Memorial Day weekend in Washington. Half the people I know are out of town. The rest are out shopping. Or barbecuing. Or doing normal, all-American things.

Not I.

While DC is crawling with red-white-and-blue touristas, I am simply very blue. I pace back and forth in my apartment, climbing the walls because I want dope.

I walk to the kitchen, go back thirty feet to the bedroom, stare at the answering machine as though I blacked out for a moment and missed a call, and retrace my footsteps to the kitchen.

And so on. And so forth.

I’ve grown weary of keeping my on-again, off-again dope habit at arms length. And so, I am cultivating a local connection that will allow me to do dope on demand.

At first, doing dope was a trans-Atlantic thing; I did heroin when I was in Zurich, a city to which I began traveling more often than one normally would without the need to restock the Swiss bank account with briefcases full of cash.

Then, I started bringing back significant quantities of dope to the United States from Switzerland; I would pack capsules full of Prozac full of tan Afghani heroin copped in Zurich and slip through customs with it, betting that the odds were not great that my Prozac would be opened and sent to the lab for analysis.

(I credit the can-do attitude fostered by Prozac with giving me the cojones and intestinal fortitude to bring seven and eight grams of heroin at a time into the United States.)

Eventually, I began scoring dope on the streets of Harlem, because Zurich was too many time zones and international frontiers away to make it a practical place to procure the fuel that feeds a dope habit; I learned the Amtrak schedule between New York Penn Station and Washington Union Station by heart.

And, now, I am setting myself up to score dope in DC.

This is what they mean by evolution. Not like Darwin intended, but an evolution nonetheless.

The new DC dope connection has come courtesy of my most significant ex-girlfriend who works for the International Monetary Fund. The ex- hooked me up with a junkie chick who lives with a co-worker.

This began when the ex- casually told me stories about the co-worker’s junkie chick roommate. None of the roommates know what to do about this person because she’s a junkie and things keep disappearing from the house. She spends all her time nodding out on the sofa and, they think, she’s even selling blowjobs to raise dope money because the her dope habit costs way more than she makes as a paralegal at a DC law firm.

My ex-, with whom I still very much get along, is clueless about the process her stories set in motion.

I am dying to know a DC junkie chick. A DC dope connection will save me a lot of running back and forth to New York.

At first, the ex- who works at the IMF says no way.

It’s bad enough that I’m doing heroin in Europe and, even, bringing it back to the U.S., she says, but there is no way she will aid and abet my heroin use. We’re no longer boyfriend and girlfriend, she adds, so she doesn’t have much leverage to stop me, but heroin is something I’m going to have to do on my own.

“Heroin is evil,” she says.

She knows this for a fact because I turned her on to some smack at lunch one day; she spent the afternoon nodding out at her computer at the IMF in between trips to the bathroom to puke.

Still, every time I talk to the ex- or see the ex-, I engage her in a conversation about the junkie chick and hit her up for the phone number.

Ex-: “So, what are you working on?”

Me: “Not much. I really, really, really want that girl’s number.”

Ex-: “I’m not going to do that. How’s work?”

Me: “Please? You still like me, right?”

Ex-: “That’s why I won’t do it. You want me to come over so we can, you know, have sex?”

Me: “That would be great, but I really want the phone number. For Christ’s sake, I’ll do anything you want.”

She makes the connection for me after weeks of incessant and unrelenting pestering.

The junkie chick, Lara, is my new best friend. She’s my entrée into a network of dope fiends and dealers in the nation’s capital.

I’ve hit pay dirt.

Lara’s dealer, who I’ve met, is an ex-welterweight boxer who goes by Smooth. He says he got the name during his boxing days, as in, people call him Smooth because he was such a smooth fighter. Lara says people call him Smooth because he’s so full of shit and very good at it.

Smooth is fronting for another guy I haven’t met who fronts for yet another guy that nobody has met. Lara is, in turn, trying to front for Smooth where I’m concerned.

That’s how things go when everybody’s getting their cut.

In any case, Smooth is out of town.

Which leaves Lara.

On Memorial Day.

It’s 90 degrees outside with humidity so high you can cut the air with a knife.

I am pacing back and forth in my Dupont Circle digs, alternating between blasting rocking Husker Du tunes and depressing Bob Mould songs and staring at Headline News with the sound off.

And calling Lara repeatedly.

I reach her around three.

“You have any dope?” I say.

Lara laughs miserably and says, “No. I ran out.”

“Anybody around?” I say.

