Astroids

You know,

truth be told

I’m probably a little guilty of engendering that emotion

in you

I’m vaguely aware of it

in my choice of imagery

and sentiment.

I’m being wicked but its fun,

that spark.

The truth remains though,

you really do get it.

Why do I Love You?

I love you because in preparing to meet you I had to learn to love myself.

I love myself with curiosity, compassion, gentleness, humility and joy.

When I first imagined you in the universe, I placed you on a glass pedestal on the top of the highest spire at the very apex of the universe, such that not only could I never get to know you, but nobody else could either. I could never be disappointed in you because I could never see you but you could always be disappointed in me because you were looking from so far up in the sky.

I pictured your perfect face and your lips and your smile and your sanguine frame and I went out in the world to find your resemblance in anyone I could find. I ticked them off one by one, noting only where they did not match you, spending a while with some, moments with others, being kind because I wanted your love but also cruel because I could not get it.

The truth is though that I would not give you up or let you down. Once I had decided I would never settle for anything less which took me on a curious journey of romantic detachment. You were always by my side, five thousand feet in sky. Sometimes I would feel your touch and your words through others, but they were never you. I missed you always.

Then one day I looked in the mirror. I realized that the person looking back at me was not your perfect partner, far from it. I was the antithesis of everything I projected onto you. How could I not have seen that perfect love involves a dance of mutuality and equality? How would you even recognize me for being your other half when I was so deeply disguised with the trappings of narcissism and self absorption?

Instead of looking for you in every person I met, I started to look for myself. I looked at all my friends and family and lovers and I looked for the me that was in them. What had I left behind? What was the taint of my passing? Was it curiosity and compassion and gentleness? Was it humility and joy and beauty? How through my interaction had I elevated them? What did I most not like to see and most want to get rid of?

At first I was surprised by how angry I became at my friend and loved ones. They were so disappointing! Gradually I realized it was the legacy of my interaction with them that was so backward, un-evolved, unloving, un-sexy. I realized that some even encapsulated my worst qualities so completely that they were grim parodies of me, without heart or hope or all the things that lie at the top of the great spire where I had placed my lost love.

I knew then that I was at the bottom of the universal heap of awesomeness. I needed to reach out to everyone. I would have to spend time with each and every single one and try to change the trend that was the ribbon of my destiny as it wove through them. So I started to find them one by one and try to open up. I was amazed at how difficult it was going to be, many of them were just as angry at me! They did not like what they saw in me reflected back at them. They were having none of it!

I learned that sometimes it is not important to be right and sometimes it is not important to win. I needed to start listening. My inner self was confetti sprayed over everyone else. I had to go and pick up the pieces one by one, work out where they fit, decide if I wanted to keep them or not and ask for clues from everyone along the way. I had to learn humility! How could I find humility? By finding it in everyone else, by finding that hidden layer that we protect at all costs and allowing it to come out and breathe for a while.

I had to stop blaming the universe for keeping you away under lock and key. I had the lock and I had the key but only when I could reach over and gently take it from about your neck. I never wanted to hurt you and never wanted you to hurt me – we were always meant to care for each other. I stopped blaming the universe and started speaking the truth, by finding the truth in you. I was going to have to take a chance and just be honest. I was going to have to take a chance and find the honesty in you.

How do I know you? I know you when I am standing before you and you know me. I looked around and the mighty spire had started to shrink before my eyes. It wasn’t long before I could you see you on your glass throne and was amazed that you did not look like what I had thought. You had your own thoughts and your own breath and your own movement and your own standards. Good grief, I thought, what if I wasn’t good enough? Maybe I should just leave you up there?

I needed to find some good examples! I needed to find people that had ‘got it right’, that were ‘with it’. I needed success stories baby. I looked around and quite frankly I must say I was a little disenchanted. Some had it right for a while or seemed to have made it, but the more I got to know them I began to see the gremlins, the little bits and pieces of my own negative legacy, the lost opportunities, the paths of cowardice and insensitivity. Could it be that even you would be a bad legacy of me?

I haven’t had the delight of meeting you properly and already we are having issues, the precursor to tissues. Is it going to be worth it? Is it even worth the risk? History is no liar. The proof is everywhere you look! This is an issue filled universe! We need our god dam issues! I am not going to even speak to you if you don’t throw at least one issue on the table. Hit me with one of your own, we’ll compare notes. Look, frankly my issue is far more important than yours. How do we ever begin to proceed?

Ok, so let’s say it is all worth it. Is it humanly possible that somebody could just love you and bring you joy? Look at flowers, they’re shamelessly beautiful once the little issue-tics have been cleaned off their stems, the capricious little white mites of right thrown back to the swamp from which whence they sprang. We need to plant more beautiful swamp flowers, big lilies that encompass everything and give us balance, with a pure white Lotus at its heart being utterly, shamelessly beautiful.

Wait a minute, I’m remembering the point. When I first imagined you into my world I was totally nuts over you! I could think of nothing more amazing than having the opportunity to just see you walk, without an endless spiral of stairs into our towers of self-absorption. Ok, so let’s assume we are both going to attract issues-ticks onto our roots and stems because that is the way reality plays it? When you still had a pure heart, could you remember the longing and acceptance with which we reached out to touch each other?

The truth is that I go out there wearing my armour. I like the way it looks and moves. I like it in the mirror. It is my island vantage point from which to look out for you, always ready to do it right. You never truly know someone until you fight them. I am prepared for war. Disappointment is a rabbit I have killed and am eating by my camp fire along the journey. It is best after a couple of days like any stew and if you cook it too hot, it starts to taste meaty and bitter.

I sometimes wish though that I had someone to help me with the straps at the back of my armour. It takes a long time to put on in the morning and a long time to take off before bed at night. It’s a suit of armour for chrissakes! Can you imagine? You know how much that shit weighs? Especially those parts right at the back where you can’t reach, where you need a loving touch helping to unclip you.

I don’t mind really, because I am now a soldier in the battle to retrieve my love. This is war. Your pedestal is almost head height now but we have another barrier between us. We landed on opposite cliffs! I can see you sort of but there is a rough swell and lots of sharks. Either way we look at this thing there is going to be blood. The blood is going to attract the sharks.

I love at you from across the chasm, in your suit of armour, looking so gallant and beautiful and righteous. I wonder if it is as heavy as mine. What if we were attacked halfway through our bedtime readiness, just when our hand was tangled in the cord at the back of our armour? We would be unprepared. Creepers, maybe you sleep in yours? It looks light enough – how do you sleep? Mine is really heavy, I can’t catch a wink.

Every time I am right, I am wrong. Right does not care for me. Right is the sergeant beside me on the cliff. He has a magnificent suit of armour, almost an Ottoman dervish of colour and style and flair. It is one of the latest ‘sleep in models’ for people who take life seriously enough to get the right armour, in this winters shades. He looks pretty comfortable but I sometimes wonder if he doesn’t get tangled in all the bright belt-clips. Everything is a procedure for him, with all forms fill out in triplicate, complaints notified and ratified by all parties. He is right and I am wrong.

Does wrong care for me? Wrong sits on my left on the cliff face. Wrong is, to put it delicately, less than impressed with the lot he has been give in life. He is skinny and wears a black, lacy suit of armour. He has lots of knives, a sharp moustache and a pointy hat. If he is going to have to be wrong, he’s going to make damn sure he shares it with you. He’s a party killer, the chiller from the thriller.

He’s always ready for action. On the face of things he doesn’t stand much of a chance against Mr Right, who by now is a flight of raging, indignant light, but he has another more sinister weapon, poli-ticks, the most voracious new model, self adapted to grow through battle. His only trick really is convincing you that he doesn’t exist. Once you go with the charms of Mr Right, you are settling back into the velvety embrace of Mr Wrong.

I notice now that you also have your first advisors there with you too. Are they girls? I can see one of them picking up a spyglass and aiming it at me. Does she want to take a closer look? Is that her right or wrong guardian behind the lens? Does she have anyone else working for her? A guy hands me my own telescope for me to use.

He is standing next to me, but I did not notice him. He held his hand up smartly and announced that he was from the Bureau for Expectation and Guarded Optimism. He wanted to know what I was looking for in the glass and so did I. He demanded more though. He wanted me to make sure that I was looking for right or wrong before I even looked in the lens!

So now there are a whole host of different soldiers and commanders running around and just as many on her side. Administrative Staff! Insurance Assassins! The whole thing was beginning to make the cliffs start to crumble under the weight of all the soldiers and make ready people. It is to be an Epic! It is to be a battle!

Right and wrong are standing by my side as I start to slide down the slope and into the crashing ocean and all the sharks, which have now mutated so radically that they have fifteen sets of teeth open at one time! I realize that the sharks are not looking at either of them, my companions, as if to eat them. Only now do I actually notice that they do not have any substance or life. They are empty suits of armour being marionetted by swarms of tiny little issue-ticks all working together.

Good grief! Now you’re telling me? They’re empty? They’re are gonna have to sink to the bottom, where they will rust. Shit, so are we unless we get these stupid armour suits off. You know how heavy they are in water, even water that is thicker than blood? The truth is I can’t reach the clip at the back of my armour and without that latch I am just dead weight. So unfortunately are you and there is always the choice of drowning in a locked embrace of regrets and recriminations and lack of soulful dexterity?

We are going to have time this shit perfectly. If we manage to land in each other arms we can both reach around and unclip the latch simultaneously. Can you do this? Do you know how to jump? Do I? We catch each other and the oceanic trench has become a narrow canyon. We can both stand, but we are supporting each other. The armour seems lighter. We straighten up. The last of the thrashing sharks, who had shrunk to size of little squid, now vanished into the marshy soil. A Lily blooms beneath our feet and a Lotus stands shyly in the air between us.

Why do I love you? I love you because you are me at the core of that lotus.

Swallow the Sparrow

August sky and swallows fly like arrows through the chill.

Darkness here brings the dreamers,

flying along the coastline,

low to the water,

capping the crests with their mercurial breasts.

In the night they are shadows removed from the darkness,

tiny arrows of absence,

leaving stillness in their wake and the faint flutter of motion

like the softly cracked tip of a whip suspended through time.

In the morning they are shining and you can see yourself in them,

the smallest possible flash of you,

a retinal flicker of colours blurred with speed.

And if you follow their cracked wake by quickly moving your head from side to side,

you can catch a longer moment,

and it looks as if you can see through them into another land.

watching a boiling pot

Moving to the 7th dimension is moving backwards and forwards in time,

to the Alpha and the Omega,

to the beginning and the end of the universe.

In the boundary of this realm you will see evidence of the broken symmetry

that made life in our universe possible.

Inherent in the design of the universe is self observation

and everything reaches constantly to return and to evolve towards

original and ultimate symmetric harmony through shared observation.

Soli queue

Life reaches to be liked with such delicacy

Memories bloom with utter intricacy

Girls in strips of street clothes with woes

Try to expose the blow by blows

They sew but cannot be sown

For they reap the bread of what they’ve known.

fingers

Dancing through my love

With a glass pane between us

Our fingers tracing matching arcs

We try to be nonchalant

Hoping time will redeem us.

effervescent clown

Like a splendid pony
the little phoney pranced, enhanced
with courtiers wine, perfume and blush
like a floating dandelion in the expectant hush…

ET – unedited

My Fatherland

said a hero

of faith and bigotry

and inspired the people

who had been walking and fighting

for four hundred years.

Dispossessed people touching every word that spilled

from his coffee and charcoal lips.

Bloody cheeks and crashing brows

spreading the message of hope

and virtue.

Now beaten and pulped on a lonely bed

by revenge tokoloshe

small insipid men

migrant miseries.

He had gone one more night

to check the farm,

read his bible,

sleep on a scuffed mattress.

This Boer hero, a man of horses and high-veld winters

ashamed, fed to the dogs.

The Plan

I believe that the most significant evolution we will undergo is in the design of our brain. Already it is by far the most changed organ in our bodies in the last one hundred thousand years. Part of the reason for this evolution is the introduction of language. Language is an evolution inducing virus. There are two powerful aspects to this revolution that make it so. Firstly, language allows us to describe our perceptions. Secondly language allows us to share our descriptions. Between those two phenomena is the potential for collective consciousness and collaboration.  When this potential is actualized we develop a vast network of communal resources.

It may appear to some that the movement toward the virtual worlds and the internet, a space where there is no objective truth, is a movement away from God and spiritual awareness. I would argue that the exact opposite is true. By joining virtual communities, we are reimagineering our collective consciousness and in the process, physically evolving our brains. Phenomena like religion are in a sense parasites of the collective consciousness and their purpose is to collect souls, which is to say subscribers, investing in their commonly defined purpose. Like language, and writing, religious ideas are a form of viral media that attempts, above all, to survive.

Having said that, phenomena like this are designed to be outlived, and if we understand them in the context of ever improving software and hardware, they should be improved. However, they are bugged by capricious little self contained Trojan loops like the idea of blind faith that makes them impossible to delete. Once we understand their viral structures we can evaluates their merits with the same dispassion that we regard software. Everything has a hook and everything has a price. To get to the next level we have to accept the fact that we have to do away with history entirely. The next step is to use our never before seen collective clout to reimagine our spiritual awareness.

The search for a new God, a patchwork of science and biology and yoga and awareness and compassion, should be the most important project in our lives. It is at once a vast evolution machine that will physically transform our brains as much as an honest collective conversation on just what this spiritual force is.

what moves me

Curious,

creative,

beautiful minds,

Lights in the void,

Innocent,

lost,

wandering,

Thoughts like golden sparrows

Exploding from trees

In a dervish of autumn leaves.

January 18

So my lover - her smell and tears now distant as a night cloaked road in some foreign desert town – has admonished me to write and cook.

It is becoming what I do. My problem is that there simply isn’t enough time to run the empire that is my life and cook properly. I am starting to need bigger kitchens, wilder ingredients, dedicated equipment.

I must live vicariously through my mother’s kitchen while maintaining a small chemical lab in the closeted confines of my own. As for time and money, it’s a delicate balance. Success in life brings costly passions.

