Planetary vehicles

2009-01-26T23:24:00.001-08:00

Love, loss and trusting your first instincts

2009-01-20T00:47:00.000-08:00

“Dude, call it what it is. You’re trying to get back together with her.”
“What makes you say that?”
Louis is in denial about the status of his renewed friendship with his former girlfriend Carmen. She is back in Jo’burg for a brief visit, before she heads back to London. She holds a mysterious power over her ex-boyfriend.
“You’re bunking work so you can drive to Vanderbijlpark and meet her for lunch. Who does that?”
His mate Butch is trying to get him to admit.
“No-no, china. We just good friends.”
“Ah, come on, man. Be honest with yourself. She’s your ex, she’s been in town for two days and you’ve been chasing her around the place like a pig hunting truffles.”
“What are truffles, anyway?”
“Does she know you’re trying to get her back? Or is she just using you as dial-a-date?”
“Dude, I don’t know. I don’t think she’s over her last ex. The oke died.”
“What from”
“Dunno. She doesn’t wanna talk about it.”
“Then she’s definitely not over him.”
By 2am that evening, Louis is beginning to agree with Butch that Carmen is far from over her last boyfriend, the one after he had broken up with her.
As he gloomily watches Vanderbijlpark’s Emerald Casino gradually empty out around them, his role in Carmen’s life becomes all too clear to him. He is now that thing he so did not want to be. He is a shoulder to cry on.
He is a nice guy. Someone to turn to in a time of need. In a throbbing, agonising irony, he is exactly what he’s been claiming to be. He is just a good friend.
What he hadn’t known about Carmen’s ex – Colin, his name was – he certainly knows now.
The guy died in someone’s lounge. The guys came home late from a nightclub, sat on the couch to watch TV and passed out. He woke up dead.
No one knew what killed him. His heart just stopped. There was no trace of drugs in his body, he was 28 years old, and a regular gym-goer. It was just one of those things that happen. People die.
What complicated the situation was that he had died in the lounge of another woman. The infamous Tatiana, “That Russian bitch”, as she was known in Carmen’s telling of the story.
It seems clear to Louis that Colin was conducting an affair with Tatiana when he inconveniently died in her lounge. But Carmen never raises this possibility, so neither does he. He merely nods and beckons the barman closer, as Carmen rants on about how, “She must have killed him. She put a spell on him. I know she did.”
“Mmmm. Ja. Shame, man.”
All that remains to be seen is how much Carmen will be able to drink before she deems herself ready to be taken home.
Then, somewhere around 3am, the barman takes pity on him and calls last drinks. Louis begins jingling his keys, hopefully. But Carmen has other plans…
“I’m far too tired to possibly drive back to Jo’burg. Come, why don’t you get us a room at the hotel. We can spend the night here.”
For no other reason besides extreme fatigue, Louis jumps at the offer. Within 20 minutes they are tucking themselves in, a chaste couple of metres apart in separate beds.
In the second screaming irony of the night, Louis finds himself alone in a hotel room with the woman of his dreams. Sadly, he’s now convinced she’s more than a bit loopy. He wouldn’t dream of trying anything.
As he drifts off to merciful sleep, Louis thinks to himself that on further reflection, it might have been the right idea to break up with Carmen all those years ago.
He was correct too, it had been the right thing to do.
Sadly, he is now back in the same position, sharing a room with the slightly loopy Carmen whom he wronged back in 2001 by sleeping with her best friend.
Around midday the next day, Louis’s body is found in the hotel room by a housekeeper. He is dead. His heart has just stopped. There are no traces of drugs in his body. It’s just one of those things.
By that time Carmen’s flight back to London has already taken off.

Getting what you want, and other rites of passage

2009-01-20T00:21:00.000-08:00

It was a simple moment, nothing spectacular. Just an evening conversation between father and son.
Michael said, “I think I’d like to go to the Download Festival. I need to see Stone Sour live. The okes are making such killer music right now. They’re probably the best in the business at the moment.”
“Mmm. Good band, hey,” said his dad Angus, without looking up from his copy of The Star. ‘Tow truckers bribe cops’ bellowed the ten-column headline. The evening edition hadn’t changed much from the morning.
“Ja, great band,” continued Michael. “The best.”
Meanwhile, in the Grayston Drive Woolworths Food outlet, Angus’s wife Shelly was doing the shopping with their other son Shaun.
The Super M chocolate milks were in the dairy aisle right next to the full-cream litre bottles.
“C’n’ive one of these, Ma?”
“No, my boy. You’ve already got a juice and a two-litre Coke. Put it back, Shaunie!”
“Aw, Ma-a! You never let me get anything. I don’t care, I’ll get it with my own money. I don’t need you!”
And with that, Shaun flung the Super M into the shopping basket with an impetuous flick of his 14-year-old wrist.
“Stop shouting, Shaun!”
Meanwhile, back in the family TV room in greater Morningside, Michael was drifting slowly but surely towards his moment of truth.
“Ja, it’s just that if I want the band to succeed, I’ve got to see what the best guys in the world are doing, so we can be world class…”
“Mmm…” responded his father. “Where’s this festival?”
“The UK. It’s in June.”
“Oh. Then you better start saving,” continued Angus, now focused on a page three piece about a radio news editor who’d been stabbed at his home in Melville. “I’m sure those air tickets won’t be cheap.”
“No,” Michael tried again. “That’s the thing, hey.”
Back in Woolies, Shelly and Shaun were at the tills already. Shaun had secured his Super M, and was going for a final Lunch Bar.
“Come on, Ma. You can take it out of my pocket money.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” snapped Shelley, throwing the chocolate into the pile of groceries the cashier was busily swiping. By this time Shaun had begun wandering towards the exit. She clearly wouldn’t be getting any help with the bags.
She took a deep breath. Shoo. Another ten years and this one would be off their hands too.
Michael, meanwhile, a decade older than his junior sibling, was beginning to see that crossroads approaching at a scary rate.
“Aw, come on, Dad,” he tried forlornly, desperately. This in a tone Angus hadn’t been subjected to since the notorious mountain-bike incident of 1999. It was time to put down the paper.
“Look, Michael,” he began. “You’re 25. If you want to be a full-time musician, you’re going to have to start funding it yourself. I’m afraid you’ve already had the last of your pocket money.
“Ag, Dad,” Michael adopted a more grown-up tone. “I’m not earning. How do you expect me to pay for…”
“That’s exactly it, my boy. I think you’re starting to get it. It’s time to find a job. You’ve tried three different degrees, I’ve been buying you band equipment since Grade 10. You’ve never paid us a day’s rent in your life…”
“Rent?” Michael was flabbergasted. “But you’re my parents…”
“We are your parents,” replied Angus, a little too smugly. “And as your parent, it’s my duty to inform you that you’re now officially grown up. No more hand-outs. As from now, you’re off the payroll.
He stood up from the couch and left the room with an air of finality. He had to try not to do it with too much of a spring in his step. It just felt so good to finally say it. He walked to the drinks cabinet and fixed himself a scotch. The house was dead silent.
One down and one to go, thought Angus.
In the family X5 on the way back from the shops, things were equally quiet. Michael wasn’t allowed his Lunch Bar until after supper.
Shelly took another of her deep breaths. She wondered if Angus had had that talk with Michael yet.
In the passenger seat Shaun plugged his earphones in and cranked Stone Sour at a level he knew would be audible to his mom. Punishment for her being so unfair.
She just kept her eyes on the road and repeated her silent mantra.
One down and one to go.

Moving in, moving out and moving on

2009-01-20T00:14:00.000-08:00

Awkward didn’t even begin to cover it. But desperation is the mother of all forwardness, and thus Tony had basically invited himself.
The truth was, Jo’burg was the last city in South Africa that would have him, so, hey. Pete was moving to Jo’burg.
He’d had a bit of a misunderstanding with his folks in PE, he’d been fired from the only newspaper group in Cape Town… And now the cops were looking for him in Durban, following a money-making venture that had left a few customers less than satisfied.
That left Jozi. And since Errol was the only person living in Jo’burg whose phone number he had, Errol was the lucky winner of a new houseguest in the form of Tony Fick, originally from PE.
Errol and Tony had been to Newton Park pre-primary school together, and their moms belonged to the same book club in PE, so they were like family friends. Even though they hadn’t seen each other for about 11 years.
At first Errol was very cool about it. He agreed to let Tony stay at his place until he found a spot of his own, and he kindly gave him real-time phone directions him all the way into Troyeville.
“Take the R21. Take the R21! You should see Eastgate on your left. D’you see Eastgate? Never mind! Just keep going. That should turn into Broadway… Just trust me, keep going. Try not to stop at the robots…”
Errol shared with a oke called Quinton. That was fine, because they had a nice big couch and Tony had his sleeping bag.
The okes welcomed him with the leftovers of some pasta, they watched some Prison Break, and the next thing it was time for bed. Remembering his manners, Tony was, like, “Ay, thanks so much for letting me dos on the couch.”
“Oh no! Don’t be stupid,” says Quinton. “You can have my room.”
He doesn’t elaborate. Tony opens his mouth, about to enquire where Quinton would be sleeping, but there’s only one place he could be sleeping. And it’s none of Tony’s business, he’s just the houseguest.
Errol and Quinton are more than just housemates.
So Tony gets Quinton’s bed, and spends a fitful evening contemplating what might have taken place on it.
The next day, Quinton has something to share with him.
Errol goes off to work, which gives the two of them ample time to hang out and get to know each other.
“Do you know that we’ve actually broken up?” Quinton say-asks while they’re doing the dishes and listening to Mansfield wrap up his morning show on Highveld. “but don’t worry, I’m going to win him back…”
“Jeez, I had no idea,” Tony stutters, “I’ll move back onto the couch immediately!”
“No, no, no,” Quinton insists. “You’re our guest. I wouldn’t dream of it.”
So Tony spent his first two weeks in Jo’burg alternately guilt tripping about interfering in the endgame of a dying relationship and wondering how well his mom’s book-club mate really knew her son.
By week three Errol and Quinton were having nightly domestic spats and Tony was so desperate to get a place of his own that he walked into the Star newsroom and offered to dash sub for free until they could afford to pay him.
Desperation is also the handmaiden of diligence. The Star night editor was so impressed with Tony’s dedication that he offered him a downtable subbing job. Tony got his first paycheque a month after arriving in Jozi, and he moved out the day after that. Followed the time-honoured path of Joburg newcomers from Troyeville to Melville to the suburbs.
To everyone’s great benefit, the holiday club scheme that had seen Tony railroaded out of Durban was mothballed indefinitely.
The next time Tony and Errol met was on a quiet Thursday night at Capital Records in Rosebank, About three years had passed.
It was just Errol, no sign of Quinton. Errol looked older, he’d gone completely grey, and he had a sad look about him.
Errol seemed down because simply seeing Tony again had reminded him of Quinton. It seemed that even saying something like, “Thanks for letting me stay at your place that time,” would have been in bad taste.”
Tony made his excuses and left. And he stopped going to Capital Records for a while. Errol did too.
People move on in Joburg too. And the beauty of it is that no one has to leave town.

The Blues, the red top and moment of truth

2009-01-19T06:11:00.000-08:00

Liz was at the gym when she first saw him. He arrived with the entire Blues rugby team for a warmdown at the Sandton Personal Training Gym.
It pretty much brought the gym to a standstill – 26 enormous men of varying levels of Polynesian ancestry entering the swimming-pool area, stripping to their shorts and then slowly climbing into the pool.
She was on the exercise bikes when she spotted him. He was shorter than the others, but wider, with a vast Maori tattoo across the upper right quadrant of his chest. He wore his hair in tumbling curls down his broad shoulders.
His deep-set eyes were hooded with concentration as the team solemnly executed their routine of wading down the length of the swimming pool five times. But Liz’s bike was the one right opposite the pool ladder, so she knew it was only a matter of time…
Sure enough, the time came, and as the gorgeous man hoisted himself out of the pool, his muscles rippling with the exertion, he glanced up, and they looked into each other’s eyes.
For Liz, time stopped.
He had a caramel complexion, full, chocolate lips, and a plaster across his left eyebrow, which was raised in a mischievous way that reminded her of the The Rock.
Her monitor told her that her heart rate had gone up to 150bpm.
“Who’s that?” she gasped to the guy on the bike next to her.
“That’s Pete Paki. He’s the eighthman.”
From that moment, the course of the next two weeks of Liz’s life were determined. She would be stalking Pete Paki.
She timed her departure from the gym to coincide with that of the Blues team bus, which returned to the team hotel, the Sandton Holiday Inn on Katherine Street
From super14.com, she determined that the Blues would be playing the Cheetahs that weekend and the Cats the one after. After that she went out and bought a bright red, low-cut top.
It was the kind of top that would turn heads no matter what colour it was, but the colour – a kind of luminous magenta – ensured Liz’s bust would be the main attraction in any room she found herself in.
She immediately headed for the Holiday Inn, where she sipped a cocktail at the hotel bar until, inevitably, The Blues came down for lunch. Sure enough, Pete Paki was among them.
Liz turned and watched the team parade past. As Pete Paki passed, she brushed her left hand through her hair and tossed it over her shoulder. Again they shared a look.
She spent the rest of Wednesday hanging around Sandton City in her red top. Foreign sports teams are famous for their shopping trips to Jo’burg’s 30-year-old shopping mecca.
And eventually, sure enough, there was Pete Paki in the cellphone shop down from Mugg & Bean.
She wandered in, as if not noticing him at first. Then shrieked with recognition. “God! I keep bumping into you. Who are you guys!”
“Rugby players, ay,” responded Pete, quick as a flash. “The Blues, from New Zealand.”
“Oh, great. Well welcome to South Africa,” she gushed, a little more than she should’ve.
That Saturday she filled up her car and headed down south, to Bloemfontein, where she again donned her red shirt, then found a seat near the players’ tunnel. Pete Paki could not help noticing her both times he left the field.
By the next week, their paths had crossed three more times.
Pete was thinking, “If we can put enough pressure on Pretorius, we’ll take their backline out of the game. He’ll be forced to kick and it’ll become a lineout battle.”
Liz was thinking, “I’ll start calling myself Elizabeth. Elizabeth Paki.”
By the time the Cats had beaten the Blues 34-33, and the post-match function was into its fourth hour, Pete Paki was ripe for the picking.
As he lurked in the corner behind a potplant, rueing the missed tackled that had let Wylie Human in for the winning try, a buxom woman in a luminous magenta top sidled up to him.
“Hey, Mr Bluesman,” she said with a sly grin.
“Have you been following me?” he asked, even though he knew the answer.
“Mmm. I must admit, I have,” she said. “But don’t worry. I’ll let you get even with me.”
And with that, she turned and walked out of the room.
All he had to do was follow her…
Pete Paki finished his drink and for a moment, looked deep inside himself.

Stretched truths and affirmative dating actions

2009-01-19T06:07:00.000-08:00

“I really told a shocker this time, hey.”
And she had too. Of all the lies that Anneline had told, in all her years of telling lies, this was the doozie. This one just took the cake.
On the plane back from conference in Cape Town, she’d found herself up front in business class with the two sales executives, Thandeka and Queen. Being newly hired, she’d seen it as an ideal opportunity to impress her superiors.
To her horror, the conversation had taken a swift turn into Xhosa – or perhaps it was Zulu – minutes after take-off. With the town of Darling still visible below them, she found herself marooned on a monolingual island in her window seat.
Dying to make some kind of impact, and with an isiXhosa vocab of about 12 words, she just about flapped her ears off their hinges trying to make sense of the two women’s conversation.
After half an hour of picking up serious stompies, she determined through their brief lapses into English, that they were talking about men.
“Yuh, hayi! They don’t like to admit they are wrong!” Queen exclaimed at one point, and Annelise saw her gap.
“Yes, they’re so stubborn, hey!” she contributed in a tone that matched her neighbours’ amused exasperation.
There was a beat, as Queen and Thandeka turned and looked at her, as if they’d just noticed the woman with the platinum-blonde bob on their left.
Eventually Queen said in a condescending tone, “Ja, well at least white men are a bit less chauvinistic…”
And they went back to talking in Xhosa, or Zulu, or whatever it was. Anneline enjoys being the centre of attention, so she just couldn’t handle being dismissed like that. She said something she shouldn’t have.
“I wouldn’t know. My boyfriend’s black as well.”
There was another beat, and during this one, Thandeka just about choked on her Johnny Walker.
“Black? Your boyfriend’s black? What’s his name?”
And of course, Anneline had replied, “Thando. He’s from Soweto.”
Without missing any further beats, Queen and Thandeka had insisted on meeting Thando. All of a sudden Anneline was the most popular girl in the company.
In the ensuing week, she found herself invited to dinner with the board at The Meat Company at Melrose Arch. They even brought her along to the strategy session at Riverside Spa. Her star had never shone brighter.
One drawback, of course, was that there was no Thando. She had no boyfriend at all – let alone a black one. She’d been to an all-girls high school, the only boy she’d ever been intimate with had been a snow-white, slightly pimply teenager from Stellenbosch. And frankly she was a bit afraid of black men.
But if she was nothing else, Anneline was ambitious, so here she was, cap in hand at the home of her only black friend.
She wanted one thing from Lesego and one thing only: a boyfriend named Thabo.
“Well I do know one Thabo. But he stays in Bryanston. He works at the Absa call centre. I’m not sure he’s single, though.”
“That doesn’t matter. I only need him for one night. We can break up after that. We’ve got the AdMag awards on Wednesday night. I need to show up with a black man named Thabo. It would help if he was stubborn too.”
“He’s not stubborn at all. He’s actually quite nice. I’d be onto him like a shot if I wasn’t already going out with Gift. D’you want me to introduce you?”
“No, I think I’ll just call the call centre.”
And thus it came to pass that Thabo Mnguni had a call patched through to him from a flirtatious white woman who wanted someone to explain how the bank charges on her Absa account were determined.
He gave her the usual breakdown and commiserated with her about the exorbitant rates she was paying. So “considerate” did she find his service, that she hoped he wouldn’t mind if she was so bold as to ask him out.
Thabo didn’t mind. In fact he was flattered. It was encouraging to know that he still had the old charisma. Who said the visually impaired couldn’t be sexy?
“We’re on for Wednesday night,” he said at last, and then by force of habit… “And thank you for banking with Absa.
“Oh no, it’s my pleasure,” said Anneline. “It’s my pleasure.”
And indeed it would be, for Thabo Mnguni was a lover without equal in all of Bryanston. Affirmative dating would never feel so good.

Unexpected detours on the winding trail of dreams

2009-01-19T06:06:00.000-08:00

All Dennis wanted was to follow his dreams. But they wouldn’t let him follow his dreams.
He was an employees of Star Security and they simply wouldn’t let him go. And the problem was that he was too good at his job.
The South African security guards at the guard hut of the Via Arrezzio townhouse complex tended to fall asleep after 1am, waking only when impatient residents hooted at the gate. They were also lazy – they seldom left the hut when they were on shift, whereas Dennis was always willing to help old Mrs Friedman with her rubbish bags, or to rake the leaves in the parking lot.
They seemed to take their jobs for granted, where Dennis worked that security guard’s job like it was all that stood between him and oblivion, which is exactly what it was.
Perhaps they knew he didn’t have papers. Maybe the foreman had told them, but whenever it became time to roll the rubbish bins out onto the street for Wednesday morning’s garbage trucks, the other guard would become absorbed in his newspaper and leave Dennis to do it all himself.
And Dennis would bite his tongue and roll out the bins, all 20 of them. Because as long as he rolled out the bins and raked the leaves and stayed awake at his post, he would have a job. And as long as he was earning, he would be able to make the deposits into his mother’s account and the family would survive another month.
The residents of Via Arrezzio saw that the difference in workplace performance between Dennis and the other guards was chalk and cheese. So, pretty soon, the body corporate made him a proposal: why didn’t he resign from Star Security and come and work for the complex as their private security guard?
He and Miriam would get a living quarters behind the swimming pool area, he’d get paid extra for all his maintenance work and, best of all, the money the body corporate paid him would all go into his pocket and not to Star Security.
There was another thing. Dennis and Miriam would be getting married in December. And that would mean going home.
So, in late October, Dennis tendered his resignation in a handwritten note to Mr Reynecke of Star Security. Then they packed their belongings, locked their room in Alexandra and headed north.
Of course, the departure was not the problem. The question was whether they’d be able to come back.
Husband and wife returned to the Beitbridge border post on December 24. After four failed attempts to enter the country by road, they eventually managed to do so by foot.
They abandoned their bags in town and then paid R200 for a guide. They then hiked a few kilometres east down the Limpopo riverbank. Near an overhanging tree, they boarded a boat, in which they were ferried across. The guide then accompanied them to a hole in the fence and gave them directions to Nyundo.
The four-hour hike through the bush to Nyundo was awkward. Dennis and Miriam were city people, with no bush knowledge, and dressed more for a day at the shops than a trek through the dusty thornveld.
They arrived at the Nyundo taxi rank drenched in sweat, their clothes torn in places and famished beyond belief. A bowl of porridge was all they could afford before they handed over the last of their precious savings as taxi fare back to their old life – and the beginnings of Dennis’s new one.
But upon their return to Jo’burg, Dennis learnt that his dream was a while further off than he’d thought.
It had come to light that Via Arrezzio’s original contract with Star Security included an undertaking that they would not poach any of their employees. So if they hired Dennis after inducing him to leave Star, they could be sued.
So Mr Friedman of the body corporate informed Dennis, with regret, that there was no longer a security job for him at Via Arrezzio. They would be sticking with Star for now.
But Mr Reynecke of Star had told him that he would be able to employ him as a gardener without breaking their contract. He’d noticed that Dennis enjoyed raking the leaves and that…
The job didn’t pay much, Friedman conceded, and there’d be no living quarters by the pool, but it was better than being unemployed.
And so Dennis kicked off married life as a gardener.
Elusive things, dreams. Dennis had followed his for 1 000km. Twice. And still they eluded him.

The night Cliffie went home and never told Jayce

2009-01-19T05:57:00.000-08:00

Jason carried a gun for a while back in the Nineties. When it was the fashion.
They’ve gone out of vogue now, but in the days when the clubs were rocking in Rosebank, handguns were huge.
There used to be plastic drums of building sand outside every nightclub so that the owners of firearms could safely unload their weapons without shooting some poor doorman in the foot. Then they’d hand their weapons in to be stored in the gun safe and in return they’d be given a token that they could leave peeking out of their shirt pocket where everybody could see it and know that they were a bad-ass gun owner.
It was ugly days. Rosebank was overrun with cocaine and hijackers and, ay, maybe it made sense to carry a gun.
But not Jason.
That oke should never have been allowed out of the house, let alone armed and dangerous. In those days he was just taking too many drugs for too many nights in a row to be trusted with any kind of weapon.
But some official somewhere clearly wasn’t concentrating the day Jayce came to apply for his gun licence. And we were his mates, we clearly weren’t on top of our game either, because we really should have put our foot down.
The guy could barely string a sentence together, let alone hold down a job. He was living in his mom’s garden flat, he was eating pills like they were Tic-Tacs…
Jayce was a mess. But so were we, so we didn’t spot it until it was a bit too late.
It all came to a head that night at Therapy.
Now to understand Jayce, you must realise that he’s a bit gay. Well, he probably is totally gay. Fact is, I’ve never seen him with a girlfriend.
But Jayce doesn’t know he’s gay. In fact he’s about the biggest homophobe you’ve ever checked. But he still liked to jol at Therapy, which was like the biggest gay club in Rosebank in those days.
In those days we used to hang out with this oke called Cliffie. A skinny little oke who could never handle his dop and used to keep passing out in the oddest places. Jayce was lank protective of the oke. I know, I know. It was all a bit gay.
So the one night we’re all having a fat jol at Therapy – the place is full of gay okes – and Cliffie decides he’s finished jolling so he goes home. But he forgets to tell Jason.
By that stage Jayce is completely shunted on pills and Red Bull and vodkas. And somehow he gets it into his head that Cliffie has passed out and some gay guy has dragged him off to have his way with him.
This is what’s going on in Jayce’s crazy mind. We’re just jolling, completely oblivious.
Next thing we know, Jason has gone and checked his gun out of the gun safe and come charging back into the club. He makes directly for the toilets with his gun drawn like he’s James Bond.
He starts kicking in the doors of the stalls and waving his gun around at the poor okes inside, screaming, “Where’s Cliffie? Where’s Cliffie?”
The three of us come charging in there after him, lank shocked and screaming just as loud, “Cliffie’s gone home! Cliffie’s gone home!”
I saw a couple of terrified dudes cowering in the one cubicle, looking at one another, as if to ask, “Your name’s not Cliffie, is it?”
Jason, was like, “He’s gone home? Oh. Okay.”
Then he put his gun in his pocket and walked out, just as about six bouncers came charging into the toilets looking for him.
So that was it. After that night we banned Jason from owning a gun. We made him hand it over to his mom and the oke was no longer to be seen necking pills with a handgun token peeking out of his shirt pocket.
And almost at the same time, crime began to decrease and those sand drums disappeared from outside the clubs.
People started taking less drugs, or at least they took drugs less openly and things became a lot more relaxed in Jo’burg.
You don’t check okes running around with guns as much as you did back in the Nineties.
Yiss. You used to check some mal stuff back then, hey.

