My Big Book Of Lies

6.1 Incoherent Justifications

2011-01-26T02:33:00.000-08:00

I tell you as I feel now, in this moment, that I was more intelligent then than I am now. Maybe it’s the years of abuse, the broken, scarred and sinewy heart, the empty fields of regret that I vowed never to have. I tell you now as I feel now, I did things without foreknowledge or overshadowing, I had no philosophy other than to live in the material world, be material, experience material things. I had no concern for wrong or right, no honesty, no fear of immortality beyond death. These are all things I learnt, were thrown down on me by living materially, living with no concern for wrong or right or honesty. I just wanted to get my kicks before the whole shithouse went up in flames. It was 1990, in ten years the world would end, I had no cause to worry about being remembered, or my story being told. There would be no future generations to learn from me. This view was little in my head then but grew as we got closer to the millennium, in some ways it contributed to my many disappointments later, the world did not end, I took my kicks, suffered for them, for everything balances out, in the end. The end that I had no conception of then, have none of now. Live only in this moment that exists now, in these joys, happiness’s, triumphs of the moment. As I did then, but now am tempered by not getting kicks at anyone’s expense, but receiving them naturally, unforced. Even then I thought what I was doing was natural unforced. So this living, as I am now, in the moment may be as invalid as it was then, but at least there is a certain honesty in saying, this is how I feel, this is what I think is right to do, as opposed to what I want to do; I guess. But I have been wrong before.

2.666 - Cape Town 1990 - 1991: Boring and Necessary Details

2011-01-26T02:24:00.000-08:00

Philip Hunt has moved to Cape Town and he has a flat on the Kloof Neck Rd, right at the bottom, an old building wooden floors and palm trees. Like the palm trees in Fresnay that we shoot with the video camera, trying to recreate the shot from The Doors L.A. Women video. He has no lounge, but a studio, tables littered with drawings and photographs and a black motorbike is parked outside. I am determined to be like him but not him, I eventually save up and buy a fifties Vespa in bright yellow. Phillip is going to Spain, he needs a flat sitter, and so I give up my apartment and move into his for a month. There is something dangerously romantic about the candles and Nick Cave records. It’s the beginning of the windy season in Cape Town; spend many hours on cheap wine watching trashing palm trees out of the window. Somehow in this period I have discovered a cache of pretty young girls, all still at school, remember I am only seventeen still, my birthday is a month away. I meet a girl that I nickname Starlight, she is incorruptible, quirkily creative way before the times in which that was cool, she loved fashion as I did and made her own clothes. I create scary little notes in Phillips studios, running red ink, possessive statements, I want her, she is my Little Phil replacement. She does not talk to me, not much; I befriend her friend in some teen pink nightclub. I am all belt buckles and cowboy boots. The friend, Eve, is as into film as I am, in a move to get close to Starlight, I start to spend time with Eve. I cannot recall the exact stream of events. But it goes something like this. I start to fall for Eve without noticing, my eighteenth birthday arrives, I fully expect someone to call me, I get drunk on the wooden floors listening to Henry’s Dream. Mad by eight o clock I am determined to not be alone, I walk out into the rain and am just walking when a car pulls up. In the car is this fey man, older Jewish, gay, who has tried to pick me up before on Greenmarket Square, he is going to a party in Kalk Bay, I think what the fuck. We pull off onto the freeway, into the wind, alone into the night.

It’s a large rambling Victorian style house; set off the back of a big garden, filled with brown paper bag candle lanterns and people. I lose the guy; find myself in the kitchen, near a box wine and Styrofoam cups, being charming to a group of older people I desperately want to impress. From those young eyes, it all seemed so wonderfully grown up, there were hippies and Goths and jocks, it was in retrospect probably just another digs party, but to me it was warmth and people. Somehow in the bare light bulb yellow kitchen I get into a conversation with a woman, who is a Goth, taller than me, fat, eyeliner dyed black long hair, fishnet stockings, not ashamed of her largeness. I am drawn into conversation with her as I begin to realize that firstly I have no way of getting home, secondly I am weirdly attracted to her and off course quite drunk. I tell her about Eve not calling; I tell her I am still a virgin, that it’s my birthday, that I need a ride home. All of this she drinks in, suddenly we are stumbling through the lanterns, setting them on fire by manipulating them with our passing feet, she has reluctantly agreed to drive me home, back to Hunt’s place. I remember throwing a beer bottle out the window, reveling in the sound of the crash and then being scolded and feeling ashamed at my recklessness. We pull up at my place, I look up the stairs at the windows past the palm trees, it’s late, I am drunk and don’t want to be alone. I say, come up, she obliges.

I have bought a large bag of oranges and they are sitting in a pile next to the bed, as we flop onto it, in a sorta we know what we’re doing and isn’t it a bit sorta ironic way, wry smiles and all, she wants oranges, starts peeling them, eating hungrily, I start to lose all desire for her. I drink more. I play loud music, the palm trees flap in the wind, I have dim memories of a struggle, discovering condoms in the bathroom thankful, her on top, darkness, waking up in the morning surrounded by oranges and peels alone, Eve’s voice on the answering machine, wishing me a happy birthday, a day late.

At around this time, I was walking on Greenmarket Square and handed a flyer for a house party, from a nervous American, whom I would later learn was named Jesse. Jesse was to become my first major impetus to entertain beyond merely creating art; Jesse promoted ideas and made an art of it. I go to the party in Oranjezicht and end up seeing but not entirely meeting all sorts of glamorous people, My abiding memory of the night is standing on the stairs, once again wine in paper cup, looking out at the dance floor, hearing this strange electronic music, this pounding beat, feeling strangely attracted to it all, but in my un hipness, distant from it. I leave feeling disconnected, desperately want to be part of this whole fashionable scene, walking home, a car slows down, “We saw you at the party, do you need a ride”, We end up at Nick’s place or Brendan’s, not sure, drinking whiskey till the bleak darkness breaks, Bodine Hallelujah and his Long Street cowboys.

Phillip returns suddenly, my little sojourn with art supplies and furniture is over. I end up drifting into staying at the YMCA next to the company gardens, while I look for a flat. To supplement my income from my parents of eight hundred rand and an agreed four hundred for rent, I start working as a clothing assistant at Jack Ruby with Brian Dove. To supplement this income we hire street kids to steal car radios from around the square and sell them out of the back room of the store, it does not take long for this to turn from car radios into televisions and finally hiding LSD amongst the shirts, selling the first MDMA to body builders, before long I have another job, selling and buying records second hand on a Saturday from a stall in Greenmarket Square, this is how I encounter my first junkies and learn that selling your stuff is less important that getting your drugs, a lesson I will return to time and time again.

I find a flat in Green Point; I discover that it is only a block from Eve’s house. Below me lives a guy called Kay, flamboyantly gay, long hair, smokes buttons and like dancing, always trying to seduce me. Lonely sometimes he invites me out the one night, gets me hopelessly drunk, tugging at my zip while I am passing out, I manage to start vomiting and he abandons me under the table in a gay bar, limp home, don’t speak to him for a while.

I want to get close to Starlight, I think, but I am in actuality getting close to Eve, I go round to her house, wearing a rosary, infatuated with catholic sex and death rituals as passed onto me via hunt from Morrison, this is how I realize she is Jewish, over a Friday night dinner, embarrassed, tucking in my rosary as Eve giggles. We spend long nights talking about Starlight, it take months and months for me to come anywhere near the realization of what I feel for her. We watch all the lynch movies, Wenders; all of Twin Peaks that we can, twice, Scorsese, my film education is rounded out by this girl. And one other, Nicole Able, who I meet somehow, lives in a big house in Bantry Bay, many books on shelves, many Marilyn Monroe movies, wants to study acting, is vibrant and full of life, Hunt likes her, she supports and tries to help in my efforts to capture Starlight. I take her to all the parties, when the acid and ecstasy start flowing she is two steps behind me guiding me.

Part 3 - 1.28 - Cape Town 1990 - 1991

2010-05-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

Hard as it is too accept, I lived my whole life in these two years and everything since there has been repeat information. Obviously except the now. It is only in hindsight that we see the patterns evolve.

My basement flat. Is under a house on the hill in Greenpoint. The kitchen and shower are recessed into the darkness of the old Victorian basement. The lounge bedroom are pivy to the only mean sunlight. I spend a lot of time on the lawn. There is a single bed. I am to start film school in a few weeks. The people who live in the house upstairs have a daughter, call her Kim, we talk often and one week night I buy cheap wine and we sit on a blanket in the fading light overlooking the bay, talking, holding hands and then kissing into the darkness. Spend many mornings after that at the front door above my window, seeing if she is home. Next time I see her is when she brings her boyfriend home, I feel a bit like a house pet. There was a singular joy of rushing headlong into a new life that evening on the lawn, now I realize it is the old life, in so many ways. Having spent my bus fare on wine and processed food, I now have to hitch to film school.

Which is a disappointment from the get go. Housed in a moldy building and with a library of dog eared books and bad vhs copies of movies already seen, the owner, head lecture of the school, John Hill, proves the maxim, those that cannot do, teach. His partner in the school Nadja, proves the opposite, but she teaches scriptwriting and I have many stories, so I don’t believe I need her.

I want to learn the technical aspects, so I can make my stories live, but I don’t see the obvious, in order to tell stories, you need to know all stories, all the ins and outs, the construction of, for the story is the form. I find myself sinking in anyway. I hitch to the film school on Sundays to use the vhs and Tv to watch films, John the owner is always suffering from last night, wearily lets me in and I watch.

One Sunday I get out in the road, it’s February, the roads are quiet. I cannot get a ride, I walk over the hill from Greenpoint, down to town, to walk through the parade to hitch on the lower freeway. As I reach the top of Strand street I hear a strange mass of noise, buzzing, mingling, people are walking into town from all over, mostly not white people, I reach the parade, even the streets in front of the city hall are choked with people. Thousands, maybe seeming hundreds of thousands, dressed in yellow, green and black, mostly black people, carrying banners, chanting, celebrating, swirling around, eddies of people jubilant, breaking into dance, all facing the city hall, not facing it, hugging each other, generally happy in the moment. I have never seen so many black people in one place. I am shocked there are even that many black people in the whole country. Not just black, but brown, sprinkled with white. I find some white people, ask to find out, what is going on.

Mandela is being released. Today. Mandela? The murderer? Because that’s all that I’ve been told about this name that crops up in graffiti and sometimes the news. Mandela the freedom fighter. Mandela the hero. Now there will be peace. Not on this day, I abandon the idea of watching a film that day, here is a film, in front of me, I allow myself to be drawn into the mass, hours pass, hours of a political education, I am being pulled into conversations, told the history I never knew, given statistics, somehow too young to feel the force of the moment, still nervous of the police helicopters the men in riot gear hovering on the edge of the mass, being told that there is nothing that they can do now, we are too many, the future is ours, all of ours not just theirs.

I am down front, near the steps, the balcony, it’s late afternoon and the news filters through that Mandela is out and making his way here. The crowd bristles, some young guys, my age really, smash through and start looting a bottle store, it’s everything and all the police need, they start firing rubber bullets into the crowd, which in that small part of the crowd, panics, ullates, pushes back, I am caught up, see guys running with whiskey, falling, screaming in pain, I climb somehow into a rubbish bin, the twack of a rubber bullet hitting it’s side and then suddenly, as quick as it began, the crowd surges back and the police stop firing, retreat, by the time I get out of the bin, it is like it never happened and I am shaken by the whole day, leaning nervously against under the balcony when the speeches begin, I feel trapped, trapped, the whole mass of the people pushing on me, eager to be in front pushing, the security police coming down, to help, pull me out, shaken, I go home, not aware of the importance of the moment, miss Mandela and his speech.

1.27 - Goodbye To All That

2010-03-26T06:54:00.000-07:00

The memory is blurry, but somehow I convinced Phillipa to come to my matric dance. I even designed her outfit, out of a red and gold carpet with a chiffon skirt. I myself wore a black silk shirt with dragons on the back and the green sequined flares. There exists a photograph of me and Phillipa standing in the kitchen in Westville, I am proud, young, puffing out my chest, Phillipa looks like she just wants to get it over with. Maybe that is my interpretation. The evening is a rush. Of course by then everyone knows I am in love with Phillipa, but actually I’m crushing on another girl, who happens to be Andrews date, I don’t remember her name, even though he was expelled and not at the school, we managed to get him on the list. I buy a whole lot of daffodils on the way there. We have tequila, I think, or old brown sherry but a lot of it anyway, shout to interrupt the speeches, when the “dancing” starts, I come in from the table we have been placed at in the marquee, far from the action, to try dilute us, in to the main area, climb on a table throw flowers about. We are constantly sneaking through the gaps in the red striped tent to drink more, more, eventually thrown out of and/or leave, stopping to ring the school bell, normally only rung in reverence, loudly, continuously, until the prefects come out and we are running in the mad possibilities of it all into our futures, multiple, split, to join and split, we bundle into the car and race off to drop off Andrews date first, Roxanne maybe, Rosanne? Anyway. We get to her place and there is smoke rising from the, it seems, gearbox, “Gearbox is burning!” I shout, we all tumble out of the car and into a ditch, fully expecting it to explode, Phillipa saying “I left my rose in the car”, me, heroically going to fetch it, gingerly getting into the car, picking the rose off the back and running back to the ditch, Roxanne’s father coming to of the house, looking at us, saying, “It smells like you kids have been driving with the handbrake on”, sheepishly saying goodbye. Goodbye to all that.

The second last real memory of Kevin, chronologically incorrect, is when the Celtic Rumours played at the university, supporting Mango Groove, who at that point in my eyes where an inoffensive pop act. I had just managed to dodge army call up, with a two-year study deferment, Kevin would have to go. My sisters boyfriend, later husband, who I spent most of my life hating and jealous of his suburban ethic, Kevin referred to him as Fat Pig, for his own reasons, was in the crowd. The lead singer of Mango Groove, makes a political statement, she supports the ECC, the End Conscription Campaign, Mark, future brother in law is standing in a bunch of guys, all on study deferments, who start protesting, throwing beer cans. It is a moment of supreme irony for me, avoid beer in cans still to this day, the searing image of men throwing beer cans at a woman, trying to get them out of something that they say they believe in but are avoiding anyway.

1989 ends on December 31^st, as it should, with me, my father and Brandon Botha driving to Cape Town, to begin a life in film. We drive up, through the mountains, then me crossing the Free State for the first time (later discovering it unfree), then dipping into the great desert of the Karoo, ending up staying at a cheap hotel, edgeofthedesert half empty swimming pool, my father drunk in the room at sunset, me and Brandon, still high on a week of parties and marijuana cooking, sitting at the pool until midnight and bar closing, drinking cheap gin umbrella cocktails the desert warmth and the future promise washing over us, swimming lazily and long, my father on the edge of consciousness as we sneak into the room, a beast mumbling, keep quiet, keep quiet.

3.12 The Sudden Pull To Freedom

2010-03-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

Two things happened that sent me toward film. Spielberg’s ET and sneaking into see The Night Porter. ET left me with unwarranted tears, feeing the powers of film’s manipulative force. The Night Porter left me bored and slightly raped, dreams that night of lipstick and leather.

This book, needless to say, is not a credit list of influences or a nod of heads to all that walked through my life. I am trying to explain who I am now, by who I have been, trying to work out my need to explain it. All art is a celebration of loss. Loss of Love, Loss of Innocence. A dictum of everything we have lost and everything we have gained in the losing.

