Digging the Vein (16 page)

Everybody was drunk except me; I was nursing a Pepsi. I had stopped liking the taste of alcohol almost totally at this point. There is no pleasure in drinking for the junkie. Booze seems to stop working – it makes you feel I’ll and disorientated. The only thing that makes you feel good is dope. I had fixed at home on my way out and again upon arriving at the bar. I started nodding out at the table, my eyelids heavy, and I began missing snatches of conversation. Even though I knew I had more dope and could fix at any time, it wasn’t enough. I wanted to fix at home. I wanted to be away from the bar, the noise, the music, and the people. Kat, RP and Sal Mackenzie all ignored my behavior. They were coked up and oblivious to the fact I was semi-conscious. Joan, on the other hand, kept looking over at me. At first I thought she was flirting with me and as opiated as I was I started to feel a slight fluttering of hope deep inside me. Our eyes locked and I realized that the expression on her face, far from being flirtatious, was a mask of concern.
Pity
, in fact. Later she held her hands out to me, fixing me in a big watery gaze, and se told me that she was
worried
about me.

“
Worried? What do you mean,
worried
?”

“
You seem different. You seem
unhappy
.”

Suddenly I had snapped out of my nod and suddenly fury was building inside of me.

“
Do I, Joan? Do I really seem
unhappy
to you?” I shook my head. In disgust “Jesus, fucking Christ you really are a horribly… suburban…
twat
, aren’t you? It’s embarrassing.”

She sat there, mouth hanging slightly open, as if unsure that she’d heard ne correctly. I was mortified that this speed freak had the audacity to feel sorry for ME, and left the bar soon afterwards without saying goodbye. I cursed her for the whole journey home. Self-righteous cunt!

I started losing contact with RP, Sal, Kat and the others partly though their inability to understand my remaining so determinedly high on heroin all the time, and partly through my own choice. Heroin is a solitary drug; it reduces the need for human interaction. You exist in a blissful cocoon of negative pleasure. At first I remained in close contact with Chris, as he was the only person I knew who used every day. Soon I found myself getting more and more irritated by his manic episodes when he was on it and his whining when he was sick. He didn’t have a job and lived instead off a small allowance from his father. In wasn’t enough to pay rent and keep him in dope, so he had to find other ways to fund his habit. Hanging out with him began to cost me, as he seemingly expected his friends to keep him in heroin as long as we scored using his connections, like he was some kind of heroin broker.

He eventually relented and gave me a beeper number for one of his regular connections. The guy’s name was Pedro; he was a young overweight Mexican kid who seemed somewhat reliable and sold good shit. Once I had his number, I didn’t need Chris any more. The last I saw of him for a while was a week or so after I’d gotten Pedro’s number. My ex-bandmate was driving a truck with the antique coffee table from his living room dumped in the back. He was on his way to sell it. He looked pale and shaky and didn’t talk for long. He’d pulled up outside my house on his way to the furniture dealer and stopped long enough to ascertain that I didn’t have any drugs for him and that I couldn’t loan him twenty dollars.

Soon I stopped wanting to go to bars at all. The drunken antics of my friends irritated me. We had stopped being interested in the same things some time ago. I looked upon their boundless appetites for booze and uppers as childish and tiresome. I began to prefer quiet nights in: just me, my books, my music, and my drugs. Bar crawls and after-hours parties began to bore me. Soon I had settled down into a solitary routine. I rose in the mid morning, fixed my first hit of the day, sat down to write for a couple of hours before fixing again and then figuring out how to get more money to score with. Genesis was around less and less; mostly out at the hostess bar or whoring, or up 3, 4 nights on end high on crystal, yak yak yakking.

And then, just as suddenly as she had appeared in my life, Genesis was gone.

