Durban Poison

by Ben Trovato

  Caprice had organised us a tent. I was appalled, pointing out that I had suffered enough in my life. She said the backpackers itself was full and, yes, we could have stayed in a nearby luxury lodge, but, as a journalist, wouldn’t I rather be in the thick of things? In the belly of the beast? She made it sound like a cross between Woodstock and the fall of Saigon. I went along with it but only because I had no choice.

  The festival was structured in such a way that people could participate in a range of life-threatening activities during the day and then at night there’d be live music to which one could thrash about until one’s heart stopped.

  Later, on one of my increasingly circuitous forays to the bar, I heard high-pitched shrieking and squealing coming from the Jacuzzi. I elbowed my way through the crowd, ripping my shirt off and fumbling with the buttons on my jean pant. Instead of a feeding frenzy of half-naked Swedish medical students, the hot tub was jammed with hyperactive children. It didn’t seem appropriate to join in so I went back to the music. A band from Warner Beach was playing. The lead vocalist looked like a tow-truck driver. They were great.

  Back at the tent, I pushed our mattresses together in the hope that Caprice would suffer an aneurysm that might defrost her uncharitably chilly chastity. I had been wary of her from the moment we met. Women who don’t drink need to be watched closely. Their behaviour is often volatile and impulsive, not always in a good way.

  She reminded me of the ground rules and suggested I conserve my energy for the following day’s death-defying activities. In my condition, bumping uglies was a death-defying activity. I was prepared to risk it.

  In the morning, my dangerously unrequited member and I went off to a nearby establishment that offered as much adrenalin as one could handle. I had no intention of hurling myself from an aircraft or abseiling down cliffs or even hiking. I have a car. It would be silly to walk anywhere. Two hours of high-speed quad biking on a brutal trail through rivers and bush was enough to knock some of the testosterone out of me.

  That night I managed to score some Jacuzzi time with Caprice. It was like the cauldron scene from Macbeth, had Shakespeare written it so that this guy with red eyes and a bad attitude came along with eye of newt and tongue of dog and then got into the cauldron and for some reason one of the witches joined him.

  Inexplicably, drunks and drug fiends never harassed us. Perhaps it wasn’t that sort of festival. The healthy daytime activities undoubtedly deterred the bona fide deviants.

  Wherever I went, young people were making friends all around me. The sharp mountain air was alive with the sounds of, “So where you from?” and “What’s your name?” and “Do you have any shrooms?”

  Nobody asked where I was from. I recently sustained an inadvertently severe haircut and they probably thought I was from the Bergville drug squad. Sure, there were a few people in the rundown neighbourhood of my age wandering about, but life had clearly kicked them in the head one time too many and I thought it best to keep my distance. They apparently felt the same.

  I did, however, spend indeterminate periods of time sitting on a hay bale staring into a giant metal ball full of fire in the hope that a raven-eyed Argentinean lust-monkey would come along and recognise me as a lonely sensitive poet who needed tender ministrations rather than a tetchy rat-arsed misanthrope who needed avoiding.

  The problem with fires at music festivals is that … actually, the problem with marijuana is that people always think someone else will come along and put on more wood. I watched people half my age sitting on a pile of logs complaining that the fire was dying out. Sighing heavily, I lumbered to my feet, got them to move and set about stoking the flames. A youngster thanked me but then insulted me by calling me Oom. Perhaps he thought I was Braam Stoker.

  I overheard one conversation between a stoner and a skydiver.

  Stoner: “Hey, bru, I might not’ve jumped in that way but I’ve jumped in other ways and that’s why I can connect with you on this level, know what I mean?”

  Skydiver: “…”

  I was keen on getting involved in a game that broke out among the tents. It involved flinging a flaming toilet roll high into the sky. There didn’t seem to be any rules and nobody cared where it landed. I think the object was to not get arrested for arson or manslaughter. I made discreet enquiries and was told that the toilet roll was soaked in aviation fuel. The next time I make a braai in the wind, I’m using Jet A-1 instead of Blitz. It’ll still be burning by Christmas.

