It was early 1982, and I stuck in Johannesburg, and running out of money fast. I needed a job. I’d been living in The Pads, a sleazy downtown hotel in Johannesburg used mainly by hookers, for about three weeks. I only had enough money for a weeks more rent, and had woken up gripped by panic, after a bad dream I couldn’t remember. I left the hotel, bought a paper from a guy on a street corner, and walked to Bimbo Burgers for breakfast. While waiting for my standard double chili burger, after a quick scan of the headlines, I turned to the jobs section. An advert in bold type immediately jumped out at me. Make two hundred rand a day, it said. No experience required. Of course, it sounded too good to be true, but it was the only advertised job I had the requisite qualifications for. After finishing my burger, I headed to the phone box just down the road, and gave them a call. They sounded very happy to hear from me, which just confirmed my initial suspicions about the job, but I was invited for an interview the next day. The interview basically consisted of being asked when I could start. When I said tomorrow, the young guy interviewing me held ot his hand.
“Good to have you on board, Allen. See you at nine tomorrow.”
I still didn’t know exactly what the job I had just signed up for, beyond that it was to do with selling educational material. The next morning, I turned up at the offices and wa invited to join several othe young folk in a conference room. I quickly discovered that the job was selling encyclopedias for an American company, Grellers, door to door. There were six of us, though two days into the training two young students didn’t turn up. A week of training was conducted by a manic American woman called Sandy. It appeared that Sandy had been brainwashed, and thought we were selling one of the most important products ever conceived. She leapt around, American vowels spilling from her mouth as her arms waved violently; evidently she’d studied body language from a video that extolled the virtues of exaggerated body movement in order to put across your message. However, in spite of my fascination with her manic personality rather than the books, her enthusiasm rubbed off on us young converts; we were going to change the future of new generations of white South Africans. This was during apartheid, before educating black people became a thing. I couldn’t wait to get out there and sell. Full of confidence, we were driven to one of the white suburbs and released on the general public. I sold a set of books on my first evening out, to a couple with a young girl who loved all the plastic overlays. The sample volume, used for our presntation, had the best pages from the entire twenty volumes crammed into one book. It looked spectacular to a family stuck at home with only the SABC on television for entertainment. Coupling that with a healthy dose of expansive gestures, careful vocal modulation, and an apparent fervent belief in the product, they did not stand a chance. Two days later I sold another set; by the end of the first week I had sold five. At one hundred and ninety Rand a set, it was seriously good money. However, the second week did not go so well. I only sold one set. I stopped Believing in the Product. However, the company had a sales guru employed specifically to combat this problem.
Norman was one of the sales managers. He was Israeli, and had been in South Africa for nine months; he was the company’s top salesman. 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. Secunda was a new town that seemed to consist entirely of suburbs, with no town centre at all. Row upon row of new houses, all built to one of perhaps four basic designs. Young families, just starting out in life, here lived out their sterile lives of work, school, barbecues and beer.
Norman definitely 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, with a padded face that reminded me of 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 an abortive first evening, during which I only managed to get through one door, Norman took me out as an observer the next night, to show me his magical technique on how to improve my sales figures. The first house we knocked at invited us in but Norman declined the invitation
“I could see straight away that they wouldn’t buy” Norman informed me as we walked away, “They didn’t have the look”
The next house we knocked at were a bit more reluctant to let us in, but within a minute Norman had them convinced that they really wanted to hear what we had to say. He’d ascertained that the guy was a fireman before we had even crossed the threshold. I sat back on their fake leather sofa to watch the master at work, grinning and nodding enthusiastically any time anyone looked at me, the rest of the time marveling at the collection of porcelain kitsch that the lady of the house had assembled. She had everything from little dogs to windmills. Norman’s trick was simple; persuade people they were getting something cheap. Within a minute I was giving Norman my full attention, as were the gullible young couple leaning towards him. He told them we were doing a promotional tour, looking for families that really appreciated the importance of education; special families, families a cut above the rest. Couples who wanted the best for their children. Couples who could smile knowingly at their friends and neighbours, proud that they had access to more information than them. These lucky 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, often 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. They did not seem to appreciate the real value of what was on offer. The next thing, to my amazement, the fireman was offering Norman a bribe to sell him the books. Norman feigned outrage at this, but reluctantly accepted their deposit of one hundred and twenty Rand, mumbling vaguely when quoting the legal requirement of informing them of their right to cancel within three days.
“I knew I had them within five minutes” he told me later “If you haven’t got them in ten, it’s not worth continuing”
I took to Norman’s technique like the proverbial duck to water. Within a few weeks my sales figures were second only to his. We slept in tents in the local campsite at Secunda, selling books in the evenings. We were the only entetainment in town, apart from a cinema and a bowling alley. 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 the others I had an audience. I was selling an average of one set of books a night, more on weekends. When we left Secunda, I had racked up eight sales.
