‘Do you see that?’ said my mother to father when I came home, with stud marks having joined the cysts on my forehead: ‘He’s been bullied.’
And then told me she had made an appointment with the doctor to discuss a new skin treatment.
Midway through my Milton years, a great excitement began building in the school. Reports were filtering in from the clubs of Durban and Joburg, from the seniors above us who came back from weekends and half-terms as changed men. Rave culture had arrived in South Africa – a decade or two late, sure, but we were eager to make up for lost time. After a century in which a newspaper-wrapped stop of crumbly dagga was the only prohibited substance available to Miltonians, now recreational drugs were flooding into the country: acid, speed and Ecstasy.
On the bus journeys to and back from Johannesburg, the seniors in the year above us would commandeer the stereo system and start pumping out the tunes as soon as we pulled out of the gates. These six-, seven-hour journeys were unpredictable, liminal, even crazed experiences. Mathura’s Transport buses carrying us through KwaZulu-Natal and up to the Highveld became temporary autonomous zones. In the process of leaving or returning to school, the official rulebook was no longer, or not quite yet, in force. You could be called to the back for interrogation at any point, or made to ‘babysit’ a two-litre plastic bottle of senior urine. If you fell asleep, Chicken Licken hot sauce would be meticulously spread on your bottom lip. You could be summoned to the front by the head sadist – a terrifying jock-raver hybrid named Brando – and made to watch the sex scenes from Sliver, sat right in front of the dropdown TV/VCR.
‘You getting hard? Are you sweating? He’s sweating. You’re dis-gusting, man!’
Sharon Stone and one of the Baldwins were cavorting in an eerie apartment block, watched on CCTV by some sinister voyeur. Video footage of humans having sex – which those porn barons with access to X-rated VHS tapes covertly termed ‘wildlife’ – was vanishingly rare.8 I did really want to see this, but not, you know, here, with Brando’s face pressed up against mine, making sure my eyes stayed locked on the screen. Again, there was no way to do right in these situations.
‘What? This isn’t turning you on? Are you gay? Are you a stubbs?’9
Out of respect to those who really did run the appalling homophobic gauntlet that such schools represented, I should not imply that I had it bad. In fact, most of the time I managed to evade individual humiliation by submitting diligently to collective punishment. The skin, after all, is also the organ that gives metaphors of camouflage and mimicry, of changing colour to match context – like a cuttlefish.
This was the great life skill I learned from my school: how to keep onside, using language to keep the bullies just far enough away. But now I was at a moment of perilous transition. There had been the war-cry incident, and now my skin had found me out: the acne could not be hidden. It did not respond to language; I had to wear it like a man. It pushed me more towards outsider status, and so made me clamour more fully for insider-hood, entering into the cruel comedy of those days, relishing and stoking the humiliation when it was directed anywhere but me.
The same biology teacher who had given us the Butterfly Lab once hitched a ride back from Johannesburg at the end of school holidays, sitting at the back with his wife and two young children. We were barely out of the Zoo Lake parking lot before Brando smashed in a mix tape:
‘WIGGLE! WIGGLE!’
People’s arms went up; fingers prodded the air. We knew this one. Oh yeah.
‘WIGGLE! WIGGLE!’
It boomed out of the speakers just above our heads. It boomed out of the speakers just above the heads of Mr Clackworthy and his family.
‘PUT YOUR ASS ON MY FACE!’
But somehow he was no longer in charge here; somehow the journey was beyond his jurisdiction, and outright mutiny a real possibility. The Clackworthys continued to sit in dignified silence, subwoofers poised inches above their scalps – glorious.
‘I-LIKE-THE-WAY-YOUR-PUSSY-TASTES!’
Brando had taken nine Ecstasy tablets in a club over the half-term – this was the word going round the bus. He had collapsed in a stupor in the chillroom; people thought he was overs kadovers. But then he had risen like Lazarus and begun flailing and flinging and spiralling his limbs like a man possessed, dance moves that no one had seen before.
They began infiltrating the boarding houses, but in surreptitious and ambiguous ways. Hectic basslines and bpms behind a closed door: You gotta gotta gotta … SHOW-ME-LOVE! Then someone would emerge briefly into the corridor, skanking their arms like chicken wings, or throwing the dart, bouncing the ball, two-stepping, styling the air with their hands, checking themselves out in the bathroom mirror.
‘What you fucking looking at?’
But then it was gone: just another belligerent matric standing there with pumped-up pecs. All the sinuous movements hardened again into a jock stance, shoulders hunched like a bugger.10 The smell of Tiger Balm that lingered: was it for muscular strain sustained on the rugby field, or was it for sniffing ecstatically as DJ Eezy-E dropped another banger on the floor of E.S.P. on the early hours of a Sunday become Monday?
Us deputies, who would soon have to step into the senior role, were now confronted with another paradox. The highest ranks of the alpha males above us, the real bad boys, were going clubbing, were obsessed with it. This crew styled themselves as psychedelic voyagers coming back with tales of all the worlds they had never told you (us) about, us going about mid-term revision and swing band practice in our timeless fashion.11 FUMA began appearing scrawled on walls. What did it stand for? Nobody knew for sure. Some said it was the Fuck Up Milton Association, others suggested Fucked Up Morning After.
But clubbing involved dancing, i.e. moving the body in ways that could not altogether exclude the hips, those tense flanks where men hold so much of their anger. Or put it this way: while it was easy to be robotic and military out there under the strobes, the best dancers were those who could loosen up a little, could shimmy and snake, could allow something feminine through, who could be a little androgynous and still slay more chicks at the Second Hands’ social than anyone else.12
Behind those closed doors, amid the throbbing loops of ‘Freed from Desire’ and ‘Renegade Master’, some kind of ideological restructuring was going on. You proved your manhood, your tight-lipped position at the apex of all these old-school hierarchies, by taking E. But Ecstasy made you into an ecstatic chatterbox, a touchy-feely, homosocial being with infinite disdain for this world’s arbitrary divisions and boundless helpings of empathy. Maybe even the creeping sensation that you wanted to nuzzle the neck of your best bro, maybe even take his tongue in your mouth. Suddenly a non-ageist, horizontal gift economy was in operation: head-tingling Orgasmatrons being deployed on matric scalps by precocious 14-year-old ravers-in-waiting. Grain-fed prop forwards from the Free State sharing round their supplies of Stimorol, suckers, Vicks VapoRub – and all of this happening with such generosity and tenderness across the years!
At least for a few hours. Then it was the comedown, the re-establishment of defences and the larger philosophical questions posed by the rave ethos•. If an experience of brotherhood so precious is transmuted so utterly into its opposite by the morning after; if something so memorable could not (in the cases of those taking more than two or three Dolphins or Hitachis or Mitsubishis per night) even be remembered by anyone involved, then could it be said to have existed at all?
The