Function VIP rooms and how to work them

2009-01-19T05:56:00.001-08:00

After five calls I realise he’s checking my name on caller ID and dropping the call, so I borrow someone’s phone and call him on that. Sure enough, he answers on the second ring.
“Hey, Tebogo” I tune him, still a bit out of breath from hitch-hiking. “It’s Lance, china. I’m ya outside the party, man. Come and get me in!”
He makes some kind of grumbling noise, but five minutes later he shows up at the door.
At this party it’s cellphone invites, so I get him to pass his phone over the fence, then I flash it at the door guys and I’m in. No ways I’m gonna miss this one.
They’ve got a fashion show on the go with Pabi Moloi MC’ing, two bars and a buffet. So I go get a couple of plates at the food table. Not bad chow, ay. A Kenyan fish dish, Cape Malay chicken curry, a Ethiopian beef stew kind of thing with a weird name and these long Egyptian meatballs.
Then it’s time to find the VIP section. As I thought, it’s inside the main building. I’ve been to functions at Moyo before.
So I find a guy out of VIP who looks like he’s leaving and ask him if I can get his pass. My girlfriend’s in there, mos.
He hooks me up, so I put the lanyard round my neck and head in there.
It’s all a bit D-list. Mostly guys from MTN.
But then I spot Mike Jack, the oke I met at Hlubi’s birthday, and I go introduce myself. He’s speaking to a guy called Kumaren who’s into video production and events.
The guys are talking about a project of Kumaren’s to bring Missy Elliott down for a gig.
I tell him how her last visit was a flop because she played the wrong venue. How if “my company” was doing it, we would have put her on at the Bassline with, like, three other local acts. I’d probably have gone with Prokid, Brickz and Bongo Maffin.
Kumaren reckons, “You sound like you know what you’re talking about. Do you think you guys could organise something like that at short notice?”
He says he’s only got one gig organised for Missy – some corporate gig on the Thursday. There’s room for one more the next night before she flies back. Do I think I can swing it by next weekend?
I’m on it like a bonnet, chaan. I tune him how I’m old friends with Brad from the Bassline and how I know Mphumi from Ghetto Ruff and all the guys at Gallo, so for sure I can do it. Just, for such short notice, I’d want 15 percent of door. It’s only fair.
He cards me and I promise to get back to him before lunch tomorrow. I tell him I’m out of business cards, but I write my number on a serviette for him. But it doesn’t matter, coz he’s going to be hearing from me first thing anyway.
So then I mingle along, mingle along, all the time scheming how’m I gonna pull this off. Then I spot Brennan, this other oke I met that time we got so caned at Six in Melville after I crashed the advertising awards. I remember he said he played corporate soccer with Brad. So I go up and reintroduce myself.
The oke remembers me a bit. So we chat about football and stuff and I ask him who he’s playing for these days. And Brad?
No, Brad’s not playing any more since he had the lightie. So I reckon, ay I must congratulate him. Has he got Brad’s number for me. My phone got stolen and I lost it.
So I now I got Brad’s number.
Mingle along, Mingle along…
When I get away from Brennan I phone him up and make my pitch, sort of in a different accent: “Hi Brad. This is Kumaran er… Kumaran Pillay of Turbo Events. I’m bringing Missy Elliott out this week and I’ve got a proposal for you…”
He sounds interested, so I tell him how I’d rather he dealt with the promoter who’s putting the whole thing together. A guy called Lance.
He can call him at the following number…
Then I quickly run to the bogs, where the background noise will be a little different. Brad phones just as I get there. Like a little champie I set up a meeting for tomorrow. Styling, chaan!
‘Nother successful night out! Now I just need to find Tebogo and try organise us a lift home.
I wonder what I should call my company. How does Lancet Promotions sound? I scheme that’s a kief name.

One last pilgrimage for the reborn surfers

2009-01-19T05:35:00.000-08:00

His surfing companions were the same ones they’d been ten years earlier. Their destination was the same, indeed, it looked exactly the same too. What didn’t look the same was the three of them.
A couple of hairlines had been heading west for a couple of years, a couple of recalcitrant waistlines had been refusing all attempts at trimming and a couple of complexions were as pale as PVA after too many weekends spent chasing deadlines.
But none of them were going to call their mates on that. There was a kind of mutually assured embarrassment that kept them from pointing out the obvious. In fact, most of the critical comments were at their own expense.
“Ja, I’m getting a bit of a boep, hey…”
But otherwise, everything was the same. Three mates going surfing at Sardinia Bay they same way they’d done in 1996 or so. Same leisurely cruise down the Seaview road, same parked-up Sardinia Bay lot. Same Wurstwagen offering the same crisp, juicy käsegrillers at basically the same prices.
And the same surf.
Crumbly cross-shore one-footers flopping onto the outside sandbank and then fading out almost immediately before re-forming briefly and crashing onto the beach near the rocks on the lifesaving club side of the beach.
“We can surf that little left-hand re-form,” he said eventually, after they’d been staring mutely at the mush for a couple of minutes. One of his companions couldn’t help wondering under his breath, “What re-form?”
But the left re-form it was to be. The three reborn surfers returned to the car, unveiled their flaccid physiques, freed their receding hairlines from the trucker caps they’d lately taken to wearing and engaged their stiff, absent-minded muscles in the process of suiting up.
They stuck their borrowed surfboards under their freckled arms and locked the car. Then they started realising things were not quite the same.
In 1996, they would have stashed the car keys in the right-front wheel hub. In 1996 the car might’ve been broken into. In 1996 they weren’t driving a brand-new sports sedan.
So what were surfers doing with their keys when they went surfing in 2006? Secreting them in their wetsuits? Perhaps, but of course, there weren’t car guards at Sardinia Bay in 1996 either.
He decided to stick the keys in the wheelhub, same as always, but compromised a little. He hid them in the right rear wheel this time.
They strolled to the water’s edge and the beach looked smaller than he remembered it. He’d caught his first wave here in the Seventies, on a polystyrene boogie board from the Pick ‘n Pay Hypermarket.
He’d been to lank 21sts at the lifesavers’ club, and the one matric after-party. Just before he went overseas, he had his farewell braai here, just a bit around the corner on the rocks.
He’d brought his one girlfriend here the one time, on their first date. And Sardinia Bay had seemed vast with possibility that afternoon, back in the mid-Nineties. Now it seemed small, like the passages of your primary school when you go back to visit.
The memories seemed so much bigger than the reality.
At the water’s edge he loosened his leash from where it was coiled around the fins of the dusty vintage Liquid Art he’d salvaged from his mate Cliffie’s garage. He made a cursory attempt at a stretch routine, found it was more painful than it was worth and entered the water with no further ado.
By the time he’d waded waist-deep into the water, he was already practically at the line-up. He cast a glance up the beach to the island of offshore rocks he’d swum out to once with Cliff during the holidays between standard five and six.
There were kiteboarders out there. Two of them, projecting five, six metres high off the faces of the knee-high waves, then turning and racing back towards the beach for more.
He’d been meaning to try kiteboarding, just… never got into it, as they say. Now he was pushing forty, living in Jo’burg and it didn’t look he’d be learning to kite-surf any time soon.
But he was out the back at Sardinia Bay on a sunny day in the middle of summer, having a laugh and a couple of waves with his two best chinas. Just like the old days. He didn’t need six-metre aerials for this to be a fun day at the beach.
It made him feel a bit older. But cool with it.

The beautiful game and all she does for us

2009-01-19T04:19:00.000-08:00

The Portuguese were the worst. Frantic, hyper and oozing machismo, they presented the most difficult proposition of all the ethnic combinations a team was likely to face in the Supersport corporate soccer league.
They weren’t the best team. This season that would be Hollard – a team of mostly coloured guys, for some reason. The hip, dreadlocked black guys of YFM were pretty good too, but they tended to err on the side of midfield wizardry at the expense of goal-scoring.
But those Porras were hardcore. Lusito, they called themselves. Lusito FC. Just about every Lusito game there was a fight. The one game even had to be suspended while players chased each other into the parking lot, tuning each other poes and waving their fists.
They were talented footballers too. They played a direct, passing game, and their wings were 22, aggro and fast as blazes. Their goalie was this bald, fat oke, who liked to try scare you off the ball by screaming his head off at you.
Compared to them, Louis’s team were a bunch of pansies. Incompetent pansies, even if they went by a seemingly auspicious name. The Sandton Personal Training Gym seven-a-side team had lost all six of their games this season.
And this Monday was Sandton PTG’s game against Lusito. It was sure to be a massacre, but that didn’t bother Louis.
What did bother him was that he’d somehow ended up inviting the woman he’d been perving for years to come and watch the massacre.
He’d been making furtive eye contact with soap star Gillian Bogle ever since he’d started using the gym. Last weekend, she’d arrived with a brand-new haircut, in a new outfit and suddenly started a conversation with him.
This after two years of not a word passing between them. It was as if she’d suddenly decided to get to know him. Like she needed a new circle of friends. Maybe she’d embarrassed herself in front of her previous group of mates.
Anyway, he’d gone to gym in his soccer shirt, and she’d asked whether he played. He said sure, Monday nights. She said she’d like to come watch and he’d said well why not come along next week.
And so it was sealed.
Gillian showed up 15 minutes before kickoff at 6pm, in her PTG T-shirt and a pair of tight, black leggings. Every inch the seven-a-side cheerleader.
The problem was that Louis was not only guaranteed to lose, he was also by far the most timid member of the PTG team.
But fate has an odd way of turning our apparent handicaps in our favour.
For instance, on Monday night, late in the second half, with PTG trailing 6-0, a curious thing happened.
Coming on to substitute for Butch, Louis found himself in the unaccustomed position of striker for this first time in his life.
There being no offside rule in seven-a-side, and with Louis loitering hopefully near the Lusito goal, he soon found himself on the end of a high, bouncing kick upfield.
Louis ended up in a goalmouth scrap with the Lusito goalie, who predictably tried his usual tactic of bellowing like a castrated ox.
Louis instinctively cowered, lost his footing and fell flat on his bum. But in doing so, he managed to inadvertently nudge the ball past the keeper with his left knee.
It was the final goal of the match.
As PTG trotted back to where their bags were behind the goals on the McDonalds side of the field, Gillian planted a tender kiss of congratulations on Louis’s nose.
She even joined the team for post-game drinks.
Butch didn’t come, though. Him and Gillian have a history.
For the rest of the season, Gillian religiously attended the gym team’s football games, and even witnessed their narrow 3-2 loss to Hollard.
She attended the PTG end-of-year dinner at Su-Da-Da on Louis’s arm and everybody had a whale of a time.
It’s not like Gillian and Louis ever became romantically involved. Things soon cooled between them, and they ended up little more than email friends.
But they shared a few weeks of fun evenings on the football fields at Sandown High – there across road from McDonalds. And Louis got to meet the lady he’d been admiring from afar for years.
And football provided the pretext for their first meeting. That’s the good thing about football. It brings people together.

The tragic case of the comedy debut

2009-01-19T04:09:00.000-08:00

At this point, Gillian Bogle’s biggest handicap was that she was Gillian Bogle.
All the other comics and wannabe comics had been indulged with good-natured chuckles and unwarranted laughs as they gamely paraded their by turns weak, inappropriate and unpolished material.
The one Indian lady had somehow managed to get away with a joke that rode on the premise of a barman mishearing the name Hansa. The punchline was, “How can I give you a Hansa when I don’t even know the question yet?”
Admittedly there were islands of quality amid the dross.
Comedy prodigy David Kabuka from Uganda had this killer riff about black defiance.
“If you want to get black people to do something, your best approach would be to ban them from doing it. Dude, they’ll be toyi-toyi-ing in the streets about it: ‘Kitesurfing! Viva kitesurfing! We demand the right to go kitesurfing!’”
And he also had this line about what he says when locals speak to him in Sotho and he has no idea what they’re saying: “Sho-sho. Sho-sho!”
Kibuka was just a newcomer giving it a go and everybody was on his side. He had them in the palm of his hand from the minute he walked on with his scruffy pants blazer and his shy grin.
But how would they take to a notorious soap celebrity who now thought she could do comedy? What if they simply didn’t like her character on the series? There could be no better way of getting your revenge than going to someone’s comedy debut and simply not laughing.
On Sunday nights at the Comedy Underground, the novices are given five-minute slots before the break, and the bigger names, the comedy heavyweights, come on after the break. Gillian was opening the second half, before Chris Forrest, John Vlismas and Martin Jonas, the king of Johannesburg comedy.
It was a bit like playing your first gig at open-mic night at the folk club and coming on before Steve Hofmeyr, Koos Kombuis and Arno Carstens.
And as one does when you find yourself on the business end of such an imposing line-up, Gillian hit the bar. Hard. Two tequilas were down before she’d even got her wallet out of her purse. These were followed by a glass of wine that dived down her gullet like a bucket down a well.
She was feeling a lot more confident by the time she took the stage, clutching her second glass and puffing on the first cigarette she’d had since varsity.
It wasn’t quite the comic persona she’d been planning to project, but there you go. These were desperate times.
Where her soap opera character was a control-freak bitch, Comedy Gillian ended up coming across as a wild-eyed, foul-mouthed, female Eddie Murphy.
She’d chosen rather hardcore material to begin with, and the booze only hardened her attitude.
Gillian opened with joke that made fun of white people. And it was downhill from there. She should have felt the mixed student audience’s discomfort with racial material, but she’d had four drinks. She wasn’t quite in touch…
She’d recently had her hair corn-rowed for a celebrity boxing match, and she used the opportunity to gently mock the amount black people spent on haircare.
It went down like a bomb threat.
Then she started saying something about TK, the late R&B singer. She didn’t even manage to get to the punchline before she was drowned out in a chorus of unimpressed murmurs.
Eventually she got the hint, and lurched onto an awkward story about going shopping with her boyfriend. It was supposed to be a bit of observational comedy about the green-eyed monster of jealousy that rears its head every time her boyfriend looks at another girl at the mall.
But she never got there. The murmurs became a roar of disapproval and then a slow handclap and some whistles. They were hating her.
Gillian felt panic set in. She went blank. She had a sip of wine to buy some time, but there were no more jokes forthcoming.
“Do you want me to go?” she asked, and it won the biggest round of applause of the evening.
That night she went home and finished another bottle of wine in her flat, all on her own.
Then she crawled into her room and cried and cried and cried. Until she fell sleep.
At that point, Gillian Bogle’s biggest handicap was that she was Gillian Bogle.

Sunburnt and gatvol in the forest of legs

2009-01-19T04:08:00.001-08:00

Twelve years I been waiting!
Hey? Since that time in Craig’s room, when he was staying in that pozzie just off the garage.
Played me Ride The Lighting, Master Of Puppets and …And Justice For All in one sitting. That was metal, bru.
The Black Album was lame compared to all that.
Lame, lame, lame.
No bru, Battery is the tune. “Smashing through the boundaries, lunacy has found me. Cannot stop the ba-ter-ry! Battery!”
That’s when I worked out why all those okes had put Metallica logos on their satchels at school.
Started growing my hair that same night. Didn’t cut it for four years – till it started going bald on the sides, then went for a bit of a fringe. Like a mullet-y thing.
Taped all the okes’ albums that night as well. Lank hard to get in those days. Had to tape them. Kill ‘Em All on one side and then Garage Days on the other. Like that.
Bought the albums after that. Bought Load. Bought Reload. Bought St Anger. Bought the Binge And Purge live box set. Learnt all the words to all the songs. Even bought the Some Kind Of Monster DVD with bonus disc.
So I make out the whole story. Started in San Francisco with Cliff Burton on bass. Then Cliff got killed in a bus crash while they were touring Europe. Jason Newsted came and jolled. That’s when Craig went and checked them at Donington.
The ou caught one of James’s picks when he threw it into the pit. Still framed the thing and put it up in his room when he came back. Oke wouldn’t shut up about it for years.
Wore that Donington concert shirt till it went grey.
Meanwhile I never got to check them.
Till now.
Now I spent my R550, spent my two hours in the traffic jam and I’m in the bladdy stadium ready to check fuckin’ Metallica after 12 years. Twelve years, bru!
In my St Anger shirt, frying like a chip in the middle of Supersport Park. Yiss it’s hot.
You can’t get a wettie for any money and the babe’s not digging it less. I queue for two hours for four beers. Then they close the bar.
I manage to get us a couple of melting King Cones and a bag of peanuts at about two o’clock. ‘Tallica’s only on at 10pm. S’gonna be a long day.
We stand for three hours, through Carstens, Prime Circle, Simple Plan and The Rasmus.
We should have drank some water before we came. The fuckers wouldn’t even have let us bring any in.
Start feeling a bit faint during Roger Goode on the electronica stage, so I have a lie-down on the grass bank. Getting dark, but it’s still four hours to Metallica. The babe goes to find me some water, comes back with half of some oke’s Fanta.
The sugar gets me up again and I make it back to the rock stage, just in time for Seether’s set. They got too many bands playing at this thing. Too many bands to get through.
Seether rocks, but we just stand and watch. Wanna save a bit of energy for the main gig. Haven’t chowed in ages now, and there’s no sign of the food vendors any more.
They disappeared when ous started abusing them for running out of stock.
Yiss, I’m skraal, hey. Stomach’s growling, hey. And there’s no place to sit. It’s just so full.
Now it’s still Collective Soul for a hour. Seem to recognise lank of their songs.
Sunburnt, hey. Feeling a bit flushed.
If I faint now, bru. If I faint now…
Twelve years. I waited twelve years for this.
My legs give out a little and the babe asks if I’m okay.
I scheme I just gotta sit down for a bit. Park off on my haunches in the forest of legs.
Can hear Collective Soul jol ten songs that sound exactly the same. Then there’s a power failure during their last song. They have to start over again. And then there’s gonna be half an hour changeover between bands.
I stand up for a bit and try have a little trap around to get the blood flowing. Everyone else is just standing there, sunburnt and gatvol staring at the stage, scheming, “Come on. Play. It’s been years.”
I sit down between the girlfriend’s legs and have a little kip sitting up. Tune her, “Just kick me when it starts.”

You never know when you’ve reached the summit

2009-01-19T04:03:00.000-08:00

Peanut had earned his nickname the day he stripped for his first communal shower in boarding school.
But those days were behind him. Tonight he was David Hastings Bouwer. That was his given name, which had been entered in the charge book upon his admission to the Brixton police station holding cells.
Like a fool he’d had his wallet in his jeans and his pseudonym of David Gilmore had been found out for what it was.
That’s the thing with streaking. You have to leave your clothes somewhere before embarking on the actual streak. So any authority figure – like the Campus Square Mall security guard – has to simply wait by your clothes in order to apprehend you.
And unfortunately Peanut’s security guard had gone the whole hog and called the bladdy police on him. For streaking! At 1am through a deserted shopping mall! For fuck’s sake.
Such injustice.
So now, here he was. Topless in his jeans in the Brixton holding cells, holding forth.
“Do you know who my father is? Do you have any idea who my father is? Have you heard of Willie Bouwer? He’s the dean of the University of Johannesburg. He knows everybody in the cops. Hey you! Mr policeman. What’s your name? Lemme see your badge. You! Radebe! My dad knows your boss! My dad will have you fired for this. He’s the dean of the varsity. Hey you! Come back here!”
At the time of this outburst, Peanut was 20 years old and poised – topless – at the cusp of his life.
Psychologists have confirmed that the speed at which humans perceive time passing accelerates as we age. These scientists have even been able to identify the exact rate of this acceleration. They have determined that if a person lives to be 80, according to their perception of time, 20 will be the midpoint of their life.
So, at exactly 20 years, four months and three days of age, David Hastings Bouwer, aka Peanut, aka David Gilmore, stands astride the peak of the mountain that comprises his experience on earth.
Without even knowing it, he has summited. Like a runner running a marathon without distance markers, he has passed the 21km mark without noticing.
Peanut’s interminable three years at Happy Campers play school, his endless twelve years at Melville Primary and Roosevelt Park High and this last couple of.. gee, it’s already been a year at varsity. Those years have taken him to the halfway mark of his life. If not beyond.
But of course, Peanut is comfortably oblivious to this.
Still warm from the beer, fearless from the cosy family upbringing and uninhibited from the privilege of being surrounded by friends, he shouts the odds and threatens the charge-office cops with his father’s social connections.
But his father will not get him out of this one. There are limits to even his well-connectedness. So Peanut’s wild, angry night will become a cold uncomfortable weekend. He will notice he is no longer surrounded by friends.
He will appear broken, hungry and pale in court on Monday morning, where he will sit in magistrates court alongside the poor, the unlucky, the devious and the lazy and wait for his case to be remanded.
Friday night will be his last streaking episode. Peanut will meet Megan, his first serious girlfriend, at the post-exam student night at the Roxy. They will be living together in a digs in 7th Avenue by the beginning of next year.
She will be pregnant in a year’s time.
Their daughter will be named Mackenzie.
They will not marry, but Peanut will start calling himself David and take a job as an insurance broker to support his family. Peanut and Megan will part ways in early 2008. He will marry for the first time at the age of 32 and have another two children. A lawyer and a musician.
Megan will stay with her mom and she will later work in sales at a TV station.
David will take up marathon running at the age of 46. To get away from the wife and kids.
He will finish 11 Comrades, eight Two Oceans, three Sunrise Monsters and one Om Die Dam before suffering a heart attack on the road outside Hartbeespoort aged 60.
He will collapse just inside the yellow line, clutching his chest and he will stare up at the blue highveld sky and think to himself, “Time goes by so fast.”

Pants, power, and personal fulfilment

2009-01-19T03:58:00.000-08:00

Philip could pinpoint the exact moment that it happened. The very instant when he decided he needed to do something radical.
He was standing in the middle of the Fashion TV Café – a place he despised, wearing a garish green shirt Katherine had bought him and holding her luminous pink handbag while she went to find a light.
The place wasn’t packed, so there was enough space for him to have a little clearing to himself beneath the overhead light. There was a pause in the music, and practically everybody started gazing about the venue in search of something to stare at. And of course everyone’s eyes came to rest on the pillock in the green shirt holding his girlfriend’s purse.
Right then, Shane Warne walked past, looked him up and down and suppressed a guffaw.
Jeez. Embarrassing moments don’t get much more embarrassing than that.
And why was he there? Because Katherine wanted to go.
Who was he there with? Katherine and her mates.
Whose luminous pink handbag was he holding? Katherine’s
Just then, Kath came strutting back, ciggie blazing. And Phil flashed on the most heartbreaking part of the whole deal. Katherine was wearing a pair of his leather trousers. She was wearing the trousers!
The metaphor was brutal. Fuck, so brutal it wasn’t even metaphorical.
“Here’s your purse,” he snapped. “Let’s go.”
On the way down to the car, Philip made up his mind. This weekend was me time. This weekend they were doing something he wanted to do. No, change that. This weekend he was doing something he wanted to do.
“Let’s just do our own thing this weekend,” told her assertively. “I’m gonna do something on my own.”
But he hadn’t reckoned on the depth of Katherine’s manipulativeness.
“Ja,” she said. “It’s about time you did some guy stuff. Why don’t you hook up with your mates and go watch the Bulls game at Loftus on Saturday? Then you can go to student night in Hatfield afterwards and then have some lapdances at Teazers. I’ll see you next week.”
The minute she said that, he realised he couldn’t do any of that. If he did, he’d be doing what he was told. And Katherine would still be wearing the trousers.
To really prove his independence, Phil would have to actively do something Katherine didn’t want him to do.
He was so unaccustomed to thinking for himself, that it took a couple of days to work out what that should be, but then it came to him.
He would go and live in the Melville drain.
He took Friday off graft. Then he drove to Melville and parked his car at the Campus Square mall. He got his sleeping bag and a pillow out the boot, then walked down the hill to the drain. He hid his keys in a flowerbed in Fourth Avenue.
He found a pretty decent shelter on the embankment below the Meldene Sports Club. There was foliage, and the overhang from where the fence had started to lean over would keep him dry if it rained.
He hid his sleeping bag there. Then, feeling hungry, he took a stroll to Main street, where was able to find a half-eaten chicken burger in the rubbish bin outside Fontana.
While he was finishing it in the parking lot behind the Meldene Medi-Cross, someone tossed a R5 coin down at his feet. With that five bucks he was able to buy two loose cigarettes and a half-loaf of brown.
When he returned to camp he met Douglas, a neighbour, who allowed him to move in with him under the Barry Hertzog bridge, where he had a fire and a kettle. In exchange Phil gave him one cigarette and they shared the brown, making polony sandwiches and washing it down with water from the tap at the sports club.
The evening was warmer than expected, thanks to Douglas’s kind brazier and some plastic sheets they found in the skip behind the CSIR.
The next day, Douglas introduced him to Lani, who ran the kitchen at the Local Grill. Thanks to her they breakfasted on the remains of three half-finished omelettes.
By Sunday, Philip had procured a trolley from Campus Square and was in business as a cardboard recycler.
On Sunday, around the time Katherine was leaving her third vain voicemail message on Philip’s cellphone, he was sharing a bottle of Crackling with Douglas beneath the Barry Hertzog bridge.
Why? Because he felt like it.
What was he wearing? A pair of leather trousers.

Very precious things, and how to get them

2009-01-19T03:54:00.001-08:00

T-Boz was Ntsiki’s favourite DJ by far! She’d been listening to him since 2000 when he was still on Bop. She’d watched him when he was presenting the Saturday chart show on SABC1, and she listened to him every afternoon now that he was doing the afternoon drive show on Jozi FM.
She’d supported him every time he played at Monaco, danced right at the front all night, but still she’d never had a conversation with him. The closest was that time they’d ended up next to each other at the bar at Who Zoo and she’d told him, “Tight set, man.”
He’d said, “Thank you sister. Thanks a lot,” and smiled.
And that was that, after ten yeas of supporting him, that was the closest she’d come to meeting him.
So it was about time.
Here he was, one metre away, browsing vinyls at the Rosebank market. He was with his girlfriend, so Ntsiki hung back, just a step behind them and to the left – just close enough to here what T-Boz was saying to the stallholder.
“What I’m really looking for is one of those old, old record players – those gramophones that play 78s. You now, with the big megaphone on the side?”
“You know, you might be in luck…” was all Ntsiki heard the trader say, because she was out of there before he could finish his sentence. She knew the rest of it anyway: there was an old 78rpm record player barely three aisles over, in the antiques section.
Ntsiki had caught sight of it on her first pass through the market. It had a nice, shiny brass speaker horn on it, that’s how she remembered. But now it meant a lot more to her than a shiny brass horn.
Within seconds she was asking, “How much for the record player?”
“Two thousand,” came the reply.
Gee! For that old thing. Anyway, if that was the price of getting T-Boz’s phone number, then it was well worth it.
“It’s lovely, I’ll take it,” she snapped.
She barely had time to slap her debit card down before T-Boz and his girlfriend were at her elbow.
“No! You not serious!” he gasped. “Don’t tell me you’re buying this. Do you know how long I’ve been looking for one? It must be the last one in Jo’burg!”
It was the first thing he’d ever said to her, really. She was squealing inside, but she managed to keep her composure.
“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? I’m getting it for my, uh, for my dad. He collects 78s!”
“Really!” T-Boz was impressed! “So do I. What’s he into?”
“Oh, jazz, mostly,” Ntsiki replied matter-of-factly as she nervously eyed the debit-card machine. “Approved” it read, triumphantly.
“I’d love to see his collection!”
He was looking her right in the eye when he said it, with this cute, cute kind of little-boy smile, just begging her to invite him over. Meanwhile his girlfriend was giving her the dirtiest look you could imagine. But T-Boz was in such a record-lover’s trance, he didn’t even notice.
“I tell you what…”
Here Ntsiki paused and put her index finger to her bottom lip, in a way that she knew made her look both cute and intelligent. She’d practised the look many times in her bathroom mirror. Luckily she was wearing her brown wig today, so she gazed up at T-Boz through her fringe, as she said:
“I tell you what. I can see you’re into your music. I’m getting this player as a gift for my dad. I don’t really know what he’s got and what he hasn’t got. So I’ll see if he needs the record player. If he doesn’t, then you can have it. How’s that?”
“Fabulous! I’ll give you my number. Like I say, I’ve been looking for one of these for years. I’m actually a DJ.”
“Oh, ja! Do you play on the radio or in clubs?
“Both, hey. I’m on Jozi FM on drive time and I also play gigs…”
“Oh great! I must listen to your show. Where’s Jozi on the dial?”
Meanwhile she’d had Jozi FM pretuned to setting number one on her car stereo for the past three years.
“It’s 98.1,” said T-Boz. “So anyway, let me give you my number and you can get back to me about this record player. Coz I’m really keen. By the way, this is my girlfriend, Thumeka. I’m sorry, your name is…”
“I’m Ntsiki…”
And all three of them shook hands.
Ntsiki fielded another foul glare from Thumeka but it fairly bounced off her, she was so happy. And she floated out of the Rosebank market with the enormous record player as if it was lighter than air.
The clunky old thing meant nothing to her now. It was just a means to an end. However, on the contacts list of her cellphone nestled the most precious thing she’d ever had.

