by Luke Davies
It was the Holy Grail. In my tiny 50 mil measuring beaker there was enough liquid heroin—sometimes rich gold, sometimes dark orange, sometimes pale yellow—to make a few friends happy, to make a little money, and to get Candy and me comfortably through the next twenty-four hours.
“Okay, O’Brien,” I’d say. “Let’s say twenty-five bucks for the three packets. Give us twenty bucks more and I’ll do you a nice shot.”
He’d give me twenty dollars and his pick. I’d dip the pick in my jar and pull back to .3. On a good cook, .3 would generally do someone more than adequately. Candy and I had heaps more, of course, but that’s both the privilege of free enterprise and the necessity of a big habit.
O’Brien had veins you could drive a truck through and was always stoned in about six seconds. He never even used a tourniquet. I’d open new syringes and fill them for me and Candy to .8 or .9. Just enough room to jack back.
O’Brien was one of those people who seemed to be affected by heroin as if it were speed. He became a Mexican fucking jumping bean on the gear. Up and down, up and down, couldn’t sit still, scratching his balls and his nose, yap yap yap yap yap.
I was getting pretty fucked-up veins, and the traces of chemicals probably didn’t help. I mean, I wasn’t Bayer or Hoechst, and sometimes I was in a bit of a hurry, so I often had trouble getting my cargo on board. It didn’t help to have O’Brien zipping around the room like a pinball. You needed to be calm when veins were hard to find.
But O’Brien was lovable, so it wasn’t really hard for Candy and me to put up with it. Even so, after the cooking had been happening for a while, it would sometimes take a long time to locate a vein. I’d get pretty wound up in that kind of situation. When I found myself feeling nostalgic for the early days of veins, I knew that things were really getting screwed up.
In the early days I took veins for granted. Veins were a means to an end, in the long run.
One night, for example, way back in Sydney, way back in the beginning, Candy and Lex and I had scored. Lex was drinking a can of Fanta. I’d opened the foil package and poured the dope onto the glass surface of the coffee table. It was a nice little mound of white powder, good dope from T-Bar. I don’t know what happened exactly. Lex moved to get more comfortable on the couch. His knee hit the edge of the coffee table, which shuddered once and jumped six inches.
The can of Fanta tipped. Before we could grab it, a drop or two had spilled out. Of course it landed on the heroin. The Fanta fizzed and the mound of heroin dissolved.
There was no decision process. The important thing was the heroin. We injected our bright orange carbonated hits. Lex laughed and sang the jingle: “When You’re Having Fun You’re Having Fanta.”
It was all easy back then. There were the veins that stuck out along my arms like ridges. Where are the veins of yesteryear? Then there were veins a bit deeper beneath the skin. But after a few years, by the time Candy and I were burning up, finding a vein became like a geological survey.
It had started slowly. I’d begun in the crook of the elbow, of course, like everybody else. I had a good while there, a year or two in the general vicinity. Gradually I moved toward the wrist. When I got too close to the wrist I went around the other side of the arm.
When that method came too close to the wrist again, I changed arms. I wrote with my left hand, I masturbated with my right, but necessity is the mother of invention and I was completely ambidextrous in the matter of syringes.
In the early years this chase around the arms wasn’t too bad, because I could always get a round off within a few minutes. It was the bigger delays that began to cause grief, and the delays began to get even bigger around the time of the cooking. I suppose you could pinpoint two reasons for this.
Firstly, once we started cooking, we went from having one or two or three or five shots a day to ten or fifteen or twenty. So frequency was a factor.
But secondly, there’s a chemical problem. Casper taught me a method of converting codeine to heroin that took about two hours. A proper extraction and drying of the heroin to powder form removed trace impurities but took another couple of hours. Why bother with that when you were just going to add water anyway and turn it back to the liquid you had two hours earlier?
The price, according to Casper, was minute traces of acetic anhydride left in the heroin. So we corroded our veins with acid. And one day, who knows, we might die of some mutant fucking cancer. But what a sweet Yellow Jesus it was.
