Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  “Go on,” she laughed. “I’m sure you’re gonna tell me anyway.”

  “You need a keyboard player. But not some pussy keyboard player whose gonna sit there like a cunt and plink-plonk away the whole night. No…” I leaned in closer for effect. “You need me.”

  After that the night dissolved into an alcohol induced blackout, but when I woke up the next evening there was a message on my answer-phone from The Catsuits management asking if I would be available to play with them on a probationary basis. I accepted. Mark Brel’s live appearances remained so sporadic that I managed to hold down the two jobs with relative ease.

  As The Catsuits set off on our first US tour it seemed the world was at our feet. The more outrageous my behavior was the better things seemed to get. Even my parents, bless them, believed that I was a success. I think it was seeing me on the TV that did it. It was then at least that they stopped insisting that I get a real job.

  The US tour was brief but magically surreal. We had 5 days to ourselves in Los Angeles and members of the group tried to outdo themselves in terms of outrageous boozed up, drugged out misbehavior. The record label looked on and applauded, loving the controlled chaos of our youthful exuberance. I had just turned 19 years old while the eldest member of the band was 21. I won our little game of rock and roll mischief making. My adventure in LA started at a bar called Vida in Los Feliz with a young guy from our record label who was up for showing me a good time, progressed to a three day pool party in one of Howard Hughes’ old mansions in Brentwood, and by the time I crawled back to the hotel on the morning we were to fly to San Francisco, my epic crystal meth, coke, and lager rampage had taken me to Vegas where—in front of a small crowd of new friends who where almost as obliterated as I was—I married a girl named Christiane. As everyone told tales of sex and drugs during the brief flight, I sat and smiled. Then I dropped the bomb, flashing my gleaming wedding ring. Shock, disbelief, and then a begrudging respect made its way through my audience of band members, roadies, and record execs. Someone cracked open a bottle of champagne to celebrate. I had set some kind of record, we figured. It was one of the happiest moments of my life and I spent it with my best friends, my band mates for Christ sakes, on a plane headed towards a new city, a new adventure. This would never end, I thought gleefully, as we started to land and I guzzled the last of the booze.

  That would be our final tour, as it happened. The Catsuits disintegrated under the weight of bad management, infighting, and Laura’s increasing depression over our constant touring. In one of those moments of beautiful synchronicity, in the same week the band fell apart I found myself fired from Mark’s group over a rumble in Moscow, which had happened a month earlier. In one of the few public appearances Mark had decided to make that year, the Mafia-organized run of shows in a prestigious theatre had fallen apart after an incident in a seedy nightclub. There, the honor of a pair of underage looking Russian whores was besmirched, a stripper dressed as Lenin was assaulted by a drunken Billy Idol look-alike, and myself and the tour manager received a beating for refusing to pay a bar tab run up by a head Mafia guy. While I was away on The Catsuits final tour, I suddenly became the focus of recriminations over the incident (which I could barely remember due to the amount of vodka I had consumed that night) and I found myself out of 2 gigs at once. Before the end of the year I was heading out of London with a couple of suitcases a one-way ticket to the States. I was 19 years old and I was going to LA, so fuck them! I wouldn’t remain a has-been in London, when I could make a fresh start in the city I had fallen in love with. I set across the Atlantic to reclaim my dream: I had Christiane, a heart full of determination and 3000 dollars in my pocket. I knew I couldn’t fail.

