Chapter 2 – Michael Thompson aka Little Mikey Thompson

My Mum loved “Little Mikey Thompson”. I have to ask her why she had ever called him that. Michael was respectful and honest and responded with confidence and a smile. Never bragging never surreptitiously demanding reinsurance despite the terminals of young adolescent life. He was good company. And I benefited from his good company. By association my pimply faced, greasy haired, bucktoothed teenager persona was transformed and accepted into the cool crowd. 

Personally I never quite excepted and embraced my facial features nor the appeal of my physical body attractiveness… and today only in my 50s, have I finally stilled the nagging self sabotage of “not good enough”. Decades since teen years and only in my 40s it was that I finally began to even accept that I was “okay”. This only through the verbal acknowledgement of confirmation by other persons not through my own strength of character. In the Men’s Talking Circle which I attended regularly where, during a “King” tradition of farewell, I was being acknowledged and honoured that one man described me as “having the body of a Greek God“… Again in completely different circumstances, sitting on a park bench at Hout Bay Craft Market it was that I was asked by Daniel and Andrea of D&A Model Management if I would consider modelling for international photographers. 

Little Mikey Thompson was the youngest in a family of four. His brother, the eldest, gave him the competitive edge and the benchmark to measure masculinity. I imagine the introduction to the games the boys played being introduced from older to younger. Tennis was a game the whole family played. The Catholic Church is the other religion the whole family attended. The communities of sports, and churches, at university extended the sense of grounding and belonging, nestled in the picture perfect scenic valleys and secured in the arms of the mountains surrounding Stellenbosch. Simonsberg, overlord of the monopoly of the existence of men in the family and frivolous trivialities, their foibles, their Fröbel’s? **** 

“Valley’s deep and the mountain’s so high, 

If you want to see God you’ve got to move on the other side, 

You stand up there with your head in the clouds, 

Don’t try to fly you know you might not come down, 

Don’t try to fly you know you might not come down….” * 

Michael’s father was a Professor lecturing the English language to a mostly second language and mostly rural in origin, mainly star struck and stuttering array of students at Stellenbosch University. 

Michael‘s mother was motherly. Protective, supportive, accommodating of four healthy appreciated children. I had found my own Foster family. ***** Catholic, four children, two boys, two girls, each successful team players. Like Tony Foster had introduced my elder brother Greg to rock bands like Supertramp, Michael’s elder brother Anthony had introduced him to Barclay James Harvest, but experiencing the music in the era which it was released, experiencing it within the social context and within the people of that time in that time, not in retrospect like my belated and isolated experience. 

“For this we killed him, nailed him up high, 

He rose again as if to ask us why, 

Then he ascended into the sky, 

As if to say in God alone you soar, 

As if to say in God, alone we fly…” * 

It was 1981. Bob Marley had died. The Thompson siblings had the album Kaya**, the naughties on the cover art of the illegal doorway to drug addiction that our African gardeners may placate the monotony of their toils in the soil with, flying way over our adolescent heads filled with dreams of romance pulsating in the oppressed pleasures of the flesh. Our focus was on sweeping our soles across the dancefloor watching our feet immolating Michael’s elder sisters invaluable instructions on how to dance to Reggae music. The focus was less on sweeping a girl off her feet for fear of rejection and exploding the myth of romance. My focus is on the fine art of chatting with girls, less with sweeping grandiose bragging but more with “how are you feeling?“ and “what do you actually think about?“. More with foot-in-mouth opening lines and chat-up lines, but less in fumbling with zips and clips and braziers, keeping the flesh a mystery, passion only in the admission of the fleshes’ premature explosion. 

Michael, unlike me, had sisters and as such, talking to females was as natural as talking to any other human, not deserving an alien category of its own. 

Michael’s confidence was contagious. Michael’s camaraderie, encouragement and sporty challenge in attitude inspired me to step out of the living fantasy of my childhood dream world of being a singing superstar, and step into the spotlight of responsibility for creating my own life… I realised I could not live life in isolation on my own… I started living now! 

“So you’re going to be a rock and roll star, 

Going to make it on your own, 

Write a song that everyone can sing along… 

So you’re gonna be a rock ‘n’ roll star, 

Gonna make it on your own…” *** 

First cuddle. First kiss. 

