HE HAS been known by many names: Bitch-Born Bastard. Alex Goulding. Asterix. Yster. Lix. Skollie. Acid Alex. Three years ago he changed his handle to Al Lovejoy. Legally.

The new name goes with his new life. Ask him what he does now and he says, “I’m a professional writer. Gee, I love saying that.”

The many names went with the many parts he’s played in his time.
He was an orphan. An abused kid. A boy burglar. A daggaroeker. Reform-school inmate. Gangster. Soldier. Psychotic nutter. Deserter. Bandiet.

He graduated from Pretoria Central prison to become a fireman, a missionary, an acidhead, a rave bunny, a buttonkop, a musician, an IT expert, the head of a Cape crime syndicate. He was an international drug smuggler — taking zol into Europe, bringing ecstasy pills back into SA. Did two and a half years in a Belgian prison.

When he was a musician and drug dealer in Stellenbosch, a “completely mal writer ou” lived in Lovejoy’s kitchen. The writer ou, “Woke up one morning and announced brightly that he needed to piss off to the nearest Wimpy, bum lots of coffee and start writing furiously, because he needed to pull off a cultural revolution — but only after he had shaved his head and changed his cultural name to Koos Kombuis.”

Koos Kombuis has written the foreword to Lovejoy’s book Acid Alex. He says, “In your hands you are holding a book which is about to turn South African literature on its head.”

Quite a claim. But then Acid Alex is quite a book. Some of it is evocative of the writing of the hard-core US crime writer James Ellroy. Some passages are reminiscent of Edward Bunker, the youngest ever inmate of San Quentin prison at the age of 17, and the author of No Beast So Fierce, regarded by many as the finest crime novel ever written.

There are elements of Hunter S Thompson, Herman Charles Bosman, William Burroughs and William Wharton. But in the end it is an
amazing story told in a unique voice. A voice moulded by pain, a voice honed by a government reformatory (“Uncle Guvvie’s poesplaas”), whetted by the SADF, and sharpened by Pretoria Central.

It’s the story of a man who went to hell and came back, a morality tale, a Bildungsroman, the narrative of a fuckup who found redemption, and the anthem of a lost generation.

The book is written in a South African vernacular, with smatterings
of Afrikaans and skollietaal. There’s a glossary which explains phrases like “spookgerook (stoned to the point of paranoia)”, “spiritsuiper (vagrant methylated spirits addict)”, “nongalosh (homosexual)” and “O fok nou kom daar kak (Fuck,
now the shit’s going to hit the fan)”.

I meet Lovejoy in the Cape Town suburb of Gardens, where he spent some time in his youth, as a skollie and a member of the Mongrels gang.

He looks just like the ou on the cover of his book, in the drawing by the trendy comic artist Joe Dog, aka Anton Kannemeyer. He’s a hard man with hooded eyes and a nose that looks like it was once moered stukkend. (It was.)

He takes off his jacket and he’s wearing a vest that reveals the tattoos he got at Wildfire, tattoos that cover the gang tjappies he had as a teenager.

We go to a curry joint, and order the hottest vindaloo, ignoring the waiter’s pleas to choose some-
thing milder.

I ask Lovejoy the obvious question — how did an ex-bandiet and a former international drug smuggler become a writer?

“Man, I’ll tell you how it started. At the end of the book I talk about sitting there wanting to kill my partner and I reckoned that was a really sick place to be, and I reckoned, ‘OK, I need help’.

“The doctor I spoke to tuned me, ‘Al, nobody in this world can fucking help you because of the pain and shit you’ve been through in your life’... you make out?

“He said, ‘the only way you can dig your way out of the hole you’re in is by writing it all down as therapy’.

“I said, OK, cool, and I thought I’ll do this as therapy, but I’m also gonna take my joy, my love of reading and I’m gonna write a book.

“I took my zol, I took my pills from the last run I did, I decided, ‘fuck it, I’m tired of this running and running and running.’ I went to Jeffreys Bay and checked into a rehab. I spent a lot of my drug money — it was fucking expensive — and I started writing while fighting off a bad case of alcoholism that came from the flip side of heroin addiction.

“I read the book now and it’s almost like it happened to a character.”

