Tag: Lost Weekend

It may not be immediately evident based on his earlier appearances in these stories but Justin Two, or J2K, was a man of taste and culture. You couldn’t really watch movies on the internet in 2001 and if Netflix had started mailing DVDs to people we weren’t in on it. You had to go to a shop called Lost Weekend to rent the hard to find auteur stuff unless the library had bought it. J2K was really into the movies that Warren Oates had made with Monte Hellman, especially a brutal piece called Cockfighter.

I just watched it again with my wife because it’s free with ads on the Fox-owned Tubi and it went pretty much how I remembered it. All of Oates’ characters from the ‘70s embody this deeply broken but self sufficient form of masculinity. Like a car that would never pass smog, makes horrible noise and is unsafe for every other motorist on the freeway but technically speaking the engine does run. Something in that spoke to Justin, I had never met his father but I know he was an IV cocaine addict during Justin’s childhood and most likely a less than ideal caregiver.

There was a concept he would talk about a lot called “heroin quiche”. Basically he wanted to take the populist appeal and social acceptability of pot brownies and translate it into something a little more elitist and idiosyncratic for heroin. Heroin would taste absolutely vile in a pastry setting but the lack of oral bioavailability would be even less forgivable. Morphine comes in pills or low potency teas and resins from the actual poppy so there are reasons to swallow it. The same is by no means true for any regional variety of heroin.

What J2K dreamed up instead was taking a canoe trip down the Chicago River to cop dope at Cabrini–Green. The infamous housing project was within walking distance of the Red House but accessing it by foot, bike or motor vehicle was practically begging for a police shakedown. Squad cars watched the ingress and egress points and made their quotas like it was a grunion run. J2K’s idea was actually brilliant while embodying some of the lovable zaniness usually reserved for alcohol, marijuana and psychedelic drug stories even if it wasn’t practical enough for daily use.

I had been to the Green once or twice before with Justin when all of the West Side spots were mysteriously empty and we decided to risk it. On my first visit I had heard somebody yelling “loose squares” and nervously asked Justin if he was talking about us. I thought it meant “there’s a couple of nerdy white guys running loose, somebody come rob them or sell them drugs!” J2K laughed and explained it just meant that they were selling individual cigarettes. That should show you how green I was and he wasn’t – not that it ends up being too significant in this particular story.

We drove up North and found a canoe rental spot somewhere around Roger’s Park or somewhere similar. For whatever reason the spot that rented out the canoes wasn’t right on the River. We had to load it onto the roof rack and drive a little ways until we got to a Park with a boat ramp. The canoe was light and made of aluminum so we didn’t really need the ramp but the Park was accessible by transit for Justin to come back for his White Bronco, that part was important.

Spring must have just started happening because we had a dead raccoon named Chauncey in our freezer who we had found frozen on our block of Armitage. I feel like this canoe trip was around the time of the Red House party where we used Chauncey’s stiff but surprisingly high torque corpse for a variation on “spin the bottle”. It wasn’t full on Summer yet because the beginning of Summer was when Matt and I had the pretend “feud” where he cut Chauncey’s head off and left it on my bed.

The whole thing started when me and Francois had decided to piss into an empty Miller High Life bottle then twist the cap back on and put it back in the fridge. Francois had made the essential innovation of adding a splash of real beer to the top so it would still appear fizzy. John had actually been the victim of that particular prank. Francois saw him grab the last actual beer then look around for watching eyes and greedily slide the cold piss bottle under his 19th Century style cape. He took a sip when the real one ran out and asked J2K if he thought it tasted weird. Justin took a big swallow and immediately spit it out in cognizant disgust:

“That’s piss!”

After this rousing success Francois and I decided to escalate. We mixed up a big bowl of chocolate pudding in the kitchen while loudly and conspicuously yelling that nobody else could have any and it was just for us. I’m not even going to write what we put in it because if you haven’t already guessed you’ve got much larger problems than a plot hole and should probably talk to a professional. Anyway it was Matt who fell for the bait this time.

He ran into the kitchen and stole the pudding from us and then he had a grievance.

Strictly speaking this grievance should have been with me and Francois but I don’t think Matt felt like he knew Francois well enough for this type of juvenile feuding. I came home to some different feces resting on my pillow on one of the four or five plates we actually had in the Red House. I ran into the Pigeon Coop and threw the plate of feces where Matt and his boyfriend Joe were sleeping. Soon after I woke up to Matt standing over me holding the recently severed and suddenly room temperature head of Chauncey the raccoon.

I snatched it up howling in indignation and chased Matt down to some isolated corner of the house. He quickly placated me by proposing that we keep the feud going solely as a pretense for getting some of our other housemates caught up in the “splash zone” of collateral damage. It had pretty much run it’s course at that point anyway. We had covered the main bodily secretions, the acts of eating and drinking and the decapitation of wildlife. The only space to really escalate would be tricking somebody into intravenously injecting something unsavory and we were all doing that several times a week anyway.

Back in the canoe drifting lazily through the Northern reaches of the Chicago River the weather was absolutely beautiful. All of my future excursions on the River took place South of the loop and the water was always polluted to the point that weirs would contain an assortment of regular street garbage or thousands of unused white tampons. I’m not sure if this is because these trips took place at least six years later or those parts of the River were always more polluted or some combination of the two.

