It was 1976 in Durban South Africa, which, like many cities of that time, was going through many changes. In South Africa we were deeply entrenched in apartheid, which caused the police and customs officials running our harbors to follow many interesting policies. Everyone entering or leaving Durban harbor was under suspicion, guilty till proven innocent, or something of the sort. When the cargo ships came into port with all their goods, it was up to the Port Captain to take things into her own hands. They called her the Port Captain because she would arrange the pickup and transport of the seafarers to and from the harbor and take them to places of leisure and entertainment, the sort that men at sea had waited months for.
She was a strong, popular lady whom everyone knew and respected. She was basically in charge of all the incoming ships. Her specific job was not what you might think; she wasn’t on the employees list of the Ports Authority. But she knew just as much as any of them.
Many Greeks, Phillipinos, Portuguese and seamen of other nations were in and out of the Durban ports every month. The Port Captain would collect the men and escort them to a club called the Monte Carlo, a notoriously popular place for the seamen to go. I imagine it became legendary among them. Inside the Monte Carlo night club would be loads of women who had been set up there by the Port Captain to entertain the men with dancing and the like. My mother and her friends were some of the local girls at the club. Erica was her self-appointed name, the one everyone knew her by.
She was the youngest of 10 children born in Cape Town. Being born with rheumatic fever had prevented her from finishing school – in fact, she dropped out at a very young age. Running away from home at 15 she found herself in Durban, vulnerable and into the ready hands of those who prey on the young and impressionable.
In no time, Erica had made new friends and had found a new career of sorts, the night life, and all that it offered. This led her into a web of lies and a distorted understanding of life, with lots of sorrow, anxiety and fear. By the time she was 29 she had given up five of her children for adoption, some of the children she gave up, were willingly taken in by her loving sisters, others went into foster homes and were raised by other families. Despite leaving home at a young age, her sisters remained in touch with her. Her family never understood the life she had chosen so they loved from a distance. My mom told me that she was abused by someone as a child, as is so often the case, and that made her run away from home. The shame she felt led her like an easy prey into the arms of predators.
She quickly found comfort in daily drinking and drug binges, and friends that supported, encouraged and agreed with her daily habits.
Every night brought along a new opportunity to meet someone new, try something new and push her habit to the limit.
Amidst the constant partying and carefree mentality, I am sure that genuine relationships were made, where, perhaps partners may have even fallen in love. Some men chose to leave their country of birth and remain in South Africa, others would smuggle their new-found love onto the ship and “sail off into the sunset”. But in my case what my mother informed me, was that when my biological father found out that she was pregnant, he fled, returning to his own family and was never heard from again. She told me that she fell in love with a Greek sailor, whom she called Costa. Whenever the Port Captain informed her that he was in town, Erica would meet with him and they would laugh, drink and enjoy each other without a care. According to my mother and her friends, Costa was a real womanizer, he loved his whisky and making people laugh. They spent loads of time enjoying parties and good times together, until Erica fell pregnant. When my mother told Costa about her pregnancy, he left never to return.
I am not sure if it was my mom’s age or the fact that she had loved Costa, unlike the many others, that led her not to give me away, like many other children she had birthed. She kept me, and named me Gary Allen. I didn’t have a surname for the first year, as my mother didn’t register me at Home Affairs until a year after my birth. For forty years I believed the stories of my mother and her friends who insisted my father was this legendary “Costa”. I tried for more than 20 years to find him, using private investigators, journalists in Greece and television programmes that assist in the reunion of families, I wrote hundreds of letters to men of the same name in Greece and even received some responses encouraging me in my search. I even wrote a letter to the Greek Prime Minister.
However Just before my 41st birthday I did a DNA test which resulted in not only a disappointment for years lost but also a new found freedom and a closed door. The results revealed that I am not the son of a Greek man but rather that I have strong Italian, Portuguese and Spanish genes. This as you can imagine came as a bit of a shock, yet a part of me was not surprised at all.
Whilst it may seem obvious to many that it would have been impossible for my mother to recall who my father was, I wanted to believe the story that my biological father was an identified individual with a name and a face.
Shortly after my birth, my mother became more serious with one of the men she had met. His name was Johannes Zacharias Steyn, a manager for a local company that fixed up ships in the dry dock. He was a good- looking young man who loved life. He fell in love with Erica and decided to move in with her and adopt me, I then became Gary Allen Steyn after Johannes registered himself as my father at the Home Affairs office. At the time Johannes would have been 21 when I was born, and my mom was 30 years old .
They rented a flat together in Lionel House, Pickering Street, which was the heart of the red-light district in 1977 In Durban, South Africa.
The building’s first four floors were factories which produced different things over the years. On occasion we were evacuated in the middle of the night by firemen, due to explosions in the factories on the floors below us. We stayed on the 5th floor so we couldn’t help but hear the bangs. Fortunately, I can only recall this happening twice, however still very traumatic for me as a child.
The building across from where we stayed was about three stories high and I remember that each road-facing apartment had a woman, a red light, and what I later learned was an open invitation to men with cash in their pocket. Pickering street was known as the prostitute and pimp shopping mall.
I took karate classes for a while on one of the floors in our block. One day, while heading out to participate in a tournament, I was crossing the road without looking and got hit by a car. Whilst I was very shaken, I still insisted on going to and participating in the tournament. The organisers of the competition did not want me to fight, but I convinced them to let me unleash the adrenaline from the accident, I fought and won my first trophy.
