A Conversation With An Apartheid Spy
A Conversation with an Apartheid Police Spy
: Looking for Charles
The police spy smiled at me. Its late evening in Melville, Johannesburg
– and we’re standing outside a grimy drinking spot called Ratz,
situated on Seventh Street.
“The ANC didn’t know what to make of you-“ he's saying
“They figured either you were an agent provocateur or just crazy.”
We were talking about me back in the Eighties, when I first came to
Johannesburg and started performing onstage, in the days when the
majority of white South Africans believed Mandela was a communist
and that the ANC were hellbent on killing them all.
All that stuff which people deny now, citing their ignorance as proof
of innocense. (meantime, of course, all it proves is their own stupidity
or criminal apathy)
Back 'then' - Charles had been this slight, always slightly red-faced
but friendly student, who often came by Habiru - the student
commune that'd befriended me.
Times change. And now I stand looking at this much older, much
heavier and muscled man, hair cropped short and looking like he'd
fit right in at an Aryan Nation meeting.
It's the eve of 2001, I'm chatting ostensibly happily and calmly with
one of these former police spies, who made it their business to get
those working for democracy, tortured, detained and god knows what else.
I don’t doubt for an instant that the man in front of me, swigging at his
drink, has caused deaths.
His name is Charles, and here on Seventh Street in Melville, he’s become a familiar feature, roaming up and down the street, making friends with the shopkeepers and regular drinkers at
assorted bars. Ratz and a new drinking spot called ‘Unplugged’ has become his hangout, and he
makes much of being everyone’s friend.
Few folks, however, know precisely what he was, and probably still is. A few days earlier,
passing time in one of the shops on the street, Charles had strolled in and exchanged chatter with the shopkeeper, and had mentioned that he’s trying to organize an annual Arts Festival – and proudly boasted about almost having Nedbank sponsorship.
I offered my name as help, and he thanked me, saying that if people like Frank Opperman, Deon Opperman and myself could get behind a Festival, it would make the getting of sponsorships a lot easier..
After he left, I asked the shopkeeper just what exactly it was that Charles did for a living. They didn’t know, and in the standard nature of the locals curious absence of curiosity, it was obvious that they didn’t really care. One of the workers in the shop volunteered the information that they thought he was a policeman once.
“If you’d started talking to the black population at large, we would’ve fucked you up” said Charles “We would’ve killed you”
He nodded to himself, his face still showing nothing but twinkly-eyed amusement, which to an onlooker would have revealed nothing out of the ordinary at play here.
“But we knew that within the context of your audience, what you were saying was acceptable.”
I noted the way he said ‘we’. No sense of his involvement with the SA intelligence services being all in the past at all. We. Very much a current Company man talking, as opposed to someone who’s left his sordid and misguided past behind.
‘We’
I smiled too, playing the game. “I would’ve been quite happy to see all of you guys dead”
He nodded, and changed tack.
“You were quite upset when Joy Harnden was uncovered as a police spy, weren’t you?”
I’d had a long friendship, back in the Eighties, with a cute young woman called Joy, who worked for the Black Sash and Jodac – we met often, doing lunches and some evenings, just hanging out and getting a buzz on with red wine.
Then abruptly she’d disappeared, and whispers began to circulate about her being a police spy, and none of my leftist friends could give me sufficient proof poz to settle my mind. So I went on stage a number of times at the various venues I performed at, and railed at the crowds about this whole saga – upset and not knowing the truth of the situation. Then it finally hit the papers, and Joy was unmasked along with Olivia Forsyth as being police spies (I still have the clipping where her mother talked about being proud of her.)
Ouch.
I’d been in a number of security police raids on the homes of friends – men suddenly appearing wearing jackets, running shoes and wielding Uzi’s and other weaponry. But after Joy was unmasked and I began shouting my puzzlement onstage, the police came looking for me, and I had to disappear for a while. Hiding out and then gradually leaving paper trails heading anywhere but to me.
