Tony ONeill has had a wild life as a musician, writer and junkie. Hes 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 ONeill: Pretty much. I didnt want to write it like a memoir because Im not really into those books. Im 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 wasnt 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 arent many people who are going to want to read my memoirs, Im 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 Id 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 youre detoxing. I was in London and Id been on a methadone program for seven years, before that Id been on a cocktail of heroin and methadone. It wasnt 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 Id 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 wasnt against it. Then, pretty much from the first time I tried heroin I didnt 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. Im still very ambivalent towards heroin. I dont regret anything really, but Im not using it right now and thats 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 hadnt 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. Theyre the two that are never really glorified. Theyre 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 wasnt expecting to go and towards the end it was just a fucking weight around my neck that was stopping me from doing anything. Theres 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. Ive 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 Id probably be talking to you while still doing it. Its 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 Im not the kind of person that would tell anybody not to do it, which is an interesting position because Ive got a two year old daughter now. I dont know what Im going to tell her when she gets older but one thing I dont want to do is be a hypocrite about it. Im 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 havent 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 couldnt get it together. We didnt even play a show in the end. This wasnt 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. Antons 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 couldnt sit still to learn a song. The whole thing was kind of a mess. I went back afterwards and really rediscovered the music. Antons an amazing songwriter and the albums are great. But I hear hes a lot less crazed now than he was. Our paths crossed when we were both at our heaviest periods of drug use. Im 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 Craigs List. I didnt 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 80s or something. Theyre new so theyre learning as well and they have a real determined DIY attitude about them. Theyre putting out really risky, very odd and not traditionally written books. They dont have 12 books about politics which is the stock in trade of independent press right now. Theyve 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 Im in a few lit magazines around the place. Ive 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: Whats your day job?
TO: Ive been working at 222 Bowery, which is Burroughs' old place oddly enough, not because Im 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. Hes the one who put out all the William Burroughs recordings. Im 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. Theyre really great stuff, Salvatore Dali, Yoko Ono, The Black Panthers, The Chicago riot.
Really most of the time Im home with my daughter and Im working on a follow up book. Ive got a book of poetry thats 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 Im 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. Ill definitely keep my fingers crossed for something like that.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy Digging the Vein
Daniel Robert Epstein: Is Digging the Vein autobiographical?
Tony ONeill: Pretty much. I didnt want to write it like a memoir because Im not really into those books. Im 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 wasnt 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 arent many people who are going to want to read my memoirs, Im 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 Id 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 youre detoxing. I was in London and Id been on a methadone program for seven years, before that Id been on a cocktail of heroin and methadone. It wasnt 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 Id 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 wasnt against it. Then, pretty much from the first time I tried heroin I didnt 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. Im still very ambivalent towards heroin. I dont regret anything really, but Im not using it right now and thats 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 hadnt 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. Theyre the two that are never really glorified. Theyre 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 wasnt expecting to go and towards the end it was just a fucking weight around my neck that was stopping me from doing anything. Theres 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. Ive 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 Id probably be talking to you while still doing it. Its 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 Im not the kind of person that would tell anybody not to do it, which is an interesting position because Ive got a two year old daughter now. I dont know what Im going to tell her when she gets older but one thing I dont want to do is be a hypocrite about it. Im 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 havent 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 couldnt get it together. We didnt even play a show in the end. This wasnt 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. Antons 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 couldnt sit still to learn a song. The whole thing was kind of a mess. I went back afterwards and really rediscovered the music. Antons an amazing songwriter and the albums are great. But I hear hes a lot less crazed now than he was. Our paths crossed when we were both at our heaviest periods of drug use. Im 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 Craigs List. I didnt 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 80s or something. Theyre new so theyre learning as well and they have a real determined DIY attitude about them. Theyre putting out really risky, very odd and not traditionally written books. They dont have 12 books about politics which is the stock in trade of independent press right now. Theyve 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 Im in a few lit magazines around the place. Ive 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: Whats your day job?
TO: Ive been working at 222 Bowery, which is Burroughs' old place oddly enough, not because Im 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. Hes the one who put out all the William Burroughs recordings. Im 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. Theyre really great stuff, Salvatore Dali, Yoko Ono, The Black Panthers, The Chicago riot.
Really most of the time Im home with my daughter and Im working on a follow up book. Ive got a book of poetry thats 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 Im 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. Ill definitely keep my fingers crossed for something like that.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
courtneyriot:
Tony ONeill has had a wild life as a musician, writer and junkie. Hes chronicled the rough part of his life in the book Digging the Vein while he was detoxing from methadone...