Acid Death Game

Cape Town, 1990. Ryan died earlier this year. I've been thinking about this day ever since.

We took a drive into the mountains one afternoon. Ryan and I, Ziggy the dog and two travellers we’d picked up earlier. Crashing through the foliage with our water pistols and rolling in the mud – primal and uninhibited. We’d dropped some acid. Our minds were full of forest games, enthralled with the way the light streamed through the canopy of leaves.

Later, when the sun began to dip and paint ebony on the green, we all piled into the van, Ryan and I in the cab.

We exchanged a look, communicating without words as we sometimes did.

We had long awaited this moment. Although we never discussed our weird dynamic, he and I shared a dark crusade, and we were always seeking the pinnacle experience. We hankered to poke the limits in a Jim Morrison kind of way. Maybe we were just plain bored. I dunno. Like I said, we had this strange chemistry.

Ryan started the ignition and eased the van out of the forest and onto the tarmac. Silently he took his hands off the steering wheel, and I perched a finger there, in careless defiance of danger.

Down the snaking mountain roads we sailed. Smirking to ourselves as I steered the van with one lazy finger.

We were never happier than when we were colluding to outfox the system.

The two in the back, totally ignorant of our little road game, were chatting and laughing like happy children, the wind singing through their hair like water, hugging the dog and huddled together against the wind.

Then up ahead, around a bend, crowds of people at the side of the road, peering over the cliff. Ryan took the wheel once more and pulled over. I think he knew instinctively what he would see – a kind of metal and rubber doppelganger, smashed on the rocks.

He sat behind the wheel, ashen and silent, eyes downcast. But I had to see for myself.

At the edge of the cliff I pushed my way through the policemen and gore junkies gathered in their macabre curiosity.

Far below on the rocks lay a car, smoking lazily. It looked like a toy, flat and innocent.

Ryan was pretty quiet on the drive back to town. And he never spoke about it, couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge the awfulness and profundity of how we had teased death and escaped its hungry hands.

We soon found other things to amuse our perverse need to challenge boundaries – and some of them made us laugh. Like the time we waltzed to “Purple Rain” in this pretentious late-night café. Weaving through tables, this scruffy, long-haired blonde boy and a psychedelic goth girl with cropped black hair. We were so uncool and grungey to the café society, I suppose. We hadn’t paid our bill, and when the song ended, we gave a bow and a flourish to our indifferent audience before hoofing it, cackling all the way home.

But eventually we exploded apart. Too restless, too crazy to remain together.

If I were to see him again, I don’t think we’d talk about The Acid Death Game, though one question resounds in my mind: who died on the rocks that day – like some kind of highway Christ – in our place?