“Ahoy, ye lunatic asylums of liberty . . .”
Sam, a white child raised in apartheid South Africa, brainwashed with racism and entitlement, develops creeping ennui that is later assuaged with art, poetry, sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
Egocentricity and blind luck afford safe passage through racist thugs, Drug Squad and Military Police, to final escape from South Africa heading to Europe with his troubled wife and his naïvité, where they end up in the mythical green pastures of the United Kingdom.
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“That island was true virtual reality. Divided.”
Arrival in the promised land soon brings disillusion, breakups and breakdowns, marital and mental—the soul laid bare in a saga that traces Sam’s succession of unsatisfying relationships, social nightmares, and eventual psychic confusion ricocheting between timelines in South Africa and the UK. Motorcycling, a core facet of his existence, leads him to motorbike-courier work where his life expectancy diminishes rapidly.
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“At the doorbell of the Unknown . . .”
Sam’s memories, relevant to the needs of his psyche, interrupt his daily grind and ongoing search for love where he hopes to find a higher truth beyond his ersatz self. Occasional poetic sorties and his artwork throughout the book enhance the narrative along with excerpts of South African apartheid history—oppression, torture and violence punctuating the darker side of his environs.
Imaginative prose conjures vivid experience, from bushveld wildlife to the rain-spattered brick and concrete wasteland of London, in this multi-layered fictional memoir.
About the AUTHOR
Pogo Heinz
His love of motorcycles influenced the title of Ordinary Infernal Machinery, referencing not only the beautiful machines but also the ‘tyrant ego’ resident in us all. In the 1980s in the UK he worked six years as a motorcycle courier, one of the most dangerous jobs in Britain at the time. He has lived and worked in Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, Kansas City, Boston, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Tokyo. He now resides in the USA with a modified Ducati Hypermotard SP, his wife, and their demanding cat.
Coming Soon…
SUNLIGHT ON BARE TREES
by Anonymous
56 poems by a Western dervish. The first eight, beginning in 1977, trace a journey from first glimmers of awareness up to his year of initiation—the next forty eight cover from then up to the present—each poem paired on its facing page with quotes from renowned Sufis of the past, providing context and perspective for the reader.