by Ben Trovato
Things have changed a fair bit since I was last here. New suburbs and shopping centres are mushrooming in all directions. There appears to be little planning involved and word on the street is that there is nowhere near enough water to sustain this kind of expansion. This seems to be a blind spot for developers everywhere. As long as there is enough water to mix the concrete, they’re happy.
Windhoek drivers refuse to acknowledge red lights and stop streets. The safest place to be is off the road and inside a bar. Which is where I am right now. It’s the kind of bar in which officers of the Gestapo might have been comfortable in. Everyone has a mug of beer and a Jägermeister on the side.
Somebody has just taken the stool next to me. He ordered a draught and two Jägermeisters. This makes me nervous. He has eyes like melted Frisbees, the teeth of a serial killer and the fingernails of a diesel mechanic. He also has a cough like the inside of an emphysema ward.
He’s not doing anything. Just drinking and giving me the side-eye. I want to move away from him but there’s a good chance he will take offence and disembowel me with a rusty Okapi knife.
I am pleased that the bar staff are hefty Ovambo-speaking gentlemen. In this environment, I feel safer when black men are around. Apartheid seems not to have worked very well on me.
The barman just put a bowl of snacks in front of me. We’re not in peanut country anymore, Dorothy. This was a heap of deep-fried pork. Scratchings, I think they’re called. Judging by their size, though, they’re more like scrabblings. Desperate scrabblings. The mound of dead pig looks lethal but I have to eat it for fear of being mistaken for a vegetarian. Namibians think vegetarianism is a mental illness. One of the criteria for citizenship is being able to consume an entire lamb within seven minutes. I was already drawing attention to myself by not drinking Jägermeister, not smoking, not having a moustache and typing on a laptop instead of staring vacantly at the bottles behind the bar.
A young Afrikaner with the face of a blunt agricultural implement just stalked up to the bar and grunted his order. He failed to say please or thank you. I decided against teaching him a lesson in manners and history when he returned to a table of bikers covered in studded leather and beards.
A skinny white girl just handed an ice bucket to a waiter and asked him to hold it up, look at the camera and say, “Sauerkraut!” Then she asked him to do it again, this time with a bigger smile. I am not making this up.
Perhaps I should just mind my own business and read the newspaper. Here’s a story about a drive-by shooting in the Tses district. Five cattle grazing alongside the B1 road were gunned down. The shooter has not been apprehended. City police have failed to clamp down on illegal car washes. Municipal spokesman Joshua Amukugo said, “These things of car washes are so complicated.”
Classes at a school near Oshakati were disrupted when three cousins “started slithering like snakes and channeling the voice of a known villager”.
Maybe I’ll have that Jägermeister after all.
GETTING WASTED ON THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT
Decorations seem to lack something of the Christian ethos this year. When I was growing up, you could barely move for cheerful scenes of the crucifixion and mawkish tableaus of ceramic shepherds hanging around dodgy mangers.
For years, a church in Durban North put out a nativity scene on the street. Then people started stealing the livestock and a couple of the wise men went missing. It was stopped altogether the year baby Jesus was nicked.
Anyway, nativity scenes are outdated. If it were today, the three wise men would be unemployed academics with substance-abuse problems, Joseph would be out working overtime to pay for the new baby and the shepherds would be on strike.
Meanwhile, not too long ago, you could barely walk through a mall without smacking your head into a polystyrene angel swinging from the rafters. These days it’s all disco balls and plastic dross swaddled in fairy lights. It’s not so much Santa’s grotto as it is Hugh Hefner’s grotto, although you do have a slightly smaller risk of contracting Legionnaires’ disease in the Hypermarket.
You’d think the very least the dude responsible for all of this could do is send down a few real angels to pretty up the city. Maybe we’ve been doing it wrong and everyone has gone straight to hell. Or perhaps this is hell. Perhaps heaven is another planet with mountains of marijuana and rivers of beer and beautiful women who don’t mind if you never call them but who will happily whip up a hearty breakfast if you drop by early on a Sunday morning, horny and bleeding.