There’s always someone bigger than you…

2009-01-19T03:43:00.000-08:00

Damian had been out of roller hockey for five years. He’d drifted out of the sport when the design graft at Freeflight started getting hectic.
Back then he was so fit he couldn’t handle so much as one beer without getting all dizzy. He had a physique like Bruce Lee, the reactions of a snake wrangler and the scarred good looks of kickboxer.
Five years later, things had got ugly. Dame had let himself go alarmingly. The physique was approaching the one Will Ferrell modelled in Anchorman, his reactions now felt like those of a foreign policy adviser and his scarred good looks were now, well, formerly scarred podgy looks.
Then he bumped into Shaun at the Baron and he mentioned that the okes were playing roller hockey again down at Regents Park. Damian only needed to pat his boep a couple of times to realise how badly he needed to start exercising again.
That weekend he was down at the rink early, ready to hook up with his one-time comrades in arms.
They made a rather motley crew. Shaun was in fairly good shape – probably coz he was still playing provincial cricket. But Bob, Andre and Stefan were at least as overweight as he was, if not worse.
And to think that in 1997 they had represented South Africa at world champs in Chicago. “Yiss, you okes look like Gummy Bears!” said Shaun, kind of rubbing it in.
They were playing a school team from Bridgemead High.
They played two 20-minute halves and it came as no surprise to find the lighties were on a completely different level of fitness to the ageing warriors. Also, because they now had dedicated smooth concrete rinks, they were playing with proper plastic pucks. In the Nineties, they’d played with a ball on asphalt parking lots.
But what Damian also noticed was that while they’d been away, roller hockey had become a sissy sport.
Christ, in their day, it was a proper contact sport. In a 50-50 situation, body-checking was considered compulsory. Now, the kids had no commitment. They gave up the puck like they didn’t really want it.
Which was fine by the men of the Gummy Bears, as they’d christened themselves, despite the fact that they still wore the faded Lions kit they’d last worn in 2000.
Things got way physical, every single 50-50 went the way of the Gummy Bears and by the end of it, three of the Bridgemead lighties had sustained bloody noses, while showing no sign of retaliating. The only fight they showed was when one of the parents came on to the rink and threatened to moer Shaun for “being too physical.”
“Ay,” replied Shaun, “It’s not a game for ninnies.” Even though it so plainly was. But at least the Bears were paying the Bridgemead lighties the compliment of playing with all they had.
In the end, they wiped the rink with the schoolies. Damian body-checked the one lightie right over the hoardings. Ha, ha. The Bears won the game and the brawls.
The next Monday Damian showed up at work a changed man. The seed of his lost youth had germinated inside him. After years of sad decay, he was growing again. He was a conquering warrior.
Those lighties thought they were bok, but they’d showed them who was boss. At the water cooler he lifted his shirt and showed off his bruised ribs to hot Simone.
“That’s from when I charged their goalie right off his feet,” he told her.
“Shame man,” said Simone, “You guys were bullying the poor kids!”
When he got back to his desk Gavin was there waiting with a large briefing envelope.
“Morning,” he said. “We’re pitching this to MTN tomorrow morning. There’s thumbnails in here and some display-copy ideas. We need point-of-sale layouts, a billboard design, package art and three different magazine ads.”
“By tomorrow morning,” spluttered, Damian. “But this’ll take me all night!”
“Looks like you having a late night, then,” said Gavin. “That’s why you get the big bucks.”
“But I’ve got hockey practice…” Damian protested vainly, but Gavin didn’t even hear him. He was heading back to his office. “Have it ready by 8.30,” he called over his shoulder.
At the next desk, Simone was chortling to herself.
“Ja, you see,” she grinned. “Every bully gets bullied sooner or later.”
Damian didn’t respond. He resolved not to speak to Simone for the rest of the week. She was wrong. It wasn’t like that at all.

Making a living with the innocence of children

2009-01-19T03:38:00.000-08:00

Eddie was a special child. One of those people who clearly have something different about them. Perhaps he had a chromosome missing, or a nurse had dropped him on his head when he was born. On the other hand, perhaps he was born of a virgin birth, or he came down from heaven. He was that kind of special too.
He was constantly smiling and seemed to have no iota of shyness about him, despite having at first glance the intelligence of a child. He used children’s words and he seemed to hold beliefs that were fanciful at best, but on further reflection, they carried deep truths.
He visited the bank almost daily, having first struck up a friendship with Samson, the security guard. Then he started coming into the bank itself. He met Yvonne, the customer service co-ordinator, whose job it was to greet anyone who looked like they needed assistance.
Eddie was about 35, with a childlike bowl haircut – the kind his mother might have given him. That first day he stared around the bank, with a mischievous smile and knitted eyebrows, like he was looking for something.
“Can I help you, sir” Yvonne asked.
“Where do you keep the money,” Eddie wanted to know.
It had taken her a while to explain that he couldn’t see the vaults, and secondly, that banks didn’t work with as much physical money as they used to.
“So you don’t have any cash here”
“Some,” Yvonne explained. “But not much. Most people get their cash from the ATMs.”
“So why don’t you put the guards at the ATMs instead of at the banks,” he asked.
Yvonne had to admit he had her there. Why didn’t they?
The next time he was in, he stuck his hand out and tickled her under her armpit until she giggled awkwardly. “That’s better,” he said. “It’s nice to see someone laughing in here. You’d think more people would laugh in banks. They all here to fetch lots of money.”
Yvonne pointed out that a lot of people were there to spend money, so there were sad people too.
“Well then they should spend their money on things that make them happy,” he said.
A couple of days after that, he came in to visit and brought her some flowers that he’d picked for her in the flowerbeds outside. He told her, “Do you know you work in a pyramid?”
She hadn’t understood what he meant, until he took her for a walk to the top of Sandton City during her lunch break and showed her the roof the bank building. It was a perfect, four-sided equilateral pyramid. She did work in a pyramid.
“I think it looks like a church,” said Eddie. “It’s like a church of money.”
The next time he came in, he produced a R5 coin and said he wanted to open an account. Yvonne had to explain to him that the minimum balance for normal savings accounts was R50.
“So if you’re not rich, then you can’t save?” he asked.
She had helped him assemble the R50 in order to teach him the rudiments of saving and interest, then been embarrassed to discover that most of his investment was gobbled up by service charges.
Eddie was crushed to learn that the R50 proceeds of his begging and street hustling had been reduced to a mere R29,64 within a month.
“No wonder the poor people don’t save with you,” he proclaimed angrily, then insisted that his account be closed.
“I think I’ll keep my money in my pocket from now on,” he said, with tears in his eyes.
Shame. To make him feel better, Yvonne introduced him to Mr Smit, the bank manager, and got permission to show him around the vaults.
He was surprised that the wads of banknotes weren’t bigger. “Don’t people need cash any more?” he wanted to know.
Yvonne said that she supposed not.
“So, what’s the most cash that you need?” he asked.
Yvonne smiled fondly at the innocence of his question. “Well, to be honest, Eddie, all you really need is about two hundred rand for petrol… otherwise, most people use bank transfers.”
“Two hundred rand?” Eddie mused. Then his tone changed. “Nah. I think I’ll take the lot.”
He produced a nine-mil handgun and a plastic Checkers bag and told Yvonne, “Now if you don’t mind filling this up for me…”
His childish smile had vanished.

Shake, rattle and too much rock ’n’ roll

2009-01-16T07:37:00.000-08:00

It started as an absent-minded habit he indulged in when he was thinking of something else. This little thing he did with his thumb and forefinger, a little rubbing action.
Then it became a tic, a little tremor. He first noticed it one evening when he’d just finished jamming with the band. He was having a cigarette on the patio outside the jam spot, when he looked down at his right hand and saw ash falling from his shaking hand. He thought, “Hang on, I’m not shaking my hand. It’s shaking itself!”
He thought he was just a little buzzed from the rehearsal, or his hand was tired from strumming the guitar. It went away after a few minutes.
But a week later it came back. He was chilling in the cafeteria at college, having a fruit juice, when he noticed concentric rings, little waves, in the bottle of Clover Krush he was drinking.
He was trembling again, and it was like that scene in The China Syndrome, where the power station’s nuclear meltdown caused ripples in the coffee cups. There was something seriously amiss here.
RSI was the first thing he thought of. Repetitive strain injury from all those years spent playing guitar. Then he started thinking it might be something to do with circulation. Simon hadn’t weighed himself in more than a year, but it was a safe bet that he was well overweight. Deep into triple figures. One-twenty or so, he estimated…
Maybe it was circulation. Hopefully it was just circulation.
So Simon made his doctor’s appointment largely seeking confirmation that he’d let himself get too fat, and that was somehow cutting off the circulation to his right hand. And of course he hoped, he needed, he was praying to hear that he didn’t have the big P. Or perhaps the big A. Was Parkinson's the one that made you tremble, or was that Alzheimer’s. He could never remember.
It was either that, or carpal tunnel syndrome, he told himself. Or maybe deep-vein thrombosis, from the time he flew to Cape Town for his mate Chombit’s wedding.
He had no medical aid either, so the 400 bucks for the appointment was coming out of his own pocket. Well, the Roxy’s pocket, since that’s where they played their last gig. His split of the bucks came to exactly R400.
The afternoon before his appointment, his top lip started trembling, and that’s when he knew it was definitely Parky’s. He was dying of Parkinson’s, same as Michael J Fox. All that remained was for Dr Meier to confirm it.
Perhaps he could get the band to do a Parkinson’s benefit gig while he could still hold a guitar. Or write a song called, oh, I Feel It In My Fingers. No, not that. Been done.
So that night he breaks down and tells the band okes that he’s dying: “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to keep playing with you okes. I’ve got this syndrome, and it’s getting worse…”
“Ja,” said Chunley, the bass player. “I been drinking like a fish lately too.”
Fuckall sympathy. He decided the band didn’t deserve to know about his plight. They lacked basic empathy, so he would soldier on and bear the load of his impending death alone.
Anyway, he goes to doctor Meier, pays the 400 bucks and hesitantly outlines his bleak and ominous symptoms. The trembling, the facial tics, the poor circulation…
The guy says he needs a full check-up, pokes and prods him, takes his temperature, weighs him, probes him, for crying out loud, and then takes blood for testing. Says it sounds like it might be Bells Palsy.
On the return visit, by which time, Simon’s getting tremors all over his face and making twitchy winking moves. The oke tells him he’s got a static tremor. He says he should try dopping a bit less and it should be cleared up within a week or so.
Another few hundred bucks later, sure enough, the tremors are gone and Chunley wants to know if he’s still dying and whether they should start auditioning new singers.
It’s not funny, and Simon tells him so. In the end they do write a song about it. It’s called Probity.
In between gigs and band practice, Simon eyes the exercise bicycle in the corner of his room and rubs his thumb and forefinger together.
Sometimes it makes him drop his cigarette.

Barking like a dog, raw knuckles and other firefighting methods

2009-01-16T07:18:00.000-08:00

The long, white-knuckle overnight drive, the wrong turns, the near-death passing-out experience outside Hoyfmeyr… If you considered all the complexities of Gavin’s drive down from Jo’burg to PE, you wouldn’t blame him if he lit up a cigarette the minute he descended Colchester hill and realised he was home and dry, back in the Bay.
You wouldn’t begrudge him that well-deserved ciggie, but somehow, throughout the eight-hour drive that ended up taking eleven and a half, Gav never even once considered lighting up. He wasn’t a smoker, see. Never had been.
It was more an aversion to lighters than tobacco smoke, actually.
And the source of that aversion can be traced to Gavin’s childhood in Ben Kamma in Port Elizabeth’s wooded, westernmost suburbs.
When the young Gavin turned six in the late Seventies, his family’s two-bedroom home was in fact the last house in PE. When he hopped over the vibracrete wall after his half-day of sub-A schoolgoing, it was right into the virgin bush of the undeveloped wilds. The Wild West! Baakens River crabs the size of hubcaps, dark, mysterious eucalyptus forests and, in the distance, the Lady’s Slipper looming over it all, blue and ominous, like a witch’s castle in some scary fairytale.
There were two last houses in PE, because Gavin’s family had neighbours, an Afrikaans couple from Oudtshoorn. They were the only two houses in the new development at the top end of Walker Drive.
Now Gavin was an only child, and he loved his parents dearly, especially his mother Pam. His father Nick worked long hours at the government garage, so little Gav spent most of his afternoons after school with Pam watching the beginnings of SABC TV.
On SABC, Gavin’s favourite programme was a show called Here’s Boomer, about a heroic mongrel dog named Boomer. It was Here’s Boomer that caused all the trouble.
An episode that caught Gavin’s imagination for all the wrong reasons was the one where Boomer saved a family from a runaway forest fire. Basically he came and woke them up by barking a lot, just as the blaze was about to surround their mountain log cabin.
Most of Boomer’s heroics involved alerting the humans with a lot of barking. And they always seemed to understand what his barking meant.
But what Gav enjoyed most about that episode was the powerful footage of the outrageous forest fire. Sheets of flame. Entire mountainsides on fire! Trees exploding from the sheer heat! Helicopters dropping water bombs!
Somehow, that episode of Here’s Boomer awakened the pyromaniac in Gavin, and he decided to set fire to the forest behind his house.
In those days everyone smoked. Gav stole his mom’s cigarette lighter, hopped the vibracrete and set about trying to light the nearest patch of grass.
After ten minutes of flicking his mom’s Bic, he had not yet managed to generate any kind of blaze. But the neighbour from Oudtshoorn had spotted him.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing? Are you trying to burn down the forest?”
It was the first time a strange adult had ever raised his voice at him. All he could think of to say was, “I’m cold.”
“Well then tell your mom to give you a bladdy jersey,” the man bellowed, then grabbed him by the ear and dragged him off home, where he was presented to Pam, a sobbing, snotty mess.
“I found him next door trying to start a fire. He says he’s cold.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” said Pam. “Thanks for bringing him home.”
The man did not seem satisfied. “What kind of a mother are you?” he asked. “You sit at home all day and you still can’t even look after your lightie. If he was my lightie I’d give him a bladdy hiding. And give him a jersey for God’s sake. Check how he’s shaking!”
That evening was the first time Gavin saw his mother crying.
He earned a clip behind his ear too. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life,” Pam wailed, as Gain chewed his knuckles in shame. “Did you hear what he said? I was absolutely mortified.”
Gavin dearly loved Pam, his mother and TV-watching companion. So when she said, “And don’t let me ever catch you playing with my lighter again,” he was inclined to listen.
That’s why, despite a harrowing drive down to PE from Jo’burg, Gavin Bull was not smoking a cigarette as he passed Algorax and took the Settlers Way turn-off. Instead, he chewed on top knuckle of his left hand.

Angels in the upholstery. Had to be

2009-01-16T07:13:00.000-08:00

Gavin got approval on the cellphone print campaign late on Monday evening. He’d worked out that he’d have to be back in Jo’burg by the following Monday. So if he was going to have any kind of holiday, he’d have to leave for Port Elizabeth immediately.
He’d worked late for five nights straight, so if he went to sleep now, he’d probably sleep the whole of Tuesday. Then he’d have to drive on Wednesday, drive back Sunday… His holiday in the bay would be reduced to three days.
Nah, bugger it, he thought. He’d buy three Red Bulls at the Grayston Drive BP, fill up with unleaded and hit the road.
The Z3 could do the thousand-odd kays to PE in eight hours if he chose the right route. Bloem, Colesberg, Venterstad, Steynsburg, Hofmeyr, Cradock, PE. And the roads would be empty in the early-morning hours.
It was about 10pm when Gavin got his change from the petrol attendant, reset his odometer and pointed the roadster at Madiba Bay.
The first Bullie worked its magic and the 300km to Bloemfontein flew by in what seemed like no time. He topped up his tank with unleaded, as the AA had recommended, grabbed a bag of peri-peri biltong snap sticks – more out of diligence than hunger – and continued.
He took the Norvalspont turn-off just before Colesberg and skirted the Gariep Dam en route to Venterstad.
He’d driven this route before, and something in the back of his mind told him there was a sneaky turn-off ahead. He just couldn’t remember what exactly it was. He sipped his second Red Bull as he approached Venterstad.
Five hours out of Jo’burg, Gavin found himself in Burgersdorp. The only problem was he wasn’t supposed to be there.
Around 4am, Gav pulled into a deserted petrol station on Burgersdorp’s main road, dug out the AA Book Of The Road and recalibrated. Mmm, there it was. He’d missed the right turn to Steynsburg just before Venterstad. He’d have to go back 65 kays. Unless…
A closer look at the map seemed to indicate a route to Hofmeyr that would let him rejoin his cunning route with little delay. The R391. The map showed a red line that became a pink line after a while. Did that mean a gravel road?
No matter – it would only be about 30-odd kays of gravel at the most.
Soon enough, Gav was rattling along on a dusty farm road barely wide enough to accommodate the width of the Z3. Grass as high as his windowsill licked at the mirrors as he slewed from side to side, trying to maintain a hundred.
A sick Red Bull heartburn rose in his gut, even as his eyelids began to droop…
The next thing to register in Gavin Bull’s brain was an upside-down view of a dusty farm road just before sunrise. He’d fallen asleep! And his head had slumped into an inverted position! He was halfway onto the passenger seat! Before he could pull himself upright, there came the quite unique wickety-wickety-wickety sound generated by a BMW Z3 slewing down a barbed-wire fence at about a hundred kays an hour, uprooting poles as it went.
As the fence wires tore loose they lashed across the windscreen, the barbs shrieking against the glass and gouging striations out of the Shatterprufe.
All of this looks quite spectacular when viewed upside down, with one’s head against the passenger-seat headrest, as the latest Zola album plays loud and mysterious on the car stereo.
By the time Gavin’s brain registered what the implications of wickety-wickety-wickety and the shrieking and the gouging striations were for him and his upside-down life, there was an upside-down tree in view as well…
Brakes were applied not a moment too soon, and the value of ABS braking was demonstrated once again, as dawn lit upon the Hofmeyr district, providing just enough light for Gavin Bull to eventually savour the beauty of life anew beneath a wizened wattle tree on the R391.
As Gav stared out at the world from the driver’s seat of his stationary Z3, the Eastern Cape looked more beautiful than it had ever seemed to him.
He would spend his holiday in PE with a spiralling striation pattern across the bonnet and left side of his car quite unmatched in the history of automotive décor.
He would also spend the holiday with a brand-new belief in the existence of angels. Because after all, it was an angel who’d woken him up that morning around dawn on the R391 outside Hofmeyr. And angel had saved his life. Had to be.

Sticky afternoons in hell: Jo’burg summer

2009-01-16T05:07:00.000-08:00

The air-con guys had been in since mid-November and still there was no cool air.
After two years of sporadic climate control in the Freeflight office, the contractors had decided to rip everything out and start again. The right idea, sure, but that didn’t make deadline Friday afternoons any less sticky, humid and short-tempered.
As the client came back with the fifth design change in four days, reverting to the same picture of the nerd in his underpants that they’d started with on Tuesday, Gavin felt himself losing pluck. What was the point? They were right back where they started!
They’d be working the weekend now. No doubt about it. Saturday and Sunday.
Meanwhile, Christo the designer was in rehab, Gift had taken leave and Josie had taken the day off to take delivery of her new couches. There were three of them trying to do the work of six in this stuffy office with no bloody air-conditioning!
And every media planner who came by on business would ask, “So when you taking off?” completely not realising how rude that was. Mentioning holidays in an office where people were working their asses off!
That was like mentioning Chipniks and dip in a diet class.
Christ, it needed to rain today! You could choke on the humidity in the air. You could reach out and grab a handful of it.
Gavin could see the M1 from his office and he knew the traffic was going to be mayhem. There’d been a cash-in-transit heist near the Woodmead offramp and the cars were already crawling at 2pm. It was only going to get worse as more people knocked off and started heading for their beige, faux-Mediterranean townhouse complexes in Jo’burg, Pretoria, Midrand, Centurion, Paulshof, Kyasands and everywhere fuckin’ else.
Ag, he’d just try klap it till about eight and then hopefully miss the worst of it.
He got more work done when he was alone in the office, anyway. If only the office radio was working properly. Then Ian F and Sasha Martinengo wouldn’t sound like someone was mowing a lawn behind them.
Someone was stealing from the office too. A box of cosmetics that still needed packshots done had gone missing after it had been signed for at reception. It was someone in the office. Maybe one of the messengers.
The drinks fridge was being opened at noon every day, so Gav was already on his third Bavaria of this day – working through the urge to go visit lovely Simone in the graphics office down the corridor. When he finished packaging this latest version of the ad and had ISDNed it to the client for the next lot of corrections, then he would reward himself with a visit to Simone.
And who’d gone and bought Bavaria beers? Why couldn’t they get Peroni or something decent?
He could smell his own sweat already. Because of the humidity and the uninstalled aircon and the stress a thousand beers would not be able to alleviate. Still, he had another suck on his Bavaria. Okes were on the dop system at Freeflight these days.
Besides Thabo, who was rolling himself a bifta at his desk.
Around three the sky began darkening and at four the storm broke – just as Gavin clicked on “send” in his dialogue box and the job vanished down the pipe to the client’s agency.
Lightning illuminated the curtainless office as he skipped down the passage to visit Simone on the first visit he was allowing himself today. He brought a couple of Bavarias for them to share. But her office was empty. She’d pushed off early.
Who could blame her?
That was all he could take. He placed both beers on Simone’s desk and walked downstairs. As he walked outside, the rainstorm was breathing its last. Intermittent raindrops splashed on his face as he cast his eyes skywards and breathed in the fragrant earthiness.
Aaah! That was better. Rivulets rain down his cheeks like tears of relief. He opened his mouth and lapped a few droplets from the sky.
Water.
That’s what he needed. There and then Gavin resolved to go on holiday. He would finish that blasted cellphone campaign, find a tank of unleaded petrol somewhere in Jo’burg and head for the coast. He would drive to Port Elizabeth, where an ocean of water would bathe his beery body and wash the troubles from his worried mind.
By way of agreement, like a wink from the heavens, the skies cleared a little and a sunbeam lit upon the entrance to Freeflight Design.
Yes. By next week he would be swimming in the sea.

People who ask you for money: the curse of being nice

2009-01-16T04:25:00.001-08:00

An open face had been Russel’s curse for as long as he’d lived.
It was his open face that got him called to everyone’s desk at work to help them download new fonts. His open face made him the go-to guy when you needed a lift to pick your car up from the garage.
And why was he the guy all the women in the office confided in when they had a crush on the new guy? Why, because of his open, boyish, unthreatening features and his slightly effeminate mannerisms, of course.
Russel had a habit of looking people right in the left eye, something he’d not been able to unlearn despite having lived in Johannesburg for five years.
This made him a sitting duck for every beggar, scammer, charlatan and panhandler on the streets and in the shopping malls of Gauteng, Tshwane and Ekhuruleni.
“Hau, Chief,” was a common opening line among the robot beggars, Homeless Talk salesmen and windscreen washers, often followed by that fist-to-fist handshake where you twist your thumbs together.
But most scary were the chancers. A guy at a robot will generally be satisfied with two bucks. A Homeless Talk costs R4 a month, but certain moneygrubbers set their sights higher than that.
They’re the types you only see once in your life. Not for them the reliable routine of a patch on the corner of Rivonia and Grayston. These loons roam Jo’burg ceaselessly, scamming the innocent, the soft-hearted and the open-faced with their transparent lies and shameless fabrications.
Like the sunburnt lunatic wearing a beanie whom Russel had once encountered in the parking lot behind the Market Theatre. He’d come up to him bearing a clipboard and a pen.
“Name?” he’d asked, the minute Russel had finished parking his car. “Mmm. How do you spell that? Okay, now please fill in your address.”
Before he knew it, Russel had complied.
“Thank you. How much will you be donating?”
The next thing you know, he’d given the guy ten bucks – and told him where he lived. And he wasn’t even the car guard!
Another time an Indian-looking woman had accosted him in the Grayston Shopping Centre parking lot.
“Hi there. Sorry. Are you in too much of a hurry? No? I’ve just finished my aromatherapy diploma and I’m busy collecting money to start a website so I can open my own business. If you could help with a hundred rand, fifty rand... Or even just twenty rand…”
He’d been half looking over his shoulder at her with his open face, on the way to the video shop. It just seemed easier to give her the bucks than argue the pointlessness of aromatherapy websites. Also, there’d been a swarthy-looking boyfriend type leaning against his car right next to the lady, monitoring her progress.
These people were mad. It was worth twenty bucks to avoid getting into conversation with them. You never knew what they might be capable of.
But the craziest conversation Russel’s approachable demeanour ever got him into was at the Killarney Mall on a Saturday afternoon, just before the five o’clock movie.
A teenage guy had come up to him just outside Woolworths carrying a cardboard egg box.
“Hi there, I’m a student. Are you a student perhaps? No? You know how all the varsities have initiation? Well I’m going through initiation at the moment, so if you give me five rand, I’ll let you break this egg on my head.”
He had only two eggs in his egg box and showed no signs of anyone else having accepted his offer.
Russel so knew he had to get away from this person.
“It’s to raise money for my hostel’s rugby tour,” the lunatic continued. This in mid-November! On the periphery of Russel’s vision was a girl, possibly a sidekick, with another egg box.
He had frantically fished out R4,35 in change from his jeans pocket and retreated into Woollies as if on a highly important mission.
When he emerged ten minutes later with a bag of pork crackling-flavoured crisps, the hustlers were gone, and he was able to make his way to the Killarney Nu Metro unmolested.
As luck would have it, he came up three rand short for his popcorn and a Coke. He had to bum a few bucks off the couple behind him in the queue. They both looked at him a little funny.

