Digging the Vein (2 page)
Authors: Tony O'Neill
Tags: #addiction, #transgressive, #british, #britpop, #literary fiction, #los angeles, #offbeat generation, #autobigrapical, #heroin
Bonus Tracks: B-sides, Rarities and Outtakes: Digging the Tunes
Contemporary Press for opening a hell of an important door for me by putting this book out back in ‘06.
Dan Fante: thanks for the advice and the inspiration.
Digging the Vein is dedicated to all the junkies-whores-thieves-malcontents-fuckups-burnouts-psychos & drug dealers:
You are the last truly free men and women on this stinking cop and politician-ridden planet.
It’s time for everybody to just say no to the war on drugs.
Songs From the Shooting Gallery
Neon Angel (with Cherie Currie
)
Hero of the Underground (with Jason Peter
)
James Frey
Originally published in the French edition “Le Bleu sur les Veines” published Feb 2013 by 13e Note Editions, translated by
Annie-France Mistral
In his preface to DIGGING THE VEIN, Tony O'Neill thanks "All the junkies, thieves, whores, malcontents, fuck-ups, burnouts, psychos, and drug dealers." By way of this introduction, I want to say to Tony, "You're welcome." As a former addict, a writer and above all else, a reader, I think I have read most - or at least a great deal - of the junkie memoirs and junkie novels out there. Some writers, like William S Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, and Irvine Welsh are undeniably brilliant. Others are insufferable. Tony’s first novel, the book you are holding in your hands, definitely belongs in the former group.
DIGGING THE VEIN is Tony’s roman à clef based on his years as a heroin addict in Los Angeles, and in it he does something as well as any writer has ever done. He gets it Right. Without a single false note for dramatic effect, without one syllable of pretense, DIGGING THE VEIN lays bare a vividly real picture of the junkie's life in all its desperate and depressing glory. His nameless narrator dispenses with the formalities in what is almost an aside: “I was in a band, before…” and then, without drawing breath, plunges us deep into The Nightmare.
The story goes that Tony wrote this some of this material while he was deep in the madness of his drug days finally finishing the book while withdrawing from a virulent combination of methadone, heroin and crack cocaine. There is certainly some drugged-out, hallucinatory prose to be found in these pages. What comes across strongest though, is an unsentimental view of the life of the Addict and a knack for conjuring the sights, smells and the feel of the nocturnal world of the junkie.
However Tony's real skill, and it is something that I can relate to my own work, is in capturing the mindset of The Addict. The junkie death wish, which can seem so unfathomable to those on the outside looking in, is rendered here in perfect detail. His refusal to buy into the expected trajectory of the Heroin Confession is rare and refreshing. People in AA would probably describe Tony – and myself, I suppose - as an example of “self-will run riot”. When he chants, “No more AA. No more NA. No more mind control. No more being a victim, no more looking for reasons in childhood, in God, in anything but what exists HERE. No more admitting I am powerless…” he is saying something that is almost heresy in America in this recovery-centric day and age. He is an addict who is denying his addiction to heroin is a “disease” at all.
If you’re reading this, then you probably heard about that little incident between Oprah Winfrey and I a few years ago. I will say that I was blessed and cursed by the Oprah Effect. The endorsement of America’s most powerful tastemaker helped to make me a household name. But of course you will also know about the other side of that story and the public flagellation I endured.
Now that the dust has settled I can honestly say that the Oprah Effect was a good thing. It gave me a ready-made audience for my future books, and writers want nothing so much as readers. Tony O’Neill is doing it a different way, a less public way, book-by-book, reader by reader. I hope through the notoriety of my name, created by Oprah and the media, I can maybe help Tony get more readers more quickly. Call it the Oprah Collateral Damage Effect. In blurbing his third novel SICK CITY (2010) I wrote something to the effect that I believed Tony O'Neill may be this generations Jim Thompson. When looking at the sum total of his (now) eight books and imagining his prolific future, I suspect Tony will likely grow way past my comparison. Hold tight. It’s going to be an interesting ride.
James Frey, September 2010
by Dejan Gacond
Images by Kit Brown
Originally published as the afterword to the French edition “Le Bleu sur les Veines” published Feb 2013 by 13e Note Editions, translated by Annie-France Mistral
« I fucked up the shot, blew out a vein in my goddamned wrist in a burning explosion of pain, and only felt half the effect that I should have. “
(p. 82)*
« In a few moments the most intense flash of pleasure and fear was over and my body settled somewhat, still buzzing and pinging with the intensity of methamphetamine, and 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 just stopping in an exhausted heap before shooting up again.”
(p. 71)*
According to Lester Bangs one of the best songs about drug addiction is
Hands of Doom
from Black Sabbath compared to the stupid sentimentalism of
The Needle and the Damage Done…
Neil Young’s sensibility is not too bad but Black Sabbath’s song represents the absolute despair floating around the dope’s ritual. More than a Pink Floyd album,
Paranoid
blows into the anguish of addiction even further than Lou Reed’s stories maybe… the gloomy British suburbs, beginning of the seventies; it’s raining and the sound of the industrial production is tremendous. Within this sad jumble, the youth’s answer will constitute in a dreary way out into disillusion…
The frozen echoes of unsatisfied needs…
Mind is full of pleasure, your body’s looking ill
To you it’s shallow leisure, so drop the acid pill
Hands is Doom
is a most carnal song, the closest musical equivalent to the organic deficiency caused by dope; a clinical analysis, a Tony O’Neill’s book;
Digging the Vein …
What kind of relationship do we have with the necessity of getting smashed? It’s emergency and the vile need of doing it again… A strange and unverifiable routine, an indubitable tension reflecting and going through this incandescent book.
«At some point I woke up out of heroin, and instead of becoming confronted by my living situation, my broken marriage, and my precarious financial situation, I was instead absolutely sure that all of these things were No Longer Relevant to my existence. All that mattered was that I got some drugs to help me through the day.”
(p. 66)*
All along those devastating sentences, words caracole in a furious and angry rhythm. The fragments of life described in the text express the difficulty of the endured experience. Trying to give life sickness a break! It’s the pure madness of man fighting against the demons of his own extenuation. Struggling against the angel, against the demon… the annihilation of a world, the deconstruction of a reality the narrator thought he could still perceive. Like the flabby evaporation of pale necessities… junkies walking like stray dogs through the inhuman city of angels, terrified by the misfortunes of big cities. Here; into those screaming pages, a bunch of characters usually left behind are occupying a dismal front stage. Los Angeles and its outcasts!! A few lines are enough for Tony O’Neill to snatch his reader in a world of freaks, of ODs and strange deals, crackheads musicians and ruined love affairs, organisms distressed by addiction, in a world of sordid hotels and dirty apartments… Under the shadow of stars and palm trees, desolation is crawling.
