Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  “Nah, these two hicks want to get a couple of 8 balls.”

  “You know em?”

  “Nah,” I laughed, “they just strutted up to me and asked if I knew where they could score. The fuckers are lunatics, man.”

  “Take me to them.”

  So I introduced Sal to the two jonesing kids and also to Melissa, who I was rapidly getting bored talking to. She was pretty, not unlike Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, but not very smart. The sting of my impotence was negated by the fact that when we had made it back to her apartment on Wiltshire she had been so fucked up on booze and barbiturates that I don’t think she remembered to much of what happened. She worked as a waitress at some place on Sunset when she was in-between modeling jobs, and I was happy when Sal and her both split off with the Texans to score A few hours later I was throwing back vodka tonics and laughing with Miro, a dominatrix from San Francisco who I had gone home with after playing a show with Southpaw at Goldfingers on Yucca and Cahuenga. I was standing at the bar in Goldfingers when I met her, just offstage after the set. The place was quieting down and I asked her if she’d like to get out of there and go get high with me. We smoked a lot of speed, and her permanently sweaty and pale boyfriend Pete walked in on us while she was sucking my cock. I was blind drunk, drunk enough not to be embarrassed, at least. But still, the fact that he walked straight past, made himself a sandwich and flicked on the TV felt kind of weird. She started talking about a threesome with him. Somehow, the idea didn't really appeal. I took her to the bedroom and we fucked a couple of times in the gloom on her big overstuffed bed, stopping only to smoke more speed and take Polaroids. When I left the next morning that was that.

  “You are soo cute, honey,” she was saying while drunkenly caressing my ear, letting me know that if I was drunk or horny enough I could take her home again. I was distracted, though, craning my neck to see around the room in an attempt to catch a glimpse of Joan, who was meant to be turning up here anytime.

  Lou Reed’s “Wagon Wheel” was blaring out of the sound system, and I staggered to my feet to get another drink. Suddenly, I thought I saw Joan standing by the DJ booth, and I approached her, tapping her shoulder…

  “Hey, sweetheart,” I said, but someone who was most definitely NOT Joan turned and smiled in an “I don't know who you are but I'm trying to be polite” kind of way, and she muttered back, “Hi honey.” Over her shoulder I spotted Sal talking to Oscar, a tall black coke dealer in a leather trench coat with a permanently affixed half grin. Sal was introducing the two Southern boys to him, and Oscar gave one of them a good-natured slap on the shoulder. I found myself absently muttering, “Oh, I'm OK,” to the mystery girl before drifting away to the bar again. Soon the drinks where gone and Sal was standing next to me.

  “We've gotta blow. Pick up Joan and Spencer, head over to the Shop ...”

  “You sort out the fucking Dukes of Hazzard over there?” I asked, about to nod towards them, instead looking round and realizing they’d already left.

  “They've fucked off with Oscar, but he's dropping them off at the shop so we can hang out a little, yeah?”

  “Nice one.”

  I was shivering in the cold, piling into the old battered Ford with Sal and Sky and heading over to the Smog Cutter on Virgil where Joan and Spencer were drinking. Pretty soon we found ourselves ordering drinks from Sunshine, the crabby barmaid who constantly seemed one step away from drunken violence. I was hugging Joan hello by the jukebox.

  In the bathroom I was doing key hits with her and Spencer while outside a drunk Asian guy who looked at least seventy years old, crooned “roosy in the sky-hi wit dia - moonds” over the Karaoke machine.

  “Aren't you tired?” asked Spencer after taking his hit, sniffing a little.

  “Why?”

  “When was the last time you slept?”

  “I caught a few hours on Sunday.”

  “So you've only slept a few hours since Friday morning?”

  “Uh Uh. So what? Sleep's boring.”

  Joan looked at me kind of funny, and something didn’t feel right. I could almost physically sense her slipping away without explanation. I feel that it was almost inevitable though, that this had to inevitably end in disappointment and unhappiness since it was born in such an atmosphere of chaos.

