Chapter 2: Walking Through Walls
A Journey of Addiction, Music, Healing, and Rediscovery
Day Two: Sunday August 17th, 2003
I wake up at 7 am, and can hear the other patients who have been sweeping in the courtyard. I am spared of this, just the one time, because I arrived yesterday. I am beginning to feel guilty that I am the only one here that is not going through the hardship of physical withdrawal. The others say how lucky I am that I have managed to avoid heroin, but at the same time, I feel very unsure of how to locate my addiction, because it is all in my mind. I’m already getting nervous about doing the vomiting.
The other patients are surprised I have been clean for 5 days before I got here, but to me that is easy. What is hard, is believing that I want to stop taking crack, knowing that I have to, when all of a sudden I picture myself at home with my lights dimmed, favourite music playing and smoking a rock. It’s impossible to erase the picture.
Then at 8 a.m, I bump in to Phra Gordon, an African American monk from New York who brings just cool, unapologetic wisdom with a streetwise style I recognise from all the cool cats I know back in Soho. So cool to get a sermon on a Sunday!
Just as it it said in Stuart Brindley’s article in the Guardian that I’d read before I came, he is just like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. A preacher teacher…
"Tell the drug you ain't no monkey. Hell no. He's chasing you but you ain't gonna climb no tree. C'mon brother, you cuss him, you call him a motherfucker. You ain't no quitter." - Phra Gordan
His New York jive is very cool coming from an enlightened Buddhist, quite the funky monk! He has not been back to America in 21 years and I ask him if he misses it. He replies, “Home is where the heart is….”. I proceed to ask him that it is easy to know that, but how does one learn to feel it? He said “it will come to you”.
I believe him, but this idea troubles me in my usual impatient quest for instant answers, and the rest of the day I try to work out how I will be able to be content without my “attachments”. I spend some time outside the dormitory in The Hay talking a little to some of the other patients and monks. It’s comforting that everyone is at different stages of their experience here. I guess I’m being shown the ropes.
At 3 p.m. I take a Sauna and then at 4 p.m. I meet a new monk to do my Sajja ‘vows’. I repeat words that the monk said in Thai, not understanding all of it but knowing full well the seriousness of what I am proclaiming.
I have just learnt that many of the Thai patients here are addicted to Ya Ba, which is an amphetamine-based drug taken with a similar effect to crack. One patient, a beautiful Thai girl, is clearly having problems with it. She keeps trying to say something to me and then stopping as if she doesn’t know what she is thinking. It is very sad to see in one so young and equally difficult, and none of us can offer consolation because of the language barrier.
5pm. My fellow patients bear witness to me doing my first “drink and puke” medicine session. The actual medicine is as disgusting as everyone said but easily swallowed. The tough part for me is maintaining the stamina to keep drinking the water. I swallow about 10 litres of water to bring up the medicine and find it to be the most hilarious performance of my life. I have done many strange things in front of an audience in my short life, but never have I been applauded so enthusiastically for throwing up, dressed only in a sarong.
All that is going through my mind is the thought of the poison in my body making it’s way to the medicine and then coming out of me, combined with “where the fuck are my glasses?” Afterwards I am told by Phra Hans that I did very well for my first time.
I eat vegetables and rice and have another session in the steam room. When I get back to bed, I am in agony. Nothing to do with the treatment, it’s the message balm that the masseuse rubbed in my back. My sweat has made it run to my groin and it’s fucking burning.
You are the gardener to your own garden. I will not devote anymore energy to whether I do or don’t take drugs. Focusing on how not to return to drugs is becoming just as bad as doing the drugs. I will water the roses and ignore the thistles.
Dream: 17 August going into 18 of August
Stephen Spielberg arrives at my flat with a friend. I go to the toilet and it dawns on me that this could be a good opportunity. I go back in to see him and tell him about a film that I had written the music for. He is only interested in finding a black pen, a fine liner to be precise, and neither Jack or I can find one for him.
I support these organisations who are shaping a system change to integrate mental health awareness and well-being into the music industry. Please do read about their work.
The Creative Well
Music Minds Matter
Waterbear College of Music