This is the first time we've ever watched an entire YouTube ad. And we even abandoned the video we were originally planning to watch!
We were just pretty impressed with Chevrolet building a cricket pitch at Cowan High School, which also happens to be in Port Elizabeth, our old stomping ground. PE's the home of the Chevrolet Warriors, which cannot be unrelated.
Makhaya Ntini makes a cameo and the aerial perspectives don't hurt either. Good luck to the lighties playing some crick at Cowan. Hope to see you playing for the Warriors soon.
Showing posts with label Port Elizabeth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Port Elizabeth. Show all posts
Friday, February 22, 2013
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Fun power: Me and dad gaming into the future
During the Seventies and Eighties, there was an upmarket shopping centre on Main Street called the Constantia Centre. It was where Pier 14 is now.
In my mind it will always be distinguished by being the location of the first set of escalators I ever saw, and for a spectacular display piece that occupied the triple-storey foyer.
It was a massive cylindrical piece, with a couple of hundred vertical strands of wire, and these drip-fed streams of oil pouring down each strand. And all the drops were descending in formation! So it looked like sheets of heavenly raindrops were falling into the foyer of the Constantia Centre, which was also the first new-school shopping mall in Port Elizabeth.
The Constantia Centre was the scene of a vital bonding ritual that my father and I shared in my boyhood.
Every few months, perhaps three nights a year, my dad and I would go to the games arcade at the Constantia Centre and play arcade games.
It was our special night out, just me and him, driving out into the darkness on a Friday night to share our thrilling boys’ ritual of pinball, Ms Pac-Gal and motor-racing games.
Dad would wear his leather jacket and I’d wear my favourite light-blue one, the one with the military epaulettes and the corduroy patches. We’d park in the upstairs parking garage and stride through to the arcade in formation. The boys out on the town.
Dad would buy several pockets worth of tokens and we’d unleash ourselves on the place.
This was the heyday of Space Invaders, Tetris, Exerion, Galaga and those sit-down Asteroids games.
Then there were the old foozball tables, real pinball that you could tilt and get free games off, and one of the original Pong arcade-games consoles. We challenged each other to game after game, and I scarcely minded that I lost every one.
Ah, maybe Dad let me win a couple, but the point was I got to spend an entire evening with my father, who was usually so busy that he came home after dark every night.
Another reason was that Dad had worked out that I had an addictive personality. Given the chance, I would easily have spent all my free time and pocket money playing video games.
I guess he figured regular, sporadic doses would help alleviate my games craving without having it take over my life. Give me more time for sport and homework.
Whatever the reason, it must have worked. I’ve generally managed to keep my various addictions under control, I’m still into sport and I always get my homework done in time – as the Weekend Post editor can attest.
In addition, Dad and I have remained the best of friends. To continue the gaming theme, I recently gave the guy a Wii gaming console for his 70th birthday. We played a couple of Wii golf games against each other and it was just like old times. The boys gaming together again. Awesome.
I hope he doesn’t get addicted.
In my mind it will always be distinguished by being the location of the first set of escalators I ever saw, and for a spectacular display piece that occupied the triple-storey foyer.
It was a massive cylindrical piece, with a couple of hundred vertical strands of wire, and these drip-fed streams of oil pouring down each strand. And all the drops were descending in formation! So it looked like sheets of heavenly raindrops were falling into the foyer of the Constantia Centre, which was also the first new-school shopping mall in Port Elizabeth.
The Constantia Centre was the scene of a vital bonding ritual that my father and I shared in my boyhood.
Every few months, perhaps three nights a year, my dad and I would go to the games arcade at the Constantia Centre and play arcade games.
It was our special night out, just me and him, driving out into the darkness on a Friday night to share our thrilling boys’ ritual of pinball, Ms Pac-Gal and motor-racing games.
Dad would wear his leather jacket and I’d wear my favourite light-blue one, the one with the military epaulettes and the corduroy patches. We’d park in the upstairs parking garage and stride through to the arcade in formation. The boys out on the town.
Dad would buy several pockets worth of tokens and we’d unleash ourselves on the place.
This was the heyday of Space Invaders, Tetris, Exerion, Galaga and those sit-down Asteroids games.
Then there were the old foozball tables, real pinball that you could tilt and get free games off, and one of the original Pong arcade-games consoles. We challenged each other to game after game, and I scarcely minded that I lost every one.
Ah, maybe Dad let me win a couple, but the point was I got to spend an entire evening with my father, who was usually so busy that he came home after dark every night.
Another reason was that Dad had worked out that I had an addictive personality. Given the chance, I would easily have spent all my free time and pocket money playing video games.
I guess he figured regular, sporadic doses would help alleviate my games craving without having it take over my life. Give me more time for sport and homework.
Whatever the reason, it must have worked. I’ve generally managed to keep my various addictions under control, I’m still into sport and I always get my homework done in time – as the Weekend Post editor can attest.
In addition, Dad and I have remained the best of friends. To continue the gaming theme, I recently gave the guy a Wii gaming console for his 70th birthday. We played a couple of Wii golf games against each other and it was just like old times. The boys gaming together again. Awesome.
I hope he doesn’t get addicted.
Monday, June 16, 2008
From the novel Greener Grass: The Men The Chicken Run Left Behind
“Coming in to Joburg. Sandton swimming pools and Soweto shacks…”
Like the song says, it’s the main thing you notices flying in to jan Smuts. Or Joburg International, or whatever it’s called now.
What’s it now? Three years I’ve been away. I figured I’d take a bus down to PE from Joburg. See the countryside and recquaint myself with the land of my birth, I schemed. Ends up being 15 hours of lower-back-pain hell in the Translux. And most of the trip’s at night. 'Course I shoulda flown down, but there you go.
Finally the bus rolls into the windblown parking lot behind the Greenacres mall. It’s Sunday morning around elevenish; pale and blustery.
And there they were to welcome me back from the outside world. No folks, no girlfriend, no family friends. Just my three chinas. The men the chicken run left behind.
Joe looks like the dude from Korn, with one of those pointy bokkies, in a pair of combat pants, rave sneakers, a black lycra muscle top and dark brils. Dennis is in his wheelchair, stubbing out what looks from here like a entch of a scoobie. Girrick’s standing all hunched over in his same Sid ‘n’ Nancy T-shirt and his beige tracksuit pants billowing on him like he’s a scarecrow.
They look like they’ve come straight from the jol.
Joe just laughs when he sees me.
“Pitjie! You stingy bastard. Save R500 on plane fare, and spend six times that amount over the next four years on chiropractor's fees Typical. Welcome back, bruddah.”
After a moment’s contemplation, we give it a full body hug.
“Ja, man. Welcome back, man.”
“Ja. Shot. It’s good to be back.”
Ay, Pitjie. The Pitchmonster. Back in town. Hey!” says Girrick to himself, more than to me.
I pat him on the back and give him a “Hey Garr.”
Dennis whips out the roach from just now and relights it. “TK first-grade,” are his first words to me. “Bet you haven’t had a hit of that for a while, ay Pitj?”
I pull it deep and hard. It has been a while.
The other passengers are identifying their luggage still. I go fetch mine, and we start packing it into Joy’s new car, a second-hand Escort. Dennis is the only one who offers to help carry.
“So? How was overseas?”
“Ay awesome, hey. Kryp.”
“Kief, man. Must’ve got waves.”
“Ja, some places. Indo was the kryp. I’s also working in London for lank.”
“Ja I heard. In some bar?”
Jeremy had styled me in Jo’burg – I’m still pulling crystal rocks of snot out of my nose from all the Charlie him and his mate Carlo were feeding me during my stayover. The folks had sold up and gone travelling, so I’m gonna be staying on mates’ lounge floors for a bit.
I got Joey’s number from his old graft at Music World.
“Bailed that in a big way, bra. Year ago already.”
The place is called Francisco’s, and I can tell things are still pretty shimmery for the ous.
Dennis’s developed this sick, sick, depraved party trick where he lifts his remaining leg onto the table, puts his foot to the side of his face and pretends it’s a telephone. Totally dials numbers on it, and has conversations and stuff. You laugh, but it makes you feel sick at the same time. “You want warm or cold milk with that?”
“Milk? Er cold, I guess.” Coffee shops in PE. Who woulda thought?
“No bra. Finances is quite cool and independent at the moment,” is what Joe tunes me, all in this weird half-coloured accent way I never checked before.
“What, are you merting?”
“…bit, hey…”
“What? Pills ‘n’ shit? … Zol?”
“… Can get you that.”
How’s this? My bra’s a mert! A popular one. There’s other party okes in the coffee shop, still pilling, coming up to our table and just tuning Joe howzit, and shot. He’s fully urbane and like, “Have a nice time last night?” It’s rad.
Last I remember, Joe was just a chilled goofball. I realise all of a sudden that Girrick is actually a good deal more shambolic than usual. He’s shaking. And chain-smoking, all grimy from a whole night’s partying. He’s quite pink, flushed, and bopping his head to the background music, which – it being eleven in the morning – is Phil Collins.
His only contribution to the conversation is to say, at ten-minute intervals. “Jeez, I’m fucked, hey.” Dennis debriefs me.
“So where-all d’you go?”
“All over, hey. England… Europe… and then Indo… Hawaii… the States.”
“So then how long were you in…”
“Oz…”
“…in Indo for?”
“Where? In Oz or in Indo?”
“Both.”
“I went to Indo twice. Once for two weeks, and once for three weeks. And I was in Oz for about a month, hey.”
“And Hawaii?”
“Ag. Actually, I just flew through Hawaii and the States on my way back to London. I didn’t really surf there.”
“Oh…”
“And zol? How’s the weed over there?”
“Over where? It varies…”
“Ja, but I bet it’s way much more expensive than here,” says Joe, in this professional kind of tone, “gram for gram.”
“Yah. Depends who you know, though. And because you paying more for it, what you get over there is only the kryp. Generally it’s way better quality than TK’s. No seeds. But hectically expensive.”
At this point Dennis grabs his foot, which has been resting on the table near his elbow, and shakes it at me accusingly. It’s a total spin-out.
“Ja, Pitjie, my boy! And what’s with this ‘kryp’ shit? Hey? You been running it since you got off the bus. What’s it, some London lingo?”
It’s American slang for really hardcore. Over there everything’s kryp. But I actually picked it up from this Hawaiian guy I met in Indo. Billy. We surfed Ulus together. I think it’s from kryptonite – from the Superman comics. It’s that green stuff that comes from Krypton, from his home planet. It’s the thing that makes him lose all his superpowers.”
“…aaah! So the kryptonic weed is the one that makes you go all vlam?” postulates Dennis.
