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.

1.23 Apartheid and Trenchcoats

1.23

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

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

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

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

3.6 - Westville Methodist Church.

3.6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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