5: Trust An Addict
He arrived back beaten. It was obvious the beating was fake. We had pooled our money and he had gone to buy from the dealer who sells stone. He was gone for four hours. I had already hustled more and smoked and was merely simmeringly pissed off. Tell me you smoked it all and it's fine. He clung on to the story and I had no choice but to act like I believed him. For whatever reason he needed that freedom. Here, in the clutch of this transient community, you get aligned with acting like you believe and working with the remnants.
I needed him because he provided me a place to stay, he needed me because I was better at spinning, and in that burnt out third floor roofless room, I began to see the lies in his truths and the truths in his lies and had no choice but to accept that he had his reasons, he made no explanations.
“If you have relapsed I will no longer help you,” and so you cannot say that you have relapsed. You want to be able to tell the truth. But you will tell small lies to survive the withdrawal, the hunger, the elements.
And the shame of this will slowly demand more oblivion. It is the dishonesty's shame that leads to the justifications. It is the asking and not achieving what you honestly wanted to do that leads to the over-explaining. Of trying to explain to yourself the lack of ability to explain the lack of ability.
The help was just enough to maintain where I was, not enough to get out of it. It was hard enough for people to survive through the day, how could I expect any sort of total solution from any one individual. They had the distractions of their everyday traumas. Sometimes I knew the help would set me back. But the prospect of being foodless, drugless, unnumbed was not something to embrace for the sake of the greater good. It was hard enough to survive through the day. Constantly crawling toward evaporating levers of change, there is always some form of oblivion to embrace. Without the privilege of distraction, the only choice is between oblivions.
The sorry story that accosts you huddled in pity me pose on Long Street is just another performance. Another strategy for survival. The insistence of woe reaps more reward than mere hunger. And then woe becomes who you are. You cannot let people see the small moments of joy.
In days spent performing sadness there is little room for the distraction of joy. Even the spending is a grim reminder of the soon lack.
You distance yourself from yourself by talking in third person, the royal we, instead of I, you say you.
Waiting for the lights to change, putting loose coins into the hands of the man holding up the black plastic bag at the traffic lights. At least he's trying. At least you've helped in some small way.
You distance yourself from the problem by helping in some small way.
In the drug houses there is a community of Smalls, Sdudlas, Ntombis, BoyBoys, MaLevens, the people change, the names are always the same. It is impossible to have anything of your own. To stick to oneself is to invite suspicion, or theft. To have nothing openly for long enough, is to invite sharing. The meagre spoils of the day made less in sharing is a kind of insurance against lack, when without maybe someone here will help, and so everyone shares, in a balance between fears.
There is no linear path to get here. Some people are born here. There is no time in the day to even get to home affairs to get a new ID. Some people here were born without being entered on the record. Survival is time consuming. There is no space for breathing. There is a basic scrabbling for the end of each day that is hard to translate. There are people with genuine kindness that will help in case of emergency, and they do not understand that every day is an emergency and emergencies are invented that they will understand. Lies containing truth. The choice so often is between honesty or survival.
The old man has two beds in his room. One for him, one for newspapers and cats. He lives on the second floor of a milked with rot perhaps old boarding house, a faded five stars on the gate. To get to his place you pass through a dishevelled drinking place , climb steps above the brothel, it has that particular smell that these places have: husks of cockroach eggs, cracked windowsill paint strata, wood decayed in bodily fluids, electrical shorting, forgotten fires, paper damp with age – a smell no amount of hope can mask. His neighbours talk to him only to mission cigarettes, boiling water from his, the only kettle, and advice.
He wakes at 4:30am amongst the mewling of kittens and cats waiting to be fed, and he irons his suit, as threadbare as the financial district he will walk to in order to ply his trade. He needs to look respectable, it's for his own sake. He mends his suits in the late morning, after returning from, he calls it, pan-handling, after doing his modest dose of heroin, and then reads the morning papers and returns to work around two in the afternoon. He needs the heroin and the repaired suits in order to endure getting the money for the heroin and the suit repair. The cats are his survival.
Huddling in the lee of the stench at the scrap for crack recyclers, I clutch the pipe against the clawing hands, then into a garbage bag to try grab windless space to inhale some small dots of smack. There is no time to breathe. I must get more cans. I must dig in more bins to stave off reality. This is not a party.
Someone buys me a hoodie. It's summer in Durban. They will not give me money for food, or drugs or medication but they buy me a hoodie. Give it to me with the price tag still on. One thousand two hundred rand. We both know that I will sell the hoodie for drugs, not even getting cash so I can get food, the merchants only pay in drugs for clothes. I cannot exchange it, without a recipient I will be arrested for shoplifting. I get two hundred rands worth of drugs.
Chop Wood. Carry Water.
There is a methadone program here. At seven in the morning they line up to receive their daily dose. Methadone has a twelve hour half life, by seven tonight everyone here will be in withdrawal. There is no nightly dose. There is no methadone on weekends. And so the attempt to get clean results in higher tolerance. The dose never reduces, it is not tracked, this is not a reduction program. This is not a pathway away from daily addiction, this is another way to maintain. The nurse and admin person upfront have no time for my questions, “we are trying to help you, do you want or not?”.
I follow him straight line from the traffic lights at the mall where I have spent the afternoon withdrawing, watching him work the passing cars, trying to not shit in my pants. Before when I have had money I have shared resources with him and now he is helping me. We are passing time here while he waits for his end of day daily peace job,of which he often boasts. There is an older man up the road just before the old zoo who pays him to feed the monkeys in the fading light. This old man sits on his balcony and throws down bags of fruit and an envelope containing a hundred rand. We fight for the fruit with the monkeys while feeding them, he has pulled in maybe another hundred or two at the lights. I do not ask. We in the now darkness head down the alley, to the side gate that leads into the stolen apartment complex where he pays rent in kind.
The gate is blocked by the sleeping figure of an old man. We have to move him, “Don't wake him.” I interpret this as kindness. An old brown sherry bottle rolls off, tinkling decorously toward the gutter, the old man grunts, “don't fucking wake him.” Why not? “He's my father and he will want to come inside. Never trust a wetbrain”. Slipping inside the gate, up the filth littered stairs. Tripping over recalcitrant rats unabated. He has lived, alongside his family in various forms for his whole life. From here by the tracks, past the factories, the mall, up to the old zoo, these few square kilometres have been his whole life. He almost finished school just over there. He almost got a job in another town once and would have left from the train station over there. He has no electricity, no television, no phone, can hardly read, no size-able ambition other than this daily avoiding of withdrawal. The nightly comfort in the distractions and rituals of oblivion, is his only allotted purpose.
He always makes sure he has one cap of heroin to wake up to, so that he can get to work calmly, “you cannot hurry the money,” he smiles as he takes small joy in his morning ritual.
At the traffic lights he fights over his place with a woman on crutches, “the bitch can walk.”
And besides, he has been here his whole life. He has pride in this work, knows all the people in the cars. He has an impatient conversation with a man through the car window. The light goes green. A shrug, “says he'll be back later,” shouting now, “I could have asked three other cars, these larnies, always over-explaining, always a story with them, they can't just say no.”