My kitchen is dedicated to making stock at the moment. For Christmas my sister Kim – with unwavering retail prowess and attention to intuition – bought me a cook book that stands as royalty among lesser tomes: ‘Grand Livre de Cuisine, culinary encyclopedia by Alain Ducasse’.

It is so large that and so full of ideas that it has its own ecosystem. I hear it whispering to me at night in a strange and wonderful language that I am only beginning to understand. As the introduction to the book cheerfully puts it; ‘By imitating the masters, one cannot of course reach the levels of their perfection, but one often escapes the routine of one’s own banality.’

How utterly French.

It is true however that I cannot follow a single recipe easily, not even in concept, never mind practice. There is none of this explaining business to be found in mortal cook books; ‘Just take the consommé, dust it with Fleur de Sel and place it next to the Veal Juice.’ And you make those how?

Trying to answer those basic questions is in fact what brought me to page 1039, whereupon I discovered a section entitled Basic Recipes, which is to say butters, stocks, consommé, jelly, fumet and juice.

The juice section alone is like a small farmyard of recipes – lamb juice, beef juice, duck juice, pheasant juice, rabbit juice, veal juice, chicken juice and last but not least, my personal favourite, pigeon juice. What’s more, most of the reductions are made up of each other. Lobster jelly, for example contains calf’s foot jelly and brown game stock contains veal stock.

You can’t just go and create one stock or jelly without creating a supportive family of others so that the flavour reductions can be played together like a symphony. This part is the real secret to professional cooking.

I have bought six large jars which are sitting on the kitchen counter. It is now a case of finding six kilograms of veal bones, a job not as easy as it appears because we no longer live in villages. The meat is stripped in far-off warehouses’ and sent out ready packaged for market. Never fear though I have a plan for tomorrow.

Tidnab

‘What’s your name?’
‘Tidnab’ she responded.
‘That’s an unusual name.’
‘Not really, I hear it every day. What’s yours?’
‘Thomas’
In the background, tango music played with zesty persistence, like an operatic mosquito.
‘I love this music.’
‘Agreed.’ she stood up, ‘but enjoyed best in moderation.’
Her jeans were skinny as her legs, dark blue with little badges sown into the fabric.
‘Where are you going?’
She turned to look at him. Her large eyes were coral blue and she wore a violet coloured lip ring through her lower lip. Her shoulder length hair was bible black. She had the tattoo of an Egyptian Ankh on the side of her throat.
‘How is that any of your business?
‘It’s not. I just wanted to talk to you a little longer.’ He had an innocent smile and a wide mouth.
‘I was going to go and cast a spell on someone. Do you want to come with me?’
‘I would love to.’ He jumped up and stood to attention. ‘Show me the way.’

They moved away from the party, into the garden. The smell of Jasmine and Fynbos was scented honey in the treacle thick air. She felt a bead of sweat running down her throat. The heat was amber coloured.
‘Who are you casting the spell on?’
‘That guy,’ she pointed at a tall, skinny boy in a blue suit. He looked very awkward. ‘It’s a love spell.’
‘I’m curious.’
‘Wait here’. She walked off and stood next to the skinny boy. Her body looked shy, her knees a little unstable, fingers brushing against his. They spoke for a while and then she reached up and kissed him full on the mouth. Briefly her metal piercing flashed between his lips. He embraced her and she held him. Then she pulled away, bowed slightly and walked away.
‘Did the love spell work?’ Thomas asked.
‘I think so.’
He grabbed her hand as she started to walk past him.
‘Can you cast that spell on me?’
‘Sure.’ She smiled, ‘follow me’.

He followed her through the crowd, watching her back flex sinuously. At the exit, she turned and paused. She put her arms around his waist and whispered in his ear.
‘Can I ask a small favour of you before I take you home?’
‘Sure.’
He watched her pull out a white wallet. She opened it and removed a wad of notes which she slid into the back pocket of her jeans before handing it to him.
‘Would you mind returning this for me?’
‘To whom?’ he asked.
‘You know,’ she giggled, ‘its a little payment for my spell. Go quick, just say you found it and then come back. I’ll be waiting for you.’
He ran off, laughing at her wickedness. He saw the poor chump looking through the chairs for his wallet. He was about to throw it at him when suddenly he checked his own back pocket.
His wallet was gone, replaced by a business card which he pulled out.

Tidnab

Turning the card over he read the name upside down and realized he had been caught and didn’t even have a kiss to show for it.

Brandy

I like to dine alone. Besides the coolness factor, it gives me an opportunity to eat my heart out at half the price of a beautiful companion and concentrate more intensely on the eating experience; dressed in a clandestine manner, carrying a book on brain chemistry, I explore the night for culinary delight. I often do it and tonight I decided to go the V & A Waterfront, a cluster fuck of restaurants next to the ocean.

I quietly visited all the restaurants as though shopping, interviewing their menus slowly, languidly. The shopping was without doubt as enjoyable as the buying. I loved the delicious sense of treating myself. I had teleported my child nature into an adult state with as much cash as I needed. I was limited only by my personal choice, not even having to take into account a partners persuasions.

Eventually I decided on a restaurant called 221, specializing in what you might call ‘global now food’ if you had no idea how food is actually officially categorized, which I don’t. The main decision pole was to make sure that the restaurant served oysters, since I was still in oyster consciousness from the previous evening.

I had just been served my first drink, pulled out my brain chemistry book and sidled comfortably into my seat when I was informed by the waiter that the oysters were finished; This is despite the fact that the last five restaurants had aggressively displayed whole tanks of the little fuckers bubbling with streams of water to keep them fresh and delicious.

Oh well, such is life. I  rubbed my hands together in glee as I relished the thought of treating myself to a sensational dinner. I had a starter of delicately fried prawns in a cocoon of Baklavah string pastry, served with a light buttery sauce. It was delicious but needed a twist of lime. I made some notes, next to a list of the ingredients.

Next up was another starter, country smoked trout and cucumber wrapped around a bar of creamed cheese with an array of cute sauces that had been scraped through by foodie tooth picks to make them look dramatic. I was really beginning to enjoy myself now but my stomach had had enough of the richness.

I don’t normally eat desert but restaurants the world over have developed a secret weapon that they use shamelessly to force your brain to eat more. It is called Crème Brulet and you have to be six foot under not to feel a twinge in your stomach just reading those words.

I was also almost done with my glass of very expensive wine. I had been so engrossed in my food that I had neglected to order another and now it seemed sort of rude to eat the Brulet without some wine. Impulsively, I decided to order some brandy, a patchwork of memories of films reliably informing me that Brandy and desert was something yummy to do.

The waiter, who had been very sheepish and cooperative since the debacle of the oyster drought, asked me what kind of Brandy I was requesting. He quickly worked out that I had no clue and said that he would bring me a surprise.

Oh my. Oh my, oh my. Who else knows about this Brandy stuff? Why the fuck didn’t someone tell me? I thought brandy was stuff that teenagers and Afrikaners mixed with liters of coke to kill time and brain cells.

The waiter, true to his word, brought it in a tumbler which itself was floating in a bigger tumbler half filled with steaming hot water in which steeped coffee beans. A spoon of brulet, followed by the tiniest sip of brandy – that is to say, the butter soft lips of an angel followed by the flash of her tongue and the sweet, rich hint of her breath.

In love, totally in love with this feeling – mission accomplished.

Oyster

Oysters can make you look pretty fucking cool.

I am sitting at Willoughby’s at the V&A Waterfront, arguably the finest sushi purveyor in Cape Town. It has the horrible fate of being in the thoroughfare of the busy mall but since I no longer smoke cigarettes – and therefore do not have to dart off to the exits between sips of wine – it is a handicap I am prepared to accept, so good is the food.

I am dressed to thrill, my outfit some lazy dalliance between agent provocateur, vampire chic and foody hipster. On the table beside me is a book on brain chemistry and a note pad, where I occasionally capture fleeting thoughts. In my hand is a glass of chilled, dry white wine.

I have been served oysters, Mississippi style, deep fried and then baked with a gratin of garlic herbs and breadcrumbs. The oysters are distended, almost poached, still creamy but losing all memory of ocean essence beneath a carpet of invading crumbs, lemon juice and Tabasco sauce. No, no, no, no, no!

The oyster is the pearlescent soul of the seven seas, salty waves and sexy ocean mucus captured for a moment of time in a suit of crusty armour! In the immortal words of Anthony Bourdain after tasting his first oyster as a child in France;

‘This I knew was the magic that I had until now only been dimly and spitefully aware. I had learned something. Viscerally, instinctually, spiritually – in some small, precursive way, sexually – and there was no turning back. The Genie was out of the bottle, my life as a chef had begun’.

I had enjoyed oysters, a dozen times or so. At first they taste like snot and salt but eventually you get into the whole coolness of it and hang around at parties getting nose rushes from the lemon and Tabasco. Some people are completely altered by them, but I clearly did not fully understand.

Which was why, upon reading Mr Bourdain’s book, I decided that I would have to rewire my brain to transform the rubber sex doll of my oyster romance so far – into the extraordinary sensuous Mexican tango of the experience it would eventually become. I began to eat them, whenever I could.

It took a while but eventually I started to get it. It took me to far off places like Elands Bay and culinary Mecca’s like our local Nobu. Even my lover, a die hard vegetarian, eventually agreed to eat them. After weeks of subtle manipulation on my part I had succeeded in convincing her that, in principle, Oysters are not really animals. They are not even plants; they are moments, suspended in time.

While visiting the amazing Biscuit Mill market two weeks ago, I was walking through the stands, salivating at the food and seeking some form of breakfast when, to my delight, I saw a bucket of oysters so fresh that my legs felt wet from the sea spray – I had to have them. That was the deal I had stuck with myself. They were also serving beautiful champagne.

I sat down at a crowded table, pushing my way in through plates of muesli and yoghurt and fruit to lay my glass of champagne and 12 icy west coast oysters in front of me. First thing in the morning, the body, flavour and sophistication of the oysters was almost overwhelming.

I recoiled at the intense creaminess. The table seemed to be waiting, the entire hall suspended as though I too were a moment in time, in oyster consciousness. You don’t just casually sit down at a table of Gucci Kaftan wearing Zippies with champagne and oysters and then think you can get away with not finishing them.

My sunglasses were a movie screen between me and the crowd as I began to eat. Something in my brain changed and I knew that not only were the flirtations of my budding romance becoming a little saucier, but that oysters can make you look pretty fucking cool under the right circumstances.

Fire Nymph

I enjoy indulging in random act of theatre and shameless self promotion, if for no other reason than it is fun. If I could get a bit of TV face space while doing something heroic at the same time, I would be the first guy to stand in line. Unfortunately, Heroics involve sacrifice.

I have never been one for civic duty but I love that feeling when a fire engine comes blaring up the road and you have to pull your car over to make way for it. For a moment you are part of the community and participating in an emergency relief scenario. It’s very exciting.

In 2003 Cape Town tried to burn itself to the ground. They called for volunteers and we responded.

Standing on top of Rutherford drive I took in a spectacle of life that I had never seen before. I stood at the last house before the bush began, sensing the fire moving toward me. To my left a family was running around their garden with the hose and buckets of pool water, watering the hedges and Wendy Houses. The dogs were barking their heads off.

A fire man walked up to me.

‘Okay you can go now.’

‘What are you talking about man? I came to fight the fire!’

‘Yes but now it’s coming and you need to run back down the hill and wait with the other people. We’ll take care of things from now.’

The man left and I waited there, outraged and indignant. Worse still, I saw an ETV camera van waiting at the bottom of the hill, probably aiming their zoom cameras at me. This was my moment. I called my brother and my friend Ash over to join me and we stood on the crest of the hill, arms crossed, hips squared, and a far away look in our eyes.

And then it came, the most frightening thing I have ever experienced. Like a volcano creature of heat and rage and light the fire approached, swallowing trees as tall as ten story buildings, not just burning things but exploding things. Massive Bluegum trees that had withstood every trial of nature simply vaporized.

I could not control my body. Panic seized me and ran me down that hill as fast as I could go. I had run a full hundred meters before consciousness returned and I stopped my mad flight. This is not what I had come to do. I had come to fight, not to flee.

To my right across the road, now four houses down from the crest of the fire, a human drama was playing itself out. The electricity had gone out in the whole block and that meant the electric gates to the house were jammed closed. This was a problem for the family’s grandfather, who appeared to be not only wheel chair bound, but was in all probability asleep. It was weird to think that the technology which housed and protected them was now stopping the firemen from saving their most precious possession.

I turned and ran back up the street a little way. The firemen were fighting like pirates and had somehow miraculously stopped the path of the fire at the last fire break. The house at the top of the hill had taken some damage. The outer fence and Wendy House were gone. Inside the forest a beautiful glass conservancy was all jutting and black and broken. The family who owned it was standing around, stunned and philosophical. They seemed happy that the dog was alive.

After some of the heat had died down we approached the fireman again and asked them if we could help. I surreptitiously glanced over my shoulder but the ETV News truck was still at the bottom of the hill. The guys looked at my Gucci inspired sunglasses and Samurai blond topknot and seemed reluctant to give my brother and I a job.

Eventually he pointed at a small section of unburned forest where a fire about the size of half a cat was smouldering like a petulant teenager.

‘Put that out.’

He handed me a small spade and ran further along the ridge to where the real action was, shouting in the official way that makes you so excited about cooperating with fire engines. We ran over to the piece of fire and paused, not sure what to do with it. Our only clue was the small green military looking spade.

I decided to bash it with the flat of the spade and within about five minutes our little fire became a Maltese poodle with rabies, nipping at our jeans and shoelaces. My brother started jumping around with his big boots and the fire turned nasty, spreading out around us with a whoosh of heat. Somehow, in the midst of all, we had managed to start a fire.

Next thing he shouts with delight and runs over to where a limp fire hose is lying on the road. The front handle thing on a fire hose is heavy and functional, like a pythons head. There is a way of holding it, body braced – the head tucked under your arm – which I remembered from a school visit to the fire station.

