by Ben Trovato
Word on the street is that one can buy anything from a secondhand car to heroin at the circus these days, so I went over to the trailer advertising Coke and sweets and asked for a beer. There was a clown behind the counter. Not the kind you find behind almost every other counter in this country, but a real one. In full merry prankster makeup. He said they didn’t sell beer. I waited for the punchline but there wasn’t one.
“You must be one of those clowns who laugh on the inside, right?” I said. His harlequin eyes hardened. Maybe he was just a sad old man who got drunk earlier and passed out and his mates painted his face without him knowing.
“Whaddya want?” he said. It was probably the wrong moment to mention heroin so I bought a small bag of popcorn. It cost the equivalent of an early model Maserati. With what I thought was a comically exaggerated flourish, I presented my ticket to another clown standing at the entrance to the Medium Top. He said something in Afrikaans. I don’t know if it was funny. I doubt it.
I was expected to find my own way to my seat, much like we are expected to find our own way in the new South Africa. May we still call this the new South Africa? Of course we may. If politicians can blame load shedding on Jan van Riebeeck, we can pretty much say whatever we want. Just as long as we wiggle our hips when we’re saying it.
The tent was less than half full. This wasn’t surprising. It was, after all, a Friday night, the one night of the week when people do their drinking at home. Saturday is the night that fathers take their families out. Sometimes to the circus, sometimes with handguns.
The red velvet curtain parted and another clown appeared. This should be good, I thought, chucking popcorn down my throat. But it wasn’t so much a rousing “Welcome to the greatest show on earth!” as it was a grim litany of warnings and disclaimers about cellphones, handbags and our personal safety. Not a single joke. Unless that was the joke. Welcome to the circus. Careful you don’t get robbed or raped. Ha ha. Punchy Punchinello needs to work on his introduction.
With the audience suitably terrified, the ringmaster stepped through the curtain and began going through the motions of running the show, much like Jacob Zuma did when it came to running the country.
Almost all the acts were by people who looked very much like they weren’t from this country. There’s probably something in minuscule print on the back of the tickets that says if you’re a Home Affairs official, you agree not to arrest the artists until the end of the show. I tried checking but it was too dark to find my ticket. I think I might have eaten it. Probably tasted fresher than the popcorn.
The main act, which recurred throughout in various forms, consisted of half a dozen Chinese people doing some crazy balancing stuff. Then again, most mornings I find getting out of bed and walking to the bathroom to be a fairly crazy balancing act.
After our future minister of sport and his staff bowed and smiled and graciously accepted a smattering of applause, three black men in tight pants came cartwheeling into the arena. I quickly stuffed my wallet down my trousers and went into a defensive crouch. They also looked as if they had wallets down their trousers. However, they didn’t seem to care about us in the cheap seats and, much like our civil servants, had a party of their own. Unlike our civil servants, they were supremely fit and agile. There was humour, intelligence and effort in their performance and this country would be a lot better off if the ANC had them in the top six.
Then the animals were up. When I was a kid, this would have been the time the band kicked it with blazing trumpets and dramatic drum solos while Gambian slaves – fresh lash marks visible on their naked backs – scuttled about erecting metal barriers between the all-white audience and the beasts that growled and prowled and once made me soil my shorts.
The curtain parted and four goats sauntered out. I thought they’d wandered in off the street but it turned out to be the next act. There was also a llama with the airs of an alpaca. She seemed not to want to get too involved and stood there trying to look cute.
The goats didn’t do anything that a four-year-old child couldn’t do. If you’re going to have goats in your circus, you’d better make damn sure they do things like play a musical instrument or perform card tricks.
I remember, as a boy, the high-wire act being a genuinely death-defying stunt with the tightrope walker so high up you could barely see him. This one was four metres off the ground. She had two of her comrades tracking her in case she fell and sprained an ankle.
