The Million-Rand Teaspoon

by Nikki Ridley

  The

  Million-Rand

  Teaspoon

  The

  Million-Rand

  Teaspoon

  A TRUE STORY of

  ADDICTION and REDEMPTION

  Nikki Ridley

  Published by Zebra Press

  an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd

  Reg. No. 1966/003153/07

  80 McKenzie Street, Cape Town, 8001

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000 South Africa

  www.zebrapress.co.za

  First published 2006

  Publication © Zebra Press 2006

  Text © Nikki Ridley 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners.

  PUBLISHING MANAGER: Marlene Fryer

  EDITOR: Robert Plummer

  PROOFREADER: Ronel Richter-Herbert

  ISBN 978 1 77007 321 0 (print)

  ISBN 978 1 77022 262 5 (ePub)

  ISBN 978 1 77022 263 2 (PDF)

  Over 50 000 unique African images available to purchase

  from our image bank at www.imagesofafrica.co.za

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  Let Me Introduce Myself – Paul Bateman

  Looking Back – Val Bateman

  PART I: TAKING CHANCES

  A Different Place Where a Different You Fits In – Paul

  High Times – Savannah

  Red Eyes and Sticky Fingers – Val

  The Ties that Bind – Paul

  Breaking the Ties – Savannah

  Getting Tough – Val

  Heaven Goes Grey and Cold – Paul

  At the Prison Gates – Paul

  So Much for Rock Bottom – Val

  Determination Can Get You Nowhere – Dale

  Under the Bridge Downtown – Paul

  Hope Doesn’t Float – Val

  The Call – Val

  PART II: A SECOND CHANCE

  A Hand for the Damned – Savannah

  A Hard Decision – Val

  Swimming – Paul

  The Unimaginable – Lynn

  Headway – Veronica Raaf

  Time to Think – Paul

  IN CLOSING

  The Million-Rand Teaspoon – Mark Bateman

  Hindsight Is an Exact Science – Paul

  POSTSCRIPT

  Author’s Note

  I LAY NO CLAIM TO THIS STORY. The Million-Rand Teaspoon is someone else’s story, and it belongs to him and the others who have contributed to it. My authorship has simply been a bridge between their experiences and the way they are described in this book.

  The primary character in this story is a blind and brain-injured ex-drug abuser named Paul Bateman. I was first approached by his family in April 2003 to help Paul tell his story. Their concern was that they would not be around to look after him forever, and they were hoping he would be able to derive some form of future income from going to schools to give talks on drug addiction. The original idea was to put something on paper to complement such talks, which the children and their parents could take home with them.

  However, apart from some immediate doubts as to the logistics of Paul touring the country’s schools, at our first meeting a listless Paul told me he hoped that by telling his story it would give his life a purpose, and between us we expanded on the original idea of ‘putting something on paper’ to producing a book – intended for the market that Paul felt he needed to reach in order to obtain the purpose (and peace) he sought. Paul wanted to put his story ‘out there’, he said – but he was concerned, as were other members of his family, that among the recent glut of addiction tales, and considering the change in drug trends, his story would not carry the weight required to affect anything. So he made it clear that he didn’t want to come across as preaching the evils of drugs. He just wanted to tell his story, get it out of him, with the hope that it might make just one vulnerable teen think differently. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I’ve been there. I didn’t listen. So why would they? Preaching is a turn-off. It just encourages you.’

  My intention was to write Paul’s story just as he told it to me, but I quickly put that idea aside – for a couple of reasons. Firstly, Paul has ‘lost’ most of his life. It quickly became apparent that he remembers only bits and pieces, and he had a tendency to get ‘stuck’ in one place when trying to delve into both the past and his psychological present. Therefore I needed the input of Paul’s family and friends, to fill in the gaps in his story.

  Secondly, while interviewing Paul and his family, it struck me that their story needed to be told just as much as Paul’s did. Addiction is a selfish disease, but the way recovering addicts are treated encourages that selfishness. So much on the subject focuses on the psychology of addiction and methods of recovery for the addict … while the enormous cost to the addict’s family, both financial and emotional, is brushed aside. The addict is seen as a ‘sufferer’ (with carte blanche to relapse without losing points), and the family is left emotionally and financially broken in the wake of the addict’s actions and, most of all, needs. By giving voice not only to Paul, but also to his family and loved ones, this book shows the effects that addiction has on people close to the addict.

  So, instead of interviewing those involved for information in order to build the framework of the story and with which to jog Paul’s memory, it made sense to give each of them their own chapters.

  Therefore, while the history remains the same, the story has been told from several points of view – providing a more holistic picture than could have been provided by Paul alone, even if he could have remembered more, and also extending the relevance of the story to the families and friends of addicts.

