by Nikki Ridley
I began to seriously stress then, because the jacket wasn’t mine. I had just picked it up on the way out of my friends’ flat, and I didn’t know if there was anything in the pockets. It was quite possible that there could have been. I remember praying silently: Please, please, let there not be anything in the jacket! Please!
It would have been bad enough if we had been in our right minds, so to speak, but when you’re tripping and all this is happening … it’s like your worst nightmare.
Paul and I were both borderline hysterical, and became even more so, but in a different way, when the narc pulled a plastic-wrapped tampon out of the inside pocket of the jacket and started examining it closely, turning it this-a-way and that-a-way.
The poor guy couldn’t figure out what it was! What was he thinking? That he hadn’t learnt about this one on his course in illegal substances? All the other cops standing behind him clearly knew what it was, because they were all ‘umming’ and ‘erring’ in either amusement or embarrassment, or both.
I remember thinking to myself that if he didn’t put that thing away, I was going to lose it and start laughing uncontrollably. Paul and I absolutely could not look at each other. We knew that if we so much as caught one another’s eyes, it would be the end. We were going to laugh ourselves into a puddle on the floor.
Eventually, after what seemed like the longest thirty seconds of my entire life, he put the tampon back into the jacket pocket, and we were distracted by the sight of our dealer man being escorted into the back of the paddy wagon. We also saw sheets of acid being carried out of the house.
We knew that he was going down for a very, very long time. That was a sobering moment.
The narc then threw the jacket back at us, and told us that we could go – to our great relief. Actually ‘relief’ is probably the wrong word when you are tripping on acid. The world started rearranging itself back into its former molecular structure.
However, just as we were about to go, the narc really freaked me out. He looked at me through the car window and said, ‘Julle junkies lyk almal dieselfde.’*
Well. That was it. I was incensed. I finally lost all control.
‘Who you calling a junkie?’ I yelled back. ‘I’m not a junkie! YOUR MOTHER’S A JUNKIE!’
Thankfully, you cannot be arrested for calling a cop’s mother a junkie.
Acid makes you fall about over nothing. Funnily enough, although Paul has forgotten so much of the things we did together, we both remember the wicky-wacks episode.
The wicky-wacks episode was a marathon laughing session after Paul and I went to a corner café while we were tripping and stuffed about twelve wicky-wack chewing gums into each of our mouths. We each had these huge soccer balls of gum in our mouths, but when we went back to our friends’ flat and they asked us where their chewing gum was, we were like, ‘What chewing gum?’, and we’re chewing away, all chipmunk cheeks, shaking our heads. ‘We don’t have any chewing gum.’ Laughed for five hours over that.
On acid, the mundane can become hysterical. That’s what makes it fun. It can also drive you crazy, or tip you over the edge if you happen to be borderline anything (schizophrenic, depressive, etc.), help you accidentally kill yourself or eventually lose your teeth if you chomp enough of the stuff (LSD eats calcium). For some it is the doorway to another world, the gateway of perception, but for us it was just a fat laugh, because no one who takes drugs recreationally thinks that anything bad can actually happen to them.
So we were having a ‘jol’, but at some time I woke up about Paul. I became aware that he was doing something else, because he got ‘darker’, and then that he was shooting up.
Soon it was all out in the open, because the results became too obvious not to see. Paul was sick much of the time. I remember not understanding it at all. It made him ill, so why did he do it?
I’d say to him, over and over, ‘I don’t understand. I’m really not getting the point of this, because you’re sick, and then you’re more sick, and then you are just not interested in anything.’
None of my questioning and needling penetrated, though. By the time he had finished his army service, he was like a man on a mission – a mission to do nothing with himself.
Besides the physical sickness, his whole attitude had changed. He was no longer on the go and always looking for things to do, and he had no more interest in the sport he had been so good at.
He wanted to just lie there in the flat. He was dulled and unenthusiastic. It was a total contrast to the active, healthy surfer boy I had been seeing for the past few years. He was lethargic. Different. He wasn’t the same Paul. Hello, who are you and what have you done with my boyfriend?
He began to get devious around this time too. He never had any money, and he always needed it. I specifically remember him using his asthma as an excuse.
‘Please can I have R50? … No, what do you need it for? … Please, I really need an asthma pump … Okay, you can get one from the day/night chemist up the road … Thanks, I’ll be back just now. In about an hour.’
Ja, right. An hour, when the chemist is two minutes away. Maybe I am not the sharpest pencil in the box, but that’s just a little too much for me. It was always stuff like that, too obvious to miss, but not sufficiently underhanded to completely derail our relationship. You cope with the so-called ‘small stuff’ at first. You tuck the little white lies and small acts of deviousness away in the back of your mind because it still benefits you to do so. Who’s gonna freak over fifty rand? Who really wants to end a four-year relationship with someone you still love?
I had always thought that Paul would get into some major trouble in the army. Honestly, how the hell you end up making a borderline drug addict a medic is quite beyond me. But that is what they did.
