Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  There were other factors in the band’s slide into inactivity than my drug use - infighting, bad managers- but the heroin certainly didn’t help. The biggest difficulty, however, was our sound: Southpaw were melodic and melancholy, taking out musical cues from The Verve and Lou Reed. Few people were interested in “that kind of music” while bands like Limp Bizkit dominated the LA scene and A&R men were scrabbling to throw money at any bad metal band with members who wore backwards baseball caps. In the face of record company indifference one day the band simply stopped rehearsing and that was that.

  Out of the blue Dito called me one afternoon, excited and talking a mile a minute.

  “Hey man, you gotta do this show with me at the Viper Room next Wednesday! It’s a real big deal! A lotta people are gonna be there … Are you up for it?”

  Sensing I had no choice, I agreed. A rehearsal was hastily arranged for the weekend and I shot up a speedball before going over to the rehearsal space, turning up sweaty and manic, babbling a lunatic monologue about the cops and the absurdity of jaywalking laws, knocking things over and cursing, running to the bathroom to fix with shaking hands, making a mess of my arm and returning to the room with blood soaking through my shirt muttering “Let’s play, let’s do this…”

  Trying to play the keyboard my fingers felt leaden and unresponsive. The instrument itself - newly rescued from the pawnshop just for this occasion – was alien and awkward to the touch. I remembered how easily playing came in the days of The Catsuits – it was a purely automatic response. I never had to think about it. I never had to try. It had come as easily as breathing.

  I felt, here in this claustrophobic LA rehearsal room, old and burnt out. The cocaine made my nerve endings scream in raw, amped - out fury while my heart pounded my ribs in an attempt to escape my toxic, wasted and poisoned body. I was an impostor, a fraud, a sickening phony. What had I done with the kid who played that show 3 years ago? I had pummeled him into submission with hard drugs and bad decisions. The pilot was dead - the plane was doomed.

  The day of the show, disaster struck. I was out of money and needing to find someone willing to advance me enough heroin to get through the day. I had last fixed at 9am and by 5pm I was getting desperate. Junk sickness swept through me like a black wind. A migraine so severe I could barely open my eyes pounded at the inside of my skull. Suddenly I began to vomit. I covered my mouth but hot puke cascaded through my fingers and splattered the floor, covering the newspaper I had been reading before the sickness really kicked in. It was now 6 o’clock. I had 3 hours before we were due on stage, 2 and a half before sound-check. Dito had begged me not to be late, not to be fucked up and I’d sworn to him that it would be OK.

  Where the fuck was Henry? Henry was a young Peruvian kid I sometimes bought from. He’d reluctantly agreed to drive out to me and deliver a balloon of heroin on credit. This was at noon and six hours later I was still waiting, needle, spoon, lighter and water sitting on the counter awaiting his dope. I desperately beeped him again, adding ‘911-911’ after my number. I tried to imagine the sound of his car pulling up outside, the clump of his boots approaching the door and the pause before … knock!knock! … as if by visualizing it I could somehow make it happen. I screamed in frustration and cursed him to hell. It was too late to try and score anywhere else – I was too sick to move. Time crawled on – 40 minutes to sound-check - and my mind reeled. I couldn’t play; there was no hope. I could barely stand up. I had now been waiting for 7 hours and 50 minutes for him to make the 35-minute drive from his place to mine.

  At 8 o’clock, like Jesus, like sex, like love, he appeared at my door. I staggered to wrench it open. He stood there, picking his nose as if nothing was going on.

  “Come in…”

  “You look muy malo, homie,” he trilled.

  He dropped the balloon in my hand and split. I called a cab and started to unwrap the drugs with shaking hands. At the centre of it lay a clump of white powder. This was strange. Had some white heroin somehow made it into the LA supply chain, where black tar heroin usually reigned supreme? I tasted it, and the tip of my tongue immediately went numb. Cocaine. Motherfucker! That lousy motherfucking Peruvian cunt had destroyed me! Destroyed me! There was no hope now – cocaine was no use for my sickness. I slammed it anyway, puked before the needle was out of my arm and then staggered out to my honking cab. I was wired, weak and crazy with dope sickness.

