by Tony O'Neill
In between the bitter brutality of Bukowski and Lester Bangs’ fury, between Huncke and Selby Jr, William Burroughs and his son, but with something more modern and rock n roll, O’Neill’s writing displays itself around influences from which he takes a distance. A more contemporary vision on the occidental wandering, on the affliction of our society and the absolute need of escaping it.
A new way of writing maybe… A text built like a rock n roll song. Sentences are twisted like a Sonic Youth composition, the world seems as desperate as listening Decades but with a kind of Lou Reed’s biting irony. An amplified prose hitting us silently! Starting to shake, becoming crazy… like if a Bukowski’s short story became a song of Joy Division in William Burroughs’ corpse.
The shadow of Ian Curtis floats in this corrosive writing, which also reflects to Artaud, through the body analysis who became an uneasy obstacle and through the vindictive social and institutional critics.
« Les toxicomanes malades ont sur la société un droit imprescriptible qui est celui qu’on leur foute la paix. » Artaud
(The sick drug addicts have an imprescriptible right on society, which is to leave them in peace)
Dedicating his book to outcasts, junkies, prostitutes, dealers, burnouts and any kind of psychos, Tony O’Neil shows the necessity of being different from a crawling norm or an omnipotent government. A scream into the modern world’s darkness, a punch in the face of a society who tries to destroy any parcel of humanity in bodies wherefrom utility has to be maximized. If affliction is too big, it’s much better to fuck yourself up, to surf on momentary pleasures. Like Artaud said in his letter to the decider of the narcotic law;
« Tout homme est juge, et juge exclusif, de la quantité de douleur physique, ou encore de vacuité mentale qu’il peut honnêtement supporter. »
(Any man is judge and exclusive judge of the amount of physical pain and mental vacuity he can honestly handle.)
« 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 (…), 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. I choose to deal with it by shooting dope. It’s either that, or commit a mass murder.” (p. 180)*
Narcotics, wandering and the Brian Jonestown Massacre here renamed The Electric Kool Aid!!! Ephemeral companion of Anton Newcombe’s tortuous road, sharing opiate disillusion, sonic experimentation and refusal to conform with one of the last Rock n Roll Animal. The author restores the gloomy and mythic atmosphere floating over The Brian Jonestown Massacre: a psychotic leader, musicians leaving the band one after another, muso types getting insulted, another ruined concert or the chaos existing during rehearsals. Quick a fix while no one is watching*! A musical parenthesis for a man lost in addiction’s limbo, like if his body had a strange reaction after a speedball… The Brian Jonestown’s episode is for Tony O’Neil the ultimate stage before the fall. Imprisoned in his vice and not able to stick to his world, no money and nowhere to stay just this fucking necessity to satisfy.
« I was out of luck, out of dignity, out of money, and out of veins. » (p. 205)*
Sex or dope, rock n roll or writing… O’Neil tries to find a way out, a universe where he can live and handle as he says in the introduction of Notre-Dame du vide. To Escape and to forget and even to forget that we escape! It doesn’t matter as long as we’re somewhere else, as long as we’re different. Like the road he used to explore since he was young with Marc Almond for example, existence considered as a repetitive movement. Going slowly from one place to the other to do here what we endured over there…
A life he’d be able to cross quickly in a progress of self-combustion. A life scattered over anchoring points with foul stenches. Those disgusting toilets where he’s forced to fix himself all along his life sickness... An enclosure of nauseous freedom! Toilets are in Digging the Vein a possible space where it’s possible to pull out of reality. A place of nowhere, another kind of utopia. Filling the veins with poison where the body usually gets rid of its rejection. The veins precisely; so difficult to localize in the angular failings of an extenuating organism! Veins wherefrom blood splashes are spreading on the walls of different toilets for the joy of the narrator.
« I felt like a dog marking its territory. I had gone in the nicer hotel in West Hollywood to use the bathrooms and leave my mark on their pristine walls. It gave me a curious satisfaction (…). Perfect. I was the junky Jackson Pollock. » (p.91)*
As the veins are digging and rotting, as the fact of shooting himself in the neck emphasizes affliction, O’Neil brings his sense of humor where we can’t really expect. For a junky toilets are an area where it’s possible to give life a break, it’s the needle’s territory! In O’Neil’s writing, humor is like a breath inside the agony of the story. But outside of the cabinets, beyond irony, there is the urban hell and the body’s pain. There are the infinitely tangled streets and those veins; digging; always digging! Fortunately you can find toilets where it’s possible to get wasted for the price of a cheeseburger…
Heroin becomes so important for the narrator and the reader that we almost forget sex and rock n roll, those instants of illusionary freedom the book started with… A young guy gets to L.A. during a US tour with his successful band, he has a little money and a lot of hope, he falls in love and decides to stay away the usual grey atmosphere of London where he lives. He’ll have some success, he knows it! Despite the strength of his beliefs, hope is fading out and his relationship consumes itself. No more band, no album to record, no concerts; he writes, drinks and takes more and more speed. Then he breaks up with Christiane and starts heroin. His desires go away as addiction increases… The possibilities he used to envisage not long ago, the oscillating eventuality of his fantasy… what can he do now? Take more drugs to give everyday’s persistence another form.
