Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  Everything stopped for a moment, and the band almost walked straight into their singer as he broke his stride. I panicked and stuttered, “What I mean is … is there any dignity in it?”

  Mick gave a contemptuous look and instead of answering he slowly raised his middle finger and placed it in front of my face.

  “Asshole,” he said.

  Then he repeated the gesture into the camera and at Sam who stood there looking like someone had slapped him in his dopey face. Then boom! The band was gone. Jules and Paulie stood around, unsure of what to do until Sam barked, “Follow them, you pricks! We’ve still got to film the fucking show!” They scuttled out onto the casino. Sam and I were left in the corridor.

  “That was pretty good, right? I mean you can use that, right?”

  For the first time since the whole thing started Sam lost that annoying enthusiastic look. He looked tired. Now the fucker knew how I felt.

  He shook his head then walked out to watch the rest of the show.

  I made it out there for a few songs. I was more interested in the crowd than the band, which churned out lackluster versions of the usual Stones’ tracks. The audience didn’t mind though; they were drunk and up for a good time no matter what.

  I went to the bar to get a drink. There was nothing else to do. Biker girls stood next to their man-mountain boyfriends and a few of them flashed their tits in order to get the barkeep’s attention. Tit flashing seemed to be de-rigueur around these parts. When a bartender finally noticed me I ordered a vodka tonic at a hideously inflated price.

  I noticed a burly, bearded figure in full Angels' regalia standing next to me. He watched my every move with an amused look on his face. I looked up and he grinned, exposing a mouthful of tobacco stained teeth. I smiled back and nodded.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  “Yuh look a little lost,” he slurred.

  “Really?” I looked around, wondered what on earth he meant. His smiled broadened.

  “Yeah, you do.” He leaned in as if about to impart a great, cosmic secret. Put his lips to my ear and growled, “So here’s some direction for ya … San Francisco’s thataway you scrawny-assed limey faggot.”

  I nodded blankly at him. What else could I do? He laughed a deep crackly smoker’s laugh and I picked up my drink and made my way to the side of the stage. The band were flailing their way through “Brown Sugar” while a couple of drunk peroxide blondes were dancing up front, mouthing the words back at the band. Mick blew them a kiss and attempted to replicate the famous Jagger chicken walk, badly. On the stroke of midnight, an Angel rode through the casino floor on a gleaming Harley with, yes, a topless girl riding on the back. It got the biggest cheer of the night, and when the band resumed playing “Sympathy for the Devil,” the sense of anticlimax was palpable.

  That evening we rode back to LA in silence. The band refused to do the scheduled post-show interview and decided to stay on in Laughlin for a few days, then make their way back to LA. With no good reason to be in Nevada anymore we started the drive back to that night.

  I started to feel better and better as each mile closer to home rolled by. I nodded out on a nice strong hit of junk for most of the journey back and surfaced as we were pulling off of the freeway near the Hollywood Bowl, just minutes from Iris Circle. When the van pulled up outside of my place Sam yelled, “We’re here!” and I was already grabbing my bag.

  “OK guys,” I said, hopping out. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

  Jules and Paulie waved at me as I headed to my front door. I called back to Sam, “Thanks for everything!”

  I heard him mutter something before the van pulled away with a roar.

  I slid my key into the lock and smiled. I swore to myself that I would never set foot in Laughlin, Nevada for as long as I lived. Oh Christ, it felt good to be home.

  PART TWO - ALVARADO AND 6TH BLUES

  Alvarado and 6th: smell of meat cooking on grills at corner taco stands, 2 for 99 cents and the feel of the sun against your back, walking on to the beat of mariachi music blaring from Popsicle stands. Guys waving an inverted ‘L’ shaped hand signal to oncoming traffic yelling “papers!” LAPD patrol cars rousting the street drunks, one pours a bottle of Thunderbird into the gutter as old bum yells, “please god, no!” tears streak his sun-beaten, filthy face…

  Alvarado and 6th is purgatory: I have done my time on its corners and in its shady doorways hoping to score, dunking pound cake into my coffee in its donut stands, waiting for my beeper to go off, sitting in McDonalds and Wendys and Burger King waiting for the bathroom to vacate so I could fix under flickering fluorescent lights…

  Alvarado and 6th was overrun with people. I walked past the bar where a Mexican in a cowboy hat empties his bladder, too drunk to stand straight, propped up against the wall he is pissing on. An older man stood in the doorway next to a sign reading “Cerveza - Futbol” eyeing me with suspicion as I went past. The people around here weren’t dummies. They knew the score, and could tell what I was straight away -a viscioso, one of the junkies who haunted this intersection, waiting anxiously by payphones, cursing God as the sun dragged across the sky, mercifully scoring before scuttling away from the daylight.

