Review: Vivien Horler

Addict – A tale of drugs and recovery, by Milton Schorr (Penguin)

Addict is a tough read for adults. What I would like to see, though, is it rewritten, perhaps in a comic or graphic book format, aimed at 12-year-olds.

Because Addict is a cautionary tale, and the warnings it contains are stark. It is impossible to overstate how much better prevention is than cure, because there seems to be no such thing as cure at all.

Milton Schorr writes unflinchingly about his life, but I flinched, often. There was a temptation to put the book aside, and I nearly did, several times. And yet.

So where did things go wrong? One thing may have been Milton Schorr’s problematic father. As an 18-year-old Schorr senior had been a soldier in Ian Smith’s white Rhodesian army, and never entirely recovered – along with a whole generation, presumably on both sides of the Rhodesian civil war.

As a little boy living with his parents and two sisters in Cape Town’s northern suburbs, Milton was happy and loved. While his comfortably off father was a touch distant, his mother was nurturing. And Dad was a hero in little Milton’s eyes.

The Rhodesian stories were backed up by a huge pair of elephant tusks in the sitting room, from an elephant Milton’s dad had shot because it was terrorising a village.

How do you live up to a guy like that?

And then one morning, when Milton was six, his dad left, and the family fell apart.

There was not much money, and some uncles stayed over. Mom wasn’t around 24-7 anymore, because she had to work. Milton was devastated. Had dad left because of him?

A new uncle was Uncle Soen, who ran a fish factory up the West Coast, near Saldanha. Mom took her family to join him. Milton hated it.

He writes, today, that some children are drawn to breaking the rules for the thrill and the danger. “In my experience these are usually kids with something difficult going on inside them. Loved kids don’t generally go looking for attention in all the wrong places.”

Mom loved her kids, but she also had to keep Uncle Soen on side. And Uncle Soen was an old-school Afrikaans man who believed children should be polite and respectful and do as they were told.

Milton wasn’t that kid. He started smoking cigarettes, got into a little shoplifting. He and a friend were caught for a burglary. Uncle Soen sorted it out, but things were going downhill.

Milton became increasingly enraged. At 13 he ran into trouble at school. It ended with him thinking: “Fuck Uncle Soen. Fuck Mr Steenkamp. Fuck God. And fuck Mom, too.”

Dagga followed, then buttons. Milton’s friends were misfits, like him. Eventually he was arrested for scoring drugs in the local township, and his father, who now had a new wife, claimed him. Milton was moved back to Cape Town.

Things did not get better. At 15 Milton watched Leonardo DiCaprio’s film The Basketball Diaries. “Where others saw a tragedy on the screen… I saw absolution. I saw peace. Because release comes when the inside matches the outside, even if just for a moment… I wanted to be who I felt I was. Broken. A wreck. Unlovable. I knew I wanted to be a heroin addict.”

And he became one. The next few years are hard to read, a spiralling towards ruin. People occasionally tried to help, but Milton was not interested.

One life-changing moment came a few years later when his junkie girlfriend became pregnant, and was determined to keep the baby. He didn’t want it – he couldn’t even look after himself – but the baby was born, and in spite of himself Milton bonded with little David.

Eventually things fell completely apart. One day in Muizenberg, Milton, now in his 20s and working as a fast-food delivery man, found himself terrified and weeping.

“And then a thought I will never forget, which rose in me on an electric rush of emotion, that crackled the tears on my cheeks.

“It’s the drugs. It’s the drugs that are the problem.

“I shit you not. This was the first time I had thought this.

“I realised right then that I had always seen drugs as the solution to my emotional struggles, to my eternal disquiet, but in fact it was the drugs that were the problem.”

He took himself to a drug rehab in Kommetjie, and his father agreed to pay for it.

The last third of the book describes his struggle to follow a drug-free life, to accept the 12-step programme, to learn to pray and to surrender himself to a higher power.

You don’t have to believe, he was told. “You can fake it. But do it.”

And he did, because he was determined not to be the father to David his own father had been to him.

Milton has now been clean for 19 years.

But this is where the subtitle of this book isn’t quite true. Because Milton – and the thousands of addicts out there who fight hard to become clean – has never recovered, and will never be cured.

He writes, after 19 years of sobriety: “Some days I am more recovered than others. But all days, I’m on this river that is my addiction, my story paddling down or upstream, fast or slow, for however long it lasts.”

So I’d like 12-year-olds to read this book – which they won’t in this format – and realise: “Never.” Because once it’s got you, it never, ever lets you go.