I have told this story before and will tell it again. My father could not understand my love for photography, my need for film, my inability to not write. He was convinced I would take over the family business, his building company. Not that it existed, he was living from job to job, holding onto the house with my mothers salary. After two years in Cape Town, I hitch back home to surprise them, am surprised by the fact that they don’t live in that house anymore, have to get the new residents to give me the new address at one a.m. Loss comes slowly and is then definitive.

I applied to the Cape Town Film and Television School as a last ditch effort. Photography schools, techs, would not take me, I was told that I would have to start at second year and you can’t do that. I was for the first, not boasting (am, really), not the last time, overqualified. The day the fax came through, I heard the phone ring, picked up, pressed start and slowly saw the acceptance form coming through. I called my mother, who’s response was, as I recall, simply to say “We have to break this to your father gently”

Of course he tried to talk me out of it, the mantra, “when are you going to get a real job” was beginning to form. I remember putting the fax, already browning, on top of his, already yellowed, architectural plans for a long since lost project and him trying to convince me. The next morning my mother told me that my father would be leaving for Cape Town to find me a flat. All that was left to me of my adolescence was a matric dance and some goodbyes.

3.11 - Car Crashes, Sequined Pants and Suicide.

2010-02-19T01:35:00.000-08:00

The first of many car crashes occurs days after the matric dance, weeks before I am due to leave town to go study in Cape Town. We are driving the car home to my parents place. Andrew is driving, I am still under the age and anyway haven’t learnt yet. I think we are on acid, something, and I decided to see if we can make the car fly by flapping the doors. I’m not sure how it happens, but Hallucinogenics, the car door is ripped off its hinges, but still hanging on, by something we pass, or passes us. When we get home, we manage to “convince” my mother that the door was open and we caught it on a pole parking. Next night we borrow Dad’s bakkie, smash the windscreen with a mistakenly popped champagne cork.

The first of many run-ins with the police. We are in the back of some truck, having hitched a ride. It’s 1988 and we are not so aware, so we don’t realize that getting a ride with two black men might be a problem for white boys. The cops pull us over, one of us starts to freak out, he has a matchbox of marijuana on him, the truck is enclosed there is no way to throw it out. The yellow cop van is idling right behind us. No escape. For some, goodness knows what, reason the police give us a cursory search, find the match book, spill out it’s contents and drive off. The guys giving us the lift, drive off, turn the corner, order us out. It’s too dangerous. For them, we are not a concern.

1.26

There was a club we would go to, played the early parts of dance music, was in an apartment building in Point Road, started sneaking in at 16, place called 330, it grew as we got older, taking over other floors, swapping staircases, getting into commercial house, but in my earliest experience, we had to pretend to be eighteen and gay to get in. Dancing in the pounding strobe and hanging out in the women’s cloak rooms, watching the older patrons line up to get to the toilet. Whole evenings spent, sitting on the floor, with only an occasional dash to the dance-floor to throw ourselves about under the hard strobe to New Order.

A fire drill one night, I am wearing my green sequined flares. We are all standing on the pavement. Suddenly the profusion of police means it’s not a fire drill, it’s a raid. Drug dogs everywhere. Somebody says, “I thought there was a fire”, Nicky O says, “It’s Roger’s pants that need to be on fire”.

I will remember this moment later when I am vomiting after spilling amyl nitrate on myself in Nicky’s squat in Brixton (London, Not JHB) three years later, everyone mooning about Smashing Pumpkins, me vomiting up my only meal for days, dry take away chips. Wanting to just go home with Eve, who is not consoling me, just wanting to go home, me not having a home but a bedsit, Eve, meaning her mothers house, me seeing the whole affair falling apart. Feeling self righteous in my vomit, not realizing, how wrong I had been.

5.3

Essentially there were five of us in that art class who were pushing forward, whether we were any good is a question for a later debate. Besides us gang of four, there was Bryce Gordon. Bryce was a pasty faced, greasy haired, pimply, biting sense of humour guy who painted De Chicero derivatives with technical aplomb. No matter how we tried, we couldn’t get him to join in, come out with us, anything.

In matric Bryce Gordon won the Art Prize, something we had all secretly desired but had claimed we wouldn’t receive on Dadaist grounds. He had won it the year before as well and on the evening of it’s announcement and presentation we all showed up at the school, lint free uniforms, all hoping it would be us. The award is announced and the principal stupefied by the fact that Gordon is simply not there. He did not show up. It wasn’t on any other grounds, as it simply meant nothing to him. It held us in awe. But Bryce didn’t care for other reasons.

After Matric exams, the news reaches us. Bryce and his whole family have committed group suicide. They got into the family car together, with the dogs and gassed themselves, all of them. It seems they had applied to immigrate to America and had simply been waiting for Bryce’s matric results which, although the top of the class, had obviously failed to raise whatever profile the family had in the eyes of emigration. A whole family gets into a car with the dogs. Mother, Father, Brother, Sister and agree to end their own lives. It cannot have been an instant decision, rather something that took place over a long amount of time and disappointment and frustration. I think now back to the existential gesture of refusing to, but actual being one of resignation, knowing it’s no longer important to, receive the art prize. The many times we tried to get Bryce to go out with us, teased him for not, the disdain he showed, all exterior signs of large responsibility and in the end signs of defeat. They simply could not live here anymore.

5.3 Oil and Water

2009-11-04T03:01:00.000-08:00

5.3

I will bring this up not because I want to flood you with self indulgent detail, these things come into force later. I promise to leave out the irrelevant, I promise not to tell you any stories.

We used to have these little get togethers at my parents house. It was a big double story house in the suburbs, with a lower half exposed storage basement thing just near the pool, out of view, under the main house, opposite side to my parents room, shielded by the servants quarters. Yes, before my father sold it all for liquor, we were rich. There was a big liquor cabinet, old French oak, well stocked. I used to pour my parents drinks before Hill Street Blues started (and in every ad break) so I knew where the key was. Side Note, by the time we got to A-Team my mother had cut back to Cola Tonic and Lemonade and my father doubled to whiskey doubles. So My friends would come over and my parents woulde that, get drinks.

By this stage, I was courting the popular. ID3 had changed name to Jack Ruby. One of the models was this coloured boy, Brian Dove. I kept inviting him to these things, he lived too far away he said. I hadn’t put together that he could not come into a white area at night.

One night, we are drinking, at school, in the dark room, we have discovered glue, someone comes up with the bright idea to go to our store room, see if we have any. Fucked out of our little heads. We collapse the shelves, my father too drunk to come out then, but from there on, whenever I have people over, he positions himself on the verandah, bottle in hand, looking for trouble.

My seventeenth birthday. I invite all the popular people over. It’s a day time thing around the pool. At the back, come down the drive, around the back steps, don’t bother about knocking. Brian can come, it being day. Before sunset, figuring other people not coming we decide to go to Melanie and Marks place and then to a movie. We leave my father on the verandah.

Brian arrives just before sunset. He pulls up with his brother, not sure of the house, which one, that is. They sit in the car and look at it, do not in the semi darkness of the veranda see my father. Brian follows my instructions. He goes down the drive way, avoids the front entrance, sees the side gate, tries it, we have bolted it, not locked, he gets it open, saunters toward the pool.

My father on the veranda sees a car pull up with two coloured youngsters. They survey the house. One of them gets out and slinks down the driveway, plainly avoiding the front of the house, going furtively around the side of the house. He calls to my mother, sends her round the back, calls the police, goes round to the side gate.

All I know is what is reported to me after. I am at Mark Collins flat, we have had a little to drink, the movie is later, we are descending into procrastination. Hours after Sunset we are about to go to the City. As we leave my father arrives with friends of his, worried for my life, carrying cricket bats. Some black bastards have tried to rob the house, and they knew my name, how did I know these people. These people. My mother is in hospital, it seems brian has slapped or punched her. Even in the court case that was to drag out, I never found out the full truth.

A year later, working in the Cape Town branch of Jack Ruby, while at film school, working with Brian Dove, we would have to take days off at the same time to fly back to Durban to attend the court case.

Satanism, Scabanti, Shame.

2009-09-04T23:51:00.000-07:00

1.25

In Standard Nine. 1988, I am expelled for Satanism. For 2 days, until my father makes a deal, makes them take me back for a caning, six of the best, then spends the evening with my grandmother’s sewing kit making me a pair of underpants padded.

I wrote an ironic essay on the basic hypocrisy of Christianity. Including local examples, the younger Religious education teacher, married, who we had spotted kissing a maths teacher by the wood work room, we thought, my cousin Terry, Christian guitarist with too much happiness for my liking at that point, some preacher caught “Fucking a Whore” as I, bad mistake, profanity, destroying my argument, put it. Early signs of my predilection for always striking to close to home. The essay was theoretical, realized then that I couldn’t hand it in, left it on my desk, someone else did for me. Early signs of self sabotage.

Let me say this now, as I have said before and said again. I know my father, my mother loved me, I know my father did, was human, struggled to express these things, none of what followed is his fault, really, really not. But then I felt the gap. Thought I had created it, acted like I didn’t care, for reasons still unknown to me.

4.6

When compiling the memories I felt I should explore it came to my recall the story of Jimmy Scabanti. Now when it comes to the moment that I must write this memory down, I find it dim around the edges. Something to do with Kevin and a fight at school, getting home late or detention, clearly it was Kevin’s fault but I could not blame him, at them moment of truth before my parents I blurted out “It was Jimmy Scabanti”, who I then proceeded to describe as an Italian boy from “the wrong side of the tracks”, Scabanti was mean, but through no fault of his own, his father had abandoned his abusive and crippled mother and so on, he was the perfect scapegoat. Soon the legend of Jimmy Scabanti grew, Kevin and I used him for any situation we need to. Dirty school clothes? Fight with Jimmy Scabanti. Out of pocket money? Bought food for the Scabanti family. Need to go to the sports club disco? Must help Jimmy with his homework and boy, is he stupid, it might take all night,

But Scabanti grew out of our control, others started to use him too, and parents do talk, soon there were conflicting reports of the nature of the Scabanti family doing the rounds and one morning after Kevin and I had been out separately and presented different Scrabanti-isms, his parents, mine and another set were talking at the local takeaway, compared notes and came home determined to finally have a talking to Jimmy Scabanti’s mother. We could not produce her. The artifice collapsed. For years afterward anytime anything couldn’t be explained, Kevin would blame it on Scabanti.

2.01

Just after Christmas, my parents are away. Amanda and I are alone in the house. I think, there may have been a party, there may have been other people, but we are in my bedroom, fumbling. It was not how it should have been, this was before the break up of course. I am poking around in her panties, feeling proud that I have finally got this far and ashamed at myself for not loving her. I feel dirty for lying and giddy with power, the contradiction in feelings puts me in an unknown, indefinable place. It’s not so much that I enjoy being caught between the two, but that I know I can never fully understand it. The feeling does not last for long, the power and lust take over momentarily and then I am flooded with shame.

3.10 Phillipa & Amanda

2009-09-02T00:37:00.000-07:00

3.10

There were two girls. One I tortured myself with teen love for, one I ended up with. Let’s invoke that literary cliché and say, Let’s call them Phillipa and Amanda. They can correct me if I am wrong in doing this, saying this.

I wrote a seventy-two page poem for Phillipa, I was 16, she probably younger. I told her she could only read it in the distance, when she was twenty one. I was young, I was foolish. I fell for Phillipa, deeply, out of some literary duty to being a teen, isolated, emo in a blazer. The Smiths to blame for my unrequited love fantasy. I can’t quite recall how it happened, Phillip O was friends with a girl, or seeing a girl called Simone, or was he seeing Maxine? Anyway. Philip was in the art class with me, a surfer, wanted to be, ended up, an architect, with Maxine, I think, point is, he was cool. In that he got girls, had a crude surfers humour (Body Boarder, whatever, this distinction reduced them to nerds in the end), but was aloof and educated. Unlike Phillip Hunt, Hunt the Cunt as, I couldn’t understand, they called him, I didn’t want to be like Phillip O, I just wanted to understand what made him so attractive to women. They displayed their brand of toilet humour openly forever homoerotically, scatologically, pissing and shiting in each others board bags, vomiting, fucking each others girlfriends, getting changed together, all that crap so enhanced by my, via Morrissey, discovery of Oscar Wilde and my, via Hunt, my discovery of Genet. Lost Track.

Phillipa Green.
Spring, Summer, Phillipa Green, do you like Ice Cream?
Was the first line in the long adolescent ramble, I spent nights walking the long distance hitching, cadging rides, sleeping in the park once, to just pop over, was in the area kind of visit, using the older sister, via Philip to see Phillipa. Olive skin’d little Phil, round faced beauty of an adolescent fantasy, long neck, eye lashes, sharp words, don’t even think about it attitude.

That’s it. Phillip was seeing Tracy, Simone’s friend, Maxine’s friend, carry on.

Phillipa would come out to the under 18 nights at Nello’s, I’d stand around on the edge of the crowd, looking up at Hunt, standing next to Frankie, who was looking up at Hunt, next to Pseudo, who was looking up at Frankie, next to Russell who was copying Pseudo by looking up at Frankie, in our blazers and crazy ties and socks, Goss, hovering around skirting between fashion and surf and girls, us watching the fashion, the tide of girls, only Hunt and Frankie having access, being older, Frankie maintaining an Ironic Kerouac distance, Hunt, wanting to fuck them all and Fuck them All, talking about Rimbaud and me looking at Phillipa, talking to Surfers and over eighteen guys and all this around me and desperately wanting her, desperately on the road outside the eighties neon nightclub with the dancing cages and the Stock Aitkin and Waterman, and the cars slowing down, Umbilo boys shouting insults, calling us bum boys, Hunt, saying under his breath, just because they want some, to shock us, it registering but me, holding on to my Dorian Grey, wanting little Phil. It could only end badly. I mean, I was typing out a minor work of poetry on my spectrum, with my dot matrix printer.

Phillipa had a friend, a ball of Jewish energy. Oh, did I mention that all these girls were Jewish, all my early life all friends female all girlfriends Jewish, me hankering after my supposed heritage. Ananda. I called her Amanda because I was a WASP, simple. Somehow we end up, “going out” I think I had to actually ask her to be my girlfriend before I kissed her, I just wanted to kiss her, so I asked her to be my girlfriend. Kissed her on the beachfront at night on a hill, by the Tropicana hotel (later to return to this hotel for a drug deal and binge and failure) all lit up in yellow and green neon, feeling deliriously high, wandering through the promenade crowds, holding hands and saying nothing, wandering through the hotel lobby, watching the magician slash lounge pianist, through the crowds at Basement, floating did I say, floating, in the joy of the fact that I had worked out how to kiss girls, you asked them, they would always answer, even if the question wasn’t always plain, the answer either.

Phil seemed really happy for me. Hunt thought I was mad. We were standing in the LA hotel outside the door to the main dance floor club, across from the beer garden concrete, maintaining an ironic distance, him in cowboy boots, white Levi’s, red felt blazer, corduroy waistcoat, pocket chain, black shirt, long hair, black cowboy hat bad guy style, me in brown waistcoat made from floral upholstery, suede jarmins from Grey St, red dyed jeans, white shirt, so on, both books in our pocket, actually there to check out girls we couldn’t have, but could shock by quoting obscure French poets in their oxford translations. Hunt scared people, girls, girls pitied me when I tried the same moves, Hunt fascinated me, he had been a fashion model, now working as a photographer for a new fashion magazine and a trendy shop in town called ID3 where we would all hang out and pretend to know Mark Collins the model who owned it with Glady, try talk to Melanie, the girlfriend, who I was to later develop a crush on. Drink Horlicks and Honey milkshakes in the arcade.

