Digging the Vein (9 page)

As Joan started in on her second line, I began to feel bad. Real bad, real quick. A stabbing pain shot across my forehead. My stomach turned, I felt bile rising in my throat. I started shaking uncontrollably as I felt my body go cold.

“
Put the coke down,” I croaked, and as she did I fell back on the bed. My vision started to waver, making me feel sea sick, so I closed my eyes hard. I could feel a bead of cold sweat making its way down my temple. I opened one eye cautiously.

“
Are you OK?” she asked, suddenly concerned, leaning over me.

“
It's fucked me. It’s fucked me,” I gurgled as way of an explanation.

“
Shhh, it's OK. It's OK,” she whispered, as she massaged my throbbing forehead with her cool, soft hands. I started to feel a little better. My stomach growled, ominously. She continued to work her fingers on my forehead, and I started to breathe slowly. My stomach growled again, weakly, after ten more minutes of this. It was the sound of my body submitting. It was as if she had absorbed the bad feelings through her fingertips.

She leant over and kissed me. My pager went off. I checked it: message centre. Sal Mackenzie.

“
Hey guys, it’s me. It sucked at the party so I'm on my way to 3's, so either head on over or page me. Bye.”

I cursed silently and broke the news to Joan. The thought of heading over to Hollywood and Vine to drink at 3's right then wasn't the most enticing of ideas, but I decided to let her make the call. She paged Sal back.

“
Sal, it's us. Head on over to the Wayward, we're here. We had a bit of a situation here, but it’s all right now. Bring everyone. Bye.”

She walked over to the bed after hanging up the phone and sat down next to me.

“
How long d'you think we have?” I asked, quietly.

“
Long enough,” she replied, handing me a condom and kissing me hard. We made love, missionary position. My gaze never left hers the whole time, and she talked to me in an excited whisper throughout. My hands mapped out her body, her breasts her hips in the darkness, before we finished, dressed and went downstairs without a word.

When the party restarted at the Wayward, I was completely out of it. We had cut the remaining line from earlier into four generous lines to spread it out a bit more. I was trying and failing. I was just throwing fuel into a dying fire now, feeding a psychological rather than physical need. I couldn't get high and I was slipping into a kind of psychotic half-sleep that made me no use to anyone. Two English guys appeared with Sal, maybe half an hour after Joan and I had gotten dressed. One, a hulking skinhead, was ex-British Army who'd served time in Northern Ireland. He had that look about him, fat sweaty face, alcoholic watery eyes, awful tattoos featuring Union Jacks and bulldogs. I intrinsically mistrusted anyone who served in the British Army, finding the idea that anyone would volunteer to be stuck in a stinking filthy barracks with a bunch of other mentally challenged fools wearing itchy, ugly army fatigues absolutely shocking. Everyone I knew from childhood who went into the army was the kind of violent, bigoted moron that couldn’t get a job sweeping the streets under normal circumstances. So they’d join the army instead, and some genius would give them a gun, teach them how to kill and send them into various political hotspots around the world. Upon hearing that they were army though, I simply murmured, “oh wow, that's cool,” before staring off into the middle distance for the rest of the night. I suppose they seemed nice enough, but whenever I encounter the British abroad I try and keep my distance. They seem to feel that they are under attack from all forms of the new culture that surrounds them, and retreat into a kind of bizarrely ultra - British caricature. I know if these people wandered around Manchester with their flags waving and their soccer tops and their affected accents, people would think that they'd lost their fucking minds.

Sal left for the shop around three. Everyone but Joan and I were ready to keep the party going. The English guys, sensing that I wasn't up for a discussion about old Blighty, football or politics, started laying into the lager and cocaine with gusto. I felt like a corpse, moving my eyes over to Joan every so often to see how she was doing, before returning my stare to the wall again. My heart raced in my chest and I was finding it hard to swallow. I felt like I had slipped completely into auto pilot and I found myself reciting the words to my favorite songs in my head, trying to stop myself from going crazy.

