Truckin' With Gretchen

When I first met Gretchen, in the winter of 1970, she was living in a Roscoe Street apartment on Chicago's North Side, just a few blocks from where Bugs Moran had lived many years before. She was in her salad days then: a tough and pretty street pharmacist who knew all of Chicago's joints and alleys and all the ways to spot cops. She was living with a guy she called the Chemist.

Gretchen gave nicknames to everyone and the Chemist got his because, although the two of them dealt every kind of street drug, the house specialty--"Mother's own," she called it--was a pure-white Methedrine crystal that he manufactured in a jerry-built laboratory just off their bathroom. When business was good there was a lot of money, which the Chemist would carry in a bunchy roll in his pocket. But it never lasted long, (continued on page 194)Truckin' with Gretchen(continued from page 191) because he was his own best consumer of the speed and Gretchen pilfered everything else out of their considerable stash, especially the downers. So every few months the Chemist would beat her and send her to work dancing topless or waiting tables to make the money they needed to live on and to buy chemicals with. She had just the last, faded part of a black eye and had been on the job--serving drinks at Melvin's--only two days when I met her.

My own winter situation was not great, because Sharon had left me, and because I had spent only one other winter in Chicago and didn't understand yet how to dress for the cold or where to find friendly public places to get warm. Chicago is not a city that is proud of itself or sick of itself--like San Francisco, where I am from, or New York, where I have been--and especially in the winter, the city hides itself. People on the streets hurry along under gray skies through the bitter wind to do the necessary only. People on buses are silent and seem to pass only colds and flu to each other, and when they do talk, it is always about the weather, which in winter in Chicago is more important than religion or politics, or love even.

I was living with a friend, Wayne, sleeping on his sofa bed, but he had his hours and I had mine and we were together for drinks and long talks only now and then. So I had taken to walking at night, trying out bars, and trying out different combinations of shirts and sweaters and jackets to keep warm. What I would find out this winter was that you cannot dress against Chicago's cold when it gets bad, any more than you can put on a turtleneck to keep out loneliness, which is something of what I was trying to do that night in Melvin's.

Gretchen was 26--the right age for Melvin's hip-singles crowd--and pretty, but she was a bad fit among the other waitresses. They are mostly moonlighting stewardesses, which the North Side is full of, and there is a shyness, an awkwardness about them as they move from table to table, in Mod pants and sweaters, without flight pins or bras. They worry and jabber among themselves about men--that Xerox salesman with the muttonchop sideburns and the 450 Honda who promised when he left that morning that he would phone, but he hasn't somehow.

Gretchen came through the crowd in red-cord pants that were a little too baggy (she said later she had shoplifted them) and a white sweater that wasn't quite clean, looking as if the last promise she had believed was something about seeing God on acid, somewhere back in the Sixties. And if there is a Midwestern face, it was hers: a light delicate complexion that saw the sun mostly through clouds; broad cheekbones, not high but strong; thin, straight Scandinavian blonde hair; and big eyes, blue. A prairie face just saved from looking innocent by red coke-burned nostrils and the shadow of blue under the right eye.

I ordered Scotch, and by the time she had delivered three, we had smiled at each other enough that she said, "How come you drink this stuff, anyway? It's bad for you." I told her it was a second choice and that I drank it because I didn't know anybody in this town who could sell me marijuana in any greater quantity than a dime bag at a time, and that dime bags in the Midwest seemed to cost $20. "Twenty dollars?" she said. "You gotta be shopping at Marshall Field's." A few minutes later she was back to give me a check, and she sat down in the chair across from me to add the figures. I asked her when she got off work and when she said four A.M., I asked if she wanted to go for coffee. She looked up at me as if I were something out of the Fifties (which I am, partly, and especially behind that much Scotch), but then she said, "Sure, why not?"

When I picked her up, she gave me an umbrella that someone had left at a table, and as we went out onto State Street to look for a cab, she said, "You don't really drink coffee, do you? Let's go get high." And then, before the cab could turn north on Lake Shore Drive toward Wayne's, she leaned through the partition and asked the driver if he minded us doing our heads as we rolled along. He was black, and said no, so Gretchen took a rumpled joint out of her purse and lit it.

"Dynamite," she said. "Jamaican gauge," and she wasn't lying. About halfway through the joint, my mind went onto something like daylight-saving time. I asked her if she could get me some.

"For you, anything," she said. "Smack, if you dig it, coke, Demerol, Seconal, acid, mesc, THC, DMT, hash, Benzedrine, pure Meth crystal, lots and lots of that and ... what else is there ... ?"

"Grass," I said.

"Ah, yes, I can get you this Jamaican stuff, or Panama red, or Acapulco gold, or Kansas green, or whatever you want, and I can get you enough to send you up for thirty days or thirty years, if you like." Then she said that about the only things she couldn't get for me in quantity, and at a good price, were booze and coffee. The cabdriver laughed and looked in his mirror at us.

"I mostly want the grass," I said. "Maybe some hash and some mescaline, that's all."

When I asked her what she was into, she told me, "Anything that gets man or animal high," and when I asked her if she was strung out, she laughed. "Look," she said, holding her arms the way doctors do after they've scrubbed, "no cavities. I been using smack for three years, off and on, and I've never been hooked. It's no problem if you're careful. I just don't use it often and I don't use much and I vary it with a lot of other stuff. I was into downers heavy for a while, but now I'm just into everything. Moderation is the key. Besides, the junk we get in Chicago is only about twenty or thirty percent pure, which means you really have to work at it to get strung. You ever try smack?"

"No," I told her, trying hard to make it sound more like a decision than fear of the dark.

"Do you want to?"

"No ... not right now, anyway."

"Ever have your toes sucked?"

"No," I told her again, and whatever little-kid look had crept onto my face made her laugh.

"You remind me of the priest my mother goes with."

"Does your mother really go with a priest?" I asked.

"Yes, she really does, and you really remind me of him, except that your hair is longer than his and he's a speed freak. Are you Catholic?" I told her that I had been for a long time.

"I thought so," she said, "which reminds me, I have to be home by eight this morning, because my old man doesn't like me out with Catholics ... or Protestants or Jews or Hindus or atheists ... but especially not Catholics, because I used to be one, too. OK?"

