by Nikki Ridley
Still, there is no room for recriminations and ‘what ifs’ in our lives – not in my view, as I live by the philosophy of dealing with the present and moving forward. I have never, and will never, wallow in regrets. What’s done is done, and there is no going back. The past exists, one cannot change it, but one has a choice whether or not to hold onto the good and discard the bad, and this is a choice I have made.
I believe that this is the attitude that has carried us – my husband Mark and me – through the turmoil that beset us for so many years. We never allowed ourselves to become chronically depressed under the weight of it all, though of course we had our bad days.
I think that the reason we, as a couple, survived our son’s addiction is that we managed to alternate our bad days, thus never leaving ourselves without the support we needed to cope. When I was down or stressed, Mark was all right, and vice versa. We argued at times, but we kept up a united front, and we survived. Our family survived.
When things go wrong with a child, as they did with Paul, I suppose there are two perspectives one can adopt. One is that you are to blame in some way, that you have contributed through the way you have raised your child. With this perspective, you might spend your life desperately navigating the pathways of the past, lost in self-indictment and melancholically welcoming of your sentence.
Or you might adopt the other perspective, that your grown child is responsible for his or her own actions and that their mistakes need not be an indication of your inadequacy as a parent.
Whichever perspective you adopt, you may be right or you may be wrong.
Of course there are extremes – if a child has been neglected or abused, or even just overly spoiled and never taught to take responsibility for himself. There may have been an incident, or incidents, in his childhood that could have affected his emotional stability in some way. Who’s to judge? What secrets lie behind the doors of a family home? For that matter, what influences are to be found outside the family home?
There are many possible scenarios, but I do not believe that drug addiction, or any other form of delinquency for that matter, is a given conclusion when the nurture part of a child’s development is not perfect, or that freedom from deviance is guaranteed when it is.
A child can walk from an orphanage and become the president of a corporation, or from a good middle-class upbringing and hit the streets. Their own actions will take them to their destinations. That is a fact. Clear and indisputable.
What isn’t so clear, particularly in cases like Paul’s, is what doesn’t stop them from taking those actions. He had everything going for him. He had every chance, and he threw it all away. I struggled to understand.
What do you do when you dig and you find nothing to pin it all on? How do you convince those, like the psychologist at Riverfield, the first rehab we sent Paul to, who are trained to look for something wrong in the family and are determined to find it? How do you cope when your son plays the Blame Game, but you cannot in all righteousness take responsibility for his problem?
I may be right or I may be wrong, but I have chosen not to try to negotiate the tangled strings of responsibility. I am able to look at myself, and at my family, and find no cause for the direction that Paul went in, and in so doing I made a choice, early on in the story of Paul’s addiction, to adopt an attitude of simply coping with the present as best as possible.
I do not, and never have, blamed myself or my husband – either of our roles in Paul’s life – for his choice to take drugs.
I don’t think that anyone who has not been addicted to drugs can understand what happens in the mind of an addict. If you have not been there yourself, you cannot understand the incessant pull of drugs. Yet, if you have been close to it and directly affected by it, as much as you may never understand, you learn to accept it – you learn to deal with it from a point of view that discounts the possibility of simple persuasion and dependence on therapy.
You get tough.
It helped that we had learnt to be tough, because when we heard those words, we needed all the strength a person can have.
It had always been beyond me. He’d had a home, and friends. He’d had all the support a person could need or want, from his family, his girlfriends (and their families), and from the people who tried to help him in the rehabilitation clinics.
None of it helped.
None of it helps.
When things got bad with Paul, I began to keep a diary. After his overdose, I destroyed it, because it was all over. I didn’t want the bad memories any more. I wanted to move forward. My son was blind, and brain-damaged, and it takes all of your energy in the here and now to cope with something like that.
It was less of a choice than a necessity, because there really was no going back. The past could not be fixed, or changed. It could not be wiped away. But it also couldn’t be thrown away.
With the possibility of a life finally free of drugs came the reality that it was no longer possible to ever forget that it had happened.
So, although I threw the diary away, I have, for the purposes of this story, looked back as best I can.
Part I
Taking Chances
A Different Place Where a Different You Fits In
Paul
THEY CALL DOPE THE ‘GATEWAY DRUG’. FOR MANY DOPE smokers it’s the destination. It’s only the gateway drug if you go further, but then … many do. Including me. So excuse me for beginning at this somewhat formulaic starting point. Read further, and let me take you where I would not want you to go, so I can tell you things I think you should know.
I remember my first joint. It was twenty years ago now, but I remember it – at Hyde Park High, in the playground.
I also remember that there wasn’t anything particularly spectacular about it. I was fourteen years old. I got it from somewhere. I don’t know now from where or from whom. I’m sure that detail hasn’t stayed in my memory because it wasn’t all that important. The stuff was around. It was easy to get. That’s all. Getting hold of dagga was no big deal in Standard 7.