  What follows is the result of a collaborative effort between me and the various contributors. This collaboration took the form of interviews and the submission of requested written accounts – followed by further interviews and correspondence to the point where I felt that I had the right input to create a story with sufficient chronological coherency and content. In all chapters, I have aimed to retain the character of each contributor as much as possible.

  No part of the story is fictional. Every event and incident referred to is factual, and where poetic licence has been used for descriptive purposes, it has been done carefully and with dedicated attention to conveying the precise meaning intended by the contributor.

  This last applies most to the chapters contributed by Paul. Some explanation may be necessary in this case. How does a brain-injured man produce a completely coherent and often very descriptive account of his life and feelings?

  While he is cognitively impaired, this impairment is highly function-specific – for example, he has only relatively recently re-learnt how to dial numbers on a phone, but he has been verbal and fairly articulate for years.

  Paul’s ability to understand specifics fluctuates, as does his ability to verbalise his thoughts appropriately and succinctly, or put them in order. He also has little descriptive ability when it comes to talking about things outside of himself, or when elucidating on a statement. This necessitated many interviews and, in some instances, suggesting suitable words to help him express what he was trying to say. I obtained what we needed by revisiting ‘weak areas’ over and over.

  However, his verbal abilities and insight into his condition, past and present, were at times surprisingly sophisticated – with him conveying things with a level of perception that seemed utterly incongruent with other interviews. A good example
of this is the final chapter, which is the most similar to the original tapes provided by Paul. Some sentences have been transcribed and remain in the text almost word for word, as there was no need to rewrite them much or use other words to better convey what he was trying to say.

  On reading his story back to him, which I did many times and at all stages of the process, he constantly interrupted to say, ‘Yes! That’s it! That is it! Exactly!’ To test this, I occasionally threw in ‘red herrings’ – to see if he was just saying yes for the sake of it. On each occasion, I was brought up short with ‘No. It wasn’t like that.’ All analogies and descriptions used are based on an attempt by Paul to make a certain point, then built upon by the two of us, and subsequently approved by him.

  The overall intent was for Paul to tell his story, to make that story readable and give it impact, and I believe that we have succeeded in doing so without straying from the truth. For the purpose of integrity, where Paul’s memory has failed him, it has been written as such. Nothing has been fabricated to ‘fill in’ gaps or to attempt justification of content.

  The story has been told as it happened, and the result is, according to Paul, what he intended: to put his story out there, and so perhaps give some meaning to the direction his life has taken.

  Nikki Ridley

  MAY 2006

  Acknowledgements

  THANK YOU TO THE CONTRIBUTORS: SAVANNAH, DALE and Veronica Raaf, and of course Val, Mark and Lynn Bateman. Thank you to certain friends who, though they did not contribute directly, gave me the information I needed to make good what was given me.

  Special mention must be made of the vital contribution made by Neil in Knysna. Though he had never met Paul, he was there to explicate and develop the chapter on Paul’s heroin year in London.

  Thanks also to Georgina Hamilton and Michael Johnson for encouragement in the final and most daunting stage (trying to find a publisher), to Howard Selfe for further encouragement and for his crucial proofing of the first draft, and finally to our editor, Robert Plummer, for his definitive decision that Paul’s story is important and should be published, and all that he and the rest of the team at Zebra Press have done since.

  Last but definitely not least: thanks and well done, Paul! Your story is now where you wanted it to be – out there.

  Introduction

  Let Me Introduce Myself

  Paul Bateman

  MY NAME IS PAUL BATEMAN, AND THIS IS MY STORY. I have not used drugs for nine years now, since an overdose and subsequent coma left me blind and so impaired that I could not continue doing what I loved doing best.

  The impairment is brain damage, and the blindness is cortical blindness – a form of blindness caused by non-function of the area of the cerebral cortex responsible for interpreting the signals from the optic nerves (and ‘seeing’), as opposed to a problem with the eyes or optic nerves themselves.

  I am, or was, what is known as a polysubstance abuser. I am not a heroin addict, or a Wellconal addict, or a Mandrax addict. I was addicted to all of them at some time or another. (Please excuse the interchange between the words ‘was’ and ‘am’ when describing my drug addict status – you see, once an addict, always an addict. I am still the same person who did drugs, and I live and cope with the consequences every single day.)

  Being a polysubstance abuser basically means that I would use any form of narcotic or mind-altering substance, as long as it got me where I needed to go – high.

  Why did I need to go there? Now that’s one for the psychoanalysts and sociologists.

  I do touch on it at the beginning of my story – as far as I can, and as far as I feel you might be able to identify with me, but not too much. Psychological delving doesn’t alter the facts, and, for the moment, for the purposes of telling my tale, a touch is enough. Because once I became an addict, the ‘whys and wherefores’ went out the window, and I became a walking, talking behaviour pattern. In so doing, I became psychologically addicted to, and embroiled in, a way of life that utterly discounted the possibility of not including drugs in it as much as I became addicted to the drugs themselves.

