by Nikki Ridley
I was hooked. It looked unbelievable to me.
Lee would be in my life for a while, but the habit that she introduced me to would stay with me a whole lot longer.
My future began on the day I first shot up with her, in all its wretchedness. The misery and heartbreak I would ultimately put those closest to me through was conceived on that day in Port St Johns.
But I had no crystal ball with which to see the future, and if I had, I would probably have smashed it anyway.
Dagga had become a bit dull and tame. A bit innocuous. A change is as good as a holiday, I thought, and I went for it.
I stayed in contact with Lee for quite a while after she returned to Johannesburg. My crush never developed into anything, but we had become friends (much to Savannah’s chagrin).
Lee would occasionally vanish for days, leaving her beloved Afghan hound behind. I always wondered what she was doing when she disappeared like that, and I suspected that it had to do with ‘pinks’, that she was getting into that scene quite heavily. She was crazy about that dog. It was her ‘baby’, so why else would she leave him? My suspicions were borne out when she was arrested by the Flying Squad. The details of her arrest, and the exact reason for it, are sketchy now, but I visited her in prison a few times before her release on parole. I felt so sorry for her, and would take her sweets and chocolates to cheer her up. In what now seems like a sick parody on her plight, I would take her packets of tiny little pink sweets that looked like pills.
What was I thinking? Was it all a big joke to me? Or was I ignorant of the irony, not yet being on Wellconal myself? I don’t know now. I just remember taking her the sweets.
Because of my brain damage, so many of my memories consist now of little more than a few loose puzzle pieces that once formed a part of a whole picture – more fragmented than what would result from the natural degradation of memories due to time. My memories of Lee and our friendship consist of little more than what I have already put down here – the Transkei, tourniquets, needles, pink sweets and the dog she loved so much and left with me to look after while she was in prison. Snapshots in my album.
We lost contact. I don’t remember what happened to her in the end.
Paregoric was my new friend for the remainder of my military career. I carried it with me wherever I went. From the first hit with Lee, I always made sure I had some on me, or close by. Paregoric, in its medicinal form, has a lot of impurities, and these have to be burnt off before you can shoot it up. But it was easy to cook up, and I could do it anywhere. I used a little gas burner in the army boarding house.
It was also very easy to obtain. An unscrupulous pharmacist in Ladysmith made sure that I was never in short supply. No prescription required. I always had access to it, and I used it all the time. I would go home every evening and get high. When I went to Jo’burg on the weekends, I would get high. With my introduction to opiates, getting high became less a recreation than a preoccupation that I saw as a recreation.
It is important to make it clear that addiction does not necessarily arise immediately from the initial use of opiates, particularly a relatively mild form like paregoric. A lot depends on the personality and behavioural tendencies of the individual. Dependence, first psychological and then physical, sets in after habitual use. But the minute you do something more than two or three times because you like it, you have set everything in motion. If you are not yet addicted, there’s a very good chance you soon will be. You’ve made that choice, before you even realise it. Liking the effects of a drug is a powerful motivator and a conscious experience of an altered brain chemistry. I’ll come back to this point, the altered brain thing, a few times in my story, because it explains a great deal of it. Why once you are an addict, you are one for the rest of your life, no matter how much you might ultimately not want to be, and no matter how many times you manage to come clean.
Stoned and happy. High and happy. Hating the army. For two years.
Of course, regular use of any mind-altering substance eventually affects your general state of mind, and consequently your behaviour. Not in a good way either. People start to notice. Often long before you do. It wasn’t long before high and happy was interspersed with strung out and unhappy. I wasn’t doing my duties properly in the army, and if I’d become demotivated before from smoking dope, I now outdid myself. Savannah began to comment on the change in me, and complained that I lazed about. It didn’t take her too long to figure things out.
That change in me, and the fact that I had initially tried to hide what I was doing from her – that was the first dimming of the light. It was the first break in trust in our relationship, and the first of many.
At some stage my superiors sent me off to the army doctor and searched through my things. They didn’t find any drugs, but they did find my little burner and a few other items I used to prepare my hits. Instead of recognising these items as drug paraphernalia, however, they took it to mean I was dabbling in the occult, and sent me to see a psychologist for that. I don’t remember exactly what I told the psychologist, but I played along, while denying, rightly, that I had anything to do with satanism. When that all blew over, I carried on using as per usual.
I hated the army. I didn’t see the point of the ‘great panic’ and the fear of ‘Die Swart Gevaar’ that engulfed the country in the eighties. I didn’t see colour, or understand the second-class-citizen status of non-whites. I hated being a part of the process. So I didn’t apply myself. I didn’t care. I just wanted to do my own thing and get it all over with. I believe, though, that those two years of army service changed me. Subtly, and it wasn’t just the drugs. That period of my life awakened something in me. Something disdainful and disrespectful of authority.
Something that made me ready to go out and show everybody ‘the finger’.
