Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  I looked at her questioningly and she pointed at her mouth. “Inside.” She wanted me to open my mouth to be sure I wasn’t going to spit it out later and sell it for dope money.

  Waiting for my juice to hit, I settled down into the bathroom to take a hit of coke. My only working vein was between my second and third finger on my right hand and to get to it I had to slip off the gold and onyx ring I wore on that hand. I stared at the ring for a second. It had been passed on to me when I was just seven by a family friend I had loved dearly named Frank Barnet who lived next door to my godmother Sarah. He had kept me entertained every Saturday when my mother was out shopping and my father was working. Those long Saturday afternoons watching cartoons and wrestling, playing board games and hide and seek in Sarah’s tiny flat were some of the happiest memories of my childhood years. Frank had become another father figure to me and when he died of cancer I was so distraught I couldn’t go to school for three days, crying myself to sleep in a kind of grief-stricken daze. He was the first person I knew who died on me. The concept that he just wasn’t there anymore made no sense. That the ashes they spread on the ground were all that was left of my Frank, who laughed with me and bought me toys, made no sense at all, and hurt with a painful intensity. I remember the day when they held the service, a misty churchyard, a handful of mourners and the confusion of realizing that people die, suddenly and without any reason.

  His son had given me the ring—the one he wore on his pinkie—some weeks after the funeral. He said that one of Frank’s last wishes was that I should have it to remember him by. Of course it didn’t fit, but I kept it next to my bed until I turned seventeen and filled out enough to slip it onto my own hand. Throughout all of the turmoil—the record deals, London, the tours, Los Angeles, addiction and homelessness—I had kept the ring on me at all times. I had never taken it to the pawnshop.

  I still felt some of that youthful distress in my chest as I slipped it off my finger and placed it on the cistern, cinching the belt around my arm. What would Frank think of this? Maybe the same kind of sadness that I felt when he died. Maybe the same lack of comprehension. I don’t know. I pumped and flexed to get the vein up and slipped the needle in, drawing blood after a few minutes spent poking around painfully in my knuckle. A ribbon of black–red blood flooded into the barrel and I slowly pushed the coke home. I felt it hit, tasted it, and stared open-mouthed at the door. The door. Someone was pounding on the door.

  “Hurry up in there! Number 23? Time for your dose!”

  “Yeah…” I yelled, jumping up, slipping my belt though my jeans and grabbing my works before heading out.

  I was back at The Mark Twain later when I realized that I had left the ring in the bathroom. The realization that I did not have it any more tore at my guts, a sudden bolt of pure despair that cit through the methadone and cocaine haze. The clinic was closed for the day and I was tired and broke and this was the final straw. I tore the room apart in a hopeless rage, ending up lying on the bed in the fetal position, groaning with despair as I imagined where the ring might have ended up. Sold for a ten-dollar rock. Flushed down the toilet. On the hand of some fucking gutter junky bastard thief. Jesus fucking Christ! I was the stupidest person alive!

  Of course when I went back the next day, the ring was gone. Of course no one had handed it in. In a moment of naivety I even put up a sign offering a reward that I couldn’t pay for its return, stressing the lack of value in the ring and its sentimental meaning to me. No one ever called and that part of my life was gone forever.

  Soon my days turned from the horror of scoring, hustling and fixing to a different kind of horror: the waking death of the methadone clinic. Never quite sick, never quite high, I sleepwalked through the first two weeks before they started cutting my dose by 10mls a week.

  When I was down to 40mls a day I was sick all the time. I made it to the clinic five minutes late one day. I had been unable to leave the bathroom that morning for fear that I would vomit, shit my pants or both as soon as I got out into the hallway. At the door to the clinic the two black guys who guarded the entrance barred my way, telling me I was too late. I’d have to come back tomorrow, they said. I felt suddenly faint.

  “What the fuck do you mean ‘come back tomorrow?’ Tomorrow’s too fucking late!”

