The crazy one.

I worked at a bar in Observatory, Cape Town many years ago. It was a meeting place for locals and travellers who called themselves writers, sculptors, painters and philosophers. They drank and smoked together for so many years that they became completely entangled in each others lives and I was happy to call myself one of those people. Some nights that place would go crazy, people got naked and danced on the tables and we would only switch off the lights after the sun came up. There was the resident homeless man who obsessively built sculptures out of trash. The alcoholics, the deranged. Some overdosed, some committed suicide, some have continued on their paths of life with joy and pain. We all grew up in that place.



One of our regulars was a real card. Grant was always standing up in the middle of our evening rush and reciting his poetry out of the blue. He organised slide shows in the café of his trips abroad, usually ending with a recitation or an improvised skit, or music; whenever inspiration hit him he’d indulge it. We shook our heads behind the bar counter as we poured more drinks and people got up and walked out en mass. At some point while I was still working there he disappeared and I forgot about him as I did with many of the other faces that peered at me over glasses in the dimmed smoky light of Café Ganesh.


My accommodation in Barrydale is on the property an old accomplice from there, a light-hearted Blacksmith as big as a bear that used to spend a lot of quality time sitting on the seats of that bar. He moved here a couple of years ago and offered for me to stay in the tower above his gallery for a month or two. At ten o clock last night I got home to find the Blacksmith downstairs cooking up something frightful and slugging back brandy-and-cokes with his old pal Grant who was passing through with his wife and child, and had stopped by for tea. Their tea had turned into drinks, which in turn had become dinner. The Blacksmith was The Orchestrator, throwing on old LP’s and humming to Neil Diamond, Oscar Peterson and U2. Grant’s daughter, a girl of perhaps seven or eight with short, dark hair and the same intense glare as her father walked around aimlessly. Her mother, a mathematician, wafted in and out of the room covered in a shawl, smiling blissfully as I passed her by.


“Well, hi there!” a voice boomed as I walked in. Discordant electric guitar cords had started competing with the Blacksmith’s LP’s. The place was mayhem. Grant descended on me wearing a large blue kaftan that hung loosely over his tummy and hips. His hairline had receded some since the last time I saw him, and what remained had grown down to his shoulders where it hung in oily curls. He shook my hand as if for the first time. If he smiled anymore it would drop off his face.


“Hi Grant,” I said and introduced myself.


“Ah yes, I remember you I think!” he said, as if hit in the face by an old light bulb that was flickering on and off rapidly. “How lovely to see you again. Café Ganesh…. That’s like a different life now! I left Cape Town nine years ago. I just realised that the people there would never be able to think any bigger, you know? Perhaps it’s because they’re stuck between the mountain and the sea!” he laughed and the kaftan jumped around his stomach. “I went travelling after that, nowhere and everywhere for a couple of years, until I found my enlightenment, and then I came back.” I blinked twice. Did he just say he’d found his enlightenment?? “Now I’m based in Grahamstown… Hey, have you met my daughter?” He pointed to her. “I think I lost my desire to be an artist after we had her. I mean, isn’t she perfection?? What an amazing creation! Isn’t life amazing?! We’re starting a band, the two of us. Have you heard of the White Stripes? I’m totally inspired by them! I mean there’s just the two of them and you know, if you can read you can do anything! No really, you can teach yourself anything. I got this book…” Grant was gesticulating wildly and pacing and produced a small ring bound booklet with a guitar on the front. “I mean, this is all you need to start a band, isn’t it honey?!” he shouted to his little girl who had taken over the guitar and was noisily banging away at it. She ignored him completely. His wife, tall and thin, wafted through the room again like an ethereal Christian effigy, briefly stopping to applaud her daughter’s efforts on the guitar.


