Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  HERE COMES SUCCESS

  I was lying on the couch, the uppers and downers and whatever else I snorted or ingested that night still flying around my bloodstream. It was maybe a week or so after Dean Monaco’s birthday party, and my state of mind had been growing steadily worse; I felt spacey and sick from the drugs, and closing my eyes only caused odd hallucinations. Images of small insects or bacteria multiplying a thousandfold, intricate networks of piping which contorted and bulged with an organic energy, mathematical maps and figures: all variations on a theme I guess, which I could not equate with the normality I saw around me when I opened my eyes and observed the dying party. The smell of smoke, the taste of blood in my mouth and the pain in my bruised (possibly broken) knuckle, Iggy Pop monotoned, “Here comes success...,” and I felt worse than I had ever felt.

  I looked around. Kris was still quietly trying to talk Kat into a state of unconsciousness while Sal lay on the floor already out cold. Tate, ever the realist, disappeared into the night when he realized that the party was winding down, a sixth sense that I sometimes wished I possessed. I got to my feet and made my way unsteadily to the kitchen. Thankfully it was empty ... what day was it? I had no idea: I only had a vague clue of what time it was, somewhere around close to eight in the morning. Eight in the morning at the Wayward, another party, another drug and booze marathon. Jesus Christ, I felt so fucking bored.

  I sat on the linoleum cross-legged, my head thumping, and the beginnings of a painful hangover in the back of my skull. The urge to weep which had been torturing me since the birthday party, all those days ago, was getting stronger now. Light streamed in through the window and I felt like an absolute zero, having finally regressed to a point where I didn't care what happened next.

  You see, it's sad, but the whole affair with Joan and its repercussions made perfect sense within the context of my life; it was just another way for me to sabotage myself. I remember when I was 17 standing up on a table in a bar called The Three Bells—the table my podium and the regulars my unwilling audience—and announcing that if I wasn't famous by the time I had reached twenty-five I would return to kill myself in that very bar. I was drunk and suddenly seized by the utter meaningless of my life in the north of England. I received sneers. Laughs. Someone, enraged by my cockiness, tried to throw an empty pint glass at me, but was stopped by their girlfriend. Looking back, I must have looked like an incredibly punchable young asshole.

  “Do it now, son,” someone yelled. “Give us a fuckin' laugh and save yourself some heartache.”

  I smiled, recalling the moment. I'd never have the balls to do it, I think, to go through with my promise when the time comes. Worse than that, I wouldn't have enough honor to do it. How could I go through my whole life like I have, pissing opportunities up against walls, falling in love with the wrong people, failing to reach my goals, setting clumsy landmines for my marriage instead of having the sense to just get up and walk away, and yet then have the nerve to pull off a finale as beautiful and majestic and full of truth as that? No, it would be beyond me: better my life ends in the same way it proceeded ... slowly, painfully and with no real significance.

  Finally, I was finished with it. I was finished with the party, I was finished with everything. I didn’t need to say goodbye to anyone. I got up, and I got the fuck out.

  On a whim, I called Chris. I had not seen him since he left the band. The last I had heard he was trying to get his burgeoning heroin habit under control. She sounded surprised to hear from me, even more so when told him I was coming over to see him.

  When he opened the door he hardly seemed overwhelmed to see me. Hostility poured out of his large brown eyes in waves. He hadn’t left the band on the best of terms, and I had been wary to speak to him during his own drug hell, which seemed to be spiraling even faster than mine.

  “You look like shit,” he told me.

  “Thanks” I said, as he led me into the house. “I’ve not slept.”