Over the rest of that early morning and through a gray sunrise, she told me she'd been busted three times, acquitted twice and was going to court on the third charge in about a month. All of the arrests were for simple possession. "Dumb," she said and recited the law that made each invalid. And this last, she thought, was dumbest of all. She had been living in a hotel on Lincoln Avenue, and when the manager offered her a break on the rent if she would ball him, she told him to fuck off. When he told her he would call the police and tip them to her dealing, she told him the same thing, threw him out and cleaned her room of all dope. Two narcs arrived that afternoon and made her sit for four hours while they searched. They wouldn't let her smoke or talk, she said, and when she asked if she could piss, they made her do it in the bathtub while one of them watched. "He said it was so I wouldn't flush evidence down the toilet, which was bullshit, because both of them had already felt me up and they knew I didn't have anything on me except my own nice tits. Fucking perverts." They found one joint and one Seconal in her purse and busted her, and she spent a night and a day in Cook County Jail before she made bond. She said jail wasn't too bad, except that they (continued on page 326)Truckin' with Gretchen(continued from page 194) found needle marks in her arm and immediately started injecting her with a heroin substitute that she didn't need or want, because it wasn't smack she'd been shooting but downers. She tried to tell the matron that the drug was just making her high and constipated, but the doctor came in twice that day anyway, and insisted on shooting her in a "roller," which is a vein that won't stay in one place and makes the needle painful. She called the doctor a pervert, too. She'd also had hepatitis once, from using the community needle, and she said if there was one thing worse than jail, it was to be weak and horny for six weeks in a hospital under a doctor's orders that she could have no drugs that would get her off and no visitors who might bring her drugs. But there was a crazy old woman in the next bed who swore she was visited by her dead husband every night and who was willing to trade her ration of sleeping pills to Gretchen for dirty books. "She gave me ten hits, five days' worth, for The Big Whip, but when I really figured her out, I started getting like fifteen for things like Sisters in Love."

Before eight I asked her where I could call her, and she said I couldn't, because the Chemist had rigged a stolen phone in their apartment and had taken the bell off so that the telephone company wouldn't know, and that they could make outgoing calls only. But she said not to worry, that she'd call me about the pound of grass and the ounce of blond Lebanese hash I had asked for, and about a week later she did.

"Hello, is this the Bishop?"

"Gretchen?"

"Yeah."

"Who's the Bishop?"

"You are," she said as if it were a present.

"OK, what's up?"

"Well ... this is Merrill Lynch El Dopo and Pierce calling to say that Lebanese cheese closed today at one hundred and eighty a share ... and, let's see ... if I can fucking find it here ... yes ... Mexican gold smelters is holding around one hundred and fifty a share, so ... how 'bout it?"

"Ah, is a share of the Mexican stock, ah, like a pound?"

"Yes, yes and shit," she said slowly. "You have blown my very clever code, you know...."

"I'm sorry. I want a full share of each."

"OK, one share L. C.--dynamite cheese, really--and one share M. G.; I got it and I'll bring it by tomorrow."

After she hung up, I began to believe that she really did have all the dope she said and that nicknames and telephone codes were more than idle games for her. Then my paranoia took a little fantasy leap and it occurred to me that the two of us might be the first people ever to be busted on drug charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The next day she showed up with everything in a Bonwit Teller bag. The grass smelled good and seemed moist and fresh and I rolled it in my hands and sniffed at it, although I can tell nothing about any kind of drug that way. Finally, the only test I have ever found is to put it into my body and wait. If I do not die or lose my mind, or murder someone, or run screaming through a window calling the names of God and my seventh-grade girlfriend, then I know that it is good dope in the right dose. Grass and hash have always proved benign by this test and I do not worry about them. But with almost everything else--mescaline and acid, THC and coke--that I have snorted or dropped, I have always felt like the man who ate the first artichoke. When I was young, my stepfather used to tell the story (at dinner with artichokes, usually) of that anonymous daredevil who had "taken his life in his hands to find out if that prickly green thing was edible." I always pictured him as a Salinas Valley Indian, and now in my 29th year, I am nearly sure he was looking to get high, not fed. And if he was in that mood, looking for magic fruits and weeds to make the world different for himself, then archangels and the threat of hell couldn't have kept him out of that garden, nor from making dangerous friends among its snakes. Some people are just like that. And it has always been a hopeful sign for me that with all the millions of pounds of illegal drugs that get peddled on the streets of America every year, the capitalists who sell them seem much more interested in ripping their customers off than in poisoning them.

"How do I know this is a pound, Gretchen?"

"Trust me," she said.

She dug the hash out of the bag and it really was blond--white, almost--and it smelled like cinnamon. It was about the size and shape of a Three Musketeers bar and had a little chunk gone out of one corner. When I said that it looked like mice had been at the Lebanese cheese, she told me to think of it as her commission. Then she suggested a walk through snowy Lincoln Park so that I could try a little of each, because, she said, satisfaction was guaranteed, and she would take it back if I didn't like it.

I told her that I worried about the police, but she said not to, that it was too cold to get busted. "You goddamn nearly have to fire-bomb a pig's car to get him out of it when it's this cold. Spring and summer you got to be a little cool, but never in winter." Then she paused a second and said, "I never thought about it, man, but California must be awful. All that sunshine; no wonder you're paranoid."

We went into the park at LaSalle Street and Gretchen lit the first joint under the statue of Ben Franklin.

"He wouldn't approve," I said, pointing up.

"Fuck him," she said, and we started north through the deserted snow fields of the park.

Somewhere near a statue of Hans Christian Andersen, she told me that she'd been a kid on the South Side, that her mother was a dental nurse and a stone Virgo, that her father was a Great Lakes tugboat captain and that she had gotten her first piece of ass in a forest preserve near O'Hare airport when she was 18 years old.

She hadn't seen her father in years, she said, and even when she was young, he hadn't been around much. There were long jobs on the lakes, like the dredging of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and when he was home, out of the bitter wind and the company of seamen, he was drunk and timidly mean, which Gretchen guessed was the reason she couldn't get into booze. She said her mother had been using Benzedrine ever since she could remember and that she was an awful woman who had pussy-whipped her husband out of being an artist. Maybe a great one.

She said she'd been a Bunny in the Jamaica Playboy Club-Hotel until she went out with a guest and was fired, that she was a quadruple Leo, that she couldn't stand being alone for even an hour and that she just wanted to be happy: not powerful, not rich, not prettier than she was already. Just happy.

