Dragons & Butterflies

by Shani Krebs

  I invited the guy to join us for a braai on the Sunday, which was going to be our house-warming party, with only our immediate family attending. At first he declined my offer. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘I insist. It allows me to show you my appreciation.’ It didn’t take much to convince him, and we shook hands.

  Sunday could not have come fast enough for me. Sarah-Lee and her mother prepared the salads and baked potatoes, laid the tables and generally saw to everybody’s needs. I invited the electrician to help me braai. After a couple of beers, I dropped the bomb. Making sure nobody heard me, I murmured under my breath as my girlfriend walked past us. ‘Would you like to fuck her?’ As I pointed to Sarah-Lee’s sexy ass, the look of guilt on the man’s face was something priceless. It was the kind of look rarely captured on camera.

  Sarah-Lee was a very beautiful woman. She was slender, bordering on very thin, and she had a great pair of tits. She oozed sensuality. I couldn’t help myself. As the electrician, in a slightly drunken state, began stuttering I just started laughing. To save him further embarrassment, I said, ‘Listen, I don’t blame you, man. She is very fuckable.’ His expression went from bewilderment to one of enquiring interest. I confided that Sarah-Lee and I were actually not happy together, and that I was looking for a way to get out of the relationship. If he wanted her, I told him, he could have her. He looked at me in amazement. As far as I was concerned, the day was turning out to be a huge success.

  Everyone enjoyed the lunch and the conversation revolved mostly around politics. Apartheid was in the process of being dismantled. Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk had jointly been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and Mandela was soon to become the first elected black president in our country, democratically voted for by the entire nation. In some views, the future of the white man in South Africa was looking bleak.

  I didn’t know it then, of course, but my fate and that of my country were indelibly connected.

  Meanwhile my plan was falling beautifully into place. The scene was set for the following evening. I would leave the townhouse around 6pm and return around midnight. This would give the fucking electrician sufficient time to make his move. He would arrive unexpectedly, claiming to be looking for me.

  The following day around the agreed time, instead of going on my daily drug deliveries, I went to Burt Reynolds’ place, where I treated him and Goldie Hawn to a couple of grams of cocaine. The occasion called for a celebration. I was about to become a bachelor again.

  My plan was foolproof.

  I had learnt from my sources that my electrician friend came from a wealthy Afrikaans family and lived in a mansion in an opulent area just outside Joburg. The only thing that turned Sarah-Lee on more than a stiff cock was a man with a permanently fat wallet. I definitely didn’t fit the fat-wallet profile, at least not permanently. Material things had never meant much to me. In her eyes, I was more of a dreamer than anything else, and I had always suspected that she would leave me if something or someone better came along. The thing about drug money is that it is not hard-earned cash. As easily as it is made, spending it or losing it is even easier.

  After an evening of heavy freebasing cocaine and drinking with my friends, I was in a stoned, sullen mood. It was well after midnight when I returned to the townhouse where I had left the unsuspecting Sarah-Lee to be seduced by the immoral electrician. I thought that if the seduction failed, the electrician would no doubt confess to Sarah-Lee that it had all been my idea. I was the rogue, he her knight in faded jeans and a shirt that matched his socks. I entered through the garden. Besides the kitchen light, which was on, the rest of the apartment was in darkness. The curtains in the Jacuzzi room were fully drawn, but I couldn’t help noticing that the window panes were all misty and covered with water droplets.

  I was a little stunned that it had all been so easy, to be honest. Sarah-Lee and I had not yet made love in our new townhouse and yet this motherfucker had already fucked her and, worst of all, in my Jacuzzi! I reminded myself not to forget to drain the water. I didn’t even bother going to the bedroom. Instead I poured myself a stiff whisky, put on some music and stretched out on the couch. I found myself reminiscing about the times Sarah-Lee and I had spent together and, quite unexpectedly, I felt a sudden sense of loss and pain that left me feeling sick in my gut. After a few more whiskies the tumult of emotion transformed into cynicism and I laughed to myself as tears streamed from my eyes. I was my own worst enemy. On the one hand I yearned for love, while on the other I ran from it. Would I ever break this pattern?

