Granger Korff - 19 with a Bullet

Nevertheless, Johannesburg and the East Rand were good places to grow up… as long as you were white. An endless sprawl of lovely modern neighbourhoods with clay-tile-roofed houses and well-kept gardens; BMWs in every other driveway; housemaids and gardeners chatting over garden fences as they clacked, chased and reprimanded white babies in Zulu or Tswana as they strapped them, tightly wrapped in blankets, onto their backs and rocked them to sleep.

Johannesburg and South Africa had universities, schools, shopping malls and freeways equal to any in the world—and then some—but they were a city and country suffocating with discontent and torn by strife and racial conflict. Tempers were short and men were quiet and deep.

In my last few years of high school the evidence of this social unrest—the thick smoke of burning car tyres—could be seen in the distance now and then, coming from the sprawling African townships that lay on the outskirts of our towns. Some of these townships housed up to a million black people. These were the workers and families who rose at 04:00 every day and journeyed the 30 or so kilometres to the white world in a stream of taxis and buses, to clean our houses and mow our lawns. A sea of humanity who lived, mostly in squalor, in their own world. A world separate from ours and apart.

A world of apartheid.

The world had damned South Africa, boycotted trade and blackballed any country that broke sanctions and dealt with us. “The evil racist regime,” they called us. Personally, I didn’t see much wrong with what was going on, and neither did a lot of the Africans I spoke to. It made pretty good sense. We were very different, culturally and economically. After all, this was Africa. The black African people lived over here, the white people lived on that side, and the Indians and Coloureds lived just behind that distant hill over there. It made sense to me.

The world did not see things the same way as me and millions of other South Africans, however, and the world trade boycott that had been imposed on the country for years now was strangling the economy and making life difficult for both black and white.

I wasn’t a hundred percent clear on the details, nor did I give a shit. Things were pretty okay as far as I could tell and I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. The world was claiming that the black Africans were being oppressed because they were Africans. But, as far as I knew, any of the black political parties that were banned at the time had links to communist states that were just waiting to get their claws into our country. That was the reason the blacks weren’t given any power even though they were a majority.

Well, it was a good excuse anyway; that’s what the newspaper told us. So, like any South African, I just went about my business, not too concerned about world opinion or that we were No. 1 on the world’s shit-list.

The scrap at the plaza had lightened my mood; I smoked a cigarette and walked back to the town library. Amazing how cheerful kicking someone’s ass can make you feel. I felt in touch again, in control. I felt good. My right cross had not betrayed me, and if ‘they’ didn’t want to see things my way, I would educate them. Whoever it was. But things had not been that easy lately, nor as simple as the ass-kicking of idiots, which was not the source of my frustration. I was 19 and it was the end of 1979—my last year of high school. There were only three months to go before final matric exams and graduation, and I had been ‘asked’ to leave school. Again. And the school I was at did not expel students lightly.

It was one of the new, very liberal, private college-type schools in an office building downtown where one could do interesting subjects like criminal law, criminology and so on. There were only about 150 students in the whole school. It did not have a uniform like all the other public schools. We could wear our hair long and we could come and go on breaks as we chose. We could also smoke at school, so all in all it was a pretty good thing.

I was just beginning to feel good about myself when word inconveniently leaked out that I was screwing the English teacher, and reached the headmaster. Apparently he had suspected it for a while but could not prove it, while she had denied it with outrage and shock when he had questioned her about it—‘she’ being the English teacher—a little brunette with freckles, cute as a button and the dream of every schoolboy at the college.

Bev was a doll. All the guys talked about her—the provocative way she stood in front of the class with her tight white slacks riding up her crotch, or how she sat up against the desk with her legs slightly spread as she read from a book. She would pace the classroom, enthusiastically dissecting a sonnet or reading ‘The Rubaiyat of Kublai Khan’, a poem written hundreds of years ago by a stoned, self-proclaimed opium addict. When she got mad she would pout her lips and flick her short curly brown hair and scowl as she wrote long notes on the blackboard for us to copy, driving the guys wild watching her round backside wiggle up and down the madder she got and the faster she wrote.

One day, urged on by my good friend and constant devil-on-my-shoulder, Darryl, I wrote her a horny letter, marked it ‘personal’ and handed it to her with a smile as she left the classroom. She took it, also with a smile and stuffed it into her handbag. She probably thought I was having some problem with my poem or sonnet and was too shy to ask for help in class. I spent the whole night deeply regretting what I had done; I was sure she would show her husband the letter, or turn me in to the headmaster the next day or, even worse, pick me out and make a fool of me in class. Who was I to try a hit on her? What was I thinking?

The next morning I crept sheepishly into school, expecting the worst. But, amazingly, my fears were put to rest when she came into the classroom for first-period English beaming from ear to ear, and sent a few provocative looks my way. Jackpot! I had lucked out! I had rolled the dangerous dice of love and landed with huge double-sixes! Since that morning, and for the last five months now, we had been screwing after school any place we could. I would skip classes and meet her at the lake close to her house, or go to her house for ‘extra lessons’ after school. The black nanny would watch the little tykes and we would disappear into the study. The nanny knew what was going on and would go for obliging strolls in the backyard or around the block.

Bev was 30 years old, married, with two kids; I was 19 and more or less permanently horny. She told me that she had met her husband when she was 13, dated and married him and that she had never experienced another man. She made up for lost time, though, and went wild on me. We became bold and stupid and would even steal quick French kisses in the corridors if the chance arose, or run naked around her car at the lake at 11.30 in the morning.

I was living out every schoolboy’s fantasy and she was living out her own. I had unleashed a tigress.

I couldn’t brag to the other guys at school about my accomplishment, especially when they would talk and drool over her. I would sit with a ridiculous smirk on my face, and nod.

“Boy—what I wouldn’t give to sink a bone in her. See how she was standing just now with those slacks crawling up her bum? She knows what she’s doing… I know she does.”

“Yeah, cool, eh? I bet she’s a tiger in bed too… you can tell.”

“Probably loves being slammed from behind,” I would say with some authority and a smile a mile wide.

“Yeah, probably,” someone would venture.

I would nod my head and crack up.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you, laughing like you know something! You wish you knew! Hey, can’t I laugh, or what?”