But I Digress ...

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  Please understand, I am under no delusion that society is ready to embrace the discriminating serial killer, but if I were a sniper and confining myself to picking off people who forward jokes by e-mail, or men who wear open-toed shoes at night, or Jamie Oliver, then at least when the fevered dreams visit in the tortured solitary hours I would be able to console myself that I have been making the world a better place.

  It will be some time before the Americans stop talking about the Washington sniper. You would think with the number of serial killers at work in America they would have learnt not to overreact by now, but you would be wrong. I was still smiling at the report of the Washington DC mayor’s office advising the local citizens not to walk in a straight line while the sniper was at large, but rather to weave down the street (how would traffic officers issue on-the-spot sobriety tests? “Excuse me, sir, would you kindly zigzag on either side of that white line.”), when I read the latest cautionary warning.

  Some specialist in such matters laments that the sniper might have been stopped before he sniped, had his friends and relatives only paid attention to the subtle warning signs. The subtle warning signs in this case came when he announced he was going to buy a rifle and shoot people. Apparently even once the snipings had started, and someone offered this information and the name of the sniper, it still took the Washington police several weeks and bodies before they considered him worth investigating, which should make you feel a little better about our own police force.

  But the report went on to say that people should be alert for other warning signs. The public is encouraged to report individuals who show signs of depression or anger, who make threats and who display suicidal tendencies. Now really. Christmas is almost upon us. Christmas is the season of depression, anger and suicide. If you use those criteria to arrest people, there will be scarcely a family in the country left sitting around the turkey.

  Good fences make good neighbours

  CAPE TIMES, 15 NOVEMBER 2002

  I DON’T MIND TELLING you, I’m becoming a little nervous. I live, you see, in what is called a “quiet neighbourhood”. I do not know who my neighbours are, and ordinarily that is precisely the way I like it. Not for me the Mediterranean exuberance of the bustling street, the merry housewives gabbing over the backyard fence, the tousle-haired urchins popping round to borrow a cup of sugar. For me, neighbours are like relatives – you can’t choose ’em, you have to have ’em, but the wise man keeps contact with the blighters to the bare minimum.

  I cherish the quietness of my neighbourhood, but of late it has begun to trouble me. Why is it so quiet? Why don’t I ever see my neighbours leaving for work in the morning, for instance? I raised this issue with my friend Chunko. “I think you will find,” said Chunko, “that most people leave for work at some time of the morning prior to eleven o’clock.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So you are still asleep,” said Chunko.

  It makes sense, I suppose, but I am not soothed. If the statistics are anything to go by, the fact that I am seldom made aware of my neighbours probably means that I am living in a community of serial killers, sex offenders and fugitive international revolutionaries. Besides the excitement of discovering last week that James Kilgore, the last member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, has been living in Claremont, I was most struck by the comments of his neighbours. “He was such a quiet man,” they said. “We would never have guessed.”

  I briefly lived in Claremont myself, in the days when I was a disgruntled university student, and I am compelled to confess that I would not be surprised to find a good deal more international villains hiding out there. There is a kind of simmering menace that hangs over Claremont, an unnatural stillness in the heat of the summer mornings that would be just the ticket for a Josef Mengele, say, or a Jack the Ripper living out the final years of his long retirement. Whispers have it that Robert Mugabe has a safe house tucked away somewhere above the railway line. Or perhaps I only remember Claremont that way because I spent most of my disgruntled student mornings fending off the kind of hangovers that make the world seem an altogether sinister place. Who can say?

  But Kilgore’s neighbours’ comments were food for thought. Admittedly, you would probably expect an international fugitive to keep a low profile, rather than run up SLA banners on a home-made flagpole and play the Internationale on a trumpet each morning and offer night classes to explain precisely what “Symbionese” means. All the same, it is always, as neighbours around the world are quick to tell reporters, the quiet ones you have to watch.