The ANC at the time thought I was either an agent or crazy, because I was so vehemently hardcore in my approach. There’s a war on. Do whatever necessary to attack, hurt, demoralize and kill the enemy. Plain and simple. Seeing the primitive level on which the Left were operating, right down to being unaware of the surveillance devices available, I kept pushing
for a hi-tech solution, to confound the thugs of the Police and Security Apparatus.
I had no fear, you see. I’d had violent experiences in the South African Defense Force, and knew that nothing else could hurt as much, so I didn’t care. It helps commitment, sometimes, to
have a very clear idea of exactly what physical violence is like. So from the get-go, you're not
playing as a whiney pseudo-committed 'revolutionary'. You have a total understanding of the
levels of personal pain that you can take (or not, as the case may be)
And similarily, you have no illusions, or false belief systems to cloud your judgement as to
what you're up against. No time wasting on bleating about how awful 'the enemy' is, or even
expressing outrage. Minimal internal verbalising needed. They want to hurt you. You want
to hurt them. They have the weapons and muscle and will. You have a fervent burning will
and a commitment to Democracy. It's not enough, but it has to do.
But I guess my approach was considered insane. I mean that pure Zen approach combined with a fierce outrage at the nazism so visible, didn’t make me committee material, I think – which is how things were being done.
The White Leftist revolution relied very heavily on the bookish dutiful plodding worker
who followed orders, went to meetins, and considered it a major coup to see themselves being whipped in a 30 second insert on ABC News. (Many of us used to go to the lunchtime TV news
showings at the US Embassy)
But back to Now, and the spy.
“Yeah, I kind’ve liked Joy” I said and looked at him thoughtfully, and continued playing along.
In previous chats with the spy, I’d put forward an exploratory persona – pretending that his attitude towards the local homeless and beggars in Melville, was acceptable to me. He had a hardcore fascist approach in dealing with the gradually rising problem of vagrants, beggars and low-life’s, beginning to filter into Melville society – and specifically into the nightlife of Seventh Street. Crack their heads, I said. He nodded, yeah - I was His Kinda Guy. Hence the conversations.
He'd initially made a plea for 'basic human understanding and dignity', trying to bullshit me into believing his statements about how these folks were underprivileged and had a right to try and improve their lot and blah blah. But once he seemed to buy my 'crack their heads' approach - he'd opened up, bigtime.
I was fascinated with him.
I remembered him very clearly as the awkward student visitor to the commune every now and then. And the juxtaposition and thoughts of me confronting my mindset of Now versus 'then' - was interesting as hell to me.
Besides, how often do you get to chat with a Nazi spy, who spent years deliberately making friends and spying on them, and doing his best to get them detained or tortured?
Not often.
He'd sounded like a child at first, whimpering the standard liberal line which always is trotted out by those who are safe from the brutalities of the dispossessed. “People have got to have their dignity and self respect” he bleated, looking as earnest as possible.
But in the same conversation, a little later (and some drinks further on) he agreed with me about these stupid liberals with their democratic ideas, and related how he’d been beating up some beggar on the side street alongside Horatio’s, a fish restaurant across the road from where we stood.
And the people inside the restaurant, according to him were all doing shock and horror – including the owner.
“But after I explained things to her’” he leaned forward smiling, confiding his little secret
“She actually saw that I was right”
He nodded the nod of someone who thinks they know the way the world is and feels smug having conveyed it to someone else effectively.
I nodded too, thinking 'this is a Nazi'. This is someone who didn’t want Mandela released, or the ANC unbanned. Someone who made a living out of informing on the student Leftist movement. Supplying information for money and I assume, from a belief that they were following what they believed was the correct political path.
He’d told me how he’d been given a car and cash, and had taken a long holiday back in the old days, after some particularly good information coup, he’d been part of.
I could see it. This currently overfed and balding man, as a long haired picture-perfect student Nazi, on the open road in the late Eighties, having passed sufficient info to his Masters, to get someone or some people jailed, beaten, tortured – killed?
Riding happily through the countryside, en route to a holiday. A nice paid holiday.
