Rhodes: '90 to '94

Cramming Flashbacks

2010-02-03T09:19:00.003+02:00

17 years on, I still get the same nightmare. After months of Work Avoidance Behaviour*, it’s two weeks til finals. How do you read 12 English set works in that time? Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is just a slip of a book, but Faulkner’s heavyweight Sound and the Fury will make you feel like a drooling Faulknerian man-child after 10 pages.

Cramming dreams still wake me in a cold sweat, scrabbling for the valium. I wake bolt upright, my brain screaming, “Fuck! Get studying! Find someone’s note’s to photocopy! Do you still have your DP?” The stress of those last feverish days reaches back all the way from 1993- the days before email, cellphones, iPods, and the rigours of adulthood.

*Drinking, convalescing from Vic nights, spading, smoking joints on the roof, encounters with the local constabulary, stay in bed four day John and Yoko-style love-ins, trying to learn bass guitar in order to pull girls, making mix tapes, Kaif-crawling marathons, skipping lectures to go to Shelly’s Cove, electrical experiments, and dabbling in the Periodic Table of the Elements.

Kill Me Something!

2009-09-16T07:08:00.002+02:00

A cold winter night at 67a African street. All of us stoned into the bejesus belt, lying on the couches like melting Dali clocks. The face of G, my vegetarian girlfriend at the time, swam into my vision, as I slumped on the couch like a slow-blinking, cap-sized tortoise.

Vegan Meat Rage

“Fuck this vegetarian shit!” she shouted, grabbing my t-shirt in her fists,” I’m SICK of lentils! I want you, as my man, to go out there and KILL me something! ”

Lady Macbeth gets the Munchies

An English 2 student, she then got all Lady Macbeth on my ass, going to greater, more hysterical entreaties; “Lo, would I snatch the suckling child from my breast, and dash its brains upon a rock!” she moaned, releasing her grip on my throat, and collapsed next to me.

Pigeon Bludgeoning for Beginners

Shuffling of the couch, like Frankenstein’s monster wading through molasses, I peered out the kitchen door. My only option seemed shinning up the nearby telephone pole and bludgeoning a tasty, plump-breasted pigeon atop it with a brick. Naaah. I slunk back into the lounge. Lady Macbeth glowered at me. Banished from the bedroom, I slept alone on the couch that night, shivering under a kikoi, with only a bong for company.

Drug Bust

2009-05-01T20:27:00.002+02:00

"Do you remember that night in our digs on Wotsit Street near the Graham, when Dave (AKA Fat Irish) was still living with us? Well Ed had just come back from the Ciskei with, like, a proper, proper haul of weed. None of this half-assed couple of bankies business. A couple of black bin bags in a car boot.

And yea there was much celebration, and making of ceremonial bongs and Boomerang (elegant vodka-lemon-in-a-bucket concoction), and calling of friends to share the bounty. Nesh got naked; Adam got vomitty; Stark got thrown out. Sara and Lisa got high, an annual event; Danny 'M-Net' Scotsman got babooned (M-Net because with a Scottish accent and a prediliction for drink, after 7pm you needed a decoder to understand him.)

As a result, at 3am when there was a heart-stopping hammering of iron fist on digs door, we were mostly passed out and scattered far and wide through the digs, as was the weed. There was some in every room and everyone. But panic only spread truly through the ranks when Adam came belting through the house naked but for his tighty whities, wide-eyed and white-faced, banging on bedroom doors and whisper-shouting 'Pigs! Pigs! This is not a drill!"

I looked out over the balcony and I have never seen anything like it: ranks of Boere cops in riot gear and shotguns. Not one but TWO of those blerrie scary big yellow monster armoured vehicles - what were they called? Alsations on chains. High-octane torches. Guttural shouting and crackle of radios. Jissus. It's one thing having the cops knocking at your door; it's quite another having the full Soweto riot patrol.

Cue flat panic as we tried to rid ourselves of this monster haul of weed. David attempted to chuck a whole plastic bag full over the balcony onto the street, towards the cops (verily raining drugs down upon them) and then was rendered useless for the rest of the night by his horror at the thought of this near miss. We flushed and flushed. Ed - cool-headed in a time of chaos - was methodically chucking baggies into the back garden of the Graham, in the hope we could fetch it tomorrow. I was frantically flicking through Shakespeare - I had stashed my stash in something Shakespearian but as an English major, it was taking me some time to work out which play. Comedy? Tragedy?

It was a full half hour later that, terrified but standing firm and shoulder to shoulder, we finally answered the door to the torch-wielding, helmetted, flak-jacketted cops.

Lead cop: Does Dylan May live here?
Dylan (white and shaky, ready to bolt): Yes.
Lead cop: Mr May, can I ask you to identify this?
(Flourishes grayish rag in the air.)
Dylan (bemused and traumatised): Um, yes, those are my underpants.
Lead cop: And you recently reported a robbery at this address?
Dylan: Um, yes.
Lead cop: Did you sew this name tag in your underpants?
Dylan: Um, no, my Mom did.
Us, cops: Snigger.
Lead cop: Well, good for her, because we've been on a stolen goods raid in Rhini and we need you to provide evidence. Thanks for your time. Goodnight.

Sjoe."

Reunions

2009-02-25T19:10:00.012+02:00

“Martin Q. Blank: Did you go to your reunion?

..Marcella: Yes, I did. It was just as if everyone had swelled.”

- Grosse Point Blank (1997)

Insurance Seminars

Official Rhodes Reunions are as much fun as partying with your Dad. I’ve been to one. Only once, and never again. It was fun like an insurance seminar. None of the interesting people I’d really want to catch up wouldn’t be seen dead at a Rhodes-sponsored reunion anyway.

Laugh ‘til Beer Squirts Out Your Nose

As a rule, I usually hand-pick who I want to see, and meet them in a cosy bar in London, or at a skanky Jo’burg pub. Some old friends’ company has no shelf life. Conversation's easy like an old well-worn mix tape, where you both know what song’s coming next. In a heartbeat you’re finishing each other’s sentences, swapping obscure jokes and giggling at them like school kids passing notes under the desk in the in class. Those are nights are glorious fun, we always laugh ‘til we cry, and our stomachs hurt. Seeing the cherished old friends that helped shaped the sum of your soul is gloriously life affirming.

Exes That Haven’t Got Fat

Some exes should not be seen nor heard, particularly if they dumped me, and haven’t got fat. In an ideal world, those ones will be bigger than my postcode, with jowels and thick ankles. In an ideal world, I’d just walk up and say;’ Wow. It’s been ages. What have you been doing all this time... APART FROM EATING?!’ Seeing the old girlfriends that spurned you, and are now fat, is gloriously life affirming.

The Ones That Got Away...

... Are the ones you’ll never forget. I guess once a relationship starts, on some plane it never ends. It just carries on. Maybe you got married, maybe you broke up earlier than you did, maybe you shagged her sister. Whatever. Somewhere someplace else, those feelings never stop, they keep just going on an on, like a million flickering TV shows bouncing off the satellites, beaming into space.

Taking Stock

Reunions bring on a heady mix a nostalgia and introspection. Some good, some bad. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices have been half chance. So have everyone else's. We all muddle through somehow.

Amid the rigours of adulthood; the small work triumphs, shallower new friendships, and sane, pragmatic relationships of now hold up like a faded photocopy compared to those bright, shining times, idealised in recollection. Rhodes was heaven and hell, but sometimes I brood, and wonder if I was at my best in those years, with you people, in that place.

A Lack of Consequences

2009-02-19T06:12:00.010+02:00

“Youth is a fever, the sleep of reason.”

- My Gran, in a letter to me at Rhodes (1991)

Rhodes was a bubble, perfect for unfettered feats of youthful folly.

Drugs

Rat had a bee in his bonnet about becoming Jesus. So, he locked himself in a blacked out room for two days, with a litre of water, and three Golden Buddhas, a potent brand of lysergic acid diethylamide that peeled your head like an orange and vomited the Encyclopaedia Britannica into your skull. Half of one would have Marilyn Manson convinced he was The Man From Galilee. Rat emerged unshaven, a bit thinner, and with a distinct lack of Christ-like superpowers. I believe he’s a barrister in London now. I somehow don’t see a “Previously Jesus” post script on the brass plaque on his law office door.

Drunk Driving

We all did it, at one time or another. Thing was, the average drive was no more than three km, and Grahamstown’s narrow, sleepy streets seemed to guide you, snug as a marble run. True drunk drivers could never really go faster than about 60 km/h. The stoners drove freaked out slow as a 45rpm record at 33.

Duelling

In 67 African street, disputes between gentlemen were settled with a duel. The combatants would stand back-to-back, the weapons of choice a Black Label quart and a spatula. At a signal from their seconds, each would walk ten paces apart, turn round, flick the lid off the quart with a deft flick of the spatula, and down the beer. Last one to finish lost the duel, and had to down a mug of Buddie’s Liquor Store No-name Brand Tequila™.

Duly Performed

The Duly Performed Certificate (DP) was as anathema to a tardy scholar as soap to an art student . Skip too many lectures, and you’d lose your DP. No DP meant you couldn’t write exams, you'd fail, and your parents would kill you and bury you in an unmarked grave.

Intervarsity

2009-02-16T23:49:00.003+02:00

A sanctioned festival of sport and unbridled, foaming madness, intervarsity was a three day journey into the heart of darkness. The sporting events were a mere sideshow to Rhodes, Maritzburg, and UPE students all trying to outdo each other in drunken feats of excess. All of them did things that’d make a maggot gag, and have a Zimbo cowering under his duvet.

Great Field Bakkie Slalom

Intervarsity morning. The Vice Chancellor was having breakfast with some UPE big knobs on his balcony above the Union. The polite clink of cutlery on plates was rudely disturbed by a god-awful ruckus broke . The dignitaries peered over the balcony to see a mud-spattered bakkie doing donuts on the Great Field below them. Not only that; Hay-sus de Costa was hanging on to the tow hitch, being dragged over the grass on his stomach, bawling in drunken excitement, and dressed only in a hessian sack. The VC’s eyes narrowed. “Bring me that boy” he said.

Spare the Rod and Spoil the Student

Ms Verwey, our art lecturer, was built like a dubiously gendered brick shithouse, part big-boned KGB buffalo dyke, part Afrikaans Maggie Thatcher. She was not to be trifled with. After our appalling second-year June exam results, she petitioned the VC to allow her to cane the “bloody lot” of us, “like we did in the ‘40s”. Her request was denied, so she vented her rage by screaming, kicking furniture about, and throwing the overhead projector round the lecture hall (this is true), while we watched in shocked, ashen silence.

During a calmer lecture about Post-Renaissance Rococo influence on the Pre-Raphaelites, our fine art lecture hall was besieged by a rambunctious intervarsity party of rowdy Hunter’s Gold-crazed Maritzburg varsity students, banging on the door and shouting obscenities. Verwey opened the door and walked off stage left. We heard a withering outburst, a pained Natal-accented yelp, then a terrible silence. Verwey walked back in, dusted off her hands, and calmly carried on the lecture.

From What I Do Remember

Due to an obscene amount of beer chased with First Watch whiskey, I remember only snatches of intervarsity weekends: Zimbos helicopter vomiting on the Kaif lawns; Stumbling through crunching foot-deep snowdrifts of empty beer cans; waking up in the rose gardens, festooned with my- or several others’- vomit; A stray pig with “UPE” daubed on it wandering into the rugby game, and as one the crowd of men and women UPE students rushing off the stands onto the Great Field to chase it, trampling the hessian sack-clad Hay-sus and Steve Patterson, who’d been heckling them from the touch line.

We all did some pretty depraved shit, but like Vegas; what happened in intervarsity stayed in intervarsity.

Sex

2009-02-08T10:08:00.024+02:00

I don’t have a hard-on at this moment, but at 18 I’d get one just brushing my teeth, folding my laundry, or most embarrassingly, during a crowded Dickens tutorial. Closing my eyes and thinking of Andrew Lloyd Webber usually sent it packing. The mere thought of sex drove me up the wall most waking moments in those years.

Multi-tasking
Frantically snogging like a bulldog eating porridge, stroking her hair with one hand, and feverishly trying (and failing) to unclasp the blasted bra with the other would have me weeping with frustration. I felt like an orangutan trying to play the violin.

The Bra is Your Enemy
Bra un-knotting was a proficiency badge they really should have had in Scouts when I was 15. After the the bra, dungarees were a sexual Gordian knot. Trying to peel off their rape-proof layers and countless buttons off Ilsa was like trying to ravish an onion. Laboriously un-lacing Doc Marten eight-ups was also almost as much of a passion-killer as feverishly trying to put on a condom.

i like my body when it is with your body
Undressing a girl for the first time, with trembling hands felt breathlessly sexy, scary, and heart thumpingly exhilarating as motorcycle speed. Seeing someone naked struck me dumb with wonder and tear-brimming gratitude.

