Digging the Vein author Tony O’Neill
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Tony O’Neill has had a wild life as a musician, writer and junkie. He’s chronicled the rough part of his life in the book Digging the Vein while he was detoxing from methadone.

Buy Digging the Vein

Daniel Robert Epstein: Is Digging the Vein autobiographical?

Tony O’Neill: Pretty much. I didn’t want to write it like a memoir because I’m not really into those books. I’m more into guys like Bukowski, Hemingway or the early Burroughs stuff when they were writing exactly what happened to them but it was a novel. Another guy who does this is Dan Fante who I have a lot of respect for. When I sat down to write it I wasn’t doing it to get published. I was just writing to keep myself sane while I was detoxing off methadone. I just took my own name out of it because I got really crazy riffing off myself. Also there aren’t many people who are going to want to read my memoirs, I’m no Winston Churchill. I just figured no one would be interested in my memoirs unless it was a novel.

DRE: How did writing get you through detox?

TO: When I finally did it and stuck to it my wife and I had a daughter on the way. I was really terrified of what was coming next because I felt like I’d hit a dead end. I gave up everything else when I started getting into heroin so everything just ground to a halt. You have a lot of time on your hands when you’re detoxing. I was in London and I’d been on a methadone program for seven years, before that I’d been on a cocktail of heroin and methadone. It wasn’t NA or AA or any of those things, I just did it all by myself. I got a private doctor to give me medicine to get me through the worst of it and then it was just me on my own. Writing gave me something to do. Every morning I’d wake up and the first thought in my head was I really needed to score and to stop myself from doing that; I would sit down at the computer and write. I procrastinated over one page a day and after a while it started really coming and the more the book appeared the more excited I got. I realized there was another option because there was something else I was good at besides getting high.

DRE: How did you get involved in drugs?

TO: It was around a lot when I was in LA. I had some success as a musician in England then the band broke up, I married a girl I met on tour and I ended up in LA at 19 years old. I never tried heroin before but I wasn’t against it. Then, pretty much from the first time I tried heroin I didn’t stop. It still is the greatest drug experience I ever had. I went from smoking it one week to injecting it the next week and I knew that this is what I wanted to do. It was like a really intense love affair that left me penniless, careerless, with not many working veins in my body. While it lasted it was beautiful and I was really buried in the drug subculture of LA for a while. I’m still very ambivalent towards heroin. I don’t regret anything really, but I’m not using it right now and that’s the way I have to keep it.

DRE: You must have loved the romantic aspects of heroin as well, who knows what William Burroughs would have done if he hadn’t been a junkie.

TO: Yeah, I always look back and think that maybe I was destined to be a junkie because when I was 16 my heroes were Lenny Bruce, Chet Baker, William Burroughs. It was never deliberate but, as you said, there was a very romantic aspect to heroin. Every other drug was just a little more accessible, if you want to do the most unacceptable drug to society, you either smoke crack or you shoot heroin. They’re the two that are never really glorified. They’re looked upon as being the worst drug you can ever do, so of course I wanted to do it. I also thought I would be able to control it. My whole motto was live fast, die young. It took me to a place I wasn’t expecting to go and towards the end it was just a fucking weight around my neck that was stopping me from doing anything. There’s nothing romantic about being on a methadone program. My entire life was pissing in bottles and giving it to doctors. If I needed to go anywhere I had to come up with enough of a description of where I was going so I could leave town for a few days. The walls really closed in around me.

DRE: I had a friend who kicked heroin and he told me he would never tell anyone not to do it, do you agree?

