Erdedy waits for the pot delivery
He had tried to stop smoking marijuana maybe 70 or 80 times before. Before this woman knew him. She did not know he had tried to stop. He always lasted a week, or two weeks, or maybe two days, and then he'd think and decide to have some in his home one more last time. One last final time he'd search out someone new, someone he hadn't already told that he had to stop smoking dope and please under no circumstances should they procure him any dope. […] because each time he got some he knew this time had to be the last time, and so told them, asked them, as a favor, never to get him any more, ever.
Context
The book's first addict-portrait, and the addiction loop laid out as plain arithmetic: 70 or 80 revolutions of "one more last time," each turn of the wheel needing a fresh supplier who hasn't heard the speech yet. Erdedy is sitting motionless in his living room waiting for a woman who said she'd come, and the prose itself runs in the habitual tense — the tense of things that happen over and over.