The Pavement Bookworm

by Philani Dladla

  At last things were going my way and life was getting better. I had saved thousands of rands that I was planning to spend on my education the following year. But, I thought, since we go to school so we can be employable and I already had a job, a permanent one for that matter, education could wait. So I used all the money I had saved to rent my own place and be more independent. I moved from the room I lived in to my own apartment. It was a much better and more secure place. The best thing about living in my own apartment was that I made my own rules and could decide to live by them or break them. Nobody told me what to do or when to do it. Life was good, but I guess I got too comfortable. I never did finish my Grade 12.

  I started doing drugs again after two months of living on my own. I just wanted to know how it felt. My curiosity got the best of me. I had always wondered about the people I saw high. I had heard about The Sense in Hillbrow, so I asked a homeless guy who used to ask me for money on the streets and he took me to The Sense. I told him I wanted to know what it felt like. He warned me that it would make me happy but that it could destroy my life. He told me that he had had a life, a good one, before the drugs. I just didn’t think it could happen to me.

  But this time I was not just smoking weed, I was taking stronger and more addictive drugs. I knew that it was wrong, but I said to myself, Don’t worry, you’ve got this. My plan was just to have fun once and never do it again. I never thought it would get serious. I never thought that a once-only experiment would cause so many problems. I told myself I was just having a good time celebrating good times. I used to hear motivational speakers saying you should celebrate your victories. For me it was a victory that at age 21 I had my own apartment. Where I’m from, I see old men still living with their parents and feeling comfortable with it, men still asking their mothers what’s for dinner every day.

  I stopped caring about many things, including eating and taking care of myself. So paying rent was the last thing on my mind. Because I was still ‘working’ and had the right paperwork, I went and got a loan of R15 800 – all that I qualified for. I spent all that money on drugs. After that I started selling the few things I had one by one. There were days when I didn’t pitch for work. I would wake up not feeling well from the cravings. And I just got lazy. I soon received my first warning. I didn’t pitch again the very next day. After some days, I felt I couldn’t face the shame of going after not pitching for so long. That is how I walked away from a good job; a job that I was good at. It is a shameful thing when you let down people who believe in you.

  Within a very short space of time, I lost my job, my apartment, furniture, appliances, gadgets, my dignity and everything else that I worked hard for because of the drugs. I was no longer able to pay my monthly rental so I was kicked out of the apartment where I lived. I was only allowed to take a bag full of clothes, a blanket and a pile of books. I had nowhere to go. No friends, no money, nothing but problems, problems and more problems. I remember it like it was yesterday. I spent most of that day under a tree in Joubert Park with my problems coming at me. All I could think about was problems. For starters, I didn’t know where to go from the park where I was sitting; where would I sleep? I owed more than R15 000 to a local bank for a loan. I should have used that money to pay my rent, but no, I used it to finance my drug addiction.

  Under the influence of drugs, I was too stupid to remember that there’s something called tomorrow. I had squandered everything I had worked for and was now homeless on the streets of Johannesburg. I couldn’t call my mother and ask for help, or go to her friend’s house because when I started doing drugs I changed my contact number and stopped calling her or sending money to her or my brothers.

  It was a cold night in Johannesburg and it was getting late. I had to make a plan and look for a place to sleep. Trouble was, I didn’t have friends or relatives living in Johannesburg. I was stuck all on my own. I remembered that I had seen people sleeping under the Nelson Mandela Bridge. I had no other choice; I had nothing to lose so I decided to go ask them for a space to sleep before it was too late. Homelessness is better in a group than to face it on your own. I didn’t think it would be a big problem since I had my own blanket. I went there and asked them for a space to sleep, and they agreed to accommodate me, but there was a catch. They told me that we all know that there’s nothing for free in Jozi. I had to give them my bag of clothes as a rental payment (they called it a protection fee). I didn’t care about clothes anymore. All that mattered was that I would have a place to sleep that night and I could keep my expensive pile of collectable first-edition books that Joseph Castyline had left for me.

  Johannesburg was very cold that night and my first night homeless was the hardest. The concrete was not as comfortable as my bed was. I didn’t even have boxes or plastic bags to sleep on – only concrete. But that would turn out to be the least of my worries. It stank there from the smell of shit and urine combined with the body odour of the guys who occupied that space under the bridge. They stank like they’d never had a bath in their life and yet they were all comfortable with it. Some of the guys were busy interrogating me, asking all sorts of general and personal questions like they’d never heard the phrase mind your own business. Eventually they stopped questioning me.

  Instead of asking me all of those questions, I wish they had bothered to tell me that while they were the bosses during the day, at night rats ran the show. The whole night rats owned the space. It was like they knew that I was new and they were trying to welcome me. I was afraid that they would bite me. I don’t even remember what time I fell asleep because I was too worried about the rats.