  Then I met a fellow surfer who had just arrived from Cape Town. He said he was waiting for a friend to get back from her hike.

  “Me too,” I said. And, just like in the movies, my friend turned out to be his friend. What a happy coincidence. He and Caprice went off to the Jacuzzi and I went off to stare into the fire some more.

  When I got back to the tent around midnight, she had moved out. I’ve had women move out on me before, but this was the first time it’s happened in a tent. All that remained was a sock. It was more than some of the others had left me.

  Driving out early the next morning, I was pleased to see that he had a smaller tent than mine. In cases like these, size really does matter. I laughed like a man who’d dodged a bullet, pointed the Landy’s snout into the rising sun and headed for the ocean.

  GO BIG OR GO TO THE FUNERAL HOME

  I have always paid scant attention to that section of a newspaper devoted to matters concerning money. I find very little of it makes any sense. Recently, instead of rolling a broadsheet-sized joint from the front page of Personal Finance that would take at least three people to hold and a flamethrower to light, I began reading a feature headlined, “How your retirement plans might fail you”. I took this as a sign that I was growing up and it disturbed me a great deal, but not as much as it did to discover there was a very good chance I’d be destitute and partially eaten by monkeys before I could retire.

  Oh, who am I kidding. I’d be thoroughly eaten, digested and shat out long before anyone even noticed I was missing. The alpha monkey of the Westbrook troop – the one with the giant blue balls – would move in and my neighbours would whisper among themselves about how shrunken and hairy I had become. My death would only become apparent when Blue Balls, having found my wallet and car keys, went off to buy bananas from the Seagull Roost café and crashed into the complex’s electric gate because monkeys don’t understand that they have to press the red button to get back in. Once they work that out, we’re finished as a species.

  That’s enough about monkeys. On the financial front, there is some good news. For me, at least. The rest of you are screwed. Amid the increasingly hysterical requests from the traffic police that I hand myself over, I received a reminder that money was imminently due to me. This wasn’t a reminder from Lagos Larry, either. Apparently I had taken out a number of policies some years ago. It almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if San Reddy hadn’t brought it up. San and I worked together at e.tv when the channel started. Between the two of us, he was the more sensible one when it came to money. When it came to anything, really.

  Having a drink in Bardelis after work one night, San suggested I get in touch with his then financial advisor. I suggested he desist from such depressing talk and buy another round. Being the gentleman that he is, he politely refrained from sketching a picture of me in 20 years living in a cardboard box on the N2, drinking recycled Chardonnay and eating my girlfriend’s toes.

  I have never responded well to advice from people who have my best interests at heart, but this time I followed up on it. I worked like a dog in harness at e.tv in those early years and the recurring chest pains went a long way towards encouraging me to make that call.

  She suggested we meet at a coffee shop in a mall. This wasn’t a good start. My idea of a financial advisor was someone who’d insist on meeting in an underground parking garage at 2am. I believed then, as I do now, that the deliberate accumulation of wealth is a dark and treacherous affair and negotiations are best conducted out of the
public eye. Or, at the very least, in a bar where the taxis don’t run and the tequila is cheap.

  She was impeccably dressed. Her make-up was perfect. Her shoes matched the colour of her nails. I knew right away that I was either going to spend my retirement in the Bahamas or in a homeless shelter. It was a gamble, possibly the biggest of my life. I asked her if everything went pear-shaped, could she at least guarantee me a spot in a homeless shelter in the Bahamas. She laughed and picked up the menu.

  “What would you like?” she said. I thought a bit, then said I’d like to retire at 45 with enough money to never again have to sit in traffic, take guff from mental midgets or have to settle for 21 days leave a year. A small island in the Caribbean might also be nice.

  “I meant,” she said, “what would you like to eat?”

  Suspecting that this could turn into more of a mugging than a blessing, I opted for a liquid lunch. She wanted a guarantee of my money, not my temperance. One finds drinking often helps to blunt oneself to the trauma of dealing with numbers. However, it also makes one inclined to sign whatever it takes to hasten the end of the horror.

