Dragons & Butterflies: Sentenced to Die, Choosing to Live (26 page)

‘
You bliksem se moer, ek gaan jou op fok, klim uit die kar
’ (You fuck, I’m gonna fuck you up, get out of the car), he cursed, instinctively putting his knuckle to his mouth, blood still dripping. ‘
Waar is die Mandrax?
’ Waving their guns, the cops ordered us out of the car.

I pretended I didn’t know what they were talking about. With my hands in the air, my face got slammed onto the bonnet of the car and I was subjected to a thorough frisking. They found nothing on my person, but then they went about searching my car systematically. The rear of this particular model station wagon was like an open boot and you could see into it from outside. That day, the boot was packed full of football uniforms, which must have been a disappointment to them. Meanwhile, the other cop was frisking Dennis. The one nursing his hand was growing impatient. He kept telling his partner we had nothing and they should let us go – and eventually that’s what they did. They didn’t find the LSD under the driver’s seat.

When we arrived at Barney’s place, who had been expecting us much earlier, we told him our story. Jokingly, I added that his LSD caps were now going to cost him double.

Every weekend I played football, and before a match we’d always smoke. One Sunday I was running late. I found the time to smoke but not to warm up before the match began. Early into the game, I collided with a defender, Martin, from the opposing side. He was younger than me but a lot heavier. My body went in one direction and all of Martin’s weight came down on my leg. There was a loud snapping sound, as if a plank had broken in two. It was so loud that the few spectators sitting in the stands said afterwards they heard my leg break. The tibula and fibula, my right leg this time, had broken clean through. Fuck, I couldn’t believe it! A broken leg again.

This was before the days of cellphones, so I lay on the field for at least an hour before the ambulance arrived. I was taken to the new General Hospital, where they wasted no time in getting me all plastered up. I was discharged straight afterwards. An ex-girlfriend, Barbara, from my school days had come with me to the hospital and she insisted that I stay at her parents’ home with her in Victory Park. That night was a nightmare: I kept her awake the whole night with my moaning and groaning. It was too much of an imposition on her family, I realised, so I arranged to be moved to the Arcadia cottage in Greenside, where I shared a room with one of the guys staying there. It was far more convenient, and having people there made it much easier for me to move around.

While I was in the Arcadia cottage, I met a woman named Michelle who was a lot older than me. She was also a bit of a nymphomaniac. One night she suggested we go to Sun City with a friend of mine. She borrowed a car and off we went. It wasn’t all that much fun for me, hopping around on my crutches, but the night seemed to pass pretty fast. On our way home, late at night, I was in the passenger seat, my friend was driving, and we smoked a Mandrax pipe. After that, Michelle got all horny and wanted to fuck. (This woman wasn’t shy. On a previous occasion while I was in bed, and had friends visit me, she gave my mate a blow job in the toilet.)

I slipped my pants down over my full plaster cast and she sat on me and proceeded to fuck me. The driver, who was supposed to be keeping his eyes on the road, obviously had a break in concentration because the next thing we heard was a loud bang and there was flying glass everywhere. Then a fucking head came slamming through the windscreen! We had hit a donkey, can you believe! The driver slammed on the brakes and the donkey went flying over the car into the middle of the road. I was covered in glass and Michelle was screaming her lungs out.

We pulled over about 20m down the road and my friend helped me out of the car. I had just managed to dust the glass off my clothes and was pulling up my pants when a Putco bus came down the road towards us at a helluva speed. By the time the driver saw the donkey lying in the middle of the road, despite desperately slamming on his brakes, it was too late and he drove over the poor animal. The bus then veered off the road, hit the gravel and began to slide straight towards us. I was frozen where I stood, and with my crutches and broken leg I couldn’t have moved anyway. I watched helplessly as the headlights, in a cloud of dust, come closer and closer. I began to pray. And then, as if by a miracle, the bus came to a halt literally a couple of metres from us. Another of my lucky escapes, but the most bizarre yet by far!

After about four months I had the full cast removed and was given a half-cast, which enabled me to walk without crutches. During this time I enrolled at the Gordon Flack-Davidson Academy of Design to study fashion design. I also stopped dealing in marijuana. There were several reasons for this, one of them being that Derek and I had had a falling-out over a stash we’d stolen. Catching a bus to the city and back with a half-cast was horrendous, so after two weeks my dream of becoming a clothing designer came to an end. I threw in the towel, something I later deeply regretted.

I got back onto the Joburg-Durban run and my drug habit escalated out of control. At one stage I found myself in Durban with nothing but the clothes on my back and my gun. I had lost all my possessions, including my motorbike. Some of my belongings were in Joburg. I was skin and bone, sleeping in a bus shelter in a coloured area at night and making do during the day. With the last coins in my pocket, I found a phone booth and called Joan.