Why did I start smoking? I wish I could give you a distinguishable reason. Perhaps place the blame somewhere else, such as family problems. But I can’t do that, because I didn’t have any family problems. No alcoholism, no abuse, no absent parent. No nothing. Lots of perfectly normal.
I smoked that first joint because it was there, I could, and I wanted to try it.
The same reason most kids who start smoking dope try it.
However, apart from liking the effect that it had on me and wanting to experience it again, I am able to come up with an excuse for continuing to smoke dope.
I was quite shy and reserved at school. Not painfully so. I had friends. In fact, I was fairly popular. Nevertheless I felt ‘different’. I felt as if I was ‘on the outside, looking in’.
Once I started smoking dope and drinking, I discovered a way out of feeling that way.
Being drunk or stoned, or both at the same time, took me out of myself and gave me courage. It made me feel a little braver, and that’s what I thought I needed to gain the acceptance and respect of my peers.
It was irrelevant that my peer group ultimately changed to suit me.
I soon felt that the only way I could truly express myself was to be ‘out of it’. It made everything okay. I guess I felt that it made me okay.
I really don’t know what it was that made me feel so un acceptable and insecure, but I realise now that it was those self-perceptions and their accompanying emotions that initially contributed to my choice to play on the wrong side of the road.
That terrible, but common, fear that you are not quite good enough, and trying to find a place where you are good enough. A different place where the ‘different you’ fits in.
It wasn’t so hard for me to slot into the ‘other’ crowd, and to start involving myself in something that seemed rebellious and ‘left of centre’. I felt ‘left of centre’, so alcohol and drugs led me to a place where I f
elt I was able to be myself. It was a new world in which I belonged. A world I shared with others like me. It was great!
My friends and I knew what we were doing was wrong (of course we did – that’s why it was so attractive), but we were hardly delinquents. We just ‘hung out’. It was all normal schoolboy stuff. We would occasionally sneak out at night and go drinking at the Hyde Park Hotel. Play a bit of pool. Roam around like a bunch of little thugs with an overblown idea of our own thuggery. Smoke the odd joint. We didn’t really get up to anything truly bad. Going out and indulging in occasional illicit drinking and dope-smoking was our gateway to a collective rebel status. We felt ‘cool’ and it gave us a pack identity. Every teenager, and everyone who remembers being a teenager, knows that the self-identity one is afforded as a member of a group helps to hoist one out of the mental and emotional morass that is the transition from child to adult. The only difference between fourteen-year-olds is the pack each one chooses to run with.
I started dating. Nothing serious – just flirtations with the world of relationships. My grades were fairly good and I didn’t have to try too hard to keep them that way. There was nothing all that unusual about me, or my friends. There was nothing about me that would have alerted the casual observer to the threat of serious future aberrations. I was not a ‘problem child’ and I was not unstable.
The joints were relatively few and far between at first; then it became whenever we could get them – meaning more frequently, because dope was so easy to get. Someone at school usually had some to sell.
I began smoking a little more. One joint wasn’t enough in a day, so then I was on to two. My drug habit ways were beginning to manifest, although I had no inkling of that then.
I think dope affected me slightly differently from the way it affects those who experiment with it but never go on to form a serious habit or ever feel the desire to try something a bit harder. Perhaps I built up more of a resistance to it. It could have been a physical response, or a personality response, or both. All I know is that I needed to start pushing it a bit. I liked to be twice as stoned as everybody else.
After a few months my parents began to notice a change in my behaviour. I had begun to ‘drift away’, and I had developed a tendency to be moody. ‘Bolshy’ was a word used to describe me at the time, but nobody suspected drugs. In their eyes I was just being a teenager.
In my eyes I was just being a teenager, but it went a bit further than that.
Typically, I hated being told what to do, and unfortunately I took it too far on at least one occasion, when I, if I didn’t change my future, I certainly added one small nail to my coffin.
I was a keen and very talented windsurfer, and I was spotted boardsailing at San Lameer by a member of the South African Windsurfing Team when I was about fifteen. He approached my parents and persuaded them to bring me to the Team Trials at the Vaal, but I refused to go, partly because my father was insisting that I try out, and partly because I was smoking dope. I still enjoyed the sport, but by that point the dedication required to devote the greater part of my free time and energy to it was already waning in me.
My parents refused to take ‘no’ for an answer, loaded up the windsurfer on the day and took me out there – where I flatly refused to sail. An opportunity of a lifetime thrown away because I had to have an attitude with my dad, even after they had given me a second chance.
After a time, my headmaster at Hyde Park High also noticed a change in my behaviour – a change marked enough for him to call my parents in for a meeting. This resulted in them taking me out of the school and placing me in a boarding school in Pietersburg, Capricorn High, halfway through Standard 9. They still didn’t suspect drugs, though, and I continued smoking dope at my new school. Birds of a feather flock together, and I found the right circle of friends when I got there.
