Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  I made it to a strip mall on the corner of Rose and Lincoln consisting of a fast food Chinese, check cashing place, pawn shop and a bodega. I ducked into a shaded spot and sat on the wall waiting for Raphael to show. I watched every passing car, intently looking for his junkyard Toyota. A new-looking SUV pulled into the lot and I was surprised to see Raphael behind the wheel with a new girlfriend in tow. He looked clean, healthy. I wondered absently if he’d finally stopped drinking, snorting and whoring every dollar he made.

  I limped over and slid into the back of his cool, air-conditioned vehicle. I closed my eyes, enjoying the feel of the leather seat and the cool air against my skin. I couldn’t help but notice the change in our circumstances. When I first met Raphael he was working the corner of Pico and Coronado in ripped sneakers and a dirty T-shirt, hawking balloons of dope to the white dope fiends who descended from every part of the city. I had a car, an apartment and a life. Flash forward to now: I am broke and broken, climbing into his brand-new, air-conditioned ride.

  “Hey buddy,” Raphael grinned, turning round to face me. “You don’t look so good.”

  His girlfriend glanced at me before turning away with a slightly disgusted look on her face. She muttered something in Spanish and started fixing her lipstick.

  “I don’t feel so good, my friend”

  We did the deal and Raphael dropped me on the corner of my street. I thanked him, told him I’d be in touch, and split with my drugs. There's not a lot of small talk to be done between a dealer and a customer once the transaction is completed. If only all human interactions were so clean cut and well-defined.

  I carefully slid the front gate open, and walked back into the house. Jim was in the yard watering his plants. He looked up at me and raised an eyebrow.

  “Hey, what you doing up? I thought you’d be … well, you know.”

  I had originally met Jim through Dito. He was in his fifties and had been on the periphery of the music industry for most of his life. He made his living training corporations on how make even more money by employing some kind of new age psychobabble. He tried to explain it to me once, but it made no sense whatsoever. My overriding impression of him was the bitterness he carried around at never making it as a musician. I figured this was why he still tolerated me coming around to borrow money that I could never pay back.

  He was the type who collected colorful characters and I was sure I made a funny topic of conversation over dinner. To Jim’s friends he was a genuine eccentric – good old Jim with his crazy musician friends. In exchange for fifty dollars here and there, or a roof over my head, I was here to provide Jim with material. Sometimes he’d play me a song he’d written and then it would be my job to tell him I liked it. I was a whore. Instead of sucking his cock I was a performing monkey. My role had changed slightly over the years: now I was playing the part of the junkie musician on the skids. More material for dinner party conversation. Jim smoked pot and claimed to understand my problems, yet he thought it was as easy as just putting the needle down for me to get straight. Right now I was not in the mood for his bullshit.

  “Yeah, I’m not feeling so good. Tried to take a walk to clear my head but I didn’t get far.” I gestured to my bare feet. “Too hot to go more than a block without shoes.”

  “I’ll say!” he laughed. I saw him file that one away. Walking around Venice barefoot! “You look pretty bad. You are doing the right thing, though. That shit will kill you, know what I’m saying?”

  I stared right through him, focusing on getting past him, into the guesthouse and fixing.

  “You’re right, Jim. I’m over it. I just need to get my strength back and I’ll be cool.”

  “Good, man.” He gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder and I tried not to recoil from it. “Keep it up.”

  I walked past him thinking FUCK YOU JIM, FUCK YOU FUCK YOU, but said something about going for a lie-down as I slipped inside my room to get myself well again. I split the twenty bag in two and slid the needle into my neck for the sake of speed. The shot instantly flooded my system with warmth and good feelings. I didn’t get very high, but that familiar feeling of all being well radiated within me. I had come home.

  I spent the day in a pleasant state of blessed out lethargy. Suddenly I had an interest in TV, music, writing again. I scribbled in my journal a little, ate some cakes and chocolates from the fridge, dozed off for a while. I awoke some time later, when the sun had set and something dark had risen in my heart. I looked at my pathetic wrap of smack and resisted the urge to do it. I wasn’t sick yet. Again, the thought of what would happen when I ran out surfaced and I felt a pang of psychosomatic withdrawal symptoms simply by thinking about it.

