Dragons & Butterflies

by Shani Krebs

  In an attempt to distract myself and also to familiarise myself with my new surroundings, I half-lifted my head from my pillow and did a quick reconnaissance of the ward. The patient to my immediate left looked like he was from outer space: he had both his legs in some sort of contraption with all these pulley cables and protruding steel pins, which seemed to be holding his upper thighs together as well as his lower legs. Both his arms were broken, too, and they were also suspended from a complicated-looking steel structure. On top of that, his head was completely wrapped in bandages. I wanted to shrivel up in shame and crawl into a hole. This guy had injuries one thousand times worse than mine and he was lying there in silence. I wondered if maybe he was dead. I looked to my right and then all around me. In comparison to everybody else’s injuries, I could consider myself very lucky. There, at that moment, life was teaching me another lesson, and only later on would I understand the full impact of it.

  Later, I was given some painkillers and the tablets knocked me out. I don’t know how long I’d been sleeping when I felt somebody hugging and kissing me, and wishing me happy birthday. It was my sister Joan, who had come to see me with some of my friends. Despite the pain I was in, I was pleased to have them around me, but I don’t remember much after that because I passed out soon after being woken.

  The following morning, an entourage of doctors and nurses came to do their rounds. I could see that the doctor who came to my bed wasn’t at all happy with what he was seeing on my X-rays. He carefully explained that I had sustained a compound fracture of both my tibia and fibula and then strongly suggested that they operate immediately and insert a steel plate into the leg. If this wasn’t put in, he said, I might walk with a limp for the rest of my life.

  As a child, I’d had these visions of playing football in the English First Division for my favourite team, Manchester United, even maybe representing my country in the World Cup. I was a great footballer and a big fan of the game. One moment you are who you are, the next second everything you ever dreamt of is taken away from you. I cursed myself for taking that fucking red pill. What the fuck had I been thinking? One bad choice made on the spur of the moment had changed the course of the rest of my life.

  In life, there are some choices that are not within our control. We can’t choose who our parents are, for example, or who our children will be. But the other choices, the ones we deliberately make ourselves, ultimately define who we are. Perhaps taking that pill and getting on the bike was the beginning of a series of bad choices that would mould me and determine the course of my life. And even if I knew that such choices might lead to an untimely death for me, did I care? Truthfully? No, I did not.

  Many of my idols, like James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, had all died before they reached the age of 30. Who wanted to live past 30 anyway? I mean, 30 was like fucking old, and I was just barely out of my teens.

  Besides the bad news he’d just delivered, the doctor also wasn’t happy with the way my leg had been set. I heard him instruct one of the nurses, in Afrikaans, to have the plaster removed so that my leg could be reset. I called out to the doctor and he came back over to my bed. I told him that under no circumstances did I want a steel plate, screws or any other foreign objects planted in my leg. Taken back and clearly disapproving, he reluctantly acquiesced and told me that the choice was mine.

  After the doctors finished their rounds a nurse and a male assistant arrived, presumably a national serviceman doing his two years as a medic, and together they cut the plaster off my leg with a vibrating metal saw. I asked the medic what had happened to the guy in the bed next to me and, for that matter, most of the guys in the ward. It looked like they were all pretty fucked up.

  He told me that I was in the same ward as all the casualties who were being flown back from the Angolan border and that the guy next to me had been in a vehicle that had hit a land mine. My conscience pricked me a little bit because I had managed to wangle my way out of fighting alongside these soldiers, but mostly I felt blessed. I could so easily have been a border war casualty myself, but, ironically, here I was anyway, a casualty from a different war, a war of recklessness that could have been avoided. What a fuck-up I was. It just went to show: you should never stop counting your blessings. No matter what your circumstances are, there is always somebody, somewhere, less fortunate than you.