With only a couple of weeks left before the traditional exchanging of gifts and bodily fluids, I found myself in the maw of a gargantuan shopping maul, having been driven there by guilt. Or, more accurately, by the Bad Yellow-Eyed Woman. I am dating a woman who believes in the magic of Christmas instead of doing the sensible thing and dating an iconoclastic pagan who would sooner perform outlandish fertility rituals around a burning goat than go shopping.
At first glance, it appeared as if the complex was designed by Dante Alighieri himself. There was Cerberus tied up outside and a sign at the entrance saying, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Inside, nine levels of hell, jam packed with opportunists, adulterers, gluttons and greedheads, hypocrites, thieves and sodomites, the sullen, the slothful and the suicidal. It sounds more fun than it was.
“Let’s split up,” said the Bad Yellow-Eyed Woman.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I replied. “I’ll have my stuff out by Tuesday.”
She gave me the lazy eye and, in an instant, was swept away in a raging torrent of hoarders and wasters, deceivers, flatterers and sowers of discord. I sought refuge in a shop called Dad’s Toys. It was either that or CUM Books, a shady outfit that looked like it might sell tasteful Christian porn to happily married couples.
Dad’s Toys was the perfect shop to get something for my landlord. He’s been married for a while, so it was a toss-up between a crossbow, a knuckleduster, two throwing knives, a pair of nunchucks, a bulletproof vest and a riot shield. In the end, I took it all. To even things up a bit, I bought his wife a stun gun, flick knife, hip flask, a can of pepper spray and two pairs of handcuffs. It’ll be like a second honeymoon for them.
Back on level three of Dante’s inferno, I suffered some sort of weird asthma attack in a shop that reeked overpoweringly of the stuff women put in their underwear drawer to repel their husbands. It appeared to be a biological agent. Nerve gas, probably.
Fighting to breathe and lurching like an escaped lunatic, I was steamrollered into Game by a mob of unbaptised heretics. Almost immediately, I felt my sanity slipping away. An alarm wailed as if the store were under terrorist attack, purple-faced tellers shouted for reinforcements, wild-eyed women clawed at one another’s eyeballs to get the last trolley, the floor vibrated to a hideous rap version of “Hark the Herald-something-or-other” and every few seconds the madness was cranked up a notch by a maniac screaming over the PA system for Dawie to meet Hannelie at the front of the store. I think it was meet. It could’ve been eat.
Ripping through the mayhem like a circular saw through the occipital bone came the most terrible sound of all. If Christmas is such a happy time for children, why in god’s name are they all crying? Why are they lying on the floor thrashing about like epileptics?
The idea of penetrating too deep into the belly of the beast filled me with revulsion, so my plan was to buy anything within spitting distance of the tellers. A man in a red waistcoat came over and asked me to stop spitting.
Adrift in the toy section, I overheard an assistant say to a man with a troubled face, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but Spiderman has sold out.” This was disturbing news. Had our hero been bought off by the Green Goblin? Had Peter Parker finally discovered that it would be far more lucrative to become an estate agent and use his superpowers to spin a web of lies and deceit instead?
I was distracted by row upon row of babies stacked up like prematurely born infants in cheap plastic incubators. There was Butterfly Doll
with eight functions – five more than a real baby – and Kissing Baby, a favourite among visiting Belgian paedophiles. Sippin’ Sue is a cute little thing “who lets you know when she wants more”. Yeah, she’s cute now. Wait until she grows up and starts demanding cunnilingus and vodka at 3am.
There’s a doll that speaks six lines. Or does six lines. I can’t remember. Cocaine Barbie, perhaps.
I came across New Born Baby. “Look after me,” the synthetic sprog demanded. “I can drink and use my potty.” So can I, but you don’t see me lolling about in a cardboard box expecting people to pay R300 to see me do a wee, do you? Not that I wouldn’t.