Pickering Street was littered with many men covered in tattoos, sitting on the pavement, smoking cigarettes wearing vests and hats. With names such as Blacky and Spike, they had that thousand yard stare in their eyes that made you want to throw your wallet at them and run away as fast as you can, if you were ever unlucky enough to cross their path. They would sit there spurring their ladies to work the street hard, whilst instilling fear in all who lived in the area and frequented their paths.
Prostitution was illegal at the time except in “massage parlors”, as they called them. So, the women would walk up and down the streets approaching the cars and negotiating prices before either hopping in or taking their client into one of the adjacent blocks for an allotted time. Often the pimps would beat up the men who visited the ladies, take the cash and advise them never to return, knowing that most of them were married or prominent people and wouldn’t dare report the incident to the police for fear of humiliation.
Not that the police were any better, many of them knowing each worker by name and sometimes arresting them, sometimes receiving favors.
Despite what I have already shared, I had, what you could say, for the most part, a regular childhood. There were other boys and girls that lived in our apartment block, and we would all play in the streets, ride bikes and get up to all the regular mischief that I thought all kids got up too. It felt normal, it felt like fun.
But just to backtrack a little, soon after I was born, approximately two years after having me my mom gave birth to my brother Eric (real name Thenius Lodewyk Steyn), child no 7. But I called him “Boy” for the first few years. He was a cute little guy and had a soft, loving nature. I took on the well known role of the hard-older brother a lot. If you know what I am talking about, it’s the stance you regret taking later in life. But I also felt like I needed to be hard on him to protect him as my mother wasn't around watching over us and we didn't have a dad for very long to teach us the ropes.
My step father was a hard-working man, who was kind to my brother and I, he loved us both very much, even though I wasn’t his biological son.
He was much younger than my mother and it is a possibility that he ended up moving in with her because she was pregnant, as he didn't seem to stay very long. I don’t know much about his life before us, but I guess he didn’t have too much of a history, being only 22. He enjoyed a good party just like the rest of my moms friends. Our youth living in Pickering Street was filled with pimps and prostitutes, some were friends of the family and we got to know them well.
Some of my parents’ favorite pastimes were the daily ritual of smoking cannabis, and, when the rest of the crew were around, “buttons” or Mandrax came out to really heighten the excitement. If you could just picture for a moment, getting home and seeing your parents, with huge plumes of smoke, sucking hard on a broken bottlenecks filled with cannabis with a crushed pill of Mandrax on top. For some people this is something only seen in the movies but for my brother and I, it was not something foreign.
It was one of those smells I knew so well and came to hate whilst growing up. My brother wasn’t so fortunate, he developed a liking for cannabis in his teens and together with his friends would get home from school and smoke. My parent's would often be the hosts of the parties and during this time my brother and I used to be put in our room for the night while the party raged on with music blaring and loud swearing, sometimes laughter and sometimes tears. Being young boys, we never knew any different, we had no method of comparison.
Of course, until starting school, we did what other boys did at that age: rode bikes, played games and had fun with our friends, whilst meeting lots of characters along the way. The lessons I learned as a young boy were far from the ones we wish for our children today. I remember being with my dad whilst he was stealing railway tracks from the harbor. I was old enough to know my father didn’t own the tracks he was taking, but at the same time I knew he would probably get some decent cash for them, cash that we needed.
Despite remaining most of our lives as children in the same apartment and area, we did venture out on a road trip to Cape Town to meet my dad’s parents. It was fun, except for the fact that their farm was called Thenius Lodewyk, which, as mentioned previously, was my brother Eric’s real name – need I say that he was the favored child? Knowing I was an illegitimate child, I was sort of welcomed with unopened arms into their traditional Afrikaans (Dutch descent) family.
Both my mom and I were treated like the spare wheel that comes with the car – part of the package but best kept out of sight. My step-grandfather was a tall strong man who made us speak Afrikaans. His big, leathery hands were not the type you wanted to wake, nor his voice one you wanted to argue with, so needless to say we complied with whatever he dictated.
Once back in Durban, life as we knew it, carried on in much in the same way with parties, drugs, and all its counterparts.
At the age of six I did what most kids do at that age – for some insane reason as I saw it, they all head for an institution called school. This was a devastating blow for an insecure little guy who loved his freedom, and up until that time I really thought that our family was just like every other family. My idea of normality was shattered as I entered school and encountered other children of the same age.
After not really adjusting too well to the rules and regulations at my elementary school, I discovered that Pickering Street was actually not the “coolest” place to live and judging by the teasing that began to take place, it was probably in the eyes of many, one of the worst. Despite the ridicule, I made friends, generally those who were bigger than me. Since I had a big mouth accompanying my attitude, a small body and lots of street savvy, it made sense that I would choose friends such as these. My first friend, we will call him T, had grown up not far from me and had an older brother who taught him the meaning of pain. His learned aggression fitted in well with my plans to take over the school playground. I won his allegiance and we went around helping ourselves to the weaker pupils’ lunch and stirring up the English speaking kids against the Afrikaans for our lunch time “paras”, as we used to call them, which is slang for fights. Punch-ups were easy to start if you understood the power of the tongue and the pain that it could inflict.
After all, I hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but as someone once said, “You were born with a silver tongue”, which I later realized was a dangerous weapon.