Digging the Vein

by Tony O'Neill

  I threw some clothes on, hit my horror-struck eyes behind a pair of drug store sunglasses and left the room. I had five dollars to my name and felt like a walking corpse. As I passed the front desk the old Indian guy who ran the place started to yell at me about the rent but I kept walking, yelling, “You’ll get your money, just gimme a couple of hours!” before I was out and onto Wilcox, the baking heat assaulting me the moment I hit the air.

  The Mark Twain was across the road from the post office, and heading toward Hollywood Boulevard you pass by Bob’s Frolic Room 2. Already the stench of cigarettes and booze was leaking out of that dark place and onto the street. I headed past the peeling graffiti depicting bygone Hollywood icons sitting in a movie theatre and turned right at Playmates, a store that specialized in sex toys, lingerie and stripper shoes onto Hollywood Boulevard. There I found a working payphone and beeped Carlos. Due to non-payment my cell had been barred from making outgoing calls. Then I walked, heading past the Hollywood walk of fame, looking at all of the movie star names and cursing each of them as I tramped on: Buster Keaton, Eddie Murphy, Marilyn Monroe, yeah, fuck you too. At the corner of Cahuenga I stopped in at Popeye’s for a pink lemonade. In Popeye’s a couple were arguing over what to order and as I settled in behind them I caught the boyfriend telling his girl, “Woman, you need to fatten up that skinny ass, not lose more weight. Sheeit.” Sitting around morosely eating fried chicken for breakfast were a few of the kids who hustled on the boulevard, mostly young boys who came in from Ohio or Utah to escape their families and got by sucking cock for dope money, but also a few girls, most of whom looked younger than fifteen, with skin so white you could almost see the workings underneath and eyes so black they seemed all pupil. The place felt like a waiting room for lost souls, whatever time of day or night I came in here the midnight pal of shipwrecked lives hung heavy in the air.

  As I got the soda my cell buzzed into life, and Carlos’ familiar voice was asking me what’s up.

  “Hey man, it’s me.”

  “Whatchoo need?”

  I started off highballing him.

  “Listen man I need twenty white twenty black. But I need credit, just ‘til this afternoon.”

  “Come on, man,” Carlos sounded sleepy and pissed off. “Don’t fuck around. You owe me money right?”

  “Listen, man, I got money coming in later today, but I need to get fixed so I can go pick it up. You know I’m always good for this. I only owe you forty bucks, man.”

  A moment of anxious desperation. Would he go for it? My whole day depended upon this fucking asshole giving me a nugget of smack on credit. Carlos let out a long sigh of exasperation before conceding. He didn’t even force me down to just twenty dollars of heroin like I expected. It was as if the sun had unexpectedly come out and suddenly the snaggle-toothed, meth-starved denizens of Popeyes looked like Calvin Klein models.

  “OK, twenty black, twenty white. Where you at?”

  “I’m getting on the metro, I’ll be there real soon. At the usual spot. I’ll beep you 555 when I get there.”

  And with that Carlos was gone. I walked out of Popeye’s with my soda and a new spring in my step. Things where looking up—for now.

  I got on the metro at Hollywood and Western, enjoying the feel of the air conditioning against my skin. I got onto the train without paying. I was taking a risk because the LAPD often boarded these trains to check tickets, but I didn’t care: lady luck was on my side. I was already anticipating my first shot of the day, figuring out where I would do it, already tasting the dope flooding into my bloodstream. Nothing could touch me now; I was immortal.

