Innocence Lost


Chapter 5. * No license, no cherry, no clue!

I should tell you about Luke S - a fellow school buddy at St. Andrews School in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He had one of the biggest appendages I’ve ever seen on a man, not that I’ve this untamed propensity for checking out packages, but with about twelve or fourteen of us living in the dormitory sharing three showers, it was unavoidable. Luke’s massive penis resembled a baby’s arm holding an apple,and would hang to his knee when he was just fourteen years old, somewhat like a prozac’ed python wrapped around his waist. One summer, he invited me to spend the holidays with him at his grandmother’s farm in the beautiful Eastern Cape Province. The area always reminded me of The Lord Of The Rings, with it’s soft, green hills and rambling woods, and I think Tolkien actually did spend some time living and writing there. We had a rustic little thatched round bungalow, a rondavel, out the back of the main farm house where Luke’s grandmother lived, and also visiting for that summer, was Luke’s cousin, Janisa. She was a very pretty twenty-nine year old and sadly had been fairly recently widowed, and was the mother of a six-year old daughter, also visiting her great-grandmother. On our first night there, at about eight o’clock, after we’d finished dinner and said our goodnights, we went back to our rondavel, to retire early and turn out the lights, there being only a limited supply of electricity from the farm generator. About nine-thirty as we were lying in bed attempting to read by candlelight, there was a quiet knock on the door. It was Janisa, and she’d a bottle of cheap scotch, and was smoking a cigarette. We let her in and she offered us a drink and a smoke, both of which we accepted. And both of which tasted terrible to me. And then we all just lay around the edge of the bed and talked, and told stories, Luke in his pajamas and I in my white underwear under the covers of the big bed we were sharing. Now, I have no doubt that the massive lump in his schoolboy shorts was the motivating factor for her visit, and before long the formalities had been sidelined and her predatory proceedings were sufficiently advanced that I was a mere spectator, an innocent bystander and a very curious voyeur, albeit unwittingly. I was lying prone on the right side of the bed, while she had her wicked way with Luke. Like a corpse with advanced rigor mortis, I was lying dead-still on my back, with only my left hand nonchalantly escaping the boundaries of my death state, and doing the Addams family hand-slide towards her so I could ever so gently touch her softly rocking ass cheeks, as Luke was losing his cherry and mounting her from atop, and after it was over – which wasn’t very long, we all lay around and drank a little more whisky, before she headed out the door back to her room. I was wide awake and still aroused for hours long after the pair of them had entered and explored the mysteries of their deep REM sleep.

The next morning, over an unusual and unforgettable breakfast of eggs, white carrots (which could have been turnips, radishes or parsnips) and toast, we all tried our best to be nonchalant about the events of the previous evening. Janisa’s parents, her daughter, Luke’s grandmother and us all sat about the table, and after our mouthwatering farm breakfast and a cup of tea, did whatever fourteen year-olds do on a farm without any supervision. We rode horses all over the farm, shot frogs in the creek with a pellet gun, snuck up to the sty and shot a pig in the hind legs and then ran like hell as it squealed like a terrified woman in a Boris Karloff movie. Early dinner, and Janisa wasn’t around, and after we’d had an enormous meal of grilled lamb chops and mashed potato, Luke and I headed back to our rondavel. At about ten o’clock there was a knock on the door, and there was Janisa – looking much worse than she had the previous evening. She’d been drinking and seemed a little out of sorts, and she came into the room, put her arms over my shoulders and said “I think it’s your turn tonight, honey!” She kissed me, had a little toke on her marijuana reefer and started stroking my stomach with her long nails while Luke swigged the raw alcohol straight from the whiskey bottle and looked on. She pulled the covers of the bed back, lay on her back and took my shirt off. I was harder than Chinese arithmetic as I fumbled at the clasp on the back of her bra like a watchmaker in boxing gloves, but I did not have the combination or technical capacity required to unhook her, and the clasp stayed secure until she arched her back up, and let herself (and the twins) out! On the little transistor radio on a ledge behind the bed, America sounded very brittle and tiny as “Horse With No Name” escaped the bounds of the short-wave radio’s two inch speaker. I tugged at my jeans, and grabbed at her damp panties, managing to remove them, but before I could get my newly liberated manhood significantly ensconced in her musty and dank folds, my resolve was fatally weakened, and my loins exploded over her dark curly haired mound. Oops, I’d just lost my cherry........ Just like that! But Janisa wasn’t quite done with us, and decided that we should all drive to Durban that night, a port city about six hundred miles away, madness, but we would have done about anything, ANYTHING, for her.