  I considered the futility of throwing a punch, of being beaten to a pulp. I had no energy for such theatrics. I sat in the parking lot, considering my fate. I had twelve dollars and I was sick. There was a promise of three hundred coming tomorrow from some writing I managed to do months back, but that was no help to me now. I watched a tall, heavyset blond girl go through the same routine with the guys at the door. “Sorry,” the bigger of the two guys was telling her, “but you’re too late. Come back tomorrow.” This girl was having none of it and she had a hell of a lot more fight in her than I had. Man, she called them all kind of names. “

  You dumb motherfucking niggers I need to get fixed! Don’t give me that fucking bullshit, man!”

  They just laughed at her. Another crazy junky whore. She walked away and slowed down as she approached me.

  “You get locked out, too?” she asked, looking down on me, thankfully blocking out the oppressive afternoon sun a little.

  “Yeah. Those guys are fucking pricks.”

  “You got your twelve dollars?”

  I nodded and stood up. She told me she had a little dope on her. We went to her car and cooked it up, right there in the Thrifty parking lot and got well. Then we went back to her boyfriend’s place, explained what had happened, pooled our money with him and went downtown to score. She told me her name was Suzie.

  “Nice to meet you,” I told her, shaking her track-marked hand.

  That was the last time I’d go near a methadone clinic for a year and a half.

  MIRACLE DOWNTOWN

  I was hanging out with Suzie and her boyfriend Mike in their apartment off of Highland Avenue. He was chipping a little on heroin and she was trying to clean up, doing yet another reduction cure at the Hollywood methadone clinic. I was still strung out and had turned up in the hope of getting a free meal. Suzie liked listening to my stories and her boyfriend tolerated my presence, although I could never quite figure out why. Mike was a big guy, from Boston originally, covered in tattoos. He wore a pork-pie hat at all times. He loved the Misfits and DOA and didn’t seem like a natural born junky. I thought he seemed more likely to gravitate towards speed, booze and bar fights. He did a lot of push-ups. I’m sure Mike thought of me as a useless junky scumbag and I’ll admit I was a little scared of him. It wasn’t unusual for him to belt Suzie in the mouth if she answered him back too many times and he always seemed to be brooding, about to erupt into another bout of screaming violence. Being around them was exhausting, trying to second-guess when they would erupt into violence and where to position myself accordingly. On his own I could tolerate Mike a lot more, likewise Suzie, but when you were with them together it was never possible to relax.

  I had been there two hours and I was beginning to regret turning up at all. The night before Mike and Suzie had a fight because she was using dope on top of her methadone, and now Mike was on one of his anti-dope kicks and didn’t want anyone using in his house. Implied in all of this was my culpability in Suzie’s relapse. Mike felt I was a bad influence on her. Hell, it was probably my fault she was shooting up again. Of course, don’t blame the clinics with their tightwad doses of methadone and their bull-headed insistence that you must fail a reduction cure three times before you’re even eligible for a shot at maintenance … blame me. Why not? All in all I felt pretty uncomfortable in their apartment, regretting my decision to leave my last shot of dope loaded in a syringe in the glove box of the Volvo instead of bringing it with me. At least then I could have gone to the bathroom, faked constipation (it could take me ten minutes or more to find a vein) and have a shot. I wasn’t comfortable sitting there listening to their bickering and their lame attempts at conversation and trying not to react to
the looks Suzie was shooting me - pleading, desperate looks - because she wanted to fix too and saw me as her ticket out of the apartment and away from Mike’s watchful gaze. I couldn’t even acknowledge that she was staring at me every time his back was turned because he had an uncanny ability to pick up on shit like that. I really didn’t need to be stuck in the middle of a boy-girl fight right now.

  I was trying to figure a way to leave without offending Mike so much that I couldn’t mooch off him anymore when Suzie started talking to no one in particular.

  “You know what I’d like to do…”

  I knew what was coming. Mike stopped pacing around and glared at her.

  “What. What would you like to do Suzie?”

  “You know, I’d like to give Blood a call...” (Blood was her dealer at the time) “I mean it’s been two days…”

  Mike stared at me, looking for a reaction. I kept a poker face, praying he’d go for it and we could all stop doing this ridiculous dance around the fact that we all wanted to get high.

  “And I suppose you’d need me to drive downtown and get it, right?”

