Digging the Vein
By Tony O'Neill
4/5
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About this ebook
“Digging The Vein will appeal to all Tony O'Neill fans, of which I'm one. It's another pitch dark classic." Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting.
Tony O'Neill's debut novel has become a cult classic since it was originally published by Contemporary Press in 2006. Digging the Vein is the tragicomic portrait of a young Englishman who arrives in LA fresh from an abortive career in rock and roll. His world abruptly changes when he submerges himself in the subterranean world of the Hollywood junk scene. Winning acclaim from the likes of Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting), John Giorno (You've Got To Burn To Shine), Dan Fante (Chump Change), James Frey (A Million Little Pieces), and Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight), Digging the Vein's unflinching depiction of Los Angeles' underbelly led to a deal with Harper Collins, who went on to publish a sequel (Down and Out on Murder Mile) as well as several other works of O'Neill's fiction and non-fiction.
Beyond the theme of addiction,Tony O'Neill's debut has an obsession honesty and authenticity - a desire for freedom at all costs that pits the narrator irrevocably and disastrously at odds with the world around him. Our hero has big problems: a wife he had known for only two days, no job, no money and a drug habit expanding beyond all limits. As you might expect, there are wild stories of drug deals gone wrong, friendships lost, suffering, casual sex and unexpected violence. And of course there are lonely nights in rotten motels, withdrawal symptoms, methadone clinics and the constant quest for the high. But Digging the Vein is a novel concerned with much more than the nocturnal world of the junkie: to paraphrase one great poet it's the narrators "Lust for Life" that keeps the reader hooked. This is a tale related with a startling lack of romanticism, and this refusal to apologize and condemn propels Digging the Vein down a far murkier path that lies beyond the traditional route signposted 'addiction / redemption.'
Since it was first published in a limited run back in 2006, O'Neill's debut has been long unavailable outside of the collectors market. Vicon Editions is proud to bring you the definitive e-book edition of the novel John Giorno described as, "mining diamonds for the crown of the King of Hell." As well as incorporating material originally left out of the US paperback edition, this all-new edition of Digging the Vein contains a gallery of covers from the book's various incarnations around the world, an introduction by "Million Little Pieces" author James Frey, and a mixed-media essay on Tony O'Neill and Digging the Vein by Dejan Gacond and Kit Brown (both of which originally appeared in the French edition of the novel, "Du Bleu Sur Les Veins").
Tony O'Neill
Tony O'Neill is the author of Digging the Vein and Down and Out on Murder Mile, and the coauthor of Neon Angel and the New York Times bestseller Hero of the Underground. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter.
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Reviews for Digging the Vein
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Book preview
Digging the Vein - Tony O'Neill
DIGGING ‘DIGGING’:
"Digging the Vein will appeal to all Tony O’Neill fans – of which I’m one. It’s another pitch-dark classic."
Irvine Welsh
"Digging the Vein is mining diamonds for the crown of the King of Hell.
John Giorno
In Digging the Vein O'Neill does something quite special: he simply returns literature to its guttural, all too human, roots. He doesn't mystify his words; there is no higher, spiritual, cryptic language or elongated metaphor. Digging the Vein is a human fiction, a book ostensibly about misplacement and love, a book that is true in every sense of the word, penetrating into the deepest, darkest recesses of human existence without fuss, arrogance and obfuscation. There is no need for Tony O'Neill to try and dazzle us with his prose styling…a weight that seems to loom large in the forefront of many writers’ mind… he knows he will be heard, that every word counts, because he experienced each painstaking syllable. Digging the Vein is a book that, although steeped in its genre's traditions [think Burroughs’ Junky here], transcends this very same genre [think Burroughs’ Junky here also]. It is first and foremost a work of Literature - and I can honestly say this without my toes curling in disagreement.
Lee Rourke
A noir to stand up with Dante and Bukowski… what separates O’Neill from more fashionable junkie peers is a reservoir of self-awareness and not an ounce of self-pity. His evocation of the haunted landscapes of Los Angeles resounds with the gnarled grace of vintage Tom Waits…
The Guardian
Reading it I could taste the LA smog. Here pain comes at you like a Mack truck – relentless and unavoidable. Don’t blink… keep reading.
