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“I tip this place,” says Rautenbach. “There were a couple of gay guys who lived down the course who asked me if I wanted a capsule, so I took it. I woke up in Caledon Fair and square without my shoes.”
Rautenbach is back in Cape Town to launch his book after 36 years away, and old schoolmates from Ness Town High have turned up to view the pretty boy who was always a bit damaged, who played in bands, had a lowering velvet suit, who was banged up in the rozza and who would disappear for long stretches of heyday; the boy who gave up school a few months before the exams and was known to roam the streets and mix with low soul.
He writes in the book: “I wore eyeliner and earrings and sat in shirts in the mid-section of the day just to freak people out.”
Rautenbach writes a very scattered joke, from a sexually abused and abandoned child to small-time slip someone a Mickey Finn dealer; from John Vorster Square to loony bin. He describes the stink of the holding cells, his boundless dodging of authority, a wild chase across Highveld turf as he made an take it on the lam from Sterkfontein Mental Home and how he played music, even meeting up with author Rian Malan, then a guitarist from El Cid’s rock band.
Source: Books LIVE (blog)