Digging the Vein (28 page)

The next day, walking around I found a bus that ran all the way to East Hollywood. In a kind of autopilot I got on it, with forty dollars in my pocket. By seven that evening and almost without realizing what I had done, I was back in the motel room, with four needles from the exchange, two rocks of crack and a bag of dope.

This time was different though, I told myself.

This time I wouldn’t get hooked.

CORPUS DELICTI

I was hanging out behind the apartment building where Carlos’s replacement, Macho, operated from. I found myself spending a lot of time in this shadowy, garbage-strewn alleyway as Macho suffered from a chronic inability to show up on time. As I hung around, cursing him and feeling the worst twinges of opiate withdrawal, I would sometimes see reoccurring characters lurking around just like me. Just like me they seemed to be rendered in black and white against the color and brightness of the Los Angeles mid-afternoon sunlight. Just like me they sniffled and coughed and tried to look nonchalant, returning often to the payphone to page their connections again and again. They sucked dejectedly at sodas from the nearby 7-11, took long drags of down-to-the-filter Pall Malls, or sometimes just crouched down there with their heads in their hands, waiting dejectedly for their guy to show up, with starved rats scurrying around their ankles.

The car was gone. Pawned for 100 dollars at an auto-pawn place downtown. I sat there, sick and hopeless shortly following my relapse. In a matter of weeks my habit was back, stronger than ever before. On a muted TV screen in the pawnshop, while the old black lady behind the bullet-proof glass processed my payment and wrote up a slip, I watched a Concorde burn in furious reds and Halloween oranges upon a Paris runway. Black smoke belched and vomited up into the sky. I looked at my arms, covered in gooseflesh and bloody, angry raw injection sites. I watched it burn, fascinated at the terrible beauty of what I was witnessing.

Macho was late again. Each time I saw someone stepping out of the apartment building my heart would leap into my throat, and then a feeling of crushing disappointment when I realized it wasn’t my man. I was furious with myself, just a few months out of rehab and I was back to scoring day after day, reduced once more to a state of pure need and desperation. I had been no more able to control my use of heroin and crack than I was able to control my use of oxygen. I was grimly following a path of total obliteration. Once I had given up and let go of my niggling thoughts of staying clean, of getting into the twelve-step program, of struggling though life without heroin to ease the ache in my soul, I actually felt palpable relief. I was now an athlete totally focused on the goal of total oblivion at all times. A star racehorse. A heavyweight champion.

I noticed a new girl standing by the payphone that afternoon. Physically she looked like a survivor of Dachau, bone thin legs in black tights with a black miniskirt wrapped around a barely-there ass and waist. She was making a call, facing away from me, smoking a cigarette and punching numbers. The outline of her ribcage was clearly visible under a skin-tight, long-sleeved, dirty grey top that exposed one pitiful shoulder, entirely free of muscle or fat. On top of the torso sat a head that looked too big for the body, with a mop of dirty blonde hair. She looked as if she would shatter into pieces if she tripped over her rickety high-heels and hit the concrete.

I sensed someone’s approach, heard a whistle and there was Macho, dressed down in a Lakers top and sweat pants, loitering by the mouth of the alleyway. I got up and walked towards him, and noticed the apparition in black from the payphone fall into step beside me. It seemed that we were both waiting for Macho.

He turned back down the alleyway and we followed along like children begging their father for candy.

“
Whatchoo need, whatchoo need?”

“
Forty,” I replied.

“
Twenty,” I heard the girl cough out from behind me.

He stopped and moved his tongue around in his mouth to separate out the different balloons as I handed him the bills. The girl was beside me now as she handed over the cash and I caught a faint, sickly-sweet smell of body odor and junk-sickness wafting from her. Macho turned and dispensed the medication into eager hands.

“
Haff a nie-ce daye,” he grinned in mangled English, before turning and walking away.

“
Spic cocksucker,” the girl muttered in a faraway voice.

