Dragons & Butterflies

by Shani Krebs

  Covering her firm, voluptuous breasts was a flimsy little T-shirt, her nipples practically piercing through the fabric. Fuck, she was hot. I was not sure how to read the situation. Smiling apologetically by waving her hand, which had an unlit cigarette in it, she asked, ‘Do you have a light?’ in what was definitely a seductive tone.

  ‘Well, hi there,’ I said, pushing myself up on my arms. ‘We have never formally been introduced. I’m Shaun, and you are?’

  ‘I know who you are,’ she laughed. ‘I’m Cherie.’

  I jumped to my feet. ‘Just a minute, let me get you a lighter,’ I said.

  All I was wearing was a pair of jeans. While I made my way to the bedroom, I thought of putting on a shirt. My lighter and packet of Camels were on the bedside table. As I turned around, Cherie was there. She had followed me into my bedroom and was standing so close to me I could feel the warmth of her breath on my face. I felt dizzy. I reached out my hand and moved her hair back from her face, and pulled her towards me. As our lips touched, with my other hand I squeezed her breasts, then caressed them with both hands. Our tongues mingled hungrily, exploring each other’s mouths. I placed my hands on her buttocks, pulling her tightly against my manhood. I literally ripped the little she was wearing off her taut muscular body and in a minute I was in bed with a little tigress.

  In the middle of making passionate love to her, my conscience started troubling me. I was being unfaithful to Sara. I stopped moving my hips, still holding Cherie tightly, and let out a deep sigh. Fuck, what was I doing? I rolled off her, soaked in her wetness.

  ‘I, uh, have a girlfriend,’ I said lamely.

  ‘And I have boyfriend,’ Cherie said, lighting up a cigarette.

  That may well be, I thought to myself, but the problem was that I could never look Sara in the eye as though nothing had happened. Too late! I had eaten the forbidden fruit and it was quite apparent that Cherie was not planning to leave my bed until she’d finished what we’d started. Sensing my hesitation, she put out her cigarette and moved her body onto mine, touching me all over. It felt good. We kissed, grabbed, groped.

  Then she straddled me and with her hand guided me inside her soft, wet, hot pussy. Turning her over, I mounted her, lifting her legs until they almost touched the pillow. It was wild. Eventually she climaxed and I followed soon afterwards. Heaving and panting, we lay side by side on our backs. Then Cherie began to tell me that her boyfriend, Peter, used to score weed from me, and that she had seen me at nightclubs but had been too afraid to approach me.

  We chatted and smoked a joint and later she left.

  Feeling guilt-ridden about what had happened, in an attempt to clear my mind, I took a midnight dip in the pool. On the one hand, I felt guilty for cheating on Sara, but probably more because of her extreme jealousy of other women than for the fact that I had been unfaithful; on the other hand, knowing that a break-up was imminent, I didn’t actually give a fuck, or so I thought. I didn’t tell Sara about my infidelity, but women generally have a sixth sense about these things. Eventually she asked me if I had been fucking around, and I confessed. And so we broke up.

  I was really distressed by the break-up. For a long time I couldn’t accept that I had lost Sara, but there was no way she was going to give me a second chance. For weeks I would drive out on my motorbike to where she lived, knowing that she would recognise the sound of my exhaust. I would do ridiculous speeds through the bends and the long stretch of road that led to her parents’ townhouse complex. I was torn between my heart’s desire and my own inadequacies, and emotionally I felt crippled, like a blind man searching for light in a world of darkness. The more I stumbled, the harder I fell. The more I fell, the longer I was bound to keep falling.

  My perception of love was mixed in with pain and fear of abandonment. I seemed bent on destroying love and running from those who showed me affection. This was my twisted way of expressing a love that was so profoundly beautiful it would drive me to the brink of insanity. With Sara gone from my life, all I wished for was to die a painful death. Pain made me feel alive. Sara had told me that she never wished to see or speak to me again, and I took it very badly. I was set in a destructive pattern of behaviour that would become deeply ingrained in my being. I would run and keep on running.

