4: When The Student Is Ready
By the swimming pool park, at the far crossroads, looking at the street names, today's using buddy says, “Who was Percy Osborne anyway?”
And I say, “Yeah and Matthews Meyiwa?”
“But,” shrugs Mickey Mouse, “Adrian must have been the most badass, no last name, like Tupac.”
He liked to be called Mickey Mouse because he visited Disneyland as child, part of a school thing, his mother saved up for months. And he discovered Mickey Mouse, hustling fantasy hard for tips. He struck up a conversation with this real life fake Mickey Mouse, and somehow ended up in the change room and saw all those ten dollar bills tumbling out of the costume and he thought to himself, this is what I want. It became his ambition to become a hustler like Mickey Mouse. So he left school, called himself Mickey Mouse and now not so much later, it seems to him, he hustles for change outside the public swimming pool, parking cars -he has made a hard shell of life in order to protect his self.
Mickey Mouse spent his nights on the steps of an abandoned house, on the corner of Adrian where Meyiwa becomes Percy, watching over the sex workers who work from the house at opposite corner. One night after a client refuses to pay one of them, and is trying to shove her out of his car, Mickey Mouse shows up, pulls the guy into the street, takes his car keys, marches him to the nearest ATM and makes him pay her.
There are other stories, that he walks the old ladies home after water aerobics, that there is a sex worker – clean now, with kids, off the street – who comes to swim at the pool but because of her past she is afraid to walk alone to South Beach where she now stays alone. He always gives her a walk, Mickey Mouse.
Not popular with the residents of the drug houses – who harass the sex workers, steal from them, worse – he is not allowed in some of the drug houses, maybe because he has stood up to the Nigerians he bravado shrugs.
On the last night of Mickey Mouse, he had gone into the drug house a block further up Percy to ask if anyone had food for him, maybe a piece, or a bag, anything. One of the magosha's boyfriends claims that Mickey Mouse has been harassing his bitch. Another accuses him of stealing some food. Without perceptible warning they are swiftly stabbing pummelling parries into his body...
...and he drops.
He is thrown onto the pavement. Waiting for the ambulance to arrive too late, his burbling blood sucking where they have stabbed him in the lungs.
Down on the corner at Adrian the magosha are bemoaning his fate, here at Percy less than fifty meters away they are talking – whatapestwhatapain, what a poes he was.
Other versions of history.
Mandela was replaced by an actor. Jan Van Riebeck was fat. Jesus was black. How quickly these discussions gain speed. Passed down theories as an attempt to make sense, to comfort, a sense of peace in acknowledging lack of control. In a vacuum rumour stands for truth. Truth is relegated to rumour. History is bigger.
Tupac Eminem. It's the only music around here, no one has a phone, data, the time to find new music, the access to people who know new music, the music played is what's known, what has been passed down, the older deader addicts liked Tupac, the old USBs still work in the new, always a new speakerbox visiting before it's sold. The old legends survive. Watch out for the illuminati.
A phone is not to look for new music or find information. A phone is not a communication device. Everything is currency. Airtime, data bundles, they pass through – sold for drugs food comfort. It's comfort to think there is a larger conspiracy, every disapproved act is resistance. Access is expensive. Cheap flip flops, they're shit, fall apart fast, new shoes that would last can be traded down by the ranks, for food.
On the corner of Meyiwa and Thusi, this twelve year old, he helps me sometimes, he's lived here his whole life. Not long, just his whole life. I help him when I have spare caps, nyope, crack. He helps me when he has spare caps. It is more often he helps me. He knows how to protect himself. He has learnt survival to a degree I will never comprehend. When I get clean I must come back and get him a job. He's never been to school, can't read, can count in multiples of the price of crack. He tells me that he knows I will be getting clean because I have an education, I must have people. To watch the way he survives out here, to see the him pull from nothing, from trash, a baleful look, an alchemist of need. An education to envy, if educated to value it.
It is far more complex than this. Every conception of self is untranslatable to a language outside of the self. Everyone's awakenings are their own. All forms of languages learnt from different sources.
This guy, early forties, he grew up, somewhere West Coast, inland, sand dunes, past the tourist influence, has just been off the street now a year, rebuilding. Twenty years ago he started on the street, has done prison time, is a twenty-eight. When he was fifteen or so he stabbed one of his teachers, but still didn't try meth for six years, and it started even before the teacher.
Somehow earlier he has made himself hard, and then somewhere around twelve he took to stabbing trees.
He would get angry and take out the stolen okapi and find a tree. At school, he would escape the day early, over the back wall, down in the veld in burbling distance to the river, there was this one tree that lent in toward the slope, and he could put one arm around it and his forehead against the trunk, and he could make like it was a brother he was greeting, “Otherwise?”, and he could stab that tree in the stomach, in hard parries, holding on fast and just imagining the life in flurries escaping, the gurgling in his ears.
So for him, in getting clean his biggest fear was that going home his old mense would invoke the number credo, “you leave us, you die”, but after six months die goede het begin balance, so he has to go find them, to get it over with. They've heard he's clean. They appreciate the visit, but he must not spend time with them. He, to them now, is hope. It is impossible to know the truth of this.
The youngest person in the rehab is fifteen, he has booked in with an older using buddy. Court conditionally there, they have been caught breaking into a pre-primary school – they were trying to steal the school's media technology to sell for meth. If they complete the six months they will get a suspended sentence. They spend the hour after the thin meal, before lockdown, out in the twenty by ten metre courtyard, spitting rhymes at each other. The older writing his own, the younger reciting Tupac, Eminem.
He spends his sixteenth birthday in the rehab and the gift given to him by his dorm mates is half an hour alone in the room -so he can skommel in peace.
When he gets home, he plans to stab someone, to get arrested. “In prison I will learn how to protect myself, to...”
He brandishes his fist as if holding an okapi. This is his best option as he conceives it.
It is a week after they book out, that we hear the news, the sixteen year old has escaped to the streets.
One of the older guys from his dorm chuckles at this news. “Fucking seun,” shaking his head, “te steek...”, he grimaces and clutches his fist, swooping quick tight parries, “...human flesh is not butter you know.”
Someone else sighs, “yassis, you know that sound...when you pull out the knife,” sucks air wetly between his teeth, grabs his crotch, “makes me so hard.”