The Axe Forgets
The Ballad of Johnny Hayes - My English Traits - Chapter 48
It’s a tired old trope, a worn-out cliché, a familiar old chestnut, a bromide, a platitude, a banality. But clichés become clichés not because they’re repeated so often and so vacuously, but because they’re founded in a truth we no longer wish to hear.
The cool die young.
It hardly needs a roll-call:
James Dean, Edie Sedgwick, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Mindy McCready, Steve Biko, Ronnie Van Zant, Jim Morrison, Peaches Geldof, Kurt Cobain, Bob Marley, Hank Williams, Otis Redding, John Lennon, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Buddy Holly, Brian Jones, Jim Croce, Robert Johnson, Keith Moon, Charlie Parker, John Belushi, Jesus Christ, Syd Vicious, Gram Parsons, Elise Regina, Che Guevara, John Kennedy Toole, Bruce Torr, Caravaggio, Peter Tosh, Keats, Munchie Coleman, Amy Winehouse, Chopin, Philip Seymour Hoffman — the list goes on.
You can pick your favourites and mourn their passing. Or you can tell yourself they had it coming. Death, like everything else, is a matter of taste.
Two of the coolest people I ever knew were killed for their coolness. I will tell their stories as coolly as I can.
But first we need to put the definition of cool to bed. Your cool may not be my cool. Etymology can’t help us here. Nor can the dictionary.
Cool isn’t an ethical thing, a political thing or a fashion thing. It’s not a collective, a movement, a programme, an ideology or a faith. Cool is not an intellectual position. Nor is it a unique and defining combination of attitudes, opinions, preferences or tastes that add up to coolness. It’s entirely individual. You can’t dress to be cool, or sign up to be cool, or seek to discover and follow the rules of cool. You can’t learn it, you can’t buy it, and you can't catch it like the flu.
It’s the opposite of that. You’re blessed with it at birth. And you’re cursed with it for life.
It’s a simple twist of fate, a freak mutation in the lottery of meiosis that breeds in the bones of some cool little neonates. They come out screaming bloody murder at the world as it is. They grow up rejecting, despising and dispensing with anything and everything they’re told to do, told to believe, told to think, told to follow or told to imagine.
You can spot it early. The nappies will still be stinking the stink that only a parent can love when the proud progenitors are telling their parents, their in-laws and their friends, “Well, she’s a little different, you know.”
Back among the sweet and soothing perfume of their rose and lavender gardens, Grandma will sigh, “It takes all types to make the world go round.”
And Grandpa will say, “There’s a runt in every litter.”
You’ll meet them at school. If they’re boys, the girls will flock to them. If they’re girls, the boys will run a mile. Unpick that.
They’ll be despised for not being “team players''. They’ll be ostracized for not “joining in.”
Cool people are not necessarily anti-socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-communist, anti-woke or anti-social. They’re anti-institutional. They’re anti every organisation that looks, smells and sounds like an organisation. They’re anti people who tell other people what to believe, what to think and how to behave.
Their moral position is self-defining: don’t be uncool. Which makes them profoundly anti-fascist and totally anti-totalitarian.
You’ll find them in the kitchen at parties. They’ll be listening to Leonard Cohen while you’re still listening to the Bee Gees. By the time you’ve zigged to Cohen and Dylan they’ll have zagged to Hank Williams, Townes van Zandt and Emmylou Harris. Their favourite Beatle probably won’t be Paul.
As Kurt Cobain more than hinted, the nature of cool not to be cool.
You’ll call them posers, pricks and pussies. You’ll scorn them the more for envying them so much. They’re NFTs in societies of interchangeable stereotypes.
It’s as meretricious as the best and worst of advertising always is, but Apple was right about the credentials of cool:
Or, in the spirit of Emerson, they’re people who find their own lights and live by them.
Cool people don’t try to be cool, and they don’t need or want to be told they’re cool. The word “cool” in the mouths of uncool people is self-disqualifyingly uncool. To call a cool person cool is to break the cardinal rule of coolness. It makes coolness sound like an institution. They can be judged as cool only by their thoughts, words, deeds or actions in the context of where and how they were expressed.
Because cool is only how cool behaves.
I was never cool. I knew I wasn’t cool long before I knew what cool was. I knew it because Brer Bruce, my closest sibling, was the personification of everything I wasn’t. I felt it even if I didn’t have a word for it.