  After being in LA for well over a year, I was still out of a record deal. Actually, my band getting a deal now seemed like some distant dream fading rapidly, and I was getting by on the old fall back—writing. I was messing around with an idea for a novel which never seemed to get anywhere and since leaving London I had been making ends meet by writing music reviews for a weekly newspaper and music video treatments for a handful of music video directors around town. Often it paid very well, and in the first week of a good month I could have already earned enough to pay rent and cover living expenses. I suppose it was a testament to my laziness that even these two or so hours of work a week started to irk me. I resented and couldn't stand to listen to the bands that I had to write about. For every piece of shit band that you cringe at on MTV there are a million others, each seemingly more mediocre than the last, who aren't even good enough to fool the mass of stupidity that is the American record buying public. I created numb skulled video scenarios for New Country artists, middle of the road rock bands fronted by men who looked like they should be chugging beers in some awful frat house in Hell, soft metal, funk, rap, even, god forgive me, ska-revival groups: trying in vain to block out anything but the pay check from my mind. And to make matters worse, there was the unfinished novel that sat by the bed, taunting me every night as I went to sleep, nearly two hundred pages of self-indulgent shit, which seemed like it would never be finished. As I stopped work on the book and took on more and more work writing music videos, my sense of rage and impotence grew… My drinking and intake of drugs increased in indefinable increments at first, just as my relationship with Christiane started to fall apart. It was hard to say where or when the rot started but soon both of us were as withdrawn and frustrated and full of mute resentment for each other. Christiane was like some strange and alien form of life to someone like me. After all I had grown up in a depressed, overcast Northern English mill town, while she was a blonde-haired and blue-eyed California girl. She had the kind of life that I had only encountered in bad television; her grandmother was a well known Hollywood actress from the 40’s and 50’s and Christiane inherited some of that spoilt movie star sense of entitlement. She wasn’t wealthy; her father snorted and drank away the family fortune before Christiane had made her teenage years, only stopping to find God and Alcoholics Anonymous when every single dollar and family heirloom had been sold, destroyed or left as insurance against his cocaine debts and bar tabs. When I met her father he was living in a shack on the outskirts of the city with a family of piss stinking cats and a collection of firearms for company. He had once managed some of the biggest soul acts of the 1970’s but he now had a crazed look about him, like he self-destructed before he could save his soul.

  I was hanging out a lot with RP a lot at the time. He was one of the seemingly endless list of people on the fringes of the film industry in my social circle, but when he found a steady girlfriend his appearances became ever more sporadic. I started hanging out with his friends, who where now my friends, to compensate. And of course, RP not being around as much did alleviate one problem, which was becoming more pronounced as my marriage stagnated. That problem was the nature of his relationship with Christiane.

  RP had some kind of weird Midwestern cult family background. He landed in Los Angeles when he was 20, with long hair and a pretty, androgynous face. He went to work building sets, and then went to work on LA’s drugs and women. 15 years on and he was still doing it. He built sets for the kind of movies that are only seen by people involved in the production or insomniac late-night cable viewers—dull soft-porn thrillers, straight to video horror sequels, vehicles for unknown rap artists. The films he worked on were almost exclusively directed by first timers, hacks, or 70’s pornographers on the skids. RP was older now, a little heavier, with his hair bleached and cut short, eyes perched owl-like behind a pair of Diesel glasses.

  RP was also Christiane’s ex-boyfriend. The photograph of her giggling coyly underneath his draped arm on our apartment wall served as a constant reminder of that fact. His youthful and somewhat handsome face taunted me from various other photographs on our living room walls, staring at me with a James Dean sneer and a look in his eyes announcing ownership, superiority, masculinity. He was the only one of her ex’s that she still socialized with; the onl
y one who she kept photographs of on our walls. When I questioned her about that, she would tell me that she only kept the picture because it had her mother/ father/ dog in it. He disgusted her now, she told me—he was a drug-addled asshole. The way she said it let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I, too was also in this category and rapidly falling out of her favor. My rising jealousy was in direct correlation with the stagnation of our sex life, which had started to disintegrate pretty soon after I came to LA to live with her and had reached a virtual standstill by this point. I felt self-conscious of her constant rebuttals of my sexual advances. After a while the way she looked at me contemptuously when I placed a hand on her body became more than I could bear, so I stopped making any kind of advances whatsoever. Sex became a strange and rare occurrence in our home. This didn’t really bother me too much. She fucked like a corpse for the last few months and had transformed, with frightening and baffling speed, from the exciting and exotic girl I’d met and married on a spur of a drunken moment, to an angry, uptight and withdrawn stranger. She became expert in shaming me out of any kind of sexual demand. We didn't kiss when we fucked. She refused, point blank, to give me head. Towards the end, all I fantasized about doing with her mouth was punching the fucking thing.

