Down and Out on Murder Mile

by Tony O'Neill

  Yes I give up to tha Lord!

  Because he is the wan Lor’

  Tha wan an on-ly Lor’

  And I could feel my heart rattling in my rib cage and I started to wonder what would happen if I died right now, if my heart finally gave out, if Vanessa got the call that I was found dead on an underground train with my bloodstream full of cocaine and heroin and I cursed myself silently for being a weak fucking idiot.

  Who you gwan call when the judg-ment come?

  I say who you gwan call when the judgment come?

  When Gabri-el’s trumpet sound?

  Stepping off the train and into the noise and chaos of Euston. Cutting down endless corridors, looking for a way out. Every suitcase a potential bomb. Potential mass slaughter. What kind of world was this? For any of us?

  And down down down the escalator.

  “Oi! You! Come back!”

  But I’m already away—down, down, down—no looking back, not even a glimpse of the devils on my heels, and I don’t think I’m ever gonna surface.

  36

  ADULTHOOD

  We argued all night. And the worst thing was that I was arguing from an untenable position. Vanessa was crying hysterically because I had lied to her, because I couldn’t even admit that I was high when I walked into the house. The argument had started as soon as I came in and she saw my pupils, as small as pin pricks, and heard my lies muffled through a mouthful of cotton as I tried to tell her that I had only smoked weed and taken some Valium. She asked me if I thought that she was some kind of naïve idiot, and I told her no. But that’s what I was treating her like. A naïve idiot.

  The argument carried on all night, and at eleven o’clock we were both in bed, bunched up in our separate miseries, her sobbing and red-eyed on one side of the bed, and me alternating between tears and anger directed at her but really all about myself and my own weaknesses. I punched the wall and the skin on my knuckle split painfully. And then she said to me: “I am going to leave! I’m going back to New York! I will not have a junkie raise my daughter! If I can’t trust you now, how can I trust you with the life of my child? You’ll never see her! You’ll have nothing to do with her, I swear it!”

  And her words finally bludgeon the fact home that this misery that I have been enduring for the past few months is not the end, but the beginning of once again being alive, and I am amazed at how ungrateful I am, and how completely at the mercy of the most base and ignorant part of myself that I am. I realize that I am on the brink of losing everything and being back where I started. Somehow, through dumb luck or divine intervention, I fell in love, truly fell in love for the first time in my rotten, fucked-up life, and I fell in love when I was at my lowest ebb, my worst point, my most destroyed, destitute and bankrupted, and yet somehow this woman saw past all of that and let me into her life, and allowed me an opportunity to reclaim enough of myself that I could have something substantial to offer her and yet, despite having gotten past the worst of it, having done the things that even six months ago would have seemed utterly impossible—detoxing, finding a reason to carry on, seeing the world for the widescreen, Technicolor spectacle it truly can be instead of a black-and-white junk-eye view from underneath a mountain of shit and garbage—I am still a prisoner to the screaming, whining, dying part of my brain that is content to wallow in the gutter for all eternity.

  And I know what I have to do.

  I have known all along.

  I need to see this through to the end, or live forever consumed by the thoughts of what might have been, of what life may have had to offer me, of where those alternate paths might have led.

  And I know now, I need to grow up.

  37

  A GHOST

  Vanessa and I were riding the subway, on our way back from the hospital. She had a real pregnant belly now. Our daughter, for we have discovered that it is a little girl, was due to be born in two months. Slowly, my sanity had started to return. Seeing that living thing moving around inside of Vanessa’s belly filled me with a giddy joy that three months ago I would have thought was impossible.

  The first thing that happened was that I started sleeping through the night. For months I would fall asleep and then find myself wide awake at four in the morning, with nothing to think of but how much I wanted heroin. No matter what I tried, the sleep wouldn’t come. When that stopped, and I was able to sleep again, my mind began to heal almost immediately.

  Still, everything reminded me of junk. Sometimes, walking around the London streets, I would catch the scent of just cooked heroin on the breeze, and it made my stomach churn. Sometimes I dreamed vividly of shooting up, and when I jolted awake my breath was shallow and my heart pounded in my chest. But the days did not seem so impossible anymore. Every day it was getting easier to make the decision to not get high.

  We were on the train heading into the West End when they got on. There was a little old lady walking with a cane and a cadaverous-looking man supporting her. I watched them, lulled half asleep by the motion of the train, when my blood suddenly turned to ice as I realized who they were. They recognized me too. Susan tottered over to us, with Jimmy the Scottish junkie from the needle exchange in tow. They sat down opposite us.

  “Long time no see,” she said.

  “All right?” Jimmy grinned.