There were some dogs as well. None of them jumped through a flaming hoop because there wasn’t one. Perhaps the budget didn’t allow for it. One of them, some kind of poodle, jumped over something. I quickly lost interest. They should have dressed the clowns up as housebreakers and had the dogs chase them round and round the arena before tearing their throats out.
If there’s one thing we need more than laughs, it’s catharsis.
FEEL ME, TOUCH ME, HEAL ME, PAY ME
The lights were turned down low. Near the bed on the far side of the room, a light burned. I was nervous. This was my first time. He smiled when I walked in. Gently took my hand in his. I recoiled as he began stroking my arms. “Just relax,” he murmured, running his fingers over my face.
“Take your shirt off,” he said. He turned me around and stroked my back. It felt good. Then he asked me to move to the bed. “Take off your pants,” he said. I hesitated. I had never been touched by another man in this way. Hesitantly, I unbuttoned my camo shorts and let them fall to the floor. He sank to his knees and ran his hands over my thighs, making soft appreciative sounds. Then he asked me to lie down. I knew this was going to cost me.
Dermatologists don’t come cheap.
I grew up surfing in Durban at a time when cigarettes were good for you and brandy improved your looks. I remember my mother shouting, “Put some bloody suntan lotion on!” before I went surfing. In those days, boys weren’t interested in applying oil or cream to anything that didn’t involve their genitalia. I doubt much has changed.
I had years, if not decades, of unprotected exposure to the sun. You’d think my face would look like a cross between a raisin and a piece of biltong by now, but you’d be wrong. Mmmm. Biltong. Thanks to good genes and beer, my face is silky smooth and completely hairless. No, wait. That’s my bum.
If I were to be honest, and, to be honest, I rarely am, the main reason I was there was because I had begun growing a second willy and wanted advice. Should I keep it? My gut told me there were benefits to having a backup, but my gut has been wrong in the past. I needed a professional opinion.
The doctor’s fondlings trailed off as he failed to discover any melanomas or carcinomas, malignant, benign, squamous or otherwise. I could see in his eyes that he was wondering whether I simply enjoyed being felt up by older men. I had to bring out the second willy before things turned weird.
Not wanting to drop my shorts again, I instead pulled the pant leg up. And there it was. My second willy. I apologised and turned my head away so the doctor wouldn’t see the shame in my eyes.
“Ah,” he said. “A polyp.” Oh god. It has a name. Polyp shall be thy name. Polyp, meet Doctor … I couldn’t remember his name. Apparently it wasn’t a second willy at all. I was crushed and elated at the same time.
“A lot of women have them.” Confused, I thought he had asked if I have a lot of women. “Not as many as I’d like,” I said. He looked at me for a few seconds, then moved away to load up a syringe. This wasn’t what I had in mind.
“If you’re going to be operating, shouldn’t I have a general anaesthetic? Or at least a shot of pethidine?” He smiled. There are only three times a doctor smiles. When he’s about to tell you that you have two months to live and you’re up to date with your payments, when he gets the keys to his new Mercedes and when his work permit arrives from the Australian embassy.
He plunged the syringe into my thigh. I screamed but stopped when I realised that I had barely felt it at all. Then he picked up a pair of scissors and that was that. No more second willy.
But that wasn’t the end of it. He grabbed what looked like a can of spray paint and began inspecting my body like a delinquent tagger would inspect a naked wall. He was looking for dark patches. I had a few. Not enough to get a tender, but enough to mar my otherwise perfect skin.
I thought he was about to touch me up with Neutrogena Blemish Concealer, so you can imagine my surprise when the can turned out to contain pressurised liquid nitrogen colder than a polar bear’s arse.
The doc walked around me spraying this, that and the other thing. Every burst felt like a thousand poison darts. The British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes lost some of his fingers after being caught out in -20°C. Please. That’s like a week on the Costa do Sol compared to what I went through. Try -200°C, Sir Ranulph. Then you can complain.