We were standing near Schiller and not far from Shakespeare now, at the head of the concourse that ends at the Lincoln Park Conservatory doors. It's a great plant house that I had been in often, straight and stoned, to look at the big palms and rich ferns and other plants. I was stoned now because we had finished the joint and it seemed to be the same great stuff we had smoked that night in the cab. I was about to suggest that we go into the glass-roofed, jungle-humid conservatory and smell the differences among the orchids, but my fear stopped me. It was always summer in there, I thought, and I was afraid the old guard who stood at the door might pick today to give me and my Bonwit's bag the junkies' rush and put us up against one ivy-covered wall or another. So I told Gretchen, with some horticultural detail, about the trip and she said, "Good dope, huh?"

We were near the bronze Carl von Linné, the father of modern botany, when she took out a hash pipe and loaded it with a chunk off the little brick.

"Wait till you taste this," she said.

"I am in no way going to be able to judge the quality of the fucking hash after that joint," I told her while she lit the pipe.

"Never mind, let me tell you how they get this stuff," she said, "and I will tell you true, because I never lie to friends. First of all, this is pollen, not resin like the black stuff, and it comes from Lebanon. And what they do is let the hemp plants get heavy with the pollen, so it's just about to drop, and then they get naked and wet themselves down and run through the fields until their bodies are all golden with the stuff. Then they come back and scrape the pollen off with sticks and then press it into blocks. Fantastic, huh?" I told her it was a nice piece of dope mythology whether it was true or not. "I swear, it's true," she said.

I asked her where she got it and she hinted that she and the Chemist had Mob connections, which is what all drug pushers with dreams of empire will tell you in Chicago.

"You remember last summer's drought," she said. "Well, when the shipment that finally broke it came in, certain gentlemen made me a present of thirty pounds of seeds from it. Now, if you can imagine how much marijuana it takes to get thirty pounds of seeds, you will see that I do not fuck around with the small stuff."

"Did you know that you live very near the street that Bugs Moran lived on?" I asked her. She looked happily surprised. "You're only a couple of blocks from his old apartment."

We were standing near Goethe now, and although his name is pronounced "Go-thee" in Chicago, his statue is biggest and handsomest of all. "Too bad they don't have a statue of Bugs in this beautiful park," I said.

"Now, that," she said, "is an outa-sight idea. Perhaps I will talk to my alderman, because I think there should definitely be a Bugs Moran memorial, like this one. I mean, that dude was willing to fight for his drug. Even if it was booze."

Then she said she had to split and headed west up Diversey.

"Maybe I'll come and see you at work," I yelled.

"Nah, the fucking bunch of perverts fired me. I'll phone you," she called back.

It was two weeks before I saw her again at Wayne's, and she didn't phone to say that she was coming. As it turned out, she wasn't in shape enough to use even a push-button phone. Wayne and I were sitting in his living room--my bedroom--around midnight, drinking beer. He was also getting into some Makers Mark bourbon and I was into the Lebanese cheese. We were telling each other lies about other places and other times, and Merle Haggard was on the stereo singing Who Do I Know in Dallas? for about the fifth time. As a rule, I'll take the Beach Boys or the Grateful Dead way before country, but Wayne is from Alabama, which puts Merle about dead center in his record rack. And with the hash and the good talk, I was getting to like it.

Wayne is generally thought of as a red-neck, but the truth is that he is only about 50 percent Gulf Coast good old boy. The other half went to a Midwestern college to study economics and philosophy and enjoys late-night conversations about what is real in the universe, North or South. His apartment, however, looks like a Dixie barroom. A courthouse-sized rebel flag hangs on one wall and poster-sized pictures of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on another. His Vietnam combat helmet has a dying philodendron planted in it and hangs from a central doorjamb. and the green beret he very occasionally puts on sits on one of the stereo speakers. There's a Navy dress sword that leans up against a closet, a coffee table made out of a hatch cover and a high-powered bow and arrow with a camouflage case. In the whole apartment, there is only one concession to hip America and that was a mistake: In trying to buy a fluorescent light for his bathroom, he got a black light instead, which he installed anyway, and which gave all the porcelain an eerie glow.

I had told him about Gretchen, that I thought she was amazingly together, considering the life she led, that she was funny and pretty and that he would like her. But two weeks had been a longer time for her than for me, and that night she came through the door with the skin tightly drawn across her face, her eyes red and one of them drooping, and her red-cord pants, which she still had on, hanging baggier than ever.

"I'm sorry, man," she said as soon as she was in. "I just don't think I can walk any more and I got a lot of money or me and I'm afraid of getting ripped off, you know. If I could just rest a minute...."

I introduced Wayne. She looked at him, then smiled and said, "You're so big. You're Wayne the Bear." Then she started coughing and choking.

We got her onto the couch and she said that she had just delivered some coke to a Lake Shore high-rise a few blocks away, that she had been speeding for two days and was trying to come down behind some Seconal she'd just taken.

"I didn't think ... I would ... come down this ... fast," she said and began coughing again.

"How many downers, Gretch?" I asked in a slow, clear voice. "Are you gonna O.D.?"

Her head was propped up at one end of the couch very close to a duck-decoy lamp on the end table. She opened her eyes for a second, saw the mallard head and said, "Oh ... hi ... how are you? ... Me, too," then closed her eyes and groaned.

"Are you gonna die, Gretchen?" I asked her. "Shall I get an ambulance?"

Wayne was standing with the bottle of bourbon in his hand, watching, and looking like this was the final piece of evidence that it was easier to survive snakes, malaria and the V. C. than it was to live in the city. I had begun running around like a medic without bandages (I decided to make some coffee). Gretchen just lay there making bad noises, trying to die of wounds we couldn't see. About the time I got water boiling, someone else was at the door and Wayne called out that he'd answer it.

When I got back to the living room. Wayne the Bear was standing with all his six-odd feet and 225 pounds across the doorway, nearly toe to toe with a tall, grubby, long-haired kid who had a large mouth and was asking for Gretchen. Wayne just stood there, foursquare for Makers Mark, a roadhouse bouncer, and the kid was saying, "I got to see her, man, I'm a friend, really, and I got to get her out of here."

Gretchen rolled her head, squeaked one eye open and said, "Oh, it's old Lips, let him in, you guys, OK?"

Wayne did, and Lips was almost to the couch when he began to notice the walls and got an "Oh, shit" look on his face. "Come on, Gretchen," he said, "we gotta go now. The Chemist is gonna kill you. Gel up...."

He was shaking her and she was mumbling that she was too tired, that she just wanted to rest for a minute, and then he began to slap her face.

"Hey, come on," I said. "That's not gonna do any good. She's crashing."

"Yeah, well, she crashes a lot, but I got to get her home," he said and slapped her some more.

