by Tony O'Neill
“Uh-huh.”
“Like what? Five? Ten?”
Quietly she said, “Fifteen, at least.”
We both sat in silence for a moment.
“Well…that’s great. Shit! Where’s the money! Let’s split!”
“It’s gone.”
“What? Gone where?”
“We spent it all, asshole! On fucking drugs! How much do you think I made doing the books for a fucking Laundromat? We’re broke!”
“Shit.”
“Yup. We’re fucked. Where are we gonna go?”
“Shit, Susan. I don’t know anymore.”
That Saturday night we had been up for almost forty-eight hours smoking crack and shooting speedballs. Half insane, I suddenly heard cop cars pulling up outside. We turned all of the lights out and the cop cars’ flashing lights illuminated the apartment with an eerie, rhythmic glow. My guts flipped in fear.
“They’re coming for us!” I whispered.
“The closet!”
We ran, shut ourselves in the closet, and sat in the dark, trying to smoke up the rest of the crack before the police broke the door down. Under a pile of clothes I found a flashlight and, balancing it in the crook of my neck, I tried to shoot some cocaine. My hands were shaking, the beam of light was unsteady, and I succeeded in tearing a big bloody hole in my arm and spraying blood all over the inside of the doors and our clothes. After half an hour, it all seemed quiet.
“Are they waiting for us?” I whispered.
“I don’t know,” Susan replied, her eyes wide with fear. “Maybe they’re waiting for the feds to show up.”
“Or the INS. Or Jesus! Are there any rocks left?”
Another ten minutes—or it could have been an hour—dragged past before I worked up the nerve to open the closet door and sneak over to take a look out the window. Outside the lights were still flashing, and I could hear voices. I peered through a crack in the blinds.
“Oh shit! Look at this!”
Susan crept out to the window in time to see her car being towed off down the street.
“Motherfuckers!” She groaned. “My fucking car!”
The glove compartment has been stuffed with outstanding tickets. The plates were expired too, and one night, insane with cocaine, I had removed the plates from a car parked farther down the street and stuck them to our bumper. They had obviously reported it, and the city took the car. We were officially fucked.
There was no place left to run. We called Susan’s mother and told her what was happening. We asked to stay in her guesthouse for a while so we could clean up. Susan’s mother was in a cult called the Forum and was an all-around nut. The whole family was pretty insane, but her mother was something else. She lived in Ghost Town, one of the worst slums in Venice. Going there to clean up was as ludicrous as moving to Vegas because you have a gambling problem. But it was a roof, and a place to stay for a few weeks. It was about then that I started thinking about getting away from Susan, and Los Angeles altogether. But then I looked at her, jobless, homeless, and hopeless, covered in dried blood and rocking back and forth on her heels whining to herself in insane, cracked-out fear, and I realized that for the time being I was stuck with her. I mean, I had encouraged her into this habit. Walking away at this point would have been tantamount to murder. The last time she tried to kill herself, she fucked it up, cut her wrists the wrong way, and lost the feeling in her pinkie fingers. I knew that the next time she wouldn’t take any half measures. My only consolation was that at least the guns were in the pawnshop, for the time being.
3
I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS
The guesthouse was nothing more than a shack on the back of Susan’s mother’s property. Outside, the crack dealers operated with a gleeful disregard for the law. The whole neighborhood was involved in the drug trade in one way or another—kids as young as seven or eight acted as lookouts. People allowed their front yards to be used to stash product. In the shacks and the project houses crack was being mass-produced in kitchens all day and night. The only outside traffic in the whole area was kids from the suburbs looking to score. But somehow it felt safer to be away from Hollywood. I knew I had to get away from Los Angeles. I felt that if I could just get myself back to London, I might have a chance to make a break, even resuscitate my stalled career in music.
I knew I had to make a break from Susan too. I knew I couldn’t quit with her around, because there would always be one of us giving the other a reason to use again. I looked at her with a kind of mounting horror. My wife of six months was a skeletal, deathly figure. I’d wake up to find her trying to shoot dope into the little veins on the sides of her blood-dripping tits, a cigarette clamped between her shaking teeth. The party had stopped being fun sometime before we had married, and now it seemed like the only way out was death. I had never been as strung out as I was now. If I waited six hours in between hits, I would get sick. I woke up sick in the morning if I slept too long. If the heroin was there, I’d leave a loaded syringe by my bedside so I could fix before I was even fully awake.
The first reason I stayed with Susan was pity. She had had a horrible time of it before I came along. Her grandfather had plied her with booze and raped her when she was a teenager. The way Susan related the story, when she returned home sobbing and hysterical, Mommy didn’t seem too bothered about the whole thing.
“Well, I did warn you about this,” she told her. “You know he’s into that kind of shit. I told you what he did to me when I was your age.”
“What?” Susan sobbed. “Told me WHAT? YOU DIDN’T TELL ME ANYTHING!”
