6: The Addiction Of Stigma
From the crisp cavern of the last of the stars I am woken with half a mug of semi warm sweet black tea. I can feel the warmth of the security hut lingering in this incursion of hands into my nest. There is a message for me on his phone – charging in the hut, I must come, he leaves shift in ten.
I had arranged for someone to send me money for transport, and waited all night. The whatsapp now apologizes, they have only just put through the instant clearance which will take roughly forty minutes. And I am going to be late for my appointment if I wait.
Down at the Denis Hurley Center there is a social worker who can get people into a free rehab. And there are people who will believe in me again if I just get myself to a rehab. There are people who believe that I can get myself to rehab.
I did not want to walk.
I can not tell you if I would have used the uber money for smack and walked anyway...
Before rehab every user wants one last hurrah.
But the money will come in less than forty and the appointment is in fifty and if I wait for the money I might buy smack and not make the appointment, and it is maybe a half hour’s brisk walk...
I set out to set out from the small sanctioned space that I sleep in, tucked away in the church garden, where I have returned to eek the last warmth out of my carving of cardboard and plant life in the last blueness of morning, and gather my things, my bank card, my hoodie, my tin foils and lighters...
All I want is a room to sleep in, regulated medication for the withdrawal and to be free from the ability to assuage my pain endlessly with heroin. I want to slowly un-numb. I want to be endlessly numb. Both at the same time. But the returning thing from which I am trying to escape is invading the numbness, and the endless small junkie tasks of every para day are no longer numbing and money is less but the tasks are relentless and I take no joy in them and then the smack is less and the wheedling and the shame is more and so now, it is impossible to be impossibly numb anymore and the only way, is to unnumb slowly, to return to the waking world.
I set out to walk to the Denis Hurley Center.
Determined. Withdrawing. Shivering. The bone splintering pain is in the post. The shit streaming down my legs is later. But later I will be in rehab and have methadone.
The park I sometimes sleep in, smoke at, in small groups in the lazy afternoon haze. It’s not afternoon, it’s empty, no groups to try get a hit off.
As they bask in the balcony shade of their nymandawos, out of reach of the rising day’s heat, the dealers lazily refuse to give me credit.
The other park, empty except for some still sleeping, glazed with the restless sweat of nearing need. Scattered sandwich wrappers from the call to prayer meal drop.
Just around the corner is the rotting cat carcass, it’s on my route to the scrap for crack place and I have been noting it’s decay daily, and today it’s eyes are full of maggots, and it’s stomach has exploded with flies.
The corner of the intersection, under the protection of the overhanging roof of the abandoned butchery, where I sometimes sleep after a day of digging tins from bins. No-one but detritus, foils romantic in wind eddies -depleted. The trickle of shit is starting to eek. I’m going to rehab. I can make it. They’ll have methadone.
The crack house where I sometimes hustle for change, crack, a roof, and the smoking room is abandoned, three para’s outside trying to make a plan in the hot sun.
The rank of broken taxis where we smoke, under the canopy of old trees and plastic sheeting breathing in the morning heat the users are huddled around a burning tyre for a warmth not possible, and no one will spare me a hit, no one has – they say and they retreat into the old minibus rusting black plastics, someone offers me a blackening banana, the smell of it makes me retch, I am offered a hit if I come back in a little bit or wait but I am late for my appointment to get into a rehab and my stomach is bubbling and my hands are chicken hands cramp, searing tendons hot and steel pulling in parts of my body I never had before and fuck I really wanted to uber.
The abandoned methadone clinic with the nyaope dealers selling what I need right now – christ just one hit before I book into rehab...
Indanda smell soaking like a spoeg bucket through a warren of weeds and bushes where the dealers live in the abandoned lot next to the abandoned boat builders yard, where the paras live in the hulls of abandoned boats.
The boys who smoke on the steps of the abandoned HIV clinic opposite the taxi rank where the dealers hide among the sellers of cell phone accessories, smileys grilling on open fires,
The users smoking on the steps of the abandoned public toilets, trying on freshly shoplifted hoodies.