My brother had obviously not been to that class. He picked it up like a garden hose and confidently aimed it at the fire as if he were holding a writing pen. A hovering drop of water suddenly sucked up the pipe, like the ocean retreating from the shore before a tidal wave. You could almost hear the low, distant rumbling.

Further along the ridge, the fire crew had fired up the water wagon. The limp fire hose in my brother’s hands became a rigid lead hard pole in the space of three seconds. He lifted off the ground as the hose pumped him up and down, bashing him around the ridge. Eventually he lost his death grip and the loose hose became a thing of Greek legend; a single hydra head spitting water at high velocity. It spun around and smacked him in the face.

An instant rupture of blood erupted from beneath his eye, spewing away dramatically in the ash cloud of our newly created fire. I felt so left out.

We decided go and look for Ash. Eventually we spotted him on a far off ledge. The sound of his voice echoed across the valley, ordering people around using Canadian fire break talk.

We were watching him with some fascination when we suddenly noted a helicopter arising from the heat haze like a big black wasp, its slow distant percussive thud still sounding impressive against the apocalypse of the fire ravaged scenery.

A metric ton of water from the water scoop beneath the giant Russian helicopter fell from the sky and we watched in morbid fascination as it landed square upon Ash. He realized his danger at the final moment and, rather rashly, jumped under the cover of a half burned tree. The water smashed the branches above him and one of the branches hit him in the head. Another geyser of blood erupted.

This was ridiculous. I looked down the hill towards the camera van and saw it creeping up the hill. Something had to be done.

In a moment I had conceived of my masterpiece and gathered the boys together. We were going to get involved in a water bucket chain gang. Dazed home owners had automatically formed bucket lines from pools and pipes and the little borehole in the grounds of the ruptured conservancy. We joined that gang, running water along the line, scooping it up from the smelly concrete water tank.

‘Which house are you from?’ said the dude in the line next to me.

‘No man, we don’t live around here, we live in Seapoint.’ Seapoint is about a half hour drive away.

‘We?’ the guy looked nonplussed.

‘My brother and I. We are brothers from Seapoint, coming to lend a helping hand.’

This was it! The building story – CNN face time. I could see the headlines. I looked up at the ETV van and saw it was at the top of the hill. The cameras were like bees to this sound bite of human opera at its theatrical zenith, gravitating towards me.

I looked down at myself and took in my outfit. It was a masterpiece of fire fighting chic. For some reason however it was also spotless. Not one drop of blood, not one deluge of water, not a single streak of mud. My face was barber fresh while around me were the faces of war, smeared with mud and tears.

In a panic I ran over to the corner of the Conservancy, trying to stay out of sight and reached down to take two big handfuls of mud. I streaked them across my face with clawed hands. Turning around I walked in slow motion across the cameras, whipping my head around to glare into the live lenses.

A friend of mine in Johannesburg had his funniest ever moment. Watching ETV live he saw me walking across the camera view in my outfit and I was the only person in the entire battle ravaged crowd that had tiger stripes across his face.

My Father

One of the saddest and most defining memories was watching him sitting at a sunlit dappled table on the lower deck of our restaurant in Hout Bay. He appeared to be sipping a glass of white wine and watching the sun seared, lazy ocean swell. What he was really doing however was waiting for customers.

It was our opening day and the restaurant was empty. The expression on his slightly wizened face was one of inscrutable complexity, unless you knew him well. On the outer surface of his skin there was calmness and irreverence while in the muscle was displayed concern and weariness. In his bones however, a deeper emotion lived, a sense of dignity.

That was what saddened me. For months he had been working with my mother, building this place, drawing the capital from some abyss that only he possessed the keys to. They had relocated from Johannesburg, along with most of the family, travelling across the country to Cape Town. They came with a dream.

And now, the dream was being tested and the car park remained empty. He sat there until after dark, nursing one glass of wine, patient and determined. At last he got up and walked slowly back inside, his shoulders arched ever so slightly.

Now as I sit beside his bed in this dank and morbid hospital, as he hovers on the edge of some lightless place, his face seems to register the same emotions. In his posture he is resistant and hopeful, showing off for me. In his eyes I read confusion and fear.

His eyes are blank in a way I have never seen them before. His spirit seems to be passing into me, as if he is staying awake long enough to make sure that I get his power. I have fought to be in this position, beside his bed. A life time of anger had to be released and forgiven.

He is holding my hand. It is like holding a piece of cool, damp bark. He has never held my hand before. Through his skin I can feel his bones and, like that moment in the afternoon sun, years before, I can feel his pulse. I don’t know if he will make it through the night but whatever else happens from this point; his dignity will pulse in time with mine.

I love you dad.

The Entrepeneur Part 3 – Selling

At eighteen I was forced to get a job, forced mostly by my parents, who were beginning to suspect that they had a high school drop-out and serial lay-about on their hands. They were exactly right and I was as reluctant as hell to go and work for somebody.

The options were hugely unappealing. The most obvious choice was to become a waiter but there was something sadistic about the idea of the heir of a crumbled restaurant fortune serving hand and foot on the patrons of some rotten franchise. I could not become a lowly digger in the gold mine that we had once enjoyed.

Fortunately, while walking through the back streets of my neighbourhood one day, fate struck me like a newspaper strip blown into my face. I pulled it away and glanced at an advert. It boldly read: EARN BIG BUCKS! Get out on the road and earn big bucks as a ‘Global Book’ representative! That was enough for me. I loved having big bucks.

My friend George and I arrived at the location for the interview, a drab acid-rain etched building in the centre of town, about half an hour from away home, as the hitchhiker flies. My tremulous hopes of becoming a sort of international roving reporter for a BBC style magazine were quickly dashed and replaced by hammy faced, vodka nosed salesmen. I had entered the seedy secret underworld of the Encyclopedia Salesman.

The door to the Big Bucks might be narrow but the waiting room was large. There appeared to be no barriers to entry, given the evidence of the twenty or so people who waited with us like a support group for rejects. As it turned out, the first and major qualification for the job was memory.

We were each given a piece of paper with about a hundred words on it and were told to read it for ten minutes. After that we were separately asked to repeat the gist of the message. This canny step cut out three quarters of the hopeful room but I was fortunately armed with a photographic memory and repeated the paragraph almost without fault.

I got the job. My mother was delighted – she had always dreamed that I might one day become a roving journalist for a glossy magazine.

On the following Wednesday night I fully submerged myself in the mealie mouthed underworld of hocking encyclopedias. Each team was met by a Kombi and a team leader and we would be driven out to some desperate edge of city neighbourhood. The better teams had ‘hotter’ areas to work in but I only ever saw the most frigid of lower middle class clientele. These people were actively resentful of salesmen and I quickly learned that this was because their areas were the most heavily visited. They were a testing area for amateur reps.

The way the scam worked was this: Very few people in the neighbourhood could actually afford the set of eighteen encyclopedias but they were offered amazing terms over long periods. At the end the encyclopedias cost more than their cars and when people eventually defaulted on payments, the encyclopedias were repossessed, recycled and the clientele were forced to pay hefty penalties.

One of the most critical steps was to collect a deposit, ten percent of the value of the total set, close on R2000. The company preferred to get it in cash, if at all possible – this was where you earned your special bonus.

The encyclopedias were so rubbish that most people returned them the next day, but once you had signed the form, the deposit was gone. There were in fact only sixteen beautiful pages in the whole series and they were only in the sample copy you carried. These pages had double spreads of coloured transparencies showing the layers of the body. The rest of the series was black and white

That’s where the memory came in: you had to rehearse an exact speech while you flipped only to those exact pages, creating the impression that the entire series was just as impressive.

Our team leader, and stand alone inspiration of the company, was a big Australian named Ronny Digby. People called him the Digger. He was the self proclaimed King of the pyramid scheme. Any pyramid scheme worth the name had known the touch of the Digger. Even as you were being bled dry by this guy, you still felt that you were part of his crew. He was the only man I ever knew that could rob somebody while patiently explaining how he was doing it.

My first night on the job I had the privilege of watching him work as I partnered with him on my training session. Each person in the team had an area of about sixty houses that they worked doing wife hour, around four in the afternoon. It was important to get them about two hours before hubby, the decision maker, came home. Normally they were a little nervous to let us in but that was no problem for old Digger. By way of example:

- I’m afraid my husband isn’t home.

- No problem Miss (presumably in Australia he called them Sheila). You can’t be too careful these days. In fact, I insist on only speaking to you when he is home. That’s only fair. I am going to back in this area around six, maybe I can pop in for a few minutes around then?

That was the purpose of women hour. There was no objection that he couldn’t overcome.

- No problem Miss, I can’t meet with you now either. In fact I’m meeting the mayor at around five to discuss educational issues. Why don’t I nip past you, on the way home, say at around six?

When husband hour arrived, the Digger entered his domain, his space of true power. I imagined that at the rising crest of moon, colours became brighter and smell’s sharper.

On the first call, he had the audacity to put his arm around the reluctant husband and walk him out into the garden. He complemented the man on the enormous hedge of Bougainvillea that clung to the garage awning like a demented octopus. They spoke about it for a while.

- Well anyway mate the conversations not outside. Let’s go back inside and have a quick word with the missus.

He led him back into his own house.

I was in awe already but words could not express the ease with which he took control of that house. He immediately sent the kids to their rooms, turned off the TV and sat in the ‘husbands chair’. This of course forced the couple to sit together on the ‘wife couch’, a position from which they could not possibly feel that they were not back in school. It was a standard technique in the encyclopedia game but it was only the Digger that would ever use it, so vast was the egoistic energy required to apply it properly.

They fell like buffaloes trying to stampede a crocodile filled river, every seventh one falling, screaming and rolling in the waters of his compelling argument. By eight o’ clock our zone had enough encyclopedias between them to build a communal church. Husbands were sitting back on their husband chairs feeling confused and out gunned, their wives still sitting on their wife couches, mentally reorganizing the house budgets.

After we had finished, the buoyancy of our victory was met with the cruel edge of the debriefings. At the end of every night, the team leader would take each rep aside and interrogate them on every aspect of their night’s activities. There was absolutely no excuse for a low sell. If you got into the house and you said the speech and you turned to the right pages, you would get a deposit, finished.

As it turned out, most reps did not get many sales. It was a vicious and thick skinned business that required a callous indifference that most people simple did not possess. For the Digger however it represented a weak link in the pyramid, a partial commission that he would not claim and with the same sense of cold skinned confidence that was required to sell encyclopedias, he cut people apart.

I was terrified of my first debriefing and determined to be successful. The following Wednesday night we were dropped off in a zone in Benoni, an area so utterly without charm that in South Africa it is has become a sort of generic term for nowhere. It was cold too, cold in the way that only the high veldt can be, the air so thin and dry that it felt scratchy.

From the first appointment, I could tell how difficult this was going to be.

- Evening Mam, I would like to talk to you about an opportunity for your children to expand their educational …

- Are you selling encyclopedias?

- Um no, well yes actually.

- We don’t have kids.

- Okay but maybe when I’m in the area a little later I can chat to you and your husband?

- He’s playing poker tonight.

- Did I mention that I was meeting the Mayor at five?

- We don’t have a mayor.

- Okay well, have a good evening then.

The night did not improve. Over the next hour I met with stony resistance and as darkness descended like a bruised plum I came across a really rundown house. They did not respond when I knocked on the door so I went around to the side of the house and peeked through the curtain and saw an ancient couple running out of the room in alarm. Embarrassed, I rang at the front door again to apologise and a fierce looking wizened old goat of a man opened the door, pointing a small revolver at me.

I ran down the street in a desperate terror, utterly shattered, wanting more than anything to be sitting at home in bed, eating sherbet and reading a comic. My mother was risking my life, for this? More powerful than the gun however was the promise of the coming debriefings. Attempted murder was no excuse for zero sales. Man I was scared. With the sample encyclopedia and its sixteen good pages, I approached the last house on the block.

***

The man who answered the door, Gerrie Britz, had a firm handshake, hair like an inner city pigeon and smelled strongly of cheap brandy. Having said that he was endearingly hospitable and offered a big smile that displayed horse yellow teeth. Behind him stood a tired looking but cheerful woman and eight kids.

They were running their own daycare centre made up of their own kids. The place was a mess, the garden a sculpture of rusted car steel and cable thick weeds. It had probably been an intolerably hard thing to accomplish but Gerrie Britz had, in some stretch of the word, provided for them.

They all seemed to love each other and were ranged in age from two years to a sassy young girl a year or two younger than me. They had no fancy toys and no fancy TV but played together just beautifully.

While I clutched my sample encyclopedia and tried to remove my grip from Gerrie’s meaty bolt-cutters, they all ran around me like pikkenen’s with blond hair and Afrikaans blue eyes, waving me into the house. Gerrie immediately offered me a beer and his own chair, the best chair in the house, directly opposite the radio.

He sat with his wife on the wife chair, holding her hand with a clumsy sensitivity. The kids sat around my feet on the carpet like an expectant audience at a conjuring show. They were dead keen on seeing my book.

I gave the speech and turned to the pages and then looked down, ashamed of the dark hypnotic spell that I had unleashed into their happy home. I saw the panic in his eyes as the kids turned to him as one. Their desperation to own a set of Global Book encyclopedias was lazered into their eyes. They were seeing the dollar signs of knowledge.

He agreed in principle eventually to commit to the series. That of course wasn’t good enough. I needed to get the deposit.

- Gerrie my man, the only way you are going to get the last of our stock is if you pay your deposit and sign the contract now.

- I don’t have that kind of money with me, ou pal.

- Can you draw it from the ATM?

Now I was committed. I had stepped over the edge of some moral precipice into ruthlessness. I did not care about this man or his family and he was going to draw the money that he would almost certainly lose. Finished.

He bought it. He had no choice. We jumped into his big white bakkie and drove a kilometer into town. I was starting to feel awefully guilty about the whole process when Gerrie returned to the car.

- Sorry ou pal, the machine is not working.

