The Million-Rand Teaspoon

by Nikki Ridley

  It was a full-time job. First one I had managed to hold down. If lifting other people’s sports goods was a listed occupation, I would be well up the career ladder.

  I would go in, dressed for gym, check out the circuit or play a few rounds of squash, just to blend in and become invisible, and then off I’d go with a few more possessions than I’d walked in with.

  I lived from hand to mouth like this, or rather from hand to hit, eking out an existence through theft.

  As long as I looked the part and could move in the right circles without standing out like a sore thumb, I had a never-ending supply of quality goods to pawn for drugs. I got away with it for a long time because I succeeded for the most part in not looking like a junkie. I was lucky – I managed to keep one step ahead of my habit this way. I was always able to feed my ever-burgeoning addiction – the continuously starving animal that will eat its owner if he stops giving it food.

  Addicts can be extremely cunning and inventive when it comes to planning their life of crime. Parents are a soft target. You know where they put everything, and how long it will be before they notice it is gone. If they notice. You know how much to take, and how much not to take so that you can keep the avenues of doubt open. But the real creativity comes in denying everything, or worming your way out of it with as many excuses and inventions as you can conjure up.

  You can’t always nick from the folks, though. They are a finite resource, and so you get a bit bolder and look outside the family home. You begin lurking, waiting and scanning for opportunities to rip off something you can sell. Mmm. Car radios and CD shuttles.

  I was very partial to CD shuttles. I was very quick with my hands. I would walk around a parking lot, casually bumping into cars to see if an alarm went off. If it did, I’d drift into the darkness, but if it didn’t – what a pleasure. I’d be in in a sec. As a professional tradesman, I always had my tools with me – tools like screwdrivers and other useful things. Things that could be hidden in my pockets.

  I liked to make the most of a location, so I would hit the parking lots outside the gyms.

  Desperation will get you a long way.

  On the flip side of the coin, that same desperation can make you careless. Then you get caught.

  My first arrest came for breaking into a car in Sandton. My second for running away from a rehab, my third for possession, and my fourth for breaking into a car in Hillbrow.

  I did get a fright the first time, and I quite honestly intended to turn my life around after my father posted bail for me. It was a wake-up call. Diepkloof, the first prison I was sent to, was horrible and dirty and it smelt like samp and beans – like the stuff they slid along the floor of the cell for everyone to tuck into. No meals on trays for each of us.

  It was scary too. There was a lot of posturing and power plays – the odd threat directed my way – and although I was left alone for the most part, I was only in there for a short time. Most of the inmates in my cell were illegal immigrants. They weren’t really criminals, so I was lucky … you know what I mean. I was fortunate in my company. Not everyone was.

  I didn’t want to go back to that, and I was keenly aware of the fact that I now had a criminal record, and what that meant. So I can honestly say that I intended to pull myself together.

  Truly, intention is the mother of all fuck-ups.

  Prison is not pleasant, and of course when you are in lock-up you cannot use, so you go through withdrawal. Nasty, or it would be if there wasn’t a whole bunch of things to help you through it. Like grass, alcohol, buttons. Anything, really. Takes the edge off a bit. You could get anything you wanted. Grass was the cheapest and the most readily available, so I stayed stoned.

  The guards must have turned a few blind eyes.

  So you fear it, but just as the fear of death fades in the face of your need to keep using, so does the fear of arrest. It is always there, in the back of your mind, like your last piece of clean underwear stuffed into the back of a messy closet. Just as hard to find, and it likewise eventually becomes moth-eaten.

  You start taking chances again – venturing out to score whatever you can get your hands on. Innate dishonesty has nothing to do with it. You are not stealing because you are that way inclined. You are stealing because you have to, and that is the life you now live – a life in which the only important thing is scoring your next hit.

  The higher you get, the less you worry about that sort of thing, and the lower you get, the more desperation supersedes the self-preserving hesitancy to put yourself at risk once more.

