Dear DB,
Do you ever have the feeling you’ve painted yourself into a corner? That you’ve got yourself into a bind of your own devising? That’s how I feel as I approach the task of writing this week’s missive.
It was me, after all, who first said,“let’s tell our life stories from A to Z in grisly detail.” I thought by now the narrative would have reached our thirties, having skipped over those earlier years with a broad brush. Instead I find myself examining in fine detail a period of my life I really, really, don’t like thinking about, let alone writing about.
But if I don’t write about it, what happens afterwards won’t make sense.
Anyway, there I was, seventeen going on eighteen and just finished school. And excitement of excitement, I’d been accepted as a cadet reporter by the Johannesburg Star. This was a major daily newspaper and it felt like I’d won the lottery. A glamorous career surely awaited.
The first six months of training I lived in a residential hotel in the heart of the city along with the rest of that year’s intake. There were about a dozen of us, and we’d been recruited from right around the country. It was thus a time of great change, because not only was there an exciting new career, I also got to leave home and share my life with a group of new friends.
All of us were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and bubbling over with enthusiasm about becoming journalists. In the mornings we’d troop off to the newspaper offices where we learned shorthand and typing and exciting stuff about newspaper law. Then, in the afternoons, we’d be let loose on the world, and sent to places like the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court where our task was to dig up stories. Some of our efforts were published, some not. We were learning our craft.
But there’s always a dark side: the Magistrate’s Court was truly horrific. In those days, ‘justice’ in South Africa largely involved punishing people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the era of the ‘pass’ system. Black people had to carry ‘passes’ entitling them to be in certain places and failure to do so had terrible consequences.
This was also an era when corporal punishment was still employed in the ‘justice’ system for these and other petty offences. I can remember with a terrible sick chill the sounds of those brutal whippings echoing up from the evil basement of the Court building.
In the evenings, we’d put all that out of mind with some hard partying and hard drinking. We were learning how to be proper journalists and drink. And we were becoming politicized, radicalized and increasingly anti-regime. So it was a time of deep change on many levels. Then the deep change in my life took a nasty personal turn.
One of my new colleagues casually introduced me to a man called Kevin. I didn’t like the look of Kevin, not one bit did I like the look of him. But when he invited me out, I hadn’t yet learned how to say ‘no, thank you’, and so I said ‘yes.”
What my colleague neglected to tell me was that Kevin was fresh out of prison. For rape.
I know that you have a horror story of your own coming up, and so I am going to spare our poor readers further details for now. (When do we get to write funny stuff, by the way? I don’t know if I can stand too much more of this grimness...)
Dear M,
I'm glad that you got away from being a propagandist, I mean journalist, (same thing in this country anymore) I would hate to think of you that way. But I'm so sorry you had to experience Kevin. I think I would be nearly as upset at your colleague for setting you up with that animal. I don't know if you believe in the death penalty, but I think it should apply to rapists and child molesters. No one has the right to do that to another person and they should be taken from this world for thinking they do. But as many times as I've heard that happening, I imagine we would have a lot of executions going on. At least we wouldn't have to worry about over-population. :) After that bomb, my little trouble at school seems rather trite, but I'm going to continue it anyway. I can't think of anything else to write.
I'm picking up from where I left off last week. If you are old and have memory problems like I do, you might want to scroll down and get a refresher from our previous blog.
My father picked me up. He didn't look at me or say a word as we exited the school. It was as if he was so disgusted that he didn't want to soil himself with the acknowledgment of my presence. I climbed into his truck and sat next to him on the bench-seat (practically hugging the passenger-side door) as I waited for the explosion that was sure to come. The tension was unbearable as we pulled out of the school parking lot. He was holding onto the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles were turning white, and the veins in his neck bulged as he struggled to find words. Finally, in a calm, even tone that denoted the simmering rage waiting to be unleashed, he spoke:
"Where did you get it?" he asked. Before I could say anything, he added, "And don't give me that same bullshit answer you gave them. I want to know who had that goddamned stuff. And if you really did have it, then I want to know who sold it to you."
I knew my dad, and he wasn't going to accept anything other than names and facts, but I still feared peer humiliation more than my own physical well-being... and I was a great liar. Before I could think of the repercussions of my answer, I blurted out: "It was mine. I didn't buy it from anyone. I grew it."
"You grew it?" he scoffed, as he turned to look at me for the first time. He looked away before turning back with a malicious scowl that made me shiver. "Where's the rest of it? And don't tell me that that was the last of it. I wasn't born yesterday."