Yeah, definitely the good old days.
(Maybe you weren’t around in the Eighties, or maybe you were, and still try and get by on the lie of not knowing anything. But people were being hurt and killed then, because there was a war on, between the majority of South Africans, and the National Party, who used their armed wings, known as the South African Police Force, and the South African Defence Force, to maintain control.)
But Melville. A semi trendoid area of bars and restaurants, the place keen to be bohemian but
just too damn rich to ever offer more than an illusion of the genuinely bohemian area of Yeoville.
There'd been a recent Mardi Gras, and Charles van Niekerk was apparently involved in some degree, in organising it.
(The Mardi Gras basically resulted in a lot of litter, and at least one death – from a customer who’d fallen off a slide, set up for the day. No whispers from anyone about court action, and I never read anything in the media about this.)
“So what’s in my folder back at headquarters?” I asked, and the spy laughed.
“Nothing” he said, and gestured at one of a group of equally quietly threatening young men
who were lurking in the area as I spoke with him. “He’s got more in his folder than you do”
It struck me as odd how the lout in question, didn’t ask Charles what he meant. He’d just approached while we were talking, been included and referred to, and then had subtly moved back to the outside bar-hatch on the pavement a few feet from us.
It dawned on me that spies don’t refer to security police matters, past or present, within earshot of civilians usually, and I took a closer look at some of these supposed innocent drinkers, hanging around outside the bar, and noticed that there were a number who didn’t quite fit – perhaps because they fitted almost too well.
Charles is very visible in the Melville area, on Seventh Street. If you go just about any night to Ratz, and look for a casually well-dressed man, just quietly relaxing by the bar hatch, sometimes surrounded by assorted men, other times not. He never sits inside the bar – always preferring to lurk on the pavement. Everyone knows him. You can ask for him, and the staff will point him out. He’s done a fairly good job of ingratiating himself into the nightlife, which alone isnt necessarily cause for concern, but his involvement in the politics of Melville – from the Mardi Gras, through to an proposed Arts festival, is somewhat sinister.
We spoke about many things, from covert ANC meeting places in Hillbrow, which the police new about and monitored - through to another friend of mine who lives in Melville, and who was an ANC spy – and throughout the conversation, there was no hint that Charles was not still working for the South African Intelligence Services.
I tested this theory, by drawing him out, and asking why he didn’t write a book about some of the less sensitive operations that happened? I mean, this is truly cool stuff. It is actually, if you think about it. The rest of the world was doing Duran Duran mania, and we were playing life and death warfare here. But invariably his response used the word “We”.
“There’s a new government in place and we don’t want to cause any problems or embarrass them”
“But just some of the older stuff maybe, you know? Its history after all” I asked.
“WE don’t do that sort of thing…”
I nod. Pity. There's a whole history that's going to remain unwritten, unfortunately.
(The librarian geek in me hates this idea. In 500 years we'll all be dust, so who cares
then - history needs to be written down, for future folks to absorb and maybe
learn something. See how stupid we all were.)
I raised the issue of UFO’s, just for the heck of it –asking if he’d ever heard any reference to the subject. He didn’t blink as he said no, and I could see him dismissing me once and for all, as a threat of any kind, given the question. Partly as I intended - but hey, I was also honestly curious as to whether the UFO phenomena had ever shown itself, amidst our brutal grimy
struggle.
Now in Christmas 2001, I was chatting with a hippy friend called Russel, who pretty much lives on the street, making cigarette and food money by telling fortunes using a well worn Tarot pack.
I've known him for years, and we get on well - even though he has a tendency to try and persuade you that Alastair Crowley and ice hockey are intrinsically entwined somehow, with modern history. Okay, so he's a little off the wall. So am I. Who cares, he's a nice guy and I've always got time for him.
He tells me that Charles had dragged him out of one of the bars a few days previously, and slapped him around a bit, because he’d mentioned that Charles was a policeman.