  I paged Carlos from the payphone at the intersection. Then I settled down at the bench at the bus stop to wait. It had been months since I injected that first time with Genesis and life had moved fast. My friends’ attitudes changed towards me considerably. I was totally open with them about what I was doing. As a result I saw them less and less. “Dropping the H-bomb,” Chris called it. “They can tell you that they’re cool with it,” he said sagely. “Act like they’re all hip and open minded. But unless they do it too…”

  I didn’t see too much of Joan once my heroin use became public knowledge. She had her own problems and was dealing with some relationship bullshit with B. Their intake of crystal meth had increased steadily. She stopped going out altogether. I suppose B felt uncomfortable out at parties and clubs because no matter where he was he’d rather be in his room smoking crystal with Joan, talking endless hours of nonsense though sunsets and sunrises, fucking and talking, talking and fucking, pausing only for more hits on the pipe. She spent most of her time in bed sleeping when he was up in San Francisco, and stayed shacked up in her room with him when he was in town. They got high and fucked so often that RP worried aloud that B was going to “wear her pussy out.” He laughed and took a slug of his beer. “Shit, it ain’t right. Nice young girl like that. Her cunt’s gonna look like a twenty-mile stretch of unpaved road after that fucking tweaker gets done with it…”

  I held in a gasp of pain. The comment stung. Thinking about what Joan and B got up to in the bedroom still hurt me inside. Later - during on one of my rare outings that didn’t involved scoring dope- I saw her at 3 Clubs and a strange thing happened.

  As it turned out it would be one of the last nights I saw everybody. Since returning from Laughlin there had been nothing much to do. Consequently I was shooting more and more dope every day. Money was getting tight and my habit was getting bigger -the thought of hanging out in a bar with my friends was not exactly appealing. When RP insisted I turn up I did so out of a sense of loyalty. I didn’t want them to get too pissed off at my flaky behavior. I knew that once this final link to my non-heroin world was severed that there would be nowhere for me to go… except further down.

  Everybody was drunk except me; I was nursing a Pepsi. I had stopped liking the taste of alcohol almost totally at this point. There is no pleasure in drinking for the junkie. Booze seems to stop working – it makes you feel I’ll and disorientated. The only thing that makes you feel good is dope. I had fixed at home on my way out and again upon arriving at the bar. I started nodding out at the table, my eyelids heavy, and I began missing snatches of conversation. Even though I knew I had more dope and could fix at any time, it wasn’t enough. I wanted to fix at home. I wanted to be away from the bar, the noise, the music, and the people. Kat, RP and Sal Mackenzie
all ignored my behavior. They were coked up and oblivious to the fact I was semi-conscious. Joan, on the other hand, kept looking over at me. At first I thought she was flirting with me and as opiated as I was I started to feel a slight fluttering of hope deep inside me. Our eyes locked and I realized that the expression on her face, far from being flirtatious, was a mask of concern. Pity, in fact. Later she held her hands out to me, fixing me in a big watery gaze, and se told me that she was worried about me.

  “Worried? What do you mean, worried?”

  “You seem different. You seem unhappy.”

  Suddenly I had snapped out of my nod and suddenly fury was building inside of me.

  “Do I, Joan? Do I really seem unhappy to you?” I shook my head. In disgust “Jesus, fucking Christ you really are a horribly… suburban… twat, aren’t you? It’s embarrassing.”

  She sat there, mouth hanging slightly open, as if unsure that she’d heard ne correctly. I was mortified that this speed freak had the audacity to feel sorry for ME, and left the bar soon afterwards without saying goodbye. I cursed her for the whole journey home. Self-righteous cunt!

