The Nightclub Years

Same crowd. We were friends, in as much as reeling around and back-slapping could be described as friendship. They were around the same age as me, maybe older, but that could have been the effects of years of what we called fun. She worked at the club with me. She was a celebrity- in the way that people aggregate around such larger-than-life personalities. We’d work all night, go out to breakfast, make space for the hotel buffets by vomiting in the gardens of the neat blocks of apartments in Sea Point.

Her cupboards? If you looked inside, they were a nightmare. Everything was black. All of it. So how she managed to select clothes is a bit of a mystery to me. We’d dance when we had a break, or once the bar was closed at the club. Sniff poppers and fall over each other, pissing ourselves laughing. Total freedom and debauchery, with no sense of a future beyond the sneaking suspicion that a hangover would have to be dealt with by drinking even more.

So flash-forward. I no longer worked in a club, and she vanished into a world of smoking-toe-injecting horror. She was maybe thirty when her heart gave out. I can still hear her laugh, almost sense her in the room.

The other guy? He was harder to relate to. I was friends with him, but never quite relaxed around him. Mainly because he was fucking insane. He hit me once, and I had my guard up after that. One night at the club, he fell down the stairs, and his shoe came off and broke.

I’ve lost my soul! He cried. I’ve lost my sole! And we laughed till the tears dripped off our faces.

Flash forward. He got into even heavier stuff, injecting shit, and contracted HIV. I bumped into his brother, and asked how he was doing. Dead.

And why did I not go that way? Why didn’t I also end up in a Dutch prison for drug smuggling, or with a small group of people wiping the tear-snot off their haggard faces onto the sleeves of their leather jackets at my funeral? I have no idea. But I am amazed that I got to be older. Not frozen in time. I have had children, known love. Incredible, and I don’t deserve it.