Hooked: Secrets and Highs of a Sober Addict

By Melinda Ferguson

In this a no-holds-barred account of her post addiction addictions, Ferguson becomes enslaved by self-help fads, Oprah, 12 step meetings, dodgy men and social media. She finds herself trapped in a world where instant gratification and narcissism is the norm. She struggles to break the cycle of "more, more,more", of use and abuse which is deeply embedded in her DNA. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melinda Ferguson Books
• Release date: Apr 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781928420927

Melinda Ferguson

Melinda Ferguson is the bestselling author of her addiction trilogy Smacked, Hooked and Crashed. She is also an award-winning publisher. In 2016 her groundbreaking title, Rape: A South African Nightmare by Prof Pumla Gqola, won the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction. In 2020 she joined NB Publishers under her imprint Melinda Ferguson Books.

Book preview

1:

CRACK BOOK

Facebook.

Even in that moment, as I lay writhing on the carpeted floor of my five-star hotel room, I grinned at the absurdity of it all.

LOL.

Facebook. FB.

What kind of a name was that!

Well, er, a pretty good one actually for a ‘social network group’ which by 2010 had grown to boast over 400 million active users, its members multiplying like a mutant virus, daily.

Facebook was the brainchild of nerdy Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg, who at the age of nineteen decided to give a platform to his college mates to display their mugshots online – a kind of a digital yearbook. Within a single day of its launch in February 2004 over one thousand of Zuckerberg’s fellow students had signed up. Soon the idea found its way into universities and colleges across America and then the world. It literally spread like electronic wildfire.

By 2007 Facebook.com had become all-pervasive, creeping into every conceivable organisation, office, home and dinner-party conversation. It literally colonised the world as we know it.

You’ve got to admire the dude for coming up with something so seductively simple. You see ‘Friends’ are what hold Facebook together. Friends you have not seen in years, Friends you’ve only met once, Friends you’ve never met, Friends you meet on Facebook …

Friends are the glue, the mortar – they are what holds the entire Book together. Whether the connection is rock solid or entirely new, on Facebook it’s all about your Friends. By logging on, you become part of a huge and incredible network of belonging; part of an ongoing, never-ending loop; part of a bigger whole. You are a miniscule part of an enormous electronic chain gang, adding and adding …

It is alive. It is spreading. Everywhere.

Then there are all the intricacies that get the Facebooker hooked. Like on a user’s homepage there’s the narcisstic Update Your Status function, where a block is left to fill in: John is … (What are you thinking? Add your state of mind/what you’re doing.)

Seeing your Friends’ status updates is as good as meeting someone for a cup of tea or a beer. And the bonus is that you don’t actually have to go anywhere or even really speak to anyone! The more Friends you have, the more updates you are party to: Joan is feeling Nauseous, John is f***cked off, Rohan is loving the Pixies: ‘I live cement, I hate this street’, Candice is looking for a hit man.

Status updates are like sound bites, encapsulating your Friends in one or two lines, constantly updating, changing, informing, keeping the messages flowing. And then, of course, if you comment on the status updates, you become part of your Friends’ realities by simply adding your response to their statements: You become part of the bigger picture. You become part of the loop. You become popular, loved, wanted – part of a social network!

This is called sharing. It can go on for pages and last for days. You meet other people by commenting. You invite them to be your Friends. You never talk to them again. It doesn’t matter.

You can also find out more about each other without ever having to meet – you look at her Info wall, you see what books she reads, what movies and music she likes. You look at your Friend’s profile picture to see what he looks like. You go to the Info page, you see where your Friend works, what her interests are, when he was born, what quotes she enjoys, whether he is single, in a relationship or married. And when your relationship status changes, Facebook alerts all the people in your network of this: John went from being in a relationship to single. Your Friends know you might be in a sad state and comment on your relationship status change: ‘OMG, what happened?’, ‘WTF, are you okay?’ You feel cared for.

You can see what Groups and Causes your Friends support … In fact, you can find out more about your Friend by clicking a mouse than you might ever find out about him or her in the real world. In a whole lifetime. And all this without a word being spoken.

It’s a perfect recipe for Instant Friendships. It’s quick, it’s easy and it’s clean. And when you have too many, or you tire of your Friends, you can Delete them. No bloodbath, no shouting, no casualties. Delete. It’s like they never existed, like they were never there.

It feels like you’re in touch. In tune. Informed. But are you? Are you really? And in this virtual new Wild West, what is ‘really’ anyway?