Dan Fante
This book will take you inside the mind, heart, spoon, pipe and needle of a junkie. Tony has cooked down the life of an addict and injected it into these pages. It brought me back to the street, back to the hell of craving and the bliss of getting as fix.
Noah Levine
It’s a great book… an existential look at non-existence. Instead of feeling disgusted or revolted by this dark vision of the world, you just want to keep reading.
Word Riot
"It’s not very often that a writer’s words can punch builder’s hands through the paper, and throttle the lifeblood out of you. But Tony’s words do just that. His experiences are so powerful and emotional, and full of fucking heart that it pales everybody else’s work into insignificance. Tony O’Neill will be remembered as one of Northern Britain’s great young hopes in years to come. When Monica Ali, Dan Brown, and Zadie Smith are nothing but footnotes in the history of writing, O'Neill’s work will still be standing tall and proud; a testimony to life in the gutter in the late nineties. Digging The Vein isn’t a story of redemption, there’s no happy ending, its just pure, unadulterated Brutalism."
Straight From the Fridge
CONTENTS
Digging Digging
Thank You
Also by Tony O’Neill
Foreword by James Frey
On Digging by Dejan Gacond and Kit Brown
The Art of Digging – Covers 2006-2014
Hollywood August 2000
Part One – Before
The Weekend Begins
The Wayward
Saturday, Joan and Why I Hate the English In Los Angeles
All There’s Left To Do
It’s Not You It’s Me
Here Comes Success
Goodbye Christiane
Genesis
Near Misses (Part One)
Gimmie Shelter
Fucked Up, Nevada
Part Two – Alvarado and 6th Blues
Southpaw
The Electric Kool-Aid Speedball Test
Nothing Shocking
Miracle Downtown
Communing With God
The Sweet Smell of Oblivion
Near Misses (Part Two)
Detox
Near Misses (Part Three)
Rehabilitation
Corpus Delicti
Ghost Town
Leaving Los Angeles
London Again
After
Bonus Tracks: B-sides, Rarities and Outtakes: Digging the Tunes
THANK YOU:
Contemporary Press for opening a hell of an important door for me by putting this book out back in ‘06.
Dan Fante: thanks for the advice and the inspiration.
Digging the Vein is dedicated to all the junkies-whores-thieves-malcontents-fuckups-burnouts-psychos & drug dealers:
You are the last truly free men and women on this stinking cop and politician-ridden planet.
It’s time for everybody to just say no to the war on drugs.
ALSO BY TONY O’NEILL:
Down and Out on Murder Mile
Sick City
Black Neon
Songs From the Shooting Gallery
Seizure Wet Dreams
Notre Dame du Vide
Dirty Hits: Stories 2003-2013
Neon Angel (with Cherie Currie)
Hero of the Underground (with Jason Peter)
FOREWORD
James Frey
Originally published in the French edition Le Bleu sur les Veines
published Feb 2013 by 13e Note Editions, translated by Annie-France Mistral
In his preface to DIGGING THE VEIN, Tony O'Neill thanks All the junkies, thieves, whores, malcontents, fuck-ups, burnouts, psychos, and drug dealers.
By way of this introduction, I want to say to Tony, You're welcome.
As a former addict, a writer and above all else, a reader, I think I have read most - or at least a great deal - of the junkie memoirs and junkie novels out there. Some writers, like William S Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, and Irvine Welsh are undeniably brilliant. Others are insufferable. Tony’s first novel, the book you are holding in your hands, definitely belongs in the former group.
DIGGING THE VEIN is Tony’s roman à clef based on his years as a heroin addict in Los Angeles, and in it he does something as well as any writer has ever done. He gets it Right. Without a single false note for dramatic effect, without one syllable of pretense, DIGGING THE VEIN lays bare a vividly real picture of the junkie's life in all its desperate and depressing glory. His nameless narrator dispenses with the formalities in what is almost an aside: I was in a band, before…
and then, without drawing breath, plunges us deep into The Nightmare.
The story goes that Tony wrote this some of this material while he was deep in the madness of his drug days finally finishing the book while withdrawing from a virulent combination of methadone, heroin and crack cocaine. There is certainly some drugged-out, hallucinatory prose to be found in these pages. What comes across strongest though, is an unsentimental view of the life of the Addict and a knack for conjuring the sights, smells and the feel of the nocturnal world of the junkie.