Joan and Malcolm had got married in 1980, and he and I had always got on well. I didn’t see them all that often – mostly when I needed money or help or was in trouble. Joan and I became really close when we lived in Arcadia and, although I was the wild younger brother and was often in trouble, she always looked out for me. In a way, I suppose she really took the place of my mother. Not only did she show me devotion and caring, but she also felt a deep responsibility for me as well. She was always coming to my rescue, a pattern that began in our childhood and continued into our adulthood. Now Joan told me to make my way to Vereeniging, south of Joburg, where she and Malcolm were living. They would fetch me from wherever I managed to get a lift to.

A new shopping centre, Three Rivers, had just been built in Vereeniging. One thing it lacked was a delicatessen, and so Joan and Malcolm had decided to open one there. It was called Deli-World. I was given the responsibility of managing the place. The centre was L-shaped and our shop wasn’t in a great position. It was right at the end, which meant that we got no passing trade. We sold an assortment of fresh cold meats, cheeses, chocolates and a variety of mixed nuts and dried fruit. On Sundays in the early hours of the morning, we would drive to Kaufman’s Bakery in Joburg, on Louis Botha Avenue, opposite a drive-in fast food place called the Doll’s House. There we would pick up many dozens of freshly baked bagels and be back in Vereeniging in time to open up. The bagels were a big hit with our Jewish customers.

Sadly, the delicatessen was doomed not to succeed. For one thing, I started giving credit to some of the African workers who frequented the centre, and for another I would help myself to my favourite foods every day – biltong, rare roast beef, nuts. I just loved the nuts. My sister would argue that I ate all the profits, but this was not strictly true. Unfortunately, we ran at a loss from the day we opened and eventually we were forced to close our doors.

One good thing about living in Vereeniging and working at the deli was that I got clean and I stopped dealing.

In 1983 I moved back to Joburg and stayed with my old school friend Craig in a flat in Berea. Prior to leaving Vereeniging I had organised a job with one of the clothing companies I’d worked for previously. I had always been good at what I did, even when I was stoned. I was given an already established sales round, one that was generating quite a substantial income. Being back in Joburg and reconnecting with my old friends, it was hardly surprising that I started smoking weed again. I seemed to go through these cycles: stop, stay clean for a short while, work, make money, use drugs, lose everything. By now I understood this pattern, and I thought I would limit my smoking to weekends only. On Saturday nights I always went to a club, where I would drink as much as was humanly possible and smoke weed well into the early hours of the morning. At that time there was a quaint club on the edge of the city called DV8, where a lot of punk rockers used to hang out. Everybody was tripping out on LSD and, club-wise, Joburg was happening. People of all ages flocked to the clubs to have a good time.

I remember the first time I ever took LSD was during the day. It was called a microdot, a small, round, hard substance that looked like a slightly compressed lentil. There were six of us and we were raving out of our heads. I remember we walked into this fruit shop. Everything became more colourful and intense. We proceeded to eat the fruit. I don’t know what was so funny, but we were hysterical with laughter. Maybe it was the look on the shop owner’s face. He couldn’t believe our audacity and he did nothing to stop us. I almost died from laughing. We must have looked like raving lunatics. Laughing and provoking the owner, we left the shop without paying. I suppose he was only too happy to see us go.

One night, Craig and I got really fucked out of our heads on Mandrax. I think it had been almost two years since I’d smoked Mandrax. Craig had been going to these African clubs on the far side of the city, where on several occasions he had picked up some hot black chicks. Until then I had never ‘crossed the colour bar’, but I had often wondered what it would be like, so on this particular night I agreed to go with him.

Once at the club, besides one other white male, we were the only white guys there and the black chicks seemed to hover around us. At first I couldn’t actually see myself picking somebody up and taking her home, but as the evening progressed and the drunker I got, the more I entertained the idea. After smoking a joint on the roof later into the evening, Craig picked up two chicks. He introduced me to them at the bar. They acted all shy around us and remained at a distance, giggling and whispering to each other, but never addressing a word to Craig and me. Eventually, we left the club with the two girls. They sat in the back of the car huddled together, but, again, they never uttered a word. When we arrived at the flat, Craig took his chick to his bedroom while I escorted the other one to the lounge, where the lights were pretty dim. She came and sat next to me on the couch. She had make-up plastered all over her face, and her perfume was so strong I thought I might choke. I put my arm around her and my hand came to rest on her breasts. I gave them a slight squeeze but all I could feel was foam. I squeezed a little harder – still nothing, only a padded bra. Although I was drunk and fucked out of my head, this still struck me as strange. I put my other hand on her leg and in one swift movement I pushed it up her skirt and grabbed her crotch. Jesus, fuck! The woman had a huge cock and balls! Shocked, I jumped up so high I almost hit the ceiling. At the same time I pulled out my .38 Special.

‘Get the fuck out of here, motherfucker!’ I yelled. Grabbing the bitch – I mean, the
guy
 – by the scruff of his neck, I dragged him to the door. There, pointing my gun straight in his face, I pulled the door open and threw him outside. Then I ran to the bedroom where Craig was under the covers in a hot embrace with his partner. I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t noticed that he was with a man, so I shouted at him, ‘She’s a fucking
man!
’ He turned around to face me, mouth agape, his bloodshot eyes widening. I was waving my gun around.