“
I'm going to bed,” Joan eventually announced.

“
Can I crash in your room?” I asked, a little too quickly. Even she looked startled by my desire to be away from the party.

“
Sure,” she shrugged, adding, “you can have the couch.”

We somehow made it into her room and locked the door. I undressed and flopped onto the bed, half watching as Joan took off and folded her clothes. She slid between the sheets, huddling next to me.

“
Goodnight,” I murmured.

“
Goodnight.”

As fucked up as we were, we had sex three times before we finally slept, not waking until noon the next day. The last time we did it she lay on her left side - as did I - and I fucked her from behind making small, careful movements. I hugged her throughout, burying my face into her shoulder. I briefly wondered if it was possible that I was falling in love with her. I thought that I probably was, although I had nothing to compare the experience to. Christiane flashed across my mind, and I blocked the thought out as soon as it surfaced. Over the past month she had become a ghostly figure, entering the apartment as I left it, leaving notes by the bed for me to clean the goddamn house, or coming in drunk herself once in a while and shooting me dirty looks as I wrote, before staggering off into the bedroom to collapse unconscious.

“
This isn't good,” I thought as I came inside her, immediately starting to drift into a contented sleep. “This isn't good at all.”

ALL THERE’S LEFT TO DO…

A week later I turned up to rehearse with my band, Southpaw, only to discover that our rhythm guitar player Chris was no longer in the band. It was hardly a shock—he was constantly fucked up on heroin since playing a tour with LA psyche-rock band Electric Kool-Aid, a bunch of junkies notorious for turning on any and all of the people who drifted in and out of their circle. I had been exposed to junkies on the periphery of the music scene and had hung out with the heavily strung-out Atom, the lead singer from Electric Kool-Aid. I found them to be a pretty agreeable lot, a lot less annoying than stoners. Chris, though, became someone else on smack—high-strung, whiney, forgetful and lazy. He turned up hours late to rehearsal, constantly tried to borrow money from the band, would stop a song halfway through to make obscure comments which made no sense to anybody but him. It was sad to watch. He had the hunted look of a man no longer in control of his life.

As I walked into the room, the first thing I noticed was the space where his amplifier should have been. James, our drummer, was setting up in the corner. He looked up, shrugged, and said, “And then there were four.” That’s when I knew.

The band’s leader was Dito, a singer-songwriter from Astoria, Queens, who wrote impossibly beautiful songs about New York, innocence, death and most of all, love. He had the intensity of a man who had seen life and death in all of its terrible, close-up finality. When he turned up and we started playing he said nothing about Chris. I figured he felt bad. I think we all did.

Afterwards in the ramshackle waiting room up front, I drank a Dr Pepper while Dito fed a quarter into an arcade game. The rest of the band packed away and drifted off.

“
Shame about Chris,” I said.

“
Yeah, yeah,” Dito muttered wistfully, suddenly punching the Galaga machine as his ship blew up. Turning to me, “Wanna shoot some hoops?”

We walked out into the early evening heat and I ran across the street to a bodega to pick up a forty of Olde English, as Dito effortlessly dropped the ball into the basket.

That night I was spilling out of the 3 Clubs with Sal Mackenzie and a Vietnamese kid called Sky who I met through a friend of RP’s. I was drunk and tripping on a hit of E—not peaking too hardcore yet. I had just been doing coke in the back room with Sal and I was now sitting in the bar sweating, wide-eyed, semi-psychotic, rapping a bit with two kids from Texas who swaggered over trying to score coke as I smiled at them. Any other group of fuckers in there would have rolled them. They set themselves wide open for it, coming right out and trying to score off of us. “How much d'you want?” I grinned, a 60-dollar wrap in my back pocket, thinking I could maybe make a few bucks. They said, “Oh, just a couple of 8 balls,” and I stopped, thinking maybe I'd misheard them. But the one closest to me shot me a wide country boy shit eating grin, and I figured that they seemed too stupid to not be genuine. “Hold on,” I muttered, and left them in the booth where they had interrupted me talking to a red haired model called Melissa. I had attempted to screw her a month or so ago, so high on coke I couldn't get hard, instead stuffing my limp cock into her soft wide cunt, somehow achieving a weak orgasm.

