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.