by Nikki Ridley
The young prostitutes. Teenage girls, and boys – many of them runaways, some just trying to support their habits. There was a house they could go to to get condoms, and clean syringes.
There was a pharmacy where I could buy clean syringes without any questions being asked, or I could get them from the house when I didn’t have enough money.
I remember another house. A poor, dirty house with not a whole lot of furniture in it, because it had all been sold for drugs. I didn’t stay there. I used there. I was ‘officially’ living at my parents’ house, in Sandton. I would run from their house to this house, and then wander back again when I needed to sleep, or have a bath, or get something to sell. I used my parents’ house. I used my parents, and, as an extra spin-off, my trips to Sandton helped keep me in shape.
I had always been very fit, and no doubt my turn of speed to get to where I could use in peace, and in the comforting and uncritical company of other addicts, helped keep me that way. For a while.
The house was always full of people shooting up. A couple lived there, with a couple of kids. They were toddlers, and I had the impression that they didn’t know that anything strange was happening around them. (Though my memory often fails me, it sometimes leaves the consolation prize of an impression.) Maybe they were just used to it. They were just there.
I lived for a while with a friend in Yeoville, a notorious dealer and fellow user whose name I do remember – but I’ll call him Carl to protect my knowing his identity. I have no idea where – or who – he is now, if he is alive. He stole my Ray-Bans, and in indignant retribution I stole his sound system. Despite this little incident, however, life was easy.
(I can’t quite place this time in my head now. Was it before I went to London, or after? I think it was before. I used to go clubbing with him, his girlfriend and Savannah. So I knew him before I went to London, at least. That’s when it all started. He’s dead. Another pinks addict murdered him. I remember that now.)
That’s how it is with my memory. So many years later … So much time for me to recall the face of the man who took my Ray-Bans, and the fact that it got shot off. Were the Ray-Bans more important to me then? I laugh to myself now – I clearly remembered nicking his stuff, and him nicking mine, but not the fact that he got shot. He was a mean muther, and could have been the shooter. I’m lucky he didn’t shoot me for taking his sound system.
We had managed to find ourselves a tenant who kept us knee-deep in pinks. He had terminal cancer, and he was living out his last days shooting up pinks that he got legitimately for his pain. He seemed to have a never-ending supply of scripts, and as long as we could use them, he was a welcome guest.
We kept him alive – gave him food and a place to stay – on condition that he kept supplying. I don’t think anyone really cared about him. We would probably have tossed him out on the pavement if he had stopped supplying us. I don’t remember his name. It wasn’t important. He was just a living script dispenser. Then. Pinks had taken away my capacity to care.
It’s a murky, horrible place you go to when you start messing around with narcotics.
I remember so clearly the smell of his room. It was the sickly sweet smell of impending death. The man was rotting from the inside out from shooting up so much.
He was dying, as much from the drugs he was using to deaden the pain as from the cancer itself.
That smell. As much as I struggle to remember a lot of details now, I remember that smell. I have no problem recalling that. It was the smell of death, and it came with the pinks. It is hard to get rid of. It follows you wherever you go. It permeates you – your clothes, your hair, your skin – and it comes from inside.
It was the same smell that came from my friend in London. It was also the smell of pain, and the smell that came from me when I couldn’t walk properly any more. When the veins in my arms were gone, and the veins in my groin were collapsing, and there were abscesses at the injection sites, and the smell came from the pus when they popped.
I often shot up into the main femoral artery by mistake, because I was so out of it, and that is absolutely excruciating. It’s like missing the vein and shooting into tissue. I’ve already described this pain. When you get infected at the injection sites, it’s even worse. It’s an intense throbbing pain that doesn’t go away. Red lines run up and down your arms or your legs – wherever the vein goes. Then you get thrombosis when your veins start calcifying and then collapse, and then that limb is useless. Then you start poking about wherever you can find a vein. Everything is painful, but you start to panic if you don’t find a vein, so you just poke away.
The ache is unbelievable, and the only way to get rid of it is to shoot up more.
If you get full-blown septicaemia from infection, you’re finished, and if you get gangrene, you lose your limb. I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t get gangrene.
I remember the twenty-four-hour take-outs. Fontana’s, where I’d get food, and Bimbo’s, where I’d wait for my dealer.
Waiting for my dealer, and drinking endless cups of coffee. Getting wound up. Sweating a bit. Biting my lips. Smoking. Dragging deeply. Feeling cold. Feeling like shit.
The dealers were, by necessity, very clandestine, and they would rock up from a variety of different directions at different times. They needed to know that you knew where to find them, but they would avoid keeping any kind of regular schedule. So you could wait and wait, looking around. Goddammit, where is he? Another cup of coffee. Waiting, waiting, drinking coffee, waiting for my stash.
That’s all I did when I wasn’t lying against a wall in a room somewhere shooting up, or out stealing. Waiting to get high. Waiting my life away.
My usual dealer’s name was Frank. Frank with the flashy Mercedes-Benz and the never-ending supply of forged scripts. He had an uncanny knack of making you feel ‘real grateful’ for the poison he supplied. Frank with the gold chains, dishing out syringes and hanging around Bimbo’s like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, summoning all his followers with little pink sweets.
