Digging the Vein (13 page)

NEAR MISSES (Part One)

“
Oh fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. Fuck SHIT man!”

That was Chris, who had become my partner over the last weeks on our regular trips to score off the street. Up until now we had been on a typical, uneventful drug hunt. There is nothing like scoring heroin off the street to make you feel dirtier and more used up than you already are. A fat Mexican sticking his head through the passenger side repeating, “Whatyouwan, man? Whatyouwan?” until you cough out, “Chiva” followed by a monetary amount as you thrust the bills towards him. Him spitting out the tiny balloons into your hand and you stashing the saliva soaked objects under your own tongue as you drive away. Yeah, it makes you feel real good about yourself, but you don't care; You Have the Drugs. Oh Christ, the night is looking up already.

Pulling out of Bonnie Brae and onto 6th, our uneventful night suddenly turned into an eventful night. The street was a usually a notorious haunt for heroin dealers and as we circled the parking lot outside of USA Donuts I began to feel a little uncomfortable at the lack of action in the area. Something was in the air. Something had scared the dealers and the other junkies away.

Chris was muttering something about lazy Mexicans as he pulled out onto 6th and headed west, and I was the first to notice the black and white patrol car tailing us almost immediately. After a block and a half, they began to flash the brights.

“
Oh fuck,” Chris muttered, “oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck! Fuck SHIT man.”

“
Pull over,” I ordered, “and chill the fuck out, OK? Do you have drugs on you?”

“
No,” he said, shaking, pulling over.

“
Anything. Blow? Anything?”

“
No.”

“
Good. Be cool then.”

“
Step out of the car,” a cop instructed. “Driver first.”

Chris made his way out, stood against the wall and spread his legs.

“
Now you.”

The second cop frisked me and I looked over absently at Chris as he emptied his pockets for the first. The cop’s hand rested lightly against my chest for a moment.

“
Why you so nervous?” he inquired, trying to deceive me with his nonchalant tone.

“
I've never been stopped by the police before,” I replied, trying to keep my voice neutral and flat sounding.

“
I know you guys were trying to buy dope,” the cop tells me later as his partner turns the car over. “Why don't you make it easy on yourself and 'fess up?”

I looked blank, not avoiding eye contact but keeping a poker face.

“
No. We got lost. We were just turning around. We don't have dope; we didn't try to buy dope.”

In the end we lucked out. They didn't feel like fucking with us I guess, so no trip downtown, no cavity search, nothing. Just a warning, a reprieve. Driving back to Chris’s house, he is shaking and quiet. I have already decided to try and give dope a break. Suddenly he turns round and says, “Maybe we could get some crack instead. I know a place,” as we hit Western.

GIMMIE SHELTER

“
You need to get out of LA, man.”

I had heard it from a few of my friends in various contexts and situations over the last couple of weeks. I wasn’t looking so good and I suppose I seemed to be a little down at heel. I didn’t want to go to the parties anymore, I didn’t want to drop Ecstasy or snort coke. I wasn’t interested in getting laid. A few of my friends figured I had taken the break-up with Christiane harder than expected, while others suspected that Joan had somehow caused this sudden change my change in behavior. They could not have been further from the truth. One night I caught RP peering curiously at the bruise on my arm. I stared right back at him. In an unspoken moment he became the first of our friends to know that I was using needles. To his credit he never gave me a speech about it. He was too much of an unrepentant hedonist to ever try and pull that kind of patronizing bullshit. No, RP was good people. He looked up from the bruise and said, “You know; you need to get out of LA for a while, man. You should take a break.”

“
Funny you should say that,” I told him. “I’m leaving tomorrow for a few days. I just got some work in Laughlin with a film crew.”

“
Good, man.” He reached into the beer and tossed me a cold Tecate. “Take it easy for a few days. We’ll have some beers and a few lines when you get back.”

Laughlin, Nevada. The poor man’s Vegas, or the Vegas of the future depending on who you’re talking to. Laughlin had none of the glitz and pretence of its more famous cousin and it certainly didn’t try to cater to families like Vegas did. Fuck magic shows and Wayne Newton: Laughlin was a town for gamblers and if you didn’t like to gamble and found yourself in Laughlin … well, you were pretty fucked all around. Me, I didn’t gamble unless you counted the risk I took by injecting heroin cut with who-knows-what several times a day.

The gig came about in the most convoluted and spurious of ways, but let’s just say I agreed to do something when I was drunk at a party. I woke up the next afternoon to the sound of the phone ringing and an overly enthusiastic voice offering me money for a few days work. It seemed like an easy enough gig – they needed an extra pair of hands on a low-budget documentary they were shooting in Laughlin.

“
What’s the documentary about?” I asked, staggering out of bed to find a pen.

“
Tribute bands. Get this; we’re filming a Rolling Stones tribute band playing in a casino, which will be hosting the annual Hell’s Angels River Run. Whaddya think?”

With my friends’ advice about getting out of town ringing in my ears, I accepted. Three days later I was in a van tearing across miles of desert, while Genesis had my apartment to herself for a couple of nights.

