Digging the Vein (5 page)

Within 5 minutes I was scoring in a back alley from a tall black guy, snaggle-toothed and balding, hunched over on the curb trying to get a hit from his pipe. He sold me two rocks and offered me a hit. I said okay out of habit, but then started to get edgy as I watched the crackhead pull the rock from a pocket of his dirty sports jacket and fumble with it, clumsily balancing it on the gauze. Then he was shaking the lighter and trying to make it work. Click… click… the lighter was dead and the crackhead was pissed. His remaining hair was turning grey. I wondered how old he was—forties? Fifties even?

“
Mother … fucker!” he hissed, “You gotta light, man?”

“
No.”

I started to walk off and he looked suddenly dejected at the prospect of being left alone. He was really high, jerking spasmodically even while sitting down.

“
Hey … hey!” he yelled. “Don’t go, man. Wait.”

I stopped and half turned, raising my palms to the sky.

“
I gotta split, man. I gotta go.”

“
Wait … wait.” He flashed me a yellow, rotting grin. “You want me to suck you a little? I’ll do it for one of those rocks, my man.”

Later in Greco’s Pizza I sat waiting for Carlos at a Formica-topped table. I was drinking a cup of pink lemonade. A young Dominican guy slid into the seat next to mine. He wore a huge Virgin de Guadalupe pendant encrusted with fake gems around his neck and Ostrich skin cowboy boots. His grin revealed a gold tooth.

“
You waiting for someone?” he asked in broken English.

“
Yeah. Are you a friend of Carlos’?”

He smiled and pulled out a beeper.

“
Carlos is gone. I have his pager now. I got the stuff.”

“
What happened to Carlos?” I asked, slipping the forty dollars into his hand.

He shrugged spat a balloon into his hand and rolled it on his pants leg before dropping it in my palm.

“
I have his pager now,” he simply repeated.

There’s something in the ritual that you learn to love … opening up the balloon of heroin and placing the dope into the spoon. The spoon is stained dark brown with old heroin residue and is coated black with carbon on the underside. There is a smell to Mexican black tar heroin … caramel or treacle mixed with the smell of lost childhood summers. The smell of a strange kind of nostalgia, of a yearning that you can’t explain.

Adding water to the spoon and holding a flame under it. Watching the nugget of smack dissolving, turning the hissing and bubbling water the color of chocolate. And then there’s the sound as you unwrap a fresh needle from its package … the way the cotton you drop in the spoon swells and engorges with the solution … the smell again, stronger as it rises with the heat from the freshly cooked junk. The faint fizz as you draw up the shot into the barrel, turning the cotton dirty grey once more. You become addicted to this. I have become addicted to this. For a moment an insane thought crosses my mind—maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe I don’t have to inject this drug. After all, I am no longer physically dependent on it after 38 days in rehab. Maybe simply preparing the shot can be enough … my overwhelming need for the ritual sated so I can go on with my life.

Bullshit. No. It’s too late. I’ve already made my decision.

Putting something appropriate on the CD player. Chet Baker maybe, singing
Almost Blue
. That’s always good. And then slipping the belt from my jeans and wrapping the cold leather around my upper arm. Flexing for a vein, needle grasped between my teeth. I almost don’t need the shot, it’s true. I am already altered, transported, fixed.

I slide the needle in anyway and shoot my way to glory. Outside of my motel room, in a dull suburb of Los Angeles less than a mile from the rehab facility I checked out of last night, I can hear the cars and the yelling and feel the heat outside on the walkway. None of it can touch me now. The heroin is deep and heavy in my bones. I fall back into a trance.

I have moved beyond life and death, beyond the boredom and madness. I make a mental note to myself while drifting into my opiate dream. If this ever ends, if I survive this, I will write it all down. I need to remember everything and I don’t want these years to have been for nothing.

Well, this is how it started:

PART ONE – BEFORE

I was in a band, before. We were called The Catsuits and we enjoyed a brief burst of success during the tail end of the Britpop thing. Looking back on our rapid fall from grace its still amazing to see how quickly it all slipped away from us. Everyone was completely unaware it was falling apart until it was too late to do anything about it. “The best band in Britain by a million miles,” trumpeted the
NME
. Enthusiastic press coverage, a top 20 single, appearances on
Top of the Pops
, a debut album that peaked at number 9 in the charts. Every date on our UK tour was greeted with packed, adoring houses.

I joined the band after accosting them drunkenly at one of their shows at the University Of London Union. I was in London playing keyboards for Mark Brel. Mark had enjoyed a long, successful solo career after hitting it big in the early 80’s and was the voice behind one of that era’s most enduring hits, an electro take on an obscure northern soul song. I had landed the gig via a blind audition, a stunning bit of good fortune for an unknown from a shitty northern town. During my stint as his sideman though, he withdrew almost entirely from live performance. This left me sitting in my rented room in a crumbling Edwardian house in Chelsea, collecting my weekly retainer to spend on alcohol and drugs. The Catsuits show I attended was typical of my performances in London at the time: I drank vodka for most of the night and after the show ended barged into the backstage area, talking to all the faces I recognized from the music scene as if we were on first name terms. “Your band is fucking brilliant,” I told the lead singer Laura, waving my arms drunkenly at the other bands and hangers-on lurking by the open bar, “Much better than the rest of these assholes. You lot have
class
. Hold on…”

I drunkenly staggered over to the bar and while the bartender was busy serving someone a drink I leaned across and grabbed a bottle of Grey Goose. As I crossed the room to rejoin Laura I topped off several peoples glasses, like some kind of demented waiter. Finally I poured Laura another drink and took a healthy slug from the bottle.

“
Now, back to The Catsuits,” I said. “You know what your problem is?”

