Durban Poison

by Ben Trovato

  To calm my shattered nerves, I ducked around the corner to the Galley Beach Bar and Grill. I was busy getting a couple of stiff shots into me when a black dude came up off the beach. He was carrying a bunch of sticks and I braced myself for a fight. Instead of attacking me, he tried to sell me one. Normally I would have waved him off, but he said something that turned my day around.

  Holding up one of his carved sticks, he said, “They are not only for old people.” This was clearly a man who knew what he was talking about.

  “This one is good for walking,” he said, holding up a stick identical to all the others. “You don’t need it.” Damn straight I don’t. He held up another that was good for leaving in your car in case of road rage. Then there was the Zulu fighting stick. I didn’t even haggle. If one were going to live in KwaZulu-Natal, one would be an idiot not to own a stick specifically designed to fend off warring tribes from the next valley. It was made from tamboti and had a big knob on one end. I felt so virile limping out of the bar swinging my big-knobbed Zulu fighting stick that I wanted to go back to the Spar where the ageist teller would beg me to take her as one of my wives.

  By the time I reached the car I was out of breath and leaning heavily on my stick. On the way home I bought a magazine called Longevity in the hope of discovering some sort of Benjamin Button-type elixir to reverse the ageing process.

  Worryingly, the giveaway sealed inside the plastic was a canister of 10 vitamin A tablets and a paperback called The Camden Cowboy. I couldn’t work out if there was a connection between the two.

  I flipped through it. “Once their peaks had been reached, leaving them both sated and satiated and their reunion finally and firmly sealed, Seth collapsed with his back to the …” I closed the book, hoping it was a story about mountaineering and that Seth was exhausted after summiting the Matterhorn.

  Being a late starter in life, I think it is only fair that I live to at least 140. I was relying on the magazine to help me get there. Right away, I wolfed the vitamin A and began searching for the secret to immortality.

  I expected their advice would include advising me to stay out of the sun. I live in Africa. Should I go and stay with the Mole People? I’ve tried that. It was a disaster. I can’t stand being jostled and pawed.

  And I’m not interested in cosmetic surgery as a means of looking younger. On the other hand, my bum is my best feature. It’s extremely well preserved after sitting on it for so many years. I could get a transplant, I suppose. It wouldn’t be the first time someone called me arseface.

  I came across a remedy for hangovers. This was a good start. Hangovers have taken years off my life. Biologically, I am a teenager. Another five years and I expect I’ll be a foetus. Their advice? Exercise. Oh, come on. Those familiar with hangovers will know that anything more strenuous than lurching between the bathroom, kitchen and bedroom can kill you. Oh, wait. They’re not giving advice on how to feel better. They’re just saying that exercise can help repair brain damage caused by too much alcohol. What is too much alcohol? What is brain damage? What is what? I rest my case.

  I spotted an advertisement for an incontinence product featuring three middle-aged women. They are having tea and scones and laughing and, presumably, weeing gently in their broeks. I’m not judging. It happened to me once, but it had nothing to do with tea. I might not even have been conscious at the time.

  Memory loss and brain shrinkage can, apparently, be stopped with a daily cocktail of vitamin B and folic acid. I tried asking the barman at the Bush Tavern in Umdloti for a Long Island Iced Tea with a shot of B6 and B12 but he gave me the lazy eye and went off to look for backup. As for memory loss, I watched my mother die of lung cancer not too long ago. I’m looking for something that helps with forgetting.

  Something else I learnt. If you want to know whether you should be taking multivitamins, you need to check your homocysteine levels. That’s fine for some, but what about those of us who can’t even check their oil because they don’t know how to open the bonnet of their car?

  There was a section on serums, but I’ve only ever heard of a truth serum. We need to get our hands on a million litres of the stuff, dump it in parliament’s water supply and rig the offices with hidden microphones.

  I was told that five grams of salt is the recommended daily allowance for an adult. I don’t know what that looks like. Is it the same as five grams of cocaine? Seems a bit excessive. Unless, of course, you have friends around from the Bluff, in which case it’s probably not enough.

