God put human beings on earth, Barney Simon used to say, because he likes to hear stories.

I met Barney through Nicky Rebelo. During his time at university, Nicky had worked on a creative writing project. He had been in the thick of some weird shit with 32 Battalion during his army stint, and was, like most of us, dislocated by the experience. Perhaps as a result, he developed a fascination with the hobos of Joubert Park, a little slot of greenery that nestled between the city and the cosmopolitan flatland of Hillbrow. Nicky befriended these people of the road, and then took to carrying a concealed tape recorder and capturing their conversations. Out of this material he had written a play, Outers, and taken it to Barney, who loved it, and who committed to directing it on the main stage of the Market Theatre. Barney's reputation was such that no actor would ever say no to him, and he had assembled a stellar cast, including the great Marius Weyers.

The bit Barney was missing, however, was the protagonist. He didn't want to do a play about a guy with a secret tape recorder. So he was searching for a character and a story and an actor to develop them with, someone from outside the homeless world who could ease the audience into the situation. Nicky, who had seen my army play, National Madness, suggested me.

So I met with Barney in his house in Yeoville. We drank tea and talked. I can't remember if he asked me to read anything. But I get a clear picture in my head of the man himself, his bald dome, fringed round the edges like a monk's; his grey beard; his gnomish, wise, youthful eyes behind the glasses. Barney was a mad professor inhabited by the spirit of a fourteen year old, Jewish, literate, working class adolescent. When you spoke with him you could use language of literary criticism, or you could "tune" him in the dialect of the street. Barney would be with you all the way. He was a Joburg ou.

In any event, I must have done something right, because Barney cast me. This was a big opportunity, although I didn't have the experience to realise it at the time. Not even the fact that my character and his story were yet to be found, would only be found during the course of rehearsal, was enough to cause me fear. Far as I was concerned, I was just getting to be challenged as an actor.

So we gathered one day in a rehearsal room at The Market and commenced the work. We read through the text, which was, is, unequalled in its ear for the lyricism of the gutter, and then put it behind us for a week or so. Barney started by giving us tasks.  Our first was to go into town dressed, shall we say, down, with no money, and experience the street for four hours. I found myself near the station, in a predominantly black enclave, invited as bait in a classic sleight of hand gambling game, where's the pea. Funded by the game's controllers with a capital of two rand, I won two more, and a real mark, spotting my success, joined in. Suddenly the manipulation of the bottle top was happening just a little faster, and the pea was popping up in unexpected places. The mark was loosing crumpled notes hand over fist.

Our second task was to go to a government department and try and claim a financial benefit. The catch was that one had no fixed abode. With no fixed abode, one entered a Pinter world and the world of the play. It was a world from which one might escape, if only one could get to Linden to fetch one's papers. But, what with the stolen shoelaces, and the methylated spirits hangover, it seemed better to cadge a rand, to linger beneath the tree and make sure no "darkies" intruded on the leafy domain. Joubert Park was, and quite rightly as far as our particular hobos were concerned, a whites-only area. And so they stayed, and by the mechanisms of irony the meths turned their faces a deep purple, almost black in fact, and the years swung round, and then they died.

My third task was to go three times to the public toilet at Joubert Park. Barney was quite specific about this. It had to be three times.

The first time I went to the toilet in Joubert Park I walked past a man who lay on the grass in the sun.

The second time I went to the toilet in Joubert Park, the man was inside, leaning against the wall next to the urinal, and he bummed a cigarette off me. The third time I went to the toilet in Joubert Park, we spoke further.

The man told me he had burnt his arm in a welding accident. He pulled up a biker's black leather jacket to reveal swollen blue and mauve flesh. He said he was meant to be at the hospital, but he was scared. They would hurt him with their curing.

You can go to the toilet in Joubert Park and find that man. For five rand he will pull your wire. For five rand he will milk your lizard. For five rand he will stretch out his burnt blue and mauve biker's arm toward your secret dreams and say hello.

I wrote that at the time. Now, I can't remember what actually happened in that toilet. I presume a proposition was made and I fled. But it's more complicated than that. I've been telling the story for years. When, digging through old scribblings, I found the above, I realized that what I had been saying at dinner parties had taken a life of its own. It had combined with another incident. Something that happened when I was walking home from town, and took a route through Joubert Park. Needing a piss, I went into the toilet. Standing at the urinal, unzipping my fly, I heard a sound. I stepped back and looked down the line of cubicles. All the doors were open. I could see no one. But there was someone in there, because the sound came again. A moan and a twisted oath. Half formed words, from which one, kaffir, escaped fully formed. The groan was I realized, viscerally, that of one penetrated. For the second in my life, I fled the toilets in Joubert Park.

Looking back now, I think Barney was uncertain about where to go with the character we called Richard. He was sniffing around the gay world that he would navigate later in plays like Score me the Ages. Barney, who knew the gay scene, had instincts about those kinds of places. He knew that three visits would be enough create the impression of a need, to catch someone's eye. Watch, Barney would say. Watch people's hands, how they handle their money. Watch their eyes and where they are looking.

So, at Barney's behest, we went out into Johannesburg, and came back with lines and insights and stories which we told to each other, and which Barney and Nicky began to weave into the text. "Jy moet a nuwe hol kry, want jouna het ‘n gat in." (You must get a new hole, because yours has a puncture.) Once, in search or who knows what, Barney sent Nicky and me out into the downtown nightclubs. We met a woman, rough and wild and not unattractive. Nicky, always ready to push the boundaries of adventure, suggested we go back to her flat.

"Maybe you'll rape me," said the woman.

"Maybe we won't," said Nicky.

Outraged, she drew back a hand and walloped him around the ear.

