Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  “What’s your problem?” she sneered. “You wanna get a job at the Virgin Megastore instead?”

  “This music is terrible,” I hissed. “These assholes should be taken out and fucking shot.”

  “Oh yeah! You’ve got it tough, man. Somebody actually pays you to do this shit and you’ve got the balls to whine about it! Some of us have to work for our money, you know.”

  “It would just be nice,” I told her, “to write for people I respected.”

  “You don’t respect anyone!” she yelled, slamming a cup down. “And you know why? Because you’re bitter! Because they’re doing it for a living and you’re writing their fucking videos! You’re jealous!”

  “Oh, fuck you,” I told her. But she was right.

  We drove back over to the Wayward, and when we stumbled out of Sal's big black 1968 Mustang, Kat was pulling up with Kris and some tall skinny blonde kid who I didn't recognize.

  Kat bounded over to me “I've formed a new band, we're rehearsing in the garage right now,” she announced. “It’s a speed metal jazz band ... we're going to be called The Bitch Pussy Nigger Nazi's. Do you want to be in it?”

  “Sure,” I said bewildered, hugging her, and introducing myself to her new guitarist.

  “Jaz,” he said as he took my hand, a lank haired blonde kid with high cheekbones and pale blue eyes. He looked like some kind of hick, and so emaciated looking … his skin was almost transparent, exposing nothing but sinew and bone underneath.

  Kat was full of energy, bouncing around in a tight black top, her huge tits threatening to bust out at any moment. I had briefly formed another band with her, a punk band called The Hitler Sluts who played one gig at The Garage on Santa Monica before breaking up onstage. She played bass (badly) and sang a little. Her ideas, though outweighed her talent. Talented musicians are ten a penny. Musicians with ideas though ... that's another story. I wondered absently if she was fucking Jaz.

  Along with RP, Kat was probably my favorite person in the city. Sadly I felt trapped by my own inability to express this in any meaningful way. Only at 5 o’clock in the morning, full of coke and booze and crystal meth, could we begin to articulate this to each other, and the next day it seemed like more drug talk and bullshit.

  “Let's go to Jamba Juice!” she suggested and Kris grabbed me.

  “Yeah come on. Let’s get some juice.”

  Half out of my mind on cocaine and booze and sleep deprivation, the sudden whirlwind of activity swarming around me on the driveway became too much. I looked at Kris’ idiotic empty grinning face and felt my muscles tighten. What the fuck was he so cheerful about all of the fucking time? Phony asshole cocksucker. He was nothing but a useless West Coast rich kid party boy, with his too-perfect teeth and Hollywood tan. I finally snapped in the face of his idiocy.

  “What are you? A fucking hippy? I fucking hate juice! Do I look like the sort of person who drinks juice? Fuck Jamba Juice! Fuck it and everyone who works and drinks there, fucking assholes! Get inside and let’s do a line, there's some Colt 45 in the fridge.”

  “Hey, its not even noon,” laughed Kat, unsure of how serious this outburst was and hanging onto Jaz.

  “And your point is?” I shot back at her

  “I love this guy!” laughed Kris a little too loudly, attempting to break the tension in the air. “He's crazy.”

  “Oh go do some heroin, you fucking retard!”

  I was left there, panting heavily after my outburst as everyone dispersed. They seemed a little stunned by my ranting. Shit, I needed a beer.

  “That was kind of harsh,” Joan told me after they'd fucked off to Jamba Juice, “with Kris, I mean.”

  “Nah” I said, “He knows I was ... joking.”

  “Where you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Sal laughed, and cut out lines for himself, Joan, Spencer and I.

  “Here's to Saturday night,” he said, snorting his.

  SATURDAY, JOAN AND WHY I HATE THE ENGLISH IN LOS ANGELES

  We hung out doing blow for the rest of the day, and when Kat, Jaz and Kris returned with their goddamned fruit smoothies Spencer disappeared into the garage with them to drum for their new band. Joan, Sal and myself listened to the noise vibrating through the windows for a while before Joan announced she had to go to sleep before tonight. I went back to the Bike Repair Shop where Sal lived, and we carried on doing lines until seven in the evening, listening to The Stooges and David Bowie until I started to zone out. I started to wish that I'd slept.