Back in 2008 I found it all a bit embarrassing. I hadn’t even wanted to join a stupid social network. I had no need for it. My life had been FINE!

‘It’s a waste of time,’ I protested, like a stubborn chow. ‘Oh please, I have better things to do than sign up to a school yearbook group. I don’t want to know people from my past, that’s why I left town after school. I’m too hard core for this shit. I wouldn’t be seen dead posting a profile pic, a status update – in the third person! It’s for sad people with nothing better to do than perv on other people’s crap …’

In my world Facebook was for regressed wankers. For lost beauty queens who needed Botox. For twitchy, pimply Xboxed teenagers. For middle-aged school-reunion junkies. For bored housewives who wanted to post pictures of their moronic children. For spaced-out office workers who were too brain-dead to do anything else. For zombies, dickheads, lame brains – not me.

Not me! Little Miss Recovered Addict. I was the author of a bestselling book on how I messed up my life, then gave up the drugs and became a newborn clean freak. I had a second career as an inspirational speaker, telling my tale of woe and redemption to bankers, MDs, CEOs. Hundreds of people had written to me, telling me how I was a hero, telling me how I had saved their lives. I’d been on television more times than I could remember. I’d been nominated for courageous women awards. I was about to get my own radio talk show, for God’s sake … I didn’t need Facebook!

I can’t today recall the actual moment that I relented, but somehow, in the midst of my weakening protestations, I signed up.

With a substance like heroin it’s pretty difficult not to know that you are doing something that’s potentially damaging. For a start, you have to actually prepare the hit. To chase the dragon you have to heap the smack on tinfoil, light the lighter, heat the powder from beneath and observe the gooey brown begin to run. Then, when you’ve imbibed the smoke, felt that slow rush envelop you and spent two or three hours chemically altered, drooling on the couch, it’s pretty plain that what you are doing is not ‘healthy’. And it’s even easier to know that you have a problem when you don’t have a hit!

Facebook, in contrast, was insidious. It took a while to take hold. It really was a case of take it or leave it … Not like heroin, which had transported me straight away after that first hit. Facebook was tame, nothing like seedy, sticky smack, and even now I’m not sure how or why it got me. Was it the structure, the Book itself? Or was it the people, the chat, the Friends, the updates, the flirting, the eternal infinite loop of info, the meaningless trivia? Maybe it was the pure narcissism of it all? Maybe it was the feeling of belonging?

Whatever it was, I’d been locked up in my hotel room for hours, unable to leave, stuck to the screen of my laptop, longing for a lifeline, a word from HIM. And when I did venture out I ignored the ocean, the mountain, one of the world’s most beautiful cities. I saw nothing but the screen before my eyes.

Six months earlier, life had been pretty calm, dare I say, complete. That is before Mr Addict Australia, the Rockstar and the Critic.

‘Three? Why three?’ you might ask. ‘Why can’t you just be normal and have one online relationship?’

I asked myself this question often: Why do you have to be so extreme? Why do you always have to be wanting more?

And I guess it really boils down to this: I’m an addict. It’s not an excuse, just a reality. I never do anything in half-measures. And three made a kind of sense, like a triangle. Perfect symmetry. Three corners; three edges. The black girls at the mag where I worked on were great believers in ‘the spare wheel’. I had my boyfriend but I needed three spares. Just in case. It seemed logical somehow.

2:

DOWN UNDER

Are you the author of ‘Smacked’?

The message bounced into my Inbox. I had set a tone alert on Facebook New Messages – it sounded like a combination of a waterfall and bongo drum – so I knew instantly when someone was mailing me. It made me feel in the loop, switched on.

That day was a day like any other. I was at my desk at the magazine; tapping at the keyboard, putting the finishing touches to my story. I’d been on the Relationship Beat for a few weeks at the time. God knows why. It wasn’t like I was an expert, but I had a certain edge, I guess, a charm even, in the way that I approached these stories. Spill your guts, reveal a bit about yourself, lure the reader in with some juicy personal info – the reader loves to be party to a writer’s life, a writer’s fallibility – then get an expert to comment.

Working in magazines was perfect for someone like me, someone who loved being anywhere but where they were supposed to be … Sometimes it didn’t even feel like I was doing a job.

