9: Life On Life’s Terms
He leaves the rehab fat and full of confidence. He is afraid of disappointing his mother. Glowing complexion, new clothes from the outside, and a shrug, happy to be clean, out the rusty gate, under the wide sky. Three months later he returns unrecognisable. Thin, more teeth gone, and a homeless tan, dark burnt by the sun.
He leaves the rehab to return to one or two places, his mother’s – but she drinks. People, places, things. Or his brother’s – who smokes. The brother promises not to tempt him.
His brother’s place is Netflix and time, and egg sandwiches. Or scrambled egg on toast. Or fried eggs. He waits for his ID to get his driver’s so he can start to look for work. Sometimes just toast. It’s the boredom that gets him. The inability to imagine any sort of life within his grasp. An endless stream of Netflix and toast, an anomie of aspiration and not-having, the salve of opiates waits in the next room.
One week later they have sold their uncle’s flatscreen and are spinning for food, to trade for nyaope, outside the Spar in Melville. It’s when the Spar closes down that they start to run out of options.
And so they, the brothers, book back in, for another year. Into a place where the only future one is able to imagine rests in doing the right thing... everything will turn out. There is no skills training, no way to reach for actual purpose, no path to concretely doing the right thing.
Once a friend came to me after he had witnessed his first overdose, her slack body in his doorway, sat up still waiting. He had been out looking for her. She had been waiting. “People don't change”, he says, “unless they have to choose between staying the same, or death, and then they realise too late”.
Rat Park, an experiment in the late seventies. Kept In isolation, given a choice between morphine laced water and plain, rats mostly chose the morphine. Rats in a well stimulated social environment with other rats, enough food, space, play things, were given the same choice and by and large preferred the plain water. Rats, addicted, in isolation previously when moved into the socially functioning environment, mostly switched over slowly to plain water.
Nestled close to the train station bridge in Observatory, literal rainbows painted on the exterior of the house, met outside by the woman who ran the place, Rainbow House halfway house seemed a good alternative to the YMCA, where dealers roamed the street opposite the entrance.
There were signs. The meeting was outside on a bench, no tour. She asked for the money as a cash send and immediately dispatched someone with it to “go see Bennie”, she dropped the phrase “a wet house” casually into conversation.
The fading schedules on the common room walls, the occasional still stuck poster promoting the steps, were the only interior signs that Rainbow House had once been a halfway house, funded, with staff, counsellors, a cook, a manager, and a skills development program. Now all ripped wiring, stripped plumbing, and the smell of no laundry.
The funding gone, along with all signs of hope. There were no NA meetings, no-one came to discuss up-skilling or grants or… No-one came. Occasionally a woman claiming to the landlord tries to evict everyone – drug paraphernalia is hidden, everyone on their best behaviour.
It too three weeks after the funding evaporated for the staff to abandon the building. It took less before people started using to fill in the gaps left by meals, therapy sessions, meetings, classes, promise. A society disturbed by some painful crisis. First the stove and the fixtures went. But the addicts maintained a gas stove and meals were at least still served, frugal, desperate, but meals, maize and vegetable donations from the local shops.
The copper wiring started to go, the fridges long gone, the taps, the doors.
Wednesday was the mines, everyone out at 6am to scour the garbage bins left out in the suburban streets for anything of value. Every other day was plan making and petty theft of each other’s made plans.
Across the road there is an open space, some people living there off car guarding and minor dealing, the loss of daily structure and the proximity to access to meth, nyaope… it wasn’t ever going to take long.
There was a pit-bull, there is always a pit-bull, who would escape into the neighbour's garden, the ever complaining neighbour. He tries to keep the pit-bull, is visited by threats.
A family of four camps out in the backyard, in a broken tent.
Sheets and blankets are seldom washed.
Gavin smokes indanda and meth, hates the smell of nyaope, beats me if he catches me smoking in the room.
There is a deep presence of failure somewhere in my chest. I have attempted to move away from a place where I was in danger of relapsing and have moved into a place a relapsing. I do not know if I intentionally ignored the signs.
It is impossible for me to tell the people who are paying for me to be here, my food, my laundry, my medication, my airtime, the laptop stolen by Gavin… impossible to confess this failure for fear of the streets.
Gavin is too lazy for any aspirational sort of theft. He bullies things out of everyone. He rents space on his bed for people to smoke in peace, if they give him some. He gives them no peace.
Most of the residents of Rainbow House know each other. They were all living on Devil’s Peak, behind the houses in the bush. When Covid hit the department of health came to get them, put them in some sort of camp on a field somewhere. Rainbow House was the post Covid solution. Somewhere they were promised a payout that they never got. Gavin thinks about this payout a lot. What his life would have been. The loss of this hope is at the root of his daily anger. His larger deeper angers are rooted somewhere else.
Must a drowning person explain how they got in the river before they are thrown a rope.
Gavin often lets Mornay smoke meth on his bed. Mornay nurses a powerful paranoia when high, the people in the room he sleeps in, they do not tolerate it, they have their own drugs.
Mornay is sure, in depths of the night, that the neighbour is watching us and he peers out the window, and hears the voices, and the people in the tent below the window what are they doing?
For weeks this goes on, Gavin seldom has his own money, wants to use the laptop to watch TV, there is no peace in the room,, always Mornay at the window, always asking someone taking something, always another story, eventually the laptop goes. And he shares the drugs garnered from it with me, to spread the shame of being in this place.
An NGO is called in to negotiate between the residents and landlords. It is not a negotiation, it is an eviction. The house is stripped down to the bricks, a revenge on displacement. The former residents of Devil’s Peak, of Rainbow House, of Covid tent camps, move on, owning only the realisation of lack. Not even toast.