  The plan was to go to Spaceland to see a friend of Kat's DJ a set before trying to gatecrash a party at Spot Studios on Santa Monica and Vine. It was some kind of private party, and we had two tickets to sneak seven or eight people in with. I was watching TV when Sal shook me. The faces of the overfed, orange-tanned anchors on the news looked distorted and even more ridiculous than usual, hysterical and grotesque. I couldn’t make sense of what they said, a garbled moron-monologue of celebrity gossip and idiotic punning between the soulless airbrushed newscasters. I almost missed the grey-clipped tones of British news – at least that didn’t make you feel as if your brain was rotting away as you watched it. It was Sal’s hand on my shoulder and his voice saying, “Hey, its 9:30, we have to pick up Joan and Kris,” which shook me out of my mental fog. I was momentarily confused, until I realized that I had fallen into a drugged half-sleep. I got to my feet unsteadily, muttering, “Let’s fucking go. Let’s do a line.”

  By the time Sal, Kris, Joan and I had made it to the club I thought I was dying; my eyes were heavy and I was feeling incredibly jumpy. The coke had fucked me up completely, and I realized that I had been doing lines now pretty much every fifteen minutes since nine o'clock last night. Now it was 10:30, and there was no way I could stop at this point. The more I heard about the party at The Spot, the less I wanted to go; the words “hardcore techno” were being banded around, and I knew that the club had a 500-person capacity at most. I had an image of a small, dark, sweaty hole with thundering dance beats blaring out of a maxed-out PA system, sweaty clubbers bouncing up against me, my coked-out exhaustion and paranoia reaching new heights of insanity. I began to fear the consequences of putting myself in that situation, seeing a trip to the emergency room or a police precinct as definitely in the realms of possibility.

  The more Kris started to hear about the party, the less sure he was that we could all sneak in. It was just the four of us, as it turned out, (Kat had gotten herself a ticket through some jungle DJ she knew), but we still only had 2 tickets. Somehow the party was transforming into the place to be in Los Angeles tonight, Kris and Sal’s mobile phones started to ring incessantly after 8 o’clock with friends and casual acquaintances trying to get hold of tickets. Of course, the idea of hardcore techno was pleasing to Kris, and he definitely wanted to go. Joan looked as doubtful about the whole thing as I felt, and Sal seemed as indifferent as ever. I was thinking we should dump Kris and head back to the Wayward to do more blow. I fucking hoped so.

  By 11:15, Joan and I were heading back to her house with the blow, and Sal and Kris were cruising over to The Spot. We arranged to meet up at the 3 Clubs at 1:30 to work our night out, and Joan and I decided to get a little more fucked up in the meantime. I was viewing everything through a haze of coke, Ecstasy and sleep deprivation. We arrived back to the empty house and headed straight to her bedroom. I cut out four lines, four thick, long lines. I figured it was all I could do to even feel the effects. I handed her the CD, and she did her line, struggling to get it all up in one go. I watched her face wrinkle in discomfort as I pressed play on the CD player.

  “Jesus Christ,” she murmured.

  She handed me the CD case and I did a line with the only functioning nostril I had left. I snorted, chunks of coke going straight to my already numb throat; the length and width of the line enough to make me feel the kind of burn that I hadn't felt since my first line of the night. The taste of chemicals in my mouth and Praise You by Fatboy Slim blaring from th
e hi-fi and the fire in my nostrils creeping up into my skull…

  As Joan started in on her second line, I began to feel bad. Real bad, real quick. A stabbing pain shot across my forehead. My stomach turned, I felt bile rising in my throat. I started shaking uncontrollably as I felt my body go cold.

  “Put the coke down,” I croaked, and as she did I fell back on the bed. My vision started to waver, making me feel sea sick, so I closed my eyes hard. I could feel a bead of cold sweat making its way down my temple. I opened one eye cautiously.