- Is there another one in the next town?

Unbelievably he drove to the next town. Once he had decided to do it he became perfectly accommodating. If I needed to get that money then that’s what he would do – it was a deal between men. He paid me in cash and we drove back to his house. He signed the contract and I left, warmly shaking his hand.

On the way out, after he had closed the door I shoved the whole sample encyclopedia into the post box. I was fired an hour later in a tirade of elephantine proportions with an Australian accent. Nobody had ever lost their sample encyclopedia.

My parents were not happy. Once again I had failed. Instead of earning money we ended up owing them money.

Gerrie Britz however was delighted when he checked the post box two days later and found the encyclopedia with a torn up contract and two grand in cash in its most colourful centerfold.

I hope to God he has the wisdom not to repeat his mistakes.

The Entrepeneur Part 2 – Packing

By the time I reached high school, my family’s previous restaurant fortunes were like an ancient crumbling prawn smelling lighthouse on some forgotten coastline.

After the failure of our fast food chain, Bunnycow, itself secured financially by the sale of our last restaurant, we descended into a bit of a funk. I – or rather my mother – had been applying to high schools for about a year and I finally secured a place at KES, a premier high school in South Africa, provided that we fulfilled the zoning requirements.

And so it was that my Dad overextended himself to secure a house in the exclusive suburb of Upper Houghton, directly opposite from the school. There was something about us that did not fit in with the neighbourhood. My father, bless his soul, did not even consider trying to get a job. He was after all, an entrepreneur.

The first business he started was a type of pool cleaning device called ‘aquanaut’. Joburg is a city with a lot of pools. If Joburg were a massive piece of human skin, the swimming pools would be like pores, dimples of liquid fighting a war of attrition against the dry heat and alarming lack of nearby oceans. In such a market, how could you fail? As my father fought to build our future pool empire, I was starting to struggle in social situations.

- So what does your father do?

- He is in the pool cleaning game. Yours?

- He’s a government minister.

- Oh. That sucks right?

- No your dads aquanaut sucks

Aquanaut folded eventually and my dad decided to start a fudge making business. Fudge is the business! We bought a little self contained franchise called ‘Mr. Fudge’, named in a moment of cavalier lateral thinking. The interesting thing about this change in direction was that the guys who had previously been gunning for me at school started hanging around the house as I became the local fudge dealer. I had my own business, a little sideline I liked to call friendship.

Mr. Fudge collapsed and my dad concluded that a soft serve ice cream franchise was the way forward. Soft Serve is the business! He still had the fudge making equipment which he kept in the garage along with the new equipment and so our garage became a kind of American Diner serving ice cream and fudge, a road-stop for boys spilling out of the school grounds. Instead of a cute waitress with roller skates however, there was only me, a young man using candy to lure acceptance.

With the inevitable failure of the great soft serve empire, my dad found a dazzling side line in a new miracle food called SOYA. It was like pretend mince meat and it was decided that we were going to solve the food problem in South Africa by providing this Chinese Voodoo Mince to the masses.

I remember my sister and I – how cute are kids? – made up a batch of this stuff with a tray of little toast pieces and walked around the neighborhood trying to sell them for a buck a piece to the passing migrant workers. We were trying to help my dad but it was not a good look when we were passed by a carload of the cool school kids. We were like Hansel and Gretel stumbling out of the woods onto the 51 Interstate.

I decided to apply my mind once more and – using the plastic sealing machine from the Soya operation – started making little packets of sherbet and fudge and flogging them at school. At every step I had been walking in the bold shadow of my questing father, creating a little enterprise from his scraps, like a jackal poaching kills from a rogue lion.

A few weeks later my entire grade went on our annual veldt school trip, a sort of mixture of scouts and a stint in the military.

A great entrepreneurial opportunity arose when I realized that many of the boys would need to smuggle in some kind of contraband to make the boring trip bearable. One or two boys smoked pot and drank spirits and there were several who wanted to take cigarettes with them.

My idea was to make little sealed plastic bags of whisky and smuggle them in the interior of a large camping torch that I bought for the operation. I managed to get about thirty of them in there, thirty little packets of bush veldt spirit that would fetch a handsome profit.

It was the first day of Veldt School. A hundred nervous boys sat on the grass being addressed by the Neolithic Afrikaans Instructor giving us our orientation.

- I know you boys think you but too clever, he boomed.

- Every year we have boys who think you can smokkel in some cigarettes. We view this as a very, very serious crime and it will be met with severe corporal punishment and possible expulsion!

He looked like Hitler practicing for Nuremberg.

Christ I thought, if they think cigs are a massive crime, how are they going to handle a sophisticated whiskey bootlegging operation?

- We will however show some mercy if you come clean right now. You have ten minutes to decide whether you are going to own up like real men, with pride, or wait for us to catch you like lying little Jackals.

I’ll take the Jackal option, I smirked. They will never crack my flawless plan. I heard a boy whimper behind me in fright and shuffle up to the front of the crowd, visibly shaking hands clutching a half smoked cigarette.

- This boy has taken the only safe option and he will be exempt from punishment. For those of you who mos think you are too clever for us, we know all the tricks, starting with your torches.

I suddenly felt the cold dead grip of farmer fear grip my guts. Torches, you say? You’ve thought of this? Really?

I waited the full nine minutes before I eventually stood up, rigid with fear. A collective murmur swept through the boys. Killeen, what could he possibly have brought along? Isn’t that the poor, skinny boy with the courage of a crippled Maltese poodle?

I handed the man my torch and he grinned in immense dumb satisfaction, opening the back of the torch and emptying out the contents. What should have been a couple loose cigarettes or a torn porno page emerged as a fistful of sealed packets. From a distance they could have been Angel Dust or plastic explosives and the crowd was utterly stunned into silence.

And so, you know, I was in trouble again. How could I possibly convince them that I was acting in the spirit of the free market; that my actions were – contrary to the biblical disdain surrounding me – kind of cute really.

Like their own sons following them around the cow farm or whatever and learning the tricks of the cow tit squeezing trade, I was applying the keen opportunistic eye that had been learned from my own father. I was being a good boy.

I looked into the future after the terrible fall-out of that day and decided that I would have to refine my entrepreneurial discernment. Either I would have to devote my life to the study of science and art or start a global drug operation.

It was simply too early to tell, but the spirit was there.

The Dream

I awoke this morning dreaming of her,
The dream that never goes away,
Even after all these years.
It is as persistent and inevitable as the coming of winter,
Which right now is clawing at my windows
With bony trees and moaning cold.
Sleep is clawing me back but the dream waits
Like a pink spider on a beautiful blossom.

The Prayer

The five of us were prowling through Hillbrow, hustling for money and booze, when we stopped down the road from a local supermarket and discussed the notion of a little heist.

It was part of the tradition of our group that we would steal small items from stores as a test of our ninja prowess. We had already had countless successful steals and it had become a part of the evening’s entertainment, to set the mood, as it were.

It was a miserable, angry sky that night and we were all a little soaked as we walked around the corner and into the shopping centre’s foyer, laughing and goading each other along. It took a complete skidding stop to avoid us burrowing into a nest of Christians that were haunting the lonely midnight street corners, hoping to pick up converts.

They were the ones who like to clap, and they were clapping. Head down, with my swanky boys coming up on all sides, we swept through them like a battery of vampires.

-               Can I offer you a prayer?

-               Um, no, can I poke my finger in your eye?

I looked up and beheld a vision, a condensation of all romantic dreams, wrapped in a brown Christian jumper, tufts of ivory blond hair damp with the mist.

-     Just a little prayer, it can’t hurt?

-     Um, sure. A quick one.

She held my hands in hers and looked up into my eyes. My friends, discombobulated by my without precedent choice of action, started to fall all about the streets, as if they were spontaneously transforming into lycanthropes.

-               I offer you my prayer of protection in the face of adversity. Her voice was simple and quiet and exquisitely courageous in its dedication.

-               Aren’t you supposed to send me to hell?

We were pulled apart, two spinning tops in the rain, two clashing star systems of faith interlocked for a moment by aesthetics. I felt energised and delighted by her prayer as I entered the supermarket, pirouetting, as was my style, to take in all the CCTV camera positions.

After wondering around for a bit, I pocketed a large chocolate and something, maybe intuition, made me head for the door. To allay suspicion, as I always did, I sidled over to the store guard and initiated some friendly banter. He seemed perfectly cool and after a while I smiled and headed out the store. It was then that he grabbed me.

They took me to the office area as I protested my utter innocence. In those days a crime like this was often punished by cop jacks, six strokes to the ass by a maniacal cop flying on brandy. They patted me down.

I was wearing chino pants with deep pockets. In my right pocket I had a metal cigarette tin.

-     What’s in there?

-     A cigarette tin. I pulled out the slim silver tin that had been on the outside of the large slab of chocolate.

He came behind me again and decided at the last minute to push his hands into my pockets. His right thumb hooked onto the edge of the right pocket and because the pockets were so deep, his fingers stopped millimeters above the chocolate.

Now he was embarrassed and I screamed my indignation to anyone who would listen. They quickly hustled me to the entrance, where I emerged triumphant into the soggy night. Across the square my friends waved happily, giving me the thumbs up.

And then I heard a voice, soft as a barn owl slamming into a rabbit.

-               Just a little prayer.

I turned and saw her looking back, shepherded by her manic new family, the only one of them pure enough to still offer an innocent prayer, a prayer powerful enough to see me once again joining my friends, her image locked in my mind.

The Lighter Thief

For me, stealing lighters has moved beyond an art. When it was still an art form, I was vaguely conscious of the process. I would find a lighter in my pocket, look at it and sort of announce it to everyone in the room.

‘Hi everybody, I’ve got this lighter so if anyone owns it, it’s here.’

Secretly however, I was proud of myself. I was so utterly deft of hand. I gained something of a reputation for it. At some point I no longer noticed the thieving but other people, having recognized my established reputation, started pointing it out.

Ultimately I became the fall guy for every lighter loss at every gathering I ever attended. This is unfair really, considering that lighters fall into the same category as socks and pencils. They are things that simply disappear. I felt like I was the cosmic drawer of residual objects and all because I possessed a talent.

Apparently, on the face of it, I was good at thieving.

Eventually, what had become an art became an act of the subconscious. I was no longer aware of the coordinated ballet of my body and fingers as I pilfered lighters from one end of the country to the other.

On many, many occasions I would come home and go through my bags and pockets to find half a dozen lighters. They were almost a record of the people I had met that night, or the ones that smoked anyway, which are generally my favorite people.

Smoking, being a filthy disgusting habit, is often a liability when meeting prospective lovers. I smoke and I still have that repellant reaction to a pretty girls mouth tasting like the acid soaked cud of regurgitated cow chewed grass. It is a relief though if she smokes because by the second bottle of wine your commingling ashtray lips have reached an uneasy alliance.

The bigger problem for me really is the fact that the world on the whole has taken up arms against second hand cancer and mealie mouthed teeth. Sitting in a restaurant with a beautiful woman and a glass of sultry red wine, you realize that all you can think about is a cigarette.

Unfortunately that involves getting up, walking through a busy restaurant and standing out in the ice cold smoking a cigarette which you hate because you suck too hard and your lips are transformed into dung smelling seared Carpaccio. When you get back, your date is colder than your windswept lips.

One night I was alone, looking after my parent’s house, flying high on a gram of cocaine when I realized that I had run out of cigarettes. In my heroically drunken state, this meant I was four road blocks, one jail sentence and a horrifying accident away from the nearest cigarette shop.

For those of you who have never been in this scenario – and I imagine there are dozens – let me assure you, it is a huge barrier to contentment. It is like being afloat on a sun-griddled ocean of saltwater without a drop of clear water to drink. It is like being trapped on a floating whale carcass in the middle of a sun-griddled ocean with a flotilla of sharks circling you.

I decided, in a moment of rare strength and willpower, that I would simply go without a cigarette at the one time that I really, really wanted one. Morning found me back in my own flat and sitting on the edge of my bed. I decided that since I had made it this far, I would plainly have to give cigarettes up for good.

In that moment, I decided to remove all of the smoking paraphernalia from around my body. I looked in my pocket and found, not one, but two lighters. In the other pocket I found another one. In my shoulder bag I found a lighter and three boxes of matches; in the draw beside me one broken lighter and two boxes of matches. In the draw opposite my bed I found a gas burner and another two boxes of matches, one of which was a jumbo box.

I had enough lighting devices now to start an arson attack across the entire city. And this I suppose is the beauty of the moment; the lighter thief, washed up some far shore, surrounded by dozens of useless lighters. Maybe I could create a repository.

In the normal course of affairs however I tend to lose lighters at roughly the same rate that I steal them and in that way I feel comforted in the knowledge that I am giving it all back. It is a whole whirlwind of movement, the movement of my own body, recycling lighters, beneath the level of my consciousness.

I have moved beyond art. I am an agent of gross flame pollination.

Yobai

She walked in to the rustic bar area, looking around the room. She saw wooden plank walls, large fishnets hanging from the ceiling, a pool table on the one side and a large fireplace on the other. Behind the bar, which looked like it had been crafted from an immense piece of driftwood, was a black man, with rough skin, heroic lips and shrewd brown eyes. He smiled as he watched her enter.

She chose to ignore him for the moment and concentrated on the other person in the room, a slim Japanese man of almost elfin beauty. Turning to look at her he smiled, shyly, his teeth perfectly straight and white.

‘Hi, I’m Yolande,’ she held out her hand firmly. Her features were classically Afrikaans in that rare way that sometimes creates creatures of luminous beauty, with strong features and lupine eyes.

‘I am Yen,’ she took his hand but his grip was like a piece of drifting silk, utterly without strength. He did not flinch as his bones were put under strain by her vice like grip.

‘Pleased to meet you.’ she waved vaguely at the barman and asked him for a beer. ‘Is this your first visit here?’

‘Yes,’ he smiled slightly, his lips were silky smooth.

‘I had to come up here because it’s too depressing being on your own in Cape Town on Valentines Day.’ She laughed self consciously.