I tapped Sal on his shoulder. “Hey, is Oscar around?”

Sal turned; a pint of Boddingtons in hand and smiled. “Not had enough? It’s a fucking Tuesday night, I'm holding a half; we're fine.”

“
Nah, these two hicks want to get a couple of 8 balls.”

“
You know em?”

“
Nah,” I laughed, “they just strutted up to me and asked if I knew where they could score. The fuckers are lunatics, man.”

“
Take me to them.”

So I introduced Sal to the two jonesing kids and also to Melissa, who I was rapidly getting bored talking to. She was pretty, not unlike Mia Farrow in
Rosemary’s Baby
, but not very smart. The sting of my impotence was negated by the fact that when we had made it back to her apartment on Wiltshire she had been so fucked up on booze and barbiturates that I don’t think she remembered to much of what happened. She worked as a waitress at some place on Sunset when she was in-between modeling jobs, and I was happy when Sal and her both split off with the Texans to score A few hours later I was throwing back vodka tonics and laughing with Miro, a dominatrix from San Francisco who I had gone home with after playing a show with Southpaw at Goldfingers on Yucca and Cahuenga. I was standing at the bar in Goldfingers when I met her, just offstage after the set. The place was quieting down and I asked her if she’d like to get out of there and go get high with me. We smoked a lot of speed, and her permanently sweaty and pale boyfriend Pete walked in on us while she was sucking my cock. I was blind drunk, drunk enough not to be embarrassed, at least. But still, the fact that he walked straight past, made himself a sandwich and flicked on the TV felt kind of weird. She started talking about a threesome with him. Somehow, the idea didn't really appeal. I took her to the bedroom and we fucked a couple of times in the gloom on her big overstuffed bed, stopping only to smoke more speed and take Polaroids. When I left the next morning that was that.

“
You are soo cute, honey,” she was saying while drunkenly caressing my ear, letting me know that if I was drunk or horny enough I could take her home again. I was distracted, though, craning my neck to see around the room in an attempt to catch a glimpse of Joan, who was meant to be turning up here anytime.

Lou Reed’s “Wagon Wheel” was blaring out of the sound system, and I staggered to my feet to get another drink. Suddenly, I thought I saw Joan standing by the DJ booth, and I approached her, tapping her shoulder…

“
Hey, sweetheart,” I said, but someone who was most definitely NOT Joan turned and smiled in an “I don't know who you are but I'm trying to be polite” kind of way, and she muttered back, “Hi honey.” Over her shoulder I spotted Sal talking to Oscar, a tall black coke dealer in a leather trench coat with a permanently affixed half grin. Sal was introducing the two Southern boys to him, and Oscar gave one of them a good-natured slap on the shoulder. I found myself absently muttering, “Oh, I'm OK,” to the mystery girl before drifting away to the bar again. Soon the drinks where gone and Sal was standing next to me.

“
We've gotta blow. Pick up Joan and Spencer, head over to the Shop ...”

“
You sort out the fucking Dukes of Hazzard over there?” I asked, about to nod towards them, instead looking round and realizing they’d already left.

“
They've fucked off with Oscar, but he's dropping them off at the shop so we can hang out a little, yeah?”

“
Nice one.”

I was shivering in the cold, piling into the old battered Ford with Sal and Sky and heading over to the Smog Cutter on Virgil where Joan and Spencer were drinking. Pretty soon we found ourselves ordering drinks from Sunshine, the crabby barmaid who constantly seemed one step away from drunken violence. I was hugging Joan hello by the jukebox.