Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  I later discovered that the original line-up of the band had all quit after Atom began using heroin after a few years clean. Soon he was worse than ever, shooting coke on top of his usual diet of smack and speed. This led to a number of high profile onstage fistfights that delighted the music press but ended up breaking up the band’s classic line-up. When the band walked out Atom also got kicked out the documentary filmmaker who had been following the band around for years in the hopes of making a film about their antics. I met her once or twice and she seemed like most of the other people floating in and out of the Kool-Aid’s inner circle – flaky and drug damaged. I figured there was no way in hell this movie would even get finished. I was astounded years later when it was not only released, but became quite a hit, effectively re-launching Electric Kool-Aid’s career.

  The line-up I played in was cobbled together from musicians who either didn’t know how crazy Atom was or didn’t care. Despite this freewheeling attitude the band lost members by a rate of approximately one person every couple of days. We had 3 weeks to prepare for a headlining “comeback” show at the Troubadour that was getting a lot of press hype. The original line-up consisted of: Atom, Simon, a strung out guitarist named Aaron, Mike from my band Southpaw on bass, a Hollywood freak named Buddy on second guitar, and myself.

  Aaron was the first to go, gone after getting too high to play and fucking up his cues a couple of times. Despite the fact Atom was a junky too, he couldn’t tolerate sloppy drug users. Atom berated him for over an hour one time in particular, calling him a useless nancy boy junky who couldn’t even play the guitar, a pathetic, clichéd Johnny Thunders wannabe … he even told him that he was rotten at being a junky, never mind a musician. That was the last we saw of Aaron. He was practically in tears when he left. Aaron’s real problem was that he was in awe of Atom, and if you were in awe of him or you feared him, Atom would use that weakness to completely destroy you.

  Mike went next. He and Buddy were the two non-junkies in the band and even his impeccable patience and normally unflappable personality couldn’t take these rehearsals. We would generally start an hour or more late while everybody shot up, wheedled drugs out of each other, or nodded out during long circular conversations about where this sitar line should go or on the relative merits of the The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society album. Then the music would start, either as a funeral-paced dirge (if Simon had done heroin before counting us in) or at a breakneck jittery pace (if he had done crystal meth). Then each song would be interrupted several times while Atom berated Simon, myself, Mike or Buddy for playing a note behind or in front of the beat, not grooving enough, or simply to interject another piece of information relating to a conversation we had all had three hours ago which he’d just remembered. I think the whole scene just got too weird for Mike and one day we were a four piece: vocals, two guitars, keyboards and drums. It would be almost 4 years before I saw Mike again, in London. He was touring as the lighting guy for the latest group of ex-Kool-Aid musicians to be in a flavor-of-the-month band.

  Buddy got the worst of it once Aaron and Mike had split. He was not a junky, just a pot smoker with a stupid stoned grin permanently stuck to his face. He absolutely idolized Atom. The most banal bit of information offered by Atom would receive a slow, rapturous nod, as if Buddy was a devout Catholic receiving a personal proclamation from the Pope himself. It was sad: because he worshipped Atom, Buddy tolerated every piece of verbal or physical abuse Atom would throw at him. Our singer seemed to take this is a personal challenge and a grotesque exercise in sado-masochism began to play out every time we showed up for rehearsal.

  As the days wore on, Buddy the whipping boy of the group. Sometimes he would bring it on himself. I think he like to see himself as some kind of voice of reason among the chaos. He mistakenly assumed that Atom would somehow respect that. Once he pulled me aside and told Simon and I to stop sharing our drugs with Atom.

  “You see how crazy he gets when he shoots dope, man,” Buddy told me. “You got to let him fly, baby. He’s a genius, and the dope is holding him back…”

  I told Buddy that if he really wanted to see crazy he should watch what would happen if I didn’t share my shit with Atom.

  His biggest mistake (and the moment which, in retrospect, spelled the end for Buddy) was when one day we took a break to fix. I told Buddy to hang and read a magazine as this was often a messy, protracted process. Nobody’s veins were in great shape anymore.

