| This is it, pretty simple. Like most
babies I was nice and fat, back in the late 70s and early 80s, and
my favourite childhood picture is of me and my brother, him six years
old with freckles and teeth, me two years younger, like a shaved little
Labrador puppy, pudgy and white-mopped. Now I'm 27, of average height
and weight, with a beer boep which will probably only get bigger every
time I ignore yet another plea from Men's Health to actually
bother enough to pay R20 for a magazine with an intimidating picture
of a beautiful muscular man on the cover which, contrary to what I
suppose their intentions are, only makes me want to be gay - or a
woman - so that I can have sex with such a beautiful man. Don't want
to be that man, just want to be with that man.
I'm very envious of my dad, he doesn't have a beer boep at all. It might be because he's never drunk beer or any other booze of note in his life. It might also be because he works very hard and spends most of his time doing physical labour. Me, I push pens. Or not even. More like these buttons I touch as I write this. Pretty useless vocation compared with people who take bricks, cement and wood and build houses with them. I'm also more than a bit lazy around the edges of the ruck, unlike Schalk Burger.
I just ate two eggs for breakfast, sending them down with toast, chopped onion, mushroom and tomatoes, with some chilli sauce for extra verve. Last night I ate a mutton roti, the night before a Korean squid dish, preceded by an ironically enormous box of crap popcorn while watching Supersize Me. The Coke, which, like all movie house Coke, tasted like it was pumped from a sparkling clean HTH swimming pool in the basement of the shopping complex, lost its taste not even halfway down. I have eaten one fruit this week, an apple. Other weeks I might eat forty, but then it would be naartjies and naartjies are like performance-enhancing drugs: once you've had one and tried to throw the peel into the bin on the other side of the room, you just have to have another.
I don't do drugs, except for the above-mentioned naartjies, coffee and alcohol. I never used to like beer either, that is until I spent one hot August in Botswana with nothing but free St Louis and Hansa for company (and pretty girls in a double-cab Hilux). Now I love beer. I never drank gin and Dry Lemon, until I accidentally poured one two weeks ago from the back of a (double-cab) Mitsubishi somewhere in Barotseland, Zambia. It was free, again. I suppose I should stop going to African countries before it makes me like heroin. There was a sign by the road on the outskirts of Kalabo (a small town in Zambia) that read: "Beware of drugs, they will drug you".
This is exactly what I like about alcohol. Last night I had a quart of Milk Stout, a Savanna, a gin and Dry Lemon, four tequilas and four Jägermeisters, approximately. Luckily, I could walk home. One of the few things I truly dread is having to drive drunk and then crash. It's sad and stupid. I'd rather just crash and die when I'm sober. Alcohol hardly ever gives me a hangover, which is a stroke of luck not to be scoffed at.
I never do any physical exercise except for when I have a girlfriend. During the dry patches there are those moments of confusion during which you think the way magazines want you to think: I don't have a girlfriend because I am unattractive. I need to work out. Get a hairstyle which isn't a sheep-shearer's number 1 clip. A six-pack on, not in, my stomach, will get me sex, maybe even a job and a car that doesn't break and, hell, a closer communion with a god of some sorts.
I choose to let those moments pass. Screw it, if someone doesn't like me because I have a hairy back, a beard like a tuft of yak hair stuck onto a part-time explorer and a body capable of only basic functions like walking and clapping hands (but not advanced stuff like salsa or rock-climbing), then so be it. So my workout for when I have a girlfriend consists of twenty push-ups in the bathroom before I take a shower, directly after I've taken a crap. Sometimes followed by twenty sit-ups, but they're harder and make my back hurt. This I do because I read that Kleinboer does mini-workouts like this to keep him sharp in bed. I like sex, and anything that can make it last longer is worth a try. My housemate is going to workshops on tantric sex lately, and she bought a DVD last night. I intend to check it out just now.