From this point on the conversation gets a bit hazy. Graeme spoke about how he’s discovered that sound is the ultimate art form, that it’s basically “sound sculpture” in that every sound that you make becomes an actual form in space, and that depending on what music you listen to, the shape of the object that you have created would vary. Or something like that. He quoted the Bible. He spoke fervently, like his mouth could barely keep up with his head, and all the time he looked like he might take off at any moment, like the excitement was almost too much to bare. Nothing could put him off. He wasn’t concerned by what either myself or the fourth party, (whom I haven’t mentioned) thought about any of this, which I felt was somewhat of a mistake on his part. At some point whilst Grant was blabbering on, the fourth party sucked hard at his cigarette and surreptitiously rolled his eyes at me whilst Grant went off on another tangent. I giggled. Grant is crazy, I thought quite plainly. He’s mad. His wife is as cooky as he is, and I’m sure their daughter will grow up to be a wonderful but deeply cooky person as well.


I slipped upstairs to the tower soon after that, but the music continued for most of the night. Sometimes things quietened down, but then I would hear uproarious laughter, or something breaking. There was dancing late in the night, and at about four am I was woken by Grant shouting: “Rachmaninov! Rachmaaaninov!!” The Blacksmith turned up the sound and a piano concerto blasted itself to smithereens. I might as well have stayed for the party, because sound loves a good tower. I heard them locking up after the sun came up, and later I heard a car drive down the driveway and leave. His wife must have been the driver, I thought. He’d barely gotten into bed before getting up again.


I couldn’t get Grant out of my thoughts after that. I played our short conversation over and over in my head. Something about his confidence had made me feel insecure during our conversation. The fact that he hadn’t played by the same rules as everyone else, the fact that he DIDN’T CARE what we thought and that it obviously worked for him, made me resent him. I part of me felt like saying: “Are you deaf and blind?? You’re getting pretty old buddy, you’ve never been exceptionally beautiful, you drive an old car and your daughter looks like she might just have walked out of Children of the Corn. You have NOTHING to be happy about!”


I only laid eyes on the Blacksmith again two days later, after his recovery. “Sounded like you and Grant had a great time,” I said winking. “Oh God no, Grant went to bed soon after you did. I went to the bar and brought home the German from town. It was the two of us going crazy down there. Sorry…”


The question I’m forced to ask myself is: On what grounds do you we judge people? And what do we reward them for? Did my judgement of Grant make me a happier person or did it just reflect my own rigidity and fear of going against the grain of what is acceptable in society? Let’s face it, it’s not ok to be that happy in our world. Too much joy makes you a freak, a crazy.


If he'd been a conformist he would probably have been a bored old bastard, slightly cynical about the world with a chip on his shoulder, but he’s not. Perhaps he HAS found his enlightenment; how would you go about telling someone you're enlightened anyway? Hey, the man is happy, there’s no doubt about it. Grant has been faithful to what’s in his bones, and in my book that makes him a superhero.  I'm the crazy one here.  I'm the one who's crazy.

Love is a tower.

I gave notice on my flat a couple of months ago. After I got back from America I couldn’t settle down. At night my feet burned and my dreams felt too real. Finally I conceded.

On the first of December I moved out, packed up my life and stashed it in various places in and around the Cape peninsula. There are bits of me in ceilings, at the top of garages, in other people’s flats. My travel bug has not been satisfied. Cellini Euroline was reinstated as my official Travel Companion, so I tied her up and gagged her, threw her in the boot of my car and quietly left Cape Town. No big goodbyes, no big deal. I slipped away like a shiny eel, out through the tunnel and passed Worcester, wine farms and horses, townships and trains. Out to Barrydale, a small town in a Karoo valley that’s surrounded by big blue mountains and Pierneef clouds.


My room is perched on top of an art gallery; one room, a basin for washing up. At the back an old ball and claw bath. A winding staircase laps down to the ground like a lazy tongue, and so I am Rapunzel although I have no hair. Downstairs my landlord, a metal worker, puts the final touches on the door hinges he’s been brooding over. Blue light flashes through his studios’ windows and when it does, the lights in my apartment flicker down, then up again.

Clouds roll in late afternoon to deliver a short but violent shower of rain. A hammer maims a sheet of metal below. Dogs bark. The traffic on the R62 surges past. Out one window lies a grey cemetery; beyond that houses, dogs. Out the other, endless blue sky broken in pieces by mountains, sometimes mist. Next door a couple of men are digging a grave. They’ve been at it for three days now. When night falls their employer pulls up in his car and leaves the headlights on so they can see. He sits on the bonnet drinking a quart of beer while I watch from behind a curtain in my tower. His legs dangle in front of the headlights, throwing strange shadows on the ground.