I told my hairy and cheerfully disheveled friend that the next time it happened, walk over to anyone who saw it, ask for their name, phone number and ID number, then go to the local police station and report a case of assault.
He ummed and aahed – in the standard nervousness of those at the bottom of the social heap, when prompted to do something that might make things worse.
My friend blinks at me, his hair dishevelled, clothes worn, clutching his hockey stick and his hand-made books on Crowley and Golden Dawn, I Ching and Illuminati. He's shown me them a few times. Pages etched and layered with careful calligraphy, pasted in glowing illustrations, found God knows where. I'm bowled over at what I see. Regardless of the content, he's made 'Art' that's worthy of Peter Greenaway's wildest creations, scrapbooks that are utterly beautiful modern versions of those old illuminated manuscripts.
And clutched here in the hands of a street-dwelling guy who's just trying to keep his reality together enough to make it through each day.
And the spy slaps him around.
God, no offense, but you're a fucker sometimes. You know? If you exist, you really are a mean-spirited fucker, I don't care how all this suffering and unfairness might fit into 'your infinite plan', but you've got some explaining to do, in my view, you evil little holy ghost fuck you.
*sighs*
And the spy walks free, unpunished, rewarded and moving his careful way into social circles and presumably to report back to his Masters and handlers. He actually got a job for a while as a bouncer in one of the bars. Thus providing an even better excuse for 'being there'. For lurking and listening, and soaking up the chatter of whatever remaining unsuspecting activists who flow through the crowds of 'civilians' even today, unnoticed and quietly doing whatever they're doing, that's presumably of interest to the Authorities..
Charles disappeared eventually. I did my best to spread the casual word of his past employment, if not his current one.
It's interesting to look at the face of your enemy.
To realise who you are, and who they are. To get a sense of who you were, and what they were.
And to try and make sense of all these different things, these different people that you and they used to be.
And how it 'fits' into who you are now.
Hmmm..
Time destroys all things. But healing takes a little longer.
And yeah, we live in a democracy now. The past is dead.
But 'forgiveness' for mass murder is not an option in my morality.
: Looking for Charles
The police spy smiled at me. Its late evening in Melville, Johannesburg
– and we’re standing outside a grimy drinking spot called Ratz,
situated on Seventh Street.
“The ANC didn’t know what to make of you-“ he's saying
“They figured either you were an agent provocateur or just crazy.”
We were talking about me back in the Eighties, when I first came to
Johannesburg and started performing onstage, in the days when the
majority of white South Africans believed Mandela was a communist
and that the ANC were hellbent on killing them all.
All that stuff which people deny now, citing their ignorance as proof
of innocense. (meantime, of course, all it proves is their own stupidity
or criminal apathy)
Back 'then' - Charles had been this slight, always slightly red-faced
but friendly student, who often came by Habiru - the student
commune that'd befriended me.
Times change. And now I stand looking at this much older, much
heavier and muscled man, hair cropped short and looking like he'd
fit right in at an Aryan Nation meeting.
It's the eve of 2001, I'm chatting ostensibly happily and calmly with
one of these former police spies, who made it their business to get
those working for democracy, tortured, detained and god knows what else.
I don’t doubt for an instant that the man in front of me, swigging at his
drink, has caused deaths.
His name is Charles, and here on Seventh Street in Melville, he’s become a familiar feature, roaming up and down the street, making friends with the shopkeepers and regular drinkers at
assorted bars. Ratz and a new drinking spot called ‘Unplugged’ has become his hangout, and he
makes much of being everyone’s friend.
Few folks, however, know precisely what he was, and probably still is. A few days earlier,
passing time in one of the shops on the street, Charles had strolled in and exchanged chatter with the shopkeeper, and had mentioned that he’s trying to organize an annual Arts Festival – and proudly boasted about almost having Nedbank sponsorship.
I offered my name as help, and he thanked me, saying that if people like Frank Opperman, Deon Opperman and myself could get behind a Festival, it would make the getting of sponsorships a lot easier..