“Yeah. But you gotta say it just kryp, you know. Not kryptonic. And in Hawaii they call zol pukalolo. It means crazy smoke in Polynesian. That’ why some people over here even call it pockie, or puckalolly.”
“My babe calls it that,” says Joe.
“I don’t know,” says Dennis, the bladdy otherwise bastard. “I quite prefer kryptonic to just kryp. Girrick, remind me to start saying kryptonic more often. Like a ou tunes you, ‘can you score me some bain?’ And you tune him back, ‘Got a few packies of kryptonic TK, if you interested… Superman! Ha-ha ha ha-ha-hah. Coff. Coff.”
This is the funniest thing Dennis has heard himself say in moons. He has to put his foot back in his lap so he can lean on the table and wipe the tears of laughter away from his face and have a 30-second coughing fit. Joe gets up and goes to the toilet.
Our coffees come. I’m putting my milk in, when, out of the corner of my eye, I see this white flash.
I look up, and it's an Alsation. It shoots straight through the restaurant and into the bogs that Joey just went into. I scheme, “O-o”. Looked like a dagga dog.
Dennis is till crying and coughing into his coffee, Girrick is just bobbing his head in a Phil Collins trance and pulling on the cigarette he bummed from one of the shiny, pilling people.
“Did no one check that?” I ask out loud. As if. Girry raises his eyebrows to reveal a pair of eyeballs as pink as a couple of cherries that someone drew eyes onto. He says nothing, but Dennis pulls himself out of his laggies paroxysm and says, “What’s 'at, bra?”
“I’m not sure if I imagined it, but I’m sure I saw an Alsation just run into the bogs after Joey.”
“Ja bra. These Alsations are insatiable,” says Dennis and starts lagging and crying again. At one stage he even wipes the tears out of his eyes with his limp foot.
I’m just keeping an eye out for a bunch of police to come bursting into Francisco’s and start busting pillheads left and right. I just got off the bus, so I’m clean as clean, but the rest of the clientele look a bit sketchy.
“Ay, ay, look!” Here it comes again. “Gary. Check.”
There’s another grey flash through the coffee shop. The dog comes missioning out of the bogs like silent stealth and shoots between the tables with its tail down, underneath the radar and outta there. Girrick checks it this time. “Aaaiiiiyyyy, bra.”
Joe comes out a second later.
“Did you ous check that? Pitj, tune me you checked a dog come missioning out of the toilets.”
“Fully. I saw it go in and then come out about a minute later. Less than a minute.”
“I can’t believe it. I got robbed by a dog,” Joey’s scheming, all irate.
A couple of heads come over from the next table, all concerned. “What’s that Joe?”
“Bra! I’m in shock. You won’t believe what just happened. I go in the bogs to pop another ecccie. As I get in there, this dog comes shooting under the door of the stall, stands on its hind legs and pins me against the cistern. The thing fuckin’ growled at me.”
“Fuckin’ dog-mugging, bra,” one of the other okes schemes.
Joe looks a bit pale.
“Starts sniffing me all over, like he’s searching me. I had my bankie of pills out, and the fuckin’ bastard just grabs it in his mouth, and bails back under the door the way he came. Fuckin’ hound took about a grand’s worth of pills off me.”
“Ffffnnnnnrrrk,” one of the waitresses can’t quite contain her laughter as she serves Full English to the couple behind us.
“Ay it’s not fuckin’…” Joey shouts before realising he’s being too loud. “It’s not fuckin’ funny, okay,” he tunes under his breath now, glaring at her, but she’s off back to the kitchen, still lagging to herself and about to tune the coffee guy.
“Looked like a police dog,” I say.
“I scheme so too,” says Joey. “But then where the cops?”
“Ay, who knows,” this little 18-year-old raver oke with gelled-up hair that I’ve never met before tunes. “I gotta be going home now, though. Can you get my coffee. Cheers hey.”
“Ja. Shot, hey,” the rest of the okes at his table tune, and bail as one.
“Ay, fuck you ous” Joey blurts out. “I just been robbed of a grand and now I gotta pay for your coffees?”
But the lighties are outta there fast.
“And those little shits owe me about five hundred bucks each,” growls Joey with his face in his hands, lank bitter. “Fuck!”
“So let’s go get ghoefed,” says Dennis. It’s a winner, that suggestion. We all stand up, except him. Girricks tryna finish his bummed pot quick, having huge lung-hits of the Stuyvie.
“No refills for you guys?” asks the giggling waitress from now-now. Quite a sweetie, actually.
“Nah. We bailing. Gonna go have a wheat at Joey’s spot,” Dennis tunes her. “When d’you get off shift?” He’s spading her swak.
“What’s your name? I’m Dennis, this is Gary, you know Joe, and this is Pitjie – Steve – he just got back from overseas.”
“Hi. Hi. I’m Sharon. Not soon enough, hey. I’ll catch you guys some other time.” She’s got a beauty spot, and these wicked sexy, pouty lips. Arty kind of babe. Jewish looking, with her hair up and curly.
“Hope so,” says Dennis, and we’re off.
“I’m fully functional, in case you’re wondering,” he shouts back to the waitress as Girrick wheels him out.
“Let’s go for a cruise,” Joey schemes as we get into his car. “There’s a whole lot of okes passed out at my spot, and the chick's still dossing. Let’s just do the beachfront. I got a section here.”
Girrick lifts Dennis out of his chair and lowers him into the passenger seat. Folds up his chair, walks round to the boot and drops it in. Looks like he’s done it lank times.
Joey reaches into the cubbie and whips out a bankie. I lean through the middle and check it out. It’s not first grade, it’s second grade. Bit dry and lank little pitjies in it. And stalky. Smells quite peppery, though. Should put on.
Dennis starts crushing on the Sunday Times magazine. Picture of the blonde babe from Austin Powers on it. He’s got a new sorting technique, because he only has one thigh, so he can’t crush between his legs any more. He holds it folded over in his left hand, and picks the seeds out one by one. He’s got it down, though, and by the time we get off the freeway and onto Beach Road at the Bumble, he’s got a king-size zock blazing. Mmmmm. Splif de Paradis.
"Zheezzzz, how’s all this development,” I can’t help blurting out. They built an entire shopping mall behind the Bumble – Spar, gym, bottle store, shops, offices, a M-Net sports café.
“Even a McDonald’s”
“Bra, there’s four McDonalds’s”
Good grief. Leave town for a couple of years and they turn it into a city. I’m pulling on the pockie by the time we get to Hobie Beach. That whole section where Sea Acres was and the tennis stadium used to be is flattened. Full demolitions going on, and bulldozers levelling ground up where the rondavels were – where the Nude Girls used to stay. Although it’s Sunday, so the plant is just standing.
“Casino, bra,” Dennis tunes me. “With restaurants and five-star hotel and all kids of stuff. They taking over the army base too, and the Sugarbush roadhouse.”
The wind’s a howling south-west, so the sea is pale green, and being whipped creamy. Millers is half a foot, with cross-waves chopping the surf to deah. Building sand is being lashed all over the greater Boardwalk area, and it’s miserable.
It must be gale force. The only people braving the weather are a couple of die-hard car guards and a Despatch-looking family going for lunch at Barney’s. There’s some dude trying to sell necklaces out of his kombi, it seems, as we cruise by, heading round the corner. Scoob’s only half way. Joey rolls down his window a bit. “Bra, I can hardly see out the windscreen. Dennis you always gotta roll such huge joints.”
“Ay it’s organic, Joe. It comes from the good earth,” says Dennis, all defensive. “We have naturally evolved THC receptors in our brains especially for getting ghoefed. Smoking zol is our evolutionary birthright,” he says. “Unlike certain other synthetic medication.”
“Dennis, you weren’t being quite so judgmental at Logic last night,” Joey’s tuning in his mert voice again. “I gave you three pills on credit. Now you owe me six-forty. Make it a sweet six hundred.”
“So Pitjie…” Dennis changes the subject without even flinching. “Why d’you come back?”
“Just hang on,” Joey interrupts him. “Sorry Pitjie. I just gotta make something clear here. You two losers owe me almost a grand and a half for eccies and grammage. And I owe Benjie and Jerry fuckin’ huge. So if you don’t pay me back by next weekend I’m fucking you both up. Actually, I know. I’m confiscating your wheelchair, Dennis. And Girrick can go raving at Logic with you on his shoulders.”
“Ahh, come on , bra,” says Girrick weakly as he pulls the spliff. “Who made this girrick?”
“See what I have to deal with?” Joey tunes me. “So how long are you back for?”
“Ay I might stay.”
This is greeted with uncontrollable coughing by Girrick, a high-pitched “What?!” from Denny the Mushroom Mert and a cynical “Yeah, right,” from Joe.
“It’s like the president says,” sings Gary as if he’s copying some pop song. “Stay for our sakes.”
I’m serious. I made bucks in London, but waitering sucks, however well you get paid. I still gotto finish my accounts articles here, though. Wanna finish board exam. It’s hard to explain now, driving around pulling pockie with these ous, but when you’re in London, you miss SA a bit as well. The sun and that. And it looks like business is slowly picking up in the Bay.
“Okay, maybe for you,” says Joey. “You got a degree. But for vlam okes like us, there’s less chance. Bra, if I could wax it, I’d be over there like a shot. I was thinking of coming over to visit you, but you need, like, twenty grand in the bank. That’s almost what my bladdy debts are.”
“Anyway, you’ll check, Pitj,” comes Dennis now. “The graft is min, even for ous with degrees. I’d have an ancestral visa, but my ou-lady’s been divorced so many times I can’t find any birth certificates or anything. That’s why we just working for Joey.”
“Oh. You okes are together.”
“Sub-contractors,” Groans Girrick, with his lungs full of smoke. “Informal sector.”
“Ja,” says Joey, “I’m also spinning a few tunes. I’m DJ Salinger. But the drug industry’s the only business in town that half decent. And if it’s between being a barman and a mert, which it basically is, I’ll be a mert every time.
“If you merting pills, everyong loves you. If you’re a barman, everyone just tells you to move it up and you have to kiss their arses for a two-buck tip so they can go home pissed and beat their girlfriends. Fuck that.”
“Fully,” says Girrick.
“Or putting CDs in alphabetical order all day for six rand an hour. It’s childish.”
“Whyn’t you go to Cape Town?” I ask him.
“Bra! Cape town can fuck off. Between Nigies and Moroccans and gangsters and Pagad? There’s no ways I’m’onna go mert in Cape Town. It’s bad enough here!”
“What about the cops,” I tune Joe.
“Fffffffff… “ is what Girrick tunes, exhaling.
