by Nikki Ridley
In Closing
The Million-Rand Teaspoon
Mark Bateman
I WILL NEVER FORGET THAT LITTLE TEASPOON. IT WAS THE only remaining item left in Paul’s flat in Durban when I went there with my wife to see what Paul had done. The only thing left. Not even a fork, or a knife or a cup to go with it. A teaspoon. Other than the clothes on his back, it was the only material thing that Paul had left in the world.
I call that my million-rand teaspoon, because when I think back on all of it, I think of that spoon, and the ‘all of it’ that I am thinking back on has set us back (my wife and I, as we sit now, in our retirement) about R1000000. Yes, that’s right. One million.
That is the monetary cost of Paul’s drug habit. As the family breadwinner, I’ll deal with that first. It’s practical.
How do I justify coming up with such a large amount? It is the cost of all the rehabs, all the cars he wrote off stoned or high, the bail we paid after his first arrest.
It is the cost of the things he stole from us – the videorecorders, TVs, jewellery I’d bought my wife, and the money we at times paid to pawnshops and dealers to get our things back. It is the money he plundered from my credit card account after he found the pin number. (To put all of this in perspective, at the height of his addiction, Paul needed R400 a day just to get through it.)
It is the cost of the trips we made to visit him in prisons and rehabs before his overdose, and in care and therapy facilities after it. It is the cost of the twenty or so hour-long hyperbaric oxygen treatments that we sent him for years ago, and to which he owes his minimally improved eyesight. It is the cost of all the lost dividends from investments that had to be liquidated to pay for these things – money that was meant for our retirement.
Since we were already in our fifties when it all started, it amounted to over thirty years of working and saving.
I’ve worked it out. One million. Gone.
But that one million is also the price paid to have something else.
It is the price we paid to see our lives in perspective.
When my wife and I became involved in Tough Love, she took a counsellor’s course. She has an attentive, understanding and forthcoming manner that made her ideally suited for the task. I considered myself too emotional to cope with that, and so, unwilling to simply sit back and do nothing to try to help the others in our position, I got involved with the court process.
When Paul was first arrested, we refused to pay bail, as we had seen what happens when parents pay bail. The child invariably sees it as a free ticket to carry on, because he or she knows that Dad will come to the rescue again.
Of course, as has been told, we did eventually pay bail because of the political situation in the country, but Paul was due to be sentenced to go back to prison, and I did not want him there, less for those reasons than because I wanted him to have the opportunity to be constructively rehabilitated – an opportunity that would be denied him in prison.
While attending meetings, I had heard of several cases where children had had to spend up to six months in prison before being transferred to rehab facilities. The ‘rehab’ sentence would be simply tacked on to the end of the prison sentence, effectively separating the crime from the cause.
I approached the prosecutor on the day of Paul’s trial to petition for an immediate transfer to a rehabilitation facility.
I asked her to please bring it to the magistrate’s attention that the theft for which he had been arrested was drug-related.
Paul was sentenced before lunch, to Magaliesoord, a (supposedly) secure government rehabilitation facility, pending an evaluation by the District Surgeon.
(I say ‘supposedly’ because at that time we thought it was secure and drug free, although we know better now.)
In addition to this, I was not only permitted to transport the now ‘confirmed’ drug addict there myself, under police escort, but I was paid to do so! They also offered to handcuff him for me, but I declined.
I had obtained a warrant for the transport from the director of Magaliesoord after arranging an interview with him immediately after the sentencing.
The total time that elapsed between my approach to the prosecutor and Paul’s entry into Magaliesoord was under twenty-four hours.
It all happened so fast and so easily that I was encouraged to help other parents through the court and sentencing ordeal, and from then on I made it a personal mission, where and when possible (given the constraints of a business that took me overseas regularly), to attend their children’s court appearances.
When your child is imprisoned it is devastating, not only because of the circumstances, but also because of the loss of influence you experience. They are effectively taken from your control, and the only influence you retain is the ability to set them free temporarily by paying bail. You may not have had any control before, in any actuality, but when they are imprisoned that actuality is formalised when they are in the worst possible environment.
So, to have influenced my son’s fate so easily in this case was enormously empowering.
My only stipulation for doing an intervention was that the parent or parents were not to attend their child’s court appearance themselves. The reason for this was simple. When the question of bail is raised, it is extremely difficult for parents to resist the desperate appeal on the face of the accused as he or she turns around to will them to pay. I knew how hard it was.
However, my decision to intervene in the court process was primarily motivated by concern for the children themselves, and for the life they’d be thrown back into if bail was paid.
The extent of the desperation faced by the addicts themselves was for me more than aptly illustrated by an incident that occurred shortly after I started involving myself in the court and bail application process.