  We sat around for awhile, making small talk. He talked with enthusiasm about some new band he was playing with and told me he had a new girlfriend. I was feeling ill and gripped by anxiety from the drugs in my system. I asked him if he had a beer. He told me that no, he was off of booze for the time being. This surprised me a little, as I knew that Chris liked to drink as much as I did. I remembered the nights we had spent in the old days driving around LA trying to find parties to crash, open bars to drain. We were pretty close, once. Chris had always struck me as something of a little boy adrift in the world of adults. He was pretty and girls tended to flock to him. It seemed every time we played a gig with Southpaw he would end up screwing the only pretty girl in the half empty club. At first I thought it was the fact that he looked a little like Keith Richards when he was at his handsomest, but later I came to think that maybe girls were attracted to the child in him. Despite his considerable prowess on the guitar and a string of model girlfriends, there was an insecurity to Chris that kept made him seek approval from the most mediocre of people. He would tell outrageous lies to impress even his best friends. At the time I suppose it irritated me, but in light of what happened to him there is part of me that wishes someone had been around to protect him from himself instead of egging him on into a habit.

  “How about something a little stronger?” he asked, and I shrugged and said, “Sure.”

  We headed up to his room, where he locked the door as quietly as he could. He popped a CD into the player and went to his desk. He retrieved the tin foil and the heroin and laid it out on the bed.

  I had smoked it once before, but had been turned off by the effects. It had made me tired and disinterested in all that was going on around me. I didn’t get sick, but it wasn’t the kind of high I was looking for. Now though, I thought that maybe it was. I watched Chris as he cut a piece of the ball of black tar with a pocket-knife and spread it onto a section of foil. He smoked quickly and with experience, following the bubbling melting blob of heroin down the foil with his pipe, inhaling the fumes and exhaling the smoke through his nose when he was done. He was in the process of passing me the pipe and the foil when he hesitated slightly and seemed momentarily in two minds about whether to give it to me.

  “Look, we can go buy some more. I’ve got money,” I said, thinking maybe that he was worried about leaving himself short.

  “That’s cool…” he said, heavy lidded, “but are you sure you want this? You know the deal, right?”

  “Yeah I know the deal,” I told him. “And yeah—I’m sure.”

  I awkwardly smoked some of the heroin. I found moving the lighter in such a way as to push the heroin down the foil a difficult maneuver to execute while concentrating on following the drug with the pipe and inhaling at the same time. Eventually, seeing me waste good drugs became too much for Chris and he held the foil and the lighter for me, allowing me to inhale a couple of big hits. We sat back listening to the stereo. Slowly, I felt my mood begin to brighten. It was unperceivable at first, but as I noticed a pleasant sensation starting in the base of my skull, sending shivers of pleasure throughout my body, I realized that I really didn’t care about what was happening with Joan. I mean, what was the problem? She could fuck whomever she wanted. Suddenly, I felt silly for putting so much significance onto what was basically some coked-up sex between friends.

  Even Christiane seemed like less of a problem. So it wasn’t working between us. Either we could solve our problems, or we couldn’t. It didn’t seem worth making myself miserable for. I was twenty years old for Christ’s sake, and I was worrying like an old man.

  “Good shit, ain’t it?” asked Chris, and I grunted in agreement.

  “I love it,” he continued. “Don’t need to get drunk any more. Or do coke. It’s nice not to wake up hung over and fucked up every morning. It’s nice just to feel …”

  “Content?” I offered.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Content.”

  As the shadows gathered in Hollywood we drove downtown to pick up more smack
, buying from the street dealers at USA Donuts on Bonnie Brae. We pulled into the parking lot and stopped, sitting in a parking space with the engine running. I watched Chris, waiting for cues. There was a gaggle of ten or so young Latino kids hanging out by the donut shop and within a minute or so of us pulling up, one broke off and approached us. Chris rolled down his window as the kid, who looked to be in his early twenties, leaned in.

  “Whatchoo need, man?”

  “Chiva.”

  “How much?”

  “Two twenties.”

  The money was handed over, and the kid spat two tiny colorful balloons into his hand and passed them over to Chris. With that he was gone, a furtive look to the left and right, before rejoining his friends. I still felt great from the little bit of heroin I smoked in the morning and I took the balloon that Chris passed to me.

  “Put it in your mouth,” he told me, “until we get out of this fucking area. There’s a lot of cops, man. If we get pulled, swallow.”