  “Hey Atom,” Buddy yelled, “don’t you think you’ve had enough? Let those two losers go get high … Lemmie show you this song I wrote. I think you’ll like it…”

  Atom didn’t dignify Buddy’s moronic suggestion that he didn’t get high with a reply, but the look on his face said it all. The next day, Buddy was gone.

  Now we had a real problem. The show was in 3 days and we had to rearrange the entire set to be played on guitar, drums and keyboards. We did more and more drugs. I had started shooting coke and I was finding it hard to sit still long enough to finish a song without sneaking off and fixing while no one was looking. Atom wanted to find a Hammond organ and have me play the songs “like the fucking Doors, man.” At this point we had only learned 4 songs and they sounded ropy at best. I began to realize the show was going to be a disaster and broached the subject of pulling out. Atom stated that there was no way—we needed the money.

  It all ended in a suitably farcical manner. We were rehearsing when Atom suddenly decided he wanted some fresh orange juice and that he wanted Simon and I to go get it. I figured he had some drugs that we weren’t meant to know about and he wanted to do them. We got into the rickety Volks and started down Lookout Mountain. At the bottom of the mountain we hit a right and headed to the Ralphs supermarket on the corner of Sunset. As soon as we were on the road though, the car started spluttering and shaking.

  “Aw fuck,” Simon said as the engine died and he rolled the car over to the curb. “I’m outta gas.”

  It was too far and too steep to walk back to Atom's place. After rustling up five dollars in change between us and an empty Gatorade bottle, we walked twenty minutes to the nearest gas station, filled up the bottle with two dollars of gas and brought it back to the bug. We then drove down to the gas station, put the other three dollars in the tank, and finally returned to Atom’s place. We had been gone over an hour. When we walked in we were hot, thirsty and thoroughly pissed off. My first thought was finishing the last of my smack and getting a glass of cold water. Atom was sitting in his chair and I immediately knew that shit was about to go down. For a start he had that ceremonial sword lying across his lap.

  “What kept you?” he asked. His voice was deceptively calm.

  Simon started the whole convoluted story about how the Bug died and how we had to get gas. Atom nodded affably. When Simon was done I sense Simon’s growing agitation. His patience with Atom’s craziness was wearing dangerously thin. I could see that Simon was just waiting for Atom to say something to set him off. The two of them stared at each other, both about to erupt.

  “Well?” asked Atom, a thing smile curling his lips. “Now that story time’s over… you want to tell me where my fucking orange juice is?”

  And that was it.

  “Did you listen to a word I just said, man??? We had to walk to the gas station and fill a fucking Gatorade bottle full of gas and walk back to the car!!! Asshole! I did not get your fucking juice!”

  In the ensuing ruckus Simon was almost decapitated by a Masonic sword. As I tried to escape Atom’s flailing blade I accidentally knocked a guitar against an amp so hard that we could still hear the feedback wailing out of the open front door – along with Atom cursing us, our mothers and our unborn children – until we were at least halfway down the mountain.

  Still, Simon and I showed up to the comeback gig two nights later. Simon used to score from a girl who worked the door and so we slipped in without paying. The filmmaker was back, ready to capture the carnage for posterity. As the lights
went down and a few expectant whoops and hollers went up from the crowd, Simon leaned into me and said, “I can’t wait to see how the motherfucker tries to pull this shit off …”

  Atom walked up to the mike and began to play the opening song with just an acoustic guitar. From the very first chord it was obvious he was badly out of tune. It was obvious that Atom was out of his mind on smack and coke – his eyes were practically rolling back in their sockets. In-between songs he berated the sound guy and the lighting guy, saying they were crucifying him. He forgot the words to the songs. I could sense the crowd getting uglier and more restless around us. “Where’s the rest of the band?” someone yelled, and Atom muttered, “I am the fucking band, asswipe.”

