Durban Poison Read online

  Durban Poison

  ALSO BY BEN TROVATO

  Incognito – The Memoirs of Ben Trovato

  The Whipping Boy

  Still On The Run

  On The Run

  Ben Trovato’s Art of Survival

  Hits & Missives – The Worst of Ben Trovato

  Ben Trovato’s (mis)Guide to Golf

  Ben Trovato’s Guide to Everything

  Ben Trovato – Stirred Not Shaken

  Will The Real Ben Trovato Please Stand Up?

  The Ben Trovato Files

  Hearts & Mines

  Durban Poison

  A Collection of Vitriol and Wit

  Ben Trovato

  For Liberty

  INTRODUCTION

  Somewhere in this book is the one millionth word I have written as a newspaper columnist. If I knew precisely which word it was, I would have it tattooed on my arm to celebrate this terrible, beautiful milestone. With my luck, it would be something like “hungover” or “retarded”.

  This has been a long, strange journey ... that might not be the right word. Journeys start with a departure and end with an arrival. I hazily recall departing, but the fact that I am writing this in a dodgy bar on the edge of a wild peninsula on the southern tip of Africa suggests that I have not yet arrived. Unless, of course, this is my destination. Oh, well.

  I never deliberately set out to become a columnist. Does anyone? Come to think of it, I have never really set out to become anything. In fact, I might well be one of those people who is generally content to let life happen to them – until their back is in a corner and they are forced to make a decision. Often very quickly. Fortunately, life has been kind to me. Or perhaps it’s just that I have a blind spot when it comes to recognising when I’m in a corner. Bouts of penury, a couple of marital miscarriages and a succession of festive but fraught relationships might suggest the latter.

  My accidental career as a columnist began in 1986 through no fault of my own. It started on The Namibian newspaper when I inadvertently impregnated and married the editor. She decided a fitting punishment would be to give me a regular column. Being a love-struck political neophyte, I put my beer down and grabbed the poisoned chalice with both hands. I wasn’t to know that she was setting me up for weekly mayhem-drenched deadlines that continue to this day.

  Way down the line and back in South Africa, the editor of the Cape Times grabbed me by the shirt in a dark alley and threatened to give me my own column. I had little choice but to go along with it. Five years later, I abandoned ship when the Sunday Times offered to keep me in a manner to which I had no idea I deserved to become accustomed.

  That lucrative five-year stint ended with an irresponsible spending spree encouraged by my second wife, followed by a period of misery, introspection and, ultimately, divorce. I considered doing something completely different, like cage fighting or fostering abandoned chimps, but then the Sunday Tribune came along and ruined my first real chance of breaking this monstrous cycle.

  True to form, that also ended after five years. Not by my hand, mind you. That would have involved a decision. I’m pleased it did, though. I now believe five years is the optimum length of time for everything, jobs and marriages included. Beyond that, it gets messy.

  If you have actually bought this book and taken it home instead of reading it in the shop like a cheap bastard, you might have worked out that Durban Poison is the perfect toilet book. Tests have shown that reading one of my columns takes exactly the same amount of time as it does to perform a standard bowel movement.

  One of the ancient Greeks said that a man who can laugh and defecate at the same time is a happy man. I don’t know if this also applies to women. I dare not presume. Smash the patriarchy.

  Ben Trovato

  Kommetjie

  CARE TO BE STONED, STRANGLED OR STABBED, SIR?

  There is so much going on in this wonderful country of ours that I scarcely know where to begin. Perhaps I could start with the murders. When you pick up a newspaper, you have to be selective when it comes to choosing which acts of brutality to read about.

  I think most of us skip the random shebeen stabbings and gangland shootings. Par for the course. Surprise us, we say, flipping the page. Jilted husband homicide. Yawn. Farm killing. Next. Drug lord whacked. Who cares.

  Quite frankly I don’t know why the papers even bother. If the bloodshed involves alcohol, we would rather you didn’t write about it. Instead tell us about people who, after drinking too much, stumbled upon a cure for cancer. Drunk people probably accomplish all manner of incredible things that nobody ever gets to hear about. After all, it’s only because Isaac Newton kept falling down while staggering home from the Slut & Legless that we know about gravity today.

