Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  “Its bread man, that’s what I told him. What are you gonna do? So I gotta screw some old Chinese fuck, no big deal right? But he gets all possessive, and slaps me around … fucking asshole. He’s still happy to shoot the crank my pussy pays for, though. So I left him.”

  I had been at the apartment for three months, but it was still filled with nothing but a TV, my CD Walkman and empty take out containers. When we got there, she walked around it, sizing it up, running her hands along the work surfaces.

  “Nice place,” she commented. “Lots of room.”

  We sat down on the floor cross-legged and I threw the baggie of speed down between us. I took out the glass pipe and watched as she pulled out a Hello Kitty pencil case from her purse and popped it open, exposing a needle in its plastic wrapping and a rubber tourniquet.

  “You got a spoon?”

  “Sure.”

  She poured a little speed into the spoon, added water and swirled it around. Then she took out a packet of Marlboro’s, ripped the filter off the end of one, and dropped it into the solution. The needle was taken out of the packaging, the liquid drawn up into it before she rolled up her sleeve and tied the tourniquet around her arm. I stopped what I was doing to watch, fascinated, but she was so wrapped up in her ritual that she didn’t seem to notice. She slid the needle into the crook of her arm and almost immediately a red-black glob of blood flowered in the clear solution. She snapped the tourniquet off with her teeth and pushed the hit home.

  She withdrew the needle, wiped the spot of blood from her arm and closed her eyes.

  “Oh thank fuck …” she exhaled. “That is sooo good. Thanks, baby.”

  It was different to how I imagined shooting up to be. The needle was much smaller than I’d expected, and it didn’t seem very messy at all. Not all blood and guts. Quite painless and sterile.

  “How does it feel when you shoot it?” I asked her, placing my pipe back on the floor still unloaded.

  “Great. Totally different from smoking or snorting it … just … incredible, I guess. Like how I guess diving out of a plane would feel. I feel so … great right now.”

  “You got a spare needle?”

  “Yeah, sure. I always come prepared, honey.”

  “Will you shoot me?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  I watched, stomach turning in excitement and fear as she prepared a shot in the exact same way. I tied the tourniquet around my own arm, flexing while she ripped open a new syringe and drew up the hit. I watched as she slid the needle in, telling me that I had good, fresh veins, watching my own blood fill the dropper so dark and thick, looking almost like the contents of some kind of biological lava lamp. She snapped the tourniquet off with one hand, keeping the needle steady in my arm with the other, and then slowly fed the shot into me. I imagined that I could feel it going in, that it felt cold, and it wasn’t until it was all in my veins and she started to withdraw the needle that I sensed it starting, something building in the base of my skull and my stomach, my heart starting to beat faster as waves of euphoria and nausea tore through me almost so strong that they overwhelmed me. Genesis watched me, smiling, as my eyes registered shock at the intensity of the hit, so different from anything I had ever felt before, a kind of whole body vibration, the kind of hit I had always wanted but never gotten completely from a drug. She told me to keep breathing and go with it, her voice distant and tinny, almost lost in the roar of my blood rushing in my ears. In a few moments the most intense flash of pleasure and fear was over and my body settled down somewhat, still buzzing and pinging with the intensity of the methamphetamine. I lay back on the floor muttering, “Oh god, that feels so fucking good,” and we both lay there giggling and laughing, before —like ballet—we undressed without acknowledging it, and fucked in that brutal, endless crystal meth way, cock and pussy hammering against each other, yelling and rolling about on the floor, not coming, but finally collapsing in an exhausted, sweaty heap before shooting up again.

  That afternoon developed into a two-day speed and heroin run. We cooked up some of my black tar heroin from Macarthur Park next, and I was hit with my second revelation: the beautiful intensity of heroin pushed home into the mainline. The gentle euphoria and disconnected peace of mind of the drug was multiplied tenfold, combined with a rush which felt like my muscles were turning into warm honey and drip-dripping down my spine and into my feet.