“No. It sucks.”

Lara is tall and thin as a rail. She has short brown hair, wears glasses and looks more like a DC office drone than a junkie. We have things in common. I’m a reporter. Her father was an editor at the Washington Post during Watergate, so she’s a prominent journalist’s junkie daughter.

Call us occupants of an obscure subbasement of the Fourth Estate.

“Can we score some dope and some rock?” I say.

“I know some guys on V Street, but I don’t have any money.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll buy.”

“Really?”

“We’ll get whatever and hang out. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds great.”

Lara says she’ll be over in a few.

I go out and hit the ATM down the street and the liquor store around the corner for a six-pack of Pacifico. I practically dance back to my apartment building.

Lara is at my door within the hour.

We head out and catch a cab.

The cabbie shoots us a weird look when Lara gives him the address, which is not in a nice part of town.

When we get there, Lara looks down the street.

“Anything wrong?” I say.

“No,” she says. “I’m making sure the people I want to see are here and that the people I don’t want to mess with aren’t.”

“So everything’s cool?”

“Yeah, no problem.”

I give her two hundred bucks for four bags of dope and the balance in rock.

She tells me to wait for her in front of a Safeway around the corner and disappears down the street. I’m leaning on a shopping cart when she reappears ten minutes later.

“Let’s go,” she says.

“You have anything to smoke with?” I say.

“We can get stems at a liquor store a couple of blocks from here.”

We walk to the liquor store and go inside.

Staff and merchandise are behind quarter-inch thick bulletproof Plexiglas—my favorite kind of retail outlet.

Nobody blinks when I ask for two glass stems, some Chore Boy—copper scouring pads that are used for more than cleaning pots and pans—and two lighters.

Lara wants to go to her parents place. They’ve got a town house north of Dupont Circle, and they’re at the beach for the weekend. We can hang out there. Besides, she says, she needs to stop in for a couple of things.

We hop in a cab. In no time, we’re back in a better part of town and lounging on the deck behind Lara’s parents’ place.

It is a very nice home.

We make fast work of snorting up a twenty-five dollar bag of dope. New York bags cost ten bucks. DC bags cost more than twice as much for about the same amount of drugs.

This is the result of the Law of the Inverse Relationship Between Price and Quality of the Shit and Distance from New York City, which says that the further you are from New York, the lower the quality of the dope and the higher the price.

But, who cares?

Shit is shit and, at least, we’ve got some shit.

Then, we break out the rock and fix our respective stems, packing the ends with small pieces of copper Chore Boy.

We start smoking.

“I need to get some stuff from the house,” Lara eventually announces. “But I don’t have the keys.”

“You forget them?”

“My parents changed the locks.”

“Should we be here?”

If the parents don’t want their daughter in the house, do they want her hanging out at the house?

Junkies have extra family dynamics to deal with that normal people don’t.

“It’s cool,” she says. “I can hang out anytime as long as I don’t go in the house.”

“Why can’t you go in the house?”

“They accused me of taking some shit from the house. You know how it is.”

Indeed. Robbing the house can strain family ties.

“That sucks,” I say.

“But I know how to get in anyway,” she says.

Lara gets up from the chaise lounge.

“Where you going?” I say.

“I need to get a couple of things from inside.”

She points to a small window about nine feet off the ground.

“What about the alarm?” I say.

“The one on that window doesn’t work. I need you to help me up there.”

I look around.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“It’s my house. I’ll come down and let you in. We can hang inside for a while.”

“Why don’t we go back to my place?”

“Relax,” she says. “Nobody will know.”

Lara is standing below the window.

“Give me a boost,” she says. “It’ll only take a second.”

One way or another, she’s getting into the house.

I walk up behind her and lock my hands together so she can use me as a stepladder.

Moments later, she’s opening the window and squeezing inside.

I’ve never participated in a break-in before.

I remind myself that it’s not really breaking in.

It’s Lara’s house.

In a manner of speaking.

Robert Guskind has been writing for a long time. An award-winning Washington-based journalist
and contributor to major national magazines and newspapers, he now lives very close to Manhattan,
where he continues to write, shoot photographs and work on a book based on his travels and
experiences as a reporter and formerly disreputable dope fiend. He is all better now. He is a regular
monthly contributor to Cherrybleeds and had just launched Gowanus Lounge a new blog that has
nothing to do with either addiction or recovery. He hopes to make Gowanus Lounge a full-fledged
literary website in the very near future.