  I started losing contact with RP, Sal, Kat and the others partly though their inability to understand my remaining so determinedly high on heroin all the time, and partly through my own choice. Heroin is a solitary drug; it reduces the need for human interaction. You exist in a blissful cocoon of negative pleasure. At first I remained in close contact with Chris, as he was the only person I knew who used every day. Soon I found myself getting more and more irritated by his manic episodes when he was on it and his whining when he was sick. He didn’t have a job and lived instead off a small allowance from his father. In wasn’t enough to pay rent and keep him in dope, so he had to find other ways to fund his habit. Hanging out with him began to cost me, as he seemingly expected his friends to keep him in heroin as long as we scored using his connections, like he was some kind of heroin broker.

  He eventually relented and gave me a beeper number for one of his regular connections. The guy’s name was Pedro; he was a young overweight Mexican kid who seemed somewhat reliable and sold good shit. Once I had his number, I didn’t need Chris any more. The last I saw of him for a while was a week or so after I’d gotten Pedro’s number. My ex-bandmate was driving a truck with the antique coffee table from his living room dumped in the back. He was on his way to sell it. He looked pale and shaky and didn’t talk for long. He’d pulled up outside my house on his way to the furniture dealer and stopped long enough to ascertain that I didn’t have any drugs for him and that I couldn’t loan him twenty dollars.

  Soon I stopped wanting to go to bars at all. The drunken antics of my friends irritated me. We had stopped being interested in the same things some time ago. I looked upon their boundless appetites for booze and uppers as childish and tiresome. I began to prefer quiet nights in: just me, my books, my music, and my drugs. Bar crawls and after-hours parties began to bore me. Soon I had settled down into a solitary routine. I rose in the mid morning, fixed my first hit of the day, sat down to write for a couple of hours before fixing again and then figuring out how to get more money to score with. Genesis was around less and less; mostly out at the hostess bar or whoring, or up 3, 4 nights on end high on crystal, yak yak yakking.

  And then, just as suddenly as she had appeared in my life, Genesis was gone.

  The night she OD’d started pretty much like any other. It was late Friday night and she came in high and drunk, her high heels click-clacking across the floor as she staggered about the place. She knocked on the bedroom door and woke me up. Staggered in, propped herself down on the end of the bed looped on speed and talking a mile-a-minute. She asked for some heroin and I agreed in an effort to stop her talking.

  I mixed up a weak hit and she skin popped it; lifting up her dress, sliding the needle into her buttock, depressing the plunger, and hissing in pain. I watched her impassively as she did it. In the beginning watching her shoot up turned me on. I thought I was the only one who got a sex kick out of shit like that, but an old junkie I met years later confessed to a similar fetish. “Tan lines and track marks,” he used to say with a dirty grin, “Nuthin’ turns me on more than those hot-ass California junkie bitches…”

  I was so high that she may as well have been scrubbing the toilet for all the enjoyment I got out of watching. She was pantyless on the bed, dress hitched up, her shaved slit exposed but her sexuality utterly obliterated for me by the heroin in my blood. She was lolling on the bed, waiting for the heroin to take the edge off the speed as I prepared a shot of my own. She talked at me the whole time, while I concentrated on cooking and fixing my own drugs.

  “This guy was so rich … he took me and a couple of the other girls from the club up to this place on Lookout Mountain. I guess he must be in movies or something. It was pretty boring … he had booze and really good coke and we just hung out and tweaked all night … he dressed us all up in this nice lingerie that he’d bought … and then he had me eat Connie out and the he brought out some dildo’s and had Connie and Trina fuck each other. I didn’t even have to fuck him, just suck his little cock. I stole a bathrobe – its beautiful, looks like Chinese silk… Fuck him anyway, he came in my hair so I gotta wash it now…”

  I put the needle in my arm and got a register. I fixed and lay back on the bed. It took me a while to realize that Genesis had stopped talking. I enjoyed the silence at first; just the rumble of traffic on the 101 lapping against my thoughts. It started to seem like the roaring of some distant sea, so I didn’t mind. I suppose she may have gurgled a little when she went under, but I don’t remember. I’m pretty sure she didn’t convulse or gasp because I didn’t rouse for a while. Actually it was the silence that started to bring me round, because Genesis never remained quiet for too long. When I finally sat up and looked at her skin was blue. Her eyes were completely unfocused and were looking in opposite directions. For the first time in her life Genesis looked hideously ugly. It was shocking. When I say that she was blue, I mean that literally. I thought when they said people turned blue when they overdosed it was an exaggeration, but no: her face was blue. Her lips were purple, her cheeks the same color I remember my grandfather’s being when they laid him out for his wake in Ireland. Flecks of drool and foam crusted around her mouth.