Standing in the LA hotel, I tell Hunt about Ananda, he plainly says to me, have you slept with her yet, no have you fucked her. I’m 16, He’s 19, maybe. I am mortified. I know I should have. He says, you better, before she discovers that you’re in love with Green. I will not describe the distance or fumbling that took place on the blue embroidered bed cover that New Year eve. The drinking of gin from belly buttons, forced romantic that would haunt me. It felt like conquest, knew in the instant after, it was defeat.

I tried to maintain the relationship with Amanda. Eventually, I think it was her who said, why don’t you just break up with me. Why do we actually have to say it, I thought, isn’t it embarrassing enough. Said, Will you break up with me? No, you need to say you’re breaking up with me. Okay, I’m breaking up with you. Little Phil was not actually horrified, more dismayed, in a kind of, I thought I’d gotten rid of him kinda way. I will spare you the details of all the crushes that came after, always Lolita obsessed, Gina, Tarryn, even though not old enough, me. Always brown or olive, tanned, dark hair. Every little fucking obsession could be an entire novel, every day. But this is not a diatribe on teen love. I am taking you somewhere. My editor promises me, this all has a final point, a resting place, a moment for reflection, a final shucking off of stories, lies, a moment of truth. Promise.

1.15 - Embryos

2009-08-13T01:36:00.000-07:00

1.15

In my early adolescence I attempt to write my first of many unfinished books. This one is based on reading too much Thom Wolfe, listening to too much The Doors and wanting to take acid badly.
The genesis of it was La Honda, Kesey’s farms name, became my hero Nathan Zeno’s hometown, near the city of Ergot, like a Smallville Metropolis relationship. Nathan Zeno was a superhero who wore green sequined flares. It was filled with Pow!’s and Ta-dah!’s of writing style and is, thank heaven, lost.
But Nathan was to follow me.

5.2

"The machine does not understand the flesh"
Seth Brundle/Brundlefly in Cronenburg's "The Fly"

You have read many poetic descriptions by now, in your life, of chemical processes. Some of photography. I cannot do that analogue magic justice. I can deride digital, but this is not the point. Film is always light, it is never broken down into numbers. This is the first thing to remember in any comparison. Film means you cannot immediately preview, so you must know what you are after. Film means you only have 12, 24 or 36 shots, per roll and that you better know what you are after. Film being chemical and always light, means that what you get will be a sum of the two added to what you thought you were after, it will always be other than what you expected and at the same time exactly what you knew you where after. Or only know now. I cannot speak to digital, it has it's own advantages, none of which I am versed in.

I am versed in silver halides and sepia tones, C41 and E6, 127 mm prime lenses and leaf shutters. I know to cross process and the colour temperatures of light, I can read f-stop off the back of my hand and rely on no metering or automatic camera adjustments. Though shooting photographs I have come to know light, but not understand it. Knowing only that it cannot be grasped, nor contained. I have come to love light and find and draw out its small motes in shadows. I can see light in the biggest of darknesses and find shadow in blinding light. I over expose, I under expose, I revel in CIBA chrome paper and gelatin prints. Long hours in labs and darkrooms talking with technicians, myself sometimes that technician, finding a particular aspect and working ways, to without disturbing that natural order of light, enhance, reveal. I can hide with light and show with light, I can ring in darkness. I can be darkness. The astringent smell of the stop bath. The girlfriend adjusting her hip in the fading sun. dew drops on my lovers navel in the morning. My fiancée’s ass in see through panties. The crackhead on the corner, the whore whose soul I trapped and paid for. Joy at festivals, despair in war, my eyes have seen it, through the eye in my camera I have seen it again, different, refracted off my brain.

Photography is not memory. It never happened quite the way a photograph sees it. In its infancy especially but also beyond, there were proponents of film that believed somehow the chemical interaction with light revealed things invisible to the naked eye onto the photographic negative. Photography was used to track ghosts, capture fairies, find under sea monsters. Photography is myth making, celebrity in all it forms. Photography is another life revealed, a heart broken is so many different ways. I learnt things about peoples souls through photography that would have not otherwise have been revealed to me.

I have been told that I "have an eye" yet myself have always believed that my choice of camera and film stock is the only decision of framing and light I can make, the camera, the light direct me, the spirit captured on the film, is a guiding force. In all my times of emotional prosperity, I was holding a camera, looking at everything refracted in different ways.

3.8

As a teen, I was a classist, an arrogant son of a bitch who believed you could tell a man, by his shoes, the cut of his clothes, I mean, you can, but not in the ways I thought. I had French Vogue's, Blitz magazines, loved fashion, Oscar Wilde, dressed and believed in the Modern Dandy and Decadence. The other was not a concern; don't know how conscious I was. Carried these things into my twenties.

As my record collection grew, so did my reputation as a teen DJ and my popularity at parties. Maybe I only ever did five or ten, but they felt like an occupation. I consulted with Gordy, the DJ at Basement, with other DJ's at other clubs on the spur of the moment. Can you see? I am acquiring a swagger.

At Basement discovered public embarrassment when I insisted Gordy play a bootleg copy of George Michael’s "Faith" video on the big screen sent to me by Fiona (I think) and the sound quality so bad that it was mere fuzz. Gordy, Tertius, all faces looking at me.

This social advancement led from 6D through Richard Power to Guy Duncan, Phillip O, The North Beach Crowd, Rod Harries, Brad Anderson, watching the boogie boarders spit on each other upstairs at North Pier my pants on embarrassingly too tight, loving The Smiths, feeling superior not being got. Andrew egging me on in TD to hit that boy with the T square constantly. That boy later hanging himself.

Masturbating to the picture of Wendy Oldfield on the Sweatband album cover, thinking that song "This Boy’s gonna get there” was about me. In all ways imaginable.

Shopping in Grey street for Blazers and Tie's trying to emulate the older boys, The Tony Goss's the Colin Frankie's and the Phillip Hunts. Having Pseudo Sutic and Russell Van der V, follow my predilection for carrying Oscar Wild books to nightclubs, Dean preferred On The Road, never went on the road, whatever. Russell and me both crushing on a girl called Kathryn, who had an older boyfriend. Afternoons in her flat, she was out of school, how did we find her? Photographing her in a stream in the Drakensburg, amazed by the black hairs on her stomach, her cat like eyes.

Fell deeply for a girl called Helene, who Russell later got, was jealous but all of these, Maxine included were mere precursors to Phillip Hunt, Phillipa Green and Brian Dove. All my misconceptions and convictions’ stem from here.

3.7 - From Art to Ash

2009-07-21T04:17:00.000-07:00

Somehow we fooled them. This was my making, essential part of my making, we had freedom unparalleled in art class at school. I am repeating here, but somehow my Art teacher, Paul Litchkus, I think used us a rebellion.

In the eighties cultural expression, dissemination of cultural expression, reading of anything outside of the expression of Calvinist values was just not allowed, actually to the point of being banned, you could be thrown in jail indeterminable for showing a child the works of P J O Rouke, and that man was a Republican chrissake.

Litchkus told us about bizarre architectural concepts, dada-ism. We threw obscure pots, made large sculptures that fooled teachers. Hermanides, Adrian. Ohlmsdahl, Philip. Botha, Brandon. Joubert, Mark. Geniuses all, that I followed, into abstract photostats of photographs degraded in strange chemicals, good for breathing and processing, film and thoughts. More than this. we were allowed to run rampant. we would file an essay on the essential art nature of all things and then dress a standard six as Cindy Crawford and parade him through the Religious Education Class. We would dress up in spools of rubber hosing and run through the school during maths class singing, “home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play.” We ended up, all our valid works in an exhibition on the value of art in schools, at the Playhouse, essentially our provincial state theatre, first taste of rock stardom.

1.24

“for we posses nothing certainly except the past”

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED _ Evelyn Waugh

My dad had a habit of repeating stories, forgetting who he had told what to, As a teen this was not a problem for me, as i got older and his drinking increased, his stories becoming less consistent, a true problem emerged. He would tell you not only the same story twice in a a day, but in that day, in two different ways

First off, I do not wish to set myself apart, we all have exceptional childhoods, wonder-filled adolescence. This is just mine. Except I heard it told so many times, with so many different details that i wonder still sometimes what did i really do, as a teen. And further more what of my families history is to be believed. It is the slow realization that the facts don't really matter that allows me to tell you this, that will lead to me repeating myself, telling the same stories in different ways, for different reasons. My fathers was alcoholic memory loss, mine is simply that in the advance of time and through the many natural and or manufactured chemicals that have passed through my brain, I see refracted below the surface of things, many ways of remembering. Memory, the past is nothing. We do not hold onto it in any real way. These recollections of mine, will pass away. In a year from now you will only have a selective memory of what you have read, this process is more for me than you.

Here. Try this. Take the preceding page of this book. Tear it out. Now. Yes, actually do it, tear out the preceding page. Yes. Of this very book that you are holding. Take it in your thumb and forefinger and rip it from the book.

Now, fetch a match, a lighter or turn on the toaster or oven, or ask the library assistant for a match, a lighter, there that fellow crossing the parking lot. Hold up the page. Okay, Have you ripped out the page? Do you have a source of fire? Don't be shy. After all it's your book, you own it. or at least borrowed it (if you borrowed it, check the page numbers, see if any pages have been ripped out, if so, think, was the narrative interrupted, did i notice) but anyway Rip Out a Page. Get fire. Now do this, you will have to put the book down to do so so read on for a bit. You will now put the book down. Then you will hold the page aloft, set it on fire and hold it for as long as you can until you have to release it's remnants into the breeze. Yes, burn my words, I'm telling you. do it now, seriously. Put down the book, burn the page. If you're shy, burn just the title page, pick a page, any page. put down the book and burn the page, holding it aloft, letting the remnants go into the wind.

There. That is memory. does it matter that the exact sequence of events on that page are no longer accessible to you? You will be able to recount a smattering, embroider, somehow convey what you gleaned from that page, but ultimately like our lives, that memory those precise facts is just ash in the wind. this is no small relief.

2.6 - Vern, Lauren, Fiona

2009-07-19T02:46:00.000-07:00

“you gave me a can of red spray paint & told me to spray 'celtic rumours' on the bridge. when we got down there, there were too many cars passing by to write out such a long name ... we did some anarchy signs (they were there for years) and went back to the church. you were so pissed that i'd let you down”

Fiona Thomson First Love #2

But before I was inducted into The Basement, in the trailing off of church, after Vern left I transferred my young love onto one of her friends and one of my confidants, Lauren. I transferred my confidence and friendship onto Lauren’s friend Fiona; the dark little Goth. Lauren had a friend Lisa. Soon I would transfer the crush to Fiona and the confidence to Lisa. There were hours on the phone.

Lauren was the archetypal pretty blond, except looking back on pictures from the time, she was not. But the attraction was her popularity. How did one create that from scratch? Anyway, not important, Lauren was not important; she could not even make me cry, after Vern I thought I would never cry again. Fiona was an infinite black loss that was only formed long after she was gone. She was an ache while she was around a dull thud in my pants that was totally out of sync with the fact that everything about her, according to my standards of the time should have revolted me, but didn’t. She was skinny and smoked cigarettes, pimply, somehow greasy; she was more a boy than a girl, physically and mentally. He arguments against religion and for bands like The Cure were far more convincing than anything Vern had or could thrown down, she fascinated me in the same way road kill was to later. When I visited her I preferred to sit outside, but was inexplicably drawn into the chaos of her room. She never took no shit from no one, she was cool. Beyond popular. All those boys I wanted to be in with mattered nothing around her, with them it was how many records you had, with her it was what records you had, and what songs you preferred and what did you prefer about that song. She had an obviously insular familiar childhood; she had delved into Deep Thought. Wanting her seemed absurd. Like how could she be desirable? But I wanted to see what it was like; I sensed layers of tenderness when the Laurens of the world would only yield up one happy face and no secrets. Fiona was secrets, things hidden from me by the world until then. I made black mix tapes for her and never gave them. I only knew what I had lost once it was gone, obviously.

How did I lose her. I can’t really say. She went to England with her parents, she never really came back. She was around. I saw her once or twice. But I had fucked it up before with the same lack of courage that was to dog me until I later discovered that having money was confidence (discovering this was an incremental step toward my eventual destruction). Fiona made dangerous emotions natural, she made death seem inconsequential, some how in her hard-shell sweetness she engrained in my romantic nature, into my desire to save my self for The One (There was always a The One) the underlying notion that sweetness and light was not for me, mystery, layers, Fiona introduced me to duality, I am grateful to her for opening up the doorway toward my eventual collapse, for duality is an easy way out of the complex natures of humans. But we were young, we were foolish. We didn’t know what we were thinking.

Years later when I lost my virginity. On Phillip Hunt’s bed to a fat goth. On the way from the party to the bed, I kept looking at this vacuous pile of flesh, arm out the window like a truck driver, thinking about Fiona, how unlike Fiona this was going to be. How unlike Fiona anything was.

1.23 Apartheid and Trenchcoats

2009-06-29T11:59:00.000-07:00

1.23

We say that as kids we knew nothing about apartheid. But an attitude was passed down that even at the age of fifteen was confusing in that it evoked feelings of power and feelings of shame. The blacks were subhuman (only later becoming human when I saw them en masse. When I saw them bleed), they were other. Sub. Shack dwellers. I struggled to understand because they seemed human. Kind even, not like my kind. They led the horses at the hotels, The Oaks, Dragon’s peak, they cleaned the fire places. They cooked. Esme our maid was that. She inspired fear in me, was the one who had, I’ve been told changed my nappies, fed us, made us do our homework and yet she was below us. She was dismissed for theft. Later my father said that she was dismissed because he just didn’t like the look of her. We received a new maid, a “girl”, she was probably around twenty. And I taunted her.

What they fuck must she have thought? But I simply did not regard her as anything other than clockwork. We were told that she was just to cook and clean and did not have the authority Esme had had, we were told to distrust her. I thought she was quite pretty. I thought of all the westerns I had read, stories of John Smith and Pocahontas, “The Searchers”, and I was the wise benevolent white man. She would marvel at my attentions. She had to, she worked for us. I had these thoughts, I acted on them, so I could not have been ignorant of Apartheid. Maybe I didn’t understand the scope and range, but I understood that no matter what I did, if she said anything she would be dismissed, and Blacks needed jobs, right? So.

It must have lasted 2 weeks. My father had this trench coat, his dad’s from world war two. It was a heavy item and I would only wear it out to clubs in mid winter, it was a very “Alternative” accoutrement, I had a thing for embroidered badges, saved up for them, put them on my shorts. Anyway. I would go swimming down by the pool and instead of a towel I would take the trench coat. I would swim naked, masturbate furiously in the pool and then put on only the trench coat, it had a natural way of closing itself, and I had to contrive with the back cross strap to keep it ever so slightly open, so that my young erect cock would stick out. And I dripping wet, erect would go into the kitchen and make a sandwich. What I expected to achieve I cannot tell you. What was thrilling was her lack of recourse. Her total immutability, she could not afford to lose this job. I took to just coming home from school and not even bothering with the swimming. Strip, put on the trench coat, in weather that made you sweat if you thought about it, and pass through the kitchen. I don’t remember that women’s name and neither does anyone in my family, she up and left after quite a few weeks of this sexual harassment, this debasement, this fascism. Before she did that, she came across me walking down the stairs from my sisters TV room place and looking straight at my penis said something like “Why do you keep bothering me with that thing”, This was the first thing she had ever said to me. I never tried it again. But she quit anyway, she had become pregnant and although the baby was months off, my father had been instructed to get that young woman as far away from here as possible and make her sign something so she won’t come back.

