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.
Showing posts with label South Africa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label South Africa. Show all posts
Monday, June 29, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
DIVERSION #1
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.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Part the First
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.
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.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Prologue
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.
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.
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