by Tony O'Neill
Now my coke was wearing off and I was starting to feel edgy. The pleasure was all gone now, only anxiety and a pounding heart remained. My nerve endings felt as though they had been crudely peeled back to reveal the softness beneath. He told me to head down to Pico, where we drove around back streets slowly looking for the connection. I began to wonder if this was some elaborate revenge for my owing him money for so long. Surely “the connection”, the man who in weight to street dealers like Raphael didn’t lurk around on street corners near Union / Pico? Still my overwhelming need for coke kept me there. I wasn’t sure where we were anymore, but I knew damn well that the grim compulsion awakened in me when I started to shoot coke would keep me driving him around for as long as he wanted, even as the situation seemed more and more hopeless.
And that’s how I found myself parked in a gang-run neighborhood with Raphael sitting on the hood of my car, wild hair sticking up and shirt ripped open, watching him trying to blearily dial a number of his cell, experiencing a growing sense of hopelessness for the whole situation – tonight, my life, everything.
I sat there, debating whether to give up on this and find a place to stay for the night. “A few more minutes,” my head demanded of me. “He might get through to his connection any moment.” I thought about getting another shot of coke into me. I imagined the tidal blast of pure chemical pleasure I would experience as I pushed the shot home.
I shut up and I waited.
An patrol car rumbled past us but Raphael was completely oblivious to the danger from the cops, yelling at his phone like a madman, talking craziness and looking like an escaped lunatic with his shirt ripped open and one of his shoes hanging off. I groaned as I watched the car pass us by. They must have seen me! I had two balloons of heroin on me still and my spikes in the glove box. Plus I had been shooting coke all day, and my track marks were particularly bloody and vivid. It would take no more than a passing glance for the cops to realize I was a junkie and toss the car. I watched the pigs turn left at the bottom of the street and was gripped by the absolute certainty that they were going to circle the block and come back around for a closer look. I stuck my head out of the window.
“Hey Raphael!” I hissed. “Forget it! There’s too much heat around here! Let’s go!”
He looked at me, barely able to focus and started to argue with me in Spanish. He slid off the hood and came around to the drivers’ side window, his shit-stinking breath wafting in like a garbage truck on a summer’s day.
“Leesten man… he come! He say… right now, he say… he come in… two minutos, homie!”
It was the third time in the past hour that Raphael had given me the same speech. I calculated I had maybe a minute before the patrol car would swing back around. I stuck the car into drive and peeled out, leaving Raphael flailing around in the street. I took a left at the end of the block and - sure enough - I caught a glimpse of the prowl car turning back onto the street, flashing the red lights as it came.
“Fucking alcoholic motherfucker!” I fumed, taking the next left and heading back toward the safety of Hollywood, “I hope you get popped, you drunk fucking prick!”
Drunks. They’ve just got no class to them. They’re worse than crack heads, stumbling around breathing their fumes on you. A fucking liability. I remember when I was staying up on Iris Circle and my only connection who would deliver was Pedro, the podgy young kid who drove a red Toyota Corolla. He was pretty good with credit but towards the end his drinking started to get out of control. Because of that I hardly saw him anymore. The worst time was when my car was broken down and I was completely out of dope and sick. Man, I was puking and shitting myself, doubled over with stomach cramps so bad it felt like my intestines were coiling and uncoiling like a pack of snakes. I took my last seven Oxycontin but that didn’t even touch these withdrawals. I had called Pedro at eight that morning and he assured me he’d be there in an hour. At nine I called him, he told me twenty minutes. At ten he told me two minutes. At eleven he told me he was at the bottom of my hill and would be there in a second. Every time we spoke I could hear music, and people talking, and raucous laughter but I kidded myself that it was just his car stereo and not some party he was hanging out at. He finally turned up eleven hours late, drunk as a motherfucker and hardly able to stand. I wanted to beat the shit out of him but I was too weak, and anyway he had the dope so I was polite and thanked him after he took my money and handed me the drugs. The next day when I got my car fixed, though, I went out and found myself another phone connection, swearing never to have another drunk as a dealer. Unfortunately, it seemed that almost every heroin dealer in Los Angeles was a borderline alcoholic. The trick was learning to rotate them in such a way that you mostly caught them on good days. I cursed Raphael again and swore that if I ever had children I’d rather they did heroin than drank alcohol.