  The sun came up and we were across town again in the cowboy’s hotel room, rushing on cocaine and ecstasy, talking to RP on the balcony overlooking Western Avenue in Hollywood, while the music and conversation fluttered about from inside like demented radio static. RP was asking me if I was OK—I suppose I was distracted that night—and I was trying to articulate the sense of inexplicable loss I was feeling, trying to find out for myself where the pain was coming from, trying desperately to second guess what would happen next.

  “Where is this going to end?” I asked him.

  “Death,” he told me, “for all of us. For the whole city. The whole 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’s left to do.”

  RP looked beautiful that morning. He had been awake for a couple of nights. His pupils were vast pools of night from the MDMA and his lips were dry from cocaine and crystal meth. He was disheveled but in an almost deliberate way, and the early morning light gave a color to his usual pallor. He made sense. He made all of the sense in the world, and there on that balcony full of whiskey and cocaine and ecstasy and speed I loved RP, I truly loved him as a brother and I didn’t want the moment to pass. I blurted out a garbled, “I love you,” and immediately regretted it, full of embarrassment and inexplicable shame. But he reached out to me and put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me, telling me that he loved me too.

  “I understand you,” he told me. “Don’t ever doubt that. Don’t ever forget this.”

  We came back into the room, and I felt better equipped to handle our reality than I had before. Maybe it was the drugs, but I don’t think so. Inside, Oscar sat on the bed talking to the cowboys, who sat in rapt attention at his feet.

  “So I told this bitch, if you ain’t got that damn money and you don’t want your man taking a beating for this debt, you better figure out a way to work this shit off,” and then he grabbed his crotch for emphasis. The cowboys giggled like schoolchildren.

  “So what did she do?”

  “What the hell d’you think she did?” roared Oscar. “That bitch worked that shit off, boy! Still ended up costin’ me money, though. I’m too soft with those bitches. I ended up paying for an abortion for her, an’ shit. She was a nice piece of ass, though…”

  IT’S NOT YOU IT’S ME

  “It's not you, it's me.”

  I'm not sure if I had fucking imagined her saying that or if she had in fact trotted out that particularly hurtful cliché. I can't really trust my recollection of events. I was on the tail end of another drug binge, crazy with sleep deprivation. Joan had returned from San Francisco, that fucking town of overrated nightlife, hippies and silicone valley yuppies breeding like cockroaches, and I dialed her number as soon as I heard she had gotten back. She had left without telling me the weekend following our adventure with the Texans. It was near impossible to be home; Christiane, although totally unaware of my infidelity, was still freezing me out even worse than usual and the guilt ... oh fuck, the guilt. The irony was I was feeling guilty over my lack of guilt. I wanted to feel bad desperately, I wanted to feel SOMETHING at least, but with Joan out of town I could not summon any kind of emotion whatsoever except loneliness. It just didn't feel like infidelity—Christiane and I hadn't fucked, Jesus, we hadn't even kissed since I slept with Joan. Who was I kidding? I hadn't so much as held hands with my wife for months prior to this.

  I finally spoke to Joan two weeks after our last weekend together. In my increasingly desperate attempts to avoid the shit storm in my own home, I had spent the last two days with an alcoholic coke dealer named Mike who insisted on spooning more and more of the shit up
my nose in between frantic freebasing sessions and blasting out Rolling Stones tracks. He’d yell over the noise to me about this guitar part or that bass line, slipping into incoherent manias and trying to suck my cock when he'd get really high. “I'm not a faggot,” he'd gurgle, red cheeked and sweaty with a filth stained bathrobe hanging open, revealing the full horror of his spent and wasted body. “It's just a sex thing.”

  Time spent with Christiane was impossible: I slept there, nothing more. She had her work and her anti-anxiety pills, and I had ... this.