When that was all over, ‘real life’ began. My grandmother had left me some money, and I used it to travel overseas. Savannah was still in school, so I went alone. I visited a few countries, and worked for a while on a kibbutz in Israel. I encountered the odd substance here and there, including heroin in London, but it was all more playing, or more experimentation … or whatever you want to call it. I didn’t spike the heroin. I smoked it. It was supposed to be less addictive that way, and it was consequently a very popular method of doing it among new users. I wasn’t in London all that long anyway.
When I got back, I met up with Savannah again, and decided to look for temporary work to earn money to go over again with her.
We partied a bit, and I carried on playing, smoking dope, doing lines, doing buttons occasionally, acid – whatever came along. I just loved getting high. The substance didn’t matter. The choice of what I would get high on was secondary to the experience. That was my priority. I didn’t care whether I was looking up my nose in a mirror, enchanted by a marshmallow world or the lights in a club, or squinting through a cloud of acrid smoke. I just loved the altered state of consciousness.
Savannah and I started living together. As before, we did some things in tandem, but not everything. She was working.
Then I found pinks, and started playing with that. It was exactly like heroin, and I started shooting it.
Much better than paregoric!
A bit of tension developed between Savannah and me, but nothing that a sweet word or two wouldn’t fix.
She’d get upset with me when I wanted to borrow her car. I didn’t tell her when I started doing pinks, and I had to get into Hillbrow to get the stuff. I no longer had a car. I’d had two, but I’d written them both off, and a third, before I’d finished my army service.
The first car was a Renault – cooked the engine. The second one was an Opel that I’d tucked under another car on my way to see Savannah one weekend. I’d come out of that unscathed. Then I did it again. The third write-off was my mom’s car – a misunderstanding over right of way at a stop street.
So I was dependent on others for transport as well as money (till I got work, of course),
and that necessitated a great deal of creativity on a day-to-day basis. I was up for it, though. I was very resourceful.
Savannah cottoned on quickly to what I was doing, partly because of the ludicrous number of times I needed to go somewhere, and the equally ludicrous excuses I came up with for needing to go alone and needing to borrow money, and I knew it, but I carried on anyway. She couldn’t tell me what to do, and it was pointless even trying to hide it after a while. I didn’t really care. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do.
I lied when I had to, to keep the peace. When a straight lie, like ‘I have to go to the dentist’ or ‘I was out looking for a job’ wouldn’t wash properly, I’d come up with some sob story, or change tack to distract her. I’d invent ways to make her feel bad for not letting me have what I wanted. I still wanted her. I didn’t want her to leave me, and we had so much fun together. I loved her.
She refused to lend me her car after a while, so I either hitched or ran to Hillbrow. How to have fun and keep fit, the Paul Bateman way.
I always made a plan.
I would shoot up when I had a bad day. I would shoot up after a fight with Savannah. I would shoot up and do everything else when there was cause for celebration. There was always a reason underpinning the lack of need for a reason.
At the time, I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I was going to do career-wise, but I wasn’t worrying about it. I thought that there was time in the future to figure that out, probably after I’d gained some more life experience overseas with Savannah.
I was sure, though, that whatever I did, I would do it well, and that I would do well for myself. I was very confident about that.
I reckoned that I was very able, and that I had the power within me to do whatever I wanted to do, when the time came.
I was living in the moment, and I wanted to have fun. I was young, man! The future was not something I worried about. It would sort itself out and it would all be good. It seemed reasonably far away, in any case.
I took drugs on my terms. I knew I had a habit, but I was in control because I was doing what I wanted to do, and when I was ready to stop taking drugs, I would. It would all happen at the right time. I would give it all up, and I was as confident of my future success at giving up drugs as I was of my future success in whatever stunning and exciting career I’d end up in.
High Times
Savannah
I WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLD WHEN I MET PAUL ON A HOLIDAY at San Lameer in Natal. He was fifteen or sixteen at the time. Quite a big age difference when you are in your teens, but we nevertheless hit it off straight away.
Our parents had holiday cottages at the resort, and Paul and I had a friend in common, so I had seen him before. Paul was everyone’s dream boy – this blond, blue-eyed, gorgeous surfer type. Very sporty. He was always doing something – surfing, windsurfing, kayaking – all sorts of things. We spent most of our time together that holiday, but among a group of friends, so it wasn’t this hectic teenage relationship or anything. Before we left, however, we made it ‘official’ and agreed to see each other in Jo’burg, which we did for the remainder of that year. The following year his parents sent him off to boarding school. We stayed together, though, speaking to each other on the phone a couple of times a week, or whenever permitted by the ‘Nazis’ at his school (as we thought of them!).
When Paul came home in the holidays we would hang out together and with our friends. As young as I was, I started clubbing with them. I had always had friends who were older than me, not to mention now a boyfriend who was older than me … so that’s what we did, frequenting some of the dodgy ‘joints’ in town, like The Doors and Subway. We all drank and smoked dope, but I never got into anything more serious than that, other than a bit of acid at a later stage.
Paul remained at boarding school until he matriculated, and then went straight into the army for the next two years. The first four years of our relationship were a bit bizarre then, by ‘normal’ long-term relationship standards, firstly because I was so young, and secondly because we only saw each other periodically, or on the weekends when Paul was in the army. That was a good thing for me, however, because I was still in school right up to the end of Paul’s army career.
