Digging the Vein (12 page)

Just thinking of it I was gripped by that same rage again. I looked about the room for something to break. Then seized by the utter futility of it, I went into the kitchen, grabbed a sheet of aluminum foil and prepared to smoke some more junk.

That night I walked to Bob’s Frolic Room on Hollywood Boulevard to get wasted. On top of the heroin, the whiskey and sodas I ordered started to get me very drunk indeed. The barmaid knew me, and always made them seventy percent Makers Mark with just a splash of soda. I drank three quickly, and asked her to line up another. The bar was half empty. A couple of older Hollywood alcoholics sat nursing wine and beer, grey, spectral, broken-toothed, and huddled over the bar in the darkest corners they could find. Nobody talked tonight. The jukebox played Television’s
Marquee Moon
.

A drink later she walked in. A young black girl, high on ecstasy … she danced across the room to Blondie’s “Rip Her to Shreds,” came over to me and leaned over my section of the bar, taking a long drink from my whiskey and soda. She was pretty with a wide mouth and a grin that exposed pink gums and gleaming white teeth. The symmetry of her face was ruined—just enough—by a scar which ran under her left eye. I called the bargirl over and ordered another Makers Mark and soda. I slid it over to the scarred girl and she accepted it, still without a word.

Later, back at the apartment, I screwed her on the bed I’d once shared with Christiane, doubled over with her ass in the air. It was a hard, drunken fuck. We hung out in the house for a little, drinking malt liquor and passing a joint back and forth. She asked me about Christiane, whose picture was on the living room wall, but I didn’t want to talk about it. We fucked again on the floor. At four a.m. she left and I started packing my things. I smoked more heroin, amazed by the sense of physical and mental peace it was granting me, before sleeping on my old pillow for the last time. The next day I left. It was 2 weeks before my 21
^st
birthday. The next time I saw Christiane was 6 months later to sign our dissolution of marriage papers.

It’s hard to look back and think in any kind of logical way how heroin became so important in my life during the weeks and months following these scenes. I suppose the first part is physical dependence. When you wake that very first time and you feel awful, like you have ice in your belly, like something is crawling around underneath your skin, it’s very easy to just react by throwing more smack on the foil and fixing yourself. I learned to barter away the future for a short-term bit of relief. And if I tried to make any concerted effort to stop smoking for a while, the reality of my situation would come back into focus and seem so completely fucked up that I soon went running back to the cocoon and relative peacefulness of heroin.

When does a habit become an addiction? It’s hard to say. When does the particular insanity that comes with choosing heroin as an aesthetic, as a lifestyle, become normal to you? I’m not sure; all I know is after a while of drifting along with things, of not dealing with my immediate problems and focusing instead on funding my heroin use, things shifted around me fundamentally. At some point, I woke up out of heroin and instead of becoming confronted by my living situation, my broken marriage, my precarious financial situation, I was instead absolutely sure that all of these things were NO LONGER RELEVENT to my existence. All that mattered was that I got some drugs to help me through the day. The other stuff, well, that was as abstracted and distant as if it was happening to someone else. And in a way, I suppose it was.

GENESIS

It was 4:30 in the afternoon and I was at a hostess bar in Koreatown scoring speed from Lori, a crazy fat meth-head who worked the bar there and doled out grams of crystal for sixty dollars a pop to tweakers and all kinds of crazies who came from as far west as Hollywood to cop. The place had a stench of cheap aftershave which lingered in the stale air, Formica tables around which sat old Korean businessmen nursing overpriced, watered-down whiskey and the thunk-thunk of chunky thighs as plump, gone-to-seed blonde girls sashayed from table to table looking for business. It was the girl’s jobs to entertain the men, bring them drinks, laugh at their jokes, run their hands through their hair. The more the men paid, the more they got. The best money always went to the white girls with blonde hair, even the most beaten up and drug-fucked of them made twice as much as the prettiest Asian girls. Lori, always wired but never any thinner, shot me a grin full of broken, ground down tweaker teeth and slid two grams wrapped in a napkin across the bar to me.

The place was half-empty and the constant gloom made me feel as if it was midnight and not a blazing desert afternoon. The only illumination in the place was the neon screaming “ICE COLD BEERS—COCKTAILS” and the almost luminescent pallor of Lori’s skin. I was about to leave when a familiar figure pulled up a stool next to mine, and slumped forwards over the bar. I recognized her as Genesis, the girlfriend of a kid I saw around from time to time named Bobby. She was from the Midwest: pretty, with a heart shaped face, blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She looked tired though, older and thinner since I last saw her.

“
Hi, stranger,” I said, causing her to look up and blink her teary eyes in recognition. “What's wrong?”

“
Oh,” she sniffed, wiping her eyes with a tiny pale hand. “N-nothin'. I just split with Bobby and I’m crashing. Haven’t slept in a while.”

Lori was at the other end of the bar sliding drinks over to a waitress with two blue tears inked on her cheek, who silently chewed gum and stared at the ceiling fan. “Wanna get high?” I asked Genesis, her face lighting up at the very words. “I’m holding…”

I took her to my car. Los Angeles being Los Angeles one of the first things I had to do upon being kicked out by Christiane was buy a car. I am no car lover and I bought the ugliest, cheapest most un-LA car I could find: a 300 dollar, reconditioned eggshell blue Volvo with rust patches and an engine that gave out frequently.

Driving back to my apartment on Iris Circle, she filled me in on what had been happening. She was still working at a hostess bar not far from Lori’s and had been supporting Bobby while he worked on his music, paying for all of the drugs. When they started doing more and more speed Genesis needed to make more money, and Bobby started getting uptight that she was staying over with guys who came into the bar and attending “parties” organized by the club for some of the better paying clients.

“
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.