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Enemy Coast Ahead
I’d arrived in
Johannesburg the night before, checking into a sleazy hotel called The
Pads, one of those run-down places that’s the last stop before the
street, the last rented roof before it’s a choice between the park or an
underpass. I’d drunk about eight beers in the Europa Hotel before making
my way past the hookers hanging around reception to my room, where I’d
passed out fully clothed to the sounds of an argument in the room above
me. I woke up about nine the next morning, sweating from a bad dream, in
which I’d been chased by a horde of faceless kids through some sepia
derelict city, my feet slipping on some brown goo underfoot. Taking a
minute or so to realise where I was, the peeling orange wall paper
shouting me down like some nauseous acid flashback, I groped around until
I found my cigarettes and lighter, lit a cigarette, and immediately
started coughing, one of those rasping hacking coughs that’s only a
short step from a retch. Eyes watering, I sat up, rubbing my face and
singeing my hair in the process. I could hear a cat in the rubbish bin
outside my window, frantically trying to get through the upper layers of
detritus to the imagined tasty morsel below. It sounded desperate, driven
by intense hunger. Perhaps it had kittens somewhere, secreted under an old
building, crying as their mother fought for their survival. I’d seen the
cat the night before, a skinny black beast that had looked at me
accusingly, as if it was my fault that the world was such a cruel place. I
was a bit hungry myself. The gnawing in my stomach brought me back to
reality, and I remembered why I was here.
I’d just been fired from
a job in Swaziland, for refusing to come to work one day. I’d been down
there for two and a half years, ostensibly being sponsored towards a
Commercial Pilots Licence, but in reality working like a slave for a
hundred Rand a month, doing everything from office reception work and
shopping to working in the hangar as an apprentice engineer. In the two
and a half years I’d been there, I’d only amassed one hundred and
sixty flying hours, forty short of the two hundred required for a
Commercial Pilots License. Now here I was in Jo’Burg wondering what the
fuck to do with my life. I was sort of on my way back to Botswana, but I
knew that my parents wouldn’t be particularly pleased to see me.
They’d thought that my job in Swaziland would make me settle down, get
serious about life. Fat chance. I had a shower, got dressed, and checked
out. I found a ‘phone box and phoned around, with the idea that the
first friend who offered me a bed, I would go and stay with them. I’d
lost touch with a lot of people, but on my third call I got hold of Berty,
a friend of mine from school.. He stayed with his mum, and I wasn’t
going to be able to stay with him too long., but for now it would do. His
mum had always liked me, thinking I was the least weird of his friends.
One afternoon, a week or
so later, I was lying on the floor in his lounge reading the jobs section
of the Star. I needed a job soon. Since I’d moved in all we’d done was
drink and smoke dope, and if I didn’t get off my ass soon, I’d
probably never do anything else. The problem was , I wasn’t qualified to
do anything. One job looked promising:
MAKE ONE HUNDRED RAND A DAY. NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED.
I wrote down the number and, after reading the entire jobs section, it was
the only number I had apart from a bar job. I gave them a call, and the
next day borrowed Berty’s suit for an interview. The job was selling
encyclopaedias for an American company, Grellers, door to door. A week of
training followed, conducted by a manic American woman called Sandy. There
were six of us, though two days into the training two young students
didn’t turn up. Sandy had been brainwashed, and thought we were selling
one of the most important products ever conceived. Her enthusiasm rubbed
off on us young converts, and we couldn’t wait to get out there and
sell. Full of confidence, I sold a set of books on my first evening out,
to a couple with a young girl who liked all the plastic overlays. The
sample volume had the best pages from the entire twenty volumes crammed
into one book. Two days later I sold another set.
One of the sales managers was an Israeli guy called Norman. He took me and
two girls out to Secunda in the Eastern Transvaal, where Sasol have a huge
plant for manufacturing petrol from coal using some process invented by
the Nazis during the Second World War. We slept in tents in the local
campsite, selling books in the evenings. I tried to shag one of the girls,
a Greek girl called Alex, but she wanted a platonic relationship. Secunda
had loads of new houses, with young families, and I made six sales in my
first ten days. I got paid a hundred and twenty Rand for each confirmed
sale. Selling encyclopaedias seemed an easy way to make a living.
Norman had the gift of the gab. He had been living in South Africa for
about a year. His English was not that good, but it didn’t handicap him
one bit when it came to selling people books they did not really want. He
was short, dark, stocky, dark-skinned, padded face, like a puff-adder. His
habit of peering at people myopically over his small oval glasses,
occasionally pushing them back up his nose, seemed to hypnotise people. He
was the undisputed master of door to door selling, his sales more than
double that of his nearest rival. After two weeks selling in Secunda,
Norman took me with him one day to show me how to improve my sales
figures. We ended up in this fireman’s house. Norman’s trick was to
persuade people they were getting something cheap. He told this guy and
his wife that we were doing a promotional tour, looking for families that
appreciated the importance of education. These families would get the full
set of twenty books for the ridiculously low price of just twelve hundred
Rand. Included in this special promotional offer were one hundred coupons
that could be sent in to the company for courses on anything they wanted.
