Dave Chislett (23 August 1970) grew up in Johannesburg, but has lived in Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein and London, and is now a resident of Cape Town. With a degree in English and Philosophy from WITS, Dave prefers to spend his time writing and playing to working. This story is part of a larger body of work that he is still trying to persuade someone to publish.

What will boys be?

We sit on the porch and drink our beer. Old friends don’t need to say much. Music radiates out to us as we watch the clouds re-arrange the sky and the sun arc through its path. The reflection from the swimming pool is too bright near the ground, so we aim our vision high.

The house belongs to my friend Pete’s parents. We are looking after it while they are away on a Caribbean holiday. The house sits on the crest of a gentle rise and the land drops away on all sides. From the porch where we catch the mid-morning sun, we can see the river and bulrushes to our right, the swimming pool dead ahead, and the neighbour’s wall to the left. It is a good green view to enjoy with a beer glow inside.

Saturday morning with nothing to do but kill some time and absorb the laid-back vibe of the suburbs on the weekend. All around us the crescendo of lawnmowers, children and bird calls mingles with the music we’ve turned up loud. New Saturday smells like fresh bread and cut grass, open beer and cigarette smoke flush the toxins out of our everyday sinuses. A faint breeze encourages these smells of ease, they eddy and shiver through the air.

A big dog barks, his assertive voice triggers the whole valley, and all the underling yappers feel compelled to say their share. A mad jogger passes, wheezing, sweating and cursing the dogs that mark his slow progress.

These scenes seem quite frenetic, perhaps ill at ease, but from here they’re quite normal: we would be unnerved if they should cease. I look across at Pete, you’d swear he was asleep, slumped in his seat and balancing a beer on his waistband.
     “Another one?” I ask.
     “Sure, still six cold in the fridge.”

I grunt an acknowledgement, heading inside. The cool from the floor sends ice up my spine. Momentarily blind from the glare, I wait for my vision to catch up before going further indoors.
     “What are we going to do today?” I hear Pete’s voice drift in from outside.
     “I don’t know yet, Pete,” I reply, struggling to balance tins of beer while closing the fridge door. “Let’s finish the beer and the day can decide.”
     “Very funny,” he snorts.
     “Well, by the time we get through these, we won’t be able to do certain things.” I’m still struggling with the fridge door, not that Pete gives a damn about that.
     “Elaborate,” he barks.
     That’s Pete for you, concise and to the point.
     I sigh. “Well, if it takes us till after two to finish the beer, we can’t go to the movies.”
     A murmur.
     “If it takes us until after six ...”
     “Fucking likely.”
     “Rude swine! It’s true enough, but you get the picture.”
     “We could go to a bar and watch TV,” says Pete, peering through the gloom to see what is taking so long.
     “What’s wrong with sitting here and doing the same?” I ask, as I walk back outside with the open tins.
     “No-one to look at here,” sneers Pete sarcastically. He does, however, have a good point there.
     “True enough,” I concede.
     Pete laughs. “Yeah, you don’t count as a person.”
     “Thanks, wise arse.”

Pete is full of shit, but also some good ideas. What’s the use of getting pissed if you’re not going to go out and enjoy it? Besides, the day is too good to waste sitting about here, staring at the sun and the clouds, no matter how appealing such sloth may be.

I like Pete, we’ve been friends since junior school. His reckless attitude towards things in general is a pleasant change to my polite hesitancy. But to get him to follow through with things often requires some prodding.
     “So which bar then, huh?” I ask.
     “Any one.” He thinks about it for a minute. “One with a TV.”
     “Obviously, if we’re going to watch TV.”
     Pete shrugs. “I don’t know, what’s near by and likely to be full?”
     “Plenty of places, but none of them any good.” That’s the problem with living in a central area: plenty of places to go, but a corresponding increase in the number of shit places, too!
     “Baron’s?” I suggest, knowing full well he’ll say no.
     “No. No fucking way.”
     “The Jubilee lounge?”
     “Maybe ... too far, though.”
     “Sure. How about the Trocadero?”
     Pete looks up, suddenly galvanised. “Trocs! Yeah, they’re starting this thing with a stripper at lunch times. It’s just five bucks to get in. Let’s go!”
     Now that the destination is finalised, Pete is very hard to restrain.
     “C’mon,” he says, looming purposefully in the doorway, “let’s move it up.”
     “What about the beer?” I peer up at him where he stands, half hidden, in the gloom of the doorway.
     “We’ll take them with in the car.”
     
