6.1 Incoherent Justifications

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

“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.