Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  It ended for me in Camden, sitting around in one of those churches looking for a likely face and one guy in particular had the look of a reluctant junky about him—sallow cheeks, big scared eyes, pale skin, didn’t want to say much. I could tell that it was over for him as well, that he was just waiting for a reason to jack in all of this self-help fellowship companionship, finding it as empty as I found it, and so I decided to give him his reason. We talked, I told him what was up and in an hour we had made a connection and were up in his flat, cooking up the brown powder in lemon juice, tying off and shooting our way back to glory.

  I shoplifted from markets mostly—Camden, Portobello, Spitalfields—to get the clothes I needed to stay warm. I lived in a series of short let apartments all over the city: Shepherds Bush, White City, Tufnell Park, Hackney, all cheap and cold and miserable. My health wasn’t good. My teeth starting to fall out, one while eating a stale slice of pizza and another snapping off into Brick Lane bagel. My parents coming through with a hundred here or there when it seemed like I was at rock bottom, my heroin habit growing again with alarming regularity, as January moved into February and then March, the winter seemingly endless, I sat there on many long nights thinking of ending it all in a rat bag flat in the East End shooting heroin and cocaine and going crazy with melancholy. The idea of getting onto a methadone program started to loom on the horizon again, but after my experience in Hollywood, I was wary, to say the least.

  Finally I found myself with no other option, no money and no prospect of money for a while. I walked into a GP’s surgery, hearing that this particular doctor was willing to prescribe methadone and I laid it on the line. I was broke, sick, out of credit with my dealer and with no idea of how I was going to get through the day. I had found a new job selling ad space for a music magazine and I knew that if I didn’t get a prescription today that I would lose the job and possibly my apartment. I begged and cajoled. The doctor was doubtful, but someone had just that morning dropped out of the methadone program and there was a place to be had. Somehow I got it. I started off on 80mls of the sweet tasting green linctus a day and began trying to put my life back into order.

  It was hard, crawling back. I often thought that I might never make it. The hardest thing about being on a methadone program is not abstaining from heroin but restraining yourself from physically attacking the doctors, caseworkers and pharmacists who all conspire to make your life impossible. Doctors who tell you that you are mentally ill and in need of years of therapy to confront your inner demons. Caseworkers (basically glorified social workers with little or no medical knowledge) who tell you that they do not believe a word you say as all junkies are by their very nature liars and you are no exception. Pharmacists who dispense your methadone with a sneer and remind you not to steal anything while you are waiting to get dosed. All of them assholes, all of them shits with an axe to grind, all of them with the power to have your prescription taken away from you at twenty-four hours notice. It is not a very secure feeling, knowing that the whim of any of these people involved in your treatment could leave you out in the cold, with a bigger habit that you had coming into the program - methadone is notoriously harder to withdraw from than heroin.

  You find yourself sitting around in chemists’ shops waiting to score instead of car parks and coffee shops, but it’s always the same deal. The connection—be they the dealer or the pharmacy—will make you wait. You always have to wait. They will belittle you and you will always have to respond to them with a smile and the suitable amount of ingratiating groveling. At least when you are using street drugs you can always find another connection straight away. With methadone, one stink at any drug dependency unit or GP’s office will follow you around, thwarting your every attempt to even get on another waiting list like a curse from an evil eye. Suddenly, on methadone the walls begin to close in around you and you are left with two stark choices—submit to this life or get clean.

  Submitting at first seems like the easy option. It’s just a matter of keeping up the routine, keeping up the pretence. People are nice to people that they detest every day in every over walk of life, so why is doing for to your methadone doctor any different? Maybe in two years, if you behave yourself, they will let you attend the clinic less regularly. Maybe you will be able to pick up your methadone weekly instead of daily. Maybe they’ll ask to watch you piss into a bottle less than they do now.