I only started having sex in recent years, which is a pity, because it's one of the better things you can do with your body, whatever shape it is in. I'm generally a slow learner, and having been fairly shy as a teenager, heavily laden with small-town quirks like the NG Kerk and nothing but Radio Algoa reception, I missed small but vital tools of emancipation like exposure to good rock music and girls who actually come onto you instead of sitting in the corner of the school hall during sokkies with eyes darting around the dark like a duiker who suddenly heard a twig break while having a kak. I was the DJ at the sokkies (I scratched "Pump Up The Volume" and my name into the roof of the DJ box, you can go check) and never even kissed a girl in school. That sucks, though it could be because my mates always brought kak like Bad Boys Blue and Too Unlimited tapes for me to play. I lost my thread here; what I wanted to say was that this is my excuse for having such a long gap between wanking for the first time huddled over sexy pictures of Miss South Africa finalists as displayed in Rapport Tydskrif in the toilets of the school hostel while constantly glancing upwards (no roof for toilet, those partitioned ones) to check if someone is watching me (throwing a big black "Geen Warm As, No Hot Ash" dustbin full of cold water onto a wanker was considered massive entertainment) and life as it is now, which includes regular sex.
Sex would be a small part of my body if it wasn't for the fact that it's impossible to switch the sex part inside my mind off. What time it would save! All of a sudden this mist descends (blood rushes elsewhere, meaninglessly) and five minutes later I've been fooled (by a magazine, again!) and I've bought the SA Sports Illustrated Sexiest Sportswomen edition pretending that I always buy the magazine (for the articles on Jacques Kallis…), but hey, you try resist a magazine cover featuring a blonde dressed in nothing but an orange skirt and a hockey stick pressed over her nipples. Look, just wasted an entire paragraph again. Puff pastry.
The only part of my body (for the outward appearance I care superficially and the sex part I just play along sheepishly - it's a jostle for positions which will make the first corner of a Formula One race look orderly) which is of slight concern is my mind, which must be part of my body as it's inside my brain, which is somewhere above my teeth and tongue in my skull. How everything we are and do can come from this one little Steers burger-sized spot is a mystery, and considering how easily a bullet through your brain or your head hitting your front window while doing 100 can squash everything inside your brain and, therefore, everything you are, it's quite an amazing secret to know (the answer to "What the hell are we here for?"). Mad. But that's dying for you, just about the only thing your body can't deal with. Plus we have no choice (except for suicide, or deliberately excessive behaviour which will leave you trying to die - it didn't work, he only died later - like a slit-wristed Sid Vicious in a pool of blood and shit and piss while a "friend" puts a microphone to your mouth and asks you "So, Sid, what really happened that night your girlfriend died?") in how or when we die, which kind of makes it exciting to be alive, but also slightly inconvenient, because it means your time alive will be laboured with having to decide whether it's worth registering for tax at all, or subscribing to a magazine for three years in order to save money in the long run, or having a pension plan or a medical plan, because what if you die just now as you walk out onto the mad streets of Observatory or Morningside or Mitchell's Plain or wherever. A body is, after all, also about waste, about secreting smelly stuff which this living, breathing animal and all its cells don't require any more, and about decomposing when the match in your mind is snuffed out, leaving only the pleasing smell of sulphur, just like when you light a match on the toilet to hide the smell. That is the smell of death, maybe (man's greatest burden - having to kak - coupled with man's greatest invention: portable fire). And then we feel we should file this body with all the other dead ones, for humans like to file stuff. Mine you can just cremate, or better still, donate to the vultures. Being eaten by a crocodile can't be nice, but at least it speaks to older values, unlike having to die of stress or high cholesterol or being shot by a man who wanted your crap watch.
