the result of her urine test.

When she saw me, rather than running into my arms, she held the results of the urine test out for me to inspect. Sure enough, they said that she had tested clean. How had she done that? Especially since she had been smoking not only crack, which like cocaine leaves the system within three days, but also weed, which takes six to eight weeks. See what I’m saying? Her results were suspect. I could be mistaken, but I felt that she either had gotten a clean pee hook up or somehow, some other way compromised the test. But I didn’t say that. I think I said something like, “Shall we go? We have a cab waiting outside.”

On the ride back, she seemed to lighten up. She took my hand in hers. She looked like the old Teresa, and she said that all she wanted that night was to be comforted. “Got any weed?” she asked.

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I thought about lying, but I didn’t. “Yeah,” I told her, adding, “Do you think that it’s ok. I mean your being JUST out of rehab like this...”

“Sure,” she reassured me. “ I’m so used to going to bed at ten that all I want is to smoke up than have you hold me until I fall asleep.” She then asked me if I had been masturbating during her absence. Although I wondered if our conversation was too salty for the taxi driver, I answered Teresa truthfully, that the events of the last month had destroyed my libido. But that I had missed her. She said that she hadn’t been masturbating either, and that she had missed me too.

When we got to our apartment, it turns out that she did not want to simply smoke up then be held by me until she drifted off to an early night’s sleep. Nor did she want to have sex. No, instead of that, once we got home, Teresa decided that she should track down William, who still had her car. And to track William down, we would need a car, her Mom’s.

But first, she got high on my weed. I had misgivings, but how could I tell her not to when I did it myself. I think that’s how the logic went. At least she used my new hitter. I had thrown all the crack tainted smoking devices away. It did not take much herb at all for Teresa to get pleasantly high. Her tolerance for everything was gone at this point, so she was really high for the walk to her mother’s apartment.

Normally, the idea of walking to her Mom’s apartment with Teresa at twilight in late May would have been heavenly. Some of my happiest memories are of walks to the store with this woman, walks on the lakefront, through the park, just being with her, you know. On the surface, everything seemed okay. It was a lovely May night, and the way to Jo Anne’s was replete with peach trees heavy with red and pink blossoms dotting the 55

avenue on one side. On the other side was the vast tract of manicured but undeveloped meadow owned by Misercordia, which is some kind of monastery.

Teresa told me, “You cannot imagine how happy I am to be home with you. I have hated being in that place so much. It really taught me a lesson about appreciating...Hey look at the–it looks like there are diamonds lying on the sidewalk.”

She was referring to bits of broken glass lying on the concrete. “I am so high,” she said.

“Help me walk. Take my arm.” I gladly took her arm as the purple and orange skies sunk behind the meadows of Misercordia. I was afraid that things were going to end badly despite her happy mood and reassuring talk. I’d seen crackheads searching sidewalks and gutters looking for rocks. Once I had been walking home from a diner, and ahead of me was a rather heavy guy bent over and examining the sidewalk as if looking for something, among the pebbles and cigarette butts, except he would frantically walk in circles, get up, run about ten feet, then bend over and do it again. Then he’d go back, then twenty or twenty-five feet forward, looking for rocks, looking for rocks. Was I being a paranoid ass in seeing a connection between that and Teresa focusing on the bits of glass on the sidewalk?

We got to Jo Anne’s, and Teresa explained to her Mom that she needed the car in order to locate William. Teresa told her Mom that I would be with her, so that she would know that Teresa would be responsible. Of course. She promised to have the car back in the morning. I had agreed to drop it off before I went to work the next day. Jo Anne reluctantly agreed to let us have the car. “I need it tomorrow morning. I have to be at work across town by eight. Listen, sweetie, don’t let me down,” she told Teresa, and Teresa laughed light heartedly and hugged her Mom and called her Mommy. Jo Anne 56

searched for her daughter by looking into her face, deeply into her eyes. She said, “Baby, you know I love you. Don’t... don’t be the last part of my life to... well.” Poor Jo Anne.

She’s only a year older than me. Like Teresa, Jo Anne is a beautiful woman. Things had been awful for her, particularly during the last couple of years. Teresa smoothed Jo Anne’s hair and said, “I love you too, Mommy. Things’ll be different now, you’ll see.

Things’ll be like they were, Mommy. I love you.” Then she got the keys and we left.

She drove. I hate to drive.

As William was a crack dealer, to find him we would have to go to the place where he hawked his wares, around the entrance of the Howard l station. It was a windy night, the breezes gusting punchily. Teresa parked about a block away in a spot she found along a residential street, and she told me to wait there. “It’s like this,” she explained, “You’re a white man. They don’t know you down there. You wait for me here. I’ll be back soon, hopefully with my keys.” By going with her I would be breaking dope spot crack transaction etiquette. I reckoned that mostly she just wanted to get high or cop without me around, but I really didn’t want to go to where the people were getting crack or being crack whores or criminals. I guess she mistook my silence for emotional pain at being left behind on her adventure. Teresa said, “When I get back, we’ll go home and we’ll be in for the night. I bet you’ll be relieved.”

That, of course, was an understatement. She left, and I sat there and listened to the radio. Where she had parked wasn’t a bad neighborhood. It seemed like a dream. I didn’t know how to accuse her of lying or being manipulative or getting high or how to stop her, and I wasn’t ready to make ultimatums or to simply leave right then. Not yet.

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She wasn’t gone that long, and when she came back, she burst in the car and immediately started the engine. We high tailed it out of there. Teresa was still in a happy mood as we sped past the Howard L toward home. “Did you find William?” I asked.

“No,” she answered. “No one has seen him. He’s probably avoiding me. Hope he didn’t go ahead and burn up my car. Oh hell, I don’t give a fuck. I hate that damn car, you know?” Teresa went on to tell me that the dealer she had asked had given her a hit off a joint. “After I walked away, the police rolled up on that boy,” she said. “You should have seen him running from the car. They were almost on him when his partner pulls up with the motherfucking door open and he DIVES in the moving car leaving the pigs standing there with their dicks in their hands! It was like a movie I’m telling you.”

When I didn’t respond by saying something like, “Gosh, what a good yarn,” Teresa said, “Aren’t you glad I’m home?”

“Oh I’m very glad you’re home.” I was scared out of my wits.

When we got back to our apartment, Teresa wanted to sit in the car until the song we were listening to was over. She held my hand and put her head on my shoulder as she explained it all to me. “I don’t know if it was us getting into an actual physical fight, but it made me love you more,” she said. Getting assaulted and robbed hadn’t made me feel more beloved for some reason. It wasn’t like when you’re having sex and your partner or you say, “Hurt me,” and you feel maybe hotter if not more loved or more hurt, but I kept it under my hat. Maybe I just told her the truth, which was that I love her. Don’t remember.

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When we got upstairs, Teresa had me put on some Goldie, and I drew her a bath.

It looked as if she were going to follow through on her stated intentions of making an early night of it. “Go on to bed in my room,” she said. “After my bath, I’ll be in.” I uneasily lay down and listened to the jungle music play. Teresa stuck her head in her room and said breezily, “I need to stop downstairs for a minute and tell Vern that I’m back.” Vern was a neighbor whose friendship she had cultivated during the month she took up crack, although he did not use crack, Teresa said.

Did I expect her to come back in a minute? Oh I don’t know, but after Goldie’s jungle opus finished playing, I put on some Friends of Dean Martinez and continued to wait for her to maybe come home. Didn’t happen.

I didn’t wait until the end of the cd. I went downstairs to check on Teresa. Her friend Vern wasn’t even home, and Teresa was nowhere to be seen.

I didn’t want to go looking for Teresa, nor did I feel like staying up all night worrying about her or worrying what she would do or whom she would bring if and when she might come home. I had to go to work the next day. I had to teach stuff to special ed students. I wrote Teresa an arch note telling her that I knew she hadn’t been at Vern’s and that I thought she was getting high on crack somewhere and that I had told her that I didn’t want to be around her if she were going to do that...So I was leaving that night.

And she needed to get back into rehab. Stuff like that. And I went back to the Dorian that evening. Ended up checking in there around two in the morn.

The next morning I was in the class teaching it up when she called to give me hell and tell me that contrary to my snide note, she had NOT been getting high at all. On the contrary, she had gone to the bar across the street and drank cokes in order to honor her 59

new sobriety, and afterward had met a new friend, Carla, in front of the nearby Duncan Donuts. Teresa had told Carla so much about me, and had brought her around with the express purpose of introducing me, so it was especially embarrassing when Teresa had brought this new friend around and instead of finding me, she found my awful, judgmental note. Where did I get off? And on and on in that vein, but also demanding that I come straight home after work. “I won’t be doing that, and I’ve got to go now,” I told her.

If I were feeling any guilt at being overly harsh with my poor sick roomie, my sympathy was somewhat dispelled that afternoon when my Principal appeared at my door with a note and the message that I was to call the fraud division of Visa as soon as possible. During my prep period I called them to find out that my credit card account had been cleaned of thirty five hundred dollars that morning through some slick transactions involving Western Union. The woman I talked to asked me if I wanted to get the law involved. I said no. I felt less bad about staying at the Dorian.

Since I paid by the day, I only paid for one day at a time and had to be out of there by 11, so I took my wardrobe and toiletries with me to and from work and showered and shaved at school early. When I left school, I took it all with me to The Dorian and checked back in for the night. I had the same room, not yet the better one, still the first room with the broken latch on the window and the drab brown curtains that you could see through. Nevertheless, I settled in and ventured out to walk.

I needed some sort of exercise. I have always found comfort in motion, be it running or walking. I hadn’t belonged to the gym for a couple of years by then , so I 60

walked to Lincoln Avenue, then walked south almost all the way to the park. I walked about two hours or so, until it was time for the Simpsons reruns, suppertime. I went in a restaurant with a cabin theme. It was very nice.

I had an old fashioned hot meal on a plate, well not entirely old fashioned: pecan encrusted chicken breast with green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy. Actually, that is pretty much what I would make for us when I would cook, except for the pecan encrusting. Of course, I drank several beers before and during my dinner. A group of elderly tourists, a coach bus group I believe, came in the restaurant after I had ordered but before my food had arrived. It was good to see them. They were all seemingly happy.

Ah, what do I know? It was still cool to see them all together, active and engaged in life, traveling all over and enjoying all sorts of sights and dining experiences. I wondered if they had a name for their caravan of about three dozen, like the Nitecappers. I think that’s actually a name for a group of people somewhere. I wished one of them would come over and invite me along. One of them could say, “Hey, we’re going to go to Arizona and we were wondering if you’d like to come with. We have plenty of room for you...” Then I could have them stop by the Dorian to grab my garbage bag of stuff, and off we’d go. It would be a bit hard to smoke pot around them though, maybe. Still, I could drink and chill and not deal with my poor friend.