TO: I agree with that. I’ve got friends who have been completely destroyed by lots of other things. I always look at heroin as a fairly benign drug. What I think is not benign is the kind of prohibition and the kind of lifestyle that goes along with it. If it was the turn of the century I could have just gone into a chemist shop or a pharmacy and bought my heroin and clean syringes and I’d probably be talking to you while still doing it. It’s the fact that. depending on where you are it is so expensive. When I was in LA they were always struggling to close the needle exchanges down so it forced you into this criminal lifestyle. It was like I had to indulge in criminality to do it. In between hustling enough money to get it and trying to keep a roof over your head, there was no time for anything else. But I’m not the kind of person that would tell anybody not to do it, which is an interesting position because I’ve got a two year old daughter now. I don’t know what I’m going to tell her when she gets older but one thing I don’t want to do is be a hypocrite about it. I’m sure her mother will have plenty of stories. She never used drugs like that and I was still using when we met.

The more I get away from it the more I can look back and romanticize some of the misery, which is also a good thing when it came to writing this book.

DRE: You hung out with The Brian Jonestown Massacre back in LA; do you have to stay away from people like that now?

TO: I haven’t been back to LA since I finally left. My regret with the band was that it was so abortive because everybody was so high we couldn’t get it together. We didn’t even play a show in the end. This wasn’t just about the guys in Brian Jonestown Massacre being messed up, because Anton had managed to assemble a band of people who were even more fucked up than him. Anton’s got a reputation, but I think I was doing more drugs than him throughout that, which is pretty hard to do. I was doing coke all through those recording sessions so I couldn’t sit still to learn a song. The whole thing was kind of a mess. I went back afterwards and really rediscovered the music. Anton’s an amazing songwriter and the albums are great. But I hear he’s a lot less crazed now than he was. Our paths crossed when we were both at our heaviest periods of drug use. I’m sure now we could kind of get together and it would be a lot saner.

DRE: How did Digging the Vein get to Contemporary Press?

TO: It was completely a random thing but I had actually heard of them before. When I finished the book I thought maybe someone, somewhere, would be interested in publishing it. Then when I moved with my wife back to New York I got an internship with Contemporary Press through Craig’s List. I didn’t have any working papers yet and wanted to do something to get some experience and figure out what I was going to do. They are a bunch of really cool people and there was something punk rock about their attitude. After a couple of months I told them I had a book and after they read it, to my surprise, they freaked out. They thought it was great and they spent the next few months whipping the book into shape and doing final edits on it. Contemporary Press is a great outfit and it feels like having an album out in Rough Trade in the 80’s or something. They’re new so they’re learning as well and they have a real determined DIY attitude about them. They’re putting out really risky, very odd and not traditionally written books. They don’t have 12 books about politics which is the stock in trade of independent press right now. They’ve got books about brain-eating zombies and serial killing lesbians and in that pile is my celebration of rock and roll and drug abuse.

DRE: I saw you have work in a few upcoming poetry compilations like Paris Bitter Hearts Pit.

TO: I write poetry and short stories and I’m in a few lit magazines around the place. I’ve got a short story in a magazine called Savage Kick about a guy who gets his balls cut off by a prostitute and then becomes a really famous writer once he learns to live without his balls. An excerpt from my novel is going to be in a UK publication called 3AM magazine.

DRE: What’s your day job?

TO: I’ve been working at 222 Bowery, which is Burroughs' old place oddly enough, not because I’m obsessive and stalking him, I just started to work for an outfit called Giorno Poetry Systems. John Giorno is a poet and was friends with Burroughs. He’s the one who put out all the William Burroughs recordings. I’m actually working on a project archiving a bunch of photographs from this Italian photographer called Gianfranco Mantegna who died a few years ago and left all these boxes of unpublished photographs. They’re really great stuff, Salvatore Dali, Yoko Ono, The Black Panthers, The Chicago riot.

Really most of the time I’m home with my daughter and I’m working on a follow up book. I’ve got a book of poetry that’s going to come out in the US in 2007 and another book of stories and poems in the UK.

DRE: Is anyone looking at Digging the Vein in Hollywood?

TO: Not that I’m aware of. People keep telling me that I should really do that. As a movie it writes itself because great people are on the periphery in it but at the heart, it is a really visceral movie. I’ll definitely keep my fingers crossed for something like that.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Digging+the+Vein+author+Tony+O%92Neill/