  Vanessa did not know either of them. Until this point, she had never seen Susan’s face. I could tell that she sensed that they were people I knew from the heroin scene, because she placed a protective hand over mine. She knew that relapses are made of smaller things than meeting up with old dope buddies.

  “Hi, Susan,” I said eventually. “How have you been?”

  “Well…not so good. Not so good at all.”

  They stayed on for a couple of stops. The conversation was vague and circular. She told me that she and Jimmy were living together, and they had found a good doctor near his place in Brixton. I asked her about the cane and she mumbled something about a fucked-up shot of Dexedrine. She was very high: her mouth was slack, and her face looked worn down. A few times she zoned out mid-sentence and her eyes turned up a little in her head. Jimmy was slightly more together. “I have a job now,” she told me, coming back to the conversation.

  “That’s great.”

  “I work at the needle exchange. They found funding to take me on as a full-time employee.”

  “Cool. That’s great news.”

  Susan looked over at Vanessa. Vanessa smiled at her awkwardly.

  “You’re having a baby,” she said.

  “Yes. A little girl.”

  “Congratulations.”

  I could bear this no more, so I squeezed Vanessa’s hand and told Susan, “This is our stop.” We stood to get off the train. It wasn’t our stop, but I felt like I could not breathe properly anymore. Jimmy shook my hand again, and Susan said, “Nice to meet you” as Vanessa waved at her, and we walked out of the train onto the platform.

  We stood there together, as the train pulled off into the night. It was a misty, winter evening. We waited in silence for another train. “Jesus Christ,” Vanessa asked eventually, “that was your ex? That was Susan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said again.

  “I know.”

  I looked over at Vanessa. She was truly beautiful. I don’t know what I did to deserve her. I placed a hand over her belly again, and we stood closer, huddling for warmth.

  “Isn’t life strange?” I whispered to her, as another train pulled into the platform.

  38

  PEACE

  Summer is dying and London is changing again, the colors of the city are darkening and a somber kind of autumnal feeling is on the streets: the skies are fading to magenta in the early evening and the air carries a crisp, sweet chill in it. The gutters are becoming choked with leaves, and every day the child that grows within Vanessa becomes stronger and more alive. Sometimes when we lay in bed together I place my mouth near the smooth roundness of her belly and
I have whispered conversations with my child, or I play gentle music like the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, or Nick Drake, resting a hand there gently to get a sense of her movements.

  It is not just London that is changing, and it is not just the child in Vanessa’s belly that is growing. It is happening to me also. At first the process was painful, almost unbearably painful, but now that I have become accustomed to these changes they are a constant source of wonder to me. My body and my mind are experiencing sensations that had been absent for so long that they had become alien to me.

  One day I suppose I will have a perspective of these weeks and months that will be radically different from what I am experiencing now. But for now life is almost unbearably vivid. The colors seem too bright at times, the longing that I feel too intense, the love and devotion that I am capable of terrifying in its implication. I am stumbling through the days like a child, wide-eyed and open, lost in the wonderment of all that surrounds me.

  EPILOGUE

  Brief Encounter

  Vanessa was admitted to Homerton Hospital at three o’clock this morning. It seems that the little girl she has been carrying about in her belly is ready to make her appearance. We have decided to wait to name her until we see her face. We picked out all kinds of names but decided that it was unfair to choose before she has even had a chance to draw breath in the outside world. She will tell us her name.

  There is a certain irony in the fact that my daughter will be born in the same hospital where I once received my methadone. Vanessa and I have talked and talked and we have come to the decision that it would be best for us to leave London. I hope that London will not become poisoned to me, as Los Angles became. We are considering a move to New York, once our daughter is a little older. But for now, for certain, we have to leave London. It just feels like the right thing to do. Earlier I picked up some things for Vanessa in the city, before getting back on the train and heading to the hospital.

  RJ boarded the train at Kings Cross, his phantomlike presence filling the carriage with old memories, tastes, smells: standing in his kitchen in Hammersmith while he weighed out the junk in the bathroom and his daughter absently watched cartoons in the next room and talked to friends on the phone…“Darren? He’s a fuckin’ arsehole…I ain’t fuckin’ desperate, you know?”…and having to split from his flat with the gear and find somewhere else to fix, despite the sweat running off me in torrents and the puke and the shit all about to vacate my body violently, because his family thinks he is off the gear and dealing weed instead.

  “Jesus, RJ, how are you?” I ask him. He jumps and turns—his placid old junky’s face has filled out a little in the intervening year.

  “What the fuck? Fuckin’ hell long time no see, mate…. What the fuck happened to you?”

  “Ah you know, I kicked a little while back, and then…” I raise my palms and shrug.

  “You off now?”

  I laugh a little. “Yeah. For the time being. You still dealing?”

  “Nah…I’m off the gear right now, too. Coming up to six months. Just got out a meeting at the Cross.”