On Sunset, near Western I found a dump of a motel called the Motor Home Lodge and I paid thirty-five dollars for the night. When I went to grab my bags from the back seat and noticed something small and black on the backseat. Well fuck me – they were two black balloons of dope. They must have fell out of Raphael’s pocket during his drunken flailing about. I picked them up and rolled them between my fingers. They big and fat, sixty-dollar balloons it looked like. Well, the night wasn’t a waste after all! I was starting to feel real edgy coming down from the coke and counting back it must have been at least five hours since I had fixed some heroin. I sprinted up to my room, let myself in, and threw my bag on the bed.
The room was dark, with a creaky old double bed and a fuzzy out of focus TV playing hardcore porn. It had the dirty, furtive feel of a place where junkies come to shoot up, johns fuck ten dollar crack whores, and washed up screenwriters come to drink themselves to death. I got my kit out and headed to the bathroom with Raphael’s dope. Even when I have a room to myself, I like to shoot up in the bathroom. I suppose its just habit, but to me a hit isn’t a hit to me unless you do it in a bathroom. Automatically I had the spoon out, water in the spoon, ripping open a balloon with my teeth…
I was cold when I woke up.
The smell of vomit flooded my nostrils. I blinked my eyes into focus. The world had turned on its side. My face was on the tiled floor of the bathroom, and I was lying on my left side, curled into the fetal position. I coughed, spitting out some more puke. I tried to lift my head out of the mess. I made it to my knees and noticed the needle still hanging out of my left arm, dried blood clogging around the stem. I pulled it out and threw it across the room.
The last thing I remembered was cooking up one of the balloons that Raphael had left in the backseat. It was a pretty big hit, but nothing more than I’d done in the past. I’d surprised myself by finding a vein in my left arm—I’d thought they’d all collapsed—and I’d pushed the hit in. Almost immediately I’d sensed that something was wrong. That breathless feeling I’d get in my chest when I got a good hit continued to grow until there was a void expanding outwards… stretching further and further… choking my every attempt to draw breath. I felt the warmth envelop me… tried to stand as my vision started to blur…
Somehow I’d managed to fall with my head to the side. It kept my airways clear enough that I didn’t choke on my own puke. I had OD’d, but somehow I had woken up instead of slipping away.
I staggered to my feet and checked my reflection in the mirror. I looked terrible. My lips were thin and purple, my skin white, vomit splashed around my mouth and up the side of my face and in my hair. I looked like death. Smelled like it too.
“You gotta clean up,” I told the apparition in the mirror, “you stupid fuck.”
I stayed up all night, scared to fall asleep. I’d heard stories of people who, after OD’ing and being brought out of it, had gone to bed only to die in their sleep. They’d simply stopped breathing. I found a little bit of crystal meth and tried to shoot it but had trouble hitting a vein because my blood pressure was so low. In the end I had to shoot into my neck, although I really hated
the sensation of injecting there and tried not to do it too often. The rush was disappointing and short lived, but the speed took away my all-encompassing desire to close my eyes at least. I alternated between watching people fuck on the TV and listlessly tapping at my word processor. The sun rose and time dragged. As soon as eight o’clock came by I got my shit together and prepared a final shot of heroin. It was weak, the color of tea. Instead of mainlining it I shot it into my muscle. Then I headed out, and drove straight to a detox facility I had heard about from a girl I used to get high with.
I was going to get clean.
NEAR MISSES (Part Two)
I was in the emergency room of Hollywood Presbyterian with Suzie who had collapsed, shaking and gurgling, convulsing and choking after shooting coke with me all night. Suzie turned up at my door every so often, usually because she and Mike had had an argument over drugs. She would teach him a lesson by crashing at my place for a night or two. She’d take all the drugs and loose cash in their apartment and we would get high together. These little interludes would last as long as the drugs and the money did and then she would be gone, usually without even saying goodbye. Many times I had come to, groggy and still high, only to find that she had taken her stuff and cleared out. It was almost as if she had never been there at all.
