Digging the Vein (25 page)

“
Okay.” We stared at each other for a moment, then I motioned toward the cup of medication. “So let’s get those pills …”

The third and forth days were the worst. They seemed to blend into one endless fever dream, where the sun rose and set randomly. My meds were at their maximum level at this point, yet they could not stop the horrors and the physical agonies of my withdrawals. I awoke at three a.m. and listened to Billy and Todd sleeping. I flopped over in the sweatbox that was my bed and landed on the remote control. The TV flickered into life and
A Clockwork Orange
was on the screen in black and white. Alex was bellowing “I was cured all right!” when I managed to flick it off …

I sat with Alicia in the front desk in the early hours. I was signing papers in a headfog of Valium. An answer-phone light blinked at me with hypnotic regularity …

“
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change …”

Balmy Los Angeles evening. Crickets chirp as a warm wind blows in from the coast …

“
The courage to change things I can,”

A voice with a soft West Coast lilt reciting some kind of prayer …

“
And the wisdom to know the difference.”

And I am surfacing, upright in a plastic chair part of a circle of men in the twilight…

“
Amen.”

I joined in with this, anticipating it in some primitive part of my brain. The meeting was over before it even started for me. Fuck, passing out in public again. How embarrassing. I was too stoned on Valium and sick to articulate any kind of apology. Nobody seemed to mind, anyhow. Somewhere in my back brain I realized that this must be the end of the fourth night. I should have been feeling better by now. Maybe I was.

My head cleared and the pain stopped gradually, in almost imperceptible steps. Two new men arrived, much older than the rest of us. The frailest of them looked heavily sedated and partially bedridden. First I spoke to was Tommy. The other new arrival was a barrel-chested old man with weathered red features carved into a Victorian scowl, topped off with a white bushy handlebar moustache. Tommy was a drunk and had worked at sea his whole life. We were in the smoking garden sometime after breakfast. He was ill-looking and pale, still trembling slightly and telling me how they had to hospitalize him after an initial attempt to detox here because he started to have violent fits.

“
Woke up in the hospital, stinking and sober, bruised up and bleeding, tongue half bit thru’, with no idea of where I was, or why I was there.”

Todd later introduced me to Sal; the sickly-looking old man who peered at me over his round glasses while propped up in his bed. Sal was in his late sixties, and looked more like he should be in a care home than a detoxification ward. He blinked in recognition and wheezed an agonized breath.

“
What are you coming off?” I asked him as he continued to study me. He looked as if he were thinking of the right thing to say to me. When he came to a decision his face took on a look of quiet determination and he nodded his head. Sal leaned forwards, beckoned me over to him and grabbed my collar. He brought his lips over to my ear.

“
Call my wife …” he hissed. “Tell … that… bitch … to get me two … TWO balloons … and a spoon …”

Then he fell back onto the bed and started muttering in agonized Spanish.

“
Jesus,” I said to Todd as we split to get our medication. “He’s fucking looped on tablets. Either that or he’s fucking senile.”

“
Yesterday he told me that he’s here to kick smack and angel dust, if you can believe that. Says the last time he kicked was 1978.”

That really was something. I could understand why they had medicated him so heavily. A sixty-something year-old man, coming off of a twenty-two year heroin and PCP bender—it kind of put my pain into context.

After I received my pills from the nurse, a beady-eyed old white woman who looked at me like I was liable to cut her throat and abscond out of the window with her purse, Alicia beckoned me into her office.

“
I’ve got some good news for you,” she said, sitting in her chair and motioning for me to take a seat. It reminded me of one of my old doctor’s office back in England. Above her, a poster with a kitten hanging from a branch captioned: “Hang in there!” There was no stamp here of the personality that I’d imagined Alicia to have, nothing of the tattooed punk rock ex-junky at all. It may as well have been the office of a fifty-something Christian charity worker. Again my view of “sober people,” as twelve-steppers like to refer to themselves, slipped further.

“
I’m cured?” I joked, getting a smile out of her.

“
Well, not quite. What would you say if I asked you to consider coming over to the rehabilitation wing after your detox is over?”

“
I can’t. I don’t have dollar one, Alicia. I don’t even know where I’m gonna sleep when I get out. Sorry.”

“
What if you didn’t have to pay?”

I shrugged. “What do you mean?”

“
I put in an application for the Musicians’ Assistance Program to pay for you to stay longer with us, and the approval came through today. All you’ve got to do is sign here…”

She told me about the Musicians’ Assistance Program as I sat pondering my next move. They had formed in the seventies, a group of sober survivors of the L.A. music industry. They started off running a musicians-only AA meeting which proved to be hugely popular, attracting some pretty big players from the jazz era, as well as rock and roll groups and executives from many of the big record labels. After a number of high profile musicians died from fatal overdoses MAP set up a trust, which paid for musicians who couldn’t afford it or didn’t have insurance, to get access to treatment. The only requirement was that you have to have recorded on an album. I suppose it made sense; I thought that Alicia was taking an unusual interest in the bands I had been in, querying me about dates and record labels. And now she had gotten me a break with these MAP people.

The idea of staying here for thirty more days was terrifying to me. I knew that in this wing we were treated with kid gloves because we were detoxing and fragile, but in the rehab wing things would no doubt be far less relaxed. I knew people who had been to rehab and it always sounded to me like a prison for junkies and only something that someone who had absolutely no choice in the matter would endure. I was due to be discharged the day after tomorrow. I had already planned out who I would call to pick me up, how much money I could borrow off of them, and when I could get my first taste of dope. The thought of
not
getting high at the end of this weeks detox filled me with an awful sense of disappointment and anxiety.

