Digging the Vein Read Online Free PDF Page B

in an attempt to get somewhere on my book. I wrote a few illegible paragraphs before passing out around midnight. I woke up still drunk at 4am with the words THIS BOOK IS SHIT scrawled across several pages of my manuscript in a childlike hand. I crawled into bed then, and Christiane left for work by 8 that morning, failing to wake me up with her usual round of alarm clocks, stomping about on hardwood floors and demands that I clean the house.
    Despite the fact I worked from home, Christiane still treated me like an unemployed layabout. I had fallen into an easy writing gig that paid well, and she seemed to resent the fact that I often made more than she did per week by writing for a couple of hours a day. She told me I need routine, I needed to cut back on the drugs and the booze, that I needed to act like a “normal human being.” When faced with my drunkenness and drug abuse she cut down her drinking to borderline sober amounts. I fought the sneaking suspicion that she would do that just to spite me—it seemed too ridiculous. I needed booze. The drunker I stayed the happier I felt and the less likely I was to trigger another crying/ name calling/ plate-smashing argument by asking her why we never fucked anymore. I stayed drunk and high, and Christiane tolerated my silence. I acted like a spineless asshole.
    I told RP I’d be there. I put the phone down and wandered into the bathroom, regurgitating violently into the toilet bowl for a while. Then the worst of it was over I called Joan, a pretty friend of RP and Sal Mackenzie’s who worked over at Nickelodeon in some vague managerial role. She well read, funny definitely attractive: RP had found her during a nine day drunk nearly four months ago and she’d quickly assimilated into our group. Dark hair and dark eyes, alabaster skin and high cheekbones - classically beautiful, I suppose. She had the look of a girl from a nice middle class family who had rebelled; her face had breeding about it, full lips and smooth skin that had seemingly never known a day of worry or self-doubt. Nearly every male friend of mine was attracted to her and I she knew it. Recently I had sensed a growing closeness between us. Although I knew it was dangerous, I allowed it to continue. With the shit I had to endure at home, the attention of another female made me feel at least slightly better about myself. I got through to her office first time—a rarity—and we talked casually for a while.
    “You paying a visit to JB?” I asked after a few moments small talk, assuring myself that she was heading out with us tonight. JB was a friend of hers, a drug dealer who specialized in pharmaceuticals and Ecstasy.
    “ Sure.”
    “ Will you pick up some stuff for me?”
    “ Yeah honey, what d'you want?”
    “ Couple of hits of ex.”
    Later, I wandered along Vermont Avenue for a while, picking up a copy of The Melody Maker at Skylight Books. I read it sadly as I ate at a hole in the wall Mexican joint called Orange BJ's, reflecting on my situation. I missed London. I missed my old bedsit in Battersea, I missed the changing seasons and the feeling of sweetpainful nostalgia when Autumn settled over the city and the foggy air would glow with yellow sodium light. I’d fled London because I’d sensed an encroaching darkness there, one that threatened to swallow me whole. I’d somehow thought the endless California sun might banish it, or at least keep it at bay. But now I knew that the darkness had traveled with me, and there wasn’t enough booze in the world to drown it in. Back at the house I cracked open a can of Steel Reserve and I listened to David Bowie singing “Life on Mars.”
    Later that night and I was driving up and down Sunset with Daschel Tate, an oddball Hollywood agent who claimed to have psychic powers, and drank alcohol as if it were spring water. He was a nice but temperamental guy, and tonight was about to turn psychotic through lack of food. “My blood sugar level is