It was a junky girl called Heather who had showed me how to shoot cocaine, and in a way it was one of the worst things that anybody ever did to me. I did coke for the first time when I was sixteen years old and it was a drug that I had used in increasing amounts after moving to Los Angeles. In L.A. coke was cheap, and the quality was good. Although it may seem naïve, it had never occurred to me that I could inject it. The first time I shot it I nearly passed out and threw up violently. I had misjudged the amount. Despite the inauspicious beginnings I soon learned to love the feeling of shooting coke almost as much as I loved shooting heroin.
Injecting coke is very different from snorting it; it is the difference between a kick in the ass and a shotgun blast to the face. Shooting coke is an unbelievable rush of pure joy in the brain, like wiring the pleasure centers of the nervous system to the electricity grid and flipping the switch. It is very different from heroin, which is a more physical and even emotional sensation. Heroin is sweet-painful nostalgia for long ago childhood autumns. It is a mother’s caress, the intensity of adolescent first love. The high from shooting coke is so crudely pleasurable, a kick so good that the first shot reduces the user to a state of pure, uncontrollable need. While it lasts you will do anything to get more of the drug inside you. When I am on a coke run, make no mistake about it: I will steal from you. I will rip-off friends for money or drugs; I will lie and do anything within my power to get more coke. It is not a matter of making a decision to behave like a scumbag; it is simply a question of reacting to an overwhelming state of need. A sense of right and wrong is a laughable luxury when you are out of coke and the crash sets in, like some awful tsunami of spiritual horror.
Suzie had shown up with a black eye, an 8-ball and a pack of fresh needles, cursing Mike as an asshole and a spoilt child. We didn’t get into what had happened too much after that, instead getting down to the business of mixing up the coke and water in a spoon, filtering and preparing our shots with expressions of furrowed concentration. Before that first shot I had the usual twinge of reservation about starting this up again: I knew that after my first hit I would be completely at the mercy of this drug. I had no doubt that the final result would be misery, black depression, bleeding arms and sores left over from frenzied injecting. On a coke run I could easily inject every fifteen minutes for as long as the drugs lasted. I had managed to fuck up most of the veins in my arms, hands and legs doing just that. Still, the anticipation of that first rush once I pushed the coke in, the taste in the back of my throat, the hit of endorphins and adrenaline, the ringing in my ears … well; that brushed all other concerns aside.
However, just past midnight, following a huge shot of coke, Suzie fell backwards before she even had a chance to get the rig out of her arm. Her eyes were rolling back into her head and she was making a death rattle gurgle, flopping about the floor, twisting and bashing her head against the wall. I was in a blind panic, pulling the syringe out of her, yelling at her, asking her what the fuck was wrong, dialing for an ambulance, her nearly biting completely through my fingers as I jammed them in her mouth in an attempt to stop her biting off her own tongue.
Surreal ambulance ride down to the hospital, Suzie in the back, me along for the ride up front with the driver, wired on coke and crashing hard already, worrying about the implications if she dies, wondering if she’s still flopping around back there under the restraints. The ambulance driver, a sandy-haired, leather-faced old guy was rambling, some monologue about how he used to play in rock bands, spinning off into a story about playing a support slot with for America, and I was thinking “oh Jesus, how did this happen? Half an hour ago I was in my apartment with a nice fat hit of cocaine in my rig, and now I’m in a fucking ambulance listening to this old bastard go on about shitty soft rock music…”
In the ER waiting room a Mexican girl in a leather miniskirt hung around while I waited to get news of Suzie from the stoic black nurses. The girl was talking to her father on the payphone, telling him that she had to leave town because some kid she knew called Mikey had just been shot five times and she figured she might be next. I watched her on the payphone, twisting the cable around her fingers. She didn’t look so good, either. Another one who’d obviously been up all night getting high, then dragged from that world by unforeseen circumstances into this one of antiseptic smells, blood and screaming victims. On her arm was a tattoo of a low rider car with the legend ‘213 – VIDA’ underneath.
