Billy Malherber

 Billy Malherber was late to work and he blamed his contumelious mother for this. Who else? Her opprobrious nature always led him to scurrilous ways that he couldn't claim for himself. For instance, staying up late with a forex account and basically gambling his life savings away because he needed a way out of the old house which was quickly becoming a prison. That morning of the great gambling loss, he'd come to work in a state of confusion and had to lie to his boss ultimately. This was a necessary lie, he had decided, after he'd spilled coffee on some rich tourist in the coffee shop which formed part of the business complex, and which was only a hundred or so meters from his office. At that moment, he decided he'd better be off home again. He'd made up a lie about crashing into a ditch, slept for the day, and returned the next morning. 

His friend, Mr Miniture, was less of a truculent individual, even on early mornings. His brain being less fraught with information and less likely to do anything offensive. He'd gotten the job that Billy had applied for, and Billy had been shunted aside to do some data capturing. Backlinks they called it in the office, even though he for his part wasn't sure what that even meant. It just entailed yards and yards of spreadsheets, and the computer he had was not up to the task, so he'd had to go back home and get his mothers. What a virulent crowd the outside world was! He simply wasn't cut out for it; and he decided he never would be. That would have been the easy route out, but Billy had never taken it. Billy had endured the vitriolic attacks of his school mates, of an abusive stepfather-to-be, of the whole world just about long enough to feel he could never be fully part of the system, and now he was stuck on the outside of everything. 

Just one more vituperative, and I'm done, he decided. Billy liked to watch films where he always identified with the main character who was always abusing people, and thrusting obliquy their way; but he didn't much like to take it himself. An invective by his boss was prone to throw him off the deep end and there was nothing worse than having to deal with the boss all day. Once he had been trading and the boss and his father in law wandered past. On his screen was a near closeout warning for an exotic couple. Well to escape being reviled, Billy had to close the tab, but had he simply sold some of his trade, he'd have escaped the loss. Earning 5000 rand a month was such a drag, even back then. 

Had he but enough money, he'd have been extolled and lauded for his open-mindedness, but instead, he was a dead loss, he only  ever achieved the glowering eyes of the public, the treatment of those who saw in him a diffident and useless young man. 
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The greatest and most venerable days were behind him. He no longer had the hope of achieving them again; not unless he worked completely by himself. At school he was no stranger to achievement. He grew up impressing all those around him. They thought he was a genius, whereas he had merely applied himself. Raised by the father who had left him, he might have been an all-rounder, his attainments might have lain outside of the dry and cerebral world of school textbooks and dusty faced old headmasters. The capstone indeed had been in Grade 9 when he'd come in 11th place in the entire school, just Quentin Donaldson ahead of him, a real buffoon of a fellow, who'd merely gotten ahead for his eminence in Afrikaans, a dead and useless subject which Billy had no interest in humoring. 

The fruition of all that had never come though. Billy saw the possibilities of being cool, of skating and of marijuana taking and suddenly his whole world became a trampling ground for anxieties and weird paranoia. One day in class he felt himself sweating as he looked at his friend Neville who took turns sitting with another friend and compadre, and leaving him to the desk alone. Now he had no one to sit with and his whole body became tense and expected the worst to befall him. Where would he go if the lynchpin of his whole social world at school left him? Where would he hide? And so, having tasted something of popularity, Billy was loathe to disappear back into anonymity. Even though he spent his break times in the library and in the art room with others who had no one to share their time with at school. No peers or colleagues to call their friends. 

But there were little fragments of light here and there. He had developed a masterpiece of a painting in school too after quitting history class for the fool of a man, Pretorius who always aggrandized the great rugby players for poorly written assignments. That masterpiece was an abstractive work of Jimmi Hendrix. It was more than a vainglorious facade unlike so many of his colleagues' works. It was the real thing. And amidst all of the debacles he'd faced, the result mainly of class-conscious gibberish which he was sure lacked a soul, anyway, there was hope. It came in the form of Tarryn who played in the Scottish band he'd joined in Grade 10. In those first moments with Tarryn, everything seemed wonderful and open to possibility. But once he had actually decided to mention his feelings to her, things changed pretty dramatically. He sent her a message "I think you're beautiful," and from that moment he'd fallen from her estimation and become a thing, a cockroach not to be thought of as human ever again.

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Somehow the bumptious always got their way and he never made the grade in the great social paternity. One day Billy found himself working for the Spur, a South African franchise, at the first restuarant of that franchise ever. And he met a man with a faux job there who was really a criminal of evenings. He ran with this criminal once and they'd gone around with a steel coat hanger trying to open up cars and steal their sound systems. Not the kind of thing he'd usually want to do but in this new atheist and relativistic frame of mind, he'd thought that the ostentatious and those with unbridled convictions inherited the world. Indeed what was previously wonderful and virtuous had seemingly given way to the vainglorious and the façade of everything was all there was. Billy had gone for hyperbole as a means of impressing people. Jactitation and bloviation was all there was. He didn't want a real career anyway. 