Part of my ‘work’ was reading, staying in touch with other publications, and in the course of the previous few years I had become a total women’s magazine junkie. I loved nothing more than hauling a hoard of the latest international releases home with me and burrowing into a comfy spot under my white cotton duvet (400 thread count) surrounded by Vogue Australia, UK Glamour, US Essence. Taking a deep breath, I would stroke the glossy covers, savouring that pre-reveal moment, then with love and reverence, slowly open them. The smell of the sample perfumes: Dior’s Addict, DKNY’s Apple, J’adore, CK’s Obsession, Mugler’s Alien. Each page parting like the Red Sea for Moses. It felt as close to biblical as I was ever going to get.

Sitting on my bed in my house on the tip of the African continent, with a mag on my lap, sipping from a huge white mug filled to the brim from my nine-cup pot of espresso (Vogue Australia told me coffee was no longer a no-no – in fact, it combated Alzheimer’s) I would think of the millions of other women across the world who were getting exactly the same pleasure out of this ritual. All of us together, turning the pages like one gorgeous, automated, feminine machine. We were all connected in that moment. Our hair sleek with the latest silicone product, our hip bones jutting just enough to give us a hint of Kate, our skins rejuvenating from the myriad of age-defying nano-particled products that we’d slavishly purchased and applied. The communion of it all was sublime. It was perfection.

How I had changed since those early post-junkie, slaving-in-the-fish-shop, non-moisturised days.

I had landed in this industry by pure chance, remember? Working as a waitress in a sushi bar, one night serving the deputy editor of the most-read women’s magazine in the country, blabbing my long and tragic tale between serving the sashimi, refilling the soy and wasabi … The poor woman, exhausted by this crazy waitress, suggesting I write down my story in the vague hope that maybe I would give her a moment to actually swallow her avo maki.

Me believing this was a sign from God. Me going home, to my mother’s house, where I was staying because I had totally fucked up my life (losing my children, my husband and my marriage because I had loved crack and smack more than anything else in the world). Me staying up till 4 a.m., typing the story on a rickety typewriter – there was no computer at my mother’s home – in-between brushing away the tears that kept falling into my lap. Me faxing it the next day to the mag (I was not online then), getting photographed and published a few weeks later. Me looking at the picture of myself in the magazine, shocked at the lines around my mouth, my eyes – such sadness in those eyes.

That was the first magazine I’d opened in years – who’s got time for Elle and Marie Claire when you’re a junkie?

A few months later I received a call telling me that I’d been nominated for an award in the Best Feature category for my story ‘Six Weeks in Hell’. Of course, I didn’t have anything to wear to the awards ceremony, held at some swanky hotel in Sandton, and on the night, as I looked at the other guests swanning around, I longed for a drink to still my nerves – I needed a swig of whisky more than my next breath. But, in the end, although I didn’t take the award home, I fell asleep that night feeling good about myself for the first time in years.

Slowly, I built up my confidence – writing stories, sending them out, getting ignored, rejected – until, finally, a piece – ‘I Was Addicted to Porn’ – found a home in Marie Claire.

Reading, reading, reading; honing my talent. Despite having never studied the craft, finding that my writing somehow fitted into the women’s magazine requirements, just enough smut, drama, sensation; just enough honesty and always some take-home value …

—

The story I was working on, on the day I got the message from Down Under, was ‘The Freemale’, if I recall correctly. The blurb went something like this: ‘Are you a freemale? Do you no longer need a man in your life?’

Freemales: successful, goal-orientated women who had circumvented the desire for a man to make their lives complete; women who were too busy being well-rounded and successful to need smelly socks and hairy bums. Free of males. I marvelled at them. I was not one of them.

The message in my Inbox came from a guy. Someone called Genix Silk. What kind of a name was Genix? Serbian? Bosnian? I searched for a clue. His network said Australia and he was studying Education at the University of Melbourne. Aah, an Aussie. He liked metal – Slipknot, Korn, Flyleaf – and classical – Bach, Tartini – and under his Favourite Books he listed Shantaram (in my opinion a yawn epic that went on for over 900 pages) and Smacked. My book. Wow!

I loved people who had found my book. It was as though I had all these little wayward children and when people found a copy, it was like someone had come from the Lost and Found, in a huge sprawling shopping mall, holding my baby, my book by the hand, saying, ‘Look, see I have your child.’

Of course, my ego was always stroked when I got messages from fans, but this was a little different. It was his profile picture that interested me. He was cute. Lots of piercings and eyeliner (guy liner). He looked like a goth. All in black. Tortured. A kind of Johnny Depp vampire double. In fact, he looked a lot like my first boyfriend, Jim, who I had danced my virginity away with in Joburg clubs in the late Eighties.

