by Ben Trovato
I stopped in Butterworth to get money from one of the few functioning ATMs in the Transkei and emerged to find a very old man leaning on a stick. He pointed at my Durban registration and said, “Isandlwana.”
It sounded familiar. I know something happened there a long time ago, but I don’t know who won or lost. I’m not even sure who was playing. I apologised and gave him some money. This is how the wrongs of history are righted.
Later, maddened from the sun-scorched wastelands around Dutywa, where the skies are the colour of a Bavarian serial killer’s eyes, I passed a general dealer in a state of considerable disrepair. The shop, I mean. I don’t know what state the dealer was in. Appalling, I imagine. On the outside wall was a sign that said, “Woza Meatiness.” There might have been more to it but I was travelling at top speed, around 85 kilometres an hour, and missed it.
This shall become my mating cry and I urge you to follow suit. It’s not gender specific. Should you be struck by the need for coitus, all you need do is shout, “Woza meatiness!” Your partner, or even complete strangers, should, in theory, respond immediately. You can thank me later. I hope to try it later tonight at the backpackers.
I tried to go to a bottle store in Dutywa and, not wanting to leave the Landy unattended, I was relieved to spot a car guard waving me into an empty bay. I was less relieved to see him huffing glue and took my business elsewhere, which, in the Transkei, often translates into nowhere.
It took me 10 hours to travel from Durban to Cintsa. Gruelling doesn’t begin to describe the experience. Delirious with dehydration and nervous exhaustion, I lurched up to reception at the Buccaneers backpackers and bought four beers and a room. My room is called Biko. The O has fallen off, so for now it’s just Bik. That’s okay. This is the Transkei. Things fall off. Steve of all people would have known that. The room has a shockingly beautiful view over the lagoon and ocean, so anything can be forgiven. Almost anything.
I’m not wild about the communal tables in the restaurant. Eating is a messy, primal affair and should be done in private. It’s barely tolerable eating with close family, but having to do it among strangers is simply not acceptable. Also, when one is a little older than the average backpacker, they tend to look at one – if they deign to look at all – as if one is a person who has fallen upon hard times and cannot afford more salubrious accommodation that might perhaps be more befitting of a person of a certain age.
I might have a word with one or two of them about this in the bar later tonight. This judgmental fuckery will not stand.
A young couple made the mistake of engaging me in conversation. They didn’t know it was a mistake, obviously. Apparently that’s what people who stay in backpackers do. They look at you until you have to make eye contact and then say things like, “So vere are you from?” And, “Vy are you verking when you could be hafing fun?”
Even though I had put my name down for the curry dinner, I decided to remain in the shadows out on the balcony when the shiny-eyed girls and their ferret-faced boyfriends stormed the buffet in a deafening chorus of “so-vere-you-froms” which, as far as I remember, is simply a prelude to “So you vant me to vere a condom?”
Then I got an email from my accountant. I have an accountant not because I am wealthy but because I would rather free up my brain for stuff I actually stand a chance of comprehending. A couple of weeks ago I was told I’d been selected for an audit. That’s okay. I’m not hiding anything. I don’t earn enough for that sort of chicanery. If I had to try and hide something, there’d be nothing left out in the open. The email informed me that SARS wanted documentary evidence supporting my expenses claim. These are basics like telephone, internet, bank charges and … well, I can’t even remember the other things I made up.
My claim amounted to R3 300. I’m pleased that SARS is using their manpower to hunt down the real criminals. If you let high-flyers like me get away with it, this country is doomed.
My accountant said, “Let me know how you would like to proceed.” I replied, “I’m looking out over the Cintsa lagoon after a 10-hour drive from Durban. I’d like to proceed directly to the bar. Withdraw the claim. Tell them I’m dead.” She advised against it on the grounds that SARS would then want death duties.
No wonder I drink.
