We meet in a three-story brownstone on Chicago's Near North Side. The red brick buildings, side-to-side, give the street its drabness, more than the small patches of spotty lawns that cold February day. A grammar school is at one end of the block, a corner grocery at the other.  Further down, a bar, pizza place, shoe store and a second-hand shop hug the corners.  Enough two and three-flat buildings have been converted into condos to make the area stylish, although it is still a ‘fringe’ neighborhood. Your neighbors protested when your drug group moved in. 

   I sit in the living room on a plush couch, waiting for Jack to finish work. He introduces me to you and others who come and go while a stereo blasts and a counselor in his mid-twenties fiddles with a Quaker Oats box, wires, pliers and plugs.  He calls to the back room then pulls a switch. Everyone in the living room is silent while a faint noise travels down the hallway, through the dining room and into the living room.  Rock ‘n roll music fills the air.  The young people are delighted and amazed.  You say the controls might catch fire because the Quaker Oats box is cardboard. The counselor insists it is fine and finished. 

   A girl sits next to me and accuses the staff of being drug moguls: no will give her medication for her menstrual pain. Another person is angry with a third. . Another young man has jaundice, his skin yellow, but he had a pass for the night, is over 21, and plans to go drinking.   

   Later, I ask Jack why the young girl isn't given medication. 

    “No medication will help,” he says.  “She should see a doctor, but refuses.” 

   “But menstrual pains are real!” 

   “That's the least of her problems, Zola. It's probably her whole reproductive system from too many drugs and too much sex when too young.” I raise an eyebrow.  “She's 16,” he says.  “She may need a hysterectomy.” 

   Jack knows these stories well because he, like the residents at the House, has been a state ward, shuttled from one foster home to another, while adults collect the state check, beat the foster kids, favor their own, molest each other's relatives and whoever is around, drink the food money and twist every childhood feeling into perversion.  At 17, in 1965, Jack escaped by joining the Marines and serving 11 months in Vietnam. 

   I wait for him to finish work another night and talk with Irene.  She is 15, but a vibrancy in her matures her.  She is an out-patient, like you.  Earlier, she was hysterical, begging the staff to let her stay the night rather than send her home to her hated father. The staff called an emergency meeting and most everyone is in the back room while she and I talk in the living room. I adore her silver and gold bracelets, peacock earrings, gemstone necklace. She tells me she makes most of them and describes the process. 

   For weeks, I visit this madhouse, a state polydrug clinic.  It is like stepping into another universe, people with a thousand demons.  Jack explains how some staff members live in the House like he does while a few others have apartments.  The staff have known each other from years back when they did dope together.  Jack had flipped out on STP, an intense dose of LSD, for three days. Kicapoo State Park Rock Festival. His friends baby-sat him because he lost all control over his physical body while his mind blanked out.  All he can recall is seeing in black and white and hearing someone repeat his name. His friends, including the ex-heroin junkie who has founded the House, brought him back from that trip only after six months of care.  Jack tells me the first step in his healing.   

   They had to get him to sleep.  They help him under a cold shower for as long as possible.  The cold water conflicted with his over-heated body and re-adjusted his thermostat.  He was then able to sleep for days.  

    Most of the staff is under 30 and many of their problems stem from their old friendships and hostilities. It is as if the entire drug culture, including those working for a cure, experience the world within a thick, distorting veil. No one seems to be cured in these new Dante hells because both residents and counselors inflict pain on each other. Everyone struggles to free themselves from their drugs and return to a normal world of 1972 with Nixon and Vietnam trailing their dead across prime time television.  

   I ask Jack why Irene, the young girl I was talking with, was upset. 

   We are eating dinner in a small Italian restaurant, a bottle of wine on the red and white checkered table. He looks at me in surprise, “She was on acid. Couldn't you tell?” 

   “No,” I say. “She talked, which is more than I can do when tripping.” 

   “She's a state ward. Since she fights with her sister at home, violently, and can't get along with her father, the Court made her a ward. The House is responsible for her.” 

   He wants to forget his job while with me, but succumbs to my curiosity. 

    “She was just released from a mental hospital.  Her parents are divorcing and since they're  upper middle-class, she was acting out…..” 

   “They hospitalized her during their divorce?” 

    He shrugs. “This is all classified information. We're not allowed to discuss their pasts. It's in their files. Let's change the subject.” 
   