  With Sunset Strip traffic I arrived at ten minutes to 9. I started to wonder why I had even agreed to do the show. When the band had stopped rehearsing it came as something of a relief: I found no pleasure in playing music anymore. It’s hard to say why. One reason was that it began to dawn on me that I stood little to no chance of even experiencing a similar level of musical success to what I had found with Mark Brel or The Catsuits. I felt in my heart that my moment had passed. Here in LA, with the perfect unchanging weather and the perfect unchanging drugs I ingested, time had a way of slipping past unnoticed. In the almost 3 years I had been in LA drifting by, I had done nothing to capitalize on my successes in England. Those years felt as though they had passed just moments ago, but in the music industry my achievements may as well have been in another century. Nobody remembered, nobody cared. No, the only reason to continue playing music would be the good old clichéd ones: a passion for rock’n’roll, an unwavering belief in THE DREAM. Truth was, I had neither anymore. With all of the energy I needed to spend keeping my drug habit up, I had not a drop left over for something as all-consuming as art. I was here out of loyalty to Dito and, I suppose, the fear that without even a band to tie me to my old life, I would finally be adrift in Los Angeles: a ghost whose lines of history and self had been cut off for non-payment.

  I had blown the sound-check and as the cab pulled up outside the club, I saw Dito pacing the sidewalk like an expectant father. I threw open the door and staggered onto the street, vomiting one last time over my shoes and into the gutter in the same movement.

  “I’m here, I’m here …” I spluttered and Dito muttered, “Oh Christ, man…” as we made our way in through the back exit.

  The show dragged and I played badly in my vomit stinking shoes. Songs like Superstar and Fade Away that had once seemed to vital and spontaneous now dragged, every bit of life and had joy bled away until nothing remained but a junked out shell of what once was. Irrespective of that, I stole 40 dollars from a tip tray and headed out to score almost as soon as I walked off stage.

  Outside, I hailed a cab as Dito ran from the club to catch up with me.

  “Hey!” he yelled, “Where you going? You OK?”

  “Yeah, yeah … just something I gotta do …”

  “Oh,”

  We stood there, in total silence for a moment. It seemed he wanted to talk about the show, but the look of total desperation on my face silenced him. I found out later that Dito had talked some A&R guy into seeing the show. Despite my best efforts to the contrary he actually liked what he saw. That gig would eventually lead to a record deal for Dito. While his album never hit big, it enabled him to make an unexpected segue into directing movies. He finally was able to realize the dream he’d been working at since I’d first met him. By the time Dito was enjoying the first flush of his success I was at my lowest ebb. I didn’t know it at the time but I hadn’t reached the bottom, yet. Hell, the truth was I hadn’t even truly begun the descent.

  Dito and I stood there, looking at each other. I was at a loss for what to say and hated myself for it. I knew as well as he did what was happening here. The cab honked and I said, “I gotta split Dito,” and he nodded. We left in opposite directions – me towards downtown to score dope, and Dito back inside the club. I watched the lights of the Viper Room fade into the distance as the cab pulled away and headed east.

  I miss you, Dito.

  THE ELECTRIC KOOL AID SPEEDBALL TEST

  After the Viper Room gig I pretty much gave up on music for a while. I abandoned the apartment the night before I was due to be evicted. I t
ook whatever I could fit into garbage bags. The place was destroyed: bloodsplats on the tiles, garbage lying all over every surface, used needles in kitchen drawers, the medicine cabinet, underfoot.

  I began a nomadic existence of motel rooms while I could still afford them. The people I knew from the various bands I had played in tried to keep me up-to-date with the latest trends and who was getting signed, but I never turned up to the shows when I was put on the guest list. No - one wanted to come over to whichever motel I was staying at because it usually involved running the gamut of crack dealers and alcoholics who loitered in the lobby before getting to my room and gingerly picking their way around the piles of discarded syringes to find me incapable of having a conversation which didn’t revolve around where to score more heroin … I started to get the reputation of a gutter junky around the music scene in Hollywood and nobody wanted to hang out with someone like that unless they were a junky themselves. And that, I suppose, is how I ended up in Electric Kool-Aid for a brief but eventful run.