It would be easy to say we voted PFP and that my parents were opposed to the whole system. To say that I knew nothing about it, that I was just a kid, but whether I was willing or not, I too lived off of the spoils of this war. My parents were never so wealthy again after Mandela came out.

3.6 - Westville Methodist Church.

2009-05-08T05:15:00.000-07:00

3.6

Westville Methodist Church. That place has a lot to answer for. Like most churches. Anyway, it’s me that’s got to answer. It happened as I remember like this. I had, through my newspaper route, my pocket money and birthdays, accumulated at lot of records. I was going to church youth groups and the church always needed to raise money. There were boys at school who girls wanted to be around, the girls at youth group didn’t want to be around me. I wanted to be around those boys. Through Guy Duncan, I met Andrew Guilfoyle, who was popular because he had been expelled or something from another school and liked Depeche Mode, Andrew was friends with Warren Hickey, who was popular because his dad was rich and bought him lots of records from his overseas trips, records that I could not get my hands on, limited editions, coloured vinyl stuff like that, gatefolds, music magazines less than a month old (Smash Hits came in 2 months after the fact at CNA where I had a standing order along with MAD magazine, before magazines were published here, it took 2 months because they had to pass through the censor, sometimes an edition would not appear). I wanted to impress these boys, be allowed into their inner circle. I don’t know how I came to do it but I decided to throw a disco at the church recreation hall. I made a hand written sign. One. And put it up on the school notice board. I looked in the phone book found a mobile DJ booth to hire. Lights. I paid for it all. The church organised refreshments. Remember I was Fifteen (eternally fifteen it would seem, later I am eternally 28 or 32 or 25, you will see). And people came. It worked. I slowly worked my way into the circle. The other thing I had to offer was the school darkroom, I had the keys, Prefects weren’t allowed in because I might be developing, I could skip assembly because I might be developing, if anyone wanted to cut class, they hid in there, smoking cigarettes by the ventilator. Later when prefects demanded to inspect, I would say sure, but refuse to turn anything but the red safe light on. Everyone hid in the equipment cupboards, the prefects never thought to look, stumbling in the darkness. We experimented with typex thinners in the dark, all kinds of darkroom chemicals. I threw another disco. More people turned up, I split the profits with the church. bought more records. Andrew invited me to go to a club with him called The Basement, it was an under 18’s club in Durban, then far from suburban Westville, now on the same freeways it’s only fifteen minutes. I skipped youth group, lied to my mother about sleeping over somewhere and me and Andrew hitched into town. Finally I was in.

No. Omit is wrong. Condense. These are not all my true experiences. Not what really happened. That is incommunicable. I can give you remembered shards. Like the list that stretches below. The rest of this book. Now it is a list, later it will be paragraphs, parts. And there are certain memories that I will blend two into one to communicate an emotional truth, maybe I’m rushing this, so much to cover, but when you read it too, you will rush, skipping words, bits, here and then. So maybe try this. I will give you a phrase. Consider it, consider everything that had to come together to make that phrase. His first pet. What kind of pet was it. Who chose it. Where. How. How did he receive it. Who was he. Who is he now. Is he still he, is he she, is he dead. The pet being the first, implying others must be dead. Buried where. But that is after think of the before. How did he receive it. In a box. Bounding out the car. In a cage. With joy. With sadness. I had a hamster, called Hammy, it lived with another hamster whose name I forgot and anyway died. Later when we discovered that Hammy was pregnant, we rename her, Mother Hamster. Mother Hamster got cancer or a tumor and died, after we had given the babies away. I was at someone’s house, my mother picked me up, driving me home told me that Mother Hamster had died, I knew she’s had him killed. I recall her telling me this on the street where she had once run over a cyclist who had darted into the road. All I ask is that knowing these memories are amalgamations, you consider them. Occasionally while you skip through my life like so much television.

(I am singing now to some unnamed entity. It might be a girl, a bungie jump or a god.)

So then. When I got to the basement it blew my little mind wide open. Well partially open. There was a huge queue which I had to stand in. Andrew said wait here and disappeared. I waited. Hickey and Andrew walked past me and went inside. It took me another 30 minutes to get in and pay the ten or twenty rond. An there was this cavern so different from the mass in the rec hall, but so much the same full of people. But darker, more adult.

I was young and my time at the basement was a blur and a backdrop, soon we were moving on to Play @ C.A.W., Nello’s, Ronnie’s (if we had fake I.D.’s) and spasms, where through Depeche mode and New Order I discovered, dance music.

Somehow I ended up working as a barman there and at this point I’d never kissed a girl. It was an under 18’s club so no alcohol. But I kept some in a fridge in the storeroom, for the Boss, Tertius, occasionally I’d bring in extra and sell them, under the counter, to Andrew and Warren. I wanted to impress them. Tertius was short and fat and wonderful, friendly funny and with a mean temper. I had played DJ at the church thing, so DJ was where I was aiming then, I started to lend Gordy the resident DJ some of my best new music.

Eventually once my mom accepted that I was obviously not sleeping out at friend’s places if I got home at 4 in the morning. After the basement me and Andrew and some other would go elsewhere, Like Play, at community arts workshop, a Goth alternative thing that played way better music than The Basement. Sometimes it was Nello’s. By that stage I had met Tony Goss and Colin Frankie. Tony was our age and hung out with the north beach crowd a vulgar lot that I wanted desperately to be accepted by. Colin was out of school and a male model. He was well dressed. A trendy he was called, I aspired to that, I started to care about how I looked, dress up, carry a copy of “Dorian Gray” in my back pocket. There were other Russell van der Westerhuzen had the same aspirations, Basil, their friend Dean. And while Russell and Dean and I hung out under Colin and Tony’s shadow, there was something Genuine about Russ, something distinctly pseudo about Dean Sutic.

Colin Frankie had been shot for the clothing catalogues for a local shop called I.D.3. The photographer was Phillip Hunt. They all dressed incredible well and I wanted to be just like them, I started to invest more money in clothes, spend more time reading Vogues than books, as I was leaning photography at school I was discovering fashion and fashion photography, Phillip was a working Fashion photographer, six foot something, skinny, dressed like a cowboy on acid. Here, I thought, was a teacher.

But that was later. It got to the point where my mother couldn’t stop me going out, so she insisted she pick me up. In that embarrassed teenage way, I always had her meet me round the corner. On one of the first or second nights of this, she parked up the road and to my teenage embarrassment, we had to drive past the club, everyone outside as it was closing time. There had been this girl earlier talking to me, Michelle, and someone this had offended this guy, who I’d never seen before. As the car rolled slowly past the club, he gave me the finger. Instinctively I reacted, quickly pumping rolling down the window shouted, “Yeah, well go fuck yourself too”, or something like that, I then turned to my mother and said, “Sorry about that.”

The following Friday as I arrived at The Basement, Michelle was standing there, and there was this guy. Andrew was standing off somewhere out of sight and this guy comes up to me, giving me the whole "that’s my girlfriend speech". I didn’t have anything to say. Then the fucker slapped me. Hard. And I knew from experience, from being a fat nerd, to not move. He screamed some more and hit me again. I shrugged and walked off, to go down into the club, leaving him screaming after me, it happened like in a dream. And Michelle followed me down.

That night, I kissed my first girl, with tongue, to Cinema’s “My Kind of Girl”, on the dance floor. Gordy stopped the music and Andrew and warren applauded. Seriously. I felt like I had arrived. I worked in a hip nightclub, I had “won” a fight, the cool guys liked me and I had a girlfriend.

Later that night Warren bought me a beer, I grabbed it and drank lustily. It wasn’t beer, Warren and The North Beach guys had filled the bottle with piss.

Then I discovered that everyone had fucked Michelle, I realized the clapping had been ironic. And she wouldn’t leave me alone, then she told me that she was 23 and I was her boyfriend now, so I mustn’t talk to other girls. And most of my real friends were girls. I left the club that night with a gnawing sense of horror; I was to report to Michelle’s house the next afternoon, to meet her brothers.

5.1 - Images

2009-04-26T05:15:00.000-07:00

5.1

Photography. It began as an accident. Like this. Remember the me being a nerd stuff. Well in the school system in standard 7 you have to choose your subjects for your last three years. I’d had an I.Q. test and was meant to be a genius but already for std 7 I’d opted out of Latin, for accountancy, which meant I wasn’t going to be a lawyer. That was fine with my Dad, he wanted for me to take over the family business, which was his little building company, ManRodge Enterprises (Get it Mandy and Roger, he even had this silly brass plaque in front of the house in Westville. Have I told you about the house? We had big avo tree, my dad made me climb it and then go up and down the street giving the avo’s away to the neighbors. My dad would bring shit home, like you know, appliances and if we asked where he got it he would say “I acquired it”, my mom said it was a bad example and when I acquired some chocolates from Johnny’s tea room, my dad didn’t see the humour when I said just that to the arresting officer. Then in Standard seven I met Guy Duncan. 7D. Guy introduced me to typex thinners. What I’m trying to tell you was that without knowing it, I was whittling down my options. So by the time it came to choose, I ended up with English, Afrikaans, Math, Science (wiz bang, not biology), History (real enlightening in 80’s South Africa) and Art. Art you only took if you were gifted or just not bright enough for other subjects. Somehow from being a genius in Std 6A I was down to not very bright and in 8G. I had some trouble with drawing, painting, sculpture, pottery and everything else. Luckily two things happened. I took a photograph of Kevin at band practice and because I couldn’t draw I traced it. It looked okay but my Art Teacher Mr. Litchkus saw right through me. And the second thing was he got the school to reopen the old darkroom and convinced someone that Photography was acceptable as Art; I didn’t have to paint or do ceramics. He also introduced me to the drawings of the expressionists and told me that drawing wasn’t reproduction, nor was photography, it was interpretation. That man saved my life. My whole life. He gave me a path. A path away from having to take over the family business. I owe that man everything good that ever happened to me because of the craft he taught me, everything bad that came out of that craft, came out of me.

Mr. Stokes my English teacher filled in the gaps one sunny Std 7g afternoon when he read “ode to a Grecian urn”. Truth is beauty and Beauty is truth. I bought my first camera with proceeds from the mobile disco I was running. Oh yes, the mobile disco. Blame the Church, blame Vern, blame my desperate desire to be cool, to have an audience, again I must take a step backward.

1.12

About the family business, my Jewish-ness and all that. I’ll tell you what my father told me one day after watching the Jazz Singer (Neil Diamond version) on VHS together. While he cried he said that’s me, that’s what my dad did to me. Referring to the scene when Larry Olivier rips his shirt and says you’re no son of mine. My mother says the following is untrue; my sister while never hearing my version of what I was told swears that it is true in essence. Maybe it was just a good story. My father’s dad owned a construction company. My father wanted to run it, he was the second born. He was given a hardware store instead. Musgrave garden and Hardware (My mother in her wisdom opened a branch of a building society inside the store, this was before ATM’S and when building societies were basically another name for banks. This was clever, it was like putting an ATM inside a Mica hardware store, her whole career and ability to make money and support my father through his alcoholism stemmed from this smart move) however was badly run, my father let out too much on credit, blamed the lack of good parking spots and generally sulked because he didn’t have the construction company. I remember the overwhelming stench of new rubber dustbins, some reason it made me retch every time I walked past that section, I had to walk past them to see my mom. So they hardware store went bankrupt, my mother was hired by another branch of the building society, my dad was thrown out of the family (according to him, “My father ripped his shirt”,) and suddenly we were Methodists. My father started his own little building company, which he expected me to join him in a soon as I finished school. But the company was failing before I hit standard 9. My dad had already taken to drink. Did I tell you that he built the house in Westville himself, well, with black labour, who didn’t really exist, there being no black people in the country at the time, so “with my own hands I built this house before you were born”, he showed me a picture of him pointing to a wall while two black men looked at him. “If there had just been proper parking, we wouldn’t have lost the store and you would have had a bar mitzvah instead of becoming a Methodist” he said while Neil Diamond sang “Love on the Rocks”. I embroider, but you get the picture.

1.13

“I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar – if he is financially fortunate”

John Steinbeck –East of Eden

Invariably things will be left out. Like how I feel about Christmas. Like how I used to save ants from the swimming pool, but had to throw them in first so they could be saved. Stuff like my scrap book of silly renames, like Hark Maris for the water boatmen in our pool after “The Man From Atlantis”. Why so much water? I was in the A swimming team in senior primary. My dad told me I had to give it up because of the one lung situation. I bought it. It bought me more time at the library. I was a latchkey kid. I’d save my bus fare and walk home from school and put the money toward more records. Before birthdays I’d find where my parents had put the wrapped gifts, mostly vinyl or ZX spectrum game tapes. I’d remove the record or tape from its sleeve cover put in some older thing and play the record to death, tape it or copy the game and then when I got the gift on the day of my birthday, I’d hitch into town to the record store, (what was it called? Moola’s was in JHB right?) and swap it out for something new. I loved diving to bottom of my pool holding my breath until my lungs were bursting. Later I loved skinny dipping in the afternoon alone, knowing that our pool was not only in full view of at least three neighbors houses but also that the maid (the domestic, y’know?) could see. I would walk down to the pool in a towel, wait until I could see her at the kitchen window and drop my towel, parade around for a bit, jump in and masturbate under water furiously. Something that is not that easy in cold water, sometimes I’d swim along the bottom of the pool, scraping my erect young penis against the bottom of the pool until it bled. I was fascinated by the form my ejaculate took on in the water, floating and swimming like organic streamers in a high wind. Like I say, there are something’s I won’t tell you. Details that I will omit.

When my dad started falling apart. I mean when I realized that it had happened and I was able to trace back in my mind to time he was a different person. When I was twenty eight and concerned only with my glamorous life, and he would phone pleading for me to tell my mother to take him back, then. I tried to ignore it. I ignored it in my mother too. I offered platitudes and solutions I didn’t believe in. By then Paul was already dead, so was Jeremy and Julie. Alan. Shit, who else? I can’t place them, I’ll get to that. The thing is I should have seen the signs or maybe I saw the signs and thought that it was too late. Maybe it was too late. I would bump into people when I traveled to Joburg or people down from Durban or sitting up late on cocaine with someone who I’d been at school with and they’d say “How’s your dad doin’ and before I could answer they’d turn around pass the joint and say something like, “Roger’s dad was such a card”, or “Your dad gave me my first whiskey” or “His dad was always telling the same jokes”. I noticed that people didn’t ask much about my mother, probably because he subjugated her totally, reduced her to a cipher, the wife, the good wife. She was a good wife. She supported our family, once he no longer had the hardware store and his own little building company was gone, his work was sporadic, my mother was the only stable thing about my dad and he faded her into the background, maybe because he couldn’t face the fact that, as a man, he needed to be stabilized, looked after. It was only late at night, sometimes, some girl would say to me, if I cooked for her or did some domestic thing, “Are you close to your mother?”, Yes, always yes was the answer, but it’s not the truth, I’ve only become close to her since his death. No, since I have crossed the mountain that the slow moving continental sneaking fucking plate of his obvious inevitable death pushed up. Fuck. Sorry. Only since I got over that, I’ve been able to get close to her, I had to be him for a little while, still obviously am. He was a weak man. And everybody who never saw him later remembers him as this larger than life, generous, laughing, caring man. And maybe that’s how he started out, but that’s not how he ended up. And people would say to me then, after I’d been on the phone with him, making suggestions (Once I tried to convince him to seek out the Hare Krishna’s, thinking he could find some solace, so wisdom that would fix him in their temple and he said, “Those bloody choots who wear orange?”. He was an equal opportunity bigot) and I would ended up high somewhere and somebody from Durban would say to me, “How’s your Dad doing.”, and I say, “Oh you know Colin Young, same old hustler”, and they’d say, “Yeah, that man, he gave me the first puff of a cigarette”, and I’d nod and make another line for everyone.