There was also some kind of contraption that could accommodate seven babies. Of course. Why have one when you can have seven? It’s a valuable lesson for any girl to learn in a country starved of people.
The Americans, being the peace-loving democrats they are, seem to have ditched the toy guns this year. Instead, your cute little psychopath can look forward to Santa bringing him remote-controlled Apache helicopter gunships, M1 tanks and amphibious assault vehicles that come with flashing lights and fabulous sound effects including machine-gun fire, explosions and wounded civilians screaming in Arabic.
The ideal present for a boy isn’t, as you might think, a plastic M-16 rifle with pull-back breech action and realistic auto sound. It’s a kitchen play set and vacuum cleaner. The lad needs to be equipped with survival skills because by the time he is of marriageable age, all the women will be riding Harleys and staging cock fights in the local pub.
Some mothers never taught their daughters to clean and cook but I believe it’s never too late for them to learn the basics. Girls, or even grown women, will appreciate the My Little Home range. It has everything from a plastic washing machine to a trolley fitted with a mop, broom and bucket. Next year, I’d like to see a My Little Broken Home range where nothing works except a miniature crystal meth lab. Accessories would include paramedics and a social worker.
The electronic kitchen “makes realistic sounds”, so you might not want to get that. The last thing you need is a toy that shrieks, “You’re not having another beer, are you?” and “You can also cook sometimes, you lazy pig.”
My Little Iron also makes realistic sounds. Like what? “I’m sick of slaving away for these ungrateful white bastards” and “Why doesn’t your useless father ever do this?” and “Open the safe or I’ll iron your face.”
There’s also a talking octopus. What can it possibly have to say? I once met an octopus while snorkelling and I can honestly say that in the brief moment our eyes met, we both knew there was nothing we had to say to each other. If octopi could talk, I expect they would say, “Please take that pointy stick out of my head and return me to the rock pool from whence I came.” Well, the educated ones would. The more common octopi would probably squirt ink everywhere and try to strangle you with a tentacle.
A shop assistant caught me looking up a doll’s skirt. Awkward. I simply wanted to ascertain whether it was anatomically correct. With the education system as it is, I wouldn’t want my nephew growing up thinking all girls have a piece of hard plastic between their legs. Not that I have a nephew.
I had ingested a muscle relaxant in the parking lot and fortunately was able to deal with almost anything – even the Verimark aisle. It was like stepping into a future filled with home appliances designed by mad geniuses on hallucinogenic drugs and whiskey.
Talking vacuum cleaners with an incredible 22 kPa suction power! That’s enough to suck the eyeballs right out of your head. There was one that not only picks up dust mites, but gives them in-house training so they can entertain you with tiny circuses and cabaret acts instead of freebooting on skin flakes and crawling up your nose while you’re sleeping.
Slumped in a jewellery shop doorway, I watched a middle-aged man staring blankly at a pair of diamond earrings. He noticed me and asked what I thought. I took a look at the price.
“I think you should get something cheaper. She’s probably cheating on you right now.” Apparently a sense of humour is out of place in the festive season.
With my blood-alcohol levels dangerously low, I repaired to the restaurant area where several companies appeared to be having their get-togethers. Christmas parties used to be held at night. There would be carousing and fornicating and the company would happily pay your bail the next day. Now, the grinches offer their employees a free lunch. As if there’s such a thing.
MALICE IN BLUNDERLAND
I try to avoid carrying a bulging wallet in my pants pocket in case a jumpy cop mistakes it for a gun and shoots me in the throat. Or worse, a woman mistakes it for massive genitalia and tries to marry me.
This means I carry only banknotes, credit card and a driver’s licence. During the regular movement of cash from pocket to bartender, it’s easy for a piece of plastic to go astray. This time it was my licence. I don’t understand why we need a licence to drive but not one to have children.
I don’t know who has my licence. All I know is that it’s not me. And hasn’t been for weeks. I don’t know what the consequences are of driving without one. They certainly can’t be as severe as, say, breeding without a brain. And there’s a hell of a lot of that going around these days.