“Gary, are you ganna smoke that whole thing by yourself,” schemes Joe, leaning back over the seat while he’s still driving.
“Whoooaa! Hey man! Skort bra!” There’s a few seconds of pandemonium as Dennis grabs the wheel and Joe eyeballs Girrick, blank-faced and innocent as a lamb. We’re taking the right-hand bend near Cape Recife. “Okay, okay,” relents Gary, and passes it forward. And then, “I had a proper job.”
“Ja, listen to this,” says Dennis, chuckling as he takes the honey pot from Gary.
“PR,” says Gary. “Who’s got a smoke?”
Dennis issues him one, and he continues. “But it wasn’t for me. And they were exploiting me. Two gorillas a month was all I was clearing. Peanuts, man. Peanuts.”
“Two weekends’ work at Logic,” says Joe.
“Shooo. Proper graft, hey,” says Girrick to himself, shaking his head.
We’re driving around the back of the university, where the dunegrass and coastal fynbos has been supplanted by forests of Port Jackson willow. All the same. Just a sea of willow leaves beckoning in the gale, shining silver and green.
They brought in the Port Jackson to save the town, they say. Port Elizabeth was in danger of being swamped by invading sand dunes. Like Swakopmund. Then this one dude got the idea to plant the Port Jacksons and they stabilised the dunes. And the town was saved. There’s a monument to the guy on the PE beachfront.
“So what about babes,” says Dennis now, sort of to me, but actually to no one in particular, just sort of signalling that we will now talk about babes for a bit.
“So what are you on now?” he asks, more to me this time. Me and Dennis always had this sort of survey going on, of how many babes we’d had sex with. I was well over it, but it became a kind of vicarious sex mission for Dennis, who hardly ever got to have sex these days. I sometimes felt I was having sex on Dennis’s behalf.
It started at school already, when Dennis was the only one of us who’d ghoened anyone. Then after his accident, we started catching up gradually, and now we saw it more as a bonding exercise than anything else. I only caught up with Dennis two years after school – that’s about five years after his accident, so you must know. Damn lucky he missed the Aids era, but there you go.
“Must be into my thirties by now,” I tune him, not without some pride. “The chicks dig the SA boys that side.”
“Like where? Where was the sweetest honey that you ghoened?”
“Dennis! Jeeezuz!” Joey’s feigning embarrassment cos he’s got a babe.
“Ay shoosh Joe,” comes Dennis. “Just cos you get to ghoen Miss Rave PE doesn’t mean the rest of us have to ignore our rampant libidos, ekse.”
“So you can actually have sex, hey Dennis?” Joey asks, even though he knows the answer.
“Bra, just ask the girls from Karen’s if I can have sex,” is Dennis’s comeback. “They’ll tune you. The boy always gets his money’s worth that side.”
The king-sizer’s swak and we’re parked at Lookout, on the wilderness side of town, where the untamed ocean swells pound the rocky coastline, outside the calm sanctuary of Algoa Bay, the Bay of the Lagoon.
“So who is this babe you’re seeing?” I just gotta know.
“Ja man, you know her. Layla. Blonde babe.”
“Layla JAY?!!”
So the bastard got her. “The one you were perving from way back. I think I caught her by fluke the one night in London at Sunnyside Up.”
“Ja, that would’ve been her. But I wouldn’t say I used to perv her. We just felt a certain attraction, and we move in the same circles. She helps me with business and that.”
“Bra, you are in such denial,” comes Denny’s voice of reason. “Look at yourself. You changed your entire image to hook that babe. You gave up jamming music and took up DJ-ing, you dress like some oke from the Matrix, you started merting… and that was her business to begin with, not yours. Now you’ve got gangsters and Nigies living in your lounge selling crack and smack an all kindsa shit. Just ‘coz of that babe.”
I would’ve thought this would make Joey fully woes, but he’s mellow about it. Obviously they’ve had this conversation before.
“Ay. What can I say, ou’s. I’m pussy-whipped. Tell me you wouldn’t be.”
There are grudging grumbles of assent from all corners of the car, as Joe starts it up again with an air of triumphant finality and we leave the Lookout parking lot, following Marine Drive further round the corner towards the seaside villages of Willows and Schoenmakerskop, before the road loops back into PE.
Dunno if Joe knows about that fiasco me and Layla had before I left, but I know what he means. Men do crazy things for babes like that.
Joe’s is your basic drug house. Semi-detached Central digs.
There’s nothing too hectic visible at first. Just a section of doob lying crushed on a Skyf! Magazine. The room smells like basing, though, or buttons, or both. And thers’s little skietsels of powder on the lounge table you could probably make a line with. Girrick finds someone’s Makro card and starts doing just that.
There’s a huge black oke passed out on the couch with a curtan thrown over him. He’s still got his brils on. And some other whitie, looks young enough to be a schoolie, sitting tryna watch TV, but he’s catching fish. He’s passing out and waking up every couple of seconds. Every now and then he wakes with a start and says, “What was that? D’you check that?” before passing out again. I think it’s called narcolepsy.
I meet this coloured oke, Duncan, stopping a pipe in the kitchen with Dennis.
“Morning, boss. Morning, boss,” he tunes me. “So the boys ready for a bit of a bronchodilator this morning?”
I’m actually schmangled from the car spliff, so I weasel out of it. Dennis pounces.
“If Pitjie doesn’t have, we can put some of ’at coke in it?” he tunes Duncan, in a coloured style. “Give it a lekker skop.”
Joe’s snuck into the bedroom to check his babe. I guess that’s the end of the evening for him. I roll out my mattie and my sleeping bag and find a spot near the hi-fi, which is oozing this sparse piddly ambient music. Pee-pop. Pow-wow-wow. Woooooo-up. Jah Wobble kinda shite from two years ago.
The schoolie’s still catching fish. “Whoa!” he starts, and goes back to sleep.
Girrick’s compiled a three-inch line of cocaine, breadcrumbs, house dust and zol skietsels. I go to sleep to the sound of him sniffing it up his nose.
“Goodnight sweet prince,” I tune him facetiously.
He says, “Hey, what’s that?”
I go out like a light. It was a hell of a bus trip.
Must be half past one. It’s great to be home.
Like the song says, it’s the main thing you notices flying in to jan Smuts. Or Joburg International, or whatever it’s called now.
What’s it now? Three years I’ve been away. I figured I’d take a bus down to PE from Joburg. See the countryside and recquaint myself with the land of my birth, I schemed. Ends up being 15 hours of lower-back-pain hell in the Translux. And most of the trip’s at night. 'Course I shoulda flown down, but there you go.
Finally the bus rolls into the windblown parking lot behind the Greenacres mall. It’s Sunday morning around elevenish; pale and blustery.
And there they were to welcome me back from the outside world. No folks, no girlfriend, no family friends. Just my three chinas. The men the chicken run left behind.
Joe looks like the dude from Korn, with one of those pointy bokkies, in a pair of combat pants, rave sneakers, a black lycra muscle top and dark brils. Dennis is in his wheelchair, stubbing out what looks from here like a entch of a scoobie. Girrick’s standing all hunched over in his same Sid ‘n’ Nancy T-shirt and his beige tracksuit pants billowing on him like he’s a scarecrow.
They look like they’ve come straight from the jol.
Joe just laughs when he sees me.
“Pitjie! You stingy bastard. Save R500 on plane fare, and spend six times that amount over the next four years on chiropractor's fees Typical. Welcome back, bruddah.”
After a moment’s contemplation, we give it a full body hug.
“Ja, man. Welcome back, man.”
“Ja. Shot. It’s good to be back.”
Ay, Pitjie. The Pitchmonster. Back in town. Hey!” says Girrick to himself, more than to me.
I pat him on the back and give him a “Hey Garr.”
Dennis whips out the roach from just now and relights it. “TK first-grade,” are his first words to me. “Bet you haven’t had a hit of that for a while, ay Pitj?”
I pull it deep and hard. It has been a while.
The other passengers are identifying their luggage still. I go fetch mine, and we start packing it into Joy’s new car, a second-hand Escort. Dennis is the only one who offers to help carry.
“So? How was overseas?”
“Ay awesome, hey. Kryp.”
“Kief, man. Must’ve got waves.”
“Ja, some places. Indo was the kryp. I’s also working in London for lank.”
“Ja I heard. In some bar?”
Jeremy had styled me in Jo’burg – I’m still pulling crystal rocks of snot out of my nose from all the Charlie him and his mate Carlo were feeding me during my stayover. The folks had sold up and gone travelling, so I’m gonna be staying on mates’ lounge floors for a bit.
I got Joey’s number from his old graft at Music World.
“Bailed that in a big way, bra. Year ago already.”
The place is called Francisco’s, and I can tell things are still pretty shimmery for the ous.
Dennis’s developed this sick, sick, depraved party trick where he lifts his remaining leg onto the table, puts his foot to the side of his face and pretends it’s a telephone. Totally dials numbers on it, and has conversations and stuff. You laugh, but it makes you feel sick at the same time. “You want warm or cold milk with that?”
“Milk? Er cold, I guess.” Coffee shops in PE. Who woulda thought?
“No bra. Finances is quite cool and independent at the moment,” is what Joe tunes me, all in this weird half-coloured accent way I never checked before.
“What, are you merting?”
“…bit, hey…”
“What? Pills ‘n’ shit? … Zol?”
“… Can get you that.”
How’s this? My bra’s a mert! A popular one. There’s other party okes in the coffee shop, still pilling, coming up to our table and just tuning Joe howzit, and shot. He’s fully urbane and like, “Have a nice time last night?” It’s rad.
Last I remember, Joe was just a chilled goofball. I realise all of a sudden that Girrick is actually a good deal more shambolic than usual. He’s shaking. And chain-smoking, all grimy from a whole night’s partying. He’s quite pink, flushed, and bopping his head to the background music, which – it being eleven in the morning – is Phil Collins.
His only contribution to the conversation is to say, at ten-minute intervals. “Jeez, I’m fucked, hey.” Dennis debriefs me.
“So where-all d’you go?”
“All over, hey. England… Europe… and then Indo… Hawaii… the States.”
“So then how long were you in…”
“Oz…”
“…in Indo for?”
“Where? In Oz or in Indo?”
“Both.”
“I went to Indo twice. Once for two weeks, and once for three weeks. And I was in Oz for about a month, hey.”
“And Hawaii?”
“Ag. Actually, I just flew through Hawaii and the States on my way back to London. I didn’t really surf there.”
“Oh…”
“And zol? How’s the weed over there?”
“Over where? It varies…”
“Ja, but I bet it’s way much more expensive than here,” says Joe, in this professional kind of tone, “gram for gram.”