In reality these coupons would net them no more than references on the
subject they were interested in, coincidentally for sale by the same
company. Within five minutes this poor guy and his wife were hooked.
Norman told them he wasn’t sure if they were really the sort of people
the company wanted to participate in their promotional offer. The next
thing , this stupid Jaapie (Afrikaner) was offering Norman a bribe to sell
him the books
I took to Norman’s technique like the proverbial duck to water. Within a
few weeks my sales figures were second only to his. In the afternoons
we’d do a bit of canvassing, knocking on doors while hubby was at work
and inviting ourselves back that evening. The trick was not to waste time
on people who didn’t bite. I could get through the door of about one
house in eight. Of the houses I got into, I was out of the door within
five minutes about once in every five. In all the others I had an
audience. I was selling an average of one set of books a night, more on
weekends. When Norman was asked to open an office in Cape Town, he asked
for me to be sent with him.
We moved into a furnished flat in Camps Bay, on a hill overlooking the
sea. Tastefully furnished, glass coffee tables, plush sofas, separate
kitchen. Our neighbours were mainly Yuppies. The office was a glass and
chrome affair on the tenth floor of a downtown skyscraper, accountants and
lawyers sharing our view of the shiny stainless city below. We put ads in
the local papers and soon had a regular stream of recruits through the
doors. We trained them conventionally at first, and then later, if they
stayed, showed them the tricks of the trade. One in ten would stay more
than a week. Some were weak-willed or shy, some desperate. Norman could
spot potential, and soon we had a hard-core of dedicated salesmen. I hired
a VW bus and drove out to the suburbs every evening with seven
salespersons. Two of them, both male students, were really good. Soon I
stopped selling myself. I was making plenty on commission from their
sales. Life was easy.
One of our salesmen was a guy called Ray. Ray was from Jo’Burg
originally, and he’d moved down to Cape Town the year before. He was
pretty keen on drugs, and had avoided the army by taking a tab of acid
when he had his medical. He’d been referred to an army shrink, who
decided that, although the military welcomed people with various
psychological afflictions, Rays particular disease was not conducive to
letting him near high powered weapons. We got on really well, selling in
the evenings and then partying all night. There was a club in town called
1886 where we used to take speed and dance until dawn, trying to pick up
girls. We would sleep the day away before heading out again in the evening
for our suburban paycheques. Cape Town is a great city. I could settle
here, I thought . The two years I’d spent in Swaziland had been OK, but
now I had money for the first time in my life. One evening as I sat
looking out over the sea, the great French windows wide open to the balmy
breeze, I realised that finally I was where I wanted to be, comfortable,
no obligations, twenty -one and without a care in the world. The main
thing I missed about Swaziland was the women.
One night Norman and myself decided to have a party. Norman went down to
Seapoint and came back with three hookers. We had a gram of coke and three
grams of speed. Ray came round, along with a few other people from work,
and Max, our neighbour, came round with a bottle of scotch. Max was a
shipping agent. He was tall and skinny, with a goatee beard, and did all
his cooking on an upturned iron while he listened to the B 52’s. He was
normally fairly quiet, but Ray had given him some speed, and he stood in a
corner babbling about flying saucers and the huge cover-up in Area 51 to
anyone who would listen. I went through a UFO phase myself a few years
previously, hoping that one day I would happen on some aliens who’d
invite me back to their planet. I mean, this one’s not bad at the
moment, but it’s starting to get fucked up, and there’s a lot of jerks
around.
Norman had made up some
punch which tasted of liquorice, and from the way I was grinding my teeth
I guess it had some speed in it. Soon I’d be joining Max in the corner.
I went into the kitchen where Ray was looking through the ‘fridge. He
pulled out a beer and passed it to me.
“What did you think of
Candide?”, he asked me, offering me a cigarette. He’d leant me the
book a few days earlier.
“That Voltaire must have been a weird guy, “, I answered, as Norman
strode into the kitchen without any clothes on. He grabbed a bottle of gin
and disappeared again. That would finish off the party. “Do you think he
was pissing himself as he wrote it, wondering what foul thing he could do
to Candide next?”. Strangely, though, I felt much as Candide did, that
all would turn out well in the end. Every time something bad happened to
me, something good happened to put it right, unlike Voltaire’s hero who
eventually started losing limbs and shit as his world imploded on itself,
only his optimism carrying him through. I could identify with Candide,
though I did not envy him the world he lived in, despair always just a
thought away. Optimism is great because it makes you feel better. I mean,
if something bad happens, what is the point of getting upset about it? It
just makes you feel worse. Far better to shrug it off and do something
else. I’ve been accused of being callous. There is a world of difference
between being callous and not giving a fuck. The word “callous”
implies some malicious thought or intent. I don’t want to hurt anyone,
and I don’t like seeing people suffering, which is why I avoid them like
the plague. No point in us all feeling shit. That is why I liked Ray,
because more than anyone else I’d ever met, he refused to let anything
get him down. The party slowly degenerated into a full blown orgy and most
of the guests disappeared. I ended up in the bathroom with one of the
hookers, a skinny girl called Beth, mixed race, curly black hair. The
speed had turned my dick into a useless fleshy appendage, dribbling piss
as Beth tried to coax some life back into it with her long skinny fingers.