  But let us return to the foulest of felonies. Matricide has been an eye-catcher ever since Amastris, queen of Heraclea, was drowned by her two sons in 284 BC. I don’t know why they did it. As the first woman to issue coins bearing her own image, she was probably a right pain in the arse. Or it might have been because her sons loathed the names she gave them – Clearchus and Oxyathres. On the other hand, if children offed their parents simply because of the outlandish names they were given, it’s unlikely the likes of Kanye West, Bob Geldof, Jamie Oliver, Gwen Stefani and Gwyneth Paltrow would be alive today.

  Imagine if your mother had named you Racing Cloud and you weren’t a member of the Sioux tribe living on a reservation in South Dakota, but instead you were a Theron and you lived in Fish Hoek. I am fairly sure, though, that this isn’t why Phoenix Racing Cloud Theron and boyfriend Kyle Maspero bumped off her mother Rosemary. Newspapers reported that the mother and daughter had argued. Mum went out and the two teenagers “smoked drugs”. When she returned, Maspero strangled her with a rope.

  Every report I have read mentions that the idiot children had “smoked drugs”.

  Smokeable drugs include marijuana, crystal meth, heroin and the most addictive substance of all, tobacco. Let us for a moment assume they weren’t driven into a homicidal frenzy by one too many Marlboro Lights.

  When one hears the phrase “smoking drugs”, one instinctively thinks of weed. Maybe it’s just a Durban thing. This country – and KwaZulu-Natal in particular – grows some of the best marijuana in the world and I don’t know why anyone would bother smoking anything else if they were planning to kill one of their parents. Heroin ruins your skin and crack makes your teeth fall out. Surely you would want to look your best when you appear in court?

  For a few months now, I have wanted to kill my neighbour. He is loud and obnoxious and encourages his rat-faced bastard dogs to bark for no reason at all. Motivated by news reports of the Racing Cloud incident, and curious to see if cannabis would provide the impetus I needed to get the job done, I went off to find some.

  Not knowing if I would need a gram or a kilogram, I emptied out my boot and filled my pockets with money. The last time I bought weed, it cost a rand for a handful from Themba round the back of the Journey’s End Moth Hall in Broadway. The hall is now a post office sorting depot, Broadway is Swapo Road and Themba is probably a director general in the ministry of police.

  I went to a bar north of Ballito and asked for a beer. When the waiter brought it, I gave him the secret handshake and asked if he might be in a position to help me out with an ounce or two of the old igudu. He brought me a menu. I tried again. Intsangu? He started telling me about the specials. I made the international gesture for crushing, being careful to remove the pips and stalks, snapping the neck off a wine bottle, making a girrick, inserting the girrick into the bottleneck, filling the neck with zol, wrapping a sulfie around the neck, putting it to my mouth, striking a match and inhaling deeply. I even coughed a few times in case he thought I was acting out a parable
from the Old Testament. You never know with Zulus.

  I noticed everyone had stopped talking and was watching me warily. The waiter made the international gesture for “I think you should leave now”. After almost getting arrested several times, I eventually came upon a maker of beaded wire animals. It’s a well-known fact that threading beads is impossible unless you are stoned. I was right. He even threw in a small yellow and blue chameleon with the bankie. It was the smallest bankie I had ever seen. Three 50c pieces would have been a squeeze. What kind of people use this bank? Lilliputians?

  On my way home I stopped to pick up an axe from Mica. One of those big mothers that lumberjacks carry. When I knocked on my neighbour’s door, filled with a violent bloodlust after smoking my drugs, I wanted him to be under no illusions about what I was doing there.

  There was only enough for a toothpick of a joint, but size isn’t important. Especially not in Durban. Two hits and my mouth was drier than Bill Murray’s sense of humour.

  This wasn’t good. My neighbour would open his door and he’d find me struggling to speak. “Mmpf mmpf,” I’d say. I would have to lick my axe to get the saliva glands working. To avoid arousing suspicion, I might even have to do a Miley Cyrus impersonation, licking my axe, thrusting my pelvis and rolling my eyes, by which time he would have called the whole family to come and watch and I would then be forced to kill everyone.

