Digging the Vein
A Novel
Tony O’Neill
Contemporary Press: New York, NY, 219 pages

Reviewed by Mike Ferraro

As a young man, a kid really, Tony O’Neill got strung out on heroin in Los Angeles in the wake of a promising music career and a quickie marriage gone south. For three years he battled his addiction and demons, a virtual smorgasbord of woe begotten experience filled with junky days and nights, Methadone clinics, and twelve step mishaps, eventually kicking on his own through the perseverance of will and the power and promise of redemption through love, faith and inner fulfillment.

Still a young man, Tony O’Neill has survived the nightmare ordeal that is heroin addiction and given us his debut novel, DIGGING THE VEIN (Contemporary Press, 2005), a compressed fictionalized account of those brutal years on the streets hustling, scoring, fixing and getting clean. His suffering becomes our deliverance and it is a most generous gift for those willing to receive it. Like Burroughs, Selby, and Algren before him, O’Neill is unflinching in his portrayal of the dehumanization that permeates the life of an addict, capturing the stink and filth of burned-out neighborhoods and characters infected by this lifestyle. In showing us the bleakest, blackest bottom we are confronted with an elemental humanity and compassion. Strange how life works, no?

Yes, having ingested and internalized all the great dope fiend novels that choke as they define the genre, in DIGGING THE VEIN Tony O’Neill offers up something miraculous in a perversely oversaturated field: a unique perspective on the whole drug thing. I never thought I’d say the words … This condescending attitude toward drug fiction can’t be helped when considering all the years of abuse and bad writing that has plagued the genre.

The opening chapter introduces O’Neill’s nameless British protagonist: a young junky looking to score in Hollywood, fresh from thirty-eight days in rehab and glad to be back on the streets, back in the familiarity of routine. He is of a pedigree and background similar to the author’s own: a teenage musician “from a depressed northern English mill town” who finds himself on the skids, caught up in the excess and the wreckage of the music biz. Back in a motel room, reveling in his first fix since bailing on the clinic, he is aware of the clawing need to bear witness to his disintegration, to mine the depths of his despair and addiction:

None of it can touch me now that the heroin is deep and heavy in my bones. I fall back into a trance. I am beyond life and death, beyond the boredom and madness now. 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. (page 4)

Moments like these are when O’Neill is at his best. The writing is sharp and focused, digging at the heart of what it means to be an addict.

Back in L.A. churning out music reviews and video treatments for crummy late-90’s pop stars, O’Neill’s protagonist has “two hundred pages of wank,” a novel-in-progress, on his nightstand taunting him and the despondency and impotency of his life and marriage leads him into the vapid, drug-fueled L.A. party boy lifestyle. Through mountains of cocaine, E and one-dimensional characters his destiny is set and the first third of the novel focuses on the grim superficiality of L.A.’s drug and club culture. Despite endless partying, and sex, and ‘wild’ lifestyle chronicled here, no one is having a good time and that seems to be the point of these early scenes–to illustrate the banality of the deeply unfulfilling lives that these people lead.

To writ, all of this can be summed up in the character of Sal Mackenzie, a fringe reveler of the party set, but indicative of the degeneracy of the lot:

Sal was a man without any kind of moral compass, and so long as you accepted him on this basis, he could never surprise you. It was best not to get mad if he screwed you on a drug deal or fucked your girlfriend while she was passed out drunk. He just didn’t know any better. (22)

Other than junk, the closest thing to a friend that O’Neill’s unnamed narrator has in all this is RP, an ageing pretty boy and set designer of straight-to-video soft porn thrillers, who used to sodomize our hero’s wife in the back of his truck when they had a thing. As O’Neill’s protagonist slips further into the doldrums after another all night binge he tries to articulate his sense of loss and confusion to RP on a balcony overlooking Western Ave in Hollywood:

“Where is this going to end?” I asked him. “Death,” he told me, “for all of us. For the whole city. The whole 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’s left to do.” RP looked beautiful that morning. He had been awake for a couple of nights … He was disheveled but in a deliberate way, and the early morning light gave a color to his usual pallor. He made sense. He made all of the sense in the world, and there on that balcony full of whiskey and cocaine and ecstasy and speed I loved RP. I truly loved him as a brother, and I didn’t want the moment to pass. I blurted out a garbled, “I love you,” and immediately regretted it, full of embarrassment and inexplicable shame. But he reached out to me and put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me, telling me that he loved me too. “I understand you,” he told me, “don’t ever doubt that. Don’t ever forget this.” (46)

This passage underscores the nihilistic core of the novel and illustrates the utter disjunction between these characters and the profound isolation of its central figure. In O’Neill’s world, this is as close as these people get.

When O’Neill finally plummets off the cliff, into a life of sustained hard drug usage, it is not with a bang but rather with a whimper or dull thud: “Finally, I was finished. I was finished with the party, I was finished with everything. I didn’t need to say goodbye to anyone. I got up, and I got the fuck out” (59). This decision feels inevitable, as if there is no other choice or trajectory for this young man at this juncture. This realization is confronted head-on, rationally–clinically–even. The roots the same as in any fractured life gone too far, be it in pursuit of drugs and alcohol or money, or a million other life-eroding illusions that allow the essence of one’s life to get lost and become rotted. I believe it was Hubert Selby, Jr. who said “Happiness is an inside job.” Well, whoever said it knew what the hell he was talking about. Whatever the case, once the course of self-destruction has been set it becomes exceedingly difficult to right the ship. From DIGGING THE VEIN:

When does a habit become an addiction? When does the particular insanity that comes with choosing heroin as an aesthetic, as a lifestyle, become normal? I’m not sure; all I know is after a while of drifting along with things, of not dealing with my immediate problems and focusing instead on funding heroin use, things shifted around me fundamentally. At some point I woke up out of heroin, and instead of becoming confronted by my living situation, my broken marriage, 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. The other stuff, well, that was as abstract and distant as if it was happening to someone else. And in a way, I suppose it was. (66)

There is no moralizing here, no grandstanding, no clues to kicking or self-righteous proclamations of the “cured.” Instead you’ll find two-hundred-plus pages of unremitting brutalization; bruised and battered junk life devoid of sentimentality and romanticism. This is a real as it gets. In DIGGING THE VEIN Tony O’Neill has lived more lives in his twenty-seven years than most people could in a thousand.

I recently saw the Bukowski documentary BORN INTO THIS and the refrain of one of the poems featured, “the crunch” from LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL, comes to me now: “people are not good to each other.” This is undeniably true. To which I would like to add, people are not good to themselves. DIGGING THE VEIN is a bludgeoning reminder of that simple axiom.

We can learn a lot from Tony O’Neill if we have the courage to listen. This is an engaging and original debut.

Mike Ferraro is a musician and write. He is currently based out of New Jersey.