by Nikki Ridley
From using every day, it became twice a day, to several times a day. Things began deteriorating between Savannah and me. I began using so much that money became a problem. I had to deal more and more, and sacrifice expenditure in other areas to pay for my hits. I started taking more and more days off work. Things had flipped around. I was no longer incorporating heroin into my life, I was living for it. Everything revolved around scoring and using. I didn’t care too much for anything else. I didn’t have time for anything else. When I wasn’t shooting up, I was out looking for the dealer, or waiting to meet up with him. All the colours of life gradually blended into the grey sky and almost constant drizzle that characterise London when you are not doing any of the many things you can do there, but I really didn’t care about that. All I thought about was smack and how to pay for it.
I started reusing needles and occasionally sharing needles, boiling them to clean them, and that freaked Savannah badly. She knew by this stage. She wanted me to do an HIV test and I refused. I didn’t want to know.
What a jerk.
I never stopped loving it – doing smack – but I soon forgot how to feel normal without it, so getting high became as much about getting through the day as about getting high.
Then I lost my job. I had been taking too many sick days, and I was looking pretty shocking.
I’d shoot up in the morning, then again, then off I’d go to score because I knew that I would soon need more, because if you don’t get more, if you run out and you can’t find the dealer, you will start feeling very bad.
You feel the sweat coming. You feel yourself slowing down. You start to shake. Your eyes feel funny, as if there is sandpaper in them.
You’re paling, and you begin feeling freaked out. Your heart begins beating too fast.
You feel dreadful. Sick. Bad. Bad. That’s a small word for a very big feeling. Anxiety. Fear. Horror.
You-don’t-have-any-more-and-You-Can’t-Find-The-Dealer …
Your bowels start trembling.
Pain, mental and physical pain, envelops you. Your bones ache. They ache, man! You are so scared and the world has turned nasty. A heavy blanket is over you, clouding you. It’s a demon’s blanket. BAD. YOU FEEL SERIOUSLY BAD AND YOU NEED SOMETHING, NOW!!! And you are panicking, and desperate. You are craving another hit so badly, and the thought of not getting any is terrifying. It’s consuming. It’s the sickness.
If you don’t get a hit, you will begin to go through full withdrawal, and you know that it’s going to get worse. You will beg, and cry, and piss in your pants. Your bowels will loosen. You will go to hell.
You know this will happen. So you make sure that you always have more smack.
If you don’t have any money and you get too sick to make a plan, you are going to hell for a week. You are going to go mad.
If you are on the dole, you are ‘sorted’, but if you’re not, you will steal or do something – anything. You will. You will do whatever you have to to look after yourself. If you have no money, you will steal, because you have no option but to find a way to not feel like this, and the only way is to get more smack.
You will even let your girlfriend (whom you love, because you know you do, you have always loved her and she is your best friend) go hungry. You will tell her that there is no money to buy something to eat. You will let her starve rather than admit that you have got some money, because you know that you need it to buy more smack, and that if you don’t get more smack, you are going to go to pieces.
I let Savannah starve for four days after we ran out of money and had to leave the hostel. I felt guilty about that … but not that guilty. I loved her, but I couldn’t put her first. My needs came first. They had to.
We bummed around during that time, after which I met up with a couple of my mates and moved into a squat. To be more accurate, we broke in. One of my friends kicked the door in, and there we were – tenants by the grace of England’s Squatter Rights. If you can get in, you can stay there, and no one can make you leave. It’s a fantastic system that, along with the dole, supports thousands of would-be itinerants and their heroin habits.
The place was a revolting hovel, with nothing in it, not even a toilet. The only thing it had were some pictures on the walls that had no doubt been left behind by the previous tenants.
That’s when Savannah left. She’d had enough. She had found out that I’d been shooting up while we weren’t eating, and the prospect of living in a squat was the last straw after everything.
I loved Savannah, I must have, but I couldn’t feel it much any more, and when she left I didn’t care enough to try to stop her. I was preoccupied. She was gone … oh well … pass the spoon please.
The ties that bind can be so strong, and yet so easily broken.
After Savannah left there is not much more to tell. Some other squatter types walked into the place one night and lifted all the pipes and fittings.
We just watched while they helped themselves. They didn’t threaten us. We were just too apathetic to give a shit. I vaguely remember trying to make some kind of deal with them … see if we could score a bit of cash out of it.
I moped about when I wasn’t too high to think about the fact that my girlfriend, the woman I had been devoted to for years, had left me.
I was shooting up several times a day, moving from squat to squat. Everything was dank and dreary and dismal. We, my untrustworthy junkie friends and I, never had any furniture.
We met up with a junkie couple and lived in a squat with them for a little while. All I really remember about them is that they trawled the Portobello Road Market, stealing clothes and whatever else they could get their hands on, for a living.
My Scotsman friend couldn’t walk properly. He shuffled about all over the place because his legs and groin were infected. He was covered in abscesses, and they were festering and suppurating, and smelly as hell.
