POETIC LICENCE

WE HAVE been through a lot as a country lately, and I am pleased to write something happy and light to read.

Rudy was my best friend, a white boy who had so much soul and life in him.

Recently I had been telling tales to the woman I love of my adventures with my old childhood friend.

I met Rudy in 2001 when my father, me and my sister, who was five years old at the time, moved to Krugersdorp from Soweto, following the death of my stepmother about a year prior.

Rudy and I were barely teenagers when we met at that store on the corner of Premier and 4th Street in Krugersdorp North. I went there to play arcade machines, and so did he.

My father “misplaced” a lot of coins from his car to those arcade machines, unbeknownst to him of course – may he continue resting in poetry.

I later learned that Rudy was deemed a menace in the neighbourhood. A disrespectful, unkempt, rude and unruly child who lacked morals and could aimlessly walk into taverns and casually mingle with adults.

But I never saw what everyone else had seen in him. I saw a boy my age with the same interests as me. We had the same taste in music, movies and video games; he would come over to my house on Saturday mornings with a fistful of 50c coins. I couldn’t leave the house until I did my chores – he would help me so we could head to our domain at the corner store and go dominate other children at the arcade machines.

We would spend hours playing Street Fighter in that store. They might have seen a delinquent in him, but a friend is what I saw.

And the friend that I met in 2001 who had so much soul and life in him, was the same person I saw this week through a meaningful coincidence when I bumped into Rudy at a restaurant in Ruimsig, West of Johannesburg. We only spoke for a minute, but his message was clear; it was as though he came to affirm what I had been pondering.

I was sitting at the garden tables at the restaurant with my beloved, and by some synchronicity, a manifestation of the collective unconscious, Rudy appeared from the restaurant. We immediately acknowledged each other. After an exchange of pleasantries, I proceeded to ask him how has he been, I hadn't seen him in over 15 years. All he said was, “I have changed my ways, I am leaning to God and I am going to do it right this time.” I could only wonder what kind of hell he must have gone through. It crossed my mind briefly that he could have become what everyone had seen him as when we were barely teenagers.

He said, “I am going to dive into the pages of the Bible, I am looking for something, and I will find it there.”