  I knew somewhere in the back of mind that I had turned a corner from which it would be very hard to come back, but when you’ve got heroin it just doesn’t matter. Genesis stayed with me, coming back the following night with all of her belongings in four bags. She set up camp in the front room. It was great for the first few weeks; she brought me down to a storefront needle exchange on Cahuenga and Hollywood where you could buy 100 clean syringes for 10 dollars (or a donation of less if you were broke), and we hung out together getting high and fucking, but after a few weeks we were just getting high. She would take off for days at a time to work and would come back with a couple of hundred dollars, sometimes more, bitching about the way this one stank, or that one kept trying to stick it in her ass without lube. Everything was always OK though, when she was back at the apartment and had her drugs around her again.

  The honeymoon lasted for a month or so, but I suppose it was fatally mismatched from the beginning because at the end of the day, she was a speed freak and I more naturally inclined towards heroin. I couldn’t take speed for more than a few days at a time, the nightmarish comedown and depression that followed coupled with the hallucinations caused by lack of sleep all eventually driving me crazy. I would get obsessive on it after the first 24 hours, repeatedly checking that the door was still locked, or that the cops were not outside … sometimes I would become convinced that ants were swarming over all of the white surfaces in kitchen, only for them to vanish when I reached out to touch them. As soon as I moved away, out of the corner of my eye, there the bastards where, swarming everywhere again.

  Genesis frequently expressed a fear of doing too much heroin because she didn’t want to become strung out. I asked her what the big deal was, repeating what I had heard from Chris, that coming off of heroin was no worse than having the flu for a week. She asked me if I had ever stopped completely since I started all those months ago and I told her that I hadn’t. She nodded at this, as if to say, “Well, just you wait.” I would retaliate by asking her when the last time was that she went a week without shooting speed, and she would try and fail to remember. It had been a year at least. I then would nod, thinking “touché,” as I prepared a shot of heroin for myself.

  NEAR MISSES (Part One)

  “Oh fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. Fuck SHIT man!”

  That was Chris, who had become my partner over the last weeks on our regular trips to score off the street. Up until now we had been on a typical, uneventful drug hunt. There is nothing like scoring heroin off the street to make you feel dirtier and more used up than you already are. A fat Mexican sticking his head through the passenger side repeating, “Whatyouwan, man? Whatyouwan?” until you cough out, “Chiva” followed by a monetary amount as you thrust the bills towards him. Him spitting out the tiny balloons into your hand and you stashing the saliva soaked objects under your own tongue as you drive away. Yeah, it makes you feel real good about yourself, but you don't care; You Have the Drugs. Oh Christ, the night is looking up already.

  Pulling out of Bonnie Brae and onto 6th, our uneventful night suddenly turned into an eventful night. The street was a usually a notorious haunt for heroin dealers and as we circled the parking lot outside of USA Donuts I began to feel a little uncomfortable at the lack of action in the area. Something was in the air. Something had scared the dealers and the other junkies away.

  Chris was muttering something about lazy Mexicans as he pulled out onto 6th and headed west, and I was the first to notice the black and white patrol car tailing us almost immediately. After a block and a half, they began to flash the brights.

&nb
sp; “Oh fuck,” Chris muttered, “oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck! Fuck SHIT man.”

  “Pull over,” I ordered, “and chill the fuck out, OK? Do you have drugs on you?”

  “No,” he said, shaking, pulling over.

  “Anything. Blow? Anything?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Be cool then.”

  “Step out of the car,” a cop instructed. “Driver first.”

  Chris made his way out, stood against the wall and spread his legs.

  “Now you.”

  The second cop frisked me and I looked over absently at Chris as he emptied his pockets for the first. The cop’s hand rested lightly against my chest for a moment.

  “Why you so nervous?” he inquired, trying to deceive me with his nonchalant tone.

  “I've never been stopped by the police before,” I replied, trying to keep my voice neutral and flat sounding.

  “I know you guys were trying to buy dope,” the cop tells me later as his partner turns the car over. “Why don't you make it easy on yourself and 'fess up?”

  I looked blank, not avoiding eye contact but keeping a poker face.

  “No. We got lost. We were just turning around. We don't have dope; we didn't try to buy dope.”