  Jeffrey Dahmer? Quiet. Fred and Rosemary West? Even more quiet. OJ Simpson? Seldom had loud parties. So don’t complain about the people across the road that play rap music all night and occasionally throw beer bottles at each other on the front lawn. At least you know they are not sex-killer cannibals or plotting the violent overthrow of the state, or Lord Lucan. You may not have peace and quiet, but you have peace of mind. Now you will have to excuse me. I have bought a drum kit and a tuba, and each night from now on I am going to teach myself to play them. It’s the only polite thing to do. I don’t want the neighbours to worry.

  Bag to the future

  STYLE, DECEMBER 2002

  I’M NOT, AS you might know, a trendsetter. I can’t pretend: I am no friend of the trend. I don’t know one end of a trend from another. When I am told that beige is the new brown, or that old is the new new, or that socks worn with sandals are big in Europe this season, I can but shrug. Trends do not rouse me to strong emotions. Well, there was the occasion when someone announced in my presence that the mullet was coming back as an acceptable hairstyle so I killed him and hid his body in the woods before he could tell anyone else. Those were strong emotions, I suppose. But for the most part, I care little for the malicious oddities of the world of fashion.

  So you will understand that I carry my man’s bag not in order to resemble David Beckham, but in order to carry things. That’s right, you heard me: my man’s bag. A man’s bag, in case you have never seen one, is a rather sportylooking accessory, designed to hold things. Bigger than a pocket, smaller than a knapsack, the man’s bag slings over one shoulder, cunningly freeing the hands for important everyday functions, like helping yourself to food at a cocktail party, or shaking hands with yourself, or shooing away small children. The man’s bag, I am compelled to admit, might bear a superficial resemblance to a handbag, but there is one vital difference: it is not a handbag. It is a bag for men. It is, as I say, a man’s bag, and more than that, it is my bag and no matter what snide comments and sarcastic wolf whistles and complimentary wine spritzers I may receive, I am proud of it.

  It is rather a handsome and masculine man’s bag, if you must know. It has “Puma” written on the side, and I have always found pumas to be very handsome and masculine beasts. Leopards I find handsome but a little effeminate. Something swishy about the tail, if you see what I mean. I am told that my man’s bag is all the rage in New York at the moment, although come to think of it the star-spangled banner is also popular in New York at the moment, and so are firemen, not to mention dark nightclubs where men wearing leather masks beat each other with rubber sticks moulded in rude shapes, so I suppose that shouldn’t count for much. Anyway, I carry my man’s bag for practical reasons.

  I lose things, you see. My patience, my temper and roulette, mainly, but also my cellphone and my wallet and especially my keys. I am a world-class key-loser. I lose keys as Tiger Woods plays golf, or as Tom Hanks’ wife cries at Oscar ceremonies. No one is better at losing keys than me. Many people claim to be absent-minded, but I have them all beat. I will take on all corners in a key-losing competition. When it comes to misplacing important everyday items, I am unrivalled for speed, endurance and sheer creativity.

  And so I started carrying a man’s bag, and since then I have not lost a single item. At first, though, I thought I was going to lose my friends. My first day with the man’s bag, I went off with a couple of hearty fellows to watch the Sp
ringboks play Australia at Ellis Park. They regarded me in heavy silence. “What is that?” they said.

  “It is a man’s bag,” I replied, shrugging my shoulder to hitch up the strap.

  There was another silence, and suddenly I was glad I was holding the tickets. “If anyone at the stadium asks,” they said at last, “tell them your girlfriend is off buying the beer.”

  But South African men are not the boors that other South African men sometimes fear. Not a single man in Ellis Park threatened me with violence because of my man’s bag. In fact, no man made a disparaging comment. I wish the same were true of the womenfolk. In the stadium I found myself beside a large fellow from some suburb where people conduct motor maintenance on their front lawns. He inspected my man’s bag for a while and tugged contemplatively on his mullet. “What do you carry in there?” he said at last.

  “Probably the same things you carry in the pockets of your blue cotton shorts,” I replied.

