Birthday bungee ain’t what it used to be

Next time you get a shirt for your birthday, or a thing of aftershave, just be glad you didn’t get a bungee jump.
I got a bungee jump for my last birthday. It’s hectic, because you have to do it. There’s no looking a gift horse in the mouth, as they say. Also it was a present from my wife, Baby, so there was a manliness dimension to it as well.
She didn’t hand over a present or anything. She just called up a web page, Sky Riders Power Swing – off the cooling towers at Orlando Power station in Soweto. One hundred and ten metres off the ground! “That’s your present. Happy Birthday.”
Unfortunately I have just enough experience of adrenaline sports to know that 110m is bladdy high.
I hopped out of a plane about ten years ago, and I also did a bungee and a kingswing at Gouritz outside Mossel Bay. After that Mossels kingswing, I hung up my bungee cord.
Thank god that was over. Now I could say I’d done it, no one could call me a pussy and I’d never have to do it again.
Sadly no one told my wife that.
Of course we both insisted that it would be alright if the other one didn’t want to go through with it, but in the end we peer pressured each other into it. Next thing we’re at the foot of the left-hand cooling tower in the heart of Soweto, and Vaughn from Sky Riders is showing me how to make a special front pocket in my jeans to avoid the straps squashing my gonads when I bottom out at the end of my 50-metre plummet.
Then we’re putting a brave face on things as the cage ascends up the side of the tower to the jumping platform. I’ve got a little video cam, and I’m filming the ascent through that, hiding behind it, hoping it’ll shield me from the horror.
The vertigo hits as we exit the cage, clambering up the fragile staircase clinging to the lip of the chimney on the roof of Joburg. (Don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down).
Shhhooo. The wind’s gusting up there, and it’s bright as blazes. I got the camera thing going on, anchored to this tiny bench they have, as far as possible from the edge as I can get.
Then Baby goes and volunteers to go first. It’s gonna be like that. No hanging around. Next thing she’s inching her way to the very edge, and the instructor’s counting her down.
I’m giving her encouragement, all the while trying not to look down. Not easy when everything there is to look at is below you! There’s Orlando lake. I can see Maponya down there… This other girl can check her house from here. She’s waving to her mom!
Now Baby’s gone. Plunging into oblivion. Four seconds of silence, then just shrieks. Shrieks of relief and adrenaline.
In less than a minute that’s going to be me. I’ve just got to go through those steps. Clip on the cord, walk to the edge, feel the terror of the oblivion yawning below, feel every sinew of my body begging me not to do it. And despite all that, to step off into the abyss.
Thirty seconds to go now. Happy fuckin’ birthday…

The beginning of the end

“It’s the beginning of the end,” moans Disco.
I didn’t realise how long it had been since I was in Greenside. It wasn’t anything personal; I still loved Greenside, it had a very special place in my heart. But apparently I hadn’t been there for two years.
When I was last in Greenside, it was a pleasant strip of affordably upscale restaurants with attractive elements of residential suburbia. There was a Portuguese seafood place, an Indian restaurant, a couple of trendy eateries of indeterminate ethnicity, alongside a Kwikspar, a laundry and petrol station.
While I was merrily going about my life in Sandton, with some tangential encounters with Newtown, Melville, Fourways and Bryanston, I somehow contrived to avoid Greenside. God, I’d been down Barry Hertzog at least four times, I’d been jolling in Parkhurst, been for a chow in Mellies. So close! I’d even paddled in a canoe race at Emmarentia dam…
I’d taken Greenside for granted. In my mind it was always there, inscrutable, eternal, like the Grand Canyon. Meanwhile it was changing, reimagining itself, becoming scrutable.
And now it’s the beginning of the end!
Disco is a Greenside resident, he stays right on the strip, and he has witnessed the change. The devolution.
Where once there was an upmarket eatery there is now a rock club. Gin, it’s called. And it represents the end of Greenside civilization as we know it.
“It’s not the rock club as such,” Disco clarifies. “It’s what happens when the club closes and the place starts emptying out. You get people hanging around on the street, chatting till all hours. Cars driving up and down the street…”
“Mmm… noisy.”
“I think the answer is double glazing. If you think of the Kempinski Hotel in Moscow. It’s right on the main road, and you hardly hear the traffic. Double glazing, bru.”
“Ja, and this is how it started in Melville,” I find myself saying. “Yeoville, Rosebank... It always starts with a nightclub, next thing it’s a couple of nightclubs, then the larney restaurants close down. Next thing the merts arrive…”
“Ja, and you know what it does to the property values.”
“Ja, if you think about it, twenty years ago we were sitting having a dop on the roof of Tandoor.”
Indeed we were. Tandoor in Rockey Street in Yeoville was the coolest place to hang back in 1990. The pulsing Bohemian heart of Johannesburg. A mix of eateries, rock clubs and elements of residential suburbia. Today I wouldn’t go to Yeoville unless I needed to sell my car to a drug dealer for five grand.
“Should we get one more round?”
“Might as well. Make it the last one.”
Ja. Okes are pushing forty. And we can’t be staying out as late as we used to in our heyday. So we’ll make it one last round. Disco gets up and heads downstairs to fetch that last round.
Downstairs at the bar. At Gin, Greenside’s finest new rock venue.