  This transformation rendered whatever sex we did have into an ordeal. I started to suffer from premature ejaculation; sparked partly by the fear of the belittling look I knew would follow if I came too soon. It was a horrifying look: at once emasculating, cold, yet almost sexy, in a masochistic way. I told no one of what I was going through, as Christiane and I lived virtually separate social lives. It would have been too much to reveal to my friends the pathetic truth. I had defended Christiane doggedly, when RP started putting her down during our beer and meth sessions. Now my foolishness would have been revealed to all. Me; reduced to a miserable, masturbatory shadow of my former self with my dear, dear wife - back turned, thighs pressed tightly together, less than a foot away from me physically, but still an ancient ocean between us.

  It was the first time since I lost my virginity that I was so resolutely and unwillingly celibate. I had to find something else to pass the time and I sure as fuck wasn’t finding it in writing. I was as uncreative as I was unsexual. Still, I had my friends and I had my drugs. RP liked to go out and get high as often as I did, and I have to admit I got a kind of self destructive kick from being around him, despite the whole grey area with Christiane and her possible feelings for him. Our drugs were coke and speed, and I soon discovered he was expert at finding narcotics at a moments notice. We would snort our way to the place where higher was not an option, days blending into nights and still more days. And we talked… my god did we talk. Our conversations were endless, cyclical, but it always came back to her. I remained silent despite RP’s tales of their fucked up sex life, which (I noted with a little envy) seemed a little racier than ours, even before it had ground to a halt. He'd sometimes go to places that made me feel even shittier than I did before, but I never, ever stopped him. I'd meditate on images of him sodomizing her in the back of a truck later, as I watched her sleep. Everyone has a history, I'd reason, remembering the endless one-night stands I'd had on and off tour. I'd try and think of the girls I had lived with and slept with: Mette, the Danish barmaid in Chelsea who often brought men from the bar back to the house and fucked the nosily in an effort to make me jealous; Yuko, the Japanese girl from Queens Park who’d asked me in a childlike voice why I didn’t want “to hold her hand anymore” the night we broke up; and all of the others, an army of flesh fucked and groped in flats, hotel rooms and bathrooms all over England. Then I'd think about Christiane sucking off RP while they worked on some awful movie together. I wondered sadly if she swallowed. I was almost glad we didn't kiss anymore.

  “Fuck,” I'd mutter to myself; climbing into bed, “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

  My relationship with RP was changing for the worse for other reasons. Since he found a new girlfriend, the chemistry changed slightly. He would disappear into the night as the Ecstasy or the coke or whatever kicked in so they could screw; leaving me at some anonymous Hollywood party to fend for myself. I suppose I didn't care too much: I actually felt relieved that he had a girlfriend. He talked less about Christiane now. I usually did OK when stranded: there would be someone with a car, high enough on Ecstasy to offer up a random act of kindness, or a couch where I could crash for the night. I wasn't in any hurry to make it home, as I knew that when I did return Christiane would greet me with scorn— or even worse, impassivity.

  THE WEEKEND BEGINS

  RP called me on Friday afternoon telling me to meet him at a Koreatown bar called The Escape Room around ten. It sounded good to me; the Escape Room was a sleazy little dive bar, dark and cheap with toilet stalls that locked from the inside.

  It was around 3 p.m. I was getting out of bed with a raging hangover. The night before I’d washed down four temazepam with a bottle of Crazy Horse in an attempt to get somewhere on my book. I wrote a few illegible paragraphs before passing out around midnight. I woke up still drunk at 4am with the words THIS BOOK IS SHIT scrawled across several pages of my manuscript in a childlike hand. I crawled into bed then, and Christiane left for work by 8 that morning, failing to wake me up with her usual round of alarm clocks, stomping about on hardwood floors and demands that I clean the house.