Things were just getting interesting when the police arrived and told us
to pack it in. Ray drove the girls home on his way back to Mouille Point.
The next night I was at work as usual. Five of my crew had made sales.
Norman and myself went for a beer and then drove home. The key didn’t
work so, thinking the lock was jammed, we went to see the landlord, a
Polish immigrant.
“You have damaged the sofa”, he told us.
“What do you mean?”, I asked.
“There is a cigarette burn.”
“OK , we’ll get it fixed.”
“No possible. I have to cover it all new”, he said in his treacly
accent.
“No way!”, Norman interjected,” We can get the mending invisible
done.”
Norman was waving his hands around, punctuating his speech by wrinkling
his nose and pushing his glasses back as they threatened to slide off his
face. We argued for twenty minutes or so, but he would not let us back in
the flat. All we had were the clothes we were wearing. We went round to
Rays, slept on the floor. The next day, when I arrived in the office,
there was a stranger sitting at my desk.
“Who are you?”, I asked.
“I’m Fred Cojinski”, the stranger answered, in an American accent.
“I’ve been sent over by Grellers to look at the operation here”. He
was sitting at my desk wearing a bright red and yellow checked jacket and
a tie painted by Mondrian, bright irregular squares and rectangles in red,
yellow, and blue . He had blonde hair parted at the side, big eyebrows,
large square face. Piercing blue eyes stared at me.
I introduced myself.
“Ah, you are just the man I want to talk to”, he replied, in a
Southern accent. “I see your sales figures have dropped off dramatically
recently”.
“That’s because I’m so busy training new recruits. All my crew are
very productive.” This guy had a fucking cheek.
“We expect our sales managers to set an example”, he replied. “This
company is powered by enthusiasm, and not taking an active part is just
not acceptable. You are not productive. Your services are no longer
required”.
I was gobsmacked. I lost my temper, called him a Yankee asshole. He just
sat there impassively, looking at me with an expression of boredom. I went
to the training room and trashed it, hurling the boards covered with
stupid slogans like ‘A sale a day is the Grellers way’ across the
room. The next thing I knew I was being escorted from the building by a
security guard. I left the building with a strangely disjointed feeling, a
sense of unreality creeping over me. Part of me was pissed off, another
part excited at the prospect of unexpected change. I picked up the V.W.
bus from the car park across the road. I was hungry, and realised for the
first time that I had no money. I was owed some commission from my
team’s recent sales, and on three sales I had made myself a week or so
earlier. I had two Rand and thirty two cents in my pocket. I went round to
the car hire company to drop off the bus. The deposit didn’t cover the
bill, so I told them I was going to the bank. The manager appeared, told
me he was going to call the police. I told him I wanted to show him
something on the bus, and as soon as we exited the office I ran off. He
chased me for about a block, then gave up. I was glad he was overweight.
I wandered slowly back
towards Mouille Point, a cold breeze blowing in off the Atlantic fighting
me all the way. Ray wasn’t home. I sat on the football fields behind his
house and had a joint. Some kids playing football kept staring at me. I
felt strung out from the speed, verging on psychotic. Speed always makes
me hear voices in my head, muttering my thoughts to me in voices of people
I once knew. I could hear a girl I’d known in Botswana, Kathy, telling
me to eat something. I wasn’t hungry, though I hadn’t eaten for more
than a day. Suddenly there was a loud explosion in my left ear and I was
knocked sideways. A mad ringing in my ear and the stinging pain on my face
made me realise I’d been hit by a football. I scowled at an apologetic
ten year old who could barely contain his mirth and staggered to my feet.
He obviously thought I was going to hit him, and he picked up his ball and
ran off, laughing. Little shit.. It was starting to get really cold. I
decided to walk to Steven’s house. Steven was a friend of Rays from
Jo’burg, who’d moved down a few years ago. His mum was a religious
nut, spoke in tongues and all that. I set off up Mouille Point towards
Seapoint. I was feeling a bit depressed, and tried to remind myself that
Candide had had far worse days, and yet continued on in the blind faith
that things would get better.
In a fit of pique, I kicked an empty bottle along the pavement. It span
off with an echoing, swirling sigh, bounced off a rubbish bag, flew off
the curb and shattered on the road, flying glass spraying in front of the
wheels of a braking BMW There was a loud pop., a squeal of brakes. I
started running, not looking back, imagining a panting yuppie, stamina
built up by squash, reaching out and grabbing me. I ran all the way up
Mouille Point, then I could run no further, and stopped, hands on knees,
and looked back down the road. A guy in a suit about fifty yards away was
gesticulating wildly at me, brandishing a mobile phone. He made a
half-hearted effort to resume the chase. I ran a few steps, and then
walked off. I had been chased twice in less than an hour, and felt
completely knackered.