"i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new"
- e.e. cummings

Things that Go Hump in the Night
Her: “If you love me you’ll wait”.
Me: “If you love me you won’t! Anyway, it isn’t premarital sex if we have no intention of getting married.”

[censored]

“Sex is like kicking Death in the arse while singing.”
- Charles Bukowski

Pillow Talk
I was never much good at pillow talk. I usually ended sex with a slap on her buttock and saying "Well done! Now back to the village with you!” This met with mixed responses.

Pregnancy Scares
In the early ‘90s, AIDS too abstract a threat for us white-bread middle-class types. The thought of telling your and her parents that she was knocked up was teeth-grinding-insomnia-stare-at-the-ceiling-all-night terrifying. In a particularly hot and bothered moment, Nadja said “Whoah! Isn’t this how you get pregnant?" I sighed, rolled off her, stared at the ceiling, and with a flash of inspiration, replied “Hey! Your mouth can’t get pregnant.”

Alternative Night

2009-02-02T19:38:00.018+02:00

Alternative night was Tuesdays at the Vic, what passes for a nightclub in Grahamstown, though none of the clubs I’ve seen since would want the Vic dating their daughter.

Juggling Mix Tapes
We played everything from blistering hardcore punk to waving, shoe-gazing indie. Most of the music was only available on swapped tapes. This made cueing and mixing songs a plate-spinning nightmare.

The night drew a motley crowd of cliques, from Goths, Metalheads and indie kids, each with their own favourite songs, and idiosyncratic dances. Indie kids tried to look cool, head-bangers moshed in packs. Only the metalheads and punks danced like no one was watching.

Whiskey in the Jar. Only Not.
As all the denizens went in varieties of narcotic malaise, alcohol took a back seat. Kenny (Satan, Saddam Hussein horrible owner of the Vic) would complain “We sold four beers and given out over 200 glasses of water! What the fuck?"

The Rotters

2009-02-02T17:26:00.018+02:00

“Let’s get wrrrrecked!” was the call to arms of Craig and Errol, two ropey, atrociously alcoholic felons who terrorised the African street lentilheads’ digs. If the Zimbos made your mother cry, the rotters would send her into a sobbing nervous breakdown. In two years, I never saw either of them without a drink (theirs or someone else’s). Their ethos can perhaps be best summed up in one of Craig’s favourite songs, which he sang to me on the African street roof, one wrrrecked afternoon:

“There's sweat on my finger tips

I got a belly full of beer shits

My head is too close to the wall.

There's blood in my underwear

I don't know how I got it there

I swear I'd bust open my head, should I fall.”

- The Wonder Stuff, A Great Drinker (1993)

Salad Valley Bush-dive

They were breath-takingly, brutally rude bastards to anyone unfortunate enough to be in their path. I myself paid a local thug R50 to beat them up the first night I met them. They’d made some eye-wateringly disparaging remarks about me in front of my new girlfriend’s father. Sadly, my designated assassin got drunk on the 50 rondt at the Spur, and bush-dived the salad bar before he was arrested. The rotters were left untouched, and instead drank themselves to unconsciousness on the African street lounge floor, blissfully ignorant of their intended violent fate. I never did get a refund.

Fish and Chips Bush-dive

The rotters were scarred with countless drinking injuries, constantly falling off, over, and into things. Craig got 20 stitches after falling on his prized new bottle of whiskey. All the way to the hospital he sobbed for his loved - and tragically lost - bottle. Then there’s the time he went down the rock slide at Mermaid Pools on his face. How we laughed. Errol passed out face-first in his fish and chips at a family meal. How his dad didn’t laugh.

Re-tox Parties

The rotters were ever trying – and failing – to give up the grog. A few days of sobriety were always rewarded with riotous re-tox parties that punished them and their livers like a roaring, brandy-fuelled Volkswagen Beetle crashing into a wall of burning rubbbish bins. These parties lasted for days, with the rotters taking turns for one to pass out while the other drank on, like a wrestling tag team.

The Glass of Water Pick-Up Line

Despite constantly reeking of cheap booze, and dirty unwashed hair that looked like rats had been fucking in it, Craig was remarkably successful with women, in those rare moments he wasn’t drooling, passed out and without the rudimentaries of bladder control. He invented the glass of water gambit, a girl-meets-boy master stroke by this Cola Cane Casanova, and a legend to this day.

Despite bulbous, manic eyes the size of tennis balls, a wide, leering mouth, and a Mr. Spock haircut, Errol pulled Shannon- so well done there.

What’s the Frequency Gwyneth? The Rotter Lexicon

Grog fever – What the drink-starved rotters would fall into thrall to after several hours without alcohol. Symptoms including screaming, cursing at all bystanders and recently previous friends, and downing whatever or whoever's drink was at hand.

Kickin’ it live – The boisterous, hopeful, pre-falling down phase. Just after Grog Fever, and before Showing them.

Showing them – Guzzling drink and drugs at a sprint, where more timid souls would fear to tread. Going out and getting “so drunk you’ll chunder on a bitch’s tits” (actual quote).

Cola Cane – The floor-sweepings of the Zimbabwean alcohol industry. Seven dollars got you a bottle of this violent blend of spirits and wine.

Pouncemania – Rotter feelings toward a winsome member of the fairer sex. Eg. “Fuck me! Shannon’s pounce-mania!”

A Big Fat Lezza - Any woman who's not pouncemania, or who rejects your advances.

Zimbos

2009-01-31T12:25:00.004+02:00

Zimbos drank harder, bush-dived further, vomited with aplomb- and that was just the women. The men had nicknames like Dombo, Skurra, and Rodders. They smoked Madison Red cigarettes that tasted like wood smoke, drank, puked, and generally did things that would make your mother cry.

ZimSoc Parties

Everyone I knew, South African and otherwise, was a member of ZimSoc. You could charge the membership to your student account, and that got you into their Great Hall parties half an hour early to get baboon-whipped on the free wine. The wine tasted like San antiseptic, but at that age we’d drink a bottle of Mrs Mcready’s Bruise Liniment™ if it had an alcohol content percent on the label. The wine did get you in the mood quicker than you were prepared for though. If you remember a ZimSoc party, you weren’t there.

ZimSoc’s resident DJs Gunther and Pete Loverdos of Cargo always played better music than RMR. ZimSoc parties was shotgun-beercan down-downs, stage-diving, and mayhem; AC/DCs’ Back in Black album to RMR’s Hunter’s Gold, Shoop Shoop dance, poncey Roxette razzles.

Intellectual Zimbos

At my Rhodes tenure’s end, I met a new kind of Zimbabwean, who didn’t conform to the vellie-wearing, boxer shorts stereotype. They still drank like Irish dockworkers, but also smoked enough dope to lay low an entire ashram of lentilheads, and adamantly referred to themselves as “Zimbabweans”, scorning the boorish “Rhodies” (Rhodesians). They had a gentle, soft-spoken refinement under their bohemian abandon. You’d find a Shakespeare anthology bookmarked with a bankie* on their bedside tables.

Red Hot Zimbo Love

The first night I met Giselé, all blonde 6’1” of her, she drank me under the table with a combination of sledge-hammering Zim cocktails, including the “Clan Special”, a beer mug of red wine chased with a glass of brandy. I have not the words. As I lost consciousness, she picked me up and fireman-lifted me the three blocks back to digs. I was in love.

So in love, in fact, that at the end of that year I took the long train from Alicedale to Harare, to her country. 18 hours later I stepped off the train at Harare, with its lush tree-lined streets, exotic shades and colours, and fell in love with the place at first sight. Giselé may have helped. She was waiting on the station platform. I hugged her, we kissed, and I was home.

“All seems beautiful to me,

I will toss a new gladness and roughness among you,”

- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1856)

*bankie. A South African unit of marijuana. Enough to make you and everyone reading this blog to miss today, tomorrow and come up somewhere three days from now, wondering what… the fuck?

Bottoms

2009-01-24T15:28:00.008+02:00

A ramshackle double story house on New street, Bottoms was two doors up from Horse’s vetkoek paleis opposite the Vic. It was 1994’s kept secret, a speakeasy, and an unlicensed shebeen for illicit after-hours drinking. Entrance was gained with a not-so-secret knock. You could get a shot of Mothers Shots there for 50c, several of which got you in the mood real quick.

Tear-Gas and Bullets

We kept a tear-gas grenade taped under the bar, just in case the crowd got too rambunctious. It was used only once, and turned out to have indelible green dye in it, which left for a crowd of red-eyed, sneezing, green patrons, who stayed dyed that tinge for days.

Another night, a careless Squonk had stashed his revolver behind the bar. A gurningly drunk Hay-sus de Costa snatched hold of it, swung it around amid the crowded bar, then fired a shot into the ceiling, narrowing missing Brain P asleep upstairs. Much shrieking ensued, and the party was moved into the garden.

Music ‘94

1994 was a sublime year for music: Counting Crows, Blur, The Breeders, Oasis, The Crash Test Dummies, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, The Cranberries, and so much more; but James’ Laid was the Bottom’s official anthem. Listening to it now takes me right back, to people sloshing drinks as they danced on the creaking wooden floors.

Parties

Beth’s 21st fancy dress party was a show stopper, with people dressed as Hannibal Lecter, to Martina Navratilova. You can see some photos of it here.

Kurt Cobain’s recent death inspired a Dead Celebrities party. The home-made free drink at the entrance was christened the “Kurt Cobain”: black sambuca, vodka, aniseed grains, gulped down out of a 12-guage shotgun shell. The Party was a roaring, dancing, vomiting success; so I’m told- I lost conscious embarrassingly early in the proceedings.

Most weekends we’d just chuck an amp and some tape decks on the lounge-sized dance floor, a few steps up from the bar. It was at one at those late year parties, that I first played Blur’s new song, Girls & Boys, which sent the whole place onto the crowded dance floor, pogo-ing up and down like pre-schoolers on a sugar rush. That, and Counting Crow’s Mr. Jones remained beloved party songs for that year.

Slumber Parties

Late late nights, where a handful of the denizens were too drunk to walk home, we’d cover the dance floor with mattresses and duvets from the attic, and the drunk casualties would pile on and sleep snugly in front of the fireplace til the morning after night before. Coffee and cigarettes were doled out, and the walking wounded would shuffle off up New Street.

An Anachronism

Bottoms could only have existed at that time and place. I’m surprised we didn’t burn it down during one of those crazy nights. We certainly did some lasting structural damage, to the house, and our minds.

Kenton

2009-01-17T15:05:00.007+02:00

Any hot Saturday, first year, 1990. Liam, Merve the Perla, The Fat Guy with the Beard, Slimer and I would pile towels, six packs and sunscreen into the U-Boat (Slimer the German’s 1964 Volvo) and head off down the cracked tar road through the pineapple fields to Kenton. Ray Ban wayfarers, the wind in our hair, and the irrepressibly bouncy, cheesy sound of the B52s in the tape deck. We were young, without a care, and a day at beach lay before us. Days like this, you got nostalgic for even as they were happening.

Shelley’s Cove

Park in the lot near the lagoon, grunt up the steep dune, through the milkwoods. Just as we neared collapse, breathless and knackered, we’d reach the top of the dune, hear the crash of the surf, and see one of the prettiest beaches in the world laid out below us, bracketed by a crescent cove of sun-bleached stone slopes.

Merve the Perla: Fuckwit Extraordinaire

Our first time at the beach, Merve the Perla - a Bsc. Major - had the bright idea of keeping the beers cold by burying them deep in the cool sand. A well was dug, the six-packs interred, and a stick marked the spot. Needless to say, after much gambolling in the waves, we returned to find the stick had vanished. Much frantic digging ensued; hole after hole; till the beach looked like a family of oversize rabbits had moved in. The beers are still there, somewhere.

U-Boat Speedo

While rest of us wore baggies, Slimer insisted on a grey Afrika Korps-issue speedo, that when mixed and matched with his pale skin and verdant body hair made for visually upsetting results. Coupled with the fact the he’d often stuff a rolled up rugby sock into the speedo, the ensemble gave him the air of a ‘70s porn star. He’d emerge from the waves with loaded lunchbox and the womenfolk would puzzle at this mysterious hirsute stranger bringing adventure, romance, and a hint of danger to their shores.

How the Bearded One Got his Name

On the way home, we’d cool off by jumping off the Kariega bridge, about a 13 metre drop into the icy high tide. We were all lined up at the bridge edge, waiting to jump, when a booze cruise boat hoved into view. “Jump!” they shouted. “You! The red-haired girl! Jump!”. So Tammy stepped off and plunged into the water. “You! The skinny one! Jump!” and I dutifully leapt. This carried on, til only one, let’s call him “Derek”, remained. “Uh… you! The… FAT GUY WITH THE BEARD! Jump, you bastard!” And thus, a nickname was born.