I remember two things. He took me to a building site, he was building a house for someone, and gave me the one-day-this-will-all-be-yours speech and I told him I was going to be a photographer, never a builder and he just didn't hear me. He never even came to my matric exhibition; my mother bought me my cameras. And two, when the fax came through from the film school that I had been accepted and I was so happy all he could say was, “It’s not too late could try start the building company up again.” And three, when I came home after working on a feature as a coordinator for eight months, exhausted, flush with cash, with my shiny new imported apple laptop that had cost seventeen grand and nearly eighty in savings, when he was unemployed and my mother was making about eight a month, he took me aside and said, “When are you going to get a real job?”. And look here, now, dead for all these years and I’m still trying to make him see me.

I think about songs recorded long ago, imagine someone like Woody Guthrie or Robert Johnson or some forgotten orchestra or man in white hat, cane, striped jacket, the music recorded directly onto wax cylinders, fragile, tinny, later transferred to Bakelite, then years later remastered to magnetic tape, made bolder, rerecorded by others, added instruments, new voices, to a different tape, then to vinyl or other tape, remixed, and then to magnetic disk and then optical disk and now existing fragmented in different hard drives around the planet, spread out mutated, possible to bring together through the wires, emerging from the ether through these speakers, tinny and grave, the history of the recorded song like a life. Must I really draw out the parallels.

Prt 2 - 3.4

2009-04-06T02:02:00.000-07:00

3.4

Often you have heard that advice is a form of nostalgia. But this book is nothing but advice cloaked in nostalgia. There are no good writers only writers that have discipline and good editors.

My hard memories, the unpleasant the embarrassing are easy to write. The pain still fresh. For the last ten days I’ve been struggling to start writing this memory. The sentence…

Kevin Lived across the road and down one.

…has been sitting on the screen for hours, while I have attended to other menial writing tasks, reviewing this. Opinioning on that. Following it is...

(A vague memory of Malcolm’s mugging and star wars toys)

… I am trying to recall completely as a relatable story a happy time, a golden time in my teen years. Yet the more I plow into this collection of recollections I realize that the happy moments are long vague blurs and feelings. No distinct events stick out. The above bracketed I can tell as a brief story. The time with Kevin and the band is a long hazy happy blur. But let me try. I call myself a writer. Let me man up, have discipline. Let me hope for a good editor.

I’ll take the slow road the easy way. A vague memory of Malcolm’s mugging and Star War’s Toy’s. Carol and her brother Lyndon lived across the road. He was weedy and red haired, the thinness of his hair makes me think this pallid boy must be bald by now. His sister Carol (Do not mistake her with Carol Anne, Kevin’s sister, who lived next door to them, down one across the road from me), She was winnowy and red haired and freckled and googley eyed and funny jawed and I fantasized about her only when I was hit with the reality that none of my other fantasies would ever come true (When I realized these fantasies wouldn’t come true I fantasized once about my sister, and even once or twice about the young version of my mother in a photograph I found in my fathers bedside cupboard, but maybe that’s also because I knew that’s where he kept his playboys, banned in the country at the time so doubly rare. I knew about banning, often wondered why Hunter Thompson wasn’t, anyway those are the least off my depravities, you will learn this)

Two recollections. Whenever I fell out with William or Kevin wasn’t around (This is after Karen’s family had moved) I would go to Carol and Lyndon’s house (Why were neither of their parents hair red?) and we would play in the big side yard, climb tree’s and I would envy Lyndon’s Star Wars toys that had brought with them from England (why had they emigrated to South Africa, their father transferred here, how horrid). The Eurhythmics, There Must Be An Angel was a favorite song, I dedicated it to Lyndon one morning on the radio, because he dared me to. It took me years to figure out why my sister and Carol giggled so when it happened, Lyndon taped the dedication and played it back, just the dedication. It shamed me somehow and I snuck into his room one afternoon while they were in the tree, faking needing the bathroom and erased the tape. He never mentioned it again.

Malcolm was mugged. On the beachfront. In a parking lot. Beaten badly for his wallet. The more I think about it the more it doesn’t make sense. Was he beaten for being white? For his money or being British… I will never know. But he came home from hospital and was bedridden; we were all filed in by my father to look at the bruised swollen once vital man lying bandaged and breathless in his own bed. The first time we had been allowed into those parents room. He was in the centre of the bed (did he move over at night for his wife to get in?) and he mumbled. Kevin was there and tried to speak with him but his lips were swollen, just looking at him you could feel the violence, the house was horrid quiet. I went into Lyndon’s room and played with his Star Wars toy’s. Once of them had a button, if you pressed it it reeled off a quote from the movie, a storm trooper, brusque electronic, loud. Kevin rushed into the room, grabbed the toy from me and scolded me. For disturbing Malcolm, couldn’t I see? I didn’t want to.

After the mugging, after the healing they went away on holiday. But somehow their house had become infected with fleas. My dad knew the solution and as we were watching the house, he set about driving the fleas out with branches of syringa trees. We collected hundreds and covered the couches, the beds, the floor where we sat and played Atari (what was it with that wood paneling on that plastic machine) and the house was a quiet jungle grove. With fleas. Hollowed out by Malcolm’s pain, funereal in the smell of decaying leaves. The mad panic to remove them when they were on their way home. We never told them about those leaves, because when they came back, with their dogs, the fleas returned. But I knew a secret about their house that they did not. Once it had been covered with leaves.

3.5

Kevin lived across the road and down one and was a year ahead of me in school. He had his own drum kit. We watched “My Bloody Valentine” on 16mm, as I was the projectionist at the library, I was the projectionist at my house, at Kevin’s, at anywhere in the neighborhood (My father was becoming unreliable, he had let a whole reel of a Bud Spencer & Terence Hill movie pour out of the projector in our upstairs room and spill down the stairs). That was when I noticed Kevin was growing apart from our little gang. He wasn’t the same guy who had put a nail in my sister’s head accidentally and lectured against girls. He was unusually diligent in decorating the garage because he was having people over, Carol Anne wasn’t allowed to attend. After band practice, we packed down the drum kit (How did he get that band together in the first place?) and decorated the garage. I was allowed to be there to operate the projector but once the movie was over I was to go home. There would be girls there. Once the movie ended I made myself useful changing records. Watching everyone get drunk on cheap punch and making out clumsily.

Because I had a computer and Kevin only a typewriter, it was more convenient for him to write the lyrics down for his band “EMPIRE RAGE” at my place. He was obsessed with Jim Kerr of the Simple Minds and thought U2 was a flash in the pan. But he copied Bono’s strut from the Sunday Bloody Sunday video, especially the New Years Day bit. This, him dictating, me typing and printing the lyrics led to my first intimacies with the making of music. I even tried to write a song, a hopeless pastiche of a Simple Minds number that I can’t remember, eventually Kevin was kind enough to include some of my lyrics in a verse of the some that became their second and less popular single. We slaved over that ZX 48k and that dot matrix printer. I started to attend band practices at Kevin’s place and then as the band grew, at a church in Pinetown on Saturday’s. I carried equipment and played with levels. I noticed when the girlfriends came to watch, their rapt fascination. I’m not sure if Kevin’s Wendy had arrived on the scene yet, but there were always girls. I wanted there to be girls that felt about me the way these girls felt about the band. The music was very average but I didn’t know it at that age. All I saw was the power of it.

The band had played once or twice before, but one afternoon it was renamed. In the same way I stole the rhythm of the Cure’s Japanese Whispers to make The Celtic Rumours, the same way I stole a piece of Simple Minds song to try make one of my own (I was embarrassed when Kevin spotted it), I have been stealing bits of style and tumbling phrases ever since. I am not a writer, I am thief. I have no problem with this. I’ve, since that moment when the band played on my parents veranda to a bunch of our friends, when Kevin thanked me from stage and everyone applauded, I’ve been prepared to do anything to win public approval, including discard actual singular approval from those I love and care about. I mean if they love me they’ll forgive my errors right? The public however is unforgiving. I knew that, but was to find out just how unforgiving later, when I thought that the people around me were my friends, when I didn’t realise that my whole life was a performance and everybody was my public. Soaking up the public approval then, I started transforming into the dancing monkey. I started tuning up to sing for my supper. I still do. I am right now.

I digress. Life with the band was great my duties were adulation and keeping Wendy away from band practice. And phoning Phil Wright and Barney Simon in a variety of different voices to request that they try hear the Celtic Rumours. This was in the days when, if a band was new, they couldn’t just record and put their music online. There was no online. I was prepping the DJ’s for the day when The Celtic Rumours demo was posted (yes ordinary in a brown paper bag with string and sealing wax post) to them. We phoned newspapers and created buzz, I was 14, I was a publicity machine. Phil Wright got the cassette tape, a Sony d90 with four songs on it. I had shortened the length of the tape so it was 2 songs per side, publicity machine, ensuring no silence, and he played it on air. Gigs followed. Kevin thanked me less and less from stage. After nearly 2 years of faithfulness Kevin matriculated and I was still stuck in school. That December we went to Johannesburg. I bought Smiths 12 inches in Small Street Mall, it was 1988, it was very hip and bohemian. The band played at the Thunderdome. Fifteen years later I lived in the Thunderdome as a homeless person, on the remnants of the stage, and I cried for the lost glory of that night.

We drove up to Joburg, it was the furtherest I’d ever been from home. I don’t remember where we stayed, I just remember the dressing room, meeting No Friends Of Harry and Phil Wright saying to me, “So you’re the kid that keeps phoning us and putting on funny voices”. It was heaven. Sure they were a support act, sure there were only 12 people on the dance floor, I was a one man mosh pit. With short hair and a New Romantic fringe.

Before I continue remember there are many days in a week and events happen in minutes not hours. I had other lives going on, even now as I separate them out for the telling I know they cannot be truly separated, although I have for all these years.

It was after the gig that I remember Kevin telling me that the band was going on tour. That because I was still in school I couldn’t come, that they had gotten themselves professional management, that they’d signed a record deal, that they had discarded me. It took a while for it to sink in. I wasn’t even considered to take the album cover photograph (And at that age in Standard 9 I was already an exhibited photographer) and it would be the first time that not being mentioned in the credits planted a seed of rage and revenge. Somehow this and my success as a DJ made me realise that I could no longer ride on other people’s fame. I could learn from them, like I was learning from Colin Frankie and Tony Goss how to dress and be a trendy, but my fame, my public I would have to create. I do not remember the ride home.

Part 2 - 2.4

2009-04-03T03:33:00.000-07:00

2.4

Vern Field and her audacious love of god and desire for purity was no match for my cousin Trevor’s insistence. My insistence that I had loved her at first sight and had seen her first seemed only to spur Trevor's interest. Vern was fascinated by his bad boyness, this is how we began our long telephone calls, she would phone me to find out about Trevor, but the calls would go on, for hours, we talked about everything, I read to her from my latest literary discoveries, there was no end to my want. Even when Trevor and Vern started going out, the phone calls continued, Trevor didn’t like me speaking to his girlfriend all the time, I couldn’t help myself, our phone calls and meetings became more and more clandestine, fleeting. Vern had a friend at youth group called Lauren, I took to phoning Lauren, to talk about Vern, in a slow weaning, a musical chairs that would I would follow the rest of my life, my affections began to shift. There was something in Vern’s slow undoing by Trevor, his confessions of how far they had gone, me talking to her, her hinting at how far, me knowing, that became sordid and somehow deeply satisfying. “I” would never have treated her this way, “I” was good, Trevor bad, Vern was slowly being taken over by an evil force, she became less attractive. And she pitied me, tried desperately to find someone else for me to pour my nascent love out onto, she had a friend, whose name I do not remember, that she pushed me toward, in my rebellion my embryonic hatred of her purity, her Christianity and its easy corruption, I found myself latching onto Lauren, Vern pitied me more. I stopped finding, excuses to go around, “Vern is going to teach me piano” or guitar or whatever, and started lusting after Lauren. But as the relationship shifted, I needed a new confidant and I found it in Fiona, the musical chairs shifted, Vern lost her seat.

And then I learnt that Vern was going to move to New Zealand. Lots of families were moving away, I never grasped the reason then. Somehow, I got real desperate, I needed affirmation, I began to discover, then, perhaps 15 by now, already sneaking out to nightclubs, trying to buy favor with the cooler boys, my ability to slowly coerce. 15 years later, the raw power of this ability was to render me impotent, but then I became fascinated with the slow torture of Vern. Of turning her on to her wrongs, to (before she left) bringing her to full Christian confusion. The details are scanty in my head, but after she had admitted to me that she had “done it” with Trevor, that it hadn’t been that nice, I turned the screws, phone calls and then bouts of ignoring her. Quoting the bible and telling her that Jesus would forgive her if she repented and left Trevor.

One night, two nights before she left, we went to a movie, probably “Young Sherlock Holmes” or some such derivative speilbergian crap that I was into then, and afterwards while we waited for her parents to pick her up, I twisted, she broke, we kissed, she cried, confused, she said some things that she probably didn’t mean, but they were enough. I was vindicated, I had conquered. The next day Trevor phoned me, he didn’t understand why his girlfriend was refusing to see him before she left. I felt that power keenly, that memory is very clear. Sitting on the wooden phone bench in the cool dark afternoon passage at my childhood home, alone, I put down the phone and did not know whether to laugh or cry, but none came naturally, just a feeling of being stunned of not fully knowing what I had been a part of, yet somehow knowing, in the core of me, that I had won something, that I no longer needed to fight for her.

Her letters from New Zealand, I replied to for a while, but her acquiesion to Christ and the Church the moment she got there, her constant chiding that I give my heart to Jesus, (Oh since then how many times I’ve recited the sinners payer, take me sweet Jesus, with fingers crossed). Well, I no longer needed to pretend for Vern. I had other things to concentrate on, she just inspired boredom. At Youth group I needed for them to believe in my commitment to the Lord, by then I had another purpose for them growing in my mind and I needed Jesus to be my patsy. I wanted to be popular. Like my sister was popular, I wanted to be invited to the nightclubs, not sneak my way in. And with my record collections, my subconscious machinations began.