  The back section of the magazine is taken up with depressing stuff about working out. How to do deadlifts, lunges and something called burpees. As a beer aficionado, I do plenty of burpees but they don’t make me feel any younger.

  If you’re angry, their advice is to take up boxercise. They just make up words, these people. Here’s my advice. If you’re angry, become a police reservist and shoot a hijacker in the face. You might not live longer, but, more importantly, neither will he.

  I was left with the distinct impression that the magazine was heavily slanted towards women. Why? They already outlive men. How much longer do they want to live? What are they planning? I’ve changed my mind about longevity. I don’t want to be around when they make their move.

  Unless, of course, they already have.

  BROKEN MARRIAGE TURNS MAN INTO RENT BOY

  Mosquitoes have begun sending out the Recces early this year. They’re coming in at high altitude late at night – not in packs, but in pairs. They split up once they’ve gained entrance to the bedroom. One makes for the head, the other the feet.

  Being a reconnaissance mission, they are meant to check out conditions ahead of the summer advance, then leave quietly. But there are always one or two who can’t help themselves. Like some of our Recces in 1976 who just had to push on to Luanda, these little suckers are hanging so bad for a hit of blood that they throw caution to the winds and embark upon a frolic of their own. Let it be said that they don’t always make it back to base.

  I need to get out before the real onslaught begins. Cape Town has four mosquitoes and a summer that doesn’t leave you perpetually drenched in sweat. I spent 17 years there and only returned to the east coast after my wife showed signs of being a lot colder and way more unhinged than all the winters combined.

  My plan, if you can even call it that, was to spend summers in Cape Town and winters in Durban. However, due to the sudden but not altogether unforeseen change in my marital status, I no longer have a home in the Mother City. This would mean having to rent. Given my budget and the feeding frenzy of greed around Cape Town’s property market, I’d be lucky to get an asbestos box downwind of Koeberg.

  I am going to have to rent out my Durban spot and use that money to get something a bit closer to the action. I wouldn’t go so far as to say my place isn’t fit for human habitation, but it will certainly take more than a rug to pull the living room together.

  I have four dining room chairs that were ripped to shreds by the cats formerly known as ours but which were really hers. I assume it was the cats. It could just as easily have been the ex sharpening her teeth late at night when the full moon was out. When I took them in to be reupholstered, the dude asked me what colour material I’d like. I told him it didn’t matter because I lived alone. He seemed to understand.

  I don’t have a colour scheme. Or a scheme of any kind, really. I bought a microwave oven that’s too small to accommodate a dinner plate. All my meals are on side plates. The bathroom hasn’t had a light for months because I can’t get the cover off. None of the windows have curtains. I hung two metal elephant heads on the wall, knowing their protruding trunks would almost certainly put someone’s eye out. The beds are pushed up against the wall like prostitutes and their bases are naked. The local monkeys seem to think the place is theirs.

  I want to advertise it on Airbnb since this would give me the flexibility to return should something unexpected happen, as I fully expect it to. It also means having to make an effo
rt to get it looking more like a B&B and less like the result of senile squalor syndrome. The thing is, I can’t do it on my own. I need a woman. Studies have shown that women are genetically predisposed towards interior decorating. They understand what goes where and why. They understand colours. They understand concepts like flow, light and space. I don’t even understand how my stupid miniature microwave works.

  I am, however, currently between women. And should I solicit advice from those with whom I have had dealings and dalliances, I’d be lucky to get more than a two-word response. One of them obviously being “off”.

  So I did the unthinkable. I had a sex change. No, I didn’t. That wouldn’t help at all. I’d still have my useless man brain. On the other hand, it would allow me to become a lesbian and have sex with women. Hang on. I haven’t thought this through properly.

  Anyway. I did the next most awkward thing. I went to the CNA and looked for a home décor magazine. Inexplicably, many of them insist on featuring gardens. I live in a complex. The garden is not my responsibility and plays no part in my life. I have a vague sense it’s out there somewhere, but beyond that I don’t really care what it does.

