Digging the Vein Read Online Free

“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