“Yah. Depends who you know, though. And because you paying more for it, what you get over there is only the kryp. Generally it’s way better quality than TK’s. No seeds. But hectically expensive.”
At this point Dennis grabs his foot, which has been resting on the table near his elbow, and shakes it at me accusingly. It’s a total spin-out.
“Ja, Pitjie, my boy! And what’s with this ‘kryp’ shit? Hey? You been running it since you got off the bus. What’s it, some London lingo?”
It’s American slang for really hardcore. Over there everything’s kryp. But I actually picked it up from this Hawaiian guy I met in Indo. Billy. We surfed Ulus together. I think it’s from kryptonite – from the Superman comics. It’s that green stuff that comes from Krypton, from his home planet. It’s the thing that makes him lose all his superpowers.”
“…aaah! So the kryptonic weed is the one that makes you go all vlam?” postulates Dennis.
“Yeah. But you gotta say it just kryp, you know. Not kryptonic. And in Hawaii they call zol pukalolo. It means crazy smoke in Polynesian. That’ why some people over here even call it pockie, or puckalolly.”
“My babe calls it that,” says Joe.
“I don’t know,” says Dennis, the bladdy otherwise bastard. “I quite prefer kryptonic to just kryp. Girrick, remind me to start saying kryptonic more often. Like a ou tunes you, ‘can you score me some bain?’ And you tune him back, ‘Got a few packies of kryptonic TK, if you interested… Superman! Ha-ha ha ha-ha-hah. Coff. Coff.”
This is the funniest thing Dennis has heard himself say in moons. He has to put his foot back in his lap so he can lean on the table and wipe the tears of laughter away from his face and have a 30-second coughing fit. Joe gets up and goes to the toilet.
Our coffees come. I’m putting my milk in, when, out of the corner of my eye, I see this white flash.
I look up, and it's an Alsation. It shoots straight through the restaurant and into the bogs that Joey just went into. I scheme, “O-o”. Looked like a dagga dog.
Dennis is till crying and coughing into his coffee, Girrick is just bobbing his head in a Phil Collins trance and pulling on the cigarette he bummed from one of the shiny, pilling people.
“Did no one check that?” I ask out loud. As if. Girry raises his eyebrows to reveal a pair of eyeballs as pink as a couple of cherries that someone drew eyes onto. He says nothing, but Dennis pulls himself out of his laggies paroxysm and says, “What’s 'at, bra?”
“I’m not sure if I imagined it, but I’m sure I saw an Alsation just run into the bogs after Joey.”
“Ja bra. These Alsations are insatiable,” says Dennis and starts lagging and crying again. At one stage he even wipes the tears out of his eyes with his limp foot.
I’m just keeping an eye out for a bunch of police to come bursting into Francisco’s and start busting pillheads left and right. I just got off the bus, so I’m clean as clean, but the rest of the clientele look a bit sketchy.
“Ay, ay, look!” Here it comes again. “Gary. Check.”
There’s another grey flash through the coffee shop. The dog comes missioning out of the bogs like silent stealth and shoots between the tables with its tail down, underneath the radar and outta there. Girrick checks it this time. “Aaaiiiiyyyy, bra.”
Joe comes out a second later.
“Did you ous check that? Pitj, tune me you checked a dog come missioning out of the toilets.”
“Fully. I saw it go in and then come out about a minute later. Less than a minute.”
“I can’t believe it. I got robbed by a dog,” Joey’s scheming, all irate.
A couple of heads come over from the next table, all concerned. “What’s that Joe?”
“Bra! I’m in shock. You won’t believe what just happened. I go in the bogs to pop another ecccie. As I get in there, this dog comes shooting under the door of the stall, stands on its hind legs and pins me against the cistern. The thing fuckin’ growled at me.”
“Fuckin’ dog-mugging, bra,” one of the other okes schemes.
Joe looks a bit pale.
“Starts sniffing me all over, like he’s searching me. I had my bankie of pills out, and the fuckin’ bastard just grabs it in his mouth, and bails back under the door the way he came. Fuckin’ hound took about a grand’s worth of pills off me.”
“Ffffnnnnnrrrk,” one of the waitresses can’t quite contain her laughter as she serves Full English to the couple behind us.
“Ay it’s not fuckin’…” Joey shouts before realising he’s being too loud. “It’s not fuckin’ funny, okay,” he tunes under his breath now, glaring at her, but she’s off back to the kitchen, still lagging to herself and about to tune the coffee guy.
“Looked like a police dog,” I say.
“I scheme so too,” says Joey. “But then where the cops?”
“Ay, who knows,” this little 18-year-old raver oke with gelled-up hair that I’ve never met before tunes. “I gotta be going home now, though. Can you get my coffee. Cheers hey.”
“Ja. Shot, hey,” the rest of the okes at his table tune, and bail as one.
“Ay, fuck you ous” Joey blurts out. “I just been robbed of a grand and now I gotta pay for your coffees?”
But the lighties are outta there fast.
“And those little shits owe me about five hundred bucks each,” growls Joey with his face in his hands, lank bitter. “Fuck!”
“So let’s go get ghoefed,” says Dennis. It’s a winner, that suggestion. We all stand up, except him. Girricks tryna finish his bummed pot quick, having huge lung-hits of the Stuyvie.
“No refills for you guys?” asks the giggling waitress from now-now. Quite a sweetie, actually.
“Nah. We bailing. Gonna go have a wheat at Joey’s spot,” Dennis tunes her. “When d’you get off shift?” He’s spading her swak.
“What’s your name? I’m Dennis, this is Gary, you know Joe, and this is Pitjie – Steve – he just got back from overseas.”
“Hi. Hi. I’m Sharon. Not soon enough, hey. I’ll catch you guys some other time.” She’s got a beauty spot, and these wicked sexy, pouty lips. Arty kind of babe. Jewish looking, with her hair up and curly.
“Hope so,” says Dennis, and we’re off.
“I’m fully functional, in case you’re wondering,” he shouts back to the waitress as Girrick wheels him out.
“Let’s go for a cruise,” Joey schemes as we get into his car. “There’s a whole lot of okes passed out at my spot, and the chick's still dossing. Let’s just do the beachfront. I got a section here.”
Girrick lifts Dennis out of his chair and lowers him into the passenger seat. Folds up his chair, walks round to the boot and drops it in. Looks like he’s done it lank times.
Joey reaches into the cubbie and whips out a bankie. I lean through the middle and check it out. It’s not first grade, it’s second grade. Bit dry and lank little pitjies in it. And stalky. Smells quite peppery, though. Should put on.
Dennis starts crushing on the Sunday Times magazine. Picture of the blonde babe from Austin Powers on it. He’s got a new sorting technique, because he only has one thigh, so he can’t crush between his legs any more. He holds it folded over in his left hand, and picks the seeds out one by one. He’s got it down, though, and by the time we get off the freeway and onto Beach Road at the Bumble, he’s got a king-size zock blazing. Mmmmm. Splif de Paradis.
"Zheezzzz, how’s all this development,” I can’t help blurting out. They built an entire shopping mall behind the Bumble – Spar, gym, bottle store, shops, offices, a M-Net sports café.
“Even a McDonald’s”
“Bra, there’s four McDonalds’s”
Good grief. Leave town for a couple of years and they turn it into a city. I’m pulling on the pockie by the time we get to Hobie Beach. That whole section where Sea Acres was and the tennis stadium used to be is flattened. Full demolitions going on, and bulldozers levelling ground up where the rondavels were – where the Nude Girls used to stay. Although it’s Sunday, so the plant is just standing.
“Casino, bra,” Dennis tunes me. “With restaurants and five-star hotel and all kids of stuff. They taking over the army base too, and the Sugarbush roadhouse.”
The wind’s a howling south-west, so the sea is pale green, and being whipped creamy. Millers is half a foot, with cross-waves chopping the surf to deah. Building sand is being lashed all over the greater Boardwalk area, and it’s miserable.
It must be gale force. The only people braving the weather are a couple of die-hard car guards and a Despatch-looking family going for lunch at Barney’s. There’s some dude trying to sell necklaces out of his kombi, it seems, as we cruise by, heading round the corner. Scoob’s only half way. Joey rolls down his window a bit. “Bra, I can hardly see out the windscreen. Dennis you always gotta roll such huge joints.”
“Ay it’s organic, Joe. It comes from the good earth,” says Dennis, all defensive. “We have naturally evolved THC receptors in our brains especially for getting ghoefed. Smoking zol is our evolutionary birthright,” he says. “Unlike certain other synthetic medication.”
“Dennis, you weren’t being quite so judgmental at Logic last night,” Joey’s tuning in his mert voice again. “I gave you three pills on credit. Now you owe me six-forty. Make it a sweet six hundred.”
“So Pitjie…” Dennis changes the subject without even flinching. “Why d’you come back?”
“Just hang on,” Joey interrupts him. “Sorry Pitjie. I just gotta make something clear here. You two losers owe me almost a grand and a half for eccies and grammage. And I owe Benjie and Jerry fuckin’ huge. So if you don’t pay me back by next weekend I’m fucking you both up. Actually, I know. I’m confiscating your wheelchair, Dennis. And Girrick can go raving at Logic with you on his shoulders.”
“Ahh, come on , bra,” says Girrick weakly as he pulls the spliff. “Who made this girrick?”
“See what I have to deal with?” Joey tunes me. “So how long are you back for?”
“Ay I might stay.”
This is greeted with uncontrollable coughing by Girrick, a high-pitched “What?!” from Denny the Mushroom Mert and a cynical “Yeah, right,” from Joe.
“It’s like the president says,” sings Gary as if he’s copying some pop song. “Stay for our sakes.”
I’m serious. I made bucks in London, but waitering sucks, however well you get paid. I still gotto finish my accounts articles here, though. Wanna finish board exam. It’s hard to explain now, driving around pulling pockie with these ous, but when you’re in London, you miss SA a bit as well. The sun and that. And it looks like business is slowly picking up in the Bay.
“Okay, maybe for you,” says Joey. “You got a degree. But for vlam okes like us, there’s less chance. Bra, if I could wax it, I’d be over there like a shot. I was thinking of coming over to visit you, but you need, like, twenty grand in the bank. That’s almost what my bladdy debts are.”
“Anyway, you’ll check, Pitj,” comes Dennis now. “The graft is min, even for ous with degrees. I’d have an ancestral visa, but my ou-lady’s been divorced so many times I can’t find any birth certificates or anything. That’s why we just working for Joey.”
“Oh. You okes are together.”
“Sub-contractors,” Groans Girrick, with his lungs full of smoke. “Informal sector.”