  No sooner had we broken up than Sara hooked up with this guy who came from a wealthy family and who represented everything I wasn’t. I tried to be happy for her. In my mind, no woman on this planet deserved to be cursed with the likes of me. I heard that this punk had badmouthed me, however, even after learning about my background.

  At this time a friend of mine from school days ran a video shop in Victory Park. He knew I had a score to settle with Sara’s new boyfriend, who, as luck would have it, was one of the video shop’s clients. I had just arrived at the video shop on my motorbike one day when he and Sara were pulling out. My friend quickly pointed them out to me. I jumped back on my bike and raced after them down the long sweep of Rustenburg Road and all the way to Barry Hertzog Avenue, weaving my way through traffic. I drove up behind them, driving dangerously close to their car, and gestured for them to pull over. Sara recognised me instantly. I remember thinking they looked like frightened chickens. Then I changed down a gear, opened full throttle, tapped through the gears and disappeared into a long line of traffic.

  I never saw Sara again.

  Chapter 5

  Drugs, Sex and Guns

  Whenever things in my life fell apart, I would find myself running. Material things meant nothing to me, and time and again I would lose my job and just about everything I possessed. This recurring pattern was usually determined by the amount of drugs I was consuming.

  After my break-up with Sara I started using drugs again, but now it was mainly Mandrax. In those days it was popular to pop Obex, smoke weed, drink alcohol and take LSD. It was while jolling at Club Bluebeat one night and tripping on LSD that I met Dennis. We discovered we had a lot in common: we both sold drugs and loved to get high and to party. He used to hang out at a commune in Yeoville. Between Dennis and me, we could get our hands on almost any drug. Most of my customers lived in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg and were part of the South African Jewish community, roughly 200 000 strong, and most of us knew each other either from school or through social events. Almost everybody smoked weed. Through Dennis, I was introduced to a whole new generation of revellers, from punk rockers and college kids to prostitutes and gays. One of Dennis’s closest friends was a diehard punk rocker named Brett who played bass for a garage band. As first impressions went, Brett looked like your typical high-school dropout, except that he had one of the meanest Mohicans I’d ever seen. Surprisingly, he had a degree in sound engineering or some shit like that – I don’t really remember. What a cool guy.

  George the Greek was another of Dennis’s friends. He came from a well-to-do Greek family who owned a café close to the coloured areas of Newclare and Bosmont, just west of Joburg. These suburbs were rarely frequented by white folks, and the area boasted some of the city’s most notorious gangs, such as the Fast Guns and the Western Boys, who were constantly at war with each other. Fights between these rivals were vicious and brutal, often resulting in violent deaths.

  George was one of the few white guys who dared enter these areas. He introduced me to many of the coloured merchants, such as the legendary Oom Bertie from Newclare, who was instrumental in pioneering Mandrax as a smokeable drug. One of his sidekicks, ‘Kidnap’, was notorious for having engineered the very first high-profile kidnapping in South Africa. The rest of the gang had all done hard time for crimes that varied from hijacking cars and housebreaking to rape and murder, not to mention armed robbery.

  As a sales rep with a company car, I had the perfect cover to enter these areas, as all my sales agents were black South Africans. As it happened, one of my areas was an industrial one, actually called Industria, which converged on Newclare, and during my rounds I regularly popped in to score Mandrax from Oom Bertie, who wa
s supplying many of the boys who were pushing drugs on the street corners.

  It was in Newclare that I befriended Kaffs, a coloured guy originally from the Cape whose skin was unusually dark. He ranked high in the Fast Guns hierarchy. It wasn’t long before I was able to move around the streets of Newclare without fear of being robbed, and I became a regular customer, scoring Mandrax there for all my friends. I even spent a weekend staying over with Kaffs and smoking it up all day.