The Drive Home

They were good, golden days. We’d drive home lazily, sand grit sprinkled in our hair, saltwater on warm skin, squinting at the orange sundown on rolling hills stubbled with prickly pears. Hand out the window sill, sculling the cool breeze, smiling at a day well spent. I wish I’d spent more days there.

RAG

2009-01-16T07:56:00.007+02:00

March Madness

RAG was always doomed from the start. The weeks building up to it were days of chaos, a collective madness. The whole overexcited student body drank itself into a drooling lather; Union toilets were kicked in by some enterprising soul; the stoners smoked themselves into the bejesus belt; and the irascible lesbians mounted pitched street battles outside the Mr and Ms Fresher competition.

Walking Wounded

Come RAG morning, the students would struggle awake, shuffle off from whatever bush or rock they’d slept under on the night before, and join the broken parade, like a meandering column of British walking wounded fleeing the battle of Majuba. The RAG march was a deplorable sight, more a rolling shipwreck than a parade. I’ve seen TV footage of caravans of fleeing Congo refugees that step livelier and look more spruce.

Rhodes RAG Parade 1992. Somewhere on High Street.

Sausage Roll

The good folk of Grahamstown weren’t spared either. My friend Sausage awoke in a New Street gutter, clad only in his y-fronts, wrapped in a Zimbabwe flag, tight as a spring roll. Pinned tight, unable to get up, he slithered onto the road and began to roll towards campus. An old biddy in a Morris Minor appeared at the bottom of the street, tottering up the road, slow as a snail carrying heavy shopping. Sausage rolled into her side of the road. She tried to drive round him, but he rolled in front of her path, hollering obscenities that’s make a coloured snoek fisherman blush. After some back and forth rolling, the granny made her escape, doubtless off home to write an outraged letter to Grocotts Mail.

RAG was banned after that year.

Generation X

2009-01-09T07:20:00.018+02:00

Generation X came of age between 1991 and 1999. We’re the inbetweeners: book-ended by the baby boomers and the millennials. We're the last generation to hoard albums on vinyl, make mix tapes, read newspapers . . . the last generation to express any sort of resistance to corporate servitude. Xers are self-conscious, detached, sceptical, and questioning. Be it culture or chemistry, we’ve got a lot rattling around in our heads, sometimes maybe too much.

Over-educated

Most of us pepper our daily life with obscure references (obscure films, dead TV stars, high-brow literature, niche indie music, etc.) as a subliminal means of showcasing our education, connecting with kindred spirits, and disassociating from the world of mass culture. This shorthand is baffling to strangers, and too much like hard work for the Millennials.

“Her hair was totally 1950s Indiana Woolworth perfume clerk. But the dress was early ‘60s Aeroflot stewardess- you know- that really sad blue the Russians used before they all started wanting to buy Sonys and having Guy Laroche design their Politburo caps. And such make-up! Perfect ’70s Mary Quant, with these little PVC floral appliqué earrings that looked like antiskid bathtub stickers from a gay Hollywood tub circa 1956. She really caught the sadness- she was the hippest person there. Totally.”

- Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1993)

Under-employed

“McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low benefit, no-future job in the service sector.”

- Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1993)

Nadja repped for Rentokil, I worked as a photography assistant and waited tables at night, Hay-sus worked in a dive bar. Amid these God awful jobs, we dreamed of the of that first rung of the corporate ladder: the veal-fattening pen- those small, cramped office workstations built of grey wall partitions- named after the small pre-slaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.

Mid-Twenties Breakdown

This mind-numbing drudgery brought on my mid-twenties breakdown. I sunk into a period of mental collapse, probably caused by my inability to function outside of school or structured environments, coupled with a realization of my essential aloneness in the world. I just wanted to curl up in the garage with a bag of dog biscuits. Instead, I turned to drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol.

Live Fast, Die Young, Win Fabulous Prizes

“Is it worth the aggravation

To find yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for?

It's a crazy situation

But all I need are cigarettes and alcohol!“

- Oasis, Cigarettes & Alcohol (1994)

For five years after grad we partied hard, drank a fuckload of booze, and did enough drugs to fell a concrete elephant. Getting off your face several school nights in a row was fine; our dead-end jobs were so un-taxing, so dull that we could come home at five am, sleep til six, then shuffle to work and sit there numb and embalmed til home time. What cash we did earn were just fun vouchers for more good times.

It’s Better to Burn Out Than to Fade Away

In January 11, 1992, Nirvana's Nevermind album reached number one. Two years later Kurt Cobain shot himself. He wrote the Neil Young lyrics “It’s better to burn out, than to fade away” in his suicide note. Hearing the news, the world felt shittier, like we’d all lost something that day. A big piece of our innocence fell away, like a crumbling ice shelf plunging into the sea.

The Rise of the Millennials

“I'm losing my edge. The kids are coming up from behind.”

- LCD Soundsystem, Losing my Edge (2005)

Britney killed our generation. Everything changed with her arrival in 1999: The Xers' groovy, indie music-and-second-hand-store-style heyday was out; consumer hell was in.

The millennials, spawned during the last days of disco, speak with none of the doubt and scepticism that have marked - and - hampered Generation X. They just LOVE stuff. They love celebrities. They love technology. They love name brands. They love everything. They're happy to do whatever advertising tells them to do. So what if they can't manage to read anything longer than an instant message? If anything, it's an advantage. Because literacy leads to self-reflection and critical thinking, and self-reflection and critical thinking open the door to doubt and scepticism and stuff like that just gets in the way when you're trying to get ahead.

In a Cold World, You Need Your Friends to Keep You Warm

The clung-to myth that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts, usually in the form of our parents- doesn’t apply for most of us anymore. Friends are the new family now. The most precious thing we can give each other is love, kindness and understanding- mirrors for each other to show us how and where we're at.

“Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.”

- Kurt Vonnegut (1997)

Hangover

2009-01-08T12:34:00.005+02:00

Awake with a purple gasp on your Res bed, in last night’s clothes. Your heart’s beating like a fucked clock, and your nerves are shrieking like a xylophone being scraped with a fork. Try to focus, but thoughts misfire, plonk and plink like knives and forks being flushed down the toilet.

Headshrinker

Stumble to basin, slop water down mouth, trying to wash out the taste of ZimSoc wine. Lurchingly glimpse your face in the mirror. Not good. Your head has apparently been dried out and shrunken while sleeping. Lectures are out of the question. Just curl up foetal and ride out the trauma.

Denial

No no nooo. Someone or something is hammering your mind on an anvil with a bowling ball. Your mouth tastes filthy and dry as the floor of a parrot cage.

Anger

What. The. Fuck! Why do I do this to myself? Is that a vomit stain on my shoes? Why do these muscles hurt? Did I make out with anyone? Why is there a traffic cone in my bed?

Bargaining

Please make this stop. I’ll go to tomorrow’s dawnie. I’ll finish that Keats essay. I’ll give money to smallchangers.

Depression

Loser syndrome. A black mood arrives like a Smiths box set. I hate this room, my degree, this town, my life. I HATE everything. Except Mazoe and Grandpa headache pills. Aaah…

Acceptance

The painkillers are kicking in. You’re surfacing. Screw the bargaining, you’re not going to drink until… Wednesday.

Exams

2008-12-19T17:50:00.006+02:00

Being shot out of a circus cannon into a vat of starving elephant leeches; going over Niagara falls in a biscuit barrel; or packing fish in a remote Alaskan aircraft hanger - there are few places I’d less like to be than sitting in an exam, waiting to turn over my question paper. I still get nightmares about exams that wake me with a gasp, covered in cold sweat, my bowels turned to Nesquik.

Cramming

Exams were the come-down hangover after a year of giddy abandon. In the desperate last two weeks, we’d try gulp in all the knowledge that should have been seeping into our brains throughout the year- the mental equivalent of sucking the Encyclopaedia Britannica through a garden hose.

A year’s Art theory notes weighed in at about 4 stone. Trying to learn it all would be like trying to eat the phonebook, scrunched page by scrunched page, mouthful by mouthful. So, we learned spots: rote essays based on a specific questions- about as dicey as Russian roulette.

Lucky Charms

Fluffy toys were popular. There was a certain type of track-suited Pringle girl who’d bring the entire cast of Watership Down to exams, and line them on the desk like a mute row of Duracell bunny cheerleaders. We preferred rubbing The Fat Guy with the Beard’s beer belly before we left the African Street digs. This brought mixed results.

Into the Breech

An exam was like running a marathon in longhand. Four essays in three hours, that would leave your brain like a squeezed out toothpaste tube, and your writing hand cramped into a claw.

I remember sitting in Alec Mullins Hall, like a massive typing pool of inmates, an assembly line of higher learning.

Grief

Exams are pretty much like any other life trauma:

Denial: (Turning question sheet over and over) “Fucking hell! Surely there’s one question I studied up on?”

Anger: “Bastards! Who the fuck reads an entire Nadine Gordimer?”

Bargaining: “Okay, maybe I should just answer one essay question. I’ll crack it, and they’ll overlook the three blank ones.”

Regret: “Maybe not reading the Nadine Gordimer wasn’t such a hot idea”.

Acceptance: “Fuck it, I know there’s an hour left, but I’m handing in this piece of shit and getting out of here. I need a cigarette, and one or twenty Black Labels.”.

The Vic

2008-12-18T16:17:00.005+02:00

A lumpy pavement walk down from the Union, (the bumps more or less jarring according to how much Taverna Rouge had been gagged down at the Union) the Vic skulked like an inevitable full stop on the end of every evening.

It’s Raining Sweat

With hindsight; the Vic was a dank armpit of a place, the Quasimodo of dive bars. I recall a packed summer night early in second year, where the sweat condensated on the ceiling in dripping patches and rained down on us. But, it was the only place we had. When life gives you lemons, drink enough alcohol to fell a concrete elephant (or something like that). So much for drinking the girls pretty, we drank the Vic cool.

War Wounds

A common step in dating someone was showing each other your drinking injury scars sustained in wild, reeling Vic nights. Common accidents included: stage-diving off the table you were dancing on (hello Nadja?); somersaulting down the stairs at boaters (Neil, I know you’re reading this); and very occasionally, breaking your ankle on the step at the entrance (yes, you Emily). Friends rushed to administer first aid, usually a whiskey, and slurring reassurances.

Vomitorium

By 11 o’clock the mens’ toilets looked like a beer slaughter house. Wall-to-wall vomit, splattered toilets , and malcontented queues for the loos, with always some lurching enterprising spirit leaning against the wall and pissing in the sink. All in all a sight to make even the most slovenly maggot gag.

DO YOU COME HERE OFTEN?!!

Trying to pick someone up amid the Vic dance floor riot was like trying to steal a wheel from a moving car. Chatting up someone amid the RMR house music carpeting bombing of was futile as reciting poetry in a wind tunnel. Better to lay down your smooth Nick Gray moves in the relative calm of Boaters, then ask said paramour to dance.

Would You Like to Come Back to Mine for Coffee?

In other words “Let’s go home and do naughty things to each other”. The coffee was mainly just a ceremonial observance to form. The lunge and resultant snog was usually consummated before the kettle had boiled, and the Gordian knot of the bra strap pawed at before the “Chicks Dig It” mix tape was finished.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Hill Dweller

Even if you were lucky enough to get the coffee green light, the long walk from the Vic back to Kimberley Hall on the hill was a bigger passion-killer than Andrew Lloyd Webber. Most girls would say “Oh, you’re on the Hill? Uh, goodnight”, leaving me to walk home in a lather of aggrieved sexual agitation, railing to the sky at my res allocation. The trick was to break the walk into passionate pit stops: some electric eel tongue action against a New Street wall; a leafy tumble in the Drama department bushes; some hot and botheredness near Kotch creek; then throw her over your shoulder and do a running fireman lift to the steps of the Cullen Bowles quad. If you got her that far, you’d better pretty much propose marriage on the spot.

Shake Your Money Maker

By the time I got to the Vic, the music was, to my drunk ears, somewhat vague and removed, like a couple next door fighting with power tools. I do remember some anthems though. AC/DC’s Thunderstruck was guaranteed to get the sweat flying, The B52s’ Love Shack would have Stevie and I running whooping on to the floor and doing the spastic weather girl. Groove is in the Heart by Dee-lite would every time convince me (erroneously) I could dance like a black woman.

The Vic. If you weren’t there you’ll never know.

McJob

2008-12-10T13:21:00.004+02:00

“McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low benefit, no-future job in the service sector.”

- Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1993)

As the last days of varsity approached, and the real world juggernauted into view, I was terrified. I felt the trepidation of a young virgin bride, cowering behind the sheets, dreading being roughly rogered for the first time.