     Then he’s gone into the house and I can hear him blundering, glare blind, down the passage to his room. As Pete searches viciously for shoes and clothes, swearing and banging, I sit back and enjoy the sun. He’ll take a while. I savour the flavour of my beer. Ice cold. The small, snaky tendrils of excited expectation begin to creep beneath my skin. It always happens when I’m about to go out. The slightly out of phase sensation caused by the alcohol combines with my desire to form a heady cocktail that brings a ridiculous grin to my lips. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something vibrant about starting to party in the morning. I love it. Look at my hands shake! With this thought in mind, I get up and head inside to greet the growing frenzy of Pete’s preparations. Ah, to throw one’s self on the mercy of the day.
     “You ready yet, Pete?”
     “Does it sound like it?” he growls. And he does have a point there.
     “C’mon then, hurry up, we’ll miss the show,” I chivvy.
     “Hey, give me a break, I’m going as fast as I can. Dammit!” He swears quite viciously as something quite heavy falls over.
     I like revving him up, he usually gets really uptight and comes rushing out red-faced and puffing. Then I make him wait around while I lace up my boots. So I sit in the sun until Pete comes back out of the house.
     “Oh, you ready?” I fake surprise as he emerges through the doorway.
     “Ahh fuck man, not again,” he snorts, and heads back inside. It is only once I hear his boots squeak on the kitchen floor that I raise my head to exhale a wheezy laugh and get some air again. Falls for it every time!

Sitting like this reminds me of another time, doing much the same thing. Me and Pete, the lazy winter sun and plenty of liquid inspiration. It was about two years ago, when we were both still in the force and had too much money and nothing to spend it on but alcohol. We were out on a week’s pass at the time. Well, AWOL actually, our pass didn’t start until the Monday, but security was lax over the weekends and we skipped out that Friday as the sun went down.

Come Saturday we were hanging out to dry on the porch and trying hard not to look like the red-eyed, lust-crazed monsters we undoubtedly were. It was winter, and the sky was that southern white-blue that promises a freezing night but that cooks you while the sun stays up. By two o’clock we were bored with drying out and rapidly running out of cans. We had decided to head out to find a bar and some fun. But we had no petrol in the car and not enough money to buy both petrol and beer. So we grabbed the rest of the cans and decided to leg it.

To shorten the journey a little, we cut through the tract of undeveloped land that runs alongside Pete’s house. It’s really wild and overgrown — green and seething. The bulrushes along the river shouted hoarsely, incomprehensibly at us as we stumbled through the long, waist-deep grass. The low winter sun radiated weakly through our jackets, making us ooze sweat gently at the seams. Not exchanging a word, we swigged from our cans and pushed and stumbled our way through the landscape. Once we emerged onto the road, we were a pair of animated scarecrows, all stubs of dead grass and leaves.

From there we tried to hitch hike the rest of the way. It wasn’t until twenty minutes later, when we walked past a reflective shop window and saw ourselves that we realised why we were not being picked up. We didn’t even bother to remove the pieces, just stopped hitching and walked the rest of the way into the bar. That’s how I feel now: happy, disconnected and ready to get down and party with a vengeance.
     I burp down the dregs of the can in my hand, swing out of the chair and head indoors to check on Pete and tell him I’m finished, can we go now?