“Oh,” her mother replied. “Maybe it was your sister I talked to. Anyway…you’ll get over it. I did.”
After that trauma there was a host of others. Rapes. Beatings. It all sounded too outrageous, too Gothic to be made up. Who makes that kind of shit up? At the time, I was shocked and began to feel very protective toward her. Only later did I realize that among female junkies Susan was no exception. All of the females I have come into contact with on the scene had similar stories. Rape. Child abuse. Incest. Female addicts predominantly are a certain type and that type—sadly—is the used and the abused.
Also, my perception of myself started to change. I faced it every morning in the filthy mirror: I was an intravenous heroin user, out of necessity a thief and a scam artist. My looks where shot to hell, my arms were open sores, and my teeth were falling out of my head. I was turning into some horrible mirror image of Susan. I felt as if I had taken so many steps into a maze that I could no longer retrace them and find my way back to the start. I had no option but to keep going and to pray that I would chance upon a chink of sunlight. I was lost, lost, lost, and could find sustenance only in drugs and our encroaching despair.
It was now Christmas Eve. We had twenty dollars left. We had started up on crack early that evening and now the money was gone and we were in trouble. Twenty dollars’ worth of crack is nothing once you’ve taken your first hit already. It won’t even sustain you. It will delay the crash for maybe ten minutes. Try and split a twenty-dollar rock in two and you may as well light the bill itself and try and get high off the fumes. It was 11:00 P.M. Susan was on my last fucking nerve, begging and wheedling and pushing me to go out and score more crack.
“I’m not going out there,” I told her, “That’s it. At least we have twenty bucks for tomorrow. The place is crawling with pigs. Everyone is drunk and high and crazy. Anyway, it’s Christmas Eve for chrissakes. All of the dealers are gonna be back home. The only people out there are gonna be scam artists looking to rip off stupid white kids out trying to score.”
She was cleaning out the pipe, trying to find a grain of residue that she had missed on the previous five rounds of cleaning the pipe. The pipe was clean as it could be. It was gleaming. I knew it was futile. She knew it was futile. But she persisted in heating up the stem and using a piece of wire to drag the Brillo through the glass repeatedly, trying to pick up some melted cocaine.
“Then I’ll go.”
“You’re not going.”
“I’m gonna go. I’m a girl. They’ll cut me a break.”
“They’ll cut your fucking throat after they’re done gang-banging you,” I told her. “Now don’t be so fucking stupid. We’re gonna need smack tomorrow. We ain’t spending our last twenty bucks on a rock. It’s over. Take some pills and go to sleep.”
She continued to clean the pipe, holding it up to her lips for a futile attempt at smoking the residue, cursing, and getting back to work.
“You are a motherfucker,” she told me matter-of-factly.
“And you’re a fucking crackhead. You’re out of your fucking mind. Now give it up.”
She carried on scraping the pipe and tried to take another hit. Of course there was nothing. She started to cry, big heaving sobs like hot needles inserted into my nerve endings. Then she picked up one of my books, one of the big ones. Céline maybe, or a dictionary or a medical book. I don’t remember. She held it in both of her hands, gripping it tightly until the knuckles turned white before she started to smash herself in the face with it, her sobs becoming more and more frenzied and grating. After the fourth or fifth thump I yelled at her to knock it off. I grabbed my keys.
“I’m going, you stupid cunt,” I grumbled, “I won’t be long.”
The streets of Ghost Town were alive with junkies, dealers, and all kinds of human flotsam. Most of them were rip-off artists. On more than one occasion I had been sold soap or some other unpleasant-tasting shit instead of the crack I wanted. I retraced the steps I had taken earlier, hoping to locate the last guy I had bought off. I turned the corner and tried to locate the kid’s spot. I coughed and tried to draw attention to myself. The bastard popped up, right on cue: “Psst!”
We did the deal, and I split back for our place. Sirens provided constant background noise, as did the throbbing of helicopters circling overhead. It was like living in some grotesque, drugged-out Blade Runner hell. I was thinking this as I stepped off the curb and into the path of an LAPD patrol car, lights blazing, sirens roaring, and speeding toward me.
I had no time to react. I was bathed in light momentarily as my feet left the ground and my whole being shook…. I flipped back, weightless and graceful, a moment that seemed to stretch to infinity.
Crunch!
I couldn’t even process the information until after I had bounced off the car’s hood and back onto the tarmac with a yell of surprise. I looked up and saw two cops looking down on me, like angels of doom.
“You okay?” one of the cops asked.
“Yeah,” I said, getting to my feet gingerly.
The other cop radioed in to the station as I started to feel warm blood trickling down my left leg. “You just stepped out,” the cop nearest me—a virtual man mountain with a buzz cut—told me. “We couldn’t stop. We were in pursuit. Didn’t you hear the sirens?”
Well, of course I heard the sirens, but I’d heard them so often all night that I had begun to block them out like all of the other city noise. I was concentrating more on getting me—and the crack—back indoors.
