SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM WINDOW

For the next 15 minutes, the caller and I bantered back and forth, to the amusement of the audience, as I attempted to explain to him that Ruby was not in at the moment. The conversation took every surreal turn it could, discussing the dilemma of the addict housed in my attic, and everybody thought I was making it up. When it was all said and done, several people congratulated me for such a clever monologue. They didn't really believe it when I told them that there was an actual caller on the other end.

You see, when my new room mate Ruby hadn't shown up for nearly 24 hours -- knowing what I know about her condition -- I got in touch with the last number on the caller I.D. to find out what was up - or down, as it turned out. Well, he'd given her a large sum of money for favors she promised him, waited patiently for her to score a hundred dollars worth of smack and return, then nestled up to her vacant body as she lay there under the throes of death all night, deriving what pleasure he could from a temporarily vacated corpse.

"Who the fuck are you, anyway. you're not her father!" was one of his observations to me over the phone. At another point during the conversation he told me that she had a problem and his only interest was in trying to help her check into a treatment center - after he was through drugging and fucking her, of course.

Finally, when he heard the guitarist chiming in behind me, he wanted to know if I was playing a guitar: "Hey dude, I play guitar. maybe I can come over some time and jam!" What did this guy think was going on - that I was sitting in an empty room somewhere playing with myself while talking to him on the phone?

Ah, the heroin run -- the running away from sanity and security, the run from anyone who might actually love and care for you. On the surface it seems like the addict wants none of it, but deep down inside there is a tremendous longing playing itself out; a dangerous test of love that daily puts her own life at stake. Over and over the addict forces these incredible trials on her family too, demanding that they repeatedly prove their love for her, by following one more time into the pits of hell to save her. So far they've always arrived in time. They can sense her love calling them. She knows they care.

She is a legal 21, free to make her own choices, even about dying - an adult in all the usual meanings. But she is emotionally a frightened little girl whose first action upon arriving here was to notify her brother that she was "safe and secure" in an artist's studio in Chicago. Naturally, she knew brother would tell mother, and from that day on the family was in touch with me, telling me about the very real tragedy they referred to occasionally by the name of Ruby.

Oh she was a junkie all right. She was adept at fooling most of the people all of the time, as the saying goes. Heroin would be the last thing you would think she was capable of single handedly injecting into her still youthful and pliable veins, this very average looking girl-next-door. What ordinary person on this planet - in this room -- has even seen anything like what I'm talking about - cooking up drugs in a spoon and shooting them up inside a living, bleeding vein? I'm not takking about a movie simulation. We all tend to believe whatever disguise someone puts out there for us to believe. In a kind of mutual conspiracy we overlook the obvious little discrepancies and white lies in others that we are all guilty of in ourselves. But a real live junkie with intact camouflage in our midst?

On first glance it was obvious that she was medicated. indeed, she was using a legal prescription for the popular new affliction, bipolarism. But because of the obvious dependency, it took me an extra day to see through her American girl disguise to the real addiction. So when her mother contacted me on the second day, with a long rambling e-mail about the family's standing and accomplishment, polishing it off with the most bizarre summation in the final paragraph - "Ruby is a heroin addict" - I had already figured it out. I was never a junkie, in the tradional meaning of the word, but I had previously punctured my own veins on many occasions, getting down and dirty with every known drug in the pharmacopoeia. It was never really about trying to get down with the use of narcotics, but just trying to get back up.

Still, I was glad to have her mother's confirmation for a condition I could only guess at. I always hate to guess. But like the Beatles said she would, she came in through the bathroom window, protected by a silver spoon. Now she sucks her thumb and wonders. and occasionally I'd see her there, late at night sitting on the commode with the door wide open and grinning, shitting I guess. Because she did most of her pissing in her room, in a huge plastic bowl she grabbed from the kitchen, the one I usually put the potato chips in for the Sunday night coffeehouse and soiree.

A real solitary individual, a true junkie, she also bent and burned and otherwise ruined a dozen of the matching new spoons I'd recently bought at Walgreen's to make the coffee stirring consistent on Sundays. This chick was a bitch that had no concern for another man's property!

She also kept one of the large stainless steel pots up there in the attic room, to bathe in, usually just her feet and her crotch. She wanted her feet looking good and not smelling because she'd lucked out and gotten some work performing for a foot fetishist. The crotch thing was just necessary maintenance; her main income was from fucking and she didn't want her cunt smelling from cumulative encounters. As her only friend of the moment, she used to have me accompany her to Walgreen's for foot powder and deodorants, panty hose and stockings.