‘Where I come from we don‘t celebrate this event.’ said Yen.

‘Valentines day?’

‘Yes,’ he gave her an impish stare, ‘or it could be said that we celebrate every day as an opportunity for romantic play.’

The beer arrived and the black barmen stood entirely too close to her. She declined to react as he brushed against her with a lazy, indolent strength.

‘You guys are really conservative though right, sexually I mean?’ She took a big hit on her beer and reached for her cigarettes.

‘We have some customs that would make you blush.’ His grin widened, spears of his straight black falling across his eyes, before being pushed aside by graceful hands.

‘Oh come on! Tell me one thing that you guys think could be considered racy. I dare you.’ She sat upright in her chair, her arms hooked over the back, pressing her pretty breasts forward. Her T-shirt was tight fitting but sort of ripped and tatty, with a print of Che Guevara on it.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘have you heard of Yobai?’

‘Nope’

‘It is the ancient Japanese custom of night crawling. In a place like,’ he pointed toward the beach and the prefabricated tents they were to sleep in. ‘it would be perfect for Yobai, the night crawl. In the old days, a young man would creep into the house of his beloved to be with her, but now it is often the case that at executive business weekends, where we are all camping in a place like this, Yobai begins.’

‘You arrange it with each other?’

‘No’ he said with intensity. ‘It is a matter of mystery. Often, if he is a masterful night crawler with sensual talent, she will allow him into her tent, or even, as I have experienced, pretended to be asleep.’

‘You’ve done this!’ She suddenly felt a bolt of excitement in the pit of her stomach.

‘I have done this.’

They talked for about an hour. He was charming and erudite, like a diplomat. At length she decided to take a walk along the beach. It occurred to her as she walked away, pulling her shorts out from between her buttocks, that she hadn’t asked him about his job or why he was even visiting the beach camp. He was a total mystery, a collage of erotic Japanese fables.

The coast was a sumptuous scattering of ochre boulders and foamy, jewel blue seas. Inland lay the vast fields of indigenous fynbos, flattened beneath a peppering wind.

She was thinking about him. After he had left she had found on the table a piece of red felt with a black symbol sown onto it, like a bashful invitation. She did not speak Japanese but imagined it to be a sort of exotic custom. Apart from anything else it was so sweet! It was challenging and erotic and yet somehow innocent, almost coy.

She imagined a whole bunch of Japanese village folk, running through plum blossom streets, nipping in and out of each others houses. The next day would see all the girls giggling in the town square, with one dejected looking boy trying to pretend that he hadn’t been rejected. A whole night life of erotic frangipane ninjas ruled the social scene of that ancient Japanese village.

By the time she returned it was almost dark and as she stumbled along the moss slick boulders of the newly turned tide, she decided she would throw caution to the wind and submit to this fantasy. She was his plaything – she wouldn’t even open her eyes while he worked his medieval customs.

She walked into the candle light and all eyes turned toward her. A whole school of obese Afrikaans family folk were circling around the bar. She was wet from sea spray and it made her shorts cling seductively to her hips, alienating at least half of the audience.

Turned out he wasn’t around. She didn’t ask anyone but assumed he had retired early. She felt almost lonely without him. She didn’t know any of these people. They were all so loud and different language sounding. She ate her dinner, consisting mostly of fresh fish that had burned long enough to give off a carbon dating reading and some limp greasy potatoes. Eventually, emotionally exhausted, she went to bed.

He arrived at about twelve, or at least it was way after everyone else seemed to have gone to bed, joking and farting and being generally homo erectus as they stumbled through the dark camp to bed. She had fallen asleep briefly but woke immediately to the sound of the tent flap being gently lifted.

She remained still, eyes tightly shut, her heart ripping around her chest like a crazed cat trying to escape a cage. Over its deafening roar she could hear the distant sounds of the ocean rumbling into shore. She focused on it and stifled a body spasm as his hand gently slid over her hip. His touch was firm but gentle, although his skin was slightly rougher than she expected.

His breath smelt of honey and almonds and freshly ground coffee. She was swearing a skimpy pair of white hot pants and he slid these down with absolute confidence and no sudden movement, as though he were hoping she were asleep. Involuntary, she jerked her right leg, bringing her knee upward and causing the blanket to fall away and expose her completely. He froze, his hands becoming perfectly motionless. This scared her more than anything than had happened before.

She stifled a scream and tried to control a tremor that rippled through her body. She focused on the sea and slowing the manic fanfare of her heart. She breathed in deeply and slowly and then, as if lazily chasing a dream, allowed her to leg fall outward. The sudden acute awareness of her recent shaving habits almost forced a giggle from between her lips.

His hands moved again, sliding slowly over her pelvis, brushing gently into the soft tip of her clitoral folds. She visualized sea anemones in the not too distant ocean waving aqeously in the moon filled ocean as he started to slide his fingers back and forth, as though he were a boy playing in a beautiful field from his youth, so joyful and carefree were his movements. Finally a moan escaped her lips and now, though they were both aware of the truth, he did not stop his dance and she did not open her eyes.

When he left she didn’t know, but the fluid of her desire was streaked across her inner thighs and sheets. She held the vision of his beautiful face in her mind and thought of the ceremony of Yobai as she drifted off to sleep.

She woke up at dawn and felt like the sun was rising between her legs. She felt like she had been sun burned from within. Dressing quickly she ran out into the camp. He was not there and neither was anyone else. From some of the tents she heard the evidence of snoring elevating to elephantine intensity, as though amassing a final assault before the coming day. It made her laugh. Those poor wives!

‘You need to get yourself some Jap boy nooky,’ she whispered as she walked from the camp, ‘some Samurai Yobai.’

She walked for several kilometers through a beautiful morning, thinking about her exotic adventure and exactly how many of her friends were on the ‘need to know’ list. There were at least ten, maybe twenty, not counting her parents. This would be the closing bell of every book club in the country. This was Femina and Vogue penciled under a pseudonym! This was glorious.

She marched back into the camp restaurant and flashed her glanced across the dining area, taking in the wobbly, moustache wearing crowd. He was still not there. She walked up to a table and spoke to an immense tree of a man, who looked grey with age and friendly.

‘Have you seen that Japanese man from yesterday?’

He looked puzzled for a moment and then lit up with amusement as he turned to the table, ‘you mean the man who I tuned “howzit my China?”’

The table erupted in uproarious, bush pig laughter and she felt a spear of despair for the state of humanity slice through her heart. That beautiful mystical man from such far shores and a civilization that had eclipsed their own millennia before it was formed. To them he was a sub-human, almost as bad as a black.

‘He was Japanese,’ she said acidly, ‘so he probably didn’t catch the joke.’

‘Anyway,’ he turned to face her, ‘he left yesterday before dark. He came with a happy snappy Chinese tour group.’

‘Japanese,’ she whispered but already her voice was retreating down her throat.

Her heart went icy cold and the voices were suddenly drowned out. She whipped her head around and looked at the barman. He was looking at her calmly, almost sadly, with his large hazel eyes. Around his neck he wore a love necklace, a cord attached to a bit of red felt with a curious Xhosa symbol sown onto it.

He smiled, winked and turned back to his work.

Becoming a Ninja

My ninja career began, I believe, in the summer on 1982. I watched a movie called ‘Enter the Ninja’ and in a celluloid epiphany, I saw the future and understood that it involved ninja stars. In a hot rush of fantasy I knew that all my problems were solved; no longer would I be the guy who always lost at fights and got picked last for all the sports teams. It was simple really. I would become a ninja.

I kicked off by getting hold all the ninja movies available in South Africa. I became a B-grade Japanese movie aficionado. After that I gathered my mother’s sharpest kitchen implements and stuck them into my belt – dressed in my blackest pajamas – and set off into the night to do ninja things. I developed a nocturnal routine called ‘ninja runs’. For two hours every night I would run and ninja the neighbourhood, scaling walls, shuffling through shadows and leaping down steps like I had just jumped off a ten story building.

One time, on a rare and daring ‘day run’, I rolled across the roof and over the edge, my hands holding onto the gutter while my legs swung freely in anticipation of a neat landing in the flower bed below. A hive of wasps happened to be nesting there at the time and cut me to ribbons as I hung hysterically from the edge. Eventually I pulled myself up, running across the roof with the wasps in hot stinging pursuit, proving that they never die off after just one sting, and leapt through the air one story down into the swimming pool. Sometimes Ninjas have to deal with these things.

My parents, wearying of my inability to do anything else useful, decided to take me to the world famous Stan Schmidt Centre for karate training. Not only was he one of the most senior practitioners of karate in the world – barring the snobby Japanese – but he was one of the only men in South Africa who had successfully turned karate into a money making enterprise.

Walking into there was like walking into a university of martial arts. It was the forerunner of the super gyms of the next century, with multi-levels, dozens of students and various supplementary arts being practised. It made a huge impression on me and Stan… well, Stan was the man. I heard that he once shoved his hand into a goldfish bowl, grabbed a marble and withdrew his hand without disturbing the water.

My brother had achieved the lofty goal of brown belt earlier in his life. In karate, like many martial arts, the rubbish beginning grades have bright, attractive belts like white and red and yellow but later on get more serious with blacks and browns and purples. Also their suits are just ridiculous looking and I quickly realised that if I ever moved to another martial art, it would be one with brilliant looking suits, like ninja uniforms. Ninjas normally wore black, to blend in with the shadows, but sometimes they were white, in case they got stuck in a piece of snow. Bad Ninjas always wore black.

The worst thing about karate – and I would discover this to be the case with all martial arts – is that it involved exercise and getting hit and, most important of all, enthusiasm. I thought it was horrible. I hated fighting people and I hated getting sweaty and sore and stiff. The only reason I was doing this was to become a ninja but I wanted to do it through movie osmosis.

A couple of years later I heard of an actual ninja school, which was great. Peter Thompson, who was our grandmaster, was good looking, with long hair and had a hot girlfriend. I got my father to drop me off there twice a week. It was in a rundown part of town on the third story of an abandoned building and after walking through gutted corridors and smashed glass and a maze of walls tormented by graffiti, you would emerge into this sacred, secret sanctuary with rows of weapons up against the wall and red satin flags hanging from the ceiling.

This was a proper ninja school. We all used to kneel in a row with the Sensei at the head. We learned about wonderful things in there. Water focus training involved us being attacked from multiple directions while we diffused our attention such that we blurred into a world where every block and reaction was synchronous with our attackers. He taught us to move with the flow of the world. I also learned some spectacularly party worthy tricks like rolling on concrete and doing flick flaks.

Once we went to this ninja camp. That was amazing. We played this game called ‘Stalk the Lantern’ where squads of teenage ninjas would try to sneak up on the circle of ninja masters and touch the lantern without them touching us. They taught us how to move with the wind to cover footsteps or the covered moon to cover shadows or to cross a stream at an angle that created neither sound nor ripples. I am proud to say that I touched that lantern to win the contest.

Years later, at about the age of seventeen, I was standing on the top of a hill on a farm outside Durban with a group of my brothers older friends, who owned the farm. I was dressed in a full ninja suit that my mother had sowed for me, involving leggings, jacket, ninja hood, gloves and those shoes with a split next to the big toe. Earlier in the year, my father had promised me that they would sow me a suit if I could get 90% percent in my next exam. It was an art history exam and for the first and only time in my life I not only scanned the text book but memorised it word for word, literally. I got 99%. I think maybe I spelled my name wrong.

Towards sunset they left me to my ninja training and admonished me not to leave too late or get lost. A few seconds after they disappeared from view, night descended like a rain of sea urchins and I panicked as I tried to find my way back. Hours later and completely lost, I came across a Zulu drinking hall. I could smell the strong scent of Putu and beer and smoke. From inside were the sounds of drunken voices raised in aggression. I hesitated nervously and then knocked on the door loudly and announced, in English, that I needed help.

I might just add at this point that Zulus were killers. They were the Samurai of the Bantu folk, with long, edged spears and hard sticks called ‘knobkerries’. If you messed with a Zulu, you were finished and in the year that I knocked at that door they had been wiping people out like it was nothing.

I remember their shouting and singing vanishing with violent speed and then, tremors waterfalling down my body, I decided to run and hide. Barely had I reached the road when they all charged out of the hall, shouting and screaming. At some point I jumped over a fence and the barbed wire tore my pants open and left a streak of blood down my inner thigh. The road was a long death trap and so, in a moment of inspiration I leapt into a sugar cane swamp on the one side and lay beneath the water with a sugar cane pipe allowing me to breathe.

The mud oozed into my clothes with the overpowering scent of rotting vegetation. My breathing straw lasted about three seconds before collapsing, forcing me to hold my breath.

After the war party had passed I crawled out of the sugar cane, covered in mud and gore, to surprise an old drunken man who had been shuffling along the dirt track. He nearly had a heart attack. After he had recovered he directed me towards a farm house where a pack of dogs came howling at me up the hill, preparing to tear away at the frozen Ninja teenager. They were obviously quite impressed with me because I didn’t get one bite and managed to work my way around to the side of the house.

I knocked on the door and was greeted by the most unbelievable reality. There must have been forty of them in that room, a whole nest of Christians that had gathered together for their Sunday prayers and had been interrupted by a bloody, muddy guy dressed all in black with goats feet on. I somehow convinced them to find my friends’ farm but as far as my ninja reputation went, I would never live this down.

Parking Bandits

In the bad old days of apartheid, it was illegal to loiter. Among the vast web of fascist Afrikaans laws designed to keep the black man on his knees, you had the loitering and pass laws. As a black man, you couldn’t simply just stand around, doing nothing. You were either at your job, working, you were traveling to or from work, or you were planning something dangerous. Worse yet, you were planning a rally. Not only could black people not stand around, they most certainly could not stand around in groups.

In the new dispensation, everybody is free to stand around pretty much as they please. The loitering laws still exist but are no longer policed. Unfortunately, our new freedoms have come with a price. Hard economic times, coupled with newly introduced basic human rights such as minimum wages and worker protection mean that unemployment rates amongst the blacks have soared.