But they didn’t invite me on their magic carpet ride, those naughty Nitecappers, and by the end of my dinner, I was buzzed on three beers and full of food. Walking back was a daunting option, so when I got outside, I hailed a cab and went to the Dorian. Once there, I smoked some pot and went to sleep.

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And the next morning during class, Teresa called me during my first period. She sounded as if she was crashing, pitiable. It broke my heart to hear her say, “Please come home. I haven’t eaten in a couple of days. I don’t have any money.” As I write this, I wish I would have gone back, cooked her some chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans like not so long ago. Would it have made a difference? I only know that I have never believed in punitive measures toward people whom you love. I’d never been a proponent of tough love; in fact, if my parents had practiced tough love, I’d have been in trouble.

I think I was still mad at her emptying the balance of my credit card account, and I said I don’t know how you could be out of money as the fraud bureau told me my account had been depleted just yesterday. I told her not to worry, as I wouldn’t be pressing charges. She was silent for several seconds before she said that her new friend Carla must have gotten my number and her and her uncle finagled Western Union into giving up all my money... I think I told her that I wasn’t coming home until she decided to go into rehab. Then I would come home. Call me then.

I must say that I found her story suspect, not the part about Carla and her uncle having a part in ripping me off. Just the part about Teresa knowing nothing about it. I had cut up a credit card and thrown it in the garbage. Carla could have found it. So could have Teresa, and by this point, I didn’t trust her. Maybe if I’d gone home, I could have helped her quit without her committing to rehab, but I didn’t believe that I could. It was as if she were gone. A crackhead had found a way inside Teresa and taken possession of her, only allowing her personality to surface when she was crashing. And I didn’t know whether she was only being herself to get her needs met, some money for 62

crack. Or maybe just some reassurance of her humanity. An easy night of food, cable. I just didn’t think an easy night would be enough for my tortured friend.

It was the next afternoon, and I was on my way out the door of the school, when one of the office secretaries ran out and called me back. Some girl was crying on the phone and wanting me. I ran back and took the call in the office. Teresa said she was ready to go back to rehab. She wanted me and Susan to take her. Susan would be around when she got off work at five. I called Mr. Freemen and told him the good news. He assured me that if I could get her there, he would arrange for her bill to be paid. I called Lakeshore Hospital Admittance, and a woman named Lisa told me that she would have to speak with Teresa herself before she would agree to anything. I called back at my old apartment. Teresa answered. Her sad voice sounded scared on the phone, and I told her that she had to call Lakeshore Hospital and talk to Lisa at Admittance. She told me she would as soon as we got off the phone. I said see you soon, hung up and ran out the door.

One of my fellow teachers drove me to a spot where I could get a cab. I raced home praying that she would not be jiving, that she would be there packed (sans crack) and ready to go. And that Lakeshore Hospital would readmit her.

She was there when I got back to our apartment, but she wasn’t alone. No longer was she crying, but now she was happy, like really happy, like really high, feeling radiant I would venture. She was in a see through ensemble that was of the micro-mini length.

Her beautiful brown eyes were bugged, darting from our living room to the kitchen as she emerged from her bedroom and swept through our dining room. When she saw me, she smiled and hugged me. Her newest friend was standing in our kitchen. Wow! 63

It was a tall, skinny crackhead guy with an knotty afro and a beard and mustache.

He was high as fuck it seemed to me, just like her. Teresa introduced me to Diamond.

“This is Diamond. I’ve told him all about you,” she said.

“Howdy, Diamond. Nice to meet you,” I said forcing a smile. For his part, Diamond’s frozen smile seemed to be tightening by the millisecond.

“Hi,” he managed to say in a sighing shuddering kind of way. He was so fucked up he seemed to be vibrating. Teresa kindly took his hand and led him a few feet away to stand in the kitchen where she told him to wait for a moment. “Sure,” he said shivering with pleasure. He stood there as she rejoined me in the dining room. I was gawking at Diamond. It was okay. He was staring intently at our kitchen wall and sweating ropes.

My dear old friend placed a hand on my shoulder. She said, “Diamond is one of the good guys. He isn’t on drugs.” Diamond had started quietly jabbering to himself as Teresa told me this.

At the risk of being a buzz kill and inciting her to maybe either attack me or have Diamond do so, I said to her, “Weren’t we going to take you to rehab? Isn’t Susan supposed to come by at five? Uh. I don’t even know if we can get you readmitted. Did you talk to Lisa at admittance?”

Teresa lightly laughed and kissed my forehead. She said, “There is this look of anguish on your face that I wish you could see. Lisa told me to come in tonight and there would be no problem in my checking in.” I doubted that she had talked to Lisa.

Enter Diamond. “Baby,” he said, “I couldn’t help but hear you talking about going into rehab, but don’t you think thaz kind of heavy. I mean instead of that, I was

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picturing you and me flying to Jamaica, chilling out, riding horses on the beach. Getting healthy. Can’t you see it, baby?”

Judging from the grin that spread from ear to ear, Teresa could indeed picture her and Diamond basking on the tropical beaches of Jamaica. Again, Teresa kindly led her new full of possibilities friend to the kitchen where she told him to wait a moment while she spoke with me. I heard him say to her to hurry up as they had to go back to his room to meet someone. When she came back in, she said, “As you can see, he is pretty fried right now. I really need to help him out. I think we’re going to go out for a little while.

He has lots of money. I think he’s in love with me. You know, if you want you can come with us.”

From the other room, Diamond said, “I don’t know if that would be such a good idea.”

And it was settled. What did I say? Something like, “You’re going to be back by five when Susan gets here aren’t you?” To which she said of course she was. Oh and she handed me some tiny little bags of weed, about five or six.

“Remember William?” she said, “He’s totally in love with me. Gave me a bunch of rocks and this bit of weed that he wanted me to sell at the Cro-Bar. But fuck him. I don’t owe him anything. At least he finally got around to torching my car.” And with that, she and Diamond left.

Teresa did not come back at five. Susan and I waited there for her, and as we waited, the phone rang. I expected it to be her, telling us that she was running late. It was William. He didn’t mention being in love with Teresa, although he did mention that she owed him seven hundred dollars that was past due. He told me he would be calling 65

back. More drug debts. How thrilling, though I had no intention of paying anymore of Teresa’s unpaid crack bills. Nor did I intend to stay in my old apartment that night.

Rather than sitting around stewing, waiting for William to call back or come by. I wrote Teresa yet another arch note. In this one, I said that as I saw it, she had to go to rehab. She just had to. I would have nothing to do with her otherwise. I don’t think I was my normal conciliatory self. As if anything I said or thought mattered. As if it had anything to do with me. Susan wrote her a note also. Her note said that we had waited for her, and that she wasn’t being responsible. I don’t know what else. Susan gave me a ride to the Dorian. I told Susan that I would call her the next day. I think that Andy would be getting home the next day too.

The next day was Friday. After school I went to Berlin’s and had a few beers.

After I got buzzed, I was going to call Susan to see if she had heard from either Teresa, Andy or Jo Anne. As it turns out, Susan had heard from Andy. Teresa had called Andy and told him that she was in love with Diamond. Furthermore, Diamond was simply a nom d’ plume, not his real name. CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT? No, his real name was JOHNNY B. GOOD! She had also told him that she and her “husband” were going to drive to South Carolina and get clean. As if that weren’t beyond the beyond, Susan’s next bit of info floored me.

“You’re staying at the Dorian. Well listen to this and be on the look out. A friend of Andy’s works in The Chicago Tattoo Parlor next to where you’re staying, and this afternoon, Teresa and this Johnny B. Good came in there high as fuck. Teresa told everyone, ‘I’m a crackhead. My Boyfriend is a crackhead too, and we’re high as fuck 66

right now, but we’re going to South Carolina to get married and get clean and I want his name on my shoulder,’ ” she told me. “The guy who’s a friend of Andy’s said he put a big assed Johnny B. Good in a circle on her arm just to keep her quiet, and that’s right next door to where you’re staying.” I was envisioning running into Teresa with Johnny B. Good/Diamond. Didn’t want that to happen. Love at first sight for her and him though.

Love at first sight. He was a crack dealer and an addict. She was an addict. They were going to drive from Chicago to South Carolina, presumably with a huge stash which they would be smoking to make the drive more interesting. It crossed my mind then, and still does, that if I’d stayed there and made the best of things that eventually she’d have quit and wouldn’t have felt she had to turn to... guys like Johnny B. Good. Or maybe he was really a great guy aside from this crack addiction business and they were simply two young kids swept away with the fever of love. When I think about it, I don’t think my presence would have stopped her from smoking crack or caused her to steer clear of characters like her new love. You got me.

I went back to my little room at the Dorian and went to bed.

On Saturday the first person I called was Andy. He was still stunned, but her actions were so crazy that it was as if a huge part of him had let go of her because there was nothing else that could be done. When he talked of her new tattoo and of her supposed trip to South Carolina, his tone was sadly affectionate, bewildered. He was in shock, as were we all. Yes, we did not know what to do, but we were also tired of these wild manifestations of her cross categorical illnesses of bi-polar disorder and crack 67

addiction. And though we knew that it was not her fault, we blamed her too. None of us could control her, and we felt she was out of control. If she simply would have behaved like most ill people do and tried to get help. But that attitude is patronizing; perhaps she was trying harder than we knew. We wanted her to be in rehab. It seemed that she wanted to smoke crack, marry Johnny B. Good and either go to the beaches of Jamaica or go to South Carolina and quit with Johnny, the one man who now understood where she was coming from and who didn’t judge her like all the rest of her so called old friends. She was gone gone gone.

The next day, Saturday, I was in Barnes and Noble, which was not only a good place to use the bathroom, but also a good place from which to make phone calls. I was calling Susan. She sounded different than she usually did. “Teresa came back to your place and got really pissed when she read your note,” she started. “ I don’t think that Johnny B. Good could deal with her, so he dropped her off. She’s coming down from the crack and called her Mom, who got Tom and went to your apartment. Tom was trying to get her to get into her Mom’s car, but she jumped into a taxi and took off. And incidently, she called me and told me about your and her DIRTY LITTLE SECRET.” So, Teresa was probably en route to a crackhouse and had called Susan to tell her about what she now termed our dirty little secret. Maybe she had called her Mom or Andy and told them. Everyone would then be pissed at me. For fucking her. Andy I could understand, and to a certain extent Susan I could understand as she and Teresa had once been an item and Teresa had cheated on Susan with me. Her Mom would probably be pissed because of the duplicity I suppose, though I guess the age difference between 68

her daughter and myself would probably add to her pissed offedness. Also, they would all be mad because they never figured Teresa and I to have sex despite the fact that we’d lived together for five years and been close friends for ten. They had thought that I was too old or maybe because of my harelip too ugly or maybe they thought I was asexual, and they certainly reckoned Teresa to have better taste. So this was now roiling through my brainpan. I responded to Susan’s announcement by saying, “Oh.” She then bid me a cold goodbye. My feet felt as if they were filled with lead.