However Tony's real skill, and it is something that I can relate to my own work, is in capturing the mindset of The Addict. The junkie death wish, which can seem so unfathomable to those on the outside looking in, is rendered here in perfect detail. His refusal to buy into the expected trajectory of the Heroin Confession is rare and refreshing. People in AA would probably describe Tony – and myself, I suppose - as an example of self-will run riot
. When he chants, No more AA. No more NA. No more mind control. No more being a victim, no more looking for reasons in childhood, in God, in anything but what exists HERE. No more admitting I am powerless…
he is saying something that is almost heresy in America in this recovery-centric day and age. He is an addict who is denying his addiction to heroin is a disease
at all.
If you’re reading this, then you probably heard about that little incident between Oprah Winfrey and I a few years ago. I will say that I was blessed and cursed by the Oprah Effect. The endorsement of America’s most powerful tastemaker helped to make me a household name. But of course you will also know about the other side of that story and the public flagellation I endured.
Now that the dust has settled I can honestly say that the Oprah Effect was a good thing. It gave me a ready-made audience for my future books, and writers want nothing so much as readers. Tony O’Neill is doing it a different way, a less public way, book-by-book, reader by reader. I hope through the notoriety of my name, created by Oprah and the media, I can maybe help Tony get more readers more quickly. Call it the Oprah Collateral Damage Effect. In blurbing his third novel SICK CITY (2010) I wrote something to the effect that I believed Tony O'Neill may be this generations Jim Thompson. When looking at the sum total of his (now) eight books and imagining his prolific future, I suspect Tony will likely grow way past my comparison. Hold tight. It’s going to be an interesting ride.
James Frey, September 2010
On Digging
by Dejan Gacond
Images by Kit Brown
Originally published as the afterword to the French edition Le Bleu sur les Veines
published Feb 2013 by 13e Note Editions, translated by Annie-France Mistral
« I fucked up the shot, blew out a vein in my goddamned wrist in a burning explosion of pain, and only felt half the effect that I should have. " (p. 82)*
« In a few moments the most intense flash of pleasure and fear was over and my body settled somewhat, still buzzing and pinging with the intensity of methamphetamine, and I lay back on the floor muttering, « Oh god, that feels so fucking good », and we both lay there giggling and laughing. Before – like ballet – we undressed without acknowledging it, and fucked in that brutal, endless crystal meth way, cock and pussy hammering against each other, yelling and rolling about on the floor, not coming but just stopping in an exhausted heap before shooting up again." (p. 71)*
According to Lester Bangs one of the best songs about drug addiction is Hands of Doom from Black Sabbath compared to the stupid sentimentalism of The Needle and the Damage Done… Neil Young’s sensibility is not too bad but Black Sabbath’s song represents the absolute despair floating around the dope’s ritual. More than a Pink Floyd album, Paranoid blows into the anguish of addiction even further than Lou Reed’s stories maybe… the gloomy British suburbs, beginning of the seventies; it’s raining and the sound of the industrial production is tremendous. Within this sad jumble, the youth’s answer will constitute in a dreary way out into disillusion…
The frozen echoes of unsatisfied needs…
Mind is full of pleasure, your body’s looking ill
To you it’s shallow leisure, so drop the acid pill
Hands is Doom is a most carnal song, the closest musical equivalent to the organic deficiency caused by dope; a clinical analysis, a Tony O’Neill’s book;
Digging the Vein …
What kind of relationship do we have with the necessity of getting smashed? It’s emergency and the vile need of doing it again… A strange and unverifiable routine, an indubitable tension reflecting and going through this incandescent book.
