PREVIEW - Publishing - 12 April 2016

ADDICT NEW EDITION  (1979 - 2016)

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​​My story has the answers.

What is addiction?

Why do some children get addicted to drugs or drink and grow up to spend their adult lives in turmoil?

Why do some drift into crime?

What are the tell-tale signs as our children act strangely at the beginnings of a life of horror?

What makes them become different while others continue their studies to successful lives?

Can we catch it all in time and prevent it?

And if our love ones are already on board the roller coaster ride to hell can we get them off?

I was one of the problem children. A misfit, a rebel who drifted into a bizarre life of addiction, crime and lunacy. As my addiction took its toll I fell from being a wealthy playboy to living in homeless missions ending up for over five years sleeping in shop doorways.

Now 72 years old I look back with both deep regret but also gratitude that my life experiences can benefit us in identifying what makes some kids different and doing something for those children before it’s too late.

Let’s learn from my story because

My story has the answers.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTENSIVE CARE

​After the operation in intensive care staring at the ceiling it was some time before I could pierce together exactly where I was. All I could sense was foreign voices constantly leaning over the bed telling me I was going to die. Every now and then the same face a chubby woman shaking me telling it too late. She would say always the same words ‘Too late too late’ and off she go again. Slag I thought what the fuck has she got against me. I didn’t even know her. Okay I was going to die but did that wicked bitch have to keep telling me. Drifting in and out of consciousness the pain in my head was bad and I vaguely remember getting injections. As hours probably days passed I must have been getting stronger when one day as the grim reaper paid her visit I screamed back ‘Too fucking late let me die in peace you slag’

‘No she’s asking you if you’ve been to the toilet’ I could see those magical blue eyes looking down on me with that I love you smile.

It was Hannelore who then explained that the German nurse was saying toilet not too late. The nurse had been asking me if I wanted to go to the toilet but to me the word toilet in her heavy accent had sounded like too late. 

‘I love you, you’re going to get better’ Hannelore whispered leaning over to kiss my forehead.

A day or so later I was taken out of intensive care and put in a two bed ward with an American soldier because the authorities deemed it would help me to be able to speak in English. They meant well but it back fired. He was a practicing alcoholic. As I gained consciousness he leaned over my bed to give me my first beer introducing himself as Danny. He’d had his leg amputated but as an alcoholic was full functioning on his crutches with bottles of beer hidden everywhere. ‘Drink some of that nothing stronger for a few days you’ve had a big operation’ said my bed mate who practically force fed me that first drink.

 ‘Were going to be alright’ smiled Danny taking a swig from a miniature whisky. ‘We’ve got to be sensible Steve keep you on beer for a week or so till you get stronger’ Danny had a heart of gold but fuck like attracts like and for me an amphetamine addict half dead just released from a life sentence on drug island and one day out of intensive care I was now checking in big time to my own alcoholic asylum.

Sadly I was to stay alcoholic for a long time.

Gross Harden was a huge very modern hospital and at the time was the only Hospital in Europe to use micro surgery which is what saved my life. Little Legs had smashed my head so bad the crack in my skull was getting wider and wider each day and left any longer I would have died.

The Whittington Hospital in London were wrong to discharge me but in 1979 that type of micro surgery was not available in England.

A lot of Danny’s booze came in via his soldier mates but on the basement floor of that hospital open 24/7 was heaven.

Two giant automatic machines that dispensed the beer of your choice.

At night drinking beer in my hospital bed I was telling Danny parts of my life when one evening he spoke with true alcoholic wisdom saying ‘Ooh no Steve you mustn’t ever take those amphetamine pills again look at the mess they got you into.

 He’s right I thought and although the first part of my decision was very sensible the second part was disaster. Quietly in that hospital room I vowed never to take amphetamine pill again I’ll drink instead. And drink I did becoming the happiest patient that hospital ever knew. Every morning Danny was grouchy hardly speaking never offering me anything but once he’d got a few drinks down him I became his best mate and free drink flowed my way.

Hannelore visited every day and once allowed out of bed in a wheel chair down we soon went down  to the basement stocking up with my own private liquid refreshment. Now I didn’t have to rely on Danny’s mood or generosity.  As any alcoholic just like a drug addict having your own private supply of booze is more important than oxygen. Instead of tens of thousands of pills hidden here there and everywhere it was bottles of booze. The only thing that had remained consistent was my love for Hannelore. It truly was for me real love for the first time in my life. As I drunk more and more beer we would wiz up and down the long hospital corridors with me laughing and singing from my wheel chair.

Hannelore thought I was interesting, different and I guess that’s why she loved me. Coming from a small village in Bavaria to her I was unusual to say the least especially now with my head bandaged like an Indian Sikh.

We talked for hours and hours hiding all over that massive hospital when I should have been back on the ward in bed. These were the happiest few weeks of my life and I call it our honeymoon. Two lovers not on a cruise in the Caribbean but in the corridors of Grossharden Hospital. As I got stronger we started parking the wheelchair in the toilets locking the door and having sex on the floor. After one session I got up a bit quick hit my head on the wash basin and blood started coming through the bandages.  Our sex life had to be put on hold for a while.

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CHAPTER TWO

LIVING IN GERMANY

The hospital became our own little world and it came as a shock and I was petrified when a month or so later when I was released.

Hannelore picked me up and it was only then I finally realized I was now in a foreign country with no money nowhere to live and recovering from a beating that should have left me dead. The surgeons had sewn the facial nerve together but the right side of my face was still paralyzed. I was now totally deaf on the left side where they had removed the inner ear to put a metal plate inside my head to bring the cracked skull back together.