“
Go on,” she laughed. “I’m sure you’re gonna tell me anyway.”

“
You need a keyboard player. But not some pussy keyboard player whose gonna sit there like a cunt and plink-plonk away the whole night. No…” I leaned in closer for effect. “You need
me
.”

After that the night dissolved into an alcohol induced blackout, but when I woke up the next evening there was a message on my answer-phone from The Catsuits management asking if I would be available to play with them on a probationary basis. I accepted. Mark Brel’s live appearances remained so sporadic that I managed to hold down the two jobs with relative ease.

As The Catsuits set off on our first US tour it seemed the world was at our feet. The more outrageous my behavior was the better things seemed to get. Even my parents, bless them, believed that I was a success. I think it was seeing me on the TV that did it. It was then at least that they stopped insisting that I get a real job.

The US tour was brief but magically surreal. We had 5 days to ourselves in Los Angeles and members of the group tried to outdo themselves in terms of outrageous boozed up, drugged out misbehavior. The record label looked on and applauded, loving the controlled chaos of our youthful exuberance. I had just turned 19 years old while the eldest member of the band was 21. I won our little game of rock and roll mischief making. My adventure in LA started at a bar called Vida in Los Feliz with a young guy from our record label who was up for showing me a good time, progressed to a three day pool party in one of Howard Hughes’ old mansions in Brentwood, and by the time I crawled back to the hotel on the morning we were to fly to San Francisco, my epic crystal meth, coke, and lager rampage had taken me to Vegas where—in front of a small crowd of new friends who where almost as obliterated as I was—I married a girl named Christiane. As everyone told tales of sex and drugs during the brief flight, I sat and smiled. Then I dropped the bomb, flashing my gleaming wedding ring. Shock, disbelief, and then a begrudging respect made its way through my audience of band members, roadies, and record execs. Someone cracked open a bottle of champagne to celebrate. I had set some kind of record, we figured. It was one of the happiest moments of my life and I spent it with my best friends, my band mates for Christ sakes, on a plane headed towards a new city, a new adventure. This would never end, I thought gleefully, as we started to land and I guzzled the last of the booze.

That would be our final tour, as it happened. The Catsuits disintegrated under the weight of bad management, infighting, and Laura’s increasing depression over our constant touring. In one of those moments of beautiful synchronicity, in the same week the band fell apart I found myself fired from Mark’s group over a rumble in Moscow, which had happened a month earlier. In one of the few public appearances Mark had decided to make that year, the Mafia-organized run of shows in a prestigious theatre had fallen apart after an incident in a seedy nightclub. There, the honor of a pair of underage looking Russian whores was besmirched, a stripper dressed as Lenin was assaulted by a drunken Billy Idol look-alike, and myself and the tour manager received a beating for refusing to pay a bar tab run up by a head Mafia guy. While I was away on The Catsuits final tour, I suddenly became the focus of recriminations over the incident (which I could barely remember due to the amount of vodka I had consumed that night) and I found myself out of 2 gigs at once. Before the end of the year I was heading out of London with a couple of suitcases a one-way ticket to the States. I was 19 years old and I was going to LA, so fuck them! I wouldn’t remain a has-been in London, when I could make a fresh start in the city I had fallen in love with. I set across the Atlantic to reclaim my dream: I had Christiane, a heart full of determination and 3000 dollars in my pocket. I knew I couldn’t fail.

After being in LA for well over a year, I was still out of a record deal. Actually, my band getting a deal now seemed like some distant dream fading rapidly, and I was getting by on the old fall back—writing. I was messing around with an idea for a novel which never seemed to get anywhere and since leaving London I had been making ends meet by writing music reviews for a weekly newspaper and music video treatments for a handful of music video directors around town. Often it paid very well, and in the first week of a good month I could have already earned enough to pay rent and cover living expenses. I suppose it was a testament to my laziness that even these two or so hours of work a week started to irk me. I resented and couldn't stand to listen to the bands that I had to write about. For every piece of shit band that you cringe at on MTV there are a million others, each seemingly more mediocre than the last, who aren't even good enough to fool the mass of stupidity that is the American record buying public. I created numb skulled video scenarios for New Country artists, middle of the road rock bands fronted by men who looked like they should be chugging beers in some awful frat house in Hell, soft metal, funk, rap, even, god forgive me, ska-revival groups: trying in vain to block out anything but the pay check from my mind. And to make matters worse, there was the unfinished novel that sat by the bed, taunting me every night as I went to sleep, nearly two hundred pages of self-indulgent shit, which seemed like it would never be finished. As I stopped work on the book and took on more and more work writing music videos, my sense of rage and impotence grew… My drinking and intake of drugs increased in indefinable increments at first, just as my relationship with Christiane started to fall apart. It was hard to say where or when the rot started but soon both of us were as withdrawn and frustrated and full of mute resentment for each other. Christiane was like some strange and alien form of life to someone like me. After all I had grown up in a depressed, overcast Northern English mill town, while she was a blonde-haired and blue-eyed California girl. She had the kind of life that I had only encountered in bad television; her grandmother was a well known Hollywood actress from the 40’s and 50’s and Christiane inherited some of that spoilt movie star sense of entitlement. She wasn’t wealthy; her father snorted and drank away the family fortune before Christiane had made her teenage years, only stopping to find God and Alcoholics Anonymous when every single dollar and family heirloom had been sold, destroyed or left as insurance against his cocaine debts and bar tabs. When I met her father he was living in a shack on the outskirts of the city with a family of piss stinking cats and a collection of firearms for company. He had once managed some of the biggest soul acts of the 1970’s but he now had a crazed look about him, like he self-destructed before he could save his soul.