The kind of romance that’s good for the company

2009-01-16T02:32:00.000-08:00

It started off innocently enough, as just a group of colleagues going for after-work drinks. Then it was just the two of them going for drinks. Gift and Simone.
He was into the music scene and she’s the kind of arty girl who gets invited to all the best exhibition openings. So it was fun to introduce each other to their respective jols.
Then the one night after the record company showcase, they had a little thing.
They were both a little tipsy that time, so they sort of ignored it, and it didn’t affect the atmosphere in the office too much.
But a week later they had another thing, then another, and then it became clear to them that they were having a fully fledged office romance.
Relations in the workplace became a little awkward; no one else on the Freeflight staff knew about their affair and they saw no need to give the game away immediately.
Workplace liaisons had fallen out of favour since Freeflight’s short-lived last appointment, some guy who had thrown himself into wooing Simone at his first office party. The dude had ended up setting his pubes on fire in a fit of drunken besottedness.
These two lovebirds shared subtle caresses and clandestine kisses on the stairwell, then periods of basically ignoring each other as they overcorrected in trying to keep up professional appearances.
They did remarkably well in keeping their relationship a secret from all of their colleagues for a full two months before matters came to a head.
What brought the whole house of cards tumbling down was the annual Advertising Charity Fund Bowling Night.
The event is one of several social highlights of the advertising industry’s year, besides being a party of renown and notorious for being the genesis of several boozy office flings.
It would have been the perfect event for Gift and Simone to come out. Except then Gavin, the big-boss MD of Freeflight goes and invites Simone to Charity Bowling as his date.
Simone said she’d check what she was up to and then get back to him.
“What should I tell him,” she immediately confided in Gift. “If I tell him I’m going out with you, there’ll be a huge jealousy thing in the office. You know how crazy he can be!”
“And if I go with him, he’ll start thinking I like him and he’ll probably keep asking me out. And he’s really not my type.”
Good oke that he was, Gavin was a shaven-headed, tattooed weekend biker, and developing a boep.
“I don’t know,” Gift hesitated, suddenly seeing his advertising career on the verge of disaster thanks to his unchecked libido. “I can’t tell you what to do. You’ve gotta make up your own mind.”
“Hmmpf,” thought Simone to herself. Gift was all keen to have her as his skelm, but when it came time to own up he was suddenly all coy! She would certainly make up her own mind about who to take to Charity Bowling.
And so the appointed evening arrived. It had became clear to both Gift and Gavin that she was not going with either of them. Probably all for the best, they’d told themselves. These office romances only end up causing trouble.
Still, Simone is the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. A Bohemian, blue-eyed beauty with tumbling blonde curls, a mischievous smile and a taste in clothing straight out of the Melville thrift shops.
Anyway, bowling night arrives. And Gav and Gift end up going as each other’s partners. Not in a gay way, just to have someone you know to go with.
So there they are, sitting at the bar at the Brightwater Common bowling alley. The whole ad industry is there and things are just starting to warm up. A couple of tequilas have been quaffed and the first naughty nods towards the toilet have been shared.
And then Simone walks in. Looking like Fergie out of the Black Eyed Peas in a shiny, skintight pair of scarlet pants, and a plunging handkerchief top… and Ryk Neethling on her arm!
Gavin nearly drops his Red Bull and vodka. Gift bites his lip so hard it stings. In fact heads turn all over the bowling alley. “Who’s that with Ryk Neethling?” “Simone from Freeflight!”
Sheess.
They’re the undisputed stars of the evening – the celeb-mag photographer can’t get enough. Meanwhile Gift and Gav sit anonymously by the bowling-shoe booth.
“They look quite good together,” grimaces Gift through his whisky.
“Ja,” says Gav. “Hope it works out for them. Be good for the company.”

The man with the funny accent at security

2009-01-16T02:19:00.000-08:00

“Have you heard that security guy’s accent,” remarked Gavin as he dumped his man bag on his desk and began preparations for the working day.
“I know the guy you mean,” replied Simone. She’d noticed him too. “He’s a black guy with a fully English accent.”
“Ja. And it’s not a Model C accent either,” remarked Gavin. “Every morning when I come in, the guy’s like, ‘Howzit, man. Fine thanks, yourself.’ Hey Gift, what’s the story with that security guy with the white accent?”
“I don’t know,” replied their colleague. “He always speaks Zulu to me.”
Meanwhile, downstairs, at reception Khulani Dlamini was checking the morning’s third visitor into the building.
“There you go, sir. Freeflight is on the second floor. You have a nice day, now.”
As often happens, the guy did a slight double-take when he heard Khulani’s accent, but he soon disappeared into the lift.
Someone’s accent isn’t usually the kind of thing you ask them about.
And a person seldom contemplates their own accent any more than they wonder why their nose is narrow. So Khulani, or KK, was not thinking about his accent as he rearranged his pens and sat back down at this tiny security desk with this week’s copy of You.
He wasn’t thinking of his youth growing up on the farm outside Mkuze. Nor was he thinking of his mother, and how she had raised him and his three brothers on her tiny salary.
As he straightened his tie and shrugged his blazer into position, he certainly wasn’t thinking about the 16 summers he had spent chewing sugar cane on the banks of the vast Jozini dam, near the place they called Ghost Mountain.
Nor was he looking back on his lifelong friendship with Mark Longdon, the farmer’s son.
The last thing on KK’s mind was the time him and Mark had hitch-hiked to Richards Bay to go swimming and been arrested for having friends of a different colour. And how they’d only been released when Mark convinced the cops that KK was actually his garden boy, whom he had brought along so he could carry his shopping.
No, that’s not the kind of thing you think about when you’re manning the security desk at a Midrand design agency.
You don’t dwell on the fact that your English accent sounds like a white person’s because your blood brother, your soul buddy from long years was a white guy.
Of course, someone checking in with you on their way to delivering some agency proofs to Freeflight would be totally unaware that somewhere in the world there’s a white guy named Mark, who speaks Zulu without any trace of an English accent.
And how even Mark’s English accent was coloured by a lifetime spent in the wilds of Zululand, by a thousand afternoons spent fishing in Jozini Dam, by a hundred evenings spent dancing to Phuzekhemisi’s maskandi music on the stoep outside KK’s place.
These are things not dwelt upon. You don’t think about how your voice sounds, or why your face looks the way it does, or why you have a habit of scratching the skin behind your ear.
Those idiosyncrasies are simply part of the complex matrix of in-born, and in-bred, characteristics that go into making a person a person.
And what a unique person was KK, as he sat at his security desk, spotless in his corporate blazer, perfectly positioned tie and sparkling leather shoes.
In his heart lay an understanding of another culture matched by few of his people. It had taught him love for his fellow man and respect for other human beings. That sense of empathy had brought him to the city, despite his rural heritage. He’d gained an affinity for the bright lights from his old mate Mark.
Mark, in turn, had found he missed the countryside, and had long ago left Johannesburg to become a game ranger at a private lodge in Maputaland.
Straddling Zulu and European culture had made Johnny Clegg an international superstar. It had earned KK a job as a multilingual security guard and made Mark Longdon a game guide who got on with the locals.
But KK never thought about that. He simply sat at his security desk, perfectly turned out in his blazer, shiny shoes and nicely positioned tie, and awaited the next visitor to Freeflight Design. He simply sat, the sum of all he had ever learnt.
And when a customer arrived, he’d say, “Hello, howzit. How you doing?”

“But Eric, I hardly know you!”

2009-01-15T07:40:00.001-08:00

“I’m not putting extensions on the whole of your head,” said Theo. “I’m leaving gaps, and I’m using short extensions, so it’ll look like little feathers hanging down your neck.”
Lorna wasn’t sure about that. Part of her was also livid that Shaun had insisted they get married so soon. And right after she’d had a haircut. She’d always expected she’d have at least a year’s notice before her wedding day, so she could grow her hair out properly.
Now the silly fool had gone and proposed during their weekend away in Clarens and she’d gone and agreed to get married the next month. What had she been thinking!
Now mom and dad had to come screaming up from PE to help organise the wedding, she’d had to take leave at the last minute to make time for the honeymoon and there was no time to save up either!
“Clarens is lovely,” chatted Theo as he applied a weft . “I went there with my ex-boyfriend in March. They had snow last weekend.”
“Mmm,” said Lorna as she sipped her second glass of Lyric of the morning, “My brother’s also gay.”
“Who, Eric? You lie!”
“Ja, I think so. He hasn’t had a girlfriend in ten years. He must be gay. I think he’s just too shy to tell us. He doesn’t want to hurt my dad’s feelings. And now I feel terrible because he’s going to feel forced to bring some poor girl to our wedding.”
“You should never do that to someone,” gasped Theo as he moved to a track lower down on Lorna’s scalp. “I was in the closet the whole way through varsity and while I was in the army and I’m telling you it was the worst time of my life!”
“I know, it must be terrible!” said Lorna.
“Lorna, I want you to pick up your cell this very minute and call your brother,” said Theo. “Tell him you’ve always known he’s gay and you want him to bring a boy to the wedding!”
“You think?”
It was a bit of a big step for Lorna, and besides, her wedding was all about her, not her brother’s sexuality.
“I’m positive, Lorna! Do you know what a nightmare it is having to pretend to be romantic with someone you have no interest in at all? Have you any idea? I mean, how would you like it if you had to go to a wedding with a lesbian woman and hold her hand the whole way through the ceremony?”
“Well, now that you put it that way…”
Lorna was starting to think Theo had a point. “I tell you what, Theo. You’re single at the moment, aren’t you? Well, why don’t you give Eric a call and invite him to come to my wedding as your date?”
“Mmmm,” growled Theo as he applied another weft, “I have been single for far too long…”
That evening Eric was on a date with Liz Griffith-Reid at Soulsa in Melville when he got Theo’s call on his cellphone.
“Theo? The hairdresser? Er, how can I help you?”
Liz raised her eyebrows and then headed off to the bathroom to give Eric some privacy.
When Liz returned five minutes later, Eric was looking flushed and a little wild-eyed. He immediately invited her out onto the balcony for a breath of fresh air.
“We can watch the cars going up and down Seventh Street.” He told her. “It’ll be lank er… romantic.”
“Ja, why not. I could do with a smoke,” replied Liz.
But the minute they stepped onto the balcony, Eric got a funny look, like Anakin in that one love scene in Star Wars. The next thing he puts his arms around her, leans her back over the balcony and kisses her deep and passionately, half on top of an elderly Greek couple’s table.
“But Eric, I hardly know you!” gasped Liz, when she’d dug herself out of his clutches, handed him off and got her breath back.
“What’s to know, Liz,” he replied. “I’m a man, you’re a woman. It’s pointless denying our desires!”
Involuntarily, Liz moved a chair between them, suddenly glad she’d come in her own car. “I think I need to be going. I’ll, I’ll call you…”
She retrieved her bag, left a hundred on the table and hurried downstairs.
“Wait!” Eric called after her. “Are we still on for my sister’s wedding?”
Just then his cellphone rang again. It was Theo.

Faith and redemption at Melville Second Hand

2009-01-15T07:33:00.001-08:00

The sound of children woke Theo from his slumber on his folded-back driver’s seat in the notorious Meldene parking lot, around the corner from the Oh! gay bar, where he had spent the bulk of the previous night.
His last lucid memory was of launching into a series of tequilas with a cute ad executive from some fashion magazine. It must have been a long series, because he could still smell them.
At least he’d had the presence of mind to sleep in the car, rather than play with people’s lives by trying to drive home in a tequila-stained muscle shirt and, he was embarrassed to admit, running eye make-up.
He looked in the rear-view mirror. Yip. There it was. Two black streaks of kohl down his cheeks like he’d been crying bitumen. Clearly he’d not got lucky last night.
If only he’d remembered to leave a window ajar he might not smell quite so bad this morning. Grief, his car smelt like a stable! A stable in which someone had installed a tequila still.
Oh well.
Noon on Saturday. Mothers with three children in tow dragged their squeaking progeny down the road towards the Melville Boulevard centre. Taxis hooted, car guards whistled that distinctive Zola whistle and the smell of pap drifted into the car through some mysterious conduit. Certainly not through an opened window.
Then it hit him. Grief! Today was the day of Gay Pride!
Only the highlight of the entire gay calendar! Only the must-attend event of the year, the most fabulous street parade imaginable and the first one set to end at Heartlands, the new, revamped gay district in downtown Braamfontein.
If ever there was a time to go to Gay Pride this was it. Guys had been planning their outfits for weeks. It was going to absolutely flawless!
But here he sat, completely drenched in tequila, no outfit planned and the shops closing in less than an hour. And the parade was starting at 3pm – from the Constitutional Court on the other side of town.
Feeling terrible, Theo removed the electric razor he kept in the cubby hole and began shaving. That always made him feel better. As he was doing his neck he stared absent-mindedly through the windscreen and his eyes came rest on a large sign emblazoned on the wall in front of him: Melville Second Hand Clothing. If you don’t want it, somebody else does!”
At that point the shaver’s battery went flat. Great. He’d be going on the Pride parade with stubble. At least most of his neck was done. And as for the shopping, there was no time to do it any other way. He would be buying his Gay Pride outfit at Melville Second Hand Clothing.
He wearily got out of the car and donned his sunglasses. His hangover hit him with renewed force, complete with a special, piercing headache centred right between his eyes.
Ghastly. And the biggest party of the year starting in three hours. If ever there was a day for a couple of Red Bulls. This was it. But first, a bit of shopping.
As he entered the second-hand shop, Theo could see he was on a hiding to nothing. This wasn’t one of those fabulous costume shops, Melville Second Hand was essentially a pawn shop. Literally the kind of place you sold your unwanted possessions and sad old clothes when you needed money. The last stop of Melville’s drug addicts before they gave up and went into rehab. There was even a dusty acoustic guitar in a corner, nestling forlornly near some golf clubs.
Suits, overalls, a thousand pairs of tatty jeans, sad, peeling leather jackets… it wasn’t an inspiring selection. If he was going to make it to the gay parade, he would have to think laterally. Then he stumbled across a pile of Eighties pop records in a dusty corner and he had an idea…
This might not be a total loss after all. Stubble, this white T-shirt over here, these torn jeans… He went through the jacket rail and found just the right black leather biker jacket…
As luck would have it, Theo’s steel-rimmed sunglasses were of the very same design that was the height of fashion in the mid-Eighties…
He donned his ensemble, slung the guitar over his shoulder and evaluated the look in the mirror. Spot on.
Theo was George Michael from the 1985 video for Faith.

The perils of making a good first impression

2009-01-15T07:23:00.000-08:00

Freeflight had impressive offices for a ten-person design operation. Ant remembered them from the interviews. A freestanding double-story with full glass frontage in a Midrand office park.
This indicated either a design shop that was ready for lift-off or an operation hopelessly overinvested in its corporate image.
Seeing as he’d just won an art-director’s position there, Ant was going to keep believing it was the former until it was proven otherwise.
It was his first day at work, and he was set to make a good impression. He rocked a stylishly unkempt new haircut from Theo in Melville, a fashionably torn Magents T-shirt from the Y shop at the Zone and a new pair of Counter Culture sneakers. He’d offset the torn, scruffy look with a smart pair of 501s for an overall image of edgy, creative ambition.
Gift, the dreadlocked creative director, showed him to his desk and introduced him to the team. Six okes and four girls – including a stunning designer named Simone.
“We’re gonna have a rocking time, dude,” he said. “Get settled and then meet us in the bar downstairs. We’re having a farewell for Shane, the oke you’re replacing.”
The word was Shane was moving to a more conservative design shop. He was in his thirties and recently married.
Freeflight was notorious for having the hardest-partying creatives in all of advertising. Their exploits at the annual Loerie awards were the stuff of legend. At last year’s one Ant had seen the entire Freeflight team playing touch rugby with their Golden Loerie in the parking in Spiderman outfits at 4am.
That’s when he’d decided he’d like to work here.
He could party down with the best of them and he was anxious to prove that to his new colleagues, especially Bohemian young Simone with the blonde ringlets and the beret…
They commenced Shane’s farewell drinks at 11am, and had drained the beer bathtub by 2pm. By three they were in Newtown at Kapitan’s curry den, screaming through plates of mutton vindaloo and a terrifying series of tequila suitcases.
5pm saw Ant dressed in a sari, serenading his new co-workers with a version of Loslappie that he’d picked up during his time working for Mossel Bay Tourism. “Ek is ‘n loslappie,” he crooned, suggestively waving the fringe of his sari at Simone, who seemed more confused than impressed.
By 7pm they were at a bowling alley in Randburg, blowing vuvuzelas and breakdancing in the lanes wearing luminous-green afro wigs. An hour after that they were at the casino, smoking cigars as thick as broomsticks and lining up absinthes so strong it made Ant’s eyes water just to look at them.
At one point, as they staggered down the cobblestone alleys of Montecasino’s Tuscan backstreets. Thabo the copywriter asked if Ant was doing okay. But, painfully aware of the office culture, he felt obliged to shrug him off and hit the Vacca Matta action bar for brandy and more cigars.
Ant’s first sign that he might not have the capacity required to ride with the big boys was when the face of Simone, his object of desire, morphed into triple-focus as he delivered his most successful chat-up line: “You know, we’re just the right size for each other…”
Then there came dance music so loud that talk became meaningless. So Ant’s only way to demonstrate his manliness was by showing her. For some reason, and for the rest of his career in advertising, Ant would wonder why, he decided to whip out his lighter, partially drop his pants and set his pubic hair alight.
It made sense at the time, but it proved a bit more than the bouncers could stomach and the entire Freeflight staff was soon evicted, while Ant was taken to the security office and charged with public indecency.
In the cold light of the next morning, Ant’s eagerness to impress the hip guys also appeared to have gone a step too far. He was fired on arrival for his second day of work and for the rest of his career would be known as That Oke Who Set His Pubes Alight.
It was also the kind of notorious exploit that makes a creative’s reputation. Ant would never struggle to find ad-agency work, but his relationship with cute, Bohemian Simone with the blonde ringlets never developed.
They were, though, just the right size for each other.

The new-school rules of being cool

2009-01-15T07:16:00.000-08:00

“Who’s that? Who’s that?”
He’s a short, podgy, bald guy.
“That’s M’du. Kwaito star. He’s pretty old-school. But he’s still cool. He did that song, Let’s Go 50-50 with Mandoza. And there’s Mandoza! There, there.”
Simone is getting her latest lesson in a course in Jo’burg hipness, courtesy of her colleague Gift. She’s cracked the nod as his partner at the record company’s end-of-year function. It’s at The Mix at Melrose Arch, the newest upmarket club in all of Jozi. That’s why they came.
Cool Rule 1: Upmarket is cool.
“Oh, ja! He looks familiar. So that’s Mandoza, hey.”
“Ja. He’s not the hippest guy here tonight, though. It’s mainly white people who listen to his music.
“Mandoza. But he’s crossover, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. White people listen to his music.”
“So who is the hippest guy here?”
“Zola, of course! Don’t you know anything?”
“I don’t know much, but Zola’s not playing tonight. Check the list. He’s not playing.”
Cool Rule 2: Read the invite..
“Mmm. He’s not hey. So the coolest person playing tonight would be, let’s see… Lebo. Ja, definitely Lebo. She’s the queen. You’ll see.”
Cool Rule 3: Afro-pop is way cool.
“And who’s that guy in the suit? The guy with the chiskop in the yellow suit.”
“Oh, him. I don’t know his name, but he’s the manager of one of the artists. Maybe Thando. Or Doc Shebeleza. He drives an A3.”
Cool Rule 4. Cars are mad cool.
“What’s an A3?”
“It’s an Audi.”
“Okay. So why don’t you call it an Audi A3.”
“You never say Audi A3.”
“Come, they playing my song. It’s Too Late For Mama.”
Cool Rule 5: You dance when they play Brenda.
The entire dancefloor begins stepping as one. Two steps to the right. Two steps to the left. Two steps back. Then they lean back twice, skip 90 degrees to the left and start again.
“I know this dance,” says Simone. “Isn’t it called the Codesa? Because you move backwards and forwards, but you stay in the same place.”
“Nah. I think it’s called the Bus. Because you move together.
Just then M’Du comes on the mic. “Yeah, come on. Everybody do the wedding dance.”
Cool Rule 6: I doesn’t matter what the dance is called.
“Let’s get drinks. Do you want me to go and find a waiter?”
“You could, but the bar’s wide open. Why not just go and order from the bar?”
Cool Rule 7: Don’t order from the bar.
“Come, the buffet’s open. Let’s go get some of that.”
“I thought we were dancing.” Simone is confused. “The song isn’t even finished.”
“Come, Baby. We’re done here. Let’s go check out the buffet tables.”
Cool Rule 8. When dancing, the goal is not to sweat. Less is more.
“Wow. That guy’s plate is so full, the food’s almost falling off it!”
“You see? Now that’s how you dish up!”
Cool Rule 9: More is better.
With the buffet nicely dealt with, our happy couple returns to the dancefloor, where the evening is reaching a peak with Lebo’s imminent arrival.
“Are you ready for Lebo?” screams the MC, to a slightly muted response. “I
can’t hear you,” he reiterates predictably. “Are you ready for Lebo?”
Lebo reluctantly takes the stage to only marginally improved cheers. As if to make a point, she proceeds to put on a show of blistering intensity. She and her dancers appear to be in some kind of trance. By the time they’re performing Music, her biggest hit, they’re rubbing themselves up against each other in a way Simone thought only a man could rub up against a woman.
Before the encore is over, she finds herself bumping hips with Gift and gyrating in a way directly attributable to the new queen of African pop.
By the time Lebo finishes, Simone is red in the face and shrieking. Gift has his shirt unbuttoned and is doing such a low-down kwassa-kwassa, his ass is touching the floor.
“Whooooo!” Simone screams, happier than she’s been since the time she won the fancy dress at Zuurberg Holiday Resort in 1989. “Lebooooo! Whooo! Lebooooooo!”
Cool Rule 10: There’s a time to stop being cool.

Waiting for the man: The quest for a helping hand

2009-01-15T06:48:00.000-08:00

That Monday, just after 7am, the first of the pilgrims arrived. She was a sangoma from KZN who had been having visions that he could help her find her lost son. He was last seen on a bus trip to the Wild Coast Sun.
But there was no help to be had. The man was in a hurry. He reversed his Crossfire out of the driveway, closed the gate with the remote, and was off to the SABC.
He didn’t even look at her.
Nor did he look at the eight pilgrims he passed on his way down to Main Rd. He knew what their request was all about. They had relayed it to him every day for the past couple of weeks.
Seven of the eight of them were blind. They knew the rules, but they thought that because they were blind, perhaps he’d be able to make an exception.
He couldn’t.
As his car sped past them, their guide sadly announced the news and they realised they’d missed their chance. Dejectedly, they turned and began making their way back to the tree in the Meldene parking lot, where their morning umpokoqo still simmered on the fire.
There they met a man in a wheelchair, who had travelled from Maputo to state his case. Since he only showed up at eight, his chances of a personal meeting were slim, but he had something the others didn’t have. He had the guy’s phone number.
He’d bought it for 50 000 meticals from a concert promoter who had once brought the man out to Mozambique for a music festival.
At the Melville Nando’s on the corner near the parking lot, a schoolgirl bought a Portuguese roll and a salad while she typed out an SMS to the star. Would he remember her, she wondered. Of course he would. He’d given her his number. That time after the concert in Welkom.
Across the road from the Nando’s a street preacher bellowed his interpretation of the scriptures. He too had shared a pot with the blind pilgrims in the few days he’d been in the neighbourhood.
Like the sangoma stationed outside the house, the preacher had also been having visions. His dreams told him that he and the star had to work together on a gospel song. The kind of song that would change the world.
A kid from Dobsonville with a plumbing certificate, who had been unable to find work for a year, arrived at the house around lunch time and looked for the doorbell. Finding none, he peered through the gate, where he saw a car parked.
“Hallo,” he tried, and tentatively banged on the pedestrian gate. There was no sign of life, so he went and sat on the nature strip of the house across the road. But the retired gentleman who lived there was having none of it.
“You can’t sit here,” he said. “You people always want to wait here on my lawn. It’s private property this. If you want to sit, you must go to the park.” And he gestured towards the playground up the road to where the legs of the lady sangoma from KZN were just visible beneath a shrub near the swings.
The plumber decided he would have to leave a message for his hero. He dug a set of writing implements out of his bag and over the next 17 minutes, poured his heart into a two-page missive to the king of kwaito and the most famous social worker in South Africa.
Having written his note, all that remained was to get it into the yard, the house having no visible letterbox whatsoever. On the corner of the four-metre perimeter wall, he found a hydrant, from which he was just able to reach the corner of the wall.
He hopped up and grabbed the corner brick of the wall. It wobbled and gave way, as if dozens of hopefuls had pulled themselves up on it to get a look into the yard, to deliver their desperate pleas for help.
Next thing, the desperate plumber found himself flat on his back surrounded by mortar and bricks, at the feet of an ADT security man, who had been summoned by the star’s concerned across-the-road neighbour.
“You’re under arrest,” the guard told the hapless plumber. “Come with me.”
Later, as he helped the wannabe jobseeker into his patrol car, he offered this piece of advice. “If you do not follow the write-in procedure, Zola 7 will not help you. Don’t come to his house”

The pros and cons of getting back into running

2009-01-15T06:46:00.001-08:00

It was a plan that grew out of a morning of TV-watching on Youth Day last year. Louis van Huysteen had been munching his way though a tray of cocktail pretzels in his lounge last June 16, watching Sipho Ngomane surge to victory in the Comrades Marathon, when he decided that, hell, he could run the Comrades too.
If those okes could run the 90-odd kays in six hours or so, how hard could it be to finish the marathon in 12 hours? Urban legend had it that you could in fact walk from Durban to Pietermaritzburg within the 12-hour cut-off time – as long as you never stopped and always trotted down the downhills.
That was probably not true, but, as a reasonably trim 38-year-old, Louis was convinced he had it within him to finish a Comrades.
As long as he trained for it.
Now it was mid-October, and it was time to start.
The launch of Louis’ training regime coincided with his move to bohemian Melville, courtesy of his growing financial stature as an investment banker.
He’d been in his Sixth-Avenue house barely a fortnight, so he decided his maiden training jog should serve as a reconnaissance of his neighbourhood, as well as a gentle limb-loosener.
Everyone should run the Comrades once, he thought to himself as he trotted down Sixth Avenue and turned right into Beyers Naude. It was already almost 6pm, so he would just make this a quick run around Westpark cemetery.
He didn’t know the neighbourhood that well, but common sense told him he’d be able make his way anti-clockwise around the cemetery to Westdene, and thence back down into Melville.
The first stretch through the dip on Beyers went well. Louis got into his stride fairly easily and the joints seemed to be holding up well. He still had the old skills from primary-school landloop.
He took a left at the entrance to the graveyard into West Park road and began the gradual climb up towards Westdene.
Twenty minutes later he was still climbing. And his joints were starting to hurt.
Park Road had a gradual, but inexorable gradient that he could never quite see over. After another five minutes the road began curving to the right, away from Melville.
It was around 6.30pm now, and getting dark. The cemetery still lay to his left, dark and wooded, with a hedge and a wire fence protecting the perimeter. How big was this place?
There was less than 15 minutes of daylight remaining. It was too late to turn back. There had to be a left turn soon. The graveyard couldn’t stretch all the way to the coloured area. Could it? He was headed towards Westbury!
At any rate, he wasn’t taking a short cut through no graveyard. That was for sure.
Eventually, a left turn presented itself, rising steep and ominous towards a block of flats on the koppie.
Louis’ right knee was hurting badly by the time he reached the flats. He was going to have to stop jogging. But it was pitch dark and this seemed a rather dodgy neighbourhood. Only every third streetlight was working.
He willed himself through another couple of blocks, wincing in pain. His knee was on fire.
It was a rough neighbourhood of plain, tile-roofed workers’ houses behind rusting garden gates. “Sophiatown shop” said a sign in one yard. Sophiatown?
Louis stopped running. He was at least five kays from home.
But as he did so, he became aware of the sounds of the neighbourhood. The dogs of Sophiatown sensed his presence and he set off a soaring crescendo of barking.
He passed a group of three coloured guys in hoodies under a streetlight.
“Howzit,” he said, trying to sound casual and not scared.
Half a block further, the road became a downhill and he began running again. But after another block he had to stop. He was in agony. And it felt like someone was following him now.
He was navigating by instinct. He prayed he was heading down into Melville and not Westbury. He didn’t know much about the area, but he knew he didn’t want to be staggering around in Westbury at night, penniless.
There was a parking lot he’d seen on the west side of Melville. If his sense of direction was accurate, it might lie at the bottom of this hill. He might just make it that far. If not, he was stuffed.
Please let that parking lot be at the bottom of this hill. Please…