Ray was at Steven’s house. They were sitting at the pine coffee table in
the immaculate cottage kitchen with Raeburn, drinking herbal tea and
talking about the New Testament. Healthy big green plants in pots were
arranged tastefully with due attention to light. Steven’s mum, Delia,
made me uneasy with her intense blue saintly eyes. She was very pretty,
pert nose and blonde bob. Ray was well into the conversation. I rolled a
joint, passed it to Ray. He declined. Later he would tell me that this was
the first time in his life he had ever refused a spliff. Steven had no
such qualms, squinting guiltily at his mother as he sucked on the joint.
Ray finally stopped talking and greeted me.
“Hey, Alex, howsit? I got fired today.”
“ Really? So did I. That American jerk?”
“Ja. Not enough sales.”
“Same here. What are you going to do?”
“I scheme I’m going back to Jo’burg”, he answered.
“Me too. Shall we hitch?” I hadn’t seen Ray at the office, but he
must have been in there before me.
We agreed to hitch to Jo’burg within the next few days. Ray was totally
wrapped up in his discussion with Steven’s mother. They were talking
about morality. I left them and headed round to Shane’s. Shane was a
friend of Rays. With no money, it was going to be difficult to stay out of
my head. Shane always had a supply of whites, Mandrax, or Quaaludes as
they’re known abroad,, smoked mixed with grass in a broken bottle neck.
I didn’t much like them but a white pipe or two would obliterate a few
days. I walked along wondering why it was necessary to take drugs. Why
couldn’t you just decide how you wanted to feel and adjust your brain
just by thinking about it? The problem was, once you’ve smoked dope,
nothing is ever as good without it. I can’t go to the cinema to see a
good film if I’m not stoned, it just seems a waste. And once you’ve
tried acid, assuming it was a good trip, then the normal world becomes a
very mundane place.
Shane live on the hill behind Seapoint in a rented ground floor room,
furnished with a bed and an iron, which he used as a stove, a trick he’d
learnt from Max. He snorkelled for pearlemain, which he sold to
restaurants, and dealt in whites. He was playing Mr. Tambourine Man on an
acoustic guitar when I arrived. The air was heavy with the smell of burnt
tablets. He seemed pleased to see me.
“Alex, howsit man. Where you been?”
“Howsit Shane. I’ve been fired from my job , I’ve been locked out of
my flat, and I’m skint.”
“Want a pipe?”
“Ja, lekker”, I replied, “I need one”.
He put down the guitar, pulled a bag out from under the bed. Jimi Hendrix
watched obliquely from a poster on the wall. Shane wrapped a Mandrax
tablet in a piece of paper, crushed it to powder with an empty Coke
bottle. He mixed it with some dagga, then picked up a broken bottleneck
and rolled up some tin foil, plugging the neck with it. He put the mixture
in the neck, tamped it down, and passed the neck to me. I wrapped a piece
of toilet paper round the neck, wrapped my index finger and thumb around
it and made a funnel shape with my hand. Shane struck two matches
together, scraped the burnt sulphur off, held it to the pipe. The first
hit was always the best, the smoke, with its slight chemical tang, still
cool as it shot down my throat, filling my lungs. I breathed out a cloud
of smoke, trying not to cough. Shane held the matches to the pipe again,
the smoke rushing down my windpipe, my head getting heavy. I passed the
pipe to him and lay back on the floor, my head spinning, the eyes of
Hendrix upon me. I could hear a rasping sound from Shane’s lungs as he
sucked on the pipe.
I was at twenty thousand feet over Bremen. The bomb aimers voice came over
the earphones, “Steady, steady...” Flak was bursting all around. In
the distance a Lancaster trailing flames fell away in a gentle arc. In
front of me and below the yellow marker flares on the ground lit the way
to the target. Around us in the dark were eighty-odd other Lancasters,
including our own squadron. A voice over the radio, squeaky, “Drop on
the greens, drop on the greens.” Down below fires raged through the
city, explosions lit up the skyline, burning orange death. I wondered how
many people would die tonight. I was sweating, and my fingers itched in
the leather of my gloves. The smell of cordite, leather and oil found its
way through my oxygen mask, and I needed a shit, as I did every time over
the target. Thirty missions and never been hit. At first I had thought we
were invincible, but their were too many faces missing to think that now.
Now it was just luck. ”Bombs away!” came over the earphones, the Lanc
bucked as it suddenly became ten tons lighter, and I hauled the ‘plane
round in a tight turn, stuck the nose down to gain speed, and set heading
for the coast. None of us spoke for a while. Everyone was looking for
night fighters, circling round the edges of the flak belt like vultures
around a kill, waiting. I kept the nose down, and soon we were through ten
thousand feet. Oxygen masks off, cigarettes on. I wiped away the sweat,
rubbed my face where the mask had been chafing. It was getting light. We
crossed the coast of Holland low level, the gunners shooting up a convoy
of half-tracks and troop-carriers. As we shot out over the sea, leaving
the enemy coast behind, a weight lifted, though we were not safe yet.