  I gripped the phone hard, trying to visualize what Joan was really saying to me. I had felt a momentary tinge of jealousy when I discovered where they had gone. After spending the last seven days telling myself that it was OK to feel this way, that it was OK to miss someone like this despite being trapped in a marriage with someone I dreaded even seeing, I was ready to launch into the weekend with a new attitude. I really felt like I was ready to tell her how to feel. Instead of speaking to Joan when I called the house on Friday though, I spoke to Jo instead, who informed me of Joan’s unannounced trip with Sal, Kat, RP and basically everyone I knew. It was my own fault, I rued. I had not been returning calls, not associating with my friends, too concerned with my piece-of-shit book, which had advanced exactly zero pages and zero worthwhile words in the past few weeks. Christiane ghosted around me the whole time, tut-tutting and wondering aloud when I'd take up a day job to supplement my income. Eventually I snapped and screamed, “When we start fucking again,” and she got mad, smashing every dish in the house.

  Now Joan was back. And she'd been thinking. About us. About how it could never work.

  To save face I agreed with her gamely. “I was about to call you to say the same thing,” I lied, unconvincingly. And then for good measure I rambled on weakly about sex and friendship, inanely concluding that no sex was worth sacrificing a friendship for. (“This wasn't just sex!!! It wasn't just sex!!!” I wanted to scream when she fucking AGREED with me.) Her relief was so tangible, so childlike and beautiful that I even felt elated when I hung up the phone, relieved and overjoyed that I had done THE RIGHT THING. That feeling lasted less than an hour and I later sank at last into a deep dark depression, which threatened to swallow me whole.

  Drinking coffee one morning with Kat, she told me how wonderful it was that Joan met someone as cool as B when she was up north, and how happy she seemed that he was coming down to visit her. I nearly choked on my drink as she imparted this information, coughing uncontrollably and having to excuse myself.

  Dean Monaco's birthday was the first night I met B, and by the time ten o'clock rolled around I had been doing coke and drinking with RP for the best part of a day. The party took place at the White Horse on Western, and we had taken the liberty of renting out a room in the Motel 8 situated above the bar so we could do drugs or carry on in any way we saw fit after 2 am without having to relocate. RP and I spent the day driving round and buying beer and decorations to create within the small, damp-smelling room at least a tinge of party atmosphere. We settled on the cheapest theme we could find, hideous sixties smiley faces, (which were going cheap in balloon, table cloth and mobile form), and the room took on a rather sinister edge once every available surface had been covered. We bumped into Monaco on his way to a seedy Korea-Town titty bar called Gold Diggers around one p.m., and he was already steaming drunk. When we rolled into the dark bar at ten thirty he was lying almost catatonic on the settee by the electronic dartboard with a pretty friend of RP's from the East Coast, Lilly, who flopped over him in an Ecstasy haze.

  Upon spotting B I stared at him briefly, not trusting him enough to get too close. He was like some strange new animal, which for the moment lay dormant, and I watched him closely. I honestly believed that if I got too close he would take his chance and bite.

  “I Wanna Be Your Dog” blasted out of the jukebox, and I drank beers saying “hi” to everyone who passed by, including a completely obliterated Francisco Engel who alternated screaming incoherently at his pretty blonde girlfriend and shaking my hand with a desperate urgency, staring at me hard and grinning, “We're the same, you and I. We're the fucking same, dig?” I just nodded at the young, wild-haired drunk as he grinned and screamed, screamed and grinned.

  I saw Joan from across the room and—determined not to exude any sense of weirdness—strode right over to her, kissed her cheek and asked how she was.

  “Great,” she replied, her pretty face lighting up as always when she smiled. “I'm doing great. This is B...” and she motioned towards Him, his dark eyes burrowing into me. I felt weak, sickened in the presence of something bad and evil: impure and festering away in front of my very eyes. He was tall with light brown hair that stuck out at all angles from his head. His face had the sunken look of a man who had spend many nights awake while the drugs surged around his system. Tattoos covered both of his arms, stretched over the collar of his T-shirt and spelt messages across his knuckles.

  “Hi,” I croaked.

  “Hi yourself,” and he shook my hand, stretching out an arm and gripping my limp hand firmly. I wished a cancer on him as he did so. In my drug-fucked state I could almost see the hostility he was radiating towards me. It turned the small bar purple in a burst of heartache.