  It’s no way to live though, and you realize that. It’s patently obvious when you speak to the guys who have been on a ‘script for most of their lives. They are older now, fatter, too, with the pallor of the methadone addict and a sheen of sweat constantly on their brow. Some of them jump like a startled animal when their numbers are called to see their caseworker, someone who will be, in all probability, some asshole straight out of college who has never so much as smoked a joint. And you sit there, thinking of the stories they have told you—the years of scoring and hustling and avoiding jails and morgues—and you know that despite their lifetime of experience they will still have to postulate themselves in front of this young halfwit in order to keep up the charade of conviviality needed to retain their methadone. Even the ones who hold their nerve and don’t jump still have that look in their eyes, the startled look of someone wondering how it came to this … years of cramming down hurt and pain deep down inside yourself. They are men with the weight of the world—or at least the medical establishment—on their shoulders.

  Withdrawal though, it’s all about withdrawal. The withdrawal from methadone is just as severe as from heroin, with the added horror of it lasting for two weeks or more. Despite all of the reasons you have for not wanting to stay on methadone, that fear of withdrawal is one that brushes aside all other concerns. So you remain trapped in indecision, knowing that if you ask the clinic to start reducing your medication it will be incredibly difficult to get them to stop and impossible to get your dose put back up to its original level. Misjudge that and you will be sicker and more screwed than ever. Months pass and the chances are you will remain tortured and undecided until the day you realize you are now one of these old, beat men waiting for their new ‘script. That is, of course, unless something extraordinary happens.

  And for me it did. I fell in love.

  Vanessa was beautiful, probably the most beautiful looking girl I had ever seen. She was from New York, with gorgeous brown eyes features and smooth caramel skin. We talked and laughed and fucked together in an innocent and happy way and every time I saw her it blew my mind that this amazing girl wanted to spend time with me. Her appearance in my life was as sudden and as forceful as that first appearance of heroin had been years earlier. Her presence shocked my out my dumb, methadone passivity.

  As our relationship developed, the schism between the normality of our relationship and my life as a methadone patient started to grow. First I stopped injecting heroin, black market methadone or coke on top of my allotted dose. Although she claimed not to be bothered by the sight of my digging for veins in my arms and legs first thing in the morning while trying to get well enough to make it to the methadone clinic, I knew it had to be a profoundly disturbing sight for a non-injector to watch. I started going out again to clubs and bars, snorting coke, dropping ecstasy and getting drunk. It was a new world in London and it had been rumbling on underneath my nose the whole time; music was exciting again, creativity was in the air, the seeds of legends were being sown in East End bars and venues. And despite having almost completely stopped all other drugs since becoming a heroin addict, I found that I still got a kick out of them. As I started meeting and gaining mutual friends with Vanessa, I realized that there had to me more for me than life as a methadone patient.

  The deciding moment came when Vanessa told me she was pregnant. The shock I felt was absolute. Somehow I had assumed that all of the chemicals I had pumped into my body would have somehow poisoned my sperm. The fact that they were able to fertilize an egg was almost stunning.

  “What are we going to do?”


  I looked her in the eyes as I said it. I had never considered the possibility of being a father before. Vanessa shook her head.

  “What do you want to do?”

  And there it was. A life that suddenly split into two possible paths. Whatever decision was made here would decide the course of the rest of my life. There could be more no hedged bets. I could be a father or I could be a junky. But there was no way in hell I could be both.

  Within weeks of hearing the news I had switched to a drug called buprenorphine in order to withdraw altogether. I found a private doctor who prescribed me enough pills to kick at home and we did it together in our flat in Stoke Newington, me groaning and cursing myself for having to do this again and her doling out the pills, words of encouragement, kisses on my forehead …

  It was a month before I could do anything but chew Valium, smoke weed and watch television. The depression threatened to swallow me whole; I cried over charity appeals on television, I dreamt of shooting up and smoking crack as vividly as I had during my first month in rehab three years ago. I thought that my brain would never let me feel normal again.