  “I could go with you. If you want,” I ventured, “I’ve got some bread.”

  “Alright, goddamn it,” Mike conceded at last. “This is the last time Suzie. I’m fucking tired of this shit.”

  We took the freeway downtown in silence. Mike was gunning his old Chevy, pushing it as fast as it would go. I rarely came downtown to score; I didn’t know the scene there so much. Scoring downtown, from the street dealers, was something that I considered too risky to do regularly. The cops were all over that scene and the likelihood of a bust was higher that in Macarthur Park or Alvarado and 6th. Homeless people hung around the scoring spots selling new needles for 2 dollars or ‘reconditioned’ needles for a buck, in the hope of making enough money to buy a bottle of Mad Dog or Night Train from the continuous drug traffic. It was a circus. I counted three LAPD cruisers on the freeway before we turned off to downtown.

  “Man, there’s a lot of heat tonight,” I said, watching the black and white pull over a beaten up looking van.

  “There’s always a lot of heat around here. I fucking hate coming down here. Where do you score?”

  “I got a couple of guys around Macarthur Park.”

  “Is it that tar shit?”

  “Yup.”

  “I can’t stand that shit.”

  “It’s strong.”

  “So is this, and I don’t have to deal with a bunch of beaners to get it. Those fucking beaners would cut your throat for twenty dollars, man.”

  “What’s Blood then? Is he white?”

  “Nah, he’s a nigger man. He’s OK, though.”

  I contemplated this. I had never gotten ripped off buying from Pedro, Carlos, Raphael, Henry or Paco. I remembered the mantra I had heard in the streets since the first day I got into this – never buy off of niggers; they’re all con artists… Mexicans are honest, but a nigger will rip off a white guy as soon as look at him. I came from a background where the word nigger simply wasn’t used. It was shocking to hear it the first time. Then, like everything else, I got used to it. I hadn’t been ripped off by anyone so far and I had bought from blacks, Hispanics and whites. Maybe I had been lucky.

  We pulled up in a dark street with a few pensive looking hookers and winos loitering around. Mike killed the engine and turned to me.

  “I’ll be two minutes,” he said, getting out of the car. “Keep your head down, the pigs do sweeps of this street all the time.” With a slam he was gone, along with the sixty dollars we had pooled together.

  I sank down into the passenger seat as a black and white crawled by flashing a light into the parked vehicles. I saw a prostitute fade into the doorway of a bodega as the white light started to bathe the street like an interrogators glare. I started to feel edgy. I reached into the pocket of my jacket for the shot I had grabbed from my car. It was too dark to get a hit in there and too exposed, so I jammed the needle through the leg of my pants and emptied the barrel into my burning thigh muscle. I pulled it out and rubbed the painful injection site as it began to weep blood. I put the cap back on the needle and stored it away. It was a nice strong shot, strong enough to feel even though I had to muscle it.

  A set of headlights in the rear view mirror distracted me. I checked it out, and with a cold hit of fear realized it was yet another patrol car. This time however they were pulling in behind me, about five parked cars back. The real vulnerability of my situation started to dawn on me. No ID, in a car with expired plates that doesn’t belong to me, parked in a notorious scoring spot with a used syringe in my possession. It was too late to dump it: that would only attract attention. I slid further down into my seat and watched what was going on in the side mirror. Two pigs got out of the car and huddled in conversation. Oh, where the fuck was Mike? I didn’t know what would be worse – if he showed up right now and walked into the cops with all of the smack he had picked up, or if he didn’t come back and they found me cowering in his car with my rig in my pocket. I started to panic, imagining how long it would be before I was in cold turkey withdrawals on the floor of a holding cell if I got taken downtown …

  The pigs started creeping towards me, toying with me, I was sure, flashing their lights into the parked cars, sticking their faces against the glass of the drivers’ side windows. Oh please God let them find some other poor bastard shivering in a car waiting to score before they find me … they were taking their fucking time, shining, staring, conversing, laughing before moving on.

  They were three cars away now. This was it. I was popped for sure. I wedged the syringe down under the car seat in a pile of old Jack in the Box wrappers, hoping that they wouldn’t want to rummage around in there, while knowing full well that they certainly would. Two cars away. I could hear them talking.