  I got off at Westlake / MacArthur Park and paged Carlos before heading to the spot near Alvarado and 6th where I usually met his runner. Then I settled down and waited. Hip-hop and salsa music was booming from passing cars, kids were playing in the streets with no shoes, and the sun crept further and further across the sky. On the other side of the street was a donut shop where if you asked for “blue donuts” they would sell you Valium for two bucks a pill. I liked this neighborhood. I’d met people who wouldn’t even step foot in this place, for fear of getting shot. People like Christiane’s friends, who thought they were being edgy by getting their nails done in Boyle Heights. They thought the place was a warzone, they seemed to think that they would get shot the minute they got out of their car, As far as I could see most of the violence that happened here was gang on gang. I felt the people in this neighborhood were hardworking and honest. I mean, it seemed that everyone had a finger in some aspect of the drug trade of course, but they were honest in that the dealers always played the game straight. Mostly the people who lived here were extremely poor and stepping in to fill the demand for drugs was their only way to survive. If you need to put food on the table then you’d have to be a fool to turn up the kind of money that the drug trade brought to these streets.

  The poverty I saw here was unlike the kind of poverty I knew back in England. I had friends whose entire family were on the dole and had been for generations: they wore hand-me-down clothes, their houses were tiny and old and falling apart, if they wanted luxuries they had to steal it. I had grown up in a family were both parents worked and had never taken government handouts, and the lifestyle of some of my school friends shocked me at first. There was no denying it: they were poor. But poor in the North West of England and poor in East LA were two entirely different concepts.

  I once went up to an apartment a few blocks from here to score crack and was shocked by the amount of cockroaches the place had. They scuttled out from under the bed when you sat down, or climbed the walls and watched you with no fear at all. The guy selling the rock had four tiny kids, and they sat naked on the floor playing with dirty-looking stuffed animals. The connection noticed me staring at the bugs and said, “All of these buildings… many cocka-roaches… ees very bad, very dirty.” He had a sister who lived there too. She was brain damaged from a childhood accident that had left an ugly indentation in her forehead. He sent the kids to their room and we all sat around for a bit smoking crack, but as the coke pumped the adrenalin around my body setting off neurotransmitters like some kind of frantic flashing pinball machine, the sight of the sister waiting for the pipe to come around impassively while a roach crawled up her arm was unsettling me and so I had to leave.

  Finally, the kid pulled up on a pedal bike. He was young: maybe thirteen or fourteen. Skinny with a Lakers top on. I walked over to him and copped the two balloons, slipping them under my tongue.

  “Carlos says call him later,” the kid told me, and I nodded as we both went off in opposite directions. Him back to Carlos and more deliveries and me to Burger King to shoot up.

  There was a time when I hated McDonalds and Burger King, but somehow after arriving in Los Angeles they made total sense. In a town where everything was new and plastic, they seemed almost like monuments to the spirit of the city. After I got my habit they came to hold another significance for me: they were the only places you could be guaranteed a clean bathroom with a door that locks for the price of a hamburger. I often wondered if they knew the service they where doing to junkies all over the world, or if straight people ever sat on the can and pondered how many people had sat there before them, probing for a vein and looking for answers - or at least relief from the pain. I stepped inside and got a Coke, asking for the key to the bathroom. I locked myself in, threw my coat onto the floor, pulled the kit from my pocket.

  I carried around an old pencil case containing a clean 1cc Turemo disposable syringe, an alcohol swab, lighter, rubber tourniquet, spoon and filter. I tied the tourniquet around my left arm before preparing the shot quickly before some nosy asshole started banging on the door and yammering about calling the cops. I ripped open the black balloon with my teeth and unwrapped the plastic getting to the pungent sticky nugget of heroin inside. It was a nice size. Half would have done the trick, but I was sick and gluttonous and I decided to stick the whole lot in the spoon. Then I added a little wat
er and held the flame underneath. I was faint with dope sickness as I watched the water start to bubble and boil and the black lump of smack start to dissolve, turning the water into a murky brown color. I could smell the vinegar-like aroma rising from the spoon and in my weakened state I thought I might gag but instead I clicked the lighter off and carefully balanced the spoon on the sink. Then I took the white balloon and unwrapped it to get to the lump of pressed cocaine in the centre. I snapped off half and dropped it into the spoon. I pulled the plastic plunger out of my syringe and used it to crush up the coke and swirl it around in the spoon until it had mostly dissolved. Then I put the syringe back together and dropped the filter into the speedball. The white cigarette filter immediately turned brown and became engorged with the mixture. I stuck the needle into the filter and drew the solution up into the needle, running it under the cold tap to cool the solution before attempting to shoot it.

