Digging the Vein (24 page)

“
Now you get the fuck outta here,” he said in a cool, measured voice. With that he went back into the ER. It took me a while to make it to my feet and stagger off towards Sunset Boulevard. Later I heard from Suzie that when he went back inside he came to her bed and ordered the doctors out of the room, demanding to know who she got the drugs from, lifting up her dress to expose her track marked inner thighs, leering at them, asking her how much she made as a whore, how much she charged to suck cock. She told me she called him “sir.” He didn’t arrest her either. When the doctors finally told him that enough was enough he stared at her in disgust for a moment before leaving without another word.

It was a warm, muggy night. I headed toward Sunset Boulevard. I had no drugs and no money to get home. I was pretty sure I could count on Suzie to keep her mouth shut. More hopeless than ever, more broke than ever I started the long walk back home.

It took me a long while to make it as I could barely walk. It was seven days before I stopped pissing blood; almost two weeks before my kidneys stopped hurting.

DETOX

“
What drugs do you do on a regular basis?”

“
Heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, crack.”

“
Alcohol?”

“
I don’t drink anymore.”

The woman doing my initial assessment looked up at me and raised an eyebrow. She was white, in her late forties, with bright red hair and a hard take-no-shit look about her. She looked like every woman whom I have ever encountered in any kind of institution. They all have a similar look about them; faces interchangeable with shared mannerisms and voices.

“
I’m on a health kick right now,” I added.

She sighed; looked back at the sheet she was filling in and ticked a box.

“
And you inject, is that right?”

“
Yes.”

“
Where do you inject?”

“
Arms, legs, hands, feet, neck sometimes … anywhere I can, really. I hit a vein in my stomach once but it blew out.”

“
Groin?”

“
Nope.”

“
And what do you want from treatment?”

“
I want to get straightened out. I’m tired; I almost died last night. I’m living in motel rooms, sleeping in my car. I haven’t seen anyone for the past six months apart from other junkies and my dealers.”

“
Have you ever attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings?”

“
Yes, in the past. I didn’t like them. They didn’t do anything for me.”

This was true. I found that twelve-step meetings alternated between boring and scary. People tend to divide into three camps at the meetings. First were the people who really didn’t have a drug problem, for whom meetings were social gatherings that allowed them to talk about their problems at length to a captive audience. They either had decades of clean time after a few months of real drug use and therefore no reason to be at a meeting anymore, or they never had a problem in the first place. People who were social users or users of non-addictive drugs like pot who just joined NA for other reasons. In Los Angeles, NA meetings were becoming the new cool place for Hollywood types to network. I remember being told that if I ever wanted to sell a screenplay in Hollywood, to get to the Tuesday night meeting on Western and Beverly. And it was true, the room was full of these fucking assholes slurping coffee and chain smoking cigarettes, hustling and thanking god that they aren’t a more socially unacceptable kind of addict any more.

The second group were the assholes that only came to meetings to boast about how fucked up they were and to get a bit of notoriety that they were too dull to achieve in the real world. These people really pissed me off. They shared wild, improbable adventures of getting loaded, running around with guns, getting shot, OD’ing, blowing thousands of dollars on drugs. They stood up to talk, posturing and strutting, with a line of bullshit a mile wide. They were always inexplicably popular in meetings. People thought that they were “characters.” I felt that the real characters were the one’s still out doing it.

The third group where the true believers, religious fanatics who had swapped drugs for god and who banged on about the program, spoke only in program speak and hammered their vision of the program into anyone who would listen. Annoying, self-important cocksuckers all of them, switching an addiction to drugs for an addiction to the twelve-steps.

“
Well, we are a twelve-step based rehab, and the meetings are mandatory. When you go over to the rehabilitation wing of the unit you will be attending two meetings a day…”

“
I don’t want to go over to the rehabilitation wing. I just want to detox, and have done with it.”

The woman looked at me and sighed again.

“
We don’t recommend that people attend detox and then just walk out of here. It just sets people up to fail.”

I was starting to get sick and restless as I sat in this airless little room answering questions and having boxes ticked for me. Knowing full well that twenty-eight days in the rehab wing cost over three and a half thousand dollars, I decided to draw a line under the idea of my going into rehab once and for all.

“
Listen, I’m not saying that I don’t want to spend some time in rehab in principle, I’m not saying that at all, but the bottom line is I can’t afford it. The money I’m spending to detox is all I’ve got. I can’t afford rehab. All I can afford is a detox.”

“
And you said you are a musician?”

“
And I write, yes. So no, no real job.”

With that, the interview was over. I paid my money, had my belongings tagged and put into storage—apart from a few changes of clothes—and was taken over to the detoxification ward.

The place was bright and clean, quite antiseptic in appearance. Behind a large reception desk was a guy who looked like a skater, filling out some forms. The woman introduced me and he told me that his name was Jay. We shook hands and she disappeared off.

“
So how you feeling, killer?” he asked with a forced joviality as I sat down.
Great
, I thought,
stuck with a bunch of happy-clappy California ex-addicts who will insist on calling me ‘killer’ or ‘sport’ or some other shit like that
. This was going to be rough.

“
I’m feeling like shit, Jay, how are you?”