From the house, we climb into Pete’s car, along with a six-pack of beer.
     “Come on, then,” says Pete, as he slides into the driver’s side. “We’re going to miss the show.”
     I smile and jog the last couple of steps to the car. “All right already, I’m coming.”
     “What do you want to listen to?” Pete is rummaging through the glove compartment, trying to select a tape.
     “Something loud, I think,” I reply as I pull a couple of cans out of the bag. Holding each can out of the window in turn, in case of spray, I open up two and hand one of them to Pete. He takes a couple of swigs and places it between his legs.
     “All right, SLF or the Fiend?”
     “The Fiend.” I’m into a little bit of Alien Sex Fiend when winding up for a party. Pete, looking over his shoulder, reverses his car out of the park and we head on up the street.
     “Great afternoon,” he says, as he swiftly accelerates the car through the gears.
     “Sure is.” The wind whips my reply out of my mouth and out of the window.
     “Hey?” shouts Pete.
     “Sure is,” I said.
     We both laugh, over the sound of the music. Anything short of a shout is hard to hear. The beat pulses gently against my breastbone and skull. My eardrums swell gently and pulsate in time with the throb of the engine and the music. My fingers feel slightly numb against the cold of the can where it nestles in my hand. My nose and front teeth also numbing as the sun roasts my arm where it hangs out the car window. The sensation of the contrasting temperatures registers randomly upon my consciousness. It is a pleasant, slightly unreal feeling.

I grin across at Pete. He is concentrating fiercely on his driving. It’s just as bloody well that he is, because he is driving really fast and one little mistake will have us up a telephone pole in no time at all. We don’t say much, getting involved in the music and watching people in the traffic. Pete finishes his can before me. In a lazy arc, he extends his arm out of the window and lobs the empty over the roof of the car. I watch his throwing action and, turning my head, watch the can as it sails over my side of the car. It tumbles through the slipstream of our passage, bounces once on the pavement and disappears into the long grass beyond.

Wordlessly I reach into the bag at my feet and hand him a refill. I drain my can. The awkward backhand flip that I have to execute to get rid of my empty is nowhere near as graceful as Pete’s. Watching the coloured tin bounce and disappear into the undergrowth, I experience a momentary pang of guilt about our actions. But the warmth of the sun and beer soon absorbs the feeling, like a benevolent sponge. All regrets into tomorrow’s, just as today’s turn into regrets, our futures will come to haunt us. It doesn’t seem to matter at the time.

There have been other times, too, when things have just not mattered. In the push and pull for life, for person, the means one resorts to push one’s head into the light, adopting things, guises, or stripping away inculcations, ideologies. Each considered move ending up as another careless flick of ash into an already full tray. Exactly the same as before.

I remember standing outside junior school, aged eight years, urine-sodden pants clinging to the backs of my legs. I remember hoisting my jeans back up to my waist and standing up. I remember leaving without a second glance. Not counting change and drinking until it was all gone. All these remembrances are the same, they are all wise and foolish. Wise because gone, foolish because, now that they are lived, their opposites become absurdly apparent. Often the repeating permanence of my life props me up like a pillow. Insomniac, I watch its flickering repetitivity, a captive audience chained to the floor of a cave.

“Wake up, Shithead!”
     A big, closely-shaved head fills my vision, rupturing my reverie.
     “Dream time is over, lover boy.”
     We are in a carpark, cruising for a space. Pete spots a gap between a big, blue BMW and a red sports car. He slots his old jalopy in neatly.
     “No-one will pinch it now,” he laughs. “Too much of a tempting contrast!”

After the thrum of the engine and the music, my ears are very sensitive and register tiny sounds, seemingly at great distances. They fall softly onto my waiting eardrum, beat it softly into recognition and miraculously head electronically to my brain. From there those sounds speed to my limbs. Here they mutate again, chemically forcing my arms to move, to open the door, my legs to get out. I step into the cottonwool outside the car and smile an idiot’s smile.
     “We’re here!”
     Fuck, Dislocation!