  In the midst of this depression I received a phone call from a ghost. Kat was on the other end of a crackly transatlantic connection, the first time I had spoken to her in years. She had tracked down my number after hearing I was in London and it was almost physically shocking to hear her voice again.

  “I’ve got some bad news,” she told me.

  I hung up the phone half an hour later, exhausted and upset. RP had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Cambodia. She told me that after I had lost contact with him he started smoking crack heavily. Soon became the focus of his life. He started showing up on film sets for work cracked out and insane and people simply stopped hiring him. Kat recalled literally packing his bags and putting him on a plane to Cambodia to visit Sal Mackenzie in the hopes that he might clean up out there. Away from Los Angeles his health improved, he met a girl and was even talking of starting a business and staying permanently. Then one night, driving at full throttle, with his girl riding on the back of the bike and Sal following, he rounded a corner and came upon an abandoned truck lying across the narrow path too late, and in a flash of endless white light it was over.

  I thought of us in the same city, me in a motel bathroom and RP in his apartment in Echo Park locked into our private miseries, not knowing we would never speak again. Life felt fragile and transitional.

  The word processor had been hiding away in the bottom of the wardrobe since Vanessa and I had moved in together. Even looking at it sometimes, I got an odd queasy feeling in my guts—it was stained with years old blood splatters and the writing inside was stained with something darker and far more permanent. I dug it out the day that Vanessa told me she was pregnant.

  In a way I was amazed that the rickety machine still worked. Flicking through the files contained in there I saw title upon title of failed video treatments for failed bands. I clicked on one and read the opening line: “We are at a pool party on top of a mansion in the Hollywood Hills… the camera pulls back from a close up shot of a bottle of Cristal…” and I immediately clicked it off in disgust. I felt a dry heave building in my stomach and had the sense that this was a bad idea and I should leave well enough alone. Put the fucking thing back in the bottom of the wardrobe and take more Valium. Sleep. Watch some TV. Anything but this shit. I forced my attention back to the glow of the black and white screen.

  I avoided any files that looked remotely related to my old line of work. I found clumsy attempts at poetry next. Awful—kid stuff. The ravings of a half-wit junky moron. A suicide note that I never finished which ended cryptically “I’m fucked, tired, used up. I tried, but I can’t do it anymore. I can’t stay straight and I can’t live like this. At least looking back I can say that I…” I guess I ran aground trying to come up with any achievements worth boasting about, or maybe I nodded out at that point. More junk, bullshit, ravings.

  Then I found a short, four-page description of the night that Suzie OD’d on coke. It was pretty good. When I finished it the dry heaves started again and I had to sit in the bathroom splashing water on my face for a while. I hadn’t thought of that night in a while and had no recollection of writing about it, but out of anything I had written it was the best; it was to the point, and intentionally or not I had conjured that night with a perfect dead - eyed junky clarity.

  I looked at the back of my hands; they were all I had now. I had been working since returning to London for the only people who would hire me: alcoholic lunatics running folk music magazines out of their basements, drug addicts running start up businesses into the ground, sales jobs for minimum wage, working underneath bitter, sadistic, asshole managers. I had an educational history that ended abruptly at eighteen years old and a work history as patchy as they come. These hands had once promised so much, now they were covered in still healing track marks, and the shiny scars denoting long-since calcified veins. Not hands to be proud of. Hands that had grown soft and weak through misuse. Could they ever do anything for me again?

  I got up and walked to the window. I looked at the London skies, overcast and moody, the same skies that my as yet unborn child would soon look upon. I remembered my father’s hands, how solid they seemed when I was a child, how sturdy. Hands that had laid concrete, driven buses, fixed cars. I looked at my hands again, white and thin and mangled. What good had these hands ever done?

  With a sigh I walked over to the word processor, opened a blank document and began to write.