Little Legs had to pay one day for what he did to me. Pay he did.

But it wasn’t the physical injuries that were the worst to cope with the real shock was living without amphetamine.

Before my five homeless years which were just a cloud of drunkenness ending with oblivion on mentholated spirits with the winos practically my whole adult life had functioned on large intakes of amphetamine. Over the years as my amphetamine addiction worsened I needed handfuls of pills not to get high and rob banks but just to get out of bed. Imagine waking up with a mega bad hangover well that’s just kids’ play as against waking up needing amphetamine. It’s a million times worse. With a hangover eventually it wears off but with no amphetamine you just lay there speechless waiting till the drugs inside you begin to work. Now there was no waiting because there was no drugs. Shaving getting dressed was for me a major issue and I had to force myself to do that. For six months we lived with Hannelore’s parent’s thanks mainly to her father to whom I will always owe my life. We had a kind of bond he’d lost his arm as a teenager in the war and as a teenager I’d lost my mind. Whatever it was his compassion saved my life.  For her mother a homely yet simple woman it was a living nightmare. A washed up 36 year old bank robber had been dumped in her Bavarian home. For her it must have seemed like a space ship had landed in her garden then flown off leaving a very strange individual behind.

The drugs over the years had done their damage leaving me very mentally damaged. Only in hindsight can I really appreciate how deranged I was. At least now I was in different surroundings with no bad memories on every street corner and no chance of buying amphetamine tablets. For an addict of my severity this had to be God’s decision as the only possible way of keeping me off pills. Hannelore worked for the local council in their art department and with her father at work and brother and sister in school I was alone in the day with her mother. We never spoke and I spent the day in the bedroom upstairs. Every evening we all ate together in typical German fashion round the table. Although I couldn’t speak the discipline of coming downstairs once a day was good for me. And so it carried on week after week.  That house became like a psychiatric ward nursing a hopeless case back to some level of normality after 20 years of amphetamine abuse. I spoke to no-one except Hannelore alone in the bedroom.

For several months that’s all that happened me alone in the bedroom just coming down at night for a meal then straight back up.

I’m not a doctor and have no text book medical conception of the damage the years of drug abuse had on me. For years I lived on cloud nine out of my head and now I was well and truly behind the clouds in a fog of fear and confusion unable to speak or join the human race becoming a recluse in a foreign land.  

Then a miracle the breakthrough came in a very sweet fashion.

One evening Ulrich Hannelore’s 14 year old brother asked me if I wanted to play table tennis in the basement after the evening meal as against going straight back upstairs.

I did and the road to recovery drug opened up big time with all its glory. I wanted to win and every night those games became as important to me as an Olympic final. Alone with my thoughts winning the game was rebuilding my life showing me I could do things off amphetamine. Subconsciously each point was of vital importance.

Whether that kid bless him let me win I will never know but win I did and that made me feel ten feet tall as nightly we climbed back up the stairs to the main house to what seemed like a Wimbledon centre court crowd to announce I won again. I became obsessed with it and would now wait by the bedroom window early afternoon waiting for the kid brother to come home from school to practically force him to play table tennis. I started laughing joking with the family at night as we emerged from the basement each evening. ‘World champion wins again’ I shouted to them all laughing.

It was spring instead of isolating upstairs I was now going to the garden after our evening matches. The family began laughing and now referred to me as their ‘Welt Meister’.

A miracle had occurred I was talking I was interacting with them. I was associating and talking to people without amphetamine for the first time in my life. For an addict to come off drugs and perhaps just talk to nurses is the start but to interact normally with other people, that’s the big one. The drugs that gave me that invincible confidence in those big robberies over the years had taken away my ability to interact normally. While I was robbing banks for million those fucking pills were robbing me of me. They stole my innermost personality which God gave me and allowed to grow inside me as a baby, young boy to teenager. I would gladly put a gun to Doctor Unwin’s head and make him sweat watch a second hand on a huge clock with a tape recording counting down 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 seconds to live.

I would like to see his face as he died.

Introducing me to amphetamine was the most evil thing anybody could ever do and he like any drug dealer big or small should be executed. One’s early years are like a tree growing its branches. We learn to live on this planet to interact with others. Five year old boys in a kindergarten don’t chat up the girls and take them out on a date that’s what growing up is all about. That bastard with his handbag snatching therapy robbed me big time. Now in the garden after table tennis I was being me.

It was like I was meeting myself for the first time drug free and what’s more I liked myself.

With no money and no giant hospital beer machine that spring was probably the most beneficial period of my life. Sadly it wasn’t to last for long but at least I never had to have a few drinks to win that night’s table tennis. So many lives, so much God given talent is wasted then destroyed with the thought I write better, I talk better, I dance better, work better, do the housework better on booze or pills. The whole world can’t go to Germany and play table tennis but there has to be a viable rehab programme to treat addicts’ alcoholics to cope without their fix. Alcoholic Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous have gone a long way but there must be more as society we can do to save our world not from global warming but global addiction.

Not long after we moved to a tiny flat on our own and that’s when it got hard. I was now back in the real world with no table tennis matches. Hannelore worked during the day so I was on my own. I was in love and the determination to do right by Hannelore was very strong. I made myself a strict regime to get up with her and get dressed and shaved. In those early days Hannelore was like a mother to me and everything she did was to re-build me and each evening I would wait by the garden gate. I went to a language school to learn German didn’t learn much but it gave me an enormous sense of pride to go there every morning. After the school I went to the vegetable market buying and cooking a meal ready for Hannelore when she came home from work.  We had hardly any money which controlled my alcohol intake. I only drank at night so as yet there were no bad alcohol problems that was to come.