  I stood up with a new sense of purpose. I started hunting around for the last of my money. I was going to get high, and if there was no heroin in Ghost Town then I suppose I’d have to smoke crack. I rustled up forty dollars in bills and change and headed out of the back door.

  An hour later and I sat with Henry and Arturo, two members of a street gang called the V13 (V for Venice, 13 for the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, M for Mexico). I was cooking up a rock of crack in lemon juice plucked from the lemon tree growing out the back of the guest house. They watched me with a curious mix of disgust and respect as I cooked it up, filtered it into a syringe and started digging for a vein.

  “Man, shooting crack,” Henry grumbled, shaking his head and looking at the floor, “that’s some prison shit right there.”

  Henry was a man mountain; a local crack dealer covered in jailhouse and gang tattoos. It seemed slightly comical that the sight of me injecting crack shocked him. I smirked for a second before returning to the job at hand. As I pushed the concoction into a vein it stung—lemon juice is caustic, especially when administered intravenously. The hit was good. That familiar rush of adrenalin that comes from shooting coke took me and after glazing over for a moment, I came back to the situation at hand.

  Earlier on I had scored a rock off Henry and took it back to the guesthouse. I didn’t have a pipe, so I picked a lemon from out the back and injected the rock. I licked it first and as it tasted like coke, not soap or wax, I felt somewhat reassured about shooting it. The rush was good, so I headed out with the rest of my money to buy some more.

  Henry talked a little more this time. He asked me if I was new to the area, if I lived nearby. When I told him that I was two blocks away he made me an offer. If he and his homeboy Arturo could come back to my place and have a smoke they would provide the pipe and a few free rocks. I was pretty looped on crack so I decided that this was a fine idea and Henry gave a coded whistle summoning Arturo, a dealer ensconced on a further street corner over. Introductions were made and we all headed back to the guesthouse. As Henry and Arturo made a bong out of a glass stem, some gauze and a soda bottle, I prepared a fix.

  The pipe went round a few times, with the usually stomach knotting tension of a crack session with strangers. Conversation was stilted and forced, and tended to drift off as we watched each other load the pipe and take a hit with starving eyes. Things only relaxed when the pipe was in my hand and I could concentrate on putting a rock on the gauze, holding a light to the stem, filling my lungs with the smoke, bellowing out plumes of white cocaine fumes, feeling the rush dizzying me and almost as quickly starting to fade as I passed the pipe on and resumed watching intently and awaiting another turn.

  Pretty soon the crack was gone and Arturo turned to me.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” he said. “I gotta pick up some more.”

  Cruising the back streets of Ghost Town, Henry at the wheel with Arturo smoking a joint laced with angel dust and me in the back seat, I started to get a bad feeling. My adrenalin was pumped up to insane levels and my guts churned in anticipation of something indefinable and terrifying. Henry was circling a block with a set of projects on it shadowed with palm trees and whispering conspiratorially with Arturo. The joint was passed back to me but I refused it as the very smell of PCP was making me
feel sick. I kept my eyes firmly on the guys in the front seat and my hand on the door handle in case I needed to bail out.

  There was a kid hanging out on the corner. Spotting him Henry whispered, “Here we go.” He killed the lights and turned into a side street half a block away. Arturo pulled a gun and a balaclava out of the glove box. He slid the balaclava over his head, and jammed the piece into his jacket pocket. I kept quiet. Silently he opened the car door, and slipped off into the night. I watched him disappear into the gloom.

  “What the fuck is he going to do?” I hissed. In the darkness I saw Henry grin.

  “Taking care of a debt. That fucking nigger workin' the corner is getting jacked, man.”

  The silence of the night hung all around us in the balmy air. I heard the crackle of the pot burning as Henry took a drag. The chemical smell from the angel dust filled the car. I kept an eye on the street around us but it seemed completely deserted.