The company announced one day that they were planning on expanding. Norman was asked by Sandy to open an office in Cape Town, and he asked for me to be sent with him. By this time, we were hanging out after work, and I was now sleeping on the floor of a one-bedroom apartment in Hillbrow belonging to an Israeli friend of his, who was away on holiday. We drove down to Cape Town in Norman’s battered Mini, and moved into a furnished flat in Camps Bay, on a hill overlooking the sea. It was quite upmarket, tastefully furnished with glass coffee tables, plush sofas and a separate kitchen. Our neighbours were mainly Yuppies, then still a new phenomenon. 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, he could see greed and avarice in people, 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 new salesmen was a young English speaking guy from Springs, near Johannesburg, called Ray. He’d moved down to Cape Town the year before, after being invalided out of National Service. 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, including psychoses like his, Ray’s particular variety of this condition was not conducive to letting him get anywhere near high powered weapons. We got on really well, selling in the evenings and then partying in the city at night, sleeping during the day before heading out again in the evening to collect our suburban paycheques. There was a club in town called 1886, where we used to take speed and dance until dawn, trying to pick up girls. Cape Town was a great city; in fact it’s a lot better now, after Apartheid. I could settle here, I thought. I had money for the first time in my life. I was white and had all the advantages of my colour in a racist society, although I did feel guilty about not feeling particularly guilty about it. I didn’t make the laws. I didn’t agree with them though, and felt no remorse in breaking them. 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, with no obligations, twenty one years old, and without a care in the world.
One night Norman and myself decided to have a party. Norman was actually a pretty sleazy dude. He went down to Seapoint, and came back with three hookers, a gram of coke and three grams of speed. Oh dear. Ray came round, along with a few other people from work. Max, our neighbour, arrived 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, I thought, 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 something extra 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. I felt much as Candide did, I thought to myself. Everything is for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds. Except, of course, it wasn’t a very nice world. I was living in a fascist state where racism was actually the law. However, in those days I didn’t know any better, although I completely ignored apartheid, which had resulted in me being arrested under the Orwellian Immorality Act the year before, for having sex with a black woman. I could identify with Candide, however, as he also inhabited a vicious and unfair world. 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’d often been accused of being callous, but there is a world of difference between being callous and not giving a fuck. That is why I liked Ray, because more than anyone else I’d ever met, he refused to let anything get him down.
The next night, with only hazy recollections of the party, I was at work as usual. I felt pretty rough, but five of my crew made sales, which perked me up. 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 thick accent.
“No way!” Norman replied, unconsciously mimicking the landlord’s accent.
” 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. Norman and the Pole argued in broken English 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 Ray’s, and 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 that looked like it had been 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 what I took from my youth watching Westerns to be 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 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 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. How quickly life can change.
I wandered slowly back towards Ray’s flat in 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 disjointed thoughts to me in voices of people I once knew. I hated the stuff, always had, yet for some reason, if it was offered, I’d have a line. I cursed myself. In my head I could hear a girl I’d known in Botswana, Kate, 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 as I 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 frustration, 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 from playing 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, one of those huge first generation bricks. He made a half-hearted effort to resume the chase. I ran a few steps, and he walked back to his car, still shouting. I needed some peace.
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 green plants in pots were arranged tastefully, with due attention to light. Steven’s mum, Delia, always made me uneasy with her intense blue, saintly eyes. She was very pretty, pert nose and blonde bob haircut. In spite of the fact that I never felt totally at ease around her, Delia was a wonderful and very non-judgemental human being. She welcomed any of Steven’s friends as if they were family, an she greeted me warmly as I joined Steven and Ray in the kitchen. I rolled a joint, took a few puffs, and passed it to Ray. Much to my surprise, 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, Allen, 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 together?” I hadn’t seen Ray at the office, he must have been in there before me. I asked him if he’d seen Norman. Norman of course was the golden goose, so we both doubted he would have fallen victim too.
We agreed to hitch to Jo’burg within the next few days. I wandered into the small garden, and looked out to sea over the rows of houses while I finished the joint. When I returned, Ray was totally wrapped up in a discussion with Steven’s mother. They were talking about morality. I asked ray for his keys, and set off back to his flat. As I walked, I found myself wondering why I smoked weed, snorted coke, and drank beer. Why couldn’t you just decide how you wanted to feel and adjust your brain just by thinking about it? And once you’d tried acid, assuming it was a good trip, then the normal world became a very mundane place. In spite of these thoughts, I decided to visit Shane.
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 learned from our mutual friend Max. He snorkelled for pearlemain, which he sold to restaurants, and dealt in whites, or Mandrax, commonly known as Qaaludes in the USA. 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.
“Allen, 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, “Why not?” I knew I’d regret it. Every time I’d smoked a white pipe, I ended up really wishing I hadn’t.
He put down the guitar, pulled a bag out from under the bed. Jimi Hendrix watched from a poster on the wall. Shane wrapped a Mandrax tablet in a piece of paper, then crushed it to powder with an empty Coke bottle. He mixed it with some dagga (weed), 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.