He was different. My parents said he was different. Everything he did and said was different. He didn’t read what we were supposed to read, he didn’t listen to what we were supposed to listen to. He made his own rules and followed them to the edge of every mental, emotional and physical precipice he could find in the small world but the very large territory of New Dell Farm, Hidcote, Natal.
I tagged along in shame, guilt and trepidation.
We liked each other without understanding each other. He was the doer; I thought I was the thinker. He drew and painted and experimented with every medium he could find in the shed, the kitchen and the turnip field. I crammed my head with everything I could find in my mother’s Edwardian library.
I wanted to understand the world as it was. He saw it as a blank canvas.
In 1969 we went our separate ways. He studied architecture in Durban; I read English at Pietermaritzburg.
In Durban, in the very cool company of some of the coolest kids in white, English Natal, he developed a bitter distaste for their intellectual, political and overtly social coolness. They had turned their coolness into a club. At which point he decided not to be cool, never to be cool and, if possible, to find and live and become the radically extreme opposite of everything they thought of as cool.
Bruce was so determined not to be cool he left Durban after graduating to live in very uncool Newcastle in uncool northern Natal among uncool Afrikaners with very uncool political views. He bought a very uncool yellow Valiant Charger with black stripes racing from fender to fender. He got a very uncool and very yappy little mutt, tied its floppy ears in pink ribbons, and called it Suzie.
His anti-coolness didn’t prevent him from marrying a very cool wife, having three supremely cool kids, and designing the coolest buildings in Newcastle. I’ll dare to say the only cool buildings in Newcastle.
Among them was a small side-chapel he designed for the very uncool Nederlandse Gereformeerde Kerk, the church that in 1948 had provided the architects of apartheid with a biblical justification for the separation of the races (Joshua 9:2, etc), and that continued until 1994 to provide successive National Party governments with the moral sustenance required to enforce it with regular doses of Christian fire and brimstone.
They looked at Bruce’s plan. They liked him, and they liked the price. They bought it. He built it.
His design was elegant in its austerity: no more than a plain rectangular structure with a traditionally pitched roof, the rafters exposed inside above a traditional arrangement of pews for twenty or thirty people. They face the equinoctial east where the altar and cross traditionally stand in Christian houses of worship. There the tradition ends. The cross, some two metres in height and about a metre in width, is cut out of the eastern wall.
It’s a space, not an object. It’s the sky in the shape of the cross. The morning light pours through it. So too the birdsong, the breezes, the rain, the wind, the hail, the smell of veld, acacia and petrol fumes; the sound of lawnmowers, barking dogs and of not-so-distant traffic; of children playing, laughing, crying.
It never occurred to them that he had made a cross of negation — that he was chiding them to observe and contemplate the very absence of their Calvinist god in their austere little chapel — their absence of compassion, of feeling, generosity, humanity and care. In their stead they would see, hear, smell and feel only the world as it was outside the four walls of it, in all its mad and mixed-up glory.
He didn’t say so. He didn’t justify it, explain it to me, or ask me what I thought of it.
He just showed it to me with half of a hint of his famously crooked smile. It was the last time I saw him.
Now I worship the space he left behind. As we do with the loved and lost.
I’ve met other cool people. They think for themselves, speak their minds, and live their lives according to their own lights. I would call them authentic if the advertising industry hadn’t decided a while back that the way to get people to love this or that brand of washing powder, vodka or SUV was to make their clients’ products feel, you know, authentic.
Oscar Freire is one of the bougiest streets in Sao Paulo. It’s Brazil’s equivalent of Bond Street, Fifth Avenue, the Bahnhofstrasse or the Rue Saint-Honoré. I walk it some days to see the lights and the sights.
There’s this guy I’ve come across several times now. He’s a drifter or a grifter who pulls a wooden cart behind him, looking out for scraps of stuff in the skips and garbage he can take home to sell or eat in whatever impoverished barrio he calls home. He has a dog, something cross-between a brak and a mutt, a slim, elegant mongrel with a silky coat of black and gold.
The point is that the dog lives on his shoulders, wrapped partway around his neck. It’s a living scarf, a canine comforter. And it’s cool as he is. It goes where he goes, sees what he sees, smells what he smells. Together they are supremely cool. They are cooler than all the bougiest pedestrians, shoppers, SUVs, shops, cafes and restaurants that flood the street from Consolação to Avenida Nove de Julho.
