Chapter 1 - The Water Tower

George, like all children - except Christians – had been born without sin. Born in sin perhaps, or at the very least in bad taste, for his mother was an immigrant Italian without appeal or prospect and his father a mild mannered Afrikaner of the lower caste, given to backyard motor maintenance and darts. Their time together was doomed and his children were raised in an atmosphere of low grade bickering and wasted personalities. After that the man had gone down for fraud and did a short spell in prison. His mother, bless her heart, had tried to raise the boys, but from the word go they were uncontrollable.

There above their neighbourhood lived a hill with a frilly dress of syringes and bottlenecks forged by drugs users. The walls were a memory of white layered by the paint of urban terror, lads with cans, fuelled by liquor and boyhood. One had a sense that the walls could be cleaned and it was clear to all that passed that it should all be cleaned, splashed over by some new white order, a thicker, more robust kind of paint. But if it were done, there was always the chance that the boys would return, slash their blades of colour once again across those pure surfaces and then it would be obvious to all, once and for all. They could not be stopped. Better to leave the walls as they were and pray that they did not spread.

Up there also was a water tower, a grim monster of metal and rust that had once served to supply water to the houses lower down on the hill, which had begun their lives as a planned neighbourhood but had now become prisoners of war. When the massive spherical tankard had been erected, the locals had complained against its unsightly presence. The tower however had been built with more staying power than the homes and remained much the same through the years while the neighbourhood slowly degenerated into a slumberous ruin. By a strange twist of irony and fashion it was now the most beautiful object around and though no longer useful to anyone, it remained.

We would gather there at the breast of evening and climb its spindly ladder to sit on top and watch the city spread away on all sides, a city of alchemical power, where gold had been transformed into endless structures and societies. We saw a gridlock of concrete and electricity, of sharp square edges and broken bottles, of places where the sun had not entered in a hundred years and a whole tribe of people lived in hidden cardboard cities. And out there somewhere, beyond the gold mind dumps, we knew of the other horror, the cities of corrugated iron, where lived the dark races, with blazing bloodshot eyes and bunched muscles, always sharpening their long, killing knives.

Then we would smoke, passing the neck from one to the other in a sort of grim camaraderie, as of a group of boys about to be conscripted in some foreign war, a war where miles of misfits would be propelled into the lines of the enemy without hope or remorse. We knew something was planned for us and some hoped for a quick death, for to die in battle was a far better prospect than to live in mediocrity and the circumstances from which we had sprung. So we passed the pipe and laughed loudly and bravely at the coming promise that yet lurked beyond the horizon, kept at bay only by the fragile garden fence of youth and innocence.

When I first came there, I was fourteen years of age and thin like a conversation piece. My hair, slowly rebelling against my education, had now begun to lick at my shoulders and the tips could be pulled around into my mouth, which was something of a signifier of momentum. We all wore black and some with black boots, beetle crushers, with the occasional flash of a metal cap. Others sported the colours of the Rastafarian, evidenced by beads and laces in the shades of Jah. Only a few had weapons and there were those that were into magic and carried their silver emblems and pagan signs and especially liked to wear their hair long and dark and straight.

I came there by way of a friend from our high school named Rene. Rene was a wayward one and though born to a modicum of privilege, sought instead to consort with the unlawful and the immoral. Like Pinocchio, his nose guided him unerringly to pool, cigarettes and booze. He liked to drink the strong stuff, from little bottle nips that could be got for the price of a lightning fast foray into your mother’s purse on a Friday morning. Brandy, Sambuca, Cane, Vodka and half jacks of Rumba; Beer was somehow peasant food. Liquor had to be consumed from a flask, or bottle.

Like our inspiration in the form of the droogs from Clockwork Orange, we were into the smart dress and affected cravats, tails and pocket watches as well as our silver engraved Zippo lighters and hip flasks. My friends and I used to enjoy entering a state of profound drunkenness. Only the strong stuff could do that. It gave you a moment, smeared between cataleptic stumbling stupor and complete unconsciousness that was divine, and in its passing made you temporarily a God. In that mood we fantasized about warfare, the warfare of Clockwork Orange, where we would dance about in our Tudor suits and commit acts of consummate and athletic violence while bedeviled by the torrential downpour of Beethoven’s fifth. Only our inability and cowardice kept us from that grand reality.

From early on we were into the classics and regaled in how different it made us. In our suits and with our fancy music we were about the streets and strutting ever so grandly. Only in school would we transform and conceal ourselves in the uniforms of the enemy and even tuck away our hair and its proud growth. Most days however we would skip school and concoct grand fantasies for our tutors. We lived like spiders in vast webs of ever more intricate deceit and delighted in our acts of sharp theatre, but always, it seemed, fighting a rearguard action, our only nutrition and fortification being our flasks and their hot liquid power.