I called my Mom then and told her what was going on in my life. She’s seventy-eight, still working, a vice prez at our small town bank back home. I had wanted to spare her, but I figured that I wouldn’t be able to. Mom liked Teresa, though she thought that she was too dependent on me and Andy. She didn’t know that Teresa and I were fucking. She thought that I’d quit all drugs including pot long ago. I had to tell my Mom the truth about stuff. I mean, until then for about the past three or four weeks I’d been calling Mom and telling her I was at a movie or something so not to bother calling the apartment. Enough of that. And after that talk with Susan, I figured it was just a matter of time before Teresa would call my Mom herself, so I called from Barnes and Noble. Told my Mom everything. Anyone going by was hearing bits and pieces of this story.

Mom was glad that I wasn’t on crack. She’s my Mom, so she pretty much took my side. Told me it wasn’t my fault that Teresa was on crack. She gently admonished me and her for fucking; after all, my Mom is a seventy-eight year old Catholic woman banker. She was like, you have to cut your ties with her. I told her that I didn’t know if I wanted to do that or if that was necessary. But inside myself I knew our lives together 69

were over. I knew because I didn’t want to be around her now. She scared me. She was someone else now. I knew it.

After that I first bought a Good Old Days magazine and then walked for several blocks, to a restaurant and bar on Halsted and George street. I drank four beers with my meal, a big greasy hamburger and a side of pasta and veggie salad. I had taken to eating once a day now. Twice if you count drinking as a meal. It seemed that I was just too upset all of the time to eat. I was losing weight. People at work were advising me to eat a hamburger and drink a milkshake. Now when I ate, I would have a sumptuous meal, but it would only be once a day. As I got drunk and ate, I read a few of the shorter first person accounts of life during simpler times. One man wrote about how as a lad he and his family had taken their Model T on a month long road trip to California. They camped in the rough, but it sounded like they’d had a wonderful time. Another woman wrote about her early years living on a farm with her big family and helping her Mom and Grandmother preserve all sorts of vegetables. What a wholesome thing to do, preserving veggies . Another woman waxed nostalgic about her aunt’s superior abilities as a seamstress. The woman had made her niece the fashion plate of her class despite it being hard times. There was an accompanying picture of the girl wearing a prom gown that had been made of scraps. It was white with red piping, really eye-catching, and the girl wearing it, the writer of the piece, was beaming with pride or anticipation of the prom, or some mysterious something.

Still, I couldn’t stop worrying about Teresa. Where was she? I’d never been able to stand for her to be mad at me or disappointed with me, and I’d always tried to accommodate her. Now I wasn’t there when she probably needed help more than ever.

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Or maybe she was just getting high and having more insane fun and didn’t need me at all.

And of course there was the sidebar consternation regarding whether Susan was the only person she’d told about her and me, or if Jo Anne and, even more, Andy would now know. And if they knew, what then?

Sunday I got up at six-thirty and went out on Belmont Avenue. It was too early for mass. I was afraid that I would see Teresa, like she would either be out there getting high or out there looking for me, and I wondered if she had gone to the Chicago Tattoo Parlor because she knew that I was staying at the Dorian and wanted to run into me. I was also worried about her. And the worst thing was when I would put myself in her shoes. Even now, I can’t do that, though I force myself to. I thought what it was like for her to be coming down from crack (coming down from having snorted cocaine all night those times was the worst thing I’d ever endured), and wanting her old friend, me, to comfort her, except the old friend, me, is gone and doesn’t want anything to do with her.

The only thing sadder are the memories of the previous nine years when she wasn’t on crack or on cocaine. Those were the years when I thanked God for putting her in my life At that time in the morning, there was little happening. The breezes knocked the litter from the previous night down the street in little whirlwinds under the l station. The bars had closed about a half hour ago. It wasn’t a residential neighborhood, this street, so there weren’t commuters hurrying to the downtown trains. I didn’t see anyone walking.

The only signs of outside life were the pigeons, iridescent in the morning sun that broke through the underpinings of the tracks. The air was fresh and moist at that hour, clean

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smelling except when I walked by the alleys, which perpetually smelled of piss. I did not see any drunks, addicts, hookers or police either, no one at all.

I went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It was nice to kneel in the dark pew in the back of the church. Since I was early, no one was there yet except a few people, some who were old and simply came to mass early regularly and others who had come in off the street. I prayed for Teresa to stop using crack. As I prayed, the pews began to fill up, slowly at first, then more rapidly until the large church was full of people and the mass began. The priest talked about Lazurus. What if Lazurus hadn’t wanted to come back from hell? Pretty unimaginable to me. Thinking of the addicts I’d seen on the streets, and remembering the accounts that I’d read about the goings-on in crack houses and the way they were described, I couldn’t imagine wanting to party like that, in those places with folks like that as my co-horts. What the fuck.

After mass, I walked to the lakefront and sat on the rocks for awhile. I was waiting for P.S. Bankok to open because if I was going to eat one meal on Sunday, I wanted it to be there. The reason is that it is a buffet with several hundred items, no lines, beautiful ambience, well beautiful compared to my room at the Dorien. So that’s where I ate.

When I got back to the Dorien, the desk clerk told me that two people had called within five minutes of each other and both had left a message for me to call them back. It was Susan and Andy. My heart started pounding. I was figuring that Teresa must have killed herself or been killed or was in the hospital or maybe someone was on their way to do me harm or tell me off at the very least. Who should I call first? I hurried to the entrance of Muskie’s where the phones were.

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Susan first. I now carried an index card in my wallet with all my important phone numbers on it. The spring sunshine made the streets of Belmont and Sheffield shimmer with new color. I dialed her number anticipating the worst. What new bad thing had happened? Two rings and she answered.

It wasn’t bad news at all for once. Teresa was back at her Mom’s house and was crashing. When she’d gotten home, she’d agreed to go back to Lakeshore. Maybe she had “bottomed out”. At any rate she was sleeping her crack binge off and was temporarily safe. Furthermore, Susan told me that she had not told either Jo Ann or Andy about Teresa and me. She said that after she’d gotten over the shock of it, she had not blamed me. She explained that it was bad because I was older than Teresa, and under different circumstances, finding out would still be shocking but not as shocking because really this was one more huge shock in a series of unbelievable happenings. She wouldn’t say that she would always keep this particular secret, but she wasn’t going to say anything for the time being, and she wasn’t angry with me. So it seemed that there was still hope, although I didn’t think that Lakeshore would be anxious to readmit a patient who had repeatedly threatened to sue them. Also, Lakeshore wasn’t prepared to handle the type of cross categorical illnesses that Teresa suffered from. They were for substance rehab, not really a psychiatric facility. Lisa at the hospital had told me that over the phone. I had my doubts about how things would work out but was relieved that Susan wasn’t telling me that they had found Teresa dead in a parking lot.

I didn’t feel quite as apprehensive when I called Andy. He told me that he’d found out that Teresa had been with Johnny B. Good in his hotel room where he’d had a cache of crack. He’d had to go out for awhile on some sort of drug related business and 73

had left Teresa in the room. She’d then managed to lock herself out of the room and had started raising such a commotion that someone on the hotel staff who was friends with Johnny B. Good had called him and told him that his new girl was about to get him busted. Johnny had come back, picked Teresa up and taken her to her Mom’s house.

Andy told me not to worry, that I could go back to my apartment. Teresa would be checking back into Lakeshore tomorrow, and he had called the law on the crackhouse that Teresa had been frequenting. He laughed as he told me that the police had found crucifixes all over the walls as if the place were some kind of church. I told him that I didn’t think she’d be admitted, but Andy told me that hospitals had to accept people who were in need like that. I thought he was being naive. He told me that when he’d gone to Teresa and my apartment, it gave off the feeling of a tomb. She’d called him and threatened suicide. He’d come over and found the place wrecked. She’d told him that she reckoned that I’d be home eventually. When he told me this I pictured her there, desperate, needing me, and me not being there. Andy then offered to help me straighten up the place. I told him I’d call. Thanked him.

I wanted to believe him, and I did feel a wave of optimism that lasted all afternoon and into the evening, which I spent at a bar called the Sheffield Links. I sat at the bar and drank four beers, watched the large screen t.v. Took a break to smoke a joint outside, then came back in and drank another beer.

I was nervous the next day. After school, me and my bag of clothes and toiletries rode the bus back to what had been my home. It was painful walking up the stairs. It just didn’t seem to be mine anymore after what had happened to Teresa. Also, I was afraid 74

that Tom or Shella or some other drug dealer would come a calling to demand money for crack that they had foolishly fronted to Teresa.

Nor did I want to see my neighbors, particularly an elderly couple I’d grown fond of over the five years we’d lived there. His name was Skeet and hers was Maggie. She was suffering from cancer. I’d bring their newspaper up to their door in the mornings.

They’d asked me not to have plants on my back porch because when I would water, it would spill onto their porch below us. Still, they were nice people whom I’d respected.

Now it would feel bad to see them. I’d always thought that I’d probably be around for a long time, maybe even be of some help if her health got really bad, but that wouldn’t be happening. I quietly hurried up the stairs to the third floor.

Nor did I want to come in and find Teresa there getting high.

She wasn’t there. The place looked worse than it did the day I’d come home in February when she’d told me not to come in the apartment. Of course the curtains were drawn throughout the house. There was that one particular light on in the entertainment center. One of our table lamps was broken and lying on the floor. All was different. I didn’t feel comfortable there anymore. Such a short time back, it had been my home.

My home and Teresa were my heart. I had always trusted her judgement, deferred to her.

Her opinions were my reference points. And my home. There were my plants. There would be no outside plants this year, and my poor indoor plants must have felt the change. Even being there, it was like it was all already gone and I was missing it while still in its midst. The sink was full of dishes. Oh, and I found bits of foil and torn ends of baggies on our hardwood floor. I put on some soothing music, some space age bachlor

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pad music from the fifties and filled the tub. I hadn’t had a proper soak in my bath since Teresa had been in rehab.

While I was soaking, Teresa and her Mom came home. I jumped when I heard the key in our lock. I hadn’t seen her since the night that she had checked out of rehab then bailed from our place to hook up with Carla and deplete my credit card account. I said, “Uh, hello!”