The plan was to use the trip to cut down my heroin intake to a marginal level, and then kick dope altogether when I returned to LA. There wasn’t a particular reason that I wanted to stop, just the usual insomniac doubts that would surface at three in the morning.
The longer you do this the harder it’ll be to stop…
On top of that my habit was costing me more and more as my appetite for smack increased. I figured I needed a break. I was pretty early on in my habit and I figured that kicking would be a breeze. I just needed some meaningful activity to keep my mind off of dope, and what better activity than working on a documentary about the “legendary” tribute band,
The Really Stoned
? I left LA in a minivan with the director - a scrubbed up, looking healthy college kid called Sam who was way too cheery for my liking, the stoner sound guy Paulie who wore the same filthy Megadeth T-shirt, which left his pale flabby gut hanging exposed, for the entire trip, and the cameraman Jules. Jules was one of those vegan-types, the kind who hang around in organic coffee shops and say they’re Buddhists. He acted as though he had never so much as handled a camera before making this movie, and constantly muttered incomprehensible complaints to himself: “… hmmmm, we’re losing the light for the tripod boom set-up, you know, the long shot, hmmmm …”

And of course there was the band. They too were crammed into the minivan, and I spent the entire four-and-a-half hours drive nodded out and dribbling on Charlie Watts’ shoulder.

The Really Stoned
were the most ludicrous and motley collection of fags, mooches, wash-ups and has-beens it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. The stink of desperation and failure hung around them as though they had been sprayed by some terrible, vengeful skunk. The guy who was meant to be Mick Jagger looked like an overweight drag queen trying to pass for butch and failing, while the rest of the band seemed to be a bunch of alcoholic 70’s session musicians who had been dragged out of semi-retirement and stuck into ill -fitting velvet jackets, pancake makeup and fright wigs in the vain hope of passing them off as being at least in their thirties. The one who was trying to be Keith Richards was either talking with the worst, most affected British accent I have ever heard, or had some kind of unusual cleft palate which made him sound like John Merrick meets Dick Van Dyke.

He nudged me out of my nod and asked, “Wot yooo fink these, uh, biker be chicks are gunna look like?”

“
Oh, I’d be careful,” Sam piped up. “I don’t think the Angels appreciate people messing with their women.”

Keith nodded sagely. “That’s wot I ‘ear. Tread careful, mate. Tread careful.”

I closed my eyes again thinking absently that old Keef should forget about the Angels and watch out for undercover cops, because the only action that old fuck was gonna see in Laughlin was the type that charged twenty for head. An hour later when I opened my eyes again, the arid, lunar landscape rolling past the window was seemingly unchanged. Sam was humming to himself as he pressed on the accelerator, allowing himself to creep up to five over the limit. I yawned, stretched and then asked, “So Sam… where are we booked intro? Are we in a casino or, like, a Holiday Inn or something?”

Everybody laughed a little.

“
Oh no,” said Sam. “No money for that, I’m afraid. We’re going to be sleeping in the van, the band are staying with some friend’s in town. We can use the bathroom facilities at the casino, though.”

Sam caught my darkening expression in the rear view mirror. “That’s, uh… not a
problem
, is it?”

“
Oh no,” I said. “No problem at all. That’s just … great.”

So I was sleeping in a van with Curly, Larry and Moe. It was at that was the point where I realized my attempt to cut down or quit heroin would have to happen another time. In fact, I decided, I would need more heroin than I already had. Without a significant amount of dope to get me through it there’d be no way in hell I could keep up the pretence of sanity under
these
circumstances. I would need to find a connection in Laughlin as a matter of urgency.

“
You need to get out of LA …”

Yeah
right
, fuckers.

Finally Laughlin reared up on the desert horizon like impending doom; it was a squat, ugly city with a miasma of smog and desperation hanging low over it. As we pulled up at Harrah’s Casino, where the annual Hell’s Angels River Run was due to take place, we were greeted by an awesome spectacle. It was late afternoon and the furious desert sun was reflecting off of a sea of chrome; bikes stretching out as far as the eye could see in every direction. This fuel belching mass had taken over the vast parking lot and as hundreds of bikes revved their engines in unison it made a sound akin to that of the fabric of the universe being ripped apart. Everyone in the van was awed into silence by the noise and sheer amount of hogs. A scrolling neon sign announced, “Laughlin Welcomes Hells Angels,” in enormous gold letters.

“
Well, this should be interesting,” Charlie Watts said.

“
Fuckin’ A,” Mick said. ‘Now let’s get to the house, Sam. I really need to take a shit.”

We circled around the lot and I saw hundreds Angels standing around the bikes, drinking beers and laughing, slapping their buddies on the backs, all faded denim and leather vests with patches announcing their chapters. Everywhere you looked the Angel’s Death’s Head insignia looked back at you, either sewn onto leather or inked onto skin. Handlebar moustaches and aviator shades and late thirties big-titted blonde girlfriends who lifted up their shirts when anyone whistled at them, exposing their swollen, surgically enhanced tits to approving roars and whoops. I was struck by the absurdity of it all, amazed that the Hell’s Angels still existed out of the movies or books by Hunter S Thomson. They seemed like a quaint throwback to a different age, an age without the Internet or instant celebrities or reality TV. Yet here they were, smoking and burping and slapping asses in this backwater gambling town on the Colorado River, as baffling, as ugly, and as undeniable as life itself.

As we headed toward the house where the band was staying, I suddenly started to become very afraid of leaving Los Angeles for this madhouse, even if it was just for a few days. I had nothing here; I was a lost, stupid English drug addict with no possible way to comprehend what was happening around him. I felt suddenly sure I would live to regret my decision to attend this farcical event.

As nightfall descended I was in a taxicab headed back to the strip. Everyone else was at the house, which turned out be owned by two drunken, Valium-addicted ex-strippers who announced themselves as “dear, dear friends…” of the band. Maybe in their booze and diazepam haze they really thought these people
were
the Rolling Stones. Hell, maybe they thought it was still 1967, who could say?