   Waiting for Jack again at the House, Irene and I sit on the couch in the living room, and watch people go by.  She tells me she spent more than a year in the teenage ward of a hospital, with waterbeds and a great stereo system.  She received electric shock treatments, prescriptions drugs and little therapy.  She didn't use illegal drugs until she was released.  She smiles and although I am seven years older, I feel an immediate intimacy.  Years later, when in college, she confides she had trouble remembering, and wondered if the electric shock treatments had impaired her. I told her they didn't ruin her, they must made learning more difficult, but she would be fine if she were patient with herself.  My own mother had used the loss of memory from electric shock treatment to conveniently forget things I wanted to know.  

                            December 1971 

    I want to live with Jack, but he is indecisive. I receive a letter from Shawn in Spokane, leave Chicago, and return six weeks later, hitchhiking through the city on my way to college in Carbondale, on 100% borrowed money.  When I stay at Irene’s home, she tells me I should see Jack, that he misses me. 

    Her eyes are wide, her brown hair with frosted ends is stylish so it looks naturally wild and artsy. She is the woman I would like to be, with a trust fund and an ability to work with her hands in crafts. “Jack loves you,” she says. 

   “I know that,” I shrug and look away. I have had enough ‘love’ in Spokane.  

   “Isn't that a good reason to see him?” 

    “No. When I wanted to live with him, he didn't want me.  He said nothing about it for two weeks. So I left him for Shawn.” 

    “Jack still cares.  See him.” 

    I shove Shawn's German backpack by the staircase at the house.  Jack greets me with his strong hug and I am reminded how much I love how our bodies match in height and weight, both short and slim.  We sit on the couch.  He rubs my leg, his brown eyes clear and powerful, his thin body radiating the heat I find so lovely in bed. I am leaving the next day, to start school on borrowed money, and he asks me to live with him. 

   He repeats the question as I sit speechless. I finally mutter, “I should be more cautious than I've been in the past.” 

    “You should,” he agrees, grins, his palm resting on my knee. 

    I laugh, “Yes!”  

   You, Richard, are now an out-patient. Your drug wounds were not as extensive as Jack's. You had been to college at Northern Illinois and thus much of your drug consumption, like mine, has had the intellectual vein that city drug use lacks. City drug use seems a rapid descent into primal emotions of evil and destruction with city pollution clinging to each inhalation.  College drug use has ivy halls, open air, recorded histories of initiation rites expounded by Castanada, Leary and Huxley.  You fell from grace in college with your drugs, and returned home only to be tossed into the streets, drugs your Achilles’ heel. 

   Jack introduces us at the House, telling me you will be willing for all three of us to live together in your new apartment on Newport Street, next to Wrigley Field Baseball Park where the Cubs play.  The February cold wind blows against us as we walk to the “L”.  You wear a jaunty cap over your tight, curly black hair. 

    “Another resident said it wasn't a good idea, us three living together,” you say. 

    “Why?” I ask and shove my hands into my pockets. 

    “They say Jack is crazy.” 

   I laugh. “If that's bothering you, Richard, you should be more worried about me!  I'm the one with the crazy reputation. You're 23, I'm 22, and he's 25.  We're old enough to be adults with each other and live together as friends.” 

   “They said it wasn't a good idea, for a couple to live with another man.” 

    I laugh again, place my gloved hand through your arm.   

  “That's silly. People say a lot of things and you don't believe them, do you?” You shake your head “No.”   

   “Besides, I like you. You seem intelligent and I'm crazy about Jack, so I don't see any problems, sexually. Do you?” 

    “Not really,” you say and show me the huge two bedroom apartment on the third, top floor.  Sleeping over on a mattress in the living room the first night, I wake in shock.  I shake Jack awake.  “What is that? Something has smashed into the building! Didn't you hear it?”    

   “It's just the subway.  You'll get used to it.”  In the morning, I learn not only is the “L” Belmont station outside our windows, but it is the Belmont transfer station:  More trains, more crash-sounds, more noise, day in and day out.  

   My problems with Jack are not sexual although sex rolls between our bellies, our thoughts, our threesome meals, arguments, terrors and betrayals. He works unusual hours: night shifts, split shifts, some weekends, often sleeping over at the House while you and I paint the apartment. He appears, helps paint for awhile, then disappears for his job, or for a beer at the corner bar.  And I am unemployed.