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mindless addicts. The distinction in our minds was absolute.
    Anyway, while the mother is waiting for the water to heat, she decides to fix up. When the water is nice and warm she pops her six-month-old in the pan, only unfortunately she forgets to turn off the burner. I think it was this simple domestic detail which got to us. It was the kind of thing we were doing all the time. None of us would forget the night Larry set the kitchen on fire when he got the munchies and started to fry up some food, then switched trips and wandered off leaving the pan on the stove. But there were five of us, and at least one usually had his head straight enough to keep track of what was going on. The woman in New York wasn’t so lucky. She was alone, and she’d miscalculated the dose when she fixed up. Result, she passed out and the baby was boiled alive.
    OK, it was a real bummer, whichever way you looked at it, but any other time we’d have had a moment of silence and moved on. These things happen, life’s a bitch, gotta keep on truckin’. But that evening, for some reason, we all got hung up on this thing. Maybe the grotesque nature of the tragedy had something to do with it. People getting boiled alive sounded like something from the Middle Ages, or some wacko late movie scenario. Plus the details were hard to work out. How big was the pan? Couldn’t the kid climb out? How much water was there? Why didn’t it drown? How long did it take to die?
    The only way to exorcize all this was to find someone or something to blame. For the TV people there was no problem, of course. They blamed the mother, and the dealers who had supplied her habit. But even though we disapproved of heroin, and despised anyone who let themselves become enslaved to it, we couldn’t get off the hook that easily. We’d all been equally out of it at one time or another, and although dropping when alone was against our code, who was to say what we might have done if we’d had kids to raise and poverty to contend with and nothing else to ease the pain? There was no way we were buying into the newscasters’ smug, judgmental line.
    But if the mother wasn’t to blame, who was? For a while it looked like society was going to take the rap. If the woman had been brought up in a caring, supportive, communal environment, like the indigenous peoples before the white man fucked everything up, this would never have happened. There would have been plenty of old people with time on their hands who were only too glad to look after chores like bathing babies, leaving the mother free to go out and get royally laid by a selection of superstuds like us. Plus she’d be living in harmony with nature, so she wouldn’t need drugs or other artificial stimuli to combat the colonialization of her mind by the propaganda machine of late-capitalist consumerism, right?
    We had all more or less agreed on this solution when Sam put a new spin on the whole thing by bringing up the religious angle. This was a personal thing with him. He’d never talked much about his fundamentalist background until a couple of months earlier, when his mother was killed by an intruder at her home in Milwaukee. They caught the guy right away, a local loser who’d already done time for break-ins. Another conviction would send him to the pen for ten to fifteen, so he’d taken a gun along and, as guns will, it had gone off.
    Sam had never given the impression of having much time for his parents. When he talked about them at all it was as a big joke, a couple of hicks given to quoting the “good book” and dwelling at great length on the moral failings of others, so we were surprised to see how hard he was hit by his mother’s death. His father had succumbed to cancer five years earlier, and his mother had begged Sam to attend the University of Wisconsin so as to be near her. He had been equally determined to keep his distance, but when the old woman died in such a shockingly gratuitous way he naturally felt