  I was standing at the back with Simon, stoned and pretty amused about the whole spectacle. Then, out of nowhere somebody jumped up on stage from the audience and shambled over to Atom. I figured maybe somebody was gonna go punch his lights out but then I recognized Buddy, with that same dumb grin stuck onto his face. He actually picked up an electric guitar during the intro to a song called “I’m In Hell” and started trying to plug into an amp. Despite all of the abuse, the poor bastard was back for more. It was a beautiful, ridiculous moment. No one else knew who Buddy was, but the biggest cheer of the night came when Atom noticed him with a scowl and walked over, guitar aloft, and tried to smash it over Buddy’s head. He missed and slammed the guitar against Buddy’s shoulder. With a yelp Buddy staggered off the stage.

  I left before the show was over. After half an hour the floor started emptying out. There was an awful silence when Atom abandoned his latest songs midway through. The sight I left with was of an object arcing through the glittering stage-lights on its way towards Atom as he strummed some half-forgotten song. The missile seemed to freeze momentarily in the air before hitting his guitar and disintegrating in a shower of red. It was a tomato. As I headed to the door I heard Atom screaming, “Why don’t you just shoot me instead?” Temping fate, as usual. Outside, it was a beautiful clear night in Hollywood. We took the 101-freeway east heading to Sunset and Benton to cop.

  “You know, Simon,” I said, as the city lights danced off the bug’s windshield, “sometimes being in a band isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  But Simon wasn’t listening. He was yelling into his cell in pidgin-Spanish. “Cinco minuto, man! We’ll be there in cinco minuto!”

  NOTHING SHOCKING

  Nothing surprised me anymore. I watched a guy mix up a shot of crystal meth and distilled water, and right there in the driver’s seat of his car – we were parked on Hollywood Boulevard with groups of tourists strolling past us at the time – he whipped down his pants and shot it right into his groin. Pulled the balls and dick aside and slid the needle into a red, open wound that was waiting for him like some awful, suckling mouth. I was spun off of shooting speed too and had seen enough crazy scenes on crank that I was really unflappable at this point. It was three o’clock in the afternoon during a baking Los Angeles heat wave. I asked him if it hurt fixing there.

  “Only the first few times,” he told me. “I’ve done it so often now that the hole never really closes up. I can get a hit there anytime I like. I just stick it in and wham! Blood pops right up like I had willed it…”

  I felt trapped and sick, my habit outstripping my income and my ability to work. Systematically, over a period of four months, I had managed to alienate every single person I knew who was prepared to pay me to write. All of my desperate calls to Propaganda Films trying to rustle up more work were mysteriously rerouted to an answering machine without even an outgoing message on it. I was persona non grata with the people who were once my main source of income. I could no longer keep a fixed address, staying in short-let motels, friend’s houses, often just sleeping in the back of my car.

  In an effort to straighten myself out I had briefly flirted with methadone treatment at a clinic in Hollywood. It was hardly an encouraging experience. The clinic was right around the corner from where I was staying at the time, a roach-ridden hooker motel on Wilcox between Hollywood and Selma called the Mark Twain. I was there out of pure economics—it cost 150 dollars a week and they didn’t require a security deposit. I remember thinking “The Mark Twain – that seems like a good omen for a writer.” As depressing as The Mark Twain was, with its threadbare brown carpet in the halls and lime-green walled rooms with dilapidated 1920’s bathroom fixtures, and one barred window looking out over a parking lot where on Sundays they gave soup to the drunks and the street kids who spat and grizzled and fought over it, there were some unique advantages particular to this Hollywood address. The only needle exchange in Hollywood was a five-minute walk on Cahuenga, right across from a queer bar that opened at 6am, a place called The Spot Light where I sometimes hung out when I was shooting meth and couldn’t sleep. And then, when I was tired and broke and trying to figure a way out of my predicament there was the methadone clinic, which was five minutes or less in the opposite direction.