  Simon was a kid I met through Lori, my speed connection. As we had a drug habit in common Simon and I started to hang out and occasionally play music together. In a typically incestuous LA twist, he was also the latest in a long line of drummers for local legends Electric Kool-Aid. After briefly becoming the darlings of the Hollywood music scene, the band were now better known for their extreme behavior than their music. It was a shame: the band’s leader Atom was an incredibly talented songwriter, and if they’d just managed to hold it together for a year or two they could have been a very successful band. Unfortunately it all kept falling apart in a reoccurring maelstrom of hard drugs, fistfights and lunatic decision-making.

  I became a regular at Simon’s place in East Hollywood, which was becoming a kind of halfway-house for drug casualties, groupies and human wreckage from East LA’s art scene. We would sit up night after night injecting meth and heroin, recording hours and hours of music. Some of these angular, stoned songs were pretty good and we planned on putting a group together to perform them, but we were too busy getting high and it never happened. Most were recorded at around 4 in the morning after a full 24-hours or more of constant, heavy drug use. Oftentimes Simon’s place looked more like a waiting room for the methadone clinic: most days there would be three or four wan, pained characters sitting around itching and shifting uncomfortably, waiting for someone to show up with some smack. They looked like crows on a telephone wire, their eyes shooting to the door with a pleading look anytime someone new walked in. Most of them were in awe of Atom, Electric Kool-Aid’s leader. Since it was well-known that Simon drummed in the band groups of them hung around on the off-chance Atom would show up, seemingly desperate to bask in his reflected glory for a while. I was utterly indifferent to the band, focused entirely on ensuring the flow of drugs remained uninterrupted. The latest ripplings in the music scene were a ludicrous, abstract thought.

  One day Simon and I were waiting for Lori to show up with some heroin. When she waltzed in she was with a tall, lithe guy dressed in white robes like some kind of fucking cult leader. Peeking out from under the hem of his robe were the pointed toes of a pair of snakeskin boots. I recognized him as Atom straight away. He looked taller, more gaunt and sickly than the press pictures I had seen of him. He surveyed the room and some of the other junkies practically jumped up to offer him a seat.

  Atom knew me vaguely through my band’s erstwhile guitar player, Chris. He nodded in recognition and came over to perch on the seat next to me. Lori came over with my balloon, which I knew the thieving bitch would had opened, removed a fraction of the tar heroin and then clumsily resealed. This unspoken thievery was par for the course when dealing with Lori, there was no point in trying to argue about it. She was a repulsive human being: a con artist, a liar, stupid enough to be considered borderline retarded and ugly on top of it. But right now, handing over the dope, she was the most welcome sight in the world. I would have got down on my knees and kissed that fat monster right on her vile asshole if she demanded it in exchange for the drugs. I took the dope and started to prepare my shot.

  The last time I had seen Atom I was not injecting dope, but if he was surprised when I opened up my pencil case revealing a carbon-scarred spoon, filter, tourniquet and insulin syringe, he didn’t show it.

  “Got your own kit now, huh?” he said, with a smile that was half wince. And then: “You got a spike?”

  “Sure.” I gave him a fresh needle and we began to cook up in silence.

  After shooting our way to glory we all got real quiet and heavy except for Atom, who suddenly became very animated. Stories poured out of him about their recent tour of Japan: the fanatical groupies, the trouble they had scoring drugs, the record company representative in Tokyo who handed over a tiny baggie of grass in a manner that suggested international espionage. I laughed – Atom was a funny storyteller, and charismatic. But there was an undertone of malevolence that I found appealing and unsettling at the same time.

  “You should come play with us,” he said.

  “You’ve got a keyboard player.”

  “Not anymore. I had to let him go.”

  “Why?”

  “You know Odessey and Oracle? Like, The Zombies’ album?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He said the production on it was “faggy.” That was the word he used – faggy.” Atom shook his head as if still galled by the keyboard players ignorance. “I mean, it’s a fucking great album.”

