The song used to float out of my Los Angeles motel room, intertwine with the smell of the heroin I was cooking and the chemical stench of the crack. I used to send it up into the endless California skies and let it float away like a lost childhood balloon. His voice, fractured, grown husky and thin from the ravages of the drugs and the heartache, every word seemed on the verge of collapsing in on itself. It was the saddest music in the world.

"There’s a girl here… and she’s almost you… almost blue."

In a Hackney flat, above a shoe shop on murder mile I watched cockroaches walk about on top of the portable television, and listened to the mice in the walls. But Chet was always by my side, reassuring me. He was so beautiful once. A beautiful man. But by the time he recorded this version of the classic song he was old and sunken. He looked like a death mask; his real teeth had long since been smashed out of his head during a drug deal gone wrong, and replaced with dentures. When he raised the trumpet and blew, each note seemed crystalline, fragile, hanging impossible in the ether, always on the verge of collapse.

The song was performed at a funeral pace. “This is heroin music,” I thought, the first time I heard it. This song followed me like 4am guilt from London, to Los Angeles and back again. When I stumbled off the plane in 2001 weighing 120lbs, my teeth missing, my arms still open, Chet was with me. When loved ones would cry and ask me why I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t explain… but it was all there in Chet’s phantom voice:

“Flirting with this disaster became me
It named me as the fool who only aimed to be
Almost blue

It’s funny to think that now I sometimes play the song for my daughter. I bathe her, she giggles, and I dry her off, she jokes with me, splashes me, and I comb the tangles from her dark hair while Chet’s disembodied voice floats over the both us from beyond the grave. The song makes me sad sometimes. Sometimes it makes me want to get high again. Sometimes it makes me shiver, as if someone walked over my grave.

I have had very vivid dreams, ever since getting a junk habit. These lucid dreams have stayed with me since quitting heroin.

I once dreamt that I was in Chet’s hotel room in Amsterdam the night he fell from that open window to his death.

Did I push him?

I don’t remember.

I remember Chet’s old spectre face smiling at me from across the room, lit underneath by the flame of a lighter as he cooked up a shot.

I remember feeling that I was home.

And then nothing more.

Tony O'Neill is 27 years old. In a previous life he played keyboards for bands and artists such as Kenickie, Marc Almond and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. After moving to Los Angeles he also became a heroin addict, crack fiend and a speedfreak. He started writing about his experiences on the periphery of the Hollywood Dream and has been writing ever since. His autobiographical novel 'Digging the Vein' was published in January 2006. He lives in New York where he works as a labourer and writes. To read a selection of Tony’s writing on the Showcase, click here or to visit Tony’s official website, click here.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.