Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  The Escape Room was small and hidden away behind a strip mall. We pulled up at the nearby 7-11 and got out to use the ATM. Sitting by the machine was an old bum in a ratty suit and filthy undershirt clinging onto a bottle of Wild Irish Rose.

  “Spare a dollar for a drink?” he asked, breathing death and decay up towards us on the desert night air. Our eyes met for a moment and a strange sense of understanding passed between us. He knew I was no good for money, not tonight. I shook my head and we got our money and walked into the waiting gloom of the Escape Room.

  RP and his girlfriend were sitting in a booth, nursing Heinekens and laughing. Her name was Mya, and she was tall with large tits and a coal-black bob of hair in a 1920’s flapper style. She looked like a stripper, pretty in that fake Hollywood kind of way, with an animalistic sexuality about her. She sucked on a beer and licked her red lips in the same way I imagined she would before sucking RP’s cock later in the night. A young cat called Francisco Engel who I had seen around from time to time was with them, glugging Vodka tonics like they were ice water and making drunken comments about the service a little too loudly. A Korean barmaid looked over at him with a sour expression as he laughed and looked away. A muzak version of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” played on the jukebox, and we greeted each other with “heys!” and hugs as we took our seats. Two whiskey and sodas arrived at the table for Tate and myself, and I disappeared off to the bathroom to take a hit of coke.

  I unwrapped the bindle in the toilet stall, which smelled faintly of vomit and detergent and spooned a little of the powder onto the end of my key, taking a blast. I repeated the procedure twice in each nostril. Feeling good, I put it away, shivering slightly at the cold and the sensations beginning in my brain. When I got back the others had arrived.

  After a few more drinks and some more drugs something in my brain switched up a gear. I passed my bindle of coke to Tate, then to RP. RP then took me to the bathroom and cut out a couple of lines of crystal meth on the top of the toilet cistern. We chatted for a little bit, uninterested and unfocussed before returning our attention to the drugs in front of us, snorting them and returning to the table. I was struck by an overwhelming sense of righteousness, that what we were doing was all that should be expected of us. I thought of Christiane, wondered where she was, before pushing the thought of her out of my head.

  Returning to the table I found that a DJ friend of ours called Kris had arrived; he got a round in and I asked him where Joan and the others where. Kris was a squat little creature who was constantly pointing out to new people, at great length, that he had been in rehab for 6 months. He lied about the fact that he was in for coke. I suppose he thought it sounded too bourgeois, so he told everyone said he was in for heroin instead. It was Joan who had given me the low down on Kris’ fantasies of being a junky and it really soured my relationship with him. It made me consider him a fake and a phony. Now it seemed every time he opened his mouth I caught myself rolling my eyes internally, just wanting him to fuck off. He was a second rate DJ too, playing bad, soulless techno garbage. A walking mass of mediocrity and bullshit, he fit in with the LA scene very well.

  It was past 11 and I really wanted to drop the Ecstasy before I got all too fucked up on coke and speed. Kris told us that there was some party on Winnona and Hollywood and another friend of ours, Kat, was DJ-ing there. They'd already stopped by to check it out, he told us, and we should head over there soon. Another whiskey and soda arrived at our table and I took a mouthful of my watered down drink and nodded hello to Kris, still talking about work with RP at our end of the table.

  Pretty soon we were heading out into the night again and I was reeling, kinda unsteady. I jumped into the Volvo with Tate and offered him a bump which he hurriedly accepted before we sped off into the night in search of kicks. It was kind of ironic, since the party turned out to be right around the corner from where Christiane and I lived. We pulled into my parking space and walked over there. As we were walking down Winnona to the house with its lights and groups of people standing drinking outside, I realized, even before we walked in, that it was going to be a bad scene. I remembered turning up there for a party once before with Kat and Sal Mackenzie, doing some bad speed and ending up paranoid and shaking in a downstairs room, unable to connect with the noise and chattering people around me. The house was forever cursed in my mind now. Plus it was nearly midnight and it didn't seem even half full from the outside. RP's car pulled up alongside Tate and I as we were about to walk into the driveway.

  “RP,” I yelled, “I know this is going to be hell. Let’s just pick up everyone, and get the fuck out, yeah?”