When he sees me now he angles his chin as if to say, what’s up in your world, gringo. It’s not a question.
One of the coolest things about it is that nobody in Oscar Freire thinks he’s at all unusual.
Perhaps because he is so clearly comfortable with being so obviously out of place that he reminds me of Johnny Hayes, the very coolest person I ever had the privilege of sharing a joint with. It was Greefswald in 1971. This is his story. I sang it because I couldn’t write it. Follow the words below if you can bear it.
The Ballad of Johnny Hayes
We came back from the bush one day
Heard a Bedford drive away
Some oke was lying in the sand
Kaalgat as a new-born babe
Playing a harp in his two hands
Blackie Swart said, I’ll be damned
If that ain’t Johnny Hayes…
It can’t be Johnny Hayes we said
If he’s not here yet he must be dead
Said Blackie it’s a well-known fact
Nobody plays the harp like that
Except for Johnny Hayes
The legend was he ran away
The first time it was Walvis Bay
Got lost among the dunes
And he nearly died of thirst
Was DB where he learned his tunes
No matter how they swore or cursed
Or how much he was abused
He wouldn’t wear a uniform
Or touch his R1 too
So Blackie stopped and said to him
We wondered when they’d bring you in
But where are all your clothes, hey, boet?
As if he’d just run out of luck
But Johnny shrugged and said this looks
Like a lekker place for ballesbak
And he lay back in the sun
With a little grin
He asked, where am I anyway?
When none of us wanted to say
Blackie coughed a little cough
And said we call the place the Vault
Better vasbyt, Johnny Hayes
The Vault, he said, sounds safe eksê
There’s dagga growing everywhere
I saw him last I won’t forget
Listening to a tape cassette
It was playing Three Dog Night
He seemed to me to be quite alright
Of all the mysteries they say
That hang about the Vault today
The most mysterious of all
Not one of us can say for sure
What happened to Johnny Hayes
Many years long after that
We made a place where we could chat
In a Facebook group about
The things that happened at the Vault
Someone who was anonymous
Knew Johnny was alive because
On the beach in Toti there
An oke was lying on his back
Tanning in his birthday suit
And he could swear it was the truth
Because it was a well known fact
Nobody had a dick like that
But we all thought that he was just
Taking the piss
But the stories kept on pouring in
Like Elvis was alive again
And someone else was certain cos
A friend of his in Durban was
Walking on the Esplanade
When he heard the tune that Johnny played
From underneath the ocean waves
We thought they must be seeing ghosts
Until somebody found a grave
It was around the old Point Road
It said, Here lies Sarah Hayes
Who lost her only loving son
And died with justice left undone
You filled my dreary world with joy
God bless you, Johnny boy
Then we knew that he was gone
But the mystery lingered on
If it was somebody’s fault
It would be buried in the Vault
Until the end of days
Then there came a time by chance
I bumped into Blackie Swart
Putting petrol in his car
In PE once on holiday
He said the story that he was told
By somebody he couldn’t name
Jesus, man, was such a shame
Was enough to make a grown man weep
I saw a tear roll down his cheek
As he told me Johnny’s tale
They put a gasmask on his head
And pulled him through the river bed
Tied behind a jeep they said
With a rope around his hands
Running through the Shashi sands
Until he couldn’t keep it up
Until at last that he threw up
When he couldn’t vasbyt any more
And drowned in his own vomit then
It was the very last of him
For sure
Of all the mysteries there are
Underneath these southern stars
The ones that never will get out
Are those they buried in the Vault
Along with Johnny Hayes
But it’s min dae for us all as well
And if they sent me back to hell
I’ll take a harp like Johnny had
And learn to play it just like that
Until the end of days
Yes, it’s min dae for us all as well
And if they sent me back to hell
I’ll take a harp like Johnny had
And learn to play it just like that
Until the end of days
They killed Johnny Hayes because he wouldn’t conform. They killed Bruce because he made a decision based on principle, not on the politics of who owed what to whom.
The axe forgets. The tree doesn’t.
👍 so good Gordon
Thanks, Nils. Very cool of you. Yes, Holden Caulfield, Zappa and a thousand more.