  Then a miracle happened. I heard a radio crackle into life, spewing out pig code words. They were so serious that both cops freeze before snarling, “Roger that,” into the walkie-talkie and rushing back into their car. I watched their vehicle roar into life, sirens on, as they pulled out, made a u-turn, and sped off. I didn’t allow myself to believe it until they were out of sight. As they disappeared I started feeling my dope come on heavy and slow, taking me like a skilful dance partner as I crossed myself and thanked God for making the cops disappear. The moment they were gone a figure came hustling out of the shadows and toward the car.

  Then the door was wrenched open and Mike slipped into the drivers’ seat. Without saying a word he sparked the engine into life and pulled out. He spat out a handful of 7-dollar bags and handed them to me as we sped off into the night.

  “Man, I almost got busted back there …” I babbled. “If you’d have shown up two minutes earlier we’d have been popped for sure.”

  “No shit,” Mike said, looking at me like I was some kind of idiot. “I know. I was watching you.”

  “What?”

  “Who do you think got rid of the pigs?” He pointed at himself, beaming with pride.

  “You? But how?”

  “I saw them pull up. I got on a payphone and called 911, said that some people had been shot a few blocks away and there was a cop down and bleeding. That’s the only way you can make every pig in the vicinity disappear, man. Tell ‘em one of their own is bleeding… shit, who’d you think got rid of ‘em? The patron saint of junkies?”

  We both had a laugh over that as we turned onto the freeway and headed back to Hollywood. My rent was due on the motel in three days and didn’t have the money to cover it, but right now I had been blessed, not by a saint, but by another junky. Sometimes the universe decided to smile upon us instead of shitting on our heads. I had a pocket full of dope and for that, I was thankful.

  COMMUNING WITH GOD

  Oh fuck, out of money, out of drugs; the owner of the motel is pounding on my door telling me that I have until noon to get out, oh you stupid bastard, why do you do this to yourself?

  My bed stank and the she
ets clung to my body like someone poured a bucket of stagnant water over me during the night. I had been awake for a couple of hours, ever since the unrelenting sun started pouring in through the windows turning the room into a greenhouse once more, refusing to admit I was conscious, trying to put off this moment, trying to ignore the heavy feeling in the pit of my guts but now time was running out so I sat up and unpeeled the sheets from my body and ran to the bathroom, doubled over on the toilet and shivering. I was sick: the sweat and liquefied shit was pouring out of my pores and ass. The smell made me gag. I wondered if there is any fate worse than being a sick junky in a motel in East Hollywood on a hot stinking Los Angeles morning like this one.

  From my throne I raised my head and looked over to the word processor on the bedside table. Although this had been my only lifeline as far as making money went in the past four months, right now it represented nothing more than two days more in the Mark Twain and enough heroin to get me well enough to consider my next move. But I was too sick to haul it all the way down to Fairfax to pawn so I started racking my brains, trying to figure out a way to get just enough dope to get me on my feet. Then I could then make it to the pawnshop and get my stay of execution.

  I looked at the clock; it was quarter to nine in the morning. A time when people all over the world – except in Hollywood it seemed -were heading to straight jobs, completely divorced from my nightmare reality of shit, sweat, vomit and heroin. I was totally outside of their world. Even here and now – sick and pathetic and falling apart - I honestly didn’t know if I would swap my place for theirs given the opportunity. I was in the sewer all right, but king of the sewers nonetheless. Nah, I wouldn’t swap, I wouldn’t give it up and the thought made me laugh a defeated little laugh and yet again I started to wonder about my sanity.

  The only dealers I knew who operated this early in the morning were Raphael and Carlos. Raphael was a no-go; I’d completely burned him down as far as credit was concerned. I owed him a couple of hundred bucks and he wasn't likely to extend any more favors to me. The last time I called him he said he wouldn’t even sell me some dope until I paid some of what I owed him. Carlos, on the other hand, was a maybe. I owed him forty dollars, but I’d always tried to keep straight with him. There was a very good reason for this; he was part of the18th Street crew and I’d heard ugly stories about what happens to debtors.