Sometimes the night-fighters were waiting for us at home, where it was
easy to bag a tired crew, thinking they were home safe. I was so
tired..…
“Wake up, Alex”, I could hear through the mists of fatigue. In my
dream it was Archie, the radio operator. But it was Shane, forty five
years later.
“Fok, man, I’ve got to cut down”, he said as he passed the pipe to
me. I rubbed my face, still feeling where the oxygen mask had been.
I did not think then that he would be dead within a year. The Mandrax
coursed through me I and realised I needed a shit, as I had in the dream.
As I sat on the toilet, I thought about God, and about Ray. I had a
feeling something strange was going on.
Shane and myself sat there talking crap for a while, then he nodded off
and I staggered into the sunshine, my legs refusing to obey the confused
demands made on them by my lobotomised brain. At least I didn’t have to
worry about being hungry for a while. I headed back to Ray’s. He
wasn’t there, but Norman was.
“Ray’s found God”, Norman told me. “He came round a few minutes
ago saying he was going to church.”
“You can’t be serious”. I had seen he was interested in Steven’s
mother, but I had assumed his interest was sexual.
“Oh ,yes. But look what he left us.” Norman slid an old biscuit tin
across the carpet. I picked it up and pulled the lid off. The first things
that caught my eye were about twelve pencils of Durban Poison. I took the
bundle out and then lifted out a plastic bag containing various different
coloured capsules and tablets.
“The bastard kept these pencils to himself. What are these?”, I asked
Norman, lifting out the bag of tablets.
“He can’t remember what most of them are. He said he took two of those
blue capsules once and slept for two days.”
That will take care of Tuesday and Wednesday, I thought to myself. There
were three black capsules that looked like bombers. That would remove the
need for eating on Thursday. There were a couple of Whites with bits of
fluff on them and some unidentifiable smaller white tablets, two little
round yellow ones and what looked like a single suppository. Something
strange must have happened to Ray for him to give up this lot. I ate one
of the little yellow ones and then rolled a joint. I had forgotten how
good Durban Poison was. In spite of the Mandrax I felt a pleasant rush.
Ray had an old projector set up in the living room. Norman dimmed the
lights and we sat watching Woodstock and smoking joints. I felt very
little from the little yellow tablet so I took two of the little white
ones and took one of Rays beers from the refrigerator. I kept thinking
about my dream. I could still smell the flak. I dozed off again.
I woke up with a strange “ schwick....schwick” sound accompanied by
Norman’s snoring. A bright rectangle of light on the wall made me
realise that the projector was still running. I had a headache and my neck
was in agony on one side. I could smell onions, which I knew from past
experience was Norman’s particularly unpleasant body odour. I felt
vaguely nauseous, almost hungry . I looked at my watch. Ten at night. I
must have been asleep for about five hours. Realising I should eat, I
stepped over Norman’s prostrate body and went into the kitchen. The
fluorescent tube lent an unpleasant reality to the dismal state of the
kitchen. A half eaten bowl of spaghetti hoops sat on the red plastic
table, attended by several large flies. In the fridge was a piece of
hardened cheddar, a mouldy half loaf of bread and some withered lettuce
leaves. I took the piece of cheese, cut off the hard bits with a dirty
bread knife, and almost puked when I ate it. Out of the corner of my eye I
saw a nearly full bottle of Scotch hidden behind the microwave. I took a
large swig, and went back into the living room carrying the bottle. Norman
was awake and, presumably thinking I had left, was having a wank.
“Leave it alone!”, I yelled as I collapsed on the armchair.
Norman, startled, sat up abruptly and cursed me in Hebrew.
“Where the fuck is Ray?”, I asked, not expecting an answer.
“He phoned while you were asleep. Said he was going to a bible
meeting.” As he said it, we heard a key in the lock. Ray walked in,
dressed in a suit. In his left hand was a bible. He switched the light on,
walked over to the projector which was still running, switched it off. An
embarrassing silence descended on the room. No- one said anything.
Ray’s eyes, normally dull, were bright blue. I realised I had never even
noticed what colour they were before. Finally Norman broke the silence.
“Uh, Ray, you say any prayers for us?”
Ray picked up the full ashtray, looking in disgust at the scene which a
few days earlier had been so familiar. He walked to the kitchen, returned
and stood in the doorway with the bright neon light behind him, looking
positively evangelical.
“You okes just don’t get it, do you?”
“What do you mean, Ray?”, Norman asked, “Don’t get what?”
“There’s more to life than drink and drugs”, Ray answered, “Life
is a gift. Why waste it on physical gratification?”
“’Cause it’s fun!”, I replied, “We like it. So did you a few
days ago.”
Ray emitted a short snort of disgust and disappeared into his room.
There’s nothing worse than reformed smokers or born again Christians.
Norman took me for supper to Papa Corlinnis, a cheap seafood restaurant
near Seapoint. I had seventy two cents left. I ate my fish and chips and
thought about mugging someone. I watched couples walking along the
sea-front and imagined waving a knife in front of them and demanding
money. Trouble is, I hate violence.