  The idea of using a bedpan (basically taking a crap in my bed) was something I couldn’t tolerate, so, after a couple of days, with the assistance of a medic, the painful task of climbing out of my bed began. Just lowering my broken leg to the floor and the restoration of blood flow caused the most terrible pain; in fact, it was so sore that my whole body started shaking. I cried out to the medic, saying, ‘I can’t, I can’t.’

  This guy had no sympathy. He said, ‘Man, it’s up to you. Do you want to take a crap or not, because if you do, you have to vasbyt.’

  And so, slowly, inch by inch, vasbyt I did.

  A few days later I was getting around on crutches. At first this was really difficult, and painful, but it became easier with practice. The doctors had also managed to sew my baby finger back on. It had been severed at an angle from just behind the nail, shattering the bone. It was bandaged and kept immobile in an aluminium brace, which was held together by an adhesive bandage.

  After two weeks I was moved to another ward that was full of soldiers who were well on their way to recovery or who had only minor injuries. Time in that ward just dragged. I spent most of my days sleeping and the nights reading whatever books happened to be circulating. One of my favourite books, strangely enough, was Papillon, the bestselling account by Henri Charrière of his incarceration and escape from prison in French Guiana. The title of the book takes its name from the butterfly – papillon – he had tattooed on his chest.

  Although my finger had healed and the stitches had been removed, it looked deformed to me, a bit like the front end of a hammerhead shark. It looked almost as if someone had sewn a thumb onto it. It also felt clumsy, ugly, and I kept knocking it against everything. When the doctor did his rounds one morning, I told him my problem. He examined the finger and was convinced that he could fix it by replacing the bone with a pin and a little trim here and there. He told me confidently that he could reshape my finger and restore it to its former self.

  I was totally unpersuaded. ‘You know what, doc,’ I said with bravado I didn’t really feel, ‘let’s just chop it off. It will be one less fingernail I’ll need to cut.’

  One thing about the military hospital, they didn’t procrastinate, and I was booked the very next day for the procedure. I woke up back in my ward and had to keep my hand upright to prevent the flow of blood to the wound. Those first few nights, I found it very difficult to sleep, as my arm was suspended in a sling above my head. Within a couple of days, though, my finger had gone septic. It was dark in colour and smelt terrible.

  The doctor was concerned. He told me that if the infection spread any further he might have to amputate the whole finger and part of my hand. Fuck, this couldn’t be happening. The doctor then quickly added a ‘but’. In life there is always a ‘but’, and invariably it’s not a good sign. In this instance, though, the ‘but’ had a positive ring to it. The doctor said there was a chance that the finger could be saved, but I would have to clean it three to five times a day using Eusol, which is an antiseptic liquid, and bandage it up with penicillin gauze. So every day I cleaned my finger and dressed it. At first, there was so much pus that I would have to take a syringe, stick the needle quite far into my finger and drain the pus out. It wasn’t pleasant, but within a week the infection had gone and I had saved my hand.

  Even though I was recovering in hospital, I was still a conscript in the South African army and had to complete my time in the military. Because I’d been in DB, the time spent there, which totalled 62 days, had to be added to my original mandatory two years of service, which, in effect, meant I would have to do an extra two months. But still, I now
had min dae (few days). My army service was coming to an end at last. Knowing this, and also knowing that I wasn’t going to be returned to my unit, I started becoming belligerent and giving the nurses a hard time, undermining their authority at every opportunity. It got so bad that I was moved into a private ward. It had been almost a month since I’d smoked any weed. Maybe I was craving it, or maybe I just wanted to smoke for the hell of it, but, whatever it was, I needed to get my hands on something.