  “Whatever” he said, parking by a fire hydrant in his big old white Chrysler.

  Inside we spotted them straight away, Sal Mackenzie and Joan deep in conversation by the DJ booth in the half empty main room, and I realized that the party was even worse that I first feared. Dotted around the huge, empty main room were coked-up forty something Hollywood scum laughing and high-fiving each other in Ralph Lauren suits. A survivor of the Sunset Strip glam metal scene staggered about with a bleach blonde perm and an open shirt looking like some ugly, awkward victim of evolution, a club footed Dodo in leather trousers.

  We all met up and within seconds gravitated towards the bathroom: Sal, Tate, Joan, RP, Mya, myself and Kris. We were sharing blow and I handed cash over to Joan who dropped the two white pills in my hand. I smiled—”bombs away”—popped them in my mouth, glug-glugged them down with a Corona I had found half full on top of the sink, and I was hugging Joan and shaking Sal by the hand, asking him “what's up?” Sal was dressed in his usual uniform of a well-cut, sober suit in the style of a 1940’s bank manager. His appearance reminded me of Buddy Holly, and it was always a little strange to see this suited figure, with his thick-rimmed glasses and conservative air, snorting coke, dropping pills or screwing underage looking girls in the back rooms of LA dive bars. He divided his time between The Shop, a repair joint that he lived above and which never seemed to be open, and various strip clubs in and around Hollywood. He could be found every Tuesday night in Jumbo’s Clown Room on Hollywood Boulevard, at the bar eating Thai food from across the road, drinking beers and slapping the asses of the girls who were all on a first name basis with him. He often disappeared out of LA on a moments notice to Thailand or Cambodia and there were dark mutterings about what he got up to over there. Sal was a man without any kind of moral compass, and so long as you accepted him on this basis, he could never surprise you. You just couldn’t get mad if he screwed you on a drug deal, or fucked your girlfriend while she was passed out drunk. He just didn’t know any better.

  The next destination was decided upon almost immediately, the White Horse Tavern on Western and Sunset, and as the beer wasn't agreeing with me I decided that it was time to switch to water or end up puking both doses of Ecstasy right back up again.

  The drive was a blur, with Tate and me snorting the rest of my coke on the way over, pouring it into our thumb and forefingers, and sniffing it right up. By the time we had hit our first red light the package was empty and we were wired. We found a parking space right outside the bar and made our way in. Amazingly, RP and Mya were already there with beers in their hands, with Joan and Sal Mackenzie still on their way. I began to wonder if we had fallen into some kind of wormhole on the journey over. Tate ordered us both whiskey and sodas before I could tell him I just wanted water. On the way RP had somehow acquired Dean Monaco, a lank haired 40-something set dresser with a sardonic laugh and a sarcastic, dry sense of humor. I didn't get Dean, didn't know where he fit into the big picture. People seemed to like him, people seemed to think he was funny. I personally thought he was a miserable asshole, and I treated him as such. He had been gripped by a bout of self-pity and depression for the past few months, and would tell no one where his sullen moods and self-imposed isolation stemmed from. Because of this, his appearance tonight was even more of an unexpected displeasure. I took a gulp of my whiskey before I found
myself in the bathroom with Monaco doing a line from the shelf, which conveniently circled the stall.

  “We have to hang out more,” I told him, almost vibrating from the effect of the coke, filled with a sudden good will towards Dean which wasn't really me. “I mean outside of this. We have to hang out more.”

  “I'm not afraid,” he told me, snorting his line with a disgusting snotty flourish.

  I gave up on my whiskey and ordered a glass of water at the bar. The barmaid, a full figured tattooed Russian blonde with huge tits and a mean look in her eye, went to get it. Her boss, the old Russian lady, sat at the far end of the bar drinking Vodka 7’s—watching, always watching. It was known about the place that she had an immediate distrust of blacks, tattoos, and men with long hair, fearing they were all violent drug addicts. A handgun was reportedly taped to the underside of the bar in case of trouble. Luckily the old lady was usually too blind and drunk to notice the sea of drug deals and crime that flowed inside every time the doors were opened.

