Her addiction was so overwhelming to me that even having her downstairs was too close for comfort – knowing that behind closed doors she and Scott had been sniffing down their rent money, drooling on the couch cushions, festering in their apartment like ancient invalids when they were barely legal drinkers.The image of heroin in our culture, or at least the image I have of it, is as a sort of monstrous gateway to an unquenchable need: once you’ve tried it, addiction can be startlingly quick, and once you succumb, you can’t ever get enough.I am incredibly nervous all day before going to Jeff’s. “I’ve got friends to take these two, `cause they’re pure-bred Abyssinians, but nobody wants Babydoll The people I’m staying with won’t let me bring her. Do you know anyone who will take her?” Babydoll, a black-and-white longhair, gazed up at me.”I have two already,” I said, which was true. They don’t want him to see me at all, even with the baby coming, but I know he loves me.”"Are you moving out?” I asked her.”Getting kicked out is more like it.” She pointed down at the cats.

I brushed my teeth and threw the toothbrush in the bin.In the months after, I would pass Scott and his girl on the street and in the stairwell They never seemed to see me. Then, one day, she was moving things – rubbish bags, stacks of LPs – out into the hallway Three cats and a ratty little dog wound around her feet She stopped working and called to me “Hey! Are you the one who .. ?”"Yes,” I told her “I am.”"Thanks,” she smiled “He’s not here anymore His dad and his brother kidnapped him into rehab They just drove up one day and threw him in the car They don’t care that I’m pregnant. I came home and he was passed out on the couch.” There had been stories in the news that week about China Cat, a super- pure heroin that was causing a lot of junkies to miscalculate their dosage.As soon as Scott sat up, I ran back into my apartment and spat, in the sink. Over and over, I rinsed my mouth out, as if I could wash the death and drugs off my lips. There was nothing to do but keep on breathing into him and wait for the ambulance to arrive.Scott the Junkie died shortly after the ambulance people took over from me.Seconds later, he was shot back to life with a needle full of adrenaline.

“Welcome back from hell, Scott,” barked a pink-faced policeman who had followed the ambulance workers up the stairs. His young partner quizzed the redhead about her dosage.”I don’t have heroin in my system,” she said “I got into a methadone programme last week. They took me because I’m a girl, but he” – she pointed to the body on the floor – “he got put on the waiting list.”"Who is he?” asked the cop.”My husband,” she answered.”I got asthma,” muttered Scott as soon as his eyes fluttered open.”We didn’t give you for asthma,” a uniformed woman wearing rubber gloves scolded him “We gave you for heroin, and that’s what worked, Scott How much did you take?”"Not that much Just a bag,” the redhead answered for him “There musta been something in it. Crowding into the fluorescent- lit passage with two men from across the way and an old man or two from the top floor, I saw a man lying on the hall tiles.

He lived in the building; I had said hello to him and his girlfriend on the stairway He sometimes played the guitar out on the fire escape. His face was deadly blue.The girlfriend, a redhead, was screaming, trying to get him to sit up “No, honey,” I said to her “The oxygen has to go to his brain. We need to lie him down.” He slid to the floor, his head banging lightly, and I started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”Is he on any drugs or something?” asked a heavy-set, moustached man whose dogs were trying to run out into the hall.”Yeah,” she answered, as I put my mouth on his and heard the air rasp into his lungs “He’s on heroin.” His stubble scratched my lips His pulse was slowing The redhead kept saying it must be his asthma. “Don’t be nervous.” I hang up, and am overwhelmed with fear.What exactly am I afraid of?Last autumn I was sitting in my apartment drinking beer and reading poetry when a woman started to scream in my hallway. It won’t be a problem.”What about me? What if I throw up on your floor?” I ask.”That’s OK with me,” he says cheerfully. “I do not readily believe,” he wrote, “that any man, having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium, will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol …”Jeff phones to tell me he’s got me some to try He says he’ll do it with me He can do it casually, he swears.

I crave for mental exaltation.” I think, too, of Samuel Coleridge and “Kubla Khan”, and of Thomas De Quincey, whose narcotic hallucinations fuelled Confessions of an English Opium- Eater, the most interesting autobiography of the 19th century. I forget the junkie kid lolling on a corner in the East Village, hair spiked like Johnny Rotten, patting a sad-looking dog and holding a cup of change Instead, I think of heroin’s other history. I think of Sherlock Holmes alternating cocaine and morphine, heroin’s chemical cousin. Holmes injects in pursuit of the life of the mind: “Give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere,” he tells Watson “I can dispense then with artificial stimulants But I abhor the dull routine of existence. Talking to him, I forget the history of lives cut short by overdose, rock stars and runaways lying choking and bloated on bathroom floors. It seems to stem from a hunger for grand experience, an illicit, expanded understanding. Still, he says he definitely has a dependence, and suffered withdrawal each time he stopped Pain in his fingers.