Digging the Vein
Page 1
DIGGING THE VEIN
Tony O’Neill
Originally published by Contemporary Press
This edition published by Vicon Editions / Smashwords
Copyright © 2013 Tony O’Neill
All Rights Reserved
http://www.tonyoneill.net
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. However if you want to share it with someone, go right ahead. Just use your common sense. If you have the money, buy it. It’s less than five bucks so you ain’t gonna break the bank. Writing is a tough game and there’s a reason so many of us in the Shakespeare Squadron get hung up on drugs, off ourselves, go crazy, etc: being broke all the time will do that to you. I didn’t get an advance from Contemporary Press when they published Digging the Vein back in ’06. They were an indie. A real indie as in one-hundred percent independent. It was kinda amazing they got their books into stores at all considering how broke and drunk everyone was most of the time. Remember this was in 2006, just before e-publishing got respectable enough to tip the balance a little and give the smaller guys a fighting chance.
CP’s office was a bar off of 14th Street were they met for drinks after putting in a full day at their straight gigs. They were really good to me. I started off as their intern and slipped the manuscript into their ‘to read’ pile. When they said they wanted to put out Digging I had no illusions I was going to get rich. Just having a book in print seemed like enough. They put all their money into printing the book and making it look cool. They even paid for my train ticket to go do a reading in Montreal, which I couldn’t afford at the time. Even though there was no money to be had they bought that ticket for me because they believed in the book. The CP crew were - and are - 100% thoroughbred Johnsons, i.e. good people...
Digging the Vein’s launch party was at the much-missed The Holiday Cocktail Lounge on St Marks Place. Jay Brida gave me a five-dollar bill for the jukebox, we stuck up some posters, and everybody got smashed. I never made a penny off the book in conventional terms but it acted as a calling card, which eventually lead to a deal with Harper Perennial for Down and Out on Murder Mile. I’ll always be grateful for the leg-up that the CP crew gave me. I tell this story because I want you to understand that Digging the Vein never made anybody rich, myself included. It was my first book. Not a perfect book by any means, more like a cry of pain than a love song. Living as a writer for these past ten years I’m broke more often than not. I’ve got a family; so be honest with yourself: if you can spare the four bucks then pay for the book. If you can’t, well shit, I’m not gonna lecture you. I stole plenty of stuff when I was strung out so it’d be a little rich for me to start coming on like the copyright police at this late point in game. But remember this: unless you’re Stephen King or JK Rowling it’s tough out there for a writer. I’ve got more books in me, but I gotta eat and my kid needs shoes. This isn’t a hobby. I don’t have the ace-in –the-hole of my parents paying my bills. If I don’t sell books, I don't eat. Try and support artists. You don’t try and fuck Ronald McDonald out of his five dollars when you get a Big Mac with coke, so don’t be a dick and do it to me.
That’s it, lecture over. Go read the fucking book already.
DIGGING ‘DIGGING’:
“Digging the Vein will appeal to all Tony O’Neill fans – of which I’m one. It’s another pitch-dark classic.”
Irvine Welsh
“Digging the Vein is mining diamonds for the crown of the King of Hell.
John Giorno
“In Digging the Vein O'Neill does something quite special: he simply returns literature to its guttural, all too human, roots. He doesn't mystify his words; there is no higher, spiritual, cryptic language or elongated metaphor. Digging the Vein is a human fiction, a book ostensibly about misplacement and love, a book that is true in every sense of the word, penetrating into the deepest, darkest recesses of human existence without fuss, arrogance and obfuscation. There is no need for Tony O'Neill to try and dazzle us with his prose styling…a weight that seems to loom large in the forefront of many writers’ mind… he knows he will be heard, that every word counts, because he experienced each painstaking syllable. Digging the Vein is a book that, although steeped in its genre's traditions [think Burroughs’ Junky here], transcends this very same genre [think Burroughs’ Junky here also]. It is first and foremost a work of Literature - and I can honestly say this without my toes curling in disagreement.”
Lee Rourke
“A noir to stand up with Dante and Bukowski… what separates O’Neill from more fashionable junkie peers is a reservoir of self-awareness and not an ounce of self-pity. His evocation of the haunted landscapes of Los Angeles resounds with the gnarled grace of vintage Tom Waits…”
The Guardian
“Reading it I could taste the LA smog. Here pain comes at you like a Mack truck – relentless and unavoidable. Don’t blink… keep reading.”
Dan Fante
“This book will take you inside the mind, heart, spoon, pipe and needle of a junkie. Tony has cooked down the life of an addict and injected it into these pages. It brought me back to the street, back to the hell of craving and the bliss of getting as fix.”
Noah Levine
“It’s a great book… an existential look at non-existence. Instead of feeling disgusted or revolted by this dark vision of the world, you just want to keep reading.”