  We had taken over the jukebox and the bass line of The Beastie Boys’ “Brass Monkey” caused the floor to vibrate. The White Horse was huge, but nearly always empty. As I got my water the barmaid shot me a knowing glance which told me she knew I was fucked up on some kind of drug, and as I made my way back to our booth I suddenly started feeling strange. It felt as if my head was expanding and I had to catch my breath for a moment. I made my way shakily to the table and put the water down. The E had kicked in so suddenly and so intensely that I thought it would overwhelm me.

  From somewhere Joan and Sal had appeared with a bleached blonde manic-depressive called Spencer who coupled bouts of inane overactivity with moods so deep and sudden that he looked as if he would be crushed by the weight of them. I looked at his pupils and saw dilated black chasms staring back at me.

  “Amazing shit huh?” I asked him, “It just came on walking over from the bar. Fucking mind bending.”

  “Hallelujah, brother,” he grinned, “Bump?”

  “Don't mind if I do.”

  And so the night continued.

  As the first wave of the Ecstasy really started to hit, I hid in the bathroom looking at myself, the silence around me strange and alien. I whispered nonsense to myself, enjoying how it sounded reverberating off the tiled walls. My throat was dry and I was breathing heavily, staring at myself in the mirror, high as all fuck on the coke and the Ecstasy—the edge almost off the coke now, the pills taking over. I punched the mirror lightly and fixed myself in a stare again.

  “Wa wa wa wa wa wa,” I chanted quietly, enjoying the sounds it bounced off the tiles. After a while I started to feel stupid so I fell out of the bathroom and back into the bar.

  “I have a concept about the human soul,” I told Joan at some point later, who nodded politely, high on speed, not coke and seeing my highly artificial state of mind for what it was, “It is in the middle.”

  I was at the bar, watching the barmaid serve drinks to the drunken staggering clientele, raising her eyebrows and flashing her teeth at them, wiggling away in heels to get their beers and reaping the extra tips. She looked like a peroxide 50’s lingerie model, with a face sharpened by hardships, white fleshy thighs jiggling slightly as she clip-clopped about the place. RP told me that she also worked as a prostitute out of a motel 7 room above the bar, and had done so for years.

  “Come on, we're going,” yelled Sal, grabbing me by the arm, and I realized it was approaching two a.m. I muttered “where?” in a blissed out state, and someone said “The Wayward,” which was to say Joan and her girlfriend Jo's house. We jokingly dubbed it “The Home for Wayward Women” one night, and the name just stuck. Out into the night once more, shivering at the cold and the rushes from the Ecstasy, and into the Volvo, giggling like idiots, and Tate drunk on seven whiskeys and the beers we drank earlier.

  THE WAYWARD

  Tate was wearing a long black wig and I was laughing hysterically, both of us in Joan's bedroom while Donovan's “Season of the Witch” blasted from the stereo. Sal Mackenzie was cutting out lines on the nightstand while Joan flopped around on the bed with Jo, a blonde costume designer from New Jersey who was in the middle of a mushroom trip. RP had disappeared with his girl on the way to the Wayward. It was four am and all was well except for Tate, who suddenly ripped off the wig and yelled, “I feel insane!” before storming out. Jo muttered something about the wig looking like a dead museum before burying her face in Joan’s chest and laughing.

  At five am Sal pulled out a souvenir of his recent trip across the border to Mexico – morphine sulphate tablets - to help us come down. We all took the morphine and tried to settle down a little. The four of us lay on the bed counting the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling and bursting into unexplained giggles every so often. There was a pile of blow and a bag full of Ecstasy on the nightstand waiting for us to wake up. Things gradually settled down and I heard Sal's softly begin to snore. Jo too seemed to be out for the count. I turned on my side and tried to sleep. Joan was lying facing me, her large brown eyes looking into mine. She reached out and clasped her small cold hand around mine. We stayed like that, silently staring at each other for a while.

  Eventually I softly asked: “Want to go downstairs and get fucked up?” and she nodded. I remembered being in this same situation a month ago, when it had just been her and I with Sal laying unconscious in the bed with us. I had tried to get her to come downstairs with me to fool around. She’d refused, telling me it “Didn't feel right.” Joan seemed more understanding tonight.