Through the alleys and finally through a levelled building, just one or two bricks high the smokers and the spikers leaning against the wind in plastics trying to get their hits and I look for someone to ask for just one fucking hit... the money must be in my account by now. An ATM mocks me from across the road. And there, one block away, is the Denis Hurley centre.
Fuck it, I'm going to rehab, they'll have methadone.
I wasn’t going to rehab. There was no methadone.
In order to get into Newlands Rehab, to get off street drugs, you have to be off street drugs. They do not accept anyone who tests positive for any substances. If you want to get clean, they advise you self manage your own detox by reducing the amount of nyaope you smoke over five weeks. Over that five weeks you have to attend two sessions a week, one private with the social worker, and one group session with all those trying to reduce to get into rehab. I agree to this and ask them if they can maybe get me an Uber, I know the money has hit my account and I don’t want to walk back, because then I will spend it badly, sharing and paying back all the little hits I had on the way, and then have nothing for myself to get through the night. They are unable to call me an Uber.
I miss my next session.
I try to attend the group session but at the same time, at the Denis Hurley Centre there is a free meal, and the queue is an hour and a half long. I can queue and eat or I can go and listen to how I need to reduce my usage in order to get clean, to get into a rehab to get clean.
I choose to eat.
I phone the Newlands Rehab to see if they offer a twelve step program and a way to reintegrate into larger society. They tell me they will help me get closer to God.
I get myself Suboxone, via an addiction psychiatrist, to help get through the withdrawals. This is an exercise unto itself, it is days and hours and so much time trying to explain to people my limitations and how I need help and how just giving me money will not help and the help I need is not to be trusted. To be not trusted. Not to be.
On my way to my second one on one session at the Denis Hurley Center the cat is starting to dry out, caved mummy skin. A lack of flies.
I am there to tell the social workers that I have Suboxone, can start it immediately, and it’s a six month process but I will be free of all street drugs within three weeks and I can I get into Newlands, I’ll come to all sessions from now on. And I am told that to get into Newlands you cannot be on any medication at all.
All I want is a room, medication and for it to be impossible to take any heroin for roughly six weeks, I want a rehab to formalise this, because it is impossible for anyone to know that I am trying to claw my way back unless there is the official stamp of a rehab, however unsuited to rehabilitation it might be.
Now it seems that even being clean is not a good enough to get into Newlands, the only free rehab I can find, it seems that I must be off all medication, even the medication that is keeping me clean. And I start the walk back from the social worker at the Denis Hurley Center, with no money for caps, and slightly close to withdrawal. I could start my Suboxone now, but I only have two weeks worth and have been told that only if I get into rehab will the full six months be paid for. Reduction therapy is a joke when some days you have nothing at all and some days you have too much. Addicts cannot self manage, its in the name. Coming off Suboxone without titrating down is a different kind of withdrawal, easier on the mind, hard on the body, which is hard on the mind.
I just want a room and time to think without the pressure of withdrawal every eight hours, twelve hours on methadone, twenty four hours on Suboxone.
I pass Matshikiza, squatting in an alley, beating like porridge the insides of a fan. She’s getting the copper out. She thinks it might be just less than a kilogram. That’s about R150, if we make the daytime scrapyard, but they’re far and it’s after three. Her hair is flotsam, long with strips of fabric, strips of coloured plastic, ribbons, discarded hair extensions, bits of bright wig, braided, melted into her own impeciably matted. She flings it over her shoulder occasionally as we work, stripping the plastic casing, always talking Matshikiza, “Iris is back,” she tells me.
“And fat,” I say as we break off the metal transformer bit, “I saw her last week.”
“Returned from the farm, yes, she was clean but there was no work, now her weight is already going” and then we have to unstrand the copper wire, but there’s more copper in the cables and we need every bit we can get, and we take to trying to burn off the plastic and someone comes out a door and shouts, “FUCK OFF PARAS” and so we amble away and find a parking lot to mine our copper.