SIMPLE SINGLE SERVINGS FOR THE SINGLE SIMPLE MAN
One of the benefits of living on your own is that nobody tries to force-feed you home-cooked meals every night. Sure, we don’t live as long as married men do, but that’s a good thing, right? Look around you. Of course it is.
There is a chance I have been spending too much time on Facebook, because I would like to tell you about my supper. It is a three-course meal. I have lit the candle (a crude wick embedded in a block of Mr Zog’s Sex Wax) and set the table, which conveniently straightens out into a pair of legs once matters of a culinary nature have been concluded.
The starter is a 250-gram packet of nachos chips. On the front it says beno fido. This could mean it’s suitable for dogs. I care less. Any product that has the word “whateva” on its packaging deserves to come home with me. It dovetails nicely with the general state of nihilistic dispassion in which I currently exist.
It is a starter that makes no demands. Eat me, don’t eat me. If a nacho could shrug and turn its mouth down, it would. I find it far more appealing than a starter that sits up on your plate all perky and pretentious, clamouring to be devoured. There is nothing worse than food that is anxious to please. To accompany my starter, I have engaged the services of a sweet chilli dip. Since I have sold my books for beer money, I entertain myself by reading the ingredients.
My chips contain sulphur dioxide, silicon dioxide, oleoresins and unstipulated flavour enhancers, which could be anything from powdered donkey hooves to dried yak vomit. Yum yum. My dip contains anthrax, ayahuasca and cat bile. That’s what it looks like, anyway. The print is too small for the human eye.
The packaging on my nachos advise, in no uncertain terms, that I am to use immediately once opened. The instruction jars with the mellow vibe the chips had going. I feel pressured. Emptying the dip into the packet, I stuff handfuls into my mouth. It’s not a pretty sight but when a man lives alone he quickly adopts habits and mannerisms not dissimilar to those of a spotted hyena.
By the time my starter is finished, I couldn’t feel any worse had I stuffed 250 grams of heavily cut cocaine up my nose.
My main course is a tin of vegetable curry with chicken – the sort of wholesome meal wealthy white people would give to the staff, along with their own enamel plates and tin mugs, on a Thursday afternoon. Ah, those were the days. Now it’s either something from Woolies or a strongly worded letter bomb from Cosatu.
Being an aficionado of heat-and-eat haute cuisine, I am taken by the photo on the label. This looks like a top-of-the-log curry to me. I empty it onto my plate and gently insert it into the microwave. While waiting for radiation to do all the hard work, I peruse the ingredients and am pleasantly surprised to find sodium metabisulphite, tocopherol and tumbled chicken breast. They don’t say where it tumbled from. The sky, I imagine, since that is where birds tend to congregate.
The vitamin activity in tocopherols was first identified in 1936 from a dietary fertility factor in rats. If there is anything rats know, it is how to eat well and fornicate like champions. I was in good hands.
They also promise 20 per cent chicken. I don’t know if that means a fifth of the contents is chicken, or if the meaty bits are 20 per cent chicken and 80 per cent we’d-rather-not-say.
The consumer helpline fails to provide the number for an ambulance service. Not that I need it. But it would be nice to have just in case.
My main course looks nothing like it did on the label, but that’s probably because I forgot to make rice. It was an unforgivable oversight and one that forces me to pig out on dessert – a very tasty tipsy tart conjured up by a single phone call.
NO TRUTH IN A PASSPORT TO PARADISE
I can’t get out of Cape Tow
n even if I wanted to because I am wrapped up like a beef roti in an electric blanket that’s plugged into a 30-metre extension cable. It’s the only way I can leave the bed and get to the beer without hypothermia setting in. I’m hoping the weather will warm up enough for me to make a run for the airport. I need to get closer to the equator.
I know someone who has a house in Mozambique and I’m thinking of holing up there for the rest of winter. If nights turn nippy, I shall toss a fresh poacher on the fire and open another bottle of Tipo Tinto rum. But there’s a problem.