Teresa came right in the bathroom and said, “Hello stranger.” She gave me a peck on the cheek and said, “Glad to see me?” I told her that I was. It was true. We’re hardwired to be happy when we see someone we care about, even if we’re ambivalent.

Also, there was the huge tattoo on her shoulder, actually encircling her shoulder. It was Johnny B. Good in beautiful cursive script. From the other room, Jo Anne said hello, and I yelled out hello. “Got any weed?” Teresa asked. I lied and told her no.

I got out of the tub, quickly dressed and helped Teresa get some of her things together. The plan was for her Mom to take her to Lakeshore first thing tomorrow. When I mentioned that Lakeshore might not let her back in, Jo Anne didn’t know what to say, and Teresa said that of course they would admit her; after all, Mr. Freeman was paying them, so why shouldn’t they readmit her?

I walked them to her Mom’s car. I told Teresa that she was so beautiful, and she kind of laughed and said that the drugs had taken away her face for awhile. I hugged her.

She asked if she could always stay with me if she had no place else to go, and I said yes, but I didn’t mean it. I didn’t even know that I didn’t mean it entirely at the time. Until then, not offering her whatever I had was unthinkable. It was afternoon then. Another lovely day. They drove away.

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Later that afternoon, Jo Anne called and asked about some toiletries that Teresa had left behind but would need. She said that Teresa was asleep, and that since she had to walk her dog, Chief, she could come by. I told her that I would meet her half way, as I wanted to get out of my apartment for awhile. It still felt oppressive. I collected the deodorant and the special lotion she needed and set off for the park, where we were to meet.

By the time I got there, Jo Ann was already there with Chief. She was sitting in one of the swings and had Chief on a tight leash. Chief was a large young Rottweiler. Jo Ann smiled when she saw me. I handed her the bag of things and sat in the swing next to her. It was about six by then, and the early evening light was still strong but was casting long shadows through the playground and the hedges surrounding us. She told me that Teresa was still sleeping and she commented on how much food she had eaten after coming home the previous day. “And Johnny B. Good was calling her,“ Jo Ann said. “I told him if he wanted to that he could come on by and get her. He said, ‘Well, I know that she has some problems.’ I told him if he wasn’t going to come get her to stop calling and agitating her.

“You know, when Teresa was a little girl, she would get so excited, or mad or happy about everything. But too much, you know. They didn’t call it hyper back then so much. I just remember when she’d start the school year, her teachers would just love her, give her special assignments, and then they’d all end up mad at her,” Jo Ann said. Down a ways on the park path were two elderly eastern European women, both of them wearing babushkas. Jo Ann noticed me looking at them. She said, “They’re old friends. I’ve seen them walking in this park for years.” I’d always hoped to be able to still be friends 77

with Teresa when we were both elderly, or at least when I would be elderly and her middle aged. I flashed back on Teresa asking me to promise to always be her friend and to always be there for her.

I petted Chief for awhile, and I made Jo Ann laugh by telling her about how when I’d been a little kid, I’d been bitten on the upper lip by a family friend’s normally docile beagle. He, Skippy, had been lying asleep in his little bed. As my family and I were getting ready to go, I was saying goodbye to the sleeping Skippy. I stuck my mug into his muzzle and chirped, “Bye bye, Skippy,” whereupon he instantly awoke and chomped my upper lip. My Mom and Dad took me to the hospital where I got a tetanus shot and a stitch. After that, these particular family friends kept Skippy chained outside whenever we’d visit. I said to Teresa, “And he had to bite me right in my fucking harelip of all places to boot,” and Jo Ann had laughed.

She’d been through so much all of her life, and as far as I knew, she’d always tried to do right. As a kid, her Mom had put her in a home, not the other kids, just her. I don’t know why. Later, she’d put herself through nursing school. Teresa’s only complaint regarding her Mom was Jo Ann’s temper that she’d express by whipping Teresa and her brothers when they were kids. But Teresa had forgiven her Mom. She loved her Mom, and Jo Ann loved her as well as her other kids Tom and Steve. Now ...

Teresa had been Jo Ann’s hope. Still, she wasn’t despairing. She’d housed Steve at different periods when because of his addiction he’d have no place to go, and now she was prepared, insisted upon taking in her daughter. I admire Jo Ann. Jo Ann told me that she was glad that everything was now out in the open. “No more secrets,” she said talking about Teresa’s crack addiction. I didn’t have much to say 78

when she said that. So much of Teresa and my life had involved secrecy. Jo Anne and I hung around the park until the sun had nearly gone down, then I went back to my old apartment, and Jo Ann and Chief started on their way back to Jo Ann’s place. I turned my head and caught a glimpse of them as they grew smaller. That would be the last time I ever saw Jo Ann. When I got home, I sat on my balcony, drank several beers, smoked a bit of weed and went inside to watch t.v. It almost felt like home. Well not really, not without Teresa there the way she used to be, but I was able to relax a bit that evening, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if Teresa were there in her current state. Even if she weren’t high I wouldn’t trust her now. I’d be worried. How awful for her as well, if not more.

Some charge that addicts refuse to take responsibility for their actions, but I think they do. I think they torture themselves with guilt, and maybe it doesn’t manifest until they’re crashing, but I think the fucked up things they do that alienate loved ones does bother them. I’ve read accounts where addicts say they want to quit but can’t, and are driven to do whatever they have to do to get the drug because they can’t stop themselves from using no matter what the cost and no matter what they really want, which is to quit.

I’ve read that addiction alters brain chemistry so that the need for drugs becomes crossed with the survival instinct. If it is a disease then will doesn’t enter into the addicts decisions.

On the other hand, I’ve read stuff by addicts in recovery like Danny Bonaduce where they reject the disease theory and claim the addict always is in control of the decisions he or she makes. He says that people suffering from real physical diseases are usually pro-active in getting cured and do not seek remission once they are in recovery.

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Addicts choose to get high and damn the consequences because they are making a wrong choice willfully. So the mother leaves her children hungry to get high. Family and friends become easy targets for the addict to manipulate or steal money or possessions from to get the drug. Is it the crackhead’s fault or not?

And what difference does it make when the crackhead is disrupting your life and using you? Given that you love the person, nevertheless whether you sympathize or blame, how long will you hang in there while the crackhead does one insanely fucked up thing after another? And when you abandon the crackhead how guilty will he or she feel for having driven you away? And how guilty will you feel?

And even as I watched MTV, the abovementioned thoughts swam through my head as I drifted off to sleep. Unbeknownst to me this would be the last night I would spend in my apartment on Thome, my beautiful third floor apartment with the white walls, the dark blue furniture, the plants, the light, the wonderful balcony and the hard wood floors.

I had a dream on the last night I stayed there. In it, Teresa was in her room, high and getting higher. I went to confront her, and she and I got in a fight, but then I couldn’t talk, so I tried to scare her by making what I imagined to be scarey moaning noises, but she laughed. In the dream I then went to bed, and she exited through our back door and left it open. In the dream I observed myself in bed as as about a dozen crackheads crept in, and then the wind began blowing so hard. It blew open my door, and some of them came in my room. I wasn’t able to move or speak, and they were talking in tongues, nonsensical words while they desperately were looking for rocks on the floor. One would take a hit then start jibbering. Another would take a hit and levitate across the room as 80

another would try to touch me, messing with my ears, my face and my neck and mouth.

One took a hit, crawled over to me and tried to kiss my fingers. The wind broke the doors and knocked me out of bed, but it didn’t phase the crackheads. Then the wind became painfully loud until the air in my room turned a chalky blue and the sound filled my head like some sort of cosmic wind with a lethal force. I was crying, but the crackheads were laughing because they were so fucking high.

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As soon as I got home from work the next day, the phone rang. It was Teresa.

She said that she wanted to come over to get some things and to hang out. It seemed that Lakeshore had not readmitted her. She would have to go somewhere else. I told her that I didn’t think she should be hanging out. I said it because I no longer trusted her, and I thought that the place she belonged was in the hospital. When I told her to pretty much stay home, she got mad, and in hindsight I think rightfully so. She hung up, and I called Andy at work and told him that she hadn’t been readmitted and that she wanted to come over but that I had shut down that idea. He told me to reconsider, and I did. See, I didn’t know what to do. It seemed that my presence in her life was a signal, a license for her to get high and fuck or do whatever she wanted because I was always her partner in crime and would always have her back, cover for her and lie for her if need be. In the recovery industry parlance it is called co-dependency, and I wasn’t going to do that for someone addicted to crack. I wasn’t going to hold her hand and pretend everything was alright while she was killing herself. But Andy was right. I’d made a stupid choice, a harsh choice. I called her back and apologized profusely and begged her to come over.

Mistake.

Second mistake. I called Susan and told her what was happening. She said that she would call Jo Ann and try to get her to keep Teresa from coming over. I don’t believe that she felt Teresa coming back to her and my old home was conducive to her recovery either.

Teresa came over, and she looked like her same old self, beautiful. She was wearing a peach colored top and jeans. She was more like her old self than I was like my old self. I was nervous, but I was so happy to see her. But I didn’t trust her. She asked if 82

I’d like to go for a walk and get an ice-cream cone, and I was encouraged. I was set at ease a bit. It was like the good old Teresa whom I had adored. I was like, let’s go, and she said okay but first let me get my things. Then she was in her room going through her stuff, getting this and that. I wondered if she were getting some crack she had stashed in her clothes. As she was going through stuff, she started obsessing about suing Lakeshore.

More and more time went by, and she kept talking about suing the hospital, and I got a bad feeling. Eventually she stopped going through stuff in her room, got what she had come to get I suppose, and she came into the front room and sat next to me on the couch.

I put my arm around her, and as she chattered on about suing those motherfuckers, she put her head on my shoulder. I wanted to kiss her.

Then our buzzer rang. We both kind of jumped where we were sitting, and we looked at each other. I don’t know why I didn’t simply ignore the buzzer. It’s not as if I’ve never left the buzzer unanswered, but this time I hit the intercom and asked who it was. It was William. Teresa’s eyes got big and she looked like she was freaked out. I told him that I would be down in a minute.

Before I went down Teresa told me what to say to him. It seems that she owed him for the drugs. She said, “Tell him that I’m in the hospital. And tell him that my Mom found the drugs that he fronted to me and threw them away, and that I’ll pay him out of the insurance settlement I get when he gets rid of my car.” I numbly agreed and went downstairs to meet and greet William.

I did not open the iron gate and let him in, but talked to him with the gate between us. He didn’t have a mean expression on his face but rather a soft, concerned look, like your Mom might get if you were going to go swimming in a dangerous place right after 83

eating.. He said, “Teresa owes me seven hundred dollars. I gave what I had to her for her to sell, and someone gave it to me. Now they want their money. Where is she?”

