I was a whacky kid always on the edge of willful madness. Too popular for a popular kid, and too lowly to fit in with the losers. I made it through three art teachers in my time in high school. (And I made a friend of a fourth when I got out of school. An unlikely gem of a friend. Although... that is a story for another time). And when you put it all together, I'm the model of a charmless man as the song goes... There are too many extremes in a child who goes to church with his mother, considers atheism the middle or objective ground for reasoning, and simultaneously imagines what it would be like to be at the top of a diamond smuggling ring( I had a real pirate for a stepfather).
Put this together with dreams of being bathed in cool ketchup as a 3 or 4 year old child and you might end up with a soul that is naturally poised for a life of paranoia. You might end up with a business magnate, politician or an actor, if there was some guiding male influence, but if you are a believer in possible lives and theories like it, I pity you for being like I was when all I had was time to waste. That was the time of my adolescence.
No, no, the stars were set one way, I'm sure of it. This is the life only life we were put to, and the only set of eyes we'll ever have. Like a horse is put to the open field we trample our destiny out. Like a diamond set in an eternal ring, where our thoughts run like ants over its round.. it's match, set, game for the diamond-soul. Ladies and gentlemen of the court, there is no way off this merry-go-round. On the ring I am talking about, if you get off, or put so much as one foot off, you will go mad. I am living proof on such matters as these. But that is also another story.
This road is not the way we choose. Already infinitely narrow as it is, we already suffer from having a narrow gate foisted on us. Death! But as for the road of life that plots itself out, millisecond by the miscellaneous millisecond, whether it grinds or runs like a soap bar over a hot pan, even granting the element of choice, when all is said and done, we will still be on one road that begins at the beginning and ends where it ought to, at the end! So much for metaphysics.
And in this vein, I have always been - contrary to what the prior statement may suggest - a believer in trinkets, because they were so rare for anyone like me, of whom there weren't any of my like, who lived next to the railway line and watched trains pass by and listened to Beethoven and the Blues on cassettes, standing on an old Australian cherry tree's bifurcating trunk watching trains pass by.
But these trinkets were rare only rare the context of my life, and in comparison to my colleagues at the semi-private boys' school I attended, where everyone was a barbarian without sentimentality to appreciate such trinkets. To me, trinkets have always carried light from beyond. Little glass star here and the gleam of a green bottle there, and the little golden swirls on the inside of some marbles, set in eternal motion just as they were in some Chinese factory, and preserved in still-motion no less. In all of this, of course, I was seeing things as I was, not as they were. The rarest trinket of all is ones' own mind. Like all faiths, eventually you settle on one main God. Mine was my mind.
The first art teacher was Ms. Jordan. She shouted at me a lot. There was a moment when I cried in that art room in front of the other 14 year old boys because of that. That art room has no helpful psychological analog existing anywhere else in the world now, but to give you a vague idea, the room had a strange and acrid smell of acrylic paint and oak wood drenched by the continually running pores of sweating adolescent males. The foulness of their minds and blood and scabs and hair made my head boil with anger. I thought of AIDS and thought rugby was the best way of transmitting it when I thought of them or saw their big knees or their faces covered in pimples. I thought that if it were possible to be a caveman in that school, then it was also justifiable to be something approaching femaleness and formlessness, and cleanliness without cause for being mocked.
I'd accepted that a man had to have a female sensibility to raise himself above the bestial herdish brute. Such was the beginning of the world, after all, in the Bible too. A quiet and dark place where you didn't have to exist in the material was the first thing there was before all. There was not a beast along its surface. It's the same in the Tao Te Ching. You didn't have to desert your wife at the turnstiles of a hospital one day, selling her to highest torture in exchange for child, making her into a Mary-Martyr despite her will to the contrary. You could be one of the angels, sexless but male, but also resembling a female in purity. You didn't have to take on the aggressive role, you didn't even need to take a role at all. You could be a friend to the whole of womenkind. You could be the savior of all women everywhere, and they could be your salvation too. I loved women. I loved Ms Jordan even if she didn't know it.
Jesus was Cobain in my world but only much later. And Cobain was a kind of Jesus, not only to me but to many. He died to clear the collective consciousness like an electrical storm cleanses the air. But that period of time when Ms Jordan was my teacher was the time of a certain black plastic radio with a lovely electronic smell. And that radio came to me before I discovered Cobain. I would sit alone on the grassy slope that led up to the sports' field, listening to 5 FM, circa 2001.