  And so you get arrested again, and sent to prison again, and then rehab again, and you intend to stop again, and you don’t – again – and you start stealing again.

  Let me clarify my previous statement about intent. Yes, you do intend to turn things around. When you walk out of that prison into the sunlight, you walk out into a light of a different kind. By necessity, you have been off drugs (well, the hard ones anyway) for a time. You’ve withdrawn, and come back. You still think about it and you still maintain a certain amount of conscious appetite for your drugs. In fact, you talk about them all the time, and think about them all the time. (There is a term for it: ‘euphoric recall’. Every moment is taken up by talking about how high you got, how you kept your habit going, what cool times you had. They try to stop it in the rehabs. They try to introduce new topics of conversation, but with little success. It is just so interesting talking about it all.)

  But when you walk back into real life, as preoccupied as you are, you are now aware of another world in which it might be possible to live without them – a state of being that you’d forgotten. You are at a fork in the road. You can see the exit sign, and it is not flying by like before. You’ve stopped. You might actually start walking up that off-ramp. One or two have been known to make it all the way up off the freeway and far enough away to only ever have to hear the noise of its traffic from a distance.

  But something else walks out of that prison with you besides good intentions. When you start using drugs, you begin to hardwire your brain to the experience. When you are completely addicted, that neural network is so strong and so entrenched that it has become a part of you, like another personality. It has its own voice and its own agenda, and it wants to do the only thing that will keep it alive. It wants more drugs. It is the devil on your shoulder, and it is very persuasive, because you know that nothing really feels good any more, and it offers you what you can no longer find in simple things.

  All the time you were inside, it has kept quiet, because it couldn’t get what it wanted. Now that it can, it comes to life. This other personality is as much a part of you now as the self you once were. The former self that is the angel on the other shoulder as you stand at that fork in the road.

  I was never really interested in stopping drugs, because the new personality I had integrated into my self had the majority share. It was now ‘I’, and it wanted to get high. I wanted to get high.

  In all the prisons and rehabs I landed myself in, I was just biding my time. I was playing along and singing their tune because in the back of my mind, I knew it was not the end, and I never wanted it to be. I wanted to get high. I loved that sensation so much that everything else seemed to pale by comparison. The back of my mind, that subconscious realm that drives you to do the things you do, was vanquished by my desire for it.

  Almost everyone in the rehabs had been sent there by someone or some place else, and nobody was really interested in stopping. There was no real desire. We played with the counsellors the same way I’d played with my parents. A lot of the ‘lay’ counsellors were so screwed up themselves from taking drugs, and they’d been clean for so long, that they had lost touch with where their own minds had been. So they believed all our bullshit. They had, in my opinion, lost both their street-smarts and their acuity.

  I knew that it was just a matter of time before I would get the satisfaction I craved, and, while I waited, there was plenty to distract the mind, as l
ong as I had something to trade for it.

  On the surface I was determined to reform, and grateful for the chance to stop. On the occasions I thought I really did want to stop, I was kidding myself as much as everyone else.

  The new me kidded the old me that what I was doing was not so damned bad, or dangerous, or that it could end up with me overdosing and dying. I lived in denial, ignoring the voices of reason and fear till they went quiet.

  At the same time that I told myself I wanted to stop, I really couldn’t see life without drugs. They were a part of me. They were my lover. Waiting for me at the prison gates.

  So Much for Rock Bottom

  Val

  PAUL WAS CAUGHT BREAKING INTO A CAR IN SANDTON. The call from the police came fairly late in the evening. They asked us to come and pay bail for him so they could let him go.

  Mark and I lay in bed and discussed what to do for quite a while.

  Although this was our first ‘call’, we were, thanks to the Tough Love meetings, familiar with the pattern that usually followed them. The parents would pay bail, and take the child home. The child would leave and be back on the streets in a matter of hours.

