Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  As we headed toward the house where the band was staying, I suddenly started to become very afraid of leaving Los Angeles for this madhouse, even if it was just for a few days. I had nothing here; I was a lost, stupid English drug addict with no possible way to comprehend what was happening around him. I felt suddenly sure I would live to regret my decision to attend this farcical event.

  As nightfall descended I was in a taxicab headed back to the strip. Everyone else was at the house, which turned out be owned by two drunken, Valium-addicted ex-strippers who announced themselves as “dear, dear friends…” of the band. Maybe in their booze and diazepam haze they really thought these people were the Rolling Stones. Hell, maybe they thought it was still 1967, who could say?

  A party had started with bottles of Jack Daniels and ELO blasting from the ancient Hi-Fi, when I made my excuses and called a cab. The house was tiny and stank of cats, hidden up in the hills with what seemed like no other living things for miles around. Looking out at the dust and the vast nothingness, it seemed as if I might have been dropped on the moon with this collection of freaks. Cooking up a shot in the bathroom, (replete with topless pictures of our hosts obviously taken sometime in the early seventies), I was repeatedly interrupted by one of these swaying and slurring car wrecks who beat on the door and yelled, “Ohhhh honey, how long ya gonna be in there? I gotta pee reeeeaaallll baaaaad.” I fucked up the shot, blew out a vein in my goddamned wrist, and only felt half the effect that I should have.

  In the back of the cab the motion of the wheels started to lull me into a nice stoned nod, as I felt the familiar excitement of going to score – a sensation as addictive and weirdly pleasurable as the drugs themselves – building deliciously in the pit of my belly.

  “Change of plan,” I told the cabbie. “We’re not going to Harrah’s…”

  “Okay sir,” the cabbie grinned, “Another casino? How about the Tropicana?”

  “No,” I told him. “No casinos. Bring me to the worst part of town.”

  The driver seemed a little taken aback. He paused for a moment and asked me to repeat myself.

  “The worst part of town, man. You know what I’m taking about. Drug dealers, hookers, that kind of place.”

  He started to get all coy on me, talking about how he didn’t know much about “that kind of thing” and how Laughlin is a quiet town. I dangled ten dollars through the partition and laid it out country simple for him.

  “Look, you’re a cabbie. You know what goes on. I am in desperate need of someone who is gonna sell me drugs. Hard drugs. I ain’t a tourist; I’ve got no interest in gambling or seeing the sights. What I need is to be dropped off in the kind of place where I might find that kind of action. Can you help me?”

  The driver paused for a second and took the bill before driving the rest of the way in silence, allowing me to enjoy the remnants of my shot in peace.

  He dropped me off at a seedy looking strip mall across the street from a broken down motel. We were well away from the casinos and neon lights back here. A few sad looking streetwalkers, overweight and dressed like they were heading to the Stop and Shop, tramped dejectedly around the place. There was a check cashing joint and a pawnshop still open, and sandwiched between them was a gloomy looking bar called Casanovas. I paid the driver and he took off without a word. I figured I should head to the bar to get orientated.

  Inside, the air of dilapidation and decay was even stronger than outside. A sad looking Christmas tree and neon Santa Claus tried their best to create some kind of festive spirit, despite it being late April. The place smelled of sweat and stale cigarette smoke, and an infomercial for diet pills bleating from a small black and white television behind the bar was the only noise in the place.

  I walked up to the bar and ordered a beer. The woman behind the bar was an old, dark-skinned Native American. She said, “three dolla,” and I handed her the money. She returned to the far end of the bar and picked up her cigarette right where she left off.

  The beer tasted flat and stale but I persevered with it while taking in the rest of the bar. A pool table lying unused. A fat guy in a cowboy hat pushing coins into the cigarette machine, and a woman sitting alone in a booth nursing a drink. I took in her face: the sucked-in cheeks, the dirty blonde hair tied back in a severe looking bun, the glazed eyes … she could have been anywhere from forty to seventy years old. There was no doubt in my mind this woman was a junky or some kind. I got up and walked over to her.

