Oh no. I went out to explore my wild side …
4. Give your heart to Hillbrow
Johannes Kerkorrel’s song of the same name has always captured the fear, desolation and bohemian funkiness of the place during those years; I could really understand what he meant. I experienced it, felt it in my body, smelled it and inhaled it the way you draw in cigarette smoke.
Hillbrow.
How did a nerdy princess from Linden end up there?
I had always wondered how different the Eloffs were in comparison with the many typical, God-fearing Afrikaner households that sent their children to Linden High. We all interacted with each other every day, after all.
We were probably not that different. My dad was a computer programmer, a real computer geek, and my mother a housewife (The Homemaker). Diagonally opposite us lived a funny guy with a beer paunch and his wife. She had a beehive contraption of a hairdo. Their two children were terrible brats, snotty nosed and foul mouthed. But we had to smile at each other politely in church on Sundays. We could just as well have been characters in The Simpsons.
Look, there were good times and there were bad times at the Eloffs. Sadly, as I grew older, the bad times became longer and the intervals between them shorter. Or my awareness of it simply increased as my understanding developed. There was a time when my mother used to hum as she went about her household chores; she laughed a lot and we always had a good laugh along with her.
But later there was no more music to provide a soundtrack for the good times.
Nobody laughed anymore. There were no more intervals; just bad times.
Our home was a desert battlefield full of shit and bodies where once there had been love and happiness. I never invited school friends to my house; I was too scared they would gossip about it back home. Ma, Karin’s house is hell. Genuine…
I’d rather visit my friends. When my mother allowed it. And lie about what was going on at home. No, Auntie, everything’s great at home!
During my final exams, my father came to sit next to me while I was studying one day and announced he had decided to divorce my mother. His timing wasn’t the greatest, but I was relieved. Almost glad. Maybe it would bring an end to the emotional heavy artillery and daily bombardment.
It didn’t. It became worse, and my mother’s yelling unbearable.
So it was that I was desperate to leave home as soon as I could after finishing school. And get far away. Even if Hillbrow was only ten minutes’ drive from our house, it was far enough. All the weirdos, artists, misfits, pinks addicts and runaways deviated there.
Believe me, I felt right at home.
I simply told my parents that God had called me and I was going to become a missionary with an outreach programme in Hillbrow. My parents had more important things to worry about than what I was up to. Things were fairly hectic at home: my mother had a breakdown and ended up in an institution. She could not believe her husband was divorcing her.
The Christian action I joined was extremely militant. After the so-called minister molested me and one of the other girls, and I was told I was going around like a cow on heat, I ran away from them to another outreach group that was more spiritual than Christian. There wasn’t the same judgemental element that I experienced with the Christians. I felt much safer. And immediately at home.
Shelter for teenage runaways and drug-addicted prostitutes, read the sign at the front door.
The place was run by an Afrikaans couple who taught me more about life than I had learned in twelve years at school. The first thing I learned was: Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken. It made unbelievable sense. If someone does not want your help, don’t be arrogant and go raping their psyche with your patronising, know-all rescue effort. Leave them alone!
We therefore only helped those druggies who wanted help. Nobody was forced to dry out if they didn’t want to. Help meant simply providing clean needles and a place to bath and eat for druggies, and condoms for prostitutes.
It was not a rehabilitation centre. The approach was: If you have to do it, do it responsibly.
I was a chaste eighteen-year-old. I had never used, or had anything to do with drugs. I was actually also simply trying to escape the hard reality of my parents’ bitter divorce.
But it didn’t take long for me to become helluva curious about the bloody, crimson haze of sleaze that was Hillbrow. I developed an obsession with the underworld because it reflected the dark emotional maelstrom within me.
My memories of Hillbrow are vaguely surreal: a pinks addict spurting blood against the walls of our bathroom; camera crews from the TV programme Carte Blanche; the other girl living there dancing with me to the music of Frank Duval in front of the windows at night while lonely single men in their cars slowly cruised by, looking for one of the prostitutes lingering on the pavement out front; or the two of us just sitting side by side in the night breeze that smelt of pollution, dagga smoke and freedom; us throwing glass bottles against the wall to give vent to our inner confusion; a gangster storming in and telling us about the Thrupps gang of which he was a member; an addict who tried to rape me and all I could utter was a shocked giggle (fortunately I was able to escape with only a slight tear in my trousers). We lived off Fontana chicken and creamy hot chocolate from the Three Sisters. And I fell in love with Jacques.
Jacques (I can’t remember his surname) was a former policeman turned drug addict. He lived with a couple of prostitutes in a decayed block of flats nearby. I was quite hot for him and regularly fantasised about how we would have riotous sex and how he would brutally vanquish my virginity.
He had to go to Durban to pick up some mandrax, he told me one night, and he would spend a little more time with me after that. He never returned. We just heard he was dead. Cheeky and Shane, two crackheads, also died.
And Elize. Of an overdose of heroin. Shame. We would have become friends, she and I. She might have become a writer. Or a poet. Or something else. Anything other than dead.
Shortly after her body was removed from the room next door, I discovered a diary in which she had written every day. She wrote to a guy by the name of Manny. I didn’t know who or where Manny was; I had never met him. I assumed he was someone she had known at school, or someone who lived in her imagination. She was sometimes not only on another planet but in another universe.
I kept the diary and paged through it again recently. And read:
I ran away, Manny.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
Fuck them and their selfishness.
I’m here in Hillbrow now.
I climbed into the monster’s mouth and he is slowly swallowing me …
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where are you?
Do you remember Kariena?
I bumped into her yesterday at Pop’s. She was looking for a CD, something by Madonna. She told me how she never wanted to visit me again because my mother screamed at me so badly, calling me “a dumb fuck” because I didn’t put our coffee cups in the kitchen sink at the end of the visit.
I had already forgotten about it. Kariena scratched open all the wounds again.
I remember the screams now. Like yesterday – how my mother went crazy; how every night, red faced and pop-eyed, she yelled at my father as he sat in front of the TV: “You spineless jellyfish, shit excuse for a man!”
I taught myself to be deaf.
I no longer hear the screaming.
But I remember.
I remember