Oh Jesus. The crack! My stomach began to churn and fear welled up inside me. I started to talk fast.
“You know I wasn’t concentrating on what I was doing. Preoccupied. Completely my fault, I’m really sorry.”
“What are you doing out here? This isn’t a good neighborhood.”
“I live right down there. I’m on my way home.”
“Well, we’re gonna radio for an ambulance to have you checked out.”
“No need!” I insisted. “I’m fine. Listen, my wife is at home, she’s gonna freak out if I’m not back in twenty minutes. You know how it is in this neighborhood. I’d rather just go home and forget about it.”
The cops eyed me for a while. It was quite obvious to them that I was half out of my mind on drugs. It was also obvious that I could create a bunch of paperwork for them if I went to the hospital because they hit me while I crossed the road. They didn’t want the paperwork and I didn’t want to have my pockets turned out.
“Well,” said the cop with the buzz cut, “if you’re sure you’re all right….”
“Positive.” I beamed. “Never better! Happy Christmas officers!” “Yeah, you too,” they growled, getting back into their car.
I limped back into the guesthouse. I sat down and rolled up my pant leg, exposing a large ugly gash running up my shin.
“Jesus!” Susan said, coming over to look. “What happened?”
“I got knocked over by a cop car. They let me go. I told you it’s a fucking mess out there tonight. I should have never gone…Fuck!”
I went to the bathroom and peeled off my bloody jeans, trying to wash the dirt out of the wound as best I could. Susan popped her head in the door after a few minutes.
“You could have been busted,” she said, quietly.
“I know. Or killed. Imagine that. Killed on Christmas Eve by a speeding cop car. Jesus!”
Susan smiled a little and said, “Pretty funny, huh?”
I just glowered at her.
“No,” I told her eventually. “Not really.”
“Did you get the rock?”
I sighed and nodded toward the bloody jeans. She retrieved it and scuttled out of the room.
I got cleaned up and found her playing with the pipe, exhaling white smoke. I limped over and said, “Where’s mine?” She handed me the pipe. I held the lighter up and took a long drag. Nothing. Not even a glimmer of something.
“Where’s the rest?” I asked her. “You killed this one.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah…it was a small rock. That’s it.”
“Well thanks,” I told her. “That’s fucking great. Thank you so fucking much.”
“Don’t yell at me!” she said, before adding quietly “It is Christmas, you know.”
I looked at the clock. Ten after midnight. Well, she was right about something. It was Christmas. I looked out of the window and could see nothing but vast, endless black. Somewhere out there was the moon and the stars and the Pacific Ocean, but from where I was looking I could have been a thousand feet underground. I could hear her, somewhere behind me, starting to nervously clean out the pipe again. It would be less than an hour before she started up again, maybe two before she started bashing herself in the face with my books and sobbing. But for now, for a moment, there was peace on earth.
4
HOMECOMING
Airports hold a special sense of horror for me. They rank in my top five least favorite places in the world. They are especially awful if seven days ago you kicked heroin cold turkey in a shithole motel called the Deville—you and your junkie wife puking into the toilet, the sink, the shower, watching reruns of The Golden Girls and Judge Judy, curled into agonized balls in opposite corners of the room, masturbating and crying to pass the time.
Airports rank alongside the post-OD ride in an ambulance, pumped full of the Narcan that has ripped you from the mouth of endless white light and deposited you into that instant, chemically induced cold turkey so severe they had to strap you down to the gurney. Airports rank alongside the East LA crack house where, at seven in the morning when the money and the rock have run out, you sat twitching with a bunch of coke-crazed lunatics, terrified to exit into the unforgiving LA sunlight and figure out just what the fuck you are gonna do now, hopelessly combing the filthy carpet for a rock of crack you are convinced you must have dropped earlier in the session.
I find airports THAT awful.
It’s the brightness and the sterility of them. The way everyone looks so fucking STRAIGHT and HEALTHY, like they have never so much as experienced a minute as awful and degenerate as your last year has been. The insinuating way the airport security staff talks to you and look at you: like they KNOW you’re up to something. It’s almost like they think they are doing you a favor by letting you travel to another country. The unspoken question
of “Why should we let a scumbag like YOU cross international borders?”
That edge of twitchy paranoia is increased a thousandfold when you feel as raw and as fucked up as I felt that day, preparing to return to London from Los Angeles. Out of options, we had decided to flee to England’s friendlier climes. At least there we could receive treatment for our addiction. In the United States we were thrown to the lions: even the “free” methadone clinic on Hollywood Boulevard expected its clients to show up with twelve dollars a day, for each dose of methadone. When heroin is only seven dollars a bag downtown, and the clinic won’t even provide enough methadone to keep you out of withdrawal…well, you can do the math. Susan’s mother was eager to see us leave the United States, even paid for our plane tickets. Susan and I were convinced the airport cops were gonna pounce on us before we even made it to the plane.