Shotguns and Milk Stout

My first post-Rhodes job was as a cowhand in the remote hills of Zululand. I was given a shotgun, a 4x4, and told to ferry cows from farm to farm. The mountainous roads were notional at best, and after a particularly heavy Natal rainstorm, just getting to work through the mud was a sliding, churning, get-out-and-dig affair. It was a glorious job, but the danger, my lack of Zulu, and aversion to milk stout ended it all too soon.

Smirnoff Tongue

Job two was as a photographer’s assistant in a studio in downtown Cape Town. The hours were long, work exhausting and I worked for free. Such is the norm when you’re breaking into a photography career. A low point was spending hours setting up a Smirnoff vodka shoot, and getting the lighting on the bottle just so, that we daren’t move it a hair. The vodka looked misty in the studio light, so we had to get it out, without upsetting our meticulous display. Short story: I had to drill a hole in the bottle top, suck out the vodka with a straw, mouthful by mouthful, and spit it into a bucket. Not the nicest thing when you’re already labouring under a Guiness hang over. I threw up four times, my tongue went white, and I couldn’t taste anything for days. We did get the shot though.

Would You Like Fries with That, Motherfucker?

To pay for beer, Styvies and rent, I got job three at a pizzeria in Cape Town, after the day’s work at the studio. Being forced to be obsequious to pita bread munching proles knocked the stuffing out of any “but I’ve got a degree” arrogance. The only job satisfaction was using a stashed magnet to blank the credit cards of unsuspecting customers who didn’t leave a tip on their bill.

These Days

I slowly discovered that finding a job I liked was a process of trying things I’d quickly realise I didn’t want to do, and slowly gravitating to what I did. I generally like my work now, it lets me be creative, and the good projects do get me out of bed early sometimes.

Student Bands

2008-11-27T11:02:00.004+02:00

The Five Stages of Drunkenness:

One: Your face gets a bit numb. A feeling of general feeling of bonhomie begins.

Two: You’re the funniest, handsomest person in the room, and you can dance like a black woman.

Three: You lose your memory. This is Nature’s way of preserving self-respect.

Four: Name-throwing. The limbs move, the mouth talks, but Mr. Brain has long since left the building. Activities range from exuberant bush-diving, to dronk vedriet crying jags.

Five: You pass out, comatose. Your brain flat-lines, and you enter the realms of death.

Never, ever listen to a student band at any level below four.

Yo-yo-Knickered Groupies

While there were one or two dedicated musos, bands were formed mainly to pose and get chicks. There’s a type of impressionable female BA student, who finds a guitar and a copy of Catcher in the Rye in a dingy Res room a sign of sensitivity. They were generally more pliant in the presence of said objects.

Acoustic Wall of Mud

Proclaiming your musical influences was a far weightier issue than actual skill at any given instrument. At the mixing desk, drowned vocals, blunted guitars and muffled drums were mangled into a throbbing aural porridge, an acoustic wall of mud. Impossible to dance to, and unbearable at any drunken stage below level four.

Bands I Remember

New Dawn, a rasping, wailing band that went through countless incarnations over nine years, in that time going through roughly 58 band members. They played muddy Chris Rea covers, and incoherent UB40 songs. It’d be easier to dance to a didgeridoo accompanied by the sound of knives and forks being flushed down the toilet.

Loomer were precociously good. But they had just one song, the only lyrics being “Over and over, roll me in clover” or some such, repeated by the winsome, angel-voiced lead singer.

Fireside Jams

A Sunday night open-mike session at the Union, where anybody with anything from a guitar to a tambourine could climb onstage and have a bash. The fireside jams were a great opportunity to watch your friends play, and drink them melodic. In front of the band, earnest groupies would leap about like yanked string puppets, dancing to the undanceable.

There are many things I miss about varsity, but the vast majority of student bands are not among them.

Vomiting Stories: The Maltese Wager

2008-11-23T19:49:00.003+02:00

Your saliva’s working overtime; the heaves are rolling from the pit of your stomach, and you’re gulping like a goldfish on hot tarmac. That last drink was just one too many. It and dinner are about to stage a comeback. All this, and nary a maltese poodle to be found, for love nor money.

Liam and I had a running bet: first person to vomit on a maltese poodle wins a case of Black Label. The vom had to be hands-free: you couldn’t hold it or anything, just had to take it by surprise and PHROOOOOOOAUUUGH! There had to be at least one eye-witness, and the prize was doubled if the moment was captured on film.

There were a couple of close calls, including me chasing a yapping maltese through several Pietermaritzburg hedges during intervarsity. I pursued it for about four blocks before collapsing wheezing to all fours and chundering in a rhododendron bush.

The prize remains unclaimed.

Before Email

2008-11-21T11:56:00.005+02:00

Letters were analog to email’s digital. Something real, something you could hold in your hand, knowing the writer had held it too, days or weeks ago, somewhere far away.

They seem quaint as vinyl records and polaroids now, but letters were the everyday currency we used to stay in touch. They to’d and fro’d like paper carrier pigeons from far off places, with exotic stamps and strange post codes.

Handwriting is unique as the whorls of a finger print. Reading someone’s for the first time is like slotting a new piece into the jigsaw puzzle.

I’m sure your letter-writing mind works at a deeper, more continuous wavelength than the staccato blips of email brain. Organic flow versus the clacks of an abacus. Alone with longhand and without the spell check, letters take more effort and application.

Writing things down always felt more profound than typing it out on a word processor. Reading the words “I love you” in ink on paper rung in my chest like a hundred church bells. I’ve got some letters I’ve read over and over, like answered prayers.

Envelopes could hold glossy, tactile photographs, that you could raise to your face and squint at, a hand-labelled mix tape, or just sketches in the margin.

Let’s face it, no one ever sighed clasped an email to their chest. Email’s like reading a fucking TV screen. Letters are a document, not morse code of ones and zeros.

I miss letters. These days you just get bills and junk mail.

The Oppie Cookbook

2008-11-18T09:10:00.006+02:00

I arrived in 67A African Street with a car boot sale of implements, and a dog-eared 1932 hardback copy of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.

Y-Fronts

Ollie always fried breakfast dressed only in his in his y-fronts. A singularly unedifying sight. We’d wake to the sound of him yelping as flying drops of hot fat spat from the pan onto his naked skin.

Power Drill Pancakes

Slimer tried to whisk waffle mix with a fork sellotaped to a power drill. He let fly, there was screaming whirring, like the sound of a bucket of cutlery being thrown into a jet engine, and Slimer and the kitchen were claymored with goop.

Exploding Pressure Cookers

We had a squat, furious pressure cooker that turned anything- meat, pasta, or veg- into the consistency of runny paper mache in seconds. It would hiss and shake worryingly, occasionally exploding and projectile-vomiting ratatouille onto the ceiling.

Food Parcel Riots

Worried parents sent food drops, that were quickly hidden, lest the digs fight over them like famished Somalis attacking a food truck.

Francis always got great parcels from her Sandton folks. Chocolate, crunchies, tinned ham and what not. I phoned my hippie Howick mother and demanded same. A few days, a joyless brown paper parcel arrived, containing some trays, a bag of alfalfa seed, and “Make Your Own Bean Sprouts at Home” instructions. Francis still teases me about that.

Snap, Crackle, Pop: Food and Marijuana

After some reckless trial and error on the guinea pigs (Francis and me), Slimer perfected Rice Crispie dope biscuits that would render you a giggling mess, then leave you slumped dumb in the corner of the Union, peering through slitted eyes like a freshly-shelled tortoise and nodding somnolently.

During a boisterously stoned Pictionary game on George Street, Aimee made us peanut butter on toast, which went down a dope-dry mouth like sawdust in the Sahara. Conversation was silenced for an hour by the sound of mealy-mouthed, desperate chewing.

Jim and Anne made date-rape-drug-strength marijuana snackwiches in Kenton, with patchy results. Jim surfed the couch, hung ten for a few seconds then wiped out. Anne, Sera, and The Fat Guy with the Beard wandered off to the beach, and were last seen zig-zagging towards Diaz Cross.

The Lesbian Factory

2008-11-17T08:34:00.006+02:00

No One Gets Out Of Here Straight

Prince Alfred Res was a lesbian assembly line, straight girls went in, and newly minted-lesbians were trotted out, like phalanxes of militant marching lego men. Scorning makeup, they dressed in Doc Marten 12-ups, leggings, and sweatshirts shapeless as mielie sacks that left a boggling amount to the imagination. They roamed in packs, listened to Nine Inch Nails,and wore their hearts on strident placards.

Riot Grrrls

Lesbian Society extra-mural activities included picketing the Vic whenever the first year men had a stripper in, and rioting outside the Mr and Miss Fresher competition. They were loud, proud, and in your face. Being gay in the early ’90s was much more of an issue than it is today.

I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It

To me, lesbians were a closed book, a secret club more opaque than the freemasons. They claimed the sexual high ground, saying that the gusset-typing finger sutra of lesbian sex made our scorned straight bump-and-grind look like trying to pick a lock with a 12-pound hammer. They seemed to know impossibly complex Sapphic card tricks, while I still found the bra strap a Gordian knot. My early ham-fisted attempts at female arousal felt like trying to play twister colour-blind.

Handbags at Dawn

Worlds collided when boorish elements of the Rhodes First XV, messed with three lipstick lezzas and Dolph the uber-dyke outside the Graham. The Rhodes forward pack was happily thrashed to a pulp, and were last seen retreating em masse to the safety of Botha Res.

Have Your Cake and Shag it Too

A common habit of the winsome pajama-clad denizens of St Mary’s Hall, bisexuality was apparently the best of both worlds: you could have your cake and fuck it. To my provincial mindset, it seemed a bizarre feat of sexual fence-sitting, like kicking with either foot. I had a bi girlfriend for a time, and often felt that a sort of Jekyll and Hyde game was being played in the laboratory of her disorientated longings.

I made some good lesbian friends at Rhodes. They played mean pool, drank black label quarts, and had cool music taste. Their friendship was open and honest: unfettered by the minefield that sometimes occasioned straight girl friendships. I liked them. They rule.

Photos

2008-11-13T18:26:00.004+02:00

For those of you Facebook, you can view a bunch of photos from '90 - '94 here.

'Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.'

- Kurt Vonnegut

Burgled and Ransacked

2008-11-13T11:22:00.002+02:00

A quiet Thursday night at the Vic. A policeman was going round, asking “Does anyone here live in 67A African street?” After coming up zero on a quick mental inventory of any contraband lying around at home, John nervously stepped forward and said “Uh, yes, I do”. “I’ve afraid I’ve got some bad news”, said the cop. “Your house has been broken into and ransacked. Please come with us”.

Ransacked!

John pushed open the ajar kitchen door, and peered in. “Can you see if anything’s missing?”Asked the cop as he followed him in. “Uh… no, not that I can see”, John replied. “But look at this place! Its been ransacked!” Said the cop, in with rising outrage.

“Um… no, not really” replied John, “We live like this”.

The Poetry Wall

2008-11-11T17:07:00.004+02:00

In the foyer of the English department was a large noticeboard where students could pin up their poems and musings, in a collage of careless scribblings on paper and more earnest typed pages that took themselves far more seriously. Roughly 99.8% were rubbish. Most sensitive poetic souls (wisely) published their work unsigned, as most poems were covered over in scathing comments, palimpsests of abuse.

Pennies in the Dross

The nice ones would catch your gaze like a bright penny in the grass. They’d pull you in for a moment, into their world of trenchant lines, or transporting paragraphs. Dave Fair's stand out in memory. I recognised his handwriting on some great little anonymous poems that’d pull you right in. I can’t recall any to repeat here, but I do remember an ending I liked:

“… and always

the wall pushes me

back into the sea,

where i was mad.”

Well, I thought it was pretty deep at the time.

Found Genius?

I found some of my first year poems the other day, in an old box of letters, photos, and keepsakes. Excited, I scanned the pages for transporting evocations of distant afternoons, campus perves freeze-framed in polaroids of ink, or just the roiling throes of the melodrama of my 19 years, seen from the mast I’d lashed myself to.

Dog Vomit Omelette

No such luck. Page after page was indecipherable, ham-fistedly scribbled dross. In my earnest attempts at a pastiche of Smiths’ lyrics, Bob Dylan, and T.S. Eliot, I’d created a dog vomit omelette of trite shite. I showed my ‘work’ to Dave Fair once (and only once). He hmmmed through a few of them, and with an eventual, defeated sigh, he said, “That line there" (somewhere in 16 pages of foolscap) "has got…something. Needs work though".

Tuesday Night Tequila Special

2008-11-04T22:30:00.006+02:00

“Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins” –Tom Robbins.

