My son has a Dr. Seuss book called I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today. My dead brother’s ex-girlfriend has a single monkey on her back called heroin. Her story might be called “I’m Trying to Lick a Monkey in 28 Days.” Gail* is in a 28-day detox program. Detoxification. For an addict this means getting clean, quitting the alcohol, cocaine, heroin, or even aspirins they think they can’t live without.
Gail grins, “Well, she was taking 80 a day. You should see her, she goes crazy every time she sees an aspirin commercial on TV.”
Bob died almost ten years ago and it occurs to me that I may be visiting Gail now out of guilt over not having kept in touch with her since then. I found out that she was in detox when word filtered down through the family grapevine that she had really hit bottom. She’s been in two major car accidents–in the last one she almost lost an arm and the paramedics had to use the Jaws of Life to get her out. She doesn’t have a job or a place to live. Plus, she’s a heroin addict.
He says she’d be pissed to find him doing this, would probably throw him out. And he doesn’t have anywhere else to go just yet because he only got out of jail this morning. He split up with Gail long before, so he can’t go back to her. My mother hasn’t even seen him because she couldn’t get off work. When you clean offices in downtown Chicago you know better than to fool around with your job–there’s someone right in back of you who’ll take it. Since my mother’s husband died she’s supported us by working nearly around the clock–at night she cleans offices, during the day she works as a seamstress in a laundry, and on the weekend she waitresses.
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Through the dirty glass of the coffee table, beyond the pop-coffee-beer rings I see an Etch a Sketch on the floor that must belong to his girlfriend’s kid. I haven’t seen one of those in a long time. I had one when I was seven or eight and Bob, who was ten years older, used to sit me on his lap and we’d draw on it together, each of us taking one knob. He was the only one who played with me. My other brother was 12 years older and already into job and school and my mother worked all the time and I never knew my father.
I hated it when he had to go back to school in the fall. He went to a Catholic grammar school, Saint Columba, right down the block from where we lived in Hegewisch. My earliest memories are of waiting in our fenced yard for him to come home after school. He’d turn the corner down the street smiling and pulling his necktie off as he went.
I set the Etch a Sketch down and look at Bob. He’s got his arm stretched straight out in front of him, the syringe in his other hand. I stand up. He eyes me for a split second, then readies the needle.