3.3

Let me paint a picture with a thousand words. Count them. I grew up in a really big house. In part of my suburb that wasn’t considered rich. I didn’t have a lot of pocket money, but my parents indulged every whim. From guitars to BMX’s to film playback toys and view masters. Surrounded by bits of antique bric a braq from various great grand this or that’s. The subtle insinuations of lost honour and a huge lounge with a marble fireplace. Domestic staff and a top lawn a front lawn, a back lawn, a bottom lawn, a swimming pool, a greenhouse, a giant avocado tree and a vegetable garden/orchard, a shed, servants quarters, a separate TV room for my sister and I, my parents TV room had it’s own bar. As well as the liquor cabinet in the formal lounge. Yet apart from having to climb the avo tree to pick the fruit to then go and give away to the neighbors, I really only have, as memories or my parents, my mother driving me to school, my father taking me to his building sites and telling me how one day all this would be mine and together we would beat the competition, that is, his dad’s building company. They gave me complete freedom. Unabandoned freedom. Or more like abandoned freedom. To roam the nature reserve, the other kids houses. All that. But ours was the biggest on the block. At school I had no status, in the neighborhood, I did. Every evening, even though the TV in our TV room was bigger me and my sister would sit in the bar/TV room with my parents, I would watch the TV I wanted and every ad break pour my dad another drink. When he fell asleep, my mom would send us upstairs to the second floor to watch TV, while she smuggled him to their mauve bedroom. The only time I ever watched TV on my own upstairs was Saturday nights when my sister was out with her boyfriends. I’d shut the concertina Formica door at the top of the stairs and masturbate to the Solid Gold Dancers. Dizzy from the experience, knowing it was about the time my mom was shuffling my dad to bed, I’d put on Depeche Mode’s Broken frame or Duran’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger and dress in my sister’s underwear. Sometimes if my sister was getting home late, I’d sneak out into the suburban roads dressed in her training bra and panties, and spill my seed in various neighbor’s driveways. In one driveway in particular, as a voodoo charm to make the girl who lived their desire me. Not love me. I wanted raw sexual lust. It was an escape from all the other shit I had going on with girls. At home I had all the toys, all the privacy, all the power. At school, in Standard Six, I was a chubby nerd. I had chubby nerd friends and I desperately wanted to be cool, like my sister was cool. And all the cool kids had the best record collections, snuck out to discos. So I wanted that, so I always chose 2 records every time I went to Moola’s, one for me and one to impress them.

In Standard Seven, a church youth group regular, slipped from 6A to 7D because I chose art over Latin, I met Guy D. who introduced me to the coolest kids, Warren H. and Andrew G. The same Andrew who had slapped me for saying spastic 2 years earlier. It was my chance to become cool. I tried to figure out how to deliver. And the church youth group provided the perfect cover, as was to become pattern, all the precursors were becoming beacons and the pieces begun to slip into place.

Bugger, only 640 words, I told you I’d lie. But how about I make it up to you later?

1.3

“If your treat a man as he is, then he will be as he is, If you treat a man as he could be, he will become what could be.”- Goethe

Let’s start here, I am a charity case, I survive through the kindness of family and strangers (and a mysterious other force, call it third) . The dancing monkey at the cocktail party, I am bought out to show off other people’s kindness. I wouldn’t survive if it weren’t for X. Y has helped me so much. I’m so grateful, for the cheap rent, the food, the money I have to pay back. And yes I pay for all these things by being the dancing monkey, I constantly have to relive my downfalls, and the only way to do this is to quickly highlight, but never linger on my successes. It is perverse. To constantly remind me and place me constantly in the context of someone who used to live on the street in a cardboard box. I am no longer that person, no more than I am still the child who sought to impress with an extensive record collection. But with words I can be that and words travel, words have power, words shape other people’s perceptions of you. And what are we, if we exist in this world of people, other than the sum total of other people’s perceptions. Even if you are your own man, it is because you are perceived thus, the only option other, is solitude, divorce form the world. When I strike my hand upon a surface, I feel the material weight of my hand and the surface, I am therefore of this world and will therefore experience this world. This has always been my philosophy.

I always thought 10 months of no sleep would be the price, not chubbiness, bugger. I sit here. Rid of the desire. Feeling healthy in mind, but feeling the price I have paid in my body, and now this, chubbiness, jeans so tight as to cause striations on my hip skin. Enough of me. I will now try and bind your life to mine with music.

Part Two

2009-03-26T04:46:00.000-07:00

Divertimento – The Now

What fresh hell is this? There is nothing more gut wrenching than those first weeks off of smack, the pull of sheer habit, the boredom. Then sinks in the realization that you HAVE burnt all your bridges and you are going to have to build yourself up. Then comes the building up, the crappy jobs, the blows to your self esteem, these that you must endure, the fake promises, the constant smashing of hope. If you weren’t a Junkie before, the process of rebuilding your life after being one would turn you into one. People are only in it for themselves, no matter what they say, and they will protect their small castles with a vile vengeful self righteousness that shows that not only are people not will to teach a man to fish (or even to try grasp what that means) but unwilling to even let him see a fish.

There is nothing more gut wrenching, then the months of boredom that follows, the constant pushing that you must get real, get a real job, that you blew it and must give up on your dreams. Then why not be a junkie if I can’t have dreams. No wonder there are so many relapses. What I want is simple help. What I get is the constant pulling of being people’s plaything, that help comes with a condition. That, no, if you’re going to pay your rent late you can’t stay home and work on your book you must come out with me. Because I paid for your food this week, you cannot go to that shoot and earn money you must sit and listen to me complain about my girlfriend. It goes on. Help offered always comes with a price, the real help you need, no one will give it to you. You have to resort to Junkie tactics to get it, which brings you back into the Junkie mentality, which brings you closer to relapse. Which justifies everyone not helping you in the first place.

I am in a bar, filled with Characters out of the Simpsons’, girls with no chins, but not yellow, yellow boys with hair that’ll make a rehab counselor relapse. Do they know they’ve danced to the same song twice in the last half hour, do they know this track’s melodic structure is a rip off of an early nineties hit. Why must they tell me that they love Enrique Eglasias? A mixture of the very young and the very old all in common in their desperation, their manipulated tattiness. What ever it is you’re looking for it isn’t here. Said more to myself than to anyone else. Something about the music’s bangin’ness is akin to listening to Brahms on a 70’s car radio. Every one of these stalking mask wearing freaks should be put out of their misery, starting with the D.J and his over enthusiastically dancing girlfriend. Including myself as I lean against the bar, interrupting the waitresses celebration of a big tip by asking her for similes of desperation.

Part the Second

13yrs to 17yrs > 1985 to 1989

HIGH SCHOOL

12.1

Born June 11^th, 1972, I am a solid Gemini, diagnosed Bi-polar countless times, told by my father, I could not write because I was missing bones, short of breath because I only had one lung (knew this to be untrue but convinced myself to prevent myself ever taking up the vile habit of smoking), I have always been aware of the dual nature of man. The truth and the Lies, the good and the evil, but now looking back, become who I have, I must confess this. Firstly that if something created us, it is greater than us and therefore pointless to contemplate, but surely beyond man’s petty good and evil, which means we must be capable of at least trying to be beyond that. I for one dwell in two worlds still and side by side, yet constantly striving. On one hand to be pure and innocent and on the other to be moral (by my own inner compass) and knowledgeable (for one can never strive toward wisdom, only earn it for oneself, it in itself being unteachble untransmutable), and to be these things innocent and trusting in my own compass, constantly every day, to never lose sight of the past but to never be bitter or regret, this is of course impossible, I am human, less than perfect, and somehow because so, am perfect. All our adolescences are the loss of innocence, some times I scream out across the void to my little unformed self, wishing I had the depth of experience to look after him better back then, but there is no reply, only constant echoes.

“Cant really remember anything more opinionated - we were all quite sweet really.

I have a couple of old photos of Roger, aged 15 or so, wearing a baby-blue cardigan and white, school regulation, PE shorts with a large VHS video tape stuffed in one of the pockets. I don't actually remember this dress sense - just that he was eccentric. Roger was Kevin's overly-enthusiastic friend next door, and the band's first unofficial manager.

It was during one of the strategy meetings over at his place that Roger blurted out the name 'Celtic Rumours'. We'd decided that 'Empire Rage' wasn't quite cool enough, and that The Cure's song 'Japanese Whispers', with its elusive romanticism, had what we were looking for.

He also organised the band's launch party and first official gig on the veranda of his folk’s house for a bunch of our school friends. We felt like kings. Our dreams were big back then and Roger was right there with us.”

Ross Campbell, Celtic Rumours Drummer #1 (or #2)

“i don't remember our first meeting.

it must've been late '86. my parents were super strict and i wasn't allowed out, but eventually they let me go along to that church youth group with some girls from school. it was never about church, it was always about the unchaperoned time after our parents dropped us off, and before they picked us up. we made prank phone calls from the payphone downstairs, and learnt to smoke in a doorway round the corner.
somewhere along the way there was 'some guy' who knew and liked the same bands that i did.
the cure. the housemartins. the smiths. the the.
we'd mess about and talk during ...whatever youth group was supposed to be about. i thought you were funny and cool and creative.

at some point, you had to join the older kids in a different group and i didn't get to play with you any more. i stopped going apart from when they would have those discos.
at some point, you started phoning me.
i don't know which came first.

we used to spend hours on the phone. literally hours.
sometimes we'd meet when i got off the school bus near boys high.
sometimes your dad would bring you to my house.
but mostly we just talked on the phone.

we used to read smash hits for the retarded funny stuff, and every week there was part of a series of cut-out 'facts'. i thought you were hilarious because you actually saved them all and made the (tiny)book.

when did vern leave south africa? after you'd stopped talking about her, it was all about lauren. i fancied you by then, and was no longer friends with lauren so that was pretty annoying!

in may of 1987 my parents took me out of school for 2 months to go to england. you wrote to me while i was away, and you saved every copy of smash hits for me.

when i came home, you started coming round to the house more.
my parents used to tease me about "my boyfriend" and i was mortified because
we were just friends
i was at that age
i wasn't a "proper" girl
you were far too cool

some time later, there was a phone conversation.
something like; lauren had said that you should ask me out and what did i think?
i was furious that she was involved. i didn't know what you thought. were you actually asking me out? what did 'out' mean?
and so i said "no!"
and you said "thats what i thought"

and that was pretty much that.

over the next couple of years we saw each other out at gigs 'n things occasionally, but you were always really cold. i think i still fancied you despite the fact you were 'a trendy'.
the last mention of you in my diary is 30th november '88 ... last day of school, a concert at the exhibition centre in durban.
"saw roger! he is SO nice now" i dont know what that meant

Fiona Thomson First Love #2

3.2

My sisters boyfriends. All had cool motorbikes that smelt like bees dripped in macho-ness. She rode on the back without helmet, came home late, wore black; saw her once from my window vomiting predawn on Dad’s pristine precious lawn. My ideas of love maybe formed through her, maybe through the books I was devouring, let me try lay it out for you. When you are that age love is like hunger. We are seldom hungry, actually hungry, but we always eat to prevent it, we say we are hungry but actually we just know intellectually that to prevent hunger we should eat. At 14 we know that we should be seeking love, we desire love, but do we actually feel love, I can deny my body food, and I have had to deny my soul of love, but unlike food, love has been around every corner, ready to strike. The pain of adolescent love is very similar to the physical experiences I had later of actual hunger, of starving when living on the streets, but I ramble. Let me lay it all out for you.

Somewhere I started to read, often, twice three times a week after school I would go to library and just read (if William came with we would play on the wooden faux bus outside). I would devour six books a week. I was in the adult section before I hit 15. In standard six, the first year of High school I still had a newspaper route. Saturday and Sunday before sunrise I would pedal my bike round neighborhoods delivering the Sunday paper. I used the money I made to buy records. There was a record shop in town called Moola’s Music. My tastes were embryonic based on my sisters. Duran, Depeche, so on. I started to amass a huge record collection. I fell for The Smiths only later, when my little heart had been broken. Through smash hits magazine and Barney Simon I began to branch out and order from Moola’s imports, stuff not freely available, not locally pressed, these imports R40 instead of R20, were impressive things, gatefold sleeves, glossy inners covered with lyrics, secret messages scratched by engineers into the vinyl, never lost my love for vinyl. And big to my little hands. I will never love like I loved analogue. Moola’s smelt of vinyl, the racks of records took up so much space, thin you had to page through them, every shelf was a book of desire. Soon after Moola’s I discovered Adams book store, huge two storied rambling place, with seemingly no order, strange books not available in the library were found in piles seemingly discarded, unvarnished wooden floors, serious people, a buzz of chatter, not like a library and too, I discovered that if you liked a book you could discover what other books the author had written and you could order them. There were books that published lists of books. I went through these catalogues manically ordering anything with titles that seemed outrageous, it did not take me long to discover Kesey and Hunter S. Let me tell you Hunter S. to a 15 year old mind in apartheid Durban was a very dangerous thing. Very dangerous, how my mind leapt at the idea of his writing, then Ginsberg, and later Phillip H. introduced me to Burroughs, but I leap ahead.

At that age, in standard six I was a chubby nerd. I was in the nerd class, my friends were nerds, we listened to Queen and liked computers, I had a computer, ZX spectrum, sometimes I would, pixel by pixel recreate movie posters in glorious 16 bit color. We used to go to movies on a Saturday afternoon. Our parents would drop us off. Listen it was so safe back then, eerily safe that by the age of 15 I was hitching into Durban on Saturdays to buy my books and records. Hitching, I had discovered through Kerouac, was sweet freedom. But I was still a nerd, the height of my social activity was going to Russell T’s house to listen to Queen and wander through his parents amazing aviary. Or Church youth group on a Friday night. Or talking to the librarians at Westville library. I had such a crush on Jo-Anne the junior librarian, whatever she told me to read I would love, she introduced me to science fiction, essentially opening up the path to discovering Philip K Dick, I don’t know who is more dangerous to an unformed mind, Phillip K Dick, Kerouac or Thompson. The girls who went to youth group were either nerds or naughty girls whose parents were trying to hold them in check. I was a nerd who was looking for company, my cousins were sent because Terence had found the Lord and intended to not only keep him but share him with his twin Trevor who saw it as an opportunity to meet girls. Back then I spent so much time with my cousins that essentially Trevor was my best friend. It was there in Standard Seven, that I met Vern.

End Part The First

2009-03-20T00:48:00.000-07:00

7.1

it would seem now that one must retrace ones steps,
seeking out the small moments
in order to work out where it all went wrong

it doesn't happen as a rape, a violent break-up
it happens in small doses,
you lose your ability to connect.

doubt that you were able once to find
things valuable in others

3.1.2

There is always back aways I can go. I have forgotten to tell you about VHS and the Royal wedding.

As it is mostly, there are two sets of cousins, mothers and fathers. The Allens’ are my mothers brothers set. And with the total involvedness of my Mom’s parents in our lives, the Allens, at the same high school, were a total part of our lives. We used to play in the big pine tree in their garden, getting sap covered, their slippy slide, Auntie Hilary used to cut my hair, in afternoons in her cigarette haze filled kitchen, while I amazed at auntie Flo’s elephantitis like calves. And there was always VHS.

While my father still preferred to hire a 16mm projector and show us Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies on a sheet, the Allens always had the latest British comedy on VHS, duplicated in some back room of the video shop they some how had ties to. When I say latest, I mean, Kenny Everret, Benny Hill, Carry on movies. And they had the biggest TV. Me and Trevor were more friends than cousins and I slept over often. It was a girl who effectively ended that friendship. But before her. My early teens are a mishmash of movies that they would get on tape before they hit the cinemas. And while I loved the whirr of the projector and couldn’t resist the cinema and popcorn with my A class friends at least twice a month, I was constantly in awe of the sheer volume of movies and TV shows that the Allens pulled out of their hats on a regular basis.

We watched Diana get married at the Allens, they let us out of school for that day. Those years Later, when the news of her death came through at midnight to 61 Somerset Rd and me and Paul in shock found ourselves crying, I remembered the Allens, how far ago that was. And recognized in Paul, in his admiration for her death something that I would only understand after his.

By Standard Seven I had learned to separate my groups of friends. There were my Street Gang at home, the art class, and then My A class friends and My D class friends, two groups at odds, the first loved cinema, computers and Queen. The second, Violence, nightclubs, Depeche Mode. And while they ignored each other I flitted between.