And so, I was caught-up in my own lie. I usually kept a small baggy of my homegrown in a hole in the wall of my closet, but, as luck would have it, the only thing I could offer him as proof that I wasn't lying was my entire stash that I kept in my tree-house by the barn.
One summer a friend and I tore down a small shed and built the 'Pot Palace' in a huge maple not far from my marijuana garden. The tree had five big branches that went up from the ground and we put the entrance right in the center with a padlock. The four walls and ceiling were designed to move with the sway of the wind and we even shingled the roof. It was quite a marvel considering we designed it ourselves. It was so large that I was able to take my two six-foot tall, six-foot wide plants inside and hang them to dry.
My dad was too big to go through the narrow entrance, so he made me climb up and bring down my weed. I thought about dumping some of it out on the floor, so I wouldn't lose my entire stash, but I feared that he would find a way to get up the tree to check it for himself (he never did). I threw down the black bag that still contained about a quarter-pound of pot.
"Is there any more up there?" he yelled.
"Just the stems," I replied.
"Throw those down too".
He walked me back to the house in silence. I had no idea what was on his mind, but I knew a beating was sure to follow. I imagine that if he hadn't had the time to think about it from his drive to the school and back home (a two hour round trip), I would have already had welts on my bum.
"Go to your room".
That didn't mean that I was safe. It was one of his favorite ways to torture me - to make me wait and fear his wrath - but it meant that my mom would have a chance to intercede on my behalf.
A few moments later, his voice came booming up the stairs to the room that I shared with my brother, "Okay, get your ass down here!"
I leapt for joy. He would never pull off his belt and whip me in front of my mother. My backside was safe.
"I want you to go to the garage and get a shovel and a tape measure," he began. I nodded in glee. "You're going to go to that pile of chicken-shit were you grew that crap and dig a hole six-feet deep to bury those stems. But don't do it until I come out and verify that its not five-foot eleven inches. If isn't six-foot, I'm going to use you to dig the rest."
I flew to the garage, skipping and singing the 'I'm not getting an ass beating' song in my heart. All I had to do is dig a hole - how hard could that be? You'll have to wait until next week to find out.
Your American friend,
DB Stephens
Do you ever have the feeling you’ve painted yourself into a corner? That you’ve got yourself into a bind of your own devising? That’s how I feel as I approach the task of writing this week’s missive.
It was me, after all, who first said,“let’s tell our life stories from A to Z in grisly detail.” I thought by now the narrative would have reached our thirties, having skipped over those earlier years with a broad brush. Instead I find myself examining in fine detail a period of my life I really, really, don’t like thinking about, let alone writing about.
But if I don’t write about it, what happens afterwards won’t make sense.
Anyway, there I was, seventeen going on eighteen and just finished school. And excitement of excitement, I’d been accepted as a cadet reporter by the Johannesburg Star. This was a major daily newspaper and it felt like I’d won the lottery. A glamorous career surely awaited.
The first six months of training I lived in a residential hotel in the heart of the city along with the rest of that year’s intake. There were about a dozen of us, and we’d been recruited from right around the country. It was thus a time of great change, because not only was there an exciting new career, I also got to leave home and share my life with a group of new friends.
All of us were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and bubbling over with enthusiasm about becoming journalists. In the mornings we’d troop off to the newspaper offices where we learned shorthand and typing and exciting stuff about newspaper law. Then, in the afternoons, we’d be let loose on the world, and sent to places like the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court where our task was to dig up stories. Some of our efforts were published, some not. We were learning our craft.
But there’s always a dark side: the Magistrate’s Court was truly horrific. In those days, ‘justice’ in South Africa largely involved punishing people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the era of the ‘pass’ system. Black people had to carry ‘passes’ entitling them to be in certain places and failure to do so had terrible consequences.
This was also an era when corporal punishment was still employed in the ‘justice’ system for these and other petty offences. I can remember with a terrible sick chill the sounds of those brutal whippings echoing up from the evil basement of the Court building.
In the evenings, we’d put all that out of mind with some hard partying and hard drinking. We were learning how to be proper journalists and drink. And we were becoming politicized, radicalized and increasingly anti-regime. So it was a time of deep change on many levels. Then the deep change in my life took a nasty personal turn.
One of my new colleagues casually introduced me to a man called Kevin. I didn’t like the look of Kevin, not one bit did I like the look of him. But when he invited me out, I hadn’t yet learned how to say ‘no, thank you’, and so I said ‘yes.”