« I was as uncreative as I was unsexual. Still I had my friends and I had my drugs” (p. 12)*
A long way out of this anguished path, reproducing Hollywood’s disillusion in London before meeting Vanessa, a Dionysus omen, a Satori! Exploring again the joy of fluid and life, of innocence and oblivion, fucking with a new sensual delight! Thanks to this meeting and the sensitive surge going through his body, love will slowly make his gloomy routine an old souvenir… Eventually he’ll be able to sing and to enjoy…
« Music was exciting again, creativity was in the air… » (p. 212)*
Music is now a necessary acoustic skin, an ethereal support to the loving fusion of pleasure he’s experimenting. Kraftwerk or David Bowie, Joy Division, Beastie Boys, The Stooges, Lou Reed or even Fatboy Slim… rock and pop songs are for the reader a companion through their diverse mood and the feelings they inspire… Here a chapter is named Gimme shelter, then another one Here comes success, a little further some words from a song slide into a sentence. Because Tony O’Neil is a musician; like Henry Miller, like Nietzsche. A musician who decided to continue his sonic quest through the writing while he was crossing the successive circles of his hell, a writer who made with words a rock n roll masterpiece…
« When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing. It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.”
Henry Miller – Tropic of cancer
La Chaux-de-Fonds, Javier 2
THE ART OF DIGGING
COVER GALLERY 2006-2014
1: FIRST US EDITION, CONTEMPORARY PRESS, 2006
Cover design © Dennis Hayes / Contemporary Press
2: FIRST BRITISH EDITION, WRECKING BALL PRESS, 2006
Cover design © WRECKING BALL PRESS
3: FIRST FRENCH EDIT
ION, PULSE / 13e NOTE EDITIONS, 2014
Cover design © Christian Kirk-Jensen / Swedish Pastry Design & 13e Note Editions
Cover image © Scot Sothern (Starlight)
4: ALTERNATIVE UK COVER #1, 2006
Cover design © Wrecking Ball Press
5: ALTERNATIVE UK COVER #2, 2006
Cover design © Wrecking Ball Press
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DIGGING THE VEIN
Tony O’Neill
VICON/02
HOLLYWOOD, AUGUST 2000
In Hollywood the sun rises and stays up in the dirty sky pummeling you into submission for twelve hours or so before sinking behind the hills. Then everybody waits for it to start up all over again, up and down and up and down, futile and ceaseless. No seasons, no change, just relentless brightness. In Hollywood there is no escape from the glare of that unforgiving sun. So we just carry on, dumb with sunshine and desert heat, trying to find a darkened corner where we can conduct the kind of business that has no place is the daylight.
I took the metro to Hollywood and Western. The station was all done up in a gaudy, touristy faux-Hollywood style. Columns of film canisters reached up to the fluorescent white light beaming down from the ceilings. Images of palm trees and a DayGlo Hollywood sign adorned the walls. I ascended in the glass elevator to the surface and I found myself back on familiar ground. I felt comfortable at least to be back into a regimen.
I followed Hollywood Boulevard west, watching my feet as they trampled the stars. Here tourists started to slow up and turn around sensing the sudden decline in the neighborhood. As soon as they hit Vine the street traffic became mostly homeless kids and crack dealers. Cops prowled the side streets menacingly. Wine heads loitered looking for change. Here, tourists became very aware of the cameras around their necks and the travelers’ checks in their wallets and most hastily retreated to the security of West Hollywood. On the stroke of 6 o’clock a troupe of Scientologists in matching light blue shirts and navy ties marched up the street from their residences and into the bedlam of the boulevard, barely making eye contact with the human wreckage swarming them. I watched them from a payphone while stabbing the number for Carlos’ pager. On a billboard above the porno theatre a tired looking woman in a red bikini looked down at me sadly.
At the corner of Hollywood and Vine an old crazy crack head with a white beard turning copper at the edges sucked on a glass stem and looked at me with wide dead eyes as I loitered in front of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. He blew out plumes of white smoke like some ancient dragon, and the chemical smell hit me from 20 feet away, making my guts churn in delicious expectation. Oh, hell. Before I even knew what I was doing I found myself walking down Vine and cutting left into the side streets to score some rocks.
Within 5 minutes I was scoring in a back alley from a tall black guy, snaggle-toothed and balding, hunched over on the curb trying to get a hit from his pipe. He sold me two rocks and offered me a hit. I said okay out of habit, but then started to get edgy as I watched the crackhead pull the rock from a pocket of his dirty sports jacket and fumble with it, clumsily balancing it on the gauze. Then he was shaking the lighter and trying to make it work. Click… click… the lighter was dead and the crackhead was pissed. His remaining hair was turning grey. I wondered how old he was—forties? Fifties even?
“Mother … fucker!” he hissed, “You gotta light, man?”
“No.”