  George lived in a cottage in Melville, but he would come and hang out at the commune in Berea that I’d moved into. It was just off Harrow Road, which linked the highway from the city to the suburbs. Over time, several high-rise apartment blocks had sprung up in the area, and the best known of these were the Metropolitan and the 54-storey concrete tube called Ponte, which was believed to sway slightly when buffeted by strong winds.

  Life at the commune was pretty hectic but also a lot of fun. There was a constant flow of diverse people, all of whom had one thing in common: we all loved to get high. If you were one of those who were partying in the early 1980s, you will recall a carefree era similar to the hippie period of the 1960s, where smoking weed and popping acid were part of the new generation of rebellious youth challenging society’s norms.

  Disgruntled with the South African political system and feeling the weight of the expectations of their parents, in the 1980s more and more teenagers were drawn to the drug culture. Sexual attitudes were liberal. Drugs, sex and rock’n’roll – we lived by them and many of us would die by them, too.

  Heroin was virtually unheard of at that time. One of the more fashionable drugs was Wellconal, a small pink tablet that you crushed and diluted with water, and then shot intravenously. Because of its chalky substance, it could block up your veins, causing them eventually to disappear completely and forcing addicts to shoot up in the most unusual places on their bodies. Many junkies died from overdosing. Actually, Wellconal scared the shit out of me. Like heroin, I saw it as a bad-luck drug and one to stay far away from.

  By this time I had changed jobs again, and I was working for a company called Jabula Clothing. I was new at the company and had been recruited from my previous job with a promise of better prospects. One condition of my employment, which I’d stipulated when I’d joined, was that I wouldn’t have to do any cold canvassing, which I hated, as most days I was either hung over or stoned. My job description was sales representative, but really we sales reps were nothing more than glorified order-takers. All we did was serve our agent. Our target market was your average black factory worker, most of whom couldn’t afford to pay cash for things. Most items were marked up at least 300 per cent. The way we operated was that each salesman was allocated an industrial area. Our managers would establish our runs; normally they were required to go through the proprietors of a company and identify a reliable worker who had been employed for several years. This often turned out to be either the ‘boss boy’, wage clerk or the tea lady. Ideally, huge factories with hundreds of employees were the most economically viable propositions.

  If companies refused to allow us in, claiming that we would distract their employees from their work, we would return during lunch break and find an agent inside who was willing to work for us. Each agent would be provided with a colourful catalogue that featured African models showing off our fashion range, which included clothes for the entire family. They would pass our catalogue around to their co-workers and then take orders, which they would either phone through to our company or give us as order sheets during our weekly visits.

  I would see and call on 30 to 40 agents a day, covering five different industrial areas a week. I would deliver orders of goods, show the agents our new lines and provide them with new stock. The amount they sold, and the amount of money they collected, determined their income. Their commission was anything from R1 to R50, a sure thing of 10 per cent from R50 to R150, and they got 15 per cent over and above that, which guaranteed them a flat 20 per cent, which we paid out weekly, or when requested by the agent. Some agents preferred to allow their commission to accumulate.

  You had to be really vigilant when entering the townships. Sales reps carried a whole range of stock in their station wagons, and there were a few isolated incidents where reps had been robbed of their stock and the cash they carried. On many occasions when an agent had left his employment, I would drive into the township and collect what he was owed and, in certain instances, continue doing the business. During the Sebokeng riots of the mid-1980s I still drove through the townships, even though it could be really scary. Once a mob of angry protesters attempted to attack me, but luckily I always kept the car engine idling and I made my getaway, leaving their disappointed faces covered in a cloud of dust. If they’d caught me, I might have been lynched or had a burning tyre thrown around my neck.

  When an agent sold or delivered an item of clothing, they were required to collect half the cost as a deposit from their customers and they were also responsible for collecting the weekly instalments thereafter. There was a daily flow of cash coming in. The more agents you served, the more money in your pocket. (In my case, the more I earned, the more I would spend on drugs.) Because I was dealing with factory workers, I would dress very casually, mainly in jeans and a T-shirt, although this was against company policy; reps were expected to dress semi-smart. Still, all my agents, despite my appearance, respected and liked me.