I was trying to break the ice, but he eyed me like I had just told him I wanted to have sex with his mother. He seemed pretty uptight for a guy with Black Flag tattoos up and down his forearms, a real sheep in wolf’s clothing. He looked through the case notes that the red-head from reception had given him.

“
Hey,” I asked him after a few minutes of watching him read, silently moving his lips as he did so, “what’s the deal with the woman who brought me in here?”

“
Linda?’ he laughed. “Man, she used to be one of the biggest smack dealers in all of California. People still get nostalgic for the days when she was in business. Ask her, she’ll tell you all about it herself. She ain’t shy. She cleaned up here seven years ago and hasn’t left since. She’s second in charge here, besides Dee Dee.”

“
What’s Dee Dee like, then?”

“
You’ll see.”

The silence resumed as Jay continued to read. He was a slow reader and I started to squirm in my seat. I was sick, and being sick under strip lighting in a hard plastic chair didn’t make it any nicer.

“
So I get medication, right?” I asked, forcing Jay away from my notes again.

“
After we take your blood pressure.”

After an eternity of waiting, he finished reading and took my blood pressure. Then I was weighed—I was down to 130lbs. Finally, he disappeared to the medicine locker, returning with a plastic cup full of pills which I swallowed with water before he could finish telling me what they were. Nothing exciting, I supposed. I had already asked him if they would give me opiates and he just laughed. I would be detoxing without any substitute opiates to ease the pain.

The routine was pretty humane. I was dosed three times a day with a cocktail of benzodiazepines, barbiturates, anti-nausea pills and a blood pressure medication called clonidine said to help with withdrawals. At night I was given a dose of choral hydrate, which knocked me unconscious for three or four hours before I was awake again waiting for the dawn and more medication.

The first few days were nothing more than a blur of images and half dreams. I met people and forgot them in the time it took them to move out of my frame of vision. The staff took on the sinister look of demons, and I wandered dazed and in pain from room to room. After the first night in which I had a four-bed room to myself, two new people arrived. One was an improbably healthy looking kid with red hair who seemed too clean cut and all American to be in a detox ward with his wide, white grin and military-cut red hair. He told me his name was Todd and that he was here to get off booze and heroin. I didn’t pin him for a junky; he smiled too much, especially considering this was his first day off smack. I looked at his arms with heavy lidded eyes. No track marks in sight. Smoker. A health freak in the making too, no doubt. I figured he would fit in with the twelve-step regimen pretty easily.

The next guy was older, a tall and skinny man from Boston who talked incessantly and sweated profusely. He was quite obviously from Irish stock like me, with his pale brown eyes, black hair and pasty complexion. You could spot it even before he slipped from Boston to Irish brogue and back again.

“
Billy,” he said, taking my hand.

“
How’s it going?” I replied, heavily sedated.

Upon hearing my accent he pulled back his hand bowed his head in mock deference, then in a Dick Van Dyke English accent said, “I am most pleased to be invited to share your humble abode.”

“
Let me guess. You’re a crackhead, right?”

“
Yeah,” he laughed. “Man, you junkies are real perceptive. And for the record I prefer the term ‘Freebase cocaine user.’ Crackhead sounds so … low budget. Although I am enjoying all the Valium they got here.”

He stuck his tongue out and showed me a 10mg tablet lying there, made a coughing motion and palmed it for later. I had already been doing the same, so I could at least try and get loaded from taking three or four at once instead of dotted throughout the day. This guy I really did peg for a junky.

Food came and went, but I couldn’t hold anything down. The anti-nausea drugs didn’t work on me but I’ve always had a bad stomach, even before the smack. A girl who worked when Jay had the day off immediately became the source of conversation between Todd and Billy. She was tall, dark skinned, covered in tattoos. Pretty, I suppose. They half-heartedly tried to include me in the banter but I was too out of it by this time, looped on my medication and two days into cold turkey. I lay back on my bed, and then curled into the fetal position, feeling more alone than I have ever felt as they laughed and guffawed among themselves.

I had moments of clarity in the early hours. I’d get up when the others were snoring softly and sit out by reception under the strip lighting. I’d talk to Jay about music, or rather he’d talk at me and I’d grunt in the affirmative or negative and drool. I liked the detox wing that early in the morning. It was peaceful at least. The pretty girl who worked there was called Alicia, and she talked to me about what I was going to do when I got out. I couldn’t answer her. I didn’t even want to talk about it. I was an illegal immigrant; I’d let the paperwork slide to such an extent when I was strung out that my temporary work permit was now expired by nine months. I had no place to live and no regular income. She asked me if I thought I could stay clean once I got out. I thought about it and in light of what I was coming out to, I answered in the negative. Again, she tried to press me into going over to the rehabilitation wing, but I repeated what I’d said before about being broke and she dropped it.

I woke up the next day with these cuts around my wrists, and up my arms. Crudely the word HEROIN was etched into my forearm with scratchy red letters. It was actually Jay who noticed it when he woke me at seven to give me my medication. As I reached out my shirt rode up a little and Jay frowned.

“
When did you do this?” he asked.

“
I honestly don’t remember.”

“
Well, don’t to it again or they’ll section ya.”