  *

  The first good night happened some time after, when Vanessa and I were at a party in Brixton where I met Jonathan, a friend of Vanessa’s who had also left Los Angeles and junk behind. We talked and drank for at least four hours, talking about our relative experiences, the drug scene in Los Angeles and the difficulties he had coming off, too. He was no more interested in abstaining from all drugs than I was, yet here he was—fiercely intelligent, beautifully dressed, and most definitely no longer a junky, champagne glass in his hand, fixing me in a green eyed stare and telling me, “It does get better, you have to remember that it does get better.” And I started to believe him. I realized that for the first time the alcohol was acting on my body in the desired way and I was happy instead of tired, loud and laughing instead of withdrawn and feeling ill. Almost as if on cue with meeting this other ex-junky, my metabolism had somehow shifted, allowing me a glimpse of what wonders my body could experience if allowed to recover fully.

  That night we all stumbled from the club drunk and happy into a warm Brixton night, a full champagne flute still in my hand, our drunken raucous laughter echoing up Coldharbor Lane, and I wrapped my arms around Vanessa and kissed her on the lips, tenderly, shocking her with a kind of intimacy that I had been unable to muster ever since coming off of opiates.

  “I love you,” I told her. “It’s all going to be alright.”

  And on we went, until later we lay wrapped up together sleeping gently. It’s all going to be alright.

  AFTER

  NO more junky talk, no more dope talk, no more quantifying my existence… How much smack? How much $$$? No more standing around in parking lots, in doctor’s waiting rooms, on street corners waiting for the connection … London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, here he is with his junky walk. Here comes Paco, here comes Henry, here comes Pedro, here comes Raphael, here comes TJ, here comes Richie … down all the years, all the hours, all the streets and all of the places I have stood in solitary agony waiting for someone to drop a few hours peace into my hands.

  Happy birthday to me. Twenty-three today. Standing in Kings Cross trying to score before I have to meet my friends for a birthday drink that I don’t want. Before I have to be nice to people who don’t know that I can’t feel what they feel. Extra methadone warms my bones … take me back to dear old Blighty.

  Finally scored for a rock from some Rastafarian scam artist, tell him that if it’s good I want more. Immediately tries to g
et me to buy more now. Refuse. Takes me to his car for a smoke. Asks me to give him back the rock he just sold me, and tosses it out of the window.

  “That one,” he says, “is bullshit.”

  There is no acknowledgement of the easy admission he has made. Pulls a real rock out of his mouth and we drive around the corner and pick up his girlfriend who is streetwalking outside of a transient rooming house behind an amusement arcade. It is four o’clock in the afternoon. She jumps in, produces a crack pipe fashioned out of a miniature Martell cognac bottle from a fake Louis Vuitton purse.

  We park up and we smoke the rock in the car. A police car rounds behind us checking out street traffic, waves of black dark paranoia fill the car as the guy pulls out and we drive around the block partially tailed by the police. Somehow they lose interest. I am high, anxious and I haven’t eaten all day. We agree on the deal, he sells me the other rock and I get out. I go into the McDonalds and lock myself in the bathroom to check my purchase. I have been burnt, sold nothing but layer upon layer of cellophane. I walk out. Through the glass front of the McDonalds I see Michael, a guy who used to attend the same Narcotics Anonymous meeting as me in Camden. I haven’t seen him since I stopped attending. He is waiting by a newsstand, the furtive look of a man waiting for the connection. All around are people, all waiting, all pained and shifting from foot to foot in a conga line of misery … happy birthday to me.

  No more junk talk, no more lies. No more mornings in the hospital getting bad blood drained out of me. No more doctors trying to analyze what makes me a drug addict. No more futile attempts at trying to control my heroin use. No more defending myself when I know I am practically indefensible. No more police, using me as practice. No more ODs, no more losses. No more trying to take an intellectual position on my heroin addiction when it takes more than it gives. No more dope-sick mornings, no more slow suicide, no more pain without end.