I must be one of the few white South Africans crazy enough not to be in possession of a valid passport. My instincts for self-preservation could do with some work. The prospect of having to go to Home Affairs sent rivulets of fear trickling from my pores, shorting my electric blanket and shocking my naked arse. It wasn’t the first time it has been shocked. The things my bum has seen. But let’s not get into that now.
The nearest Home Affairs office was in Wynberg. Only in the Western Cape would you find a suburb called Wine Mountain. It’s gone now, of course, but many of the locals still show signs of having contributed to the flattening of that particular hill.
I was surprised to see that the department had modernised its operations. In the old days, you would have to use a machete to hack your way through mobs of screaming Somalis and bribe-hungry freelancers. Now you are given a number and told to wait. Home Affairs has become one of the numbers gangs. I joined the 928s. We kill time.
I was relieved to see that the personnel hadn’t been upgraded. We South Africans can’t take too much change all at once. Home Affairs employees still have all the charm and warmth of a week-old blancmange pudding.
The seats were stainless steel. The message was clear – don’t make yourself comfortable. This is not the Ecuadorean embassy and you are not Julian Assange.
There wasn’t a hell of a lot to look at. Posters saying do this, notices saying don’t do that. Suicide notes scribbled in Swahili.
Eventually my number was called. I pulled my jeans low and sauntered up to the counter.
“Yo,” I said. “I be representin’ the 928 massive.” I pushed my form across the counter and folded my arms. The clerk had wires coming out of the back of her head and an SA Bureau of Standards stamp on her forehead. She glanced at my form and shoved it back to me, stabbing her index finger at a section I had missed. She made some kind of metallic hissing sound. A bit like my electric blanket.
The section asked if I had ever held citizenship of another country. Sure, I had. But not a real country. Not like Spain or America. I had been a citizen of Namibia a long time ago. I don’t know what came over me, but I ticked the “Yes” box.
“You were a citizen of another country?” She looked at me as if I were personally responsible for the genocide in Rwanda. I mentally smacked myself across my stupid truth-telling face.
I started to explain. “Comrade,” I said, “At the time, Namibia was a South African possession ...” That was my second mistake. Her training had clearly failed to include certain elements of history, but she recognised words like possession. Drugs can be in your possession. You can be possessed by the devil. Furniture can be repossessed. It’s a bad word in the lexicon of the law.
Her eyes narrowed and she tilted her head to one side, like a sniffer dog.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I took Namibian citizenship at independence because you weren’t allowed to hold both. I was born and raised in Durban. I only went to Namibia to help free it from the clutches of the apartheid regime. I got my South African citizenship back in 1996.”
I held up my South African ID book, South African driver’s licence and expired South African passport, thinking it might be proof enough of which country I belonged to.
Unmoved by my contribution to liberating Africa’s last colony, she said, “Where is your letter?” Apparently Home Affairs gave me a letter in 1996. I explained that I had lived at 38 different addresses since then, and that I continued to lose important documents on a weekly basis.
The only thing I had done wrong was to tell the truth on the form. “I should be awarded the Order of the goddamn Baobab!” I shouted, banging my fist on the counter. “If it weren’t for me, you’d all be speaking Russian today. I am a citizen of this filthy country and I demand that you ...” She looked at a camera mounted on the ceiling and nodded. I grabbed my documents and ran away.
Twenty minutes later, I was inside the Home Affairs office in central Cape Town. I joined another numbers gang. This time, the 326s. I wanted to kill a lot more than time.
“Go into the Main Hall and wait,” said a man with the social graces of a combine harvester. If there was a sign saying, “Main Hall”, it must have been written on a postage stamp and stuck on a piece of chewing gum under his table. I bent down and had a look. Nope. Just the chewing gum.