George carried a chain, which was his secondary fighting weapon, the first being a blender blade which was attached to the end of a broomstick. He would wrap the chain around his wrist and punch with it or let it out, wrapped only once, and swing it in big arcs. At this stage however he was only fourteen and the swings were not as convincing as they might one day become. His chain came from his bicycle-locking device and he had stripped the plastic so that the metal was loose and free. He had gotten to use it once when he was at a bookstore and this older man had pushed him aside continuously to read the titles. He had let it out on him, and there they danced, the old man and George’s chain, all bloody and bald and with fraying tempers. George had lost that battle but he was proud for the fight.

He and my friend had met each other while hanging out in the neighbourhood and it was for this reason that we got invited to the water tower and I came there shy and scared and with full knowing of my thinness and pale skin. George was warm to me right off and his smile was golden. He had dark, flowing, slightly curled hair and pale brown eyes; Very beautiful skin, sumptuous and olive tinted - a Greek deity. The women loved him but he never learned how to respond, or even appreciate his own beauty. He would respond to the advances of women with indifference or at best coyness, if he were caught off-guard.

George, like the rest of us, had bigger fish to fry. We had plans to formulate, strategy to discuss. So there we were, all arrayed beside each other on the water tower, passing the pipe from hand to hand and meeting together to form this crucial partnership that would withstand the years. We shared the strong stuff from Rene’s flask and I felt pretty wild head wise. George told us about this friend he had that we would meet some time, who knew a doorway into another world. We were all dead keen on new doorways, both the witches and punk kids alike.

Later that week we met up with George at the school and saw that he was also a normal boy like us. He used to listen to some hard music, all Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. He smoked cigarettes like a champ and could blow smoke rings across some distance. From that day on he was our man at the school and we pulled away from the other kids, connected by our water tower secrets. Most of the other kids were wealthy and stuck to the rich neighbourhoods and had loud parties filled with every liquor known to man and beautiful teen girls who all took turns being touched in dark rooms and then bragging about it. I found it sad. They were all so strong and fast and beautiful but all so needy of group acceptance.

So there we had it - Us and them. George and Rene and yours truly, haunting the corridors and turning sharp eyes at all the others, who lived in the normal world. Then George introduced us to another boy, called Ian. He was a tall, thin, slightly freckled youth with sandy hair and pale blue eyes who, like us, was a satellite for people even more weird and self-obsessed than he was. He liked a bit of the hard stuff and the little smoke too so he was dead keen on hanging with our council of young crooks.

It was Ian who once got us into trouble, early on in the friendship, with some Italian boys at a local teen haunt we gathered at called, wait for it, ‘The Italian Club’. Italians, it seems, are very fond of fighting, which might explain George’s occasional bouts of fantastic violence. They would all come to this party, look at each other’s girlfriends, pick each other out and then march en masse to the soccer field to have it out. The fights happened so often that if you were bored of the party, you could spend the entire night sitting in the field watching fight after bloody fight. To get into a fight you needed no special qualifications. A glance or even a perceived glance was enough to get your face smashed in. Ian did not even know his crime. He got himself hammered as he walked into the toilet for a pee, by a young Italian boy with several friends backing him up. The boy claimed that he had been bumped on the dance floor and was seeking revenge.

As it turns out, Ian found out where the boy attended school and he was all over going over to the school, hauling the kid out of class and smashing his bones all over the corridor, a prospect that George for one relished. As for myself, I was as always on the cautious side, being the thin guy, but likewise felt buoyed by the idea of beautiful, powerful, crippling violence. As a matter of fact, I had grown up on the secret idea of one day becoming a ninja assassin. The idea was so powerful that from early childhood I dressed up in Ninja suits and crawled around at night in total darkness brandishing various sharp kitchen implements. My weapon of choice, at the time of the incident, was a long rosewood stick whose tip had been speared through with screws that had been sharpened at both ends for a raking action.

The call to action came while we were at a swimming gala and we all lit out of there to go home and collect our weaponry. Already I was on the phone to every big guy I knew to send their friends to try and protect us, but like all sane folk, including my older brother, nobody really wanted a piece of gang violence. Unknown to us, the other kid was facing the same predicament and approached the battle ground with the utmost terror. Unlike us however, on account of being Italian, he did have connections. By the time we arrived outside the school, each of us hiding our various bits of sharpened metal and chain weaponry, they had lined up three Italian gangster cars with opened boots and automatic weaponry and baseball bats ready to go. I remember us standing there in a row, us scrawny boys with our homemade weaponry, facing down this modern day Roman regiment. The older guys stared at us in disbelief, laughed raucously, jumped into their cars for fear of being arrested for child abuse and vanished, leaving our original little enemy quaking on the pavement side.

