!Yub Yna Enohpllec Morf snhaK

I was at Supertubes, Jeffreys Bay, for the first time in yonks, and I had dug out the ancient big-wave gun for the occasion. That extra length is just right for that down-the-line speed, you know what I’m saying?

           When I came back from Hawaii in 1995, one of the first things I did was ask shaper Greg Smith to recreate the big-wave performance board I’d ridden for all those months on the island. A swallow-tail 18.5” wide and 7’2” long, with a spray design in ANC colours on the underside, it’s the kind of board everyone was riding on the North Shore, but that you never see in SA.

            Meanwhile, everyone should be riding J-Bay on something like that. It lets you make every section, gouge turns and keep projecting down the line, gives you stability in the tube, helps you get onto waves earlier, so you can sit right out the back and pick off the bombs. It’s the path.

Tragically, now, with me living in Joburg and only getting to surf every December, the trusty gun hadn’t seen much action.

So I get the boards out the back room, jam it in the car and hit the Bay of Jays. It’s a Thursday and, sure enough, there’s waves.

Now, I’ve been out of the surfing loop for so long I’m an embarrassment. My boards actually have fins glassed onto the underside of them. They’re all yellow and stuff, and hey! What’s that!

I tell you what that is. Some time in the Nineties, when I last went on a surf trip with the big ANC board, I’d placed a sheet of newspaper between my two surfboards to stop the wax from the shortboard melting onto the bottom of the longboard. But it hadn’t helped. The Sex Wax melted through the newspaper and left a layer of wax on the bottom of the long board, complete with a negative print of whatever was on the newspaper!

It was like the Rosetta Stone, man, like hieroglyphics, a message from the past! Imprinted on the bottom of my surfboard in smudgy black mirror writing and surf wax, was a record of my former life. A back-to-front page of the newspaper from the last time I had seriously gone surfing.

What did it say?

It was an advert, screaming, “!SNHAK MORF ENOHPLLEC YNA YUB” Which means “Buy any cellphone from Kahns!” Do that and you could win a new Ford Tracer worth R40 000! “Get to Kahns Cape Rd today to meet the MTN Gladiators!”

Next to that is a fragment of a report about some kind of mining accident “…assistant could warn the others,” I thought I could make out. “They were trapped between the explosion and the rock… …bo-Ngcuka said a full investigation would be conducted.”

What you reckon? 1998?

In an hour and a half, I caught four waves and rode one of them past the parking lot. I was a bit rusty. I think that board was too.

And a bit sluggish from all that wax on the bottom.

 

Saved by reggae. Damned by corruption

I’m bad. I’m evil, touched by the twisted left hand of Satan. I am no doubt cursed to wonder the desert of hopelessness and damnation for eternity.

            I snuck into an LKJ concert.

            And LKJ is my god! He’s my legend, since I first heard my sister’s Bass Culture LP. The man is the voice of black pride, respect and self-defence in the face of oppression. He is also the king of Afro-Caribbean dub poetry, pre-figuring hip-hop, dancehall and still the inspiration behind the modern spoken-word revival.

            I’m at Newton early. I want to see every support band, the entire line-up, encores included. It’s the day before payday, but I’ve made a plan and I’ve got my R205 admission to begin my tutelage at the feet of the dub master.

            But I battle to find the entrance. I go in the wrong way, and end up behind the stage.

            “Is this the way in?” I ask a security guard.

            “No, you’re far from the entrance,” he tells me. “But I can help you out. This is the artist’s entrance. We can make a plan. Just go through.”

            I look around. We’re completely alone in the back section of Newtown Park on the way to the Bassline parking lot. Next thing I know, I’ve slipped the guard R100 and filtered through the artists’s backstage area into the audience. Someone called Niza is playing.

            My mate Shoul is here, with his babe. Nadine from the castings… A solid delegation of rastas. A lot of us old whities from the Eighties.

            Spoken-word poet Kgafela delivers a series of passionate raps in deep, vernac. They seem pretty awesome, but with no Tswana, we’ve only got the staccato consonants of his verbal attack to go on. His backing singers have this bewitching Sixties jazz harmony going on.

            I meet Tim Parr during the Tidal Waves set. They gonna put a new album out.

The smell of smoked marijuana attends everyone like a manservant. You can identify about five various strains of herb. By the time LKJ illuminates the stage and blesses us with his gifts along with the Dennis Bovell band, I am ripe for enlightenment.

And enlightenment he delivers, prefacing every militant musical poem of rhythmic defiance with an eloquent contextualization. “I wrote this number following the death of Blair Peach, who was killed by racist police officers at an anti-Nazi protest in 1979. This is Reggae Fi Peach.”

I start feeling so guilty for bribing my way into the concert, that I consider sneaking up to the entrance and sneaking two hundred bucks into the cash box.

Karmically, perhaps I won’t go to hell for so long, because I doubled the earnings of a poor Newtown security guard?

Still, it’s LKJ for god’s sake! An international icon of the struggle against oppression. He’s like the musical Desmond Tutu! And I ripped him off! I’ve loved every minute of my evening, I’ve been skanking for four hours, but I deserve none of it! I want to rip the entire experience from my soul, then go backstage and hand it back to him.