  We went downstairs, to carry on snorting coke and speed. She cut out two more lines of crystal. In the background a rhythmic pop-pop-pop told me someone had left a record on the platter. I walked over and took it off the turntable. I put another on, picking out a dog-eared copy of Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division. By the time the rhythmic, metallic thump of She’s Lost Control had started up, we were kissing.

  We started fooling around. I felt the hot flush of her breasts, her burning breath against my neck, the smell of her skin filling my nostrils. We froze with every creak and thump in the house, scared to be caught by Sal or Jo, inexplicably terrified of anyone finding us out. I think she and Sal had some kind of thing, or maybe even she and Jo had fooled around, but either way it would be uncomfortable if anyone knew about us.

  Joan’s cat, a mangy half-dead thing with falling-out black fur suddenly pounced on the back of the couch we were sitting on and mewled loudly. The sudden noise was enough to make us both jump and bang our teeth together painfully.

  “We can’t do this right now” I hissed, infuriated by the animals sudden appearance. “It's too risky”

  “Yeah” she breathed. I was disappointed but I didn't feel too bad. Something had changed tonight. I knew that it would happen now. It was inevitable. I had noticed a slight change in the way she looked at me over the last week, felt that she held eye contact a little longer than was usual. There was a sudden desire to confide in me, to engage in whispered conversations away from everyone else.

  We took the CD with the coke piled on it with us and we crept back up to the bedroom. We sneaked in and stopped dead. The room was empty.

  “Where are they?” I whispered.

  “I don't know”

  Joan went over and put the upturned CD down on the nightstand, and I followed her over to the bed.

  “Do you think they're in Jo's room?” I asked. She turned to me and shrugged, landing a light kiss on my lips.

  “Do you think they're fucking?”

  “Probably.”

  She locked the door. She came over to me, smiled, and we kissed for a few breathless moments, tongues twisting over each other, probing and exploring. I felt my hard-on rubbing against her thigh.

  “Do you have condoms?” I asked.

  “Uh huh,” she nodded, and opened up her underwear drawer, pulling out a box. She undid my fly, freeing my cock, sinking to her knees.

  Thud!

  I look up, mortified. She
turned her face away from the head of my cock as...

  Thud! Thud! Thudthudthud!

  “Shit!” Joan jumped up as I stuffed myself back into my jeans. She handed me the coke and went over to the door. I kicked the box of condoms under a random pile of clutter as she unlocked it. It was Sal.

  “The fucking door sticks,” muttered Joan unconvincingly. “Want a line?”

  “Yeah,” Sal replied, “and let’s get some breakfast.”

  We found Spencer on the floor of the downstairs bathroom. Sal woke him up by pouring a beer on his head. We drove to the farmers market on Fairfax and Third, getting there around eight to grab a booth at Du-par’s. Sal ran across the road to the liquor store to buy up a bottle of champagne. We ordered orange juice and when he returned made mimosas. I coughed loudly as Sal popped the cork under table. Breakfast passed quickly. It seemed I was the only one whose appetite was sapped by the coke, but then again I reasoned myself and Joan were the only one's who hadn't slept. I felt physically drained, if not mentally. I scrunched my eyes, trying to wake myself up. I suddenly felt faint, the plate of runny eggs and bloody steak taunting me.

  “Listen,” I said. “I gotta to stop by the house and email off some stuff to work.”

  “What you working on?” asked Spencer.

  “A shitty video for some shitty band called Sugar Ray. They’re fucking dreadful, and in the video they get blown up.”

  “Wishful thinking, huh?”

  We laughed, as Sal refilled our glasses with champagne.

  We stopped by my house for a few moments on the way from the farmers market—Christiane was at work and the house was clean and silent—and I sent off the treatment, cursing myself for not just mailing it when I had completed it. Writing had been coming easy recently and I had a few big artists actually turn concepts I had written into fully-fledged music videos. The first single from Whitney Houston’s new album boasted a video that sprung from one of my treatments. Still, there was something curiously unsatisfying about the whole process. It seemed I never got the opportunity to write for bands or artists that I respected. Although the money was great, I still found writing these things to be a constant source of bitterness for me. I tried to explain this to Christiane when she asked me what my problem was. I was hunched over the computer keyboard, listening to a Semisonic song that needed a treatment and cursing under my breath.