Instead of spinning all the bullshit that Teresa had told me to say, I started winging it. I said, “William, I’ve known Teresa for ten years, and this shit had driven her crazy. Do you know that she takes medicine for depression that tells you that you can’t drink or take drugs with it or it will fuck up your sanity. She has lost her mind. Look, I don’t know where she’s at, but as far as what she owes you, she owes me over three thousand dollars, but here’s the thing. She is not responsible now, not anymore. Fronting her that dope was like giving a three year old a bag of candy and telling her to go peddle it in kindergarten. I don’t know how you expect her to sell anything, when she doesn’t even have her brain anymore. She is fried. Fried! You know what? I’ve known her for ten years and lived with her for five, and the person who’s running around in her skin is not her. ” His kindly look of grave concern seemed to deepen as he said, “When she came around, I saw her getting mixed up with some fucked up people, and I tried to get her to just chill.” His eyes became distant. His mouth pursed. “I have got to have that money.

Things can get ugly. I even helped her out with her car. Look, you call me. Here’s my number. I’ll be back.” I took his number through the iron gate. “Bye.” “Bye.” I came back up the stairs. I hadn’t wanted to tell him that her Mom had thrown away his crack, nor did I think that he would buy the theory that she would pay him out of the insurance settlement for her car. I felt scared and kind of numb. When I entered

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my apartment and saw Teresa sitting motionless at our dining room table, I knew things were somehow going to get worse.

They did. Smart girl that she was, Teresa had been listening to what I’d said to William via our intercom. She said, “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from you.

But those were your words. I guess for once I know what you actually think. Not that it matters now, but I really wish you hadn’t told him that. I wish you’d told him what I’d told you to say.” She got up from the dining room table. I just didn’t know what to say.

I was run out by all this awful stuff, in emotional shock. I’d been trying to get her off the hook. She wouldn’t look at me as she went to the front window and searched the street to see if William were waiting for her. She sighed and said, “Well, the least you can do is give me two dollars for cigarettes.” I did, and she left. I was certain that she was going to go out and get high. Although I did take into account her pain at having heard what I’d said, I figured that her response to everything was to simply smoke crack. I was having trouble keeping in mind the real person behind the addiction. Maybe she didn’t go out and get high. How can you tell?

I called Jo Ann to tell her that Teresa had just left my place and the state she’d been in when she’d left. Tom answered. He sounded disturbed. I asked for his Mom and he gave the phone to her.

Before I could tell her that Teresa had left our place and had left angry and that she was possibly going to go out and get high or, or I don’t know what, before I could get much of what I had to say out, Jo Ann started to speak. She sounded more pissed than I’d ever heard her.

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She said, “You fucking bastard. How dare you call here acting like you’re concerned, and...I just talked to Susan. Yeah, I know you’ve been fucking my daughter.

And here just yesterday I told you about how now all the cards were on the table. You sat there listening to me say that and didn’t say anything. And you pretending to be Andy’s friend. You’re disgusting! Fucking my daughter!”

“Jo Ann, since this has happened we haven’t been-“ ”What? Isn’t my daughter good enough now that she’s a crackhead ? Let me tell you something. You are going to tell Andy what’s been going on within the next twenty four hours or I’ll tell him, understand? And let me tell you what you dirty motherfucker, if I tell him, I won’t say it in a nice way. Do you understand?”

If I was stunned when Teresa left, I guess you could say that now I was super stunned, super duper stunned in fact. In reply to Jo Ann, I said “Okay.” In retrospect, I should have made it clear that no matter how angry she might feel toward me, the most important thing right now should not be that all out cards be on the table or any such stupid shit, but should be getting Teresa into rehab, and that the chances for that happening were much better if we, meaning her, Andy, me, Susan and Tom, all the people close to her acted as a cohesive recovery team. This would not happen if I told Andy this particular bit of news. But I couldn’t think of all that. I didn’t know what to say, so I just agreed. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference to Teresa if we’d all sprouted feathers and flown through the air in recovery team air formation or something. She was going to party. There is a possibility that we drove her to it as a reaction to us trying to control her behavior. Anyway...

Before Jo Anne hung up, she said, “You stay the hell away from my daughter.”

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“Okay,” I said.

It would have been decent of me to contact Andy in person, take him to dinner perhaps, and over a sumptuous meal and several drinks break it to him face to face and hope he would forgive me. Instead of that, right after I spoke to Jo Ann, I called Andy at work, where he took the call on his cell phone while actually on the job. And I just told him that I had a confession, that Teresa and I had had a physical relationship. That is how I put it. Poor Andy.

After a silence of several seconds he asked if it were still going on, and I told the truth.. I told him that it had started long before he’d met her. That during the first two years of his and Teresa’s relationship, it had stopped. Then when he and Teresa had broken up, it had resumed and continued after they got back together. I said I was sorry.

Hadn’t meant to hurt him. That Teresa genuinely loved him, and that he had behaved honorably, like a man, which I hadn’t done. That he was a good guy and I wasn’t. I said all of this over the phone in the space of about a minute or two.

When I was done with my little guilt spiel, Andy said, “I guess I’ll vanish now.” I don’t remember my reply, probably I said I was sorry again. I am sorry. I wonder if he’s forgiven me. For his sake (of course for my own sake too) I hope he has. I came to love Andy. He took me to see Iggy Pop on my birthday. Andy was honest and truthful. He thought of me as a friend, and he deserved loyalty from me. He loved Teresa more purely and deeply than I could I suppose. He had morals, or more morals than I. And him working in the entertainment industry and me being a teacher. He deserved so much better than he got from me and Teresa.

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I left my apartment after that. Never came back for any length of time. The few instances when I would come back henceforth, it would be in and as quickly as possible, out.

The phone rang. It was Susan. I told her that I didn’t blame her for telling Jo Ann, but that she was really mad at me. Susan told me that although Jo Anne was mad at the moment she would get over it in time. Then I told her about Jo Ann’s ultimatum and the call I’d made to Andy. Susan was like, oh shit! I told her that I would call her to keep posted on what was happening to Teresa.

Before bailing out of my apartment, I called Brayfield, one of my colleagues at work. Brayfield was my helper during my second period class. She was a lovely woman whose ex-husband had become addicted to crack. I believe everyone at my school by then knew what was going on in my life with Teresa. After all, I was showering at school every day and hauling all of my essential belongings to and from work in garbage bags, but no one else had an immediate significant other be a crackhead as did Brayfield. So I valued Brayfield’s opinions. She told me to get the fuck out of there before any more crack dealers came around demanding money for drug debts. I grabbed my garbage bags and went back to the Dorien.

Teresa’s visit. William’s appearance. My conversations with Jo Ann and then Andy. All within an hour on a beautiful May afternoon. It was like what you would call an hour of power, all the shit that happened. It surely fucked me up.

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Once re-registered at the Dorien, I think I went to The Sheffield Links, had beers, smoked a bowl on my way back to my room and back there I listened to The Five Blind Boys of Alabama while saying my prayers.. Oh the things I prayed for that night when I was lying in my room at the Dorien! Sorry. Help. Dozens of variations of those themes mixed in with ruminations of Teresa when she was well and how she was now and how I’d always hoped Andy would never find out and how pissed Jo Ann was and how it really fucked up things with her finding out, but how I didn’t blame Susan for saying what she did. Didn’t blame Jo Ann for her misplaced priorities. Like me, they didn’t know what to do to help Teresa, so they’d both done what they’d thought was right.

Didn’t blame them, but now all would be lost. Teresa needed all of us in her life. Now that was out of the question. Instead of Andy vanishing, I figured it would be me that would disappear. How would they explain it to Teresa? To stop thinking about these things, I prayed the Lord’s prayer to myself over and over until that and the voices of the Blind Boys helped me drift off to sleep.

Within a day or two, I found out through Susan that Teresa had been admitted to a rehab that a friend of Susan’s who was a social worker had found. That was where she was. She hadn’t been told about me. Even Andy wasn’t telling her that he knew about her and me. I was still living at the Dorien. Every day I would call Susan, and she would tell me what was happening.

You’d think that at some point here, events would stabilize, but here it twas not to be because within forty eight hours of her admittance, Andy had told her over the phone that I had told him. Perhaps you will recall her reaction as told to me by Susan. I was at the phone in Duncan Donuts on that brilliant Sunday afternoon, the corner of Clark and 89

Belmont. Skatepunks and runaways. Blue skies and beautiful youth mixing with the homeless and the trendy tourists. “Teresa checked herself out today...Whatever you do don’t go home...Said she’d slit your throat as soon as you come through the door...Sitting at the kitchen table telling Jo Ann this over the phone...Butcher knife in her hand...Said she’d phone the police after she did it and would wait for them there...” Remember?

The next week I checked out of the Dorien and into the Aristocrat. They were around the corner from each other, so I was able to haul by hand my garbage bags of stuff, my suitcase and my boombox to my new home. Before I settled there, I checked a few other places. Had my eye on a well kept place on Broadway, but they were full up.

One Saturday morning, I looked at a horrific room in a place on Sheridan, not far from Teresa’s old hospital, Lakeshore. Someone told me that despair is the only unforgivable sin, the crime against the Holy Ghost I think the person said, and the walls of this place sweated despair. They told me that they would have a room for me tomorrow if I gave them a deposit now.

The Aristocrat was the best choice by far for me. The Dorien was simply too expensive. At the Aristocrat, I would still be in my old, beloved neighborhood, even though I’d be surrounded by fucked up people. The move took about four trips, and on my last trip, the people behind the desk at the Dorien told me to stop by and say hello sometime.

To get to my room at the Aristocrat, I had to take the narrow stairs. When I got to my floor, in the entrance to the row of rooms, there was a gaping rotten place where the carpet started, as if someone had perhaps dropped a bunch of hot, dirty grease on the 90

floor and left it there to fester. I believe that I have already mentioned the little crack vials I spied in the corridor, as well as the first night vision of a red roach on the wall and the subsequent second hand comforters spread everywhere in the room. I had my little lamps set up so I didn’t have to turn on the stark overhead bulb. My green lamp I had perched at the foot of my bed on the sink that I never used. The other lamp, the choochoo train I’ve had since I was a wee child, I had on a night-stand next to my bed. I’d covered the night-stand with a midnight blue comforter, and I had a picture of my parents next to the lamp. I had a Bible which I tried to read sometimes, but big patches of the Bible tended to put me asleep, which was actually fine.

