Dragons & Butterflies: Sentenced to Die, Choosing to Live (49 page)

The letters from my sister were a bit different. She would constantly remind me – it was more like nagging – to stay out of trouble and away from drugs.

The year 1995, the year I would turn 36, was a significant one for me on many levels. Not only was I learning about the people with whom I was forced to coexist, but I also discovered a lot about myself. In prison, your strengths are revealed and your weaknesses are exposed. There’s no running away from yourself or deceiving yourself about who you are. Through my poetry and art, for the first time in my life I began to find purpose. One of the books I read was Nelson Mandela’s
Long Walk to Freedom
. I couldn’t believe how ignorant I had been about the plight of black people in my own country. Mr Mandela had sat in prison for 27 years; I had barely finished a year and I felt sorry for myself. His crime was fighting for the rights of his people; mine was that I was a drug dealer, a destroyer of lives. Reading his book was a huge inspiration for me. I thought that if anybody could relate to my unjust incarceration, it could be him. I saw Mr Mandela as my ticket to freedom. I wrote him a letter, which I had smuggled out of the prison to Joan. I urged her to publish it as an open letter in one of the South African newspapers. Nobody wanted to publish it, however. Although my conscience did trouble me regarding my claim of innocence, I justified the lie because of the ridiculous sentence I had been given: 100 years for a first offence. This was virtually unheard of in any Western democratic country. Through the assistance of a mutual family friend, my sister managed to have my letter hand-delivered to Mr Mandela.

In the letter I described the appalling conditions in Thai prisons, the outrageous and arbitrary sentences handed down to drug and other offenders, the corrupt system of using prisoners as labourers in the prison factories, the overcrowded conditions, the poor food, terrible sanitation and the unhygienic water in which prisoners had to wash themselves and their clothing. I hoped that the President would feel compassion for the plight of Africans in the same situation as I was and might intercede on our behalf with the Thai government. It was perplexing to me why a country was so bent on keeping foreigners in its prisons. I couldn’t get my head around it. Perhaps it had something to do with the United Nations’ provision of a daily subsidy of about 25 Thai baht for each foreign prisoner held there – we prisoners were lucky if we received one fifth of that amount. Perhaps Thailand’s corrupt and strict judicial system was a way to leverage stronger political ties with certain Western countries.

Another thing that surprised me, considering all the noise the Thai government made about drugs and the country’s drug problem, was that there were no official rehabilitation programmes in the prisons. Instead, there were drugs everywhere. They were so easy to get. The psychological effect on a prisoner of a life sentence in a Thai prison can be devastating, and drugs are an obvious route to dull the pain. This easy access often resulted in people who had never used drugs before turning to them, initially as a method of coping and then very soon becoming addicted. I saw this over and over again in Bangkwang.

In the general run of things, besides the annual inter-building sports events organised by the prison authorities (but paid for by the prisoners), all other recreational actives were organised by the prisoners themselves. The allocated area for these was situated just off the centre of the main yard, adjacent to the towering, ominous 4.5m wall with electrified barbed wire that divided Building 2 from Building 1.

Three of the most popular forms of exercise were football, basketball and jogging. Exercising and some form of game began as soon as we were let out of our cells at around 6.30 in the morning. There was always a game of basketball in progress, which lasted until about 8am, before it got hot. The yard and adjoining court had no covering, and the only protection against the scorching sun was the occasional stray cloud.

At 8am the Thai national anthem echoed through the many speakers strategically positioned around the building. All prisoners had to congregate in the yard for the hoisting of the flag. We foreigners refused to participate and would stay in our houses while this was going on, while some of the Thais would absent themselves by occupying a space in the communal toilet.

When I’d first arrived in prison, the prospect of using the communal toilets was so revolting to me, given the filthy state they were in and the fact that I couldn’t take a shit in full view of others, meant that I didn’t go to the toilet for eight days. Eventually I was on the verge of bursting. I imagined my intestines and stomach exploding and the pieces spraying in every direction. I hovered by the toilets, hoping to find a moment when there was nobody around, but no such luck. There was a constant flow of people answering nature’s call. So, finally, armed with my bucket of water and plastic bowl, and consumed by a feeling of total degradation, I took occupation of one of the end toilets. This meant I had to tolerate only one person at my side rather than two – a small consolation. I had tied a bandana around my nose and mouth, as the stench was unbearable and made me want to throw up. I lowered my shorts and went into a squatting position. Nothing happened. Nothing wanted to come out.

Using both my hands, I pulled the cheeks of my buttocks apart, expecting that this would make it easier to discharge my heavy load. I could feel some movement but whatever was in there was struggling to come out. Because I’d held it in for so long, my faeces had solidified. I kept pushing with all my might, sweating and taking deep breaths with every contraction, and my anus stretched to the limit. The pain was excruciating. I imagined childbirth might feel something like this. The muscles in my calves started to ache. Leaning with one arm on the small wall on the one side to take the pressure off my legs, I was forced to use the other hand to remove the hardened mass that was now protruding from my backside but wouldn’t budge any further. I felt nauseous, not only from the rancid odour, but also from the fact that I was using my hands to dislodge shit from my arse. After successfully extracting parts of my hardened stool, my bowels erupted and excrement poured out of me and, to my horror, quickly blocked the toilet, while I frantically tried to flush it down.

