Insight & Execution

Activities encompassed the game “Yahtzee” and watching video’s. On Sundays Bro loved to play pinball in cafes, a hobby for which she was once arrested. At one stage she attended the female mud wrestling championships, another forbidden activity. Saturday nights most of us partied at Pretoria’s gay club although Ms C never showed her face there so Bro seldom went with us.

Amongst the more refined patrons of Skinner Street were members of Pretoria’s literary circles. One night Ailsa, James, Pierre and I attended a poetry reading in a quaint little artists’ colony called Rondegeluk (Circle of Happiness). Ailsa’s impressions are preserved in her poem Insight and Execution which first appeared in the literary magazine Die Tagtiger, waarby ingelyf is Graffiti en Ouma, Last Quarter 1982.

Insight and Execution

For Pieter

Let’s get together, you know I enjoy it so.

To rip them apart, not really the art, but the people that are new at any old do.

It’s hysterically funny, isn’t he a bunny? And that one there, has no hair!

We should spend more time together, not in the heather.

We drink from the same cup, so we can send them all up.

The Skinner Street house was kept neat and tidy by Onica who lived in a cottage at the back. Thanks to Onica’s labours one would never have expected the place to be a depot of illicit substances. I loved chatting to Onica in the kitchen. Tswana was her mother tongue and her use of Afrikaans intrigued me.

Sunday nights Ms Sharon C and Bro spent the evening watching blue movies with her dad and his girlfriend. Bro’s dad was always involved in semi-clandestine activities. When I accompanied Bro to his warehouse one night, he farted constantly whilst blaming an unknown person for his flatulence. Even Bro was embarrassed.

Bro had a motorbike and a powerful car with mag wheels. Long before it became a familiar phenomenon, she suffered from road rage. A ride with her was an ordeal, as the journey was spiked with exclamations like “you fucking cunt” and “fuckyou’” gestures. Bro wielded her car like a weapon.

Not even the police fazed her. Pierre once went with Bro and Ailsa to buy pizzas. On the way back to Pierre and Richard’s apartment in Polwin Flats near Pretoria Police HQ they made a “hot box” in the car – smoked dope with closed windows. In front of them a police vehicle was moving too slowly to Bro’s taste.

She passed the police vehicle, cut in front of it and slowed down to a snail’s pace. When the siren came alive and the blue light started flashing, Bro accelerated with the police van in hot pursuit. At Polwin Flats, Bro deftly parked the car as the police van came to a screeching halt.

With calm authority Bro told Pierre to take the pizzas up to the apartment while she sorted out the problem with the fuzz. Ailsa stood by her side. Fifteen minutes later the two of them entered the flat on the 17th floor in a jovial mood. As mentioned before, Bro could be delightfully amicable.

Much later, Ailsa, Bro and Pierre worked at a perspex factory which made neon signs. Pierre created the designs, Ailsa was responsible for the settings on the advanced machinery and Bro did most of the cutting of the perspex. Lunchtime was spent smoking dope on the roof of a warehouse in the back yard.

By now, Bro was living with a married couple in the suburbs. Her friend, the wife, was called Auntie. That’s where Bro acquired her taste for Lexotan, from Auntie. She took six a day, smoked dope in the morning, smoked again at lunchtime, and of course smoked more and took more Lexotan after work.

The roof offered a wide view of Pretoria West’s industrial area. Sometimes, when an attractive woman passed in die street below, Bro clenched her fists, jerked her hips to and fro and expressed her admiration with: “Check out that pretty chick.”

The owner, Mr T, got along well with Ailsa but barely concealed his distrust of Bro. Referring to his baldness, Bro named him “Chrome Dome” and “Meat Quiff”, nicknames that the other factory workers enthusiastically took up as Mr T was not popular.

The aristocratic Ms C had by then faded into history so Bro was a regular at the gay club in Potgieter Street along with the other friends. Adjacent to the club, a wide parking area gave way to open veldt. On one occasion Pierre had to pee but the toilets were all occupied so he decided to use the far end of the parking area. Bro accompanied him.

For some reason, probably alcohol, Pierre squatted down in order to pee. Not Bro. Having drawn her denim and pantie down to the ankles, she acrobatically extended her middle far to the front and peed like a man.

However, let’s return to the early 1980s and the roaring marijuana trade. It was unwise to turn the house into a shop as the trade attracted more and more customers. I was in the habit of speaking to Ailsa on the phone every night. One night there was no answer, odd for a house with six occupants. The next day I phoned from work and Onica confirmed my apprehension in her broken Afrikaans: “He was all catched by police.”

Owing to the jealousy of a young woman named Camel, the police had raided the house in Skinner Street the night before. Camel had been in love with an artist who had in the mean time entered into a relationship with Ailsa, a love affair that lasted for years. So Camel ratted on them.

As Fortuna would have it, everyone except Ms C was there… including the kids of Waterkloof aristocrats. That was a good thing as the parents, when they heard, immediately bailed out their children on whose slipstream the others got out. Bro remained the longest – two days. Besides the shock, the repercussions weren’t serious. Everybody was let off with a warning except Bro who received a suspended sentence and a parole officer.

In those days, under the Calvinist Apartheid regime, such lenience was unusual. Clearly the elites played a pivotal role in the quick release and the lenient sentencing. Two redoubtable gay women – prominent in Afrikaans media and literary circles – must have pulled the strings.

Bro’s retail career was over but the smoking didn’t cease; it only became more discreet. Bro’s wrath now derived from the parole woman who conducted an initial interview with her. This might have been a type of comprehension test, as one of the questions was the date when Jan van Riebeeck arrived at the Cape. At first Bro was indignant. Indignation soon gave way to seething rage:

“I know the fucking Hollander came here in the 17th century but what the fuck has that got to do with my life?”

Shortly thereafter Ailsa immortalised the events in a poem which appeared in the same issue of the aforementioned literary magazine.