In 2001 the water was clean and sparkling with midday sunlight. We passed ducks and Canadian Geese, we glimpsed large fish through the water and passed a Great Blue Heron who was scanning the shallows in patient concentration. There weren’t really any other moving crafts on this part of the River but the East Bank occasionally had small decks and sets of stairs leading up into the trees and wooden boats not much bigger than the one we were sitting in. I thought about the fact that I had probably biked, walked or ridden in a car or bus on whatever street was opposite the row of houses that these decks would be attached to.

One of them had a row of colored tiki lanterns that immediately and continues to remind me of a full page illustration toward the back of an early issue of Eightball on the topic of hedonism.

We had stocked up on snacks for our voyage at some kind of dollar store. Pretty much just the rectangular packs of cheese and peanut butter flavored cracker sandwiches. There was a short lived and probably unsuccessful line of G.I. Joe branded artificial juice beverages that came packaged in army green plastic bottles made to look like military canteens. I think they were already on the kind of clearance that allowed us to buy several for a dollar. We had tied a rope around the plastic bag full of them and were dragging it in the water behind us to keep them cold.

The River started to get wider and more industrial as we got closer to Cabrini-Green. There are a few landmarks around that section of North Avenue that I can’t strictly remember if they came before or after our landfall so I’ll describe them here. The rusted out old cantilevered drawbridge that sits above the old Green Dolphin Street jazz club. The chunk of cement called Goose Island that was already the home of a popular brewery. This bar on North Avenue that I believe was already shut down with a big River deck decorated with mannequins, junk sculpture faces and signs that said “LOOK!”

We tied up under a bridge and pulled the canoe out of sight where nobody could see it. This put us in a position to climb through a broken fence and access the housing project without crossing one of the major streets that would have attracted police attention. Justin had friends in one of the high residential towers so we made our way up the terrifying cement staircases with missing light bulbs. Justin’s friend was of mixed Black and Irish descent – he wore his red hair in the twin French Braids that signified “OG Gang Banger” at that point in time. He used to be a big time drug dealer but now him and his old lady were just dope fiends.

They weren’t trapping, she grabbed our money and went somewhere else in the towers with the promise that she knew the best thing going.

This was my first time in this kind of apartment and there were a few cultural signifiers I was seeing for the first time. The coffee can full of congealed beige bacon grease. Tiny pieces of devotional art – mass produced images of adult white Jesus or a more Eastern European looking Madonna and Child. Some of the walls are made of absurdly thin particle board and some of them are the cement walls of the tower itself – stenciled with letters and numbers and looking like they could withstand a grenade blast.

Somebody had a country cousin visiting who went by the name “Brother”. He didn’t have a shirt on and was missing most of the incisors on both his upper and lower jaws. He was extremely impressed with the fact that we had arrived via boat. He said that he wouldn’t be caught dead in one himself because he had never learned to swim. He really wanted to teach us about some lesser known anatomical curiosities concerning the common chicken.

According to Brother a chicken’s blood moves not through veins but rather through similar but less efficient structures he referred to as “ducts”. To add to the confusion he generally pronounced this word as if he was saying “ducks”. Apparently this made chickens nearly immune to any form of toxin that is introduced via the circulatory system:

“A chicken got ducks so if a rattlesnake bites it don’t die!”

Around this time Justin’s friend came back with our bags of heroin. I wasn’t actually physically dependent or in any sort of withdrawal at this time but an addiction to heroin basically boils down to being addicted to the positive feelings that come with pulling off some light problem solving. We had approached the problem of acquiring drugs in a unique and clever fashion on this particular day so our brains were especially generous when it came time to hand out the reward chemicals. Whatever went in our veins after that was icing on the cake.

She had also bought some crack for herself and started to smoke it. Me and Justin tried to hassle her for a tiny hit and she told us to fuck off and if we wanted it we should have bought our own.

We floated down the stairs, into our canoe and down the River. There was a paddle for each of us but we didn’t have to use them much even before we were nodding out. Now the late afternoon hours were reaching forward into the kind of long shadows that would be quietly stretched out into darkness. The River was changing, the streets and trains and highways were filling up with evening commuters.

The light that had danced across the water’s surface on the earlier phases of our journey was leaving – but ever so gently and not all at once.

There was a metal bridge in the Northern Loop that had the metal grates that make a vibrating sound every time a car drives over them. From the water’s edge a tall staircase allowed us to carry the canoe all the way up to street level. I want to say that our canoe just drifted into the bottom of that staircase and came to a stop on it’s own but that’s not the way it happened at all. We knew where we were going.

I sat at the top of the stairs and waited with the canoe while Justin took trains and buses all the way back to the little Park on the North Side where he had left his White Bronco. This probably took a fairly long time but I wouldn’t have noticed. It was my first year ever of IV drug use – I was a parking meter filled with so many quarters you could build a little house. It was completely dark when he finally pulled up.

Justin had heard somewhere that you should put large heavy rocks into the downriver nose of the canoe to help make sure that it wouldn’t drift off course. We had done that but by then we had both forgotten about it. When we flipped the canoe onto his roof rack the rock fell out and made a spiderweb crack in his otherwise perfect windshield. I laughed because I was an asshole and because Justin Two was just born for physical comedy in the same way as Chris Farley or Buster Keaton.

We went home – back to the Red House where Francois lived in a tent in the living room and opened the flap during the day to play RBI Baseball on Nintendo with people and Jamie lent me his ID to go to shows I wasn’t twenty one yet for until I got it taken away and Andy made things for Art School out of condoms and rosaries and syringes and Robyn would have sex with me on the bathroom sink while yelling through the door to John that that wasn’t what we were doing and Kiki lived behind a curtain on a section of the second floor with a sink and me and Justin lived in the basement and the basement was haunted.