  I looked for the spot between my thumb and forefinger where I had been shooting recently. The spot was angry red and swollen, so I slid the needle in gingerly. There was a sharp prick like a bee sting when the needle broke the flesh, and then I was probing around with the spike, pulling the dropper back, looking for a register. It took a while, but when the blood shot into the barrel I could have almost cried for joy.

  In the Burger King bathroom I communed with God. The coke hit first, a chemical smell that hit me almost from within… as if I breathed in after depressing the plunger and emptying the barrel into my vein and breathed out the cocaine fumes … my brain started buzzing as the pleasure centers were activated again and again and again: Zing! Zing! Zing! I got the sensation of vertigo as if I was being lifted from this toilet way, way up into the air, my stomach flipping over, and the second wave hit me as the coke and the heroin propelled me out of my personal hell and back into the real world once more.

  I became acutely aware of my dingy surroundings but they could not touch me now. I started to pack my kit away, storing the heroin wrapper and the rest of the coke with my equipment then jamming the case in my jacket. I flushed the toilet, washed my face and hit the streets again.

  Back at the Mark Twain, I bounced into the lobby, raising my palm to the old Indian guy as he saw me and started to come around from the counter.

  “I told you I’ll have the money soon,” I said.

  “No, no, no,” he retorted. “You listen to me. Two thing. First - your mail”

  He handed me two envelopes, one that looked suspiciously like a check of some description.

  “And second, you get your shit out my hotel right now!”

  This wasn’t just rent anger any more. His brown face was turning purple and he looked ready to kill me right there and then.

  “You’ll get the money!” I replied weakly.

  “Fuck your money!” he snapped back. “Your money is no good here, you fucking junky shithead!”

  I backed off from him, but he advanced on me, brandishing what looked like one of my old, barbed syringes.

  “I sent my sister in to your room to look for my money and she stepped on this! It went into her foot! She’s at the hospital getting test for AIDS right now!”

  “I don’t … why did you go into my room, man?”

  Suddenly I was back on the moral high ground. The lousy, thieving bastard!

  “I oughta call the cops on you, you fucking dick! You can’t go into my room like that!”

  “You? Call cops on ME?”

  The old guy looked about ready to explode. I started to laugh at the stupid expression on his face, and this was my mistake because I wasn’t ready for the punch he threw at me. It wasn’t hard, but it took me by surprise. It connected with the side of my face and I fell backwards, cracking my head against the wall.

  “You get your shit,” he barked, “and you get out! I will call the cops, asshole, not you!”

  Suddenly all of my bravado had deserted me. I staggered to me feet. “Jesus Christ, I’m going, I’m going…”

  I didn’t punch him back. I limped off to my room with him following me, muttering darkly each step of the way. I tasted blood - my lip was bleeding. As I made my way back to the room I tried to figure out my next move. I was homeless again, with only a word processor to my name, no heroin, and a bleeding lip.

  Oh, you stupid bastard, why do you do this to yourself?

  I opened the door and slammed it closed in the manager’s face. I sat down on the bed and took my jacket and shirt off. I concentrated on my breathing and the metallic taste of blood in my mouth. I tried to clear my thoughts. If you force yourself to make decisions in a panic situation the brain will turn on you and start sending out erroneous information like a malfunctioning computer. Many a person has been fucked over by listening to an overwrought mind. It took me ten minutes to shut out the chatter in my head and the managers yelling from outside the door. Finally he tramped off down the corridor again. My brain kept intruding, sending snippets from the past year crashing into the fore of my mind like uninvited guests at a party: Genesis, pretty, blonde, naked and OD’d in my bath after I shot her with some of my heroin, my screams reverberating around the bathroom as I smacked her in the face and sprayed cold water all over her yelling for her to wake up, wake up, you stupid bitch—the cops beating the shit out of me outside Cedar Sinai’s emergency room, getting an abscess cut out of my arm, doped up and unfeeling, yet quietly revolted by the smell of the rotten blood as they stuck the scalpel into the weeping, swollen flesh …

  Eventually I forced these images out of my head and let my mind rest. There really was only one option left, but it wasn’t one that I felt I could do: clean up, before I ended up in jail or OD’ing in a shabby motel room.