  In the end we lucked out. They didn't feel like fucking with us I guess, so no trip downtown, no cavity search, nothing. Just a warning, a reprieve. Driving back to Chris’s house, he is shaking and quiet. I have already decided to try and give dope a break. Suddenly he turns round and says, “Maybe we could get some crack instead. I know a place,” as we hit Western.

  GIMMIE SHELTER

  “You need to get out of LA, man.”

  I had heard it from a few of my friends in various contexts and situations over the last couple of weeks. I wasn’t looking so good and I suppose I seemed to be a little down at heel. I didn’t want to go to the parties anymore, I didn’t want to drop Ecstasy or snort coke. I wasn’t interested in getting laid. A few of my friends figured I had taken the break-up with Christiane harder than expected, while others suspected that Joan had somehow caused this sudden change my change in behavior. They could not have been further from the truth. One night I caught RP peering curiously at the bruise on my arm. I stared right back at him. In an unspoken moment he became the first of our friends to know that I was using needles. To his credit he never gave me a speech about it. He was too much of an unrepentant hedonist to ever try and pull that kind of patronizing bullshit. No, RP was good people. He looked up from the bruise and said, “You know; you need to get out of LA for a while, man. You should take a break.”

  “Funny you should say that,” I told him. “I’m leaving tomorrow for a few days. I just got some work in Laughlin with a film crew.”

  “Good, man.” He reached into the beer and tossed me a cold Tecate. “Take it easy for a few days. We’ll have some beers and a few lines when you get back.”

  Laughlin, Nevada. The poor man’s Vegas, or the Vegas of the future depending on who you’re talking to. Laughlin had none of the glitz and pretence of its more famous cousin and it certainly didn’t try to cater to families like Vegas did. Fuck magic shows and Wayne Newton: Laughlin was a town for gamblers and if you didn’t like to gamble and found yourself in Laughlin … well, you were pretty fucked all around. Me, I didn’t gamble unless you counted the risk I took by injecting heroin cut with who-knows-what several times a day.

  The gig came about in the most convoluted and spurious of ways, but let’s just say I agreed to do something when I was drunk at a party. I woke up the next afternoon to the sound of the phone ringing and an overly enthusiastic voice offering me money for a few days work. It seemed like an easy enough gig – they needed an extra pair of hands on a low-budget documentary they were shooting in Laughlin.

  “What’s the documentary about?” I asked, staggering out of bed to find a pen.

  “Tribute bands. Get this; we’re filming a Rolling Stones tribute band playing in a casino, which will be hosting the annual Hell’s Angels River Run. Whaddya think?”

  With my friends’ advice about getting out of town ringing in my ears, I accepted. Three days later I was in a van tearing across miles of desert, while Genesis had my apartment to herself for a couple of nights.

  The plan was to use the trip to cut down my heroin intake to a marginal level, and then kick dope altogether when I returned to LA. There wasn’t a particular reason that I wanted to stop, just the usual insomniac doubts that would surface at three in the morning. The longer you do this the harder it’ll be to stop… On top of that my habit was costing me more and more as my appetite for smack increased. I figured I needed a break. I was pretty early on in my habit and I figured that kicking would be a breeze. I just needed some meaningful activity to keep my mind off of dope, and what better activity than working on a documentary about the “legendary” tribute band, The Really Stoned? I left LA in a minivan with the director - a scrubbed up, looking healthy college kid called Sam who was way too cheery for my liking, the stoner sound guy Paulie who wore the same filthy Megadeth T-shirt, which left his pale flabby gut hanging exposed, for the entire trip, and the cameraman Jules. Jules was one of those vegan-types, the kind who hang around in organic coffee shops and say they’re Buddhists. He acted as though he had never so much as handled a camera before making this movie, and constantly muttered incomprehensible complaints to himself: “… hmmmm, we’re losing the light for the tripod boom set-up, you know, the long shot, hmmmm …”

  And of course there was the band. They too were crammed into the minivan, and I spent the entire four-and-a-half hours drive nodded out and dribbling on Charlie Watts’ shoulder.