I didn’t want to ask if this was a life-saving procedure or a purely cosmetic endeavour. Twenty minutes and R1 200 later, I repaired to the nearest saloon for a cheaper anaesthetic. What were once slightly discoloured spots barely visible to the naked eye slowly began turning into angry red lesions. By my third beer, the lesions had become blisters. Big, puffy ones. It looked as if some hideous tropical disease was erupting from my body right there in the bar. I ordered another beer. An attractive woman sitting nearby on her own smiled at me. I gave a shy wave with my festering hand. She looked away, then got up and went to the bathroom. To throw up, I expect.
It’s going to be a long, lonely winter.
GLOBAL WARMING? IT WASN’T ME, OFFICER
On April 22 back in the year 238, the Roman Senate ousted Emperor Maximinus Thrax due to his barbarian tendencies. Almost 15 hundred years later, German philosopher Immanuel Kant was born. Two hundred and 36 years after that, I was born. And, 30 years later, I married a woman who said that I, too, was something of a philosopher.
“In what way, my little stoolpigeon?” I asked.
“In the way that you’re also a bit of a Kant,” she said.
Max Thrax has nothing to do with this. I only mentioned him because he has an awesome name.
Loads of famous people were born on April 22. Most of them are dead now. I don’t know if there’s a connection, nor do I care. It’s my party and I’ll die if I want to. This year my birthday falls on Earth Day. My one moment of glory in the entire year and it gets hijacked. Stupid, selfish planet. It even has its own website. Not the earth, because it doesn’t have hands or even a Facebook account. Its self-appointed guardians have a website. They urge us to sign their petition. Right away my hackles went up. “Urge” and “petition” are two of my least favourite words.
With arched eyebrows, the petition says, “We call on you to keep global temperature rise under the unacceptably dangerous level of two degrees Centigrade by phasing out carbon pollution to zero. To achieve this you must urgently forge realistic global, national and local agreements to rapidly shift our societies and economies to 100 per cent clean energy by 2050. Our world is worth saving and now is our moment to act. But to change everything, we need everyone. Join us.”
I wanted to. I really did. But the weight of responsibility on my shoulders grew heavier with every sentence – as did my eyelids – and by the time I had finished reading I was too weak to do anything more heroic than crawl back to my bed and pull the duvet over my throbbing head.
I can’t stop climate change any more than I can stop breaking the speed limit. Clean energy by 2050? Please. It’s touch and go whether I’ll find the energy to clean my beer-encrusted body by 2050.
United Nations Climate Change Conferences have been held every year since 1995 with not a hell of a lot to show for it. When it was held in Durban in 2011, conference president Maite Nkoana-Mashabane declared it a success because it didn’t rain and not a single foreign delegate had his head hacked off.
In 2009, the conference was held in Copenhagen. It was a year that many things made little sense to me. This was one of them. I couldn’t understand why anyone would hold a conference on the dangers of global warming in a country where people tear their clothes off and run outside if the mercury hits 10°C.
In 2015, the conference was held in Paris. Naturellement. Por le shopping, oui? Paris is in grave danger of disappearing when the English Channel rises by 100 metres in just a billion years from now. There is no time to waste. To the barricades! No, wait. To the boulevards!
If I were Secretary-General of the United Nations, and I will be one day, I would hold the conference on Palau where delegates would have to take off their socks and shoes every time the tide came in. Then, after the conference, people would get the chance to remove the rest of their clothing, drink powerful rum-based cocktails and rub up against the locals until hovercrafts arrived to rush everyone to the nearest airport before another iceberg melted and drowned everyone on the island.
Look, I am as environmentally conscious as the next man, but aren’t we taking this whole “we’re killing the planet” thing a bit far?
I don’t know about you, but the mantle of guilt does not rest easily on my shoulders. I violate the rules of the road with reckless abandon and never donate anything to charity. I refuse to pay my traffic fines and think street children are more annoying than hadedas. And if, as a white South African, I don’t feel responsible for apartheid, I’m not bloody likely to take the blame for raping the planet, am I?