Sometimes the crackheads at the Aristocrat seemed to take a break, and what they seemed to do when not being up all night hollering is, of all things, cooking. They would cook, and the hall would be filled with the smells of... I don’t know, cheese being boiled in dirty aquariums perhaps. One day when they were cooking, I decided it would be best to walk the half block to Belmont and go to The Windy City Tap for awhile. It looked like a storm outside and The Windy City Tap had their front wall open to the street. The sky got very dark in mid-afternoon, and I sat and drink beer as the storm erupted. I was far enough inside that the torrents of rain didn’t touch me, and the intense storm washed Belmont. No one was on the street. Sheets of rain came down wave after wave. There was thunder and flashes of lightning, and the hot day cooled probably fifteen degrees. It was nice, watching the rain and being so close to it, soothing. Distracting.

Last night I heard the police knocking on my neighbor’s door. “Open up, it’s the Chicago Police!” one of them said. This was about 3 a.m.

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When I heard that shit, I instinctively reached for my weed, which along with my book-bag and my closed plastic bag of toiletries, vitamins and supplements, was on the bed next to me. When I felt it, I shoved it under my book bag.

Next door, the officers knocked louder. Open up! My neighbor did not open her door. Let me give you a short description. She was a crack dealer. I don’t believe she smoked herself because she was rather heavy, but you never know. Deathly thin people came to her door at all hours, and sometimes if she wasn’t home or simply wouldn’t answer, they’d get loud and would pound on the door, pleading, threatening her. Once I opened my door to find a soft looking young middle-aged man, bare chested and sweaty, banging at her door. Do I even have to say that his eyes were bugged out? Anyway, he said, “Have you seen her?” except not in that sweetly regretful tone that the Commodores put in that song they sing but in that herky-jerky frenetic crackhead way.

“No, I haven’t,” I told him. He looked like he’d faint. Anyway! The police were at the door of this woman demanding entry, and finally I heard her whimper, “I don’t want to open the door.” Well, who can blame her? But the officers didn’t go away. They pounded on her door some more. I was thanking God that they weren’t wanting to visit me, and I quietly lay there and listen. She’s going to get busted for crack is what I was thinking.

But no. The police said the complaint was from a taxi driver who said that the woman had run out on a cab fare just now. My neighbor’s tone changed considerably then. Her voice went from scared shitless whisper to like the throat-croaking lead singer of some death metal band. She must have been innocent because she threw open the door

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and started screeching shit at them, demanding to see the sack of shit who was lying about her, and she accompanied the policemen to the lobby.

I figured they had mis-identified her, and I was correct because she was back the next day when I came in. Her door was cracked open and she was standing in it dressed in a sheer black peignoir. She said, “Was your roof leaking last night?”

In fact, the roof had been leaking, but in light of the broo-ha-ha with the police, the leak in the ceiling had been a peaceful interlude. After all, it wasn’t leaking on me or the bed. Still, for days my ceiling had been breaking out in what appeared to be dripping boils. “It’s been leaking,” I told my neighbor.

She looked sadly put upon, and she said, “I reported it this morning, but they won’t do shit.”

The water that drips from the ceiling is brackish. “If it gets too bad, I guess they’ll have to move us to different rooms,” I said.

“Well they’d have to do the moving, and I don’t want them touching my shit,” the woman said. She was leaning against her door, and one hand was on her hip.

I forced a stupid chuckle at what she said and told her, “Yeah, I know what you mean.” Sure. “Well, take care,” I offered, and she said bye as I went inside my room.

The ceiling wasn’t bubbling up or sweating.

Everytime I talk to Teresa on the phone, it makes me so sad. By now, it’s been over a month since I’ve seen her. Before that, unless one of us was on holiday, the longest I’d go without seeing her would usually be a day or two. I spoke to her over the phone this morning. She’d obviously been smoking a lot because her voice sounded as if she had laryngitis. Her phrasing was tentative, a jerky kind of cadence to all she said.

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She said she’d been crying. She asked if I hated her. I told her the truth, that I loved her.

She told me that she was going to move in with a woman whose husband was in recovery. I think she wanted me to reconcile with her, to tell her that we could still live together. I don’t want to live with her anymore; yet, I still love her. I thought she loved me. But if she loved me, she’d quit crack, and if I loved her, I’d stick by her no matter what. And if she’d loved me, she would have been my girlfriend or wife, and if I’d loved her it would have bothered me that she was Andy’s girlfriend. And if we both loved Andy, we wouldn’t have been carrying on like we were. I wish I knew what love meant.

It’s like you try to love someone until eventually they do something so fucked up that you’re backing away from them going, “Okay, you win, guess I didn’t really love you as much as I thought.” Or it’s the other way around with you trying to love someone yet fucking up until they’re running away from you.

I’d meant to set a time for me to come by with Sandy’s van and collect my stuff.

The furniture and our lovely plants I was giving to Teresa. I would be taking the rest of my clothing, which I would drop off at the Salvation Army. I’d be taking my books too and selling them at the used book store. The twin beds I’d take to a place called The Brown Elephant where they’d sell them hopefully to some nice family. Unbelievable. As if the last decade was worth nothing. Of course I could stay, leave all my stuff in the apartment, renew the lease (there was still time) and continue to try to make a home with Teresa, whom I still love. It’s just the trying to make a home with Teresa that seems impossible. Nonetheless, I couldn’t bring up the subject of my moving my stuff out.

Somehow the sound of her scratchy voice made me unable to say anything that I figured would hurt her, now that she isn’t high and invincible and mean.

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She said that she couldn’t talk about me to her Mom or to Andy. I told her not to worry about rent. She told me that she had two weeks of being clean and sober. I didn’t believe her, but I told her that was great. I was ashamed that I didn’t believe her. She told me that she would be going on a recovery retreat and that I should come by and water our flowers while she was gone. I didn’t want to. I didn’t believe her about going to a recovery retreat. I’d lost my faith in anything she said. What kind of love is that?

Weak.

I told her to get some rest. I used to watch her sleep. I’d stay in bed long after I’d awaken because I was so happy to be next to her. I miss seeing her wake up and smile.

After she got on crack, Sandy asked me why I didn’t kick her out. To me that’s unthinkable, even though in August our lease is up, and then, for the first time in five years, she’ll be living on her own. I hope she doesn’t want to live with me. That’s unthinkable too, and I doubt that Teresa is giving it much real thought. On the phone with her, I said nothing about it, told her again to go to bed and get some sleep. My twin beds were so small that when we used to sleep in the same bed in my room, when one of us would turn, the other would have to turn also.

Once she woke up from a nightmare. She told me that she had encountered herself, and she and her twin self fought. She described her other self as crazed and laughing as she tried to destroy herself . It had scared her. Now I see why. That was before Andy and Mr. Freemen, not long after we moved in together, and we were still living in my old place on Briar in my good old Lakeview neighborhood. Back then she wanted to do so many things. She sang. She wanted to act. She took improv classes.

She auditioned for things. Not enough.

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Now as we talked on the phone, she didn’t suggest that we get together, but I sensed that she wanted to see me. I don’t want to see her. Not anymore. Not seeing her makes me feel awful. It’s as if something deep inside of me is imploding and I’m being killed, except I’m not really dying as I listen to the person I love tell me to take care of myself and to call her. The worst thing in the world is seeing her lose herself and be helpless. Teresa is so lost. The memory of the way she used to be and our lives together are drowning me, except I’m able to breathe perfectly well. Her poor voice. Sandy had told me that he’d called looking for me, and when she’d answered, Teresa’s voice was the same burnt out husk it was now. It had been a Saturday when he’d called, and when he’d asked for me, Teresa had dazedly told him that she thought I was at school. How could she be so out of it? Now I told her goodbye.

What must the crack high be like? It makes these people fuck up in every way imaginable. People trade their lives, give up their most important relationships and possessions for literally just a few hits. Folks betray their spouses or lovers. They let their kids run in the streets unsupervised at all hours and go hungry and dirty. They betray friends and family until most of the people who love them want nothing to do with them. Those who do continue to see addicted loved ones must be prepared to be manipulated and victimized as well as treated to the sight of the person they love vanish to be replaced by a psychotic, emaciated, criminal, whose horrible behaviors are manifestations of the disease that is killing them, and which they cannot choose to end.

People trade their lives for a sensation.

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It must put them in another world. Is it pure happiness? How does it compare to the first stages of love? The sensation must be one of mind bending pleasure that cannot be compared to anything normal that you might experience. Body and mind rush I imagine. Not a feeling any of us were meant to feel. On the other hand, there is the possibility that the high isn’t that great, that its use triggers a vicious habit rather than a great feeling. Some have said that the high isn’t good enough to pursue, that it’s jittery and short lived. I’ve read accounts by bon vivants who say they and their friends have all tried it without becoming the archetypal raving crackheads popularized during the eighties, the figure at which people laugh, and the name people call one another jokingly when someone has done something dumb. Some say that type of addict was made up to reinforce racism. These voices equate crack with other drugs. I’ve known three people who say they’ve tried it once and not liked it enough to repeat. Then again, Teresa and her brother Steve tried it once and became addicts almost immediately. I’ve seen crackheads wandering the streets and riding the CTA for years. I don’t know how crack can be compared to any other drugs, with the exception of meth, which like crack is a stimulant to the sympathetic nervous system.

I love weed. It’s scarey that I could get into lots of legal trouble for having it, but its illegality is the worst thing about it. It doesn’t make you stay up for days without eating. You can function in life and smoke weed. It doesn’t make you violent or paranoid. Nor does it inspire the degree of crazy and criminal behavior that crack use does. Crack must feel something like coke does when you snort it. What an awful, awful drug. You feel good. Then you feel horrible. Ecstacy I loved, but you don’t know what you’re getting, and it IS a hard drug and bad for you, but Ecstacy is nothing compared to 97

crack. Ecstacy makes you the opposite of violent and paranoid; it makes you happy, like emotionally tripping on happiness. Tripping on acid is a lot of work, and it’s not something to which most people feel compelled to become habituated. I’ve never seen heroin nor known a heroin addict, although I’ve seen dozens of them nodding out and scratching at various places throughout the city. Shooting up seems an awfully severe way to try and have fun. Still, perhaps because of my disposition, I can understand heroin more than I can crack. Maybe all drugs are the same, and I’m a hypocrite to be upset with Teresa for using her drug of choice.

On Sunday I ate at P.S. Bancock. I didn’t put too much on my plate. For years I would go to Indian, Polish, and oriental buffets and load my plate with pounds of food.

Now I put about three things on per plate, and then I get another plate. I enjoyed my meal.

On my way home I crossed one of my co-habitants at the Aristocrat. I’d seen her before. Major drug addict was what I’d thought.

She would push around a grocery cart and look really beat, stupefied actually. At first I was wondering if she was on heroin. Now I’m convinced that most times I’d see her she’d be coming down from crack. What do I know? I’m probably wrong.