  “Are you OK?” she asked, suddenly concerned, leaning over me.

  “It's fucked me. It’s fucked me,” I gurgled as way of an explanation.

  “Shhh, it's OK. It's OK,” she whispered, as she massaged my throbbing forehead with her cool, soft hands. I started to feel a little better. My stomach growled, ominously. She continued to work her fingers on my forehead, and I started to breathe slowly. My stomach growled again, weakly, after ten more minutes of this. It was the sound of my body submitting. It was as if she had absorbed the bad feelings through her fingertips.

  She leant over and kissed me. My pager went off. I checked it: message centre. Sal Mackenzie.

  “Hey guys, it’s me. It sucked at the party so I'm on my way to 3's, so either head on over or page me. Bye.”

  I cursed silently and broke the news to Joan. The thought of heading over to Hollywood and Vine to drink at 3's right then wasn't the most enticing of ideas, but I decided to let her make the call. She paged Sal back.

  “Sal, it's us. Head on over to the Wayward, we're here. We had a bit of a situation here, but it’s all right now. Bring everyone. Bye.”

  She walked over to the bed after hanging up the phone and sat down next to me.

  “How long d'you think we have?” I asked, quietly.

  “Long enough,” she replied, handing me a condom and kissing me hard. We made love, missionary position. My gaze never left hers the whole time, and she talked to me in an excited whisper throughout. My hands mapped out her body, her breasts her hips in the darkness, before we finished, dressed and went downstairs without a word.

  When the party restarted at the Wayward, I was completely out of it. We had cut the remaining line from earlier into four generous lines to spread it out a bit more. I was trying and failing. I was just throwing fuel into a dying fire now, feeding a psychological rather than physical need. I couldn't get high and I was slipping into a kind of psychotic half-sleep that made me no use to anyone. Two English guys appeared with Sal, maybe half an hour after Joan and I had gotten dressed. One, a hulking skinhead, was ex-British Army who'd served time in Northern Ireland. He had that look about him, fat sweaty face, alcoholic watery eyes, awful tattoos featuring Union Jacks and bulldogs. I intrinsically mistrusted anyone who served in the British Army, finding the idea that anyone would volunteer to be stuck in a stinking filthy barracks with a bunch of other mentally challenged fools wearing itchy, ugly army fatigues absolutely shocking. Everyone I knew from childhood who went into the army was the kind of violent, bigoted moron that couldn’t get a job sweeping the streets under normal circumstances. So they’d join the army instead, and some genius would give them a gun, teach them how to kill and send them into various political hotspots around the world. Upon hearing that they were army though, I simply murmured, “oh wow, that's cool,” before staring off into the middle distance for the rest of the night. I suppose they seemed nice enough, but whenever I encounter the British abroad I try and keep my distance. They seem to feel that they are under attack from all forms of the new culture that surrounds them, and retreat into a kind of bizarrely ultra - British caricature. I know if these people wandered around Manchester with their flags waving and their soccer tops and their affected accents, people would think that they'd lost their fucking minds.

  Sal left for the shop around three. Everyone but Joan and I were ready to keep the party going. The English guys, sensing that I wasn't up for a discussion about old Blighty, football or politics, started laying into the lager and cocaine with gusto. I felt like a corpse, moving my eyes over to Joan every so often to see how she was doing, before returning my stare to the wall again. My heart raced in my chest and I was finding it hard to swallow. I felt like I had slipped completely into auto pilot and I found myself reciting the words to my favorite songs in my head, trying to stop myself from going crazy.

  “I'm going to bed,” Joan eventually announced.

  “Can I crash in your room?” I asked, a little too quickly. Even she looked startled by my desire to be away from the party.

  “Sure,” she shrugged, adding, “you can have the couch.”

  We somehow made it into her room and locked the door. I undressed and flopped onto the bed, half watching as Joan took off and folded her clothes. She slid between the sheets, huddling next to me.

  “Goodnight,” I murmured.