  I wanted ideas on fairly basic stuff. Like how to make a bed look as if Charlie Sheen hadn’t just spent a week in it. And how to use scatter cushions without making Liberace seem butch. Also, where to put two enormous couches and a wooden table that were removed from the marital home in a fit of pique but which aren’t altogether suited to the new, reduced circumstances.

  There were at least 30 magazines dealing with homes. In the end I settled for a pack of three. One of them was called Beautiful Kitchens. Every one of its 146 pages has to do with kitchens – a room most women hate being alone in and which most men know only as the place where the fridge lives.

  I got home and saw they were all British magazines. That’s no good at all. Ooh, what a lovely lamp. And it’s … let me get my calculator … only R48 000 excluding shipping! What a steal. I’ll take a dozen.

  After flipping through these magazines, I realised two things. One, that I’m not gay. And two, interior decorating has more to do with the actual structure than it does the decorations. For a start, it helps to have a fireplace, high ceilings, a staircase, wooden floors and bay windows overlooking two horses in a field.

  People who peruse these periodicals are presumably looking for ideas. Well, I had one. It involves flying to London, catching a train to Wiltshire, going around to Andrew and Amanda Bannister’s converted 19th-century Baptist chapel, ringing the bell and, in the unlikely event that they open the door instead of unleashing the hounds, saying, “Absolutely love what you’ve done with the place. May I buy it?”

  I found this decorating tip. “Paint all the walls white, then wait a while before choosing a colour. That way you get used to the effect of the changing light.” You would have to be mental to follow this advice, and not only because it’s utter gibberish. I repainted my bedroom a couple of years ago. There was so much screaming and swearing that the body corporate sent someone around to have a word.

  I can only assume advice like this is given by people who can afford to pay others to do the painting.

  I don’t want to read about “intimate seating areas where you can curl up with a good book”. If I’m going to get intimate, it’s damn sure not going to be with a book. And at my age I want to be able to stretch out on my back at the first signs of intimacy.

  “Jane and Roger have a Buddha from Nepal that creates a beautiful focal point.” I have an aggressive gecko from Westbrook. It creates a terrifying focal point for herpetophobics.

  Decorating tip: “If you’re unsure about choosing colours for a room, just pick out an accent from a cushion and build the scheme around it.” Bru, I don’t know what you’re smoking, but if your cushions are talking to you in any kind of accent, regardless of what scheme you’ve got going, you need help.

  “An off-white wall makes the perfect backdrop for a set of antlers.” Indeed. There is nothing quite like the skull of a dead stag above your bed to get you in the mood for love. Especially if you’re wearing pyjamas made from the foreskins of baby otters.

  These magazines are full of attractive white people with perfect teeth and matching dogs and children called Jay, Poppy or Milo. They are constantly stumbling upon run-down farmhouses or barns and turning them into paragons of gorgeousness awash in Louis IV couches. Here, we have run-down farmworkers sleeping on couches from Louis Fortuin Furnishers there by the bottle store.

  Meanwhile, let me know if you want to spend summer in an eclectically furnished simplex on the north coast. Bring your own side plates. Mind the elephants.

  TIME TO PAY DEATH AND OTHER DUTIES

  Right, then. I have spent R15 000 getting my place presentable enough to list on Airbnb and so far I’ve had bookings worth R3 000. So that’s going well.

  To compound the lunacy, I’m driving from Durban to Cape Town in a 24-year-old Land Rover with dodgy brakes and 278 562 kilometres on the clock. It weighs more than a bull elephant and has the turning circle of a rhino.

  There’s so much rust on the bodywork that it’s just not funny. Not that rust is ever really a laughing matter. Passengers risk being flung from the vehicle at every turn and I have to keep reminding them not to lean against the doors. Since they are invariably drunk, they rarely care if they live or die.

  The car, if you can even call it that, has a 3.5 litre petrol-driven V8 engine and I could have flown to London for what it’s costing me to drive to Cape Town.