  I opened my eyes and looked around my little room. The Mark Twain had been good while it lasted: cheap and convenient. I had been creative here, writing dozens of poems. It was a shame I had to leave. I had to clean up, but I knew I couldn’t face methadone again. Without insurance or a regular income, any other kind of treatment was out of my grasp. I knew that trying to come off cold turkey was an exercise in fruitlessness from previous experience: over the past couple of months I had sequestered myself in motels in Vegas and San Francisco in an effort to get away from my connections but always ended up high again before the third night. Doing it in Los Angeles was a joke—when dealers didn’t hear from me for a few days they’d start calling me up, and when they heard I was trying to quit they’d start offering me freebies. I suppose all I could do now was wait for something to come along; in the meantime, pack up my shit and get my sorry ass to the pawnshop.

  I ripped open my mail, starting with the envelope that looked the most like a check. I was sorely disappointed. It was a piece I had submitted for a music magazine in New York being returned to me with a rejection slip. I remembered the piece; I was high as hell when I wrote it, awake for three consecutive days on a speed run. Probably not my best work.

  The second envelope was from England. I opened it and read the letter. Then I reread it in disbelief. It was from my mother, who had finally gotten around to selling my old car. They got 1,000 pounds for it, which translated into just under 2,000 dollars. The check fluttered out of the envelope and landed at my feet. Well, I suppose that was a sign if I was looking for one. Now I had to decide for real whether to I was going to try detoxing.

  I packed up and headed for my car before calling Carlos again to pick up what may have been my last bag of dope. I would be able to think more clearly once I had had a shot, I reasoned, and if I was going to clean up, there was no point in denying myself a bit of pleasure before my trip into rehab. I headed to the check cashing place on Hollywood and Cahuenga, noting that it was past one already. It was another glorious day in Hollywood. Just up the road there was a street paved with stars for Christ’s sake. Could life be any more perfect?

  THE SWEET SMELL OF OBLIVION

  By eight thirty I found myself parked down by Pico and Sixth with Raphael, high out of my mind behind the wheel of m
y car, with Raphael sat on the bonnet, drunk as a motherfucker trying to navigate his new mobile phone and get hold of his coke connection. After cashing the check I had picked up some more smack from Carlos and later paid Raphael back what I owed him. I picked up two grams of coke from Raphael and started shooting it. I had gotten so lost in shooting coke that I hadn’t even found another motel room - instead I spent the afternoon driving around, shooting up in the car, public restrooms, wherever. Now I was trying to pick up more coke, but the only person around was Raphael. This was bad news for me because after five pm he tended to be drunk to the point of incomprehension.

  Today was no different. He told me he was out of coke.

  “You’re a fucking drug dealer, Raphael! How the fuck can you be out of coke?”

  “Eess okay, man! Eeef you geeve me a ride I can peek up some more. You doing me a favor, homes. I make eet worth your while…”

  As soon as I picked him up I regretted agreeing to drive him around. He stunk of malt liquor and cheap tequila and his English had deteriorated to the point of nonsensicality. The trip began with him making me drive down East Sunset to grab some McDonalds, then with him having me slow up next to a bunch of hookers so he could yell at them and lean out of the back window, trying to grab at them. They cursed him in Spanish and one managed to grab him and ripped his shirt a little. He made as if he was going to reach for his knife so I peeled out of there, the motion throwing him back against the seat.