But as long as those women weren't tainted by the male force, you know, one could possibly marry one of the angels and consequently redefine all relationships on earth. You could dance with one in Eden all over again. Eden itself was a state of mind for me. Vuyo Ngugushe who was a black poet in a group of five or so other rappers of poets once told off a boy for suggesting I'd be bad with women. He said, watch out for the quite ones. They get how women think. Although I though about sex, I thought of it as a religion and of women as the holy angels that deigned to make it more than just that three letter word. Something divinely inspired. Also, being tainted didn't mean having slept with someone. It meant something deeper in a person's soul was unaffected by men. Men were dirty and only someone who understood women, like an angel like I would be, was worthy. And I laid claim to one such myth during one camp at school toward the end of Grade 11. I made up a kind of myth about myself and a girl called Tawny Reynolds from the girls' school. But that was only after I befriended Neville. Tawny was said to be the slut of that school. She would apparently go around with anyone. She was beautiful and I thought she was an angel. Anyway, it came out during that camp in Grade 11, the year before I couldn't find a reasonable date for the matric ball, that I was going around with her, even when I hadn't spoken to her, except for one SMS I sent her once painting me in a divine light. Apparently she liked what I wrote her. Another time one of the boys in the hostel I later went to passed me the phone to talk to a girl and I was so nervous I told her the kid who passed her to me on the phone was a rapist.
Anyway, the A team rugby boys were passing this story around and I smiled contentedly under my sleeping blanket at the camp where it happened, not disagreeing when one of them related the story to his friends. Did this mean I'd attained manhood? Did this pernicious myth mean I was king over them all and they my humble servants. Indeed, images of King David out in the battlefields stirred my dreams, even if I didn't remember them afterward. Or at least the archetype existed instead of dreams. Or at least the myth of Bathsheba and the dawn of Solomon was at hand. At least this productive decay of my image had crept into the realm of reputations and status while I maintained my actual innocence. And then that meant that I could always eschew the role of King in favor of being a magician. I'd danced through a myth. I would soon be David's son. I would soon transform into Solomon.
A magician was better than a king, because no one understood a magician or if what he said was true or not. A magician was also an artist, and an artist is only known for what others see, while he crawls into his toasty dungeon and does something completely different to what they'd imagined. It might be eating cheese sandwiches and playing computer games with his friend near the railway line in a cheap block of flats, which was my personal preference.
My second art teacher was a gay man who I knew was a mess from the start. He was a kind of chunkily-built, perpetually-unsure-of-himself patchy complexion on feet. It looked like his veins weren't fully healthy or functioning. On one level, he was like a porkchop or block of meat with eyes. He hadn't a purpose in life, just teaching something he didn't believe. He was never on top of his game either and eventually he left the school without any of his classes having completed the necessary workload for the year. That man was not a bad man though. He had a kind of bovine gentleness I respected. He was just suffering under the weight of some personal grief that complicates adults who think too much of postmodernism and get stifled by it. That man was tolerant, except when I said I wanted to paint something from the perspective a homeless man's dentally-compromised mouth. Another boy, one of the beefy dunces of the school who I'd told to come with me to slash the science-heads tires, but who'd then gotten angry at me when I backed out as the day approached - said he'd the same idea had been floating in his mind and pretending he was upset stormed away disheartened from the queue of advice-seekers. Other kids said I was a madman from the start. Greg Shewan said. "It's not you, is it? Everyone else is wrong." I agreed. "Everyone else is wrong."
Around that time I was in hostel for the first time. I was put in a dorm room with some black Namibian boys and tried to look like a gangster to avoid getting beaten up. They just laughed, seeing through the farce. And I listened to some of their rap music, and liked the sound effects though I never got into it. Later on I met Fana Fana, who was my first real friend in hostel, a Zulu boy. Fana Fana was always a good friend. I wish I could have done more for him. But as he failed his standard seven year, he became my junior, and my peers mocked him and treated him as such.
And I made another friend called Neville during that time and Neville was a very peculiar character. I'd met him in Junior school and never thought much of him. He appeared to me as a threat back in junior school and part of High school. In Junior school, he stole my friend, Daniel Bulmez who was the son of the Romanian consulate officer in Bishops court, so I tried throwing things down at him from balconies, or shooting him with paper bullets I shot from elastic bands. Once I'd cried in Daniel Bulmez' house when I lost my wallet. He never invited me back. In high school, Neville was friends with a certain set of jocks who used to hang around the water fountain or "fish bowl" as they called it, so I didn't think he was all that important. But apparently he was really smart. That's what Neil Allan, the short gangly skater kid with the fast moth said on nights when the four boys in the dorm including me would talk after lights-out. Neil was trying to slow down light enough to see into the past. He planned to do it with mirrors and Neville had said that was a waste of time from a science point of view. Neil and all the skaters respected Neville, but to me he was just a gay kid. I saw him not only as a threat to the order of the world, but as an undeserving threat. A kid who looked that old didn't deserve to be popular, no matter how smart he was, so I thought I'd take him down.
