Digging the Vein (19 page)

I was standing at the back with Simon, stoned and pretty amused about the whole spectacle. Then, out of nowhere somebody jumped up on stage from the audience and shambled over to Atom. I figured maybe somebody was gonna go punch his lights out but then I recognized Buddy, with that same dumb grin stuck onto his face. He actually picked up an electric guitar during the intro to a song called “I’m In Hell” and started trying to plug into an amp. Despite all of the abuse, the poor bastard was back for more. It was a beautiful, ridiculous moment. No one else knew who Buddy was, but the biggest cheer of the night came when Atom noticed him with a scowl and walked over, guitar aloft, and tried to smash it over Buddy’s head. He missed and slammed the guitar against Buddy’s shoulder. With a yelp Buddy staggered off the stage.

I left before the show was over. After half an hour the floor started emptying out. There was an awful silence when Atom abandoned his latest songs midway through. The sight I left with was of an object arcing through the glittering stage-lights on its way towards Atom as he strummed some half-forgotten song. The missile seemed to freeze momentarily in the air before hitting his guitar and disintegrating in a shower of red. It was a tomato. As I headed to the door I heard Atom screaming, “Why don’t you just shoot me instead?” Temping fate, as usual. Outside, it was a beautiful clear night in Hollywood. We took the 101-freeway east heading to Sunset and Benton to cop.

“
You know, Simon,” I said, as the city lights danced off the bug’s windshield, “sometimes being in a band isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

But Simon wasn’t listening. He was yelling into his cell in pidgin-Spanish. “
Cinco minuto
, man! We’ll be there in
cinco minuto
!”

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.

It was an ugly place and the karma was wrong from the start. I was completely in the thrall of my habit at this time, shooting Mexican tar heroin and cocaine compulsively, sometimes up to fifteen or twenty shots a day, more on occasions. Everything I owned was in and out of a pawnshop on Fairfax Avenue, including my keyboard, (so I couldn’t play music), and my word processor, (so I could only write longhand). I had an appointment for nine in the morning to be assessed and dosed and I stayed up the entire night in a state of fidgety excitement fixing speedballs in the backs of my hand and my feet (my leg and arm veins where pretty much all gone by now) thinking that here was a chance to quit and sort my life out—the typical excitement of the junky who has just made a promise but hasn’t had to follow through on it yet. At 8:30 I made my way down to the clinic, with 2 shots of cocaine in my jacket pocket since I had heard that the assessment could take a while. I had stopped shooting dope around 3am because they needed me to be sick before they could dose me. By 8:30 my pupils were as big as saucers and I was soaked in a sticky layer of junk sweat while the coke I was shooting worsened my sporadic twitches. On the street people gave me a wide berth. I guess I looked like a crazy homeless guy, definitely a lot older than my 22 years.

The clinic was around the back of a check-cashing place that I knew pretty well on the corner of Hollywood and
Cahuenga
(I had passed a couple of bum checks there when I was desperate and ballsy enough, and didn’t look too much like a junky and a thief). There was an anonymous-looking door with two large black guys guarding it, as though I was trying to get into some trendy Hollywood nightclub. They looked me up and down before letting me through and up the staircase. I wondered who they were there to keep out.

The clinic was a trip. It was a methadone clinic as well as a place for pre- and post-op sex changes to get medication and counseling. The waiting room was full of these hard-looking Latino drag queens with permanent makeup and huge tits, and it was hard to tell who was post-op and who was pre-op. They all looked like they could kick the shit out of you. It was some scene, man. Outside these same queens would hawk their medication to the junkies as they left, mostly sleepers or pain pills. Occasionally a Dilaudid would turn up for sale but they could fetch forty dollars a pill since they were so rare and desirable.

The methadone patients were a combination of your typical L.A. / Hollywood gutter junkies mixed with the more rock and roll type kids who developed a habit off chasing the dragon which was gaining popularity in the music scene. I was assessed by some old Asian doctor who told me, after checking my injection sites and my level of sickness that I should start off on 80mls. First I would get 40 and then I had to wait. If I was still standing after thirty minutes I would get my other 40. I paid him twelve dollars, went up to the glass counter with my slip, and waited in line. In front of me a woman who looked to be eighty-years-old, in pancake make-up and a black witchy bonnet, was handed a cup through the glass partition. She was supporting herself on a walking stick. In her efforts to take the cup she had to rest the stick against the counter and balance herself precariously against the wall. Her hand trembled as she reached for the methadone and froze as she tottered on her heels in gravity-defying slow motion. It seemed she was about to slip. Instinctively, I moved forwards to support her, but I was grabbed by one of the workers and hauled back to where I was standing. The guy who had grabbed me, an improbably large hick white kid with cross-eyes, pointed to a black line in the floor and mumbled “Don’t cross the line. Cross the line again and ya don’t git dosed.”

Meanwhile, the old lady was still going through the improbably slow pantomime of trying to raise the plastic cup of pink liquid to her mouth while remaining upright. The trembling cup crawled towards her puckered lips. I felt my guts churn and loosen more, and got the idea that I might fall over soon, myself.

“
C’mon you old fuck!” someone behind me yelled, getting a few “Yeahs!” of approval. I thought that was kind of fucked up, but when she finally got the methadone down and insisted on adding some water to her cup, swilling it around and repeating the whole bullshit procedure again, I found myself cursing her also.

I got my dose passed to me through the glass partition and downed it quickly. It tasted strong, aniseed-like. My first hit of methadone. I was about to walk away when the scowling Chinese lady behind the counter said, “Wait!”

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.