  I drifted away, affording myself one last glance at her, and realized that the game was up. I couldn’t entertain escapist fantasies of myself and Joan starting over, I would have to deal with the mess my life had become on my own. I turned away as they kissed. For a moment I looked back at them and flinched when I noticed his eyes on me, his dripping tongue flicking over the flash of his teeth, dark eyes like a bird of prey about to make its kill, before he pulled away and returned to the conversation they held as a couple, slipping an arm around her waist. I overheard Kris telling some young girl, “And then I was in rehab for 6 months ...,” heard her stifled yawn.

  I was fucked up on beer and coke, squatting next to a semi-catatonic Dean Monaco. He slowly and shakily brought another shot of tequila to his lips and muttered in a slurred and almost incoherent grumble about mortality, ageing and death. You could almost smell the onset of a midlife crisis in the semi-conscious drunkard. My mind was adrift, reeling; I was looking beyond him and absently staring at a pretty blonde who stood at the bar with a Corona in her hand talking to Sal Mackenzie. Then something that Monaco said snapped me back to where I was immediately.

  “We all have shit to deal with you know?” he was rambling, “and I don't know one fucking man in this bar whose problems don't stem from a woman. Not fucking one.”

  I grinned absently at this, as the girl who caught my interest shook her head at Sal, seemingly offended by a suggestion he had made. Monaco was in possession of a kind of antiquated sense of misogyny, holding the belief that all men were powerless pawns against the castrating influence of female sexuality. I could definitely sense the generation gap between him and I; the two decades he had on me made most of his views and values seem almost embarrassing. But then he continued, “She broke my heart. She fucking broke my heart.”

  “Who?” I asked, almost interested. I wondered if he was talking about Lilly, who was dancing alone by the bar, but discounted this almost immediately. Surely the pretty New Yorker would have never consented to sex with that shabby looking old fuck? His tequila breath drifted over to me, and I considered moving away when he suddenly barked:

  “That bitch! That fucking BITCH ... Joan!”

  I froze and looked at him—all drunk, messy and fucked up—in a place of such emotional hurt that he had lost any sense of dignity, spilling his guts to a near stranger who he must have known, deep down, did not give a shit about his crappy fucking love life. I followed his accusatory finger and watched Joan with her arms around B, and I could see the agenda now. They would leave early. Make some excuse: “We'll be right back,” and then in the same room where we had secretly fucked, he would discover her too: undress her roughly, penetrate her hard, his hands traversing her skin, their flesh i
ntertwined. I looked at Dean. He had already had her before I had even touched her. I began to wonder if I was a fool, if I had mistaken my part of Joan's chain fuck of our friends for something that meant ... anything. In the face of a marriage that had left me feeling like an inadequate fool, I had set myself up for a fall that would leave me more alone and unwanted that ever. I closed my eyes and sighed, no longer sure of what was happening around me. I felt I was no longer in control, hurtling inevitably towards some kind of conclusion. The chaos of the past few months was nearing a resolution of some kind, whether I wanted to accept it or not.

  Christiane showed up around midnight and demanded that I sit and talk with her. I shrugged, and she walked to the far side of the bar—the furthest possible point from where the party was happening—and sat down. I followed.

  “So, how was your day?” she asked, sternly adding, “day, weekend, whatever.”

  “Fine,” I muttered. “I'm glad you came.”

  I was completely wired, finding it hard to focus on this stilted awkward conversation, grinding my teeth like crazy. I looked over at the party, longingly.

  She ordered a beer, and I ordered a whiskey and soda, and we sank into a long silence.

  “So,” I asked eventually, “why are we sitting here? The party's over there.”

  “Those people are degenerates,” she commented, smiling at me harshly. “I don't like any of them.”

  “Then why did you come?” I inquired, sipping my drink.

  She turned and looked at me, and for a second we were almost back: two kids who thought they had fallen in love in four days and on an impulse committed to each other for life. She stared at me with trembling eyes and said, “To be with YOU. That's why I came here,” and I felt momentarily choked by sadness. I looked at my drink and then back at her.

  “To be with you,” she whispered, before standing up and walking out.