  I woke up to a chaotic morning under the bridge. No one had time to waste. Everybody was busy getting ready to go hustle. The scene reminded me of the saying: another day another dollar, boss. I would find out that they all specialised in different professions, so they went off in different directions. Some specialised in selling pity, begging for anything from money, food scraps, clothes and blankets. Others specialised in recycling – they woke up early in the morning to go up and down the streets of Jozi looking for cans and paper to recycle. Recycling is not an easy job. The recyclers were known as magicians because they were able to turn trash into money.

  My bookshop on Empire Road

  I SPENT MY FIRST MORNING observing my new surroundings, my new world. In the words of PW Botha ‘adapt or die’, I knew I would have to be a quick learner if I was going to survive there. The guys who were begging on the street corners were mostly selling pity and they were making good money from it. People were clearly buying it because they were giving them money. To this day I still struggle to understand why people were giving them money. Maybe it is because I lived on the streets and I know what that money was used for – drugs. The truth is, if you give a drug addict money, you’re sponsoring his supplier. You may think you’re being kind; but the money given to beggars is the reason why some parents are on their knees every night crying and praying that their sons and daughters come back home. That they keep receiving money, which they will use to buy drugs, is the reason some of them do not to go back home. When you give money to street kids you contribute to the many crimes and the lives that are lost because of the likes of nyaope and other drugs that these guys buy with all the money they get every day from begging.

  Now that I am sober, I have come to know that if you want to help with your money, there are many kids who go to school with nothing to eat for the whole day, there are many shelters and orphanages and old-age homes that can really use your help. My life on the streets has exposed me to many tragedies. I have seen terrible things there and I don’t want to see any more kids falling into a drug trap and possibly ending up like I did. I’m 100 per cent against drug usage. I’m 100 per cent against people who give money to drug addicts. People can see that drugs turn our youth into uncontrollable monsters, yet they still give them money to buy more.

  There is nothing like hunger and desperation to make you to think out of the box, an
d fast. I had nothing to eat and I had nothing to smoke. Out on the streets, no one cared whether I had food or drugs or whether I was safe or harmed; I just had to survive on my own. I knew I had no time to waste or hunger would kill me. I had to find my own way of making money. There are no rules and it doesn’t matter how you make your money, but you have to make the money so that you can have the drugs. If you can manage that then you’re the man and you can live like a street king. I also knew, though, that I did not want to sell pity in exchange for cash. I wanted to give people value in exchange for their money. And so I walked to where Empire Road meets Yale Road at the entrance to Wits University, armed with nothing but my pile of books. I had already observed that the guys I had met under the bridge had street corners that they ‘owned’, where they’d been begging for many years. Most of the busy street corners were occupied, but the one at Empire and Yale looked more peaceful.

  I started by making jokes with motorists, most of whom were university students and staff, about how little they knew about philosophers like Plato and Socrates and authors like Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, and many other authors and famous philosophers. Most people I met at the university entrance were much more educated than me, but it was unbelievable how little they knew about authors, novels and philosophy. Some didn’t even know who Socrates was. Although he never wrote anything himself, I learned a lot from his students’ work. He lived in ancient Greece from 470–399 BC and, according to my understanding, was the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy. I started sharing what little knowledge I had with motorists, giving them book reviews and recommending books and authors, criticising and rating their books.

  My idea worked from the first day. I had struck gold! Most of the money went to funding my drug addiction and not my tummy. I didn’t like it but there was nothing much I could do about it. I was officially a street kid and my books were helping me to survive. It went on like that for days, weeks and months. Some days were better than others. I used to get high and laugh at nothing with fake friends who I met on the streets and under the bridge, and then spend my nights crying and praying to God to help me regain control of my life. I pretended not to care but deep inside my heart was crying out for help.

  Take it from me. Some homeless people don’t really care about life or people, but most pretend not to care. Let me give you a few points to help you identity the ones that really don’t care and the ones that pretend not to care. Observe. When you are on the taxi or bus, you will see beggars who will never make eye contact with you. Those are the ones who pretend not to care, but they know deep inside their hearts that they care; they feel embarrassed about themselves but just don’t want to let it show. The reason why they don’t make eye contact with people on public transport is that they know that there is a possibility that somebody who knows them might be on board. Same thing applies to those guys who recycle trash. Most of them wear those hats and masks that cover their faces because they don’t want to be seen. See, even the homeless sometimes have pride.

  When I started doing drugs, I stopped caring about the many things that I had cared about, including my own family. Drugs made me feel so good and became my best friend, and when I was high I could forget about the things I had lost. Family, girls, my job and even food didn’t matter anymore. All I cared about was hustling for some money and getting high. They were in the driver’s seat of my life, they controlled my thoughts and determined my every move. I felt like a stranger inside my own body. Without them I felt empty, and I depended on them to keep me going.

  I knew drugs were slowly destroying my life but I just didn’t care anymore. I had already lost my job, my flat, my furniture and everything that I had ever worked for. Besides, some of the guys I lived with under the bridge had lost much more than I had. Some were from rich families, some of them were highly educated and some had blown every last cent of what they inherited from their parents’ estates on drugs.