Anthropology lecturers and lessons in love

2009-01-15T06:02:00.001-08:00

Remé was Spanish, which was why Ewan could not resist. The fact that she was one of his students was neither here nor there.
He was only lecturing part time. And besides, she’d asked to interview him.
It was for some kind of creative writing project, she’d said. “Interview A Celebrity” was probably the name of the assignment. And Reme had obviously heard that he was a published anthropologist.
Maybe she’d caught his insert on the Khoi on SABC 2.
At any rate, she’d got his cell number from somewhere and phoned him up just as he was leaving the Personal Training Gym.
“Doctor Mac… Mac?”
“I wonderrr if it will be alrrright forrr me to interrrview you?”
In a deep husky voice, full of rolling r’s and that rising intonation he was always such a sucker for. Of course he’d said yes, and proposed they do it over an early Saturday lunch at A Bras in Melville.
Now here he was, at a quiet balcony table for two, with a 19-year-old Spanish undergrad, who wanted to know all about him.
He found himself using his radio voice, as he talked her through his career highlights. So the couple at the table next door would probably have heard him describing his expeditions to the Baviaanskloof, his trance-chanting with the sangomas of the eastern Free State, his work with the Knysna Rasta community. How he’d walked the entire coastline of South Africa barefoot, living on seafood alone, as the ancient coastal San had once done.
Their neighbours appeared not to mind, and Reme seemed very impressed.
And that was the main thing.
She filled both sides of her 90-minute Dictaphone cassette, then dug out another tape, as Ewan picked his way through his seafood special and told her about the courtship rituals of the Kalahari San.
The recorder was handy too, since it allowed him to maintain full eye contact with her throughout. As he shelled his fourth prawn with practised hands, she seemed unable to take her dark eyes off him.
She stared at him through her tumbling Spanish curls and giggled on cue at his droll academic jokes, even though she could never have caught them all, as a second-language speaker.
He was conscious of how she was his for the taking. Besotted, like the others before her. He suggestively shucked an oyster and popped it into his mouth.
Once he’d finished the last of the mussels he would call for the bill and then invite her to his flat to watch his Baviaanskloof doccie. There things would take their natural course.
Except nature had another course to follow that lunchtime.
As Ewan was licking the calamari batter off his fingers and considering how exactly to phrase his invitation, Remé squinted at him through her tumbling curls and said something he hadn’t expected:
“You’re getting a rrrash.”
He immediately removed himself to the gents’, where he was shocked to find that he was not only “getting a rash,” he had rampant hives right across his face and neck.
Pink patches like the spots of a giraffe erupted from his mandarin collar, across his face and all over his forehead. They were itching, and he was struggling to breathe.
His seafood allergy had resurfaced in a big way.
By the time Ewan got back to the table, he was struggling to stay upright.
“I think I need to go to the emergency room,” he rasped and grabbed Reme’s shoulder to save himself from fainting flat out in the Portuguese restaurant.
Around 1pm, by which time Ewan had planned to be conducting a private screening of his Baviaanskloof documentary for his sultry Spanish admirer, he was not doing that at all. He was having a coughing fit in the passenger seat of Remé’s Golf in the Meldene parking lot, just behind the Medicross.
“Mr Mac. Wait here. I will go to fetch you a wheelchair,” said Remé.
Within an hour, a saline drip had restored Ewan McMaster to health. But his reputation on campus as a swashbuckling outdoorsman would be permanently harmed by the publication of Remé’s creative writing piece in the English department digest.
“I cradled the sobbing man’s head in my lap,” the piece began. “His childlike boastfulness had evaporated. So helpless, he needed me like a boy needs his mother…”

How to make an honest buck in Meldene on a Thursday night

2009-01-14T00:33:00.001-08:00

Thabo took the R10 taxi from Orlando West to Melville with his R5 bag of weed. If he was lucky, he’d be able to sell it for R50 to some white guys in the Melville party zone.
And he knew the place too. The Meldene parking lot, just behind the clinic. He’d sold weed there before, when he was still a kid, working for Farouk. But that had just been selling sticks for three, four, five bucks. Dried-up crumbs of zol wrapped in brown paper.
This time he had quality weed. If he found the right buyer, he could triple, quadruple his money. Times it by ten! That’s why he had spent the last of his money on the taxi fare.
He got into Melville around 8pm. Right in the middle of weed-buying time. The guys seemed to like a smoke after dinner.
Before approaching the parking lot, he cased it from the back stairs of the Boulevard Centre down the road.
Crap! Farouk was still there. Thabo could make out the lumpy outline of his cap on one of the three figures squatting beneath the tree at the back of the lot. Farouk still had a post there. That made it his turf.
There were a couple of other parking lots Thabo could try – the one across the road from the Reggae Bar, the one behind the second-hand shop… Or he could go lurk in a doorway on the restaurant strip and whisper, “Swazi! Bankies!” at passing pedestrians. But the people who bought in such places were only looking for R5 sticks. He wasn’t going to find a bankie customer there.
His best bet was to lurk half a block away from the entrance to the Meldene parking lot and then try to get the attention of a driver approaching the lot before he actually got to the turn-off. And he had to do this without Farouk noticing.
Thabo carefully selected a niche in the vibracrete wall just outside the bottom entrance. If anyone slowed to turn in, he would be the first person they saw there. He just needed to make the smoking sign, and the customer would stop immediately.
Then hopefully he could make a quick deal before Farouk noticed and came down to this end of the lot to sort him out.
This Merc might be just the ticket.
As the headlights flashed in his eyes, Thabo frantically toked on his thumb and forefinger, nodding knowingly into the light.
The car stopped so quickly it wasn’t even out of the road properly. That was enough to attract police attention already…
Thabo ran up to the driver’s-side window. “Ganja?” he and the client chorused with sublime synergy.
“What you got?” a man’s voice asked.
“Swazi bankies,” Thabo replied in his confident business voice.
“How much?”
“Sixty!” he quoted, betraying no emotion. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed people stirring under Farouk’s dealing tree.
“Okay,” came the order after a moment’s consideration. “Give me five.”
“That’s three hundred!” Thabo almost lost his composure.
“Fine. Just hurry up! I’m half in the road, here.”
“Sure-sure.” Thabo placated him as he leant in the window and took the three bills. “I’m here now.”
There was only one thing for it. He had to ask Farouk for stock.
He strode purposefully up to the three men approaching his end of the parking lot. They met right in the middle, near where the security guard sat dozing in his tiny pine hut.
“You?” came Farouk’s voice. “You selling at my post?”
“No, I’m bringing this guy to you,” was Thabo’s line. “I met him on Seventh street. He wants to buy four bags. How much is it?”
There was a beat of silence as Farouk made up his mind. And then…
“Fifty rand a bag.”
Thabo accompanied Farouk and his sidekick to an ivy bush behind the guard hut, where the henchman dug out a plastic shopping bag and produced four bank bags, bulging with weed.
Thabo handed over two hundreds, secreting the third in his sleeve.
“Enkos’”
As he trotted back to the Merc, the driver had his lights on and was already revving to go. He fished his personal bag of weed out of his crotch as he leant into the window for the last time and said simply, “Five”
The Merc was doing 80 up Third avenue by the time Thabo was upright. He immediately sprinted up the road behind him.
There would still be Soweto taxis leaving from Kingsway.

Van, Zarm and the hectic polarising of the metal scene

2009-01-14T00:27:00.001-08:00

Van was a weird oke, hey. He was a bully at school and he was a bully now.
But the style of bullying had changed, mainly because Van was no longer any bigger than his mates.
At school he’d developed quicker than the rest of his chinas. He played second team rugby when they were still jolling under-15s. He wasn’t bad either – played flank. Open side.
But now he was no bigger or tougher than anybody else, so he had to find a new way of imposing his will on society.
Then some time in about 2003 or so, he happened to go to a gig by Cyst, his mate Zarm’s band. Metal band – sort of in the Metallica style, with a bit of Mudvayne and a bit of Killswitch Engage in there.
Van went to a private party in a garage that some babe was throwing for her boyfriend. And he checked them there. Somehow, Van decided that Cyst were awesome and that with a decent management and a wider audience they could become huge.
At the time Zarm was managing Cyst as well as being frontman, writing the songs and designing flyers, so he allowed Van to take over as manager. He seemed lank into it, so ja. Why not?
It’s amazing how far bullying can get you. You and your band.
Within weeks Cyst had a gig supporting Pestroy and Bloodbath at Tempo’s. The next week they played the Blues Room. Then they made the Star’s Tonight supplement. A full-on feature on page three with a picture of the band!
And all because Van was such an unpleasant, persistent, badgering kind of oke who could hak and hak and hak people until they agreed to do whatever he said, just to get him off their back.
“Listen here,” he’d told Liesl, the reporter for The Star Tonight, “I’ve given you the band photos, you’ve done the interview… Now when’s the story coming out? Come on Liesl, don’t waste my time here. People need to know about Cyst.”
So Cyst started getting better gigs, more media exposure… they even made it onto a German new-music website.
And the weird thing was, the band started influencing him too. He started getting tattoos – a full-on shoulder patch on his left arm. This piece depicting an angel in flames on his back and these hardcore barbed-wire wristbands.
He even pierced the back of his neck and got some scarification done on his right bicep. Dude started looking pretty damn hardcore.
Then the Metallica tour came to town. Soon as he heard about it, Van got on the phone and hustled Cyst a support slot. The played first, just before Bloodbath, but still, jeez. They were supporting Metallica!
Then something odd started happening. Entertainment Live did an interview with Van about the Metallica gig, and how it was such a cool development for South African music. And Van forgot to mention Cyst’s name even once!
Cosmo did a feature on band managers and did a whole photo shoot, well a full-page bleed in colour of Van with his shirt off, showing off his tatts. And all the caption said was “Van, 27. Band Manager”
Van was becoming a bigger star than the band!
Then one evening after band practice, when they’d finished showing Van the songs they had ready for the album, he dropped a bombshell.
Van was leaving the band.
He’d had a listen to Bloodbath’s latest stuff and he felt that they had a lot more potential for the overseas metal market than Cyst had “at this stage”.
He was taking Bloodbath on a tour to play some festivals in Germany in May.
Zarm and Van got into a shoving match and Van ended up with a black eye from kopping the Mole’s bass amp when he tripped over the drum stool.
“What you gonna do,” he asked rhetorically, and a little flushed as he scrambled out of the jam room. “What? You can’t force me to manage you!”
He was right, of course. Tellingly, the first gig Zarm booked after Van left was at some dude’s surprise party for his babe after he proposed to her. It was in a garage.
Van and Zarm never spoke again, and there was this hectic schism in the metal scene after that. If you put on a metal gig, you either have Bloodbath or Cyst come play. Never both.
It was hectic.

The helmet, the sword and the hectic Clarens mission

2009-01-14T00:15:00.000-08:00

The hardest part of the whole project was getting the outfit down there. In the end Shaun decided to just bring the helmet and the chest thing he got from the costume shop. Then he managed to find a jersey at Edgars in this kind of metallic-grey wool. And a red skirt for large ladies. That would have to do.
He just barely managed to squeeze the items into his suitcase, which meant that he couldn’t bring any actual spare clothes, or Lorna would have suspected something. As it was, she tried to get him to open the case so she could put her vanity bag in there. He had to get all stroppy with her to make sure she didn’t actually open it.
He was like, “Why don’t you just put the vanity case in the boot? Why does it have to go in my bag? My bag’s full!”
So then they drove the whole way to Clarens in silence because she was sulking and he was so nervous. He kept running through the details, over and over, terrified he might forget something.
Eventually they got to Clarens and the mood lifted a little. They went for dinner at a restaurant on the square and she said, “To four years of us!”
Shaun said, “To the future,” and then immediately wondered if that was giving away too much. He ordered a second bottle of wine, because he somehow needed to ensure she slept through his early-morning wake-up and the mission to find the stables.
Mr Van Rensburg had assured him the stables were just off the square and well within walking distance of their B&B, but on their romantic pre-dinner walk, Shaun hadn’t seen anything even resembling stables. Oh well. Maybe they were a block back or something.
Assuming he managed to find the stables, the hardest part was going to be riding the bloody horse. Shaun hadn’t ridden since he’d gone pony riding at the Sani Pass hotel when he was eight.
And of course Lorna was a provincial showjumper, so she was going to be laughing her head off at him.
After the meal, Shaun talked her into going through to the bar for a nightcap. “Are you gonna try and take advantage of me?” she asked with a twinkle in her eye, and he was reminded why he was going through the whole rigmarole in the first place.
As they were making a final toast for the road, Shaun noticed a sword above the fireplace and made a mental note…
When Lorna awoke on Saturday morning, the bed was colder than usual. She lay for a couple of minutes waiting for Shaun to get back from the bathroom. But when he never returned, she went to go look for him.
She was shocked to find the bathroom empty. So she put on her jeans and a jersey and went into the B&B’s poky little dining room. No sign of him there either.
Then she heard a bit of a commotion in the street outside, and some kind of neighing sound. Right then the B&B lady came in the front door and said, “There’s someone outside who wants to see you.”
She cautiously poked her head around the door and there, surrounded by a dozen local kids, and a couple of nonplussed weekend-getaway types like themselves, was a knight on horseback! With a shiny chrome helmet, a metal breastplate and a proper sword in his scabbard! He seemed to be having difficulty staying on his steed.
When he saw her, he raised his visor and bellowed, “Hail, fair maiden! Well met!” He startled the horse and it almost threw him off.
Good God! It was Shaun!
“What the hell are you doing!” she screamed.
“I’m asking you to marry me,” he shouted back, so everyone on the street could hear. “I love you, Fair Maid Lorna. Can I be your knight in shining armour?”
Her jaw dropped open and she just stood there, in her jeans and her woolly jumper, with half of Clarens staring at her. Of course it was yes!
A cheer went up when she said it, and the B&B lady hugged her, because Shaun couldn’t get down. Then they helped her up onto the horse and led them around the square, with all the people having breakfast at the pavement cafes applauding.
And whenever they clopped past a new table of diners he’d lean down and tell them, “She’s agreed to marry me, you know!”

Butch Varnes gets his big break in soapies

2009-01-14T00:05:00.000-08:00

Since the demise of Wiaan Nortje as main bad guy on Metropole, SA’s fourth most-watched soapie, things had been up in the air.
After a series of drug and alcohol problems and a couple of no-shows, he had improbably hit the jackpot at Gold Reef City and promptly resigned.
Since then the show had been drifting.
Viewers need someone to hate. And you can’t retread a goodie as a baddie, they won’t buy that. The show needed a proper, card-carrying, scary, malevolent presence to put the fear of God into the fans.
Hence this morning’s auditions. The Metropole producers were looking for the evilest person in South Africa.
And Butch Varnes, 106kg personal trainer and recent Shakespeare convert meant to get that role. This time wasn’t going to end like his last audition, when he’d been tricked into leaving the ad agency premises in a green thong.
This time he’d been bench pressing a hundred just before he came, and he got into a shoving match with a mime in the car park on purpose. Just to get into character.
Yesterday he bribed a security guard at a parking lot in Sandton.
He was feeling well evil today.
In fact, his mood probably matched the looming threat the Metropole casting agents were looking for better than any of the other candidates. His gym client and prospective colleague Gillian Bogle had schooled him well: “You must be insane,” she’d said. “But you mustn’t realise you’re insane.”
What made it difficult for Butch was his decision to partake of the hottest substance known to supermarket cuisine before entering the audition room. His impulse purchase of Tabasco red with his usual lunchtime Yogi Sip looked like being his undoing.
The idea was to down a savage, half-bottle shot of Tabasco before entering the audition chamber, in order to get his bile up and generate a blazing storm of anger behind his normally docile eyes.
“I’m too dumb-looking,” Butch had complained to Gillian earlier.
As planned, he had whipped the bottle from his pocket as he walked up the passage toward the office at Afterglow Productions, where he would meet with Destiny.
He’d taken an almighty swig from the bottle as he paused outside the doorway, then popped it back in his pocket and strode into the performance space, script at the ready, oozing pure evil.
Unfortunately, he had not replaced the tiny Tabasco cap properly. So Butch’s vitriolic, seething reading was accompanied by the sensation of red pepper sauce oozing from the pocket of his workout pants into his crotch area.
“Jane, if you so much as move from that seat,” he growled a little way through. “I take no responsibility for the consequences.” After that, Butch just couldn’t help himself. He dropped his script, grabbed his crotch and squeezed. Hard.
He was in blazing agony. But he refused to break down. He grabbed his crotch harder and stared the casting director down as his face turned purple and he broke out into a sweat.
She seemed startled. In fact, she reeled back in her chair.
“I take no responsibility… for the consequences,” Butch repeated and advanced on the poor woman, walking being the only way he could think of to alleviate the fire in his nether regions.
His hand left his crotch momentarily to wipe the sweat out of his eyes and, oh no! He had Tabasco on the surface of his right eyeball!
By this time he was right at the poor woman’s table, tears streaming down his face. Splashing onto her script.
Through the tears, he caught sight of his next line, upside down.
“Baby. Baby! Don’t go out tonight. I won’t have it. If you only knew what that does to me!”
“Oh,” Butch sobbed. He could take it no longer. He threw his arms around the casting director and wailed like child. He squeezed her perhaps a bit too tightly, for she gasped a little.
He was an enormous, strong man, hugging her tightly and sobbing wildly, like anything could happen. It was a rather terrifying situation.
But Nkosinathi Nkayi, for that was the casting director’s name, Nkosinathi Nkayi found herself patting Butch Varnes’s enormous back and consoling him.
She sniffed back a tear of her own, shushed his terrified, sobs and assured him, “okay my baby. Okay. I promise. I won’t go out tonight.”
Even though that’s not what it said on the script at all.

Two purple drops of mortality in Meldene

2009-01-14T00:00:00.000-08:00

Bibi nervously fingered the hem of her dress as Gabe steered the Saab into the parking lot behind the Meldene Medicross.
They’d been going out for five months, so he was right. It was probably time. But still, why’d it have to be today, on such a lovely Saturday morning, when they could be doing something carefree, like lunching at Zoo Lake?
She ran through her mental list of high-risk behaviours since her last test. That first one-night stand after she’d broken up with Jodie. What was that guy’s name anyway? The German guy she’d met at Xai-Xai.
That would have to be the first one. Then, of course a month after that she’d had a “maybe we should get back together” one-night stand with Jodie. That would have to count as risky…Even though they hadn’t actually done it. What was the rule anyway, did oral count?
As he turned off the ignition and they sat silently for a second in the Meldene parking lot, Gabriel was doing his own mental audit. There was that month or so that he’d gone out with that psycho babe Tracy. He really should have got a test after that scene.
The other girls had been kiss-and-cuddle, slap-and-tickle kind of times. No risk behaviour there. But that Tracy was a worry. That girl worked as a dancer! That could mean big trouble.
At least he’d been keeping it tidy with Bibi so far. He’d probably be able to handle finding out that he had it, but he wasn’t sure he could handle the guilt of knowing he’d given it to her.
She was such a sweet girl.
Nineteen partners, thought Bibi. Was 19 a lot for a 24-year-old woman? At least she’d calmed down since the wild days at nursing college. Shoo, those were crazy days.
She’d tested negative the two times she’d been tested, but she’d never done it properly: the whole get tested, then come back after the three-month window period for another test, having stayed with the same partner. Getting tested that often was too scary.
As they passed the car guard on the way into the clinic, Gabe found himself making full eye contact and asking, “Watch the car for me, my brother?” a lot more sincerely than he normally did.
Then he immediately felt guilty. He was only doing it for good karma.
In Dr Le Roux’s surgery they were each presented with what looked like pregnancy test kits.
“I’ll add the purple liquid,” explained the doctor. “One line will appear, which means it’s working properly. If it’s a negative result, within five minutes, a second line will appear.”
“Now, who wants to go first?”
“I will,” said Gabriel bravely, then watched as Dr Le Roux added the catalyst. As promised, one purple line appeared, then time stood still as the dye moved into the indicator strip.
The doc did Bibi’s drop and the same thing happened.
Gabe grabbed her hand.
He saw what looked like a second line on his test. The doc reached over and had a look.
“Negative,” he said.
Praise the lord, thought Gabriel, then had another pang of guilt. Had it been rude of him to go first? What if she was positive? Would he stay with her? And if he did, would it be for love, or for guilt? Were you expected to stay together? It had only been five months, after all.
The doctor reached across to Bibi’s test and checked it.
“Negative,” he said.
“Oh, baby,” she said, and they stood and embraced.
Back in the Meldene parking lot, he squeezed her hand and tipped the car guard five bucks.
“Let’s go for lunch at Zoo Lake,” she suggested. It was still a beautiful day.
As they turned into Main Road, she couldn’t help asking., “Would you have broken up with me if I was positive?”
“Probably,” he found himself saying. “Would you have stayed with me?”
“I think so, baby,” she said. “I’m not sure.”
The sun went behind a cloud for an instant, and he considered starting an argument. His nerves were still on edge. Why wasn’t she sure?
But he just patted her thigh and gave a little laugh.
He was famished, drained and dying for a dop. It had been a tiring morning. Still, he mused. If things worked out, they’d never have to go through this again.

The guy is cast: a morning at Amazing Faces

2009-01-13T23:37:00.000-08:00

Butch could almost taste this part. It was made for him. His agent had explained that it was a TV advert that called for a man in his underwear. And if anyone looked good in his underwear, it was Butch.
Two hours of gym, five days a week gives you a body that will do any kind of undies justice, especially the shiny green competition briefs he liked to wear in the Open Men’s division of SA Bodybuilding events.
Butch needed a break into TV. He’d been in a magazine ad for a Verimark exercise machine and he was Mr Eastgate Shopping Centre in 1998. But he was still looking for the opportunity that would introduce him to the viewers of South Africa, and maybe catch the eye of more casting directors in the industry.
So he’d taken the day off from the Sandton Personal Training Gym to come to the offices of Amazing Faces in Greenside. After two hours of waiting, Butch was 17th in the queue and he could see the audition room from where he sat slumped on the floor of the passage.
The other guys at the audition were the usual mix of students, fallen soap stars, the unemployed and part-time models. He recognised a couple of them from the gym. But he knew what their bodies looked like, and he knew he could have most of those okes for breakfast.
No worries there. The main issue was going to be impressing the casting guy with his acting skills. But he had been working on that. He was actually reading a Penguin edition of The Merry Wives Of Windsor to brush up on his improv – and just to make a good impression on the Amazing Faces staff.
Eventually his time came. A hot blonde in a black slacksuit came out with a clipboard and announced, “Butch Varnes!” with a meaningful look at him.
Butch peeled himself off the carpet, smoothed down his slacks, cleared his throat and went into the audition room.
There he found a video camera perched on a tripod, aimed against a beige background screen, which had been put up on the wall three metres away. Behind the camera stood a guy with a scruffy hairdo like the people in Oasis and a sheaf of laser printouts.
“Right… Butch,” he said, before looking up. And then… “Oh.”
Butch made his way to the screen, engaged his camera face and pointed it at the camera.
“Oh, look, ah… Butch,” the casting guy said. “I’m sorry. Someone should have told you already. But you’re really not the kind of guy we’re looking for for this part.”
“What’you mean. I’ve been waiting for three hours!”
“Ja, I’m sorry about that. It’s just, we’re looking for a skinny guy. You’re far too… You’re too big. We need a guy who looks funny in his underwear. You’ll just look like a bodybuilder.”
“But I can act. Why don’t you just give me a chance? What are the lines?”
“There are no lines. It’s just about a guy who forgets to get dressed in the morning and goes to work in his undies. He’s just gotta walk down the road, get in a lift, and go sit at his desk in his guds, without smiling once. It’s to advertise some debit-order service. For forgetful people.”
“I can do that. I know I can.” Butch could feel the tears coming.
“Just give us a chance, man.”
“No really, I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Listen, oke” The red mist rose, and the next thing he knew, Butch had the casting agent up against the wall of his office by the scruff of his neck. “I’ve waited all morning to show you what I’ve got, now give me a bloody chance, eksê!”
There was a moment of silence, then an awkward squeak from the casting director. “Okay. Show me what you’ve got.”
This was how Butch came to find himself standing in Barry Hertzog Avenue in his bright-green competition briefs, and straining to keep a straight face. As he reached the pavement, he sensed that the director was no longer following him with the camera. Butch was like that – he had natural camera sense.
He turned around just in time for the security gate to slam shut in his face. Two beats later his clothing was thrown over the wall.
“Don’t call us,” he heard the casting director call out from within the compound. “We’ll call you”

Drama, cops and body odour on the Metropole set

2009-01-13T23:25:00.000-08:00

It had been a hell of a weekend for Wiaan Nortje, and you could tell. His face had that puffy, pink texture, like a bundle of women’s tennis socks, thought Gillian as she watched him sheepishly sipping his morning coffee and avoiding eye contact.
Of course it had been another big weekend, but Wiaan barely remembered it.
He knew it had kicked off in Sandton at Taboo, where the plebs pay R100 a head to get in, but Jozi’s soap stars are ushered through to private booths like royalty. And it had ended last night at Comedy Underground at Cool Runnings.
Wiaan’s increasingly dire Monday-morning appearances would have cost him his job a long time ago were he not the resident hunk on Metropole, fourth most popular soapie on SA TV.
It also didn’t hurt that he played drug-addled ad exec Rivers Jordaan and was required to look wild eyed and puffy-faced. It certainly made the make-up girl’s job easier.
At 25, Wiaan also fell comfortably into the age range the Metropole producers had deemed ideal for their cast members.
So while Gillian Bogle gymmed and jogged herself to distraction trying to stave off her impending 30s, all Wiaan Nortje had to do was show up wasted.
Still, he wondered, what happened to Saturday?
He must have gone home with one of those models from Taboo, but where would he have watched the rugby? Either the Jolly Roger or the Baron in Chislehurston. Ri-i-i-ight! That was it. It was starting to come back now.
It was only Oz versus New Zealand, so he and his mates Carlo the accountant and Max the model had got a table with a perfect view of the big screen.
The Kiwis won and the next thing Wiaan can remember it was late and they were still there.
Meanwhile, downstairs in the reception of Afterglow Productions, where Metropole was being shot, Detective Thami Jola was getting directions to the soapie studio.
He was starting the week with a celebrity arrest. He didn’t anticipate trouble. Even if he kicked up a fuss, he had the technique to ensure the guy came quietly.
And he’d have a cool story to tell his wife.. “Guess who I arrested today? Rivers Jordaan from Metropole!”
He would be her hero. Now he just needed to find the studio and execute the actual arrest. Stage 2. Here on the first floor…
On Stage 2, Gillian Bogle was bracing herself for her scene with Wiaan. The merciful acting angels had ensured it was not a love scene. But her character, Jane Roper, was supposed to give Rivers a kiss hello when he arrived for their lunch date. That was bad enough.
As he popped a breath mint and cleared his throat, Wiaan wondered what had happened to Saturday night. There was something dark there. He had an image from the Oxford Road Select. Something had happened there. Jeez, they’d been wasted.
“And… action,” came the director’s cue.
As Detective Jola reached the door, the red “Taping” light went on, and he waited politely. When it went out, he knocked softly on the door and was ushered into the studio by a girl with unkempt blonde dreadlocks, a headset and a clipboard.
She made a silent “Shhhh” sign and closed the door. Detective Jola got to watch his suspect complete his last scene as a free man. It was some kind of domestic spat.
“Look, Rivers,” fretted Jane intensely, “If you can’t control your habit, I don’t think we can keep seeing each other.”
“Baby I’m trying,” grimaced Rivers Jordaan. “I’m trying. And I need you now more than ever.”
And they embraced, both sobbing.
“Cut!”
Wiaan got up and went for a drink of water. He was starting to sweat. But he was intercepted on the way to the water cooler.
“Wiaan Nortje?”
“Ja.”
“I’m Detective Jola. Bramley police. You’re under arrest for shoplifting. You were identified from security footage from the Illovo Select.”
The colour drained from Wiaan’s face. And then it all came back to him. The drunkenness, the tomfoolery. Max had created a diversion at the Select, and him and Carlo had helped themselves to ice-creams and run out. Oh! What idiots. And of course they’d recognise him from security footage. He was the fourth-biggest heartthrob on TV.
As Detective Jola cuffed him and led him shamefully out of Afterglow Productions, Wiaan remembered where those King Cones were right now. Under the driver’s seat of his Renault. Melting.