«At some point I woke up out of heroin, and instead of becoming confronted by my living situation, my broken marriage, and my precarious financial situation, I was instead absolutely sure that all of these things were No Longer Relevant to my existence. All that mattered was that I got some drugs to help me through the day." (p. 66)*
All along those devastating sentences, words caracole in a furious and angry rhythm. The fragments of life described in the text express the difficulty of the endured experience. Trying to give life sickness a break! It’s the pure madness of man fighting against the demons of his own extenuation. Struggling against the angel, against the demon… the annihilation of a world, the deconstruction of a reality the narrator thought he could still perceive. Like the flabby evaporation of pale necessities… junkies walking like stray dogs through the inhuman city of angels, terrified by the misfortunes of big cities. Here; into those screaming pages, a bunch of characters usually left behind are occupying a dismal front stage. Los Angeles and its outcasts!! A few lines are enough for Tony O’Neill to snatch his reader in a world of freaks, of ODs and strange deals, crackheads musicians and ruined love affairs, organisms distressed by addiction, in a world of sordid hotels and dirty apartments… Under the shadow of stars and palm trees, desolation is crawling.
"The heroin I bought last night was so-so at best, but I dumped a lot into my wake up shot and managed to find a decent vein in my ankle. The dope flooded my bloodstream and I could feel normality returning: my aching muscles relaxed, the ice unthawed around my bones, my jangling nerves subsisted. I looked at my watch; it was 6:30 a. m. Another perfect fucking day had begun." (p. 90)*
The need of escape painted in a black veil of irony, some situations which exacerbate our ridiculous behaviors… In this book, irony is sometimes waiting with the narrator an absent dealer in a dark street corner and sometimes locked in a fast food joint’s toilets. Drug addicts’ everyday life considered as a crystallization of the human behavior the volatile wandering of conscience… the unceasing reproducibility of those self-consuming instants… A Connaissance par les gouffres (knowledge through the abyss ?) that the author tries to pace up and down. In his never-ending dope quest, in the palpable void of his sad routine, through the frictions between the lack and the excesses, the street junky represents the entire humanity. We are all lunatics seems to say O’Neill. Some do drugs, some others pray or work… so what?
Where is it going to end ?" I asked him.
"Death he told me
for all of us. For the whole city. The world man. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you smell it? It’s the last days of Rome, the empire is crumbling and we’re doing all that there is left to do." (p. 46)*
In between the bitter brutality of Bukowski and Lester Bangs’ fury, between Huncke and Selby Jr, William Burroughs and his son, but with something more modern and rock n roll, O’Neill’s writing displays itself around influences from which he takes a distance. A more contemporary vision on the occidental wandering, on the affliction of our society and the absolute need of escaping it.
A new way of writing maybe… A text built like a rock n roll song. Sentences are twisted like a Sonic Youth composition, the world seems as desperate as listening Decades but with a kind of Lou Reed’s biting irony. An amplified prose hitting us silently! Starting to shake, becoming crazy… like if a Bukowski’s short story became a song of Joy Division in William Burroughs’ corpse.
The shadow of Ian Curtis floats in this corrosive writing, which also reflects to Artaud, through the body analysis who became an uneasy obstacle and through the vindictive social and institutional critics.
« Les toxicomanes malades ont sur la société un droit imprescriptible qui est celui qu’on leur foute la paix. » Artaud
(The sick drug addicts have an imprescriptible right on society, which is to leave them in peace)
Dedicating his book to outcasts, junkies, prostitutes, dealers, burnouts and any kind of psychos, Tony O’Neil shows the necessity of being different from a crawling norm or an omnipotent government. A scream into the modern world’s darkness, a punch in the face of a society who tries to destroy any parcel of humanity in bodies wherefrom utility has to be maximized. If affliction is too big, it’s much better to fuck yourself up, to surf on momentary pleasures. Like Artaud said in his letter to the decider of the narcotic law;
« Tout homme est juge, et juge exclusif, de la quantité de douleur physique, ou encore de vacuité mentale qu’il peut honnêtement supporter. »
(Any man is judge and exclusive judge of the amount of physical pain and mental vacuity he can honestly handle.)