It was the usual story of a broken home, with a mother and a son living with a friend, as they were unable to support themselves. The friend had not been able to tolerate the drug-addicted boy’s behaviour, and told him to leave. When the mother went away for a short holiday, the boy broke into the friend’s house, along with two other people, and proceeded to denude it of all items that could be easily sold – things like the TV, video machine and so on. The maid heard a noise and went to investigate, and they stabbed her.
The boy was arrested for this, and the mother, familiar with my association with the courts, requested that I get the magistrate to agree to bail. She told me that she wanted to get him out of the country.
I refused, and I will never forget the barrage of verbal abuse I received from her for that refusal.
Despite this incident, my involvement with the other parents from Tough Love was very rewarding, aside from being a lifeline for my wife and I. The dedication and care that we ourselves received has had an enormous impact on both of us.
Self-pity has been quashed over the years through our encounters with various kinds of people. The first of these were the parents at Tough Love and their children. The second were the other drug addicts we met during our visits with Paul in the minimum-security wing of Zonderwater and at Magaliesoord. The ones whose parents seldom if ever visited them. Some didn’t care, some didn’t have the resources due to poverty or single-parent status. I remember one in particular. We gave him R10 for Christmas. No one ever visited him. He was so grateful for that R10.
When he finished his prison sentence, he was given a bus ticket, and I have always wondered what happened to him. He had nothing. No money, no job at the other end, and no family. He would have to have been a truly special person to have not done what I suspect he did do. I suspect he went home to the only family he knew – his dealers – and the only friend he had – his drugs.
That is what happens.
The third category were the many, many physically and mentally (or both) disabled that we met during our efforts to find a suitable care facility and home for Paul before and after his release from Townhill.
Some were, like my pri
soner, alone in the world, abandoned by family or by fate. Others were so severely disabled that it was with absolute wonderment that we saw them doing things with their lives.
We met a woman who was unable to move any part of her body besides one foot. She did embroidery with her toes for a living, and she was happy. She was happy!
Exposure to the misfortune of others does not lessen your own experience, but it does encourage acceptance of it. There are so many people who are worse off.
I therefore live now, not in bitterness, but with a sense of gratitude for my experiences of both the breadth of human kindness to which we were exposed, and the seemingly endless scope for human suffering that we have been spared.
We are lucky to have anything left at all, and we are lucky to still have our son, and I have a better relationship now with Paul than I have had for twenty years. We talk about things now, and he knows and acknowledges, probably for the first time since he was fourteen, that we have his best interests at heart.
That’s something.
There is some more money to spend now, but it will be money well spent.
I am finally sending Paul to college – this ‘college’ being the adult section of a school for the blind in Worcester.
Despite extremely discouraging early prognosis, even during the first couple of years that Paul attended Headway, he is finally able to spell. It’s not perfect, but it is good enough for him to learn to write again, and this he is doing by learning the keyboard.
He has recently been (provisionally) accepted into the school, after several weeks of intensive tuition on the keyboard. If he hadn’t been able to learn that, there would have been nothing they could do for him.
He has had to apply himself very seriously to this, but that hasn’t been difficult, because he is highly motivated. It’s a way out for him – an escape from the somewhat twilight existence he has been living out here in Plett for the past three years. He needs to know that there is something more he can do.
His final hurdle before he masters the keyboard is learning the difference between left and right. We help him at the moment by placing a bracelet on his right wrist, so he is able to feel it and identify that as his right hand.
He’s getting it right, and that’s also something.
Hindsight Is an Exact Science
Paul
SO HOW DO I WRAP IT ALL UP?
When I first started telling my story for this book, I spoke of what I know now about drug addiction. Before I talked about the things I experienced and felt, I listed a number of truths that I sit with now.
So it is with those that I will end this story, because they came at the end – at the end of twelve years of learning them, and eight years of regaining the capability to understand them.
Firstly, when I think back, it seems to me that I have traded one form of blindness for another. I have not just been blind since my overdose, but for the greater part of my adult life.
Drug addiction is pure selfishness, and it makes you blind to the destruction and pain those closest to you suffer as a result of it. It makes you blind to the source of the destruction and pain you suffer, and it makes you blind to the fact that there is not necessarily going to be a way out when you look for one.
I was seldom, if ever, able to take an honest inventory of my behaviours. I know that I initially thought I had some sort of control – you know, just one more shot and it would all be over if I really wanted it to be.
I stored that belief in the back of my mind when I knew it to no longer be true, so that when things got bad and I got scared, I could bring it out and use it right about the time my cravings took control. I’d whip it out like a safety blanket and smother all other thoughts so that I could be comforted while I did what I had to do.
I lost complete control of myself. I was utterly unable to reason with myself. Even when I became unhappy, desperately unhappy, I was unable to identify myself as the cause of my unhappiness, and therefore change myself.
Every time I was given a chance, I thought that this would be the time I would stop. But I never did. I remember thinking, on so many occasions, When is this hell going to end? – but it never did. I had reached the point of no return. It was beyond my control. I was beyond being able to help myself.
