From a distance it had all the signs of a super vehicle. Of something from another time and place. In my mind these vans had always been something extra-human, apart from the prosaic realties of cars and highways. Up close, however, things were different. It smelled and looked like a prehistoric, atavistic creation, the panels consisting of buckled, reinforced, bulletproof sheet metal. Its snout broad and angled and ready, fronted by a black grill designed to crush and bounce. The thin front window squashed into place. The glass was many centimetres thick and comprehensively bulletproof, its density creating a blue tint inside the driver’s cabin, which in turn was tight and defensive – a cockpit made habitable only by a gushing aircon system. The two side-window slits were essentially decorative, and the rest pure fortress. The back section literally a vault on wheels. Impenetrable.
It was a van built to be shot at, bombed and attacked. Built to keep its cash guts from spilling out, at any cost.
It was also the only reliable thing in the circumstances – a vehicle I could use to smash and grind and rip my way through fences, over the spikes and razor wire, and into houses. That the van took diesel was painful, but the pain was offset by its smash-anything ability, and by the fact that no thumb was required to start it.
Also, it had a CD player – an ancient front-end loader that looked too dusty and scratched to ever work, but which actually did. An extreme, and welcome, cultural oddity. There were a few old Maskandi disks in the glovebox, a Zwakhe Mbuli, a Brenda greatest hits and an original copy of Vinny Da Vinci’s Africanism.
CHAPTER 12
Tears of ass pain
My grandfather Barnaby Fotheringham had been pathological about miscalculating the N1 slipway out of Joburg. I remembered him freaking out on one of our rare family holidays, as my father drifted left, flirting with Soweto.
‘Watch it, Rus, watch it!’ Grandfather Barnaby barked.
‘Jesus, Dad, we have to go left here. It’s Soweto, not the dark forest.’
‘Just watch it’s all I’m saying. Friends of mine got lost here – ended up God knows where…’
Born into a wealthy family of timber farmers in the Natal Midlands, Barnaby Fotheringham had conspired to lose his farm, his fortune, his self-respect and pretty much everything else thanks to an unreasonable attraction to the fine sport of polo. The great loss of the Fotheringham fortune wasn’t much discussed in our family, for obvious reasons, but from what I could gather the nut of it was that Barnaby had underestimated the time his father, and his father before him, had spent on the farming part of running a farm. He left the technicalities to the farm manager, who in turn left much of his load to his manager, and so on. When the timber market collapsed, Barnaby returned from the polo fields to find the outer shell of a business – the insides had rotted away. All he had left was a stable of ponies.
Thus, Russle was born a rich kid. He left high school a middle-class kid, and he dropped out of university to pursue his cricket career the son of a living cautionary tale.
As I headed down the N1 in my armoured van, loaded up with supplies and jerry cans of diesel, Barnaby’s voice echoed in my head. ‘Just don’t go too far left. The Bloem slip road is the same as the one to Soweto. You have to go left, but then straight. Left then straight.’
I let the wheel drift left, then pulled straight. The rain smashed on the van’s armoured window, turned into hail and smashed again.
The N1 south was simultaneously reassuring and evocative of all the things I was trying not to think about. Orange Farm loomed up on the right, the township veneer familiar. On the left, Vanderbijl Park and Sasolburg, the cooling towers also reassuring, yet ominous in their lack of vapour. How many times had I travelled this road in my life? Fifty? Eighty? A hundred even?
Just after crashing through the lowered boom at the Kroonvaal toll plaza (another in an ongoing set of satisfying armoured van experiences), I stopped in a sunny post-storm spot on the highway and considered my father’s music collection, contained within a very old, brown cardboard school suitcase, my name stencilled in big, childlike letters on the lid.
The loss of the cloud – disconcerting in many ways – was most disruptive in terms of access to music. I was constantly patting my pockets, expecting contact. I carried my mobile in hope, but it lay silent, flashing the connection-failure notice ad infinitum, Bambi looking for his mom. Which meant my life’s music collection was scattered across the now dissipated cloud. Few of the cars, players, glasses or devices I had picked up along the way had anything in their memory banks aside from playlists; requests for beats lost to the sky.
The first cover in the suitcase had my father’s hopeful spider-writing scrawled over the front. ‘Schulz – Demo Mix 1 – Final,’ it read.
Two tightly folded A4 email printouts fell from the jewel case as I opened it.
Thanks Markus. That’s exciting. I’ll get something through to you asap.
Best
Russle
-----Original Message----
From: Markus Schulz [mailto:markus@coldharbour.com]
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2011 4:28 PM
To: Russle Fotheringham
Subject: Re: great
I think send me a sample of what you’re thinking. It’s best to have the conversation revolve around something tangible – if we’re both listening to the same thing we can make appropriate decisions.
Let me know when you’re ready and we can Dropbox it. We might need to get you over to Miami to work on it when the time comes…
Peace
markus
On 17/06/2011 4:05 PM, Russle Fotheringham wrote:
Thanks markus – that means a lot, coming from you. Delighted you enjoyed it as it was a bit of a departure for me.
I’m actually putting together an odd kind of mix at the moment. Plays with some of the ideas that came out in the Cape Town set, but maybe in a more steady, hook-filled way than that gig, which got a little wild and broken.
If you like it, it could be a good project to explore?
Lemme know
r
-----Original Message----
From: Markus Schulz [mailto:markus@coldharbour.com]
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2011 3:45 PM
To: Russle Fotheringham
Subject: great
russle
just wanted to say wow. Wow wow wow. That set last friday at Immortals. It just blew me out of the water. Completely unexpected and weirdly beautiful. And I see and hear a lot of sets.
I’m looking for something fresh for Coldharbour. Would you consider a project within that realm?
Let me know, and thanks for the experience
markus
19 June 2011.
My father was dead three months later. He had never mentioned the Schulz exchange to me, but then I was simply a son, riddled with emotion and judgement. It would have been safer to keep quiet.
The emails explained a lot. I had always wondered about the sudden swing to trance. More than being annoying, which it definitely was, it was also odd. Russle Fotheringham had always been a deep house man. Throw in a few breakbeats and some of those slower hip-hop thumpers and that was him really. Deep house. And then suddenly, just before the end, he was all trance.