What my colleague neglected to tell me was that Kevin was fresh out of prison. For rape.
I know that you have a horror story of your own coming up, and so I am going to spare our poor readers further details for now. (When do we get to write funny stuff, by the way? I don’t know if I can stand too much more of this grimness...)
Dear M,
I'm glad that you got away from being a propagandist, I mean journalist, (same thing in this country anymore) I would hate to think of you that way. But I'm so sorry you had to experience Kevin. I think I would be nearly as upset at your colleague for setting you up with that animal. I don't know if you believe in the death penalty, but I think it should apply to rapists and child molesters. No one has the right to do that to another person and they should be taken from this world for thinking they do. But as many times as I've heard that happening, I imagine we would have a lot of executions going on. At least we wouldn't have to worry about over-population. :) After that bomb, my little trouble at school seems rather trite, but I'm going to continue it anyway. I can't think of anything else to write.
I'm picking up from where I left off last week. If you are old and have memory problems like I do, you might want to scroll down and get a refresher from our previous blog.
My father picked me up. He didn't look at me or say a word as we exited the school. It was as if he was so disgusted that he didn't want to soil himself with the acknowledgment of my presence. I climbed into his truck and sat next to him on the bench-seat (practically hugging the passenger-side door) as I waited for the explosion that was sure to come. The tension was unbearable as we pulled out of the school parking lot. He was holding onto the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles were turning white, and the veins in his neck bulged as he struggled to find words. Finally, in a calm, even tone that denoted the simmering rage waiting to be unleashed, he spoke:
"Where did you get it?" he asked. Before I could say anything, he added, "And don't give me that same bullshit answer you gave them. I want to know who had that goddamned stuff. And if you really did have it, then I want to know who sold it to you."
I knew my dad, and he wasn't going to accept anything other than names and facts, but I still feared peer humiliation more than my own physical well-being... and I was a great liar. Before I could think of the repercussions of my answer, I blurted out: "It was mine. I didn't buy it from anyone. I grew it."
"You grew it?" he scoffed, as he turned to look at me for the first time. He looked away before turning back with a malicious scowl that made me shiver. "Where's the rest of it? And don't tell me that that was the last of it. I wasn't born yesterday."
And so, I was caught-up in my own lie. I usually kept a small baggy of my homegrown in a hole in the wall of my closet, but, as luck would have it, the only thing I could offer him as proof that I wasn't lying was my entire stash that I kept in my tree-house by the barn.
One summer a friend and I tore down a small shed and built the 'Pot Palace' in a huge maple not far from my marijuana garden. The tree had five big branches that went up from the ground and we put the entrance right in the center with a padlock. The four walls and ceiling were designed to move with the sway of the wind and we even shingled the roof. It was quite a marvel considering we designed it ourselves. It was so large that I was able to take my two six-foot tall, six-foot wide plants inside and hang them to dry.
My dad was too big to go through the narrow entrance, so he made me climb up and bring down my weed. I thought about dumping some of it out on the floor, so I wouldn't lose my entire stash, but I feared that he would find a way to get up the tree to check it for himself (he never did). I threw down the black bag that still contained about a quarter-pound of pot.
"Is there any more up there?" he yelled.
"Just the stems," I replied.
"Throw those down too".
He walked me back to the house in silence. I had no idea what was on his mind, but I knew a beating was sure to follow. I imagine that if he hadn't had the time to think about it from his drive to the school and back home (a two hour round trip), I would have already had welts on my bum.
"Go to your room".
That didn't mean that I was safe. It was one of his favorite ways to torture me - to make me wait and fear his wrath - but it meant that my mom would have a chance to intercede on my behalf.
A few moments later, his voice came booming up the stairs to the room that I shared with my brother, "Okay, get your ass down here!"
I leapt for joy. He would never pull off his belt and whip me in front of my mother. My backside was safe.
"I want you to go to the garage and get a shovel and a tape measure," he began. I nodded in glee. "You're going to go to that pile of chicken-shit were you grew that crap and dig a hole six-feet deep to bury those stems. But don't do it until I come out and verify that its not five-foot eleven inches. If isn't six-foot, I'm going to use you to dig the rest."
I flew to the garage, skipping and singing the 'I'm not getting an ass beating' song in my heart. All I had to do is dig a hole - how hard could that be? You'll have to wait until next week to find out.
Your American friend,
DB Stephens