Gillespie Street and the surrounding bars was the setting for Johan van Wyk’s autobiography Man Bitch as well as Zazah P. Kuzwayo book Never Been Home.
From Johan van Wyk’s ManBitch 2001
I’m looking down from my flat window. The owner of the adult video shop XXX with his steel leg makes his way somewhere. I’ve never seen any customers going in or out of his shop. Carnival sounds (‘I’ll be a bachelor boy till my dying day’) come from the band playing on the veranda of the Four Seasons Hotel and very late at night there are the underworldly sounds of a dog barking from the undercover parking under The Bazaar. Across the street I see the dwarf with the anguished eyes and wild hair of Jesus Christ. He is called Three Quarters. He was born without two arms and a leg. At night the towering Holiday Inn Garden Court throws its blue glow across the city and across my dreaming eyelids in my balcony room.
It is Saturday afternoon. There is a roar of cheering from the Four Seasons Hotel: whistles, shouts, hooting, gun shots, crowd orgasms: People are watching soccer on the TV in the Ladies Bar. There was a goal. At the end of the game the hotel erupts and life returns to the streets. I walk to the sidewalk cafe, the Costa do Sol and order a beer. There is not much action. Then I move to the equally desperate Four Seasons veranda with its Indian band playing the favourites of the aging and crippled prostitutes on the dance floor: their clothes as weathered as their wrinkled and toothless faces.