  “But with the bag your pockets don’t bulge and things don’t fall out,” said my neighbour thoughtfully.

  “Correct,” I replied.

  He turned to his wife. “Maybe I should get a bag like that,’ he said. “I’m always losing my keys.”

  His wife leaned over to eye the merchandise. ‘No,” she said. “Do you want to look like a moffie?”

  SMS SCKS

  CAPE TIMES, 27 DECEMBER 2002

  CAN SOMEONE TELL me – what is the deal with group SMSing? Really, it is beginning to annoy me.

  It used to be an irksome but necessary chore of Christmastime – if you were one who went in for such things as Christmastime chores – to handwrite warm festive cards to friends and relatives and business acquaintances and people you met on holiday, and post them off in good time to arrive before Christmas day.

  For the most part, admittedly, the cards were simply watercolours of robins or snowmen or apple-cheeked children deporting themselves like kittens with balls of wool, inside which you had scrawled “With love to the whole family” or some similar effusion of the heart in spidery handwriting with a blue ballpoint pen. People would line their cards on the mantlepiece or mount them on lengths of string and look at them with bloody-minded satisfaction on Christmas Eve as they sipped their brandy and waited for the kids to fall asleep. Christmas cards were a minimal exercise in civility.

  To send a Christmas card, you needed actually to buy the object, write in it, envelope it, lick the flap, stamp, address and finally post it. It was an exercise that demanded an investment of time and effort. You may not especially like someone or choose to spend time with them, but the act of sending them a Christmas card was a way of expressing that they were not beyond the pale of your attention – that you still acknowledged them as being in the world and to an extent in your life. It was a kind of covenant between people; to be on someone’s Christmas card list meant that – regardless of the state of relations between you – in their eyes you still qualified as a human being deserving of recognition, even if only once a year.

  This is no longer the case. Not only is the Christmas card – with its handwriting and its personalised name and address – scarcely sent any longer, but increasingly it is being replaced by the group SMS. Have you received a group SMS? On Christmas Eve and morn my telephone was athrob with them. This does not mean that I am popular and have many friends – this just means that my number is stored in an unconscionable number of cellphones.

  It is not flattering to receive a group SMS saying “Wishing you a Christmas of love, light and hipness”, and not merely because no one using the word “hipness” is a friend of mine. It is not flattering because it is not especially being sent to you. It is simultaneously being sent to everyone else in that person’s cellphone, including their dermatologist, their tax guy and the AA emergency rescue operator. I received warm SMSes solicitous about my Yule season and the year ahead from people I could scarcely remember meeting. I received one from the ex-girlfriend of a one-time friend; I received one from a man in the music industry who is in the process of trying to sue me; and one from a local soap actress who has only ever previously used my number to send me threatening messages and late-night drunken promises to have my legs broken. Very few of the people who sent me Christmas wishes would have actively chosen to send me Christmas wishes, and that is hardly the thinking behind the Christmas wish, I wouldn’t think.

  Ah well, that’s folks for you. Say, while I’m on the subject, how was your Christmas? Yes, yours. I do hope it was good. Yes, I do. Yes, I’m talking to you.

  Another puzzling New Year

  CAPE TIMES, 3 JANUARY 2003

  WHAT WERE YOU doing on New Year’s Eve? Were you? Really? Gosh. Wasn’t it painful? No such high-jinks and shenanigans for me, I can tell you. I started the New Year as I intend to finish it: painstakingly piecing together the sundered bodies of ballerinas.

  I don’t know if this sounds peculiar to you, but I spent my New Year’s Eve in a painful ecstasy of absorption, poring over the jumbled smudges of a 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle, not that it matters, was a reproduction of Edgar Degas’ “Dance Class”, or, if you are the sort of person who likes their jigsaw puzzle unwashed, eating a baguette and wearing a beret, “Classe de Dans”. Oh, don’t sneer – it was either that or the 2000-piece photograph of seven dalmations in a basket. It was the first jigsaw puzzle I have tackled in nigh 18 years, and it was just the thing for a thoughtful New Year’s Eve.

