Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  The last arrest came at the very end of the line. Michael now had no source of income and was cut off from his family completely. He was wandering the streets, trying to figure a way out of his predicament when he spotted a guy working on a storefront, fixing a sign. The worked had gone inside the shop for a moment, leaving his drill unattended. Michael did the calculations quickly and decided that he could get at least forty dollars at pawn for the drill. He crossed over, trying to look inconspicuous. Then he grabbed the drill and ran.

  Michael was a bad thief. You could tell just by looking at him—brazen, scared and desperate. A cry went up and before he knew what was happening, the owner of the drill and some of his friends were chasing him. They were bigger than him and gaining. At the intersection where 6th crosses Alvarado, he decided to run into traffic in a desperate bid to lose his pursuers.

  He ran, focusing only on the screams of the horns, the screech of tires and the yells of the guys who seemed only feet away. A motorcyclist swerved to avoid him and as it did there was a heavy thud and an explosion of pain as an SUV hit him. He flew backwards and landed in a heap, still holding the drill to his chest. Everything seemed to stop. He could hear sirens wailing in the distance although it seemed improbably early for the police to be there. He staggered to his feet and carried on running. He ran straight into an ambulance responding to a different emergency, which tossed him back to the tarmac with a crunch. A crowd was gathering now, but in his dazed and frightened state, Michael just wanted to keep running. He struggled to his feet. The last thing he remembered before waking up in the emergency room was the pain—an explosion of violent, terrible pain, as he put his weight on his right leg. He had a vague recollection of seeing his leg twist and give way, bending at an impossible angle before he collapsed to the ground and blacked out completely.

  He was here on his father’s insurance, hobbling around with a cane and pins through his leg in a last chance to avoid doing jail time. I didn’t figure Michael would make it in jail and I could see he knew it too. He still had something of the All-American asshole about him; not even the crack had managed to take away that guileless cheerfulness. If he ended up inside I had no doubt that he would wind up beaten into submission and gang fucked by everyone so inclined.

  He was still inside when I checked out of rehab and could be there still for all I know. He thrived in rehab and told anyone who would listen that he wanted to become a drugs worker. I hope it worked out for him because I had a feeling that he would hit the pipe as soon as he hit the streets despite all of the talk of it being over. He had that look in his eyes; the same one I had, the look of a pet dog that had just been beaten by its master—total paralysis by way of hurt, confusion and fear.

  I spent the next twenty-eight days in the bizarre unreality of drug rehabilitation. Rehab is a place where you are thrown in with a variety of people you would never have normally spent time with: Latino gang members, crackhead lawyers, septuagenarian junkies, alcoholic priests, coke-crazed pilots—a whole world of strange, fringe characters who you are made to rely on for friendship, for sanity and for comfort … all of you sick and vulnerable without your security blanket of drugs or alcohol; trying to figure out how to get better, getting yelled at for not cleaning floors and toilets with the correct amount of vigilance by staff, sleeping in communal spaces, sharing intimacies of your life in group therapy sessions and compulsory Narcotics Anonymous meetings. I sat there during break times freezing in the ninety degree California heat, clutching my leather jacket closed and cursing the air conditioning inside the building.

  I met Duane, a slight man with a prosthetic leg who worked for the government in the early nineties painting military aircraft with a kind of experimental paint which it was later discovered gave seventy-five percent of the people working on the project a particularly aggressive form of cancer. They sued and the case dragged its way though the courts, the resulting ruling against the military coming too late for most of them who had succumbed to tumors and agonized last hours on morphine drips in sterile wards. Duane made it, though, gave evidence at a senate committee hearing, had his fifteen minutes of fame in the news media and accepted a settlement, with which he tried to drink himself to death. When I knew him he was ill, riddled with tumors and a cirrhotic liver. He was tortured, knowing that at forty-five he probably didn’t have long to live with his body in such bad shape, torn between the desire to make his family proud of him for getting off of booze and a desire to simply drink the pain away and live out whatever weeks or months he had left with at least the numbness of chronic alcoholism to take the edge off. He cried a lot, and called me from a bar three days after I got out, the day his insurance ran out and they sent him back into the real world. The last time I spoke to him he was in that bar, his voice tired and slurring, the sound of a TV playing some football game in the background. He was tired, he told me, he was tired of living. He wanted me to meet him and bring him some sleeping pills. I told him to hang on, took the address, turned my phone off and never heard from him again. Where are you, Duane, three years and more on from then? Still waiting in some bar for the connection that will never arrive, still telling anyone who will listen about the government and how they screwed their own people leaving them to die, broken and sick like used up lab animals? Still crying, still talking about the children you cannot see anymore, days on the beach in Santa Monica, cold beers and singsong laughter? Where are you Duane?

  My caseworker was a nice guy, in his mid thirties. I met with him once a week for a one-on-one session and we talked about books mostly: Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, John Fante, all the good stuff. He was an ex-speed freak who decided to quit shooting up when he found himself lying in the bath listening to voices gurgling out of the faucets telling him he was about to die of a heart attack. Our sessions went around in circles though, as he tried to explain the theory of the twelve-steps to me. His insistence that I abstain from not only heroin but also all drugs and even alcohol led to several arguments. The very idea that someone can come into a place an addict and emerge from it not needing even the occasional joint or beer to take the edge off was ludicrous to me.