He got the dole, so he was better off than me, but food was seldom a priority. We had nothing to cook on anyway.
I probably don’t remember much because there isn’t much more to remember besides what I have told you already. What more can I tell you about heroin?
Perhaps I can tell you about a day in the life of a smack addict in a squat in London.
There is nothing. If you are not on the dole, and if you are heavily addicted, you have nothing. You have sold everything you can sell.
You do nothing. You will never spend money on anything because you must keep it for smack. You will not even go to a warm English pub for an ale and a meal of bangers-and-mash on a cold wintry night because you need the cash for tomorrow’s hit.
Tomorrow’s hit … you better hope you have it, or you are gonna have a hard time.
When you wake up in the morning, you need a hit to get going. Hit No. 1.
Not much of a rush this time. That’s not the job of Hit No. 1. This one is to help you get up, to be able to get out of bed and feel normal, because your body, and your mind, can’t do it on their own any more.
If you haven’t got any smack left from the night before, you are really in trouble. You need someone to go get it for you, because you can’t move. You can’t even get up to go to the toilet, so you’ll piss right there in your bed, if you have one. You’re shaking, and your eyes are scratchy, and as you lie there waiting, the hurting starts. The hurting is emotional pain, as anxiety floods you and fear engulfs you, and physical pain, as your bones and your muscles begin to ache. It quickly becomes excruciating, and you are in hell again. If no one helps you and you can’t make a plan, and if you start going cold turkey, you feel as if your whole world is coming to an end. You think you are going to die … and it might not be so bad.
You don’t want to feel this, and there is only one way to avoid it, or to escape from it.
Hell. But when that first hit rushes to your head, it’s okay.
If your body were a car, the first hit turns over the motor, but you need a second hit to put fuel in it to go somewhere. Hit
No. 2. Then you can actually go somewhere … or not. You’re feeling good now. If you have enough, you can go for a third hit, to get that high that will take you to the only place you really want to go.
Hit No. 3. You get ‘The Nod’ and you are in heaven, man. Heaven. It’s amazing, and all the bad stuff has gone away. In fact, everything has gone away. You are in darkness. Warm, comfortable darkness. You feel so safe, and time stops again. You can be in heaven for an hour or all day. You have no furniture. The room is cold and dirty. There is no toilet. It smells. The sounds of the city are filtering in. Cars. Rain. But you know none of this. None of this matters. It is all sad and dreary and cold and fast and noisy – and that is not where you are. You are safe and warm and so still … and so numb, enveloped in layers of hypnotic blankets that keep it all out, somewhere between here and there, somewhere between asleep and awake, in your body but not, and you just don’t care about a thing.
It feels sooo good.
You are one small hit away from dead.
If you use again, you will overdose. If you have used too much, you can go into a coma from this stage. If you do, you had better hope there is someone in the room with you to take you to hospital – if they can, if they aren’t as fucked as you are.
If you haven’t accidentally overdosed, from pushing it too far or from using smack from a different supplier – stuff you don’t know the strength of – you are pretty much dead anyway. You are no longer choosing to live in the ‘underworld’. It’s the only place you belong in now. You have no friends, because your friends are just like you, and you will all sell each other down the river for a hit. You have become a horrible person, because you will lie, cheat and steal to survive. It has become an expensive way to live, because you are on anywhere around 80–100 ccs a shot now. You are also using a bigger, and longer, needle now because you have to find new veins, ones that haven’t collapsed, and you’ll poke around wherever you can – in your groin, between your toes, wherever – to find them. There’s a deep one on the throat as a last resort.
You have developed a routine to survive. You hit up at least twice in the morning, then you go out and do whatever you have to do to make sure that you can get more to get you through the night, and then still more so that you have enough for at least two hits in the morning. It’s a fight. It’s every day, 24/7, and the fight is against time – the time it will take the hounds of hell to catch up with you and start biting at your heels. The only reprieve you get is when you are so high you have forgotten what the rest of your life feels like, because the rest of your life feels like shit. It feels like you look.
That’s the life of a smack addict in a squat in London. Not much to it.
There is hope. It comes in the form of methadone, a synthetic heroin substitute, for those who want to stop but can’t. You can become a registered heroin addict and be supplied with heroin ‘kits’ by the UK government so that you always have a fresh needle on you and never have to share needles or reuse them.
If you are as bad as my Scotsman friend, or as bad as a twenty-something prostitute in King’s Cross, dying in a toilet from septicaemia and/or AIDS, with not an intact vein left on her body, earning her last few hits with blowjobs for ten quid because her mouth is the only part of her that is still intact … then you have gone as far as you are going to go. You have gone as far as many have gone. The bubble has popped for good. The drug that designed your dreams has taken them away, along with your time and your money and soon your life.
That’s where some heroin addicts go. I went home. I missed the sun on my back and on my face. I was sick of the rain. I needed my smack, but it hadn’t taken me as far as it can take a person. I still had a chance.