  I had to agree there.

  “So we left him in Kyoto airport,” Simon drawled, half nodded-out. “Cunt’s probably still there, wondering where we are.”

  So that’s how I found myself roped into the Electric Kool-Aid traveling circus for a while. It was hot in LA; it’s always hot in LA, but when you’re always a little dope sick and out of money and cooped up in a house on top of Lookout Mountain with a bunch of other junkies trying to learn a song it seems even hotter - oppressively so.

  The first rehearsal I showed up, as would become my ritual over the next few weeks, riding shotgun in Simon’s rickety Volkswagen Bug. We snaked up the winding narrow path that led to Atom’s house on top of Lookout Mountain. The road had no barriers to prevent the car from tumbling onto the busy stretch of road below and if you met a car coming the other way, someone had to reverse all the way to their start point, or you would be at an impasse. Given that most people driving to and from the house were usually loaded on heroin or speed, these little stand-offs could often be quite terrifying. Simon had filled me in on a few of the wilder stories about Atom: the gun fixation, the death threats to the Oscar Wildes (a band who started off as good friends of Atom’s but became an object of seething resentment as their success - and his drug intake - ballooned), the obsession with the Masons, the messiah complex that became blossomed into full-on Jesus mania when he was high enough … trundling up to this large, secluded house I began to thank God that at least we had a drug habit in common. There’s no icebreaker in the world like shooting up with someone.

  Atom answered the door dressed in his uniform flowing white robes, looking more distracted than usual.

  “Rehearsal’s off,” he told us, ushering us in. “Unless you can loan me 40 bucks and give me a ride.”

  It turned out that both of his guitars were in the pawnshop. He was 40 dollars short on the tickets to retrieve them. He gave me a brief tour of the house, which included him proudly showing off his sitars… plucking long sustained notes on them and nodding to himself contentedly in a dreamlike manner… and we ended up in the bedroom where Atom held out his Masonic sword to me. It was an awesome thing, heavy and beautifully carved with intricate designs. The room suddenly became very quiet – it was obvious that Atom revered this item above all others.

  “A lot of people would like to get their hands on this,” he told me in an excited whisper. “You don’t fuck with the Masons. I shouldn’t even know this exists.”

  We got ourselves straight with a couple of speedballs.
Then we piled in Simon’s bug and rode to the pawnshop on Sunset.

  The place was typical as far as LA pawnshops go. Believe me, when you have a habit you spend a lot of time in pawnshops. It had a wooden statue of an Indian Chief outside the door and the inside was cool, musty and dark. The old Armenian behind the counter knew Atom and sarcastically addressed him as “the rock star” to which Atom scowled back, “Fuck you, old man”. The owner came out from behind the chicken wire protecting his counter and shuffled onto the shop floor. He was horribly hunched over - some kind of spinal disease I assumed - but he moved quickly for someone so twisted and bent. I flicked through the CD’s and stumbled across a copy of The Catsuits debut album for sale for the princely sum of 70 cents. It was right next to a soundtrack CD for LA Law which was a dollar fifty.

  “I got some good stuff for you rock star … new guns.”

  “Oh yeah, yeah, let me see …”

  Simon, who knew Atom a lot better than I did, suddenly had a look on his face that I would come to recognize pretty well over the coming weeks. This mask of exasperation was the signal that Atom was about to do something stupid and it was utterly futile to try and stop him.

  We left an hour later with only one of the guitars. The rest of the money had been put toward some bullets and a replica civil war era pistol. Even though it fired real bullets, this thing was so old it was considered an antique and as such didn’t require a waiting period. Driving up Sunset again, Atom kept sticking the gun out of the window and pointing it at open-mouthed passers-by, screaming, “I WILL KILL ALL OF YOU FUCKERS!” Simon looked about ready to have a heart attack every time this happened, but he seemed scared to do more than mutter under his breath about it. We stopped by some sleazy groupies pad in Echo Park, where Atom borrowed a hundred bucks, then hit downtown to score. That was our first rehearsal.