  “Goodnight.”

  As fucked up as we were, we had sex three times before we finally slept, not waking until noon the next day. The last time we did it she lay on her left side - as did I - and I fucked her from behind making small, careful movements. I hugged her throughout, burying my face into her shoulder. I briefly wondered if it was possible that I was falling in love with her. I thought that I probably was, although I had nothing to compare the experience to. Christiane flashed across my mind, and I blocked the thought out as soon as it surfaced. Over the past month she had become a ghostly figure, entering the apartment as I left it, leaving notes by the bed for me to clean the goddamn house, or coming in drunk herself once in a while and shooting me dirty looks as I wrote, before staggering off into the bedroom to collapse unconscious.

  “This isn't good,” I thought as I came inside her, immediately starting to drift into a contented sleep. “This isn't good at all.”

  ALL THERE’S LEFT TO DO…

  A week later I turned up to rehearse with my band, Southpaw, only to discover that our rhythm guitar player Chris was no longer in the band. It was hardly a shock—he was constantly fucked up on heroin since playing a tour with LA psyche-rock band Electric Kool-Aid, a bunch of junkies notorious for turning on any and all of the people who drifted in and out of their circle. I had been exposed to junkies on the periphery of the music scene and had hung out with the heavily strung-out Atom, the lead singer from Electric Kool-Aid. I found them to be a pretty agreeable lot, a lot less annoying than stoners. Chris, though, became someone else on smack—high-strung, whiney, forgetful and lazy. He turned up hours late to rehearsal, constantly tried to borrow money from the band, would stop a song halfway through to make obscure comments which made no sense to anybody but him. It was sad to watch. He had the hunted look of a man no longer in control of his life.

  As I walked into the room, the first thing I noticed was the space where his amplifier should have been. James, our drummer, was setting up in the corner. He looked up, shrugged, and said, “And then there were four.” That’s when I knew.

  The band’s leader was Dito, a singer-songwriter from Astoria, Queens, who wrote impossibly beautiful songs about New York, innocence, death and most of all, love. He had the intensity of a man who had seen life and death in all of its terrible, close-up finality. When he turned up and we started playing he said nothing about Chris. I figured he felt bad. I think we all did.

  Afterwards in the ramshackle waiting room up front, I drank a Dr Pepper while Dito fed a quarter into an arcade game. The rest of the band packed away and drifted off.

  “Shame about Chris,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Dito muttered wistfully, suddenly punching the Galaga machine as his ship blew up. Turning to me, “Wanna shoot some hoops?”

  We walked out into the early evening heat and I ran across the street to a bodega to pick up a forty of Olde English, as Dito effortlessly dropped the ball into the basket.

  That night I was spilling out of the 3 Clubs with Sal Mackenzie and a Vietnamese kid called Sky who I met through a friend of RP’s. I was d
runk and tripping on a hit of E—not peaking too hardcore yet. I had just been doing coke in the back room with Sal and I was now sitting in the bar sweating, wide-eyed, semi-psychotic, rapping a bit with two kids from Texas who swaggered over trying to score coke as I smiled at them. Any other group of fuckers in there would have rolled them. They set themselves wide open for it, coming right out and trying to score off of us. “How much d'you want?” I grinned, a 60-dollar wrap in my back pocket, thinking I could maybe make a few bucks. They said, “Oh, just a couple of 8 balls,” and I stopped, thinking maybe I'd misheard them. But the one closest to me shot me a wide country boy shit eating grin, and I figured that they seemed too stupid to not be genuine. “Hold on,” I muttered, and left them in the booth where they had interrupted me talking to a red haired model called Melissa. I had attempted to screw her a month or so ago, so high on coke I couldn't get hard, instead stuffing my limp cock into her soft wide cunt, somehow achieving a weak orgasm.

  I tapped Sal on his shoulder. “Hey, is Oscar around?”

  Sal turned; a pint of Boddingtons in hand and smiled. “Not had enough? It’s a fucking Tuesday night, I'm holding a half; we're fine.”