  I had other doubts about the whole twelve-step recovery program. Coming from an Irish Catholic background, I had more than my fill of religions for one lifetime. Despite everybody’s protests to the contrary the program seemed very much like a religion to me, with its talk of God, the constant praying, and its sacred texts. During meetings I often heard people insist that you should only spend time with other people, “in the program.” I imagined myself hanging out with a bunch of bible bashing ex-dopers and drinkers for the rest of my life and I laughed. Better I joined the Scientologists—at least I might get to hang out with John Travolta. Often at the end of meetings the entire group would stand, hold hands, and recite the Lord’s Prayer. Their “get out clause” to the accusation that AA was a religion was that the “God” referred to in the twelve-steps was a “God of your own understanding.”

  “It can be the earth,” my caseworker told me. “It can be a bonsai tree. Don’t get hung up on the word God.”

  So, I asked him, if this God could be a bonsai tree and this really wasn’t some kind of covert religious sect, why did I keep find myself holding hands with people and reciting the Lord’s Prayer?

  “That kind of attitude,” he told me, “is why you can’t stay off of drugs”.

  I told my caseworker that I wanted to get off heroin, but I wanted to do it my way. No meetings, no abstaining from all other drugs, just a bit of discipline and self-control. He laughed and asked me hold out my arms. They were literally covered in bruises, fresh track marks, lumps and razor slashes. He asked me how much faith I had in my discipline and self-control. I suppose he had me there.

  One day he asked me to write why I felt that I had needed heroin in the past, and why I thought that it might be difficult to stay away from it in the future—a concept known as “relapse prevention.”

  I wrote:
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  From the day we are born we are forced to submit to completely false and ridiculous institutions such as school, the state, god, police, government, work, the idea of being a good citizen, (as if that means anything), marriage, wholesomeness and a moral code. All of this imposed on us down the years by the kind of conservative, church loving assholes who have made this world the farce it is for as long as we have had a concept of society. This is because these same people need a stupid and complaint society to continue to work and pay taxes, fight their wars and fund their lifestyles. This is a completely unnatural state of affairs and it creates a kind of mass existential / spiritual crisis, a collective mental illness. This manifests itself in riots, murders, suicide and war. I choose to deal with it by shooting dope. It’s either that, or commit a mass murder.

  He didn’t like it. He told me this wasn’t a philosophy class, it was a chance to change my life. He told me to “Let go and let God.” More bullshit catchphrases, and on it went.

  Evenings were the best, as we got to leave the compound to attend outside meetings. Split into groups of twenty, our minibus journeyed across town to meetings in social clubs, churches, and recreation centers all over the city: Pasadena, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, East L.A., Boyle Heights… The meetings themselves were a drag, but driving through the city at night wasn’t. For most of us it was the highlight of the day. Many of the men I shared the ride with had been in there for months, others coming straight here from long stretches in prison on possession or supply charges. We were grown men, pressing our noses against the glass, looking at the city like country bumpkins in the big smoke for the first time as we drove past old bars and scoring spots, crossing by Hollywood and Vine and me inhaling long and smooth as if I could somehow breathe in the fumes from the crack being sold here and smoked in public bathrooms and darkened doorways.

  I heard terrible stories in those meetings of lives ruined and families ripped apart. A guy from a wealthy Jewish East Coast family whom I had gotten to know pretty well in the compound shocked me by telling his story of a meth - induced breakdown in LA during one of these outside meetings. He was trying to score a large quantity of crystal days before he was due to attend his father’s funeral in New York. In the insanity that followed he ended up ripping off a dealer and staying in the Tropicana Motel off of Sunset, shooting as much of it as his heart could stand before freaking out and calling the cops, telling them that he was insane and going to kill himself. He was taken from the motel babbling speed induced nonsense in a stretcher and stuck under 72 hour suicide watch in the charity ward of an LA bughouse where he observed patients jerking off and throwing their cum at staff, people shitting and pissing themselves constantly, a girl chasing invisible butterflies. When the crank wore off he was broke, he’d missed his father’s funeral and was discharged with a bus token to get back into Hollywood. Shaking and still withdrawing, he shit his only pair of pants during the bus ride and finally called his family collect to discover that he was to be cut out of the inheritance unless he checked into rehab. And that was how he arrived at the front desk, penniless and stinking with pants full of crap.

  A number of people dropped out or were thrown out while I stayed there. One kid I had been in a group therapy session with, who had told everyone how he liked to torture animals, especially dogs, finally freaked out and walked out of the main entrance to score some speed and hook up with a chick he’d met during one of the meetings. Defaulting on treatment meant that he would be sent back to jail, but at that point I suppose he didn’t care. Another guy who had been there for six months before I arrived and was now able to leave in the day time and attend work was busted smoking heroin in his room and thrown out. Billy freaked after two weeks and walked out, announcing his intention to buy a bottle of whiskey and a rope, get drunk and hang himself. All around me it seemed that our problems were incurable, and that maybe one or two percent of us stood any chance of making it. The smart money was not on me being one of the privileged few.