I listened to myself think this with a feeling of growing revulsion. I was considering leaving this place to get high. Five days ago I never wanted to shoot up again. I was fully aware that each day was creeping closer towards the only possible conclusion to my reckless drug use. I was desperate for a shot at rehab so I could get my life together. I was suicidal, a prisoner who lived in motels and on peoples floors, someone covered in track marks and dirt that nobody—except the occasional out-of-it junky girls—would consider fucking. Twenty-two years’ old and fucked up, sick, broke and alone. A miserable existence. Now I was clean for the first time in almost two years, and I was already planning my first hit of smack for when I got out. And when something looked like it might come between myself and that hit, I was ready to discard it. Discard 3,500 dollars of other people’s money offered specifically for the purpose of giving me a chance at what I’d wanted, all without my even having to ask. Jesus, I was in trouble. I signed the papers quickly and said thank you to Alicia. She was positively beaming with pride. I knew that this was probably all her doing; Alicia must have had a soft spot for lame animals like myself.

I went back to my bed. In the next bunk, Todd was lounging around, flicking through a magazine. I told him what had happened and he seemed pleased; I would be graduating to the rehabilitation wing on the same day as he and Billy. He told me that he thought it would be easier to get through the month as a gang. He sounded like he was looking forward to it, almost. In the bed in the far corner, Sal slept in a Valium hush.

NEAR MISSES (Part Three)

I had somehow ended up in Beverly Hills with Chris on a harebrained scheme to get high. Chris had a look of quiet desperation about him—he was out of drugs and soon he would be out on the streets. His housemates had finally figured out who had been removing all of the furniture from the place item by item and selling it, and they were trying to evict him. His father had finally realized that his son’s sustained financial crisis was due to a heavy dependence on heroin. The old man was threatening to not only stop loaning Chris money, but also to cut off his allowance completely, demanding that Chris move back in with him and sort his life out. So now we were heading over to the old man’s house -not so Chris could make an attempt to clean up - but so we could rob the place. Chris roped me into this whole scenario with the promise of free drugs; his father was an anesthesiologist and reputedly something of a barbiturate addict himself, and in exchange for driving him out to the house I was promised first pass on any drugs we found.

His father was in San Francisco on a speaking engagement and as we pulled into the driveway, Chris pointed out his father’s second car, a new-looking, black Mercedes-Benz.

“
Look at that,” he sneered, genuinely aggrieved. “A fucking second Mercedes sitting in the driveway and the old bastard is giving me static over a lousy 900 dollars a month! Makes you fuckin’ sick. Pull in here. Neighbors ‘round here got their noses in each others business, man …”

We pulled into the covered parking area and walked to the front door. Chris slid his key in the lock, deactivated the alarm and we went in.

It was a beautiful place. There was an expensive looking grand piano to the left as you walked into the living room, a flat-screen TV and a high end sound system, all giving the place the look of an upper class bachelor pad.

Chris set to work in the bedroom, looking for cash and jewelry, and I hit the medicine cabinet. I discarded vitamins, heart tablets and hemorrhoid creams. Then I came across some tablets that looked interesting. Fiorinal with Codeine. Checking the packaging, it learned they contained 50mgs of barbiturates and with 30mg of codeine. I emptied whole bottle went into my pocket, and half filled the empty bottle with Tylenol.

It took me a while to find Chris’s father’s medical bag. When I did I discovered syringes, a blood pressure machine, more tablets, a stethoscope and several ampoules labeled “lidocaine”. Checking the pill bottle I realized I had found something quite extraordinary. The label was yellowing at the edges; quite obviously the bottle had been lurking at the bottom of this medical bag for many years. I could barely believe my eyes when I read the label and discovered I had unearthed some actual, honest-to-god Quaaludes. There were three and a half of them left in there. Chris told me his father was in semi-retirement these days, working as a consultant to one of the big hospitals in West Hollywood. These pills had obviously been hanging around since the late seventies. In Hollywood, the golden era of the Quaalude was a period recollected by drug aficionados with rosy nostalgia. When they became popular as a drug of abuse in the 70s these potent sedatives were suddenly pulled from the market, much to the chagrin of their many devotees. I knew that the right buyer would pay big bucks for what may have been the last genuine Quaaludes in existence. Hoping that they were still potent, I pocketed them.

Chris reappeared from the bedroom, obviously having found what he was looking for.

“
You found anything? We’d better get the fuck out of here before someone spots the car.”

“
Yeah,” I muttered, examining one of the ampoules. “You know anything about lidocaine? It’s an anesthetic, right?”

“
I suppose so. Let’s roll.”

“
Wait, wait … I wanna shoot some of this. I think it’s in the same family as cocaine.”

“
Oh, Jesus. Well, hurry up.” Chris headed to the kitchen to grab some food. “Just give me a yell when you’re through doing that nasty shit.”

Chris, as heavily strung out on smack as he was, had a curiously puritanical attitude towards injectors. I suppose it made him feel a little better to have someone to look down on.

I had no idea if lidocaine was really related to cocaine. It was guesswork based upon the similar name, and the fact that dentists used to use cocaine to numb the mouth before dental surgery. I decided to take a chance. I mainlined half an ampoule of the lidocaine and waited. I felt nothing, aside from a mild chemical taste in the back of my throat. I waited for a few moments before injecting the rest and then calling Chris. He wandered out of the kitchen, eating a sandwich.