Mindf**k Read online

  MindF**k

  FANIE VILJOEN

  For the broken and the beaten – when the music is all you’ve got left, crank the volume right up.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Warning

  TRACK 01 The things we won’t do for money

  TRACK 02 Lessons on stop streets and how things work in the movies

  TRACK 03 The story about the three Bs and how I came and fucked everything up

  TRACK 04 Oh, my car, my car

  TRACK 05 The Mystic Boer

  TRACK 06 The things that Sky says sometimes frighten people

  TRACK 07 Dreams, blood and money

  TRACK 08 Make like a tree and leave

  TRACK 09 Allemanskraal Dam

  TRACK 10 Lost souls and their sins

  TRACK 11 Sky’s next revelation

  TRACK 12 Partygirl organizes the beer

  TRACK 13 MindFuck and music that makes Partygirl cry

  TRACK 14 The sex scene you’ve been waiting for (me included)

  TRACK 15 Unwelcome Guest

  TRACK 16 Frozen Moment

  TRACK 17 The plan with Partygirl

  TRACK 18 Shosaloza

  TRACK 19 The party is only starting now, and what are we doing?

  TRACK 20 Back, as we came

  TRACK 21 Night Ride

  TRACK 22 Peace at last

  TRACK 23 Lost

  TRACK 24 What would you do, Jack White?

  TRACK 25 Lost anything?

  TRACK 26 Something has changed

  TRACK 27 Brandy doesn’t work

  TRACK 28 How do you tell someone that he is supposed to be dead?

  TRACK 29 What I know

  TRACK 30 dnuoranruT

  TRACK 31 Proof

  TRACK 32 In the end it’s all lies, isn’t it?

  TRACK 33 Running on empty

  TRACK 34 A shovel full of dirt

  TRACK 35 Forever and ever love

  TRACK 36 I’m still breathing

  HIDDEN TRACK The End

  About the Author

  In the Same Series

  Copyright

  Warning

  This book won’t make you feel better about yourself, it won’t explain the meaning of life, and it certainly won’t help you ‘find’ yourself. If Mommy and Daddy don’t like it when you read books with explicit language do one of the following right now:

  Chuck the damn book away.

  Kindly request the bookshop where you bought the book to exchange it for one of those transform-your-life-into-something-precious-and-beautiful-in-ten-easy-steps-books.

  If you nicked the book from a bookshop, return it in the same fashion and instead nick one of those transform-your-life-into-something-precious-and-beautiful-in-ten-easy-steps-books.

  You can tear out the pages and use them to smoke a little something.

  You can secretly read the book in the loo where Mommy and Daddy will (hopefully) not disturb you.

  If you still have the book in your hands, you probably want to continue reading it. Tzhen, my bru, you’re in for a hell of a ride, but be warned: this book is going to mess with your mind and it may just leave you even more fucked-up than you already are.

  press play to begin …

  The things we won’t do for money

  It was Friday night. I sent an SMS to Kerbs:

  2night, 12 bells. bring ur tools. i’l open the hate.

  ‘Open the hate, what hate?’ grunted Kerbs while slipping through the gate. The rain poured down and shined on his jacket.

  ‘Hate?’

  ‘The SMS, dude’

  ‘The gate, Kerbs!’

  ‘You really should learn how to fucking spell, Burns.’

  ‘Yeah, the day you find a job.’

  It had been a year now since Kerbs finished school, and he was still unemployed. I always reckoned that anyone who even considered giving him a job would be totally off their rocker.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Kerbs.

  Back to business: Everything was organised. I nicked three of my mom’s sleeping pills earlier that night. One for the mutt. (He’d chowed down hard on that vienna and by now he was in doggy dreamland.) One for the old man. (He knocked back the whiskey and should be hanging around alcoholic heaven roundabout now.) Last but not least, one for my mom – in her coffee. I think she had already popped one by herself as well, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. (She was probably so wired that we would only see her later the following afternoon.) Kelly missed the drug party. (She was with her boyfriend again.)

  ‘Come on, I’m getting soaked,’ I said to Kerbs.

  He walked up to my mom’s brand new BMW in the driveway. ‘Is the alarm off?’

  I pressed the button on the remote. The car’s lights flashed and the doors jumped open, but we couldn’t take the easy road. It would look too suspicious.

  It was the perfect night to put our plan into action: Mom forgot to park the car in the garage. She’d intended going to the gym but it had probably slipped her mind. The rain also helped; the neighbours would be sound asleep. And nobody would show their faces to investigate strange noises.

  Kerbs stood ready with a brick in his hand. His gaze met mine. I nodded. With great force he hurled the brick through the car’s passenger window. The glass shattered, shooting away like stars and falling on the wet paving. Only then did he open the door.

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Sort of.’

  He got into the car and wedged a screwdriver between the Kenwood front loader CD player and the dashboard. It wasn’t easy, but he didn’t take any shit. I could hear the dashboard cracking. With the tip of the screwdriver lodged behind the CD player, he pressed it forward. Hard! The mounting snapped. One forceful jerk and the player popped from the dashboard like a new born baby from his mom’s tummy. Hurriedly Kerbs cut the wires.