  I woke up in the morning still on the couch in the lounge and feeling like shit. It was almost 10am. Where was Sarah-Lee?

  I checked the bedroom. The bed was neatly made and there was a note on it for me, informing me that it was over. The only things she wanted, my girlfriend said, were the tumble dryer, our bed and her jewellery. The request was more than fair, I thought. I would have given her those things anyway. I had really put her through hell. For all I knew, she could have left last night. With or without the electrician, my plan had succeeded. I was relieved and sad at the same time. We had been together for almost three years and yet, in spite of having engineered this situation myself, in an instant the world had become a very lonely place.

  Fuck, was I beginning to have regrets? Already? Yes, it seemed so.

  I phoned Sarah-Lee’s mother’s place. No answer. What the fuck was going on? I was heartbroken. I couldn’t make sense of how I had allowed myself to push her away. This wasn’t a case of when you lose something you realise how important it is to you. My mind was simply fucked up. My head played games … almost as if my mind and heart were in conflict with each other. Jesus, fuck. At that moment I seriously contemplated shooting the electrician. That’s how fucked up I was.

  That night I managed to get hold of Sarah-Lee’s mom, who was always very polite and friendly towards me. She explained that Sarah-Lee was out (with the electrician) and she expected her home only much later. I figured they had gone to a movie or something and estimated that he would drop her at her mother’s place at anything between 12 and 1.30am. So I parked outside her mother’s townhouse complex, across the road, in the shadows. Around 2am she still hadn’t returned. I was fuming with anger, but I decided I should go home. Tomorrow was another day.

  After a sleepless night, with all these images of Sarah-Lee being fucked by the electrician in my Jacuzzi playing over and over in my mind, I found it almost impossible to contain myself. Rounding up a few of the guys, beating the shit out of the unlucky electrician, and then taking Sarah-Lee back should be quite easy, I thought. I took a shower, had a cup of coffee, and took a hit on my cocaine pipe. And then, suddenly, it all became crystal clear. It dawned on me that I was single again, with nobody to answer to and that maybe, just maybe, I was better off without her.

  Two of my friends, Pete and Jill, who lived in Norwood, had become concerned about my wellbeing. Although Pete enjoyed the occasional hit on a freebase pipe, there were occasions when they wouldn’t allow me into their house if they had guests. One night I went round to their place and they told me that if I wanted to smoke I should lock myself in the spare bedroom. I had 20g of rocks on me and I binged for two days. At the end of the second day, I was down to my last rock. My pipe was the brass mouthpiece of a trumpet. I scratched out the residue of all the coke I’d smoked, which made up a full tablespoon of resin, and loaded all of it onto the pipe, placing the rock on top. Then, using two lighters, I lit the pipe. First blowing all the air out of my lungs, I inhaled very slowly, sucking in the smoke.

  The next thing I knew, my family was there. I had had another seizure. When Pete came home from work, he said he had found me lying on the kitchen floor, with one of his 13 dogs sitting on my chest, licking my face.

  I was rushed to the hospital and once again told by the doctors that I was lucky to be alive. If this was not a warning, then I don’t know what it was. Malcolm and Joan were as disappointed as they were concerned, and they insisted I s
tay with them for a few days and try to clean up my act. They suggested rehab for me, but I declined. I would stop by myself, I told them.

  But I was not in control of my life. Far from it.

  One morning Joan and I sat talking in her lounge. She told me she thought I should get away from Johannesburg, even if it was just to go on a holiday. She even offered to pay for my ticket.

  ‘Shaun, this life will kill you. You can’t go on like this,’ she said, taking a tissue and drying her tears. ‘Just get away from it all. Please?’

  A few days later, as she was thumbing through the pages of a holiday brochure on the Far East that she’d picked up at a travel agency, she looked up at me and smiled. ‘What about Thailand?’ she said.