I stared at his picture long and hard. It was hard to discern his age, but that was hardly unusual. In Cyburbia everyone is ageless. In the virtual world there are no wrinkles, no arthritis, no Parkinson’s, no Alzheimer’s, no diminishing eyesight, no bad breath. Everyone is preserved, pickled.

Profile pics are only one’s very best. We only show our most uncrinkled selves. The world we live in is addicted to perfection, but this is nothing compared to the virtual domain.

And this, of course, is just the start. There are no limitations in this new Wild West. No one knows what car you drive, what salary you earn, what label your trainers are, not even what laptop you’re banging away on … We are all free to be whoever we choose. You can be whoever you want to be. Make it up. It’s possible no one will ever find out.

For someone like me, the queen of fantasy, this was the perfect playground, so I accepted Genix’s Friendship Request and asked him the obvious.

1:22pm Melinda

What kind of a name is that? Genix? Genix Silk? Are you for real? Is it a nickname? And how do you know about Smacked?

We met on Facebook Chat, now called Messenger. By clicking on the little icon in the lower right-hand corner, a box brought everything alive, into real time. And we manifested in all our curious glory.

1:23pm Genix

It’s my real name. I’m actually Genix Jesus Silk, if you want the whole deal (though most people call me Shaun). My father was part Spanish, and there’s also some Jew in me somewhere down the line. I’ve been trying to come off methadone, so I went to the local bookshop in Melbourne and asked them for some junkie lit that might help me, and they pointed me towards yours. So I bought it and just started reading it. I looked for you on Facebook and took a chance. There are quite a lot of you. 125 if I remember correctly. But I hit the jackpot first time. I never thought a famous author would accept my request. You look different to the girl on the cover. You’re prettier on Facebook – is that you on your book?

Almost immediately Genix and I started speaking as though we had always known one another. We were almost out of breath for each other. Greedy. Writing questions, answers; sharing details and thoughts; running to catch up. There was so much to say. It was weird, that line – ‘always known each other’ – could have come out of any crappy romance novel, but it was true. Clichés often are. We were kindred spirits, soul friends, ‘on the same page’. It’s strange how one can connect with a perfect stranger and it doesn’t matter that you’ve never set eyes on the other being, you just pick up with them as though you had never left off.

Out of the billions of inhabitants stretched across countries, continents, seas and oceans, valleys and plains, one single person had reached out to me and touched my soul. A stranger who had happened to find my book, my baby, ten thousand kilometres away in some obscure bookshop in Melbourne. I was filled with a sense of meant-to-be-ness … Of fate. Of destiny.

Genix was about two weeks off methadone when he appeared on screen that day … Methadone, also known as Physeptone, Dolophine, Symoron and Heptadon, is often given to smackheads to get them off heroin. A while ago Mr Scientologist, Tom Cruise, barked off about Dolophine being associated with Nazism, claiming that its name had been given to it by its inventors as a way of paying homage to their führer, Adolf Hitler. Subsequently, this statement has been ripped apart by historians, but whether it is true or not, today there is still a great deal of controversy surrounding this medication.

You may have heard of methadone programmes in the States and in Europe. They are supposed to allow heroin addicts the space to get off smack, as well as giving the authorities a chance to monitor the junkies as they line up to get their ‘fix’. But what often happens is many addicts use the Done and smack, or get so addicted to the Done that they in fact just swap one substance for another, getting more fucked up than they were to start with.

Methadone is a synthetic upload, producing the same effects as opium, and many addicts complain that it’s far worse coming off the Done than it is coming off smack. And it takes much longer – weeks, even months. Nausea, vomiting, fever, chills, joint aches, suicidal impulses, depression, extreme fatigue, delirium, hallucination, anxiety, paranoia, delusions … the list goes on. And this shit is supposed to HELP people.

No wonder Genix was tearing at the walls. It’s like the chemicals in the Done cling to one’s receptors. Withdrawing from it is like trying to rid oneself of a many-tentacled alien monster that’s buried itself down deep in your flesh.

Now Australia, despite its reputation in 2008 for being the land of hope, opportunity, wallabies and sporting heroes like Shane Warne and Ian Thorpe, has a terribly serious smack problem, and Genix was obviously pretty fucked up. Maybe I was just ripe to try and rescue a junkie. I hadn’t tried for a long time, not since my crackhead gangsta ex-boyfriend Farrell had exploded all over my life five years earlier.

Maybe …? Maybe, whatever. This someone needed me. And who