I’d swing my arms around and around to get the circulation going. I’d dip my wrists in sinks of hot water. I’d prod and pierce until my arms were caked with dried trickles. Sometimes the syringe would become completely clotted with blood. Then I’d just have to give myself an intramuscular injection in the shoulder, and calm down, and start looking for a vein with a freshly loaded fit.
We started buying boxes of a hundred syringes, then five boxes at a time. I had to use a new pick every blast.
I moved down to my feet and ankles. It was virgin territory, gave me some breathing space for a while. There are certain places that hurt more than others, and the tops of the feet near the toes aren’t so good.
I was getting tiny veins and they would roll. I’d jack back on the syringe and get the thinnest suggestion of a trickle of blood. I figured after half an hour it would have to do. But as I began to push in, the skin would rise up in a ball, and I knew I was watching my heroin spread out under my flesh. There are many ways to describe frustration; this is a particularly good one.
In winter my feet would swell up. Shoes became too small for me, like when I was a kid and still growing. Eventually my feet were so fucked and swollen, I moved back up my body, to the northern latitudes. But available veins were getting scarcer.
I felt I was standing naked and cold in the middle of a vast forest at night, and wolves were moving in. I could hear my shallow, panicked breath above their baying.
I started making do with the insides of my wrists, the palms of my hands, the flesh between my fingers and around my knuckles. One week I found a good vein running along the back of the thumb. I was as happy as Larry for the four or five days it lasted.
But nothing could be relied on, and I felt that the world was a treacherous place, or that life, at least, was a treacherous thing. The way our bodies work. Candy shared these feelings, I’m sure. It’s a common slant on the world when you’re in love.
Everything was scarred. That was a way of viewing our lives too, though of course we never did.
The cooking was heaven and then it was hell. It was probably around the time I left my knuckles and went back down to the balls of my feet that Candy said, “We really ought to knock this on the head, go on methadone, you know, do something.”
But the big problem for me was not so much the veins. The real bummer was that we were using all this dope, more than we’d ever had, and yet it seemed we were feeling it less and less. As our habits rocketed up to new heights, so did our tolerance. Only when we had virtually unlimited dope did we finally get an idea of what chasing your tail means. Cooking gave us distance from the chaos, just a fraction. I stood back from my life and saw with horror that I’d just repeated the same day three thousand times. I vowed to myself that one of these years, sooner rather than later, I was going to stop.
In the meantime I developed the four-tourniquet method. At the end of each cook, when I could sit down at last, ready to hit up, I’d pull my four ties from under the couch. I’d take off my shoes and socks and roll my jeans up to the knees. One tie for each ankle and one for each arm, above the elbow. I’d pull them tight and begin my search.
The drill would be, say, two minutes left arm, two minutes left foot, two minutes right foot, two minutes right arm. Running my fingers softly over my skin, feeling for ridges that were rarely there. Like reading a page of Braille worn down by the years: the most popular book in the Braille school library. Shining a lamp in close, searching for a trace of blue on my white skin.
There were good days and bad days. Sometimes I’d even find a vein on the first cycle.
One night some equipment broke during a cook. This was cause for alarm. I’d just got the morphine up when the inner metal sleeve of the aspirator snapped off. It had finally corroded, from continual high-pressure use. The instant it happened, the flow of the vacuum was reversed. Water gushed into the 500 mil round-bottomed flask containing the morphine. The morph dissolved instantly, despite my lunge to disconnect the flask.
There were three regulars waiting in the lounge room, as well as Candy. I came out holding the flask, now three-quarters filled with the morphine solution. It was the usual strength, but spread through about 350 syringes’ worth of water. Being unfamiliar with these kinds of disasters, I wasn’t even sure if the stuff would work, or if somehow the morphine had been lost forever. It was the early days of cooking. I’d been getting better, but I was still essentially just a monkey with a recipe book.