I was also drinking quite a lot. Never at home – just out with my friends. Nothing unusual for my age group if one wants to face facts, but I think it compounded the effects of the dope, because alcohol had a downer effect on me. It made me morose and a bit depressed. Alcohol is a depressant, but the effects can vary quite considerably from person to person, from pronounced, as in my case, to barely noticeable in others. No doubt, my susceptibility to the side effects of alcohol (other than the straight intoxicant effect, that is) should have been a warning to me that drugs would not be something I could handle and control, but I can only see that now. It didn’t even occur to me then, and of course there is nothing quite like feeling a bit down to make you want to get high, or to help you find a good excuse for it.
An insidious result of feeling depressed due to an artificial stimulant, like alcohol, or even dope, if it has that effect on you, is that you automatically, if unconsciously, start trying to find things to be unhappy about. You look at your world differently and start to find fault with it. You can’t be unhappy about nothing, so your outlook on life begins to shift. Your attitude changes. It’s a subtle start to a vicious cycle, but one that takes a certain amount of maturity to identify.
Drink, get high, come down, feel ‘off’ … so drink again, get high again, etc., etc.
Nevertheless, I didn’t have to try too hard to get good grades, and it wasn’t as if I was out nicking cars or anything, so as far as I was concerned there was no problem. What is a bit of moodiness and conflict when you are a teenager? Par for the course. I was ‘good’ … and so was my ‘partner in crime’, my girlfriend Noo.
I had met her at San Lameer during the same holiday that I was spotted windsurfing. There was something different about her. At only thirteen, her uniqueness and individuality made her stand out from the other kids at the resort. She was gorgeous. It was love at first sight, and, whatever it was that first captivated me, my instincts must have been sharp, because she turned out to be incredible. It wasn’t long before ‘love at first sight’ turned into real love, rare in those teenage years, and a long-term relationship that lasted until I wrecked everything years later.
Savannah (Noo’s real name) and I would grow up together. She became my best friend. When we could be together, we were, and we did everything together. When we couldn’t see each other, which was much of the time during the first four years of our relationship because we were both at school, or I in the army, we’d spend hours on the phone, talking and joking and laughing. I remember that the most. The laughter. Savannah is a very funny chick. When she is on form, she is hilarious. Her sense of humour is one of her outstanding features. In retrospect, I think that helped her cope with me for far longer than most would have.
When I think back to those first years of our relationship, before I finished school, the overall impression I have is of laughter and fun … and light! Everything I associate with Savannah from that period of my life seems bathed in light.
After I matriculated, I went off to do my two years’ army service – still mandatory at that time. Two years off your life, in my opinion, but it was still useful, or should have been, taking into account that I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.
I was sent to Natal Command, in part due to my skills as a boardsailor. The army had a policy of accommodating one’s sporting skills or occupations so that you wouldn’t have to drop them as a result of doing your two years’ service.
This meant that I was stationed close to where I could continue boardsailing, and also that I was afforded more free passes. I made the most of them. It was fantastic to go and sit on the beach and get stoned – and watch other people windsurf. On the weekends, I’d drive up to see Savannah, and we’d take acid and go clubbing.
My superiors realised after a while, however, that there were too many good times going down, and my extra passes dried up. That didn’t dampen things much, though.
It was during that first year of army service that I’d discovered the joys of the medics’ supply cupboard.
I had begun my army career as a medic, and as such I had unlimited access to a range of chemical substa
nces. Nothing too hard, just sleeping tablets, Rohypnol and the like – basically anything to get a bit ‘out of it’. I wasn’t the only one either. I remember that at one stage almost the entire medics department was partaking on a daily basis. I also started smoking Mandrax somewhere around this time – a substance with which I had previously only experimented on a couple of occasions.
After my first year, however, I was moved to Ladysmith, and it was there that I began using paregoric, a form of opium used medicinally to treat diarrhoea. It was my first opiate, and the beginning of a new chapter in my life.
I had first come across paregoric when I went on leave to visit my sister in the Transkei. She had moved there to get away from the whole ‘scene’ in Johannesburg. Savannah and I joined her for a short holiday, unaware that a part of the whole scene in Johannesburg was on holiday there too – a woman.
When I met Lee I was eighteen and she was twenty-four, but despite the disparity in our ages we struck up an immediate friendship. She was very attractive, but aside from that, just as there had been with Savannah, there was something interestingly unique about her. Something untamed and free. I think it was the wild child in her that appealed to the eighteen-year-old in me. Although I was as in love with Savannah as ever, I was attracted to this woman, and with the fascination of desire comes the fascination with whatever the object of your desire does.
Including shooting up.
When I saw Lee cook up the paregoric, strap the tourniquet around her arm and put the needle into her vein, I was instantly captivated by a ritual that would eventually come to dominate my existence. But of course I didn’t know that then. I just wanted to try it.
I remember watching her face the first time she did it in my presence. I saw the instant rush go through her and the euphoria flood her, her face glowing with a mixture of ecstasy and relief as the hit landed.