The Missing Years
years 18-21
OK here goes once more. The missing years ? you asked:
The missing years
I ran away from home the night my mother and father insisted that I was not to go to University wearing sandals. It was an entirely trivial thing and they seemed to be playing out all of their frustrations with me over this silly thing.
Their frustrations had good cause.
To find yourself at University with absolutely no sense of why you are there, how it would ever lead to something you would choose to become in life, and no real sense anyway of who you might be is never going to result in a satisfying outcome for aspirational parents.
Remember that these were people who had grown out of poverty. Who hauled out the good dinner service when posh guests came for dinner. They played out the charade of being solid and respectable in a world slightly mad.
It wasn?t the odd occasion, in the neighborhood where we lived, when a man would run through our garden, hotly pursued by other men eager to send him back to the poverty he was trying to escape. And we went on living in our great big house, with our great big garden, behind veils we had created to block out the fact that there it only a few years earlier when people whose blood ran in our veins, had run blindly from the thugs and men in cold black uniforms.
The night I left home, was the night Carel de Wet had come to speak at the University campus. Robin Margo had ripped the microphone from his hands as chaos reigned through the Great Hall. And a toady head of the SRC tried to placate students saying it was wrong not to listen. We marched bravely through Braamfontein that day. Down across the bridge. By the time we reached John Vorster Square it felt as if we had accumulated a crowd of hundreds.
But they were waiting for us. The men who dragged me into the cells that afternoon seemed drunk with rage, foaming at the mouth. Through the afternoon they kept shifting us from cell to smaller cell. It transpired there weren?t that many of us there which made it infinitely more frightening.
The police had no idea what to do with us. So one by one, we were photographed, fingerprinted and sent packing. No charges were ever laid.
I treasured that finger-printing grease on my fingers. It was for me, the first formative moment in becoming someone who had his own voice. I kept it on my hands so that my horrified parents might see it as if they were somehow responsible simply because they were of an older generation.
I did not really run away. In fact I did not go far at all ? an aunt and uncle put me up for a few weeks. It was only a few miles from home and I am sure my mum was given regular reports as to my wellbeing. But I did not go back to University; I did not want to be an accountant.
I left South Africa quickly after that. The idea of going to London, to travel in Europe seemed daunting but appealing.
I arrived in London with enough money for about 4 weeks, dressed dapperly in Bevan?s trousers (the ones with the buckle on the bum) and a double breasted jacket. And carrying a suitcase of clothes.
Within a day I had moved to a working man?s dorm in Holborn that reeked of rolled ciggies and old beer where men who looked like they had fought the Germans shuffled about with TV and the Galloping Gourmet as their only distraction. Within a week my clothes had been replaced by dirty jeans.
London was throbbing with young Americans, fresh from Woodstock, coming over for the Isle of Wight festival and for Triumph Bonnevilles. I accumulated a group of travelling partners with the curious American quality of names that ended in numbers. John W Wright 111 and a boy from Phoenix named Niles with the hairstyle that Hair made famous. It was hair which saw us thrown out of almost every place we ever tried to get food to eat. With these two fine fellows we biked through England, freezing each night in some open field, never washing, rarely eating. Even Stonehenge in those days was a place where you could sleep under the stars without fence nor souvenir hawker.
I had begun, for the first time to discover, remarkably that there were girls on this planet who noticed me. So with Nancy I went to Ireland. During the worst storm in the history of the Irish Sea. Miraculously after crossing we found ourselves in a beautiful wee cottage, with hot soup and kind people. I have always loved being in Ireland. In the morning men were pushing their bikes down the mountainside as we hitchhiked our way to Dublin. I had as my only mission to haunt the bars where Joyce had been. And in every bar there would always be someone who was prepared to pay for my next round as we sang gaily into the night.
(I have been back there ? to a town called Kinsale. After a week I had lost my voice from the nightly singing. But it was there, in a shop called Boland that I had this conversation with a shopkeeper. ?Can I get a newspaper please? Well, wouldya be wantin today?s paper or yesterday?s, she asked. Today?s please, I replied. Well, you?ll have to be comin back tomorrow then, she said.?)
The Isle of Wight concert that year was disastrous. Everyone in music came. Hendrix played for the last time. I woke up during a Leonard Cohen set, and then again during Sly and the family Stone early on a Sunday morning. There were 600000 people there. They weren?t interested in the music. They were interested in revolt. When I went to the police caravan to report my missing stuff after leaving it somewhere for 6 days, the pile of passports I looked through was 4 feet high. And I left the island with a passport, a sleeping bag and a guitar.
Niles and I traveled through France, Belgium into Holland. Every hippie had to go to Holland because that was where Paradiso and Fantasio were and that?s where drugs were sold out in the open off ice-cream trays (like in the cinema).
But General Suharto arrived in Holland. And Hippies were rounded up off the streets and bundled into trains and we found ourselves back in Belgium. I worked as a dishwasher in London. Mostly at dreadful greasy spoon Wimpy bars.