I explained the dilemma. O’Brien, with the Eveready veins, volunteered to be guinea pig. I poured some of the liquid into a glass. He had two glasses in front of him: one with what we hoped was the dope, and one with water, for cleaning his fit.
He filled the syringe and hit up. Trains and tunnels. Bang. I watched jealously.
“Anything?” I asked.
He looked toward the ceiling. “Nothing.”
He cleaned his syringe and squirted it onto the carpet. He filled it again with the liquid and hit up. Candy and Victor and Yolanda and I sat mesmerized, waiting.
O’Brien’s veins were beautiful. He swiftly but patiently ran through his cycle: fill, inject, clean, fill, inject, clean. The same hole every time. After the eleventh hit he stopped for a moment. He looked to the ceiling again. He licked his lips.
“I think I’m feeling something,” he said.
There was a palpable buzz of excitement in the room.
“Let’s see your eyes,” Candy said. She leaned forward and peered into his pupils.
“Look!” she said. “They’re going pinned!”
“Shit, that’s good,” O’Brien said. “I can really feel it now, I’m getting stoned. Shit that’s a good fucking cook.”
He started to droop forward and scratch his nose.
Then it was a stampede. No one cared about the hygiene anymore. Everyone just started dipping their syringes into the main flask. Of course I knew I couldn’t possibly find all those veins, one after the other. I didn’t even bother trying. I gave myself fifteen musculars in a row. I spread them around on both shoulders, and Candy kindly gave me a few in the buttocks. I didn’t get the intravenous rush, but after about ten or fifteen minutes it was the same as any nice hit. Everyone sat around the lounge room spouting the warm crap that always came with mission accomplished.
One day, near the end, I got a small reprieve. It lasted a few months, until we finally went on methadone and threw away the lab in a moment of mad enthusiasm for an imagined future. I was soaping myself under the shower when I felt a vein on my stomach. I could see it too: thick and purple under my skin. I suppose by now I was so entirely fat-free that new, untapped veins could begin to appear. It was the femoral vein. It would be my friend for a while. I felt a degree of relief to rediscover easy access, like the good old early days. But all relief was temporary now, and time, or the sense of it, continued to shrink.
I’d mix up and fill the syringe. I’d have to stand in a shaft of sunlight, or sideways to a lamp. I’d drop my pants. The femoral vein cast a faint ridge of shadow from the light source. The vein seemed to originate somewhere beneath my rib cage, and ran down the left side of my stomach before disappearing into my pubic hair and groin.
It was a very comfortable position, to be able to operate the syringe with two hands. I’d cup it in the palm of my left hand with the needle facing back up toward me. I’d place the back of my left hand in the palm of my right hand, then rest my right hand on the flat of my stomach. I’d slide into the skin at a shallow angle and feel that discernible give, that change in texture, as the needle pushed through the skin and muscle and broke through into the cavernous cylinder of the femoral vein. Then push the plunger, whack it away, aloha Steve and Danno.
Veins are a kind of map, and maps are the best way to chart the way things change. What I’m really charting here is a kind of decay. The vein situation is no great exception. There really did come a point when we knew that our bodies were not in good order. That much was clear. As for our souls, well, we couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
Perhaps I could have gone on with the femoral vein forever. It certainly seemed nice and big. But I think in the end, with all those holes, you kind of do something. It’s like you have a container to hold your soul, and you turn it into a colander. So much of you leaks out, until there’s barely anything left. And you just keep lowering your standards, to deal with the barely anything.
You just leak away. And if you’re lucky, then one night in the silence, in the deep heart of the dark, you’ll hear the distant trickling of the blood in your veins. A weary world of rivers, hauling their pain through the dark heat. The heart like a tom-tom, beating the message that time is running out. You’ll lie there strangely alert. You’ll actually feel the inside of your body, which is your soul, or where your soul is, and a great sadness will engulf you. And from the sadness an itch might begin, the itch of desire for change.
