Part of the Pride (6 page)

I got in the car and started her up. For the next two hours—the duration of the movie we were supposedly watching—I put the Mini through its paces, driving hard and fast through the suburbs of Johannesburg. I knew I was cutting it fine, to get the car back before she became suspicious, so I was still speeding when we drove up to the shopping center. The tires squealed on the smooth concrete surface of the multi-storied car park and when we hit the speed bumps, all four wheels left the ground.

My brother Gareth had borrowed the Mini and crashed it into a brick wall some time earlier. I had conned Mom into letting me drive the car occasionally in exchange for repairing the vehicle. I didn't have the money for all the proper replacement parts so I had organized for a whole new front end—left and right fenders, hood and grille—to be made out of fiberglass. As Dave and I crested the last speed bump in the car park, the impact of the Mini crashing down on its suspension caused the whole front of the car to come loose and fly off. I put the car into a slide and skidded into the same space where she had been.

Corrine, who had been wondering where we were, walked into the car park as I was slotting the front of the car back into place. “Kevin, what are you doing?”

“Um, just showing Dave the engine, sis.”

The Mini was my car of choice to steal for our after hours jolls, but if it was parked in I could also take an old 1979 Toyota Corolla
which the family had inherited from my grandmother when she passed away, or dad's 1980 baby blue Mazda 323. We hated being seen in the Mazda. I was used to driving all the other cars, but one night one of my sisters, Candice, who was studying at nursing college at the time, had left her Fiat 131 Mirafiori in the driveway then gone off to stay at her boyfriend's place.

When Dino arrived at my place for our usual nightly departure we slipped outside and started downing our preferred cocktail of spook and diesel. We drank hard and fast, chasing feelings of relaxation, confidence, and euphoria. I pointed to the boxy red Italian car and said, “Come, let's take this one.”

It had been raining that night and the roads were slippery, but I hadn't driven the Fiat before and wanted to put it through its paces. As usual, we pushed the vehicle out of the driveway and down the street a bit before starting it. I was still only about eight kilometers from home, on the road to Sandringham, but I was already pushing it to its limits.

With Dino beside me egging me on I floored it. I watched the speedometer climb through seventy, eighty, ninety, and finally a hundred kilometers an hour. The gearbox was automatic, which I hated as I preferred stick shifts. However, I had the engine screaming at full revs as the transmission did its work. I cared for the car about as much as I cared for the feelings of my sister or my mom. I preyed on the innocence and goodwill of my family in those days. I'm not proud of it, but it's the way I was.

“Faster!”

I dropped down a gear and pushed the accelerator into the firewall before ramming it up into drive again. I came to a downhill stretch and I roared with exhilaration as the needle passed the 170-kilometer mark. We were flying at more than a hundred miles an hour down this suburban road and the rainwater hissed like a cobra under the Fiat's wafer thin little wheels.

At the bottom of the hill there was a dip. Even if I'd had time to
brake I wouldn't have. The suspension bottomed out as I hit the depression and I lost control. Because of the speed we were traveling at and the slickness of the road, the car spun through three full 360-degree turns. The streetscape was spinning past our eyes at a dizzying speed. We hit the pavement and rolled.

Luck or a guardian angel was on my side, because we missed a light pole by inches. If we'd hit it we would have been dead. The car ended up on the passenger's side. I lay there for a moment, stunned, but Dino climbed up over my lap and out of my window. It was only a small car and he was a strong guy so while I was still inside he pushed the car back over on to its wheels. I looked up, shaking my head and he slammed the open bonnet down with a thud.

He banged on the roof of the car. “Come, let's go, Kevin.”

“Dude, the car is stuffed,” I replied. “It's come to an end. We're finally going to get busted this time.”

Dino climbed in and wouldn't take no for answer. “Let's go!”

As an indication of how drunk we were, Dino convinced me that we could wash the damage off the car, so we found a garage and the owner let us wash the Fiat in the middle of the night. There we were, two drunk teenagers trying to wash scratches off a car. We sobered up pretty quickly.