  ‘Don’t just stand there watching me, you should check to make sure nobody’s coming,’ he said.

  But I couldn’t help it; one ought to learn how to do this kind of thing. You never know when you might need the knowledge and skills. (Outcomes based education turning around to bite the community in the ass.)

  Kerbs started on the speakers. After a while he said, ‘No, shit, I’m not going to hassle with this, it’ll take a lifetime.’

  ‘Okay.’ I shrugged. ‘O yeah, check out the cubby-hole. The sunglasses …’

  Kerbs removed my mom’s Police sunglasses and stuffed them in his pocket.

  ‘I also planted her cell phone in there. My mom sometimes forgets it in the car. She’ll never know it was me.’

  It was a Nokia. Small technological wonder: GPS system, WAP enabled (unlike its user) and it could take photos, record sound, you name it. She uses it to phone people.

  ‘Okay, do you have everything?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kerbs stuffed the loot into a black gym bag.

  ‘Alright then, you have to go now.’

  ‘See you later, bru.’ Kerbs gave me a pat on the back. ‘Open the gate.’

  Again, he slipped through the gate. The rain came down even harder now. I watched the raindrops run down the BMW’s leather seats.

  So much for the new car smell.

  Kerbs’ car pulled away in the street. It backfired once, sounding like a gunshot.

  I entered the house. Everything was dark, but I knew the way to my room. Hey, I must have done it a million times, after long, drunk nights on the street.

  The sudden voice from the living room startled me.

  ‘Chris.’

  ‘Dad?’ I asked when I saw his silhouette moving against the curtains with the patio light on in the background.

  My heart started racing.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us yo
u were going out?’

  Two things he said totally confused me.

  Numba one: who were the ‘us’ he was referring to? Was it him and my mother? They haven’t been much of an ‘us’ for a long time now.

  Numba two: did he really think I went out? Did or didn’t he know?

  What could he have heard? What could he have seen?

  Silently I rewound the night’s events in my mind.

  Noises: the click of the opening gate; our voices in the driveway; the brick sending the car’s window to hell; the cracking of the dashboard; the click of the gate opening up a second time; Kerbs’ car backfiring.

  See: fuck all from the house – there were way too many plants. Except if he came out of the house. Kerbs was right, I shouldn’t have checked him out, I should have kept an eye out for nosy onlookers.

  Fast forward to where we were last.

  I realised that it was one of those soapie moments where the silence lasts a lifetime and one of the actors simply tilts his head to the side until it becomes time for an ad break.

  Where was my ad break?

  Okay, time to decide.

  He didn’t know – ride the wave.

  ‘I was only out for a while. I didn’t think you would mind.’

  ‘You and Kerbs?’

  Damn, does he know?

  Again, I pulled a soapie response. ‘Kerbs?’ Testing the water.

  ‘I heard his car backfire.’

  Never, bru, where do grown-ups learn these things? He was playing cat and mouse with me. Did he want me to come up with the whole bag of stolen goods?

  ‘Switch on the light so that I can see you.’

  Pros & cons, I thought instantly. Con: he might see that I’m lying. Pro: I could see if he doesn’t really know.

  The light was blindingly bright – like D-day.

  We both twitched our eyes until we were used to the light.

  I saw the glass of whiskey I had poured for him earlier. He hadn’t drunk it. He must have known something was up when I brought him a drink without him asking for it.

  He sat there with a full glass in his hands. (That time of night?) Obviously, he was smashed. His shirt was unbuttoned and wrinkled.

  He wasn’t wearing pants.

  I darted off to my room.

  Lock the door! Lock the fucking door!

  One of these days I am going to smash his skull in, I decided.

  I knew he was standing on the other side of the door.

  And the voices in my mind came rushing fast and furious.

  Lessons on stop streets and how things work in the movies

  There was this man who once drove over a stop street at a helluva speed. Next thing he knew: flashing lights, screaming alarms. A traffic cop had managed to chase him down and stop him. (At that time he had already skipped a few stop streets.)

  ‘Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the traffic cop yelled at the guy. ‘You ran a stop street back there! Why the fuck didn’t you stop?’

  The guy checked out the traffic cop and said: ‘I don’t believe everything I read.’

  Ha, ha, ha:-)

  And you shouldn’t either.

  Do you really think my dad sat there without his pants? This is not what this story is about. Leave that for the newspapers. (I don’t even know why kids would allow stuff like that to happen to them. They obviously don’t know what sharp knives are for.)

  Sorry I lied to you about the pants-thing. I was just kinda looking for an excuse to get out of the living room and I didn’t want you to think that I’m a jackass. My dad has been keeping his pants on for years now. I think he only took them off twice in his life. The first time being when he made Kelly, my sister, and the second time when he made me.

  Ha, ha, ha.

  If he wanted anything more, he had to keep himself happy – Mom didn’t allow him near her with that thing, if you catch my drift. They slept in separate rooms. Threats of a pending divorce had been poisoning the air for a few months now, but they stuck it out ‘for the kids’.