A brush with fame at the Sandton Personal Training Gym

2009-01-13T23:15:00.000-08:00

The Sandton Private Personal Training Gym is open from 6am till 9pm and offers a sanctuary from prying, celebrity-obsessed eyes for Johannesburg’s stars of stage, screen and sports field. It allows continuity announcers, soap villains, pop-rock vocalists and Golden Lions flyhalves the chance to ensure they look good in the public eye without actually being in the public eye.
So the Sandton Private Personal Training Gym allows Gillian Bogle to execute her 75 daily chest flies on the pec deck in a semblance of privacy, so she can stave off the inevitability of her mid-thirties boob job for another year.
Only a semblance of privacy, because the staff of the Sandton Private Personal Training Gym are not immune to bouts of starry-eyed stalkerism.
Take Butch. Here he is, stood in front of his client, the marketing manager for Fiat Auto South Africa, as he feels the burn on the leg-extension machine. “Seven… eight… nine… ten. Now hold the last one. Hold it… Okay, let’s move to the hamstring machine.”
Vacant as you please. But all the while just about popping an eyeball muscle as he strains to keep an eye on Gillian Bogle on the pec deck to his right.
Having a job that requires him to count to ten all day, every day, has Butch permanently in a state of self-hypnosis. But he’s not in such a deep trance that he can’t keep tabs on his favourite soap star of them all.
“Eight… nine… ten. Okay, let’s move.”
Gillian can feel the guy’s eyes. After five years on Metropole, she’s developed stalker radar. She can feel the eyes through the back of her head. She can smell a paparazzi camera at 30 metres. Being caught a couple of times in heat magazine stuffing a cream scone into your mouth, or pulling your panties out your arse will teach you that.
Meanwhile, in between the ten counts, Butch is getting his lines straight. “Hello. Ms Bogle? I’m Butch, I love your work on Metropole. I watch it every day. I’m also a bit of an actor myself, and I’ve written a screenplay. I’ve got it here in my gym bag, if you’d be interesting in having a read of it, I’d be thrilled to know what you think.”
That should probably do it. Now he just needs to choose a suitable moment, when she isn’t sweating too much, so he doesn’t embarrass her.
“Eight… nine… ten. Okay, let’s move to the squats machine.”
Her make-up is starting to run, so Gillian will have to make the arm curls her last exercise of the morning. And the massive black guy staring at her from across the gym is starting to freak her out too. Pretty soon he’s going to approach her.
She’s noticed him doing it before. And it would be fine, but sweaty in the gym is just not the state she prefers to conduct her gracious fan relations in.
As luck would have it, the clock clicks 11 just as Butch’s client completes his tenth squat. “Okay, thanks” he finds himself blurting out. “Go-do-your-warmdown-hit-showers-and-I’ll-see-you-next-week.”
A second later, he is striding across the stretching area towards Gillian Bogle. This time he is going to do it.
But she is heading for the change rooms already. Butch gives a little skip of acceleration and coughs, “Er, Ms Bogle. Hi there!”
But she pretends not to hear him. She is three metres away, and he is almost shouting, and she doesn’t even react. Just scurries into the ladies change room like she is trying to escape.
Even Schalk, the other trainer, hears him from across the gym. He is laughing at Butch. Gillian Bogle has made a fool of him. And all he wanted was five minutes of her time.
Maybe he can intercept her on her way out if he just lurks by the juice bar…
But just as Butch’s brief window of opportunity opens, it is rudely slammed shut.
“Ms Bogle,” he restarts his spiel… But just then, Chad Wilkins, presenter of Rukker on KykNet arrives at the gym.
“Excuse me,” says Gillian, and touches him on the wrist. “I just wanna speak to my friend.”
Then they both go outside the gym to chat. And Butch is left inside. He doesn’t get another chance. After that she gets into her Z3 and leaves.
What a bitch!
Butch grimaces at the insult. And growls a little, caressing his wrist where Gillian Bogle has touched him.

Inspiration, you mysterious emissary from the gloom

2009-01-13T23:09:00.001-08:00

Butch couldn’t concentrate. He could hear them talking and laughing. The Drain People.
Gillian had got him onto reading Measure For Measure now, but he kept losing his place. How was he going to improve his acting skills when he couldn’t get through a single one of the Duke’s soliliquies without the muffled voices from the drain throwing him off?
They were near enough to be audible, just far enough away so you couldn’t make out what they were saying. Just muffled voices, sporadic laughter and loud cracks every now and then when they broke more wood for their brazier – branches torn down from the trees overhanging the drains.
And Shakespeare’s hectic. The oke writes in this intense dialect, so you have to read everything twice. You need to concentrate lank.
As far as Butch could tell, the play was about this babe who wants to get her brother off being executed. So she goes to the oke in charge, and he says he’ll only spare her boet if she pomps him. Hectic issues, hey.
Deep inside Butch something stirred.
He was swotting up on Shakespeare for his acting class with soap star Gillian Bogle. And the only reason she was training him was because he’d helped her lose five kilos and saved her acting career.
Was that a Measure For Measure kind of deal? Mmmm.
As he was scheming, Butch put his fingers to his chin and realised with a start that he looked intellectual. He immediately got up and went to his full-length mirror. He struck the same pose.
He definitely looked intellectual. No doubt about it. Then there was an angry crack of splintering firewood from the direction of the drain and his face looked startled, then annoyed. He hated that look.
That was the crack that broke the camel’s back. Butch pulled on a pair of muscle pants – he was reading Shakespeare in his underpants. He turned off the porn movie on the DVD player and waddled out into the yard, where it backed onto the drainage ditch.
As he got to the back fence, his anger melted away, to be replaced by an emotion he hadn’t felt in years: fear. Butch Varnes, all 108kg of him, realised with a start that he was afraid of The Drain People.
His breath and his pulse quickened, his fingers gripped the rusted fence of his backyard and he froze. He knew he had not the courage to confront the mysterious denizens of the night who so polluted his nocturnal thoughts.
So he kept his peace and grasped, besides the fence, a new tool of interaction: he listened. What he heard was sweet water to the arid garden of his wrestler’s mind.
“So now she sits in jail,” a voice said from the darkness. “And just because she was standing by the robot. The other time she was arrested for standing outside a shop and they called it loitering.”
“It’s wrong, that,” came another voice. “Where do they think must she now stand?”
“Exackle! So now she’s in jail for begging and all she was doing was standing by the robot like a normal person. And you know mos we haven’t got a bail. Who’s got hundred rand for that?”
“That’s right! If we had hundred rand, we could go and sit in the Steers with the larnies. But if you haven’t got, of course you must stand on the street.”
The crack of fresh kindling again cleaved the gloom. Like emissaries to the heavens, sparks rose from the ditch’s darkness.
“Where do they now think we must stand? Must we hide in the drain all day as well? Pass me some of that…”
“Ja. And then where must we go in summer when the rains come?”
“No. This city doesn’t want poor people. It’s wrong when you can sommer go to jail just for being poor.”
“Ja. I’m gatvol of Jo’burg. When winter’s over I’m going back to Lambert’s Bay. It’s good there. At least you can fish. And they don’t put you in jail when you not even drunk!”
Laughter lit the gloom, and Butch Varnes reeled.
Like he’d been slapped across his pate, Butch reeled backwards into his arid garden. Then, like the disguised Duke bearing news of salvation to sad Isabella. He hurried back to his tortured room.
But the complex, riddling volume lay unread. Butch Varnes turned on his laptop and began to write! With fingers lit to life by real life’s inspiration, Butch Varnes began to write!

Shaun and Lorna’s big day approaches

2009-01-13T22:53:00.000-08:00

When the stripper removed his shirt and began playing with his nipples, that was when Shaun knew he wasn’t drunk enough. Nowhere near it.
These kinds of things are supposed to happen in an anaesthetic haze of drunkenness that you barely remember the morning after. Everyone’s supposed to be falling-over, shambolically wasted, bellowing and hooting. This just wasn’t right.
Shaun himself couldn’t have had more than three beers and a tequila by the time the strip show started. Four drinks in two hours! He was just about legal to drive!
Now here was this woman, Colette from Executive Entertainment, rubbing her boobs in his face and he was experiencing it all in crystal clarity. No one had even thought of dimming the lights in Julian’s lounge, so Shaun could see every bulge of her cellulite as she bent over in front of him in her lime-green G-string.
Grief! A dead-sober nudie show! How awful. Whose idea was this anyway? Shaun blamed Lorna’s brother Eric. He was just the kind of sexually frustrated, closet case who would arrange something like this. It had either been him or Chris from that band with the weird name. Blow. What kind of name is that anyway? Blow what?
At last someone started hooting half-heartedly from across the room. Almost to be polite, as a professional courtesy to the stripper. Shaun looked across the lounge and it was Tshepo from that TV show. Great, now there were celebs watching him get stripped naked by a dancing girl. And Shaun hardly knew Tshepo anyway. Who invited him to his bachelor’s?
Colette produced a pink feather boa and strung it around Shaun’s neck, this time eliciting some pretty much sincere laughter from the dozen-odd okes in the lounge. She gently tied him to the chair back with it and then…
Then she got out this massive pair of granny’s bloomers and put them on his head. He couldn’t see after that, but he was conscious of her pouring some kind of sticky lotion on his chest. It smelt a little like baby oil, but there was something else mixed in with it.
Shaun heard her digging around in her bag behind him. Then she came back, and the laughter got louder.
Inside the bloomers, he closed his eyes and waited for it to be over. But it wasn’t going to be that easy. Now she was whipping him with some object. It felt floppy and rubbery. Shaun hoped it was a rubber chicken and not something worse…
He sat unmolested for a couple of minutes, then she placed something delicate on his head and something else in his hand. There was a final round of whistling and applause. It appeared the strip show was over.
“Thanks, guys. You were great,” Collette called out. He heard her ejecting her CD from the hi-fi and then Jules went and let her out the front door.
Sean was left holding this greasy rubber object, alone in Julian’s lounge with a pair of granny panties and something mysterious on his head.
The laughter reached a new crescendo after Colette had left and then someone whipped the bloomers off his head. Shaun blinked in the far-too-bright lounge light and looked down at himself.
He was topless, covered in a mixture of honey and baby oil, bound to the chair with a pink feather boa and in his left hand he held a floppy rubber cricket bat. Someone had placed a cricket helmet between his legs. Off to the side was a cricket box. It looked like it might even be his. That was probably what she’d put on his head.
“Well done, boet,” David shouted. “This one was for the Titans!”
No one knew yet that Shaun hadn’t been signed for next season. Still, it was a nice thought.
“Sheez, you guys,” was all he could think of to say as he shrugged the boa off him and stood up. “Who’s got a beer for me? I’m spitting feathers here.”
He took the Castle from Jules, then stripped naked and walked out to the pool to have a swim and wash the gunk off.
At least the worst was over. By this time next week they’d be married. He’d have his lovely Lorna by his side and they’d be listening to speeches at the reception.
Then, then it would all be over and done with.
Shaun stood in the shallow end, carefully picking honey out of his chest hairs and sighed. The things you do for love.

Lorna, the skelm and the pregnancy-test result strip

2009-01-12T03:12:00.000-08:00

No one knew that Chris the bass player was Lorna’s ex. They’d had a fling at varsity that had somehow dragged on into one of those sporadic relationships that lasted for years.
If Lorna was honest with herself, Chris wasn’t really her ex. To be someone’s ex you need to have officially been boyfriend and girlfriend first. He was her skelm.
Shaun knew about him too, but as far as he knew, she and Chris were just old varsity mates. That’s why Chris was able to pop round any time of the day or night, just to hang out. To keep her company when Shaun was away on cricket tour. He’d bring around a six-pack and they’d watch Shaun’s Pro-20 game on TV, then one thing would lead to another…
Lorna and Shaun had even gone around to watch a couple of Chris’s gigs at the Roxy.
She felt terrible about it, but it was difficult to put a stop to. It didn’t help that Chris was so damn sexy. Those sinewy bass-player’s arms. And those tattoos. Hopefully Lorna’s impending wedding would discourage Chris. His new girlfriend might put him off too. Beth or whatever her name was. All Lorna wanted was a well-behaved marriage.
Now Shaun had gone and invited Chris to do the music for the wedding. Perfect. As if she wasn’t nervous enough. She looked like a peacock with these ridiculous extensions Theo the hairdresser had stuck on her head, she’d erroneously outed her brother as being gay and now her skelm was coming to DJ at her wedding.
Great.
And she was late with her period.
That was why she now found herself sitting on the edge of her bath, with a glass of her warm urine cooling by the basin, and eyeing the instructions leaflet of the pregnancy test kit.
Right. She had to dip the strip, no deeper than 0,5cm, and hold it there for five seconds. Then she would have to wait at least three minutes. Either one or two lines would appear on the test strip. One in the control zone, and then perhaps another in the results zone of the strip. Two lines would mean she was pregnant, one line and she wasn’t.
“The tests are 99% accurate when used to instructions and conform with pharmacy brand technology and performance standards,” read the leaflet.
Lorna pictured the out comes of a positive result. Say now she was pregnant. Did she know whose child it was?
The answer to that would have to be… Shaun’s. Probably. The last time with Chris would have been the Wednesday before the trip to Clarens when Shaun had proposed. Oh the shame of it!
So if that was three weeks ago, and she was only a week late with her period… Lorna read the fine print on the label: “The kit works by testing for the HCG hormone released when the fertilised egg implants in the lining of the uterus. Implant occurs 6-12 days after conception.”
Lorna was starting to get a headache. She wished she’d paid more attention during biology. “The best time to test is at nine or ten days after ovulation.”
Okay, so if she was ovulating two weeks after the first day of her period the month before, then she was definitely within the reliable-reading period.
So all that was left to do was stick the strip in the glass of wee.
Lorna stood up and carefully lowered the strip into the glass to the depth of the stop line. She was so going to throw this glass away when she was finished with it.
After five seconds she sat back down on the edge of the bath. Three more minutes and then she would know. Then she would decide what to do next. She absolutely refused to speculate on any further possibilities or ramifications until she knew whether she was pregnant or not.
For the next… two and a half minutes she would not have to worry about babies and fathers and DNA tests and breaking the news and before-or-after-the-wedding issues. She would just sit here on the edge of the bath and watch the chemicals coalesce on the test strip and feel the morning sun poor through the window.
If she ended up being pregnant… The funny thing was, the whole process of conception couldn’t have taken longer than three minutes either.

A fugitive on the run from the whole of Jo’burg

2009-01-12T03:07:00.001-08:00

The most successful radio promotion in Jo’burg history is Highveld 94.7’s The Fugitive. Every day, during the months of August and September, listeners stand the chance of winning tens of thousands of rands if they can physically track down the person posing as the Fugitive from clues provided on Highveld.
During the months of the competition, the pages of The Citizen regularly carry pics of thrilled listeners above captions like, “Hillary Deemter won R75 000 when she tracked down the fugitive at Vodaworld in Midrand yesterday.”
It is quite a phenomenon. Office workers are known to desert their posts to go screaming across town to apprehend “The Fugee” when they think they’ve cracked Highveld’s cryptic clues.
One can also unwittingly find yourself in the vicinity of the Fugitive, and be asked repeatedly, “Are you the Fugitive?” It can be quite confusing for someone who doesn’t know what it’s all about.
Wiaan Nortje knew exactly what the Fugitive promotion was all about. So he should have known better than to show up at Gold Reef City in a black leather overcoat. Especially seeing as he’d been listening to Highveld on the way down to the casino.
The writers at Afterglow, who produce the Metropole soapie on which he was employed as an actor, had been neglecting his character lately. This could be because he kept showing up half-drunk, and possibly because the police came to arrest him on set last month.
Whatever the reason, his past few weeks’ scripts had been full of incidental, “Howzit boet”s and meaningless backslapping, with no sign of a decent plot development for his character, drug-addled ad exec Rivers Jordaan.
Today had been the last straw. All he’d been called upon to do was make up the crowd in the bar when a couple of the other characters got into a shoving match. He hadn’t even needed to be there.
So he’d bunked the soapie and come gambling at Gold Reef City. Bugger it. No one would even notice he wasn’t there.
“Where money is everywhere, but usually just virtual, there you will find me – and my presence won’t be just spiritual!”
That was the cryptic clue to finding the Fugitive today.
And that was the reason excited punters were tugging on his sleeve every three minutes, as Wiaan tried to concentrate on his gaming machine.
“Hey! Rivers Jordaan. Are you The Fugitive?”
“Er, howzit. No, no. I’m not the Fugitive. Nice meeting you, though.”
Bollocks. Bladdy fans. And of course he looked exactly like the bladdy Fugitive too. Great.
Wiaan retreated into the bar and got himself a beer. He noticed photographers at large, roaming around the gaming area. They looked ready to instantly snap whatever lucky person managed to find the Fugitive for tomorrow’s Citizen. Sheez, he realised, he’d have to keep a low profile. If management were to find out there was a celebrity on the premises, he could find himself roped into presenting the cheque! Then he would be well and truly busted by his bosses.
Wiaan took his beer deep into the pit and found a fairly sheltered gaming position under the Fountain of Fortune.
“Hey, skattie! Look, it’s Rivers Jordaan,” he heard someone whispering behind him. That was fine, as long as they didn’t approach him.
He pulled up his collar and hunched over his machine, awkwardly aware that this just made him look even more fugitive-like.
Out of the corner of his eye, Wiaan noticed a scruffy bearded man in a grey sports jacket and an anonymous baseball cap. “Now that’s what I’d expect the Fugitive to look like, he thought to himself.”
For a millisecond he contemplated going over and apprehending the oke. Seventy-five grand is seventy-five grand, after all. But then he thought better of it. Let some other oke get bust for bunking work.
Low-key money wasting was the name of today’s game.
Wiaan pushed the play button on his machine for only about the fifth time that morning and sirens went off. The Fountain of Fortune lit up like a fireworks display and an explosion of neon turned heads the length and breadth of the pit.
Photographers came running from everywhere.
A pit boss in a Gold Reef City blazer came jogging up to shake hands. “Congrats, you’ve won R100 000. We knew the Fountain was going to blow some time today. Now let’s just get a photo of you for the Citizen.”
Wiaan was so bust. In for a penny, he thought, and tapped the bearded man on the should. “Excuse me, are you the Fugitive?”

How to make a helluva scene at a wedding

2009-01-12T02:56:00.001-08:00

As the first of the guests began arriving at the reception, Chris put on some Mike And The Mechanics and started dopping. This was going to be a difficult wedding.
Beth had come as his date. But he wasn’t going to be much of a squire tonight, seeing as he’d be DJing the whole time.
He dropped Lou Bega’s Mambo Number Nine into the CD tray next. Might as well get that one out of the way. By the time Shaun and Lorna arrived – the bridal couple – Chris was on his third Label and Achy Breaky Heart was on the decks.
He was surprised how much seeing Lorna affected him. Not just seeing her, seeing her married. Just knowing she was totally off the market. It hit him right in the heart.
Meanwhile she’d told him only three weeks ago that Shaun couldn’t satisfy her the way he could. She’d said their bodies were made to fit together, but that emotionally, she had to marry Shaun.
So what was he, chopped liver? He was the skelm lover of the bride, and here he was spinning bladdy Billy Ocean tunes at her wedding. It was so wrong.
By the time the speeches were over, Chris had upgraded to whisky and Beth was already ignoring him.
To add insult to injury, he had to play the bridal waltz for the guy who had stolen the only girl he’d ever loved. It was One Love by Bob Marley. Supreme irony, when Lorna had two loves in that room alone.
Chris sommer bumped the CD player on purpose, he was feeling so jealous. Then he played Boogie Wonderland and everyone surged onto the dancefloor. He went outside for some air. So to speak.
When Lorna came outside she found Chris smoking a ready-rolled on the Jo’burg Country Club’s cricket field.
“You must be finding this a bit weird,” she said.
“You know then,” he exhaled, offering a drag.
“No thanks,” she said. “Thanks for playing, hey. It means a lot that you came. And I suppose I might as well tell you now. I’m pregnant.”
“What!”
“Ja. I just found out two days ago.”
“Congratulations, I guess.”
There was a beat before he continued.
“So do you know whose baby it is?”
“It’s Shaun’s definitely. Shaun’s baby. I had a test.”
“So…” said Chris.
“Ja,” confirmed Lorna. “So I think we better cool it from now on.”
“Ay, whatever,” exhaled Chris abruptly. “I gotta get back to the decks.”
Lorna was left alone with her thoughts and her baby on the cricket field.
A test! How could he have believed that? How could he believe she would have had a paternity test already? She had no idea who the father was, and Chris knew that too. But he seemed a little to eager to believer her fib about the test.
So it was just as well she was staying with Shaun. Her and Shaun would raise the child as their own. And there was no need for anybody to know any different. Chris seemed pretty drunk for this early… The music types were always so volatile.
Lorna picked up his discarded spliff, had a puff and went back inside. This was her big night and she was going to make the most of it. She was going to be throwing the garter soon.
She heard someone bellowing over the mic. That was probably the best man announcing it.
But when she got back to the function room, it was in dead silence. All that moved were the mirror ball’s rotating splashes of light. The music was off and Chris was standing behind the DJ box with the mic in his hand and a glazed look on his face.
As she entered the room, every head turned. Everyone looked ashen. What the hell had he said?
“And here she comes now,” Chris slurred. “The best shag in Jo’burg.”
That was when Shaun reached the DJ box and felled Chris with a neat right cross. Kwah! He crumpled to the floor and as he did, Shaun grabbed the mic. There was a ripple of applause.
“He might have been shagging her for ten years, but I’m the one she fell in love with,” Shaun said, and a cheer went up! “Now let’s throw the garter!”
Lorna shrieked and climbed onto the nearest chair as Shaun came over. He winked, then began digging around under her dress. This was the kind of man she wanted to have kids with.

Operation Pink Freedom: A narrow celebrity escape

2009-01-12T02:50:00.000-08:00

As any reader of the celebrity mags would know, there were two hunks vying for the affections of Metropole soap star Gillian Bogle. In a choice women have been faced with since the oldest times, Gill found herself torn between a bad boy and squeaky-clean smoothie.
There was her rugged, recently arrested leading man, Wiaan Nortje, with his puffy face, brandified body odour and easy wit. Then there was clean-cut Kyknet presenter Chad Wilkins with his chiselled cheekbones and gymnast’s physique, sadly offset by the fact that he had the sense of humour of a gym locker.
And as fate would have it, they were both in the queue at Taboo tonight, which presented problems for Gillian Bogle. The only one who seemed to notice this was Butch Varnes, head bouncer on the cooking Friday night where all three had somehow found their way to Taboo.
It was a time for diplomacy.
Butch left the queue and popped back to the VIP section, where Gillian was having her third cosmopolitan of the evening. “Evening, Ms Bogle,” the bouncer’s headset always made him more formal. “We’ve got Mr Nortje and Mr Wilkins in the queue outside. Should I show them through to your table?”
Gillian did a double-take and promptly spilt her cosmopolitan’s sticky pinkness all down the front of her top. Butch couldn’t have known that she’d spent the night with Chad that very Wednesday. And had spent a torrid hour in a parked car with Wiaan two weeks previously. Now was not the time to meet the two of them together.
To compound the difficulty, there was a heat photographer patrolling the club, looking for any signs of celebrity romance. “Who’s with who” is their most popular game, closely followed by “Find the drunk celeb with booze spilt down herself”.
She didn’t need this now. It was time to get out.
“Help me, Butch. I need to get out of here. I can’t be seen with either of those men. And now I’ve spilt booze all over myself and I look like hell. Please can you make a plan?”
Butch thought for a good minute, then hatched a cunning plan and set to work.
He walked up to Fanie Moses, the celeb lensman and tugged on his sleeve. “I got something you might be interested in, bru.”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Just go stand at the door. You’ll see.”
Butch returned to his station at the door just in time for Wiaan Nortje to make it to the front of the queue. “Howzit, man,” he winked at the beefy bouncer.
Butch did not return his warm greeting. “Sorry sir. No jeans.”
“What do you mean? Come on, man. I was wearing this last week and you let me in fine…”
Butch put his large right hand on Wiaan’s shoulder. “I’m sorry sir. We’re tightening up on admission policy. I can’t let you in dressed like that.”
“Are you kidding me?” Wiaan raised his voice. “These jeans cost a grand and a half!”
Ten places further back in the queue, Chad Wilkins noticed the commotion and came to see if he could help out.
“Evening gents, I know this guy. Is there a problem?
“This oke won’t let me in!” said Wiaan.
“Sir! This is not your problem,” urged Butch. “Please don’t get involved.”
He placed a restraining hand on both the TV stars, and Fanie the photographer began shooting.
“Hey!” The two TV guys immediately chorused. “Stop taking photos!”
This was like a red rag to a bull, and Fanie’s lens only clicked faster.
As Wiaan and Chad fought to get at the lensman, Butch began gently ushering the group outside.
“Sorry gents. Not tonight.” Butch had had enough. “Allow me to escort you out to the parking lot.”
With his best gentle-giant demeanour, he saw the irate duo out to their cars, as Fanie merrily earned his evening’s wages.
Somewhere behind the paparazzo’s right shoulder, a short woman in a pink-stained top could be discerned scurrying out of the nightclub and making a short left for the underground parking lot.
As she dug in her handbag for her keys and her parking ticket she thought to herself, “Good work, Butch, I owe you one.”
And then later, as she started her Z3 and moved off, “And not bad skills either, man. You can act, boy. I may have underestimated you.”