It came about during a night when some other kids and I were writing out lines for talking too much at night that I let vent the fulness of my vengeance. In magicianly terms, what I did was pure evil. I drew a little decrepit picture of Neville and wrote some dialogue where he admitted he was gay. One of the more idiotic loudmouths who was also writing lines saw it and ran with it to go to show Neville. I fought that kid in a feverish way to get it back and flushed it down the toilet before it got to Neville, but the story came out and Neville knew about it and soon Neville was my friend. At that point, I didn't care if he was gay. I just needed friends. Especially popular friends. And this was the bargain that Neville was willing to offer. As long as he was a friend to me, I wouldn't go and blow his cover. And so we were friends. And really that started the ball rolling. That's how I got to be known as Tawny Reynold's lover. I'd gotten her number and sent her some stuff, it's true. But I'd never did what everyone thought I had.
This was around the time I used to watch rock concerts with Tyler whose mom had a car to take us. Tyler was a loser from art class. I use the term that everyone else did. Tyler and I and his chunky blonde girlfriend and his mother would go to the Observatory armchair Cafe to watch "pay to play" a band that covered Nirvana songs. The way I got into Nirvana was actually through Neil Allen. I'd said to Neil Allen that Nirvana wasn't hardcore enough. I said it sounded stupid and gay, and then I listened to Nirvana some time later in the attic of a house my mom was house-sitting and I loved it. I loved it more than anything I'd heard before. It crept into my soul one day like a beautiful virus. And then Neville brought me a cassette with Nirvana on one side and Blink 182 the other. I used to go after school to Musica in Wynberg shopping mall just to listen to Nirvana CD's.
Anyway one day Tyler was raving to Neville and I about the Nirvana cover concert by "pay to play" and commenting on how drunk I'd gotten and how I'd vomited all over the bar room floor and how mad the staff were about it. Neville wasn't having any of it. "Were you with this loser?" his eyes were saying to me. "I don't remember any of that," I said. It was the price I had to pay to be popular I felt. It felt good to stand on Tyler like that. And as for Tyler, he couldn't believe I'd given up the myth of being drunk and therefore cool, and so he confusedly just walked away. He didn't even know I'd stood on him.
Then one day we got a new art teacher. I don't remember her name but she was the nicest person we'd had as far as art teachers. She was well put-together. She commented on a mediocre band that was playing on TV that I knew was inferior to Nirvana. It was called "The Rasmus". So I associated her with mediocrity and she was nice too, and being nice meant she wasn't cool. I also thought of her as South African and therefore mediocre as a result. But she was nice. I respected her.
Then the matric dance came. I smoked pot with the cool skaters in the quad in Calvin Grove, and I sat with the losers in the ball room afterwards. I had a date who I considered to be silly and she didn't like me at all anyway, which I took to be the result of her own poor taste in music. She was after all, so different from my imagination, and my imagination was sacred, so the standards I'd set were far above her. My wife would come into the picture one day, and she'd be marriage material. She'd be high above the world. A second Mary. She'd win a million battles with me across the cosmos, on many, many psychological levels. Ideally she'd be British and have porcelain white skin and be a ballerina in the nutcracker. A real power couple we'd be, with me as the brains behind the operation.
But oh, it's been 20 years since I've projected that image onto a Thai woman already and realized how impossible it would be for any woman to live up to it as a consequence. She was from a land far away, over the Andaman sea from South Africa. A rare and precious land that sex tourists didn't appreciate for what it was. That was a jaunt, it turned out. Not much more. That was just a delusion, a storm in a bottle. I still love trinkets though, and my mind is one, and I still think that there is a God and that he plays with trinkets like a child plays with marbles with little golden swirls. And that maybe God is entertained and bewildered and capable of letting me go mad as a kind of grace, as a kind of way of forgetting how truly dismal the world of men is. As a co-sharer in my own disenchantment. And maybe God likes magicians like Jacob after all. People who can turn a bowl of soup into a blessing from his father with a whole long line of ancestors at the end of it called Israel, or water into wine like Jesus did. And people like Elijah and Elisha who could do anything with any old harp or stick or barren piece of ground. And king David who just happened to get Goliath on the right spot on the head and made a name for himself despite not being anyone all that special in the grander scheme of peoples' social ranking systems.
Comments
Post a Comment