“Ja,” says Joey, “I’m also spinning a few tunes. I’m DJ Salinger. But the drug industry’s the only business in town that half decent. And if it’s between being a barman and a mert, which it basically is, I’ll be a mert every time.
“If you merting pills, everyong loves you. If you’re a barman, everyone just tells you to move it up and you have to kiss their arses for a two-buck tip so they can go home pissed and beat their girlfriends. Fuck that.”
“Fully,” says Girrick.
“Or putting CDs in alphabetical order all day for six rand an hour. It’s childish.”
“Whyn’t you go to Cape Town?” I ask him.
“Bra! Cape town can fuck off. Between Nigies and Moroccans and gangsters and Pagad? There’s no ways I’m’onna go mert in Cape Town. It’s bad enough here!”
“What about the cops,” I tune Joe.
“Fffffffff… “ is what Girrick tunes, exhaling.
“Gary, are you ganna smoke that whole thing by yourself,” schemes Joe, leaning back over the seat while he’s still driving.
“Whoooaa! Hey man! Skort bra!” There’s a few seconds of pandemonium as Dennis grabs the wheel and Joe eyeballs Girrick, blank-faced and innocent as a lamb. We’re taking the right-hand bend near Cape Recife. “Okay, okay,” relents Gary, and passes it forward. And then, “I had a proper job.”
“Ja, listen to this,” says Dennis, chuckling as he takes the honey pot from Gary.
“PR,” says Gary. “Who’s got a smoke?”
Dennis issues him one, and he continues. “But it wasn’t for me. And they were exploiting me. Two gorillas a month was all I was clearing. Peanuts, man. Peanuts.”
“Two weekends’ work at Logic,” says Joe.
“Shooo. Proper graft, hey,” says Girrick to himself, shaking his head.
We’re driving around the back of the university, where the dunegrass and coastal fynbos has been supplanted by forests of Port Jackson willow. All the same. Just a sea of willow leaves beckoning in the gale, shining silver and green.
They brought in the Port Jackson to save the town, they say. Port Elizabeth was in danger of being swamped by invading sand dunes. Like Swakopmund. Then this one dude got the idea to plant the Port Jacksons and they stabilised the dunes. And the town was saved. There’s a monument to the guy on the PE beachfront.
“So what about babes,” says Dennis now, sort of to me, but actually to no one in particular, just sort of signalling that we will now talk about babes for a bit.
“So what are you on now?” he asks, more to me this time. Me and Dennis always had this sort of survey going on, of how many babes we’d had sex with. I was well over it, but it became a kind of vicarious sex mission for Dennis, who hardly ever got to have sex these days. I sometimes felt I was having sex on Dennis’s behalf.
It started at school already, when Dennis was the only one of us who’d ghoened anyone. Then after his accident, we started catching up gradually, and now we saw it more as a bonding exercise than anything else. I only caught up with Dennis two years after school – that’s about five years after his accident, so you must know. Damn lucky he missed the Aids era, but there you go.
“Must be into my thirties by now,” I tune him, not without some pride. “The chicks dig the SA boys that side.”
“Like where? Where was the sweetest honey that you ghoened?”
“Dennis! Jeeezuz!” Joey’s feigning embarrassment cos he’s got a babe.
“Ay shoosh Joe,” comes Dennis. “Just cos you get to ghoen Miss Rave PE doesn’t mean the rest of us have to ignore our rampant libidos, ekse.”
“So you can actually have sex, hey Dennis?” Joey asks, even though he knows the answer.
“Bra, just ask the girls from Karen’s if I can have sex,” is Dennis’s comeback. “They’ll tune you. The boy always gets his money’s worth that side.”
The king-sizer’s swak and we’re parked at Lookout, on the wilderness side of town, where the untamed ocean swells pound the rocky coastline, outside the calm sanctuary of Algoa Bay, the Bay of the Lagoon.
“So who is this babe you’re seeing?” I just gotta know.
“Ja man, you know her. Layla. Blonde babe.”
“Layla JAY?!!”
So the bastard got her. “The one you were perving from way back. I think I caught her by fluke the one night in London at Sunnyside Up.”
“Ja, that would’ve been her. But I wouldn’t say I used to perv her. We just felt a certain attraction, and we move in the same circles. She helps me with business and that.”
“Bra, you are in such denial,” comes Denny’s voice of reason. “Look at yourself. You changed your entire image to hook that babe. You gave up jamming music and took up DJ-ing, you dress like some oke from the Matrix, you started merting… and that was her business to begin with, not yours. Now you’ve got gangsters and Nigies living in your lounge selling crack and smack an all kindsa shit. Just ‘coz of that babe.”
I would’ve thought this would make Joey fully woes, but he’s mellow about it. Obviously they’ve had this conversation before.
“Ay. What can I say, ou’s. I’m pussy-whipped. Tell me you wouldn’t be.”
There are grudging grumbles of assent from all corners of the car, as Joe starts it up again with an air of triumphant finality and we leave the Lookout parking lot, following Marine Drive further round the corner towards the seaside villages of Willows and Schoenmakerskop, before the road loops back into PE.
Dunno if Joe knows about that fiasco me and Layla had before I left, but I know what he means. Men do crazy things for babes like that.
Joe’s is your basic drug house. Semi-detached Central digs.
There’s nothing too hectic visible at first. Just a section of doob lying crushed on a Skyf! Magazine. The room smells like basing, though, or buttons, or both. And thers’s little skietsels of powder on the lounge table you could probably make a line with. Girrick finds someone’s Makro card and starts doing just that.
There’s a huge black oke passed out on the couch with a curtan thrown over him. He’s still got his brils on. And some other whitie, looks young enough to be a schoolie, sitting tryna watch TV, but he’s catching fish. He’s passing out and waking up every couple of seconds. Every now and then he wakes with a start and says, “What was that? D’you check that?” before passing out again. I think it’s called narcolepsy.
I meet this coloured oke, Duncan, stopping a pipe in the kitchen with Dennis.
“Morning, boss. Morning, boss,” he tunes me. “So the boys ready for a bit of a bronchodilator this morning?”
I’m actually schmangled from the car spliff, so I weasel out of it. Dennis pounces.
“If Pitjie doesn’t have, we can put some of ’at coke in it?” he tunes Duncan, in a coloured style. “Give it a lekker skop.”
Joe’s snuck into the bedroom to check his babe. I guess that’s the end of the evening for him. I roll out my mattie and my sleeping bag and find a spot near the hi-fi, which is oozing this sparse piddly ambient music. Pee-pop. Pow-wow-wow. Woooooo-up. Jah Wobble kinda shite from two years ago.
The schoolie’s still catching fish. “Whoa!” he starts, and goes back to sleep.
Girrick’s compiled a three-inch line of cocaine, breadcrumbs, house dust and zol skietsels. I go to sleep to the sound of him sniffing it up his nose.
“Goodnight sweet prince,” I tune him facetiously.
He says, “Hey, what’s that?”
I go out like a light. It was a hell of a bus trip.
Must be half past one. It’s great to be home.
Friday, June 13, 2008
10 Reasons Why Cape Town can Fuck Off!
The following is the original "10 Reasons Cape Town can Fuck Off" piece. I wrote it under my pseudonym Haai van der Schyff in 1998 for Skyf!! magazine, a Port Elizabeth scene 'zine I published for a while.
The piece was meant to satirise the whole trend of leaving your home town for the big(ger) city because, well, it's a bigger city, so it must be better.
It was later carried in SA Citylife magazine, then ended up on the global email circuit, where it has been steadily orbiting the planet ever since. It also spawned television interviews, radio appearances and other magazine articles. It was generally taken out of context - and stripped of irony - as a full-on attack on the city of Cape Town.
For better or worse, it remains my most well-known contribution to English literature.
10 Reasons why Cape Town can Fuck Off!
The piece was meant to satirise the whole trend of leaving your home town for the big(ger) city because, well, it's a bigger city, so it must be better.It was later carried in SA Citylife magazine, then ended up on the global email circuit, where it has been steadily orbiting the planet ever since. It also spawned television interviews, radio appearances and other magazine articles. It was generally taken out of context - and stripped of irony - as a full-on attack on the city of Cape Town.
For better or worse, it remains my most well-known contribution to English literature.
10 Reasons why Cape Town can Fuck Off!
By Haai van der Skyf
- It Exists.
If it wasn’t for Cape Town, PE would look a whole lot better. Tourists would love us if they hadn’t first had a dose of first-world sophistication before embarking on the garden route.
And anyway, if it’s first-world sophistication they’re looking for, why don’t they just stay in Europe or Japan or wherever it is tourists come from?
Cape Town better wake up. This is Africa, not blimming Salzburg or something. Cape Town fuck off. - Capetonians are too hip.
They’re a bunch of namby-pamby poncey glamour queens who think they live in a magazine.
Prancing around in all their hip designer wear and looking all cool and unflustered like they’re in a fashion spread when they could be wearing perfectly good five-year-old jeans and T-shirts. What do they think this is? Marie bloody Claire or something? Magazines are for wankers. Cape Town fuckoff! - They’ve got a mountain.
What is it with their precious mountain? If that was in PE we would have built condos all over its ass, and a freeway across the top of it. For good measure we would put a Playland on Devil’s Peak and a fuel depot on Lion’s Head. And ore dumps on Chapman’s Peak. Exploit the bastard.
Instead the bunch of sanctimonious pricks treat it like it’s some kind of national treasure, some gift from the almighty.
Every time some poor fool tries to built a little timeshare block on the mountain there’s a hundred fuckin’ protesters chaining themselves to the trees screaming “save the mountain, hey”.
It’s not as if they built the damn mountain themselves or anything.
So horse bollocks to them. Cape Town fuck off! - Their roads are too damn narrow.
Ninety-five per cent of the roads in Cape Town are too narrow for two cars to pass each other.
How do you figure a town of four million can have a road system built to sustain a seaside village of sixteen-odd and then try to host the Olympic Games.
A case of the little boy whose eyes were bigger than his stomach, or what?
Maybe try host a traffic-jam-free December holiday and move on from there. Baby steps, guys. Baby steps. - Their sea is not usable.
Eleven degrees? That’s a geometry angle, not a fuckin’ ocean temperature.
What’s the point of beaches if the sea’s too cold to go swimming in?
More proof that the only reason people go on holiday to Cape Town is to get into traffic jams on the way to the beach and then to pose around with their cellphones on the sand, not to go for a ghoef. Cape Town fuck off! - They’ve got a Waterfront.
The best thing Jo’burg ever did was build the Randburg waterfront. A crap hodgepodge of pubs, stores and restaurants to be sure, but one which well and truly called the V&A’s bluff, proving that Cape Town’s waterfront is nothing more than a shopping mall with some water near it.
