The waiting-for-the-delivery set piece

pivotal · YDAU (undated day), active addiction

• When: YDAU, one afternoon-into-evening of active addiction; UNDATED within the year (predates his Ennet House residency)
• What: Erdedy sits in his condo living room waiting for a woman — a Cambridge theater set-designer he'd met at a Wedekind-festival design session and slept with twice — who has promised to bring him 200 grams of high-resin marijuana for $1250. He mostly keeps off the phone for fear of tying up the line at the moment she calls (one give-in call reaches only her answering device; he leaves no message, not wanting her to know "how much now he felt like he needed it"), and instead sits through the whole light-shifting afternoon watching a shiny-cased insect go in and out of a hole in the steel girder his audio shelving fits into, feeling obscurely "similar to the insect." He runs the full compulsion checklist — clearing his calendar, changing his answering-machine message, laying in soda and Oreos and frosting, buying a new bong at Bogart's — and plans to "cure himself by excess": smoke the entire 200 grams in four days as a self-punishing "penance and behavior-modification regimen" so repulsive he'll never want it again. The scene ends with his telephone and his door buzzer both sounding at once and Erdedy frozen splay-legged between them, "without a thought in his head."