  I wasn’t all that keen, but that night I lay awake thinking about it, and suddenly it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Thailand was where my cocaine dealer was buying his heroin. He had asked me several times to join him in his new enterprise of smuggling ‘China White’ – pure heroin – to the United States, but I’d wanted nothing to do with it. Heroin had always seemed like a bad-luck drug to me. Now the situation had changed. I was on my own again and I could certainly do with the extra cash. So the next morning I contacted him, explaining that I was planning to go to Thailand on holiday. If he was still interested, I told him, I was ready to get involved.

  As it happened, he said, he was about to set up a deal in Bangkok and was only too happy to hear from me. Over the years we had established a good working relationship and we trusted one another.

  Fuck it, I thought to myself, against my better judgement, let me kill two birds with one stone. I was in. This could be the beginning of something big. My share of the deal would be approximately US$15 000.

  ‘Book my ticket,’ I said to Joan when I got off the phone. ‘I’m going to Thailand.’

  My sister was right. This life would kill me.

  Chapter 7

  The Beginning of the Nightmare

  It was April 1994, the month in which Thailand celebrated Songkran, the Water Festival. It seemed as good a time as any to take time out from my disintegrating life, to get away from South Africa and to experience another culture. I started my celebrating early by getting drunk on the plane.

  It was my first time in Asia, and my initial impressions were a bewildering jumble of sights and smells and noise. Going through Bangkok airport, the place just seemed so foreign to me, although I did notice several Africans entering and exiting the airport building. Once outside, I found a taxi and gave the driver the address I’d been given. He took off into the traffic. The heavy pollution, crowded roads, outdated cars and the sights and smells of different foods being cooked on every corner – I stared in amazement as we drove.

  The address turned out to be a hotel somewhere in central Bangkok, graded at barely two stars, if that. I checked in, unpacked, lay down on the bed and fell almost immediately into a deep sleep. That night I had dinner at a restaurant suggested to me by the taxi driver. He came back to pick me up.

  ‘You like girls?’ he asked, looking back at me in his rear-view mirror.

  He took me to a strip club, where I managed to get myself pretty drunk while watching a live sex show. I partied the whole night. I had not used drugs for over two weeks, but once I began drinking the craving kicked in. I got back to the hotel in the early hours of the morning and slept until lunchtime. When I woke up, I had a shower and hit the streets of Bangkok. I sampled different foods from the many street vendors. Then I caught a taxi and did a bit of sightseeing.

  In fact, my airport taxi driver became my personal chauffeur, and he had a whole itinerary planned for my evening. I got so drunk at one club that I got into a fight. I’m not sure whether this was because I was drunk, but the guy I apparently took on was huge and as strong as an ox. He could have been a Turk. We first exchanged blows on the dance floor and we were both promptly thrown out. The Turk was with a friend, who walked up to me and apologised, which I thought was nice of him. He put his hand out to shake mine and as I took it he jerked me forward and head-butted me square on the nose. The motherfucker! I had fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book. I lashed out with my right leg and caught him in the balls, but after that things got a little hazy. Eventually we were pulled apart by the police. The guy disappeared and I went back into the club. My nose was bleeding, so I went to the toilet and washed my face. I think the manager must have been feeling sorry for me, because he gave me a few drinks on the house. I left the club at 7am and wandered down the street. I was lost. I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was staying. I was picked up by the police and eventually we worked out where my hotel was and they escorted me back there.

  In the hotel lobby, a couple of taxi drivers I recognised from the day before were sitting around reading newspapers. My sixth sense started to kick in. I became convinced I was being watched. Back in my room I phoned my partner in South Africa and explained that I suspected there was a bit of heat. He told me to stop being paranoid and reassured me that everything would be okay. Afterwards I made contact with the people who were going to deliver the heroin and I was told that they would let me know where and when, which they duly did, several days later.

