Dragons & Butterflies: Sentenced to Die, Choosing to Live (29 page)

‘I’ll blow your fucking brains out if you take another step!’

The kid froze in his tracks. I fired a shot in the air. The distraction gave Glen and his chick a chance get away. We all jumped into the car, and, as we drove off, I fired another few rounds into the air just for good measure. Then Glen and I looked at each other, dumbstruck.

‘What the hell was that about?’

We shook our heads. I still don’t know.

A few weeks after that we did quite a big deal, which turned sour: Glen got ripped off a couple of packets. On this particular night I had planned to visit my mother, who was living close to the nightclub where Glen was going to have a meeting with the people who had conned him. The club was near the harbour and a lot of sailors used to hang out there. He made his own way there because he said he wanted to sort the problem out himself, and so I arranged to stay over at my mom’s place. Early the next morning, I went to find Glen at the abandoned house where we’d been sleeping, but he wasn’t there. One of his boys told me that the night before, at the club, he had shot somebody at point-blank range with his .357, straight in the face. Glen had gone into hiding.

I went to his parents’ house and they were really distraught by the news. Glen was from the old school, a real gangster who lived by a strict code of honour: you fuck with me, you get fucked.

After that there was no point in me sticking around. For all I knew, I could be implicated in a murder, as I was the one who had given Glen the .357 Magnum, so I left Durban in a hurry.

Back in Joburg, I hooked up with another prostitute who I knew from before. She had once hired me as her bodyguard after the violent ex-boyfriend she’d arranged to have stabbed had survived and threatened her with revenge. Wherever she went, I would go. I even moved into the tiny, rather dingy cottage she rented and shared with her huge St Bernard. I hated that dog. He kept dribbling spit all over me.

Like me, she never stayed in one place for too long, and so we moved around a lot, sometimes staying in hotels and occasionally even sleeping in the same bed. I watched her bathe, and there were times when I would be in the room right next door and could hear her fucking some steamer. Through all this we stayed friends and we never mixed business with pleasure. In the end she met a nice Jewish guy, a lawyer, who became her boyfriend and who really loved her. Eventually he convinced her to change her life. She stopped being a hooker and they got married. They both remained clients of mine. Their code names were Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn. They lived in the posh suburb of Houghton.

Dancing With Death

Like clothing styles, drugs go in and out of fashion, too. In the late 1980s cocaine became the drug of choice among Johannesburg’s elite. Everybody was ‘doing coke’ and I saw an opportunity. When I took my first sniff of cocaine, I couldn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about. Apart from my gums going numb and a slight feeling of euphoria, it didn’t do much for me.

One night when I was at a club, I was approached by a member of the Narcotics Bureau. He knew me by name and he also knew that I dealt drugs. He assured me that he wasn’t there to bust me, but told me that, if I wanted, he could supply me with the best coke in town. At first I was sceptical. No way was I going to trust a pig. At the same time, for some reason, my instincts were telling me I
could
trust him, and what better contact to have than somebody in the drug squad? To cut a long story short, we arranged a meeting point – these were always in the parking lot of a shopping mall – and we started doing business. The coke was from Peru, with a slightly yellowish colour to it, and it
was
very good. On top of this, I was getting the shit on credit.

Having an addictive personality, I did everything to the extreme. Before I even realised it, sniffing did nothing for me, and I became hopelessly hooked on freebasing cocaine. The whole ritual of preparation, in anticipation of that first hit, made me a slave of the white powder. How freebasing works is you take cocaine in its powder form, mix it with bicarb and boil it in a spice bottle with a little water. Then you heat it on the stove; once the powder turns to oil, you put a small piece of ice in the water and twirl it around. As the water cools, the oil forms solid rock.

As a drug dealer and an addict, one constantly needs people from all walks of life in your world. Addicts get to know addicts, and the dealers get to know who’s doing what. But it’s almost impossible to connect with the top guys who are moving kilograms. There’s always a second party in between. For me, the ultimate goal was to deal with the top guy. Clubs were good places to meet such people and it was at a club that I hooked up with an old connection of mine, Renaldo, who, years back, had supplied me with LSD and who was now in the cocaine business. We’d first met back when I was running wild in Durban and hanging out with Flattie. Renaldo was a South American Jew who had pulled a heroin stint in Israel and ended up doing a seven-year stretch.

As a rule, I would only take coke on credit in the event that it had been cut or laced with another substance. Generally, I had a good name for moving a lot of drugs, and procuring drugs from different sources was never a problem for me. I was happy to work with my new connection, as he was reliable and never stood (cut or laced) on the coke. In the beginning, and for the first few months, business was good and I was moving a lot of coke. But then I made the fatal mistake of smoking with my customers, some of whom were also my friends. So often when smoking socially, especially doing something as addictive as freebasing, one ends up giving credit. When an addict owes money for drugs, the second he gets his hands on cash, paying his debt is the furthest thing from his mind. He would rather make a score somewhere else than pay the person he owes. Alternatively, if he
does
pay you, in good faith as a dealer you’d be expected to give him more credit, until eventually he will owe you so much that it is almost impossible to collect your money. That is when the dealer resorts to violence.