  Hey, I should tell you about our family. But let’s do it in style – like in the movies. Have you noticed how some of them start? While the credits are rolling, the camera slowly moves across a room (let’s say it’s some little fuck-faced brother’s room). First, you notice a few pics on the dressing table, and then you think: Oh, would you just look at that, they are the perfect family. Colgate smiles, the works. Then the camera glides across the wall and you think: Oh, would you just look at that, he has a wall, man he’s so lucky that he doesn’t have to live in a squatter camp like millions of black South Africans. The camera pans to something hanging off the headboard, let say it’s a girl’s panties, and while you are sitting there in your dirty chair in the darkened cinema you think: Oh, the little fucker is already screwing around. Or he likes wearing women’s underwear.

  You get the picture?

  Alright, here is mine:

  At my door: life-size posters of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. (Did you spot that lie? What?! Haven’t you learnt anything from the stop street story?)

  Sorry, let’s try that again (take two).

  At my door: posters of the White Stripes and My Chemical Romance.

  On my desk (read: alternative, user-friendly hoarding zone to stash anything imaginable):

  An empty pizza box

  Empty CD covers

  Loose CDs (mostly pirated copies – have you seen the price of original CDs?)

  Overseas magazines (mostly stolen – have you seen the price of overseas magazines?)

  An empty fish tank (cuz the poor goldfish died), which then became a snake cage (until the snake died).

  Now the camera moves towards my bed. As usual, it looks like a war zone. Underneath my bed you will find the following assorted goodies:

  A flat rugby ball. (There was a time when my dad still had hope for me. The rugby ball is the proof of that, but I decided to hell with this, I will not run around chasing shit.)

  Dirty underwear and sour smelling socks, cuz our maid doesn’t believe in cleaning up underneath anything.

  Oh crap, there’s that biology book which had Amoeba bitching my head off.

  And then there are my prized possessions:

  The porno-mags in the drawer next to my bed. (I suspect that the old man uses them at times to assist with the DIY thing. I once found one of them in a slightly different spot from where I had left it.)

  My computer that I mostly use to play games and surf the porn-sites on the net.

  And that’s my room.

  As you can see, there are no photos of the family, cuz this isn’t a damn movie. And everyone in this household isn’t happy.

  I’ll just have to tell you about them.

  The story about the three Bs and how I came and fucked everything up

  Once upon a time there was a mommy Burns, a daddy Burns and little sister Burns. They all lived in a house in Bloemfontein. Langenhoven Park, to be precise. They were very happy. Like the people you see in the shampoo adverts on the TV.

  And then I came along. Covered in fat and dripping blood. Kicking and screaming. Perhaps I already knew back then that being born was a big mistake. I should have stayed where I was. (Exactly where that is, I can’t say right now, but I reckon that I’ll have the answer in the afterlife, so ask me again on that day.)

  I think my birth fucked up everything. Could be because I wasn’t exactly planned. It fills one with an overwhelming sense of pride to know that you ‘were not planned’. It’s almost like being a gatecrasher long before you could remember.

  Kerbs says that the best part of me ran down my dad’s leg. I reckon he might not be way off mark. I think my dad would agree.

  I was a naughty shit as a child. At the age of four, I sunk my pearly whites into one of the girls at the nursery school. There was a lot of blood. It streamed over her arm and dyed her pink, icing sugar-like dress red. My teacher, Miss Gilda, couldn’t decide whether she should faint o
r give me crap. She made these weird noises like I reckon a pig would make if it’s being castrated. I was scared shitless; I thought she was going to die. Stricken with fright I sank my baby teeth into the tender skin just below her knee. I bit down hard. Only then did she shut-up.

  Miss Gilda and the icing sugar girl both had to go for tetanus injections. My mom couldn’t believe that I would do something like that. After all, she had always taught me that one should never bite other people. I was asked to leave the school. From then on I stayed with our maid, Anna.

  Anna didn’t understand a word of English. At the age of five, I decided to teach her. And I’m proud to say that all my hard work wasn’t in vain – she still swears like a Gautenger stuck in a traffic jam.

  My sister is one year older than I am. Nineteen. At first, she was the model child, getting distinctions in all her subjects, until grade 9. Then she decided: what the fuck. And she threw open her legs. Fourteen boyfriends, two shiners and one abortion later, she doesn’t take any shit from my parents either.

  Last year, Kelly finished Matric. She said there was nothing to it. You basically have to be a moron to flunk your Matric these days. The Department of Education tries really hard not to disappoint the learners. And just in case things didn’t go according to plan, she informed the principal that her great-grandmother was black. This meant Kelly was historically disadvantaged and they had to try harder to pass her at the end of the year. And they did.

  Kelly now works at a pizza place and she mostly smells of dough and melted cheese.

  My mom and dad are like a see-saw. When one is at the bottom, the other is on top. And when one is on top, the other one is at the bottom. I’m not talking about sex here; I’m talking about their jobs.

  My dad was an estate agent. Things went well for him; he even ranked as top seller a few times at Aïda. The pay was good, but not enough. Then he decided to start his own estate agency. People probably didn’t find it amusing buying a house from a place called ‘Burns Housing’. Needless to say, the place folded like a fortune cookie.