“And the Main Hall is where exactly?” A look of irritation crossed his face. It might equally have been a look of unrequited love. Or hunger. Or wind. I expect he only had the one look. He also only had one method of dispensing directions. A jerk of the head. Hand signals probably required additional training. Perhaps he had signed up for the course and was waiting for his number to be called. He jerked his head to the left a couple of times. But then he jerked it to the right. I wasn’t sure if he was over-correcting or had Parkinson’s. I jerked my head to the left, he shook his. He jerked his head to the right, I nodded. We were developing quite a rapport.
The car guards, the crying babies, the Chinese immigrants. They were all there, slumped on their stainless-steel chairs, waiting patiently like extras in a movie called Dashed Expectations.
I was an older, wiser man by the time my number came up. My new form indicated that I had never been a citizen of another country. I paid my money, had my fingerprints taken and got the hell out of there. The truth? Don’t bother. Home Affairs can’t handle the truth.
UP AND ATOM – A VICIOUS RECYCLE
I went to my local hardware to speak to someone about building a heated nuclear fallout shelter. There was a lot of head-shaking and shrugging until someone suggested Tom. Maybe Tom can help, they said. Tom was clearly the go-to guy for difficult customers. Tom looked as if he might have advised the ancient Romans on what they’d need for an aqueduct.
“Don’t get up,” I said.
“I am up,” croaked Tom. “If it’s aqueducts you’re after ...”
I began explaining my need for a nuclear fallout shelter, briefly sketching the consequences of a Trump presidency and why there was a very real chance of millions of people dying in a giant thermonuclear fireball before the month was out.
“Good man, that Trump,” said Tom. “Damn good man.”
I took him by the sagging folds of his rotten throat. “Listen to me, you demented old troll,” I shouted. “Trump is not a good man. He is a bad man. Say it. Say Donald Trump is a bad man. Say it or I swear I will ...”
He made some sort of rattling sound. That was good enough. I dropped him and hoofed it out of that toxic hotbed of rightwing zealotry.
Back home, I opened a half-jack of Klipdrift and continued researching my academic paper on health and safety issues surrounding the increasingly popular sport of tribadism. I’m doing my master’s. Doing my Johnson, too. It saves time. Things were going swimmingly until I noticed something called Miss Earth South Africa trending.
I do all my research on Twitter and Facebook because I can’t concentrate for longer than 30 seconds at a time. My brain is like the Large Hadron Collider, but instead of atoms I have billions of images of talking dogs, sleeping cats, sloths, butchered rhinos, babies of all species, goals being scored, cars being crashed and other people’s dinners careening into each other at supersonic speed. Trump has the same problem, but he’s more extreme. He has thrown Fox News into his mental particle accelerator. Now and then his brain accidentally cobbles together a half-formed thought which he then acts on by tweeting or signing an executive order
before getting sucked back into the berserk fantasy world he mistakes for reality.
I took a break from my research and went off to investigate Miss Earth South Africa. It sounded promising. Great things can come from beauty contests. Trump, for instance, owned the Miss Universe pageant for nearly 10 years. Now look where he is. The world’s most powerful madman.
I rather like my women earthy. I don’t mean they should be covered in mud with spiders nesting in their armpits, but there’s something about a woman with flowing skirts, untamed hair and the soul of a gypsy (without their penchant for thievery) dancing barefoot beneath a full moon. Throw in a bit of howling and I’m finished.
I imagined Miss Earth South Africa to be of this mould. Someone sensitive to the needs of the planet but, ultimately, more sensitive to my needs. It wouldn’t do to have the earth coming before me, so to speak. Nor would it do to have a girlfriend who, on a Sunday morning, might say things like, “Hey! Instead of having sex, let’s rather convert that energy into making a mulch pit!”
I was beginning to resent Miss Earth South Africa before I had even met her. What did she think? That I’d rather spend the morning up to my elbows in decomposing vegetation than have scorching-hot bonobo sex washed down with lashings of cold beer? Well, she can bloody well forget about birthday or anniversary presents from me, that’s for sure.
I tried hunting her down to offer her a piece of my mind and other parts of my anatomy but, if her website is anything to go by, she might not even exist.