Word Riot
“It’s not very often that a writer’s words can punch builder’s hands through the paper, and throttle the lifeblood out of you. But Tony’s words do just that. His experiences are so powerful and emotional, and full of fucking heart that it pales everybody else’s work into insignificance. Tony O’Neill will be remembered as one of Northern Britain’s great young hopes in years to come. When Monica Ali, Dan Brown, and Zadie Smith are nothing but footnotes in the history of writing, O'Neill’s work will still be standing tall and proud; a testimony to life in the gutter in the late nineties. Digging The Vein isn’t a story of redemption, there’s no happy ending, its just pure, unadulterated Brutalism.”
Straight From the Fridge
CONTENTS
Digging “Digging”
Thank You
Also by Tony O’Neill
Foreword by James Frey
On Digging by Dejan Gacond and Kit Brown
The Art of Digging – Covers 2006-2014
Hollywood August 2000
Part One – Before
The Weekend Begins
The Wayward
Saturday, Joan and Why I Hate the English In Los Angeles
All There’s Left To Do
It’s Not You It’s Me
Here Comes Success
Goodbye Christiane
Genesis
Near Misses (Part One)
Gimmie Shelter
Fucked Up, Nevada
Part Two – Alvarado and 6th Blues
Southpaw
The Electric Kool-Aid Speedball Test
Nothing Shocking
Miracle Downtown
Communing With God
The Sweet Smell of Oblivion
Near Misses (Part Two)
Detox
Near Misses (Part Three)
Rehabilitation
Corpus Delicti
Ghost Town
Leaving Los Angeles
London Again
After
Bonus Tracks: B-sides, Rarities and Outtakes: Digging the Tunes
THANK YOU:
Contemporary Press for opening a hell of an important door for me by putting this book out back in ‘06.
Dan Fante: thanks for the advice and the inspiration.
Digging the Vein is dedicated to all the
junkies-whores-thieves-malcontents-fuckups-burnouts-psychos & drug dealers:
You are the last truly free men and women on this stinking cop and politician-ridden planet.
It’s time for everybody to just say no to the war on drugs.
ALSO BY TONY O’NEILL:
Down and Out on Murder Mile
Sick City
Black Neon
Songs From the Shooting Gallery
Seizure Wet Dreams
Notre Dame du Vide
Dirty Hits: Stories 2003-2013
Neon Angel (with Cherie Currie)
Hero of the Underground (with Jason Peter)
FOREWORD
James Frey
Originally published in the French edition “Le Bleu sur les Veines” published Feb 2013 by 13e Note Editions, translated by Annie-France Mistral
In his preface to DIGGING THE VEIN, Tony O'Neill thanks "All the junkies, thieves, whores, malcontents, fuck-ups, burnouts, psychos, and drug dealers." By way of this introduction, I want to say to Tony, "You're welcome." As a former addict, a writer and above all else, a reader, I think I have read most - or at least a great deal - of the junkie memoirs and junkie novels out there. Some writers, like William S Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, and Irvine Welsh are undeniably brilliant. Others are insufferable. Tony’s first novel, the book you are holding in your hands, definitely belongs in the former group.
DIGGING THE VEIN is Tony’s roman à clef based on his years as a heroin addict in Los Angeles, and in it he does something as well as any writer has ever done. He gets it Right. Without a single false note for dramatic effect, without one syllable of pretense, DIGGING THE VEIN lays bare a vividly real picture of the junkie's life in all its desperate and depressing glory. His nameless narrator dispenses with the formalities in what is almost an aside: “I was in a band, before…” and then, without drawing breath, plunges us deep into The Nightmare.
The story goes that Tony wrote this some of this material while he was deep in the madness of his drug days finally finishing the book while withdrawing from a virulent combination of methadone, heroin and crack cocaine. There is certainly some drugged-out, hallucinatory prose to be found in these pages. What comes across strongest though, is an unsentimental view of the life of the Addict and a knack for conjuring the sights, smells and the feel of the nocturnal world of the junkie.
However Tony's real skill, and it is something that I can relate to my own work, is in capturing the mindset of The Addict. The junkie death wish, which can seem so unfathomable to those on the outside looking in, is rendered here in perfect detail. His refusal to buy into the expected trajectory of the Heroin Confession is rare and refreshing. People in AA would probably describe Tony – and myself, I suppose - as an example of “self-will run riot”. When he chants, “No more AA. No more NA. No more mind control. No more being a victim, no more looking for reasons in childhood, in God, in anything but what exists HERE. No more admitting I am powerless…” he is saying something that is almost heresy in America in this recovery-centric day and age. He is an addict who is denying his addiction to heroin is a “disease” at all.
If you’re reading this, then you probably heard about that little incident between Oprah Winfrey and I a few years ago. I will say that I was blessed and cursed by the Oprah Effect. The endorsement of America’s most powerful tastemaker helped to make me a household name. But of course you will also know about the other side of that story and the public flagellation I endured.