The night she OD’d started pretty much like any other. It was late Friday night and she came in high and drunk, her high heels click-clacking across the floor as she staggered about the place. She knocked on the bedroom door and woke me up. Staggered in, propped herself down on the end of the bed looped on speed and talking a mile-a-minute. She asked for some heroin and I agreed in an effort to stop her talking.

I mixed up a weak hit and she skin popped it; lifting up her dress, sliding the needle into her buttock, depressing the plunger, and hissing in pain. I watched her impassively as she did it. In the beginning watching her shoot up turned me on. I thought I was the only one who got a sex kick out of shit like that, but an old junkie I met years later confessed to a similar fetish. “Tan lines and track marks,” he used to say with a dirty grin, “Nuthin’ turns me on more than those hot-ass California junkie bitches…”

I was so high that she may as well have been scrubbing the toilet for all the enjoyment I got out of watching. She was pantyless on the bed, dress hitched up, her shaved slit exposed but her sexuality utterly obliterated for me by the heroin in my blood. She was lolling on the bed, waiting for the heroin to take the edge off the speed as I prepared a shot of my own. She talked at me the whole time, while I concentrated on cooking and fixing my own drugs.

“
This guy was so rich … he took me and a couple of the other girls from the club up to this place on Lookout Mountain. I guess he must be in movies or something. It was pretty boring … he had booze and really good coke and we just hung out and tweaked all night … he dressed us all up in this nice lingerie that he’d bought … and then he had me eat Connie out and the he brought out some dildo’s and had Connie and Trina fuck each other. I didn’t even have to fuck him, just suck his little cock. I stole a bathrobe – its beautiful, looks like Chinese silk… Fuck him anyway, he came in my hair so I gotta wash it now…”

I put the needle in my arm and got a register. I fixed and lay back on the bed. It took me a while to realize that Genesis had stopped talking. I enjoyed the silence at first; just the rumble of traffic on the 101 lapping against my thoughts. It started to seem like the roaring of some distant sea, so I didn’t mind. I suppose she may have gurgled a little when she went under, but I don’t remember. I’m pretty sure she didn’t convulse or gasp because I didn’t rouse for a while. Actually it was the silence that started to bring me round, because Genesis never remained quiet for too long. When I finally sat up and looked at her skin was blue. Her eyes were completely unfocused and were looking in opposite directions. For the first time in her life Genesis looked hideously ugly. It was shocking. When I say that she was blue, I mean that literally. I thought when they said people turned blue when they overdosed it was an exaggeration, but no: her face was
blue
. Her lips were purple, her cheeks the same color I remember my grandfather’s being when they laid him out for his wake in Ireland. Flecks of drool and foam crusted around her mouth.

In the bathroom trying to drag her nude body under the cold water pouring from the shower, screaming at her to wake up wake up stop fucking around and wakeupyoustupidbitch, sick with the thought that she may well not wake up, my yells reverberating off of the blood-splattered tiles, I prayed to god for her to live and started trying to figure out what I would do if she didn’t.

No answer from the heavens was forthcoming. So I took what I felt was the only option when faced with such a horrific reality. I ran.

I was hoping that Genesis was alive. She seemed to be breathing when I left, but I still couldn’t get her to talk or focus her eyes on me for more than a few seconds at a time. I got the idea into my head that she might have suffered brain damage. I laid her on the bed and tried to shoot her with some crystal meth I found in her purse along with a bottle of Xanax. Her pulse was too weak for me to get a register so I shot the mixture into her muscle instead, not knowing if it would have any effect like that. I took the rest of her speed and mainlined it, gobbling down a couple of Xanax for good measure. With the methamphetamine rush came an almost unbearable rush of paranoia and a certain kind of drug-fucked certainty that I had scrambled the poor girl’s brains. I left her in the recovery opposition. That way if she puked in her sleep at least she wouldn’t choke on it. I looked at her on the bed, lying on her side, breathing shallow, makeup running all over her face. Jesus, she looked like a coroner’s photograph. With that thought I bailed, grabbing handfuls of old syringes and any of the drugs that were in the place and I got the fuck out of there.

