I had wet dreams about him.
Even when he had finished school and I had another two years left, I thought only of him. I never went out with anyone in school again. My mother wouldn’t let me anyway, because I had to study. There was no time to become boy mad, as she put it. My obsession with Chrissie Mulder filled my heart and high school years; his whereabouts and actions were motivation enough to get up and carry on. Every day.
In time, I didn’t know how I would ever achieve anything like a normal relationship with a man, or have sex with one. I was so painfully shy! One day I scraped together enough courage to ask my biology teacher if a man’s penis looked like a dog’s. I had once seen a dog’s stiff pink polony and nearly cringed myself to death.
“Yes, Karin,” she answered without turning a hair.
Eeeeeeuuuw …
I decided there and then I would rather never have sex if that’s what a penis looked like.
In my final year at school I was supposed to be confirmed in the Dutch Reformed Church, but I was not entirely sure of my religious convictions. Our minister and I did not share the same world view, shall we say. I once mentioned the word “evolution” in confirmation class and was told: “I see trouble for you if you harbour such ideas.”
We had to memorise the Heidelberg Catechism without understanding what it meant, and we had to declare before the entire congregation that Jesus Christ was our only Lord and Saviour.
But I did not believe it.
I didn’t know precisely what I believed, but I was convinced the god I believed in was neither as stupid nor as narrow-minded as the church’s great master minds.
A world of differences lay between us …
One afternoon after school, as I sat reading the newspaper at our dining-room table, everything just became too much for me. On the front page was a photo of a black man impaled with a spear during the township riots. The thing was protruding from both sides of his body. I burst into tears and my mother rushed closer, thinking I was crying about the picture, but I was crying because I had to stand up and lie in front of a church full of people that coming Sunday. In a prissy little cream suit. At least it would be with stockings. (Hallelujah.)
It was too late to back out, because Granddad and Grandma would be coming afterwards for tea and cake. The announcement of a total about-turn in my religious convictions and state of mind would not go down well with them.
Go through with it, my child, you won’t regret it. Mommy’s proud of you.
So I stood there and lied.
And stopped going to church after that.
Deep down I was still a prissy little girl who did her homework obediently every day and had good manners and who was so bashful around members of the male sex that my cheeks started to quiver when I had to talk to them.
Ag shame, sister.
By this time you’re probably wondering how the hell I surrendered myself to the sex industry for more than six years.
Because I could. I wanted to.
I cannot put it any other way.
Because I learned to be brave (or is that perhaps dumb?) enough to find my own answers.
Because I wanted to see for myself what goes on in the darker side of suburbia; what happens when the lights are off.
And what you fall into when you step over the precipice and tumble into the dark abyss.
I knew light was always part of the darkness, and darkness always part of the light. And I knew there was no such thing as only one truth.
I always knew I could come back again, even if I had changed along the way. I didn’t want to become a fifty-year-old suburban housewife or career-driven businesswoman who is married for decades to a balding man with a paunch, has an average of 2,5 kids and then suddenly gets ants in her pants and loses the plot completely. Or becomes deeply depressed on realising that she never really experienced or enjoyed her youth.
Oh no. I went out to explore my wild side …
4. Give your heart to Hillbrow
Johannes Kerkorrel’s song of the same name has always captured the fear, desolation and bohemian funkiness of the place during those years; I could really understand what he meant. I experienced it, felt it in my body, smelled it and inhaled it the way you draw in cigarette smoke.
Hillbrow.
How did a nerdy princess from Linden end up there?
I had always wondered how different the Eloffs were in comparison with the many typical, God-fearing Afrikaner households that sent their children to Linden High. We all interacted with each other every day, after all.
We were probably not that different. My dad was a computer programmer, a real computer geek, and my mother a housewife (The Homemaker). Diagonally opposite us lived a funny guy with a beer paunch and his wife. She had a beehive contraption of a hairdo. Their two children were terrible brats, snotty nosed and foul mouthed. But we had to smile at each other politely in church on Sundays. We could just as well have been characters in The Simpsons.
Look, there were good times and there were bad times at the Eloffs. Sadly, as I grew older, the bad times became longer and the intervals between them shorter. Or my awareness of it simply increased as my understanding developed. There was a time when my mother used to hum as she went about her household chores; she laughed a lot and we always had a good laugh along with her.
But later there was no more music to provide a soundtrack for the good times.
Nobody laughed anymore. There were no more intervals; just bad times.
Our home was a desert battlefield full of shit and bodies where once there had been love and happiness. I never invited school friends to my house; I was too scared they would gossip about it back home. Ma, Karin’s house is hell. Genuine…
I’d rather visit my friends. When my mother allowed it. And lie about what was going on at home. No, Auntie, everything’s great at home!
During my final exams, my father came to sit next to me while I was studying one day and announced he had decided to divorce my mother. His timing wasn’t the greatest, but I was relieved. Almost glad. Maybe it would bring an end to the emotional heavy artillery and daily bombardment.
It didn’t. It became worse, and my mother’s yelling unbearable.
So it was that I was desperate to leave home as soon as I could after finishing school. And get far away. Even if Hillbrow was only ten minutes’ drive from our house, it was far enough. All the weirdos, artists, misfits, pinks addicts and runaways deviated there.
Believe me, I felt right at home.
I simply told my parents that God had called me and I was going to become a missionary with an outreach programme in Hillbrow. My parents had more important things to worry about than what I was up to. Things were fairly hectic at home: my mother had a breakdown and ended up in an institution. She could not believe her husband was divorcing her.
The