  It was a hard decision, but we agreed to not pay the bail. We had to be strong, or Paul was finished. As unpleasant as the idea of him being in prison was, we saw this as a chance for him. We decided he had to stay there.

  Paul had used the one phone call he was allowed that day to call us, and he was shocked by our decision. We went to see him the next day and he begged us to pay the bail, but we refused. We put up a united front and told him that he had to stay and face it.

  Paul was sent to Diepkloof in the south of Jo’burg. The place was nicknamed ‘Sun City’. Don’t know why. I had never seen anything like it in my life.

  To visit him, we had to leave our car at a meeting point and we were all driven into the prison in a Putco bus. We were then taken into a large room with glass partitions between us and the prisoners. There was just this mass of people behind the glass. A sea of faces and arms holding up boards with numbers on them. Then Paul’s number was called and I saw him. It was exactly like it is in the movies. He was moved around to a glass door where we could approach him and talk to him, but we couldn’t touch him. He looked terrible. His clothes were torn. He told us that he shared a cell with about forty others.

  I was afraid for him. I worried about him getting raped. I worried about AIDS. I worried about what it must be like for him in there.

  He was so pleased to see us. I’d taken him chocolate, and he’d told me about the only other white boy in the cell with him, who’d put his arm across the toilet bowl and slashed his wrist so that he’d be taken out of the cells to the prison hospital.

  But we’d been through too much. He’d lied and played us for so long. None of it was enough. We still refused to pay bail. This was the only way.

  Then Chris Hani was murdered. The tensions between black and white in the country, already at boiling point, intensified. We worried about how much more volatile feelings would be in the prisons. This was apartheid prison, and Paul was among a very small minority of white prisoners in Diepkloof. We considered the possibility – the very strong possibility – that he could be a target of race violence. We agonised over our decision once again, but in the end we paid his bail.

  When he came home, he asked his father to get him out of the country, but Mark refused. He wanted Paul to face the music. He had to go to court, and he had to do his time, but Mark arranged for him to be put into a government rehabilitation facility – a rehab he couldn’t run away from.

  He was shipped off to Magaliesoord in Cullinan, near Pretoria. Mark and I felt relief. We thought he’d get clean there. We really did. At least we hoped as much as we could. He couldn’t walk out of this one. So we took a holiday.

  We had no idea. Paul was able to continue taking drugs in Magaliesoord thanks to an apparently flourishing trading system that the inmates had devised with people on the outside.

  After our holiday, we would drive through regularly to see Paul, always with a box filled with various items – mostly food, chocolate, condensed milk and the like – that Paul had requested. We hadn’t a clue that these things, intended by us to make life a little less bleak for him, were being traded at the perimeter fence for drugs. They called it the Rayton Run.

  Paul and another inmate escaped from there while my husband and I were away for a week’s break at the Beacon Island Hotel in Plettenberg Bay, somehow managing to get all the way to our house in Johannesburg, convince our house-sitter (our domestic worker who had known Paul since he was a little boy) to let them in and to give him the keys to my car, load in the bar fridge and the video machine, drive to town to sell them for pinks, bring the car back and hike back to Magaliesoord – all in time for roll call the next morning.

  They were found out, however, and Paul ended up back in the courtroom, in Cullinan. This time he was given a five-year sentence, suspended for five years, and he was sent to Zonder-water prison for six months. This time we didn’t pay bail. We didn’t even have the option, but we weren’t too upset by that. We wouldn’t have anyway.

  There was his chance to get better if he wanted to … and surely he’d gone through enough … but apparently he hadn’t.

  We didn’t know it at the time, but we know now that Paul was denied rehabilitation as a direct result of his imprisonment, because drugs were freely available there. If it wasn’t pinks, it was something else.

  On his release, I followed him into Hillbrow, and saw him visit two dealers. By now I was familiar with the area and able to see exactly what he was doing from the car.

