That’s all it took for things to go down.
Hairy Arms was clearly the leader of the pack. I watched him crack a little smile as he made a show of passing whatever was in his top pocket to his goon buddy before heading towards me. There was a hectic sparkle in his eye that said this was really going to make his day.
At 77 kilograms I was lean and in pretty good shape. Changing course in mid-stride, I met Hairy Arms head on. It was child’s play. I had already judged my timing as he started towards me and closed on him in five or six quick steps.
The moment he was within range I threw a hard, fast straight left to his mid-section, followed by an immediate right to his mouth. I had done it many times before; both punches landed solidly. I had leaned my head into the punch and felt it connect but as I lifted my head I was puzzled to see that Hairy Arms was still standing in front of me.
“What the hell…?”
Quick as a shot, I cocked my right hand. With all my strength I smashed a straight right into his face and, this time, I watched as he went head-overheels and then down flat on his back. He half sat up on his butt; for a second I thought he might try to get up— but he stayed put, looking dazed and confused.
As I stood poised over him with my fists cocked, daring him to get up, I realized that there were actually two bodies sitting on their asses in front of me, dazed. It mystified me for a second and somehow stole my concentration.
“What the hell’s going on here?”
I snapped out of it when the third goon hit me low with a sloppy tackle from the side. He knocked me off balance a little but I could feel there was no conviction in his grip around my waist and I quickly recovered and managed to flip him over in a sort of half-assed Judo throw, using his own momentum to slam him onto the floor. As he fell he grabbed a handful of my newly permed, shoulder-length hair and held on fiercely. I felt my hair tearing out at the roots, so I began bouncing him up and down seriously against the tile floor.
“Let go, you fucking moron!”
I bounced him until he couldn’t take any more and let go but not before he had ripped a good chunk of my hair out by the roots. I slammed him once more just for good measure. Just then I looked up to see Paul who had been passing by on his way to meet me at the Wimpy and who was now standing at my side with his fists raised, ready for action. For the first time I was able to look around me and assess the situation.
I let go of the turkey who had tried to scalp me. He rolled away, sprang up like a jack-in-the-box and scuttled off to stand at a safe distance. In a moment of good-buddy-bonding Paul and I stood ready, back-to-back with fists up, but there was no need for the dramatics.
Hairy Arms was yelling withdrawal instructions to his Neanderthal friends who were only now rising groggily from the deck. “Pas op, pas op! Hy’s getrain… los hom uit!” he shouted. (Watch out, watch out! He’s trained… leave him alone!)
A crowd had begun to form around us, gawking stupidly at the action. The three dipshits began to take off, one of them bleeding heavily from his nose and trying to stem the flow of blood that had saturated the front of his white button-down shirt.
It had ended as quickly as it had started. Paul and I turned and headed in the opposite direction, the only evidence of any action a thick handful of my hair that I watched blow across the brown-tiled floor of the plaza on the errant breeze.
I was untouched, except for the burning sensation in my scalp. “Fucking idiots,” I mumbled with feeling. We walked fast, in silence, and I glared over my shoulder as we weaved between pedestrians.
I had known easily enough what the outcome of the scrap would be but I was still puzzled how Hairy Arms and his mate had ended up on the floor together. Paul and I walked down the main road past the bus terminal, went into the Wimpy and sat down.
“Damn, you decked all three of those mothers! I saw it go down as I came around the corner but I couldn’t get there in time. Not that you needed any help, broer. You decked both those okes{broer: brother; okes: guys (Afrikaans coll.)} in a nanosecond.”
I craned my neck and glanced out of the big plate-glass window to see if there was going to be any follow-up, but didn’t see any sign of the unlovely trio. All at once what had happened flashed on the inner eye, so to speak. I had slugged Hairy Arms, but must have closed my eyes for a second as I nailed him and didn’t see him go down. As I opened my eyes I thought Hairy Arms was still standing in front of me, so I had slugged him again in double-quick time, but it was his mate I had nailed—the mate who had been standing behind him. Paul cracked up with laughter when I told him about the mystery punch.
“Two birds with one stone, my boet,”{brother (Afrikaans)} he hooted, his eyes almost closing with his laughter. He had Chinese eyes and looked stoned again.
No wonder they thought I was trained—I had dropped two of them in onepoint-one seconds flat! But they were right. I was trained—backyard trained. For years my brother and I had sparred with each other, using the old black leather boxing gloves my dad had bought us when we were ten. I slammed heavy, rain-soaked bags hanging from a tree in the backyard until my fists were hard as rocks. We even worked on developing our own style of streetfighting that we called ‘full force’. It was a pretty useful style; the dynamics of it were that every move you made in the fight, whether it was a shove, a punch or a grip, was to be done with one hundred percent of your force, so that if you shoved a guy he ended up across the room. If you blocked, pushed or pulled, you always used full force and all your strength. It worked but the training was tough.
South Africa, for the most part, is an aggressive country. Growing up on the East Rand of Johannesburg, which has a crime rate that makes New York or Rio look like a walk in the park, it was very easy to end up in a ‘situation’ if you were that way inclined. So it was wise to learn some tricks of the trade early in life. The East Rand was a string of five or six gold-mining towns that had sprung up in the late 1800s and grown quickly, thriving on the gold mines that expanded and followed the hundreds of miles of gold reef that joined up with Johannesburg and beyond to the West Rand.
Gold!
Our African gold mines were the biggest and deepest in the world, with shafts plunging 6,000 feet into the ground to purge the earth of the precious ore the world hungered for. A century of gold fever brought a flood of fortune seekers from all over South Africa and the world to the gold mines of the Transvaal and the East Rand. Black labourers flooded to the mines and cities looking for work. It became almost traditional for young black men from tribes who lived thousands of miles away to flock in droves to the City of Gold to live in cramped single quarters and throw themselves at the rock face every day, miles underground, blasting reluctant Witwatersrand gold out of the earth to get it to the world. Johannesburg itself was built with mined sand that still contained tons of unextracted gold, earning itself the name ‘the city built on gold’.
Most of the mines had closed down long since. The straggling reef towns grew to become thriving modern cities and Johannesburg a thriving metropolis. Only the mine dumps towered over the silent old gold mines now—mountains of yellow sand a kilometre or more across, hauled from 6,000 feet below the earth, purged of their gold and left in scattered dumps that stretched as far as the eye could see. Most had now been planted with wild pampas grass and trees; one had a drive-in cinema on the top.