Wayne spoke from the corner now, where he was sitting with the bourbon between his knees, picking his nails with a mammoth pocketknife he carries.

"Ah, maybe you better not hit her any more, like he said." He had on his thickest red-neck accent and the same side of the Haggard album had started replaying.

"Shit," said Lips, "I got to do something, man, what am I gonna do?"

"Look, I'm making some coffee," I told him, "and if we get her in shape, you can have her, or if we don't, she can stay here."

"No, no she can't," he said, shaking his head, trying to watch Wayne and talk to me at the same time. "She's got a lot of money on her that isn't hers and I don't know how many downers she popped and we have to split."

"Why don't you just relax a minute, instead?" said Wayne.

I had Gretchen propped about halfway up now and was trying to get instant coffee into her. I burned her mouth, she spit and flopped back down. "Come on, Gretch, you're scaring me," I told her.

Lips asked if he could piss, Wayne said yes, and the kid went past the bow and arrow, under the helmet flowerpot and into the bathroom. Wayne looked at me and shook his head. "She's just barely breathing," I said.

And then from the bathroom we heard, "Far out, man, far fucking out." Lips had turned on the light. "Too fucking much. Shit, look at the label on the shaving cream, what a trip, man."

"It's a mistake," Wayne yelled from his chair. "I was trying to get a fluorescent...."

"Oh, man, no, this is too far out. Fucking shower curtain looks like the aurora borealis; it's beautiful."

"Just finish what you're doing and come on outa there," shouted Wayne.

"I will, man," came the answer, "I will; it's so far out."

Wayne was trying to look mean, but I was laughing, and Lips came back into the room zipping his fly and saying, "That's something else in there," and then he bent down to Gretchen again and started to whine in her ear. "Come on, Gretch, you gotta be in court tomorrow and if you fuck up, the Chemist is gonna stomp your ass.... Wake up, you fucking downer freak."

"What's she going to court for?" I asked him.

"It's just possession, it's nothing, but she's got to show up. Fucking ... wake up, you stupid bitch ... how do you get so fucked up?"

"All you have to do is speed for three days---" I started to say.

"It ain't the speed," he said. "I been speeding for three days--shit, I been speeding for eight years--that's not what fucks you up."

Wayne looked up from his fingernails. "A man would have to be some kind of fool to put that stuff in his body on a regular basis."

"It's better than that," said Lips, pointing to the bottle in Wayne's lap. Wayne gave him a killer eye and didn't say anything. I rolled Gretchen over and asked her if she wanted to go.

"No," she said, then, "yes ... no ... I have to, man...." I got some of the cold coffee down her and she gagged but swallowed it. Then Lips lifted her to her feet and she fell. Then I helped him lift her again, he checked her pockets for the money and half dragged her to the door. She was trying to apologize again, but it wasn't coming out. One of her eyes wouldn't open at all now, and as the two of them crashed down the stairs, I wondered if she was going to die in the taxi.

"Fetchin' Gretchen," said Wayne after they'd gone. "If she's together, my friend, you and I had better talk about the nature of what it is to be apart."

• • •

Over the last part of the winter things seemed to get better for Gretch. She beat her possession charge--easily, she told me, because you can still buy a cop in Chicago if you show up at the courthouse with cash. "You have to pay them to lie or to tell the truth, whichever is more favorable to your case," she said. She had bought a lie and it had cost $50.

And she had a new job, as a bar waitress and substitute dancer at one of the Mob-owned North Side topless joints. The tips were good, and for a Chicago girl who'd grown up knowing how to clip conventioneers, there were extras. One night, for instance, a drunken Arizona restaurateur who was grabbing at her ass and calling her "girlie" gave her a $100 bill, thinking it was a ten. She made quick change for a ten and stuck the hundred in her leotard for when it rained, which, she told me, it was doing more and more often in her life. When I asked her why, she showed me the inside of her arm: It was covered with the little dit dit dits that she called her needlework. I asked her if it was downers again and she said no, that she and one of the other dancers, whom she called Taxie Ann, had gone from skin popping to muscle shooting to mainlining all in two months, backstage, between sets. She said the owners left the stuff around, which was nasty and nice at the same time, and that she didn't know if she was hooked, because she hadn't really stopped long enough to find out and was afraid to. She said the Chemist was pissed, but not enough to have her quit the job, and that she was pretty sure she was strung out. Then she asked me again if I wanted to try some and I told her no again.

"Oh, Bishop," she said, "it's not as bad as you think and there's no high like it in the universe to get you through an eight-hour shift ... of anything. You just only heard the bad stuff about junk."

"It's the Devil," I told her.

She called me a fucking Catholic and stuck her tongue out at me.

She lost the job a couple of weeks later and the Chemist ruined a batch of speed he was cooking, so she started to call me about twice a week to see if I wanted to buy any grass. The pound price got lower and lower every time we talked and although I had plenty, I started buying. I had moved in with Sharon again and our new, tender relationship was straining over the subject of Gretchen, anyway, and the worst moments were always around the vegetable crisper of the refrigerator, which was full of about three pounds of marijuana. But Sharon's humor is mighty when it is not on the blink, and she kept saying things about us getting beriberi or busted if I didn't make room for some fresh fruit. I promised to sell some and eat the rest. Then I told her that I was getting off Gretchen's case, anyway, because it was starting to make me nervous.

The next time Gretchen called, I asked her what she was doing with all the money she was getting from me.

"Same thing you're doing with the pot," she said.

I told her that was unlikely and that I was going to have to cool it for a while and she said, "OK," in a you-asked-for-it tone. "I'll tell you what I do with the bread. Anyway, I'll tell you what I did yesterday with fifty dollars. I got up in the morning feeling very fucked up and tore my crib apart looking for a bag of junk that I thought was left over--but it was gone. So I walked real fast down to Broadway and hitched a ride about twenty blocks north to a friend's place, gave him the money and took the stuff, but he was being a shit and wouldn't let me do it up there, even though I was in a hurry. Then I went back out onto Broadway and found a Wonder Bread truck. There's a little platform on those trucks and you can hang on and there's a big sign about eye level that says, 'Wonder Bread helps build strong bodies twelve ways.' I was going to tell the driver that I'd found number thirteen, but I chickened out. I wanted to get home fast, anyway, so I decided to let the bastard find out for himself. I mean, I can't go around saving the whole fucking city," she said, and then laughed as if it weren't funny.

"How do you feel now?" I asked her.

"Great," she said. "Don't be mad at me."