  Dee-Dee even left, in a manner. He was the head guy there, a skinhead in his late forties with a walrus-like moustache and swastikas tattooed on either side of his neck. He had a neat round scar in his throat where a tube had been inserted to keep him breathing after one of his various near death experiences. He was incredibly skinny; slight of stature, yet he had the whole place scared of him. I'm not sure why, but everybody just seemed to understand that you didn't fuck with Dee-Dee. He led a meeting once, telling us a little about his background. He was a member of some white supremacist group in the late sixties and spoke about the whole period with a world-weary kind of sadness. Sadness for the fact that he was so young and stupid and naive to believe in the bullshit that he did, sadness for the way the sixties ended bringing in an era of increasing repression and tough consequences for his peer group, and sadness over watching his friends die, one after the other, while he held on despite his best efforts. He was ill, wracked from AIDS and no longer as strong as he used to be. His reign came to an end before I left that place. He became too ill to be involved in the day-to-day running of the rehab and faded into a less intense role, though haunting the building still with his hawk-like features.

  I left rehab after twenty-eight days with 500 dollars in my pocket and nowhere to go. I checked into a nearby motel and settled down to wait. I was healthier, my arms were healing up and three meals a day had put some weight on me. I contacted a few people who I wrote for and trusted and told them I was over my recent troubles and ready and willing to work again. I got drunk on the first night, buying a bottle of Southern Comfort and some orange juice. I sat by the pool and watched the stars, polishing off the whole bottle. It was a beautiful night and I got blissfully, happily drunk. When the bottle was done I smiled to myself, pleased that I had gotten good and drunk and the sky hadn’t fallen in. In rehab, everyone had given me the impression that having been a heroin addict I could never drink in a normal way again. Just one beer, they said, would inevitably begin a downward spiral that would leave me back on the street with a syringe buried in my arm. But here, by the pool of a crappy motel I was drunk and happy and the world seemed OK.

  The next day, walking around I found a bus that ran all the way to East Hollywood. In a kind of autopilot I got on it, with forty dollars in my pocket. By seven that evening and almost without realizing what I had done, I was back in the motel room, with four needles from the exchange, two rocks of crack and a bag of dope.

  This time was different though, I told myself.

  This time I wouldn’t get hooked.

  CORPUS DELICTI

  I was hanging out behind the apartment building where Carlos’s replacement, Macho, operated from. I found myself spending a lot of time in this shadowy, garbage-strewn alleyway as Macho suffered from a chronic inability to show up on time. As I hung around, cursing him and feeling the worst twinges of opiate withdrawal, I would sometimes see reoccurring characters lurking around just like me. Just like me they seemed to be rendered in black and white against the color and brightness of the Los Angeles mid-afternoon sunlight. Just like me they sniffled and coughed and tried to look nonchalant, returning often to the payphone to page their connections again and again. They sucked dejectedly at sodas from the nearby 7-11, took long drags of down-to-the-filter Pall Malls, or sometimes just crouched down there with their heads in their hands, waiting dejectedly for their guy to show up, with starved rats scurrying around their ankles.

  The car was gone. Pawned for 100 dollars at an auto-pawn place downtown. I sat there, sick and hopeless shortly following my relapse. In a matter of weeks my habit was back, stronger than ever before. On a muted TV screen in the pawnshop, while the old black lady behind the bullet-proof glass processed my payment and wrote up a slip, I watched a Concorde burn in furious reds and Halloween oranges upon a Paris runway. Black smoke belched and vomited up into the sky. I looked at my arms, covered in gooseflesh and bloody, angry raw injection sites. I watched it burn, fascinated at the terrible beauty of
what I was witnessing.

  Macho was late again. Each time I saw someone stepping out of the apartment building my heart would leap into my throat, and then a feeling of crushing disappointment when I realized it wasn’t my man. I was furious with myself, just a few months out of rehab and I was back to scoring day after day, reduced once more to a state of pure need and desperation. I had been no more able to control my use of heroin and crack than I was able to control my use of oxygen. I was grimly following a path of total obliteration. Once I had given up and let go of my niggling thoughts of staying clean, of getting into the twelve-step program, of struggling though life without heroin to ease the ache in my soul, I actually felt palpable relief. I was now an athlete totally focused on the goal of total oblivion at all times. A star racehorse. A heavyweight champion.

  I noticed a new girl standing by the payphone that afternoon. Physically she looked like a survivor of Dachau, bone thin legs in black tights with a black miniskirt wrapped around a barely-there ass and waist. She was making a call, facing away from me, smoking a cigarette and punching numbers. The outline of her ribcage was clearly visible under a skin-tight, long-sleeved, dirty grey top that exposed one pitiful shoulder, entirely free of muscle or fat. On top of the torso sat a head that looked too big for the body, with a mop of dirty blonde hair. She looked as if she would shatter into pieces if she tripped over her rickety high-heels and hit the concrete.