Although Ruby arrived broke and bumming cigarettes, on the second day she handed me $600 towards rent - the easiest six hundred dollars I ever made or acquired, although for her it was one evening and one afternoon's work, and that left her with $400 for her own "needs." The next morning, broke again, she borrowed ten dollars from me for cab fare -- and returned after lunch with another equally bizarre sum of money and her daily dose.

But too, it was absolutely the most difficult $600 I ever made: babysitting a run-away addict until her mother got the impulse to catch a plane and drag her back home. The artist's life is not an easy one, after all. She wasn't any good as a model, she wasn't forthcoming as a friend, and she wasn't even capable of being a lover. But I have learned that an artist is able to adjust to even these inadequacies in life.

So it was understood from the start that she wouldn't have a key to the place, and we also both understood that she was not allowed to have anyone show up at the door. This wasn't an agreement spoken or written; it was just grasped. And to illustrate her grasp of the situation, the occasional car that arrived telephoned ahead and waited discreetly down the block in the Walgreen's lot.

All I offered Ruby in exchange for her money -- which was not even necessary for her to give to me; she offered it without my asking -- was an oasis of sorts, a place to rest up between runs. A safe place where she didn't have to watch over her shoulder for danger, a safe place where nobody was coming in to fuck with her. And that was a blessing she had not expected, being used to sleazy hotels, fools walking in with weapons drawn in the middle of the night, her possessions stolen, her body bruised and beaten back into the street every second day. For some miraculous reason she had stumbled safely into my home.

But in spite of the serenity she might have had here, the junkie's life is a door to door affair, from car door to pickup, from one sex agency to the next, from hustler and pimp, from dealer to trick. Just this rigor of scoring was exhausting enough to put her out for the count, without the actual dugs coursing though her veins. In the entire eight days she crashed only twice, for twelve hours each time, not even able to undress. The rest of the week it was a series of small consecutive nods between phone calls and car rides and condoms. Oh yeah, and trips to the corner Walgreen's.

So I never fucked her and I never photographed her, except for one solemn snapshot from a disposable camera. But I felt like I had. I'm talking about the feeling one gets when a lover leaves home for the last time, never to return. When she left I had that aching feeling like someone I loved had gone - I saw it reflected in her mother's heart as she took over the torch from me. Oh yeah, her mother showed up from Pittsburgh right on time. She followed her hunches and climbed on the airplane. "You can't believe the cheap motels and neighborhoods I've had to go in to pick up my daughter." Oh yes I can, mom!

And thank God for such a strong mother, for she has apparently rescued her daughter many times before. It was more than a rescue though. As I say, this was a strong woman who cared enough about her daughter to come get her and save her from her own destruction. Another girl I know, Alice, pretends to use heroin - snorts it once in a while at a party - and said to me: "Her mother ought to bug off and let Ruby live her own life."

Well, I would be the first to agree, but for the fact that Ruby's first communication with me was to use the phone to call her family and set up the inevitable rescue. "Live her own life" did you say? Die her own death is what she's doing. Left to her childish devices this young girl will self-destruct soon -- with a little help from her junkie tricks. Her mother and I understood this, and yes, even Ruby was privy to the truth, the way she appealed to the both of us to intervene.

But how close to salvation is Ruby? Of all the places in the universe, she ended up here at my studio, a world in which she was given the permission to contact her mom for the help she knows she needs, and my cooperation in facilitating the call. Fortunately, her mother responded quickly - by premonition, she told me - and rushed the kid back to treatment.

It is a sad story: either Ruby is going to die real soon stranded down some dark street that her mom won't be able to locate in time - or this dear child is going to have to wake up and finally shout Hallelujah! She's going to have to acknowledge one day that her mother's love was the one thing that intervened in her behalf, the one prayer that was able to work its way into her otherwise clouded awareness and alter it, in spite of the vultures who have sucked away at her soul for so long.

But even if her mother's cries do not save Ruby, I have the uncanny feeling that they are the very same cries and prayers that somehow retroactively saved me in my drug abandonment of so many years ago. Somehow, some twenty one years ago, during the original birth pangs that mother felt delivering Ruby, her future prayers contributed to my eventual recovery back there in the past. If there is such a thing as past and present...

I have no doubt that her mother's tears are being cried retroactively throughout time, not just for me but for you as well. They are validated and doing their work eternally. Time knows no boundaries and I am glad to have finally verified the resurrected Jesus - who is really the blood in Ruby's mother's veins - my savior and hers, still working and alive in this moment. And as soon as some miracle bleeds off the tainted blood of Circe that infests Ruby's circulation, she too will know what my words are for.

Yet for Ruby it may not happen any time soon. When I spoke with her mother a short week later, I was told that following the awkward trip back to Pittsburgh Ruby skipped out the back door of the treatment facility the next morning, only to be found in an alley three days later. Then back to the hospital and.