  Mark and I called the Drug Squad and told them where the dealers were that day, but they told us that they chose to leave them alone, as they preferred to know where they were. We knew the reasons, but it was nevertheless very depressing to know they wouldn’t do anything.

  My husband and I then decided to try a different tactic. Since we couldn’t do anything to get the dealers off the street, we decided to get Paul off the street. We weren’t going to wait for him to get himself arrested again, so we waited for him to come home, as he did time after time, and we looked for the telltale evidence that he was using. Sure enough, we soon found a spot of blood – a sure sign that Paul had just shot up and almost certainly had more drugs on him. We called John Vorster Square … again. Considering the fact that they wouldn’t do anything about the dealers, their reaction was fairly surprising.

  Two officers from the narcotics squad arrived at the house – big and burly and kitted out, complete with Uzis! They searched Paul, his room and the house, but found nothing. After all that they left, unable to arrest Paul for lack of evidence.

  I knew he had drugs on him. I had been so sure, and now I was as angry as I was defeated. After they had gone I rounded on Paul and demanded that he tell me where the drugs were hidden. He nonchalantly pointed out that they were in his underpants, where he had been, rightly, sure that two macho cops like that would not want to look.

  So much for that route.

  But, knowing what we know now, it wouldn’t have helped anyway.

  After that it was Shekane, the rehab in Pietermaritzburg, again. He left after one day.

  He was well into full-blown Wellconal addiction by the time he came back, and was shooting up in his groin, as the veins in his arms had collapsed.

  We didn’t want him back. We had done everything we could, and he’d got worse. If he came home, he’d just steal from us. We felt helpless even as we desperately worried about him. We knew what kind of state he was in, because we had asked a friend to watch him. Not allowing him home had nothing to do with not caring. We cared and worried, constantly, but had reached a point where we realised we were helpless to influence him and could no longer tolerate his behaviour in our home. I didn’t want him there. I just wanted to know he was okay. You get like that. It’s hard.

  It was a sordid existence my son was living, and it
pained me to think of the places he was going to, like the Pads and Ponti, and the people he was mixing with. Anything could happen to him …

  Our friend was a man we had met in Magaliesoord. He had been arrested at the age of eighteen for dealing drugs, and had recently been released after eleven years inside.

  He had learnt a trade while incarcerated, and been set free to begin life again in his thirties. He had made such an impression on us. We liked him, and he was very concerned about Paul. He had told us that he thought Paul had a lot of potential, and that it was sad to see it wasted.

  After his release, he had taken on the personal task of trying to help drug addicts like Paul, and so he moved in the right areas in Hillbrow and Yeoville to be able to keep us informed.

  He had told us that Paul was walking very badly – a sure sign that he was shooting up into his groin. It also meant possible infection. That was a frightening thought, as Wellconal addicts have lost limbs from gangrene. He also told us that he often saw Paul sitting through the night in all-night coffee shops, clearly with no place to stay, or no desire to stay anywhere.

  He had approached Paul, and he said that Paul didn’t want help. He was too far gone. He was utterly dysfunctional.

  What was clear from what we were hearing was that Paul was fast reaching the bottom of the relentless and ever-quickening spiral of Wellconal addiction. He was being sucked down the drain, faster and faster the closer he got to the bottom, and the bottom would be dead.

  Perhaps that is what influenced me.

  Mark was overseas on a business trip that time Paul came home.

  I heard him at the door. I knew what I had to do. I had to turn him away, and there can be no harder thing for a mother than to have to turn her child away, knowing what I knew.

  I just kept telling myself that I had to do it. There was no alternative any more. I would not be helping Paul in the long run by giving him the assistance he wanted. We had caught him out. We had confronted him. We had spent a fortune on rehabs. We had bailed him out. And all the time we had given him a home. We had given all we could give, and the more we gave, the more he took. There was no shame and no gratitude – certainly not enough to have effected any positive changes anyway.