When I almost made it out, I was fool enough to think that I could be the same person who did the things I did and not fall again. Stupid. Look at me now.
I never woke up to the fact that I couldn’t just stop. To do so would have meant interfering with the addiction. My actions could not be the problem. That would have meant changing them. That would have meant ‘no more drugs’. My addiction would not allow that, and that brings me to my second truth.
Addiction is an entity in its own right. One that plays you and closes down all avenues of thought and action that might interfere with its survival. It robs you of your conscience, of remorse, of the morals you were raised to hold dear. It robs you of your self. It robs you of your soul.
I had every opportunity handed to me on the proverbial silver platter, but the habit that controlled me always reached out and pushed the platter away. No thanks. He’d rather have some more drugs. No appetite for opportunity.
Whenever I did try to stop, during those lucid times when I could recognise that I had a serious problem and when I kidded myself that somewhere within me I had the willpower and self-control to come clean, my demon would reappear to take the reins again.
Addiction takes away the capacity for independent thought. It makes you do things you would never do. It guides every decision you make. It doesn’t change you. It subjugates you. You don’t become a bad person from taking drugs. Drugs make you do bad things, and it is those actions that destroy you.
It empties you, and deadens you. It takes away your ability to feel good under normal circumstances.
It places shame inside you, and you’ll do anything to run from that.
You become a puppet.
By the time I was completely, irrevocably addicted, drugs weren’t something I was doing. They were the tools of something that was doing me.
I honestly believe that when I started using drugs, I opened myself up to a dark energy. It may not be biblical possession, but it certainly is possession of a kind. You do not need to believe in a higher power, which I do – now – to recognise good and evil, and identify the latter as something that will harm you. Well, drug addiction is an evil that systematically destroys you, mind, body and soul, and it will taint everything, and everyone, around you. Evil is evil, no matter where your beliefs lie or what philosophies of life you subscribe to.
Thirdly, it is so easy to blame things outside of your control (I had a hard time with whatever … so I took drugs), but in one particular instance the blame is justified. Some people just have addictive personalities. There is probably a gene for it, but whatever the reason, they are the ones that go down.
Even before I became completely addicted to heroin and pinks, my need for substances overrode everything else in my life. Whatever I touched, even marijuana – my first ‘drug of choice’ – took an instant hold on me and would not let go. Each substance opened another door and encouraged me to try something else, to move on to different and harder drugs. There was no stopping me. I could not stop me.
In hindsight, my first joint set me on the road to addiction. To go searching for a different and a better high. Marijuana, for me, opened up the gate to a Jacob’s ladder to a living hell.
I can see so much now that I couldn’t see then. I can identify each rung on that ladder.
Fourth, immaturity feeds all of these things. I was young when I started down that road, like 99 per cent of drug users. I was immature. I thought I had all the answers at my fingertips, like most young idiots, and that made me the perfect victim.
I was too young to be vulnerable. I was too young to recognise that whatever I was feeling, I didn’t have to hide it. I was too young not to mask my insecurities, my disappointments
and my doubts about life by getting ‘out of it’.
I was too young to ask for help.
I was too young to relinquish my false sense of control.
I was too young not to hurt before I got hurt.
I was too young to stop running.
I was too young to stand outside myself and see what I was doing.
Addiction in turn feeds immaturity, because it ensures that you will never do any of these things.
Addictive personality and immaturity. Now that’s something. When coupled together, they are the ingredients for a walking, talking human bomb. A suicide bomber. Why take yourself out when you can also take out those who love you?
It is a testimony to my parents’ strength that they never allowed me to destroy their lives or relationship, as could so easily have happened.
Hindsight is an exact science, and if I could have my life over again it would be completely different.
Each person’s life, experiences and character are different. Each person will sail a different ship. But if you can be warned where the reefs lie? I know where they are. I know how they can break you and how easy it is to die. I didn’t die – not everybody who overdoses dies – but many do. I didn’t die, but the life I took for granted did.
I didn’t die, but I have been left with a legacy, one which will never allow me to forget the depths I fell to.
Still, I was one of the lucky ones. I was given a second chance, and I am now at a point in my life where I urgently need to consider how to use that second chance, though I have pondered on it at length.
I hope that somehow, through my experiences, I will be able to touch someone else. Even just one person. If one person can read my story and stop to think. One person who is, or could be, on the same path that I went down.
If, by telling my story, I can prevent what happened to me, or worse, from happening to another person, another family, that would be first prize.
I often still struggle to find meaning or purpose in what has happened to me. I am positive, and grateful for what I do have. I thank God for the second chance that I was given, but I need to put out my feelers to discover exactly what I can do with my life now. I need to try to turn my past around by making it a springboard for something positive, because my life has to be more than this. It has to be more than lying on my bed, listening to music, in my sister’s house in Plettenberg Bay, not being able to see. Not having a job. Not having a girlfriend. There has to be more to life than this, and I have to find it.