We managed to limp the vehicle home and I summoned up the courage to tell my mother what had happened. I knocked on the door of her bedroom and opened the door.

“Ma, I've crashed Candice's car.”

Still half asleep, she mumbled, “Go back to bed, Kevin, you're dreaming.”

“No, Ma, you don't understand. I stole the car and I crashed it.”

Mom woke up. “Kevin, I'm going to kill you!”

Even in our moment of shame Dino and I still had a plan. We'd decided in advance that when the shit hit the fan we would start crying. Mom was telling us off and I started pushing the tears out, telling her how sorry I was and how we hadn't meant to cause any
damage. My sister Corrine, whom I've always had a great relationship with, stood up for us, though why she did that I don't know.

We were grounded for the rest of our lives and both had to get part-time jobs to pay for the repairs to the car. Dino got a hiding, and his old man wanted to
klap
me, too. God knows, I deserved a hit.

Predictably, my schoolwork took a pounding during those rebellious years. I was out three or even four nights a week on drinking binges and hungover in the mornings. I'd also put my animals to one side. By that stage most had died—because of age, not neglect—or been freed during my release stage, and with Mom struggling to make ends meet, we had scaled down to just a couple of dogs and one or two birds at any one time.

I tried to be a good boy sometimes. I bought my mother a teddy bear for her birthday one year, but I got so drunk the night before that somehow I managed to throw up on the bear. I went to the bathroom, still pissed, and tried to clean it, but needless to say it was in no fit condition to hand over as a present.

My uncle tried sitting me down and counseling me, telling me that since my brother had left for vet school I was the man of the house, and all that sort of stuff. I know that he wanted to hit me, but he couldn't bring himself to do it as he was such a nice guy. I probably needed a beating, but he made no headway with me, and he and Mom thought I would never come right.

If I wasn't bunking off school I was picking fights with other kids. Discipline at school was a joke, and even though we would get six of the best—smacks on our butts with a cane—or be placed on detention, we treated those punishments as a joke. I always knew what was right and wrong, and while I didn't do particularly well at high school, I was able to study enough to scrape through.

We loved playing rugby at school and while the game itself doesn't make people aggressive, we would hype each other up before
games and tell each other how we were going to hammer our opponents. Without a father figure to keep me in line, I just continued to play up. My other friends, of course, had fathers and used to be disciplined, so thinking back on it now I was probably a bad influence on them, rather than the other way around.

The only positive outlet I had for my anger was cycling. I would take my cycle out in the afternoons and ride forty or fifty kilometers a day. I used the cycle to visit girls on the other side of the city, and at weekends my friends and I would ride in hundred-kilometer races. I loved going fast—still do. Mom used to insist that I get home by dark, and after visiting a girl who lived near the racetrack at Kyalami I was pushing it to get home by nightfall. As I was tearing along a policeman leapt out from the side of the road and waved me down.

“You were doing eighty kilometers per hour in a sixty zone,” the cop said to me. “Do you realize you were speeding?”

“No, officer, I didn't. Anyway, I'm on a bicycle, so what are you going to do about it?”

He shrugged his shoulders and I sped off.

As my friends and I got older we were able to get away from Orange Grove every now and then, if only for the weekend. Dino's family had a holiday place at Bronkhorstspruit Dam about fifty kilometers east of Pretoria. On one visit we found a Grey Heron which had become entangled in fishing lines. Some guys staying at the dam had gone to bed after a big night's drinking and left their rods, baited with balls of corn meal pap, stuck in the riverbed. It was winter, and when I put my fingers in the water it was freezing cold. We could see the bird was alive—just—and I decided that Dino would be the best person to go into the water and free the bird.

“Why me?”

“I know about birds. I'm going to be the one who fixes it and I have to be ready, here on the shore, to take it off your hands when you bring it out of the water.” I was, after all, the birdman of Orange Grove.

“Okay.”