  Life insurance, disability, dread disease, retirement, death, funeral. Would you like a will with that, sir? May I validate your parking? Teddy bear for the blind? Hell, yeah. I’ll take it all. Bring me another beer. Where do I sign?

  Every month for years after that meeting I would look at my bank statement and say, “What the hell is that?” I didn’t really want to know. Making enquiries would only have confused me more. I assumed somebody out there knew what was going on and that would have to do.

  And then, the other day, it happened. All policies fell due. Out of the red and into the black. Ka-ching. Just like that. I rushed to the nearest bottle store and put in a cheeky offer. Then I went for lunch with my father and told him the happy news. He nodded slowly and stroked his long white beard. “That’s very nice,” he said. “I just hope you came out with more than if you had put all that money into the stock market instead.”

  I told him I was going for a wee and would be right back, then jumped the fence and ran for my car. I don’t want to know these things. I can’t imagine anything worse than sitting down with a calculator and finding out that I would’ve made more money buying shares in Shoprite. Or even keeping the money in my current account. I don’t care. What’s done is done.

  But here’s where it gets weird. Apparently I can’t get my hands on all the money I’ve paid over the years. Apparently I can’t be trusted to sit on my big fat nest egg for fear that I will lose control, smash it open and suck up its gooey goodness and then, when it’s empty, sit back and become a burden on the state.

  This isn’t right. It’s about as wrong as Bruce Jenner deciding he’s a woman because he bought the boobies and wig but still wants to hang onto his willy. Genitalia determines gender. Lop off yer goolies, Bruce, and you’ll always be Caitlyn to me.

  So. This is the deal. I am allowed to take one-third of the value of the policies in Spar plastic bags full of untraceable banknotes. The remaining two-thirds must be invested in something called a living annuity. From this, I have to withdraw no less than 2.5 per cent and no more than 17.5 per cent a year.

  My advisor advised me to err on the side of caution. “The safe drawdown rate for a balanced portfolio is 4 per cent.” I don’t know if I have a balanced portfolio. Not because she hasn’t given me the information. She has. But you can only say, “Sorry, would you mind explaining that again?” so many times before you have to nod and smile and walk away.

  “You don’t want to start digging into your capital too soon,” she said over the phone. It’s a lesson that comes way too late in life. When I was a kid, my pocket money would disappear within the five minutes it took me to run to the corner shop. I didn’t always spend it. Most of the time it would fall out of my pocket and be lost forever. My sister would save hers. She’s probably a multi-millionaire in 50-cent pieces today.

  So it’s a gamble, and, like all gambles of any consequence, you absolutely must calculate the odds. But this one is trickier than most.

  Brain: “Take the 2.5 per cent You are going to live a long time. Make it last.”

  Gut: “Don’t fuck around. You could be dead by Friday. Take the 17.5 per cent

  Ideally, I suppose, Big Brother’s piggy bank would make its final payout and I’d spend it on something that would make me very happy and then kill me. I expect it will involve a woman.

  MOZAMBIQUE MANIA WITH THE MUIZENBERG MATRIARCHS

  I got a late-night message from a grizzled longboard surfer inviting me on a trip to Mozambique. Right away I suspected a trap. Nobody ever invites me to anything. On the rare occasion that it does happen, the host invariably ends up bitterly regretting it.

  There were fewer than a dozen people on the twin-prop flight from Joburg to Inhambane. Four of them looked like mielie farmers from Ventersdorp on a mission from God to drink every last bottle of Tipo Tinto rum in Mozambique. I eyed them warily. That was my mission and I silently warned them to stay out of my way.

  There were no taxis outside Inhambane airport. The only thing waiting for me was a swarm of mosquitoes. I dropped my surfboard and reeled into the road, thrashing and slapping at myself. “Get off me, you filthy malaria-infested swine,” I shouted. A policeman said something in Portuguese but failed to come to my assistance.

  A couple of other passengers managed to bribe someone to call a taxi and we all squeezed in. My surfboard was jammed inside the car and, grim-faced, everyone sat silently with their heads bent forward. It looked as if we were being escorted to a firing squad.