  My manager at Jabula Clothing was a real arsehole. He was this tall Afrikaner, built like a rugby player, who was as lazy as hell. His grey curly hair and anaemic pinkish complexion, combined with a glaring lack of fashion sense, reminded me of a circus clown. In short, the guy was a fuck-up. In my circles he would have been a social pariah, and it was hard for me to conceal my dislike of him.

  Whenever new salesmen took over a round, some of the agents who had run up huge accounts would disappear. After some investigation by the managers, these salesmen mostly couldn’t be traced and so the account would be written off as a bad debt. In my previous job, the salesmen were required to canvass at least two new calls a day for agents, but at Jabula the deal was that I wouldn’t have to do this. This became a point of issue when the clown insisted that I canvass. One day, after a heated argument, I was summoned to the boss’s office. Sitting in his chair behind an oak table, Len, one of the three shareholders, tried to reason with me. On principle, however, I wouldn’t compromise, so they fired me on the spot and told me that I could collect my salary at the end of the month. I got really pissed off and demanded that they pay me my full month’s salary right away. The .38-calibre pistol sticking out of my pants might have been enough to convince them that I was capable of hurting them, and, small feat though it was, I walked out that day with a full month’s wages in my pocket and my pride intact.

  I caught a taxi back to the commune. It wasn’t even midday yet and the place was buzzing with activity. When I told my friends and the rest of the gang that I’d been fired, they all cheered.

  I had been in and out of quite a few jobs by then, and it was becoming pretty apparent to me that I wasn’t exactly cut out to work for anybody. What I knew how to do best was use and sell drugs, and that was the world I inhabited.

  A person can only fool himself for so long, though. All the signs were there. It would only be a matter of time before my luck ran out.

  For a long time I had been thinking about moving Mandrax on the streets of Durban. George was buying Mandrax in packets of 1 000; in Joburg, the wholesale price was R2 a tablet. Street prices were determined by supply and demand, and varied between R8 and R15. We’d heard that in Durban the prices were double and even triple at times. Our idea was to take one packet of 1 000 tablets, test the market and use the profits to set up shop. We’d have a couple of younger runners do the street-to-street distribution.

  The South African government had some strong laws in place in its efforts to combat the smuggling of Mandrax, whose distribution was linked with the then banned African National Congress. I
t was commonly known that the proceeds from the drug trade were being used to arm the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. If anyone was caught with a sizeable quantity of Mandrax, you were immediately labelled a dealer and dealing carried prison sentences of up to ten years.

  I drove down to Durban on my motorbike, with Dennis and Brett following me with the drugs hidden under the spare wheel in the boot of Dennis’s mother’s car. We left Joburg at midnight. The agreement was that if I came across a roadblock, I would turn around and come back and warn them. Fortunately, the roads were clear all the way and we arrived in Durban as the sun was rising. It was already getting hot and the humidity clung to our skin.

  Dennis and Brett were going to stay at Dennis’s sister’s flat in the suburbs, and so they went off to check in with her. I took a drive down to the South Coast, clocking speeds of up to 200kph (for some reason the bike’s performance always improved at the coast. I would lie on the tank with my feet resting on the rear indicators – what a rush!) My two friends, meanwhile, went into the city, looking to score Mandrax in the hope of finding a connection we could sell our stash to. We’d arranged to meet back at the flat that afternoon. I returned shortly after midday and called in to see my mother, who was by then living in Durban.

  In the early 1980s, when I was living in Berea in a furnished apartment, my mother returned from Hungary and, for a brief period, came to live with me. I had seen her very infrequently over the years (once a year was a lot) and the gap between us proved impossible to bridge. It was my sister Joan who kept in more regular touch with her, and she would fill me in on whatever was going on in her life.