  Suddenly, Arturo turned the corner, still wearing his balaclava. He wrenched the door open and slumped into the passenger seat. Henry gunned the engine and we took off back towards the guesthouse. I watched Arturo place the gun back in the glove box. Even in the dark I could see it was slick with blood.

  “Here, cop this,” Arturo told me.

  He shoved something back towards my hand. I opened my palm and he dumped a bloody mess into it. In the red goop were seven or eight cellophane wrapped rocks and one smashed front tooth. I brushed the tooth to the floor with a shudder and closed my fist around the drugs.

  “Watch the blood there,” Arturo told me dryly. “I had to knock the shit out of the jungle-bunny’s mouth.”

  LEAVING LOS ANGELES

  Jim and Sheila left for Orange County early the next day to take care of some family business. They would be gone for the day, returning the following morning. They gave me the keys to the place and the number of their private security firm.

  ‘Keep an eye on the place,” Jim said as they packed up their SUV. “There’s been a hell of a lot of break-ins around here the past few months.”

  It took me fifteen minutes to break into the main house and collect enough money to score with. Rummaging down the backs of chairs, in trouser pockets, I managed to scrape together forty bucks in change. Raphael showed up around three and as soon as I got high the hunt for money resumed. Hell, it was something to do kill in time.. . As soon as it was dark, my new friends Henry and Arturo showed up with some rocks and a pipe, looking to hang out. Looking back I can see the sucker move they were pulling on me with shocking clarity. I was so high and so blinded by the offer of free crack that I remained completely unaware to the end.

  It all happened at around three in the morning.

  It was a long, surreal night. I had been smoking massive amounts of crack with Arturo and Henry and riding around with them while they made sales through the passenger windows of other vehicles or in darkened street corners. By three I was jittery and alone, left parked in their car a block and a half away from the guesthouse. They had told me to wait while they went to buy some weight from their connection. They left a decent sized rock in the car and told me to have smoke and wait for them. I had been there for twenty minutes sucking on the pipe when I noticed something crazy off in the distance: some cracked out lunatic with his shirt off, doing push-ups in the middle of the street. At first I thought it was some kind of crack-hallucination, but the longer I stared at him the more real it seemed. The yellow streetlights glinted off his body as he moved up and down with lizard-like deliberation. I loaded the pipe and took another hit, listening to the crackle of the rock and enjoying the taste as I blew out a white cloud of crack smoke. With each hit my paranoia started to grow. What the fuck was doing out here? I wanted to get back to the guesthouse.

  Suddenly I was gripped by the urge to leave Henry and Arturo at it and run back the house. I would refuse to answer their knocks. I was bored of this game, I was paranoid and edgy and I wanted my solitude so I could enjoy a good hit of smack and sleep, letting the poisonous crack work its way out of my system. My gaze fell on the crazy guy doing push-ups once more, my paranoia creeping up on me further as I noticed his face tipped in my direction. Our eyes met.

  I don’t know how long I sat there stupefied by the crack before I realized what was going on. This motherfucker was watching me. When I did realize what was happening I dashed out of the car, slamming the door shut. I ran as fast as I could, chest burning and breath tearing out of me in great gasps, to the guest house. It had, of course, been robbed by my new friends and their accomplices. They were all since long gone. They had taken all of the expensive computer equipment in the place: printers, scanners, Macs, as well as a television set. I surveyed the damage in dumb shock, before checking in my bag to retrieve a needle. I sat in the bathroom, numbed by the sudden realization of my own stupidity, cooking up my shot and thinking.

  After my shot, at last a sense of calm descended upon me and I was able to make decisions. I thought it would be prudent to report the robbery first thing in the morning so it didn’t seem so strange that I was out when it happened. A trawl around the guesthouse revealed the robbers had overlooked an expensive looking tool set, which I put to the side before going to bed. I lay and drifted for a few hours, stoned and somewhat more content.

  In the morning I walked over the nearest pawnshop and hocked his tools for fifty dollars. Then I returned to the house and dialed 911.

  The cops were at the guesthouse taking notes when Jim and Sheila arrived back. I could sense that they knew something wasn’t right but that they didn’t say anything to me. I decided it was best that I left as soon as possible.