Two nights ago I woke up to scratching and flapping, a bat in my room. I chased it, we wrestled, I lost. The next morning I woke to find Bat Baby hanging upside down next to the window like a strange doorknob or light switch, deep in beautiful sleep. We gently detached it and put it out the window. I walked outside to check on it; it just lay there, entangled in the bush like a dead thing, but when I checked again an hour later, it had disappeared.

This morning it was the banging of baboons on my roof. They come after sunrise; you hear them barking in the hills, then closer, closer. In two weeks I’ve had three encounters with them. They pull at people’s doors, break in and ransack their houses. One day I walk back home and find them in the middle of town, chasing down the main road with food in their mouths as people stare and drop their groceries.

It’s the week before Christmas. I have no TV, no radio. Consequently I have taken to reading, poetry mostly: Eugene Marais, Leonard Cohen, Pablo Neruda. At night I dream of old lovers, people I used to know, and I wake up aching. I concoct wild fantasies in which I am the heroine and I get the man. I am not unhappy. I’m just nowhere.

One of my oldest friends lives in town. We went to school together, to varsity together, but he moved here five years ago and since then our time spent have been short encounters involving sushi and wine in the Waterfront. He makes chandeliers out of recycled material, he makes things with beads, he paints. He’s a sculptor. For Christmas he helped make a huge Christmas tree in the main street of Barrydale.. There was a marching band, dancers, flashing Christmas lights. I thought about the lights in New York, the shop fronts my cousin and I had gone to see at Macy’s last year this time; the bustling crowds, the subway, the cold. A year has passed.

Welcome to the movie.

The life of Alice would make a good thriller at the moment.

Or perhaps a drama. Either way, it has all the elements necessary to induce total and complete madness or to make you change your religion.
The current story line looks something like this:

Woman bravely gives up everything to follow her dream of becoming a location independent, travelling pro blogger and Sangoma even though everyone thinks she’s finally lost the last of her marbles (or just the big important one in the middle). At least, that’s the sexy way of summing it up. The unsexy way is to say that she’s now homeless by choice. (Hence many references to madness.)


As Woman prepares for the final cut (moving out of her flat), she knuckles down and braces herself but all and all copes exceptionally well with the loss of her cat, the loss of her home, storing her possessions for the next five years and blindly believing that she’s going to find funding for above mentioned adventurous lifestyle when there’s absolutely no proof to support this.


But then!


Her beloved and trusty car breaks down. It’s serious the mechanic says, but don’t you worry Little Miss. R6,000 should cover it. You’ll have your car back in a week he says, when the parts have arrived. (If they arrive.) Woman has large and dramatic nervous breakdown all over the mechanic’s floor but he doesn’t look too perturbed about it. He just says: sign here. Woman signs. Then goes home to spend the rest of the week shaking, crying and staring at the wall.


She sits in her flat and feels like her guts are falling out of her bottom, but they don’t. In fact, now that she thinks about it, nothing has fallen out of her bottom in quite awhile.


The Blouberg wind comes up. It blows in that specific way that makes her feel like her head might come off. In an effort to combat cabin fever she does go for a walk but the wind blows her hair up her nose and she almost chokes to death.


A couple of hours after she arrives back home, she realises that baby birds have hatched in an unreachable location on the other side of the wall and they squawk and scrape on the side of the house all day long. Her madness deepens to a new shade of purple.


The two old yappy dogs downstairs bark at her when she comes home, when she leaves and when the wind blows, which means that they bark all the time. The birds are not disturbed by the barking. Their feet scrape against the inside walls and Alice listens to them as they settle down wake up scuttle about scuttle and crawl. They wait for their mother to come back baring gifts and when she does all hell breaks loose. The wind slams doors closed. They bang like bombs down the street, and the wind howls with joy and goes looking for another.


This time a year ago Alice was packing her bags in New York City to go home. A year later, almost to the day, she’s packing them again.


Almost to the day.