friendless: the onset of true Withdrawal
until a period in October when Lolasister went down with hepatitis-G and the supply of heroin dried horribly up and the only people even copping enough to chip were people in a position to dash here and there to great beastly lengths under an open public-access sky and no friend, no matter how dear or indebted, could afford to cop for another.
Context
The economic and social preconditions of hitting the Bottom, itemized: a supply drought, a sick proxy, and the atomizing logic of scarcity in which "no friend... could afford to cop for another." The scene is careful that Poor Tony does not choose to Withdraw — he is driven to it by the collapse of every human relation into pure transaction, "wholly friend- and connectionless." The Bottom is not a moral event but the terminus of a market that has stripped a person of everyone.