  “Do you mind if I sit?” I asked her, and she looked up and raised an eyebrow.

  “Sure,” she said, as I slid in next to her.

  “I haven’t seen you in here before,” she murmured. “You from the neighborhood?”

  “No, I’m visiting from LA.”

  “LA? Well you sure as shit ain’t sightseeing in this place. Lemmie guess, you’re looking for something, right?”

  “Maybe. You know where I should go to get it?”

  She leaned in conspiratorially.

  “You looking to score rocks?”

  “Nah. I’m looking for chiva.”

  “Chiva? What – izzat spic talk for heroin?”

  I nodded. She leaned away from my quickly and said, “I don’t do that shit anymore. Nuh-huh. No sir. None of that shit for me. I just takes my methadone and have a blast on the pipe and … no, no sir. No heroin for me. That shit kills you, man. And the fuckin’ assholes around here … fuckin’ kids. Man, they’d sell you any old shit and tell you it was dope man, anything at all. That’s what happened to my girl Nadine. Bought a bag from some fucking beat artist and shot it up and wham! You know what? You know what was in that fuckin shit? Fuckin rat poison, man. Rat poison! Her arm got all dried out and withered up and shit … real ugly. Fuckin’cocksuckers. At least with rock the worst that can happen is you end up smoking a piece of wax or soap. But rat poison? I tell ya … that little prick got his, though. Little spic motherfucker.”

  She went back to her drink. I waited a couple of beats and asked again.

  “You know where I can score?”

  “Well, yeah honey o’course I do. You see the motel across from the strip mall outside? The Starlight? There’s a kid that sells out of there. He’s a little asshole but he won’t burn you. He’s in Room 217, but he’s got runners hanging outside of the motel.”

  “OK.”

  “But DON’T USE THE RUNNERS! Those little fucks’ll just take your money and split if they don’t know you. Knock on room 217 and tell him you know Alicia.

  “Now, you gonna buy me a drink?”

  I got up to get her a drink. I noticed her legs for the first time. They were bowed, and literally covered in lumps, cigarette burns, track marks and craters. She had a metal walking stick under the table and I had to wonder how many years Alicia had been doing this shit. I bought her a large vodka and Coca-Cola and brought it over to the table.

  “Thanks, Alicia, I gotta split.”

  She grinned a wide yellow grin at me and raised her glass.

  “Take care,” she said. “N’stay away from those runners…”

  The Starlight Motel was, if anything, even sleazier than the bar I just left. As Alicia had warned me there was a gaggle of teenage kids in hooded sweat tops hanging out up front. They noted my approach and fanned out almost in perfect synchronization to meet me. They where mostly skinny, white, inbred looking.

  “Yo, what you want man … you looking for somethin’?”

  “Hey, hey … what you need?”

  “You lookin’ for rocks? Rocks?”

  I kept walking and muttered, “No. No I’m cool,” and made it to the parking lot of the motel. The sounds of multiple TVs blasting court shows and soap operas crept out of the darkened windows all around me. I walked up to the second floor, found 217 and rapped on the door.

  The door opened a fraction and a wired, sweaty face peeked out of the crack.

  “What you want, nigga?” it asked me.

  “Alicia told me to come by. I’m look
in’ for some stuff; she said you could help me out.”

  “Alicia?”

  The door slammed shut and I heard a lock scraping open. Now the door opened a fraction wider. The kid in front of me was a wiry white boy in an enormous Tupac Shakur T-shirt, with a red bandana over his shaved head.

  “Alicia who?” he asked, jutting his chin up and sticking his chest out. “I know a lot of bitches. Alicia who nigga?”

  “Old girl; hangs out at the bar across the road. Real fucked up legs.”

  The kid sucked in the air through his buckteeth in disgust.

  “That nasty ol’ crackhead ho? That bitch is always comin’ on like ‘D-Low I need credit man, gimme a rock man, I’ll suck your balls, D-Low.’ Sheeit, skeevy fuckin’ bitch. Now she’s sending fuckin’ crazy honkies from the bar over here. I gotta knock some sense into that bitch, yo.”