I turned and looked at her ravaged face. Her skull poked out through the skin like the modernist angles of a Picasso portrait. Her lips were swollen and cut. Her eyes were heavy lidded and dead certainly, but despite the ravages of violence and addiction there was no denying that I knew this girl.

“
Genesis?
” I asked quietly.

*

We walked together for a while, through the side streets and back alleys to find the spot where she said we could get high. We didn’t talk much. She explained the busted lip happened when some
“fucking asshole nigger”
refused to pay for head. I walked in silence mostly, my eyes returning to her wasted body, unable to comprehend the ruin the girl had visited upon herself in the period following her overdose in my apartment.

We eventually came upon an abandoned grey Volkswagen bug in an overgrown lot hidden from view by chain-link fences. She opened the door, sending the concentrated heat and stench from inside streaming out into the desert air and said, “Get in.”

Inside we cooked our dope in silence. The smell filled the car, drowning out the smell of rotting food and stale sweat. Empty wrappers from bags of heroin and coke covered the seats, along with discarded fast food containers—Jack In The Box, El Pollo Loco, Burger King, Arby’s …

I had to loosen my jeans and pull them down a little to get a hit in my inner thigh. I noticed Genesis rolling her top down, exposing one white tit to the daylight. I watched her silently as she appraised her breast in the same way that a butcher might examine a piece of meat for imperfections. Then finding her spot she squeezed the flesh hard with her left hand and slowly slid the needle in with the right.

I returned to my own shot and fed the dope in slowly, careful not to blow out the vein. I withdrew the needle and looked over at Genesis. She had pulled out and was reinserting in a different spot. A trickle of dark blood ran down her bruised tit. She noticed me watching.

“
It’s the goddamn crank,” she explained. “Fucks up your veins real quick. Who knows what those bastards mix it with? I’ve been getting some joy here recently but ...”

She froze as a small plume of blood shot into the barrel.

“
Gotcha,” she breathed.

She finished up and with a cursory wipe of the injection site with the back of her grimy hand before popping her bloody breast back into her shirt. She lay back and closed her eyes in rapture.

For now, we were elsewhere. There was silence in the car for a long time.

“
I’m sorry I left you,” I told her eventually. “You know, that night in the apartment. I panicked. I was all fucked up. I didn’t know what to do.”

She just laughed. The dimensions of her face had changed so dramatically that her front teeth seemed bigger now, almost goofy. I could only see traces of the old, beautiful Genesis in the face looking back at me. Now there was nothing left but a shell, seemingly powered by drugs and fast food.

“
Thass cool honey,” she laughed, her voice taking on a slower and deeper tonality as the heroin took hold of her. “You did what you had to do. I’m sorry I trashed your place.”

We returned to stoned silence for a moment, before Genesis retrieved a pipe from her purse and started preparing to smoke some c rank. She heated the bulb and rolled the pipe back and forth, the thick white chemical smoke filling the glass and sending puffs out of the hole in the top of the bulb. She put it to her lips and sucked it in, rolling the pipe to keep the meth liquidized and the smoke coming. She handed me the pipe and I accepted.

“
Can I ask you a question?” she said as I headed the speed.

“
Sure.”

“
Did you screw me? You know, when I was unconscious?”

I took my hit and looked at her in a kind of stoned disbelief. The ringing in my ears from the crank subsided a little and I replied, “Jesus,
no
. Why would you think that?”

“
Ah, you know. You’re a guy, an’ all. But I kinda figured you didn’t. I didn’t hurt down there when I woke up, but I just wanted to be
sure
. You could tell me, you know? I wouldn’t be mad after all this time.”

I shook my head, mute, and looked at her. Her face lit up suddenly and she smiled at me.

“
Hey listen,” she said. “I’m a little short today … I normally charge 20 for it, but you want head? How much bread have you got?”

“
Shit, Genesis I don’t know about that.”

