Review: Digging the Vein

He fought against the needle, but he had to to it stoned. Took his typewriter to the pawnshop, but that don't make it junk*.



Los Angeles, City of Angels, "a town where everything was new and plastic," and home to Hollywood's dream factory. Under a sun that shines on movie stars lives Charles Bukowski's Chinaski and Dan Fante's Dante, men "rendered in black and white against the color and brightness of the Los Angeles mid-afternoon sunlight." Told as a straight-forward first-person narrative comes Digging the Vein, one unnamed man's experience with heroin who joins Bukowski and Fante in depicting the less-glamorous side of the dream.

Novels about addiction (Junky, Trainspotting,The Basketball Diaries, The Man with the Golden Arm) follow the well-worn trajectory of first love for the drug, the downward spiral, the overdose, rehab and redemption, and to some extent that holds true here. Things start relatively well for our young man: a stint on keyboards for synth-pop legend Mark Brel leads him to a spot with The Catsuits, a 'Ramones-meets-the-Shangri-La's pop-punk' outfit. He rides the wave of success with them which, like all young British bands, washes them up on the shores of the States and into a "Monkee's-on-coke dream world." It is short-lived, though; the band emplode, the narrator's quickie marriage tanks, the music dries up and as dreams of a music deal vanish, our man turns to writing video treatments and music reviews, his sense of "rage and impotence" growing, soon turning to bitterness. Drawn away from the party-scene and moving towards the more shadowy elements on the peripheries, he gets his first taste of heroin.

In Junky, Burroughs says heroin is the 'worst thing that can happen to a man,' and as Digging the Vein progresses, the squalid and unstinting details of the narrator's habit and subsequent shabby lifestyle unfurl: the flea-bag hotels, shooting up in the toilets at McDonald's, the Methadone clinics, the junk-sickness. Reduced to a being gutter junky, "suicidal, a prisoner who lived in motels and on people's floors, someone covered in track marks and dirt that nobody—except the occasional out-of-it junky girls—would consider fucking. Twenty-two years old and fucked up, sick, broke, and alone." Shivering at the cold, he asks, "What had I done with the kid who played that show three years ago? I had pummelled him into submission with hard drugs and bad decisions. The pilot was dead. The plane was doomed."

To paraphrase Irish comedian Dylan Moran, you'd think by now that people would have heard something bad about heroin—'a great buzz, but it can give you a jippy tummy'—and, as Burroughs said, "You don't wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months' shooting twice a day to get any habit at all.. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict." So, what then is the attraction? Read O'Neill's description of cooking-up a shoot, and he'll make you understand:

"There's something in the ritual that I learned to love—opening the balloon of heroin and placing the dope into the spoon, which is stained dark brown with old heroin residue and 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 nostalgia, of a yearning that I can't explain.

Adding water to the spoon and holding a flame under it and watching the water start to hiss and bubble, the nugget of smack dissolving, turning the water the color of chocolate. And then there's the sound of unwrapping a fresh needle from its package, the way the cotton dropped in the spoon swells and engorges with the solution, the smell again, stronger as it rises with the heat from the cooked junk. Then the faint fizz as the shot is drawn up into the barrel, turning the cotton a dirty grey once more. I have become addicted to this....I am already altered, transported, fixed."

Though attractive to the O'Neill character, Digging the Vein never glamourises heroin, it is not an advert for H. "I was miserable. I wanted this to stop. I really wanted to stop. I didn't just want a break from the drugs; I wanted to go back-before I stuck a needle in my arm for the first time, before I knew how fucking amazing that feeling is, before I blew it for myself by getting a taste of what heaven must feel like. How could I go back to blissful ignorance now?"

The story itself has strong parallels with O'Neill's own life: the musician, the addict, the writer—O'Neill was/is all of these, but though rooted in biography, O'Neill elevates his tale of using and the tale of the people he meets along the way, their histories veiled and exposed, to fine piece of literature. In the final pages O'Neill writes:

"No more junk talk, no more lies. No more mornings in the hospital getting bad blood drained out of me. No more doctors trying to analyse what makes me a drug addict. No more futile attempts at trying to control my heroin use. No more defending myself when I know I'm indefensible. No more police using me as practice,. No more overdoses, no more losses. No more trying to take an intellectual position on my heroin addiction when it takes more than it gives. No more dope-sick mornings, no more slow suicide, no more pain without end. No more AA. No more NA. No more CA. No more mind control. No more being a victim, no more looking for reasons in childhood, in God, in anything but what exists in here. No more admitting I'm powerless."

A rap that recalls Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. "Choose life .. But why would I want to do a thing like that?" Just as that piece ends, O'Neill is sucked right back down again, buying drugs in London. Junkies by the very nature are liars, but you can tell by the story that it has to be true. What O'Neill lays down in these pages vibrates like a bell after it's stopped ringing and will make you grateful for the pulse of your own arteries. This is something that ain't going to dissolve in the L.A. sunshine. I have not been this impressed by a debut novel since Dan Fante came up for air (and it comes as no surprise to learn that Tony O'Neill is a fan of the writing of both William Burroughs and Fante). Fante banged out the sorry tale of Bruno Dante across three books; his would be an interesting blueprint for Tony O'Neill to follow.

[ST]

[*With apologies to Leonard Cohen]

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Digging the Vein by Tony O'Neill
Contemporary Press
219 Pages