I matriculated in 1988, the year that Paul finished his army service. Paul went overseas on a year’s return ticket, bought with money his grandmother had left him, but when he returned we decided that we would go to London together. I had been working to earn the money to go, and was willing to continue saving and wait for Paul to also earn money to go over on this second trip. However, that was the first period of time that Paul and I were together day in and day out, and it turned out to be incredibly difficult in the end.
While I worked to save money to travel, Paul got himself locked into ‘the scene’ in Jo’burg. As far as I remember he wasn’t working much, and had started stealing to pay for his drugs. He had smoked heroin in London, and had come back looking for a substitute. He found it in pinks.
As soon as he started on those, he went down so quickly.
I don’t remember what little he did for work during that time, probably because he didn’t hold anything down long enough for it to have made an impression on me. He was supposed to be trying to save money for London, and he knew it, but you can’t even imagine how cunning he was.
He would try to cover his tracks, pleading wide-eyed innocence when confronted, and claiming an earnest desire to find employment. He would say that he was trying to get a job, but that he wasn’t having any luck – or this excuse or that excuse. He’d dress up every morning, all smart and proper, and he’d be out all day, but by the end of it … oh, so terrible. Couldn’t find anything that day. Couldn’t find a job. He’d tell me he felt so discouraged. Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you look for a job in Hillbrow.
He was always trying to get cash – from everybody. He was begging, borrowing and stealing, mostly from his parents, but in such a way that they were unable to actually pin anything on him without a shadow of a doubt.
Funnily enough, he never took anything from me, or from my parents’ house, which, in that twilight world of drug addiction, I thought was pretty honourable. Love and respect, or did he know on which side his bread was buttered?
Drug addicts are so devious.
When he wasn’t out pretending to find a job or pawning stuff, he would be lying around, and I’d beg him again and again to explain the point of w
hat he was doing.
‘Please tell me the point, because I am still not getting it. Tell me again.’
He’d say that he wanted to see how far he could go.
‘It is not a big mystery! It’s not unknown territory. I can tell you how far you can go. How far you can go is that you can die, Paul.’
I remember him telling me once, as if he was joking … but not really … that if I found him dead, I must get his body out of my friend’s flat, where we were staying at the time. I don’t remember that any specific incident brought on the comment from him, like a near overdose or anything. As I remember, he just came out with it. Out of the blue. As if the possibility of death was an accepted consequence that didn’t bother him too much.
‘If you come home to the flat and I’m dead, you must drag me into the passage, because the police mustn’t find me in the flat. If they find me in the flat, then the two of you are gonna get involved. They’ll ask you all kinds of questions and you will get into trouble. So if I die, drag me into the passage.’
What kind of a conversation is this to have with someone! If you come home, sweetie, and I’m dead in the bathroom …
He was so flippant about it that I began to think he didn’t really care whether he lived or died. I think that, on a certain level, he had reached a point where he didn’t think he wanted to live. It was terrible. How do you help someone who doesn’t want to be helped?
That’s when you look at the person in front of you and realise that it’s not actually them any more, not the person you knew and loved. That they have become someone else.
Still, a part of you wants to hang on because occasionally you get glimpses of the ‘old them’ and you think that you can’t let them go entirely. They are still in there somewhere … but those glimpses become further and further apart, and eventually it’s not worth it any more. It’s not worth what it costs you to stick around.
My self-esteem was beginning to take a serious knock.
He had become the focus of my world. Everything I had been interested in or worked for was about to fall apart because I was so wrapped up in Paul, and I knew it, but I didn’t want to let go or give up. He knew it too, and he used it.
Drug addicts are by nature clever people. Contrary to what some might believe, I think that it takes a certain amount of intelligence to become a drug addict. It takes intelligence to experience the spiritual malaise that might lead to substance abuse, intelligence to want to experiment with and experience things that are out of the ordinary or forbidden, and intelligence to maintain the level of cunning and manipulation required to initially hide and support a drug habit to the point of advanced addiction.
So they are well able to recognise and hook into your need to be a saviour so that they can get what they want. They will give you just enough joy to keep you hopeful and keep you hanging on, because they want you there when they need you. They don’t want you to give up on them, and they know they can push quite far.
It’s as if you don’t know how much you want something until it is leaving you and you become desperate, and the desperation sustains them.
I was continually looking at new ideas or ways of getting him clean. I was losing myself. My mother was even getting involved in trying to ‘save’ Paul from himself. She used to put him in the sauna for hours – to sweat out the impurities – and then make him run behind her car. He always went along with it, and took it all with a smile on his face.
By the following April, in 1990, I was all set to go, but by that time I’d decided that I no longer wanted to go with Paul. I’d had enough. I wasn’t doing it any more, putting up with it. It was bad enough to have to deal with it at home where I had a support system to fall back on, but there was no way I was taking that kind of chance overseas where I wouldn’t have back-up.
I told him that I was going with a friend, that I wanted him to stay, and that was that.
