A big rave was coming to the docks in Durban. Faithless and Carl Cox would be playing in the cavernous space of the sugar mills. Get ready for a night of Insomnia!!! said the posters, With Big Black Cox. The joller grapevine had been activated: plans were being laid, coded notes passing across classrooms and dining halls.13 There were two rival dealers: one from Durbs, with whom Johnno had put in an order, along with most of the hardcore FUMA crew. The other was from Joburg, and I had happened to sit next to him on a bus journey. We had struck up an unlikely rapport, and so one week before Sugar Rush I found myself at a secret rendezvous behind the Tuck Shop, taking delivery of one E-Male from a strong, silent type called Darcus. He was known as someone concerned with his reputation for delivering quality product.
I was strangely moved by the exchange: the intellectual mascot being allowed into the scene by one of its gatekeepers, albeit on the quiet. I felt like I was being done a favour. Darcus was hardly upping his cred or turning big profits by selling one ecky to the Best Chorister. Johnno said that his order of no less than five disco biscuits plus some tabs for candy flipping would be delivered with all the others at the event. We set out for Durbs, descending into its humid suburbs and getting ready.
We pulled into a flat that a mutual friend, Bunny, was borrowing from an older sister. A game of strategy unfolded here as we got dressed. Along with his tight silver pants and tiny vest, Johnno had also procured a long-sleeve black top with a cryptic phrase printed on it: ONLY USERS LOSE DRUGS. Edgy wordplay, maximum body coverage: this was perfect for me. I craved this garment and, anyway, I had nothing else to wear. But Bunny (named for the Duracell adverts because of his copper hair) also had his eye on it, and as our accommodation provider had first dibs.
Here Johnno and I embarked on a subtle psychological campaign to convince our host that, actually, he looked far better in a low-cut, lime-green luminous top that we had discovered in his sister’s cupboard.
‘Cool colour, and it’s going to pick up the UV big time.’
‘I wish I’d seen it first.’
In fact it looked absurd: a crêpe-paper garment with a loose and lacy, plunging neckline and even the bagginess where his sister’s breasts should have been.
‘He looks like a milkmaid,’ said Johnno as we chuckled in the background, ‘A monster raving lumo milkmaid.’
I got the black top, plus his wraparound Oakley shades. As a final touch, Johnno separated some egg whites from their yolks and styled my hair into Statue of Liberty spikes. The hold provided by the albumen was something astonishing.
We arrived at the sugar mills to find the FUMA crew milling around at the back, tense, waiting for their drug delivery. Johnno said I should wait until his E arrived before I dropped mine, and so we threw ourselves onto the dance floor. For an hour, then two, three, I applied myself to dancing with the kind of diligence that I brought to most extra-mural activities. But there was only so much energy that Red Bulls could give us, and only so many laughs that could be milked from pretending to milk a cow’s udder as we danced behind Bunny’s back. Johnno kept returning to where the bad boys were still waiting, but no dice, no can do, fresca.14
The drugs never arrived, and now Johnno performed something akin to those conjuring tricks with three cups and a bean. I just needed to give him my E-male, he was going to swap it for some tabs, then trade those on to someone else to get two eckies so we would be sorted. I relinquished my precious little tablet and he disappeared for a long time, eventually returning with a much smaller pill for me, saying that we had upgraded. This was a Hyundai – new on the market, almost pure MDMA.
In fact, it was a slimming tablet, something he only confessed to years later.
‘Or maybe an anti-histamine. I had so many pills in my pockets in those days, like Smarties.’
As Faithless and Sister Bliss took the stage, I found myself yawning. People kept coming up and squinting at my chest, mouthing the words, then squinting at me, none the wiser. Eventually I fell asleep in the corner of a chillroom: ‘clubbing’ in a different sense of the word.15 During the night, Johnno’s expensive Oakleys were stolen off my face, and the fuggy heat of all the bodies slowly cooked my hairdo. Still buzzing, my co-pilot retrieved me at dawn and we somehow made our way to a swing band concert at our sister school, where his long, exploratory clarinet solo during ‘Take the ‘A‘ Train’ was widely acclaimed by the female audience.
This was the story of my first rave. I had fallen asleep in front of everyone and woken up with a frittata on my head. I wasn’t even a user, but had lost my drugs.
Though in fact, I was on far more powerful pills than all these winners, and had been for months.16
The miracle was here.
In the 1960s, during investigations into the treatment of skin cancers, Swiss researchers in the laboratories of Roche Pharmaceuticals isolated a drug called isotretinoin. This vitamin A derivative had a marked effect on sebum production, but was also found to be teratogenic (i.e. it caused birth defects), and so, in the wake of the thalidomide scandal, the research was discontinued. In 1975, the compound was independently discovered by scientists in the United States looking to treat forms of ichthyosis: rare and lethal conditions where babies are born with large fish-like scales, or emerge from the womb in the shiny, Vaseline-like coating of a second skin.
Further tests showed that 13-cis-retinoic acid was extremely effective in treating severe nodular acne. It was the only drug known to affect all the major pathogenic processes of the condition; it was antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory, also dramatically reducing oil and skin-cell production deep within the epidermis. The exact mechanism of action was unclear, but studies suggested that it induced apoptosis (cell death) in various sites in the body: the hypothalamus, the hippocampus and the sebaceous glands.
Roche resumed research and, after years of clinical trials, released the drug under the brand name Accutane in the early 1980s. The company was repeatedly taken to court, but doctors testified to the drug’s 95 per cent success rate and life-changing effect on millions of acne sufferers. The Food and Drug Administration in the US ruled that it could not restrict professionals from prescribing isotretinoin, and so it entered the global market, arriving in South Africa under a slightly altered brand name.
‘Roaccutane – a perfect case for it,’ said the doctor my mother had found, the moment I took off my shirt.
‘We just need to check your liver function, see that it’s up to it. It hammers the liver. Dries the skin out, dry lips, makes you sun-sensitive. Your face will go red and there’ll be an acne flare – it might get worse before it gets better. But it will get better.’
In those few days I mustered my last remaining shreds of Christian faith and prayed that my liver would be up to it, this pill that had been spoken of in awed whispers at school. It was, and I began taking a dosage worked out in relation to my body weight: one milligram per kilogram per day.
‘Are you, like,