Pete is already heading for the entrance to the mall.
     “Wait,” I cry, breaking into a sort of shuffling run, “Papa’s coming.”
     He laughs, “Yeah, but not in your pants, the state you’re in.”
     “I was just remembering stuff,” I mutter, “you know, these days.”
     Pete just shakes his head.
     “These summer days, just so beautiful,” I finish lamely.
     “Sure,” says Pete, “and if we don’t hurry up, we’ll miss the beauty of the floorshow.”
     Words from a Sex Fiend song, ‘I walk the line between good and evil, This apple’s rotten, rotten to the core.’ Small, anti-social words, an attempted justification of our posture, I cannot call it a stand.

The interior of the mall is cool and air-conditioned. The canned air rasps, somehow rough, as it slides down my windpipe and into greedy lungs. The neon lights are weird after the concentrated glare of the sun. In this light we walk cautiously through the crowds of Saturday morning shoppers. Parents and recalcitrant children clog the passages. A few single people determinedly try to thrust and bully a faster route through the mass, but to no avail.

Pete and I, we stick close to the display windows, where, I discovered once, most people don’t walk. This way we easily escape the throng at the too small entrance and make for the downward escalator. The unique odour of the building permeates my consciousness. Immobile on the escalator, I begin to be aware of its presence. Fast food, sweets, children, and a small edge of fear. It’s not a nice smell, new, but stale.

We doggedly keep our gazes lowered. There are too many people in this area we know and don’t want to see or have to talk to. People from our old school, mothers, drifters, people who are full of shit and just want to pass the time. The bar is a few short steps from the escalator. Once inside, we share a relieved smile but can’t relax until we have another beer in hand.
     “Made it,” says Pete with a grin.
     “Sure did,” I agree. We clink our bottles and take a couple of good, deep sips.
     “C’mon,” I say, “let’s go get a table so that we can get a good view.”
     The bar is against the back wall of the building and looks out on to the expanse of floor. A few tables and chairs are scattered in the open, booths down the walls. All the seats look inwards, towards a small stage and a dance floor. Dull red and grey, the place is gloomy and anonymous, even just before lunch as it is now. As we swig our beer, my eyes adjust to the gloom and I can see the place gradually begin to fill up. There are no women sitting at the tables grouped around the stage. A man with a huge beer belly winks at me over the rim of his glass and leers towards the stage. I refuse to be drawn and stonily return his gaze. But yeah, we’re all here for the same thing. Perverts of all persuasions unite.

The show is just about to begin. The music has changed to a languorous pulsing rhythm that always seems about to go somewhere but never quite does. The lights dim even further, until it is just the red lights against the walls which fill the bar with a mystic glow. Faces glisten as if painted with sweat. All eyes take on a fevered, urgent look. Everyone is darting short glances about the room, trying to see if they know anyone, or if they can see the girl before the show starts. Crazy looking eyes in the red light, the underlids look puffy and underslept. This morning’s stubble stands out like a four-day growth and hands become greasy on beer-glasses.

Men shift continually on their seats. They order another beer and a spare in case the show goes on too long. Each new entry is greeted by a sea of shiny red faces with puffy, suspicious eyes which soon lose interest. Coming in from the ultraviolet glare of the mall, these newcomers seem barely aware of the semi-conscious life form that stares at them from the bowels of the bar. Then they grab a drink and join us in that almost silent symbiosis and breathe its foetid air.

“Shit, I’m almost out of beer,” whispers Pete,
     “Well, it’s your fucking round,” I whisper back, not quite really knowing why. “Get me one while you are there.”
     Pete almost tiptoes to the bar, sidling between standing patrons with an apologetic smile. The man behind the bar is staring over the heads of the patrons, towards the stage. Pete has to wave his arms about to get his attention. Mine is attracted by a sudden intake of air around me and a leaning forward of heads. The show is about to start.
     