The deal: How two people can help each other

2009-01-12T02:43:00.001-08:00

When they let Miles McKenzie go, Gillian knew the writing was on the wall. They were shedding everyone on the cast who wasn’t teenage pin-up material. The fact that Miles was the most experienced actor on the show made no difference. It was just business.
After flirting with the housewife-fixing-dinner audience for the past five years, the producers had now decided that Metropole was aimed at the youth viewership. For this reason, everyone older than 30 was being systematically culled from the show.
At a marginal, if well-maintained 29, Gillian Bogle was nervous.
Four years at drama school be damned, now the actors were little more than marketing tools. Producers were saying things like, “Gillian’s quite fit. Would you be comfortable posing for some men’s magazines.” And, “You guys must accept those PR invitations. We want to see you in the social pages.”
The implication was that she had to use her body to help them promote the show or she’d be going the same way as Miles McKenzie. Shame, poor Miles. The next time she saw him after the farewell party, he was doing an ad for a funeral plan.
She upped her gym attendance to five times a week, even including the horrific spin classes she’d sworn she’d never go back to. Bugger it, her job was on the line now. It also looked like finding a husband and having kids would have to wait a couple more years.
Horror of horrors, on Wednesday, Sebastian the show publicist came mincing up and said, “I’ve set up a bikini shoot for you in three weeks time. I’ve checked and you’re not filming that day, so it’s on. Aren’t you excited?”
Hardly. Gillian Bogle was apoplectic with fear. She had a fat roll the size of a small handbag peeled over her waistband, and now Sebastian was going to have it displayed in a national magazine for all of South Africa’s menfolk to see.
Excited? She was terrified.
So great was her terror that she found herself doing something she thought she’d never do. She went grovelling to Butch the stalker/personal trainer for exercise advice. Thursday morning 6am found Gillian Bogle next to the treadmills at the Sandton Personal Training Gym gently tapping Butch Varnes on the forearm muscle.
“Okay. Another five minutes,” Butch was encouraging another of his clients as he spotted Gillian’s approach. He pretended not to notice her. He’d known she’d come crawling back. They always did.
“Uhm, Butch. Hi!” Gill flashed her most obsequious smile. “I need to lose five kilos in the next three weeks or I lose my job.”
“Hmmm,” replied Butch smugly. “Why do they always come to me at the last minute?”
“It’s not the last minute; I’ve been coming to this gym for years!”
“Ja, but you haven’t been training right. And now it’s all come down to the wire and you want me to save your ass.”
Butch was in no danger of being called gracious.
“I tell you what I’m gonna do for you.” He abandoned his client on the treadmill, put his arm around Gillian and walked her around the room in a familiar manner.
“The only way to lose that amount of weight is to run it off. You need to sweat, my babe.”
“Okay…” Gillian squirmed under his weight. He had BO, and she could feel his armpit sweat on her shoulder.
“How about this, I’ll meet you outside your house every morning at 5am and I’ll take you for a run. You’ll have the weight off in no time. What do you say?”
“How about we meet here, rather?”
“Okay fine. But then what are you gonna do for me, Gillian?”
“Do? How do you mean?”
“I’m doing you a favour. How are you going to pay me back?”
By this stage they were in the back of the gym, by the lockers. They were alone.
“How much do you charge?”
“I’m not thinking in terms of money. I’m thinking more like, how do they say… payment in kind!”
So are bargains struck. The barter system is alive and well in Jo’burg’s northern suburbs. The next morning around 6am, still sweaty from their recent run, Butch Varnes and Gillian Varnes met in the privacy of the lost-property room.
Butch had a bulge in the front of his sweatpants. It was a pocket edition of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives Of Windsor.
Because Gillian Bogle was now Butch Varnes’s acting coach.

The supermarket scene

2009-01-12T02:15:00.000-08:00

“Sorry… Diane?”
“Ja? Oh, hello! What’s it again… Ed?”
“Eric. Howzit. We met at the, er, at that art exhibition. You ’member. That one in Newtown?”
“Ja, ja. Of course I remember. Eric.”
She had the worst cold she’d ever had in her life. Her sinuses were blocked like Gilloolly’s interchange during rush hour and she was standing in the queue at Pick ’n Pay in a pair of tracksuit pants and a T-shirt stained with baby vomit.
David was at home with Gabriel and she had just shot out to buy nappies.
So she was lugging a large pack of Pampers when Eric made his move.
“So it was quite a nice exhibition, that. Didn’t you like all those animals in the cars?”
“Ja. I remember. Cats in pyjamas and chickens wearing takkies… it was great. Are you an artist?”
“No, I’m a journalist. Well, I’m a bit of an artist. But I work at Jozi Mag, with Zama. Remember, she introduced us.”
“Of course. Zama.”
“So what you up to? Are you still painting?”
“No, not much these days. Got the baby, you know.”
She waved the Pampers with a raise of her eyebrows and an apologetic shrug.
“Uh, ja… You were heavily pregnant when we met. So how’s she doing?”
“It’s a he. Gabriel. He’s about three months now. He had this rash, but the paediatrician said he was allergic to the hormones in my breast milk. It’s from the hormones your body releases when your womb shrinks after the birth, you know?”
“Uh-huh…”
The queue edged forward a little. Even though they were in the baskets-only line, things were taking a while. The guy in front was paying by credit card.
“Ja, and he’s going bald. They say they all lose their hair after a while. It’s from the friction of sleeping all day and rubbing his head against the crib. He’s had dark hair till now, but I’m sure when it grows back it’ll be all blond. ’Coz my natural colour’s blonde and David’s light as well. Excuse me… ah-tshoo!”
“Bless you.”
He started looking around nervously, and she wondered whether she was talking too much or whether he was worried about catching a cold.
“I caught my cold from David. He says he got it from some guy when he was fetching pizza the other night. And who knows where that guy got it, hey.”
Now she knew she was talking too much.
“So what are you up to? What? Oh, how much is that? Forty-nine? Gee, these things are getting so expensive! I’m sorry, you were telling me what you were up to…”
“Oh, you know. Same old same at the magazine. And then I also got a story included in this anthology of short stories.”
“Oh, you’re reading short stories?”
She was checking her change, and she hadn’t heard him correctly.
“No, writing short stories. I got a story included in this anthology.”
“Oh, that’s great.”
She realised she didn’t sound interested enough. But she still hadn’t heard him properly and it was already too late. She’d missed the beat of the conversation.
Then she had her change and she had her Pampers and it was time to go.
“So nice seeing you again… What was your name again?”
“Eric, hey.”
“Okay Eric. Nice seeing you again. I’ll… maybe we’ll see each other again some time.”
“Ja. Okay, bye.”
He seemed less excited to have seen her now…
Diane lugged the nappies out to the car and flopped into the driver’s seat. She checked herself in the mirror and was shocked at what she saw: a 29-year-old woman in a vomit-flecked T-shirt who hadn’t washed her hair in a week. As she engaged the clutch she realised she was still wearing her slippers…
What on earth could that guy have seen in her? Was he… was he chatting her up in the supermarket line? He might actually have been. Shame, he was sweet – she realised she’d forgotten his name already. Ed?
It was probably the lack of a ring on her finger that had got him interested, she mused. But the fact was, she had a partner, even if they weren’t looking likely to marry.
And that significant other probably had his hands full right now, with a baby wailing his head off and a nappy choc-a-block with fresh shit. She’d better get these Pampers home.
Oh, yes, Diane thought to herself. She was well and truly off the singles’ scene now.

Young love, old loathing: Two couples on a Saturday night at the Baron

2009-01-12T02:01:00.000-08:00

There are two couples in the Baron. Well, there are several. Probably 17, in fact. Altogether a hundred and three people have come to watch South Africa lose the final rugby test of their European tour at the Baron pub in Chislehurston.
But we will only concern ourselves with four of them. Gift and his girlfriend Simone, sitting at a table in the corner near the bar; and a married couple, Roy and Yvonne, seated against the wall near the entrance.
Gift and Simone have been seeing each other for six months now. After a few months’ denial, a trial break-up and a get-together-again, they’re now a solid item. Simone has dispensed with pretence and now freely declares her love for her new beau. And Gift, in turn, has become strongly protective of his gorgeous lady love. Their corner table is a cocoon of young infatuation, through which the reality of the Springboks’ poor first-half showing barely penetrates.
For the occupants of the other table, the cocoon of youthful infatuation unravelled many years ago. And sadly it did not give birth to the butterfly of everlasting, love. No, the ugly slug of mutual loathing crawled out of that dry husk some time in the Seventies and it has been their companion ever since.
So Roy and Yvonne sit at their table and quietly loathe each other, while Roy condemns the Springbok performance.
“The bloody fool can barely catch a ball. What the hell is he doing playing flyhalf? He couldn’t even make the Free State team and now Jake’s got him playing against France. He’s useless!”
Yvonne doesn’t even respond.
“But they all useless,” Roy continues. “Even Matfield’s having a terrible game. It’s atrocious. We’re going to lose this one by miles. I don’t know how we can expect to take these guys to the World Cup!”
At the other table, Simone is more sympathetic.
“Shame, my baby. They’re losing. I’m sure they’ll play better in the second half,” she says. “I’m just going to go to the toilet.”
She wanders off, and because their table is in the corner, she must pass the table of Roy and Yvonne in order to reach the bathrooms. Gift watches his lover walk to the toilet, as young lovers are wont to do.
Now as she squeezes past the other couple’s table, she bumps Roy’s chair from behind. “Sorry,” she says. But Roy, being in the middle of slating the Bok performance, gets a bit of a fright.
“Ooh!” he gasps. Then, when he sees it’s Simone who has bumped him, his lip curls: “Little bitch,” he spits to his wife. “Rude little bitch.”
Gift, of course, has been watching his lover’s progress through the crowded Baron, and he has witnessed Roy’s little outburst, even if Simone has not.
For exactly two seconds, he considers whether he should let it go… then he gets up and marches across to the other table. He taps Roy on the shoulder and he jumps again.
“Excuse me,” he says, “Is there a problem here?”
“No, no problem,” Roy assures him.
“I just thought that you said something about my girlfriend as she was coming past you just now,” says Gift. “It sounded like you were angry with her.”
For once, Yvonne looks up and watches her husband closely. Roy sees a very fit, angry young black man, looming over him, where once there’d stood a little bitch.
“No,” he reiterates. “There’s no problem here. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You sure?” asks Gift for the last time, just to confirm. “It looked like she bumped you a little as she was coming past. I hope she didn’t startle you, sir.”
“No,” says Roy into his beer. “No problem.”
By the time Simone returns from the ladies, Gift is back at their table as if nothing has happened and they are back in the cocoon of love. In Paris, the Springboks are ready to work on a better second-half performance.
And at the other table, Yvonne is looking at her husband of 34 years as stares at the Supersport ad on the pub’s big screen and avoids making eye contact with her.
Tonight she sees him with new eyes. She’s known for some years that he’s a miserable, bigoted grumpy old bastard. But tonight she sees for the first time that he’s a coward too.
And – mmph! – on her right, the slug of mutu

You can dance if you wannoo!

2009-01-12T01:57:00.000-08:00

Cat’s Pyjamas is open 24-7. The place never closes. They say there’s not even a key. The doors haven’t closed in ten years or something. So it’s usually the place for a late-night chow. It seems every other place in Jo’burg closes their kitchen at 10pm.
So me and Julian leave the gig at the Roxy halfway through the Diesel Whores set and then pop up to Cats for a chow. But they’re running a queue all the way up the stairs, and as we get to the front, some okes start having a barney. One guy gets punched and there’s people chasing each other down the stairs and stuff. Some guy’s bleeding all over the floor. It’s way unappetising, so we bail.
Jules remembers there’s a Secret party at the Horror Café in Newtown. I’m not feeling that hungry after the violence, but Jules is still peckish, so…
Around midnight we end up outside Tarquino’s in Parkhurst, ordering pizzas through the 24-hour hatch. My ears are still ringing from the Diesel Whores, so I’m keen to just chill on the pavement, hoping they’ll sort of peep down.
While we’re there chilling, just trying to be quiet, some ponce on the balcony across the street at the Jolly Roger starts making fun of my jacket. Like he’s never seen a pink blazer before.
“Hey! It’s one of the guys from the Preen Ad!”
By the time Jules arrives with the pizzas I’m so bitter with this oke I open the box and Frisbee my pizza across the road and onto the balcony of the Jolly Roger. Sadly I miss the twit who’s been chirping me and we have to hurriedly jog to the car upon seeing my fresh pie envelope some innocent lady’s perm from behind.
I think I can hear her shrieking as I start the Renault.
By 1am I’m in the middle of the dancefloor at Horror Café, rocking the pink blazer. I’m surrounded by black balloons and people dressed as Hunter S Thompson jumping around popping them. Luckily I’ve got my Elvis shades on, so I blend in.
The tunes are this Eighties-retro electroclash stuff. It’s indie music, and indie’s got a weird beat to start with. And the pop, pop-pop of the balloons bursting throws my dancing clean out. I’m half drunk and my ears are still ringing.
Jules doesn’t dance, so I’m on my ace.
I’m running low on energy, and my timing’s out, so I bump into the person next to me. I look up and it’s that same black girl I spotted at the Roxy the time Fokof played. Jeez, I’ve been hoping to bump into her for weeks.
I was, like dying to go speak to her that night, but there was some huge Afrikaans oke chatting to her the whole time. And of course I was wearing a moose outfit that night. I wasn’t sure if that was the kind of first impression I wanted to make on her.
So I start concentrating on my dancing now. Getting my groove on, kind of checking out the corner of my eye to see what her style of dancing is, so I can try to fit in with it. She’s got this limbo thing going on, with her hands above her head and taking it down low, gyrating her hips like that. I think they call it kwassa-kwassa style. So I give it a bash. I grind it down as low as I can take it, while that one Men Without Hats song comes on and everyone comes to dance and they drop more black balloons and the pop, pop-pop throws my timing off even worse.
The crush of the people means we end up hip-to-hip in the middle of the throng, both down low, grinding it. I’m getting a cramp in my left calf, but I grin through the pain, and shout to her, “Nice night for it, hey!”
She just smiles and looks down to check my moves – a going-deaf white guy with a pink blazer and cramp trying to pull off kwassa-kwassa. She bursts out laughing and puts her arm around my waist, so we’re dancing next to each other and she can show me how it’s done…
She ‘s got dreadlocks, and one of them brushes against my cheek as she puts her mouth to my ear and says, “Ha, ha! There you go. Just pretend you’re having sex!”
I close my eyes and do just that. Thinking to myself, Jules, you gotta try this dancing thing, dude.

The black leather Prato boots

2009-01-12T01:34:00.000-08:00

Beth just sat there drinking right through Dominique’s shift. Ordering double Jacks on the rocks and tequila shooters in between those. Like she had something to forget, some heartbreak to heal.
But she would never say what that was. Oh no, Beth van Wyk wasn’t that kind of girl. She was one of those girls who was your friend, but never really shared anything. You’d only find out she had a new boyfriend when she brought him round the Roxy and said casually, “Dom, this is Eric. Eric, Dom.” And that would be the end of that.
This was without a doubt another boyfriend drama, but Dom knew she wouldn’t get word one out of her colleague. Beth was also a Roxy’s barlady, but tonight was her night off. So Dom had the pleasure of serving her whiskies while she propped up the bar and Blow The Band screamed metal mayhem from the stage.
The worst part was that Beth was wearing the boots. The black leather Prato boots she’d borrowed from Dominique two months ago. “Ah, these are gorgeous! I can wear them to the Civic tonight. Is that cool, hey Dom?”
Of course she’d said yes, and of course Beth had been wearing the boots ever since. You’d swear they were the only shoes she owned.
And it’s not like she could ask her to give them back tonight, and then expect her to go walk home from the Roxy barefoot.
But they cost almost a thousand bucks – a whole weekend’s earnings, if not two. Beth knew very well Dom could never buy another pair, and of course Beth would never be getting a pair of her own. She was too busy spending her wages on the other side of the bar on her every night off.
And they were such nice boots too. Polished leather. Dress boots, the lady called them. They had wedge heels and went halfway up your calves, with a side zip so you could get them off easy.
So cool. And you could wear them with anything. A long dress, or stockings and hotpants… or just a pair of faded black jeans, like Beth was wearing tonight. You couldn’t even tell they were boots, for goodness’ sake.
“What do you think of Chris?” she wanted to know now.
“He’s alright I guess,” Dom speculated. “He’s got something, about him.” Beth always went for bass players. Groovy silent types.
“I’m gonna ask him to walk me to the ATM… I’ll be back now.”
Dom watched Beth’s progress as she poured a set of shooters for Blow, who’d just come off stage, and couldn’t help smiling to herself as Chris the bass player shook his head and pointed to his wallet pocket. He’d just come back from the bank.
Beth turned on her shiny black wedge heels and stormed out of the Roxy, looking irate and a little unsteady from the whiskies.
Blow had played a hectic set, and installed themselves at the bar for three rounds of suitcases while the Diesel Whores played.
The Diesels set was almost over when Dom noticed Beth wasn’t back yet. It had been almost 45 minutes. And she banked at First National – their ATM was just a block up Main Road. She said she’d be back…
Dom had a sick feeling in her stomach, and she knew she had to go check. She asked Paulina to cover for her and took a walk up the road.
In Main Road three sets of lights flashed in the middle of the road a block up. Right outside the ATM.
Please don’t let it be true. The Netcare 911 car obscured Dom’s view as she ran towards the scene. She could see a bunch of people huddled around a pile of jackets on the road. Like someone had been hit, and they were trying to keep them warm.
Two paramedics knelt by the pile of jackets. They were about to slide the victim onto a stretcher. Oh no, please let it not be her…
A plaid blazer slipped off the pile as it was loaded onto the stretcher. A pair of black-leather Prato boots peeked out…
And Beth’s voice shrieked tipsily across Main Road Melville: “Put me down! Get your hands off me!”

Gimme, gimme, gimme a mane like the moonlight

2009-01-12T01:29:00.001-08:00

Burchmore’s Auctioneers is the last place you expect to find such a beauty.
But there she was, skin glistening like moonlight on a midnight lake, flowing flaxen hair caressing her shoulders as she floated between the cars like a dusky vision, a figment of his imagination.
Could she even be real, this marvel of African beauty? What could such perfection possibly be doing at a car auction?
She probably worked here, KK told himself. She wore the fitted collared shirt and the tailored grey slacks of a professional woman and she did not carry a handbag, which was always the sign of a woman in the middle of her working day. Or night – it was 6.55pm and the auction was starting in five minutes.
KK finished the last of his R16 bacon-and-cheese toasted, abandoned his chips and stood up from his red-and-white checked table at the Burchmore’s diner. He wiped his mouth with the tiny, delicate serviette, crumpled it and threw it down with the finality of a man about to bid on some cars.
Of course, he wasn’t. This was an exploratory first visit to Burchmores, and a look at the advertised prices of the few dozen second-hand vehicles on the floor of the vast, hangar-like premises had confirmed that he couldn’t afford to buy here.
KK had R25 000 saved, and the cheapest Mazda 323 on sale had a R33 000 sign in its windscreen.
So, intimidated and ashamed, he had not paid his R5 000 auction deposit.
He was filing into the auction hall with the dealers, speculators and first-time buyers, but he was not qualified to bid. Not quite part of the scene, as always…
He’d thought he’d just check things out. It was his first auction.
The auctioneer commenced by explaining the rules. “To arrange finance, please talk to the lovely Tiro.”
And at the mention of her name, the lovely Tiro nodded and winked, in her tailored shirt, flowing, flaxen hair and her midnight moonlight skin. For there she stood, at the edge of the dais, at the foot of the auction block, ready to arrange finance.
“Our first lot, the 1997 Escort 1.4. R30 000 worth the retail. Gimme a bid, gimme a bid! Fifteen, gimme fifteen, gimme fifteen. Fifteen-five, sixteen, seventeen, seventeen-five. All done now. Closed at seventeen-five.”
Bang! The auction was on. Sixty seconds a lot. Sixty cars would be sold in the next hour. They were driven onto the auction floor, where an attendant placed an extractor pipe over their exhausts to avoid gassing the customers, and within a minute they were sold.
Bang!
“Closed at R13 500 for the Uno Fire.”
And KK realised the auction lots were far less expensive than the cars on the sales floor. He could afford to buy something!
He also realised that many successful bidders would come down from the bleachers of the auction hall once their bid was accepted and be led into the finance office by the lovely Tiro.
And each time, he – and the rest of the bidders – would be treated to a view of Tiro’s flowing, black hair and her proud buttocks beneath her tailored grey slacks as she marched her client from the room.
It was irresistible.
So when lot 26, a 1998 Kia Clarus 2.0, came up for bidding, KK could not help himself. “Fifty thousand worth the retail. Opening bids at twenty-five,” boomed the auctioneer. “Twenty-five, twenty-five. Twenty-five”
KK raised his right hand. He knew he was not registered, but he desired, he needed just five minutes with the lovely Tiro. It was the only way.
“I’m sorry sir,” the auctioneer responded. “You need a number board to bid. Only registered bidders may bid.”
And he glanced elsewhere. “Twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-five. Gimme a bid. Gimme a bid.”
The lovely Tiro gave KK a mischievous smile and a wink, then a large man in a powder-blue T-shirt, shorts and a pair of hiking boots eventually raised his number board. “Twenty-five, thanks Mike” said the auctioneer. “Now gimme twenty-six. Twenty-six, twenty-six.”
After that, KK sat obediently in the stands and saw out the last half-hour of the auction, He just sat there and let the auctioneer’s booming numbers wash over him. And he savoured the mischievous smile and the wink of the lovely Tiro, with her flaxen hair and her midnight moonlight hair.
It was worth at least R25 000. More than a Kia Clarus 2.0, that’s for sure. Much more.

The rain flowed from the heavens like a river.

2009-01-09T12:51:00.001-08:00

The rain flowed from the heavens like a river. Every day.
Mornings, some days. Other days it would rain in the afternoon and then again in the evening. Some days the rain would trickle reluctantly from the sky, on others it would pour eagerly into the earth for hours.
Gardens were awash with muddy water. In the brief interludes of sunlight, mosquitoes hatched and rushed to feast on the flesh of the humans before they were flushed away.
Outside suburban strip malls, drunk street people seeking shelter argued with security guards.
On doorsteps across the North, copies of the Sandton Chronicle dissolved into papier mache before residents could return from work and retrieve them.
Irate joggers cancelled their evening runs and loitered, restless, in front of Oprah, bugging their wives with their cynical commentary.
Corporate soccer matches were cancelled and colleagues went drinking at the Su Da Da in Sandton instead.
The rain flowed from the heavens like a river.
In their house off 11th Avenue, Bryanston, Ashley Seegers cancelled his third consecutive golf game and looked at his wife properly for the first time in two years. “So what do you actually do to have fun,” he asked, much as he’d asked her on their first date all those years ago.
In Kew Road, Randburg, Nondomiso Jabavu shook the rain from her umbrella as she entered her flat and finally made up her mind. She was too old to still be commuting to work by taxi. She opened The Star with new resolve. A 2003 Opel Corsa Lite 1.4 could be had for R48 000. Negotiable.
Just off Fourth Avenue, Melville, Pierre du Plessis abandoned the idea of walking to Ratz for a dop and instead dug his nylon-string guitar out from behind the couch. He began strumming the chords to The Rolling Stones’ Out Of Time. Within minutes he had begun writing his first new song since the band had broken up.
The rain flowed from the heavens like a river.
On the N14 to Krugersdorp, Charmaine Hendricks felt the rear of her Renault Clio begin to slide out to the left, catch, then slide out to the right. She remembered the advanced driving course her company had sent her on and began trying to steer into the slide. In doing so, she found herself drifting into the oncoming traffic.
On a townhouse balcony in Morningside the fruit on Joe Naidoo’s chilli plant began turning black and the leaves began to wilt.
In a chilly res room of a University of Johannesburg hostel, Desiree Rossouw huddled around her two-bar heater and put out her last Camel Filter. She turned off that terrible Radio Jacaranda. Charl had not phoned since last week. He would probably phone tonight, it being Wednesday. Then he would disappear again to spend the weekend jolling with his friends. But tonight’s phone call would be different. Tonight she would tell him it was all over. She deserved better than this.
In Sandown, Mark Gericke decided it was time to fix the hole in the roof of his granny flat. As soon as the weather cleared up.
The rain flowed from the heavens like a river.
In Parkhurst, Jenny Murray, snuggling under her duvet in front of Isidingo, noticed a small piece of paper folded into the pocket of her cushion. She’d bought the cushion from a Malawian lady she’d met on the street in Melville. Her new cushions bore embroidery depicting a village scene. The piece of paper told the story of the scene. “Yolanda and Thelma are coming from fetching water,” read the note.
On the N14 from Krugersdorp, Charl Mulder was on his way to surprise his girlfriend. He had been neglecting her lately and she deserved something better. He would be at her res within an hour, and then he would take her to Soulsa on Seventh Street in Melville, where they had come on their first date. It was a few days before Valentine’s Day, but he was working night shift next week, so it would have to be today.
He had even had a Mariah Carey album as a gift for her. Perhaps it would be more fun to listen to than Radio Jacaranda. He took his eyes off the road for a few brief seconds while he dug the disc out of the cubby. In those same seconds, a Renault Clio crossed the dividing line into the oncoming traffic.
And the rain flowed from the heavens like a river.

