Too old to rock 'n roll, too young to braai!

Waking up with a pounding headache in a small room with extremely ugly curtains. Where am I? I force my aching body out of bed, stumbling through the debris of the night before. Empty wine bottles. Dirty clothes flung over a guitar case. Scribbled notes for a musical set list. Blinding sunlight pouring in through aforementioned ugly curtains.

Someone tell me it’s not true! Someone tell me it didn’t happen again! At the age of fifty-five, I’m WAY too old for this sort of thing!

I open the connecting door to the other room on a crack. The other room is a slightly tidier version of the room I woke up in. My wife and kids lie sleeping in a double bed. It’s twenty-one years after the Voëlvry Tour, and I have a wife and kids. Thank God they’re still here. Thank God the last two decades hadn’t all been a dream …

Wading through a hangover fog, I make my way to the kettle. Coffee! The word is screaming through my consciousness. I must have coffee! Coffee or death! In my desperate urge to reach the kettle in time, I bump my head against a sharp object somewhere overhead. I look up groggily. It’s the corner of the wooden board that supports the overhead TV set. FOKKIT! I try reaching the kettle again, and in my desperation I bump my head on EXACTLY the same spot the second time round. The pain is excruciating, but I somehow manage to switch on the kettle, get four teaspoons-full of coffee powder into a cup, and actually pour the boiling water. At last, the agonising roar of the kettle subsides.

For the first time, I glance at my own image in the mirror. Blood is pouring down my forehead from the double gash in my head. FOKKIT again! I grab a roll of toilet paper, unwind it halfway, and, clutching my bleeding skull with a hand of soaked tissue, I eventually manage to lie back against the pillow, taking sips of the dark liquid. I feel my strength returning.

Where was I last night? And why?

I remember a rock ‘n roll stage — déjà vu! — and clouds of billowing smoke from the smoke machines. A drum beat. Left of me, my bassist, Schalk. To my right, Hunter Kennedy, guitarist and part-time songwriter for Fokofpolisiekar and possibly also aKing and Die Heuwels Fantasties. At some point in time, we are joined by Francois van Coke (also of Fokofpolisiekar, aKing and Die Heuwels Fantasties, not to mention Van Coke Cartel). In front of us, a crowd of crazy, bedraggled kids. It is late afternoon. They are yelling their heads off, and trying to climb over the security fence that keeps the stage separated from the audience. Girls in skimpy dresses, lads with pimply faces, an avalanche of teenage angst and euphoria washing up against the wall of sound emanating from us. The mired interactions of sweat, lust and loathing.

How many times had I been in that exact same position before? Too often to remember. But that was when I was YOUNGER, for Pete’s sake! What on earth was I doing back there again last night? Who was I trying to fool? I’m not made for this sort of chaotic lifestyle! Not any more! I’m a respected columnist! I write novels! I blog on Thought Leader! I have a publisher in America! I’ve met André Brink! My kids are in a respected private school and they think my music sucks!

The pain returns with a vengeance. It’s not just my head that is still bleeding profusely through the wad of kakpapier, I notice. There’s a wound on my left shin, too, I can feel it. I remember tripping over a step in the darkness backstage as I was running off the stage after the last encore. I glance at my leg. Luckily, the blood there has congealed already. How many wounds have I sustained in total? Why do I always seem to get hurt every time I venture into this repulsive genre? It never happens when I do cabaret or folk, or when I sit down to write a poem! It’s only rock ‘n roll that has this strange propensity to maim, to inflict injury, to destroy one’s sanity, wreck one’s close relationships, sabotage one’s health, and undermine one’s peace of mind.

It’s twenty-one years later, and nothing has changed. It’s not as if Afrikaans rock music has come of age, or anything like that. Apparently, it’s still exactly the same, if not worse. Thank God I didn’t stay for the after-party, like I no doubt would have done had I still been a starry-eyed young vagabond. Thank God I didn’t partake of the holy weed. In fact, I remember now what I did after stumbling off that stage, after posing for some hurried snapshots with several deranged fans and their equally deranged partners, after making my way to my rented car (flanked by two security guards), after signing my name on several T-shirts/naked stomachs/boobs etc, after driving through crowded streets and throngs of police vehicles who didn’t realise how drunk I was.

