8: The Rehabilitation Of Necessity
He escapes from the clinic. Weeks of complaining about his feet, aching, sore to walk on, walking around the rehab wincing. There were discussions, in the three years he's been in rehab he has tried to run twice before – but now his feet are so sore. He walks barefoot around the rehab, wincing when anyone looks at him.
His job is to scrape the pap off the bottom of the pot, the giant pot for forty five people, every morning and night, and he complains that he can no longer do it. No one else will scrape the pot. And so they took Sbuda to the clinic. Just before he leaves he asks that they get his sneakers from the clothes he has locked up in the office.
It takes them five days to find him. They look for him by waiting. He returns shoeless, in an openbacked hospital gown and a medicated daze. He had tried to walk to home and gotten half way, to the city centre, where after three days of walking, he had smoked. Passed out from hunger, exhaustion and nyaope he was found and taken to a hospital. Identified. They phoned his people, who had the rehab pick him up. Another six months they said. Three years six months in the rehab. They have never once visited him, they do not want him home, they do not want to deal with him. They pay for him to stay here. Scraping the pap from the pot, sleeping in the drone of the stepwork, frustrated by endless repeated viewings of the John Wicks, the Transporters, Despicable Mes.
“Wrestling,” he says, “why can't we ever watch the wrestling.” Whenever he asks, someone says, “Hey Sbuda, where are your shoes?”
The TV is cracked. There is one USB stick. No wifi. No way to download new things to watch. No staff in the office to do it if there was.
Sbuda has spent most of his life living under a bridge near the airport, hustling for money at the entrances, stealing scrap, smoking. He does not imagine any other life.
Someone else escapes during a football match against another rehab. He scores a goal and then vanishes. He told everyone he was going to do it in the afternoon meeting the day before, after he had led us in the third step prayer. His girlfriend is pregnant he has heard, he needs to know if he is the father. Soccer is banned from then on.
Scofield is so named because he has broken out of this rehab eight times, once by setting it on fire. One section of the dorms was rendered uninhabitable and so many sleep on the floor of the common area -the squatters, the rest packed into bunks three high, welded by inmates, the admitted, whoever. Badly welded. Often breaking under the movement of a skommel. Scofield was bought here in chains by the green beans. He has been in thirty two rehabs in his life. He is twenty six years old. Willingness.
Another arrives on a pole, strung up as if to slaughter, hashtagged by his own people, ranting that if he closes his eyes the world will end. He cuts his foot open on the broken tiles in the shower while dancing and trying to keep his eyes open. There are no bandages, he waits bleeding into toilet paper for a day until one of the staff can take him to the clinic. This is his third time here.
The dorm and clinic visits are managed by two former attendees of the rehab. No homes that will take them back, they have been absorbed into ebb and return. No way to navigate any discernible future. At least they are not using. One clean for two years, one going on eight.
He's 20 maybe and comes in willing and then soon confesses he is doing this not for himself but for his people. He will smoke as soon as he leaves. He spends large portions of his time talking to the ancestors, or the wall. After two weeks he tries to escape through the roof, is pulled back in by his feet, and chained to his bed for three days. After that is two weeks of short steps and dishes duty. It makes for so much happiness when people are punished with dishes, then everyone else gets to take a break.
“It's not so bad, two weeks,” he says. His previous rehab, somewhere in the forest, everyone was on short steps, the whole six months, and chained to your bed every night. “Only church, no stepwork, prayer and garden work, and ntwala. Not like these small ones here, big ones, you could never sleep, so we slept away from the beds, standing up.”
He is enthusiastic in step class, always vocal about finding recovery, after three months he leaves and is in hospital after three days — caught smoking, his brother has beaten him into intensive care.
A youngster, maybe 16 comes in for meth, hashtagged in reported fervour by the dorm managers, in his own bathroom, at his father's place, he thought his father loved him, but here? He still wants to party, he is after all, young. His people want him to stop cigarettes as well, they are not allowed to give him smokes from his tuckshop, he trades duties for two gwaai, will sweep, mop, do dishes, anything for gwaai. There is an established informal economy around these situations. Trading crips, goslows, stoksweets, eleven rand mylife, anything from the ten rand a day tuckshop to get out of duties. A system of privilege has formed around those who get sugar, coffee, tea smuggled in by the dorm managers. The two dorm managers are barely paid -their lodging and food and a small stipend of R2500 a month for the most senior, who has maintenance and debt, nothing for the junior – they extract a percentage of these smokkels for themselves, for control. Three months in a meal can be sent to you by your people, KFC and shoprite cakes mostly. Building up to a three month mark is a plague of begging, “what duties can I do for you?”