“Wake up, Allen”, I heard through the mists of fatigue. I’d been dreaming I was in a bomber, somewhere over Germany, in WW2. At first, I thought it was one of the crew, trying to wake me up. But it was Shane, holding a cup of tea in his hands.
“Fok, man, I’ve got to cut down”, he said, swaying as he handed me the tea. I rubbed my face, still feeling where the oxygen mask had been in my dream.
I did not think then that he would be dead within a year, his lungs destroyed from smoking tablets. I needed a shit. 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 rubbish for a while, then he nodded off. 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.”
“I thought something was going on. He refused a joint earlier, and was atlking about morality.”
“Yes, pretty weird, hey?. 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. What the fuck, I thought to myself. I swallowed one of the little yellow pills, 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 an old film of Woodstock, smoking joints as Norman sat like a beaver on a beanbag, rolling continously. 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 green. 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. And I also realised I’d had enough of drugs. I wished I could catch some of Ray’s new-found bliss.
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. 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. She looked gorgeous. Beauty is so hard to define, I thought to myself, yet ugliness can be summed up with one foul word.
We were back at Ray’s, sipping 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 took a half-full bottle of Coke from the ‘fridge and drank it all in one go.
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, creating a stark division in the room, one half dark and strewn with ashtrays, empty bottles and 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 was bright, the green leaves of Ray’s 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 leaned across the passenger seat, asked me where I was going. I immediately wondered if he was homosexual.
“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. It seemed I was doomed to be plagued 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.
“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 had never understood how a book written by a load of antisocial hermits nearly two thousand years ago is relevant to the modern world. 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? And 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 just wanted to piss him off, so he would stop bleating about God. 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. I thought it was karma for the episode where I had caused a puncture earlier. He thought God had punctured his 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. A bunny chow, as it’s known. 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 really liked him before, we’d just meandered along together, sharing the same stretch of river while we were heading in the same direction.
We went for a coffee. My last three sales had all been cancelled. I had paid the deposit on one of them, and had no chance of getting it back. 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 Zimbabwe. I was sick of Cape Town, and I had no money save the change from twenty Rand.
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 there, 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.
“Allen, 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, I decided. He was still finding his feet, and every now and again I imagined I could see the dark shadow of doubt in his eyes. He was almost forcing himself to believe, I thought, but his eyes…there was definitely something different there. Perhaps I was just jealous.
“I’ve given up drugs” he informed me, for about the tenth time. “Really, Allen, 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, him staring at me through his crystal lens 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, instead engaging me with his new shiny eyes, I realised that yes, he actually did believe. He looked embarrassed, for me rather than himself, and I could tell he would rather have been somewhere else.
He told me he was off to church, and was then going to someone’s house for a prayer meeting. He tried to persuade me to accompany him. I had actually 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 had a chance of seducing her. I had even once felt a flicker of something spiritual at one of their meetings, but I couldn’t sustain it, and when I finally made a pass at her she was so shocked, and I was so embarrassed, 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, his eyes all lit up with God and looking happier than I had ever seen him, barring the early occasional small flickers of uncertainty . I had 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 now had no doubt that Ray’s had been tripped. I was 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, one of the hookers Norman had picked up for the party, which npw seemed so long ago, in a different life.
“ 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.”
“It’s probably for the best” I replied. I didn’t feel like company, but as soon as she left, I felt incredibly lonell, and wished I’d asked her to stay. When Ray came back, I was in bed, feigning sleep. However, the horrible feeling of loneliness wouldn’t leave me. I couldn’t sleep, no doubt due to all the pills I’d been taking. I decided it was time to clean up my act. Maybe Ray could help me, after all? I got dressed and knocked on Rays door. I felt dizzy. Ray came out and sat down.
“Uh, Allen , someone in the church bought me an air ticket to Jo’burg.” Well, that didn’t make me feel any better, I thought.
“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. And what the fuck were all those pills? I’ve not slept properly for a week. I’ve got no clean clothes. When I wash my socks I can’t go out until they dry.”
“I’m sorry, Allen, 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 to get a lift, but I wished now that I had left three days earlier. Norman took us out that night for dinner, and the following morning he dropped me about thirty miles outside Cape Town. The trip to Zimbabwe 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 cleaned up my act, got a job.
Almost a year later, I was working as an apprentice engineer for a crop-spraying company back in South Africa, at Rand Airport, near Johannesburg. One day, they sent me to Springs to pick up some avionics. I had to wait for two hours as 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, Allen, howsit china! Fuck, I wondered what had happened to you. I was just thinking about you the other day! How the fuck are you!”
“Howsit, Ray! 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 another beer, 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, Allen, 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, after a while on cloud nine, 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. It was a real bummer. It just wore off. Fuck knows how other people stay up there.”
He walked me back to the shop, I picked up the parts, and he accompanied back to the car. He gave me his number, and we promised to stay in touch, but we never saw each other again. 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’d started the engine, he’d leaned in the window, looking tired, and said,
“Jusses , Allen, I think I just peaked too soon.”