Oh, and she had a never healing type of sore on her cheek. Anyway, on this summer day, for it was now in July, as I passed her, I noticed that instead of the usual filthy crack garb that I’d normally see her wearing, she was wearing a lovely white pantsuit ensemble that was clean as the sunlight in which we were walking. And as soon as

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she passed me, she turned around and started to follow me until she caught up to me. She said, “You live in the Aristocrat don’t you?”

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Please do not think that she said this like you’d imagine a desperate drug addicted crackhead saying it, all drooly and conniving. She said it like (How condescending to crackheads everywhere-sorry, druggies) like...she was a perfectly normal woman despite her lack of teeth and the drying, mascaraed sore on her cheek.

I said, “Yes I do.” I adopted the cheery tone that I use when talking to some of my students’ high or drunk parents on grade pick up night.

She said, “I thought I recognized you.” Then, as we strolled toward home, she told me that she was “Beverly the appliance lady,” and that she and her husband fixed appliances, some of which they found scavenging.

I told her what I did. I said, “I teach language skills to special ed students.”

She said, “That’s wonderful. My brother has cerebral palsy, and his teachers helped him so much. He has a job. He lives with a few others in a group setting. He manages his own money. Has a checking account.” It struck me that her brother had more than she did. We had a nice brief chat. I told her that originally I was from the country, and as it turns out, she had lived in the country until she was twelve. She said, “So often I’ve wished that I’d never left that old farm.”

When we got to the Aristocrat, she went ahead of me past the desk, and as I went by the desk, the manager handed me my key (we were supposed to turn in our keys when we left the premises although plenty of the Aristocrat’s guests didn’t) and when I tried to take it, he held on to it and looked me in the eye.

He’s a tall man with a mustache and goatee, shaven of head. A tough man. He said in his thick Carribean patois, “I tell you for your own safety, have nothing to do with that woman. She a crackhead of the worst sort, her and her husband. That him over there.” He pointed

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imperiously at an old tall guy skulking about the lobby. The manager continued, “They supposed be out of they room last Tursday, then it Friday. Look, they see you got something cause you go to work. They gonna rob you. Maybe cut you or try to con you or something.” He let go of my key.

“Thank you,” I said. He just glared at me like I was stupid.

I just took a break from writing to go pee, and guess who I saw? Beverly and her husband is who. They were carrying their canvas bags out. She had a hat on and was looking down, so she acted like she didn’t see me. He, though looking distressed, was dressed as if he were off to the golf course in some natty summer togs. Guess they were off to being homeless, scavenging for broken appliances to fix in the alleys and such.

So what were they? Merely dangerous desperate crackheads, or people who worked in appliances who were down on their luck and suffering from the disease off addiction? I think that sure, they were dangerous desperate crackheads, but past that, deep down, they were Beverly and whoever her husband was, Joe let’s say. They were Beverly and Joe, two people who maybe loved each other as a man and wife. Once they’d most probably led functioning lives, had jobs, friends and ties with family. I can imagine them owning their own appliance repair shop. Not anymore.

Say a prayer for them. They are out on their own tonight, without a roof over their heads.

That can’t be very good for a marriage I would think. At least it’s summer, and I ‘m going to imagine them as being high and happy tonight despite their misfortune. Picture them, Beverly and Joe, smoking their crack in the park under the sweet, blue-white crescent moon and the few stars that the light from the city allows us to see.

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Teresa has been wanting to talk to me. She had called Sandy and my Mom trying to find out where I am. Once, about three weeks ago, she called Sandy and left him a message saying that if he didn’t return her call she was going to turn him in to the police. Later, she called back and said that she hadn’t meant what she’d said. Sandy told me that he would have had her killed before he allowed that to happen. I didn’t know what to say to that. Gee, glad you didn’t have to have her killed, Sandy, or something like that I guess. When she’d told him she’d simply wanted to get him to return her call and he responded coldly, she didn’t understand why he was distant.

Anyway, she had given him a new phone number where she could be reached and asked him to tell me to call her. When I called the new number, it was not yet connected. Sandy told me that twice she had called wanting to buy cocaine, but he had told her that he didn’t have any. Now he cuts her off!

Then when I talked to my Mom, she told me that Teresa had also called her. She described her voice as being low, hushed, reluctant to talk. When she called, it was late, and my Mom had already been in bed awhile. She’d told my Mom all about my pot growing and her and my relationship. She complained that I’d told Andy about us, and my Mom reminded her that the reason I’d told him was because I’d been given an ultimatum. Teresa told my Mom about how often I don’t tell her the truth, which made my Mom angry. She told Teresa that while I wasn’t perfect and had plenty of faults, that from what she could see, I’d always tried to do right

by Teresa; furthermore, aside from her disease, she thought it was fucked up for her to tell all our business after I had been good to her. The conversation ended when my Mom told Teresa that she didn’t want her calling anymore, and Teresa saying that a pizza had arrived and that she would call back shortly. It was after mid-night when she called, and thankfully, she didn’t call my Mom back. So Teresa wanted to talk to me.

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The subject could be rent or her moving. It probably involves money. Anyway, I called Susan and told her to relate to Jo Ann that I would be paying the rent as usual and for Teresa not to worry. School had been out less than a week, and summer school had not yet begun, so I went home to visit my Mom in the country.

I came home on Amtrak. It’s a good trip coming down on the train. You leave the city and everything is green cornfields stretching to the horizon and dotted with oasis like farm houses. The green is broken by the occasional little town, showing white houses with back porches and awnings.

Mom met me at the train station in Carbondale. On the drive home, she talked badly about Teresa. Who can blame her? When I tried to defend her, my Mom would ask me how I could take up for her. I’d tell her that one of the symptoms of drug addicts is that they often lash out at the people to whom they are closest. It didn’t change my Mom, who had until then liked Teresa. She thought it was wrong of her to put me down.

Unlike my room at the Aristocrat, my old home was air-conditioned. That first night home, my Mom and I watched t.v. We didn’t talk about Teresa anymore. Mom went to bed around eleven. I went in the bathroom, turned on the exhaust fan and did a few hits of weed, then went back to watching television. M.A.S.H. reruns were on, and I fell asleep to the wisecracking antics of Hawkeye and B.J. It was wonderful being home in the country. I relaxed. By relax, I mean that I slept in a decent bed. Not only did I not have crackheads for neighbors, I had no neighbors for acres. I had a clean, private bathroom. There was a television. Every morning I’d watch Regis and Kelly. I still thought of Teresa, both worried about her and dreaded having to deal with her.

Still, I did things that I’d always enjoyed; for instance, fishing on the pond in front of the house,

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just floating in the small boat that had been there for years. There was a tiny leak, and every now and then I would bail a little water. I cast for a few hours the afternoon of the first full day I was home, Sunday. I caught a few small bass, all of which I threw back in the water. Most evenings, I’d sit on the back porch and play my harmonicas, old songs like Moon River, lots of western songs like Streets of Larado, and stuff like the Beatles and Beach Boys. Between songs the crickets and frogs filled the night with their sounds.

One evening, my Mom and I went to the ball park to watch the grandson of one of her friends play a bantam league game. It was nice seeing the little kids doing their best. I was surprised to see how many of them weren’t very good. When I was their age, playing on these same diamonds at this same ball park, I thought that I was the only one who sucked. My Mom and I sat in the bleachers with her friend, Zelma, and Mom and Zelma talked while I watched the game and the people in the ball park and beyond, in the real park, which was hilly and shady.

And after the game, my Mom drove me around our old town, all the regular sights, the familiar streets that were by now lit up from the corner street lights. There was a local a.m. station playing big band stuff and easy listening, some doo-wop. We went through the drive through window at the Dairy Queen and got Blizzards.

Teresa called me at my Mom’s house on Tuesday afternoon. She thought that I’d moved down there permanently, and she was angry. Maybe she’d been getting high and that made her angrier. Or perhaps she was frustrated at losing her best friend and she didn’t know how else to react. At any rate, she told me that I had no right to just leave, and I told her that I wasn’t leaving, just visiting my Mom between the end of the regular school year and summer school. I asked if she’d gotten the message I’d given to Susan to relay to her Mom and then to her, the message that I’d be paying that month’s rent. She had not. I expect that part of her anxiety was

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because of that. She seemed relieved. She told me to come and see her the evening I got back to Chicago, and I told her sure. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing her.

In back of my Mom’s house as well as around it are acres of soybeans. Every evening, deer would come out. I’d see them standing in the fields eating the soybeans. They’d come out of the forest at the back of the property. They’d see me and stop eating to look. I’d wave to them, and they’d look They were so beautiful. They would calmly regard me before disappearing into the woods at the back of the field.

After nearly a week, it was time to go back. Summer school would be starting. I wasn’t looking forward to going back, and I was positively not wanting to see poor Teresa. The train trip was fraught with anguished thoughts of what I would find when I went to my old apartment.

It was nearly ten at night when my train pulled into Union Station. I hailed a cab, dropped my stuff off at the Aristocrat and took the cab to my old apartment.

Up the steps to the third floor I went. When I got to my old door, I could hear muffled voices inside my old home. I heard Teresa tell someone it was their turn. I knocked.

No one answered though I’d knocked loudly enough. I knocked again. And again. I was there for five minutes knocking until finally Teresa took notice. “Who is it?” her voice said, but it didn’t sound like her voice. It was hard and mean. There was a snarl in this voice. I told her it was me and all the nastiness melted. “Oh you came by,” she said, and it sounded like my old friend for a second. Still she didn’t open the door but said, “Listen, honey, could you call me tomorrow. I’ve kind of got company right now.”

“Sure,” I told her.

I left there, hailed a cab and went directly to The Windy City Tap where I chugged a few pints of beer. I hadn’t wanted to see her, and she hadn’t even remembered that she was supposed

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to see me. At the time, I thought that I was relieved, but at the same time that moment when I’d heard the timbre of Teresa’s voice, the sad drugged love beneath her sickness when she’d realized that it was me at the door, the memory tore me down as I stood in the bar. It still does, like some hot knife deep in my gut that doesn’t hurt physically but which nonetheless sears the tender membrane of spirit and soul.

Sandy called me and said that Teresa had tried to borrow two hundred dollars from him for a retreat she was supposed to attend. He told me that he told her he didn’t have the money to lend her, and she had said that he needn’t worry about her paying him back, that she would shortly be getting twenty-five thousand dollars and would be more than good for the money.

Sandy hadn’t believed her and had hung up on her. I remembered she had told me that she was going on this retreat and to come by and water the flowers. I didn’t want to, but I went by there.

It was early, around nine in the morning on a Sunday. It’s crazy. A year ago the sight of my building on a sunny Sunday morning would have done nothing but filled me with a feeling of warmth. Now I approached with trepidation. I went in. It was quiet. It looked like my old apartment. I walked past the sun filled living area to go to my bedroom. Teresa’s bedroom door was open. She was lying on the bed, nude and beautiful, her face as innocent as an angel’s. She wasn’t alone. There was a great big man lying next to her, and he was nude as well. I didn’t want to wake them up. I left.