Suddenly we have a whole lot of people standing around with nothing to do, and because they are looking for jobs, they are hanging around affluent areas. They are surrounded by perceived wasteful luxury while having the most depressing, insulting and hungry days of their lives.

As is so often the case, the predominantly prosperous white population have to desensitize themselves to the suffering of the poor black population. The poverty and misery and injustice in South Africa are so all pervasive that one cannot take it all in. The majority of middle class people get to a point when they can look at a starving old man, dressed for the millionth time in his best job-getting suit and they cannot toss him a coin that affords them a single cigarette.

For a tiny portion of this migrant loiter force – which relative to actual white population is not so tiny – the temptation proves to be irresistible. Houses are burgled, people are robbed and most especially, cars are either stolen or broken into. We all know how annoying that is, having to go through the whole mission of claiming from insurance and driving to PG glass to replace that little side mirror.

Car burglary and theft have become rife. As recently as 2001, one in five people were the victims of ‘out of car’ theft and in the first few years of this century, this sort of crime reached a peak. One expected to get a window smashed at some point and a whole industry devoted to anti-theft devices – like Gorilla locks – was born. Of course, the obvious solution was to leave our cars empty. A teenager with their first car only gets their favourite CD collection stolen once before they learn.

As a reaction, car stereo industries developed the face-off, the part of the stereo system that one can remove, rendering the whole device useless. There is nothing more frustrating than getting the rest of the stereo stolen anyway. One possible solution might turn out to be the neatest. Simply leave your door unlocked with nothing in the car. At least you don’t need to fill out the insurance forms for the broken side window that way.

More importantly, the scourge of out of car theft has created a massive demand for people that can protect cars and so blooms probably the most extensive and wealth generating socio-economic network in the country. Where there is a demand, there is a supply and, in one of those weird little glitches of South African reality, in our case the demand is the supply. The guys breaking into the cars of the wealthy now simply get paid not to. All of these people who have been standing around grumbling suddenly all have something to do, which is to stop each other from breaking and entering.

In the old days it was a relatively simple problem to manage this type of robbery. If you were black and you weren’t actively doing something constructive for a white guy, you had no business being there – period. More and more frequently, the new conversations run something like this:

‘Hi, what are you doing here?’

‘My name is Phineas.’

‘Yes, but what are you doing hanging around my car?’

‘I am protecting it.’

‘Protecting it from who?’

‘My name is Phineas.’

At first the car guard industry came on kind of unobtrusively. Parking bandits greeted you when you parked your car and suggested you pay them when you left. Sometimes they threw in a little song and dance, making a witty comment or passed a compliment your way. The one thing they all did, though, was greet you and make sure you at least shifted your eyes towards them, if not acknowledging their humanity, then at least acceding that they were moving objects. That seemed to be the unspoken rule, because by skipping this step, you could pretend they weren’t there when you returned.

Of course, you didn’t have to pay them. In the pioneering phase of this industry, however, there was a good chance that you would get the trick by withholding the treat, even if it was just a nice coat hanger scrape along your car duct. People grudgingly began to pay them. Then some enterprising soul came up with the idea of selling car guards official bright yellow identification vests. Who’s going to shortchange a guy who is actually working for a living, a guy with a uniform? Maybe by cooperating with an official looking person, you could also get out of parking fines?

It was great! The last few years have been a golden era of safe cars. The vast majority of unemployed as well as immigrant men in the countryhave are keeping an eye on things. Hell, they even provide an escort for a lone woman walking towards her car. As the practice becomes increasingly more organized and accepted, the revenge attacks for non-paying clients have fallen away. If you don’t have any money, you do not always have to pay. The car guards now have a reputation to protect and will let non-payment slip because they have a block which is their permanent position. The parking bandit is now a car pimp. Most of the time, people just pay over a few rand. In a sense, one is sharing the price of a beer with your guard at the end of an enjoyable evening.

This is where loitering has become an art form. It pays to stand around. Anybody can do it! Increasingly, the car guards are not really guards’ at all but rather unemployed men that would have been standing around anyway. Just by virtue of the fact that they are loitering at the exact spot where one chooses to park, most people have accepted the tacit obligation of payment.

For me, the true artists are the guys that position themselves outside bottle stores, collecting money for booze in return for the four minutes it takes one to go in and get a six-pack of beer. You could not find another country which offers this sort of job security to alcoholics. For a little value add, they often attempt to guide you into your parking space. Ironically, and needless to say, they are so blind drunk by the end of day that accepting their guidance is invariably more dangerous than leaving your car unattended in the first place.

Unfortunately for locals, most of the rest of Africa is not in a good financial or politically stable position, with the result that the once seemingly limitless employment opportunities of the car guard game have now become very scarce. Not only are Nigerians willing to look after your car, they do it professionally and courteously and even offer a side-line in dangerous, mind-altering chemicals. In addition – being young, generally sober and genetically predisposed to athletic prowess – they have the added advantage of actually being able to protect your car. They also have better uniforms, not to mention truncheons.

So that’s the situation. Loitering has evolved from casual ‘employment’, where the occupational hazard was getting oneself thrown into jail; to an accepted ‘industry’ that employs countless local and foreign people. It is a form of wealth redistribution I guess, with an interesting history, involving a supply that created a demand to get a new supplier. I for one don’t like lugging around all that spare change and am happy to avoid those insurance forms.

Viva loitering, viva!

FULL TILT

24 hours earlier

‘Hey, bro, name’s Blake.’ I held out my hand, and then withdrew it. My palms were soaked with sweat.

‘Joe.’ The big black face smiled as he looked at my hand.

‘Have you got the stuff?’

‘I must phone my boy to meet him. Can I use your phone?’

I pulled out my new cell.

‘Ha! That is a computer man!’

‘I know, look after it.’ I handed Joe the roll of cash.

I turned and slid into position to play my pool shot. My object ball entered the pocket with a dull explosion. A general murmur from the crowd gave me a satisfaction that I never grew tired of.

‘Nice shot bru’ my opponent winked at me.

I stood up to swirl the cue around my body, ‘get really good at something that you can do in a crowd.’

I could feel Joe’s breath on my face, smelling faintly of peppermint.

‘I can’t hear anything in here man. I go outside quickly and make call there.’

I looked in irritation at the band churning out manic brass blues.

‘Hurry up! I’m almost out of battery time.’

‘No problem, I be back now now.’

I ran through to the toilets, had a quick piss. When I returned a new game was set, my challenger a girl.

‘Good luck.’ I went to shake her hand, changed my mind.

‘Did you just give that guy your phone?’

‘Joe?’

‘Go and get your phone dude!’

I turned slowly and then more quickly ran to the door, down the stairs and into the street. Joe was nowhere to be seen.

Oh for fuck’s sake! What kind of a man would do that?

22 hours ago

The coke was making me mad. I was driving around, completely drunk, feeling abnormally horny. I had tried to call my cell but it was dead. I needed to phone Nick quickly. I pulled over the side of the road and stumbled up to a pay phone. Nick’s cell was the one number I knew by heart.

I still had eight hundred. No, five hundred. The gram from the street dealer had cost me three hundred so I had five hundred left. I needed it after getting ripped off. I had only done this job to get a gram for myself anyway. It wasn’t my fault the money was gone. I had needed a line.

‘Hello?’ My hands were so sweaty that I had difficulty holding the pay phone.

‘Hi, Nick.’

‘Where’s the coke?’

‘I’ve had a little bit of trouble.’

‘What trouble?’

‘Some guy ripped me off. The money’s gone.’

‘I need that money bru!’

‘I’ll get it back to you soon.’

‘That’s four grand bru! You’ll never get it back.’

‘I will, trust me! I have some of it left.’

‘I want that money in full. You have until Monday. I will come to your pretty white house and burn it. I will burn you bru.’

Nick disconnected.

Now I felt terrified and horny. I needed to get laid. I considered going to a club and trying to pick up a woman. The problem was it all took too damn long. It took negotiation and smiles and humour and coercion. There was no guarantee of success. Girls can sense when you just want to take them home and screw them. Sometimes they like it, but more often than not they don’t.

Also I wasn’t feeling so good about myself. My skin was pale and spotty and glossed with perspiration. I was also very jumpy. I could no longer talk to people. I could only manage to talk at them and their voices were a far-off wave crashing into the continent of my self-absorption. They would never go for me.

For a moment I thought of being an equal opportunity employer to my addictions and hitting Grand West Casino to play the tables. Sometimes, when in the grip of cocaine fuelled psycho sexual lust patrols, it is best to substitute addictions. It was a drive though, a long drive, and I was drunk. That could mean death. Death was bad. Perhaps I deserved it: I had made my bed.

Also I only had five hundred bucks on me. At the casino things quickly go one of two ways: In my case, more often than not, they went the less favourable way. Five hundred wasn’t enough of a cushion. Chances were then that I would wind up in an hour with a bigger debt and a few more beers in my system. Then I was even closer to death on the way back.

Besides, I looked horrible and felt ghastly. Chicks and luck never go for that.

I carried on driving through Sea Point, watching the girls standing on the street corners trying to attract customers. They were real pieces of work, absolutely foul, some of them big black girls with legs like chocolate cottage cheese.

I checked a lovely young coloured girl in a blue dress on the next corner. That’s not bad, I thought. God I was horny. Towards the end of Sea Point I saw the glowing lavender fluorescence of a popular escort agency to the right and turned into the side street. I sat in the car, heart pounding and considered my options. Nobody would see me. It was a new experience.

I jumped out of the car and ran quickly across the street. I smelt garbage from the bins along the wall. There was a buzzer which I pressed at the metal gate, my stomach suddenly cramping. Walking in I saw a surprising number of people in the red smoke glow of the room. There were a lot of big Nigerians.

Christ! What if Nick came here?

‘Hi, welcome to Cherries, can I help you?’

I turned to face her. This woman took no trouble, I could see it. Her voice was flat and grey and hard, like concrete.

‘How much is it?’

‘R500 rand for one hour. Meet the girls and make your pick. They’ll take you upstairs. We accept cash and credit cards.’

Christ, I thought. That’s my whole stash. Then I’m really fucking fucked.

‘Can’t I get like half an hour babe, or even twenty minutes? I’ve got two hundred bucks to spend, max. It’s my birthday.’

‘No fucking way, do you have the cash or not?’

I thought about it. I thought of holding perfect hazel breasts in his hands. Then I pictured them sliding off with all the sweat on my palms. With three hundred I could still make a plan but with no cash I was gone. Two hundred bucks was what I had to spend. An image flashed into my mind. It was of a young girl in a blue dress standing by the side of the road.

16 hours ago

Christ I was hungry. My mouth was so dry. For the last hour I had been awake but the thought of having to go into the world was just dreadful. I wanted to stay asleep. Every ten minutes or so I managed to hypnotise myself into a tiny dream but they were thinning out as the sun began pushing against my closed blinds like an immense hot octopus.

My head was so sore. I needed to get up and take a bunch of pain killers, maybe down them with a beer. A beer was the first step to taking on a coke hangover. That was it, I needed to get up. My body like a ship wreck lying on the sea floor. I imagined my bones snapping as I forced his stomach muscles to haul me into a sitting position.

I got up and limped through to the kitchen. The place was ruined with cigarettes and beer bottles. The smell was overpowering. It was halfway vomit. On the table I saw my wallet, flipped it open. Three hundred bucks.

‘Fuck sake!’ I felt aweful.

I flipped my answering machine on as I walked to the fridge – One message. I opened the fridge. The milk was clearly off and erupted into my nose like a puffy white disease. I held my breath and grabbed a beer. I needed to get more.

‘Howzit bru, it’s Dan! Listen I just wanted to tell my most special china that there is a nice big poker tourney tonight at the Slick. Juicy money, lots of donkeys, lots of fish, maybe four grand first prize.’

I don’t have money to enter you idiot.

‘I can read your thoughts bru. You don’t have cash but remember this. You are the china that used to be the king at the tables; the king bru! I don’t know what’s been happening on your side but make a turn – it’s only three hundred bucks.’

Two hours ago

‘Blake! Howzit my china?’

‘Hey man.’ I felt sick looking at him. He was so full of life. He had a black T-shirt on with the word GOLDEN printed across his chest in gold vinyl.

‘So I hear this thing is only paying out three places, with a bigger cut for the winner. Third place is five hundred bucks, second place a grand and first place four grand. Four grand baby!’

‘Yea I heard Danny. Fuck I could do with that cash. I need four grand right now like I have never needed four grand in my life. Trust me.’

‘Me too. Check this out my china. I am getting a ring tomorrow and I am going to propose to Donna. That first prize is mine. It’s destiny.’

Oh for fuck’s sake! How perfect can he get?

‘Well good luck bru.’

I shuffled off, feeling sick. I hadn’t had enough sleep. I felt embarrassed in front of Dan. I used to be the centre of the whirlwind, and now I hardly had anything to say. I felt used up, dried out.

I needed a beer.

One hour ago

Strangely things were going well. I had managed to calm myself in an underwater lagoon of black label beer. I had been playing well, aggressively. I had a reputation. People feared me.

Now I remembered why I loved Poker. Master something you can do well in a crowd. Here I was God, omnipotent. I felt a whole lot better in fact. The Chi of the cards was racing through my bones. This was better than cocaine and Grandwest.

I’ll have the cash tomorrow Nick, come hell or high water.

Present

So this was it, ground zero. Like Danny had said, destiny. Two players left, him and me, both with equal stacks.

‘I’m so glad you got me to come here, Dan my bru.’

‘Me too china, second place is a grand for you.’

‘I need the first prize Danny boy, please believe me.’

‘What are you talking about? I am getting married! This cash is going to my wedding ring you monkey! What do you need it for?’

And of course I couldn’t answer that question. Three people from the crowd had actually spontaneously applauded when Dan announced his marriage.

What’s the matter with you people? I need to pay a coke dealer before he burns my miserable ass!