After playing for a full hour, he encores with More Time and takes his leave. “We want more!” bays a small element of the crowd, then, then! Like a redeeming angel, a rasta with a foot-high load of dreads appears, brandishing LKJ CDs for sale. I set upon him like a mugger, forcing R150 on him, grabbing the disc and lurching off into the night like a ghoul.

I’m still going to hell. Just probably not for so long now. I looked at the CD. It’s LKJ Live in Paris. Haven’t listened to it yet. But that’s not what I bought it for anyway.

            

A little drawer of your salad days

At work we needed an extra pic of Theo Crous, the Springbok Nude Girls guitarist. I spent most of the Nineties going to Nude Girls gigs and taking photos, so I volunteered to dig out one of my classics from my photo drawer.
Cue three hours of sifting…
I did eventually find it. And I could have found it within 25 minutes if I’d been able to just flick through the 1 000-odd prints in my box. But that’s impossible.
Could you take a trip through the sprawling boulevards of your life thus far without stopping to smell the roses?
Okay, maybe you could, but then you’re probably seventeen.
I so couldn’t. I got stuck on the shot from the 1993 Great Train Race, of me, Cliff, Jorgie and a girl named Jean on the back of a truck. The year we came second last, I think it was.
Then I got to the ones of me with long hair. The ones of me overseas: me and Gudrun, me and Neda, me and Alexandra. I cannot lie. I’ve known many women in my time.
By this stage, I’m sitting in bed with this drawer in my lap, going though pictures of myself with various beautiful women of international renown.
Next to me, my lovely wife harrumpfs and turns her back with a dramatic flourish.
“Baby,” I protest, “I just looking for Nude Girls pictures,” just as I get to the ones of me with my ex-girlfriends.
It’s not the best thing I could have said.
I’m about to consider guilt-tripping, when I get to the one of Elani in the fetish gear at the one Einsteins fashion show, and the one of me with Miss Phalaborwa!
I track down the offending Nude Girls pic towards the end of my photo collection.
It seems my hoarding of pictures ended somewhere around the advent of the digital camera in 2004/5.
I know I’ve got a whole lot more digital pics , but they’re all lying abandoned and forgotten in folders on my laptop. Folders with names like “Snapz” or “Party pics”, or “All Images”.
I could get in there and double-click on them, and set up a slide show with them and organize them into sub-folders by date, category and, name.
I could start some more photo albums on Facebook. But I dunno. Are these pics really for general consumption? Am I trying to solicit comments from my friends telling me “Lookin’ hot, babe?”
Would that allow me to lovingly caress the image and stare mistily into the middle distance, musing on the exploits of my single days?
No, I know what I should do. Get them all printed out on photographic paper at the photo store. That way I can put them all in a drawer, so every year or two I can open it up and sift through my piccies. A little record of my salad days.
Everybody needs that. Just a little drawer somewhere.

The great Gonzo scooter assault

Just like every time, we swung by the bottle store after surfing the East Pier. And just like every time, we bought a two-litre scrotum of OB’s, from the Solly Kramer’s in main street.
There were four of us, so we managed to klap the whole thing by the time we got to Grahamstown. Plus a loaf of white bread, a big packet of Nik-Naks and a third of a bankie. Just like every time.
Only as we rolled down Bathurst Street did we remember that it was our residence’s annual house party. Luckily the Graham Hotel off sales was on the way. We got vodka and crème soda, which would go well with the punch.
By 6pm we were slamdancing to Come On Eileen in the common room. The first of the Oriel Hall girls had barely poked their cautious noses in the room and we’d already knocked over the drinks table and torn the curtains off the walls. Then Grant asked me to come with him to PE. He wasn’t sure of his way to the airport and he needed a local to direct him.
I schemed why not and hopped in his Golf GTS with some alies for the road. Just like every time.
By the time we got to PE I was no use to Grant . All the roads looked the same and I couldn’t remember if the airport was in third, fourth or fifth avenue.
We found it by fluke. Grant sommer parked his car in the loading zone and sprinted into departures. He ran right past my mate Chappie, who had just landed, or was dropping someone off or something. By this stage I was so blitzed, Chappie must’ve thought I was on crystal meth or someone. It was about 8pm.
Chappie dropped me off at my folks’ place. No one was home, but I still had a key, so I was able to let myself in and then get my sister’s scooter out of the garage and head out into the wild night for Bananas, capital of the PE nightlife.
When I got to the Summies hotel, I stashed the white helmet next to a white wall to, like, camouflage it. Soon I was king of the dancefloor at Bananas. B-52’s, The Cure, TSOL, Men At Work, eVoid, Oingo Boingo… just like every time.
Kurt Buchner was there and all these ous from Wild Side Surf Club. Me and Patrick Parkins went for a walk on the beach with these two girls when Died In Your Arms came on.
When I came out the club to leave, someone had kyfed the helmet. So began a fraught and nerve-wracking trip back to Central, posted, on a scooter without a helmet.
The cops caught me doing about 40 kays an hour, on the pavement outside the Hotel Elizabeth.
I explained to them how I was on my sister’s scooter and I didn’t have the key for the helmet lock, so I’d hidden it by a white wall because it was the same colour as the helmet. But a thief had obviously managed to spot the helmet, leaving me no choice but to drive home without it…
Not missing a beat, the cop asks, “Het jy gedrink vanaand?”
I reply, “No, of course not.”
Just like every time.