PROBLEMS WITH
DETACHABLE HEADS: 2
The itch of desire for change. Even farce, in the end, seemed to be pointing toward the idea of change. Farcical situations, like the Carl’s Neck Situation. By the time I was Scientist of the Year, I wasn’t expecting to come across too many people with a vein problem like mine. Then I met Carl, and was reminded that there’s always somebody worse off than you.
I grew to feel a deep sense of camaraderie with Carl in the few short weeks that he was in our lives, between stints at Pentridge Prison. I’d do a nice cook and everyone would hit up, whack whack whack whack, and get relaxed and chatty, and there’d be Carl and me fretting and prodding for half an hour, sometimes forty-five minutes.
Carl was wiry and pale, with red hair and red freckles and lots of tattoos. He was Yolanda’s sometime boyfriend. Candy had met Yolanda in a brothel a couple of years earlier, where they’d often gone for the big cash kill and done doubles together, the blonde and the brunette.
Candy and O’Brien and Yolanda or whoever would be scratching their noses and smoking cigarettes in that languorous way you do when the smack comes on. They’d be sitting there going “mmmm” and complimenting me on my cook while I was the Grand Chef with the blocked esophagus, unable to taste his own food. So Carl was special, like a vein buddy in the brotherhood of suffering.
We could swap stories and hints. We could be like a support group. My name’s Carl and I’ve got no veins. I’ve had no veins for four years now. Welcome Carl. You’ve come to the right place.
Around this time I’d been to see Doctor Feelgood for my regular backup kit visit, and in his waiting room I’d read an old National Geographic with a cover story about opium. It was one of those comprehensive vacuous bullshit things that National Geographic does, a sort of Disney version of the drug world.
There was a photo of a black woman leaning in close to a mirror and puffing her cheeks out and sticking a syringe into her neck. The caption called her a “New York City heroin addict” and explained that she was puffing her cheeks out to try and get a vein up on her neck.
I was struck by this novel idea. I thought of Carl, but of course I thought mostly of myself. I ripped out the page and put it in my wallet. That night, or maybe the next night, Carl was around.
Candy and I had been using way too much of our smack—even with the luxury of cooking, our need, as always, continued to outstrip our means—and not selling much, not keeping the turnover going.
It was becoming pretty rare for Candy to work. I almost felt like the man of the house, supplier of smack and other essent
ial nutrients. But we still basically lived hand-to-mouth, always going for lots of hammer rather than lots of money. The odd cash injection was sometimes necessary to pay the rent or bills. One night Candy went off to work a shift so we could stock up on some expensive chemicals that were about to run out.
I was alone and chilling out in front of the TV when Carl dropped by, cashed up and hanging out, at about two A.M. I’d had a big hit at midnight and then settled in to watch the late movie, They Died with Their Boots On, starring Errol Flynn as General Custer. Candy was due home about five.
Of course, I had my morning blast, and Candy’s too, hidden away, and of course I felt some sympathy for Carl, begging me all snivelly and wide-eyed for a taste, but personal principles were personal principles and I would never give my morning taste to my dying grandmother, or even to Candy. Some things you had to feel secure about. Anything could go wrong.
“Haven’t you got anything, mate? Just a smidge?”
“Nothing. Not a thing,” I said. “I was going to cook when we woke up.”
“If you could cook now,” he pleaded, “I’ll owe you big-time.”
“Mate, it’s after two already. Can’t you just go home and sleep and when you wake up the dope’ll be ready?”
“I won’t be able to sleep. You know that.”
There were fine beads of sweat all over his desperate, sad face.
More dope, I thought. Why fucking not? I already had enough packets of Panadeine capsules for the next cook.
“All right,” I sighed. “I’ll do a cook.”
His shoulders sagged in relief and his face lit up. It looked pathetic. I’d been there many times myself.
“But it’s a fucking hassle, Carl,” I continued sternly. “So here’s the deal. You give me eighty bucks for two nice tastes. And you come back later today with seven large packets, and after that cook I’ll give you another taste to pay for the packets.”