The thing that puzzles my mind, and therefore my body, most is how this body of mine interacts with the bodies and minds of other people. And how, if we didn't have this kind of mind which can decide "Oh, my favourite colour is red" or "I'd like cold milk and not hot milk with my coffee, thank you", we would behave if we were stripped down to instincts, like most animals who we don't give the credit of being thinking, scheming, plotting (have you ever looked into the eyes of a tortoise? They know shit.) beings. Would we walk down the street and sniff one another's bums? Fornicate in parks while others walk their dogs and still others eat raw meat from the carcass of a German tourist (nice and tender, pity about the sunburn) at a picnic table? Would we be more disorderly or more organised? Would we be better or worse? If we were without things like religion, the idea of different nations and different languages, chocolate, televised sport and other things which totally fuck us up, would we still be the same as we are now?
Because we can't know and I can't begin to guess, I'll leave it at that.
The interaction of bodies and minds, which manifests itself practically as relationships of intimacy, whether it be physically with a girlfriend or shaped like hugs for best friends and family members, handshakes which show respect, acceptance, subordination or belonging to a certain group, is what most of us exist for. I love to be alone, but am too used to the comforts of friends, family and the staff of petrol stations, grocery stores and beggars outside my door, to ever really seriously become a hermit. But times spent alone (even if there are millions around you - a foreign country and culture often highlights the solitary nature of your body and mind) are good, as it means you can take your mind out of your body, leave it on a table for a while, scratch out the rust with an old toothbrush moistened with some gun oil and see what happens when you make unexpected new additions to it, like adding a silencer to a .22. Too often our body relies too heavily on other bodies and minds around it, diluting everyone and everything in the process, so that you get home exhausted and spent and too tired to even switch on your computer to do something creative, something constructive, something which means something solely to you (to me, I'm speaking about me whenever I say you), something which makes you happy to read later, something which is alive even when it's just dead words on a sheet of paper, because no one is in charge of words, of ideas that come from words, or words that come from ideas, or mad paintings, or sculptures both physical and not.
This is why my body is selfish. Why I keep certain parts of it entirely to myself, mostly accidentally, because I hardly know my body or my mind and don't expect I ever will. My body is also fallible, it makes mistakes, errors of judgement, it stumbles when I'm drunk, it commits crime, it doesn't always check the blind spot, it lies, it covers up, it pretends to be busy when it isn't, it mistakes love for comfort, it calls comfort love, it calls too many things love, it loves like trees in the forest having too many functions like bubbling oxygen from chlorophyll, like changing colour, bearing fruit, sending down roots, sipping sap - too busy to notice that it is stationary, and that sooner or later some guy who wants to make his cassava field bigger, or who wants more grazing for his cattle, or simply wants to make a nice set of chairs from your limbs, is going to come round with a chainsaw or an axe and just cut you down, because trees will grow again, if not here then elsewhere, wherever there's land, even just a crack in the rocks, and soil and rainfall, however irregular.
To this I can only add a little footnote. Maybe my body is selfish because it does not know war beyond scraping a living in a relatively docile environment with nothing but a lack of opinion and a good sense of direction as ready weapons. In his excellent book Flight to Arras Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says this:
A being is not subjected to the empire of language, but only to the empire of acts. Our Humanism neglected acts. Therefore it failed in its attempt. The essential act possesses a name. Its name is sacrifice.
The book is written from the perspective of a man flying a plane towards the certain death of German guns. He knew he would not live. And this wasn't just fiction, for the author perished during the war, realising the only end to his essential act.
Find a worthy cause. Sacrifice your body for it. Proceed to the next task.
Cheers, I'm off to find a war.
|
Toast Coetzer is 27 and lives somewhere in Cape Town
not too far from a bar, but was born in Cradock, went to school in
Somerset East and then to varsity in Grahamstown. He likes fish and
chips and travelling and cricket and mountains and Koreans. He's in
a band called The Buckfever Underground which has two albums out,
Jou Medemens is Dood and TAFL - Teaching Afrikaans as a
Foreign Language. Once, way back, he beat the bass player of Skunk
Anansie at pool.
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