Now that the dust has settled I can honestly say that the Oprah Effect was a good thing. It gave me a ready-made audience for my future books, and writers want nothing so much as readers. Tony O’Neill is doing it a different way, a less public way, book-by-book, reader by reader. I hope through the notoriety of my name, created by Oprah and the media, I can maybe help Tony get more readers more quickly. Call it the Oprah Collateral Damage Effect. In blurbing his third novel SICK CITY (2010) I wrote something to the effect that I believed Tony O'Neill may be this generations Jim Thompson. When looking at the sum total of his (now) eight books and imagining his prolific future, I suspect Tony will likely grow way past my comparison. Hold tight. It’s going to be an interesting ride.
James Frey, September 2010
On Digging
by Dejan Gacond
Images by Kit Brown
Originally published as the afterword to the French edition “Le Bleu sur les Veines” published Feb 2013 by 13e Note Editions, translated by Annie-France Mistral
« I fucked up the shot, blew out a vein in my goddamned wrist in a burning explosion of pain, and only felt half the effect that I should have. “ (p. 82)*
« In a few moments the most intense flash of pleasure and fear was over and my body settled somewhat, still buzzing and pinging with the intensity of methamphetamine, and I lay back on the floor muttering, « Oh god, that feels so fucking good », and we both lay there giggling and laughing. Before – like ballet – we undressed without acknowledging it, and fucked in that brutal, endless crystal meth way, cock and pussy hammering against each other, yelling and rolling about on the floor, not coming but just stopping in an exhausted heap before shooting up again.” (p. 71)*
According to Lester Bangs one of the best songs about drug addiction is Hands of Doom from Black Sabbath compared to the stupid sentimentalism of The Needle and the Damage Done… Neil Young’s sensibility is not too bad but Black Sabbath’s song represents the absolute despair floating around the dope’s ritual. More than a Pink Floyd album, Paranoid blows into the anguish of addiction even further than Lou Reed’s stories maybe… the gloomy British suburbs, beginning of the seventies; it’s raining and the sound of the industrial production is tremendous. Within this sad jumble, the youth’s answer will constitute in a dreary way out into disillusion…
The frozen echoes of unsatisfied needs…
Mind is full of pleasure, your body’s looking ill
To you it’s shallow leisure, so drop the acid pill
Hands is Doom is a most carnal song, the closest musical equivalent to the organic deficiency caused by dope; a clinical analysis, a Tony O’Neill’s book;
Digging the Vein …
What kind of relationship do we have with the necessity of getting smashed? It’s emergency and the vile need of doing it again… A strange and unverifiable routine, an indubitable tension reflecting and going through this incandescent book.
«At some point I woke up out of heroin, and instead of becoming confronted by my living situation, my broken marriage, and my precarious financial situation, I was instead absolutely sure that all of these things were No Longer Relevant to my existence. All that mattered was that I got some drugs to help me through the day.” (p. 66)*
All along those devastating sentences, words caracole in a furious and angry rhythm. The fragments of life described in the text express the difficulty of the endured experience. Trying to give life sickness a break! It’s the pure madness of man fighting against the demons of his own extenuation. Struggling against the angel, against the demon… the annihilation of a world, the deconstruction of a reality the narrator thought he could still perceive. Like the flabby evaporation of pale necessities… junkies walking like stray dogs through the inhuman city of angels, terrified by the misfortunes of big cities. Here; into those screaming pages, a bunch of characters usually left behind are occupying a dismal front stage. Los Angeles and its outcasts!! A few lines are enough for Tony O’Neill to snatch his reader in a world of freaks, of ODs and strange deals, crackheads musicians and ruined love affairs, organisms distressed by addiction, in a world of sordid hotels and dirty apartments… Under the shadow of stars and palm trees, desolation is crawling.
“The heroin I bought last night was so-so at best, but I dumped a lot into my wake up shot and managed to find a decent vein in my ankle. The dope flooded my bloodstream and I could feel normality returning: my aching muscles relaxed, the ice unthawed around my bones, my jangling nerves subsisted. I
looked at my watch; it was 6:30 a. m. Another perfect fucking day had begun.” (p. 90)*
The need of escape painted in a black veil of irony, some situations which exacerbate our ridiculous behaviors… In this book, irony is sometimes waiting with the narrator an absent dealer in a dark street corner and sometimes locked in a fast food joint’s toilets. Drug addicts’ everyday life considered as a crystallization of the human behavior the volatile wandering of conscience… the unceasing reproducibility of those self-consuming instants… A Connaissance par les gouffres (knowledge through the abyss ?) that the author tries to pace up and down. In his never-ending dope quest, in the palpable void of his sad routine, through the frictions between the lack and the excesses, the street junky represents the entire humanity. We are all lunatics seems to say O’Neill. Some do drugs, some others pray or work… so what?
“”Where is it going to end ?” I asked him.
“Death” he told me “for all of us. For the whole city. The world man. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you smell it? It’s the last days of Rome, the empire is crumbling and we’re doing all that there is left to do.” (p. 46)*