ACID ALEX
by Al Lovejoy
(Zebra Press)
The world has waited a long time to see the word poeslappie in print. And here it is, in a novel crammed full of good South African words of all types. Like the vocabulary, the story ranges across the full gamut of being Sarf Efrikan, from the disgusting to the dof, and from the heroic to the merely hapless.
Ostensibly, Acid Alex is the autobiography of Al Lovejoy. It traces a life lived across a South African terrain that might not be familiar to that many of us, from poor orphanage to reformatory, from prisons to the border. Eventually, Alex becomes an international drug smuggler, gets bust, and spends three years in a Belgian jail.
How much is autobiography, and how much a more recognisable type of fiction, is debatable. I don’t feel disposed to trust the narrator, which is a compliment to the writing. The story reads as a novel, and the reader will probably treat it as such. The power of the narrative wouldn’t be altered by knowing that everything in the book really happened.
The astonishing thing about Acid Alex is the wealth of detail it contains. I don’t just mean the insights it provides into the gang and drug sub-cultures of South Africa. Or the descriptions (sometimes horrifying, often funny) of the child abuse, religious mania and aggressive racism that formed the philosophical underpinnings of apartheid.
No, I’m talking about the revelatory details about real people, people that anybody who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and then really grew up during the horrible 1980s, will recognise.
It’s not difficult to recognise them, after all. The author names them, generally without subterfuge. Some have become household names (well, in a certain type of household), such as Lovejoy’s erstwhile housemate, Koos Kombuis (who contributes a foreword to Acid Alex), and other members of the Voëlvry mob.
Others will only be familiar to people who were part of the music scene in the 1980s and 1990s. Locations such as The Doors in Jo’burg, and The Playground in Cape Town, will strike a chord or three with locals.
But how is Lovejoy going to get away with a description like this, of one of the owners of The Playground? “The mildly infamous Mr Freebody Esq — half-insane Chinese, half-lunatic Pom, and totally psychotic don’t-give-a-flying-fuck mad cunt. The dear man taught me how it all works. He showed me how to put baby’s teething powder into very good coke and make it average.”
Perhaps that’s a stupid question to ask, as one of the tenets running through the book is that you can get away with anything. The other tenet is that you will always get caught, and Acid Alex does an excellent job of showing what kind of person can live by two such seemingly irreconcilable beliefs.
Truly, as Koos Kombuis says, this is “an astonishingly breathless story”. It’s not quite flawless, especially the middle bit of druggie philosophising that, while it rings true as typically boring quasi-religious rambling, detracts from the powerful matter-of-factness with which Lovejoy tells the rest of the story.
You’ll skip these pages, though, and be back in the irresistible flow of the narrative. Besides being a great read, Acid Alex is an invaluable record of a type of mania that gripped a certain type of South African in the last quarter of the 20th century. It’s a book that’s going to appeal to many young South Africans who currently have to turn to the United States for their myths of pointless excess, and it’s going to inspire them. Not necessarily in a particularly savoury way.