From Ego to Id in Ten Shots

Tuesday night, at Boaters, above the Vic. One Rand a tequila. Not great tequila, more akin to aviation fuel than agave. 21 bucks got us a full tray, seven each for Noah, Jim, and me. A good start to an evening unfettered by the constricts of social mores, and later, non-verbal self-expression.

No Hand Rail

Unlike beer, tequila doesn’t hold your hand in the descent into drunkenness. It’s more an uncovered man-hole plummet down the rabbit hole.

After we lost count of the shots downed, memory loss kicked in; nature’s way of preserving self-respect. The evening was later stitched together by eye-witness accounts.

Mattress Kid

Noah stripped down to his underpants, strapped a mattress to his back and for a few glorious hours became ‘Mattress Kid!” superhero to the tired, sleepy, or those just needing a lie-down. He leapt off the Africa St roof and ended his evening asleep in the bougainvillea.

Jim’s Iwo Jima

Jim was last seen bush-diving off the one-storey parking lot, an empty tequila bottle in each fist, screaming like a hand grenade-toting US marine charging a Japanese machine gun nest.

Get Your Wingwang Out

I was more demure. I merely stripped off all my clothes in the middle of a digs party and ran back home, with Gisele my girlfriend desperately chasing me down the street with a pair of shorts. I crashed through the neighbouring lentilheads’ digs front door, and chased Claire (a dormouse, kumbaya guitar type of a girl) round the lounge, waving my wingwang at her, shouting “Mufasa!” as she cowered behind the chaise longue. The enjoyable boisterousness was bluntly ended when Gisele dive-tackled me.

The San

2008-11-03T09:55:00.007+02:00

Policed by doughy matrons, sexless as nuns, who seemed to have been in nursing since the Crimean War, the Rhodes San (Sanatorium) had a whiff of the asylum about it; that, and a lingering smell of iodine.

Iodine, a Wonder Drug Since 1897

You’d sit down, ramble about your symptoms, they’d listen absently, then vice your mouth open with their strong pudgy fingers and paint your throat with foul-tasting iodine. No discussion. You could have a stomach bug, flu, or a broken arm, whatever- open wide and out with the iodine.

Bubonic Plague

Any hapless student who wandered in with a mild cough was subjected to enough projected hypochondria to overcrowd Settlers Hospital. Routine res food poisoning would be upgraded to bubonic plague or consumption in one short, adamant, misdiagnosis.

Thermometers at Dawn

Being bedridden in San was not a pleasant internment. At six a.m. every morning, thermometers would be thrust into the inmates’ still yawning mouths. Temperatures would be taken, and throats re-painted with iodine. After three days of this, I was a broken man. The only thing that kept me sane was my girlfriend Nadja, who’d talk to me through the window bars, and slip me illicit cigarettes.

Cough Medicine and Black Label

In second year some bright spark discovered that if you downed a bottle of San cough mixture and chased it with Black Label you got a giddying, rushing buzz. In that month, the San dispensed 500 bottles of cough mixture, before they became suspicious and changed it to a less gratifying brand.

Post-Wank Guilt

2008-11-02T17:39:00.006+02:00

Do not be flustered by your English tut perve sitting across from you in the Keats tutorial. She has no way of knowing you spent the previous night furiously interfering with yourself with her in mind.

Inter-Res Rugby

2008-11-01T09:45:00.005+02:00

Softball Rejects

Every Sunday, the most able-bodied survivors of Saturday night would be press-ganged into the Res Rugby XV. A shuffling, alcoholic, bookish lot; Cullen Bowles men were not gladiators of the sports field. On Sunday morning after a night of Stuyvies and Black Label, our team looked pale and asthmatic as those spotty kids you’d pick last for a school softball team.

Somali Food Riot

As soon as the ball was kicked off, any thought of formation was abandoned in a free-for-all scramble for the ball, like a scrimmage of shrieking Somalis fighting over a bag of maize meal. Someone would emerge from the ruck, and sprint off like Seabiscuit. The cheering from the stands soon faltered to an appalled hush as after a few yards the runner overheated, dropped the ball, and vomited the excesses of Saturday night. Watching all this as a passive observer was funnier than a moped collision.

War in the Congo, Apparently

Half-time oranges were shunned, and cigarettes and beer brought out to the team. Come the second half, our team spread out over the field, and any contact with the ball was avoided like a third-world country civil war: you knew it was bad and all, but you didn’t really want to get involved. The bemused opposition ran through largely unmolested, for try after try after try.

Full Time

The team (those who could walk) shuffled back to res, to the consolation of late afternoon tea, and perhaps a rousing Sunday night ‘western’* on the common room TV.

* Pornographic film

Masturbation is Not a Victimless Crime

2008-10-31T15:21:00.003+02:00

Sometime in 2nd year The Fat Guy with the Beard nicked a blank Rhodes University letterhead from Admin. He scanned the logo into his computer and soon we had a realistic, official Rhodes letter we could write whatever we liked on.

Unbecoming Behaviour

Our first letter was to the much loathed Justin Kretschmar:

10. November 1991

Rhodes University

Grahamstown

6140

To Justin Kretschmar (Student number 691K2365),

Our laundry staff have complained repeatedly about which appear to be on closer examination, semen stains on your bed sheets.

As you may or may not know, masturbation is a finable offence, and hardly behaviour we consider becoming of a Rhodes University student. Consider this your final warning, and please desist immediately.

If you have any queries, please contact Gwen Shaw, laundry department head, at block B, Jan Smuts Hall.

Yours sincerely

Derek Henderson

Vice Chancellor

Kretschmar bought it hook, line and sinker. “How do they KNOW?” he screamed at his best mate Keith.

How we laughed.

Experiments in Electricity

2008-10-30T17:54:00.001+02:00

If you heated up our African St oven to 180, then grabbed the metal door handle, it would bite you with an electric shock that buzzed your fillings loose, and zapped your whole body into break-dancing jelly. Playing with this was way better than studying for the November exams. We soon discovered that if you held hands, the shock could pass through several people.

I came home once from a prac exam to find our digs and our hippie neighbours, the lentilheads, all standing in a circle in the kitchen, hands tightly held in a human chain. Slimer, the first in the circuit, grabbed the stove handle, and everyone yelped and did the funky chicken, in a sort a sort of twitching, sparking Van der Graaf conga. This entertained us for weeks.

What Were Your Best Songs of '90 to '94?

2008-10-29T19:41:00.002+02:00

Here are some of mine, from the cool to the cringe-worthy. Let me know yours.

Depending on your response, the final compilation will be put up for download here.

1990

AC/DC – Thunderstruck

Aerosmith - Janie’s got a Gun

Alannah Miles – Black Velvet

Dee-Lite – Groove is in the Heart

Del Amitri - Nothing ever happens

Depeche Mode – Policy of Truth

Depeche Mode – Waiting for the Night

The House of Love - Beatles and The Stones

The Human League - Soundtrack to a Generation

Lightning Seeds – Pure

Lloyd Cole – No Blue Skies

Love and Rockets - Kundalini Express

Metallica – Enter Sandman

Sinead O' Connor - Nothing Compares to You

The Stone Roses - I Wanna Be Adored

Tears For Fears - Advice For the Young at Heart

Technotronic – Move This

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers - Free Fallin'

The Wonder Stuff - The Size of a Cow

1991

AC/DC – Money Talks

Angelo Badalamenti - Twin Peaks Theme

Blur - She's So High

Chris Isaak – Wicked Game

Electronic - Get the Message

EMF – Unbelievable

The House Of Love – Christine

James – Sit Down

Jane's Addiction - Been Caught Stealing

The La's - There She Goes

Love and Rockets - No Big Deal

Martika - Love...Thy Will Be Done

MC Hammer - You Can't Touch This

Pixies – Where is My Mind?

Pixies - Monkey Gone to Heaven

R.E.M. - Losing My Religion

Seal – Crazy

Sting – All This Time

Suede - Metal Mickey

U2 - The Fly

U2 – One

Vanilla Ice – Ice, Ice Baby

World Party – Put the Message in the Box

1992

The Beautiful South - You Play Glockenspiel, I'll Play Drums

Björk - Human Behaviour

Blind Melon – No Rain

The Cure - Friday I'm in Love

Faith No More – Epic

Faith No More – Midlife Crisis

Guns n Roses – November Rain

L7 - Pretend We're Dead

Lloyd Cole - She's A Girl And I'm A Man

Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit

Pixies - The Happening

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under The Bridge

R.E.M. - The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite

Right Said Fred - I'm Too Sexy

Shakespear's Sister – Stay

Soup Dragons – I’m Free

Spin Doctors - Little Miss Can't Be Wrong

Stereo MC's – Connected

Tori Amos – Crucify

Ugly Kid Joe - Everything About You

Violent Femmes - American Music

1993

Arrested Development – Mr Wendel

Buffalo Tom – Tailights Fade

Duran Duran - Ordinary World

Morrissey - The National Front Disco

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Where The Wild Roses Grow

Nine Inch Nails - Closer

Nirvana - Dumb

Pearl Jame - Jeremy

Pulp - Do You Remember The First Time?

R.E.M. – Nightswimming

Radiohead - Creep

Soul Asylum - Runaway Train

The Stone Roses - Fools Gold

Sugar - A Good Idea

Suzanne Vega - Blood Makes Noise

Toad The Wet Sprocket – Walk on the Ocean

U2 - Numb

U2 - Stay (Faraway So Close)

Violent Femmes - I Held Her In My Arms

World Party - Is It Like Today?

1994

Beck – Loser

Blur – Girls and Boys

The Breeders – Divine Hammer

Bruce Springsteen - Streets of philadelphia

Buffalo Tom – Soda Jerk

Counting Crows – Mr. Jones

The Cranberries – Linger

Crash Test Dummies - mmm mmm mmm mmm

Crash Test Dummies - Swimming in Your Ocean

Crowded House - Distant Sun

Cypress Hill - Insane In The Brain

Deep Forest - Sweet Lullaby

Enigma - Return To Innocence

Guns 'n Roses – Estranged

INXS – Beautiful Girl

James – Laid

Jamiroquai – Too Young to Die

Lloyde Cole -So You'd Like To Save The World

Oasis – Cigarettes and Alcohol

Oasis - Supersonic

Pearl Jam - Rearviewmirror

R.E.M. - What's The Frequency Kenneth?

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Soul To Squeeze

Revolting Cocks - Do You Think I'm Sexy?

Sheryl Crow – Leaving Las Vegas

Smashing Pumpkins – Today

Stone Temple Pilots – Plush

Tears for Fears - Break It Down Again

Urban Cookie Collective – Feels Like Heaven

Uncle Ron and e.e. cummings

2008-10-27T12:05:00.003+02:00

Ron Hall, or Uncle Ron, was my favourite English professor. Short, avuncular, and smiling, he had the twinkly sort of face that made you just want to pinch his cheeks. I went to his tuts two years’ running, and those whimsical, lyrical sessions in his safe, cosy study were one of the few tutorials I actually looked forward to.

Every Wednesday, at the after lunch English lecture, he’d read poems that students had recommended. The first one I recall was e.e. cumming’s “somewhere i have never travelled”, early on in first year. A fiftysomething husband, married for what then seemed an impossible number of years, he read what he called “this lovely little love poem” with such tenderness and timbre that at that green age, on that afternoon, I had a stirring of the idea of love that could span mellowed decades, not callow months.

somewhere i have never travelled

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

- e.e. cummings (1926)

Kaif

2008-10-27T11:20:00.004+02:00

A non-alcoholic version of The Union, Kaif was a between lectures (or avoid lectures altogether) way station. Somewhere you and your friends could nurse hangovers, sip a chocolate Sterie Stumpie, and surreptitiously watch your campus perves come and go.

RMR

Kaif was Rhodes Music Radio’s finest hour. Their daytime DJ’s filled the room with well-loved end of the ‘80s stuff like Tears for Fears, The Cure, The Human League; new ‘90s bands like the Stone Roses, Charlatans, R.E.M.; and loads of other familiar songs we had on the brain and on mix tapes back home in res. Four I remember being played to death in 1991 were Enigma “Sadness”; Seal’s “Crazy”; “All This Time” by Sting; and Martika’s one hit wonder “Love… Thy Will Be Done”. Hearing any of them today takes me right back to the pine wood booths, green topped tables, and the Great Field in the background.

I Never Lose At Ludo

A notice board on the wall carried various handwritten ads, and became the battleground of a libellous poster war between Dave Fair and Nick Gray. Dave’s opening salvo was a handmade A3 poster with the headline “I NEVER Lose at Ludo”. It carried on: “Yes! I, Nick Gray, will teach you the secrets of the Ludo Masters. Never lose at Ludo again! Contact Nick, at Piet Retief, Room 304 for REAL results.” Nick fired back with “The Smiths’ memorabilia and CDs on sale. Everything must go. Room 207, Piet Retief Res, day or night.” Dave won in the end.