  The Really Stoned were the most ludicrous and motley collection of fags, mooches, wash-ups and has-beens it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. The stink of desperation and failure hung around them as though they had been sprayed by some terrible, vengeful skunk. The guy who was meant to be Mick Jagger looked like an overweight drag queen trying to pass for butch and failing, while the rest of the band seemed to be a bunch of alcoholic 70’s session musicians who had been dragged out of semi-retirement and stuck into ill -fitting velvet jackets, pancake makeup and fright wigs in the vain hope of passing them off as being at least in their thirties. The one who was trying to be Keith Richards was either talking with the worst, most affected British accent I have ever heard, or had some kind of unusual cleft palate which made him sound like John Merrick meets Dick Van Dyke.

  He nudged me out of my nod and asked, “Wot yooo fink these, uh, biker be chicks are gunna look like?”

  “Oh, I’d be careful,” Sam piped up. “I don’t think the Angels appreciate people messing with their women.”

  Keith nodded sagely. “That’s wot I ‘ear. Tread careful, mate. Tread careful.”

  I closed my eyes again thinking absently that old Keef should forget about the Angels and watch out for undercover cops, because the only action that old fuck was gonna see in Laughlin was the type that charged twenty for head. An hour later when I opened my eyes again, the arid, lunar landscape rolling past the window was seemingly unchanged. Sam was humming to himself as he pressed on the accelerator, allowing himself to creep up to five over the limit. I yawned, stretched and then asked, “So Sam… where are we booked intro? Are we in a casino or, like, a Holiday Inn or something?”

  Everybody laughed a little.

  “Oh no,” said Sam. “No money for that, I’m afraid. We’re going to be sleeping in the van, the band are staying with some friend’s in town. We can use the bathroom facilities at the casino, though.”

  Sam caught my darkening expression in the rear view mirror. “That’s, uh… not a problem, is it?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “No problem at all. That’s just … great.”

  So I was sleeping in a van with Curly, Larry and Moe. It was at that was the point where I realized my attempt to cut down or quit heroin would have to happen another time. In fact, I decided, I would need more heroin than
I already had. Without a significant amount of dope to get me through it there’d be no way in hell I could keep up the pretence of sanity under these circumstances. I would need to find a connection in Laughlin as a matter of urgency.

  “You need to get out of LA …”

  Yeah right, fuckers.

  Finally Laughlin reared up on the desert horizon like impending doom; it was a squat, ugly city with a miasma of smog and desperation hanging low over it. As we pulled up at Harrah’s Casino, where the annual Hell’s Angels River Run was due to take place, we were greeted by an awesome spectacle. It was late afternoon and the furious desert sun was reflecting off of a sea of chrome; bikes stretching out as far as the eye could see in every direction. This fuel belching mass had taken over the vast parking lot and as hundreds of bikes revved their engines in unison it made a sound akin to that of the fabric of the universe being ripped apart. Everyone in the van was awed into silence by the noise and sheer amount of hogs. A scrolling neon sign announced, “Laughlin Welcomes Hells Angels,” in enormous gold letters.

  “Well, this should be interesting,” Charlie Watts said.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Mick said. ‘Now let’s get to the house, Sam. I really need to take a shit.”

  We circled around the lot and I saw hundreds Angels standing around the bikes, drinking beers and laughing, slapping their buddies on the backs, all faded denim and leather vests with patches announcing their chapters. Everywhere you looked the Angel’s Death’s Head insignia looked back at you, either sewn onto leather or inked onto skin. Handlebar moustaches and aviator shades and late thirties big-titted blonde girlfriends who lifted up their shirts when anyone whistled at them, exposing their swollen, surgically enhanced tits to approving roars and whoops. I was struck by the absurdity of it all, amazed that the Hell’s Angels still existed out of the movies or books by Hunter S Thomson. They seemed like a quaint throwback to a different age, an age without the Internet or instant celebrities or reality TV. Yet here they were, smoking and burping and slapping asses in this backwater gambling town on the Colorado River, as baffling, as ugly, and as undeniable as life itself.