  It was an ugly place and the karma was wrong from the start. I was completely in the thrall of my habit at this time, shooting Mexican tar heroin and cocaine compulsively, sometimes up to fifteen or twenty shots a day, more on occasions. Everything I owned was in and out of a pawnshop on Fairfax Avenue, including my keyboard, (so I couldn’t play music), and my word processor, (so I could only write longhand). I had an appointment for nine in the morning to be assessed and dosed and I stayed up the entire night in a state of fidgety excitement fixing speedballs in the backs of my hand and my feet (my leg and arm veins where pretty much all gone by now) thinking that here was a chance to quit and sort my life out—the typical excitement of the junky who has just made a promise but hasn’t had to follow through on it yet. At 8:30 I made my way down to the clinic, with 2 shots of cocaine in my jacket pocket since I had heard that the assessment could take a while. I had stopped shooting dope around 3am because they needed me to be sick before they could dose me. By 8:30 my pupils were as big as saucers and I was soaked in a sticky layer of junk sweat while the coke I was shooting worsened my sporadic twitches. On the street people gave me a wide berth. I guess I looked like a crazy homeless guy, definitely a lot older than my 22 years.

  The clinic was around the back of a check-cashing place that I knew pretty well on the corner of Hollywood and Cahuenga (I had passed a couple of bum checks there when I was desperate and ballsy enough, and didn’t look too much like a junky and a thief). There was an anonymous-looking door with two large black guys guarding it, as though I was trying to get into some trendy Hollywood nightclub. They looked me up and down before letting me through and up the staircase. I wondered who they were there to keep out.

  The clinic was a trip. It was a methadone clinic as well as a place for pre- and post-op sex changes to get medication and counseling. The waiting room was full of these hard-looking Latino drag queens with permanent makeup and huge tits, and it was hard to tell who was post-op and who was pre-op. They all looked like they could kick the shit out of you. It was some scene, man. Outside these same queens would hawk their medication to the junkies as they left, mostly sleepers or pain pills. Occasionally a Dilaudid would turn up for sale but they could fetch forty dollars a pill since they were so rare and desirable.

  The methadone patients were a combination of your typical L.A. / Hollywood gutter junkies mixed with the more rock and roll type kids who developed a habit off chasing the dragon which was gaining popularity in the music scene. I was assessed by some old Asian doctor who told me, after checking my injection sites and my level of sickness that I should start off on 80mls. First I would get 40 and then I had to wait. If I was still standing after thirty minutes I would get my other 40. I paid him twelve dollars, went up to the glass counter with my slip, and waited in line. In front of me a woman who looked to be eighty-years-old, in pancake make-up and a black witchy bonnet, was handed a cup through the glass partition. She was supporting herself on a walking stick. In her efforts to take the cup she had to
rest the stick against the counter and balance herself precariously against the wall. Her hand trembled as she reached for the methadone and froze as she tottered on her heels in gravity-defying slow motion. It seemed she was about to slip. Instinctively, I moved forwards to support her, but I was grabbed by one of the workers and hauled back to where I was standing. The guy who had grabbed me, an improbably large hick white kid with cross-eyes, pointed to a black line in the floor and mumbled “Don’t cross the line. Cross the line again and ya don’t git dosed.”

  Meanwhile, the old lady was still going through the improbably slow pantomime of trying to raise the plastic cup of pink liquid to her mouth while remaining upright. The trembling cup crawled towards her puckered lips. I felt my guts churn and loosen more, and got the idea that I might fall over soon, myself.

  “C’mon you old fuck!” someone behind me yelled, getting a few “Yeahs!” of approval. I thought that was kind of fucked up, but when she finally got the methadone down and insisted on adding some water to her cup, swilling it around and repeating the whole bullshit procedure again, I found myself cursing her also.

  I got my dose passed to me through the glass partition and downed it quickly. It tasted strong, aniseed-like. My first hit of methadone. I was about to walk away when the scowling Chinese lady behind the counter said, “Wait!”