I started to walk off and he looked suddenly dejected at the prospect of being left alone. He was really high, jerking spasmodically even while sitting down.
“Hey … hey!” he yelled. “Don’t go, man. Wait.”
I stopped and half turned, raising my palms to the sky.
“I gotta split, man. I gotta go.”
“Wait … wait.” He flashed me a yellow, rotting grin. “You want me to suck you a little? I’ll do it for one of those rocks, my man.”
Later in Greco’s Pizza I sat waiting for Carlos at a Formica-topped table. I was drinking a cup of pink lemonade. A young Dominican guy slid into the seat next to mine. He wore a huge Virgin de Guadalupe pendant encrusted with fake gems around his neck and Ostrich skin cowboy boots. His grin revealed a gold tooth.
“You waiting for someone?” he asked in broken English.
“Yeah. Are you a friend of Carlos’?”
He smiled and pulled out a beeper.
“Carlos is gone. I have his pager now. I got the stuff.”
“What happened to Carlos?” I asked, slipping the forty dollars into his hand.
He shrugged spat a balloon into his hand and rolled it on his pants leg before dropping it in my palm.
“I have his pager now,” he simply repeated.
There’s something in the ritual that you learn to love … opening up the balloon of heroin and placing the dope into the spoon. The spoon is stained dark brown with old heroin residue and is coated black with carbon on the underside. There is a smell to Mexican black tar heroin … caramel or treacle mixed with the smell of lost childhood summers. The smell of a strange kind of nostalgia, of a yearning that you can’t explain.
Adding water to the spoon and holding a flame under it. Watching the nugget of smack dissolving, turning the hissing and bubbling water the color of chocolate. And then there’s the sound as you unwrap a fresh needle from its package … the way the cotton you drop in the spoon swells and engorges with the solution … the smell again, stronger as it rises with the heat from the freshly cooked junk. The faint fizz as you draw up the shot into the barrel, turning the cotton dirty grey once more. You become addicted to this. I have become addicted to this. For a moment an insane thought crosses my mind—maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe I don’t have to inject this drug. After all, I am no longer physically dependent on it after 38 days in rehab. Maybe simply preparing the shot can be enough … my overwhelming need for the ritual sated so I can go on with my life.
Bullshit. No. It’s too late. I’ve already made my decision.
Putting something appropriate on the CD player. Chet Baker maybe, singing Almost Blue. That’s always good. And then slipping the belt from my jeans and wrapping the cold leather around my upper arm. Flexing for a vein, needle grasped between my teeth. I almost don’t need the shot, it’s true. I am already altered, transported, fixed.
I slide the needle in anyway and shoot my way to glory. Outside of my motel room, in a dull suburb of Los Angeles less than a mile from the rehab facility I checked out of last night, I can hear the cars and the yelling and feel the heat outside on the walkway. None of it can touch me now. The heroin is deep and heavy in my bones. I fall back into a trance.
I have moved beyond life and death, beyond the boredom and madness. I make a mental note to myself while drifting into my opiate dream. If this ever ends, if I survive this, I will write it all down. I need to remember everything and I don’t want these years to have been for nothing.
Well, this is how it started:
PART ONE – BEFORE
I was in a band, before. We were called The Catsuits and we enjoyed a brief burst of success during the tail end of the Britpop thing. Looking back on our rapid fall from grace its still amazing to see how quickly it all slipped away from us. Everyone was completely unaware it was falling apart until it was too late to do anything about it. “The best band in Britain by a million miles,” trumpeted the NME. Enthusiastic press coverage, a top 20 single, appearances on Top of the Pops, a debut album that peaked at number 9 in the charts. Every date on our UK tour was greeted with packed, adoring houses.
I joined the band after accosting them drunkenly at one of their shows at the University Of London Union. I was in London playing keyboards for Mark Brel. Mark had enjoyed a long, successful solo career after hitting it big in the early 80’s and was the voice behind one of that era’s most enduring hits, an electro take on an obscure northern soul song. I had landed the gig via a blind audition, a stunning bit o
f good fortune for an unknown from a shitty northern town. During my stint as his sideman though, he withdrew almost entirely from live performance. This left me sitting in my rented room in a crumbling Edwardian house in Chelsea, collecting my weekly retainer to spend on alcohol and drugs. The Catsuits show I attended was typical of my performances in London at the time: I drank vodka for most of the night and after the show ended barged into the backstage area, talking to all the faces I recognized from the music scene as if we were on first name terms. “Your band is fucking brilliant,” I told the lead singer Laura, waving my arms drunkenly at the other bands and hangers-on lurking by the open bar, “Much better than the rest of these assholes. You lot have class. Hold on…”
I drunkenly staggered over to the bar and while the bartender was busy serving someone a drink I leaned across and grabbed a bottle of Grey Goose. As I crossed the room to rejoin Laura I topped off several peoples glasses, like some kind of demented waiter. Finally I poured Laura another drink and took a healthy slug from the bottle.
“Now, back to The Catsuits,” I said. “You know what your problem is?”