Kopstamp and Romance at Sandton City

2009-01-09T12:31:00.000-08:00

I bumped Saul and the other gangstas by the Square and gave the thugs a hug. He was like, “Homes.” And I was like, “My brother.” He had much more gel in than me. But I’m scared to use more, ‘coz my skin’s lank sensitive and it makes my acne act up.
He’s got new jeans, but he had his same Oakley sweatshirt on. And he said he was getting Timberlands, but he didn’t have them on, so I’m sure he hasn’t got them yet.
Straight afterwards, Lee-Ann saw me outside Piatto and gave me this quick “Hello Adam” as we walked past each other. So fast that she took me by surprise. I just, I was like talking to Joel, so I just kept on walking and pretended not to hear her.
I didn’t turn around until we got to the doors of the mall. Then I dropped my water bottle and as I turned around to pick it up, I checked it was Lee Ann. She had her tight, stonewashed jeans on, and a pink Roxy T-shirt. She’s so hot now that her braces are out.
She was with Sarah and Mimi and Moon and they all saw me looking around while I picked up the water bottle. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but as I was standing up again, someone opened the door and like cracked me on my dome.
I had to walk, like twenty metres with my head fuckin’ throbbing, until I got round that first corner. There by Sportscene? All the way from those glass doors until we got to Sportscene before I could rub my head. I was with Joel and Tom and they fully saw me moer my head on the door, so we were all, like, canning ourselves the whole way till we got round the corner.
Then we just, like, collapse on the floor laughing. I was rubbing my head and laughing and crying at the same time. It was even bleeding a little. Then! Then Lee Ann and them come round the corner while we like lying there crying.
We just sort of sit up, like we just waiting for someone., And she’s like, “Are you guys also going to movies?” and we were like, ja and she says, what you gonna check, so I say, Be Cool and she says us too.
So we end up going together!
We come down the escalators together right at 7.45 and everyone’s there. And they all check us out. Saul was there at the bottom and he was fully checking at me. I was standing on the same step as Lee-Ann and I saw him checking to see if we were holding hands. No, we weren’t, but she put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m just going to the toilet quick!”
I said “Sure, I’ll wait for you here.” Then I went and got two tickets on my SK card. Mom gave me R100 for the night, so I had enough. I just got in the special Discovery members queue, so I had two tickets by the time she got back. It was H1 and H2, so we were sitting on the aisle.
Joel was like, “And my ticket, bru?” as I came past, but I went like this with my eyebrows and just walked past, straight to Lee-Ann, just as she got back.
Then I put my arm around her and said, “D’you want some popcorn?” and like ushered her towards the sweets section, right past Saul. He was fully giving me the eye, but I just went like this. Like lifted my chin quick to say howzit as we walked past.
I heard Joel going “Adam!” all squeaky under his breath behind me, so I quickly turned around and just pointed at Lee-Ann with my eyes all big.
He was like, “Ah, jeez, man.” But I’m sure he understood.
Lee Ann turned around to check what was going on, but I just put my arm around her again. Like all decisive. “Come, let’s go.”
Everyone was checking us out the whole time we were in the queue, but I just ignored them and asked her what subjects she was doing this year.
I got two Cokes and a popcorn and just managed to afford it. Then, like, as we finished at the salt stand our hands touched a bit and I just grabbed hers.
We walked in holding hands, and everyone was checking us out.
My head was throbbing the whole time, but I didn’t rub it once.

Verbal ammunition and the art of choosing your moment

2009-01-09T12:29:00.001-08:00

Gift sat at Shivava and waited his turn. In his left hand his crumpled poem grew moist. In his right, his second Laurentina was already flat and warm. He now faced the dilemma of whether to have another drink, to stop for a while or to nurse the beer dregs until his turn came.
It was quite a poser. If he had another Laurentina, he risked being too drunk to remember his poem, or he could stuff up the delivery, slur his words or get the rhythm wrong.
If he stopped drinking he’d soon start becoming drowsy. And it could be another hour before his turn came. A guy needs something to do while he sits and listens to the same people do the same poems they’ve done every week for the last six months.
It seemed like the right thing to do, but if he nursed the dregs, he’d be in a sour mood by the time he got up to do his slam. No. Life was too short to drink flat beer. He waved his Laurentina at the nearest waitress and resigned himself to a warm, happy and slightly risky delivery.
In the meantime Ayob did his one about being from Eldorado Park. “I’m a Lokshinhead. I speak words that raise the dead.” Gift had to admit it was a catchy riff, and the audience wasn’t shy to chant along either. “I’m a Lokshinhead. I speak words that raise the dead.”
That was obviously one of the advantages of doing the same bit every week – you get audience participation.
And Ayob knew Lokshinhead backwards. He’d be able to recite that sucker perfectly after ten beers, let alone three. The guy probably didn’t drink, though.
Crumbs, that guy must get bored, mused Gift. Sitting in a pub every week, waiting to repeat the same poem.
At least Gift had a new poem. He unfolded his increasingly manky piece of foolscap, had a sip of Laurentina and went through the piece one more time.

Verbal Ammunition

I need some ammunition I can hide behind.
Like a guitar. Like a bass. Like a lyrical line.
A man needs a mission he can hide behind.
A microphone is no defence, you know?
All a piece of paper does is make me more tense
Conductors get batons and musical stands and
A song the people know and think they understand.
So the only way for me to try to cover my hide
Is to say something that you’ll remember me by.
A poem, a slam, some rambling rhyme.
That kinda makes you feel you might be reading my mind
So this is it then, this is the line. The verbal ammunition you’ll remember me by.
So forget the verses and forget the time, but please don’t forget to remember the rhyme
Without it I’m naked, unarmed and sublime and without the power of verse by my side.
So this is it then, this is the line. The verbal ammunition you’ll remember me by.
So forget the verses and forget the time, but please don’t forget to remember the rhyme
I got the pow-pow-pow-power of verse by my side.
The pow-pow-pow-power of verse by my side…

And then he’d repeat that line a couple of times. That would be the hook. And he’d throw a couple of boxing combinations when he was saying, “Pow-pow-pow-power”.
Hmm. He folded the paper and cleared his throat. It was still a couple of slots before his turn. He had a last Laurentina.
Then some African goddess in a headscarf, whom he’d never seen before, got up and rocked the place to the foundations.
Her bit began: “Between my thighs lies my Avalon…”
And Gift chuckled. A bit too loud. And lasciviously. Heads turned.
Unfortunately it turned out not to be a funny poem. So he ended up looking like a cunt for laughing at the beginning. Still, the whole of Shivava was standing and hooting by the end of her bit. Woo-hoo.
Gift felt like the tide had turned, like he’d missed his opportunity. He decided he wouldn’t be performing tonight. It just didn’t feel right.
So he finished that last Laurentina and headed home.
There he would carefully unfold his sole copy of Verbal Ammunition and paste it into his Croxley hardcover book.
Alongside the 20-odd other items of slam poetry he had never performed.
He read through it one last time. “Pow-pow-pow-power of verse by my side.”
It was one of his better ones.

Smash and grab on Beyers and Judith

2009-01-09T11:16:00.001-08:00

Always the best mate, never the boyfriend, mused Eric as he cruised down Beyers Naude back home towards Fairlands in a vague, after-shift trance.
He could say howzit to two dozen women on any given night at the Bassline, but d’you think he could find a date to his sister’s wedding? Not a sausage. And as for this morning! “You were heavily pregnant when we met”! Come on, what was he thinking!
There was just something deeply unsavoury about hitting on women who’ve recently given birth in the queue at the supermarket.
And getting snubbed too. By a woman with nappies under her arm. He should be ashamed of himself. No, he had to set his sights elsewhere. But that wedding was less than two weeks away and things were looking desperate. He’d gone solo to the four last family weddings. If he showed up without a companion at his sister’s one, he would officially be gay. Grief! Maybe he was gay!
No, of course he wasn’t. He was hitting on postnatal mothers in the supermarket. Gay men don’t do that. This was all about not seeming gay. There had to be some girl he could take.
It was 11pm as Eric pulled up at the Judith Road robots and ran through his options. There was Zama from work, but she was going out with that freak in the pink jacket now. There was Beth, the barlady from the Roxy. But she was on crutches at the moment from her accident. What about her mate? The surly one she worked with at the bar. She was probably lesbian, but worth asking anyway.
Eric glumly switched his car stereo from Kaya to YFM and realised that he was going to have to ask the surly lesbian to his sister’s wedding. Great.
His gaze drifted across the intersection, to where a red Corolla was stopped at the robots opposite. A pedestrian walked up to the passenger window and peered inside.
Jeez, he thought. I hope that’s not a smash-and-grab.
Having checked inside, the guy – he was a lightie, not older than 18 – leaned back in an elasticated manner and threw something at the window.
Kkwa! It burst inwards and the guy lunged into the vehicle. A second later he was walking away, up Judith Road, with a woman’s handbag.
The oke bombed her!
His robot went green, but Eric was unable to engage first. He was still wondering what to do. Was this a get-involved moment? Should he go after the bomber, or go check that the woman in the Corolla was okay?
As he sat weighing his options, a woman jumped out of the driver’s side of the Corolla and began running after the bomber. Eric turned YFM down a little and let down his window. She was screaming at the robber.
“How dare you rob me and then walk away!”
As he was deciding to get involved, Eric noticed that the Corolla was moving. She hadn’t pulled up the handbrake. It was probably still in gear!
By this time the robot was red. The Corolla eased across the Judith Road intersection and veered to the right. It was coming straight for him!
Eric checked his mirrors. There was a car behind him. The robot on the left. There was no escape! He hooted twice. Pee-beep!
The woman, a tall blonde in a tracksuit, heard him hoot and stopped in mid-chase in the middle of Judith Road. She gave up the pursuit and came sprinting back to retrieve her car.
Too late! Eric’s last defence was to pull up his handbrake to avoid being driven backwards into the car behind him as… crrrunch!... the Corolla ploughed into him head-on. Everything happened in slow motion – because the Corolla was only doing about 12.
Boomp! The Corolla made impact, rolled backwards and then ploughed into him again. Crrunch! It was probably an automatic. The only thing to do was get out the car and run over to the Corolla to turn it off.
At that point stage the girl arrived. Pretty freaked out. “Oh god I’m sorry. Did you see what that guy did! Smash and grabs me and then just walks off! What an arsehole! How’s your car?”
“There’s a bit of damage, but it looks like we’re both still drivable,” replied Eric as they exchanged business cards.
She was Liz Griffith-Reid and she was a dance instructor. Maybe she would be free next Saturday.

Cupid scores a free meal at the Rock ’n’ Roll Diner

2009-01-09T11:11:00.000-08:00

The Saint Stithians under-13A team played Cupid. A bunch of tiny lighties who could barely kick the ball over from the 22. They were 18 flyweight grade-eights who lost a rugby game every Saturday for two months, but the one thing they had was character.
Shaun was a Saints old boy, so when his mate Dave said he was volunteering to coach an under-14 rugby team, he thought why the hell not. It was the cricket off-season, so he had weekends free, and he honestly hadn’t been back to Saints since he’d matriculated.
In the end Shaun was assigned the under-13s because no one else wanted them. The “A” thing was a bit of a misnomer. It implied there was a B team, when there actually wasn’t. They were just the under-13 team, the younger boys whose 13th birthdays fell during the first half of the year.
It was felt they might get hurt if they played against the more talented older boys, so they were clumped together and entered into the under-14B schools rugby league.
No one seemed to care that most of the working class schools’ U14A teams played in the B league. It was like throwing the lighties to the wolves.
Shaun looked at the fixtures and realised they’d be on a hiding to nothing. He told the guys at the beginning of the season that their only real test would come at the end of the season when they faced the mighty Maritzburg College, who also had an under-13 team.
Until that day arrived, it would be a tough slog, he warned them. And wasn’t it just.
Their first match, against the Highlands North U14Bs was a 42-0 massacre. They spectacularly went down 55-0 to Northcliff High. The 12-5 loss to Sandown High’s U14Bs was celebrated like a win.
He taught them co-operative tackling, where one lightie would slow the ball-carrier down by grabbing his jersey, so that his team-mate could take the guy’s legs and bring him down.
He taught them to play a fast, passing game, similar to Sevens, in the hope that their rabbit-like skills and greater stamina might give them an advantage. But when your opponents are twice your size, tactics are only going to get you so far.
After seven losses and a courageous 8-all draw against Bryanston High, the long-awaited Maritzburg College game arrived. The team’s spirits rose the minute Maritzburg got off the bus. The guys were the same size as them! This was to be a test of skill, not just a physics demonstration.
Maritzburg also played a running game, and the first half was a blur of elusive running, snap passes and tenacious tackling. They came off for half-time oranges tied at 5-all.
Loekie the scrumhalf had a huge bump on his forehead, Khulani the wing had hurt his wrist, but they both were raring to go for the second half. “Just keep recycling the ball,” Shaun told the guys. “If you keep handling well, their defence is going to break down sooner or later. And if you win this for me, I’m taking you all to McDonald’s on Monday.”
And with a minute to go in the match, the Maritzburg defence did break down. After something like nine phases of possession, Khulani went over in the corner and Saints won 10-5.
The poor lighties were so keeshed they could barely walk, but the minute that whistle went they jumped like spring hares. “You were right, sir,” Loekie said. “They couldn’t keep tackling us all day. We’ll see you at the Rock ’n’ Roll McDonald’s on Monday.”
Shaun knew that was as close to a thank you as he was going to get.
That night Shaun went out on a high. He hardly had a drink all night, but he was glowing with pride at what his boys had achieved. If that McDonald’s visit cost him a grand, it would be worth every cent.
He was leaning on the railing on the balcony at Rhapsody’s, just smiling to himself and thinking, “10-5! Yeah!” when Lorna came up to him.
“You look quite pleased with yourself,” she said. “You’ve been smiling all night!”
“Ja. My boys won their rugby game today. They beat Maritzburg College.”
“Well done,” she said. “I’m Lorna. D’you want a drink?”
That drink led to another, and eventually, to this. This weekend, if he survived his bachelor-party hangover, Shaun would be taking Lorna down the aisle.
He was still sure that one rugby game, four years ago, had a lot to do with it. Almost like the Saints under-13As had played Cupid.

Live! At the Roxy! Saturday night only!

2009-01-09T11:02:00.000-08:00

“What brings you here?”
It was the only way Kobus could think of asking her. He didn’t know a other way. And still she looked at him funny. But it was true mos. A oke had to mos ask. She was the only black girl in the whole Roxy. And she was sitting right there by him, So he was of course going to be interested.
“I came to catch the band, just like you,” she said, in a funny kind of way, as if she wasn’t the only black girl in a rock ‘n’ roll club full of sweaty, white, Afrikaans okes.
“No,” Kobus didn’t want her to now take it the wrong way, “I mean it’s nice to see your kinds of people in here. What’s your name?”
“Er, thanks,” she said. “I’m Zama.”
“I’m Kobus,” Kobus said. “Aangename kennis.” And he shook her hand to be polite. They were sitting on the bar, right at the back of the Roxy, as Fokof kicked into their third song.
It was Vernietig Jouself, one of his favourites, and he would have gone to the front to join the mosh pit, but the place was so packed he could barely see, let alone move from his position.
The ceiling was low there by the bar, so Kobus had to kind of stoop with his head to fit in, and lean a bit to his right, so he loomed rudely over Zama. He was breathing in her face a bit. He was sure she could smell the Martell. But what the hell. It’s not every day Fokof comes to play at the Roxy.
Instead of moshing, he just nodded his head and sung along.
“Does everyone know all the words?” Zama asked in awe as the Roxy reverberated to the selfdestructive lyrics and Kobus tried to see if the guy on the other side of her was her boyfriend or just another Afrikaans guy.
“Ja man. Have you not heard them before?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve never even heard of the band. What are they called again?”
“We call them Fokof. I’ve got both albums. Lugsteuring and As Jy Met Vuur Speel. I know all the guys. They came and drank by me the last time they were here.”
You could mos see they liked to drink. They were all fatter than they were last time. And that was only about six months ago. And sommer hairier too. They all had beards now, except the one guitarist.
But there was a guy in a Moose outfit in the pit, and he looked like he was having so much fun that Kobus decided to ma’ push through the crowd and to dance. It was just as well he did, because the crowd wasn’t so druk there by the stage.
There was more space, but the people were rough. It wasn’t a fight, this, but the one oke still hit him hard in the leg, like that. Kobus is big, so he knows he mustn’t fight. He just pushed him away and then the brandy took over.
It was a bit like a fight in the end. There were fists and knees and kopstamp even. Kobus’s old knee injury from under-19s even got twisted when the one guy tackled him.
So he pulled himself up on the stage to recover a bit before he went back in. But as he sat on the edge of the stage, just to sit for a half a song or what, Francois dragged him right onto the stage in front of the mike.
“Sing jy vir ‘n’ ruk” he screamed in his ear, and then went to the back of the stage to fetch another Black Label. By this stage they were playing Tevrede already and Kobus knew all the words to that too.
So he stood up and sang it! In front of maybe 400-500 people. And then half of Sporadies Nomadies, but by then Francois was back. He patted Kobus on the arm and pointed into the crowd to show he must now get down.
So he stood for a moment on the lip of the stage with his arms above him and then dived. Swak! Right onto the head of the Moose. And they caught him.
Kobus crowdsurfed above the heads of those 400 drunk, white Afrikaans guys, from the stage all the way to the bar at the back of Roxy’s. And it was a celebration of life.
Zama saw him too. She was going to put that in her article.

The guy in the red shirt

2009-01-09T10:53:00.000-08:00

Okay, so Tshepo had been drinking. But he’s more of a funny drunk than an obnoxious one. I actually quite like him like that. It brings him out of his shell.
He’s on that TV show, and it’s weird, but somehow that makes him a bit shy when he goes out in public. He gets that whole, “Please don’t let them spot me” thing going. Like if someone recognises him he’s going to get mobbed and we’ll be trapped in Cats Pyjamas signing autographs for an hour.
He’s only a host! They can’t even get a studio audience for that show, coz no one could be bothered. They have to use canned applause!
Tshepo just needs to chill on the stardom vibe. Even if someone spots him, they’re usually just, “Oh, there’s that guy from TV,” to themselves and then they ignore him.
When he gets a buzz going, he goes back to being the old Tshepo, though. Funny little comments, good conversation and that little dance that he does. Kind of an Egyptian one, with his hands out sideways.
He was doing that dance when it happened. We were talking about the MTV Base concert, and he stood up from the table to show us how he was dancing. And as he got up, he knocked this guy at the table behind us.
And the guy totally overreacts. Some guy in a red shirt. Maybe Tshepo spilled his drink or something, but still. He gets up and shoves Tshepo so he goes sprawling all over the floor. We all stand up, and the guy’s mates also stand up, but you can see they’re just as surprised as we are. They all coloured guys, and going, like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa…”
But their mate doesn’t give them a chance to calm him down. As Tshepo starts getting to his feet, the guy punches him in the head. Then as he falls, he kicks him in the gut, and punches him one more time.
By this time the guy’s mates are there already, pulling him off Tshepo, who looks like he’s passed out by this stage.
We all scramble to get at this guy, but we’re kind of hemmed in by chairs and tables and we’re bumping into each other. They guy just tunes us poes, and bails down the stairs.
Thami and Mike ran down the stairs after him, so I stayed upstairs with the girls. The waiter wouldn’t let us leave, anyway.
The guy had quite a lead on them, so I ran to the balcony to see what was going to happen. I was right above the exit on Melville Main Road. I had a perfect view.
There were a couple of people standing around outside Cats and I saw his red shirt come bursting through them, knocking one of them over. He charged across Main Road, almost getting knocked over by a truck. There was a whole lot of traffic backed up behind the truck, so Mike and Thami had to wait before they could cross.
That gave the guy time to get to his car, a red Golf, that was parked just outside the First National ATM.
You could see he was panicking. He dropped his keys twice before he managed to open the door. Then he jumped into the driver’s seat and started revving the car like mad. He knew Thami and Mike would be across the road the minute there was a break in the traffic…
People were already screaming at him from our side of the street. Then I noticed this girl coming up the road. Dressed all in black, and stumbling, like she had heavy boots on. She looked wasted.
She was looking in her bag for something, and walking across the road at the same time. She stepped into Main Road just as the first break in the traffic came…
The guy reversed out of his parking, slammed the Golf into gear and screamed off just as Mike and Thami got to his car. I’m sure I heard their fingernails scraping along his paintwork as he screamed off…
Right into this girl crossing the street. I screamed, “Watch out!” but he must have hit her doing about 60. She smacked into his windscreen in a sitting position and flew about ten metres into Main Road.
The guy had to stop then, and there were people all around his car within seconds. A cop car pulled up immediately. I ran downstairs then to see if the girl was alive.
As I got to her, she was conscious, at least. She said her name was Beth.
“Are you the driver, sir?” I heard the cop ask the guy in the red behind me. “Have you been drinking tonight?”

There's work, and then there's WORK!

2009-01-09T10:45:00.000-08:00

The work was coming along nicely. There had been two exhibitions at Spaza Art in Troyeville, and Wayne and Karl had asked him to exhibit with them at their studio in Newtown.
There had even been sales. And Vusi was at last getting a grip on what he was trying to say with the work. “You Get What You Give” he had called the last exhibition. It was all about self-determination. How you make your own reality.
He’d done it – made his own reality – so he knew what he was talking about. His name wasn’t even Vusi. It was Tinashe. But Vusi Zulu is a nice, South African name, one that comes without any kind of Zimbabwean baggage, any kind of perceived political agenda. He wanted his themes to be universal, so Tinashe had shed his cultural baggage at the border and become Vusi.
The themes? Hmn, what were the themes... “A colourful celebration of the individual’s search for himself,” the art critic woman had written in The Star Tonight.
She was probably right, even if she was only trying to get into his pants with a sympathetic review. To give her credit, she’d pulled it off too. Nicola. With wild auburn tresses and rings and the nose stud and that hippy vibe he had such a weakness for.
It was not the first time his work had got him laid, nor did he expect it to be the last. A cat on a motorbike had got him laid that time. A chubby orange ceramic Persian on a scooter with a sidecar. And a frog with goggles along for the ride.
That was the one Nicola had liked best, although Vusi’s favourite was the violin bow having sex with the violin. Of course that one was one of the only two pieces that had failed to sell.
Still, he’d made thirty grand off that show – plus a killer commission for some corporate work at Standard Bank. It looked like he’d be able to kick in the day job fairly soon.
Or the night job, more accurately. Manning the all-night pizza hatch at Tarquino Bake, serving double-cheesy pizzas to people so drunk some of them struggled to pronounce “ham and salami”.
But you only exhibit once every few months and the J.O.B. helps tide you over between gigs, Vusi told himself as he sliced up some salami discs and sprinkled the cheese on.
He was working on some new stuff, so it helped to have some day-to-day income to cover materials and rental for the studio.
He was gonna call the new stuff “Breakout,” maybe. Or perhaps just “Freedom”. It was going to be about transcending the boundaries of what you’re supposed to be. Inspired by the cat and the frog on the motorbike, sort of. The first of the new lot was a tree on a diving board, with its branches spread out like it was about to dive off. And instead of a swimming pool, there was a big pudding. A peppermint whip with chocolate sprinkles and a cherry on top. Now did that say “Breakout” or “Freedom”, Vusi wondered as he delicately extricated the pies from the oven and began boxing them.
It was probably going to be “Breakout”, come to think of it. Freedom was just a little to clichéd. Particularly in South Africa. Now in Zim, freedom meant something completely different.
Done. “Two ham and salami,” Vusi called through the hatch to a guy in a pink blazer. “Hey! Two ham and salami” The guy was having some kind of altercation with someone on the Jolly Roger balcony.
His mate eventually came over and paid for the pizzas. He turned and took them across to his irate buddy on the pavement. But the craziest thing was what this drunk, angry dude did with his pie. He opened the box, and without even examining the contents, grabbed the doughy, cheesy disc and threw it Frisbee style across the road at the Jolly Roger balcony.
Vusi watched the flying pizza with interest. It wasn’t a solid disc, like a Frisbee, so it actually wobbled a little as it floated. Like it was flapping its wings.
A flying pizza! It was to be the last pizza that Vusi ever baked.
That night he started work on his next piece for the breakout exhibition. He began by flattening the clay out into a disc, then rippling the edges a little and fashioning some feathers. Like the pizza was flying…

Rock songs of love, guilt and healing

2009-01-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

It was a time for a mixtape. Or a mixed CD, more like. A compilation CD. Seeing as Beth was going to be laid up at home for the next couple of weeks with the broken leg, and especially seeing as he’d been the last person she’d spoken to before she went and got hit by that car.
Chris just felt a little responsible. Sure, she’d been drinking before they got off stage and came and joined her, but they’d certainly been klapping those shooters. She would say, “To Blow The Band,” every time they downed a round, then they’d all say, “It’s not a name, it’s an instruction!” And then they’d order another lot of tequilas.
She’d even asked him to come to the Autobank with her, and like an absolute bladdy fool, he’d said, “No, it’s cool. I’ve just come back from there.”
It was so obvious! She fully dug him. And now she had a broken leg and was gonna be out of circulation for a month at least. There was no way he could make a play for Beth until she was at least on crutches. That was the band rule.
And besides, the band was going on tour tomorrow.
So until Beth broke the crutches barrier, Chris was going to worm his way into her heart with a compilation of sexy rock tunes, so she’d have something sweet to listen to while she recovered, and also so she could think of him a couple of times every week until she was better and could come invite him to the Autobank again.
The compilation was kicking off with a Blow tune, obviously, since she dug the band so much. Freedom would be a good one. Sets the tone nicely, then maybe go on a Led Zeppelin tip, but not a traditional Zep song. D’yer Mak’er from Houses Of The Holy would probably work, cos that allows you to go reggae after that.
Reggae puts out a mellow, positive, loving vibe. And that’s the aim here, after all. Marley next, because all mixtapes need a Bob Marley tune. A lekker acoustic song. Coming In From The Cold from Redemption. The last song he ever wrote. Shame, man.
Chris once knew the chords to that, but never had the guts to play it live. Whities can seldom get away with playing Marley. But you can certainly put it on a CD. And then Santeria by Sublime. Ska-flavoured acoustic rock. And then we’re heading back towards the rock, so maybe La-La-Love You off The Pixies’ Doolittle album.
That’s a bit of a weird one, full of whistling and more drumming than anything else. So what to follow it with? Something modern, to stop it being too retro…
Ah, hip-hop. How about The Clap Song, by Skwatta Kamp. Yiss, but those guys rocked The Bassline the other night. Sheess. There were 12 of them on stage by the end, rhyming befuck.
Then some international reggae… How about Izzo by Jay-Z and Linkin Park? Perfect, because that leads us back to the rock. Something with beats this time, maybe… Ah-ha! Lapdance by NERD. A perfect funk-rock jam to get Beth’s, well, her foot tapping.
Then a perfect three-song combination that always worked for Chris when he was DJing at London Calling. Place Your Hands by Reef into Special K by Placebo into American Idiot by Green Day. Wee-hoo. Okay, now it’s lekker punky, so maybe a slightly mellower punk song to ease out of it…
Or, hang on. Dakota by Stereophonics. That’s gotta be the best rock song ever! This is turning into a goodie.
And then finally for the coup de grace to finish off the album, Fix You off the new Coldplay. Which immediately suggests the title for the CD…
Chris scribbled, “I will try to fix you” in his neatest cursive on the top of the disc and popped it back in its jewel case.
Then he cycled over to Beth’s digs in Westdene and triumphantly popped the CD in her postbox.
The next morning Blow left on their three-week tour of the Cape, Southern Cape and the Free State.
It was only on the way back, after they’d rocked the hell out of the Mystic Boer in Bloem, that he realised he’d forgot to put his name on the CD. Such a doos!
Meanwhile, in Westdene, Beth had Fix You on repeat on the lounge hi-fi. “And the best part,” she thought to herself, “is that he just knew I’d know who it was from.”