This was my boyfriend when I was in South Africa. Such a long time ago. Almost 30 years. I was at a large house party he was at and I had a rip in my jeans at the knee and he touched my skin through the rip although he didn’t know me. It was a very intimate gesture. He said nothing. I said nothing. He was high at the time and I didn’t know that. I just thought he was strange.
He’d say one time, bru–it was like no problem. He’d say it to guys he did a kindness for like if he got them a beer. We’d drive around in a beat up white kombie. I thought gas was cheap until I translated liters to gallons and Rands into Dollars. Me and a friend picked him up from surfing once on the Atlantic side and he was shaking from the cold and had difficulty getting the too small borrowed wetsuit off his body. He said the waves checked beautiful. He had to pee during the drive home and filled a large empty liquor bottle with his urine. Then warmed his feet with it. He was from outside Jo’burg but in Cape Town because he was just conscripted and having his holiday before doing his two years of service. He drank a lot and liked doing drugs and would fight anyone at anytime.
He’d have this sly pleased smile on his face whenever his high got really deep. He’d smoke buttons which were quaaludes. It was a terrible scent. Caustic. Like a mad scientist’s laboratory burning down. We’d swing by a…I can’t think what’s it’s called, but you’d park where the people inside the building could see you and if they wanted your business, they’d wave you over and then it was like a drive up window. He’d buy two fingers of pot for I want to say 50 cents. More pot than a dime bag for hardly any money at all. I was always calculating the exchange rate for things. All these potatoes for only this much money! But people were still going hungry.
Whenever I smoke pot I get paranoid, so I didn’t for the longest time, but when I finally tried it, I found that in a foreign country the triggers weren’t there. Yellow police wagons were not black and white police cars and they didn’t make me nervous. I hadn’t thought about my paranoia as being outside of me. Even though getting arrested in a foreign country for drugs would have been much worse than at home. He’d often break bottle necks from the body of a glass by heating them at a candle flame, then snapping them. Then with the candle flame he’d heat and smooth out the edges of glass on the broken part and make a pipe. I can no longer remember what he stuffed the pipe with for the filter. Maybe it was just folded up paper that he then rolled. He used a dented soda can once because I suggested it. He used an apple, then ate it. I tried making a pipe from a bottle neck years later and found it impossible. I wasn’t smoking anything, I was just remembering him and thinking it through. I couldn’t even figure out how to break the neck off. I could see him in my memory holding his handmade glass pipe to his mouth like a musical instrument, breathing in deeply, closing his eyes as if listening. Exhale. He really liked being stoned. He cooked corn in butter not water, put banana and avocado on cheese pizza. He’d yell voetsek at animals that annoyed him. He’d say just now which didn’t mean just now. We rode the train, drove the van or hitchhiked. Everybody hitched. No one was worried about being raped or murdered, their body tossed off into a ditch. We got a ride from Cape Town to Jo’burg in an 18 wheeler. Our only payment was to chat with the driver. Keep him awake. The driver had purchased an American cab, so he was on my left like I was used to. He had to pay American dollars for it. Which made it even more expensive. I can’t remember why he wanted it that way. Why he liked the American style better. The driver did most the talking. I don’t remember what I said. I remember looking out the window. Women with their babies strapped to their backs by wrapping towels around their bodies. So snug. The children fast asleep. When we got to Jo’burg, my boyfriend and I went to a club and danced all night.
Two weeks later, I went back to Cape Town, back to school. Back to learning Xhosa. If you say something like “I brush my hair” your teacher will smile because you don’t brush your hair, you fix it. You brush your teeth.
The summer there was winter. The fall was spring. And the wind could be so strong that it’d make me laugh, pushing me backwards, manhandling me like some large monster-ghost having a good time. Maybe the stars at night weren’t the same ones I was used to. I don’t remember the firmament being so startling different. But things were indeed turned over.
There was a loud, ruckus band at that house party where I met him. I was sitting on the floor criss-cross with many other people watching the band and he stepped around a bunch of people to sit next to me, then reached over and ran his fingers along my skin through the rip in my jeans. Two weeks after that we rode the tram to the top of Table Mountain. It was really cold and we had nothing warm to wear so we had a quick look around and then went right back down.
My desk.