bios

---

After his arrest no-one mentioned him, he dropped out of our thoughts, except to mock that he had been arrested so easily. So dom. So fucking dom that Boyo.

Arrested in the golden afternoon sun clutching four meagre caps of smack, unga, nyaope whatever...

The problem with the Republic of Percy street is that all of us exist in an alternative world and we tend to forget that walking around barefoot openly holding our drug implements and vloeking and gaaning on sommer isn't normal, we tend to forget the neighbours have a whatsapp group.

In this let's say kilometre radius from the public swimming pool, the only world is a plethora of drug houses, lodges, brothels. Us interchangeable, shifting constant, shipwrecks of humanity.

Boyo does not seem to be a full human in any language. I assumed at first it was the language barrier. We bonded into long nights over how much drugs I could afford to give him for free.

A nondescript kind of broken, Boyo lurches from one degrading servitude to the next, his shit-eating grin an open deception self-facing, he's not noticed enough for any deception to mean anything to the customers here at 26 Percy.

The walls emanate rot. A milky green smell. Faded graffiti, new masonite doors newly kicked in. The larnie here, the bastard, the mafia is an ill-tempered Nigerian, adopted name Dave. An eagle eye for minor infractions and a weird over-scraping deference to the clients passing through the business room onto a fucked spring mattress, who pay, most often, less than R50 a fuck.

Dave deferentially closing the door on the smoking room that huffs clouds of various smoke: buttons, pieces, chrisstallion, caps, nyaope, stone, shit weed whatever – all the members here, a clutch of ruined floral shirts and grubby vests, other people's discards: car guards and traffic light hustlers, jumbled with young magosha still flushed enough with youth and naïveté to believe this is temporary, the walls of seeping green milky long-term evolutionary rot.

The older magosha, the Yolandas, the Tieties, the Nanas, they stay outside on the once posh ex-suburban streets all night maybe earning enough for a twenty ronds packet, and even maybe a biscuit.

The rain has penetrated these places so often, it rains permanently even when dry, indoors. A must chokes the back of the mouth.

Boyo drifts through all of this unpaid seeking opportunity: and an opportunity I often am nevermind.

He's arrested buying my afternoon drugs and I feel instantly guilty.

I seek to bail him out.

He sometimes appears as a shout in the background of calls to other people in prison, I recognize his yowl. But it's months of guilt before I get to speak to him.

I'm getting him a lawyer and need his full name and ID number.

It's a fruitless conversation.

He knows he was born in March or April or something like that.

I try to engage a lawyer. Burt. Even Burt laughs: The police called him over. He was on foot, they were inside the van, and he went over and they asked him what was in his hand and he opened his hand and told them and they told him to get in the van and he didn't even try to run.

The lawyer needs a name and maybe a date of arrest, I care so much, yet I can provide neither.

A week later Boyo has still not been found. Burt muses that arrests like that are probably a first offence. He will probably be out before we can figure out where he is.

Four months later he's out before we could figure out where he was.

“We couldn't find you on the prison records, what cell, what room were you in, what's your surname?”

He doesn't know. Boyo isn't his name either. Boyo is a generic like Ma-Eleven, Small, Studla.

He doesn't know his own name.

Or when he was born.

He drifts half formed through the many shades of smoke, the crack, the heroin, the buttons, the meth. User to user, seeking left over hits and favours, cleaning spit and vomit and running errands for a rand or two. Grabbing on to every step up to whatever approximation of high he can find.

He doesn't even know his own name.

He has the luxury of not having that much to forget.

A fucking lazy assumption if there ever was one.

So foking dom.