Crackheads and sore points

At least three or four times a week I’m summoned to one of the crack dens in my block to take a look at Keith John, a Brit-born Kiwi with around eight months left of a two-year sentence for using crystal meth.

Usually he is just having an agitated paranoia attack, twitching uncontrollably and demanding I call the British consul to complain about how he is being neglected in jail.

At times it is to clean and dress the pustulating sores that frequently erupt on his body — a side-effect of a poor diet and impure drugs. Twice this week I’ve had to dress and apply butterfly stitches to a fresh head wound caused by him passing out in the cramped bathroom while showering or on the toilet.

Having to wrestle a wet and sore-ridden dead-weight naked junkie out of a cell bathroom is not something I’ll miss when I leave this place, but I made a promise to myself that I would help everyone and anyone while here, regardless of how degrading the circumstances. I feel it is the least I can do to return the love and support I have received since my arrest.

Still, whenever I finish “treating” him, I have to get straight into the shower and scrub myself from head to toe in an attempt to wash off the contact. Cleansing my mind of the imagery is a different matter.

With most of the stories I’ve told so far about my fellow inmates, I’ve tried to highlight an element of their humanity, some spark that shows despite their crime and incarceration, they still have some innate innocence or goodness.

It’s hard to find that with Keith — if that is even his real name.

Although he was born in Britain, he moved with his parents to New Zealand as an infant and to all intents is a Kiwi — with one of the thickest accents I’ve heard.

He keeps his cards close to his chest, but from what I’ve eked out he made quite a bit of money on property before having something of a mid-life crisis five years ago, and selling up to go on a drug binge.

“I like Bali because the shabu (crystal meth) is so cheap,” the 60-year-old told me. “Back home you pay three times as much for half the amount, but it is much better quality.”

He moved permanently to Bali three years ago, renting a room long-term in a cheap run-down hotel in Kuta and leaving only for a day-trip visa run to Singapore every three months.

He’d watch the famed sunset on Kuta beach each evening before picking up some crack whore and get her to score some shabu. They’d go back to his hotel and get off, listening to electronic music and trying to have sex until midday, when he’d sleep for a couple of hours.

“You can’t get it up when you use as much as I do so I was taking lots of Viagra and Cialis, but it wasn’t working,” he said. “It doesn’t matter though. You still have a good time.”

Keith is no ordinary meth user; he is the only one I have come across that injects.

When police raided his hotel after a tip off from a girl who felt short-changed, they found 47 used syringes scattered around his room, as well as containers of half-eaten food and piles of dirty clothes.

His lawyer “negotiated” the prosecutor’s three year recommendation down to two, and Keith settled into Kerobokan — where shabu was even more plentiful and there was little danger of being caught and punished.

Keith spends nearly four million rupiah (around $300) a week on shabu — it costs 1.2 million a gram — which he uses by shooting up six or seven times a day.

“It’s much better than smoking. You waste so much that way,” he says, and dismisses the track marks on his arms as being “nothing”.

“It’s just the shitty drugs. The good stuff doesn’t leave marks.”

But whatever is used to cut the meth frequently causes his skin to break out in boils — some bigger than squash balls — which seem to concentrate on his back and behind, making sitting difficult.

Keith has frequent run-ins with his cell mates, who are angered by him hogging the bathroom and “mandi”, a tub from which water is scooped for a shower. Puzzled by why the water in the tub was frequently mucky, they were horrified to discover he had been sitting in the tub and washing himself that way.

His room mates, however, have little status.

They are Francois, a hypochondriac French trafficker and hoarder who stuffs half-eaten food under his mattress, Khoram, a Pakistani Brit and genial alcoholic who is usually incapable of leaving his room, and Chi, a Taiwanese who spends all day sitting glumly in front of the block television.

Many of us in the block have tried to talk Keith into quitting — or at least easing up — but he insists he is in full control and walks away from the conversation.

I’ve never seen him eat anything other than peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and he drinks at least a dozen or so Red Bull-like energy drinks a day, another key indicator of someone with a meth habit.

After his second faint this week, we took the desperate step of asking the head of security to come and see him, hoping that they may put him in solitary for a while and force him off the drugs, but they weren’t interested. With so many religious holidays this week, staff are stretched.

If he makes it through to his release, he plans to move to Thailand where he thinks there is less risk of being caught.

“I’m not hurting anyone but myself,” he says. “I wish people would just leave me alone.”

Until the next time I’m summoned…