kagablog

There’s this big guy in front of me. He’s about three or four years older than me and he’s going to win the cross-country race. So I cut across a field instead of running around it, which puts me in front. He screams at me: “Davey! Hey, Davey! You cheat! Davey!” but I ignore him and we enter the earthern oval which has the parents inside it with me gloriously in the lead. He pounds along behind me, catching up all the way, but I’m too far in front and win. He’s out of breath and gasping to the teachers that I cheated, but he’s one of those throwbacks who were kept in junior school forever because he kept failing (but he sure as hell boosts the rugby team) and no-one really like him or wants to believe him anyway, so I’m declared the winner of the race. It’s the last time I ever win anything, because straight after that I am pitted against the best cross-country racers from the other schools in the area, and I realize if I win the next race, which is unlikely since I won’t be able to cheat, I will have to compete in local, then provincial, and then who knows, at national level, all for the glory of the school, my parents, my country and everyone except, I reason, myself.

So I stopped competing and became the most useless teenagers any parent could not wish to have. I filled every available time period, be it break or before sport or after or between prep (I was at boarding school) or before going to bed with having cigarettes, reading Asterix and Obelix comics and later, smoking joints and that great Cape Coloured invention, the pipe, a broke-off neck of a bottle filled with marijuana, and occasionally with a ‘cream’ of Mandrax. Holiday times consisted of stealing cars, smashing post boxes, breaking off car aerials, stabbing tyres with knives, tossing stones through any window myself and my mates thought was too big, racing around on 50cc motorbikes stoned out of our heads, driving through stop streets when you couldn’t see who was coming across them, sniffing spray n cook, pursuing horrified straight teenage girls … and endless hours on empty plots getting wasted on whatever myself and my mates could afford or steal or bum.

Unsurprisingly, I did not obtain a university exemption in my finals and it was the army for me, but my call-up was only in June, so I had six months before I went to fight for white privileges, which I filled with ever more drug consumption between trying to hold down a job at a hospital. I was out every night getting high until three in the morning and had to be up at six to take the train to work. I was drawing and cutting and pasting on an artist’s easel which was stacked at 45 degrees, a very convenient angle to pass out on, which I did almost every day until I finally got fired by my totally disgusted boss.

It was somewhere in this foggy period that my drug buddy and I decided we should go and ‘score’ and ‘arm’ of weed from Crossroads township, because the tiny packets we were buying were just too expensive and didn’t last long enough. We divided this in half and I returned home and opened my stash upon my bed. I took out a bit and smoked it and went for a very satisfied walk. Meanwhile, my parents returned home and my mother, who never usually went into my bedroom, went in to put a shirt on my bed, which she had bought as a present for her errant son. Not knowing what the mass of green stuff was, which was about twice the size of a soccer ball, she called my father, an ex-cop, who identified it immediately as ‘drugs’. When I got home they were cramming my hard-won weed into the bin, which really pissed me off. I was so far from normalcy that I didn’t even think about how upset my folks were, I just wanted my weed back. Evidence of how fucked my mind was emerged clearly the next morning, when my sister raced into my bedroom to tell me that my father was having a heart-attack. I had gone out on my usual binge, smoking my buddy’s stash, the night before, and I could see no reason why I should get out of bed. My sister managed to get my father to hospital, where he underwent a double bypass. Half of his heart had died, but he was such a fit old bugger that the other half kept going. Later I went to visit him in hospital and he asked me if I knew what I was doing, so I wrote out a thesis on marijuana to prove that I did – how it cures glaucoma and reduces nausea for cancer patients and things like that – all the positives, as well as the negatives, such as that it can produce real psychosis.

My father has since died, bless his soul. It took me 30 years to give up cigarettes. I still smoke marijuana, but in really tiny, respectful amounts. I got three degrees when I finally got to university. Now my teenage son is struggling to find the required motivation to do his assignments, and I don’t know what to say to him; that it’s not for us that he must do them, its for himself?