  It was almost Christmas. I knew I could no longer carry on. I was out of luck, out of veins, out of dignity and out of money. I had to leave Los Angeles.

  I kicked in the Motel Deville in East Hollywood, a roach palace where I used to score crack. I called my parents and told them I wanted to come home for Christmas, and begged them to send me a ticket. Within twenty-four hours my flight was arranged—I was to leave in one week, to arrive in London December twentieth. I turned my phone off upon receiving the news and settled down to wait out the rest of my withdrawal.

  It was the sickest I can remember being. For six days and nights I burned with a fever, suffered migraines so severe that I literally screamed in agony. Cramps wracked my body and I vomited everything I tried to eat. I had filled the room with bottled water and tins of soup prior to finishing the last of my heroin and I survived on these, leaving my bed only to use the bathroom. With the curtains drawn, days and nights blended into one endless darkened eternity, the light from the television dancing on the walls and my gooseflesh like fire … religious channels with Southern preachers screaming about Lord Jesus and damnation … shopping channels “…and now Jay, you say this superb pendant is only 99 dollars 99 cents?” … canned laughter … news “…the latest drug menace sweeping America…” I groaned and squirmed, the sheets wet with sweat and puke, and I begged for it to end …

  I awoke from the sickness the evening before I was due to fly from LAX, tired, weak and scared. Here I was again, kicked, lost and desperately trying to figure out where I went wrong last time. With my last night in Los Angeles looming ahead of me, I did, I suppose, all there was left to do. I carried on. I scored some crack and sat up all night in the motel room getting high, watching In Living Color reruns. In the morning I checked onto my flight weak, shaky and crashing hard from the coke.

  The thirteen-hour flight was a living, gibbering Technicolor nightmare. Still sick and suicidal from kicking heroin, the come down from the crack started twisting objects in the edge of my field of vision into dark things, scary things. I sat rooted to my seat, wired yet aching for sleep, jumping and knocking my tray into the air when a stewardess walked past me unexpectedly, sweating profusely and stinking of cocaine and withdrawal sweat. The fat, pasty English guy in the seat next to me snarled in visible disgust at my appearance and I drummed my fingers, ner
vously caressing the needle sores on my forearm, praying for the flight to end.

  As the plane drew closer to England I felt as if I was being led into a death chamber. I was returning with nothing, with years of my life completely lost in a blizzard of drugs. I tried to get drunk but felt only tired and sick from the whiskey.

  The skies over Heathrow were gray, wet and ominous. I had no idea of what was going to happen next. Most of all, I wanted a shot of heroin more than I had ever wanted one in my life.

  LONDON, AGAIN

  So that was how I returned to London, like a beaten dog: broke, depressed and full of regrets. Goodbye Los Angeles and hello to London again in January 2001, one of the coldest winters on record. Sleeping on friends’ floors and short –let hotels, the cold cutting through the few clothes I had taken with me, my money dwindling fast, taking interviews for a series of menial jobs with a CV full of lies for people who didn’t care. Back to that same old UK drag, the worst kind of drag there is. A bring-down. The whole fucking country is a bring-down and soon I needed drugs to help with the boredom and the poverty and the cold and the having to wake up every fucking morning and hop across the ice cold bedsit I rented for 55 quid a week to let a trickle of warm water run over my body. Watching spiders and mice crawl around the place, on the bus in the rain, Abercrombie Mansions, broken tiles and pools of water in the foyer, fried chicken joints and all night terror in Soho cafes, sullen Arab boys flipping burgers and pouring mayonnaise on French fries and AA meetings in church halls and basements and community centers listening to the same old talk, the same old lies and the same old twelve-step misery. Kids too young to know any better attending because they think they smoke too much weed or drink too much, beaten down-looking Kings Cross prostitutes trying to stay off the needle for their screaming children’s sake, smack and crack dealers trying to stop and not knowing how sitting around in a circle talking about deals they did and runs they have had, all of them with the look of someone who just awoke from a coma to a world they no longer belong in.