It’s just another consumer temple geared to getting you to buy garments with price tags at the child buggery level of obscenity and to be served Labels by waiters more condescending than the whole of America and the ex-smoking community put together. Cape Town fuck off! - Everyone’s off their tits from drugs.
IT’s common knowledge that the only people in Cape Town who aren’t alcoholics, smackies, E-freaks, charlie-junkies, goofballs, acid-heads or nexus-fiends are Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Tunisian high commissioner.
For this reason, everyone you speak to in Cape Town is mad, either because they’re high, or because they spent the whole of the 90s eating pills and now they’ve had to stop because they weigh 12kg and they can’t even remember what high school they went to any more.
Compare that to PE, that haven of temperance, propriety and good clean fun, and you begin to see all to clearly why Cape Town can fuck right off. - All the best international bands and DJs go and play in Cape Town and none of them come to PE
So if you wanna check U2 or Skunk Anansie or Tsuyoshi Suzuki you’ve gotta mission to Cape Town and deal with the skinny roads and the toxic psychotics and poncey fashion-mag E-freaks and a mountain that makes it rain all the time.
Pricks. Fuck them. - It’s turning into another Hollywood.
Every person you speak to from Cape Town is working on a movie set.
Either they’re doing the catering or making props or being unit manager or merting zol to the film crew or being an extra in a French cellphone ad.
And getting paid 20 gorillas a month tax-free in Francs.
Why don’t they just get it over with? Build a Spago at the Waterfront and a Betty Ford clinic in Rondebosch, and put up a 20-metre sign on the slopes of the mountain that says “Zollywood”.
And while they’re at it they can just fuck off. - It’s the new Riviera
Skaapies is so dirt-cheap for Euros and Americans that they’ve all bought property there.
But it’s so incredibly dirt cheap that you don’t even have to be an A-league jet-setter to afford a farm-size house in Bishop’s Court.
Consequently, all the prices skyrocket because of all the rich bastards around, and you can’t even do any star-spotting because the rich bastards are only Belgian record executives or the earl of Derbyshire — crew that you’ve never heard of.
Waste of time, really, Cape Town. Glad I don’t live there.
Faster than the speed of David Kotze!
Dawid Kotze was the fastest sprinter at Laerskool Lorraine. Yooss, he was rapid!
In the inter-house athletics gala, he would beat me in the 100 metres by about 40 metres.
That’s why he jolled wing and I jolled hooker.
When Kotze gave it flat box, he made this “sss-sss-sss” sound, like a steam engine venting steam.
My mate Glen, on the other hand, was a loose forward. He was a fetcher, quick to the breakdown and good at foraging for ball. We used to ride bikes together.
The one year, Glen had a growth spurt. He came back for standard five and his voice had broken, he’d started shaving and he looked a bit like Gerrie Coetzee.
The oke was massive. And as inter-house athletics time rolled around, we knew. This was the year we could take Kotze.
Sure enough, that year Glen beat Dawid Kotze in the 100 metres. When I spoke to him afterwards he said, “When I was behind Kotze I could see clearly. Then when I passed him everything went black!”
Glen was one of the heroes of Lorraine. Another was John Nel, the best dodger. Dodging was big at Lorraine – it made you excel at the lunchtime open-gates games. John was the all-Lorraine open-gates champ and therefore the u13A rugby captain as well.
Michael Bense was the king of cycling. He came fourth in the 1982 Oosterlig Sirkel on his salmon-pink Le Turbo. He won a popcorn machine and got to stand up in assembly.
Gary Gibson was the only oke at our school to master swing bowling. Shaun Paton scored 30 or more in every innings he played in the B section of the under-13 cricket league. He was the best until Gert Nel’s dad bought him a thigh pad and he scored 90 against Diaz.
The cleverest in school was Sharon Hill, coincidentally also the cutest. Strongest was Jonathan Bartlett. Richest, Michael Thomson. Best BMX, Michael White. Best at kleilat fights, Michael Nel.
These were the heroes of my childhood. All of us shepherded towards maturity by the likes of Mrs Ridden, Mr Frauenstein, Mr Lotter and Mr Van Rooyen.
Where are they now?
I don’t know. And I don’t think I want to know.
Growing up changes our perspective and shifts our priorities fundamentally. What was worthy of massive respect and admiration yesterday can become utterly meaningless today. And our heroes, the kids we held in such awe, they can be reduced to the level of the mundane and ridiculous.
I don’t particularly want to see a race between Glen Wasserman and Dawid Kotze these days. They might be faster than they were in 1983, but their showdown wouldn’t have the drama, the gravitas of that epic under-13 final, with White and Blue house tied on points.
I’m sure Sharon Hill is still as lovely as ever, even if her name is different. But I prefer to remember her as she was when she sat in front of me in Mr Frauenstein’s class.
When I think of Gary Gibson, I see a shiny, red, medium-paced away-swinger being edged to first slip.
The name Michael White conjures up images of a blonde kid on a metallic-red Scorpion wheely-ing two whole lampposts in Alsace Road.
And that’s where he belongs.
The golden days of childhood were golden especially because of the boundless infinite possibility that stretched out in front of us.
I see more than enough podgy, slightly cynical thirtysomethings in my daily life. I don’t need to see any more who can make me think, “Sheez, look how he ended up. Used to be the hippest guy in standard five.”
I’ve got a couple of mates I’ve known since childhood and they’ve done very well for themselves, thank you. But the rest of them, I’d prefer to imagine the rest of their lives to myself.
To me, Sharon Hill went on to become Miss Universe, and chief actuary for Investec. Gary Gibson played cricket for the Titans. Shaun Paton emigrated to Australia, where he’s now batting coach for New South Wales. Michael White now designs BMX bicycles out of San Diego, California.
And somewhere, in a parallel dimension, Glen Wasserman and Dawid Kotze are still tearing down the grass track at the back of Lorraine Primary School. Kotze’s got the, “Sss-sss-sss” going on, and Glen’s surging past him, arms pumping and his vision going all black. The fastest oke in the whole of Lorraine.
In the inter-house athletics gala, he would beat me in the 100 metres by about 40 metres.
That’s why he jolled wing and I jolled hooker.
When Kotze gave it flat box, he made this “sss-sss-sss” sound, like a steam engine venting steam.
My mate Glen, on the other hand, was a loose forward. He was a fetcher, quick to the breakdown and good at foraging for ball. We used to ride bikes together.
The one year, Glen had a growth spurt. He came back for standard five and his voice had broken, he’d started shaving and he looked a bit like Gerrie Coetzee.
The oke was massive. And as inter-house athletics time rolled around, we knew. This was the year we could take Kotze.
Sure enough, that year Glen beat Dawid Kotze in the 100 metres. When I spoke to him afterwards he said, “When I was behind Kotze I could see clearly. Then when I passed him everything went black!”
Glen was one of the heroes of Lorraine. Another was John Nel, the best dodger. Dodging was big at Lorraine – it made you excel at the lunchtime open-gates games. John was the all-Lorraine open-gates champ and therefore the u13A rugby captain as well.
Michael Bense was the king of cycling. He came fourth in the 1982 Oosterlig Sirkel on his salmon-pink Le Turbo. He won a popcorn machine and got to stand up in assembly.
Gary Gibson was the only oke at our school to master swing bowling. Shaun Paton scored 30 or more in every innings he played in the B section of the under-13 cricket league. He was the best until Gert Nel’s dad bought him a thigh pad and he scored 90 against Diaz.
The cleverest in school was Sharon Hill, coincidentally also the cutest. Strongest was Jonathan Bartlett. Richest, Michael Thomson. Best BMX, Michael White. Best at kleilat fights, Michael Nel.
These were the heroes of my childhood. All of us shepherded towards maturity by the likes of Mrs Ridden, Mr Frauenstein, Mr Lotter and Mr Van Rooyen.
Where are they now?
I don’t know. And I don’t think I want to know.
Growing up changes our perspective and shifts our priorities fundamentally. What was worthy of massive respect and admiration yesterday can become utterly meaningless today. And our heroes, the kids we held in such awe, they can be reduced to the level of the mundane and ridiculous.
I don’t particularly want to see a race between Glen Wasserman and Dawid Kotze these days. They might be faster than they were in 1983, but their showdown wouldn’t have the drama, the gravitas of that epic under-13 final, with White and Blue house tied on points.
I’m sure Sharon Hill is still as lovely as ever, even if her name is different. But I prefer to remember her as she was when she sat in front of me in Mr Frauenstein’s class.
When I think of Gary Gibson, I see a shiny, red, medium-paced away-swinger being edged to first slip.
The name Michael White conjures up images of a blonde kid on a metallic-red Scorpion wheely-ing two whole lampposts in Alsace Road.
And that’s where he belongs.
The golden days of childhood were golden especially because of the boundless infinite possibility that stretched out in front of us.
I see more than enough podgy, slightly cynical thirtysomethings in my daily life. I don’t need to see any more who can make me think, “Sheez, look how he ended up. Used to be the hippest guy in standard five.”
I’ve got a couple of mates I’ve known since childhood and they’ve done very well for themselves, thank you. But the rest of them, I’d prefer to imagine the rest of their lives to myself.
To me, Sharon Hill went on to become Miss Universe, and chief actuary for Investec. Gary Gibson played cricket for the Titans. Shaun Paton emigrated to Australia, where he’s now batting coach for New South Wales. Michael White now designs BMX bicycles out of San Diego, California.
And somewhere, in a parallel dimension, Glen Wasserman and Dawid Kotze are still tearing down the grass track at the back of Lorraine Primary School. Kotze’s got the, “Sss-sss-sss” going on, and Glen’s surging past him, arms pumping and his vision going all black. The fastest oke in the whole of Lorraine.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Me and Dad save the day in the '81 floods
At the moment rain is bollocking down over Jo'burg, from where I write this column. A glance out the window show Randburg wreathed in grey, with a black lump of a cloud depositing lashings of rain on that wretched suburb.
But no suburb has been spared. I don't think I've seen the blue of the sky for about a week. It's living proof that God has a sense of humour that the moment someone said, "drought" it began raining like it would never stop.
But no suburb has been spared. I don't think I've seen the blue of the sky for about a week. It's living proof that God has a sense of humour that the moment someone said, "drought" it began raining like it would never stop.
And motorists were treated to the ironic sight of newspaper posters warning, "Water restrictions loom" while actually dissolving on the lampposts from the amount of rain that had lashed own upon them.
And every time I see that starting to happen, every time it rains for more than three days at a time, I find myself guiltily wishing my guilty wish upon the land: "I hope it floods!"