• • •

The first smell of spring in Chicago is dog shit melting out from under the ice and snow that preserves it for the winter. But the edge goes off the wind, people can go out casually again, and do, and by Gretchen's theory, paranoia in the drug community should blossom like a jacaranda.

I hadn't seen her for about two months when I ran into her in front of Woolworth's on Broadway. She didn't look good, but she didn't look bad, either, for a junkie, and I told her that.

"I'm not a junkie anymore, Bishop," she said almost brightly. "I got hepatitis again and was in the hospital for six weeks and I kicked."

"Great," I said.

"Yeah, and it wasn't bad at all. I hardly had any pains or cramps, which just goes to prove how shitty Chicago smack is--lucky for me. Now I'm back on speed and coke and grass and I feel fine, just fine, except my doctor says that my liver is gonna quit if I don't stay away from downers. But I'm doing pretty good; give myself a gold star."

Then she asked me why I hadn't come over to meet the Chemist and have a nice joint and I told her I would later that afternoon.

"How's your supply?" she asked.

"Jesus, I'm down to two and a half pounds," I told her. "Goddamn near cold turkey."

Gretchen had talked about the Chemist off and on over the time I'd known her. He was a Chicago kid, too, but had grown up in a North Shore high-rise because his father was a shoelace tycoon. The Chemist stood to inherit all the money if he could only outlive Dad. She said he had a degree in chemistry from the University of Chicago and had been taking speed ever since he was 17 years old, 5'7" and 230 pounds. A doctor had started him on diet pills then, and now, at the age of 34, he was up to nearly a gram a day of pure Methedrine when he had it. He had a reputation as a ladies' man and even said that he would never go to jail, that he'd run first rather than be locked up with all those other men, but Gretchen said he didn't fuck much, because all the speed kept him from getting it up. He and Gretchen had been together for almost three years, and despite the fact that he beat her and was a bum sometimes, she said, almost everyone who knew him thought he was a genius, including her.

When I knocked, he opened the door just a crack, asked me if I was the Bishop and when I nodded, he swung it open all the way and said, "Welcome to the factory." He was almost short and almost fat and had black hair that was trying to be long but was mostly tangled, and even though I muffed the peace handshake he gave me, he kept babbling, "Come on in, brother, welcome, have a seat and we'll get cool."

The place was small and cluttered, like pawnshops are cluttered, with knick-knacks taken in trade for dope from speed freaks and junkies. In one corner of the living room there was a beautiful but unstrung sitar, and on a coffee table was a carved chess set and beside that a collection of antique prescription bottles from the good old days of patent medicine that listed on the labels ingredients like cocaine and Cannabis. There were stained-glass panels leaning against the windows, some syringes lying loose on the table next to a fine old railroad watch and chain, and in an alcove that overlooked the neighborhood play lot next door were the tools of his notoriety: glass beakers, test tubes, corks, a Bunsen burner, rubber tubing, pots and pans, a big roll of tin foil, rubber gloves, paper towels, a box of Baggies and a handsome old glass-cased chemist's balance.

Gretchen was in the other room but yelled that she'd be right out, and I sat on an inflatable couch and asked the Chemist how business was.

"Pretty fucked up right now, you know," he said. "Gretchen just got out of the hospital and I haven't had any money to buy chemicals and somebody stole my bike--I had a Harley--and, you know, just hanging out, passing time till I can score some ingredients." He was lighting a joint now and passed it to me. "But I think tomorrow this cat's going to front me some stuff to make a batch," he said. I tried to give the joint to him. "Nah, that's OK, I been speeding all night and day and I'm not ready to come down, you go ahead, I don't really like that stuff, anyway. Do you want some speed when I get it made, it's going to be dynamite, pure white, you know, and you're welcome---"

"No, I can't get into speed," I said.

"Oh, yeah, really," he was talking like an AM rock-'n'-roll disc jockey, "funny, but oh well, most people can, lucky for me. In this country everybody's into speed. Coffee and cigarettes, you dig? It's like the all-American drug, helps you run fast, talk fast, stay up late, whatever you want, write the big book, make superfantastic flying machines, you know, zoom...."

Gretchen came into the room, sat on an inflatable chair and said, "Then why don't you put it into red, white and blue caps if it's so fucking patriotic--hello, Bishop."

"Ha, I should," he said and then turned to me. "If you knew some of the people who are my regular customers--you think they're all wasted, right? Well I'll tell you, I started making the stuff out of like a personal need and I had to search the literature, 'cause if it's anything to do with control of the mind they like bury it deep. But when I found the formula I all of a sudden had friends who live very fancy and work downtown. Ha, if only Daley knew."

I had done about half the joint now and it was coming on. I passed it to Gretchen and asked the Chemist what was in it. "You noticed, yeah, a little THC does wonders for bad grass and that's all there is right now. But I can get you some THC if you want it, take your head off."

"Maybe," I said.

"Well, I only offer it because you said you can't get into speed---"

"Don't get on him about not being into speed," said Gretchen from the corner. "I think it's the worst fucking drug there is."

"Oh, yeah, let's hear your speech, you were only strung out on junk, right?"

"I only got strung out because I went to work in the wrong place. All the chicks in there were shooting."

He asked me for the joint and I passed it to Gretchen and then he said, "Listen, I'm not getting on her for using the stuff. Anybody can put anything they want into their bodies as far as I'm concerned. But you don't know her, man, she cannot be trusted. Shit, I'm the one who tried to get her on methadone, because it's just very hard to deal when you have a junkie in the house."

"I only pinched your smack one time," she said.

"Yeah, that's only because when I have it I keep it locked up. What about downers, huh? Can I trust you with them around? Sure." He turned to me again. "One time, man, I had fifty downers that I'd promised to someone and she came out of the hospital after her hepatitis and so like they were going to be the worst thing in the world for her and I wouldn't let her have any. I went out and came back a few hours later and there were thirty pills gone. I couldn't believe it."

"That wasn't intentional," said Gretchen. "I remember taking four, that's all."

"How can you not remember taking thirty downers?"

"It was an unconscious move, because I didn't take any water with them, man.... If I'd been trying to kill myself, I would have...."

"Then I called the fire department ... no ... I cleaned the place first ... and then called the firemen and they came and saved our little girl."

I stood up and said I had to leave.

"What for?"

"He's paranoid when he's high," said Gretchen.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah," I said. "Don't you ever worry?"

"Not really," he said. "I've been busted a few times, but I've never been indicted even. Anyway, I get like vibrations when a bust is coming, like the aura that comes before epileptic attacks. Let me put it this way, and I don't know if it's mystical bullshit or not: I have avoided many more busts than I've been involved in because of those vibes. You can just feel it coming."