Hey, Norman, lend me fifty Rand”, I asked him as he shovelled a load of
calamari into his mouth. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a
twenty, threw it across the table. A gust of wind as someone entered the
restaurant picked up the note and I had to chase it across the floor,
ending up with my face between a woman’s legs at the next table. She
didn’t have any panties on. She squealed and pushed her chair back, the
rear legs of the chair catching on the floorboards. The chair tipped over
and she ended up on her back on the floor, her pussy, covered in red hair,
exposed. She struggled to her feet with the assistance of the man she was
sharing dinner with, looking at me with distaste.
“What do you think you are doing?” , she demanded, scowling at me from
beneath platinum locks. I could make out the dark roots below, struggling
against the chemical desolation above. Her face was flushed with
embarrassment. The guy she was with, a skinny oke in a suit, made as if to
grab me, but catching my eye thought better of it. I went and sat down.
“That was worth twenty Rand”, Norman said, laughing, “ I wonder if
that guy knows she isn’t a true blonde.”
Within two minutes the couple had paid and fled the restaurant in
embarrassment. We left shortly afterwards, going to the Wig and Pistle for
a beer. Sharon, a girl I had seen a few times, was there with some
friends. Norman picked up a girl called Tania, and the four of us drove
back to Ray’s flat. I fancied Sharon, but the lust threw me into panic,
and I just sat there smiling inanely at anything she said. I sensed she
thought I was a bit of dick-head. Norman was giving Tania the
swarthy-Mediterranean stud routine, holding one of her hands in both of
his and peering at her over his glasses while he told her what lovely
hands she had. Sharon sat there in embarrassment, knowing we were expected
to get it on, not wanting to catch my eye, a slight frown clouding her
immaculate face. Beauty is so hard to define, I thought to myself, yet
ugliness can be summed up with one foul word.
We were sitting drinking Ray’s Scotch and smoking some of the Poison
when Ray appeared from his room in a pair of underpants.
“What’s going on?” he demanded, “ I’m trying to sleep.”
“Sorry, Ray”, I answered, “ We were just having a drink.”
Ray walked across to the table , picked up the bottle, and walked into the
kitchen. I followed him, and arrived just in time to see him pouring the
whisky down the sink. I tried to grab it from him, but instead sent the
bottle flying. It landed on the linoleum floor, spinning away towards the
refrigerator with a stream of whisky spiralling from it. I leapt across,
picked up the bottle. There was about a quarter inch left which I
hurriedly downed, my eyes smarting.
“I can’t believe I was like that, once” , Ray said with a tinge of
sadness, “ I think Jesus found me just in time.”
I said nothing. It was, after all, his flat. I looked for a beer in the
‘fridge, reluctant to face Sharon again. She was too good for me. People
think I chase after rough women out of some dark perversion, but the
reality is that I prefer not to get rejected. During my teenage years I
had been put down so many times that I felt cursed, ugly. So I retreated
into an unclean world, albeit a more honest one, where lust and depravity
are recognised for what they really are, base emotions lurking in our
psyche, ignored at our peril.
Yes, there is something
exciting about walking up to a woman and telling her outright exactly what
you would like to do to her , but some of the excitement is lost in the
knowing that they are quite likely to be willing. I can spot wantonness
from across a room, a gift I have developed to compensate for my lack of
looks. With this gift has come a respect for women, inasmuch as I have
realised they can be as adventurous as men, perhaps more so. I’m
convinced that they can enjoy sex more than men.
I took a half-fill bottle
of Coke from the ‘fridge and turned towards the kitchen door just in
time to see that the girls were leaving. Norman was trying to persuade
them to stay, but they’d had enough. I wasn’t horny anyway.,
hopelessness erasing my impossible dream of shagging Sharon. She would
probably be totally unadventurous, anyway.. I swallowed half a Mandrax and
went back to sleep.
When I woke up in the morning Ray and Norman had both left. I ate some
dried toast I found on a plate in the kitchen and got dressed. There
seemed no point in having a bath when I did not have a single clean item
of clothing to put on. The sun pounded the back window of the sitting
room, lending a stark division to the room, one half dark and strewn with
ashtrays, empty bottles, blankets , the two large red beanbags looking old
and squashed, like the life had been squeezed out of them, the other half
of the room bright and green from the two huge rubber plants struggling to
breathe life into this gloomy world. I hitched to town. I’d only just
set off, when a blue BMW, that I was sure had already passed me once,
stopped. A guy in a charcoal pinstripe suit asked me where I was going. I
wondered if he was a poof.
“The city.” I had no idea why. There wasn’t really anywhere else to
go.
“God told me to come back and pick you up”, he said, smiling at me. He
had a tie-pin in the shape of a fish. My flesh crawled. It seemed I was
destined to be beset upon by born again Christians.
“Have you found the Light?”, he asked, still grinning at me with that
annoying ‘I know something you don’t’ smile that the fish people
seem to have. You see them everywhere, the stylised fish on the rear of
the car identifying them. For a second I thought of telling him I’d
bought some matches.
“I’m fairly nocturnal, myself”, I replied.