This small victory, amongst others, bound us together. We knew this one guy at school called Skyf, which in Afrikaans means either ‘chip’ or ‘small joint’, though we could never figure out which. He didn’t seem to smoke and in fact was monstrously fit, muscles bulging out like big, puffy white pythons, his skin pockmarked by a blood stream drowning in horse steroids. Unlike the Jock boys however he was from so far to the wrong side of the tracks that he was wasn’t even at the same racecourse, which of course we found thoroughly commendable and he looked out for us a bit like a big dog with very tiny puppies. We were united in our hatred for the school elite and he seemed to share an uneasy truce with them. The gap for him between school and jail would be a very short one, but while he peaked he ran with gangs so hardcore that we didn’t even know where their parties were.

So anyway, we had all snuck out of home and hiked from our various parts of the city to meet and go into Hillbrow for a night of booze, broads (or runaway street teens) and pool, which had now slowly become the staple means for us to earn any money. As boys, nobody felt threatened to play us for money and we delighted in the sweet hustle of youth, got the marks drunks and stripped them of their wallets. We were walking down some quiet street when Ian becomes the cranial recipient of an egg thrown from the top of a roof ten stories up. In the ensuing chaos we decide to attack and blab our way past the building security with a police badge that Ian had made and now proffered whenever under duress. By the time we reached the roof, our assailants had become so terrified that they had elected to climb down the drains that hugged the side of the building.

We raced down and into the street below just in time to see them, two of them scuttling down a side street. We ran after them through the darkness, dodging between cars, jumping over dustbins and slowly I felt myself catching up as we darted through one side street after the other. I really bolted ahead as never before and came close enough to realize that the two fleeting cowards were considerably more powerful looking and grown-up than I had ever imagined. Suddenly they both jumped over a wall and hid in a hedge, at which precise point I had two realizations: One; that I had no conception of what I would do when I caught up with them and two; that my friends had somehow become separated from me several streets back. I stood alone - the thinnest of the lot - and these other two cats, realizing the horrible reality, climbed out of their hedge and faced me with expressions that slid variously between grim humour, hot-blooded irritation and cold-minded violence.

It was at the point that Skyf appeared, running down the street, brandishing a .38 special with about thirty Russian looking thugs behind him. His story: He had been at a party at some penthouse with a hot girl and this group of friends behind him when the girl’s husband had arrived home and started spitting Slavic expletives at him. Then the man had pulled the gun, which was a mistake, and when Skyf had obliged him by sticking his own forehead against the quivering barrel, the Slavic man had pistol whipped him and thrown the gun in the air before bolting from the flat. Which was where I found my hero, who stops in the middle of his bedlam flight – with his friends freezing behind him as though their strings had been yanked – and asks politely, after glancing at me like I was the last person he ever expected to run into of a school night and says ‘Where are they?’ It was a laugh all right. Those boys ran off like the fear of God.

We decided to form a gang one day and to call ourselves ‘the piss-up club’. Though already we were dabbling with notions more noble, notions of ninjas and princesses, the liquor got us onto this care-not attitude and we ended up getting these little badges made, printed with the name of the club on a little metal disk that we pinned to our lapels. We were the piss-up kings. We would formulate grand plans to filch sums of money from our parents and then go and buy whole bottles of the strongest neat liquor, stuff that would blaze through us and light our feet as we danced street-wise.

One day the school decided to hold a money collecting rally for some bizarre world war two fund that involved sending out red poppies in return for a donation. Each of us got a sealed box and we were instructed to go to various shopping centers in our school uniforms and collect money for this fund. It took us about sixteen seconds to work out how to remove the seal and reseal it at need. We were thrilled and got our mums to drop us off in a well-coordinated net that would cover most of the rich shopping centers. If we had had wireless radios we would have used them.

At that time, the Two Rand coin had just been introduced and many of the mothers confused it with a twenty cent piece, a piece of metal with a tenth of the value. This was of course to our great advantage and we plagued those mothers at the entrances of the shopping malls with our well-pressed school uniforms. Afterwards we met and ripped open the boxes to pool our funds. We were stunned by our findings. We were rich beyond our wildest dreams, the haul of a two-month hustle. We gave our boxes back to the school, with a few coins in each and this gave us great satisfaction. Then we hit a chemist where they sold ‘Pericons’, a smokers cough tablet that when taken in massive doses with alcohol made it seem as though everything was slowed down and stretched out and generally groovy.