After he left, I asked the shopkeeper just what exactly it was that Charles did for a living. They didn’t know, and in the standard nature of the locals curious absence of curiosity, it was obvious that they didn’t really care. One of the workers in the shop volunteered the information that they thought he was a policeman once.
“If you’d started talking to the black population at large, we would’ve fucked you up” said Charles “We would’ve killed you”
He nodded to himself, his face still showing nothing but twinkly-eyed amusement, which to an onlooker would have revealed nothing out of the ordinary at play here.
“But we knew that within the context of your audience, what you were saying was acceptable.”
I noted the way he said ‘we’. No sense of his involvement with the SA intelligence services being all in the past at all. We. Very much a current Company man talking, as opposed to someone who’s left his sordid and misguided past behind.
‘We’
I smiled too, playing the game. “I would’ve been quite happy to see all of you guys dead”
He nodded, and changed tack.
“You were quite upset when Joy Harnden was uncovered as a police spy, weren’t you?”
I’d had a long friendship, back in the Eighties, with a cute young woman called Joy, who worked for the Black Sash and Jodac – we met often, doing lunches and some evenings, just hanging out and getting a buzz on with red wine.
Then abruptly she’d disappeared, and whispers began to circulate about her being a police spy, and none of my leftist friends could give me sufficient proof poz to settle my mind. So I went on stage a number of times at the various venues I performed at, and railed at the crowds about this whole saga – upset and not knowing the truth of the situation. Then it finally hit the papers, and Joy was unmasked along with Olivia Forsyth as being police spies (I still have the clipping where her mother talked about being proud of her.)
Ouch.
I’d been in a number of security police raids on the homes of friends – men suddenly appearing wearing jackets, running shoes and wielding Uzi’s and other weaponry. But after Joy was unmasked and I began shouting my puzzlement onstage, the police came looking for me, and I had to disappear for a while. Hiding out and then gradually leaving paper trails heading anywhere but to me.
The ANC at the time thought I was either an agent or crazy, because I was so vehemently hardcore in my approach. There’s a war on. Do whatever necessary to attack, hurt, demoralize and kill the enemy. Plain and simple. Seeing the primitive level on which the Left were operating, right down to being unaware of the surveillance devices available, I kept pushing
for a hi-tech solution, to confound the thugs of the Police and Security Apparatus.
I had no fear, you see. I’d had violent experiences in the South African Defense Force, and knew that nothing else could hurt as much, so I didn’t care. It helps commitment, sometimes, to
have a very clear idea of exactly what physical violence is like. So from the get-go, you're not
playing as a whiney pseudo-committed 'revolutionary'. You have a total understanding of the
levels of personal pain that you can take (or not, as the case may be)
And similarily, you have no illusions, or false belief systems to cloud your judgement as to
what you're up against. No time wasting on bleating about how awful 'the enemy' is, or even
expressing outrage. Minimal internal verbalising needed. They want to hurt you. You want
to hurt them. They have the weapons and muscle and will. You have a fervent burning will
and a commitment to Democracy. It's not enough, but it has to do.
But I guess my approach was considered insane. I mean that pure Zen approach combined with a fierce outrage at the nazism so visible, didn’t make me committee material, I think – which is how things were being done.
The White Leftist revolution relied very heavily on the bookish dutiful plodding worker
who followed orders, went to meetins, and considered it a major coup to see themselves being whipped in a 30 second insert on ABC News. (Many of us used to go to the lunchtime TV news
showings at the US Embassy)
But back to Now, and the spy.
“Yeah, I kind’ve liked Joy” I said and looked at him thoughtfully, and continued playing along.
In previous chats with the spy, I’d put forward an exploratory persona – pretending that his attitude towards the local homeless and beggars in Melville, was acceptable to me. He had a hardcore fascist approach in dealing with the gradually rising problem of vagrants, beggars and low-life’s, beginning to filter into Melville society – and specifically into the nightlife of Seventh Street. Crack their heads, I said. He nodded, yeah - I was His Kinda Guy. Hence the conversations.
