Introduction I have yet to encounter anything quite as exhausting or more brutal than trying to fall asleep on the pavement at the height of a Johannesburg winter. The benefits are few, and the nights are long, but for me, there is nothing more distressing than the extreme loneliness that comes with the territory. I actually envy the junkies on these streets because they all have something that binds them together. While...

Chapter Five For the sake of variety, I ventured back to Slay Queens for a few days, just to cool off a little and dust myself down. It was a pretty hard fall, but not one I hadn’t experienced before. Like Forrest Gump, I was always running. Running to escape the hurt, erase the humiliation, and forget. The antidote was always the same too. The first woman I ever ran away from was Stacy, who remains the love of my life. I...

Chapter Nine I am a gambling man and probably always have been. While I have only been a punter, in the conventional sense, for the past decade, it has become increasingly apparent to me that virtually my whole life has been left to chance. I have always stared death in the eye while completely disregarding life’s consequences - an outlook that has ultimately proved my undoing. I first crossed paths with my punting destin...