  The town of Tofo lies in the damp crotch of a sweeping bay on the Barra Peninsula in the Jangamo district. It has everything one needs for a proper holiday – a warm sea, rustic bottle stores that stay open 20 hours a day and … well, that’s about it.

  The woman who invited me on the trip had provided less than explicit directions on where they were staying. It was almost as if she didn’t really want me to come. “Take a left at the third palm tree and you’ll see a house,” she said in an email. “With a sort of blue wooden thingy outside.”

  Mozambique has more palm trees than people. And they’re in better condition, too. The driver claimed not to know of this house with the blue wooden thingy and we drove around for the best part of an hour. If you drive around Tofo for an hour, you’re likely to pass everything at least half a dozen times. Locals started to recognise me. They even gave me a name and shouted it out every time I came past. It sounded like “Velho viajante”, which means old traveller. The taxi driver corrected me. Apparently they were saying, “Velho idiota.”

  Tofo is known for attracting manta rays, turtles, whale sharks and, in holiday season, Afrikaners. They are all frightening in their own unique ways. The marine life, however, drinks less rum and raspberry and treats the locals with more respect.

  Eventually we found the house. The surfers from Cape Town were just finishing lunch, which appeared to involve a bread roll and 47 bottles of Laurentina beer. It turned out that the beer was being guzzled by a hot blonde with blue eyes and a shaven-headed gangster from the Cape Flats with alarming green eyes and the build of a Staffie. Later he told me that he wasn’t, in fact, a gangster, and threatened to cut my throat if I ever stereotyped him again.

  The veteran who had invited me on the trip didn’t drink and had, in fact, never been drunk in her life. I looked at her in awe. It was like seeing a unicorn. Her husband, who celebrated his 71st birthday on the trip, had the occasional beer. In her eyes, this probably made him a raging alcoholic. Then there was a talented artist in her 60s with a disturbing tendency to whip off her top and pole dance in the middle of the lounge. It proved to be the best entertainment Tofo had to offer. The last member of the crew was a producer who also didn’t drink, but only because she stopped trawling those dangerous shoals years ago.

  There was no bedroom for me. Instead, I was invited to share the not-gangster’s room. There we
re two single beds pushed together beneath a single mosquito net. This was a little too intimate for me so I dragged one of the beds out into the lounge and slept in full view of six strangers. This was the polar opposite of intimate.

  I asked where their car was and they laughed. “You walk everywhere?” I said in horror. An hour later I had hired a minibus taxi from Jorges at Casa Barry down the road. Everyone seemed very grateful to me, especially the blonde. It soon became apparent, though, that she was grateful to almost everyone she met. She’s one of those extremely tactile people, which I think is great. Well worth the cold showers.

  The days settled into an easy rhythm. Everyone would wake up before me and invade my bedroom. There’d be coffee or beer for breakfast followed by the stuffing of seven surfboards into the van and a drive down the road to Tofinho, a surfing spot renowned for its point break. We mostly kept out of the way of the local hotshots but managed to get our share of waves. The Cape Town contingent was ecstatic at being able to stay in the water for hours without hypothermia setting in.

  One night, the blonde, the skinhead and I infiltrated the nest of ramshackle bars in the village where the sound of pumping reggae drew us to a shack called Rastas. The shirtless owner, Tony, was a wiry dude with dreadlocks and tattoos. These weren’t your regular tattoo parlour designs, but more the kind of work that’s done by someone who shares your cell. I asked him about this and he pointed at a chop on his throat. “18 Street,” he said. It was up to Wikipedia to tell me more. 18 Street is a multi-ethnic transnational criminal organisation that started as a street gang in Los Angeles. We thought he was great and spent a lot of time at his bar.

  My crew had its own initiation ritual. It entailed everyone having their toenails painted blue. When Tony saw this he put his arm around me and asked if I was feeling sexy. This is not something you want a member of 18 Street to be asking you in a derelict bar late at night in the dark heart of Mozambique.