One incident stands out in my mind. We have just finished the last day of Standard Five, from next year we will be a t high school. This last day of senior primary was a civvies day and we are leaving the school in high spirits. As we walk down to meet someone’s parents who are taking us to see “A View to A Kill” in Pinetown, I am with my then embryonic A class group. We pass two boys seemingly our age, who we don’t know. One of them is wearing a t-shirt that says “Frankie say SPASTIC”, so I say Hey, are you Spastic. The retribution is swift, within seconds I am on the floor and being slapped and then he is off me. Andrew Guilfoyle, who will become one of my greatest friends, walks off with Warren Hickey, someone I will desperately, to the point to inflicting abuse on others, try to impress. Childhood has ended.

2.3.2

William, my chubby pal, his father was a ships captain in the merchant navy. He called himself a glorified trucker but no matter, the uniform was impressive. He was a slim bearded man and his wife large and ranging in muumuus and other flowing garments. She stayed home, made pottery and Batiks and macramé and other 80’s design inspirations. She painted a mean watercolor, as long as it was of the same stretch of beach at Arniston, somehow that spot was dug deep into her soul. Later her body would fascinate me as a teen, fueled adolescent fantasies by the token of her husband always being away.

One December, me and Will, get a ride on the ship down to East London to stay with family friends in a caravan park.

The ship ride is awesome, a huge container vessel, we have to walk up a gangplank to get on. By some accident of timing the trip is soured by the fact that she takes on her bilge water at the same time as the Durban abattoir is dumping its rotting meat into the harbor. The weekend trip is sea sickness coupled with the stench of rotting meat. The highlight discovering that there is a swimming pool on the back of the ship. I spend that Saturday, jumping off the diving board, trying to figure out why, if I’m in the air, the ship does not move from under me and leave me to fall into the propellers vast and churning. I will it. It does not happen.

In that strange rambling caravan park, with its permanent trailers, wheels removed, creepers growing up, I meet a girl that I literally abandon William to be with, she has an older brother but I ignore him, tho he comes with us everywhere. We spend the holiday in the rivers tidal pools sandy bottom catching shrimp and setting them free. I try explain that they are basically sea cockroaches but Lee Ann is fascinated with their dirty pink casings. On the last Sunday afternoon, in the fading light, as we are leaving to get a ride back to Durban, I steal my first real kiss, with tongue and everything. I am on my way back home, to face the responsibilities of high school and I am now no longer a child.

I wrote many letters to her, tried to phone, but I was a super excited 12 year old, I must have either bored her or the limits of her trailer park imagination constrained her real emotions. The truth hurts, so I avoided it.

2.3.3.

According to my mother I once refused to leave a department store (John Orrs) in Durban at the age of six because my imaginary pet hedgehog escaped. It took the store manager an hour to find him. Once she heard that, William's mother started to call me hedgehog. And seeing as I had strange fantasies about her, I didn't mind when she ruffled my hair and said, "who's a little hedgehog then....."

END PART THE FIRST

DIVERSION #1

2009-03-13T01:23:00.000-07:00

A short indication of where we are going.

9.1

This is for if you were at that Pirates game, y’know the last one of the league and just to explain if you saw me coming out, like what I was doing, okay? So.

It’s normal. Long ago I’ve learnt to make a plan for the morning. I’ve got at least 10 hours to withdrawal, lucky I’m a smoker and not a spiker so, a plan for me is not trying to resist to leave over, but who I’m going to roll over, or plea to. Cause I got at least 5 hours before the sick sets in. So I step out into the hard afternoon Jozi sun and make my way to the bookstore. Step out of the old pool house in the abandoned garden of the condemned house in Rosebank near the mall. Climb the wall with all my stuff in one bag, never know, drop it at pick ‘n pay, must be back by seven, one walk through the mall, maybe I’ll see someone who I thinks I’m still who I used to be and get them to lend me some cash so I can leave out petty left for another day, whatever.

That’s all background, I guess. I made it to the street, taking the middle west entrance, so’s I don’t have to go past Mike’s room, cause hw always takes whatever I’ve stolen with that fucking dirty knife of his, well lately it’s been the knife, which means he’s getting lazy or he’s lost the gun again, or whatever, but what pisses me is he always buys me enough out of my cash so that I don’t get too sick, but so’s I have to mission quickly so that hopefully I’ll be able to be robbed by him soonish again.

But no, I take the middle west entrance toward the sands passing the park junkies squabbling over some rich kid who’s stupidly asked for advice, Tom Dollar spots me and peels off because obviously he’s late in line for a hit and he’s offering me his pipe and I’m shrugging, no money, just here for yesterdays dash that I didn’t collect, this is code for fuck off and if he’s not sick he’ll go away, after trying the I’m sick please help about twice, anyway I’m striding past all of this toward my guy whose got brown, all the others have white which makes me jittery and obviously fucked even though I feel great.

And I need to look okay because I only managed a fifty out the mall, which is going to stop me getting sick but not fucked and if I want an easy mission this afternoon I’m going to spend a stone on James the rock head with no legs in the wheel chair, because then he’ll let me wheel him down to Park Station and spilt his sympathy earnings with me which normally means spending the night with him, and I won’t haul his wheelchair over the gate, so we have to sacrifice a hit each or a bag so we can book into a 40buck room, no blankets and how I hate that but he normally passes out so that I can escape around sunrise, and I always stash the extra I take from him so I can get a morning line of tee double you.

So Nick spots me, about 2 weeks, he came out looking like a cop, fat, clean, in a puffy jersey by now already the jersey is sold, he’s sleeping in a fucked security hut and he’s back on, so he says he’s sick and he’s not but sometimes he runs a good mission and I wanna piggy back so we start scope-ing out where the dealers and runners are stashing, and we memorize the places, specifically Juniors cause his shit is real good, then we head down the road and argue over which cops to phone cause I got guys who are good and always find but don’t give so much to you because they gotta sell, Nick wants to go with guys he knows cause they do it for the arrest, not that they’ll get one, but Nick knows they generally give at least half the stash, maybe more and we gotta have some for his girlfriend, who is, guess what, sick, but anyway.

I’ve done this before on my own and with others, in fact while Nick was inside I did it a lot and was pulling in about R300 and a few bags a day, good living, but then the one guy ripped me off and the cop had marked the fucking note and then told the dealer and arrested him and I got fucked up, big time and had to fucking pay the boss about a grand before that weekend and those cops wouldn’t give, so I went to other cops, and then shopped those cops and it was all a mess but the dealer got paid and I got some cash and only a black eye, but anyway today I have a deal coming later where a friend said they’d give me some cash to buy a phone, which of course will be stolen from me that is, if you now what I never mind, y’know so we go with Nick’s guys because. And like I said it’s the day of the chief’s pirate’s league thing so we walk down to the stadium and mission some coins to phone and then we go wait in the spot for the officers.

The moment they arrive I sense trouble, they struggle to understand the directions to the spot and looking through the cardboard down onto the street we see them looking puzzled, risk # one I have to go down, risking being seen by users or dealer traveling up to the brow but so. I get them up. And we draw them the map. Usually it’s simple they know the area, but it doesn’t take long for me to realise I’m about to waste a lot of time and energy, they don’t even know the street names, or get this, what to be looking for, turns out after we watch the drive up the hill that Nick owes them a favour for when he was moffa touched they didn’t write up the smack he had on him, so anyway. What do you think? We sit and wait. For godamn nearly ten minutes like a fucking day, I tell you, we’ve given these guys maps, top sideways front, even a 3D interpretation (thanks to the excellent tutorage in technical drawing from a Mr. Bull, I think, or was that math?) then the little blue car pulls in and only the one gets out, the least intelligent, he’s wearing his blue search gloves and has now on his police jacket raincoat thing, and in bright daylight he’s walking up to where everybody knows is Nicks spot, cars are whizzing by, we are fucked, somebody is going to say something, no matter what this guy hands us we are fucked.

Did I say that this meant we were fucked, well, then he starts calling our names, like we must come out, is he serious?

I break open the cardboard and shout, there’s no one called that here, Nick says what if he’s… but I see nothing on him and he’s alone. Guys he shouts, will you come up with me, my partner has secured the area but we can’t find anything. We Run.

Just like in the movies.

Except we’re real junkies and there’s a chance he might just maybe have something, like y’know, I don’t know.

I go down, Nick thinks I’m stupid but way I see it these guys have fucked up any chance of us using my guys so maybe like we can play them, at least for maybe a twenny or fifty or maybe we do a quick entrapment over the other side, like near the Dorchester, where I don’t have to walk through on the way to the Sands and don’t need to go.

Anyway, what it is is that this cop is suddenly all eita! And sharp on us, I think cause Nicks like sort of black, but anyway, the fact that he speaks with an English accent is lost on them so, being 80’s cops but anyway he tells us straight, he shows us the bag, there must be I dunno, 20, 30 stone, can’t see any tee double you, but fuck we can trade or compromise, and then he says it, either you come up and point out the guy or I arrest you two for dealing.

I look at Nick, I think about it, Nick is like panicked, I say, and what else, like do I have to do it in court? No just show us the guy and we’ll take it from there, okay so it’s the bribe they want, a snap. I just pray that that little cunt Bonny is on the street cause he sold me shit last week and I said I get him and god knows everyone knows that I owe him it was all over the street and everyone knows if you’ve been munged, you do whatever to get out.

Let me have a few hits, I’m gonna need them, he opens the bag, tosses them to me and we sit on the road, Nick takes out the pipe and we hit, we’re like zooming, and a call comes through on the radio, like we found a big one or we got one or whatever, so the cop says get in, I say no, not if you’re going to arrest someone, we’ll wait here, he thinks twice and then cuffs us to the fence pole next to the road, and then in a moment of compassion, tosses us a few more rocks, so then what I was saying was, if you were leaving the pirates league game in may, and you saw two guys handcuffed to a fence near the petrol station, and didn’t know what we were doing, we were smoking rocks and then we were zooming so hard we both broke our thumbs to get out of the handcuffs, which only hurt until we got back to the street and Junior told us that the cops had gone and got away with nothing, just a guy who wouldn’t say anything and was a local so legal, who they would pay some thing to when he got out, then he saw out thumbs and felt sorry for us and gave us each a bag of Thai so it wasn’t so bad in the end.

8.1

To the earliest time I can think of apartheid being something I was aware of.
We are on holiday, in the mountains at an old English leather, walking trails, oak tree kind of place, its late afternoon, “Doctor Snuggles” has just finished and the news comes on. South Africa will not be taking place in the Olympics.
“Why dad?”
“Because of Apartheid”
“What’s Apartheid?”
“I’ll tell you when you’re twenty one, now let’s go for that horse ride I promised”
And he shouts out the window in pidgin Zulu, for the boy to bring the horses round. The “Boy” is twice his age.

We are in the sky blue truck, I am a little person, we have to go past one of his building sites, when we get there all the people doing the actual building are black. There are a lot of them. When we leave, one of them has to come with us, and although there is plenty of space in the front, he sits on the back. Looking out the back window, it seems to me that he has sat on the back as a matter of choice because he seems to be enjoying the fresh air. At the next stop, I ask my dad if I can sit on the back too. He does not respond. But when we get back to the truck he opens my door for me and guides me in with the back of his hand.

Christmas shopping 1987, I have to take my Dad into town, to Grey Street, to show him the Jarmin Biggs suede shoes I want for Christmas. It is an Indian area, all the shops are run by Indians, as you pass from the parking garage to the arcades of Grey st, the racial mix changes drastically, My father is perceptibly made wary, “Is this safe?” he asks. I come here all the time. With the money from my newspaper route I buy all my clothes in the area (because by this stage I am a “trendy”), I buy all my records from Moola’s music; Dad has often warned me to be careful of the “Devious Choots”. As we are walking down the pavement, an old black woman and her middle aged daughter (I guess) shuffle toward us. I step off the pavement to let them pass, its good manners. My father gives me “A clip on the ear”; he smacks the back of my head. “Never get out of the way for them; they get out of the way for you. Especially now”. I have no idea what he is talking about, I am not yet 21, he has not explained apartheid to me. Nor has my history teacher, who has just quietly had me moved out of his class because I keep asking.

Part the First

2009-03-04T23:27:00.000-08:00

12yrs to 14yrs > 1984 to 1986

2.3

you take your wisdom I'll take mine, I can impart only this. There are no lessons here. Anything worth knowing is not communicable in words, only in the unfolding of events within time.

I will list them, those who in a Nabakovian sense were my precursors.

Carol Anne
Elizabeth
Cindy
K.
and mostly Vern (still now I feel those tiny stabs of pain and satisfaction)
Fiona.
Phillipa.

these girls set up a pattern that would follow me through all my loves'. Hunt, Catch, Release. Even in the telling I do not entirely know how.

Carol Anne, Kevin's younger sister was five years younger than me when I was twelve, as she grew, her beauty grew, I quietly watched her, reveled in her sweet company, somewhere in my head I thought when I am twenty six and you are twenty one I shall sweep you off your feet. When I left for film school age 17, she had faded into the distance as had my friendship with Kevin, as his band toured the country, I was still in school, after all the years of carrying drum kits, I was not even mentioned on the album sleeve notes.

But the shock that accompanied news of his death in my late twenties was that Carol-Anne had been in the car with him, that she was gone too, that I would never sweep her off her feet. Then, at 27, my hunting became more urgent.

Elizabeth lived up the road and around the corner, if you took a short cut through Kevin's back garden and then crossed the Dobe's property; you were five houses from hers. She taught me chess, she was never desirable. Our friendship trailed off. As I grew toward the pack of boy thugs, I was desperate to impress, she somehow slipped away. Later I caught a glimpse of her; she had become beautiful, in a totally strange Italian Vogue sense. Whatever happened to her?

Cindy was my best friend early, my next door neighbor, and only ever a buddy, she moved away, still in Westville my home town, but off the walk from school route and I would only visit when I had reason to. One reason was that her parents had an Apple Lisa, that I loved dearly, When my own parents bought me a ZX Spectrum 48K, with full color (the Lisa was only green), I had less reason to visit. For some reason I sense there was a mistake here.

Strange though that when they moved away, the people who moved in brought with them a boy, younger than me, but one who was too become my comfort in Kevin's later withdrawal into Pop Posing. He was younger than me, chubby, I thought I could push him around, that I was superior, but I was young I was foolish.

There was a Gang in my street that played together, the make up of this gang and the idea of a street to play in has followed me through my life, Rockey Street, Long Street, Seventh Avenue, O'Reilly St. The Gang was Kevin, Brandon, Me, William, to some extent Warren and partially P.J. Though they moved in and out of our street in moments. We played in rivers, through the nature reserve; we had wild treks, leaving early morning, coming home while the birds were quieting down, up the hill to Johnny's tea room and when they built it, around the walls of the prison. But the girls, I had secret friendships with the girls, as I did with P.J's sister K.

The room is golden afternoon light, the dapples from the plain trees bask it in innocence. This is not the first time we play out our game, not doctor doctor, but of marriage. The house is empty, Esme, the maid (in the parlance of the day) is in her khaya, in the back. We stand outside the door to my bedroom, with the door open the curtains drawn, the dapples yellow and shadowy against the powder blue curtains. The two single beds also blue. I have taken pillows and placed them under the one on the left, the one that receives the most light underneath. Turning on the bedroom light would spoil the magic, opening the curtains would expose us to any gang members popping over the garden fence to look in, see if they could listen to my records. But there is no music now, as we slowly peel off our school clothes, still patina'd with sweat from the walk from the bus stop home, we are careful to throw them in to my room, for soon we will close the door and a pile of clothes outside would surely arouse suspicion should my mother come home early. And then we are naked. I lift her into my arms and carry her over the threshold, to the bed, as she crawls under the bed; I go to close the door.