Frank was our main ‘feel good’ man. When you saw him, you knew, like a sigh of relief whispering in your ear … it’s not long now. The next hit is just around the corner. You can relax. It’s coming. It’s coming …
Yeah, ol’ Frank – whom I never saw shoot up once.
In a sense pinks became my lover – and I was in love. Obsessed. Everything else took second place. Including a real relationship with a human being. I wasn’t interested in finding a girlfriend. I had everything I wanted. Let me tell you about my obsessive lover.
Before I tell you what it feels like, I’ll tell you what it is.
Wellconal is a Schedule 7 prescription painkiller. It is prescribed for people, like our tenant, who are dying from cancer and are in such pain that not even morphine can help them. It is known among the medical profession as being instantly and terminally addictive, but that doesn’t matter, because these people are dying anyway.
It is very similar in effect to heroin, and is classed, like heroin, as a central nervous system depressant. That is why it is known as a ‘downer’. But, hell, it makes you high!
I can make an analogy between shooting up pinks and having one long and intense orgasm, but in fact the feeling of a Wellconal high is better than that. (In the process it also, incidentally, takes away your actual sex drive.) It is a bizarre, almost inexplicable feeling. There is nothing more intense than a narcotic high. Words to describe it? You could try ‘mind-blowing’, ‘incredible’, ‘unsurpassable’, plus a whole thesaurus’s worth of synonyms for ‘a thousand times better than sex’, if those words existed.
It is a mixture of being completely awake and aware, and drifting and floating as if on a cloud. Reality and dream become intermingled, so you are not quite sure if you are awake or not, of what is real and what isn’t. It is just the most extraordinary sensation – that floating, drifting, unhinged state.
I think it is that feeling of being somewhere outside of the real world and
being able to get there so quickly that is part of the allure and the charm of narcotics, and because of the intensity of the sensation. It is so damn real and so instant. The only problem is that you come down. And the downs ultimately become lower than the high is high. Physical dependence also sets in almost immediately, so the pain and eventually the agony of the withdrawal, should you try to stop, is not only mental but physical too. One moment floating in heaven, and the next falling, falling, down, down, and the bottom is withdrawal. The bottom is hell. All you can think of is keeping away from that hell, the only way you know how.
Unless you have been there, I don’t think it is possible to imagine emotions so intense, or desire so focused and so sharp. The fear of imminent mental paroxysm drives anxiety through your being, sickens your body with nausea, and pulls your soul into a dark recess where it is deadened until allowed to fly free again with a shot. Think of the words I used above to describe the high, now try to imagine the opposite.
The scientific term for the general malaise that sets in between highs, even when you don’t go through full withdrawal, is dysphoria – the opposite of euphoria. Sounds a lot like ‘damn miserable’, but it fails to include ‘single-mindedly intent on procuring the next hit’.
You are a slave, whipped by fear and led by desire.
You come down so quickly, and each time you are down it becomes harder and harder to re-attain that original high. Once you have experienced that first mind-blowing rush, you will go searching for it again and again, but you never find it. You will never get that feeling again. Never. But you will also never stop longing for it, and you will never stop running from its evil twin.
Trying to reclaim that original high quickly becomes your be-all and end-all. You devote all your energy to, and pour all your money (and once you start stealing to support your increasingly expensive habit, everyone else’s money too) into that search. You deny to yourself that you are not going to find it, because it is what you want more than anything. You are determined, but you are motivated and controlled by a physical and mental craving that is utterly divorced from a normal, balanced state of being. All you want is more. It’s all that matters. It’s all you can see, because you get tunnel vision, and that high is the only light in a very dark tunnel, and you have learnt to ignore the voices of reason that try to hold you back from it, because that would mean having to stay in that tunnel. It would mean never having a chance to feel so good again, and somewhere, below logic, you believe that if you can just feel that high again, you will step out of the tunnel. Misery won’t get you so bad next time. Misery can’t survive that feeling. That feeling will give you strength, because you have none now – because you feel so rotten. If you could just feel better … If you could just have it, because you want it, and you want it the way it was in the beginning, when the low on the other side wasn’t so bad. Just a step up. That’s all you need. One last one. For old times’ sake too, because it is sooo nice. First you want it, then you crave it, then you can think of nothing else … then nothing else exists. You have to have it!
If you can just feel better, then you can think. Just now. One last one.
That is the slyness of narcotics. While they take a physiological hold on you, they trick your mind into believing that they have something to offer. That you will find it again, and that this is just temporary – that you can stop if you want to, and you won’t have to pay a price. Reality goes out the window, along with your livelihood, if you ever had one in the first place, along with your youth, and, for most, eventually along with your life.
For the user, reality gets shoved aside, but for the dealers – your reality just doesn’t matter to them at all, as long as their own lives are taken care of. Dealers seldom use themselves. They can see first-hand what happens to those who do use, and they are usually not stupid enough to go down that road themselves. They can see the destruction, even as they help create it, and they leave it in their wake. As long as they get their money, they don’t care, and they will sell you anything for the right price. They suffer from a disease of a different kind – a total lack of conscience. They are false prophets that prey on weakened minds. They sell you the promise of heaven as they lead you down the path to damnation.