Rates of addiction are different for different people. For some, it is almost instant, the psychological grip so overwhelming, or the desire to push the limits so great, that the slide downhill is rapid and constant.
For others, it can be a little slower, a little more intermittent, with days, weeks, whole periods of time, free of using.
It didn’t take me down too fast. I didn’t go from experimenting and playing with opiates to junkie-on-the-pavement in sixty seconds, but that last year in London … that is what I believe pushed me past the point of no return, though I may well have been there anyway.
Just as I don’t remember the plane ride over to London, I don’t remember the journey back. I only know that I had somehow landed up in France, and been deported back to South Africa because of a visa violation.
I do know that as soon as I was back home, I headed out the door for Hillbrow. I didn’t know where to get smack, but I knew where to get pinks. They are not all that different. They are just two different tickets to the same destination … and I couldn’t wait to get there.
Breaking the Ties
Savannah
I MET UP WITH PAUL IN LONDON IN ABOUT JULY 1990. HE had begun working at a youth hostel in Earls Court, and I went to stay with him there. It was a comfortable, if not especially lucrative, set-up. While Paul worked as a driver for the hostel guests, I worked a couple of days a week in the kitchen in exchange for room and board only. Both of us were therefore dependent on Paul’s salary.
At first everything was fine. It was really exciting to be in London together. It was what we had both wanted in the beginning, and it felt as if we’d been given another chance. We had a fantastic time for a while, getting up to all sorts of things, before it, inevitably, started to fall apart again. The unravelling was just that, though – unravelling. The good times didn’t just hit a brick wall. Drugs just kind of seeped their way into our lives and gradually took Paul away from me again. This time it was heroin.
It seeped in while we went out, partied, saw live bands, and I got sucked into Paul’s schemes for extra money and good times. It wasn’t hard to just go along with things, because Paul was so much fun to be around, and when we met up in London I had the ‘old Paul’ back, the one I was in love with. The one with a wacky sense of humour that left me utterly defenceless.
Paul’s sense of humour evidenced itself in constant understated ways. One thing that comes instantly to mind is a night we ventured into Westbourne Grove – a fairly ‘dodgy’ area of London. Paul had an arrangement to buy hash there from this monstrously large Jamaican. (The hash was to deal in the hostel to all the foreigners staying there – the kind of plan that Paul commonly cooked up and which I always fell for. Reality was, however, that Paul usually smoked all the hash with his friends. A non-profit enterprise of note! )
Paul and I stood out like two sore thumbs in Westbourne Grove – these two ‘little’ white South Africans in an area almost entirely populated by ‘posses’ of ‘big’ black Jamaicans. It felt as if we were in a movie. It was a hardcore area … and it was 1990.South Africa wasn’t very popular yet in England – particularly not white South Africa. It was pre-elections, and people in London were still quite hostile.
While we were waiting for this guy, I remember being very nervous and telling Paul that I didn’t think this was a good idea at all. ‘This is heavy here, Paul. We should have brought some kind of protection.’
‘No, no,’ he reassured me, ‘don’t worry. I brought protection.’
‘What? What protection have you brought, Paul?’ I asked, because I couldn’t see anything on him.
I remember him looking so pleased with himself as he pulled a bread knife from under his jacket.
It couldn’t have cut a mouse in half! I don’t know what he was thinking, or if he was thinking, but it was typical of the way he went through life. The ridiculousness of it made me laugh, and then it didn’t matter that all we had between us and a possible bad end was a bread knife. That was me – scared to floored in seconds.
Yet that was what was so brilliant about being with Paul. When things became desperate and I’d think this is it, I can’t take it any more, it has to stop, he would make me laugh. Just by being him. He’d somehow suck the seriousness out of any situation.<
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Then I would think … well, it can’t be all that bad …
I was such a sucker. As if I didn’t know Paul well enough … but he would play sick, and I would actually fall for it. He was so good at it, and I was so good at wanting to believe him, that I would genuinely buy it that he was ill, and off I’d go to work, and then off he would go – for the whole day. He hid his stash in the ceiling of the ground-floor toilets so that I wouldn’t find out. Not that it wasn’t totally obvious. He’d started to look a bit hectic – sort of like a skinny panda bear with these huge black rings around his eyes all the time.
I knew. I had always known.
Paul eventually lost his job. He was ‘sick’ so often that they said that they weren’t prepared to employ him any more. He was never there when they needed him, and there were thousands of people looking for work in London. I continued to work in the kitchen for a short while, so we at least had a place to sleep, if no income, but it wasn’t long before they told us to go. They needed the bed. It was of no benefit to them to have either of us around any more.
When we were kicked out of the hostel we had absolutely nothing, and so our only option was to move into a squat, which, to be honest, ‘did me ‘ead in slightly’. I refused. I was not going there. I didn’t want to live like that.
With not a penny to our names after Paul’s income had dried up, we also couldn’t buy food.