My money had run out and I was terrified that the new woman I was with, Marina Athannasiou would grow to close to me and then what would her fireman fiancé and family back in Athens do to me. So I left.
I went to Israel thinking that maybe Barbara Cohen who had been the only girl in high school to kiss me, would somehow remember that kiss. And I headed off on a bus to the Midrasha at Sde Boker where I had last known her to be. I got off the bus, a stop too early and landed up working in the fields of the Kibbutz through a hard winter pruning olive trees and an awful, scorching summer looking after the 10000 chickens. My job was to kill 50 chickens for Friday dinners, to pick up the pecked-to-death ones each morning and to inject the whole lot for what the kibbutz bosses said was Parkinson?s disease but must really have been an early application of steroids. I became a vegetarian.
Ben Gurion was still alive. One Purim he stopped at the volunteer table and ate one of the hash brownies my roommate Cristina Serra had made. We thought he would die.
We walked with him on regular occasion and loved talking to his security detail, the head of which had gone to Argentina to get Eichman.
Cristina was a great cook, a beautiful Argentinian and she will always be remembered for the most delicious porcupine spare ribs which she made whenever one was caught in the traps around the veggie fields. We?d have to kill them with a jeep which meant that you needed be careful of swallowing small pieces of bone. (Hunter S Thompson was famous for his trout fishing technique which involved blasting a pond with a double barreled shot gun. Not only did the trout float to the surface but their bones were mashed too,)
I had a new love in my life by this time ? a girl in Nahal called Irit who was posted with friends to the kibbutz. Doe-eyed, tall ? we would spend nights as a group in our small hut with a record player listening to classical music and making toasted sandwiches. A great luxury.
But her mother came and before I knew it, she had organized a job for me in Tel Aviv at the Vegetable Market, a place to stay with her Rumanian Nephew who spoke no Hebrew or English but with whom I was to develop a wonderful relationship through the powers of Spir (99% alcohol) and a BSA Lightning on which we travelled through Israel.
I did go to University. I did study Philosophy and theatre in Hebrew. I did not understand almost any of it. And I have tried subsequently to study philosophy in English and still don?t understand, nary a word.
So I reach the part where Orit came into my life.
Irit after whom my daughter is named (she thinks this is a hoot), had left me broken-hearted, living in a place near the Shuk Hacarmel called Simtah Plonit (the anonymous path). I lived in a broom cupboard in an old British colonial house with concrete lions at the entrance.
It was a lonely time, I had almost no money, I worked at 18 (overseas telephone exchange) with a Cape Town hippie called Hershie Tepper. He and I walked from the Hilton to Yafo one morning before dawn after tripping through the night on opium. I worked late nights at the market, the only Jewish boy there, and I studied at Uni during the day. I thought I would die of loneliness and despair.
One day, I pasted onto my walls a Time Magazine series of the suffering of the people in Biafra. It was a turning point ? I am always brought back to reality by the idea that my life has been lived in comparative comfort and that there are so many who have not been as lucky as I.
Orit and I dropped out of Uni together. I don?t know why or how it happened. One day we were together, and for what seemed like a blissful eternity we stayed in our small one roomed apartment emerging only every few weeks to take everything we owned to the laundry. We had no source of money. But earl grey tea and love seemed to be sustaining.
I have learnt much since that time. Mostly that love isn?t self sustaining. Mostly that in order to be valuable to others you must be valuable to yourself. That your own energy in your own life, is what makes you meaningful and interesting to others.
In fact, in times of relationship or personal crisis, my solution is a mechanical one. To throw myself into something, a hobby, a job, a book, exercise. Anything, as long as it is done without question and with dedication. In the art of Tai Chi you are taught to practice the same 49 movements every day.
Initially it is a perfunctory thing. Mechanical and meaningless. But with time, interesting things begin to happen. You become aware of each and every movement, of every part of your body, your sense of total awareness envelops you. Herman Hesse?s Glass Bead Game discusses this sense of totality and oneness.
And so, as we depleted ourselves, we depleted the love we had for each other.
After I dropped out of Uni in Tel Aviv, and we were out of money, I became a driver of very large earthmoving scrapers in an area near Nazareth. For a few months I lived in a hotel in Afula with a bunch of cowboy Israelis, we drove these huge beasts from 4am till 6 each day, eating on the move, scoffing dinner at a roadside diner on the way to our hotel and sleeping till 4am when the work started again. We worked six days a week. It was dangerous, the men were mean spirited generally, but we earned well. And there was no time to spend any of what we earned.
It is strange ? in our last years of school we learnt modern Hebrew from a book called Shalom Laish. It wasn?t a riveting read; it had the common story of Jewish migration out of Eastern Europe at its heart. Suddenly, towards the end of the book and without due explanation it became a piece of Jabotinsky propaganda.
What I remember of it was the simple idea that Jews had a moral responsibility to put down their books and learn to till the soil, to work with their hands.
Maybe it was that, or perhaps it was simply a revolt against my father?s sense of academic achievement, his overwhelming urge to shape me in his own image, but when I went back to SA, I wanted to work with my hands.