A handyman is bought in to start repairing the fire damaged dorm. He is outside working on a door when the kid spots his chance to escape. Over the back wall. He makes for the freeway. The family next door shriek, “Faithy go tell the Uncle one of his people is getting out!”. There is a scramble for the chains and the car, as they head out. They find him three blocks away, lost, he does not know the area and everyone he passes is running back to the rehab, whatsapping, telling him to go back, for his own good. They pull up and he gets in, they hashtag him anyway, he'll be in short steps for two weeks.
There are no medical professionals here. It is handled by the dorm managers, sometimes they forget. Methadone is for five days maximum and the withdrawals kicking convulsively in the night are surrounded by threats, to shut the fuck up and stop crying. Those who snore are woken up, those who dream loudly are told to stop dreaming. Everyone sleeps on their own particular precipice.
Three months in being kept awake by the shadows of these kicks, still inhabiting my bones, unwilling to let me sleep, when I hear a bird in the night, I look up at the crumbling chipboard of the bunk above me, and try to trace its flight across the unimaginable sky. Closing my eyes its cries are bright pin pricks in a line against the darkness.
In the spasms of the night the shadow of a cat, the rustling of a crips packet under a bed somewhere.
“It's the ancestors!”
“Cat's are evil, get it out, get it out!”
“It's the mouse, you guys must clean up your snacks man.”
In the bathroom sometime in the hushed rhythm of other people's breathing, re-reading again The Eagle Has Landed – the only book on the fucked shelves that has it's ending intact, most are ripped out to use as dustpans for morning duties – addicts, man. Here is where I escape the no-sleep of three months in, the bathroom door has a hole in it, the stalls no doors at all, the toilets no seats or broken seats, the shower handles no handles, the mirror is scraps of reflection after an ancient tantrum, my legs kick unbidden while balancing on a three legged plastic chair trying to quiet a mind awake with regret and the opportunities I must grasp when I get out, for I have a life to rebuild, occasionally punctuated by the shitting of someone, half asleep, trying not to catch my eye.
Signalling it could be time to try get some actual sleep, around three thirty am the seekers of hot water start whispering in to the bathroom – where there is no bath – lining up and otherwising. There are shouts of shutthefuckup walking back through the common area, a double volume cold space, maybe fifteen by fifteen and ten high, where we eat, watch TV, have meetings, step classes, and where some sleep. This was once a mortuary, then a church, then a gym, apparently the guy who ran the gym needed to get clean, so he started a rehab. Passing the just waking dorm guy, who is up to start the porridge, three hours of stirring a pot that is three times too big for the only plate that is working on the stove that strains under the weight of the stirring. Between stirs he sleeps on a thin sponge in a former coldroom and scrolls through chattering upbeat tiktok motivationals, how to get that money yo, how to get that bitch yo.
Sleep comes just in time for Sekunjalo, the six am call and the bashing of feet for the slow to get up, Se! Kun! Jaloooo! Often self appointed kings of the rehab will try to do this five minutes earlier than the dorm guy, he lets them – mostly they are tolerated, ignored.
Morning meeting, readings from the NA Daily Reflections, identifications, airing of issues, then din pap, two sugars, no milk, no butter, fights break out daily over who gets the few extra bowls. Standing in the three by fifteen concrete yard, crowding around those who might let go of a sip coffee, eating pap before it gets cold, sitting on upended old paint buckets, the chipboard comes out and good natured arguments break out over who gets to play with the single set of dominoes. Milling, milling.
A scuttled together kennel of sorts houses Bullet, black dog, grey in years, the longest inmate here, shuffles, wobbles out to the pap pot scrapings Sbuda dutifully shovels into an icecream bak. The bored tease Bullet until he lashes out, too old to actually bite. Step class is at eight thirty. It's enough to just stand in the dust and feel the sun, until it's time to peel off to mop, to move the room around, bring in the desk and chairs.
Step class is given by someone who was here, is now years clean, about eight pay attention, the rest sleep on the side benches. The diligent copy out the questions, third time round, fourth time around they'll also be sleeping. The person giving class is often too beset with all the admin of the place, organising gwaai, toiletries, visits, intake, etc, that step class is given by other people, sometimes those who've been longest in this place, sometimes people who've passed through, live in the area, have free time. There are lots of those, there is a cycle of months clean, years clean, success stories, with free time. Sometimes one of them simply no longer appears..
Tea is a quarter loaf of powder bread, margarine and thin juice. After step class lunch is a quarter loaf of bread and gravy, sometimes three tins of fish divided, sometimes dahl, sometimes salted carrots but always the packet gravy. After lunch the rush to rearrange the room to set up the TV to be in front to re-watch John Wick or Power Book: Ghost, all of it. A mishmash of din sponges and threadbare blankets and sleep and bravado.