I couldn’t believe what was happening. Suddenly, I had a severe cramp in one of my calves. Desperately, I scooped water in a crazed attempt to flush everything down. I watched helplessly as everything came up instead. By now I was ankle deep in shit and my leg was cramping painfully. I wanted to cry, it was so repulsive and humiliating, but instead I screamed ‘FUCK ME, GEORGE!’ and wondered what had I done that was so terrible that I deserved this.

Yes, okay, I knew exactly what I had done: the endless transgressions while I was peddling drugs; the lives I had destroyed; the hell I put my family through; not visiting my girlfriend when she was in hospital because of a car accident I had caused; years of abusing women – the list went on and on. Yes, my immorality had blurred my ability to judge right from wrong, but wasn’t there
any
other way I could have redeemed myself than finding myself here, now, standing in a pool of shit? They say G-d works in mysterious ways, and this sure came home to me that day!

When you are serving a life sentence you are forced to coexist with so many people, and, with different cultures all up against each other, problems are bound to arise. I found the Asian way of life, or at least as I experienced it in prison, completely different to the Western way of life. At close quarters, sometimes Asian habits were difficult to handle – the habit of shouting across a room, of blowing your nose with your hands, of spitting. These things freaked me out to the point that I couldn’t tolerate the person anywhere near me. I became so irritated with Jimmy, my Singaporean cellmate, that it resulted in me attacking another Singaporean who got too familiar with me.

When I challenged him, he said he was sorry, but, sorry or not, this was prison and he needed to be taught a lesson, so one evening I just let loose. In my experience, people don’t always learn respect through dialogue; sometimes one is forced to resort to violence. Half the guys in my cell were angry with me, claiming that it hadn’t been necessary for me to hit the guy. Also, fighting was forbidden and punishment was severe. You could very well end up in shackles. Luckily, on this occasion my friend Mohammed paid money to prevent action being taken against me.

Bangkwang was so corrupt that if you had it in for somebody, you could pay the guard to turn a blind eye and hire a samurai to stab that person. The Thai inmates who had double life sentences for multiple murders were mostly total psychos and they would stab you for as little as 500 Thai baht, even if the guards
hadn’t
given the green light; some of the samurai were in and out of solitary confinement all the time. They were dangerous and calculating. A one-on-one confrontation was not how they operated; they either came in packs or attacked you when you were most vulnerable. A Thai will always first weigh up the odds. Losing a fight, especially against a foreigner, is a loss of face. We learnt never to underestimate them. As kids, every Thai male learns Muay Thai (kickboxing, or Thai boxing). For a young boy from a poverty-stricken background, Thai boxing is more than just a meal ticket. It’s also about honour and tradition.

I quickly discovered how tough the Thai prisoners were. When playing football against them, often our shins would collide. The Thai would walk away without even flinching, while within seconds I would have a big lump and a bruise forming on my shin. From the many years of Thai boxing, their shins were as hard as steel.

In the days after the incident with Jimmy, I really was not happy in my cell. I pleaded with Ryan, who had become my friend, to allow me into the private foreign room after all, which was now referred to as Room 16, or Hong Siephok. In a situation such as this, even though it was Ryan who had organised the room, he would have to discuss a new person with his cellmates first and there would have to be a collective decision. So they had a meeting and the decision was that their room, at its current 16 occupants, was closed. Taking on an extra body would mean that each person, depending on which side of the room I would sleep, would have to give up a few centimetres of his space, and no one was willing to do that. Ryan apologised, but assured me that as soon as somebody moved out, I would be the first in line to move in. I could have kicked myself for being such a fool and not moving in when he’d approached me the first time.

From the time that we were locked up to about 9.30pm, the noise upstairs in the corridor was at ridiculous levels. Between the TVs blaring and people shouting to one other, it was impossible to take an afternoon nap or concentrate on whatever it was that you were doing. Downstairs, where Room 16 was, it was much quieter. I desperately needed to get out of my room, but I had no choice but to wait.

In between the building that housed the prisoners and the dining hall was an open courtyard with two magnificent trees, which provided an abundance of shade. During the day, many enterprising vendors set up shop here. When you ordered perishable food from the prison grocery store, you would order by the kilogram, but, unless you had an ice cooler and got daily deliveries of ice, it was a problem to keep food fresh. So these vendors, who were all inmates, would portion up fresh beef, chicken, vegetables, etc. and sell them in grams. In other words, you could buy just enough to cook for the day. Different nationalities sold different foods. The Pakistanis, for example, were famous for their
roti
(flatbread), and sometimes they would fill these with scrambled egg and chilli, or else pour sweetened condensed milk over them, which was a nice snack for breakfast. There were a few guys who would barbecue chicken legs, chicken wings and – my favourite – chicken arses (the parson’s nose) on skewers. One guy sold lemon juice with crushed ice. It was amazing how this place was a world in itself, a world that functioned completely independently from the outside. If I didn’t know better, looking around this courtyard I could very well have believed I was strolling around the streets of Bangkok.