At the beginning of July, I called Teresa at a new number I got from Susan. She sounded happy to hear from me. I made her laugh by telling her of buying a pair of shorts without looking at the size and upon trying them on discovering they were about a size fifty. I called her

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from the fitness center I joined so that I’d have a place to shower in my neighborhood. One thing about having moved into The Aristocrat, it had gotten me back to the gym. Teresa was also happy when I told her that I’d paid July’s rent and that I’d told the leasing agency to give her the security deposit at the end of August. I told her that I would need to come by to pick up my twin beds and my books. She said to come by anytime, and we made a date for me to come by the next Wednesday.

Sandy loaned me his van to haul the stuff, and I found a place to donate the beds to. I would sell my books to one of the used bookstores in the old neighborhood. Before the day came, I had a fender bender while trying to park in front of a Leona’s restaurant in front of the Aristocrat. All the yuppie diners looked at me when the side of Sandy’s van crunched into the fender of the nice SUV. Oh boy. The owner was dining inside with his fiancé. She was kind of bitchy about it. We went to the police station on Belmont to file the report. I called Sandy and told him. He was quiet for about ten seconds. I told him I’d pay for whatever his deductible would be. It turned out to be about five hundred. Took me about a month to pay him. The officers were nice to me, but had little patience for the whining fiancé. One policewoman told her that she was lucky I’d stayed and not left.

The next Wednesday came very quickly. I was not looking forward to going to my old place, seeing Teresa and moving what was left of what I was keeping. Before I went, I called.

Teresa answered cheerily and told me she’d just been talking about me. I wondered to whom she was describing me and what she was saying, but I didn’t ask. When I got there she was alone.

We smiled and said hello. We hugged. Teresa showed me a picture that William’s’s daughter had drawn. It was of a house, a little girl and a kitten. She said that William wanted her to move

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in with him in August. Teresa then excused herself while I was packing booking and dismantling and moving my beds. She left.

It hadn’t been so bad, but I was feeling numb, or not numb but a dull ache as I moved out. I worked as quickly as I could because I didn’t want to be there when Teresa came back.

When I was almost done the phone began to ring. I didn’t answer it.

I was sweeping up when Teresa came back to our old home. She gasped when she saw me. She said, “I didn’t think you were still here. I called...” Then she sank to our blonde hardwood floor crying.

She told me that while she’d been out she’d gone into a bar and drank four shots because of the realization that our time together was over. “All your books are gone,” she said. “You just disappeared. I know when I was smoking it was scary, but you just left me. I would have stayed for you.” She sounded so wounded. So lost. And I was lost with her. I held her as she cried.

She said, “I try to look at everything that’s happened as somehow being for the best...I don’t know. I’ve missed you so much.” And for the last time in my life, I held my dear friend tightly in my arms. I was holding someone who had been gone, someone who would be gone again soon, whether I was there or not. And in losing her, abandoning her to either her own choices or her disease, I felt that I was abandoning myself as well.

I said, “I’ve missed you too.”

“Where are you going to live?”

“I don’t know.”

For a very short time we quietly held each other. I hugged her so hard, and she held me as if holding me could stop this horrible ending. But we disengaged, and she said, “You better go now. You call me.”

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“Okay.”

I was then in Sandy’s van, driving away, looking in the rear view mirror at my best friend. Teresa was standing at the rail of our back porch, where the summers before this year I’d had hanging boxes of petunia and sheeps ear. She was crying. And that’s the last time I saw her.

NOW I really haven’t precessed the feeling that I failed her, that I abandoned her and betrayed Andy. Mostly, I feel the loss of her presence in my life, our dynamic, our lives together. I don’t say anything about it to anyone. Sometimes though, a few people who know what happened but who don’t know Teresa that well will say something cutting about her. I tell them that she was good, that I loved her and was happy before she got on crack, but they laugh, the kind of laugh they have to force because they are not really amused, just showing me that I’m wrong. I’m asked how I could feel that way. They say that it’s ashamed that she took some money out of my credit card account, and when I tell them I don’t care about the money, they don’t hear me.

When I say the real loss was her, not a bit of money, they are dismissive. And I’m reminded that when I say I love her; well, she and I weren’t a couple were we? In fact, she had a boyfriend, and a sugar daddy. It’s not the real kind of love that married people, or even people who recognize themselves as couples feel. She and I weren’t soul-mates. I was just some fool who thought he fell in love because some pretty girl gave him some pussy. At that point, I drop it, let them talk until they get tired of hearing themselves. You would think that they would see how much it hurts me to hear them say bad things about her. I’ve mentioned it before, but like the majority of students I taught over the years, they don’t listen. I look away, look down, let it go.

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But since I left in the van on that summer day, like I said, it feels as though I’ve not only let go of Teresa, but of my own life as well. At the end of that summer, I moved out of The Aristocrat and into a tiny studio on Irving and Pulaski, on the northwest side of town. I taught another year and, having been dissatisfied with my principal for years, grieving over Teresa, increasingly concerned about my Mom living in the country on her own at eighty, and sick of students not paying attention to me, I moved out of the city and came back to where I’d grown up in southern Illinois. Since then I’ve substitute taught. I hate it, but I don’t care enough to try and do anything else.

Although I haven’t spoken to Teresa, I did hear from Susan last September.

It was to tell me that Tom had been shot and killed. I thought of the quiet young man with whom I’d taken walks, rented videos. I thought back to a sunny Sunday afternoon when I’d gone with him to a video game store. He’d told me how much he loved Teresa. In the thoughtful, measured way that he spoke he’d said, “Oh, I love my Mother more than just about anything, but I love Teresa the most.” I remembered when he’d stay with us, and he’d take the other bed in my room, him saying, “Goodnight,” as he would lay down to crash in the safe darkness of my memory. He was shot thirteen times by some guy he’d had a running argument with. Every night I pray that he’s in heaven. I also mention Steve and Jo Ann and Andy. And most of all, I pray for Teresa.

Susan told me that she’d attended the funeral. It had been nice, she said. Teresa, who’d been in a pattern of relapse and recovery, was supposed to have been admitted to another rehab right after the funeral, but she had disappeared, Susan said.

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Teresa has been living with one of Andy’s old friends. His name is Fred, and he has been trying to save her. Susan said that she’d seen Teresa during a period of recovery. She’d put on weight and was in a positive frame of mind, but since then she had relapsed. When I talked to Susan, no one had seen her for several days since the funeral.

I think about her, worry as much now as ever. I remember her and dream about her. Not just the bad times when she changed because of alcohol and cocaine but all the good times we had, just two friends together. So often, moments from our lives replay in my head. I can see us in her car. Her playing Cibbo Matto, us on our way to pick up some take-out Mexican food. I can hear her singing ‘l’ Vie En Rose’ in our apartment. Us at the lake front on the fourth of July.

Andy was there. Thousands of little things. I don’t know which is more painful, the bad memories or the good ones.

I read somewhere that when sounds go out in space, that they are never really gone, but are just expanding beyond the skies. It makes me wonder if not just sound, but every moment of our lives continues to exist on some plane, inscribed on some kind of template somewhere. I think of myself and her walking down a sunny sidewalk, Teresa singing and cracking jokes and me laughing and happy. I think of those two people still. In this world, they’ve gone, withered, dried up, crumbled to pieces and blown away, but maybe they’ll always exist somewhere. My Mom always says that nothing is lost in spirit, so maybe it’s true.

As as the days go by, my old life seems less and less real, and now it seems like maybe I never left southern Illinois. These days I tend to petunias, lilies, gladiolas, a bit of weed and mowing the big assed yard. I hardly drink but still smoke. During the summer, sometimes you can hear me playing harmonica on the back porch if you go by where I live in the evening. I like to sit and look out on the green: soybeans, the lawn, and the flowers and trees that go to the

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horizon where it becomes a greener shade of green or something like that. Way off in the distance, trains go by periodically, and they sound either mournful or peaceful. Sometimes when it’s late, the train whistles make the coyotes in the hills howl. The lonesome coyotes.

I avoid people because they make me uncomfortable. It seems they all know me either because of my Mom’s job or because I’ve substitute taught for either them or their kids. Twice a month I visit with a small group of old friends, two married couples. We have a pot luck. That’s nice. On Sundays I go to church with my Mom. When I went to church in the city, I didn’t go every week and I didn’t know any of the other parishioners or the priest, which I liked. I’d sit in one of the rear pews, but I didn’t really have a set place where I’d go and know the people around me. Here we sit in the same pew and everyone is kind of familiar, which I don’t like.

But it doesn’t really matter what I do anymore, and I am gripped by a profound indifference.

Because I’m not really here. I’m with a memory, a ghost that still is alive somewhere in the world. I miss her and I’m afraid of her as well as afraid for her. I love her and she is gone. And so am I. And it means very little.

When I was three or four, I was one day pestering my Dad to tell me a story. He told me a story about two friends, one from Earth and one from Mars. The one from Mars came to Earth and hung out. Long story short, when the Earth grown-ups saw the two playing in the Earth kid’s yard, they killed the Martian. Kind of like what would really happen to E.T. if he came down to visit. I must say, I wasn’t expecting Dad to end the story that way. I don’t recall asking Dad for anymore stories. Although the theme of prejudice between Earthlings and Martians escaped me at the time, I do recall understanding and, uh, not enjoying the lesson about the violent loss of friendship. I could imagine how the Earthling felt as he watched the expression of

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horror on his Martian friend’s face. Did the expression say, “Why don’t you save me,”? I could feel the Earthling’s helplessness. I think that story was my first exposure to the idea of senseless, irrevocable loss. Not that much really, just a story that stuck in my mind.

Also, when I was a kid, my family had an aquarium. One time, one of the guppies had babies, which we then separated from the adults so they wouldn’t eat the youngsters. One of the babies did nothing but spin in place. I remember its big goggle eyes and its ceaseless whirling in the tank as his guppy siblings swam sensibly. It lived about two days. When I got up the third morning of its existence I found it floating on the top. It was wired to spin like that I suppose. It didn’t have a choice. Maybe it did. Maybe it enjoyed the aqueous loss of equilibrium as it twirled, suspended in the water like it was in the air or in clear outer space. I remember wishing that it would simply stop spinning, or get tired and rest for awhile before it started spinning again, maybe spin in moderation. But no, it didn’t stop or get tired and slow down. It just twirled and twirled in the water as fast as it could because it was made like that. It had a disease and couldn’t help what it was doing. It didn’t have a choice. I guess. But who the fuck knows, right?

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