  Despite the fact I worked from home, Christiane still treated me like an unemployed layabout. I had fallen into an easy writing gig that paid well, and she seemed to resent the fact that I often made more than she did per week by writing for a couple of hours a day. She told me I need routine, I needed to cut back on the drugs and the booze, that I needed to act like a “normal human being.” When faced with my drunkenness and drug abuse she cut down her drinking to borderline sober amounts. I fought the sneaking suspicion that she would do that just to spite me—it seemed too ridiculous. I needed booze. The drunker I stayed the happier I felt and the less likely I was to trigger another crying/ name calling/ plate-smashing argument by asking her why we never fucked anymore. I stayed drunk and high, and Christiane tolerated my silence. I acted like a spineless asshole.

  I told RP I’d be there. I put the phone down and wandered into the bathroom, regurgitating violently into the toilet bowl for a while. Then the worst of it was over I called Joan, a pretty friend of RP and Sal Mackenzie’s who worked over at Nickelodeon in some vague managerial role. She well read, funny definitely attractive: RP had found her during a nine day drunk nearly four months ago and she’d quickly assimilated into our group. Dark hair and dark eyes, alabaster skin and high cheekbones - classically beautiful, I suppose. She had the look of a girl from a nice middle class family who had rebelled; her face had breeding about it, full lips and smooth skin that had seemingly never known a day of worry or self-doubt. Nearly every male friend of mine was attracted to her and I she knew it. Recently I had sensed a growing closeness between us. Although I knew it was dangerous, I allowed it to continue. With the shit I had to endure at home, the attention of another female made me feel at least slightly better about myself. I got through to her office first time—a rarity—and we talked casually for a while.

  “You paying a visit to JB?” I asked after a few moments small talk, assuring myself that she was heading out with us tonight. JB was a friend of hers, a drug dealer who specialized in pharmaceuticals and Ecstasy.

  “Sure.”

  “Will you pick up some stuff for me?”

  “Yeah honey, what d'you want?”

  “Couple of hits of ex.”

  Later, I wandered along Vermont Avenue for a while, picking up a copy of The Melody Maker at Skylight Books. I read it sadly as I ate at a hole in the wall Mexican joint called Orange BJ's, reflecting on my situation. I missed London. I missed my old bedsit in Battersea, I missed the changing seasons and the feeling of sweetpainful nostalgia when Autumn settled over the city and the foggy air would glow with yellow sodium light. I’d fled London because I’d sen
sed an encroaching darkness there, one that threatened to swallow me whole. I’d somehow thought the endless California sun might banish it, or at least keep it at bay. But now I knew that the darkness had traveled with me, and there wasn’t enough booze in the world to drown it in. Back at the house I cracked open a can of Steel Reserve and I listened to David Bowie singing “Life on Mars.”

  Later that night and I was driving up and down Sunset with Daschel Tate, an oddball Hollywood agent who claimed to have psychic powers, and drank alcohol as if it were spring water. He was a nice but temperamental guy, and tonight was about to turn psychotic through lack of food. “My blood sugar level is plummeting,” he warned me, staring wildly at the city glittering around us. “Don’t fuck with me, I feel insane.”

  It was ten thirty on Friday night, just past Rampart, and we grabbed tacos at The Seven Seas, drinking our way through a six-pack of Newcastle Brown on the drive home. I was spewing a drunken monologue about the Ecstasy I took on Wednesday, which was so cut with speed that I couldn’t sleep until I passed out the following night. We got back to Daschel's spacious apartment off of Sunset and Benton, and listened to music while sucking down beers. Kraftwerk's “Trans Europe Express” turned the mood kind of odd, but the mad look was disappearing from Tate's eyes at least so I knew that violence wouldn’t be on the menu tonight. I cracked open a beer in his kitchen and stared at the picture of Napoleon mounted on the wall as if it might offer a solution. I started to feel overwhelmingly anxious and I felt that my anxiety was due to a lack of drugs. I started to drink faster and faster in the hope of prompting Tate out of the house and back into his car. I was focused entirely on getting to the bar and taking some pills.

  We took our last two beers out with us into the night, and Tate wasn't really talking much as we drove towards Koreatown. We stuck to side streets: the car wasn't insured and we had open containers of alcohol in it. Not for long, though! With a long gulp my beer was gone; soon after, so was Tate’s and the bottles were tossed from the windows onto the roadside. New Orleans jazz played on some crackly AM station.