« From the day we are born we are forced to submit to completely false and ridiculous institutions such as school, the state, god, police, government, work, the idea of being a good citizen (…), marriage, wholesomeness and a moral code. All of this imposed on us down the years by the kind of conservative, church loving assholes who have made this world the farce it is for as long as we have had a concept of society. I choose to deal with it by shooting dope. It’s either that, or commit a mass murder." (p. 180)*
Narcotics, wandering and the Brian Jonestown Massacre here renamed The Electric Kool Aid!!! Ephemeral companion of Anton Newcombe’s tortuous road, sharing opiate disillusion, sonic experimentation and refusal to conform with one of the last Rock n Roll Animal. The author restores the gloomy and mythic atmosphere floating over The Brian Jonestown Massacre: a psychotic leader, musicians leaving the band one after another, muso types getting insulted, another ruined concert or the chaos existing during rehearsals. Quick a fix while no one is watching*! A musical parenthesis for a man lost in addiction’s limbo, like if his body had a strange reaction after a speedball… The Brian Jonestown’s episode is for Tony O’Neil the ultimate stage before the fall. Imprisoned in his vice and not able to stick to his world, no money and nowhere to stay just this fucking necessity to satisfy.
« I was out of luck, out of dignity, out of money, and out of veins. » (p. 205)*
Sex or dope, rock n roll or writing… O’Neil tries to find a way out, a universe where he can live and handle as he says in the introduction of Notre-Dame du vide. To Escape and to forget and even to forget that we escape! It doesn’t matter as long as we’re somewhere else, as long as we’re different. Like the road he used to explore since he was young with Marc Almond for example, existence considered as a repetitive movement. Going slowly from one place to the other to do here what we endured over there…
A life he’d be able to cross quickly in a progress of self-combustion. A life scattered over anchoring points with foul stenches. Those disgusting toilets where he’s forced to fix himself all along his life sickness... An enclosure of nauseous freedom! Toilets are in Digging the Vein a possible space where it’s possible to pull out of reality. A place of nowhere, another kind of utopia. Filling the veins with poison where the body usually gets rid of its rejection. The veins precisely; so difficult to localize in the angular failings of an extenuating organism! Veins wherefrom blood splashes are spreading on the walls of different toilets for the joy of the narrator.
« I felt like a dog marking its territory. I had gone in the nicer hotel in West Hollywood to use the bathrooms and leave my mark on their pristine walls. It gave me a curious satisfaction (…). Perfect. I was the junky Jackson Pollock. » (p.91)*
As the veins are digging and rotting, as the fact of shooting himself in the neck emphasizes affliction, O’Neil brings his sense of humor where we can’t really expect. For a junky toilets are an area where it’s possible to give life a break, it’s the needle’s territory! In O’Neil’s writing, humor is like a breath inside the agony of the story. But outside of the cabinets, beyond irony, there is the urban hell and the body’s pain. There are the infinitely tangled streets and those veins; digging; always digging! Fortunately you can find toilets where it’s possible to get wasted for the price of a cheeseburger…
Heroin becomes so important for the narrator and the reader that we almost forget sex and rock n roll, those instants of illusionary freedom the book started with… A young guy gets to L.A. during a US tour with his successful band, he has a little money and a lot of hope, he falls in love and decides to stay away the usual grey atmosphere of London where he lives. He’ll have some success, he knows it! Despite the strength of his beliefs, hope is fading out and his relationship consumes itself. No more band, no album to record, no concerts; he writes, drinks and takes more and more speed. Then he breaks up with Christiane and starts heroin. His desires go away as addiction increases… The possibilities he used to envisage not long ago, the oscillating eventuality of his fantasy… what can he do now? Take more drugs to give everyday’s persistence another form.
« I was as uncreative as I was unsexual. Still I had my friends and I had my drugs" (p. 12)*
A long way out of this anguished path, reproducing Hollywood’s disillusion in London before meeting Vanessa, a Dionysus omen, a Satori! Exploring again the joy of fluid and life, of innocence and oblivion, fucking with a new sensual delight! Thanks to this meeting and the sensitive surge going through his body, love will slowly make his gloomy routine an old souvenir… Eventually he’ll be able to sing and to enjoy…
« Music was exciting again, creativity was in the air… » (p. 212)*
Music is now a necessary acoustic skin, an ethereal support to the loving fusion of pleasure he’s experimenting. Kraftwerk or David Bowie, Joy Division, Beastie Boys, The Stooges, Lou Reed or even Fatboy Slim… rock and pop songs are for the reader a companion through their diverse mood and the feelings they inspire… Here a chapter is named Gimme shelter, then another one Here comes success, a little further some words from a song slide into a sentence. Because Tony O’Neil is a musician; like Henry Miller, like Nietzsche. A musician who decided to continue his sonic quest through the writing while