And what a character. This is Al Lovejoy in the prologue to Acid Alex: “I’m a fucking drug makwera. We run the whole eastern seaboard between Cape Town and PE. PAGAD is hunting us. They already shot Chad and the other ou on our payroll. The various flavours of the so-called Cape Town mafia want to know who the fuck we are and when they can break our legs. And, Oh Yes, Boys and Girls, just for shits and giggles, the happy little pitbulls from Sanab visited us for a chat the other morning.”

How much of the book is fiction, I ask Lovejoy as the vindaloo arrives.

He sips his red wine and laughs. “Ja, if I say ‘nothing’ I can actually get back into court. Ag, here and there I had to dramatise things.

“We changed names here and there, more because I wanted to protect people’s privacy. Here and there, there were people that have straightened themselves out, they’ve got families and kids and all sorts of things so I don’t want to go in and fuck up their lives.”

We tuck into the vindaloo and it’s seriously hot. Lovejoy starts sweating, something he trained himself not to do when he smuggled dope into Europe in his suitcase.

“Don’t sweat,” he writes in the book. “Whatever you do, don’t sweat.” The airport drug enforcement officer “looks for sweat in the cool static air-conditioned environment like gold. That is his bread and butter. Sweat.”

I ask him about drug smuggling.

“I saw myself as an opportunistic dope-smoking hippie and [the Belgian] law enforcement wanted to throw me in jail for life.

“When I read those charges in Belgium I just went white. I thought, “Oh God this is it, I’m fucked hey. I’m fucked. These people take this very, very seriously.”

(He was charged with “Drug Smuggling with the alternative charge of attempting to commit Chemical Poisoning upon the Sovereign Subjects of the Kingdom of Belgium, and Conspiracy to commit International Organised Crime.”)

He tells me about the time “these Irish hard boys offered us pills straight from Tanzania. They had a legal [ecstasy] factory running there. But I know what these fuckers are financing with this. They’re buying guns and bombs and things to blow up children in fucking supermarkets... ‘Are you crazy — I’m not gonna buy E from you.’”

We’re both sweating from the vindaloo, our mouths burning, noses running, eyes watering. We finish the fiery food, and when the waiter takes the plates away, Lovejoy chirps him, “Thanks, that was lekker. Nowhere nearly as hot as you made out.”

I nod in agreement and ask him if he ever misses the criminal life.

“No.”

“No?”

“I get an occasional thrill every once in a while thinking about like ... you know... like a little fantasy about landing like 500 kilos of something somewhere ... but I think about it for all of five minutes and I think, ‘Do you want to go back to jail?’ Fuck that.

“Look, it’s a kick to have a shitload of money. It’s a kick to walk around with R150000 in gilder in your top pocket. A kick, but it wears off very quickly because what sustains that kick is all the other shit. Being chased. Internecine fighting going on with the other gangsters you know, cops after you, vigilantes after you, you’re fucking scared of your own goddamn shadow most of the time.

“Uh huh. You get crazy man. Get crazy. You’re completely fucking excessive. When you come out of a blackout you don’t know where the hell you are. You don’t even know what town you’re in.”

Lovejoy wrote about this excessive behaviour in Acid Alex:

“I’ve smashed bottles over my head and then cut an anarchy symbol in my chest with the broken ends. Slashed open my wrists and drunk the blood chased down with vodka and codeine — then painted crimson graffiti on walls with it. I’ve lain fighting on the floor for possession of a button pipe in the middle of a pitched firefight between gattas and gangsters, with bullets flying and richocheting above our heads.”

But now, he tells me, “I’ve turned my back on it and just started walking, hey. I’m a completely different person now. I made myself a new life. A completely new fucking life. It was one of the most amazing things. A few months ago I sat up one night and said, ‘You know Al, you can credibly call yourself a writer now’.”

He’s busy writing a novel. “It’s a terrible, terrible story. I’ve got about 20000 words.”

He’s also writing the screenplay for Acid Alex. He’s in the process of clinching a major movie deal for his book, and expects filming to start in the middle of next year.

Who’s going to play Al Lovejoy?

“Ed Norton would be first prize. Dye his hair and give him a prosthetic so it looks like he’s got a lekker broken nose.”

Our interview is over and I settle the bill. We shake hands and Al Lovejoy says, “Now don’t go write something that’s going to make a bullet get put through my head.”

He’s not joking.

•Acid Alex by Al Lovejoy, Zebra Press, R143. Visit Lovejoy’s website: www.acidalex.com