Photocopy and Pass!

The photocopy machine in Kaif was the hardest working in the world. Every June and November lax students would queue up with towering piles of borrowed notes, hoping to photocopy all the lectures they’d missed, and cram their way through exams. Miraculously enough, this approach usually worked, leading to more missed lectures and more time lounging in Kaif.

Fuck McDonalds

A Kaif bacon burger and Crème Soda would stop a hangover at 20 paces, and a pack of Stuyvie Reds cost just R1.40. Good value.

His Majesty's and The Odeon

2008-10-26T21:56:00.001+02:00

His Majesty's

The only cinema in South Africa that you could smoke in. It must have been a hectic fire risk. It did eventually burn down, but I suspect the owner Sonny Sixfingers torched the place as an insurance scam.

As Grahamstown was the end of the line of the movie circuit, the reels had been spliced and repaired over and over by the time we saw them, so often movies we’d seen the whole of elsewhere on holiday would have huge gaps left out of them.

Best Movie watched at HM: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. With Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio at their all-time best, it's a movie anchored in that time and place. So funny, sad, and redeeming. I still cry like a schoolgirl at the end, everytime I watch it.

The Odeon

Very run down, very ’40s. I always imagined people there during The War standing to sing God Save the King before the feature started. The chairs were fantastically uncomfortable, stuffed with what felt like high heels and horse hair. Luckily you could bring pillows and duvets, and bunk down for the Tuesday night R5 double feature.

Best Movie watched there: Seeing Clockwork Orange for the first time, stoned. The celluloid kept overheating and catching fire, melting the picture to a mushrooming ball of blinding white. They’d put out the fire, tape up the reel and carry on, until it overheated again. It definitely added a certain something or other to the whole mind-blowing experience.

The cinemas were both mouldy, manky, with lots of surfaces sticky to the touch, but they showed an eclectic mixed bag of the movies we wanted to see - milestones that shaped our burgeoning view of the world - and technicoloured our memories.

Stoned

2008-10-23T17:49:00.003+02:00

"Out here on the perimeter there are no stars, out here we is stoned, immaculate." – The Doors (1968)

Brickies
Orientation week. We’d driven to Brickies, a deserted Victorian brickyard punctuated by impossibly high, stolid red brick towers, that in the moonlight soared tall and black overhead like Blake’s ‘dark, satanic mills’.

One hit and the violin of my thoughts segued to a syrupy base cello. I could feel the trees breathing, and dimly hear the moon singing one clear lonely note. I lay back at the base of a tower, and my gaze slid up its dark vertical and into the sky. I blipped like a light bulb and passed out.

Grey Dam
After every Fridays after lunch, the art class would traipse to Grey Dam with sketchpads, box wine, and enough dope to fell a small concrete elephant. Afternoons were lost in a psychedelic haze of warm sunshine, clouds of marijuana smoke, and cheap red wine. Desultory, frittering attempts at sketching were attempted, as we giggled and sketched charcoal pencil polaroids of each other. Sundowns gave way to skinny-dipping and the munchies, at which we’d comb the campus dining halls for food like bands of foraging gypsies.

Losing My Virginity
I lost my virginity stoned, to T, one night after a Grey Dam Friday. I’d been crazy about her for months, and went crossed-eyed with grinning delight when she kissed me. Being stoned took away the awkwardness and left everything brilliant and fantastic. To this day, the smell of dope smoke in tousled long hair remains a swooningly strong aphrodisiac.

Res Balls

2008-10-21T08:16:00.002+02:00

Rhodes balls were an exciting opportunity to dress up, see all the other bright young things, and get shit-faced in formal clothes.

Free Stuff

Complimentary Winston cigarettes on every table ( the Surgeon General’s Warning was years away), free Overmeer box wine, which was somewhere up the food chain from ZimSoc wine, which would have you stripping paint if you licked a wall. Overmeer was drunk by crusty art students at Grey Dam, which is all you need to know about it, really.

Overmeer Nemisis

Lee, for some misguided reason in the skewed hamster wheel of her female mind, was passingly keen on me on me in first year. She invited me to the Drostdy Hall Ball. I liked her, but not in that way, but dutifully I arrived at her Res on the night to escort her. Lee came down, looking winsome in a satin blue dress. We arrived and sat down in the Great Hall, which was done up in some ham-fisted Andrew Lloyd-one-thought-of-him-and-instant-erectile-dysfunction-Webber theme. We chit chatted enjoyably for some time. As I’d blown my week’s allowance on cigarettes and Kaif burgers, I got stuck into the free box wine. Some time passed, then… I remember nothing.

Darkness and Polaroids

All went black. I must have left the ball early, as I have one or two blurry mental polaroids of evidence from the rest of the evening. Exhibit A: A shifting forest of peoples’ legs. Exhibit B: Looking down and seeing my feet lurching down the centre line of a tarred road. Exhibit C: Stairs and a few sickening thuds. Exhibit D: more blackness.

Take This Cup from Me Lord

I woke up in my clothes, opened my eyelids with a screech like peeling flypaper, and prayed to the God that delivered the Isrealites from Egypt, and comforted Daniel in the lions’ den, to take this anvil of a hangover from me.

Anne Frank

”Lee’s going to fucking kill me!” was my first gibbering, terrified thought. So, like a man, I hid in my res room. My neighbour, Sausage, slid slices of res hall bread under my door from time to time. This furtive Anne Frank existence went on for some days. Until Lee came and found me.

“Get Out of Jail Free” Card

“Tim, about the ball…” She said. “Yes….?” I squeaked in terror, from under my duvet. “I hope you had a good time” she sighed. She went on, “I’m, so so sorry, but I had to leave at by nine. I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye, but I was really drunk. Kate took me home.” “Uh….huh…?” I said, peeking out from my duvet, like a prairie dog peering out from a man-hole. “Yeah. You looked okay when I left though.” She admitted. “You and Richard were playing coinage with the box wine, as I recall.” She blushed, and turned to leave. I sat up perplexed, scratched my head, and stared at the door as she closed it behind her.

Mercedes and the Moth

2008-10-18T09:20:00.003+02:00

The Quicksand Carpet
At night. Tank Girl’s lounge, African Street. About six of us had smoked ourselves into the vegetative state when you nod your head like a drowsy tortoise, and say “fully” a lot. We sat in a ring, perched nervously around the edge of Tank Girl’s manky round spiral design carpet. A carpet that when seen through stoned eyes, became a voracious spinning furry vortex, a giant plug hole that would mercilessly suck you down without a trace. Even jumping over it was considered foolhardy.

Gold Dust Wings
“Whoa…” managed someone, “That’s beautiful man…” We followed her heavy-lidded, tortoisesque gaze to a palm-sized black and gold moth, low on the wall, with flickering wings that looked sprinkled with gold dust. It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing in the universe. We stared, hypnotised, til all else peripheral faded out.

Brindle Blur
With a bang, Mercedes the resident bulldog burst through the door in a waggling blur of brindle fur, snorting like a sow eating porridge. She lunged at the wall, slurped up the moth in one gulp, and darted from the room, leaving us still hypnotised, staring with mounting horror, at a drool smear on the wall. A slowed stoned shrieking began, like a 45rpm record being played at 33, and the lounge emptied quick as a fire-drill.

Bible Study

2008-10-18T08:30:00.000+02:00

Taped to the Africa Street fridge:

Leviticus 10:9. What an abomination of the sight is a drunkard. And lo, they shall waketh with wounds they know not from whence they came.

Jewish Birthday Cake

2008-10-15T19:02:00.003+02:00

Monday 8 am. I’d missed breakfast, and had an all day art prac exam ahead, on an empty stomach. “Hey, want some leftover birthday cake?” asked Mad Flax the lax Jew, as he barged into my room.

Spiked!

“This is… gnmph…. Crunchy”, I said between mouthfuls. “It’s Jewish birthday cake. Traditional herbs.”, he replied, with a mad gleam in his eyes, and flew off to Sausage’s (my neighbour’s) room. I heard the same schpiel from Flax. A pregnant silence, then Sausage squealing “This is fucking DOPE cake!” and some indignant spluttering and spitting.

We Have Lift-off in One Hour

I panicked like a goldfish in a flushing toilet. I had a prac in 15 minutes for fuck’s sake. Repeated attempts at vomiting up the contraband failed. I splashed cold water in my face over and over, faced myself in the mirror, gave an unconvincing “Come on man, keep it together!” pep talk. Moments later I was speeding off to campus on the back of Flax’s motorcycle, feeling like a ticking dope time bomb.

Redundant Mental Rolodex

One hour into the prac, things started to get weird. The charcoal line I was sketching went off on its own thing, scribbling this way and that, eventually running out of breath in the bottom corner of the canvass. I walked away from my easel, taking deep breaths, and trying mentally to find my safe place. I turned back to my previously black and white study, to see it had transformed into a colour picture. My brain frantically ran through its rolodex, and came back with “No information on this!” After an eternity, a nudge from Elaine made me realise that I’d been staring her easel and pastel study, not mine. With a mumbled excuse to George, my lecturer, I fled up the hill back to Res.

Attack of the Killer Pies

Returning to Res, I heard through the grapevine that Sausage, and Jim had too partaken of the Cake. I found them in the dining hall queue. Jim, with all the assurance of a blinking, freshly-shelled tortoise, was waiting with his tray for lunch. A pie was ladled up in front of his face, he recoiled and shrieked like a women seeing a mouse on the floor, and ran from the queue.

Slap Chip Face Paint

I arrived at the table to find Sausage squinting mistrustingly at his food, his head nodding somnolently like a toy dog on the rear sill of a car. Next to him, Jim’s forehead was streaked with daubs of bright red. I watched in awe as he picked up chip after chip, and stirred it in a pool of tomato sauce. He’d raise the chip to his mouth, lunge and miss completely, his teeth snapping on empty air as he mashed the chip into his forehead, over and over.

I never put anything strange in my mouth again, apart from that one other time, years later.

Girls' Res’s

2008-10-15T09:16:00.001+02:00

Common Rooms

Intended as lounges for chaste discourse and the 30 centimetre rule, girls’ Res common rooms were generally austere as a Methodist church. They lacked the empty beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays, and continuous “westerns” (pornos) on TV that made guys’ common rooms so endearing and so reassuringly like our res rooms.

From Sweetie to Bull Dyke

Just being on door duty could make the most pleasant girl seem intimidating as an anorak clad, women’s’ rugby team bull-dyke, jealousy guarding access to the threshold. Buzzed on the squawking intercom, your paramour would run down the stairs and at the landing, breathless and winsomely flushed. She’d nod at the imposing lesbian, who’d frowningly scribble something in an A4 book. Your host would take you by the hand into the world of pyjamas, droning hair dryers, and muffled, tinny music behind closed door after closed door.

Fluffy Ziggurat

Anneline’s Pringle room was a perfume-scented menagerie of fluffy toys, piled on the bed like a Cardie’s shop avalanche. A “Hard Man is Good to Find” beefcake poster hung on the wall (I have not the words). I tip-toed in and tripped over a hairdryer diffuser the size of a loudhailer. Foolishly I flopped back into the ziggurat of stuffed toys and nearly drowned. Eventually, all the toys were relocated, and the bed was cleared and romp-ready; except for “Mr Snuggles” – a fave childhood teddy bear of renown, apparently – who sat on the nightstand and gazed at us with dead, cold eyes while we snogged. At some point of the grope I swatted him onto the floor. I never returned to that room. Anneline and I relocated our late night trysts to Mountain Drive and Settler’s monument.

Restless Spirits

2008-10-14T07:35:00.002+02:00

For some of us from that time, there’s a dust in our hearts that’s never settled. Our spirits are restless, always scanning the horizon, chasing a remembered depth of friendship, love, or fulfilment that’s always just over the hill, round the next corner, or a plane ride away. It’s hard to articulate this malaise, but its there, real as hunger pangs.

Maybe there’s just too much mental energy still racketing around our minds. It could be we read too many books, spread our love and friendship with reckless abandon, or drank from the well too deep. Leaving that bubble coterie marked me with a profound sense of my aloneness in the world. Even through the mellowing of adulthood, the hunger persists.

Sometimes the small work triumphs, shallower new friendships, and sane, pragmatic relationships of now hold up like a faded photocopy compared to those bright, shining times, idealised in recollection. Rhodes was heaven and hell, but sometimes I brood, and wonder if I was at my best in those years, with those people, in that place.

Random Polaroids

2008-10-13T16:28:00.001+02:00

The African street roof. Lisa, an angel in tousled blonde ringlets, toking on a finger-thick joint, bobbing lazily to Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Membrane.