He'd initially made a plea for 'basic human understanding and dignity', trying to bullshit me into believing his statements about how these folks were underprivileged and had a right to try and improve their lot and blah blah. But once he seemed to buy my 'crack their heads' approach - he'd opened up, bigtime.
I was fascinated with him.
I remembered him very clearly as the awkward student visitor to the commune every now and then. And the juxtaposition and thoughts of me confronting my mindset of Now versus 'then' - was interesting as hell to me.
Besides, how often do you get to chat with a Nazi spy, who spent years deliberately making friends and spying on them, and doing his best to get them detained or tortured?
Not often.
He'd sounded like a child at first, whimpering the standard liberal line which always is trotted out by those who are safe from the brutalities of the dispossessed. “People have got to have their dignity and self respect” he bleated, looking as earnest as possible.
But in the same conversation, a little later (and some drinks further on) he agreed with me about these stupid liberals with their democratic ideas, and related how he’d been beating up some beggar on the side street alongside Horatio’s, a fish restaurant across the road from where we stood.
And the people inside the restaurant, according to him were all doing shock and horror – including the owner.
“But after I explained things to her’” he leaned forward smiling, confiding his little secret
“She actually saw that I was right”
He nodded the nod of someone who thinks they know the way the world is and feels smug having conveyed it to someone else effectively.
I nodded too, thinking 'this is a Nazi'. This is someone who didn’t want Mandela released, or the ANC unbanned. Someone who made a living out of informing on the student Leftist movement. Supplying information for money and I assume, from a belief that they were following what they believed was the correct political path.
He’d told me how he’d been given a car and cash, and had taken a long holiday back in the old days, after some particularly good information coup, he’d been part of.
I could see it. This currently overfed and balding man, as a long haired picture-perfect student Nazi, on the open road in the late Eighties, having passed sufficient info to his Masters, to get someone or some people jailed, beaten, tortured – killed?
Riding happily through the countryside, en route to a holiday. A nice paid holiday.
Yeah, definitely the good old days.
(Maybe you weren’t around in the Eighties, or maybe you were, and still try and get by on the lie of not knowing anything. But people were being hurt and killed then, because there was a war on, between the majority of South Africans, and the National Party, who used their armed wings, known as the South African Police Force, and the South African Defence Force, to maintain control.)
But Melville. A semi trendoid area of bars and restaurants, the place keen to be bohemian but
just too damn rich to ever offer more than an illusion of the genuinely bohemian area of Yeoville.
There'd been a recent Mardi Gras, and Charles van Niekerk was apparently involved in some degree, in organising it.
(The Mardi Gras basically resulted in a lot of litter, and at least one death – from a customer who’d fallen off a slide, set up for the day. No whispers from anyone about court action, and I never read anything in the media about this.)
“So what’s in my folder back at headquarters?” I asked, and the spy laughed.
“Nothing” he said, and gestured at one of a group of equally quietly threatening young men
who were lurking in the area as I spoke with him. “He’s got more in his folder than you do”
It struck me as odd how the lout in question, didn’t ask Charles what he meant. He’d just approached while we were talking, been included and referred to, and then had subtly moved back to the outside bar-hatch on the pavement a few feet from us.
It dawned on me that spies don’t refer to security police matters, past or present, within earshot of civilians usually, and I took a closer look at some of these supposed innocent drinkers, hanging around outside the bar, and noticed that there were a number who didn’t quite fit – perhaps because they fitted almost too well.
Charles is very visible in the Melville area, on Seventh Street. If you go just about any night to Ratz, and look for a casually well-dressed man, just quietly relaxing by the bar hatch, sometimes surrounded by assorted men, other times not. He never sits inside the bar – always preferring to lurk on the pavement. Everyone knows him. You can ask for him, and the staff will point him out. He’s done a fairly good job of ingratiating himself into the nightlife, which alone isnt necessarily cause for concern, but his involvement in the politics of Melville – from the Mardi Gras, through to an proposed Arts festival, is somewhat sinister.
