Interview by Carlos Detres
In the summer of ’07, I picked up a novel called, Digging the Vein. The book is a semi-autobiographical account based on the author’s heroin use and descent from rockstar status to gutter junkie. I didn’t need to try heroin to understand because the book is about more than that. It’s about a young man going through the motions of life, broken marriages, poverty, and the harrowing abyss of drug addiction. It was one of those books that forced a finger back onto the pages and turn back to different passages to re-read them.
BLACK INK won’t be Tony O’Neill’s first Whiskey Dregs reading. He was there in the summer of ’08 in a quiet, elegant neighborhood cafe in Astoria, where we had no business doing readings. Many locals attended and were dually shocked by both his language and talent. Most people got Tony O’Neill, including the folks who had never done drugs. His writing does that. It’s relatable no matter your experience and the language is beautifully crafted with a poet’s touch.
Since then, Tony has added Hero of the Underground (co-written with former NFL football player Jason Pete), Down and Out on Murder Mile, Notre Dame du Vide, Neon Angel (co-written with The Runaways’ Cherie Currie soon to be released), and the upcoming Sick City to his growing list of novels.
For more information on BLACK INK where Tony will be reading along with others, go here. Event will take place at Angels and Kings on 4/10/2010
1. You’ve been on a tear these last few years, releasing several books in a relatively short period of time. How have you adapted to your achievements?
You have to understand that for me writing kind of came out of the left field, and it came at a time when I was pretty much down and out. So when I wrote Digging the Vein and it got published, back in 2006 that really felt like I had been handed a second chance at life. I mean I had nothing at that point – no career, no money, no solid place to live, and a big dope habit. So even though it wasn’t a money-spinner for me to have a book out on an independent press, it at least promised me a sense of direction. I just grabbed it and ran with it, because I had no idea what the plan B was. When I was strung out I devoted my every waking hour to scoring dope, so it’s not a huge jump for me to devote at least that again to my writing. By summer this year I will have published 7 books all written in the past 4 years, but until you asked me that question I never really stopped and looked at it that way. My mind is always on the next one, really.
2. You have co-authored a pair of memoirs with Jason Peter (Hero of the Underground: My Journey Down to Heroin and Back) and Cherie Currie (Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story). Their stories followed a trajectory to dreams, excess, addiction, despair, and renaissance — similar to yours. I always tell people that you can see someone who’s into cocaine a mile away. I tell them, “The devil knows his own”. Do you share a bond with them even before beginning to work together?
Oh totally, there is definitely a kind of story that I’m drawn to. Co-writing someone’s memoirs is a really personal thing, and if you don’t identify on some profound level with the subject then I don’t know how you can do it. Jason and Cherie were both totally different people, who did different things, and our working process was different. But I approached them both the same way: I talked to them, found what I identified with in their stories, and started there. With Jason, I had to learn all about sports and American colleges, and what it was like to be a twenty one year old millionaire. With Cherie I had to really understand what it was to be instantly notorious at fifteen years old, and be in an industry that totally discriminated against you on the basis of your gender. But those things that we had in common – all of the themes you mentioned in your question – they were my way into their stories.
3. You have two upcoming books. The first, you co-authored with Runaways’ Cherie Currie. Could you briefly describe what that was that like?
Working with Cherie was a trip. I love that era of music, I knew The Runaways, and despite all that I thought I knew about Cherie, the book turned into a much deeper story than I’d imagined at first. Before I met Cherie and the idea was fairly abstract, I was thinking it was going to just be this booze and coke fuelled rampage, set in the glam rock scene. Instead what we ended up with was something more complex. Neon Angel definitely has that “rock and roll Babylon” side to it; but it’s also a story about someone growing up under the craziest set of circumstances imaginable, and these intense friendships with the other girls in the band that were just stretched to the breaking point. I have a lot of respect for Cherie simply for surviving everything that was thrown at her. Cherie is a strong chick, and had her own ideas how the book should be – which is exactly how it should be. I mean, she had been working on this book for a long time, and it meant everything to her. It was an intense process but ultimately a very rewarding one, and I do feel that we delivered a book that will take a lot of people by surprise.
4. Your novels share honest accounts of addiction to heroin and use of other narcotics — the good times and the shit times. Is it ever difficult to recall some of those experiences to write about them?
No. You never forget what it is like. It was such a huge part of my life that I will carry that with me until the day I die. I still sometimes have intense dreams about injecting dope, and I wake up totally in that “fiending junkie” state of mind. That said, recently I have moved away from writing about that period of my own life. I feel that with Digging the Vein and Down and out on murder Mile I pretty much covered it, and wanted to stretch out and do different things, which is why Sick City was so important to me. I mean the lifestyle, the scene is all integral to Sick City’s story – I suppose needles will probably always be a motif in my writing in the same way that booze was in Bukowski’s stuff, but what interests me more is not so much writing about my own life, but using that world as a place setting for other stories.
5. Your novels have always been underlined with dark humor. Sick City’s premise of two addicts harboring a secret sex tape of none other than Sharon Tate is already funny. How does this novel compare to your past works?
Well, when I wrote books that were heavily based upon m own life, like the first 2, they were always presented as novels, and not memoir. This was because I never wanted to get trapped into having to write about myself forever. This might seem very vain, that I was thinking this far ahead when I was publishing my first book, that I was considering what would happen two or three books down the road when I wanted to write a work of pure fiction, but I go back to my first answer – I never had a plan B. If it wasn’t this, it was the madhouse, the morgue, or the gutter to be honest. So even though Sick City is not autobiographical fiction, it can definitely be seen as a continuation of the first 2 books. A lot of the locations are the same, many of the characters are versions of people I knew in the dope scene, it’s almost as if some of the side characters from the first two books have now taken center stage. There are scenes in Sick City which were plucked straight out of my own life. I’m just not telling you which parts.
6. You have a busy year ahead of you it seems. Are there any other projects that we can expect?
I’m hoping to get my book of short stories; Notre Dame du Vide translated and published in English. That would be cool, because I think that it’s a really strong collection but the timing was just off for America. The French really seemed to dig it though, and I lucked out and got an amazing publisher and translator over there. So I’d like to see that one come out stateside. Sick City comes out in July, and so I’m very focused on making sure that this book find the right readers, and all of that stuff. I’m working on a new novel, but I’m literally around 10,000 words in so it seems to early to talk about it, as I’m superstitious and I’m afraid to jinx it. The thing is, every time I sit down to write a book it seems like an impossible task, and when I complete one it always feels like it happened despite me, not because of me. So I’m really superstitious, down to the room I write in, the time of day I write, and the things I have on my writing desk to bring me luck. A book never feels real to me unless you have 40,000 words plus because then it’s too painful to scrap it. But right now it’s still in the incubator with tubes sticking out of it, and I definitely don’t want to do anything rash…
