10: An Understanding Of Lack
She winds down her window.
“You need your bath.”
Opening the door, settling in, driving away from the intersection where all of us spend the days asking for change, whathaveyou.
She cuts my clothes off with a pair of industrial scissors, the kind seamstresses wield. A month of embedded shit, caked dirt, of no washing. The soot has seeped through onto my skin. No need for instructions, step into the bath, she washes me slowly. With care. She makes vague statements about the whiteness of my skin coming out from behind the dirt.
She is maybe thirty, maybe thirty five, her apartment is on the edge of a neat clean affluent suburb and is neat clean and affluent. Most of the doors are closed. The sexual component to this transaction takes place on the bathroom floor. The hexagonal black and white tiles. The rounded curve, the lip of the cast iron bath digs into my neck.
She comes for me near the end of the month, it happens three four times. Pulls me alone, the lone white guy, from the crowd of hands and asking.
It ends every time with her giving me an entire new set of clothes, new shoes. Dressing me as slowly as she has undressed and washed me. I am not allowed to participate. And then a backpack of tinned and other foods, medication, bandages, and some cash. She calls me a taxi, never drives me back. Always upon my leaving she says the same thing...
“Just survive.”
There is a concrete fence and dust, long dry grass between the fence and the dust tailing onto the road, the concrete faded with painted letters peeling proclaiming a paint discount at a paint shop, traffic kicking up tiny stones at my shins. Winter in shorts, returning from sorting myself out, walking back to the shebeen, sleeping in a back room among the beer crates.
Neither the dust nor the cold reaches me, while talking to my mother on a barely together cell phone. Describing the last conversation with my father, shortly before he took his life with whiskey.
“I told him to go home and kill himself,” I weep.
“Your sister says you didn’t say that.”
My mother just wants to know where I am staying, am I okay? She can’t do this anymore. A truck passes drowning out the conversation.
From whatever dark room or disappointment, reaching out, always confessing guilt, asking for money. After having lived with my father’s drinking for so long, they stop responding.
The doctor’s room is not a room, a small cubicle grafted onto the pharmacist’s counter. Curtains, no door. The closeness of a stethoscope. Possessed only with a convincing desperation, wheedling the doctor to phone my mother. The medication to stop using is paid for, conditionally to be fetched weekly.
Somehow between this doctor, the pharmacy and my mother an arrangement evolves. My mother will no longer send me money. She rents a room in the doctor’s yard, a chipboard square in the guts of the double garage – a bed, some books, a television, a fridge, a cupboard of tinned food, noodles, and always the medication to stay clean. Everything is bolted down, nothing can be removed. Coming and going without restriction. Whenever anything lacks on the street there is always here. More and more there is here.
There is a dank concrete familiarity, over time moisture invades the chipboard. Waking up with the prospect of street hustling or medication. More and more I choose Judge Judy. The medication is slowly reduced. In a year long dissolve my life eventually pieces back together.
The pieced together dissolves a decade later when I find myself self-sufficient, there is a proper relapse and perhaps seven years of more life lived in drug houses and parks and avoiding pain. I decide to get clean again. The decision is not enough.
There is a rehab someone will pay for, in another city. They are waiting for me. From the wet floors of the drug house, peel myself into motion. Money will be sent for the bus ticket once at the bus station, once photographic proof is provided. Packing up at the backpackers, heading down the hill, passing the paras, I am leaving I am leaving, goodbye, goodbye. Past the wide park where we smoke, the taxi graveyard, down past the abandoned methadone clinic where the dealers live, and into the bus station. I send proof of my being there. An ewallet is sent. There is no ATM in the bus station. The bus leaves in an hour, the trip is ten hours. I find an ATM across from the methadone clinic. Ten hours. I should probably smoke first.
By the third or fourth time that bus ticket money is sent – just sending the same picture of the bus station, the pretence that I am going to get on the bus is abandoned. In the burnt out taxi, a fucked phone being boosted through a collection of wires to a car battery, eking out every minute of battery power begging for bus ticket money. The entrance to the bus station is just across the road, down that street, past the ATM and the dealers. An impossible journey.
The seats creak under blankets musty, the cold through the former windows. It is sometimes hard to tell whether it is withdrawal or weather. The people I stay with wash taxis in the main road, the dealers are users who sleep in the same broken minibuses we do. In the blue dawn we scrape foils and share. There is never anything to myself. When I get bus ticket money I try to keep enough for the actual bus. They are helping me, I must help them, defeated by the sure knowledge that I can not get on the bus.
Every time someone is about to send bus money I gather what is left of my things, the unsellable. The NA book, the two pairs of shorts and the torn track pants, and the ratty t-shirt that I am not wearing today, the hoodie with only one sleeve. And pack them into plastic bags, to prepare for a journey imagined. There are goodbyes, there are promises that I will come back and help them. There is the walk to the ATM and the walk back to the dealers and back to the taxi, the sponge breaking out of the old seats, the vinegar of the nyaope, the burning of copper and the daily ritual of carwashing and pleading.
I can not get on the bus. I have no solution to this.
And then I realise I can call someone and tell them that I can not get on the bus. That someone will help me, I can appeal to someone who knew me when I had a life, who has the resources to get me on the bus.
They arrive and take me to the bus. And put me on the bus.
Escape is so simple.