Tony O'Neill - A Story Sadder Than All The Bruised Whores in Hollywood

Tony O’Neill might be the closest thing we have in Britain to a Bukwoski or John Fante figure, an author who writes authentically about the world of drug addicts, pimps and petty criminals. Now based in New York, O’Neill started out as the keyboard player for Kenickie, Marc Almond and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, before winding up living a peripatetic junkie lifestyle in LA. His first novels, Digging the Vein and Down and Out on Murder Mile, are semi-fictionalised accounts of his addiction, notable for the sparse, unromantic language, bitter humour and his refusal to wallow in self-pity. Third novel Sick City moves away from this autobiographical territory, whilst still using his underworld experiences to weave a tale around two junkies looking to make enough to retire on, by off-loading a long-lost Manson Family sex tape.  

‘A Story Sadder Than All The Bruised Whores in Hollywood’ has been released as part of independent publisher Galley Beggar’s Singles Club. Like its musical equivalent, this single distils much of O’Neill’s appeal in a cheap, quick format. We’re back in the world of Hollywood hotels (not the nice kind), pimps, and Top of the Pops flashbacks. Any hint of glamour or bohemianism is immediately undercut, as the narrator describes the characters who surround him: ‘Raphael is one of the only honest-to-God pimps I have ever met and really he is quite a sad little fuck.’ Raphael and his girlfriend/meal-ticket Tori have come round to the narrator’s hotel room to smoke crack before she goes to work; in the claustrophobic room, the narrator endures Raphael’s exaggerated attempts to prove his dominance, first getting a blow-job from Tori in front of the narrator, then beating her up.

Whilst he tries to ignore Raphael, the narrator thinks back to an incident three years ago, when he had been backstage at a Top of the Pops recording with his band, The Catsuits. Robbie Williams, then in limbo between leaving Take That and his solo career taking off, bounced into their dressing room, enthusing about the ‘John Barry strings’ on his new track Angels. O’Neill dismisses him out of hand, before predicting ‘we all float or sink to the correct level over time’. Back then, things were looking up: ‘we had gotten to number 26 in the charts. It was one of those weird days where it seems like the universe has gone out of synch and maybe anything was possible. The Labour party had just gotten into government and everyone was acting as if a big black cloud that had hung over England for longer than my lifetime had finally been lifted’. 

The mood is temporary though; soon, the camaraderie of the band, and backstage, is gone, and he is alone. The relationship between junkie and dealer is a zero-sum game - ‘as my fortunes declined, so his increased. Within weeks of him becoming my regular guy I lost my apartment… if a dealer’s fat, he’s eating too well, and doesn’t need your money’. Maybe music is the same. His vertiginous decline has been matched by Robbie Williams’s soaring success. For there to be winners, there also have to be losers, and the narrator has come to a disturbing conclusion about which side he is on. This may be a way of avoiding responsibility for his own failings. His final shout of ‘never overestimate the public’ suggests he feels he has been badly treated, unappreciated in his home country – the self-pity he feels is amplified by the melodramatic title, in which he suggests his decline is worse than the brutal treatment Tori receives from her pimp. 

Like Sam Mills’s recent release The Tic Tac Man, A Story Sadder Than All The Bruised Whores in Hollywood shows the versatility of the e-book format, the opportunity it allows for writers to release short or experimental pieces without having to worry about commercial appeal or the cost of a print run. It looks like it will be a while until O’Neill’s fourth book comes out in English, so this single is a good place-filler for fans, and a decent introduction for the uninitiated. For anyone sick of the romanticised stories about Pete Doherty and the like, then O’Neill’s visceral realism will be a welcome antidote