Digging the Vein Read Online Free Page B

It was one of the happiest moments of my life and I spent it with my best friends, my band mates for Christ sakes, on a plane headed towards a new city, a new adventure. This would never end, I thought gleefully, as we started to land and I guzzled the last of the booze.
    That would be our final tour, as it happened. The Catsuits disintegrated under the weight of bad management, infighting, and Laura’s increasing depression over our constant touring. In one of those moments of beautiful synchronicity, in the same week the band fell apart I found myself fired from Mark’s group over a rumble in Moscow, which had happened a month earlier. In one of the few public appearances Mark had decided to make that year, the Mafia-organized run of shows in a prestigious theatre had fallen apart after an incident in a seedy nightclub. There, the honor of a pair of underage looking Russian whores was besmirched, a stripper dressed as Lenin was assaulted by a drunken Billy Idol look-alike, and myself and the tour manager received a beating for refusing to pay a bar tab run up by a head Mafia guy. While I was away on The Catsuits final tour, I suddenly became the focus of recriminations over the incident (which I could barely remember due to the amount of vodka I had consumed that night) and I found myself out of 2 gigs at once. Before the end of the year I was heading out of London with a couple of suitcases a one-way ticket to the States. I was 19 years old and I was going to LA, so fuck them! I wouldn’t remain a has-been in London, when I could make a fresh start in the city I had fallen in love with. I set across the Atlantic to reclaim my dream: I had Christiane, a heart full of determination and 3000 dollars in my pocket. I knew I couldn’t fail.
    After being in LA for well over a year, I was still out of a record deal. Actually, my band getting a deal now seemed like some distant dream fading rapidly, and I was getting by on the old fall back—writing. I was messing around with an idea for a novel which never seemed to get anywhere and since leaving London I had been making ends meet by writing music reviews for a weekly newspaper and music video treatments for a handful of music video directors around town. Often it paid very well, and in the first week of a good month I could have already earned enough to pay rent and cover living expenses. I suppose it was a testament to my laziness that even these two or so hours of work a week started to irk me. I resented and couldn't stand to listen to the bands that I had to write about. For every piece of shit band that you cringe at on MTV there are a million others, each seemingly more mediocre than the last, who aren't even good enough to fool the mass of stupidity that is the American record buying public. I created numb skulled video scenarios for New Country artists, middle of the road rock bands fronted by men who looked like they should be chugging beers in some awful frat house in Hell, soft metal, funk, rap, even, god forgive me, ska-revival groups: trying in vain to block out anything but the pay check from my mind. And to make matters worse, there was the unfinished novel that sat by the bed, taunting me every night as I went to sleep, nearly two hundred pages of self-indulgent shit, which seemed like it would never be finished. As I stopped work on the book and took on more and more work writing music videos, my sense of rage and impotence grew… My drinking and intake of drugs increased in indefinable increments at first, just as my relationship with Christiane started to fall apart. It was hard to say where or when the rot started but soon both of us were as withdrawn and frustrated and full of mute resentment for each other. Christiane was like some strange and alien form of life to someone like me. After all I had grown up in a depressed, overcast Northern English mill town, while she was a blonde-haired and blue-eyed California girl. She had the kind of life that I had