  Some people climb the ladder of success. I used drugs to drop off the bottom rung just as surely as the drugs pushed me off.

  With addictive disorder, if you want to call it that, when you are not high it feels like there is something deep down in your soul that is missing, that has become unhinged, rather than just a craving for a specific substance. For me, the drug was neither here nor there. The unhinging began with dope, and continued with addictive behaviour, and the behaviour continued with the abuse of more and harder drugs. Like the chicken and the egg, it ultimately became ambiguous what came first.

  What happened to me is one of the many possible outcomes of drug use. My overdose at the age of twenty-six fell well within the odds.

  What has happened to me since the overdose has been against all the odds. I wasn’t just supposed to be blind. I was supposed to be a vegetable. I’m not, though, and I believe I was given a second chance.

  By telling my story, I am hoping to make productive use of that second chance, by doing my little bit to educate those for whom drugs, particularly heroin, are a temptation, or soon could be.

  I say particularly heroin, because it is rife, it is one of the drugs I became addicted to, and it has an almost identical physiological and psychological effect as Wellconal, the drug I ODed on, but my story applies, in variable ways, to the use of almost any addictive drug.

  There are a lot of things that can happen to you if you start taking drugs, and the outcome is dependent not only on what drugs you end up using or abusing, but also on who you are, physiologically and psychologically. The problem is, how many of us know who we are when we are young?

  Matters of predisposition to addiction, addictive personality disorder, and psychological or physical aggravants can be researched and argued till the cows come home. Fact is, no one is immune to the possibility of addiction.

  You may experiment and stop.

  You may experiment and go on to use drugs casually, without ever progressing on to the ‘hard drugs’, such as heroin, pinks and crack.

  It might not perceptively damage your relationships with your family and friends.

  It might.

  It might mess them up completely.

  It might not damage you psychologically.

  It might set you on a path that includes a few stops to fill prescriptions for Prozac.

  You might go on to become a successful lawyer or doctor … or waiter.

  You might end up dead in a toilet with a needle in your arm.

  Each one of you is different.

  Each outcome is different. There are just so many variables.

  Be aware, though, that even if you don’t end up slipping through the net of society, drugs will affect you. They will change your life in some way. That is a certainty. The rest is just a matter of degrees. Ask yourself if you really feel like exploring those degrees and taking your family along for the ride.

  My story is not an anti-drugs campaign. It is just a story. One in thousands.

  I’m not saying, ‘Just say no!’, because we all know that doesn’t really work, does it? It didn’t for me. Rather I’m saying, ‘Just think about the possible consequences. Here’s one example of what they can be.’

  If the thought of death doesn’t put you off, maybe living out the rest of your life with a self-inflicted disability might. Maybe. Maybe for one or two of you. That’s enough. After all, this is just a story.

  Knowing that smoking cigarettes causes cancer and emphysema stops relatively few people from smoking. Everyone knows it, but so many still smoke.

  Knowing someone who has suffered and died from smoking probably has a little more impact.

  Statistically, you are far less likely to take up smoking, and also far more likely to give it up, if you have had a parent or relative die of a smoking-related disease. You knew them. You know their whole story.

 
; I don’t remember a lot of things. There are gaps. Many of the memories I do have are blurred or mixed up. Brain damage, due in part to the prolonged abuse of drugs but mostly due to the coma, has robbed me of much of my life. But that is not going to prevent me from telling my story, because it is not my story alone. There are others involved in it. No man is an island – so the cliché goes. Some of these others have been gracious enough to help me tell it.

  So read my story and know me, and congratulate me on being able to bring it to you, because the doctors who treated me after my overdose said I wouldn’t be able to.

  Looking Back

  Val Bateman

  ‘HE’LL BE A VEGETABLE, IF HE EVEN COMES OUT OF THE coma.’

  These words are the middle point of the life that I look back on when I talk about my son. Words among the worst a parent could ever hear.

  Paul is my third child. I was thirty-seven years old when he was born. His sister Lynn and his brother Mark were far older than him. This was once suggested by a psychologist to be a contributing factor to his delinquency. It was suggested that he’d been a mistake.

  And there it starts – the postulating, and, if you allow it, the guilt, because when they start with that, there is no stopping it.

  Since that is where it starts, that’s where I’ll start.

  The psychologist was wrong.

  He was a surprise, but like my first two children, a very welcome surprise. We considered him a gift.

  In addition to that, he was the stereotypical ‘good child’ whose sweet nature would persist into his early teens. No conflict. No thinking that we should have done this or should have done that.

  Except for three things. I believe now that, when things started going wrong, we should not have tried to deny it to ourselves for as long as we did, that we should have educated ourselves far sooner, and that we should never have tried to ‘keep it in the family’ for as long as we did.