I drove to the nearest porno store, Stan’s Adult World, high on speed, Xanax and heroin, watching a video of a seemingly endless gangbang, shoving quarters into the slot, wedging my foot against the booth door to deter any offers from the other guys for a 5-dollar blowjob. I drove around the entire next day going from porno theatres, to Mexican dive bars, to scoring spots … not sleeping, in a narcotic half-conscious state, drinking whiskey in The Gold Room, watching off-duty cops play pool at 6 in the morning in the Short Stop on Sunset, Willie Nelson on the jukebox, endless scenes of girls and guys fucking in relentless close up, twisted permutations of asshole and pussy and cock and balls on video screens and LA talk radio crackling out of my stereo, “Lord Jesus I can feel my power coming, my power coming …” At some point I found myself parked by the gas station on Alvarado and 6
^th
with a dealer called Raphael in the back seat talking tequila–cocaine nonsense, buying crack and heroin, and still later again I was parked on a dark street with the car’s interior light on trying to fix in the gloom.

When I returned to the apartment the landlord had posted a notice to vacate the apartment in 3 days or be locked out by the LA county sheriff’s department. It had been almost 24 hours since Genesis OD’d when I slid my key into the lock. The place was in disarray, but to an even higher degree than usual. I called for her. There was no reply. Pickling my way around the piles of trash to get to the bedroom I was relieved to find her gone. At least she was alive. I was less happy to find her bag of clothes, my CD player, fifty dollars and a bunch of my better suits gone, also. The bitch had robbed me and split without as much as a note. And I had three days to vacate the apartment.

SOUTHPAW

Throughout the chaos of the last few months, by band Southpaw had pretty much ceased to be a functioning unit. Members drifted away to other bands and the nucleus of Dito, James and myself rarely got together. Dito stayed away from me, sensing my need to be alone, never passing judgment or asking what the fuck I was doing to myself. It was obvious that something was wrong, though. I didn’t call anyone: I avoided meeting people unless I was scoring from them. In my heroin and cocaine fog, days stretched into weeks and weeks into months without any meaningful activity on my part. Despite the heat I was careful not to wear short sleeves around the band, but I still sometimes caught myself nodding out during rehearsal and having to stay for 15, 20 minutes at a time in the bathroom while I cooked up and tried to find a vein. After Chris’ heroin-induced flame out there was no doubt in my mind that everybody had a pretty good idea of what was going on with me.

There were other factors in the band’s slide into inactivity than my drug use - infighting, bad managers- but the heroin certainly didn’t help. The biggest difficulty, however, was our sound: Southpaw were melodic and melancholy, taking out musical cues from The Verve and Lou Reed. Few people were interested in “that kind of music” while bands like Limp Bizkit dominated the LA scene and A&R men were scrabbling to throw money at any bad metal band with members who wore backwards baseball caps. In the face of record company indifference one day the band simply stopped rehearsing and that was that.

Out of the blue Dito called me one afternoon, excited and talking a mile a minute.

“
Hey man, you gotta do this show with me at the Viper Room next Wednesday! It’s a real big deal! A lotta people are gonna be there … Are you up for it?”

Sensing I had no choice, I agreed. A rehearsal was hastily arranged for the weekend and I shot up a speedball before going over to the rehearsal space, turning up sweaty and manic, babbling a lunatic monologue about the cops and the absurdity of jaywalking laws, knocking things over and cursing, running to the bathroom to fix with shaking hands, making a mess of my arm and returning to the room with blood soaking through my shirt muttering “Let’s play, let’s do this…”

Trying to play the keyboard my fingers felt leaden and unresponsive. The instrument itself - newly rescued from the pawnshop just for this occasion – was alien and awkward to the touch. I remembered how easily playing came in the days of The Catsuits – it was a purely automatic response. I never had to think about it. I never had to try. It had come as easily as breathing.