‘Leave me alone now – what must I do in London? Just watch you lying around, doing nothing? Don’t follow me. Don’t come over.’
The point you have to get to within yourself to end it is a horrible, disappointed place. But when you get there, you know. I was there. After five years. I knew.
A part of me hated him for making me go to that place.
So I left, but I had only been in the UK for about three months when Paul’s exasperated mother called. She said they were sending him over, and she pleaded with me to meet up with him in London on his arrival. She said it was bad. Paul had got worse. He was robbing them blind.
Since he had travelled and worked successfully overseas before, Paul’s parents thought that if they could just get him out of Johannesburg, out of the country and away from his ‘friends’, it might help him.
Ja … help him find new and interesting drugs.
In any case, and despite my reservations, I said fine. It is easy to forget that horrible place I’d been in when I ended our relationship, and I did want to see him again. I gave an inch, it all came flooding back, and there I was again … the ‘pre-horrible place’, where the whole time you are thinking that there is this secret formula. That there is something you can do that’s going to make it right somehow. That you can love them enough or you can hate them enough. You get hooked into thinking that there is something you can do. It’s very enticing. People like to feel needed, and I guess I had never really wanted to give up.
* You junkies all look the same.
Red Eyes and Sticky Fingers
Val
WHEN WE PICKED PAUL UP FROM THE AIRPORT AFTER his first trip overseas, he had been away for almost a year and we couldn’t wait to see him and hear about his experiences travelling.
As much as we were looking forward to seeing him, he was looking forward to ‘seeing a man about a dog’ in Hillbrow.
He was out of the door as soon as he had dumped his bags.
He had to go see a friend, he said.
From that point on, he displayed the typical behaviour pattern of a young person for whom home is simply a place to ‘crash’ while he lives his life elsewhere.
We seldom saw him. He’d be gone for days at a time, but we became suspicious about drugs, because when he was at home he was different. He was quieter than usual, and seemed edgy. He slept a great deal, and didn’t have much of an appetite – and then always off ‘to see a friend’.
Paul had changed. It wasn’t sudden, but it was marked. The change had begun in high school and continued in the army, but we weren’t very experienced, or much informed, about drugs then. The headmaster at Paul’s school had never suggested drugs when his behaviour and his schoolwork had started to deteriorate – and I guess at first we were all just a bit ‘thick’.
But when he was in the army it had become too obvious not to see that Paul was playing with something.
He had always been consistently considerate and friendly, but then he’d developed this Jekyll and Hyde–type personality. One minute his usual self, and the next, selfish and dismissive … though never nasty. He just wasn’t Paul. He was different.
So we’d confronted him.
We’d demanded to know if he was smoking dagga.
Dagga.
To us – then – this was bad enough, because there was still so much innocence and ignorance among our generation about drugs. Dagga was a big bad wolf in itself. We were so worried about him smoking marijuana that we were distracted from considering the other stuff – like Mandrax – that the ‘scaly down-and-outers’ did, whatever it was. We didn’t think he could be doing that. We knew next to nothing about the reality of drug use in Jo’burg.
He’d denied it at first. ‘Mom,’ he’d said, ‘are you crazy? I’ve seen what it does to the guys in the army. I promise you, Mom, I am not smoking dagga, and I won’t.’
By the time he’d gone overseas, it was obvious to us that he’d lied about that, and on his return our need to suspect dagga turned into a need to begin educating ourselves to whatever else was out there, but fo
r quite some time it was hard to know where to look, what to look for, when to look … or if to look. You can’t just accuse someone of doing something when you don’t know what that something is, and when they have a million other excuses to dampen your suspicions.
He told us he wasn’t doing anything, and, as hard as we searched at times, we couldn’t find any actual evidence. But we knew. Apart from the change in him, he wasn’t getting a job and he seemed uninterested in everything. There was a distance between us that was almost impossible to bridge. His eyes were red most of the time. When he was at home he slept far more than usual. He’d lost all interest in sports, and that was the biggest indicator. He’d lived for sports.
It had to be more than dagga and alcohol, but we didn’t know what, and the distance we couldn’t bridge made it impossible to pin him down.
Red eyes? So what? I’ve been out all night. I’m tired, Mom. I’m going to sleep. I’m going out. See you later. Four days later. I haven’t found a job, but I’ve been looking. There just isn’t anything. Don’t worry, Mom, Noo and I are going overseas, so I must get work. I will soon. See you later. Just going out.
See you later.
See you later, and the door would be closed.
It would have been like trying to accuse someone of being an alcoholic because you catch them with a headache at 10 a.m.
I admit now that for a long time we were in a kind of denial. We told ourselves the kinds of things that people tell themselves when they don’t know how to deal with a situation and don’t have all the information.
Instead of getting all the information, we buried our heads and told ourselves it would pass. He was young. He was going out a lot, and doing what young people did. Probably a bit of dagga, and he wouldn’t have been the first. He would grow out of it, and we couldn’t do anything anyway unless we caught him red-handed.