The drive home from Shelly’s Cove, on a winding, cracked tar road. Hand out the window sill, sculling the cool breeze. Sand grit sprinkled in our hair, saltwater on warm skin. Burning orange sundown on rolling hills stubbled with prickly pears.

Trudging to St Peters for morning lectures, walking behind barefoot hippie girls with kikois wrapped round their winsome swaying hips. The dew-wet grass strewn with cherry blossom petals sticking in pink confetti to the soles of their feet.

Vomiting Stories: A Tiger on His Face

2008-10-10T08:37:00.001+02:00

One night, after a particularly gruelling session of coinage at the Union, Merve the Perla leopard-crawled back to his Cullen Bowles Res room, and passed out on his bed in his clothes. At some dark hour of the night - as he slept - he “parked a tiger” (vomited) on his face. With hindsight, the vom dried hard, gluing his eyelids shut. He awoke next morning with a grunt that became a scream as he realised with horror that he couldn't see, and thought he’d drunk himself blind.

His neighbour, Crapolini, heard the blundering thuds and sobbing, and yanked open the door. I don’t like to imagine what Merve’s face looked like, but with a wet towel and some elbow grease, Brother Crapolini restored the gift of site to Merve. Verily an orientation week miracle.

Digs Pig

2008-10-10T08:31:00.001+02:00

As new digsmates in 67a African Street we couldn’t afford a dog, so one day on the way back from Port Alfred we bought a piglet for 20 bucks. We thought we’d got a bargain, but from the get go Morticia was an abysmal failure as a house pet. In the wee hours we’d be woken by her squealing like someone was trying to rape her in the garden (Ollie?), when all she wanted, it turned out, was more butternut and potato peels. she could not hold her lager (apparent after she vommed on a Pringle debutante’s high heels); she head-butted anything that moved, including Hay-sus passed out on our kitchen floor; and cost us a fortune in sun cream every time we took her to Kenton, where she burrowed deep holes all along the beach at Shelley's Cove. Eventually we lost patience trying to teach her to lie flat on the baking tray holding an apple in her mouth, and sent her back to the farm.

Nightswimming

2008-10-09T22:19:00.004+02:00

Still, breathless summer nights with just the moon to see by. We’d hide in the shadow of the Rhodes pool wall, shushing in drunk whispers. Get a leg up, skin your knuckles and scale up the rough, lumpy stone slab stone wall, to the broad top. Catch your breath, then haul the others up, one by one. Once on top, we had to do a single-file tightrope along the wall to where we could jump off safely into the soft grass. Once over, we’d shed our clothes, and tip toe barefoot to the pool, each gingerly choosing their moment to jump in.

Stars and Sky Below

On nights like that, the pool lay mirror-still and black, reflecting the stars like a rectangular hole in the universe. On the diving board, gazing down into the watery stars, it felt for a moment you could dive and plunge into the night sky. Once you leaped, that held-breath moment in mid-air felt like a split-second vacuum between two worlds.

Water Babies

Splash! The water’d envelope you in a whoosh of carbonated bubbles, tickly and friendly on naked skin. In that moment, I’d never want to come up, just tumble weightlessly and play in the silent water, like a child in The Water Babies.

Break the surface with a wipe of your eyes, and swim over the others. We’d talk in a reverential hush across the still water, our bodies floating light as whispers.

Back to the World

At some unspoken moment, the spell would break. We’d climb out and haul our wet bodies into dry clothes. Wet hair and tingling skin in the night breeze, we’d walk home grinning down the leafy streets, a breathless exhilaration singing in our quickened veins.

"Nightswimming deserves a quiet night
It's not like years ago,
The fear of getting caught,
Of recklessness and water
These things, they go away,
Replaced by everyday"

- R.E.M, Nightswimming (1992)

Full Moon Halo

2008-10-07T21:24:00.000+02:00

Some nights, usually in autumn or early winter, the Grahamstown moon would come out with a shining silver halo. Something to do with ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, apparently. If the moon was a ping pong ball, the halo would circle it wide as the outline of a soccer ball. The sky inside the halo was always slightly darker - like an iris - giving the phenomenon the look of a huge eye looking down on the town.

Those were crazy mad moons, bathing everything in a breathless, alchemical energy. On nights like that, you felt quicksilver running in your veins, and could almost hear the music of the spheres.

On thos nights, all bets were off. The whole town went a little unhinged: boyfriends and girlfriends fought, dope-heads lay on roofs and smoked themselves into the bejesus belt, drinkers main-lined tequila and ran amok among the hedgerows.

I haven't seen the halo anyplace since. Have you?

Rodders and the Cupboard

2008-10-07T20:41:00.001+02:00

Chem Major, Monday, 9am. A particularly wet behind the ears first-year Rodders was sitting in the middle of a packed auditorium, waiting for his first accounts 1 lecture. A few minutes into the proceedings, Rodders realised he was mistakenly in an accounts 3 lecture, and needed to leave. With many awkward apologies he clambered past chair after chair, like someone sheepish and late when the movie’s already started.

Ignoring the hundreds of eyes on him, he strode down the main stairs toward the 2 main doors at the exit, scuttling right past the professor. He chose the left door, opened it and slammed it behind him. Outside the lecture had halted to a stunned silence. In the dark interior, Rodders realised he’d walked into the built-in broom cupboard, not the adjacent exit door. He stood blushing in the gloom, torn between whether to just hide there ‘til the end of the lecture, or brave the ridicule and come out. The stunned silence outside had risen to a murmur. After about 10 minutes’ agonized deliberation, he opened the door, and ran, head down from the lecture hall, to roaring laughter and a standing ovation.

Kindred Spirits

2008-10-07T16:54:00.002+02:00

At high school, I’d always felt like a lonely round peg in a provincial square hole. Most of us came to Rhodes to be somewhere we hadn’t. Far away from the apron strings, curfews and embarrassingly square home towns. In the first weeks of Rhodes, I discovered a gratifying amount of round pegs, generous kindred spirits open to all and everything.

Idea Soup

We gathered in packs, searching for who we were, and who we dreamed of becoming. Sitting on the floor in each other’s Res rooms, we’d talk ‘til late about the new ideas and feelings bursting through the floodgates of provincial high school frames of reference. It felt like wading through a thick soup of new ideas and sensations. We swapped music tapes, lent new books, and together watched mind-blowing films never screened in our small towns. Our teenage shells were cracked open liked fresh-boiled eggs, and what seemed like a kaleidoscopic Encyclopaedia Britannica poured in.

Emotional Hand Luggage

As well an expanding shared world of ideas, later into the night and many cigarettes later, more vulnerable feeling were laid on the table, in a candid sharing of regrets, hopes and fears. Things like our parents, how the distance from home had thrown their shortcomings and their effect on us into sharp relief. We’d vow not to repeat their mistakes. Most excitingly, we talked about girls, these beguiling, confounding creatures that a lot of from all boys’ schools were just discovering. These were not drunken confessions, but sober, earnest moments of trust. We’d wake in the morning feeling a bit bare, but knowing what we’d shared was in a safe place.

Humour

After the tight-lipped constipation of school, it was a revelation to finally find people with the same dry sense of humour, and who knew Monty Python! I met so many people who saw hilariously saw things from such an odd, hilarious point of view, you’d wonder what they were on. Our easy bond was a daily, irrepressible sense of humour, shared jokes that’d have you throwing your head back with laughter and giggling ‘til your stomach ached.

We Learned More from Each Other Than From Our Lecturers

After the mummification of high school, my life began for real in the first weeks of Rhodes. Revelations, insights, and friendships for life were shaped in those early few months. As Prof. Brookes, my art lecturer said, “Students learn the most from each other, not from us”.

"Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young."

- Kurt Vonnegut

Young Love

2008-10-06T21:50:00.004+02:00

I remember us, lying like spoons, side by side on my single Res bed, her warm breath on my cheek as she slept beside me. We’d wake in the morning with yawns, caresses and some of what Prince sings about. I liked my body next to hers, it felt trembling and new. The feel of her smooth warm skin and the trace of her bones, like a map of all the places I’d never been. Kissing her was like coming home.

Just Nadja’s presence in a room would make my blood run thick and hot like warm honey. Going out with her on my arm, knowing that at the end of the night I’d be the one she was walking home with, made me feel like I’d a million in the bank.

Flowers, Letters, Mix Tapes

I schemed up lots of ways to make love stay, like the time I conscripted all the Lentilheads - our hippie neighbours – into gathering sackfuls of yellow daisies so I could carpet Tank Girl’s bed with them before she woke up that morning. I guess I was trying too hard. She closed the account a fortnight after that.

Elsa made me a bunch of paper cranes for my birthday, and on holidays apart would send me heart-leaping letters that left me in a condition of swoon.

I perved Nadja slavishly from afar, and made countless mix tapes in my head to her before we’d ever been introduced. Those songs can still recall the smell of her perfume, and the feel of her hair against my cheek.

I Love You (But You're Boring)

Being in love at varsity could be smothering at times. So caught up in love with each other, you could just skip lectures, shut out the world and stay in bed for days, like John and Yoko. The town was so small, you were always out together. This familiarity inevitably bred contempt, and some spectacular screaming matches.

I Don’t Know Why I Love You

I took part in some bloody evil fights. One involved throwing a shelf of wine bottles at a bedroom wall, another had me chased round a kitchen table by a carving-knife-wielding bunny-boiler , and another left me foetal and whining for help as Stevie kicked me round the curb on New street. She wore Docs.

This one sticks in my mind. At a Pony Club party, Nadja and I had an argument. In between verbal doses, while she looked the other way, I dashed to my car and sped off back to Grahamstown. Not fast enough, headlights in the rear-view zoomed up; she’d had grabbed another car and given chase. A fraught, high-speed cat and mouse chase ensued through the campus. Try as I might, I couldn’t lose her, so I pulled into the car park, and sprinted into the darkened recesses of Res, with her close on my heels. I dived into Gary’s room and hid under the desk. Down the hall I heard Nadja looking for me, tearing open and slamming res room doors, closer and closer, like incoming shell-fire. Gary’s door flew open, “You Fucking Son of a Bitch!” she screamed, and went for my eyes.

Nothing Compares To You

Break-ups at that vivid, young age were bloody awful. I would dig up all the saddest songs I knew, cry myself blind, and wallow in my own melodrama for days, occasionally surfacing from my room to drink heroic amounts of whiskey then descend into slurring, impotent rage at womankind. I’d whine about quitting varsity and becoming a bell-tower sniper. I did eventually I manage to get my degree though, so I guess I made it through.

Stay (Faraway So Close)

I guess once a relationship starts, on some level it never ends. It just carries on. Maybe you got married, maybe you broke up earlier than you did, maybe you shagged her sister. Whatever. Somewhere someplace else, those feelings never stop, they keep just going on an on, like a million flickering TV shows bouncing off the satellites, beaming into space.

Wherever they are, I hope they’re singing now.

The Doors of Perception

2008-09-29T08:34:00.002+02:00

“So what do you call it?” I asked her, staring the crumb-sized thing on the tip of her finger. “It’s called a dot.” She explained. “What do I do with it?”. “Just pop it under your tongue, and wait.” she answered, grinning. Blushing at my burgeoning uncool ignorance, I asked “How will I know when to stop waiting?”. “Oh, you’ll KNOW.” she replied, with a mischievous giggle. She dropped the dot into my hand and walked off shaking her head and laughing to herself.

My Body is My Laboratory
My first sensation was of an expanding metallic taste in my mouth. And then it hit, with a grinding of mental gears, like slamming a high-revving car into reverse. I gasped. My chest felt warm as a pot-bellied stove, and my mind seemed to inhale, loud as a hissing air-lock. My memories from that first night form no linear narrative. Random images and sensation just clicked into my mind, like colour-shifted slides in those red View-Master toys I played with as a kid.

Chemical Beats
Music was something you could feel, not just hear. My whole body hummed with it like a tuning fork. Drum beats became almost solid things, like an invisible beach ball you could stretch your arms around. You could hold it in your hands, tightly to your chest, or just watch it bounce round the room and zing off into the trees.

The Persistence of Objects
Simple things, like a chair or a bottle became compelling, sole points of reference. If fixed on for a moment, they became centres of their own universes, as all other peripherals seemed to orbit around them.

Miles and I staring up at the sky, and both gasping as the fabric of the sky ripped, and the glowing, flickering circuitry connecting the stars was revealed. “Fuck, did, you see that that?” he gasped. “Yes”, I whispered.

Drugs Are a Bet With Your Mind
Sometimes the stakes are pretty high. I watched the shadows of the trees and for a moment thought, “madness is just over there.” Happily I was surrounded by wonderful friends, who were all gleefully in the same thrall. People around me were shiny and beautiful, their selves wrapped around them ten feet tall.