The doorbell rang and scared the shit out of me. It was like a rush, I thought later, more powerful than any drug rush I'd ever had and different only in that it left me straight instead of high. I said goodbye and then nearly bolted out the door and down the stairs. There was a guy with a pizza on the front porch and he said he was looking for the third-floor rear.

"Far out," I told him, and then I walked home and passed out.

• • •

About a week later, around a warm midnight, my doorbell rang, but when I buzzed the downstairs door open and then waited on the landing, no one came. I had heard footsteps, so I walked down to the second-floor landing and found Gretchen sitting huddled in a corner, sobbing. I stood for a moment listening for other footsteps, but there were none, so I went over to her and bent to ask what was wrong. She raised her head out of her hands; her face was soaked with tears and her eyes were almost swollen shut.

"I've got cancer," she sobbed. "Oh, God, I'm going to die."

I squatted beside her and waited, because she was crying harder now. I waited for minutes and then slowly she began to put words between sobs. A doctor. That afternoon. She had thought it was hepatitis again. Cancer, he said. Liver, cervix, some other internal organs. He was sure and wanted to operate. No, she wouldn't let him. She knew about these things. He wouldn't say how long. "What did I do? Why?" she asked me. "Why?" and then weeping took her again.

I walked her down the stairs and outside and then along an alleyway to a small back yard behind my building. There were no chairs and so we sat next to each other on the brick patio. She had a bag of grass and some papers in her purse and without saying anything, and without a pause in her crying, she took them out and put them in front of me. I began rolling joints and we smoked perhaps six or seven in the next two hours, but I never got high. Now and then, when she stopped crying, she would talk, and I would answer and ask questions; and though I tried hard, I couldn't keep them from sounding pitiful. She said she had had some cancer in her back--"You know those scars I have?"--when she was young but that they had operated and it had been successful. She said she had kept the Chemist up as long as she could but that finally he couldn't take any more and had passed out with a needle in his arm. She began crying again and said that she was sorry to bother me.

I don't remember the things I said, although I know I talked some. I remember mostly that my mind was running and that I couldn't stop it from even the most bizarre and horrible thoughts. I thought the whole thing absurd, and then I thought it funny. I wondered how I had come to know this pathetic person and wished I never had. I thought of it as a trick. I was afraid for a while that it would change me too much, and then I felt my ass sore on the bricks and was afraid it wouldn't change me at all. I remember thinking that pretty women are uglier than the dead when they come apart. And I was pissed. I had kept myself at arm's length from Gretchen's black eyes and hepatitis and needle marks by saying to myself that people (me, Gretchen, Bugs Moran) lived where they wanted to live; that they chose their drugs and went on choosing them. She had always said that the Chemist never beat her unless she deserved it. And I had waited for the police to find her and knew that I could handle that, and maybe even help when the time came and still be safe. But now I was only crazy--afraid for my own life--and I didn't have a thought in two hours worth thinking and I didn't say a word worth saying, and except for one phrase of hers, I will probably forget most of the night and most of the fear. "Oh, God," she said in one of those moments, "I been busted by the stars. Oh, Craig, I am so scared."

Just before I walked her home, she took a syringe out of her purse and a vial and shot Nembutal into her arm. She did it slowly and explained each step to me, carefully, and I listened carefully. She said it would help her sleep, and by the time I got her to her door she was crying less often and her eyes were trying to close. I kissed her good night and walked home.

Six days later, in the middle of the afternoon, the Chemist put on a leather jacket, walked out of the building, down Roscoe to Broadway and turned south. Gretchen had taken two Seconals and had lain down for a nap when six Chicago narcotics-squad officers broke the glass in the apartment's lobby door with a sledge hammer and charged up the stairs with their guns drawn. They crashed through what they thought was Gretchen and the Chemist's door and announced their raid loudly. They found two women, both past 60, sitting in front of afternoon television, and after some confusion and an attempt to comfort the frightened old ladies, they crossed the hall, broke down the second door and this time got it right. Gretchen heard nothing and said later that she awoke with a .38 police special at her head and someone behind it saying that she was under arrest and reciting her rights to her.

Gretchen knew the sergeant who led the raid--he had busted several of her friends--and she had nicknamed him Father Flanagen because of what she called his "phony pig paternal act." While the five others began collecting evidence--popping the inflatable furniture, emptying drawers, tearing the bed to pieces, checking the toilet tank, kitchen bottles and the refrigerator--he asked her where the Chemist was. She told him she didn't know. He told her that if she'd turn the Chemist in, he'd let her go. She said she wanted a lawyer.

Outside, a group of about 20 kids, some of them members of a gang called the Roscoe Street Blues, had gathered across the street. They spotted the Chemist turning onto Roscoe and a couple of them yelled at him that Gretchen was being busted. He took off running back toward Broadway and disappeared.

When the five were through searching, and when Father Flanagan was convinced that Gretchen would tell him nothing, they packed the evidence--the laboratory equipment, some chemicals, heroin, a hypodermic needle, some cocaine, grass, depressants, stimulants and $400 in cash--and left.

The street kids booed and hissed as they put Gretchen into a squad car and drove off to book her at the 11th and State Street station.

The Chemist called me at about five that afternoon from his lawyer's office, where he was hiding. His voice was full of the nervous excitement of someone who has been shot at and missed and he asked me if I could help with the bail for Gretchen. I told him I'd try, but that it would have to be the next day. Then I asked him if he was going to let Gretchen take his bust and he said he wasn't worried about it, because the raid had been carried out on a bad warrant and that they'd never convict her. Then I heard an angry and exasperated background voice that I took to be the lawyer's say, "We don't know that yet."

The next day it was plain that the police thought they had a case. They were making the whole thing a publicity bust. The television news carried film stories that showed the police standing in front of a table strewn with the confiscated goods. They were calling it the largest North Side raid of the year and were adding that the Chemist, who was still at large, "was the biggest producer of hallucinogens and stimulants in the New Town area, extending along Broadway and Clark Street between Addison and Wrightwood Avenue." The route of the Wonder Bread truck.

The Tribune carried a story under the headline "Hallucinogens found in raid" and accompanied it with a photo of the same table filled with glass vials, syringes, bags of powder, lids of grass and bottles of chemicals. It described Gretchen as a "former Rush Street go-go dancer" and said that the raid culminated a monthlong investigation.