What people were saying and doing in the city was extraordinary. And Nicky's play mirrored this. At one stage, not far into the tale, a new girl arrives in the park. Weyer's character, Hennie, is dubious about anyone who befriends Richard, and might cause leakage in the supply chain. Richard, seated between them, is curious about the new arrival.

 

RICHARD. Where you come from?

JEANETTE. Ask no questions and you'll get no lies.

HENNIE. Old mother Hubbard. You know what? I walked over drums and things, and battled for money, and what do you do? You sit on your flat poes all day.

JEANETTE. (Beat) My what?

HENNIE. I walked miles, my baby.

JEANETTE. I said, my what?

HENNIE. You sit on your flat poes. That's why it looks like a padda. [1]

JEANETTE. Fuck you, man.

HENNIE. I do all the walking. My feet are so fuck'n swollen.

JEANETTE. Where's my flat poes?

HENNIE. Hey?

JEANETTE. Where's my flat poes? You wanna smell it? I don't talk to you. It's clean. It's not rotten like you.

HENNIE. Fuck off.

JEANETTE. Fuck you, man. Bloody bastard. (A long silence. To Richard) You wanna take a walk?

 

A daunting invitation, fanning flames of fear and astonishment in a young man's heart. Meanwhile, opening night loomed. The gay thing didn't fly with me and Richard, became, as I had been briefly in real life, a deserter from the army. The play starts with a stage, empty apart from two green park benches the shade of a tree. Richard enters, sits on the back of a bench with his feet on the seat. He looks around, considers a sandwich, sings a few lines of Bob Marley's song, Buffalo Soldier. Hennie enters, surreptitiously examining his companion.

 

HENNIE: Was Giovanni here?

RICHARD: (Beat) Who?

HENNIE: Giovanni.

RICHARD: (Beat) I don't know him.

HENNIE: I'm supposed to meet him here.

RICHARD: Haven't seen anyone.

HENNIE: He said I must meet him here. Short ou. With black hair.

RICHARD. No. (Beat) I haven't seen him.

HENNIE: (Beat) He's a mechanic.

RICHARD: I don't know him.

HENNIE: (Long beat) You sure he wasn't here? (Beat) He's wearing a blue shirt. Short ou. Giovanni.

RICHARD: No, I'm sure.

HENNIE: Maybe I got the wrong bench. (Beat) But I can't have, because this is where I was sitting when they attacked me last night.

RICHARD: Who attacked you?

HENNIE: Here on this bench last night! (Beat) You see what happened, me and Giovanni just got here last night from East London. He went to phone his cousin and six big fuck'n kaffirs attacked me with knives and knob kerries. Look at my knuckles. That's from where I punched one of them in the head. You can see here they stabbed me on the shoulder. Look at my fuck'n clothes. This button's gone. They took my suitcase with all my clothes and all my papers. My other fuck'n pair of shoes. My socks and every fuck'n thing. I swear I'm going to find them and hunt them down one by one.

RICHARD: (Beat) Vigilante.

HENNIE: Fuck'n Giovanni. (Beat) If I had some money, I could catch a bus, but I haven't got one fuck'n cent. (Beat) Tonight it could rain. I can't sit here in the fuck'n rain.

RICHARD: Catch pneumonia.

HENNIE: Or a fuck'n cold.

 

Marius Weyers was, is, an enormously accomplished actor. And I wasn't. During the course of rehearsal, I came to realize that I was being a little bit more challenged than I wanted to be. And I was challenging Barney as a director. We ended up doing a lot of one-on-one work over weekends. We'd break to get a boerewors roll from the Steers Take-away round the corner from his house. These, he said, were "subtly spiced." When we were eating he would say: "Do it now."  And I'd have to work the speech we were busy with around the food. He was persistent like that. And sometimes frightening. Three quarters of an hour before we opened he was still rehearsing me.

"Don't worry about the moves," he said, "I can block it any time."

He just wanted to believe what he was seeing.

At some point in the process, during a run through, I, or Richard, was moved to tears. I was quite pleased with myself, believing that I had made some kind of emotional breakthrough. Barney was unimpressed. It was the audience's job to cry, and not the actor's.

Outers was well received by the profession, but not by the critics. The life of the gentlemen of the road was, I suspected, only steps away from their reality. The piece frightened them. But years afterwards I found myself at table at the Troyeville Hotel with Lara Foote, one of South Africa's most accomplished theatre directors. Somehow the subject of Barney came up and I told her about three young schoolgirls who had watched the show. Their wide-eyed awe and excitement as they experienced the production from the front row had lived with me ever since.

"That was me!" said Lara. 

She told me the production inspired her to study theatre.

Barney never used me as an actor after Outers, but the experience had made us friends.  I'd have breakfast at his house now and then and we would share the occasional joint. And once or twice we walked dogs together. Whenever we met, we laughed a lot.  And when my second play, Hellhound, appeared at the Market Theatre it opened under his sheltering wing.

I didn't go to Barney's funeral but I write with a piece of sculpture from his house close by my head. I believe that he, like James Phillips, that late great tune-meister of the eighties who got no airplay because he told the truth, comes to visit me occasionally when I do certain kinds of work.  Barney and James never worked together, or even knew each other well, but they shared many qualities. Their roots were in down-market Joburg suburbs. They both owned a profound moral insight, a delightful sense of humour, a love of Durban's finest hemp, an ability alchemise high art out of authentic South African Experience. They died around the time apartheid did, almost as if its death was the removal of their purpose, which was to shine a light on it until it withered like a fungus.

He had a little glimpse of God, Barney, and he stayed true to it, and it made him great.

 

[1]  A frog.