And prior to the job at Spur, Billy had worked at an Italian place under the spiral road that led up to the top part of the Cavendish mall. There he'd become quickly discouraged and had quit only 2 weeks in. Apparently, according to the homosexual, Craig Crossland at school, there was nothing to be done at that Italian franchise. It was 2 weeks without pay, and even then there was no guarantee of pay until you started to work, which was all up to them in the end. You had to learn a code of conduct and all this jazz and pass these exams. The thing about Primea, which was the restaurant's name, was that it reeked of wealth and all the yuppies used to go there. Well Craig Crossland threw Billy off from a good thing, and the tenants where Billy stayed, who were a middle aged couple who'd found each other late in life, Billy ought to stick to a thing. Well he didn't and that's how he'd ended up at the Golden Spur. 


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Well, as you might have guessed, Billy had always been laconic, and he was looking for a way of being able to express himself and become more amenable to the world around him. His situation at home was less than palatable. It was a method of shoving things under the carpet to go on exploratory adventures to dangerous places like Lower Main in observatory. On one particularly auspicious-feeling night, Billy had gone on a sojourn down to that place, and had found to his bewilderment that things were more frightening than he might have guessed. But this made it all the more wonderful when he arrived at a film festival being held inside the Armchair Theatre, which was in those days not a pub with a little stage, but all stage and a kind of wraparound bar. That Billy was complaisant with car thieves should not be seen as the really pervasive feature of his character.  

No, Billy was an explorer, and at the gates of the Armchair theatre, which led into a cozily lit back entrance, he was given a little stamp that depicted a bunny . And this bunny allowed him in for free because he'd lied and said he was a student. In this film festival a whole reel of interesting films were played. Some were computer animated and others were real life, but with a surrealist kind of twist. "I wonder what they'll say if I come in here with my own film" he thought. Perhaps they will assent to making me their greatest star. He foresaw in his own mind's eye a conspiracy of fate that would take him there. How else had he gotten to this dangerous area in one piece and managed to get the gate man to accede into giving him a free pass. The stars were no doubt colluding to bring him to such an arena. And it would rest on the appeasement of one or two party members assembled in this little cozy room with a couch.  He hardly understood what was being played on the screen but he applauded his hearty assent, and then he left for he did not wish to be discovered. 

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To accede is to acquiesce. To acquiesce is to mollify your opponent. To mollify is to pacify. To pacify is to placate. to placate is to prevent dissent. 

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The backyard gamblers, the roisterers, the bullies, these were people of some interest to Billy, but he was not one of them for he was more inclined to the finer things of life. But this lent him to a more or less monastic way of life and a monophobia at times, and also the reputation of a recluse which he did not really want, nor did he feel he deserved it. 

Disenfranchised, his tendency was toward immuring himself, and to prescind himself from anyone of higher class. The gregarious days seemed to be slipping away and he was never in the company of others. Seldom was he in company he liked or respected in those university days. 

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The amorphous nature of his life was yet another thing troubling him. It came of course from a lack of social structure to organize his thoughts. People were slipping away and all the parties and places he went to were filled with strangers and scenarios that left him out of the picture. When you sequester yourself, what else is going to happen but this? When you are so enigmatic that you become a mystery to yourself, what else should be the result. All of those days wondering under the bus shelter about a glorious future and profited him nothing. All those times looking at the old stone church and seeing in it the msyteries of life ready to unfurl themselves had not burst forth and flourished yet. He found himself even at this callow age, making of himself a lobster who was good only at forming lobster shaped thoughts. 

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A coffee maybe a decade later would clear all of this up. He was in a little shop with his new student who had asked him to follow her there. They were talking about the universe, and he was talking to her about the world of personality categorization. It was a world through which he thought the opaque world of the social could be brought to bear. When one or two women tell you to shut up because you aren't rich enough or they want a passport to somewhere that you don't have, this sort of thing makes you hungry enough to believe anything. Even in love at first sight. But of a nebulous thing like love, one can make anything fit the description. 

The zelig in front of him the girl who was pretending to be a woman could not remain an exemplar for long. She would ultimately become a misconstrued member of the the general society; yet another wraith who would vacillate between pup and demon, A mot juste for her was Ice Queen he thought. But another Ice Queen had also grabbed his fancy and he didn't like her at first. He'd dreamt of her on occasion. She would help and explain things to him. Level him up, even. She had come in the form of an adversary and she'd asked how he was when the fight was over. A little pushy but also very good in heart. The acrimonious feelings toward her were unjustified as his dreams would later show. 