When I called the lawyer the next day, he said that bail had been set at $5000 and then lowered to $1500 and that the Chemist had scraped $150 together and Gretchen was out. He also said he was off the case and didn't know or care where either Gretchen or the Chemist was. I asked him how Gretchen looked. "Lousy," he said and hung up.

She called two weeks later and then came to see me. She brought a copy of the charges (three felonies and four misdemeanors) that had been filed against her and she looked like she hadn't slept in a month.

I was afraid to ask her anything, which was making the conversation strange, but I finally asked her how she was. She said she had the Chemist hidden where no one could ever find him. I told her I didn't mean that, and she said that even though she didn't have a lawyer yet, she would just get a continuance on her trial. Then she said the bust was bad, anyway, because of the warrant. I asked her if she was going to die.

"Oh, that, no," she said, but she wasn't looking at me. "That doctor was full of shit, I don't have cancer, he was just full of shit."

I asked her how she knew.

"I saw another guy, another doctor, and he said that it was just my liver again, you know, hepatitis. I'm sorry about that night. I feel stupid now."

"Did the other doctor run tests?"

"No, he was going to, but he said he was sure it wasn't cancer, and so I never went back for them. They're such a drag and I was being a baby about the whole thing, anyway, and so I didn't---"

"You're not sure."

"I'm sure," she said in an almost pleading voice. "It's bullshit. The doctor said he was sure it wasn't cancer, and I believe him. He's one of the best. He even said that I should sue the other guy for malpractice. Look, I'm sorry about that night, I was just really scared, but I'm OK. The only thing that's bugging me is that I don't have a lawyer now and I have to go to court tomorrow. I'm just going to get a continuance, but---"

"I'll come with you if you want."

"Would you, oh, I'd really love you for it," and she leaned over and kissed me. "I'm just going to get a continuance, but the Chemist can't come with me and I just don't want to go alone. It's ten o'clock, at Twenty-sixth and California. Meet me there, OK?"

After she left, I sat for a while trying to figure out if she had cancer or not. I had only her words and her tears that night telling me that she did, and now I had only her words telling me that she didn't. I wasn't sure then, and I am not now, whether it wasn't the Chemist talking: To him, all warrants and all doctors are bad. But the arrest was real, I knew that, and to convince myself that that was the worst trouble she was in, I read the complaint papers she had left.

They were on legal-size paper that said, "Matthew J. Danaher, Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County," across the top. Below that on the first four sheets it said, "Misdemeanor," possession of a hypodermic needle (and the statute typed in), possession of hallucinogenic drugs, possession of depressant drugs, possession of stimulants. The next three were labeled "Felony" and were for possession of cocaine, possession of heroin and possession of marijuana. At the bottom of each, below the signature of the arresting officer, it called the charges "Crimes against the peace and dignity of the people of Illinois."

• • •

One look at the Criminal Courts Building of Cook County and you know it could beat you. On the façade of the hulking old seven-story courthouse there are angry-looking rams' heads, and below them the building's name is cut in the Roman fashion. Out the back end of the place and attached to it is the Cook County Jail, with its gray walls and watchtowers.

Up the wide stairs and through the big doors are two cops in the rotunda who stand on either side of a table and search everyone for guns or knives or bombs.

The cop who went through my leather bag was Latin and friendly and as he stuck his hand down into the purse, he looked at the ceiling and said, "You learn to see with your fingers." Then he pulled out a package of cigarettes. "Aha, pollution," he said, and then, when he had finished, he had me raise my hands while he ran his hands armpits to ankles quickly and deftly. When he was through, he told me to have a nice day.

Drug-abuse court is a small room on the fourth floor and is presided over by Judge James A. Geocaris. Inside the courtroom an old bailiff watched me as I sat on one of the 13 wooden benches that are arranged in church rows. It is his job to see that you are silent, that you read nothing except legal documents and that you doodle or carve nothing on the old but unmarked benches.

I was early, but at ten the room began to fill quickly, until it was crowded with twice the people it was built to hold. They were young, mostly, and black, or Latin, and if white, they had long hair: Every one of them fit into what I imagined to be the police stereotype of a drug user. And the police who had arrested them were waiting on a bench along one wall to give testimony. They were young, also, and, except for one face out of 12 today, they were white.

The bailiff got a gavel out of a locked filing cabinet and the clerks and stenographer took it as a signal to move to their places behind the three desks crammed across the front of the room. Judge Geocaris, about 40 years old, with a pleasant face and light sideburns, came through a back door, said good morning to his staff, changed his blue blazer for a black robe and took his chair on a raised platform behind a table in the middle of the desks.

"Hear ye, hear ye," said the bailiff, rattling off the archaic courtroom jabber, and then, because he'd found the official language of the court inadequate for dealing with accused criminals, he ended it with a lusty "Get away from the door and shut up." Then he turned and tried to fluff the courtroom droop out of the old American flag next to the judge; but it didn't work.

There were 70 or so people now, including some lawyers and some parents, and the room was almost quiet as the clerk began calling cases. Singleton, Howard, Broadski, January, Delong, Torres, Williams, Johnson, Coleman, Rivera, Mitchell, Black. Some were called in pairs and some alone, and the judge asked each if he was ready for trial. Some asked for a continuance and some were tried by the judge right then. One asked for a jury trial and a date was set. Some had their own lawyers, but most used the young, bright-faced, Mod-dressed public defender, who would take a minute to read the charges and look at the evidence, talk to the accused for another minute and then defend the case as well as he could.

In the first 30 minutes, 17 people came before the judge. Fourteen were charged with simple possession of marijuana; of these, ten were acquitted and four had their cases continued. The three others were charged with possession of heroin and two of them were continued. Of all 17, there was only one convicted. He was a 20-year-old Vietnam vet whose lawyer said he had returned from the war on smack but had kicked it now and wanted to straighten himself out. He pleaded guilty and the judge gave him a year's suspended sentence on the condition that he go to the state's attorney's drug-abuse school for four months and stay out of trouble for 12 months.

Gretchen was late, so I went out into the hall and squatted against a marble wall to have a cigarette. Twenty or 30 people waiting for their cases to be called, or waiting for friends, had overflowed into the corridor and were milling, talking and smoking. Lawyers were explaining deals to nervous mothers and girlfriends. Groups of young black gang types were lighting cigarettes from friends' cigarettes and laughing and trying to be cool. A Latin next to me was telling a friend that he was waiting for someone to get the lab report on the drugs he'd been found with, so he could go to trial. He said he was tired of waiting on lab reports. But I didn't really hear one conversation; I heard them all in the echoing old hall. Nervous chatter.