  I had befriended one of the medics and I kept asking him to organise something for me. Finally he came through. Using a candle, I started to prepare a bottle neck in my room. I fitted some silver paper in the, bottom, gave it to the medic and told him to call me when everything was ready. We were going to smoke it outside, at the back of the ward. I hopped along to the rendezvous on my crutches. The medic was there, as well as two Afrikaans guys I didn’t know, but who also wanted to smoke. So, being the gentleman that I was, I gave one of the strangers the pipe to bust. I gave him a light and, as he sucked, the weed started burning, smoke filling his lungs. There was a popping sound and then pieces of burning weed shot out of the bottle neck. The fucker who was supposed to have prepared the pipe hadn’t separated the seeds from the leaves. As the guy exhaled the smoke, he drawled, ‘This weed is so good, man, it even pops.’ I was finished. I couldn’t stop laughing. Obviously he had never smoked weed in his life before. In fact I could see by the colour, dryness and the way the stuff was burning that it was really shit quality. It was ‘majut’, the cheap weed smoked in the townships and the worst quality you could imagine. You bought it in matchboxes.

  Having smoked the best-quality weed, I shouldn’t have smoked the crap these guys had organised, but, being the fool I was, my logic said that a single hit was better than nothing and might even satiate my craving. I was my own worst enemy. The very reason I was in hospital was because I’d indulged in a mind-altering substance that had impaired my judgement. If I had had any sense I would never have taken another drag of a single joint. I mean, what was the point in numbing your brain? But there I was again, staring into nothingness. I had a splitting headache, a sore throat, a broken leg and was minus part of my finger – shouldn’t that have been enough of a wake-up call? How long would it take before I realised that drugs were destructive and destroyed life?

  After a month in 1 Mil, I was discharged not only from the hospital but also from the army. My family had organised me a room in a private house in Kernick Avenue, Melrose. The only problem was that my bedroom was upstairs and, still being on crutches, stairs were a real struggle for me, so, for the time being I was confined to my bed.

  At first it wasn’t too bad. A lot of my friends came to visit and made me a joint here and there. I even got laid once or twice. I don’t know what it is about fucking a guy with a broken leg, but something about it seemed to turn girls on. Over the course of the seven months I was in plaster, I slept with a lot of chicks.

  After a while, I started getting restless. I needed to get out of the house. One weekend I insisted that my friends come and fetch me and take me on the jol. They were only too eager to take me out. Theo, Derek’s brother, was my best friend then. We were both ex-Arcadians and we were inseparable. We had some really great times. He was a black belt, wild as hell, fearless and always ready for a fight. He lived in Sandown in a cottage on his father’s property and we would hang out there, smoking weed in a clay pipe, or chillum. While I lit the match and held it to the pipe, Theo would suck so hard he would finish the entire pipe on his own in one drag. This didn’t impress me very much, so when we smoked his weed he would bust the pipe; when it was mine I would have the first hit.

  While my leg was in plaster, Theo would fetch and carry me wherever I wanted to go. On that first weekend out, going down the stairs and climbing into the car wasn’t too easy. As soon as we left the house, the first thing I said was ‘Let’s have a joint’. My friends laughed, and as one, three hands stretched out to me, each one clasping a joint. ‘Thank you, guys,’ I said, ‘I have a lot of catching up to do. Where are we jolling?’ I was told to sit back and enjoy the ride.

  We were in three cars, numbering 12 strong. Derek had been invited to the 21st birthday party of an army friend named Greg, but he’d been told that the invitation strictly extended only to him. Greg specifically asked him not to bring any of his wild friends – we had a reputation that stretched way back. Greg lived on the first floor of a block of flats. Before we went inside, Derek explained the situation. We were gate-crashing, he told us, and he asked us all to promise that whatever happened we wouldn’t cause a fight.

  The Chinese have a saying: ‘Don’t trouble trouble, unless trouble troubles you’. As much as we tried, and for reasons that only the powers above knew, trouble had a habit of following us wherever we went. When we entered the dimly lit apartment, which had a quaint furnished entrance hall, I could see that there were at least 30 people already in the flat. The lounge area was fairly big and there were streamers and balloons all over the walls. Hanging from the lights was a banner with the words ‘Happy 21st Greg’ written on it. Oh how cute, I thought sarcastically. So a 21st might be a milestone in a person’s life, but surely getting totally fucked out of your mind with the boys had to be better than some faggoty little party! In fact, I decided, Greg deserved to get fucked up.