So, we dressed warmly, packed all our clothes into our backpacks, I grabbed my French Horn and we loaded up her big family car, and quietly prepared for our road trip to Durban. Janisa and Luke were in the back, hugging and kissing, and I was in the front, being the designated driver and all. Now, I couldn’t tell them I’d never driven before – I was just fourteen – and I felt my manliness and mature demeanor on the verge of collapse as, it was! The farmhouse was set high up in the grassy green hills, and finally, with the car packed and the three of us ready to go, we set off for the main road which ran through the valley at the bottom of the hill. Down the hill we went, slowly at first but picking up speed fairly quickly, me clinging to the steering wheel, like a drowning cat being swept downstream hanging onto a log, while the car was gaining momentum, and as the sharp turn at the end of the dust road loomed, either I froze, or had no idea what to do, but I just put my foot down hard on the pedal, and the car accelerated and took off over the edge of the cliff, crashing down violently onto the hillside, and then rolling down about five times until a line of trees arrested our descent into the valley below! When the noise and dust had settled, we were almost upside down. Janisa was very quiet and lying on the side door window with her eyes closed, making no sound at all. So Luke and I extricated ourselves from the mangled car, and sprinted back up the hill, all the way to the farmhouse, barged into her parents room panting and out of breath and woke them yelling breathlessly, “Janisa’s had an accident, Janisa’s had an accident!” Her father leapt out of bed, and we raced down to where the car had shot off the road, and he scrambled down the hill, pried opened the crumpled door and gently pulled his garbling daughter from the back seat of the car. She was in total disarray and looked terrible – her hair was all over the place, her lipstick smudged, her top had been halfway removed beforehand, and very much looked like it. But she was fine, no broken bones except she was just drunk as a skunk.

So the very disheveled four of us made our way back to the house, and we were sworn to secrecy about the events of the evening by her father, and sent to bed. The following morning, Luke and I rose at about five with the first rays of the sun and headed for the wrecked car to get our belongings, as it had been way too dark the previous evening to see anything. I found my French Horn lying on the hillside where it had been thrown as the car had tumble-turned down the hill the previous night, still in it’s hard-shell case, which had been quite banged up and was lying open. The Horn itself was unmarked, although I never did find the mouthpiece; and just as we pulled our bags from the trunk, we heard the low belly-rumble of the farm tractor coming close. So, we hid behind some low shrubs, only just in time to avoid being seen by her father and his work crew, who had come to remove the car, which they did and it was hidden behind the furthest outbuildings so Luke’s grandmother would never see it, and hopefully, never find out about the evenings goings-on! All Janisa’s father ever said to us, with a very peculiar look on his face was, “It’s certainly is strange that you two boys were fully dressed and awake when Janisa crashed, and that you heard it from so far away.”

So, as our summer holidays came to end, we headed back to school, cherry-less and with Horse With No Name wildly galloping through my desert of memories and fantasies, and permanently emblazoned on my mind. I wrote letters to her from school, but the first postcard she sent was to be the last I ever heard of her. It’s funny, ‘cos it’s true!

What is significant to me, although not as significant as oil in George Bush’s Operation Iraqi Freedom plan, is the fact that on my return to school, I moved into being the conductor of the orchestra/band. I was much more at home steering the direction of the music, aimless as it remained, than I was performing in the band. And this is the way it’s been for me ever since then, and sometimes the musicians that I work with will intimate that I’m really just a frustrated musician, to which I can honestly say, that I have no desire to be a performing or recording musician, whatsoever!

Significant too, was that sometime soon thereafter, I started playing guitar. Well, strumming the chords kinda like an infomercial chef grating vegetables on a mandolin! Blowing in the Wind, House Of The Rising Sun and Cracklin’ Rosie. Then John Denver’s Country Roads and Thank God I’m a Country Boy, and then I heard a snippet of Born To Be Wild on an illegal radio, being broadcast from Lourenco Marques. Radio LM!
From Mozambique, not South Africa .
Pandora’s box had blown open, and I could smell the panties!

1 comment:

simonfellows said...

ee gads man you've gotta find a different style of prose.
Marijuana reefer.. you sure as eggs is eggs don't say that in daily parlance and doing thus in print looks..well....!