I looked out of the grimy windshield at the dirty sky above us. It was time to go. I started to grab my stuff, trying to ignore the look of crushing disappointment on her face. “I’ve only got five bucks on me, you know?”

Genesis opened her mouth and reached in. She grabbed her front row of teeth on the top and with a little tug dislodged them. The bridge came out, explaining the difference I had noticed earlier. She leaned towards me, her ruined face suddenly aged another twenty years by the four-tooth-gap on the top row and she whistled, “five’s OK honey. Open up your jeans.”

“
Aw fuck, Genesis, I’m sorry. I gotta go.”

I wrenched the door open an d stumbled out of the tiny car.

“
Aw
shit
man,” she spat. “That’s a real pain in the ass. Now I gotta go work again today! Can you lend me the five?”

I really couldn’t afford it but I pulled five singles out of my pocket and handed them to her. She gripped them hard in her tiny fist and said, “Thanks.” The gratitude and relief in her voice made me want to cry.

“
Look,” I said, “I’ll see you around.”

“
For sure!”

I started walking back towards where I could catch the bus heading west. I never saw her again.

GHOST TOWN

Six months later spun out on crack, heroin and crystal meth once more, stinking and weak, homeless and friendless, I tried to quit again. I was too scared to return to the apartment I’d been renting on Blackburn Avenue because of a stunt I’d pulled the night before.
I let a dealer named Shakespeare crash there with a girl he was screwing in exchange for a couple of rocks of crack. When my crack was all smoked, I snuck into the living room where he was passed out and took the rest of his stash. I guessed correct it was in his shoe. I took that back to my room and smoked it compulsively, growing ever more paranoid that he would wake up and discover what I had done. He had ties to a Mexican gang called La Eme and I knew that this act of stupidity would surely not go unpunished. I stuffed my clothes into a backpack and abandoned the apartment at six in the morning, cracked out and insane with fear while they slept on.

I hadn’t paid rent in two months and figured that eviction proceedings must already be underway. I needed a place to stay and a chance to get through the worst of my cold turkey.

The guesthouse I ended up in was located at the back of a friend’s house, in an area of Venice known locally as Ghost Town. It was a slum with a thriving crack scene. The couple that let me take over their guest room for a few weeks were quite well-off, worthy and well intentioned, although I was rapidly getting sick of their concerns about my health. Broke and scared, I called them up telling them that I was trying to come off of heroin again but couldn’t do it in Hollywood. They offered me the place to stay while I got through the worst of the physical symptoms and I accepted gratefully. It had only been a few months since I’d left rehab and I’d convinced myself that my habit wasn’t too bad. How bad could it
get
in three months? Shit, I’d probably surprise myself by not even getting sick.

Seventy-two hours my last shot I was the sickest I had ever been. I realized that—yet again—I did not have the strength or endurance to make it through the next twenty-four hours cold turkey. I had to get heroin somehow. I waited until the sun went down and the night people took over the streets. Body wracked with dry heaves I threw on my stinking clothes and hit the street to score.

For a junky, the place really was a ghost town. At first I got excited when I walked around—on virtually every street corner spectral figures loitered, whistling at cars as they cruised past, running up to the idling vehicles and making sales. In dark corners, pressed against walls like statues, ebony figures appraised the foot traffic in the area. Some kids used laser pointers in what seemed to be a code to warn of approaching cops. Shabbily dressed buyers tried to hawk boom boxes, jewelry and other worthless shit in exchange for drugs. I stepped over an old white guy who had obviously just been jacked for money, drugs or both. He was lying facedown on the sidewalk, the back of his head smashed open and raw. It was a street-dealing scene almost as busy as Macarthur Park so I figured scoring dope was going to be a breeze. However, after asking the first three guys who approached and finding nothing but crack or PCP, I started to get a sinking feeling. I only had forty dollars on me. In my sick state my overriding need was for heroin, not substitute drugs.