It’s hard to remember now exactly when all the different drugs started, because, as I’ve said, I was younger than everyone else in my group and I was quite particular about what I would and wouldn’t do. Paul and I smoked dope, but I was not aware of him doing anything else for quite a while. We spent three more holidays in San Lameer together, before our parents sold their holiday homes there, and in between all the sporting activities we would spend our ‘downtime’ getting stoned and lazing about on the sun loungers. Nothing out of control, and certainly nothing that we perceived as being detrimental beyond what you just wouldn’t tell your parents about because they wouldn’t ‘get it’.
It was a standing joke among everybody that I wouldn’t smoke a pipe. Someone always had to roll me a joint before everyone started getting too stoned. They’d all pass the pipe around, and I’d be puffing, a little more ‘ladylike’, and theoretically not getting as stoned, on my joint. I wouldn’t do buttons – none of the downer stuff. I’m not a ‘downer’ person, so I wasn’t interested in even trying any of it. I didn’t get the point of doing drugs like that. I never shot anything up either, and at the time I wasn’t aware when Paul started messing with that. He hid it from me for a while. I know now that it all started when Paul was in the army – when he would come home on the weekends and visit a woman he had met during one of our holidays in the Transkei.
We smoked a lot on our holidays in the Transkei, and all I remember doing that particular holiday was getting stoned – as you do when you are there. Very stoned. Like really badly stoned. So it really is no wonder that I didn’t catch on immediately.
Back in Johannesburg, I accompanied Paul on a couple of his visits to her house – on those occasions he would come home, because he couldn’t get up to anything while I was there.
I could not stand that woman. Instinct, I guess.
When I managed to keep him away from her, we’d spend most weekends with a friend of ours in Berea. She had this beautiful big flat – the perfect setting for our weekend relationship, and most convenient for our lifestyle. Berea was not such a bad area then.
When we weren’t staying there, we would stay at my parents’ house. They’d known Paul for so long that he was virtually a part of the family.
We’d spend the weekends going out, clubbing, smoking, snacking acid, drinking, recovering. Life was young and uncomplicated. There were so many good times, ‘cool’ times, and fun and silly times. No one was getting hurt, and nothing was dark or serious. Our futures lay ahead of us. The time then was time for fun.
In the process of having fun, we had a couple of brushes, or near misses, with The Law, but even that loses its seriousness the minute you have got away with it. It’s all a big laugh as long as you don’t get caught with anything, and it never seemed to us that we were doing anything so extraordinarily out of the ordinary for people our age.
After the holiday in the Transkei when Paul met his female kismet, I remember us coming across a roadblock just as we were re-entering South Africa, and having a bit of a freak-out because we had a grocery packet stuffed with dope with us in the car.
Luckily we saw the roadblock in time, but only just. We couldn’t just throw the bag out the car – we were too close and they would have seen it, so we had to throw handfuls out the window as we drove. I remember Paul yelling from the driver’s seat: ‘Don’t dump the bag! Scatter! Scatter!’ as my friend and I sprinkled frantically almost all the way up to the roadblock.
I guess we must have perfected the art of looking innocent even while recently panicked, because they didn’t even stop us.
I became a bit of an ‘acid child’. I loved it. It was my thing because it was a total upper and it made me laugh. I never had a bad time on it – although I’d heard
of a guy who’d jumped off a bridge while tripping, because he thought he could fly (very common on acid, apparently). I had also heard of someone having such a bad trip that he actually checked himself into hospital. He told the nurses he had taken too much LSD, and they very sweetly spent the next eight hours talking him down!
Bad trips are common on acid and can have serious consequences, but Paul and I would take it and just giggle for hours. We were happy people, and trips are as much a projection of the psyche as a sensory enhancer. We only ever had good times, although there was one that almost turned nasty.
On that particular occasion we’d bought a cap of acid from a dealer guy Paul knew in Wynberg, shared it and then went to visit some friends of ours. When we got there, already on our way up, they said, ‘This isn’t right, we also want some,’ and sent us back to the dealer to get more.
By the time we got back to the dealer’s place, we had come up properly and were pretty much tripping off our faces – which wouldn’t have been too much of a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that the narcotics squad was in the process of busting him.
I remember everything so clearly now – as one does when an experience is so intense. The dealer’s house was a rondavel in a fairly open ground, so no one could miss us driving in. No such thing as sneaking up and sneaking off again unseen. Oh no.
I remember thinking, ‘Who is that odd-looking, hugely fat man wearing shorts? That is so not a fashion moment. Someone should tell the poor oke!’
Then the strange, unfashionable fat man turned towards us and he had a gun.
Reality bit, and that was so not a nice moment.
There we were, in this dude’s driveway, tripping, the place was crawling with narcs, and one of them was looking at us.
‘Oh, fuck,’ I thought, ‘I am not going to be able to maintain through this. It’s just not gonna happen.’
They all started paying us a bit of attention then, and it was politely but forcibly requested that we step out of the vehicle. They searched Paul (and found nothing), but they couldn’t search me because there were no female officers present. However, the big unfashionable guy asked me for my jacket and began searching through the pockets.