The hit that would change me forever

"I wanted to be who I felt I was. Broken. A wreck. Unloveable."

In this no-holds-barred, raw memoir, Addict: A Tale of Drugs and Recovery, Milton Schorr describes his pursuit of drug-induced oblivion and descent into junky hell and degradation and the hard journey to recovery. He was 17 when a "friend" gave him his first shot of heroin as he squatted on his haunches in a Cape Town flat. Now sober for 20 years, Schorr relates the pivotal points in his journey toward death and back to life. It is essential reading for anyone touched by addiction.

Schorr has published two novels (Strange Fish, A Man of the Road) and appeared in Hollywood blockbusters such as Resident Evil, Tomb Raider and One Piece.

This extract has been edited because of space constraints.

One night Eli and I pitched up at Brittany’s flat and were surprised to see a whole set of freaks in there already, and one of them, a man taller than everyone but me, rose from the head of the table, a godfather for sure.

Manny was twenty-one to the sixteen, seventeen, eighteen of everyone else. The absolute don of all proceedings. He’d been to seven rehabs already, a legend I had not yet heard of, and his presence was magnetic. ‘Eeeeeeliiiii!’ he yelled, bounding over the table on which was scattered every piece of drug paraphernalia, magically upsetting nothing, and grabbing Eli around the waist and lifting him in the air. Manny’s shoulders were wide and strong, his face bright and alert, his eyes dancing with intelligence, and his face lined with those same creases of addiction, that same sad smile under the weight of more. The man was undoubtedly an old soul, and, undoubtedly, he had something to offer me on my path through life.

It took a few minutes of sideways glances and exploratory jokes for him to suddenly fix me with a dead-on stare. "Who are you, and why haven’t I met you before?"

Manny sounded me out for info while cooking up a shot for himself, one part heroin and one part coke, and when he was satisfied he shot up, and shot back against the wall.

"Fuuuuaaaaack," he slurred, grabbing me by the shoulder and then draping his rock-star frame on me. "We are going to fuck shit up, you and me."

And we did.

Three weeks later he swung by to pick me up at Dad’s house at about 8pm, him and three or four other guys. With a smirk he zipped open a medical wallet, showing me three syringes nestled in there, each with an orange cap. "Is tonight the night?"

I knew it was. A tide had been building in me, the gathering force of fate. As we sped through to the city, and met Puffy just off Orange Street near the Planetarium, and tore up the mountainside to Brittany’s flat, I was full of destiny. I knew there was a crossroads ahead. I knew a moment of reckoning was here. And I was doing nothing to stifle it. Manny understood the moment. He knew that I would never be the same, and that he was giving it to me, and also that it didn’t matter. Because the shot is what I wanted. He was only the messenger.

"This is gonna feel good," he said as he added powder to the spoon, then a squirt of water, and then a squeeze of lemon (citrus is needed to cook brown heroin, junkies often carry a lemon with them). "This is gonna blow your mind," he purred as he put the spoon over a flame, and as the brown bubbled under a puff of sweet smoke. "This is gonna change your life," he murmured as he mopped it up through a shredded cigarette filter, and into a syringe.

With shaking hands I tried to unclasp my belt, wanting to make a tourniquet like I’d seen in the movies. 

"Don’t worry about that," he said, pulling me down and showing me how to sit on my haunches with my knee jammed into my left armpit, blocking the artery, an easier way to bring up the veins in my arm. And then he slipped the needle into me.

My heart was thumping. There it was, inside my skin.

"You ready?"

"Yes."

This was rebellion. My choice. My life, my death.

My blood puffed into the syringe, proof that the vein was good, and then he pushed the plunger down. He pulled the needle out and bumped my armpit off my knee to open the vein.

"I don’t feel anything," I gasped, my breath thundering through my lungs, my heart jackhammering.

"You will. It’s coming."

And this is how it went:

Suddenly, I felt a pressure on my chest. As if some force was bearing down on me, squeezing my lungs. Later I would learn that the amount of pressure was indication of how strong the rush was going to be. This was very strong. Then, just as suddenly, the smell of brown heroin and lemon juice in my nasal passages – literally, smelling the drug in my own blood as my heart pumped it up around the olfactory receptors in my nose.

And finally, the explosion as the compound spread through my cells like a shockwave, smashing every nucleus open to leave it vibrating with pleasure, an orgasm writhing through the body and dilating the mind to nothing but a receptor, obliterating thought, obliterating time, leaving only sensation, only bliss under an awesome wave crashing above. Rolling deep down there, not knowing where is up or down, and not caring if I would ever surface again. And then I did, and the world was nothing but a playground of pleasure, nothing but my playground. The world altered to my liking, me the centre of it. Smoking was simply an entrée; I had now arrived at the main course. The dragon would no longer be chased, it would be mainlined.

The atmosphere in the flat was carnival. And not because we’d all shot up, but because we had drugs to spare. We were all into money that night, and so were blessed with the perfect junky scenario, the only scenario a junky cares about – having a bag in the hand, and another in the back pocket, preferably one that no one else knows about. We had drugs for tomorrow, the present was secure and also the future. We were sitting pretty.

Dad and Aine were away, so Manny came along with me back to the house in Durbanville. And so began two days of innocent bliss for me, perhaps the last. The two of us got into bed and watched movies, the dogs cuddling with us, and we shot up continuously, deepening my love of the dragon. I started to understand the initial obliteration of the shot, to anticipate and ride it, and to love the time after. The vision scramble where the eyes would not settle and everything in the world vibrated hilariously, and I couldn’t work out how to push a button for some minutes, and it was like discovering taste for the first time, discovering touch. What pleasure. What deep, unrefined, pure pleasure. The pleasure of communing with the self, the pleasure of connecting with my body.

We shot up over and over, and I was smitten. When the drug rises up through your blood and enfolds you, it is so much bigger than you are, and yet it is your size, because it is yours. Your body is yours. The dragon is your friend. Manny and I hardly spoke, but our souls were joined. We could feel each other, we lived every moment together. It was us against a world that would deny us and we were winning, and then it ended.

Manny had been a junky for some years already. This meant that if he was using, he was on the clock, the heroin clock. This clock has a timer set for between three and six hours, depending on your level. Where I was deeply sated from our two days of using, and ready to sleep for another day, for Manny the clock was ticking. He had to get out there now, today, because he only had three hours until he would begin to feel sick.

He continued to stare at me, I fancy now, looking at a previous version of himself, the version as yet unruined, and perhaps mourning that. Perhaps he was tempted to try to save me, as perhaps he now wished someone had saved him (even though he gave me my first shot), but a moment after, a wall came down over his face, a mask marked by that rueful smile. And I understood him then. A smile that said, ‘It is what it is. I am what I am.’

Aine had a collection of vintage cameras set up in display cabinets in the house. And in the garage was a collection of her dying father’s power tools. I didn’t know it, but while I was passed out, dreaming with my dragon friend, Manny was moving through the place, secreting what he needed into his pockets, knowing that the rule of the junky is to have a plan. One bag in the hand and another in the back pocket. Because the clock never stops. For me, those two days were an eternity, a highlight never to be forgotten. To Manny, they were Monday and Tuesday.

And so my time as a junky proper began.

 Addict is published by Penguin Random House with a recommended retail price of R320.