We spoke about many things, from covert ANC meeting places in Hillbrow, which the police new about and monitored - through to another friend of mine who lives in Melville, and who was an ANC spy – and throughout the conversation, there was no hint that Charles was not still working for the South African Intelligence Services.
I tested this theory, by drawing him out, and asking why he didn’t write a book about some of the less sensitive operations that happened? I mean, this is truly cool stuff. It is actually, if you think about it. The rest of the world was doing Duran Duran mania, and we were playing life and death warfare here. But invariably his response used the word “We”.
“There’s a new government in place and we don’t want to cause any problems or embarrass them”
“But just some of the older stuff maybe, you know? Its history after all” I asked.
“WE don’t do that sort of thing…”
I nod. Pity. There's a whole history that's going to remain unwritten, unfortunately.
(The librarian geek in me hates this idea. In 500 years we'll all be dust, so who cares
then - history needs to be written down, for future folks to absorb and maybe
learn something. See how stupid we all were.)
I raised the issue of UFO’s, just for the heck of it –asking if he’d ever heard any reference to the subject. He didn’t blink as he said no, and I could see him dismissing me once and for all, as a threat of any kind, given the question. Partly as I intended - but hey, I was also honestly curious as to whether the UFO phenomena had ever shown itself, amidst our brutal grimy
struggle.
Now in Christmas 2001, I was chatting with a hippy friend called Russel, who pretty much lives on the street, making cigarette and food money by telling fortunes using a well worn Tarot pack.
I've known him for years, and we get on well - even though he has a tendency to try and persuade you that Alastair Crowley and ice hockey are intrinsically entwined somehow, with modern history. Okay, so he's a little off the wall. So am I. Who cares, he's a nice guy and I've always got time for him.
He tells me that Charles had dragged him out of one of the bars a few days previously, and slapped him around a bit, because he’d mentioned that Charles was a policeman.
I told my hairy and cheerfully disheveled friend that the next time it happened, walk over to anyone who saw it, ask for their name, phone number and ID number, then go to the local police station and report a case of assault.
He ummed and aahed – in the standard nervousness of those at the bottom of the social heap, when prompted to do something that might make things worse.
My friend blinks at me, his hair dishevelled, clothes worn, clutching his hockey stick and his hand-made books on Crowley and Golden Dawn, I Ching and Illuminati. He's shown me them a few times. Pages etched and layered with careful calligraphy, pasted in glowing illustrations, found God knows where. I'm bowled over at what I see. Regardless of the content, he's made 'Art' that's worthy of Peter Greenaway's wildest creations, scrapbooks that are utterly beautiful modern versions of those old illuminated manuscripts.
And clutched here in the hands of a street-dwelling guy who's just trying to keep his reality together enough to make it through each day.
And the spy slaps him around.
God, no offense, but you're a fucker sometimes. You know? If you exist, you really are a mean-spirited fucker, I don't care how all this suffering and unfairness might fit into 'your infinite plan', but you've got some explaining to do, in my view, you evil little holy ghost fuck you.
*sighs*
And the spy walks free, unpunished, rewarded and moving his careful way into social circles and presumably to report back to his Masters and handlers. He actually got a job for a while as a bouncer in one of the bars. Thus providing an even better excuse for 'being there'. For lurking and listening, and soaking up the chatter of whatever remaining unsuspecting activists who flow through the crowds of 'civilians' even today, unnoticed and quietly doing whatever they're doing, that's presumably of interest to the Authorities..
Charles disappeared eventually. I did my best to spread the casual word of his past employment, if not his current one.
It's interesting to look at the face of your enemy.
To realise who you are, and who they are. To get a sense of who you were, and what they were.
And to try and make sense of all these different things, these different people that you and they used to be.
And how it 'fits' into who you are now.
Hmmm..
Time destroys all things. But healing takes a little longer.
And yeah, we live in a democracy now. The past is dead.
But 'forgiveness' for mass murder is not an option in my morality.
posted by * at 10:57 AM
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