By two pm in the dusty yard we are circling the tuckshop door, it is just punctuation. Something that happens in the midst of all this nothing that happens. There is step work but there is no sense of the outside. Of what to do when you get out, and it translates into a sort of listlessness, a tired impatience with everything. “Tuckshop must open now. These guys are fucking around.” The dorm guy arrives back with packet crips that must be repackaged and someone gets that privilege. Bullet digs in the 30cm square attempt at a vegetable patch, from seeds hustled from kitchen duties preparing the supper, stywe pap with gravy, some boiled down vegetables, maybe a russian, sometimes chicken pieces, cut in two, half per person.
There is space out back to grow a proper vegetable garden and it's a common thing to want, but it will never happen, if allowed out there someone might try to escape.
Faith appears on the roof of the house next to the rehab, punctually as tuck shop is open, whatever time it is open, and she always calls out, “Het iemand seep?”
She is maybe ten, and her parents smoke – at night we smell the indanda seeping into the dorm window, the smell of plastic burning, copper being mined from the broken appliances mined from other people's discards – but fresh from school she is on the roof asking for soap, for rollons, for crips, for stoksweets. She only takes toiletries that are still sealed. She will take anything from the tuckshop, even the smallest leftovers of a goslows. She will talk for hours with anyone, any conversation always abbreviated into wants, needs, but also long enjambements about her friends and her brother, and what shit they caught on at school. She disappears when other opportunities present. “Okay, bye, but tomorrow as jy he' seep.”
Just before supper is the afternoon meeting, on hot days out in the yard, and never is there anyone willing to share, there is a list and generally when it's time there is an excuse and a battle to get someone anyone but not the same perpetually willing who share the same story over and over. On lucky days someone from outside who has free time, clean time and free time, and will fire everyone up with hope.
After dinner, the seeds saved from the whatever vegetables are taken outside in darkness, and we plant them in the dust of Bullet's diggings. The sky is sodium orange light from the nearby factories and security zones, barely a star is visible. I point to the evening star.
“That's a satellite”, I am told, “they're all satellites.”
“How can there be so many satellites?”
“I only see two.”
I cup my hands into a sort of shield against the orange miasma and ask him to do the same and look directly up.
“Oh no, yassis, those can't all be satellites”.
There is thumping music from just, it feels just next door, friday, saturday, sundays. Sundays is slow jams, nineties RnB. I start to anticipate my Janet Jackson moment as soon as the thumping starts on Fridays nine pm, just before weekend lights out. On the first night I hear it I imagine a two story building, a nightclub above some sort of shopping centre, a dancefloor, booths. I imagine wrong.
Dreaming of being out one slow jam sunday in the dark, there is the occasional “Jirre daai nommer!” from the bed above me. I say something about wanting to go dancing there, at that place. It is not a place for dancing. What I am hearing is a car wash. An open area where on weekends one guy parks his car and pumps tunes, other people pull up in their cars to listen, and to smoke, and assumingly buy, meth. Sure there is dancing, but it is not a club.
In a two kilometre square radius from the rehab there are nine other rehabs. In this area, a grid of streets, of falling down smartly kept houses, a merchant is in walking distance on any road. The local economy is spazas and meth – two giant supermarket chains suck money out of the community, employing few. There is little here to do with time.
The rehab prepares for bed in the same settling way night after night, everyone slowly peeling off to bed, small conversations. Just before this, lights not quite out, an argument. Muffled shouts and suddenly someone is on the floor and everyone is piling in on the beating. It takes the junior dorm manager to stop it, he separates the other dorm manager from the relapse patient. An old disagreement, an insult. The patient is punished, chained to his bed, given duties. The dorm manager is verbally disciplined the next day, but who else will wake up at three to make the din pap, and manage the tuckshop and cook all the meals and keep the peace.
The food is shit because this rehab costs R2800 a month, the services are limited, the counselling is limited, there is no preparedness for finding work, or even getting your ID or going back to school because this rehab costs R2800 a month.
R2800 a month is more than a third of the average monthly salary in this area. It is an entire pension. But it is cheaper than having an addict in the house.
This place is an organic response to a need. It is not registered, filling in a gap, cannot apply for funding, must stay under the radar. Kunjalo, nje.
Woken by mumbling underneath the symphony of uneasy breathing, Sbuda at the window, clutching at the bars, mumbling and crying. Touching him on the arm starts him awake. Dazed, he says, “I thought I was at my grandmom's house.” Behind him, beyond the shadow of Faith's roof, a night bird cries it's path beyond the sodium haze, against an invisible sky. .
He makes his way back to his bed, lying down in a crackling of forgotten crips packets.
“Is that the cat,” shouts from the other room.
“Ek sal dit vrek maak, oor de muur gooi!”
“Skommel jy Sbuda?”
“Hey, Sbuda, where are your shoes?”