Sex

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 fumble-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 find 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

Alternative Night

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

“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

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

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

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

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.