Lament for a tortured friend

So, it’s boring as fuck. Sorry for that. Very few hits on my last story. We’ve slipped right off the map.

(Oxford University says the f-word has taken over from bloody as the most used expletive in the English language.)

Seventy-fifth birthday in a jiffy and it’s been a long and dusty African road from day one. Death and ruin, post-traumatic stress disorder and jail time for the crime of seeking a modicum of truthfulness within dictatorships. I walk with a stick now, a geriatric to the end, and cancer surgery has possibly been successful so far.

By Warsan Shire, poet of Kenya-Somali roots

Young Israeli pilots who fatally strafe scores of civilians daily, where will their minds end up? Perhaps they are made of sterner stuff than me and my friend and contemporary Ginger whose killings began when he was an  infantry trooper (RLI) at the age of 17.

He’s dead now because he could never hold down a peacetime job and he fell into crude street drugs and raw liquor, theft and begging to buy them and to pay for random fucks with township women collecting firewood in the forests near his shelter of black plastic strung between the trees at an all-race vagrants’ squat. Sex is what people do when they still can, isn’t it?

Most armies today have compulsory de-compression counselling on demob from active duty. During his post-combat psycho work, love-him-or-hate-him Prince Harry spoke of imagining the fleeing Taliban he shot dead were paparazzi chasing his mother that night in Paris.

As for me, having been orphaned, never having had a proper family life, having escaped death by a whisker in my own conscription and war reporting, having battled through rehab twice, getting clean but not for long, I tried to talk Ginger down but it never helped. (Not his real name out of respect for the privacy of the anguished.)

Snakes ahead

Like many others, he was lost in a wilderness, lucky enough, some might say, to be far from world realities of the day but unlucky enough to be consumed by his own darkness.

Boney M were made to drop the hit Rasputin from their Soviet lip-synced tour

At our long-defunct Archipelago nightclub Ginger and I  enjoyed Boney M and Millie Vanilli until it became apparent their hits were among the biggest hoaxes in pop history perpetuated by a German producer who lip synced their tracks using seasoned professional singers. Holy fuck! said Ginger.

Music and me: The lady next door didn’t complain about my piano playing. Instead she put a note under the door. “Dear neighbour. I can’t play the piano either.”

As a recovering addict – they always use  ‘recovering’ in case there’s a relapse – Eric Clapton dropped in at the local rehab, our Home for the Bewildered, as he does wherever he goes in the world.

From my published memoir Mutoko Madness, a catharsis for me in itself, there was a Mandrax, weed and booze mix known in our rehab as ‘riding the elephant.’   When you came down from dizzying heights the elephant kicked your fucking brains out.There’s always a downer.

And then there was the devout young Catholic bachelor who admitted he would never have sex before marriage. Fucking hell, you mean to say you haven’t had a fucking fuck, someone said.

See what they mean about the f-word?. It is used all the time in popular movies. Oxford says Martin Scorsese and Robert De Nero’s 1995 film Casino used the word or its variations 422 times over two hours of screen time.

I never lie, said the politician. I’m a virgin, said the hooker