  “How is it?”

  “Shit. But what are you gonna do?”

  RJ has been in the game for a long time. When I first met him he was already fucked up. A ghost. An earthbound phantom. His patient junkie walk. His arms, white and thin, veins long since retreated under mounds of old hardened scar tissue. He told me he used to have to soak them in scalding water for twenty minutes before he could even attempt to hit a vein.

  “How’s your brother doing?”

  RJ’s face darkened. He made a motion with his hands and took a sharp inhalation of breath, which suggested that Mike had started using crack. “The coke bugs got ’im,” he said quietly, “ate the flesh off him. He died screaming.”

  And in a scream of gray metal, tinny voices chattering from the PA system and echoing through black tunnels, RJ is vanished again, lost to God, and I think, He’ll be back. They always come back. And it’s true. The only cure is death. I am convinced of that. But everyone is sick in one way or another, and the only cure for that is death, also. “Life can be considered a terminal illness.” Who said that? Well fuck…what does it matter?

  Everybody is fading out. The signal is getting weak. Sometimes people vanish in front of my eyes as if they had never been there. Then in a burst of static they are back. I am eating pills every morning to keep the ghosts away. When things start to get too clear, too focused, it hurts my head.

  There is business to take care of now. There are lives that depend on me, as terrifying and strange as that concept might be. The birth of my daughter is rattling to the foundations my long-held assumption that everybody is essentially alone in this world.

  The train keeps moving.

  I keep moving too.

  Destination, anywhere.

  Amen.

  New York

  January 2007

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would never have been written without the following people being in my life:

  Vanessa O’Neill, my wife and muse, who I’m glad to say doesn’t mind me airing our dirty laundry in public. Thank you for giving me a second shot at life.

  My daughter, Nico Estrella O’Neill, who gives me a reason to keep going every single day.

  My parents, Rose and Frank, who will never read this book (not because they don’t know, but because they DO know). You bailed my ass out of trouble more times than I can ever recall, and what do I do in return? I write a book. I know, and I’m sorry.

  These people helped ease this book into the world:

  My agent, Michael Murphy, at the Max Literary Agency and Social Club, who believes in my writing as much as I do (and that’s a lot because I’m an egomaniac), and worked his ass off to get my stuff into print. I can never repay you, but I can thank you…

  The team at Harper Perennial, who obviously have wonderful taste in authors, and who have done an amazing job with this book. You really made me feel like I am a part of the family. Extra-special thanks to Carrie Kania, Michael Signorelli, and Amy Baker for all of their hard work.

  These people kept me alive:

  Clean Needles Now, the Methadone Alliance, Jerry Schoenkopf at the Telesis Foundation, all the other fuck-ups in Cri-Help circa summer of 2000, Genesis House, the National Drug Users Network, and the Marylebone Practice.

  These people first published me:

  Contemporary Press, Erin O’Mara at Black Poppy magazine, 3am magazine, Dogmatika, Laura Hird, and Savage Kick magazine.

  Just Say No to the War on Drugs.

  About the Author

  TONY O’NEILL’s books include Digging the Vein, Seizure Wet Dreams, Songs from the Shooting Gallery, and the New York Times bestselling Hero of the Underground. His essays, poems, and short stories have appeared extensively online and in print. He is a survivor of heroin addiction, crack abuse, rehab, fatherhood, and stints in the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Kenickie, and Marc Almond’s band. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  PRAISE FOR

  Tony O’Neill

  “A writer who lays down the truth page after page, not sparing himself or the reader on his journey to find the part of him that is left to love…. What writing can be when it is honest, effortless, and leaves a piece of its soul on the page…. Read this book if you want to experience the power of writing that can transform.”

  —Zsolt Alapi

  “It’s not very often that a writer’s words can punch through the paper and throttle the lifeblood out of you, but Tony’s words manage to do just that, his experiences are so powerful and emotional and full of fucking heart that it pales everybody else’s work into insignificance. Tony O’Neill will be remembered in years to come, when Monica Ali and Zadie Smith are nothing but footnotes.”

  —StraightfromtheFridge.com

  “Tony O’Nei
ll is a potential Nelson Algren for the twenty-first century. The book is hard hitting, yet beautifully written…. O’Neill does something quite special: he simply returns literature to its gutteral, all-too-human roots…. A book that is true in every sense of the word, penetrating into the deepest, darkest recesses of human experience without fuss, arrogance, and obfuscation…. It is first and foremost a work of Literature.”

  —Lee Rourke

  “The great power of Tony O’Neill is obvious to anybody, but I hope people understand what a rare, extreme talent it takes to write at once so precise and beautiful, yet so imperiled by the damage of its own world.”

  —Dennis Cooper