  The door was wide open now. I could see shitty and pissy diapers lying on the murky grey carpet in the room behind the kid. On the TV, “Cops” was playing with the volume turned low. I cleared my throat.

  “So can you help me out? I need to score some chiva.”

  “No shit, huh nigga?” he replied, before slamming the door in my face.

  I stood there slightly shocked for a moment. Through the door I heard footsteps, a door opening and a muttered conversation that grew steadily louder. Suddenly a woman’s voice started yelling. Then a baby started crying. The kid – D-Low, he’d called himself - screamed at the girl to shut the fuck up and the door slammed again. I had him approaching and then the door was wrenched upon. He eyed me suspiciously.

  “You a cop?” he demanded.

  “No.”

  “’Cos you know if you a cop you gotta tell me. That shit’ll get thrown out of court, yo. It’s entrapment an’ shit.”

  “I ain’t a cop. I’m a junky. Can you help me out?”

  The kid thought about if for a second and asked, “How much?”

  “Eighty bucks.”

  I handed him the four twenties dollars and he ushered me in. He went into the back room, where the infant was screaming. I amused myself by watching some drunken hick getting maced by the pigs on TV. Freebasing paraphernalia was strewn across a three-legged coffee table, and the smell of ammonia hung in the air, making my eyes smart.

  The kid returned and handed me a battered packet of Camels.

  “You got a weird accent. What’re you? French or Australian or somethin’ fruity like that?”

  “I’m English.”

  “Well,” he told me, “next time you see that raggedy bitch you tell her not to be sending over anymore English dope fiends to my fuckin’ pad, yo. And next time, deal with the kids downstairs. That’s what they’re there for, nigga.”

  “Sure thing,” I told the D-Low, glancing inside the packet before slipping it into my jacket. “Pleasure doin’ business with you.”

  I opened the door and D-Low followed me out.

  “Peace out nigga,” he said, before slamming the door behind me.

  FUCKED-UP, NEVADA

  I came to in the van, still wearing last night’s clothes, tired, sweating, dope-sick and sore. The desert sun blasting through the windows scorched the back of my eyelids and roused me from my half-sleep. My mouth tasted like shit and I could hear the others snoring in varying pitches around me. With the sudden jolt of disappointing reality I remembered where I was. I grabbed my overnight bag, stepped over Jules’s prostrate body and slid the door open.

  I hopped out into the cold desert air. Within the hour this place would be a furnace, but now it was as frigid as the Arctic Circle. I eased the door shut and hurried over to the house. The front door was open—of course, why lock it out here?—and I stepped into the gloomy den. I could see the band passed out in the main room, empty liquor bottles and ashtrays full of cigarette butts covering every available surface. I tiptoed over to the bathroom. The door creaked open. A mangy looking cat with a meow pitched somewhere between a Theremin and a sick baby padded out and started mewling and rubbing itself against my leg. I kicked the fucking thing as hard as I could and slid in the bathroom to get well.

  The heroin I’d bought last night was so-so at best, but I dumped a lot into my wake up shot. The sticky brown goo turned the water the color of chocolate and managed to find a decent vein in my ankle. The dope flooded my bloodstream and I finally felt normality returning: my aching muscles relaxing, the ice unthawing around my bones, my jangling nerves subsiding. I looked at my watch; it was 6:30 a.m. Another perfect fucking day had begun.

  Over breakfast at IHOP Sam explained my duties for the day. I was to interview the band before and after the show. They would film the gig and while it was happening I was free to do whatever I wanted. When the show was over we would hit the road, hopefully making it to LA by tomorrow afternoon.

  Once again, I could barely believe I had allowed myself to get involved with something so utterly stupid. Why was I in Laughlin with these people? When did my life stop making sense? I was pondering this when Sam got up to go to the bathroom and Paulie leaned over to me and whispered something I didn’t catch.

  “Huh?”

  “I said …you got any smoke?”