  You learn interesting things about yourself when you sit down to a diningroom table spread with cardboard pieces. I chose to do a jigsaw puzzle on New Year’s Eve as a kind of gesture to myself. I wanted to greet the New Year, if not sober, exactly, then at least with some measure of self-possession. A jigsaw puzzle seemed perfect – I would spend the last evening of the year piecing together the bigger picture, putting things in their place, rediscovering the lessons of proportion and perspective, and at the end of it I would have made, with my own hands, an object both pleasing to contemplate and greater than the sum of its parts. “As with this jigsaw puzzle,” I said to myself sternly on the Tuesday afternoon, settling down with a French painting and an even more French bottle of champagne, “so let it be with your life.”

  By midnight, as I reluctantly broke from my labours to stand outside and watch the flares from the ships and hear the distant roar of the hippies on the beach celebrating the New Year three minutes too early, the puzzle was still French but the champagne was long finished. So was that shaker of gin I keep tucked under the sofa for emergencies. My eyes were swimming with tiny specks of colour and the after-image of long-ago brush strokes. I was cursing Degas’ enthusiasm for the colour green. What kind of a man paints the entire top-left corner green? And all the same colour green, at that. It must have made the painting go by more quickly, but what about the people doing the jigsaw puzzles, eh? What about them?

  As I looked at the sky over Cape Town, I found myself thinking those deep and echoing thoughts that men and women have always thought, searching the heavens on New Year’s Eve: “Cor, I’m glad I’m not doing a jigsaw puzzle of the Milky Way! That would take forever!”

  Eventually I finished, with the sun risen and my eyes bleary and my back in spasm, and I stumbled to bed with a jigsaw hangover as bad as any I could have acquired from less salubrious pursuits. And I remembered, as I drifted off in an impressionistic swirl of green, that a jigsaw puzzle is not a very good metaphor for a life. In life you haven’t the picture on the box to guide you, and in life there are very often pieces missing. But there is this similarity: in life as in jigsaw puzzles, it’s easier and a lot more fun with someone helping you. And then I thought something else, but I can’t remember what.

  Valentine’s Day

  CAPE TIMES, 14 FEBRUARY 2003

  OF ALL THE days of the year, Valentine’s Day is far and away the least romantic. Mind you, it is possible that I only say that now because I have not yet reached the age when I have to choose the date on which to have my ann
ual prostate examination. Come to think of it, when I do reach the age when I have to book my annual prostate examination, I am going to book it for Valentine’s Day, so that the two least romantic days of the year can happen at the same time.

  It is not easy to define what romance is, but I know just what it isn’t. It isn’t a duty forced on you by newspapers and shopping malls and a partner who will otherwise sulk and sigh and question your love. Romance, I think, has something to do with intimacy, and there is nothing intimate about sharing a date with every other couple so bereft of imagination and enterprise that they need to be told which day of the year they should be nice to each other. I dislike the publicness of Valentine’s Day. To take your partner to dinner and sit in a restaurant with all those other couples proudly showing off that they are not spending this Valentine’s Day without a partner, that is one step away from joining a cult and taking part in a mass wedding. Seriously – sending a Valentine card is like being a Moonie.

  Even worse are the aesthetics of Valentine’s Day. Red hearts and ribbons and cherubs and fuzzy stuffed Grizzlies holding little flags that say “I love you beary much” … that is how hell will be decorated. And if hell has a soundtrack audible above the screams of the tormented, it will be Celine Dion and Chris de Burgh and the rhythmic ka-ching of cash registers. No, to hell with Valentine’s Day. You know who had the right idea about Valentine’s Day? Al Capone. I am not necessarily suggesting that massacring your enemies with a tommy-gun is the way to celebrate Valentine’s Day, but on a day of rampant sentiment, those sentiments are not furthest from my heart.