You want to get high on pinks, or heroin? Kiss your dreams goodbye. Kiss away all the daydreams that filled your head while you stared wistfully out of the classroom window. Kiss away all your ambitions and all the hopes your family had for you. Kiss your life goodbye, because, for 99 per cent of you, there is no getting away. It won’t let you go.
Your reality becomes weeping, gaping sores in your arms and in your groin from shooting up. It becomes dirty rooms with no furniture because you’ve sold everything. It becomes cold and desperation, theft and pawnshops, prison and rehab. The torment of withdrawal, and the dissatisfaction, fear and loss of your soul that drives you to shoot up more and more. It becomes lies and hiding, guilt and blame, loneliness and numbness. And always there is death, hovering nearby, waiting for you to hand yourself over.
You can die from one hit, even one of a lower dose than your usual, because your system has become run down (your liver and your kidneys are damaged), or you can die from having a second hit because you’ve forgotten that you had one already.
Your breathing slows and almost stops, you go into a coma from lack of oxygen, and then everything stops. But you won’t know anything. Or there is septicaemia, or hepatitis, or AIDS. Or suicide.
Pinks addicts die like flies. Especially the girls. Their body mass is generally much lower than that of males, so they overdose far more easily. In Hillbrow during the early nineties someone would overdose every few days. Then there would be a whole shutdown of the streets for a day or two. The cops would be high profile, and the addicts and dealers would lie low. Then everything would return to normal. People would forget about it and start taking risks again, not really believing that they might be the next one to go. The addicts and the dealers would begin their waltz all over again, for a day or two. Another life over. Another life forgotten. It happens. Shrug and carry on. Another overdose … and so on. Many lives lost. Young lives. Many names, many faces, many people I’d bump into on the streets – perhaps we’d have a little chat, and then a couple of days later I would hear that he or she had ODed. Many Michaels, Chesters, Darryls … someone’s son and someone’s sister, none with any hope left.
Occasionally I realised that I had shot up too much, and I’d think, ‘Oh hell, I’ve really done it this time.’ Dread creeps into your heart – for a split second. (A very justified dread, because you know how easy it is to die on these things. You see it all the time. You used to think it wouldn’t happen to you, but when so many die, even the addled brain has to face some facts.) But then the stuff is racing through your system, and you feel good as you wait for the end. Too good to care.
That fear and anxiety starts to fade over time, and that little voice inside you just gets quieter and quieter. Eventually you are able to ignore it completely. The voices of reason are gone. The whispers get drowned out. In the end you are oblivious to everything around you, and you are single-mindedly focused on your next hit. You kill all conscience, all sense of guilt, all sense of remorse – all the things that might make you question yourself, and you begin to justify to yourself what you are doing.
In living for that high, that hour of pleasure, you quickly reach a point where you can’t find your way back. Where you cannot even contemplate it. You reach a point where you don’t want to go back, because you have nothing to do with what is back there any more. You know you are not gonna make it there, but there is still a way out on this side. There is always respite in those little pink pills. They are the way out.
I remember being afraid to stop because I’d have to go through withdrawal. Then I remember being afraid to stop and go through withdrawal because the fear of not doing this – of not doing drugs and being a druggie – was greater than my fear of dying.
I had
lost myself. I didn’t own my being any more. I was no longer able, capable or confident. I was nothing if I wasn’t living this life. I couldn’t do real life out there, with a job and 9–5 and responsibility. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to do it.
I told myself that. It absolved me.
When I was down, I wallowed in my weakness. But I wasn’t always down.
Just one more time. As my body craved its chemical, my soul craved the power it would bring.
I overdosed twice. I recovered completely from the first one. I will never recover completely from the second one. The second one was my way out, and, it’s true, real life out there wants little to do with me now, while it taunts me with what I’ve lost.
At the Prison Gates
Paul
THE EVER-PRESENT THREAT OF DEATH IS NOT THE ONLY thing you would think could act as a deterrent to using. Getting arrested – now that’s another harsh reality that doesn’t make a difference either.
If someone had asked me in school if I would choose a path in life that alienated me from society, carried with it an almost certain death sentence, would see me stealing to survive, getting arrested and spending time in prison, I would have laughed. Of course not. Who would? Who would choose a life like that? Sordid and shameful. But I did. I was driven to choose that life from my first opiate hit in Port St Johns.
One of an addict’s greatest fears is having his stash stolen. The thing I feared the most was not having enough, or of not being able to get a fix, because when you need to shoot up, you need to shoot up right now. So, purely in the interests of self-preservation, I managed to hang on to enough willpower and organisational skills to do two things. One was to ensure that I had enough drugs on me to never run short. The other was to make sure that I looked neat, tidy and respectable – so that no one would take any notice of me when I walked into the Wanderers Club and the Health & Racquet in Sandton and lifted gym bags.