In your hands, you are holding a book, which is about to turn South African literature
on its head. Congratulations
on buying it or shoplifting it or getting a signed copy from the Author's website
- Whatever. By owning it, you have just become a reader on the very sharpest cutting
edge. I guarantee that after you have started on the first paragraph, you will find
it impossible to put down. The reason being simple I knew Al. I
knew the drug scenes he is writing about. And he writes about those scenes so vividly,
so compellingly. After reading a page - any page - of "Acid Alex", my eyes
fill with tears. Yes,
I am the "mal ou" who lived in Alex's kitchen while I planned my cultural
revolution. I pulled it off later but that is another story. Al's
story in, many ways it is even more surprising, more shocking, more far out than
my own. Compared to Al's story, my own life seems rather tame. In
Al, I have one person whom I can point to and proclaim: "Look, this guy was
more wasted than I was." Or: "Look, this man went further than I ever did,
challenged more conventions than I did, dared to defy more than I did and actually
survived. Al Lovejoy - as a writer, is very difficult to define. I would guess he is a kind of
mixture between Herman Charles Bosman and William Burroughs, but that doesn't quite
say it all. There are bits of Walt Whitman, here, and bits of Haruki Murakami, and
bits of Kafka, and Kerouac, and Zappa, and even Courtenay. But, most of all, Lovejoy
the author - is his own person. He bounces from page to page like a fireball, he
wraps sentences and images and events together like sosaties and then braais them.
He undermines, he jokes, he preaches, and most of all he tells his story, his astonishingly
breathless story. One
of the strangest stories ever to come out of Africa. Boy,
what a literary turn-on. God, what
a trip. This
book is more than just an innovative literary experiment. Together with its subject
matter, it will do for South African culture what "Trainspotting" did for
modern Scottish consciousness. The
social implications are staggering. There
were and currently are - more people than ever, exactly like Al throughout our society.
Al was very much a part of the so-called "lost generation" of South Africa. Kids
who grew up unwittingly under a destructive regime and also suffered under Apartheid.
Al's essential problem - and this was my essential problem - was finding legitimacy
in a seemingly hostile adult environment. Since birth - idiots surrounded him. He
was an overly intelligent child caught in a hopelessly dysfunctional world. This
was the reason why I squatted in his house back then, this was the reason we became
friends, this was the reason why we landed up in street fights together, why we did
drugs. I have always known about Al's potential writing talent. I knew, even back
then, that if he wrote it - he'd have a bestseller on his hands. The problem was:
how the hell do you write a full-length novel AND hold down a steady job at the same
time? Luckily, a few things counted in Al's favour: his astonishing expertise in
the IT industry, his basic willingness to do the right thing should the right thing
prove profitable enough - and his brutal honesty as an author. Of
course I cannot vouch for the absolute truth of every incident in this book - to
do that, I would have had to be with Al right from the start of his life - but I
can vouch for his sincerity as a person, his odd firm insistence on street ethics,
and his real sense of fairness which, as he explained to me during countless late-night
conversations, came from looking after himself and his bras during bad times. Thank
you, Al, for completing this novel, and thank you for letting me stay in your kitchen
all those years ago. Oh, and I'm sorry I never cleaned up that shattered Tequila
bottle I flung against the wall in a fit of rage. Or was it you? Never mind. What's
done is done. I wish you the best my bra, now, henceforth and evermore...