Lost On Space Camp
Watching Tamsin (on her first trip too) missioning around in the bushes, peering into the darkness thinly lit by the wavy toy fibre optic torch was clutching. She wandered round the periphery of the party, like a kid happily lost from the group in NASA Space Camp excursion. I recall she woke up the next morning with a beautific grin, and said to Tank Girl "I want this everyday all time!"

I felt the same way, but the come-down was the next day was... odd. Like my brain was a jar of marbles, and I’d shaken them all up. The new connections took a while to re-wire themselves. I definitley wasn’t quite the same person I’d been at sunset the day before.

My Art Lecturer, George

2008-09-28T11:50:00.005+02:00

“Shit!” “Fuck!”
Rhodes School of Fine Art. First year, third term, first day. Slouching behind my easel, I heard a blunt-edged ‘60s London accented voice say “...and if anyone minds the word ‘shit!’ or ‘fuck!’ clear off now!’ I peered over. The voice belonged to a hook-nosed little man with charcoal-stained brick layer’s hands and a manic, aluminium sheen to his eyes. George, our first-year art lecturer had arrived. Grabbing a piece of charcoal pencil from Carol, he slashed, in Zorro-like strokes, the word “SHIT” on the nearest drawing. “This is all fucking crap!” he rasped and glared round the room at the easels we were cowering behind. “I know you’re all constipated from Matric art class - but for God’s fucking sake!”. We stared on dumbly, mouths agape, trying not to be noticed or singled out, by this raving, spitting force of nature that’d burst in amongst us like a Catherine wheel in a church service.

Détente
We drew harder, strained our concentration toward a crisper focus, generally tried more to rise to his exhortations, and George and us established an uneasy peace. We were always on-edge, for despite days of relative calm, he could always flare up like flaming magnesium at any second.

Underneath it All
George had a heart of gold. I learned more from him in a year than all my other lecturers that were to come. “Sorry I’m late” said a rather overwrought Lee to him one Monday morning “It’s just that I tried acid for the first time this weekend, and it was a lot stronger than I expected”. “Shame, dear” answered George, as he led her to a chair “Don’t move. Let me make you a cup of tea.” He was like that with all of us, at one time or another.

Summer Torpor
Roll on to October. Grahamstown in summer. The roads baked, the tar sticky underfoot. Drowsy swooning hot. The sashe windows of the art studio were wide open, but not a stir of a breeze. Stewed in a torpid funk, first-year art class dragged their pencils listlessly across canvases, slow as lichen. Most just wanly ground their pencils in the canvass; a desultory salad of doodles all the fruit of hours of soporific effort. The afternoon grinded on long and slow as the last day of school. “Okay. Stop.” sighed George.”I’m knackered, and you lot are just pathetic in this heat. Bring a costume and towel to class tomorrow morning”. Heads abruptly popped up over easels like a gaggle of prairie dogs.

Kidnapped Skinny-dipping
We all arrived early the next morning - wittering with curiosity - to see a Rhodes minibus parked outside the stone gates of the art school. George was humming, fussing and loading hampers into the boot. We all piled in to the van (we were a small class) and drove off for parts unknown. Dirt road, braking for tortoises. Parts turned out to be a stretch on the Kudu river, in a nearby game reserve. We piled out, and George and a some able-handed types fished cases or beer and hampers out of the van. George had kidnapped us all away for a stolen day. We were cutting class, with teacher. A wonderful, burnished day followed. Anthony sat like a kikoi-draped satyr on a nearby rock and played lazy guitar. Crazed on wine, beer and sunshine, the class skinny dipped in the river, till a curious hippo scared us all out, sprinting back to the shore, our bare bottoms winking in the sun. At sunset we drive home from the one-day holiday reluctantly, the memory of sun and river water on our skin, home to the humdrum of res food dinners and essays to be procrastinated about.

Rhodes First Year Art Class. Banks of the Kudu River (1990)

Mix Tapes

2008-09-26T23:18:00.002+02:00

Tape Decks and Friendships

A calling card of cool, mix tapes fluttered round Res’s like carrier pigeons. My long friendship Alistair began with my tracking him down in Retief Res as “the guy had a recording of Love and Rocket’s Kundalini Express"; which seemed the epitome of grinding goth cool those early weeks of first year.

I met my life-long friend Gary when I heard The House of Love’s Christine playing from his room. I walked in, introduced myself, and we lay on the floor, arms outstretched, listening to the song as it shimmered round the room.

Larissa had a box of tapes all labelled either “God Be in My Head”, or “Suicide Mix (numbered 1 through to about 37, as I recall)”. She came across as a stout, intimidating lesbian, but we became firm pool-playing mates when I discovered she had the first Kristin Hersh and Cranberries albums on tape.

Tapes and Girls

Making a girlfriend a tape was a customary phase in a relationship, usually somewhere between the 3rd or 4th date. You could lie in bed, and wonder if far off down in campus in Phelps or Jameson Res, she was listening to the same songs and thinking of you. Bands like The House of Love, R.E.M., U2, The Pixies, Lloyd Cole, The Stone Roses, and the Manic Street Preachers formed our emotional semaphore.

Tank Girl and Green Underpants

The night the slavishly lusted after Tank Girl and I finally got together one night, the amorous mood was derailed for a moment by her seeing my green day-glo underpants, that I’d unadvisedly fished out of the communal digs laundry pile that evening. I managed to stifle her giggling and things continued along giddy nicely. Weeks later I made her a “Kryptonite Underpants” mix, and gave it to her wrapped in the same (now laundered) lurid green underpants of that first night. She cried laughing.

CD Mixes Are Not the Same

Long before before cell phones, email, and recordable discs, mix tapes provided a shorthand of cool, an artefact that could be passed from hand to hand, like shared imagined music videos of each other in our heads.

I miss them.

Hay-Sus the Chimney Shitter

2008-09-26T09:23:00.001+02:00

Bankie Reverie
Early morning, African Street. The Lentilheads, our next-door newbie digs of 2nd years had just passed a major Grahamstown digs milestone: scoring their first stash of marijuana in their new home. Flushed with pride, they put the bankie* on the coffee table, and gazed at it with dew-eyed, adoring sighs. Their reverie was spied through the window by Jesus (Hay-sus) De Costa - one-time male stripper and swarthy self-styled 5 foot 6 sex-machine troglodyte - trudging back to our house from his usual Monday all night drinking and bush-diving binge.

Flushed Away
He snuck round to the Lentilheads’ back door and banged on it loud and sudden as a volley of gunshots. In his best Afrikaans narcotics cop voice he shouted thickly “Studente! Maak oop! Dis die Polisie! Ons weet jy het dwelms daarbinne!” (Students! Open this door! It’s the Police! We know you’ve got drugs in there!). The lentilheads scattered like dormice, hiding in various bedrooms, except for one quick-witted vegetarian who grabbed the stash and in a blur of bellbottoms and tie-dye fled to the bathroom. Hay-sus barged into the house, heard the bathroom door lock click, and threw himself at it, barking more Afrikaans obscenities. The only answer from within was a frightened squeal, and the sound of the dope being flushed down the toilet.

Anger and Loss
Hay-Sus collapsed on the floor laughing. The odd sound drew the dormice out of their hiding places. Seeing it was just him, hearing the gurgling sound of the toilet, and realising their loss, they broke into a fluttering vegan rage. Words like “bastard” and ‘rotter” were used. Hay-sus was bundled out of the house and forgotten amid much handwringing and grief at the now tragically empty spot on the coffee table.

Threats from Above
A voice from above broke the silence. They bundled out of the kitchen door to see Hay-sus on their roof, squatting on top of their chimney. “Oi! Lentilheads!” he bellowed, “I’m gonna SHIT down your chimney unless you apologize for being so horrible to me!” The female majority vegetarians flew into a jabbering panic, like a flock of chickens on a trampoline.

Entreaties, and Life Lessons Learned
Eventually, Tristan the fifth lentilhead, who’d slept through the entire ruckus, stumbled out in his kikoi, brushing aside the tousled blonde locks that would later he earn him the nickname “Miss Hawaii Airlines Girl 1994”. Blearily squinting up at Hay-sus, he said plainly, “Bru, don’t shit down my chimney. That’s like, lank blind bru…”. Haysus was thus talked down of the roof, and made a cup of rooibos. The Lentilheads were a lot more circumspect in such matters after that morning.

* A lot.

Pick-up Lines: The Glass of Water Gambit

2008-09-24T18:52:00.002+02:00

The Grahamstown Spur, near the end of the evening. You’ve broke, looking pretty damn ropey after drinking your week’s allowance, and are down to one cigarette and a glass of water. The girl you’ve been fancying all evening is at a table somewhere across the restaurant, oblivious to your existence.

Call the waiter over, point out your paramour and ask him “Could you send that young lady a glass of water with my compliments?”. The waiter duly goes over to her table, places the glass of water in front of her, and says “with the compliments of the young gentleman”. Her eyes widen, she stares at the drink, looks up and searches the room. Her gaze rests on you for a moment and your eyes meet. Raise your own glass of water to her and throw a smouldering look across the room.

This has worked, twice.

Campus Perves

2008-09-23T04:29:00.001+02:00

We all had them. Mine never really conformed to a type, unless ‘winsome’ is a category.

My physical reaction to their proximity was real as an asthma attack. Perve du jour would walk into a room, my heart would leap into my throat, beating loud as a drum in a biscuit tin, and previously coherent sentences would congeal in my mouth like lumpy plasticine. Tearing my gaze away I’d quickly fumble back what I was doing: talking to my friends in Kaif; drinking a beer in The Union; or hamfistedly fielding a question from my English tutor- but all the time my whole body knew where they were, like an agitated Pointer dog. In severe cases I was simply overcome and would have to leave the room, party, or lecture hall. I’d sigh back against a wall, breathe deep and count to ten.

They brightened my days though. The radiance of a beautiful girl was something that lit up all us mortals as we orbited round them. Like the sun, you could never brazenly gawp at a campus perve too long, but you could bask in the warmth of their comeliness. The mere thought of one would have me bumbling off in a dumbly smiling dwaal, recording endless mix tapes to them in my head.

In four years I ended up dating two campus perves. I felt like a lottery winner, and I distinctly remember thunderous applause from my friends that night I first kissed Nadja in the Vic. The relationships were giddy, flying close to the sun experiences that lasted all too short. I learned you had to punch your own weight class.

They live on in songs from those mental mix tapes. I wonder where they are now?

The Union

2008-09-21T22:37:00.001+02:00

Furnished like a a ‘70s airport lounge, with faux leather chairs that swallowed you as you slouched back, and a stained, burnt-clay coloured carpet, the Students’ Union was familiar and non-descript as a small-town sports club bar. I approached the counter and did some quick sums: R1.20 for a box of cigarettes, R1.30 a beer: on that and my virgin post-high-school provincial alcohol tolerance, I could get giddy, numb-face drunk for ten bucks, with change over if I a braved a R2.50 bottle of Taverna Rouge.

Taverna Rouge, a red wine that could peel the linoleum off a kitchen floor. One sip tasted wrong as incest; a whole bottle was a one-way ticket to lurching, slurring oblivion and a hangover that left you bargaining with God or praying for a swift death.

Amid the hum of conversation and the chink of coinage games I sensed for the first time the boundless, intoxicating freedom that lay before us. Coming from so many far-flung dorps, towns and cities, here we were free to re-invent ourselves to be whoever, and whatever we wanted. Drunk, mostly.

Res

2008-09-21T16:23:00.001+02:00

My allocated Res was Cullen Bowles, the awkwardly named and more awkwardly built residence on the top of the hill: at the highest point of the university; its roofs spiked with lightening conductors. The inmates called it “Legoland”. It was a thoroughly unappetizing sight; more Orwellian “1984” than Oxbridge “Brideshead Revisited”. The entire edifice was a series of piled-up, interconnected blocks: like a lop-sided jenga game. A crushing sense of woeful uncool radiated from this cubist faced slab. My heart sank when I saw my room: a modular interior that looked like it’d been designed to be hosed down, not swept. I stared at the wall-mounted bed and brutal face brick and nearly wept as I realized I’d be living there for the next two years. I ushered my parents off to their hotel, and went in search of disoriented and curious others- and beer.

Prologue: Selenium

2008-09-20T12:41:00.002+02:00

Fact: there are gravely low levels of selenium in the Grahamstown ground water. A healthy amount of this trace element is crucial for a sound mind: it ensures the neurons fire synchronously and generally keeps you sane and competent at crossword puzzles. Not enough of it and your brain begins to fizz and spit like a busted firework and you have trouble just making change after buying a pack of Stuyvies at Wellingtons. Selenium deficiency may help partly explain the sleep of reason that afflicted so many of us in those fevered days. Sometimes Grahamstown felt like an idiot-machine. We didn’t crawl out the same people we’d walked in.