She was and is beautiful. Way out of “my league” I firmly believed. 

My first kiss was a  stolen kiss.

Was I worthy of it? What did our shared kiss mean to her? Where does one determine one’s own value? A sense of who I am, and who I am of enough value to have look back at me. To have love me back? 

Vulnerable. Expectation. Sense of wonder. Then rejection. Failure. 

“Hand me down… a can of beans.” (Michael had actually kissed the same dame before.) 

My first kiss. Their rejection. What a delight. Can I focus on the delight rather than the dark memory of circumstances? I have already detached from emotions with the asking of a question. Psychology 101. Raised by movies and monogamy. In denial about dashed dreams and divorce. More in the moment manifest mixed with the majestic and magic of fantasy. Multiple years of wonder and wondering versus millions of memories looking back from a life of failure and hurt and rejection. Focus now on any magical moment, or lying over stains on a mattress, crying over spilt milk…? 

Am I avoiding my past? The pain and the passion? 

“He could never have been a Rock Star for the same simple reason that the rest of us aren’t rock stars. Because we can imagine not being one.” 

(about The Rolling Stones, founder member and piano player, Ian Stewart, who was then demoted to driver, and later fired by their PR for not looking the part) 

UnCommon People, The Rise and Fall of The Rock Stars, book by David Hepworth, pg. 95 

Imagine that? 

Imagine this? 

My first kiss. 

A party at a girls house whom I had been flirting with, but then insensitively I bought a new girl  along with me. 

As such, and as young teenagers we were all reliant… reliant on place and space. We did not yet own our own homes! A place belonging to adults where we could risk being intimate. A space commanded by adults where we could be vulnerable to feeling… A place and space either neglected by neglectful adults who did not care enough. Or a place and space policed and imprisoned by an authoritarian adult who cared too much. Or a place and space conceived by a considerate adult who understood the evolution of our species enough to know deeply that as children becoming adults it is inevitable that we experiment, as youth launching out into the world outside our family home we are going to explore the unfamiliar territory… of the sweetheart and of our own heart. 

As a caring parent this would be the place and space to create… a parent who cares just enough. 

As young teenagers we were also all reliant… on others for transport! We did not yet own our own cars! The girls house, was within walking distance, from my home, where Mikey and I would be sleeping, and walking distance at a push, from the home of Mikey’s date, Lisa Bondesio, where she would be returning, but a long shot from my date, Michéle Olivier’s father’s or mother’s homes in the Strand. 

This particular evening my group of teenager friends and I were reliant for a safe lift home with my brother Greg Wright, and his transport, namely the infamous Mini bakkie with the ominous nickname… The Yellow Peril…! 

Reliant as such on another older teenager with his own, um, teenage experimentation, and youthful time management… 

Thank the Gods of fate he was late. Thank the Goddess for my first kiss! 

Written by: 

Geoffrey Wright 

2021/05/25 

Stoke Newington, London, United Kingdom 

© Geoffrey Wright 

On this day 18 March 2022 dedicated to Little Mikey Thompson. You ripped, brother! 

RIP 

Michael John Thompson 

18 March 1966 

Paul Roos Gymnasium, Stellenbosch 1980-1984 

SONGS quoted: 

* Hymn 

Song by 

Barclay James Harvest 

** Kaya 

Album and Song by 

Bob Marley and The Wailers 

Kaya is one of perhaps thousands of names for Marijuana in Jamaican patois or slang for The Holy Herb, commonly known by a term with less status in South Africa by a considerably more derogatory “Dagga”.

*** Rock ‘n’ Roll Star 

Song by 

Barclay James Harvest 

CHARACTERS and References: 

(list of info to be expanded) 

**** Fröbel: 

Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel or Froebel was a German pedagogue, a student of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who laid the foundation for modern education based on the recognition that children have unique needs and capabilities. 

Froebel believed that play is the principle means of learning in early childhood. In play children construct their understanding of the world through direct experience with it. Play helps children to see how they connect with nature and the world around them. 

~ Wikipedia 

***** Foster family: 

Madelaine & Norman Foster, their family Tony, Felicity, Anita and Peter, are family friends whom I have known my whole life. Following the divorce of my parents and their overwhelming support, my mother, Doreen Wright, considered them our “Foster family”.