Dragons & Butterflies: Sentenced to Die, Choosing to Live (60 page)

Solitary Confinement

In March of 1998 I met a Thai woman by the name of Jai. She and another woman, Sheila, who was Australian, represented a private organisation called One Life at a Time, and they visited the American prisoners in Bangkwang. They were also involved in various other charities. One of the American prisoners, whose locker I had kicked a hole in, had a relationship going with Sheila. Another American, by the name of Eric, who was a sound engineer by profession, had become a good friend of mine. He was a heroin addict and trying to kick the habit, and I helped him out here and there, encouraging him to stay off drugs. To show his gratitude, he told me about Sheila’s friend Jai, and said that, if I wanted, he could ask Jai to visit me. I was hesitant at first. It had been almost four years since I had had any real interaction with anyone of the opposite sex – besides my family, of course. Having a regular visitor would also interfere with my drawing time, but what the heck, I thought. What did I have to lose?

Jai was 38 years old and she was quite pretty. She was slim and had long black hair. Her English was good. We agreed that she would visit me every fortnight. Every time she visited she would bring me fresh wholewheat bread and a packet of milk powder. She also offered to fax messages to my family and to bring me faxes from them. At first I had difficulty making conversation, so Jai did most of the talking. With the two sets of bars about a metre apart in the visit room, you had to shout to be heard anyway, and when the room was full it was hard to have a conversation. It was also awkward because the people in your immediate vicinity could hear every word you exchanged.

Jai was nice, though, and I began to look forward to her visits. We also started corresponding with each other, and within a few months our friendship evolved into a relationship. I can’t say I loved her, but I did become emotionally dependent on her. There is something uniquely sensual about Asian women, and I was attracted to her physically, too. She had the most delicate hands and her eyes were mesmerising. She had an inner beauty that shone through.

Jai proved to be an indispensable contact between my family and me. She opened a bank account for me, and, through one of the guards, I succeeded in smuggling in an ATM card. I arranged for the embassy to deposit my monthly allowance into Jai’s account, and she would then transfer it into the account for which I was now the cardholder.

Whenever I needed money, I would give my card to a guard and he would go to the bank, make a withdrawal, deduct his five per cent and bring the money to me in the prison. This was the most convenient and also the safest way of bringing in cash. From my allowance I would give Jai a running balance, and on her now weekly visits she would bring me such luxury food items as cheese, jam, fruit and ready-made meals. She would also use some of the money to buy me other things, such as art supplies, toiletries and sports equipment. She would post these to me in parcels.

You could say Jai was now officially my girlfriend.

In the middle of the year we were notified, unofficially, that we could request telephone calls to our families. This had to be done through the prison, and then arranged through our embassies, who would first have to get permission from the Department of Corrections. Each embassy also had to supply mobile phones to the relevant prisoners. It was a bit of an involved process, but worth it.

A British guy in my room was one of the first to use this facility. He made a call to his sister and brother in England. I thought he would be happy after talking to them, but in fact he wasn’t. On the contrary, he seemed to slip into a deep depression afterwards. I planned to submit my own request and try to organise a call for October, to coincide with my birthday.

For some reason, Jai’s friend Sheila disliked me. Without Jai’s knowledge, she wrote me a letter, telling me that she and Jai were struggling to make ends meet and that some nights all they had to eat was biscuits. She asked whether there was any chance I could give her some money. Sheila was friendly with the guard, Piscet Shavolit, who was in charge of the foreign section where our mail was censored. He spoke good English and knew me well. I began to realise that Sheila was reading my letters and then telling Jai what was in them. From the beginning, I had been honest with Jai about the many women in different parts of the world with whom I was regularly corresponding (about 50 at that time), and that I had formed an emotional connection with some of them. When Sheila would relay some of the contents of my letters, Jai’s response was to say, ‘I know, he has already told me.’ In my reply to the letter Sheila herself wrote to me, I told her that I sympathised with her and Jai’s situation, and that I also admired the work they were doing. At that time, however, I was receiving just under 4 000 Thai baht a month, which was barely enough to survive on, and so I was unable to help them with money.

Actually, I was flabbergasted. How could Sheila ask a prisoner for money? I was in
prison
, for heaven’s sake, surviving on the charity of my family and friends. Surely she had other means of support?

Sheila had arranged for a company to donate blocks of Philadelphia cream cheese, in their regular foil packaging, to the American prisoners every week. When she visited, she brought a dozen or more packets of cheese with her, which she would give to the surfer guy, her boyfriend, who was supposed to share them with the other foreigners. Instead, he sold the cheese in the building and used the money to buy heroin. So, when I thought about it, Sheila asking me to give her money basically amounted to supporting her junkie boyfriend’s addiction. Before I received Sheila’s letter, I had written to the consular officer telling her about the work Jai and Sheila were doing and asking whether it might be possible for her to give them a list of South African companies operating in Thailand, who might be willing to donate money to their organisation to help prisoners. Now I was sorry I had.

One day, Jai came to our visit in tears. She told me that Sheila had told her that I was using drugs and also selling them in prison. This was such crap. If anything, I was the one who was trying to discourage the other prisoners from using. I didn’t try to convince Jai otherwise. She was a Thai, and I told her she could find out for herself by asking any of the guards. All the guards knew I played football and was totally anti-drugs.

