–because the infinite does not procrastinate

LAST week we lost Clarence Young, founder of the Phoenix Recovery Project. I did not know that this facility existed until December 2013, when a close relation of mine developed an addiction, and friends pointed me in the direction of Clarence’s facility.
On meeting Clarence, it was as if I had known him for a long time. I pondered how we had never met before, because he knew many of the people that I knew who had contributed to the cocaine scourge in Guyana, and those of their victims who had died of both cocaine and marijuana overdose from the late 70s to the early 80s.
He knew players residing here and overseas, yet we never met before that day in early 2014. Clarence had much more to contribute; his vast knowledge of the metamorphosis that occurs with addiction equipped me with the insight into addiction, clarifying that my instincts were right all along, though I was a voice in the wilderness back then, when the bag-wearing Rasta movement with its philosophy of heights and Biblical interpretations of Haile Selassie with its Lion lore gripped a generation. All those brethren, and some of the sisteren from back then, were gone by the late eighties.
In the early nineties, cocaine had begun to infest our population. So, with camera and art, I decided to tell this demonic tale of addictive substances from my experiences as a witness to death and dismantled lives.

CLOSE ENCOUNTER
One of the closest and most traumatic experiences was an incident I had one night outside a dance in West Ruimveldt, where a brief tantalize led to a confrontation between myself and ‘Sharky’.
It started as a fist fight. Then he smashed a beer bottle and began slashing at me. I was cut, but did not realise it as we struggled. He ran from the corner, and Eric alerted me that I was bleeding. I did not immediately, in the following weeks, seek to attack Sharky, as I had had a run-in with his elder brother, Michael, over the matter.
I waited for forgetfulness to step-in, but the next thing I knew, he had left the country for the USA. A few years later, ‘Sweet Drink’, a West Ruimveldt resident told me Sharky was back, so I decided to go look for him to settle our score.
I had ignored Sweet Drink’s warning that “When yuh see ‘e, yuh nah gon wan do he notten.” I did confront Sharky by the Vendors Arcade, on the western side of the old Guyana Stores bond. There was a roti shop nearby. I recognised him and stared at him in disbelief. He was in his bare briefs. No pants, no Clarks, nothing. His tee-shirt was covered with human faeces, no doubt his own.
He looked at me and said, “Red Man, buy meh two dhall puri nah.” I placed the implement I had walked with in the umbrella next to the roti shop [I would leave it right there!] and bought him the puri.
Another deportee who was looking on explained what had happened to him overseas, and also to a few others we knew. I stayed in that location long after what Sharky had become left.
I was also told that drugs was a quick way to real money, but what I saw Sharky become erased all the hype I was fed. This was my first visual experience with the human devastation of cocaine addiction, and I have hated it since then. This was in the early eighties.

IN MEH FACE
By 2013, addiction stood at my door; was in my home. And then I met Clarence Young, and began a lively friendship with him and his team. Clarence came here from Trinidad to fulfil a promise to Mrs Nathalie Stephenson to start a drug recovery programme in 1995. This work he began at Charlotte and Albert Streets, thence to Amia Avenue and then to Prasad’s Hospital and the Salvation Army. He even took the programme to West End Gym in Tiger Bay, then to Hadfield Street, to Plaisance on the East Coast.
In 2006, he opened the Phoenix Recovery Project at Mon Repos on the East Coast. Clarence opened my eyes to the nature of the drug addict; showing me that a separate personality evolves. A living lie removes all empathy; deception, psychotic bursts of violence, theft and complete misery engulfs the family, many of whom, unaware of these impediments, are attempting with love and bravery to rescue a relative from addiction. Even the ‘rehab’ can only work when the affected wants to change his self-inflicted condition. Addiction is initiated by choice, and can lead to serious paranoid mental defects and to real and imagined physical ailments, but it all begins with choice.

RESCU MISSION
I had conceived of RESCU in 2012 with all the photographs and art work I had developed. RESCU is a data-dispersing group, intended to compete with the drug selling propaganda that pervades our communities unchallenged by any State action.
RESCU came into being in 2014, with the support of the ACDA Steering Committee, and official support from the then Acting Chancellor of the University of Guyana, Dr Paloma Mohammed and a few others.
But it was with the help of Clarence Young that I was able to chart an additional course of literature to provide insights to the background of the hype, and to the dangers of synthetic marijuana and the pills now used by our young people, and known as ‘De Cool tings’ .
Clarence passed before I could take him to see a friend in Albouystown who is haunted by his past drug usage, and is in the strangest mental place I’ve ever witnessed, trying this and that health supplement, inflicting shadows upon himself while forgetting to ‘Live’.
There is no one formula to the interaction with addiction; counselling, religion, all methods must be explored. The human mind, when afflicted, is a tremendous challenge to repair, because we humans know so little of the neurological world and its external currents.
Clarence had much more to give, but the infinite determines while we procrastinate. However, it is not how long we live, but rather what our life meant. And Clarence Young has touched many positively; his life meant something truly significant.