A half hour later, Gretchen showed up. She was agitated about being late but seemed in good spirits. When I asked her how she was, she said, "Stoned as I can be," and then she asked if her case had been called yet. I didn't know, so we went in and she asked the clerk, who said her case had yet to come up. We went and sat on a bench together near the back.

"They almost got the Chemist yesterday," she said in an excited voice. "He walked into a friend's place while the narcs were there. It was crazy. He showed a phony I. D. and they believed it and he was clean, so they let him go."

"Was it Father Flanagan?" I asked.

"Oh, no," she said. "He knows the Chemist and would have hung his ass up right there. It was another guy and the Chemist says he's like a real gentleman for a cop. After he looked at the I. D. and believed it, and after he found the Chemist clean, he just had him sit down till they were through searching, because he didn't want anybody who might have been coming up the stairs to be warned. The Chemist said he was a really nice guy and, like, at one point the cop said to him, 'It's all a game, isn't it?' and then they were both laughing and talking. It's just lucky he was clean."

The bailiff came over and told us to shut up, but as soon as he was gone she leaned over and said, "Flanagan just came in the door."

I looked over at a big man who had the face of my stepfather at his angriest. He had on a black raincoat and his fists were full of manila file folders. He smiled when he saw Gretchen.

"Shit, he's coming over," she said.

On his way he looked at me, slowly, up and down, the way only police and the very powerful do; then he stopped in front of us and said, "Hi, Gretch, how you been?"

"I'm fine," she said, and then he turned to me.

"Who are you?"

"A friend," I said.

"You here on your own bust?"

"No," I told him.

He shook his head and said, "Little Gretchen gonna take the fall for everybody, huh?"

She looked as if she were going to spit at him.

"Where's what's-his-name, Gretchen?"

"Who?" she asked.

"Well, who are we looking for, sweetheart? Where's the Chemist?"

"I haven't seen him in six months," she said.

He shook his head again. "OK, Gretchen," he said. "I told you, I don't want you, I want the Chemist. The cook. Hell, you couldn't cook a pot of beans." Then he laughed. "I don't know why you're taking this fall for him. He's a bum." Gretchen didn't answer. She was looking at him with a face that had taken a million moral lectures about bad dope and bad men and there was a little "Fuck you" squint in one of her eyes.

"We going to trial today?" he asked her.

"I'm going to get a continuance," she told him.

"Good," he said. "Take as many as they'll give you. Don't cut yourself thin. And take care of yourself, you don't look so good." Then he walked away toward the front of the courtroom and the other police.

Gretchen looked as if she might cry, and I put my arm around her. "I can take almost anything," she said, "but not that shit. I don't have to take that shit from that cocksucker."

The clerk called Gretchen's name and she went and stood before the table.

"Are you ready for trial?" the judge asked as he flipped through the complaint papers.

"No, your Honor, I haven't got a lawyer and I'd like a continuance."

"Have the charges been read to you?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

He was still reading them, and when he was through, he looked up with a serious face. "You better get a lawyer pretty soon," he said, "and we'll set the trial date for two months from now. Clerk, put that down, two months; and let's have the next case."

On the way downstairs she didn't say anything. She had taken out a cigarette and was smoking it hard. I told her I'd find a lawyer and she still said nothing. I told her I'd buy her lunch, but she didn't hear. When we were outside the building she took my arm and said, "I'm too scared. I thought they were going to take me away today. The way the judge was looking at me, oh, shit, man, I think this is it. I don't think I can do it."

I offered the lawyer again and lunch, but I felt like a kid trying to comfort an old man.

"Just drop me at a friend's place, will you?" she said.

I drove her to an apartment on the Southwest Side and before she got out of the car, she said, "Don't worry, Bishop, I'll be all right in a few minutes."

Then she promised to call the way she always did.

• • •

Six weeks went by and I didn't hear anything. Twice I went looking for Gretchen, but I couldn't find her. Then I met Lips on Broadway. "Oh, man," he said, "I'm surprised you didn't hear. The Chemist took off running, to Florida, I think, about a month ago and Gretchen was very fucked about it. Now she's hooked up with some guy named Dave who rides with the Outlaws, you know, the bikers, and the last I heard he had her locked up and was sending her to dance at night over on the West Side. I saw her at a party a couple of weeks ago and she's swearing to kill the Chemist, she thinks he tricked on her, she's convinced." I asked him if he knew where the biker lived.

"It's up north somewhere, around Wilson, I think, I'm not sure. But she told me she was splitting for Canada. She knows they're gonna convict her, man. Shit, I told her to run. I don't see what else she can do now."

"Is she sick?" I asked him.

"I don't know, man, I really don't. She's just all fucked up."

A week later I got a call from her. She said she couldn't talk, and about a minute later a male voice in the background started shouting, "Get the fuck off the telephone." She whispered that she was going to Canada, that night, then she said she'd be in touch and hung up.

The trial date passed and I heard nothing. Then I got a postcard with a lake on it from somewhere around Ottawa. "Canada's OK," it said, "but Chicago's better. Love, Gretchen."

Two months went by and I got a phone call.

"I'm back," she said, "and I need some money fast."

I told her to meet me in a Walton Street bar that afternoon, and about two o'clock she did. She had on dark glasses when she came in, to cover two black eyes, and her lower jaw was off to one side.

"What happened, how are you?" I asked her.

"Well ..." she said, "I'm not so good. David took off, you know--that son of a bitch--and I skipped court."

"Why did you come back?"

"I was lonely, that's all, and I got sick again. Do you have the money?"

I told her yes and then asked her where she was living, and with whom.

"With one of the Outlaws," she said.

"Did he do that?" I asked about her jaw.

"Yeah, because I ran away, but I can't tell you any more, I just need the money." Then she told me that she'd been in the hospital for two days, because of her liver again, but that she'd run out when the doctor said he wanted to do a biopsy. I asked her if she was on anything and she said she was taking a little heroin for some pain she was having but that she wasn't strung out. But the top of her thumb and all down the side of her wrist were covered with poke holes that were trying to heal but never got time.

At one point she went into her purse for a cigarette and I saw a gun.

"What the hell is that for?" I asked her.

"It's legal," she said.

"Nothing's legal for you, Gretchen," I said.

"I really have to go, man," she said. "I'm sorry," and she started crying. "I can't tell you anything, I need the money, that's all. Please, give me the money and let me go."

I did, and she left without saying she'd call, and she hasn't.