The subject of climate change is going to have to be tarted up considerably if the sanctimonious eco-pests expect us to buy into it. Look who they have as their poster boy. Albert Arnold Gore Jr, the 45th vice-president of the USA. The man hardly gets your belly churning with raw emotion, does he? If Hitler had possessed the oratorical skills of Al Gore, no more than a dozen people would have turned up at the Nuremberg rallies.
Global warming needs to be given a sexy face pretty damn sharpish if there is any hope of our interest being piqued. We do not want an inconvenient truth. We want smouldering looks and a flash of thigh. This is a filthy business and if we are going to buy into it, at least have the decency to seduce us. Encourage us to have casual sex and dabble in recreational drugs. Then, when we’re legless and smiling, whisper gently about what we should be doing to help prevent the sun from exploding.
Do not order us to drastically alter our lifestyles in return for nothing more than what we already have. In fact, we would be even more miserable than before, what with having showers instead of baths, replacing lights with candles, switching the car for a bicycle, swapping the dog for a cat and spending our Sunday evenings separating the garbage into nine colour-coded categories instead of getting drunk and passing out on the couch watching what used to be the TV before we sold it to save seven watts of electricity a year.
And don’t talk to me about the dangers of the greenhouse effect. I once visited a friend in London and he showed me around his greenhouse. He was growing some sort of super skunk hybrid and it had the most wonderful effect on me. The only dangerous thing about it was crossing the road afterwards.
As for the Arctic shelf melting, I expect this would be a welcome development among the local penguin population. I have seen the movies. These birds hate the cold. Their toes freeze if they stand in one place for too long. And because almost all the girls are frigid, the boys have to walk for days in search of someone willing to have sex with them. A bit like me, really.
Anyway, what the hell has this planet ever done for us? Look what it did to the dinosaurs when they weren’t looking. The earth is no friend of mine, let me tell you. It has tried to drown me, crush me and set me on fire on more than one occasion. It even tried to suffocate me while I slept. Okay, that might have been my wife.
We should be thankful for countries like China who have the courage to fight back by polluting the atmosphere, poisoning the oceans and depleting the fossil fuels.
Speaking of which, the last fossil I burnt was the spine of a baby brontosaurus that my dog dug up near St Lucia. I might just as well have built the fire out of wet asbestos. I won’t braai with fossils again in a hurry, I can tell
you that much.
When the earth strays from the path of righteousness it needs to be taught a lesson, and former US president George W Bush understood this better than most. That’s why he refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, a document drawn up by a bunch of goddamn pinko liberals who are more concerned about maintaining the quality of air than they are about maintaining the quality of life in a God-fearing coal-burning SUV-driving chemical-spewing oil-guzzling democracy like America. These self-appointed climate cops with their crotch lice and woolly jumpers make me want to leave my carbon footprint right across their pointy little faces.
Here’s an interesting snippet: In 2009, our then environmental affairs minister refused to set targets for the reduction of carbon emissions on the grounds that this would cripple Eskom and the economy. So that worked well.
By now our politicians must surely have a plan on dealing with climate change, even if it only extends to Blade Nzimande condemning it as a white patriarchal class-related conspiracy and Julius Malema insisting it’s the racist climate that must adapt, not us.
Here are my tips on saving energy:
Stay in bed for three months of the year.
Walk, cycle or take public transport and carry a 9mm pistol made from compressed cannabis (R999 from Gunja-R-Us).
Install energy-saving light bulbs. When your eyesight starts failing, fashion a pair of reading glasses from twigs and broken beer bottles.
Place a blanket around your geyser. At night, put it to sleep by stroking its thermostat and singing to it. The older geysers love anything by Cat Stevens.
Hang your clothes outside instead of using the dryer. Buy an eco-friendly rottweiler to watch the line.
Eat genetically modified foods. If you plan on starting a family, be aware that two-headed children are voracious eaters.
Don’t buy new stuff. Steal other people’s new stuff.
Use natural elements as a source of warmth. If your children are cold, get them to stand outside in the sun. If it’s night, tell them the moon is just the sun turned down low.