They were traveling somewhere in his hometown in the dream, waiting for her lover, the American, by a reed bed, when suddenly they started to strike a chord with one another. Eventually they found themselves by a communal bath that was closing for the night. Just sitting there tenderly in the twilight, not saying much but quite enjoying each others' presence. He was the pup now, and she was the warrior who could save him. She was the one he needed.  Conscientiousness was lacking and another less than consciencious figure would hardly be able to help. She who had always planned, always been confident, and allowed his softness to shine through actually loved him. He loves the granite on the mountain and the foliage than grows inbetween. He does not like war and strife. Then the opposite shines for him, and so it does for her. 

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The acrimonious nature of the LSD took him quite by surprise. It just wouldn't go away but lingered there as a kind of taste his stomach was able to pick up. It was his whole body tasting the stuff. And the bitterness was what broke the horizon of his eyes and allowed him to see beyond the here and now. There was a sense that the world had become open to his senses for the first time. That all was real now, whereas before he had been dealing not with reality but with thought-stuff. The green goblin and the spider man were head to head now, and they were all talking soul to soul. No longer was there a fractious division but there a pure and limpid sense of flow. Cholers was displaced to his sense of taste, and he was now placidly floating upon a fresh horizon. 

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In his diary: "To be sure I judged them a little harshly.  If only because I wanted them to like me; more than that, my cold and bitter heart wanted them to love me, and if they don't love me, well then, they must hate me instead. 
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Sex hardens everything. It hardens the world against one. Here we are talking of course about sex without matrimony. Sex for its own sake. Prepare your mind for what is to come. You can subsist on dreams for so long.  What is sacred is the time we spend together, all else, this internet nonsense is but a lie. 
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It's so easy to escape everything. That's why Billy didn't want to read a book just then. He didn't quite know or understand this to be the case, but there it was, underlying all his immediate fancies of the universe within him. Humans tend to anthropoporhize, I mean anthropomorphize animals said the old man. Well that may be true, but animals are quite a lot better than humans and make for great therapy. Choppy's aquiline nose gave much to be desired, but the bovine look on the face of Zoey van rensberg left much to be desired too. And supposedly Mr Muller had been a Leo with his Leonine beard. A lupine savage were most of the boys he went to school with, always ripping to pieces anything beautiful. And the Ophidian Mr Moses was well to be seen with his durram cap and his undersleeves showing the damp from the afternoon experiments. Even now he is eeking out memories of the more ovine students, the ones who would follow along and do whatever they were told. And the ovaporous teachers, contintually providing their great Yolk to the students. However, what if that bush in the corner of the field was really a UFO that took off at night. The ovigiporous would certainly seem to answer than in alien form. The porcine Mr Doidge liked his metal didn't he? Oh yes, very much so, and the simian coloureds of the school were always ripping off Mr Robinson and other students too. I can still smell those old oak desks, how delicious being in a school was, and how painful when it faded? Is there a way back to all that? Humans are vivaporous, well how about that, and zoomorphic things are yet to come in the era of great change. Fauna will be a lovely thing to paint. 

                                                                ******
The liberated day: I wake up inside the warm world of a log and stone cabin, insulated from the outside, which is cold and snowy. Today I'll start my day with some yoga and I wake up at 6 am just before the sun lights the horizon. I do 1 full hour of stretching before heading outside to dip my body in the frozen lake outside. After this I rush in and warm myself up. Then it's time to start writing about things that come to mind. Places I've been, places I want to go. Things I've felt and heard during my time here.


Everything is fresh and new now. It all feels like it's coming back to me. I don't eat until 1pm, but for now I can focus on a bit of work which involves shadow boxes. These shadow boxes will be designed for companies around the world to showcase. They are one off works of art. But I'm also a writer of world class. There is depth and meaning to my shadow boxes and my writing.

This takes me up to one o Clock when I have a healthy dish that is full of green goodness. Later, at 2:30 a friend visits and we play music for a few hours. We sound great playing together and we also go down to the hot water geyser later. we work out too, or go snowboarding. After that it's conversation and story time with a group of other spiritual people. 

After all of that, It's time for supper and we share a great meal together and occasionally a beer. This aids my writing, and I jot down a few ideas after that. In this lifestyle, I also have the choice of traveling anywhere in the world where hiking and surfing are a feature of my days. 

I am married to a beautiful woman who loves and understands me, and isn't just a girl. She's a real woman with spiritual values and loves her maker, a bit like Stone's wife.

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