In the shadows and glinting light we examine each others bodies with only our eyes, there is a long period where I want desperately to hold her but we merely look, then on some signal from her, we embrace and fall into an ecstasy like daze, somewhere between sleep and floating. Normally we are shocked out of it by the sound of the Valiant returning. On this last day, I am woken by the sound of P.J'S voice. I have left the window open, his hand is inside and he about to climb through, "What are you doing under the bed?" as he heaves himself up, he sees his sister. He drops back runs off. "Did he see me?", "No." but we both know that I am lying.

It is from there that, somehow abstractly I know, my parents decide I must join the church youth group. Not Jesus, I thought, but I didn't get Jesus, My cousins Terry and Trevor also went, Terry played the gospel guitar. Trevor thought the world was going to end in a "The Day After" Kind of way and wanted to get his kicks in. It was there that I met Vern.

I was told years later that the reason K's family moved away was because her parents had split up, but when I met up with her and went roller skating at the Springs rink in JHB in 1991, her father was still around. I have always feared that I was somehow to blame, a terrible thing to be responsible, sending a family to Springs.

She's married now, someone else carried her over the threshold, we tried writing, but I had just discovered The Smiths and was quite enjoying my pain. Vern served only to intensify it.

Back back slipping back, I forget Francesca, I was much younger, young, ten, nine, she was Esme's child, about 2 or three, I was playing near the khaya (later to become my grandparents flat, so much fun fur), I heard her, I went in, I remember being dazed by this small child playing on the floor. (Note: I felt like it was my right just to walk into someone else's living space. I stood over her and remember having this distinct thought, "Little Girl, one day when you are old you will remember this moment, that some kind of prince stood over you, and should have rescued you". I don't know why, maybe it had something to do with the politics my father was teaching me but, there it is, I had that thought.

I used to believe that there was ONE for every one. As I grew I believed that there might be more than one One, perhaps three? Was my opinion by my twenties. After all love can't be true if you can feel it for too many people, right.

Then I started to fall in love with anyone, just in case, also not good.

Now I can be totally in love with anyone. I just have to still my mind and observe them, doing something or nothing, totally still my mind and allow myself to be totally aware of them, how they are, their movements or non and before long I can fall in love with them, for just who they are at that moment. Not in some kind of I wanna fuck way but totally in love with this amazing manifestation of God. But if I do it in a nightclub it usually leads to, I wanna fuck.

Prologue

2009-02-27T00:17:00.000-08:00

1.1

At the age of 12 I fell out of a tree, hit my head on a rock and lost my memory. I was apparently in a coma for three days. My first memory is opening my eyes and looking up at Mrs. Stirk who was shouting into her kitchen, “call the ambulance, Gillian, and then call his mother”, I heard “His head is bleeding all over me”, as I looked up I could sense Brandon and Kevin on the periphery, and then saw that I was cradled in Shireen’s lap, she was translucent and had rose lips.

The next thing I remember is the sound of my mother screaming, but in the distance, like down a shaft, screaming “Not again”. Later I would be told by my father that this was my third death.

My first was that I had been born dead and they’d had to revive me, secondly when I was five I’d stopped breathing for 10 minutes (apparently) while being rushed to hospital with bronchitis.

Since then I’ve died twice more (though the coma technically wasn’t a death, it was more my mothers fear of another death that makes me lump it in here). Once by design and second by stabbing (not the stabbing over 2 pieces of crack that resulted in the scars on my ass but the stabbing under my ribs for my cellphone that I decided to fight for), that according to the paramedics left me dead for a WHOLE MINUTE! Gee shucks!

There was also the time the cabinet in the hotel room fell on me when me and the Swedish model were trashing the German models room during fashion week 2002 that I felt as though I had died but hadn’t, but I digress...

Firstly I was later told by my mother that all three incidences of death were untrue (Like I said the third one wasn’t real anyway, so the first two), that my dad had made them up, for what reason I am not sure. I was told a lot of things when I was in my teens that my father seems simply to have made up, about being Jewish, about being French, about parking lots, hardware stores, the lack of black people in South Africa (why we never saw any at night), why we didn’t get into the Olympics in the 80’s (The lack of black people who could run or something), so much so that I hardly know what about me is true or not.
The fact that I have no memory before the age of 12 adds to this, the fact that I was born with only one lung (not true, I have since discovered), the fact that so many things about me and my family were different always made me feel set apart, destined for great things (we were part of the royal family but had been kicked out because my great great great grandfather (the French Jew) was caught in a downstairs broom closet with a “chamber maid”), what I didn’t know, could not know was simply this, destiny is something you make with your own hands and if you sit on them and wait, your destiny no matter how great, will be slightly squashed.

According to my mother, the Stirks, my sister and Brandon (Kevin died in a bad car crash sometime in the early century and even that we’ll get to) I did fall out of a tree, I did not bleed, pass out or even go to hospital.
But I remember it all clearly.
We were playing Swiss Family Robinson in the Stirk’s Big Tree and my favorite stubby branch for leaping up a level snapped.
I remember it all as clearly as I do not remember anything before that date.
Not a thing. So the fact that I did not suffer amnesia does not preclude the fact that I have no memory before the age of twelve. I suffer from amnesia through the power of suggestion. And the power of my father’s suggestion was so vast, like gods hand, like clouds racing past as I lay in the wreck of a car in the Free State sun, like all those still moments of disaster in my life that I, to this day, think of in terms of, "I wonder how my father would tell this one".

And since his passing, not having him as a sounding board, no matter how bitter and dishonest, leaves me shouting into the darkness, begging for approval in a world were there shall be no more approval 2.1

Inevitability. Lying here. Full moon. Empty bed. My arm reaching across to your side. Events set in motion by drinking that first sip of gin from Ananda’s belly button aged fifteen, the night my parents were out.
Doing glue in the shed with Brandon and Phillip O. and the shelving system coming down, that night my parents were merely asleep but no more as my father, himself smelling of whiskey helped us up glue splattered from the ruins of his workshop.

The long rich lawns of my youth to the well decorated apartments of my twenties, my early thirties sleeping on pavements and now here in an empty flat, finally shucking off my beast but alone and possession-less, except for this double bed, the events that set it in motion taking photographs with Kevin by the river, the berg weekend with the art class boys and Tracy and Kathryn, Kathryn’s hairy arm’s, the fight with Russell, the photograph of her running over the mountain. Arms dragging over asphalt in my sleep, unchanged sleep alone, back going back over these useless years these useless limbs, unable to prevent the events inevitably set in motion, genetic code or just stupidity, I am stuck in this body in this time in this place, in this boredom like a butterfly still alive in its case. The Girls, I remember.

Let me tell you about Carmen, her 17 year old gawky body swaying as we passed the vodka bottle around, fresh from our triumph at the Smirnoff fashion show, pumped up on seeing our big shiny new computer graphic introduction on the big screen, me and the blades boys carry round a crate of vodka, dancing dancing, me just in from Jo’burg having shot the Orlando Pirates in an Adidas commercial, ready for the edit, dancing with these beautiful people at this forgotten nightclub, already doing hits of smack on the corner of credit cards and it was 1997 and the future was mine.

Except for Carmen, she was Dan’s that night, then winter and she was his all through to summer when he slept with her friend Jade and got caught, me and C. were playing on the PS2 fighting games, when she realized what was happening in the bedroom, all of us high on something, probably coke at that point and I drove her home, it was late October, in Dan’s little white corolla, as we parked outside her house I felt like a teenager an unseasonable mist rolling in and she cried as she told me her stories, which are hers, belong to her and I will leave alone, but I promised her sanctuary that night, as I was setting out to betray her, but first going back I must tell you of the first time I saw her, knew I’d be with her. But then I thought, I must HAVE her. Everything was to be possessed, and now I lie here possession-less, full moon empty bed.

There have only been three women in my life, a hundred girls, fifty sluts and a couple of whores but only three women. The choices we make are what define us and the choices I’ve made that have left me here alone for a third time define me inevitably.

3.1

PAUL NEWMAN AND A RIDE HOME.

Well all this recollectings got me thinking, like when I was a kid all books were about truth but nowadays it seems that lying is pretty much in vogue. But the way I see it, lying is really just another way of expressing something that can’t be by the facts. Like in that song, “My Lie’s are only wishes”. Like that short film I made, “Wet Shorts”, is based on something that really happened to me, the film about the guy who discovers he’s having sex with his cousin, well that really happened to me, except it probably didn’t, it just sorta sprung up like a story I was telling, like even after I discovered that I wasn’t Jewish (even though my sister claims we still were once) I carried on telling people I had been. Anyway it was a story I traded for a couple of laughs and it seemed like a good idea for a movie, like writing this down seems like a good idea to do with my life now that I’ve given up on love and drugs as a way to the divine (or to waste time). So I guess I should start with my earliest memory. Before the falling out of the tree stuff that is.

I’m very young, I’m hiding in a cupboard, we are playing hide and seek one of my girl cousins is there with me. It’s hot, stifling, muggy Durban. I don’t want to be found. After a while she cries out, “We’re in here”. It’s the same cousin I bump into later that I turn into the story that becomes that film.

In my Grandfathers yard there are chicken coops, with bird shit in them, down by the garage, there is also a huge frangipani tree, pink, smelling of pink and we climb it all the time. Me and my cousins. I remember my grandfather’s second wife (the non Jew) Alice making me toast and egg soldiers for Sunday breakfast when we slept over. I remember him shouting, where’s my coffee, bitch!” and meaning the bitch part, she just sighs, stubs out a cigarette and it’s like a 50’s roadhouse for a split second (as I remember it, not as it was).

I remember his office about the garage and the nigger begging for money that was a piggy bank and made of metal that I wanted. The smell of cigars. I wonder how much of the stuff my dad told me about him was true.

I’m young, maybe ten, we are in the lounge, me, dad, granny and gramps (not Alice and grandfather but my mothers parents) and Auntie Ginny (Who was actually my godmother and used to be a fifties cabaret singer called Virginia Lee, we had loads of her records and they were filled with pictures of her in glamorous ball gowns on hotel steps, all Bond women like, not like the little women in slacks who slept a lot we had with us now). I am performing in front of them, corny jokes from school, they are all laughing and saying don’t stop but I run out of jokes and run out of the room feeling useless.

I get to school early, standard four, so like grade 6, I must be 11 (if I finished when I was 17? Does that make sense?) And somebody has written “FUCK” in big red letters in spray paint on one of the classroom doors. I remember being picked up and whisked away by one of the teachers. Later, when I have a class there, the door is gone, replaced by a non-green one.

I remember in school thinking I could be a superhero and writing about it. I’d write about it again in high school. It was the flying thing, the ability to get away, to escape, that really appealed to me.
I remember the smell of the woodwork room mingling with the teacher’s cigarettes and wondering why I couldn’t do home economics like the girls.

I remember coming home, my dad having abandoned the boat he was building to go find Aunt Ginny in town again, as he told it she would drink too much and think she was back in the fifties and take too many pills and go to those old hotels and demand to sing and she would end up on the beach, that’s where he would find her he said when he got her back in and into a bed. My sister was living upstairs already, we had a big house and a big yard and an avo tree and orange trees and Ginny was sleeping in my sister’s old room.

I remember sitting around the wooden cabinet with the record player in the sun drenched afternoons with my mother and she played me the records she had sung on before she met my dad. She had had some song get a lot of airplay and was going to be famous but one day she walked into a kosher butcher and my dad was working there and all that stopped. She became a housewife and Judith Allen slipped away into Judy Young and she became forgotten except to her.

Sometimes on the way to school in the big old Valiant she would sing along to Elvis songs on the cassette player and smoke and I could feel her want to cry, “I’m In Love With The Girl Of My Best Friend” she would play over and over again, and once, she turned the sound down and said, “don’t end up with some one you don’t truly love”. But I was too young to comprehend it and even now wonder if I dreamed it.

I remember watching Winnie the Pooh on 16mm projected onto a sheet flapping in the wind on the back lawn at Elizabeth’s place, playing on the Apple Lisa at the Bolstridges, running from the back gate of the school to the top gate, after Cindy Bolstridge, chasing her to school, shouting “I’ll sue you, I’ll sue you” and having no idea what I meant.

These are the only memories I can dredge up from before I fell out of that tree. They are all hazy. Everything else about my early childhood is secondhand from stories my father told me later, most of which have turned out to be lies anyway.

After falling out the tree, we continued to play at the Stirks. “Clod Wars” (throwing sand clods at each other) and “Gearbox is burning” which involved starting a fire under a box and then pretending we were all in a car and the box was the gearbox, when it caught fire, the first one to notice would shout “Gearbox is burning” and we would all try beat it out before the lawn caught fire with stuff from the Stirks shed. That was one of Kevin’s favorites, which now that I think about it might be ironic and sad but is just well, not.

Kevin had the best hair, lived across the road but down one and was older than me but let me hang out with him and the older kids, by then “Cum on a biscuit” had become his favorite game but he never let me play, and I certainly didn’t want to watch. That was around the time he was starting up the band, “The Celtic Rumours”, and I was their number one fan and behind the scenes guy, essentially the roadie, but only when they played somewhere my parents let me.

Even though by then when they thought I was sleeping over at someone after church youth group, I was sneaking off to town to be barman at a nightclub.

Wait, I’ve skipped so much.

Give me a moment to straighten this out; I’ve skipped to 15, left out falling in love with Vern before she moved to New Zealand and some other stuff, it’s all equally important so let me try get it straight.

1.2

Oh!

God Point me like an arrow.

Doubt

What have I begun, so much to transcribe, the note on tomorrow or the written in a dream in blunt pencil, and I think God, you Bastard, but then like the octopus under the sea thinks of me, how can we conceive of God, what point is there. It’s Jesus I struggle with, a benevolent God I can accept, so maybe I am Jewish.

The couple in the lift, having a loving argument about the validity of surveys and what that means And I’m thinking I must call Andy and get him to send thumbs so I can put it in next and I think that I must tell him that whether when I was on drugs, or on the street or in the malls, typing into the computer or writing in pencil in newspaper margins, or even just talking to junkies round the scrub fire late night, I am always telling stories, that is my inheritance, I am the story teller. That is my existence from whatever source. I got the gift from my father, who lied to me and he lied to hide his shame (whatever that was), and I can hold no blame for that, for making me this way, stories to protect and to guide, as he tried to protect me from the failings of his family, himself, this country then.

Because of that I was coddled in my beliefs and because of that I fell hard and therefore I am this, a liar a thief of facts, a storyteller who can no longer tell the difference between lie and truth and can only tell my own truths, an unyielding, unsheltering truth. We are born in mystery, live in it, die in it. And it does not matter. Because you cling to your paper thin memories that change with the suns reflection and I will cling to mine and on these little boats we pass through time

2.2

What have I done, it would be so easy to transcribe in random from notebooks and scribblings. To drop in poems typed long years ago. but my life can no longer be approached as a ramble, I have randomized through it bumbled letting it teach me all it can and through it I have come to this point, the point of setting down.

Not that any precise chronology will make an ending but through my fumblings only the order can show the things I have come to see. Though it felt order less, I was always a tourist guided by an invisible hand. Now I feel that hand I must honor the journey it took me on.

And leave nothing out, so it will be tedious and I must start with my first life, my teenage life and I need a little time to spread it out and put it down in sense of time. So I will break from you here and lay it all down, my early embarrassing misinformed confidence.