The dealer dealt our cards. I glanced at them carefully. Cowboys; a pair of kings. Dan got his cards and looked implacable. The flop came down, three cards dancing through the fingers of the dealer. Two kings, clubs and spades and a queen of spades. I had four of a kind on the flop!

‘Danny my bru, fold this one.’

Dan announced raise and doubled the blind. I re-raised and Dan immediately re-raised again. I was wracked with sympathy but just called. The next card was an ace of spades. So maybe he had a flush or a full house but he could not beat the quad kings.

Dan went all in and suddenly I felt my stomach tighten again. I was going to win and get my way. Tomorrow morning I would wake up and know that I had the cash for Nick. On the other hand, Dan was going to have the worst day ever. The power was now in my hands. Maybe by a moral decision I could be forgiven some of my sins. Maybe my luck would change. I could give Nick one grand and beg for my life.

Fuckit.

On the other hand, my life was at stake. The crowd grew tense, like a horde of mongoose surrounding a snake. I looked at my old friend sadly and made my decision.

Ten minutes later

‘Nobody move! This is a South African police raid. Everyone is to remain seated with their hands on the tables.’

Suddenly there were cops everywhere, forcing people back into their seats. As I turned around I saw TV cameras moving toward me, filming me. I could just see it. My parents switching on Carte Blanche next week, seeing my pale sweaty face, dozens of police officers. This was turning out to be the worst weekend of my life.

‘You are all being arrested for illegal gambling. Please remain where you are and wait for an officer to come around and take your details. Please do not attempt to lie. We have the owner’s laptop with all of your entry details so we will be checking every name.’

Some guys started arguing, especially one older guy, who almost punched the camera man. Clearly he needed to protect his identity at all costs.

After they had taken down all our names, we were escorted in groups arranged by table numbers down to the street level, two floors below. On the way we passed two trendy bars and restaurants where it seemed that everyone recognised me. I felt like dying of shame.

Out on the street I was stunned to see about nine cop vans, pulled onto the pavements. They had arrived with every member of the Sea Point police station! What a waste of money. Murderers and drug dealers were ruling the streets while they were arresting harmless members of society.

Fucking ridiculous.

For the first time in my life I was pushed into a cop van. With eight guys in there it was hot and uncomfortable. It smelled of sweat and fear. I wanted to throw up but everyone was in such a bad mood that I probably would have been punched.

One hour later

After driving to the police station at high speed, we had been forced to wait in the van for forty minutes. I felt like I was losing his mind. The heat was intense. My whole body was wet with sweat.

So this was it. My life was over. In twenty four hours I had been whoring, gambling, drinking, smoking, drugging and in a few days, when I managed to get bail by roping in my horrified parents – pending my ultimate jail sentence – I was going to be murdered. Fucking great Blake, nice life you’ve made for yourself.

Eventually we were dragged out of the van and into the police station. The place was a chaotic mess. Over in the corner a hooker was screaming and fighting with two cops. I nearly had a heart attack when he saw it was the girl with the blue dress. I was taken into a separate interview room.

‘You’re a pretty boy Blake,’ the cop chuckled venomously as he took down my statement, ‘just the way they like them at Polsmoor Prison.’

Fuck sake.

‘You see the cell back there? That’s where you spend the night. Tomorrow you’ll find out what’s coming to you boytjie.’

12 hours later

I woke up feeling stiff and sore. As I was taken through into the corridor I bumped into Dan, who was smiling.

‘What are you smiling about bru?’

‘I am going to get a wedding ring today. This is my last moment in the darkness.’

‘Oh yea of course’ I hesitated ‘good luck.’

‘Blake why did you fold your hand yesterday, without showing anyone?’

‘I wanted to do something right.’ I laughed suddenly and felt my mood lift as a few shards of morning light speared through a cracked window. ‘You know bru I had four of a kind.’

‘I know. It means a lot to me. Everything here makes sense because of that.’

‘Consider it a wedding present.’ I laughed again.

‘I knew something was up and I was watching to see what you would do, whether you cared how important it was for me to win. You know what the irony is though? I had ten and jack of spades, a straight flush. You would have lost anyway.’

Fuckit.

I suddenly felt a weight lift off my shoulders.

‘Be quiet there!’ shouted a cop at the group of guys around me. ‘The good news is that we won’t press any charges. All of you guys will pay the guilt of admission fine of two hundred rand then you are free to go. I hope you’re learned your lesson.’

I wanted to do a back-flip with joy. Eight hundred left from my second place and no prison time. I wasn’t dead yet.

‘Does anyone have anything left to ask?’

Nobody said anything.

I turned and followed the other ou’s down a passage and into another waiting room. Sitting sheepishly on a bench was Joe the dealer.

‘What the fuck?’

‘Don’t be angry bru.’

‘You robbed me!’

‘Shhhh! Come talk to me here quietly.’

He indicated the seat next to him on the bench and whispered to me.

‘I didn’t rob you. What kind of a man do you think I am? When I came downstairs and got the coke from my friend, the cops jumped me. I waited for your call but the battery died. If you press charges, I am finished!’

‘Where’s the cash?’

Big Joe smiled and surreptitiously reached down and removed his shoe which he placed on the seat between us. It smelled like an abandoned puppy kennel. Inside it I saw a roll of cash and my phone, both of which I quickly pocketed.

‘Three thousand two hundred bru, it’s all there.’

I was square.

‘Did you lose the coke?’

‘No bru,’ he chuckled, ‘We stashed it. My friend has it in Seapoint. You want it?’

‘I’ll speak to my partner.’

As I walked out into my beautiful new day, my brain was racing.

I saw a girl sitting on a bench, watching the ocean, her blue dress blowing in the wind. In the daylight, the dress looked less glamorous. It was thin and patched. I sat down next to her and she turned to face me. She was young but already lines of stress were etched into her face.

‘I was arrested just after you left me’ she laughed. ‘My next trick was a cop. Good trick huh?’

‘You never know how things are going to turn out.’

‘But a good deed…’ she paused for a moment ‘You know you could have slept with me. You didn’t have to pay me.’

‘You looked like you needed it.’

Do you know that that was all the money I had? It bailed me out. Without it I would have still been in there!’

‘Do you have a phone I can use? My battery is dead.’

‘Sure.’ She handed me a beat up old Nokia.

I walked away from her a bit before phoning Nick. I was surprised to hear a distraught sounding Candice on the line, his girlfriend.

‘What’s up Candice, you sound like you’ve been crying?’

‘It’s bad Mr Blake, very bad! Nick got caught last night with a big shipment, two kilo’s of coke. They took him away and are going to deport him this week. There is no money left for his family here, for my kids!’

‘That’s terrible Candy, I wish I could help.’

‘Does he owe you money Mr Blake?’

I paused and smiled, ‘A little bit, but don’t worry about it. I hope you’re going to be okay. I was also arrested but I’m ok. Goodbye.’

Blake cut the call and sauntered over to the girl.

‘I never did get your name.’

‘It’s Lulu.’

‘You want to make some real money Lulu?’

‘I would love to!’ She smiled like a child at the thought and grabbed my hand. I let her hold it. My palms felt warm and dry.

‘I need you to speak to a friend of mine named Joe. He’ll be out of the station in about an hour.’

I turned and faced the sea, my grin widening as the carrion rank of dead rotting sea weed floated in the morning mist.

Fuckit, I’m back in business!

Dungeons and Dragons

As the boys at KES – King Edward High School – slowly oozed into their appropriate social strata I found myself with a diminishing range of options for inclusion. On the one hand you had the absolute nerds, those that were physically repellent, not especially smart and prone to acts of sheer vulgarity to get attention. To fall in with this group was a death sentence. Like a lobster trap, it was easy to enter but impossible to escape.

The next tier up were the psycho nerds, the kinds of boys who wore black and didn’t speak much, often coming from broken homes. Their way of attracting attention was bringing knives to school and carving desks. They like to talk about killing and torture and satanic rituals. Later they would evolve into Goths.

After that you had your classic nerds. Largely unattractive and badly styled, their major failing was their heightened intelligence, which made the jocks want to beat them, just because they could. Fortunately for the strong guys, everyone had to play rugby at some point, so even the classic nerds got a bit of the dumb treatment. I wouldn’t have been totally adverse to this group, except that I wasn’t studious enough.

Finally there were the Dungeons & Dragons players and fortunately, they were looking for members.

Fighting flaming dragons is a good way to spend your high school years. Dungeons and Dragons is a game of the mind in which you can be anything and do anything. You create a character and act in a consensual world of the imagination with your friends, the entire unfolding story orchestrated by the appointed Dungeon Master. You start at level one and work your way up. Some guys spend years developing their characters. When they lose them in battle, it’s like they’ve lost a family member. Not a sister or brother maybe, but at least a distant cousin.

In many ways it is an act of courage. It is the transformation of the mundane into the extraordinary and for a boy on the very edge of the social precipice it offered a delicious opportunity for escape. The other D&D crew were a sort of erosion from the main nerd groupings. Our group included smart guys, crass guys and most especially, psycho guys.

The appointed Dungeon Master, my most special friend, was Simon Anderson. He had introduced me to every facet of the world of fantasy and planted in my mind ideas that would grow to deeply influence me. He had lived on a farm in America where the parents and children lived almost completely separately. There he had learned of this wonderful game and built the core of our group at school.

Every break between studies we would gather behind the Technical Lab, sitting on the grass, eating tuck shop snacks and chatting excitedly about our characters. Often we would hardly even get to play the game before the end of break. Just discussing the inevitability of playing was exciting enough.

Having our own group gave us some measure of confidence and security. If a rugby creature had stumbled into our enclave, I reckon the lot of us could have taken him, cover him like a bunch of squirrels swarming a lion, biting and scratching him to death.

Cool as we thought we were though, we had another cool coming. One long, languorous break in the middle of summer, when time seemed to surround us like a hot haze that hid us from the world, I noticed a stranger standing by the fence.

‘Who do you suppose that ou is?’ I said to my friends, squinting through the time fog.

My friends turned to face him. He had long black hair, almost down to his bum, a pair of torn jeans, Doc Martins boots and a black T-shirt with an awesome red dragon covering it. The inscription read: DRAGONS GET BIG.

In short a sort of holy man.

He looked across the grass at us. He had inquisitive blue eyes. ‘Ist thou playing D&D?’

At that point Rene snorted through his nose as an exploding chuckle met a sip of Coke going inwards. Simon however seemed to recognise the code and responded quickly and quietly, like the diplomat character he always plays in the game.

‘Indeed Ranger, dost thou play?’

‘Why you ouens talking like that?’ giggled Kevin.

The stranger regard us sagely, took a card from his pocket and spun it through the air like a cardboard ninja star.

‘We have a crew operating in Yeoville. If you want to get some game time, phone that number.’ He flashed his glance across the group. ‘For those who are serious about the craft.’

Simon and I jumped for the card, tumbling over Kevin. When we looked up the stranger (Ranger?) was gone. Rene said he saw his foot sticking out from behind a tree but then the bell rang and we couldn’t go and check. I think he turned invisible but it doesn’t matter.

I would never have known it at the time, but we had encountered a Super Nerd.

We arranged to meet them on Friday. Afternoon lessons were so incredibly tedious that everyone started turning to jelly. Our final lesson, history, actually reversed the time flow and Gilman worked out how to talk backwards in slow motion.

Finally however, we escaped. The walk up the hill to Yeoville is a long one but Simon and I (the rest of the boys weren’t serious enough) felt like Elvish warriors going to battle.

As we turned into their road, flanked by huge Oak trees, we saw their car up ahead. Simon ran over to them in an embarrassing whirlwind of satchels and kit bags but I decided that I would maintain my dignity and strode slowly and imperiously, glancing around to see if anybody was noticing.

These guys are here for us, I wanted to say. This, my friends, is a real crew. They play D&D the entire weekend, without sleeping. They have their own transport.

As I got to the car however – nodding coolly at the three big, long haired guys chatting to Simon – and tried to open the door, they drove forward a couple of meters. I laughed in awkwardness and shuffled forward to grab the door again but again they moved forward, now all turned to me and having a good chuckle at my expense.

No! No! No! I looked around me again, this time praying that nobody had in fact been watching me. Why?

I kicked the pavement in frustration but one of the guys shouted out, apologised, told me to get in. With a rueful grin I ran over to get in the back seat and just as I got there, they jerked forward again. I was in a rage now and chased after them. They took off slowly and we continued down the road. I had thought Simon looked silly but as always, I took disgrace and crafted a Greek statue from it.

Welcome to the clan. Nice one guys.

Having said that it was an unbelievable weekend – The six of us were crammed into a stinky little flat in Yeoville, eating chips, not sleeping for two days. They gave us these cool pills which kept us awake.

We were a bunch of adventurers going on a journey. The thin guy was the barbarian warlord, the pale guy was the dark sorcerer and the hippy looking guy played the part of the nature loving druid. I played an assassin, a female one. Perfect.

In this game we had to take over an island populated by dinosaurs. In module play there is a sort of story line that the Dungeon Master can follow. The whole weekend was spent trundling around this imaginary dungeon in the middle of the island, being attacked by a whole host of mythical monsters. You had to roll dice to determine the success of your movements.

I learned more names of ancient Greek creatures in that game than I would have got in a month of Latin lessons. Pfaw! It was just amazing to think that you could spend an entire weekend thinking. How cool were we? It was like we had had a thousand chess games in a row, that’s how much thinking went on.

Late Sunday night we left. I had given my mom a list of names of friend’s mothers to cover the whole weekend but they were all moms without phones or who were permanently unavailable. I was safe. I could return home in comfort. The keep-awake pills made me feel a bit jumpy.

The next day however was just as rosy as you can imagine. I was half me, and half my beautiful elfin assassin girl. The road to school was filled with red shadows as the autumn turning Oaks transformed sunlight into colour. I was so switched on.

As I walked past the primary school, I lingered at the fence, watching a bunch of ten year old kids playing a game. They were playing D&D. I was floored. It was just beautiful. The craft was reaching the most sensitive minds, filtering through them to find a take, a kid curious about elves, about the wondrous book Lord of the Rings which I had recently read. I was looking at the next generation.