     She is tall and elegant, with long, straight, dark hair, all the way down to the small of her back. High eyebrows and huge eyes stare out into the dark. She just stands and one foot goes to the beat, a nervous tick at the extremity of her being. It arcs like current up her black stockinged calf to her knee. Pumping out a beat like sluggish blood in tropical heat. Her hip is consumed in the motion from her foot and she extends her hands. Her nails are long and dripping red, like black cherries in the red down lights.

She smiles an old sex goddess smile at us and we all squirm. There is a tiger lose in the funhouse and we all die to burn. She is an excellent dancer and a polished stripper, but there is more to the show than anaesthetic, no matter how dimly perceived. Left in just suspenders, G-string and half-bra, she calls a man up from the floor. With practised hands she guides his legs and arms until he crawls before her on all fours. He ends up on his back on the floor of the stage in just his shorts and oil. We are all wondering who is in for it next.

Pete is bouncing around in his seat like a schoolboy who knows the right answer to a difficult question, hoping she will notice him and call him to the stage. She carefully avoids catching his manic gaze. Before she has time to pick her own next volunteer, Pete bounds up on to the stage to a chorus of hoots and whistles. Determined to show how game he is, he bumps and grinds around a bit, all smiles and definite ease. I sink back into my chair, hoping no-one noticed where he was sitting, I don’t want anyone to think that I’m part of the show.

Pete has a look in his eye that at first makes me smile. He’s challenging the woman to do all she can, to try and humiliate him as much as possible. But as I watch him moving across the stage, I see that look is more than a challenge.

He moves in towards the stripper and she ties him to a chair with her black stockings. He allows her to remove his shirt and undo his belt. As she moves to rub baby oil into his chest, he slips his hands free of his bonds and, reaching out in rapid movements, removes her black half-bra and ties it around his head. Then he takes the oil from her hands and starts rubbing it into her belly and breasts. His hands make insistent hard circles in her flesh and drop suddenly into her tiny, lace panties. In perfect time with the music, she pulls herself free, saying something sharp as Pete’s hands fall away.

But he is not perturbed and he grabs her waist from behind. She swings around, struggling to escape his grip. In the instant that he masks her from the crowd, Pete punches her hard, just above the kidneys. Her mouth opens wide, almost in a parody of surprise and pain. Then her head is wrenched back as Pete grabs a handful of hair and turns her face to the crowd. Deftly now, he rips the lace panties from her hips, exposing her tightly shaved mound. Everyone in the bar roars their approval of the sight, half obscured by Pete’s roving hands.

He kneels in front of her to eat her, thinking, I suppose, that he’d overcome all resistance. I can see the dents that his grip leaves in the rich flesh of her thighs. But with a cry she attempts to bring her knee up into his face. He grabs her rising knee and punches her brutally in the crutch and then sweeps her other leg out from under her. I can hear the crack of her skull on the stage above the roar of the crowd and the music. Then Pete drops his jeans off and, man-handling the supine stripper into a suitable position, brings the show to its conclusion with hard rhythmic thrusts, finishing with the song’s cymbal crescendo flourish.

The last beat echoes through the dim, red air and a suddenly silent bar. I run up and grab Pete as he stumbles off stage. There is blood on his knuckles, some of her hair in his hand. Pete just smiles his shit-faced smile and says, “Let’s rock and roll.”

Like a dog smelling heat, I break for the door with thoughts only of the carpark and getting out of there. In the after-lunch lull, I make rapid progress through the mall. Only a few people look at me or turn to mark my running form. I rattle through pockets of people, travelling at half speed. Behind me thunder footsteps, but I do not look around but bolt, full tilt through the doors. Beer in the morning may not be all good, but you sure can run if you have to and not feel the pain. I head up to the carpark and stop next to our bay. Pete pulls up beside me, fighting for breath. Between the BMW and the red sports car is an empty space and a little pile of broken glass.

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