Digging the Vein by Tony O'Neill

Author:Tony O'Neill [O'Neill, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: addiction, transgressive, british, britpop, literary fiction, los angeles, offbeat generation, autobigrapical, heroin
Publisher: Vicon Editions
Published: 2014-06-02T05:00:00+00:00

NOTHING SHOCKING

Nothing surprised me anymore. I watched a guy mix up a shot of crystal meth and distilled water, and right there in the driver’s seat of his car – we were parked on Hollywood Boulevard with groups of tourists strolling past us at the time – he whipped down his pants and shot it right into his groin. Pulled the balls and dick aside and slid the needle into a red, open wound that was waiting for him like some awful, suckling mouth. I was spun off of shooting speed too and had seen enough crazy scenes on crank that I was really unflappable at this point. It was three o’clock in the afternoon during a baking Los Angeles heat wave. I asked him if it hurt fixing there.

“Only the first few times,” he told me. “I’ve done it so often now that the hole never really closes up. I can get a hit there anytime I like. I just stick it in and wham! Blood pops right up like I had willed it…”

I felt trapped and sick, my habit outstripping my income and my ability to work. Systematically, over a period of four months, I had managed to alienate every single person I knew who was prepared to pay me to write. All of my desperate calls to Propaganda Films trying to rustle up more work were mysteriously rerouted to an answering machine without even an outgoing message on it. I was persona non grata with the people who were once my main source of income. I could no longer keep a fixed address, staying in short-let motels, friend’s houses, often just sleeping in the back of my car.

In an effort to straighten myself out I had briefly flirted with methadone treatment at a clinic in Hollywood. It was hardly an encouraging experience. The clinic was right around the corner from where I was staying at the time, a roach-ridden hooker motel on Wilcox between Hollywood and Selma called the Mark Twain. I was there out of pure economics—it cost 150 dollars a week and they didn’t require a security deposit. I remember thinking “The Mark Twain – that seems like a good omen for a writer.” As depressing as The Mark Twain was, with its threadbare brown carpet in the halls and lime-green walled rooms with dilapidated 1920’s bathroom fixtures, and one barred window looking out over a parking lot where on Sundays they gave soup to the drunks and the street kids who spat and grizzled and fought over it, there were some unique advantages particular to this Hollywood address. The only needle exchange in Hollywood was a five-minute walk on Cahuenga, right across from a queer bar that opened at 6am, a place called The Spot Light where I sometimes hung out when I was shooting meth and couldn’t sleep. And then, when I was tired and broke and trying to figure a way out of my predicament there was the methadone clinic, which was five minutes or less in the opposite direction.

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