I reached to flip them a card but I didn’t have one. I decided I would have to get some business cards.

The Voyeur

Like all young boys, I was interested in sex from an early age or if not actual sex, at least what girls looked like without their clothes on. It became clear to me that this was one of life’s greatest mysteries, the one thing that was always covered up. Millions of girls around the world possessed their own unique little set of secrets. It was a thought that drove me to distraction.

The question was how to get them strip down so I could have a look. I was in the fortunate position of having a big field from which to choose because I had an indispensable advantage over some of the other boys; a younger sister. She was popular too and went to a school absolutely bursting to the seams with gorgeous young specimens. Every weekend a string of girls came to spend a couple of nights but, despite my fondest fantasies, I simply could not figure out a way to get them naked.

My room, in the attic of our house, was right next to my sisters. It was there that the girls would congregate and at some point inevitably get ready for a bath or change outfits or get into their swim suits. My challenge was to somehow make the wall transparent. Eventually my mad genius rose to the occasion and I constructed a sort of U-shaped periscope with a series of mirrors that allowed me to look around corners. As a project it was at best only marginally successful but a few fleeting glances was enough to encourage me to expand the scope of my operations.

I am ashamed to say that my first real opportunity came through my brother’s girlfriend, who lived with him in one of the cottages off the main house. I wasn’t hugely particular about age and not only was she hot but she had some decidedly hippy habits, like walking around the house with very little if anything on. It was simple a case of finding the right vantage point.

I had some successes with tall trees but eventually worked out that the best possible vantage was climbing onto the roof and then hanging over the edge to get an upside down but stunningly clear view of the master bedroom. It was sweet. I spent half my life up there, like an aroused orang-utan. Most of the day was pretty good viewing as she didn’t seem to work, but come night, the real action would begin when my brother returned. A bit gross one might say but I had to learn about sex somehow.

The other cottage in the house also had a string of women staying there, giving me plenty of time to perfect my art. Not for the first time was I thankful of my ninja training. It was here that I discovered that all women are not automatically dazzling without clothes. Many of them had pretty awkward looking assets. One girl living there, who I watched stripping down as I hovered outside the window, was a classic point in case. Portly by nature, she had great melons for breasts and what looked like some forest creature in her pubic region that stretched from her belly down to her knees. I decided I would have to screen my models for quality.

Across the road from our house lived My Kerr, our Form Master, one of the scariest and most influential men at KES. His daughter, Jenny Kerr, was the hottest girl around and a good friend of my sisters. From the day I met her I was in love. As a matter of fact, she had the dubious honour of being the first girl to give me the ‘friendship’ speech, that most dreaded moment in any boy’s life. Standing beneath the sodium glow of a corner street light, she let me know where I stood and how we would be great friends but nothing more. In that moment I knew that I just had to see her naked.

The first phase of my strategy was to do a ‘ninja run’ around her property and get a lay of the land. With a friend, likewise dressed in black, we spent a night creeping around and eventually worked out that if we climbed up to the top of the high fence which hemmed in the tennis courts we could see straight into her bedroom.

It was the best movie in the world, with a different ending every show. Most endings unfortunately involved closed curtains but I never gave up. Every night around bath time I would invent an excuse to leave the house and then dart over to my nest for an hour of entertainment. I was rewarded with several tantalising glimpses as she paraded around in front of the window for a few seconds.

I sometimes got the creepy feeling that she knew that I was watching and that she secretly enjoyed it, lingering with swan like grace as she peered into the night, her towel occasionally slipping down to her waist. One day her father walked into the room and looked out the window. I got such a fright that I fell off the fence.

Things unexpectedly took a turn toward the marvellous when Jenny came to visit my sister and sleep over for the night. She kicked the night off with a bath, curiously letting me know in advance how much she loved long, luxurious, scented soaks. In minutes I was in the little shed outside the bathroom and looking up at the window, which started just above my head. With painstaking artistry and patience I piled several empty cool drink crates on top of each other and climbed onto them, grasping the bars with my hands to keep me in position.

And there it was, heaven on earth, a curvy young angel gracefully washing her satin soft breasts. In that instant, the boxes beneath me dissolved with an ear splitting series of crashing detonations. Hanging from the bars, I was powerless as she looked up and stared me straight in the face.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! No, no, no, no, no! Please don’t let this be true! I let go of the bars and fell with a crash, her shrieking voice ringing through my mind. It was the single most embarrassing moment of my life, bar none, by a magnitude of ten thousand. In wild panic I ran out into the garden and simply sprinted around in circles, like a demented Maltese Poodle trying to make a bed for the night, my mind and heart filled with hot white noise. Then I ran and hid under the car, praying that it would collapse on me and kill me outright.

After a while I decided to run for my room. As I neared the kitchen I saw the whole family holding council, trying to calm Jenny down. My sister could not have looked more mortified if she had been caught herself. I opened the door without a word and ran through them, not stopping until I had locked my bedroom door behind me. Then I hid under the bed. That was the one thing I knew how to do; run and hide.

My sister’s friend! The most popular girl in school! The Form Masters daughter! Jesus Christ, I thought as my stomach did a two hundred and seventy degree reverse summersault. I was fucked, good and proper. At various points in the evening I had a combination of family members trying to get me to come out and face the music. There was no way. I would stay where I was until I was thin enough to slide through the window bars and then they would never see me again.

As things turned out she never told her father but made up for it by repeating the story to every kid at my school until my pariah status was irrevocably cemented. Every party I went to the girls would squeal in delight as they imitated me dangling from the window. It was a masterpiece of shame.

As far as my voyeuristic hobby was concerned, every impulse I had was met by the image of Jenny staring at me through that window with shock and – looked at from the perspective of age – bemusement. It was like she was looking at me saying; ‘Finally, I gotcha!’

Songbird Assassin

When it came to songbirds, I was something of a mass murderer. It was not cruelty that drove me but rather a hunter’s instinct. I liked to work out how to catch living things and failing actual capture, to assassinate them.

The leafy suburbs of Parktown North played habitat to a wealth of different bird species. There were tons of pigeons, doves, white eyes and my special favourite, the mouse bird, arguably the world’s dumbest bird. Unlike other birds, the mouse bird chose not to move when a stone hurtled past it or even broke the branch off above its head. Thus it was the perfect bird to get your sight in.

My choice of weapons included the classics, being the hurtled stone and the katty along with a few other choice weapons from my ninja arsenal like the blowgun. It was the katty that was ultimately the most deadly weapon and I became expert at it.

The instinctive guilt that I felt in this hobby was allayed somewhat by the fact that our large contingent of Zulu staff members liked to eat birds to round off their diets of putu and beans. Not that there was much meat on the little tweeters, but they seemed to enjoy beheading them and plucking them nevertheless. Perhaps it connected them to their childhoods.

Guilt or no guilt though I did have to be careful. No adult – and certainly not my parents – approved of unnecessary slaughter for any reason. I had to sneak around, making off into overgrown gardens and fields to pursue my barbarous pastime.

One of the other peculiar habits of the mouse bird is to clench its feet around the branch it sat on in the act of dying. Often it did not fall down and you had to keep shooting to dislodge it.

One time, while hunting in the university grounds across the road from our house, I had just managed to assassinate a mouse bird when a furious man leapt out of nowhere screaming at me.

‘Why are you shooting birds?’

‘I am not shooting birds!’ I replied in outrage. ‘I would never shoot a bird.’

‘Well what are you shooting then?’

‘Cans’ I said desperately. ‘There is a can in that tree and I am trying to shoot it out.’

At that exact moment, the dead mouse bird, which had been clinging to the twig in its grim rigor mortis, suddenly let go of its precarious death grip and fell down on the floor between us. I turned and bolted in a panic while the floppy-haired professor began chasing after me.

Set back by my escape from a certain hiding but not to be outdone, I changed my hunting areas to avoid the grounds of this nasty man. What was he getting so upset about anyway?

One sullen wintry afternoon I went hunting on the opposite campus, moving like a ghost between the massive oak trees, looking for prey. I spotted a large crow and took it out of the tree with a single shot. The bird fell to the ground but to my consternation and disgust decided not to die, instead flapping around on the ground with one of its great, glossy wings clearly broken.

‘Oh no’ I mumbled into the gloomy sky. What now?

I looked at the bird for a bit but it still refused to die. I decided to just walk away but no distance could separate me from the bat like echoes of its painful death throes. It seemed to be flapping in syncopation with my guilty heart. I should not have been shooting crows anyway. Crows were magical birds. They weren’t just rats with wings, like pigeons and mouse birds. They were more like, well … Doberman Pinschers with wings.

‘Damn’ I muttered as I got half way home and decided to turn around and go back to finish the job. As an eight year old I had never had to kill anything bigger that a caterpillar, not at close range anyway. Like an American General, I preferred to kill things without having to meet them first.

It was getting dark by the time I got back to the kill zone. If anything the bird was even more alive, thrashing about on the ground in chaotic circles. At one point it stopped for a second and tilted its head towards me, its cauldron-black eyes regarding me almost compassionately. I noticed a faint rim of blood around its beak as though its lungs had been pierced.

‘Why, damnit!’ I screamed in nauseous protest.

Then I pulled all of my nerve together, grabbed a brick and, closing my eyes, smashed it downwards. I felt the sickening impact but when I opened my eyes the bird was still not dead.

‘Die, you stupid bird!’ I screamed at it and struck again.

Still it would not die and I started to feel a deep seated panic grow in me. It was as if I was walking with it to the very edge of some abyss from which it would never return. It would not let me go back into the light while it faced such an awesome darkness.

Again and again I pounded it and as I did so I began to sob uncontrollably. When you peer in to death, death peers into you. A thousand beaks and claws scratched at my soul but finally the job was done and that beautiful crow was smashed into an unrecognizable smear of blood and feathers.

I placed my weapon next to its head and never played assassin again.

The Entrepeneur Part 1 – Sourcing

My family has always been pathologically entrepreneurial. My father is at the root of this tradition. By contrast, his own father and the family before him (who hide in my father’s memory like a dirty secret) were working-class chumps who would not have been able to spell the word ‘entrepreneur’.

My father had an unstable relationship with the word ‘boss’. As kids, we were never allowed to use it. At times we had temporary managers, or overseers, but they were never our bosses. We were, and always would be, masters of our own destiny. He also refused to wear a tie or anything else that might brand him as a worker, and this general unspoken attitude made him difficult to employ. Entrepreneurship was his only real option.

From his early twenties he owned and operated a host of businesses, many of which were doomed to failure: speckled amongst these were spectacular successes. Most notable, of course, was his string of restaurants, prawn houses that fed a family of crustacean consumers for almost thirty years.

Given this inspiration, my brother and sisters would spend the rest of their lives attempting to build up their own empires. As for me, being little more than a grasshopper gangster, my own road to wealth had barely begun.

Our family friends and neighbours at the time were Derora and Abey Berkovik. They were both, each in their own ways, equally vulgar but strangely entertaining.

Derora was a Jewish princess without compare, with a shameless love of money and stunning bad taste, both of which qualities manifested in loud sequined woollen jerseys worn over luminous purple leggings and leg warmers.

She also had this horrible little poodle called Gabibi that she spoke to in broken Yiddish. One of her other dogs, an incompetent St Bernard, had tried to bite its head off one day but managed only to mangle it and remove one eye, leaving a suppurating wound. It would have been acceptable if the creature had remained in the garden but she insisted on feeding it on the dining room table and the smell of dog pellets and rotten eye socket made me want to eat my lunch in reverse.

Abey was jovial enough in a drunken, lecherous way but, like many practising psychologists, he was pretty self obsessed. I liked him best because he was interested in all matters metaphysical and he had a huge library of arcane books on every spiritual subject under the sun. He also recognized in me, from an early age, a talent and propensity for these sensitive subjects and encouraged my pursuit of the other-worldly, in the process expanding my curious little intellect until it overflowed with noble notions of angels and channelled spirits.

One sunny afternoon, during which my family had gathered at his house for one of our feasts, I made a stunning discovery while accidentally looking through his bedside cupboard. He had a huge collection of pornographic books! At the time, for a South African, not least an underage one, this was like finding a stash of radioactive plutonium, so wonderful and exotic was it.

This sort of smut was ultra-banned by our neo-Nazi government, although they had reluctantly allowed the publication of an embarrassing magazine called Scope, which was peopled by dumb, busty blonds with stars on their nipples. What I had now discovered was the mother lode.

What followed was a series of lightning forays over a period of weeks. I would wait in the dining room while everyone made merry around the Sunday lunch and then, when I was absolutely sure they would not be moving for several minutes, I would dart down the passage, dive-roll over the bed, whip open the cabinet, retrieve a random book, carefully tear out a single page, dive-roll back over the bed and down the passage to the dining room, all in the time it took to type this sentence. Mission accomplished.

Earlier in the year at school, my own entrepreneurial inheritance had begun to rear its crafty head. I siphoned jelly powder into straws to be sealed at both ends, or baked cookies and fudge to sell to my classmates. Going to class was like going to work, and through the duration of the lesson, coins and sweet things would move beneath tables as if through a tunnel network operated by smugglers.

I was on my way to a promising future in small-time trade. However everything changed the day that I first brought, to school, a sample of my wares from Abe’s cabinet. Instantly I was a celebrity, literally mobbed by boys at break time. This was good enough for me until Kenny Gillman asked me how much I was prepared to accept in cash for a single page. I jokingly named, what was, at the time, a fantastic amount – twenty rand I believe – and he instantly agreed.

Within weeks, I had amassed a small fortune and the stack inside Abe Berkovik’s bedside cabinet began to dwindle like polar ice during a heat age. Of course, he couldn’t really have publicly complained, because nobody knew he had been amassing porn, but there would eventually come a day when the cabinet would be evacuated and the raided treasure trove moved to a more secure location.

I had begun my life as an entrepreneur, but, in a sad twist of irony, I could never reveal this achievement it to the one man who would have been the most proud of his protégé’s success.