It's terrible. I can't believe I actually wish such a terrible thing upon the poor people of the country, but I do. I know where my urge to curse the nation in such a manner comes from too. It is traceable to the 1981 floods in Port Elizabeth.
Anyone who was around at that time will recall that they were the biggest floods to hit the city since the 1968 ones, which are acknowledged as the worst. If I'd been alive in 1968, perhaps I'd have witnessed some extreme drama and destruction and been put off floods for life. Sadly I did not.
The reason for my psychological imbalance, my unhealthy love of floods can be linked to the fact that for me, the 1981 floods were the biggest jol ever.
It turns out that the Latin words for flood are eluvies or inundatia, so let's call it eluviophilia, or inundatiophilia, whichever sounds best to you. Either way, I contracted it back in 1981, when my sister and I awoke to the sight of rivers of brown, muddy water surging down our street in Lorraine like it was a river.
We were unable to get to school - hell, we were barely able to get out of the house - and I started to like it already. Then the pool overflowed. Ours was your standard suburban yard, surrounded by precast vibracrete walls on all sides. So naturally, when it buckets down, your yard fills up like it was a bucket.
It was quite entertaining looking at the yard through our window and seeing it as a small brown lake, with the bright-yellow kiddie slide parking forlornly in the middle of it, suddenly completely meaningless.
It rained and rained, and the muddy water level rose and rose. It seeped beneath the steel lounge doors and flooded the lounge. It was a sunken lounge, so luckily we were able to drag most of the furniture up the two stairs to higher ground. We had to abandon the sideboard to its fate and the lounge carpet would rot steamily over the next fortnight.
Then the floodwaters began licking at the top of the stair which led to the rest of the house. The surface tension was bulging over the sill of it as a couple of Family Radio & TV mags floated around, when my dad decided to take action.
He went in the garage and emerged carrying an axe. "Come, my boy. I need your help," he said, donning his jacket. Bursting with excitement, I ran to get my school raincoat and my yellow plastic Wellingtons.
Like intrepid guardians of the household, we waded across the backyard. The water was just about waist-high to me, so my dad held my hand as he led me across the muddy lake which our yard had become. "Don't fall in the pool," he warned, but it was easy to see where the pool was thanks to the swamped kiddie slide, which served as a handy marker.
Our house was immediately adjacent and down the hill from the local park, so all the sheetflow from the park had seeped into our yard, as well as all the rainwater bucketing down upon us directly. Dad obviously felt we were getting more than our fair share of the water and set out to relieve it.
We waded to the vibracrete wall across from the house and I held Dad's belt to keep him steady as he hacked away at the lowest slat of the wall with the axe.
When the slat gave way there was a whooshing sound and the yard began to drain into our neighbour's property. The water level began to drop, and the house was saved!
I fancy dad gave me a sly wink as we waded back to the house.
To this day, floods evoke the very spirit of being swashbuckling. As I look out the window, it's still drizzling a little, I'm still hoping it floods.
To this day, floods evoke the very spirit of being swashbuckling. As I look out the window, it's still drizzling a little, I'm still hoping it floods.
A prophesy that took a while to come through
As a young boy of four years old, I remember getting my first lesson in African history from my mother, who was born and raised in the Transkei.
Why, I had asked her, do black people all have to work for white people?
It’s because, my mom explained to me, it’s because a long time ago they a little girl said they must kill all their cattle so that the spirits would rise from the dead and drive all the white people into the sea.
So they killed all their cattle, but the no one rose from the dead and the white people stayed. Then the black people had no food and had to come and work for the white people.
This, of course, is the simplified version of the story of Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse. In 1855, the teenage girl of the amaGcaleka clan began seeing visions at a time when a lung sickness epidemic was decimating the herds of the amaXhosa and the British colonial forces under Sir George Grey where laying claim to the lands across the Kei river.
As described by Zakes Mda in his novel The Heart Of Redness, Nongqawuse encountered two Strangers, who told her to relay the message to her people that their cattle had been contaminated by people practising witchcraft. They should all be slaughtered, and all their granaries burnt to the ground. Once they did this, the dead would arise and cattle would fill the kraals.
The armies of the resurrected would then supposedly drive the occupiers into the sea.
Not everyone bought Nongqawuse’s prophesy, but many did. Between 300 000 and 400 000 head cattle were slaughtered. Conventional wisdom tells us that no new herds appeared, the armies of the dead never rose and the white people remained in charge.
But on further reflection, that might not be strictly true. A theory I recently stumbled across, has made me reconsider my simplistic understanding of Eastern Cape history.
Newspaper reports about increasing rates of white emigration from South Africa have also helped me formulate my new theory.
Bear with me now.
Let’s say the whole cattle killing episode did impoverish large parts of kwaXhosa, and robbed the amaXhosa of their independence, forcing many of them to come looking for work in the Cape Colony.
The Xhosa thus became the first of the South African tribes to enter the capitalist economy. A recent theory holds that this meant they were also the first to organise and form trade unions.
So the Xhosa became more politically savvy and were busily learning the ins and outs of labour and struggle politics while the Zulus were still waging war against the occupying British.
Perhaps this early integration into the colonial establishment – even if it was on a deeply oppressed level – helped lay the foundation of for the organised struggle and the liberation movements flowing from the establishment of the ANC in 1912. Perhaps that’s why Xhosas still dominate the ruling party.
The liberation movements eventually lived up to their names and liberated the country from colonialism and apartheid. South Africa has now been a democracy for more than 12 years.
Sadly, democracy has brought a fair amount of social upheaval. Many white South Africans have found this difficult to deal with. It has been difficult to deal with.
And this has lead to a surge in emigration to popular Anglophone destinations like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK.
Hotly disputed population statistics seem to show that there are half a million fewer white people in South Africa than there were ten years ago.
At the same time, the SA economy is booming. A rising black middle class now has the income to embark on a consumerist spending binge that shows no sign of abating.
So let’s recap. Nongqawuse predicted that the herds – the wealth of the nation – would return. And she predicted that the ancestors would return and drive the whites into the sea.
If you ask me, that’s exactly what’s happened. Wealth has flowed into the pockets of abantu. And the Xhosa generations that followed generation of the cattle killings learnt the skills of struggle early. Eventually they took power. Now the whites are leaving.
And a lot of that was because of the cattle killings of the 1850s. So my theory is that Nongqawuse’s is not a story of folly and superstition that humbled a proud nation. I think it’s a story of faith that was rewarded, a prophesy that came true. It just took 140 years.
Why, I had asked her, do black people all have to work for white people?
It’s because, my mom explained to me, it’s because a long time ago they a little girl said they must kill all their cattle so that the spirits would rise from the dead and drive all the white people into the sea.
So they killed all their cattle, but the no one rose from the dead and the white people stayed. Then the black people had no food and had to come and work for the white people.
This, of course, is the simplified version of the story of Xhosa prophetess Nongqawuse. In 1855, the teenage girl of the amaGcaleka clan began seeing visions at a time when a lung sickness epidemic was decimating the herds of the amaXhosa and the British colonial forces under Sir George Grey where laying claim to the lands across the Kei river.
As described by Zakes Mda in his novel The Heart Of Redness, Nongqawuse encountered two Strangers, who told her to relay the message to her people that their cattle had been contaminated by people practising witchcraft. They should all be slaughtered, and all their granaries burnt to the ground. Once they did this, the dead would arise and cattle would fill the kraals.
The armies of the resurrected would then supposedly drive the occupiers into the sea.
Not everyone bought Nongqawuse’s prophesy, but many did. Between 300 000 and 400 000 head cattle were slaughtered. Conventional wisdom tells us that no new herds appeared, the armies of the dead never rose and the white people remained in charge.
But on further reflection, that might not be strictly true. A theory I recently stumbled across, has made me reconsider my simplistic understanding of Eastern Cape history.
Newspaper reports about increasing rates of white emigration from South Africa have also helped me formulate my new theory.
Bear with me now.
Let’s say the whole cattle killing episode did impoverish large parts of kwaXhosa, and robbed the amaXhosa of their independence, forcing many of them to come looking for work in the Cape Colony.
The Xhosa thus became the first of the South African tribes to enter the capitalist economy. A recent theory holds that this meant they were also the first to organise and form trade unions.
So the Xhosa became more politically savvy and were busily learning the ins and outs of labour and struggle politics while the Zulus were still waging war against the occupying British.
Perhaps this early integration into the colonial establishment – even if it was on a deeply oppressed level – helped lay the foundation of for the organised struggle and the liberation movements flowing from the establishment of the ANC in 1912. Perhaps that’s why Xhosas still dominate the ruling party.
The liberation movements eventually lived up to their names and liberated the country from colonialism and apartheid. South Africa has now been a democracy for more than 12 years.
Sadly, democracy has brought a fair amount of social upheaval. Many white South Africans have found this difficult to deal with. It has been difficult to deal with.
And this has lead to a surge in emigration to popular Anglophone destinations like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK.
Hotly disputed population statistics seem to show that there are half a million fewer white people in South Africa than there were ten years ago.
At the same time, the SA economy is booming. A rising black middle class now has the income to embark on a consumerist spending binge that shows no sign of abating.
So let’s recap. Nongqawuse predicted that the herds – the wealth of the nation – would return. And she predicted that the ancestors would return and drive the whites into the sea.
If you ask me, that’s exactly what’s happened. Wealth has flowed into the pockets of abantu. And the Xhosa generations that followed generation of the cattle killings learnt the skills of struggle early. Eventually they took power. Now the whites are leaving.
And a lot of that was because of the cattle killings of the 1850s. So my theory is that Nongqawuse’s is not a story of folly and superstition that humbled a proud nation. I think it’s a story of faith that was rewarded, a prophesy that came true. It just took 140 years.
Windfalls and what they do to you
It was a Saturday arvie when it happened. A Saturday arvie in the Fence parking lot at Kings Beach. It was during our first holiday back from varsity – my best mate was at UCT and I was at Rhodes.
The wind was blowing homping west and it was on of those surf checks where you don’t expect there to be waves, but you still gotta go have a look just in case.
And we’re old chinas, hey. We met on the first day of Sub A, so we’re just chooning each other swak about how cool our new varsity is and how the other oke blew it by not coming to study at our one.
Tuning, tuning, tuning… until we pull up into a parking space at the far end of the lot in his Opel GSi. The first thing we see is money, cash notes, blowing through the Kings Beach bush.
Fifties, twenties, tens… There weren’t hundreds yet in those days. Pink, brown and green banknotes cartwheeling through the scrub.
We didn’t say a word, just opened the doors and went for it. It’s a gale force west, so we didn’t have a second to spare. We were out there plucking and gathering notes like it was money harvest at the KB cash farm.
