Ferguson - Smacked: a harrowing true story of addiction and survival

SMACKED

A HARROWING TRUE STORY OF ADDICTION AND SURVIVAL

MelindaFerguson

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Oshun Books an imprint of Struik Publisher 2005

This edition pulished by Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd 2010

Copyright Melinda Ferguson 2010

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-0-14-352730-5

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

TS Eliot, Four Quartets

To my darling boys James and Daniel,
who are truly the lights of my life

1 JUNE 2010

2010 will always be etched in my mind as The Special Year and not just for football reasons. This year I celebrated one of the most incredible milestones of my life: ten years clean and sober. Ten years! Thats 3 650 days (87 600 hours) without a single drink or drug! How is it possible that I could have achieved such a feat? Me, who couldnt stay without a fix for an hour? Little Miss Trashy Druggy, who gave away everything my sons, my marriage, my home, my family, my dignity, my sanity in search of that high.

Sometimes I can scarcely believe it. Sometimes when I look at the life I live today, all beautiful and ordered, restored and amazing, exciting and free - filled with so much love, light and possibility it is hard to believe that I was once a dark little creature, gnarled and skinless, who like a demonic yowling baby couldnt put a foot forward without a chase of smack, a hit of crack or a swig of Jack.

In the last five years, since Smacked was first published, so many incredible things have happened to me that it would take an entire new book to tell you about them(!): promotions, financial thriving, restored relationships, mothering my two beautiful boys, travel, romance the list goes on. However, there have also been a fair number of dark days, twists, turmoils and challenges, where I have held on to my sobriety by the skin of my teeth. And that is why, in this reissue of the book that changed my life in so many ways, I have included a new chapter called Staying Stopped, because somehow, at the end of the day, despite whatever has been thrown at me, I have managed to walk away clean and sober. I hope this addition helps to shed some more light on the disease of addiction, a disease that continues to wreak havoc on our world.

Much love to you all.

MELINDA FERGUSON

I have a gun in my mouth. I dont know much about guns, but the taste of the metal makes me want to gag. Its 1999, 3 a.m. on a Saturday, Hillbrow, Johannesburg and Ive never been more terrified in my life.

There are four people in the one-roomed, dingy flat on Soper Road: a Nigerian dealer, two coloured gangstas and me.

Open your legs, a surly, scar-faced specimen called Baby Face instructs me.

Im huddled in a frozen ball, my hands pressing my knees together. Please dont rape me.

My voice is small. My lips mercury-cold. Im a broken bird no crying, just a crackled whimper. Oh God, this cant be happening to me. The terror, the fear gets the better of me. Hysteria rises. Shoot me, dont rape me, shootmedontrape meshootme.

The words are a desperate mantra. Gods not listening.

The gun thuds into my temple. Pistol-whipped. Metal on skull silences me. Blank out.

I dont like sex. He grins. I like rape.

He unzips his trousers. Its all slow motion now.

Please wear a condom, I whisper.

Weirdly, he obliges. In this moment that is extended like elastic in time, I am vaguely relieved. Safe sex. No diseases. No Aids, gonorrhoea, STDs.

Its insane. I am about to be raped and I am relieved that latex is going to put some weird distance between this sicko and me.

I enter a place of white noise. The kind when youre a kid and hold a shell against your ear and you hear the sea rushing in, thats the space I go to. I turn my head and concentrate on the floral pattern on the yellowing wallpaper. I know I am defeated. Now I close my eyes. Blank out.

He pulls my stockings down and he rapes me.

Its strangely silent, unemotional. There is no violence, no struggle. Just empty blank. He is weak; cocaine cock cant do much, pushes pathetically into me. Sad stocking sausage. It doesnt last long. Maybe three minutes.

I turn to the side and see the other two watching. I know they are coming to get me. Condoms, I say. Please wear.

They oblige; one by one they move to me. Its like a weird, ominous dance, slow motion. I am on an altar, a sacrifice, and they are penetrating me in some kind of symbolic act against all women. Maybe they just want to get laid. Who knows?

Are they having a good time? I wonder. What are they getting out of this? Do they like me? Do they think Im fat?

This must be the most unsexual, unerotic experience. Its like fucking a dead person necrophilia. Maybe they like that.

All these things go round and round in my head while one by one they rape me.

The whole experience is over in less than thirty minutes. Thats all the time its taken to change me forever. Now I am raped. It hits me dull force. I am a zombie, dead. I am cut off, truncated to the core.

Its over. I go into the bathroom. I run a hot bath. I need something to burn me, clean it all away. The condoms are left lying near the bed. Pathetic drooped latex near the cigarette butt-burnt plastic dustbin.

My head is showing swelling, bruising. The eyes that stare back at me in the murky bathroom mirror are not mine. The steam is washing everything I knew about me away. I know I am never, ever, ever going to be the same again.

I lie in the water. I get out. I put on my clothes, pull on my stockings. I go back to the bedroom. They are smoking. My rapists give me a rock. Crack cocaine, my reward. I smoke it greedily on the glass pipe. Some call it sucking the devils cock. It is, it is.

It is this little white drug that has brought me to this place, this hell.

Three weeks ago I was a mother, a housewife, a poet living in a four-bedroomed house in the North West. I had a full-time maid, a husband, a washing machine, two sons, a drug habit and a percolator.