When all was said and done, I eventually owed Renaldo so much money that he refused to restock me. I kept getting messages on my pager to settle my account. Then the messages became less friendly. When they found me, he told me, they were going to beat the crap out of me. I had fallen so deep into the shit that the only thing I could do was get out of town. By then I knew it was hopeless. I had lost everything. Once again, all I had were the clothes on my back, my revolver and now a group of very angry drug dealers after me. I did still have my car, but everyone knew what it looked like so I didn’t dare drive anywhere. I was desperate.

For some reason, I called my mother and told her that I needed to disappear. She was full of questions, as always, wanting to know what had happened and where I was planning to go. I told her I didn’t know. All I knew was that I had to get away. She told me I should sit tight and call her back in an hour. Of all people, my mother contacted Janos, who at that time was the caretaker of a farm about 40 minutes outside Johannesburg. She arranged for him to meet me the following day at the Hillbrow Tower.

I got hold of a girlfriend who used to work at one of the clothing companies I’d repped for. Her name was Charlie. She was also into coke, but not hectically like me. I told her I needed somewhere where I could keep my car out of sight and also hide out for the next 24 hours. She said I could come to her place. Then I scored some Mandrax and weed to help wean myself off coke. Withdrawal can be pretty scary. I still had four grams of coke on me. I explained the situation to Charlie and gave her a gram for her trouble. The other three grams I cooked on her stove and got a nice rock, which I intended to smoke before running away. I was so fucking paranoid that I hid in the toilet at the back of the house, in the domestic quarters, where I smoked till the early hours of the morning.

Sitting on the toilet with my .38 Special in my hand, sweating like a pig, I waited for the sun to rise. Fuck them! If they found me, I decided, I would definitely shoot. There was no way I was going down without a fight.

My rendezvous with Janos was scheduled for 10am.

Charlie dropped me off at the arranged destination. She was a Christian and I could see she was deeply saddened by the state I was in. When she said goodbye, she added, ‘I will pray for you.’ Little did I know it at the time, but those words would one day not only give me the will to survive but also maybe even save my life. With only the clothes on my back, my drugs in my pocket and my most loyal friend strapped to my side, I waited in the middle of Hillbrow, trying to look normal.

Trying to look normal was difficult, especially when I was convinced that everybody was watching me or out to get me. I had not slept at all. I was unshaven, smelly and totally paranoid. My eyes darted everywhere. I expected something to jump out of the shadows at any second, and my heart was racing. When I was wired I had a habit of clicking my jaw, and I found myself doing this now, too. I kept reassuring myself that I had a gun with five rounds, so what the fuck was I afraid of? The mind is a powerful tool. It does its own calculations. And when it switches into irrational mode, we lose control.

To my relief, I saw Janos pull up in his car. I hadn’t seen him since the day I’d so badly wanted to beat him up, but I’ve never been more happy to see anyone in my life – ironic, I know, considering that I hated him. But here he was, and willing to help me. He gave me a huge bear hug and kissed me on both cheeks. Shit, I thought to myself, don’t go turning all weird on me now. It wasn’t like I wanted to bond with him or anything. All I said to him was ‘Let’s just get the fuck out of here.’

The farm, which was really a smallholding, was on about one and a half hectares of ground. Janos stayed in the main house and I was put into a cottage on the property. It had one bedroom, an en-suite bathroom, a kitchenette and a lounge area.

By now, the effects of the cocaine were starting to wear off and, being away from the hustle and bustle of the city, I started to relax. Janos brought out a bottle of
pálinka
, the Hungarian spirit he drank, and after downing a couple of tots I came down from my high. We talked a bit, although it wasn’t easy for me, mainly about how his life had been after my mom got rid of him. Actually, it was boring stuff, but I felt the least I could do was to listen. I don’t know after how many hours of listening to him blabbering on I finally fell asleep on the couch.

I woke up later that evening to find that Janos had prepared a scrumptious Hungarian dish for us. I couldn’t remember when last I had eaten such a good meal. After dinner I took a shower and Janos lent me a pair of pyjamas. They were these really old-fashioned blue-and-white-striped longs, which made me feel like I was in a mental hospital. I told Janos I was going to smoke drugs. He understood and left me to do my thing. I smoked one and a half Mandrax that night, and over the next days I cut down to a quarter. Weaning oneself off makes it so much easier to stop.

Every morning I jogged, and I began to feel fit and strong. There was this open field on the farm, about 30 by 100m, which was covered in weeds and blackjack stalks that were taller than I was. Over the next three months, I cleared the entire field with my bare hands. The labourers on the neighbouring farm, who saw me at work every day, started calling me the White Lion. I stopped drugs, I gained weight, and my mind became clear again.

When there was nothing left for me to do, I contacted an old army buddy whose family were cattle farmers out near Potgietersrus, and he invited me to spend a few months there with him. I said goodbye to Janos and hitched a ride. I got a job as a waiter in town at the local steakhouse. I soon realised that, in this conservative Afrikaner town, I stuck out like a sore thumb. I’d kept my hair reasonably long ever since the army, and this didn’t go down well in Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) territory, where most of the young male inhabitants dressed in khaki and had brush cuts. The AWB was a far-right political party, not known to be friendly towards blacks, or Jews for that matter. When customers walked into the steakhouse I could see them whispering, wondering what this long-haired Englishman was doing in the middle of nowhere. I thought sometimes that, if they’d known I was Jewish, too, I might very well have got myself lynched. However, being a waiter there was a lot of fun, but, as with so many of my previous jobs, the inevitable happened.