I’m a little upset that I still haven’t been through a single roadblock. Threats of immediate imprisonment forced me to spend the entire festive season drinking within a three-metre radius of my home.
Normally I wouldn’t bother replacing my licence because I drive perfectly well without it. Also, in many ways, going to prison is a more attractive option than visiting the vehicle licensing department. Or any government office, really. The queuing, the weeping, the suicide attempts. It’s all too dreadful for words.
I do, however, need my driver’s licence for ID purposes, even though I’m against a world where people have the right to ask you to identify yourself before giving you whatever it is you want. It should be enough that you have a functioning human face and can speak at least one language.
Hiding out on the Cape Peninsula, far from the febrile incubator that is Durban in summer, I went to the licensing office in Fish Hoek. The glittering jewel of the deep south holds a special place in my heart because it’s where my second marriage exploded like an over-inflated puffer fish.
I’ve had a driver’s licence since I was 18 and hoped the system would show that I had, over the years, complied with the multitude of requirements – eye tests, fingerprints, photographs, polygraph, DNA samples, ability to simultaneously pat my head and rub my tummy while saying Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry and so on – enabling me to simply pay a modest fee and get a duplicate on the spot.
Hope, however, is an alien concept among those who inhabit the dark world of motor vehicle licensing.
“Third door on the left,” said the man at enquiries. There were only two doors. The mythical third door is actually a corridor that leads to … I don’t know, a portal to another world, perhaps. A world where nobody needs permission for anything and mermaids frolic in fountains of cold beer while happy chocolate cows graze in lush fields of fresh marijuana. I felt myself salivating and started off down the corridor.
“You can’t go there,” said a woman with the eyes of a snoek on a hook.
“Why not?” I said. “Because of the mermaids and cows?”
The man at enquiries says, “Third door on the left” around 150 times a day. That’s 36 000 times a year. It would be an atrocity – a human rights violation – to tell him there is, in fact, no third door. Blocked from entering the corridor of eternal pleasure, I returned to the counter.
“There is no third door to the left,” I said. He didn’t look at me so much as through me. It was as if I never existed. “Next,” he said. I backed off and made my way to the second door on the left.
“Is this for the eye tests?” I asked a woman at the end of a longer queue. She pointed at a sign above my head. “Eye Test”, it said. I laughed and said I hadn’t noticed it because it w
asn’t in braille. She did something with her mouth. I couldn’t be sure if it was a smile or a snarl. A smarl, maybe.
My turn in the chair coincided with a shift change. This wasn’t good. The tired dude who didn’t give a damn was being replaced by a fresh dude who might give a damn. There’s not much you can do to get your eyes ready for a test. I opened them wide, blinked rapidly a few times, then rubbed them vigorously, turning the entire room into a blur.
The tester, whose eyes were redder than mine, asked me to confirm something on one of the forms I’d filled out. I couldn’t see what I’d written. Bad start. I also couldn’t find my reading glasses because I was wearing a pair of camo shorts with a multitude of pockets designed to accommodate ammunition, condoms, grenades, flick knives, compasses and all manner of illicit substances. By the time I found my glasses, he had lost interest and was waiting for me to wedge my face into the machine.
The test was basic. When the letter m appears in the viewfinder, push the toggle in the direction it’s facing. It quickly became apparent that I was going to have to wing it. After a while, it didn’t even look like the letter m. It could just as easily have been a little man in a boat fishing on a lake. I joggled my toggle valiantly, at one point laughing openly at the futility of it all.
“You failed,” he said. It seemed possible.
“My left eye’s pretty good,” I said. He shook his head. I went on to explain that I’ve never had any trouble seeing cars, people or animals in the road, hence my still being alive. But if I ever did encounter a tiny m loitering in the breakdown lane, I’d just ignore it. I wouldn’t shout, “Oh my god, a tiny m!” and wrench the wheel, rolling the car and killing everyone around me. He gave me a smarl.