  I have always given my cars names. There was Dr Bey (VW Beetle), the Electric Eel (Hyundai) and the Red Rocket (Ford Escort). I also had a Kombi once but never named it. Kombis don’t lend themselves to names. Their only function is to transport children, Labradors and garbage bags full of marijuana. Not at the same time, obviously. That would be silly. The dogs would eat the weed, get the munchies and eat the children. You know what Labradors are like. They’ll eat anything even when they’re not high.

  The naming of Land Rovers is a difficult matter. It isn’t just one of your holiday games. I gave mine a few names over the years, but none of them are printable.

  Land Rovers are clearly male, though. Volvos are female. Toyotas are bisexual. And yet Land Rovers are very in touch with their feminine side in that they will tell you everything is fine when it’s clearly not. You only find this out when you’re in the middle of the Karoo as the sun is going down.

  Another of the quirkier things about driving a Land Rover is that other people driving Land Rovers will wave at you as they trundle by. I’m talking about proper Land Rovers. The old kind. The only time people in Range Rovers wave is when they’re shooing away urchins at the traffic lights. Women driving old-school Landies don’t wave. Perhaps they are afraid that men will do a U-turn and chase after them, interpreting their wave as less of a gesture of motoring comradeship and more of an invitation to have wild sex beneath a flyover.

  I’ve known for a few weeks that I was going to Cape Town and I have been hard at work transforming the residence into something that meets the standards of people who might not be slothful singletons recovering from a decade’s worth of bad marriage.

  My final act of preparation prior to departure was to assemble a kettle braai I bought at the last minute because it was cheaper than a Weber and most of the people staying here will be from Joburg and they will almost certainly want to cook chunks of dead animal on my veranda.

  The instructions said some assembly was required and that failure to follow the instructions “could result in death, serious bodily injury and/or property loss”. What the hell was I building here – the space shuttle? There are three pages of instructions. That’s just to assemble it. I’m already debilitated with fear after reading the page titled WARNING! There are 23 DO NOTs, NEVERs, a smattering of ENSUREs, one ALWAYS and an ATTENTION. I quite like the one that says, “Keep children and pets away!” That’s pretty good advice, generally.

  It’s
important to get a good night’s rest before a road trip or you risk falling asleep and killing a busload of orphans going to the seaside for the first time and that’s not going to look good on your résumé.

  So I went to bed at midnight and set my alarm for 4am. I don’t recall sleeping. I remember getting into bed, briefly riding a three-headed pig with a snake’s body, then waking up. It might have been a snake with three pig’s heads. That’s eine Schlange mit drei Schweinekoepfe for my German readers.

  Heading into the Transkei from Kokstad, the temperature went from 21 to 57 degrees Celsius between first and fifth gears. One minute I was contemplating my jersey, and the next, suicide.

  One quickly adapts one’s driving style once one is in the Transkei. The switch from defensive to offensive driving comes instinctively as the N2 mutates into a slalom course involving trucks, lorries, taxies, goats, horses and cows. The trick is to go as fast as possible with one arm hanging out of the window and one finger resting lightly on the steering wheel. This went badly for me. I almost rolled the car because you need both hands to wrestle old Land Rovers into corners and the door was so hot that it melted the flesh off my arm. The metal clutch pedal burnt through my rubber slop. By the time I hit Mthatha, my foot was down to the bone.

  The back door of my Landy doesn’t lock. Once, while driving through the pandemonium that passes for Mthatha, an apprentice pirate opened the passenger door and attempted to board the vehicle. He abandoned his mission when I accelerated. This time I was prepared. I had a baseball bat, a knobkierie, a chain, a Balinese sword and an electric toothbrush that had somehow found its way into my arsenal at the last minute. So when I spotted someone dart from the heaving throngs and latch himself onto the ladder on the back of the Landy, I grabbed the toothbrush and prepared to defend my stuff. He didn’t try to open the door. He just wanted a lift to the other side of town.