The Year 1996 sometime in 1996

The year 1996. The Matric Dance.

The mid nineties weren’t all Oasis, Manchester United  and strolls along Muizenberg beach.
A face once bursting with pusy zits that only two doses of the nuclear warhead that is roacutan could obliterate; teeth growing to all sides of my mouth like aloe cactus that only iron roped braces could straighten; a voice that wouldn’t crack and hair straighter than Tom Jones. I was an awkward kid. And to boot it all, I was a Latin scholar.

With this fine shiny armoury, it was Matric dance time and I couldn’t go it alone.
 Tuesday nights were student night at the Doors night club, Marshal town, Johannesburg.
The Doors was a dark dingy episode. The now furry walls had seen it all, the buns of a body, the spill of a drink, the back street brawl and some footloose dance moves. Dragging your hands along those walls you could feel the pulse of the club, you could hear them talk.
The dj platform rose from the dance floor pit and a cat ladder lassooed the periphery. Intermittently jellie vodka shots would come raining down on us as we sweated our moves, grinded our crotches and mimed the rock tunes that came crashing through the booming speakers.
That school night I saw her. Dribbling that Black label beer , the cheapest beer for the leanest pocket ,down my chin, she was the girl that turned my legs to tagliatelle and she was the one that would accompany me on Dance Night. fingers crossed

The next day at school in maths class, looking cooler than Boy George in my spit shined Doc Martens and rolled up short sleeve white button shirt, tie and gray brooks with the iron seemed down the side, i leaned on Leanne’s flip top desk , on it scratched LD heart GS. ‘Leanne, babe, sooo, the girl I saw you with last night, well, I wana take her to the dance, what do you think?’ ‘Uhm, oh yea, Narissa?, hmm let me ask her’. ‘Great, thanks, let me know’. With that conversation and inches closer to my dream, I shot her a wink and made two ‘gun fingers’ as I Michael Jackson Moonwalked away to my desk in relief.
I set aside the time between Carte Blanche and the 8oclock flik for the phone call to Miss Hot-entot.
Finger dialling on the cream-coloured round, rotund family dog n bone of yesteryear, I waited for the ring, i waited for the pick up, waited for the ‘hello’, proceeded to asked her mom if i could chat her and then waited as her footsteps echoed in the background as her mom hollered for her. More nervous than an impala in big lion country, i heard her pick up the phone. With my tongue stuck to the receiver, she said ‘yes’. ofcourse she did, they always seem to.

My dad had a beast of a car. His real love, it was an Alfa Giulietta. It was aged-white and had rusted fringes, a truncated rear and a bulbous front end. It was a car constructed by a black smith, beaten into shape. It was an iron horse this thing. Caramale coloured leather interior, a giant disco ball for a gear lever and a hula hoop steering wheel. It was a sieve, for the wind howled through its cavernous interior. There was a radio and a tape deck that hovered below the dash board and the incremental lines on the station dial meant the car was of antiquity. but he loved his Italian marque.
 It embarrassed the blood out of me.

On date night my dad drove us in his Italian tar killer. First we’d pick up this cherry, and my assumption was that  id go into her house and sip champers with her parents and reminisce about the 60’s; we’d have photos in the garden of the greatest night of our lives and be all smiles at the upcoming event. But alas, as we arrived, there she stood with the front door shut surely behind her. Having opened the car door for her, we sat back seat. It was only the sounds of Crowded House that cut through the awkwardness of the drive. I really wanted to tip-ex myself out of sight at that point in time.
The dance was a horror show being sat with her and her chums, and the after party saw me leave alone. With that night going down in the anals of history  as the worst night of my life, i’m glad its behind me. To all the geeks out there, those latin scholars, those wearing braces and those with pigeon toes, The Russian Bear Hunter stands with you.