  The prick was actually trying to score fucking weed from me. I looked at him and raised my palms.

  “Shit. Well if you come across any … let me know. Just keep in on the down low. Sam, he don’t approve of drugs when we’re working, you know?”

  “Oh, sure,” I told him. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  Some hours later I was sitting on one of the casino’s toilets, pushing a shot of heroin mixed with some crystal meth I had brought with me for emergencies into the large vein that curled around my left forearm. The blood coagulated in the barrel, causing the needle to block before I could get it all in. I pulled the needle out and watched a thick trickle of blood run down my arm, drip-dripping off my wrist and onto the floor. I remained impassive as I started to sense the speed roaring around my blood, sending my heartbeat into the stratosphere. As was my ritual I pointed the needle at the gleaming white tiles and pushed the plunger hard with my thumb. Sometimes, if the syringe was totally blocked, the plunger would depress fully and spraying the blood and heroin back inside the barrel. If it wasn’t too badly blocked, as happened this time, pressure on the plunger made a thin spray of brown blood erupt from the needle and create a pretty pattern on any surface it hit. Beautiful. I felt like a dog marking its territory. I was in the habit of sneaking into some of the nicer hotels in West Hollywood to use the bathrooms and leave my mark on their pristine walls. It gave me a curious feeling of satisfaction, an almost-sexual kind of thrill… I would absently fantasize about leaving blood splatters in the toilets of Buckingham Palace, The White House or across the face of the Mona Lisa. On a whim I dipped my finger into the small stream of blood flowing down my arm and drew a crude frame around the spray pattern, which had started to run into itself and drip down the wall. Almost perfect, but it was still missing something… I smeared some more of the blood onto my fingertip and scrawled an illegible signature on the bottom. Perfect. I was the junky Jackson Pollock.

  I washed up and slipped my equipment into the pocket of my leather jacket. Then I left the relative quiet of the toilet.

  Stepping out onto the casino floor was like stepping into some kind of awful redneck hell. The noise of the machines was deafening, but even more deafening were the screams and yells and laughs and har-har-hars of the bikers, crazies, gawkers and lost tourists who swarmed around the slot machines and gaming tables, or tried to fight their way to the front of the crowds gathered around the bar. The band were due to hit the stage in thirty minutes and I was supposed to be there as they walked from the dressing room to the stage – which was set up in the middle of the casino floor - to do one of those stupid Q&A sessions on the way to the stage. I fought my way to the far wall, showed my laminate to the security guard and was ushered into the backstage area. In a long, quiet corridor I found Sam, Jules and Pauli
e standing around with the camera and boom mike at the ready.

  “The band are getting ready now,” Sam informed me. “Did you find everything OK?”

  “Yeah,” I told him, feeling a little jittery from the speed.. “So listen … what exactly do you want me to ask these guys? I mean … we haven’t really discussed any of this.”

  “Just wing it,” Sam told me with a big stupid grin. “You’ll be fine.”

  Jules muttered cryptically to himself, peering at me through the viewfinder, while Paulie stood picking his nose and looking as dumb and useless as ever. The crystal meth and heroin sent my brain whirring in all kinds of different directions. What should I ask them? I figured I’d have thirty seconds at the most to get a question and answer on tape once the band started walking. I decided that I should concentrate on one person. The obvious person was Mick Jagger … but what to ask? I needed something great, something funny. Something that would capture the inherent pathos of this sad lifestyle. A zinger … something perfect, a perfect question. But what?

  Suddenly, the doors to the dressing room swung open and Mick came strutting out with the band following behind him. They were already making a brisk move for the door at the far end of the corridor. Everything erupted around me and Jules leapt into life tailing the band. A microphone was thrust into my hand and I saw Sam mouthing, “Go, go, go!” and waving his hand frantically in my direction. I broke into a trot after the band and started yelling “Mick! Mick!”

  Mick half-turned but kept walking, and in a moment of panic I blurted out:

  “So do you do this shit because you couldn’t make it as a real musician?”