  When we showed up, there was a Bob Marley track playing and quite a few people were vibing to the song. You should have seen Greg’s face when we waltzed in, with me hopping on my crutches. The expression on his face read: Disaster Waiting to Happen.

  Derek went straight to Greg to wish him happy birthday, while the rest of us, before he could kick us out, quickly split up and mingled with the crowd. Not that Greg would have had the balls to throw us out, nor would we have gone without a fight. One of our crew, whose name was Fred, was from Durban and he had only recently joined us. He was renowned for being wild. Once Fred had a couple of drinks inside him it was guaranteed there would be a fight. He also became almost childlike when he was out of it and would often steal something, not because he was a thief but more out of sheer mischief.

  Somehow most of us had worked our way to the bar, which was out on the balcony. As we usually did, we downed our drinks as fast as possible. As everyone knows, after a quick couple of shots, alcohol soon numbs the brain. We couldn’t have been there for more than an hour when Fred tried to steal a bottle of whisky. I was standing inside the flat, but right by the balcony, when an argument broke out between one of our birthday boy’s friends and Fred.

  The next thing I knew, Fred started hitting anybody and everybody within his immediate radius. I don’t know what the fuck happened then, but, probably because there were so many people on the balcony, the balustrade collapsed and Fred, along with a handful of other people, went over the edge and plummeted to the ground. Among the casualties were at least two girls, who were quite badly injured, and one guy who was bleeding profusely. I managed to get a glimpse over the edge, where I spotted Fred, who had landed on his back on top of the broken bricks. He struggled to his feet and I heard him say ‘Where’s my fucking flip-flop?’ Then he plucked the shoe out of the rubble and walked off. The party had come to a sudden end. We all left before we were thrown out. Derek, who had got a mouthful from his friend, was the last to leave.

  My close friend Mark was a tall, lanky fellow who was not at all aggressive, let alone physically strong. For some unknown reason, a while back Mark had badmouthed a guy named Jeffrey Anthony. Jeffrey was the leader of a Lebanese gang in Joburg at that time. Although we were rivals in the marijuana trade, generally there existed a mutual respect between us, and Jeffrey operated by a code of honour that most old-school gangsters adhered to back then. I still don’t know why Mark did what he did, because Jeffrey was largely feared by his peers, and especially by those who were younger than him. In any event, the word was put out to have Mark fucked up.

  One afternoon, when I was still on crutches, Mark and I were
bored and so the two of us and Russell got in the car and started driving aimlessly around town. We were cruising down Louis Botha Avenue when Russell and Mark decided they wanted to play Space Invaders at Pan Burgers near Corlett Drive. I reminded them that Pan Burgers was where a lot of the younger Lebanese guys in Jeffrey Anthony’s crew hung out. They said we’d just drive past, and if it wasn’t too busy, we’d go and play. I was quite friendly with most of the Lebanese guys, so I wasn’t too concerned about myself; it was Mark I was more worried about.

  Apart from one or two youngsters, we found the place more or less deserted, so we went in and started playing on the machines. We’d hardly got started when the Lebanese boys gradually filtered in. Before we knew it, we were outnumbered by at least three to one. Two of the guys grabbed Mark and started threatening him. Leaning on my crutch, I grabbed the one guy by the shoulder. ‘Take it easy, china!’ I told him. He turned around and told me in no uncertain terms to keep out of it. This was not my problem, he said, and pointed out the obvious, namely, that I already had a broken leg. The next thing I knew, Russell was trying to make a run for it, but not before he got a punch in the face. He jumped into the car; I followed on my crutches, and by some miracle Mark also managed to get away. Before we could get moving, though, one of the senior Lebanese guys – I didn’t know the guy myself – walked up to the car and motioned to Mark to open the window. I told Mark that he shouldn’t but he did anyway, and this guy just gave him one punch square on his nose. I actually heard Mark’s nose crack and break.