Bear Hunting Season 10.03.2012

There was this girl I once loved. Jessica was her name. She was a real peach you know. She was so hot she could turn you to blister and though id met her, I felt it most difficult to make first contact. For if I called her, I anticipated she’d say, ‘dan, who?’ and if I messaged her, id figured she’d hit ‘delete’.  So I master minded that I’d send her a postcard expressing my deep love for her, expressing how we could act as mall rats on a Sunday, licking two scoops and holding hands, expressing how we could sit on a park bench and watch as the burning sun dipped below the horizon like a dunked Marie biscuit, or how we could lie in waiting at the airport to watch giant jumbos fly over head sipping ice cold coca colas. I heave a massive sigh.
Time passed, and finally the SA postal services delivered. Pre- polyphonic ringtones I received a text message on my black on white Nokia 5610. She’d received it, loved it and had placed it on her ceiling so she could read it each night before she went to bed. Radical rim shot. I’d nailed a double word score with all 7 letters.
Fast forward on the ol’ VHS machine.
We did one date night. I stared into her eyes to see me reflected in them. Mesmerizing.
It wasn’t all about me, i tell you, but I did let her in on my massive vinyl record collection, and that I was off to Cape Town to a wedding. “you have to visit my uncle’s record store while you’re there’, she said. ‘It’s called Mabu Vinyl’. Odd name I thought but to score some pointage with her and to grab me some super slick black gold, I vouched to visit.

My choina Steff was in the Cape as I was and a day out in Long street sipping overly, unnecessarily expensive craft beer was a sure thing. After rehydration we together stepped into Mabu Vinyl.
The search for a new record was an Indiana Jone-sian experience, with nothing licking my fancy.
The one owner with his long range locks and hipster t-shirt offered me a viewing of ‘the good sh*t’ at Stephen’s house. Who the F is Stephen? Anyways Steff and I, in his yellow-banana-coloured jam jar 2^nd geared it up the hills of Oranjezicht to Stephens house where we were met with a calmly casual guy in his khaki threads, short sleeve button shirt and flip flops. ‘be careful of the stairs, they’re slippery’ he cautioned, as the Cape rain splattered down like a Delhi’d belly.
Under the house was the musty mildew-ey dungeon with walls that had breathed, seeped and stained every part per million of THC they could absorb. Bending our heads we entered through the wooden stable door to be greeted by plumes of bellowing smoke and heaps of records. Records in blue trunks, records along shelving, records on the floor. I wanted some record. With my Led Zepp Code paper-bag wrapped record in hand we bolted.

6 months later in 2012. Cruising down the freeway in an Infinity down to Atlantic City outside of New York for a weekend rendezvous, my cousin reminded me of the legendary Album Cold Fact, of the weathered Rodrigues and this new mega hit, Searching for Sugarman. The world stopped. I sat for a moment in silence, the hairs on my arms stiffened as a teen in a popsicle store. My eyes watching the other 5 lanes of the highway zip by in slow motion, and a cotton-balled silence blanketed the cockpit. Noooo frikkin waaaay, i bellowed

I tried my darndest, the hardest effort id ever given to one chuckle berry (cherry) but sadly my dreams of being with this dear girl faded like the print on a well worn tee shirt, my spirit shot down plummeting like a lead zeppelin. The journey did though lead me to the now famed record store and to the wonderfully mellowed Stephen ‘Sugarman’ Seger man-The man that sought Sixto

Knees, Bees and Honey Trees 03.10.2016

An Ennio Morricone-composed soundtrack would have been far more fitting an interlude to my medical experience. When the doc said I’d need an MRI, that seemed a bit more than having an ingrown hair removed. I met my radiologist in the swampy holy city Benoni.
Waiting nervously for my slot, I read already-thumbed magazines and watched the off-the-shelf clock tick tack till my appointed time.
The nurse arrived motioning me to the MRI room. Emptying my pockets and unchecking the box that said ‘have you any metal plates in your head?’, i was led to stand alongside this gargantuan off-yellow barrel-like machine. Laying in the coffin-like capsule, my arms tucked in, a pair of ear phones hooked around my head, the missus covered my head in this hockey mask like grill. She then pushed ‘on’ and the machine clunked me inwards to the bowels of the ‘cave’. The nurse had told me they’d need to inject me with a dye in order that the machine could pick up colour hot spots. The thought of a robotic needle puncturing my neck plagued me and i awaited that science-fiction movie moment. It didn’t arrive after she gently took my hand and needled me to have the aforementioned dye race rapidly through my blood system.
For a machine as sophisticated as an MRI it sounded pretty agrarian. The John Deere sounding engine barrelled around my head. And then she hit play. And none other than Josh Groban came over the ear phones. My hands clawed into my stomach and my eyeballs rolled around my sockets like a ball on roulette table in absolute distaste. No-where to run, no-where to control the volume, i endured the Guantanamous Grobian torture.
After about 30 minutes I was all MRI’d but riddled with the songs and sounds of the curly Josh Groban.
The x-men had one looksee at the x-rays to find nothing but everything normal.
It’s lekker being regular. So go on and order Regular.