Pericons were an amazing discovery, only one of a host of central nervous depressants that had suddenly made their way into our mental, medical – and easily available – archives, but a very good one nevertheless. One of its best features is that slows down your vision to such an extent that you can see ghost images forming behind sudden movement, like hundreds of silver hands trailing along behind your real hand as it swings through space. They also gave you hallucinations, or what some might call pseudo hallucinations. Real hallucination would come soon. For now we were content with walking along shadowy streets and watching the shadows transform with the aqueous grace of lycanthropes. Pericons was good for that.

One fine afternoon we were lit up in my room, which was in an attic in a very pleasant house in a deep, green neighbourhood. We three of us decided to go down for a cup of coffee and we are walking through the dining room when, through the bay window, we see a figure darting across the lawn in the very dim light of early evening. This is the only glimpse I saw and can never be truly sure but Rene or Ian ran to the kitchen door and swear they saw a girl with a motorbike helmet leaping onto the back of a bike ridden by another girl. And then we saw it… a note under the kettle. Rene ripped it out and turned it over to read it. I cannot remember now the exact words and the note does not remain, but they were something like; We know about your little club, we know about you and we were think you are very cool. One day maybe we’ll meet. Signed: The FYC.

For some of you this may seem a stretch but that was how it happened, exactly. By God did that set off some snakes of fate, changing everything before them. In an instant we were transformed from some skinny little bunch of badge wearing alcoholics into a club; a real club. I decided that soon I would scrap the little badges and get a real name and get some real business cards.

I had belonged to a little gang in primary school, where my parents owned a very successful restaurant in a very dubious neighbourhood with real tough kids on the other side of the economic divide. I called it ‘The Al Capone Gang’ because my father was very into gangsters and had a gangster themed restaurant. His name is Al. We also had badges for that gang, which my mother made and they had a picture of Al Capone on them. I felt we had to have an initiation for that gang and we eventually decided that all members would rub away all the skin on the top of their index fingers until you could see the bone. Now that the ‘piss-up’ had grown into something respectable, something that other secret societies of beautiful women knew about, we had to have our own initiation. We had to take this stuff seriously. Something had to be done.

Drinking we started really seriously. Those last, sad days of my schooling were already beginning to blur through an alcohol and calmettes haze. One night, George got invited to his errant father’s house, who was now returned from prison and wanted to entertain his son and friends. George’s father was named Johnny, or ‘flip-over’ Johnny, as some would have it. Apparently he had once gotten roaring drunk, ramped his motorbike in a complete somersault and landed back on the tires. He was famous for that.

Anyway, we were all over at his house and had in each of us a cauldron of different liquors even before the father went out chasing after some loose chick. We were so very, very drunk and started fighting when I hit this table and a glass fell over and lacerated the sole of my foot so badly so that I ended up spending the night in hospital. The story only ended three operations later with a sizeable skin graft from my inner thigh. I was ordered neither to stand upright nor to get it wet for several months.

Two nights later I am hitching to Hillbrow through the rain on crutches, long hair soaked against my skinny white forehead with my miserable looking friends beside me. I honestly cannot say what drove me but it was like a bat-winged beast circling high above, urging me towards events of ever-greater catastrophe. Eventually we get there, my leg-cast a ruin, God only knows what damage going through the delicate operations under my foot. I decided I was going to hustle for booze playing pool. My crutches, I had discovered, were a great scheme because people somehow expected, to their detriment, that it affected my play.

We were hustling this one guy who I think called himself Tom, a short, plump, middle-aged fellow who seemed only delighted to lose round after round of beer to us. To cut a long story short, he invited the four of us back to his apartment where he drugged our coffee. I have a memory of sinking down next to a balcony with the mighty orange lights of the city streaming away past me in a blur, twenty-five stories below. My memory departs at that point and returns only three days later. From the account of Ian, who was the only one to resist the drug, he had to attack the man with a bread to stop his sordid sexual advances on us and we were eventually thrown out into the corridor, with Rene now coming too and screaming bloody murder as they dragged me down, crutches and all, to where we collapsed in the street, my cast submerged in a dirty gutter.

Over the next three days apparently I raged and had bruises from where my father, eventually finding me, had to subdue me. We went back there to that flat, the boys and I, armed with all of our clubs and knives and ninja weapons, but we could never find him. My foot of course was a disaster and it took a long time in recovering but our minds had been wounded by a sharper kind of glass.