  When you’re lost, just as I was, you use other people’s mistakes to make yourself feel better. When I compared my mistakes to theirs – the rich and the educated – I felt smarter than them, but when I compared my mistakes to others, I felt like the worst idiot alive.

  When I was alone I cried and asked myself, Is this the end of me? Is this how I wanted my life to end – as a useless junkie who only cared about getting high and laughing at nothing? A few months later my good friend, drugs, was not so good to me anymore. They had stopped making me feel good and started making me sick.

  Once you get in, you can’t get out

  WHILE LIVING UNDER THE BRIDGE, I had a friend called Sihle. He had left home in the Eastern Cape to go to the University of Johannesburg. His parents thought he was busy with his studies and were sending him money every month. He could’ve been a success story but he was smoking his future away and living under the bridge with us, unbeknown to his parents. He chose to be a sad story like the rest of us. That’s how dangerous drugs are. Others were not just smoking but also injecting themselves with drugs. Sometimes six people shared one contaminated needle and syringe. No wonder some of my friends died of AIDS-related diseases because one infected many. We knew it was only a matter of who would die first. We even made jokes about it and although we didn’t care about life most of us were afraid of dying.

  I always thought I would be the first to die. The drugs were killing me inside and the results were visible on the outside. My clothes were dirty and I stank. I avoided mirrors because I didn’t want to see the damage drugs had done to me. I could go on for days without eating and my breath would stink like shit. But I couldn’t go a day without drugs.

  I would walk up and down Empire Road, sometimes under the hot South African sun for hours, giving book reviews and selling books to Wits University students, staff and visitors to get money for drugs. I told them about the authors I had read, and how good or bad their writing was. I told them about new book releases if I read about these in a newspaper or a magazine. I know it might sound funny, but yes, street kids have access to magazines and newspapers. People were paying for the information I shared. I was not making a fortune but they paid enough for me to get high and forget about my problems.

  Despite my drug addiction I was getting paid for doing something I really enjoyed doing. And I learned a lot from doing that work. I got introduced to new authors and I learned more about books, like how many copies a book has to sell to be a best seller. I learned about which publishers sold the most copies and whose books have been translated into the most languages. But I was a drug slave, just another fool who worked for hours to make money so that I could blow it all in less than an hour.

  Do not think for a second that I liked the life I was living. Drugs were abusing me. I was not blind and could see what was happening to me but there was nothing much I could do about it; I felt powerless. Trying to go a day without drugs was like a suicide attempt – it made me so sick that not even a doctor could do anything about it. Life without crack, rock, nyaope and heroin was hell.

  One day I saw a young man about my age, nicely dressed in some designer clothes, walking with his girlfriend. I felt anger welling up inside me. He didn’t even have to say anything to me for me to not like him. I was jealous. My heart was filled with envy and unwarranted hatred as I looked at that young man in his nice fresh clothes. I looked at myself in my dirty stinking clothes and wished I was him; I wanted to hurt him, I felt like punishing him just to make him feel my pain.

  ‘Look at that stupid cheese boy with his skinny girlfriend. Why don’t we go make them suffer?’ I told my friend.

  He said to me, ‘Brother, the doors at Sun City are always open, prison never gets full, it’s easy to get in there but it’s very hard to get out.’

  I knew my life was the way it was because of the choices that I had made. The thing about choices is they have consequences. You are free to make a choice but after you have chosen, the choice controls you. This was the fu
ture I chose, to quote the title of Busani Ngcaweni’s book The Future We Chose. Don’t make the same stupid mistakes I made. Most of the friends I lost to drugs were bright and talented but they died too young because of the choices they made. Looking back at those years now, I still don’t understand how I managed to survived.

  Life on the streets

  SO FAR I HAVE ONLY GIVEN you a compact version of my life at Empire Road. Some of the memories from that time are hard to allow out and they still fill me with a lot of sadness. But I want to leave no stone unturned and so I will try to tell you everything. I will try to go into all the dark corners I have been into and all the fights I lost and won. The times when I was the victim and when I was the one causing others to suffer. Empire Road is where it all went down: murder, drugs, charity, smash and grab, assault, just about any criminal activity you can think of. Empire is not just a road, it’s a hood. From the day I started selling books at Empire my life changed and from that day onwards I started seeing things differently. I have seen things that I thought only happened in the movies. No, it wasn’t easy – I didn’t even know the place very well. I was just following the guys who I lived with under the bridge.

  The first good friend I made was Siyabonga. When I first met him, he was busy collecting paper and plastic, cleaning the street and begging motorists for some change and food. He asked me what my story was. I told him where I was from, where I lived and what drugs had done to me. He was not with the guys I lived under the bridge with, although they knew and respected each other. Siyabonga was more friendly, open and helpful than the others. I told Siyabonga that my idea was to start a mobile bookshop there on the streets, but he just laughed at me saying, My brother, these people are heartless; they won’t buy from you. He said that the motorists only cared about rich people like themselves and they think they are in heaven when they are inside their fucking cars.