For some unfathomable reason, Sheila was doing everything in her power to break up my relationship with Jai. After learning that I had contacted the South African embassy to try and secure some sponsorship from South African companies, Sheila took it upon herself to make an appointment to meet with the consular officer and her husband, and she excluded Jai from this meeting. Immediately I smelt a rat. Three of my enemies sitting around the same table spelt real trouble. Jai was also beginning to see an ugly side to her best friend.

Back home, towards the end of the month, Joan drove to Pretoria, as she did every month, to hand in my allowance at the Department of Foreign Affairs. This time, she was informed that they were no longer able to help her wire my money to Bangkok. We had been using this system for four years. Puzzled, she asked what the problem was. She was told that they had it on good information that I was dealing drugs in prison. Joan was completely shocked. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She knew in her rational mind that it wasn’t possible, but, because of my history of drugs, she did have her doubts. She almost had another nervous breakdown. She would now have to deposit my allowance directly into Jai’s account, incurring bank transfer fees – all thanks to Sheila. I was really concerned that between Sheila and the embassy they would jeopardise my application for a royal pardon. They had fucked me, good and solid.

In an email that she sent to me via Jai, Joan pleaded with me to stay out of trouble. No more petitions, she said, and no signing any either.

For some reason, our daily ration of white rice was changed to a plastic bag of red rice. We didn’t get any explanation, but it made no difference to me, as all my meals were prepared by my Chinese chef, Lenny. The change caused discontent among the other foreigners, though, especially among my African brothers. Okky, the Nigerian who had disliked me ever since I had declined to swap stamps with him, came to me with a petition he had drafted about the rice, which he wanted me to sign. Remembering my sister’s plea, I very politely apologised and explained that under normal circumstances my name and signature would have appeared at the top of any petition but since submitting my royal pardon request my family had advised me not to sign anything. Well, Okky freaked out. He threatened me, saying I should watch my back and warning me that there were ‘many of them’ and that I could very easily walk into a knife. This was the second time I’d almost got into a fight with this guy, first over stamps and now over rice. Fuck you, I thought, but instead I just said, ‘Do what you have to do, and I will do what I have to do.’

In order to the keep prisoners in line, the authorities had a prisoner class system. There were six classes or categories: excellent, very good, good, fair, bad, very bad. New prisoners were immediately classified as ‘fair’, and twice a year prison officials would review and upgrade your class. To give all prisoners an equal chance, when there was an impending amnesty the prison authorities upgraded you so that you would be in a position to benefit fully, although this was usually done for a fee. Your grade determined your sentence reduction, so guards were notorious for extorting money during this process. For example, if you were in the ‘excellent’ class, you would get a 50 per cent reduction of sentence, while ‘very good’ would see you receive a third, and so on.

Each class got you different types of privileges. Unless you had ‘excellent’ class, you could forget about a royal pardon, sentence remission or parole. Thai nationals were paroled when they had three years of their sentences remaining; foreigners were not eligible for parole at all. There were also what they call ‘good days’: after serving ten years of your sentence, you got two months’ credit for every year served. These months were then cut from your sentence closer to the time of your release. Here again, however, foreigners were excluded.

But you could also be downgraded, and one of the things that could make this happen was if you got into a fight.

I turned and walked away from Okky. The last thing I needed was to get into a fight. Apart from a probable downgrade in prisoner class, I could hear my sister saying those famous words ‘I told you so …’, and that was enough of a deterrent.

I was still drawing in black ballpoint pen, still in my so-called black period, but I could feel that a shift in my artistic development was imminent. Love has a way of changing one’s energy, and now that I had Jai in my life, maybe that also had something to do with it. I looked forward to her visits every Monday. She would also bring news from home; I no longer needed to wait a month for a letter to arrive.

After four long years in prison, I really missed my family, especially my niece Keri and Darren, my nephew. One day I caught a butterfly. I had one of the Thais who worked in the shell factory cast it in a Perspex block for me, and I sent it home as a gift for Keri, along with my football jersey for Darren.

Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol of Thailand was planning a visit to South Africa in February 1999. My sister intended to try to get an audience with the princess so that she could plead my case and request a royal pardon. It was important to keep my cause alive, and it was always at the forefront of our minds that we needed constantly to generate as much publicity as possible. My art was also starting to receive wider interest, and not all the articles in which I featured in South African publications focused solely on my prisoner status. Reproductions of some of my pieces had appeared in the
Sunday Times
and in magazines back home.

August was the month scheduled for my annual contact visit, on the 12th. This time it was going to be different for me: it would be with Jai. For the first time in a long while, I would physically be in the presence of a woman other than my sister. When you have been deprived of physical contact with the opposite sex for an indefinite period, you become highly vulnerable. Prison romances were not uncommon, although it was difficult for me to understand why a woman in the free world would pursue a relationship with a prisoner. Nevertheless, my relationship with Jai did wonders for my spirit. The compassion she displayed was extraordinary. She made me feel wholesome. She renewed my sense of worth. She was every prisoner’s dream. And, at this time in my life, she was a lifeline to the outside world.