  In the bathroom trying to drag her nude body under the cold water pouring from the shower, screaming at her to wake up wake up stop fucking around and wakeupyoustupidbitch, sick with the thought that she may well not wake up, my yells reverberating off of the blood-splattered tiles, I prayed to god for her to live and started trying to figure out what I would do if she didn’t.

  No answer from the heavens was forthcoming. So I took what I felt was the only option when faced with such a horrific reality. I ran.

  I was hoping that Genesis was alive. She seemed to be breathing when I left, but I still couldn’t get her to talk or focus her eyes on me for more than a few seconds at a time. I got the idea into my head that she might have suffered brain damage. I laid her on the bed and tried to shoot her with some crystal meth I found in her purse along with a bottle of Xanax. Her pulse was too weak for me to get a register so I shot the mixture into her muscle instead, not knowing if it would have any effect like that. I took the rest of her speed and mainlined it, gobbling down a couple of Xanax for good measure. With the methamphetamine rush came an almost unbearable rush of paranoia and a certain kind of drug-fucked certainty that I had scrambled the poor girl’s brains. I left her in the recovery opposition. That way if she puked in her sleep at least she wouldn’t choke on it. I looked at her on the bed, lying on her side, breathing shallow, makeup running all over her face. Jesus, she looked like a coroner’s photograph. With that thought I bailed, grabbing handfuls of old syringes and any of the drugs that were in the place and I got the fuck out of there.

  I drove to the nearest porno store, Stan’s Adult World, high on speed, Xanax and heroin, watching a video of a seemingly endless gangbang, shovin
g quarters into the slot, wedging my foot against the booth door to deter any offers from the other guys for a 5-dollar blowjob. I drove around the entire next day going from porno theatres, to Mexican dive bars, to scoring spots … not sleeping, in a narcotic half-conscious state, drinking whiskey in The Gold Room, watching off-duty cops play pool at 6 in the morning in the Short Stop on Sunset, Willie Nelson on the jukebox, endless scenes of girls and guys fucking in relentless close up, twisted permutations of asshole and pussy and cock and balls on video screens and LA talk radio crackling out of my stereo, “Lord Jesus I can feel my power coming, my power coming …” At some point I found myself parked by the gas station on Alvarado and 6th with a dealer called Raphael in the back seat talking tequila–cocaine nonsense, buying crack and heroin, and still later again I was parked on a dark street with the car’s interior light on trying to fix in the gloom.

  When I returned to the apartment the landlord had posted a notice to vacate the apartment in 3 days or be locked out by the LA county sheriff’s department. It had been almost 24 hours since Genesis OD’d when I slid my key into the lock. The place was in disarray, but to an even higher degree than usual. I called for her. There was no reply. Pickling my way around the piles of trash to get to the bedroom I was relieved to find her gone. At least she was alive. I was less happy to find her bag of clothes, my CD player, fifty dollars and a bunch of my better suits gone, also. The bitch had robbed me and split without as much as a note. And I had three days to vacate the apartment.

  SOUTHPAW

  Throughout the chaos of the last few months, by band Southpaw had pretty much ceased to be a functioning unit. Members drifted away to other bands and the nucleus of Dito, James and myself rarely got together. Dito stayed away from me, sensing my need to be alone, never passing judgment or asking what the fuck I was doing to myself. It was obvious that something was wrong, though. I didn’t call anyone: I avoided meeting people unless I was scoring from them. In my heroin and cocaine fog, days stretched into weeks and weeks into months without any meaningful activity on my part. Despite the heat I was careful not to wear short sleeves around the band, but I still sometimes caught myself nodding out during rehearsal and having to stay for 15, 20 minutes at a time in the bathroom while I cooked up and tried to find a vein. After Chris’ heroin-induced flame out there was no doubt in my mind that everybody had a pretty good idea of what was going on with me.