LITMIR.BIZ

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a car crash as the most dramatic event we are likely to experience in our entire lives – “apart from our own deaths”.

      It was an accident that changed me forever.

      CHAPTER 2

      Hotel Hospital

      I booked myself into a rehab clinic exactly six months later. I hadn’t relapsed. In fact, I was now 14 and a half years clean and sober … That’s 5 182 Just-for-Today days and a fuck load of 24 hours. About 124 000-plus. The Hotel Hospital, with its swaying palm trees and sparkling fountain, also catered for Depression/Anxiety, Burnout, Psychosis, Eating Disorders, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Schizophrenia. I qualified for at least three.

      I hadn’t relapsed on drugs or booze. Yet.

      But I had been howling for weeks, salt mines of sorrow.

      I wondered if a person could die from crying.

      My dehydrated eyes were now barren pits as I passed through the boom of the upmarket joint and parked the car in Visitors. It was an Audi, I think. The S3 S-Tronic: 2-litre model. DSG gearbox. Zero to 1000 kilometres in five seconds. I’d been reviewing it that week. Actually, it could have been a Mito. Alfa. Jesus, I was losing it. It had been happening more and more. Forgetting things. I guess the fact that I was still getting cars to test drive and review, after the monumental metal disaster, was something of a miracle.

      Everything had become a blur since The Crash.

      An accident can cause chaos. And mine was spectacular. Huge bills. No sleep. Police statements. Lawyers. PTSD. Internal hearings at work. Crazy food behaviour. Nervous burnout. All those twenty-first-century maladies.

      If I were an animal I would have been tearing fur from my coat. Big chunks. If I’d been a cutter my skin would have been in shreds.

      The Crash was one of a number of reasons I found myself waking up that April Tuesday morning, packing two suitcases and driving north into rush hour, bleary from my usual less than three hours of mind-racing-interrupted sleep. And even though it had happened six months earlier, the experts would later concur that The Crash was probably the primary underlying reason for my own, internal crash. So let’s keep it top of mind and, for the record, call it Reason 1.

      On the Hotel Hospital website there were clear instructions on what to bring: only pack appropriate casual, comfortable clothing. I brought along a lot of shoes. A whole suitcase full, in fact. Kenneth Coles, Aldos, Steve Maddens and Guess. Shoes always made me feel strangely elevated; the more inappropriate the better.

      The What to Bring also said: No sharp objects allowed. I decided to leave my Swiss Army knife in the cubbyhole of the car.

      The surrounding palm trees and ochre clay fountain at the entrance made me feel like I was on a movie set in an apocalyptic future-fucked Miami; there was a heavy tinge of toxic green in the murky water. All that was missing were the fish. Perhaps they’d died. Somehow the forlorn pond reminded me of the goldfish I kept replacing when my two sons were little. I had never managed to keep their gold-finned pets alive. I wondered if they resented me for this now that they were teenagers.

      My multiple years of Clean and Serene NA key rings jangled as I walked into reception. I had a bunch of them. What a fucking irony. Clean and sober, in gold-embossed lettering. Whoever said that with sobriety came serenity must have been smoking something – something potent. I had long since lost my serenity. Right now it felt like I was holding on to my clean time like the sole survivor in a zombie holocaust, as though my eyes had been pecked out of my skull. That can happen when the man you love, who you think you’ll live with for the rest of your life, betrays you.

      But the more immediate catalyst, what had literally sent me over the edge, was a far more recent occurrence. For purposes of clarity, this one will be Reason 2: My Broken Heart.

      A lion hates to be double-crossed. And I, being a Leo, felt as if I had been brutalised, my heart shredded into slivers.

      The Hotel Hospital had once been a bar-cum-nightclub, and the architecture – high ceilings, ballrooms, chandeliers, mirrored pillars, brown wood panelling – managed to give it an otherworldly feel. I almost expected a ghost waiter in a Stetson and tailcoat to offer me a drink.

      I’d decided to leave my bags and a mountain of belongings in the Audi – just in case I changed my mind. I always brought half my life with me whenever there was a possibility that I may have to stay overnight. This probably stems from when I had been homeless back in 1999. Post my drug apocalypse. When I landed on that homeless farm up in the Magaliesberg just off the R512 – after I’d smoked up my entire life in exchange for the high you get from a hit of crack or a lungful of amnesia, from chasing the dragon, from a deep pull of smack.

      With no more than a single plastic bag containing three dresses – donated by some God-fearing Christian do-gooder, along with a coffee-stained Bible – I had experienced what it felt to lose everything and own nothing. To become dependent on the kindness of strangers like a fallen woman in a Tennessee Williams play.

      At night, in a mouldy-ceilinged room on the farm, as I searched for sleep, I had been forced to confront my “things we lost in the fire” feelings. My demons almost killed me. To simply end it all seemed inevitable. What else was there to do with a life that had simply ceased to be worth waking up for?

      But I didn’t. I didn’t pull the trigger, take the pills, shoot up the veins, snuff the breath, cut the blood supply. Instead I managed to stumble forward, one minute, one hour, one day at a time and, miraculously, I made it across the bridge of death where black crows caw and vultures bicker over bones.

      Later, when sanity returned, I would take great solace from the line in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club that says that it’s only after you lose everything that you are free to do anything.

      But that Great Disaster That Was Once My Sad Pathetic Life had happened such a very long time ago. I thought I was cured, that I was better, that those lesions that life had left, deep etched into me, would have prevented me from ever falling down another catastrophic black hole. How could all this be happening again?

      I was, however, well on the way to discovering a sad truth about human behaviour: that no matter how hard the fall, the mind often has a cunning way of anaesthetising the lessons we should learn from Pain.

      And even though my Samsonite and Thule suitcases were now filled with designer gear – Karen Millen, Thomas Pink, Dolce & Gabbana; even though my life had transformed three billion degrees from the hacking-coughing-junkie-ho I had once been, even though, even though, even though … the truth was that the same terrible sense of an imminent implosion had taken me right back to that place of Everything Is Over.

      And here, staring at these haunting surroundings, it felt like nothing had changed, the picture had remained much the same – the only real differences were the palm trees and the manor-house façade, as opposed to the rubble and dilapidation of that place called Homeless.

      I stared at the glass-and-walnut doors leading into the Hotel Hospital; there was still time to turn back. I had filled in no forms. Made no promises. Signed no papers.

      I thought about one of my favourite The Clash songs, “Should I stay or should I go?” and how quickly days turn from gold to black.

      Was I about to lose it in a loony bin? Become Alice in Chains? Lucy in the sky with diamonds? The terror mounted. Would the long and winding road lead me back, homeless again?

      CHAPTER 3

      Admissions

      I stared into nothing as I waited on the couch for the woman from Admissions. Fuck, what was her name? I’d been forgetting the most mundane things lately, and it was getting worse and worse. I knew she had told me. Yesterday. When I’d desperately called her, talking in rising hysterical tones from my desk in the open-plan office at The Magazine.

      Jeanie … Janie … Jinny? If I made my way

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