Skinny-Legs-Spaghetti talks too much. She minds everybody’s business, and listens at doors. I hate Skinny-Legs-Spaghetti. I don’t want her to Elite FemDom talk to me anymore. Nobody understands why I am depressive least of all me. Every secret chance I get I live on the edge vicariously through other people who assume wrong impressions like the aesthetic mishap that an artist painted on canvas of his subject like that of the narcissist Dorian Grey. The drowned, disowned; those who inherited a fate like tortured public perverts and fade away. Their black hearts and dark minds and black tongues, their weak and panic-stricken hearts racing. Money is their aphrodisiac, their dirty mouths filled with secrets and lies, they live at high speed, electric and in sunlight they can even be angelic and night time their beauty is on fire.
No one knows the meaning of this life. Life Elite Dominatrix and death. The hobo curled up sleeping in a heap at the mosque is not letting us on the bigger picture. We are doing field research for my father on the next book he is writing. I am happy to be an interloper learning about my father’s past, our country’s painful history, the sorrow that yielded the strange, unforgiving stillness here by this fig tree that I am so touched by. The hateful images of these injustices of Apartheid and the Group Areas Act stay long after. From here you can see the harbour, fishing boats bopping up and down on the choppy waves still untouched in another passage in eternity.
The inner city has become an underground sin city, a ghost world, neon glowing urban and a wasteland wilderness. Pimps and drug-dealers, handsome, well heeled, well dressed, talk to a buyer on their cell phone. They are masters of disguise, vanishing acts, disappearing into thin air.
Thin prostitutes, prostitutes with slippery, shiny hair that falls down their back, curly, blonde, dyed, who don wigs, with beautiful, shiny, healthy afros, with their thigh high leather scuffed boots that skim their miniskirts or jeans, wasted or high, or pregnant, their foreheads invisible by a dark-haired, blonde, blunt fringe. Their lives are for rent. They do not smile or laugh; they draw invisible motifs of pretty and red tattoos on their skin with a needle or a chipped and dirty fingernail. They toss their hair back from their faces made-up with dirty make-up, their lies, vulnerability, tenderness is transparent and their shoulder blades are cool.
The criminal world of the drug dealers, some of who were immigrants, revealed to me that they had a celebrated affliction to harm not out of spite but out of a backward, awkward survival mechanism. They were self-styled nomads, hunters, warriors, gatherers and dreamers, survivors and freedom fighters trapped, trying against all odds to flee entrapment with a mechanical urgency, with the wisdom of awesome and powerful beasts. The way they viewed the world was not fresh and clean. Like the food they ate was neither a feast nor did it sate their appetite. The money that came to them, the more problems they saw.
There is a lifetime of ambition there of a prostitute using her mind at the devotion of her soul. They are artistic, sadistic voyeurs, fragile, their all-consuming greed, hunger attractive and yet, unspeakable. Their lifestyle is forbidden yet it is still permissive. It is frozen in time from the golden and ancient days of mistresses and courtesans. In the walls of the rooms of their love, I imagine, as our car speeds past the cheap, dingy hotels, love is not giving. It is a painful pill to swallow, their breath is like a sweet but unwholesome mist, and their vision distorted and burns a host of disturbing and troublesome portrayals of people on their brains that does not give any psychological relief.