A Village People looking cop with aviator shades and a handlebar moustache walked in and gave a long, theatrical look around the ER before walking up to the desk and speaking in hushed tones to the woman on reception. She nodded over towards me, like the judge placing the black cloth on his head, and I got to my feet and tried and made my way towards the exit as casually as possible.
“Sir, please remain where you are.”
This is the pig approaching me and for a mad moment I consider running and wonder if they would kill a white boy in cold blood as easily as if I were black or Latin, and he uses my hesitation as an opportunity to get a firm grip of my arm.
We had become the focus of attention now. The girl on the phone covered the mouthpiece and watched us with detached interest, like I was the star of some shitty TV show that had unexpectedly got interesting. I glanced around, the assorted drunks and crazies in the waiting room eyed me eagerly.
“Going somewhere?”
“I had to take a piss,” I said. Mentally I am rifling through my pockets, surely there’s no dope there. I convince myself that I am clean.
“Roll up your sleeve for me, please.”
Shit. Straight to business. I looked at him, pretending not to understand, and the cop started grabbing at the sleeve of my jacket, trying to drag it up and expose my bloody bruised arm. I relented and rolled it up myself, presenting the white, fucked up thing to his mirrored gaze.
“How long you been shooting dope, kid?”
I made the mistake of smiling at his bullshit Dragnet pig lingo and I could tell he didn’t like that, because he tugged my sleeve back down with a grimace as if disgusted by the look of my flesh and started getting aggressive with me now, demanding my name, ID, all kinds of bullshit. Of course I didn’t have anything on me and the cop didn’t like that one bit. Going through all of the possible permutations of how this situation could play out I was gripped by a sudden awful fear, considering and calculating in an instant how I would deal with kicking cold turkey in jail and eventual deportation. I flashed on something Genesis always said to me… “Always call cops ‘sir’ and don’t get excited or raise your voice. Admit nothing but do it politely. Ride it out and don’t give them even more reason to bust you.” Genesis was adept at dealing w
ith the heat; the clubs in Koreatown she worked out of would get busted once in a while if someone forgot to pay off the higher ups. I decided to cooperate.
“Six months, sir.”
“Six months, shit!” the cop snarled. “Looks more like six years. You’re a fuckin’ mess.”
“I’m trying to get clean, sir.”
“Yeah right. That’s why that junkie bitch you came in with is OD’d, is it?”
“I’m on a waiting list for a methadone program. I’m trying.”
“You’re trying, huh? Move it.”
He took me by the arm and marched me through the automatic doors. Was this it? Was I going to get busted? The possibility of getting arrested had always been a somewhat abstract concern to me. Sure I’d worry about it after every near miss, after every cop car that looked about ready to pull me over but then didn’t, or when the Rampart Crash Division pigs did sweeps of my regular dope spots near MacArthur Park but somehow missed me passing a bundle of banknotes to a fat Mexican lurking in the shadow of a raggedy palm tree… but as soon as the immediate danger had passed I forgot about it again. Dope fiends don’t think about the future. They live moment to moment. This time, however, it looked like it was really going to happen. I was going to wind up inside a jail cell. I felt faint. It was as though all the dope in my system somehow drained out of me and I was in spontaneous withdrawal, as though someone had shot me full or Narcan. The scariest thing about getting busted was the fact I’d have no dope. That awful, terrifying possibility towered over all other concerns. Cold turkey was bad enough in a comfortable bed. Kicking on a prison mattress didn’t bear thinking about.
I was pretty sure I didn’t have anything incriminating on me, apart from my track marks. Could they bust people for track marks..? The cop pushed me up against the wall suddenly, knocking the breath out of me. He was snarling in my face, exposing large gleaming capped teeth, breathing coffee and cigarettes into my face. I watched my shocked, squirming reflection in his aviator glasses.