He got about R170 and I came in with R140. In 1989, that was like finding a sweet grand lying in the street. And we’re first-year varsity students! So this is like manna from heaven!
But the first thing we do is start guilt-tripping. Where could the cash have come from? We look upwind, but there’s only a single other car parked. And that’s just empty. No one else around.
No sign of anyone looking on the ground for something they’ve lost, no one that’s just got mugged, no one frantically picking up notes like we were a minute ago.
Maybe it blew from all the way up at Denvilles.
We looked up there for anyone who might have lost a wallet. We checked around, really we did.
After that it was like, finders keepers.
We had three hundred bucks. Now what to do with it?
I still don’t believe we said this, all of 18 years old, but our first instinct was, “Bru, it’s a unexpected windfall. Let’s invest it! Let’s open up a fixed deposit.”
“Ja, and let’s check the Weekend Post tomorrow to see if anyone takes out a ad about lost money on Kings Beach.”
“Ja, ja. Definitely.”
We’re sitting there in the Opel with all these banknotes in our hands, counting them. Three hundred and ten bucks.
Dude, by six that evening we were installed at the Marine Hotel ladies bar with a couple of babes that we knew from school. Ordering cocktails like we were millionaires.
Kerry and Candy, I like to think their names were.
Fully, “Can we get you ladies another couple of Sex On The Beaches?”
We’d only been drinking properly for about two months, we’d never been in a ladies bar in our lives… geez, I don’t think we’d even taken girls out for drinks until then.
Until that night, girls had looked at us with a kind of healthy apprehension, mixed with disgust, as if we were smelly little savages who might do anything at any time.
But when we arrived at their townhouse dressed in smart jackets and larney pants and squired them to the upmarketest pozzie in town, they looked at us with new eyes.
And with good reason. The money somehow made us more mature.
I remember having conversations and stuff. Full-on chats. Asking the ladies about their hopes and dreams…
“And you? Tell me about yourself. What are you planning on doing after varsity? You gonna practise accounting or you gonna move into business?”
We were like these urbane, mysterious businessmen, who made their money from shady deals that it wasn’t polite to discuss. Men who were into “this and that”. Smooth operators, like the Sade song.
And then at the end of the evening, we dropped them off again, gave them each a peck on the cheek and said, “Thank you so much for a wonderful evening.” Like full-on gentlemen.
That 310 bucks was all gone.
As the last of the girls vanished behind her closing front door, one of us asked incredulously, “What was that all about?”
“Who knows, bru.”
I still don’t know, because the next day we went back to being smelly reprobates. To this day, I check the surf at Fence, especially during a homping west.
But it’s true what they say. Money changes people.
The wind was blowing homping west and it was on of those surf checks where you don’t expect there to be waves, but you still gotta go have a look just in case.
And we’re old chinas, hey. We met on the first day of Sub A, so we’re just chooning each other swak about how cool our new varsity is and how the other oke blew it by not coming to study at our one.
Tuning, tuning, tuning… until we pull up into a parking space at the far end of the lot in his Opel GSi. The first thing we see is money, cash notes, blowing through the Kings Beach bush.
Fifties, twenties, tens… There weren’t hundreds yet in those days. Pink, brown and green banknotes cartwheeling through the scrub.
We didn’t say a word, just opened the doors and went for it. It’s a gale force west, so we didn’t have a second to spare. We were out there plucking and gathering notes like it was money harvest at the KB cash farm.
He got about R170 and I came in with R140. In 1989, that was like finding a sweet grand lying in the street. And we’re first-year varsity students! So this is like manna from heaven!
But the first thing we do is start guilt-tripping. Where could the cash have come from? We look upwind, but there’s only a single other car parked. And that’s just empty. No one else around.
No sign of anyone looking on the ground for something they’ve lost, no one that’s just got mugged, no one frantically picking up notes like we were a minute ago.
Maybe it blew from all the way up at Denvilles.
We looked up there for anyone who might have lost a wallet. We checked around, really we did.
After that it was like, finders keepers.
We had three hundred bucks. Now what to do with it?
I still don’t believe we said this, all of 18 years old, but our first instinct was, “Bru, it’s a unexpected windfall. Let’s invest it! Let’s open up a fixed deposit.”
“Ja, and let’s check the Weekend Post tomorrow to see if anyone takes out a ad about lost money on Kings Beach.”
“Ja, ja. Definitely.”
We’re sitting there in the Opel with all these banknotes in our hands, counting them. Three hundred and ten bucks.
Dude, by six that evening we were installed at the Marine Hotel ladies bar with a couple of babes that we knew from school. Ordering cocktails like we were millionaires.
Kerry and Candy, I like to think their names were.
Fully, “Can we get you ladies another couple of Sex On The Beaches?”
We’d only been drinking properly for about two months, we’d never been in a ladies bar in our lives… geez, I don’t think we’d even taken girls out for drinks until then.
Until that night, girls had looked at us with a kind of healthy apprehension, mixed with disgust, as if we were smelly little savages who might do anything at any time.
But when we arrived at their townhouse dressed in smart jackets and larney pants and squired them to the upmarketest pozzie in town, they looked at us with new eyes.
And with good reason. The money somehow made us more mature.
I remember having conversations and stuff. Full-on chats. Asking the ladies about their hopes and dreams…
“And you? Tell me about yourself. What are you planning on doing after varsity? You gonna practise accounting or you gonna move into business?”
We were like these urbane, mysterious businessmen, who made their money from shady deals that it wasn’t polite to discuss. Men who were into “this and that”. Smooth operators, like the Sade song.
And then at the end of the evening, we dropped them off again, gave them each a peck on the cheek and said, “Thank you so much for a wonderful evening.” Like full-on gentlemen.
That 310 bucks was all gone.
As the last of the girls vanished behind her closing front door, one of us asked incredulously, “What was that all about?”
“Who knows, bru.”
I still don’t know, because the next day we went back to being smelly reprobates. To this day, I check the surf at Fence, especially during a homping west.
But it’s true what they say. Money changes people.
Monday, June 2, 2008
The near-death of a potplant
It was the wild Nineties and we weren’t really on top of things. Priorities ran to getting to know the hottest girls in town, ensuring we could get in free at any given nightspot, and catching the Fence every time it was on.
Thanks to our friendly demeanour and our lax attitude to houseguests, we were soon inundated with official and unofficial digsmates. There were comings and goings, leavings for overseas and chaotic house parties.
Even personal grooming and health began to suffer, witness Ready D’s famous spiderbite wound of 1998, the World Cup mumps epidemic and a spate of shingles that still makes my ribcage itch on a warm day.
So things were dire. Someone needed to take charge. I decided it would be me.
I called for a thorough spring clean. We began by dragging all the lounge furniture into the yard and giving the place a good sweep, scrub and polish.
The lounge furniture included a hideous foam-rubber sleeper couch, a cupboard, coffee table and a large potted palm tree in a square plastic pot.
So we dragged this plant into the yard and gave the Oregon pine floorboards a proper going over. There were also about a dozen cigarette butts in the pot, so we dug those out and gave the soil a bit of a brush.
Unfortunately, what happens when you take an indoor palm out into direct sunlight is that it gets violently bleached by the punishing rays of the sun. Thus, when we went back outside after half an hour of diligent scrubbing, we found a snow-white potplant! Within minutes, the fronds had faded to the colour of pristine straw wrappers. The poor plant had been bleached to within an inch of its life!
We were shocked! Who knew the sun could do that? Closer inspection revealed signs of life down in the stalk. So we quickly got the pot out of the sun, then trimmed all the leaves off, cutting the poor plant back to a small stump the size of a hotdog.
Who knows, maybe the thing would recover.
Otherwise, spring clean went well, ushering in a couple of weeks of semi-tidiness and self-respect.
This was shattered with the arrival of our old mate Bruce at the front door of our digs. “Howzit,” he gushed, “I’m back from overseas. Just came to pick up Priscilla.”
Priscilla?
No one told, me, but apparently the potplant belongs to Bruce, and we’re only looking after it for him. And he loves this potplant! He’s so attached to it, he’s even given it a name. Priscilla.
In his absence, we’ve managed to absolutely destroy his plant! He left us with a majestic tree and returned to a pale, withered swizzlestick of death!
It was like we’d been baby-sitting his child and let him run into the traffic.
The shame of it!
If there was anything that finally encouraged us to get our act together, it was that, the Great Potplant Tragedy of 1999.
Thanks to our friendly demeanour and our lax attitude to houseguests, we were soon inundated with official and unofficial digsmates. There were comings and goings, leavings for overseas and chaotic house parties.
Even personal grooming and health began to suffer, witness Ready D’s famous spiderbite wound of 1998, the World Cup mumps epidemic and a spate of shingles that still makes my ribcage itch on a warm day.
So things were dire. Someone needed to take charge. I decided it would be me.
I called for a thorough spring clean. We began by dragging all the lounge furniture into the yard and giving the place a good sweep, scrub and polish.
The lounge furniture included a hideous foam-rubber sleeper couch, a cupboard, coffee table and a large potted palm tree in a square plastic pot.
So we dragged this plant into the yard and gave the Oregon pine floorboards a proper going over. There were also about a dozen cigarette butts in the pot, so we dug those out and gave the soil a bit of a brush.
Unfortunately, what happens when you take an indoor palm out into direct sunlight is that it gets violently bleached by the punishing rays of the sun. Thus, when we went back outside after half an hour of diligent scrubbing, we found a snow-white potplant! Within minutes, the fronds had faded to the colour of pristine straw wrappers. The poor plant had been bleached to within an inch of its life!
We were shocked! Who knew the sun could do that? Closer inspection revealed signs of life down in the stalk. So we quickly got the pot out of the sun, then trimmed all the leaves off, cutting the poor plant back to a small stump the size of a hotdog.
Who knows, maybe the thing would recover.
Otherwise, spring clean went well, ushering in a couple of weeks of semi-tidiness and self-respect.
This was shattered with the arrival of our old mate Bruce at the front door of our digs. “Howzit,” he gushed, “I’m back from overseas. Just came to pick up Priscilla.”
Priscilla?
No one told, me, but apparently the potplant belongs to Bruce, and we’re only looking after it for him. And he loves this potplant! He’s so attached to it, he’s even given it a name. Priscilla.
In his absence, we’ve managed to absolutely destroy his plant! He left us with a majestic tree and returned to a pale, withered swizzlestick of death!
It was like we’d been baby-sitting his child and let him run into the traffic.
The shame of it!
If there was anything that finally encouraged us to get our act together, it was that, the Great Potplant Tragedy of 1999.
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