  GOODBYE CHRISTIANE

  That night I got back home around seven. I found the note from Christiane telling me that it was over on the living room table. She couldn’t take me anymore. She couldn’t take the booze and the drugs anymore. She wanted out, she was filing for divorce and I was to leave the apartment. If I was looking for my manuscript, it was out back.

  I opened the back door, and there it was; she had dumped it on the concrete steps leading to the parking space, covered it in lighter fluid and reduced it to ashes. It had mostly blown away into the evening but some pages remained, damaged but recognizable. I wondered if she’d read it. It had become something of a journal over recent months. It was all in there—Joan, the speed induced sex with Miro, the failed attempt at sex with Melissa, the drugs, the way I had begun to hate her. It made sense, I suppose, that the book was the final straw.

  I felt a vague sadness that the book had been destroyed. All I had now were older versions without many of the more recent revisions. Still, I had made no effort to hide the writing from her. I left it in plain sight day after day. I suppose a part of me thought she would never read it, as she showed absolutely no interest in anything I did anymore. Then again, a part of me had wanted her to read it. It would mean that the truth would be out and the situation would be resolved one way or another. A vague sense of panic gripped me as I realized that what had happened here by very definition had to be final. There was no more pretending now. My relationship with Christiane, barring some kind of miracle, was over.

  I grabbed the note again and reread it. She was going to her friend Susan’s place and would stay there tonight. She wanted me out by the time she returned tomorrow night. My shock receded a little and I started to get angry. I recalled every bit of hurt inflicted upon me, every stinging rejection. I wandered into the bedroom, and looked at the neat double bed with its grey sheets. The room looked like the rest of the apartment: bright, airy, practical. Christiane all over. I remembered going down on her here once, sometime towards the end of our sexual relationship. Sucking her clit in the dim bedroom, the first sexual contact she had allowed in a month or so. I stopped for a second, balancing myself on the bed and as I did so she looked down and hissed, “Keep sucking my CLIT, fucker! Jesus Christ can’t you do fucking anything right?” I had stood up and grabbed the bedspread and yanked it off the bed, flipping her off of it onto the wooden floor with a thud. And then she was on me, throwing punches and screaming curses, and I turned over the bedside cabinet, sending her trinkets and bullshit skittering across the floor, then grabbed her by the throat and tossing her back onto the bed. Standing over her yelling, “Fuck you, cunt!” stumbling into my jeans, storming out and walking shirtless and shoeless in a blind rage to the liquor store on the corner of Normandie and Hollywood.

  Just thinking of it I was gripped by that same rage again. I looked about the room for something to break. Then seized by the utter futility of it, I went into the kitchen, grabbed a sheet of aluminum foil and prepared to smoke some more junk.

  That night I walked to Bob’s Frolic Room on Hollywood Boulevard to get wasted. On top of the heroin, the whiskey and sodas I ordered started to get me very drunk indeed. The barmaid knew me, and always made them seventy percent Makers Mark with just a splash of soda. I drank three quickly, and asked her to line up another. The bar was half empty. A couple of older Hollywood alcoholics sat nursing wine and beer, grey, spectral, broken-toothed, and huddled over the bar in the darkest corners they could find. Nobody talked tonight. The jukebox played Television’s Marquee Moon.

  A drink later she walked in. A young black girl, high on ecstasy … she danced across the room to Blondie’s “Rip Her to Shreds,” came over to me and leaned over my section of the bar, taking a long drink from my whiskey and soda. She was pretty with a wide mouth and a grin that exposed pink gums and gleaming white teeth. The symmetry of her face was ruined—just enough—by a scar which ran under her left eye. I called the bargirl over and ordered another Makers Mark and soda. I slid it over to the scarred girl and she accepted it, still without a word.

  Later, back at the apartment, I screwed her on the bed I’d once shared with Christiane, doubled over with her ass in the air. It was a hard, drunken fuck. We hung out in the house for a little, drinking malt liquor and passing a joint back and forth. She asked me about Christiane, whose picture was on the living room wall, but I didn’t want to talk about it. We fucked again on the floor. At four a.m. she left and I started packing my things. I smoked more heroin, amazed by the sense of physical and mental peace it was granting me, before sleeping on my old pillow for the last time. The next day I left. It was 2 weeks before my 21st birthday. The next time I saw Christiane was 6 months later to sign our dissolution of marriage papers.