  It was arranged that they would meet me on the fifth floor of my hotel, on the fire escape. We had a code. My contact would say ‘Chelsea football team’ and I would reply ‘Manchester United’. That was the only identification agreed. The man was a Thai. He was short and stocky. He wore his hair Elvis style, and he had these enormous sunglasses that covered almost his entire face and that he never took off for a second – the guy was definitely not taking any chances. We shook hands, and then he pointed further up the fire escape, where I could see what looked like a leather briefcase. He told me in broken English, ‘You wait two minutes,’ and then he disappeared. I did as he instructed and then I ran up the iron steps and retrieved the case. In my room I inspected it and found that it had two compartments, which I presumed had been specially sewn into it. Anyway, it had been done very professionally. These compartments were where the heroin was hidden. During the past few days I had bought a few gifts for friends and family back in South Africa, which I now put in the bag.

  It suddenly struck me that I was sitting with a small bomb in my room and, truth be told, I was as nervous as hell. I wanted to get as far away from the bomb as possible, so that night I went back to the club I’d been in the night before. Before long I got into another fight. The manager recognised me. He was very friendly and gave me free drinks again. At around 3am the police raided the club and wanted to close it. A fierce argument erupted and, in my drunken stupor, I somehow got involved, but the police didn’t seem at all interested in me. Eventually, everybody was thrown out of the club except me. The manager then invited me to join him at a bar further down the street for a drink, and there he introduced me to a young Thai lady who, he said, was for me, as a token of his appreciation – no charge, he added. She was a pretty little thing, 18 or thereabouts. I had already discovered that there was something about Thai women that turned me on.

  I took her back to the hotel but the night duty clerk refused to let the girl in beyond the lobby. I didn’t know what he was carrying on about and I got really pissed off. When he started shouting at me I lost my cool. I jumped over the front desk but, being as drunk as I was, he managed to get away from me. I stumbled after him, knocked over a vase and then just started to throw the furniture around. I don’t know where the night clerk went, but once he’d ducked out of sight I took the girl upstairs to my room. In the middle of fucking her, there was a knock on the door. It was the police. I didn’t know what they were going on about either, but I took out my wallet and gave them 1 000 Thai baht each. They left and I got back into bed. Eventually, I passed out. When I woke up in the morning, my wallet was gone and so was the girl, but I didn’t imagine I would get any sympathy from the hotel management. I called Joan and explained what had happened, and asked her to wire me some money so tha
t I could pay my hotel bill. I had to reschedule my flight because the money would take a day or two to come through.

  After settling my bill and re-booking my flight, on 26 April 1994 I was taken by taxi to Don Mueang International Airport. The taxi driver was a slimy-looking man, unshaven and with short greasy hair and a pot belly. He was also an undercover cop, but of course I didn’t know that then. While I was sitting in the back seat, he kept staring at me in his rear-view mirror and trying to engage me in light conversation. In the boot of the car were my two suitcases and the leather briefcase containing 2.4kg of heroin in its concealed compartments.

  I was nervous but under the circumstances reasonably calm, and I did my best to remain composed. From the moment we left the hotel, I had an uneasy feeling in my gut, a bad feeling. Fuck it, I thought, but I knew there was no turning back, even though by then I was mentally kicking myself for getting involved in this deal. I was scared, too, genuinely scared at the prospect of being caught. In the back of the taxi I chain-smoked and looked at the driver’s greasy neck. Was it my imagination or did he also seem tense? And was I imagining it, or was he actually watching me in the rear-view mirror? I don’t know. To be honest, I was so caught up in thought that I didn’t think there was anything suspicious about the taxi driver himself, although his constant staring and chatting were irritating me.

  When I got to the airport I paid the driver and called a porter over to take my luggage. As I entered the airport building I said a little prayer. I remember asking G-d to protect me, to close the eyes of the airport security, and to allow me to pass through. I even made a deal with G-d. If I got through, I promised, I would stop using and dealing drugs when I got home. Just this one time, G-d, please, I prayed, let me through. I had never smuggled drugs internationally before, and it was now too late to turn back. I was involved. But the urge to run was almost overpowering.