I took my family to a restaurant. That’s what happened after the show. I took my family to the poshest fuckin’ restaurant in the whole town! I took them there because the previous day had been my wife’s birthday, but I didn’t have time to take her out because her birthday coincided with National Braai Day, so of course we’d braaied the day before. Not that I’m particularly good at braaiing. In fact, at the age of fifty-five, braaiing is still a mystery to me. Oh, I know how to make a fire, and I love eating braaivleis, but there’s a whole long bit in between that I haven’t quite been able to figure out yet. It’s a skill I still need to learn. How do you know when to turn over the “rooster”? How do you tell when the meat is done? How do you know what goeters to put on to the meat, and whether to do it before you braai, or afterwards? I will eventually learn all this stuff, I’m sure. I have no choice, having married into a family of white Namibians. No chance in hell of me ever becoming a vegetarian with in-laws like that.

Anyway, because I can’t braai properly yet, and because I wanted to treat my wife nicely for her birthday, I took her out to a fancy restaurant the next evening, which happened to be right after last night’s concert (the concert that had caused all the damage, psychological and otherwise). Needless to say, the contrast between the situation on the rock stage and the situation inside the restaurant was unbelievable, one experience literally screaming against the other. No smoky haze. No howling guitars. No darkness, no mass insanity. Just the quiet hum of canned muzak, the murmur of civilised voices, the soft little beeps and whirrs coming from my children’s Nintendo games, and the delicious crinkly sound of melting ice-cubes rearranging themselves around the shape of a cold bottle of Buitenverwachting dry white wine in a silver bucket. Next to me, my wife in her best evening dress. In front of me, a gigantic medium-rare-roasted steak oozing pinkish fluids through swirls of mashed potato and herbs unknown to man. A safe environment, no groupies in sight. A haven for my broken soul.

Yet, afterwards, as we followed the commands of the British voice from my GPS back to the hotel — how does my GPS manage to always stay so calm? When there is so much frantic noise inside my head? — the nightmares and the paranoia continued to eat at me from the inside, all those collective memories gnawed at my soul, the years of senseless substance abuse and all the self-destructive raging that had gone before, the inherited Afrikaner dysfunctionalities that had catapulted me inexplicably into a rock ‘n roll existence, that had shaped me into the wasted post-apocalyptic middle-aged relic of a forgotten protest movement that I had eventually become. (Now if that wasn’t a sentence Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg would’ve loved to write, I give up.)

So, it happened once again. I strayed into the cursed circle of metalmania. I became, for one night, for one hour, that creature of delusion and desire, that putrid persona I was supposed to have left behind so long ago. The forgotten, forbidden rhythms had surged through my veins once again.

Did we really end our set with the song “Verslaaf aan Ruk-en-Rol”? It was probably the corniest tune I’d ever written (next to “Huisie by die See”). It also used to be one of my greatest hits. I remember being amazed that the kids of today still remembered that unbelievably cynical, tritely subversive anthem of yore. These days, I hated the song, of course, but it seemed to have a separate existence, somewhere out in space, apart from me. And last night, we embraced again briefly, me and that ghastly song. One last stroll through the deserted mall of broken dreams. One last nod of recognition to a past I might never, ever, ever again revisit as long as I live on this planet. One last desperately decadent rock ‘n roll show on a rock ‘n roll stage at sunset on a dusty rugby field in the corner of a flea market in the middle of a small town in the throes of its annual Afrikaanse Kultuurfees …

Why? Why, why, why, why?

Because I needed the money, I suppose. Because kids still loved that kind of racket. Because rock ‘n roll hadn’t aged, though certainly I had. Because rock ‘n roll never will change. Because rock ‘n roll isn’t supposed to mature, even if twenty-one years had passed. It’s still the opposite of braaiing. Braaiing is a slow, peaceful, zen-like activity whereas rock ‘n roll is always impatient, always crazy, always angry, always raging, raging, raging against the system, against middle-class values, against everything I had come to love and appreciate during my golden years of retirement.

And because, as we had discovered way back in the eighties, words uttered on a rock stage travel too fast to be smothered or analysed or stopped by a board of Nasionalistiese censors or an ANC-appointed media tribunal. Those guys can’t hear it, they don’t know the lingo. But the kids do. The kids may be deranged, but they always know exactly what the new generation of rock ‘n roll soldiers are talking about.

Is it time for a new youth revolution? I hope not. But if it is, I suppose they have my blessing.

As soon as I have forced myself to venture forth into the blinding sunlight towards a pharmacy where I can manage to lay my hands on a bottle of Dettol and a packet of Band-Aid … FOKKIT … FOKKIT …

Nelspruit, 26^th September.