Digging the Vein (4 page)
Authors: Tony O'Neill
Tags: #addiction, #transgressive, #british, #britpop, #literary fiction, #los angeles, #offbeat generation, #autobigrapical, #heroin
« Music was exciting again, creativity was in the air… »
(p. 212)*
Music is now a necessary acoustic skin, an ethereal support to the loving fusion of pleasure he’s experimenting. Kraftwerk or David Bowie, Joy Division, Beastie Boys, The Stooges, Lou Reed or even Fatboy Slim… rock and pop songs are for the reader a companion through their diverse mood and the feelings they inspire… Here a chapter is named
Gimme shelter
, then another one
Here comes success,
a little further some words from a song slide into a sentence. Because Tony O’Neil is a musician; like Henry Miller, like Nietzsche. A musician who decided to continue his sonic quest through the writing while he was crossing the successive circles of his hell, a writer who made with words a rock n roll masterpiece…
« When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing. It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon.”
Henry Miller –
Tropic of cancer
La Chaux-de-Fonds, Javier 2
1:
FIRST US EDITION, CONTEMPORARY PRESS, 2006
Cover design © Dennis Hayes / Contemporary Press
2
: FIRST BRITISH EDITION, WRECKING BALL PRESS, 2006
Cover design © WRECKING BALL PRESS
3:
FIRST FRENCH EDITION, PULSE / 13e NOTE EDITIONS, 2014
Cover design © Christian Kirk-Jensen / Swedish Pastry Design & 13e Note Editions
Cover image © Scot Sothern (
Starlight
)
4:
ALTERNATIVE UK COVER #1, 2006
Cover design © Wrecking Ball Press
5:
ALTERNATIVE UK COVER #2, 2006
Cover design © Wrecking Ball Press
DIGGING THE VEIN
Tony O’Neill
VICON/02
In Hollywood the sun rises and stays up in the dirty sky pummeling you into submission for twelve hours or so before sinking behind the hills. Then everybody waits for it to start up all over again, up and down and up and down, futile and ceaseless. No seasons, no change, just relentless brightness. In Hollywood there is no escape from the glare of that unforgiving sun. So we just carry on, dumb with sunshine and desert heat, trying to find a darkened corner where we can conduct the kind of business that has no place is the daylight.
I took the metro to Hollywood and Western. The station was all done up in a gaudy, touristy faux-Hollywood style. Columns of film canisters reached up to the fluorescent white light beaming down from the ceilings. Images of palm trees and a DayGlo Hollywood sign adorned the walls. I ascended in the glass elevator to the surface and I found myself back on familiar ground. I felt comfortable at least to be back into a regimen.
I followed Hollywood Boulevard west, watching my feet as they trampled the stars. Here tourists started to slow up and turn around sensing the sudden decline in the neighborhood. As soon as they hit Vine the street traffic became mostly homeless kids and crack dealers. Cops prowled the side streets menacingly. Wine heads loitered looking for change. Here, tourists became very aware of the cameras around their necks and the travelers’ checks in their wallets and most hastily retreated to the security of West Hollywood. On the stroke of 6 o’clock a troupe of Scientologists in matching light blue shirts and navy ties marched up the street from their residences and into the bedlam of the boulevard, barely making eye contact with the human wreckage swarming them. I watched them from a payphone while stabbing the number for Carlos’ pager. On a billboard above the porno theatre a tired looking woman in a red bikini looked down at me sadly.
At the corner of Hollywood and Vine an old crazy crack head with a white beard turning copper at the edges sucked on a glass stem and looked at me with wide dead eyes as I loitered in front of
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not
. He blew out plumes of white smoke like some ancient dragon, and the chemical smell hit me from 20 feet away, making my guts churn in delicious expectation. Oh, hell. Before I even knew what I was doing I found myself walking down Vine and cutting left into the side streets to score some rocks.