Digging the Vein Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    I was hanging out a lot with RP a lot at the time. He was one of the seemingly endless list of people on the fringes of the film industry in my social circle, but when he found a steady girlfriend his appearances became ever more sporadic. I started hanging out with his friends, who where now my friends, to compensate. And of course, RP not being around as much did alleviate one problem, which was becoming more pronounced as my marriage stagnated. That problem was the nature of his relationship with Christiane.
    RP had some kind of weird Midwestern cult family background. He landed in Los Angeles when he was 20, with long hair and a pretty, androgynous face. He went to work building sets, and then went to work on LA’s drugs and women. 15 years on and he was still doing it. He built sets for the kind of movies that are only seen by people involved in the production or insomniac late-night cable viewers—dull soft-porn thrillers, straight to video horror sequels, vehicles for unknown rap artists. The films he worked on were almost exclusively directed by first timers, hacks, or 70’s pornographers on the skids. RP was older now, a little heavier, with his hair bleached and cut short, eyes perched owl-like behind a pair of Diesel glasses.
    RP was also Christiane’s ex-boyfriend. The photograph of her giggling coyly underneath his draped arm on our apartment wall served as a constant reminder of that fact. His youthful and somewhat handsome face taunted me from various other photographs on our living room walls, staring at me with a James Dean sneer and a look in his eyes announcing ownership, superiority, masculinity. He was the only one of her ex’s that she still socialized with; the only one who she kept photographs of on our walls. When I questioned her about that, she would tell me that she only kept the picture because it had her mother/ father/ dog in it. He disgusted her now, she told me—he was a drug-addled asshole. The way she said it let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I, too was also in this category and rapidly falling out of her favor. My rising jealousy was in direct correlation with the stagnation of our sex life, which had started to disintegrate pretty soon after I came to LA to live with her and had reached a virtual standstill by this point. I felt self-conscious of her constant rebuttals of my sexual advances. After a while the way she looked at me contemptuously when I placed a hand on her body became more than I could bear, so I stopped making any kind of advances whatsoever. Sex became a strange and rare occurrence in our home. This didn’t really bother me too much. She fucked like a corpse for the last few months and had transformed, with frightening and baffling speed, from the exciting and exotic girl I’d met and married on a spur of a drunken moment, to an angry, uptight and withdrawn stranger. She became expert in shaming me out of any kind of sexual demand. We didn't kiss when we fucked. She refused, point blank, to give me head. Towards the end, all I fantasized about doing with her mouth was punching the fucking thing.
    This transformation rendered whatever sex we did have into an