  It’s hard to look back and think in any kind of logical way how heroin became so important in my life during the weeks and months following these scenes. I suppose the first part is physical dependence. When you wake that very first time and you feel awful, like you have ice in your belly, like something is crawling around underneath your skin, it’s very easy to just react by throwing more smack on the foil and fixing yourself. I learned to barter away the future for a short-term bit of relief. And if I tried to make any concerted effort to stop smoking for a while, the reality of my situation would come back into focus and seem so completely fucked up that I soon went running back to the cocoon and relative peacefulness of heroin.

  When does a habit become an addiction? It’s hard to say. When does the particular insanity that comes with choosing heroin as an aesthetic, as a lifestyle, become normal to you? I’m not sure; all I know is after a while of drifting along with things, of not dealing with my immediate problems and focusing instead on funding my heroin use, things shifted around me fundamentally. At some point, I woke up out of heroin and instead of becoming confronted by my living situation, my broken marriage, my precarious financial situation, I was instead absolutely sure that all of these things were NO LONGER RELEVENT to my existence. All that mattered was that I got some drugs to help me through the day. The other stuff, well, that was as abstracted and distant as if it was happening to someone else. And in a way, I suppose it was.

  GENESIS

  It was 4:30 in the afternoon and I was at a hostess bar in Koreatown scoring speed from Lori, a crazy fat meth-head who worked the bar there and doled out grams of crystal for sixty dollars a pop to tweakers and all kinds of crazies who came from as far west as Hollywood to cop. The place had a stench of cheap aftershave which lingered in the stale air, Formica tables around which sat old Korean businessmen nursing overpriced, watered-down whiskey and the thunk-thunk of chunky thighs as plump, gone-to-seed blonde girls sashayed from table to table looking for business. It was the girl’s jobs to entertain the men, bring them drinks, laugh at their jokes, run their hands through their hair. The more the men paid, the more they got. The best money always went to the white girls with blonde hair, even the most beaten up and drug-fucked of them made twice as mu
ch as the prettiest Asian girls. Lori, always wired but never any thinner, shot me a grin full of broken, ground down tweaker teeth and slid two grams wrapped in a napkin across the bar to me.

  The place was half-empty and the constant gloom made me feel as if it was midnight and not a blazing desert afternoon. The only illumination in the place was the neon screaming “ICE COLD BEERS—COCKTAILS” and the almost luminescent pallor of Lori’s skin. I was about to leave when a familiar figure pulled up a stool next to mine, and slumped forwards over the bar. I recognized her as Genesis, the girlfriend of a kid I saw around from time to time named Bobby. She was from the Midwest: pretty, with a heart shaped face, blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She looked tired though, older and thinner since I last saw her.

  “Hi, stranger,” I said, causing her to look up and blink her teary eyes in recognition. “What's wrong?”

  “Oh,” she sniffed, wiping her eyes with a tiny pale hand. “N-nothin'. I just split with Bobby and I’m crashing. Haven’t slept in a while.”

  Lori was at the other end of the bar sliding drinks over to a waitress with two blue tears inked on her cheek, who silently chewed gum and stared at the ceiling fan. “Wanna get high?” I asked Genesis, her face lighting up at the very words. “I’m holding…”

  I took her to my car. Los Angeles being Los Angeles one of the first things I had to do upon being kicked out by Christiane was buy a car. I am no car lover and I bought the ugliest, cheapest most un-LA car I could find: a 300 dollar, reconditioned eggshell blue Volvo with rust patches and an engine that gave out frequently.

  Driving back to my apartment on Iris Circle, she filled me in on what had been happening. She was still working at a hostess bar not far from Lori’s and had been supporting Bobby while he worked on his music, paying for all of the drugs. When they started doing more and more speed Genesis needed to make more money, and Bobby started getting uptight that she was staying over with guys who came into the bar and attending “parties” organized by the club for some of the better paying clients.