While we burn and strip and break, her hair occasionally catches a flame and singes or flames and she brushes these forest fires off like mosquitoes. “Iris was raped by a customer the other night, but she is so not wys, you know. She went to the cops. They asked her if he paid, and then told her it wasn’t rape.”
In the fading light Matshikiza shakes her hair shampoo commercial, away from the flames, “ I am not sure if the client or the cop beat her, but her eye is fucked.”
Some boys they come past us and we find out the late night scrap yard opens in half an hour and they only pay R90 a kilogram. One of the boys wants Matshikiza to go with him to the bush, so they do and I carry on stripping the wires, burning the plastic until I am sick with acrid.
The other boy stays with me, the tiknitian, out of worn holes his backpack streams wires and broken cellphone bits and random scraps of previous technology and he paces and talks to himself anxiously, starts as if being interrupted, the familiar crys-style comforting me as I choke on plastic smoke.
Matshikiza returns with R25. We walk to the scrap merchant. He weighs us in at 400 grams, we get R40. We have R65, enough for a cap and a small piece to share.
We make it back to the open air broken building para city, a field of people huddled under black rubbish bags trying to smoke and we get a cap and a piece and we get inside the black plastic and it smells of plastic and we smell of burnt plastic and the sweat of the day and I can tell the withdrawal is coming because I am getting my sense of smell back, and a half cap isn’t going to do it but that’s what there is and I get my foil and Matshikiza loads on a dot, and I pull in, and then we dot through it, levering in the secondary smoke, dots to prevent waste, the sickness must be diminished, feeling a small bit of relief, saving the crack for just before we have to walk back up the hill from town to Percy Osbourne, where she works and I can ask people for help, and I lean back -as much as is possible inside a black garbage bag – and say, “things are bad today.”
Exhaling, we are close under the plastic, in a very tiny room, the light is gone outside and we can only see each other when the lighter sparks on. I tell her I’ve been trying to get into Newlands rehab, because I need a free rehab, but they want me to get clean first.
Matshikiza laughs. “I went to Newlands, the orderlies there, they trade nyaope for clothes or toiletries or whatever you can give. Everyone smokes there. But they charge more, so I came back.”
We hit the crack and take off the black plastic and the street lights and the people and the rustling of so many people under black plastic whispering and exhaling and we start to walk up the hill, the taxis and the rankness, the scattered pavement cookeries, the hustling shouts dying out, behind me somewhere is the Denis Hurley Centre.
Unsure now how to make our next plan and it must be made soon we stumble past the mosque where the last few styrofoams of Ramadan briyani are being handed out, and Matshikiza flirts one away from the packing up staff and we sit on the pavement scooping with broken stryofoam scoops hot rice and chicken scraps into our not hungry mouths in service of out hungry stomachs, swapping with compatriots the street gossip of the day, trying to figure out a plan.
Limping now towards Percy Street, we meet up with Grant, he’s heard I have Suboxone and so we go with him to the strip-club he dances at, and sell the Suboxone half price to the owner’s son who has a son who is trying to get clean, in order to return to school.
And we walk up to the nymandawo, to the dealers who chase us with stones, and we buy caps and pieces and steel ourselves for the walk up to the church garden to smoke
The hill ahead of us, but we will not smoke until we are safe in the garden, away from sharing, we drag ourselves up hill wreathed in eddies of mynah call.
On the corner by Venice road, Iris and her detached retina, a wary lollipop ready with okapi.
Another corner, a blankness on the pavement, an absence of mummifying cat.
We collapse into the church garden, sweating and sticky with hints of burning plastic, coal smoke, lingering briyani, various detritus, breathing in the vinegar fumes of heroin running down the foil, we have enough not to dot. Soon we fade into the intimacy of opiate oblivion. Before she sleeps she says, “Iris is lucky, she has a farm to go back to.”
In the crisp cavern of the night, a warm incursion of hand shakes Matshikiza awake, he has business for her. As she stands some of the sticks and leaves have joined into the jetsam of her hair, the glow of the street light outlines the church vaguely. She has finished sharing for the day, and will not return.
Soon it is only my own warmth left in the nest.
The withdrawal will wake me in about three hours.
Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, does not go away