Dino swam out into the icy dam and was able to free the bird, which was near dead from being trapped in the cold water all night. Dino, teeth chattering and body shivering, was near hypothermic, and the only thing I could think of was for all three of us to go to the shower room and get under a hot shower. Inside we stripped off and crowded into the cubicle. I turned on the hot tap and Dino and I held on to the bird. I had no idea if this was the right thing to do, and just when I thought it might actually die from my extreme treatment the heron came to life.

A grey heron is a big bird that stands about a meter tall, and it looks a hell of a lot bigger when it flares its wings and starts attacking you with its very long beak. Dino and I fought each other to open the shower cubicle door and escape its stabbing pecks. The heron followed us out and chased us around the changing room, flapping its wings and squawking madly. We were trying to chase it outside and the bird was trying to kill us, which I thought was a fine show of gratitude. Eventually we cornered it and, waving and squawking ourselves, shooed it to the door. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in South Africa who tell the story of the time they were camping and saw a Grey Heron running out of a toilet block, being chased by two naked teenage boys.

That wasn't the only time, however, that a few naked teenage boys made an impression on the wildlife of Africa. Once, the three of us went camping in the Retiefskloof of the Magaliesberg Mountains. We were dropped off one weekend and set off to cause mayhem. That sort of unchecked, unauthorized camping doesn't happen in the national park anymore, probably because of what people like us used to get up to.

We decided to go skinny-dipping in a pristine waterhole. It was warm and sunny, and we found that we could slide on our bare bottoms down some water-slicked rocks and splash into the pool. While we were playing we saw a troop of baboons clambering across the rocks high above us.

“
Wah-hoo
,” cried one of the baboons, giving a warning call.

“Wah-hoo,” we all started yelling back, teasing them.

We thought this was great fun, but the baboons weren't impressed. There was a splash in the water hole next to me.

“What was that?”

“Shit, someone's throwing rocks at us,” one of the other guys said.

As we scrambled out of the water, looking for our clothes, there was a minor avalanche of rocks and small boulders raining down on us. As I hopped on the rock while I pulled my shorts on, I looked up again. It was the baboons. They were the ones attacking us and now they were moving down the slope. I'd heard of stories of adult male baboons ripping apart leopards in fights, so I was more than a little worried.

As the baboons closed in on us, two stopped, crouched, and defecated in their hands.

“Oh, no! Shit!” Which was exactly what started pelting at us during round two of the baboons versus the teenagers. I'd heard of primates doing this in zoos, but not in the wild. These baboons were adding insult to injury and we took off, their foul-smelling missiles shattering in the trees behind us. If their lesson to us was to be respectful of others, we forgot it a short time later when we crossed another stream and found a dozen bottles of beer that some Afrikaner campers had sunk in the water to cool. We slipped away with our liquid manna from heaven, and later laughed and drank ourselves stupid.

The car crash had been a wake-up call, but it wasn't until I met my first real father figure that I started to apply myself to my schoolwork and, as it happened, to my animals again. His name was Stan Schmidt, and to my friends and me he was a god. He also had a very pretty daughter, named Lisa, whom I fell in love with. Stan
Schmidt was a renowned South African karate champion and the founder of the South African Japan Karate Association. Every boy knew who he was and we were all in awe of him.

“You can't possibly be going out with Stan Schmidt's daughter,” one of my mates said when I told him who Lisa's father was. “Dude, Stan's going to kick your arse big time as soon as you do something wrong to his girl.”

However, Stan was so not the person people thought he was. He never threatened me. He and his wife, Judy, would sit me down sometimes and talk to me about the directions I was taking, and life in general. I'd talk for hours with Stan, and started spending more time with Lisa and her family than with my own. As a result of the Schmidts' influence I started studying harder at school, and I even started going to church! It was one of the conditions of going out with Lisa. For some reason they trusted me and I started calming down.

It was all about respect. I don't think I'd had respect for anyone else up until that point. I respected Stan not only for his achievements, but for who he was. When that oke talked, I listened.