He smiled even more, sharing my pathetic attempt at humour, looking at me
knowingly, like he’d saved people like myself before, his expression one
of weary beatitude, a martyr to the cause. He put a hand gently on my
knee, pulling it away when I recoiled.
“Ha. Very funny....”
“Look”, I interrupted, “One of my friends has just been born again,
and I really don’t want any more religion.”
This only shut him up for a second, although the smile now looked slightly
more artificial, like someone watching a bad comedian and desperately
trying to get the humour they’ve paid for. My mind wandered as we drove
towards the shiny newness of downtown Cape Town. Table Mountain stood like
a sentinel overlooking the city of dazzling glass and stark concrete. He
was waffling on about the Bible. I nodded occasionally. The one thing that
gets me about Christians is that they take the Bible as incontrovertible
truth. I don’t see how a book written by a load of antisocial hermits
nearly two thousand years ago can be taken too seriously. I mean, if
someone wandered into town after spending ten years in the desert with a
beard down to their knees claiming that God had spoken to them personally,
they would hardly be taken seriously today, would they? Every argument you
have with Christians, they end up saying, “ Ah, but the Bible
says....”
“I get my spirituality from the chemist”, I interjected when he was
spouting from the book of Matthew. I was starting to get a headache, and
wondered if I should ask him to stop the car. I did not want to admit to
myself that I envied him his blind faith.
He looked at me, for the first time not smiling.
“Oh, you poor lost soul”, he wailed, a look of pity in his eyes.
Suddenly the car swerved as we took a corner. We had a puncture. We were
almost in the city, but I offered to change the wheel for him so he
didn’t get his suit dirty. He reckoned God had punctured a tyre to give
us more time together. I changed the wheel, then declined his offer of a
coffee and walked into the city. I bought half a loaf of bread , a tin of
sardines and a pint of milk, and sat on the pavement at an intersection. I
scooped out the centre of the loaf, opened the sardines, and shook them
out of the tin into the bread. I ate about half of it, drank the milk, and
gave the remainder of my breakfast to a degenerate looking old black guy
dressed in bin bags. As I walked off leaving him eagerly sucking the
remaining sardines out of the bread, I reflected that life can’t be so
bad when people will still eat your left-overs. I walked off towards the
city.
They didn’t want to let me into the building at Grellers, so I asked
them to call Norman for me. A huge black security guard watched me warily
while I waited in the foyer, idly watching people in suits waiting for the
lifts. Norman looked slightly embarrassed to see me, and the seeds of
dislike took root in my soul. I don’t think I’d ever thought about
whether I’d liked him before, we’d just meandered along together,
sharing the same stretch of water while we were heading in the same
direction, but I was about to fall off a weir while Norman steered himself
into calmer waters, like he was idly poling a punt along a river, secure
in his knowledge of the navigable channels. I was like someone in a
speed-boat, the prow of the boat to high out of the water to see where I
was going.
We went for a coffee. My last three sales had all been cancelled. I had
paid the deposit on one of them. I was still due some commission from my
team’s sales, but Norman said it would be a week or so until the cheque
was processed. Ray and myself were leaving in two days. I had decided to
go back to Botswana. Fuck knows what I was going to do there. I wanted to
finish off my Commercial Pilots Licence and get a job, and it was about
time I went and wrote the exams. I was carrying loads of study material
around with me, and figured I was almost ready to write them. I hadn’t
flown for six months and I was missing it a lot. I was sick of Cape Town.
I had no money.
I went for a beer down by the docks in the hopes of seeing Max, one of the
people in the flats we had been staying at in Camps Bay. He supplied
trawlers with their groceries, and I had had a few good meals aboard
Portuguese trawlers with him. He wasn’t around, so I headed back to Rays
and stuffed the suppository up my ass. I wondered what it was. I assumed
it contained some form of mind altering drug for it to be in Rays drug
collection. Just to make sure I took one of the black capsules and rolled
a joint. Ray turned up about an hour later.
“Alex, you’ve got to come to church with me”, he began, “It’s
better than drugs and it’s free!”
“Listen, Ray, I’m not in the mood. When are we going to Jo’burg?”
“Saturday. That O.K?”
“Ray, I have no money, no clothes, and I just want to get out of here.
Let’s go this afternoon. Please. Or I’m going anyway.”
He was silent for a while . He went to the kitchen and made us coffee.
When he returned I offered him the joint I was smoking. He declined, as I
knew he would. For the first time I realised it made no difference to
anyone what happened to me. Rays concern was partly from guilt, he
hadn’t been into this religion stuff long enough yet to want to preach.
He was still finding his feet, and every now and again I could see the
purple shadow of doubt in his eyes. He was almost forcing himself to
believe. He didn’t really have time to help anyone else, he could not
afford someone else’s scepticism along with his own.
“I’ve given up drugs”, he informed me, for about the tenth time.
“Really, Alex, this is the best thing that’s happened to me for
years.” He looked at me, and I stared back into his eyes. We stood there
like that for a minute or so, me trying to see beyond the earnest glare in
his eyes, he trying to put up a shield, a shiny badge of faith. He looked
away first, nervously feeling in his pocket for some imagined crutch.
“ Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”, I asked him. When he
didn’t answer, I knew that he knew that I did not really believe him. He
looked sad and lonely, and I could tell he would rather of been somewhere
else.
He told me he was off to church and then going to someone’s house for a
prayer meeting. He tried to persuade me to accompany him. I had been to
church a few times; a girl I had met in Jo’burg was a religious nut, and
for a week or so I was under the mistaken impression that I would get her
knickers off. I had even once felt a flicker of something spiritual at one
of their meetings, but I couldn’t sustain it, and when I made a pass at
her she was so shocked that I never went to see her again. This was the
sum total of my religious experience. Sometimes I wished I could believe,
but it just all seemed so illogical. But now here was Ray, a guy I had
seen eat five tabs of acid and then want more, with his eyes all lit up
with God and looking happier than I had ever seen him, barring the small
flickers of uncertainty . I have always thought that there is some switch
in your brain that can be tripped by the right stimuli, allowing you to
forget your doubts and accept religion. I wa!
s also sure that mine was fused in the atheist position.
I stayed in the flat while he went to church. I had been reading War and
Peace, and I struggled through a few pages and then gave up. Some books
are classics just because they are old and extremely long. I was bored, so
I took the two remaining black capsules. I felt a bit strange, like I was
waiting for something. The sun was going down, and soon I was sitting in
the dark. A mosquito kept attacking me.
I heard a knock on the door. I ignored it, but whoever it was knocked
harder, and I staggered to my feet and answered it. It was Beth ,the
skinny hooker from the party.
“ I saw you come in here earlier “ , she said. “I was with my mother
on the beach.”
“Beth, It’s nice to see you , but I don’t have any money.”
“I was just saying hello!”, she said, seemingly insulted that I might
think that a hooker could want money. “I’ll go if you like.”
“No. Would you like some coffee?”, I enquired, starting to feel horny.
I went and made us both coffee. When I returned I sat next to her on the
sofa. She was wearing a short white skirt and matching blouse. I touched
her leg, and soon we were ripping each other’s clothes off. We were on
the floor shagging when Ray arrived. Beth froze when she heard the door
opening, her pussy muscles contracting, and I came inside her just as Ray
walked into the room. Beth turned her face away; I smiled nervously at
Ray. He walked into his room without saying a word. Beth dressed
hurriedly, and I saw her out. I got dressed and knocked on Rays door. I
felt dizzy. Ray came out and sat down.
“Uh, Alex , someone in the church bought me an air ticket to Jo’burg.”
I was expecting a lecture on lust and depravity.
“Well, tell them to get me one too. I’ve been waiting for you for
three days now. You asked me to wait. I’m totally fucking broke and
I’ve been wearing the same clothes for a week. When I wash my socks I
can’t go out until they dry.”
“I’m sorry, Alex, I didn’t know this was going to happen. I’ll
give you some money and clothes.”
I didn’t mind hitching on my own - it was usually easier, but I wished
now that I had left three days earlier. Norman took us out that night, and
the following morning he dropped me about thirty miles outside Cape Town.
The trip to Botswana was a nightmare, but that’s another story. I never
saw Norman again. I never missed him. He had been the architect of my
destruction, in a way. I’d let him persuade me into coming with him to
Cape-Town. I just couldn’t be a mercenary.
Almost a year later I was working for a crop-spraying company in Germiston.
One day they sent me to Springs to pick up some avionics. I had to wait
for two hours - they hadn’t finished bench-testing the parts. I went for
a walk, and a few minutes later saw a familiar figure shuffling down the
pavement towards me. It was Ray. He almost walked past me, until I called
his name.
“Hey, Alex, howsit china! Fuck, I wondered what had happened to you. I
was just thinking about you the other day! How the fuck are you!”
“I’m OK Fancy a beer?” I half expected him to say no.
“Sure. I know a bar down the road.”
We ended up in a seedy bar near the station. I bought two quarts of Castle
and we sat at a tatty Formica table with plastic-covered tubular aluminium
chairs. The only other people in there were two old drunks arguing about
the English rebel cricket tour. We talked about Cape Town for a while. He
told me Norman had gone back to Israel. Finally, after two more beers,
when I had to get going, I asked the question I had been dying to ask
since I had noticed that the Light had left his eyes.
“What happened to the religion, Ray?”
“Fuck, Alex, it was great for a while. I was higher than a kite. After I
left Cape-Town it got even better. I came back here and joined a church
group. Trouble is, I couldn’t sustain it. I started coming down. You
know, as acid wears off, you’re still tripping, but the edge has gone.
It was sort of like that. I came down. Without a parachute. Fuck knows how
other people stay up there.”
He walked me back to the shop, I picked up the parts, and he accompanied
to my car. He gave me his number, but we lost touch. As I drove back to
Jo’burg in the rush hour traffic, ‘Hey Joe’ was playing on the
radio. I kept thinking of Ray’s parting words. As I started the engine,
he leaned in the window, looking tired, and said
“Jusses, Alex, I guess I just peaked too soon”
copyright Allen Grove 1999
website at www.aliengrove.com
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