after i wrote that entry about how i had no desire to do heroin... i did it the next day, at a rest stop in idaho. i kept skipping enough days in between that i didn't get strung out. we cooked dope in the car in many scenic locations, by rivers, mountains, on the edge of a cliff. i hand him each thing when he needs it and rest my arm on the stick shift to shoot up.

he was going to quit when his dope from portland ran out, but he gave in and we bought some in a park in salt lake. then we drove down to moab and he went through withdrawal in the desert, where the drive to slc was too long to consider going back to buy some. when it got really bad he gave in and got a motel room for one night instead of camping, and i read of human bondage while he screamed and pounded the bed and hallucinated his dad in the room.

i'm not really a desert person.. i prefer forests, mountains, places with lots of tall trees and living things. but i know how much donna loves the desert and i'm always trying to understand the things my friends love... so i tried to cultivate an appreciation for the desert. it is beautiful. i took 10 rolls of film, some out the car window.

i asked c. whether he liked the forest or desert more, and he said desert... high desert forest is his favorite, with pinion and juniper trees. he said "pinion is by far my favorite tree." i have a lot of respect for people's favorite things, especially favorite trees, because i know how much my favorite trees mean to me. i asked him what pinions look like (this was before we got to the desert) and while driving he did an interpretive charade of a twisted, gnarled tree, and when we got to the pinion forests i saw what he meant.

pinions are short, dry, stubby pine trees that grow extremely slowly. i asked him what he liked about them and he said "they're so old and they have so much character." in the virgin desert forests the biggest, oldest ones can be 1000 years old, but they're only a little taller than me. whenever we saw a "big" one by the side of the road he would point it out to me excitedly, saying, "that must be 700 years old!" i told him to stop when he saw a good one so i could take pictures of it. looking at things through a camera helps me understand them. it intrigues me when someone's favorite is so different from mine... i like huge trees, he likes old trees.

on the 2nd day of withdrawal he was feeling better enough to drive so we went to hot springs in monroe, utah. the springs come out of red rock and are diverted into antique bathtubs stuck right in the side of the mountain. we soaked in the springs for a long time. c. claims that the minerals "suck the poison" out of him, and he was feeling a lot better, when some local teenagers came to soak in the springs. they got to talking, and some high school girl told him that she knew where to get heroin. he came back to our cabin to tell me, and we spent an hour or so trying to find the elusive "james," a local 19 year old who had somehow developed a habit in the absolute middle of nowhere. none of his friends could help us find him, but they said he would be putting in fence posts for a farmer the next day. c. actually drove around monroe the next morning and asked 5 or 6 people putting in fences if they knew james, to no avail.

when we left the desert, it had been 3 days, so heroin was technically out of his system, and he felt justified to do it again. our first stop in salt lake was the sketchy park, and then to fred meyer to get needles (we threw out all our clean needles in the desert). i watched him shoot up in the fred meyer parking garage, and the combination of strong dope and not doing it for 3 days almost killed him. for an hour we sat in the car while i slapped his face and yelled at him to keep him awake, trying not to attract the attention of employees gathering shopping carts. he wouldn't stay conscious and i didn't know what to do, since i can't drive his stick shift car. i asked him at least 100 times if i could call one of his friends to pick us up, but he was too fucked up to understand what i was saying, so i took his cellphone and started calling people. no one was home. he started to get better, and he called the friend we were supposed to stay with, and told him in a slurred voice how great our trip was. i took the phone and told the friend what was going on. by this time c. was a little more coherent so we waited another 20 minutes until he could drive. i still had to restrain him from calling his mother to tell her he loved her.