  I finished the toothpick, fetched a beer and sat on the veranda for what felt like nine hours. I could definitely feel something but couldn’t tell what it was. Did I want to kill someone or eat something? Was it best to eat before or after a murder? Wait. The trees are full of things. Are those hadedas or monkeys? What if they start breeding? Oh god. Flying monkeys with voices from hell. I would have to move. Those branches look like fingers. I have fingers, too. We both feel. We are one. I am a tree and you, tree, are me. I must stand up before I put down roots. There was something I had to do. What was it? Water the plants? No, that wasn’t it. Stay away from the plants. They can’t be trusted. Maybe get another beer. Yes, that was it. And go to the beach. Take cheese. Someone left an axe in the driveway. Must be the neighbour. I’ll invite him for a braai. Give him his chopper back. Neighbour. What a peculiar word. Nayba. Nay. Ba.

  Two days later, I can say with absolute certainty that Racing Cloud and I weren’t smoking the same kind of drugs.

  LICENSED TO DRAIN THE PSYCHEDELIC SWAMP

  I had a friend stay with me for a few days recently. I hadn’t seen him in years. He hasn’t aged much and weighs the same as he did at 21. I told him he probably has that weird disease where you suddenly get old and fat overnight, which made me feel better about myself.

  He said he was seriously considering dropping out. He lives in Maun, a fragmented boondock in Botswana where amphibians outnumber people. It lurks on the fetid fringe of the delta, a dystopian swamp infested with wild beasts that want you dead. To most people, that would already constitute dropping out. But not him. He means right out. Down the rabbit hole and off the radar. No more queuing for permission to drive this, own that, live here, go there. No more filling in forms or sending off applications. No more requesting permission to exist. A subsistence existence beyond the law.

  He strongly recommended I do the same. Later, after a few beers, he also strongly recommended that I try something called dimethyltryptamine. Surprisingly, I’d never heard of DMT. Or maybe I had. Maybe I’d taken it a bunch of times but couldn’t remember. Tricky things, drugs.

  After first smoking DMT, American psychonaut Terence McKenna said he entered “a magical place inhabited by self-transforming machine elves made of light and language, where the totality of phenomenal existence was experienced in a terrifying transpersonal flash”. Not your average Friday night at the pub, then.

  Dropping out has never appealed to me more than it has this week. Allow me to introduce to you the Verulam vehicle licensing department – the fifth circle of hell – where members of the law-abiding citizenry are punished for their reluctance to sin.

  Verulam was around long before any of us, but that doesn’t give it the right to behave badly. The town, incidentally, was named after the Earl of Verulam, patron of the British Methodists who settled there in 1850, and not, as I always thought, after the legendary shad fisherman Bobby “Crusher” Verulam.

  Who knows why the eThekwini municipality chose to put this particular office in the epicentre of a never-ending tropical storm of people, traffic and general pavement-based mayhem. Perhaps it wasn’t always like this. Perhaps government departments simply become catalysts for chaos over time.

  The Home Affairs office in Pinetown, for instance, is the place to go if you want a passport and a screwdriver in your ribs. Well-known ANC suck-up Visvin Reddy was stabbed not far from Home Affairs. The last time his wife visited the office, she was also mugged. Maybe it’s a Reddy thing, but it doesn’t look like it. In 2015 a man set himself and his wife on fire outside the same office. By all accounts, it’s like Aleppo without the benefit of UN-supervised safe passage back to your car.

  I’ve been to Verulam six times in the past fortnight to deregister my stolen Corolla and transfer a new car into my name. It’s making me physically ill. I want to vomit when I wake up and realise that I have to go to Verulam again.

  This is how it should work. You buy a new car and want to put it in your name. So you drive to an aesthetically pleasing complex near your home, get waved into a shaded parking bay and ushered into a spacious air-conditioned hall where you are dealt with efficiently and pleasantly. You’re out of there in minutes. That is your reward for doing the right thing.

  The reality is that you drive deep into the hinterland on a heavily potholed road where you risk being set upon by jobless maniacs wielding rusty pangas at every stop street, negotiate with jumpy yellow-eyed drug addicts for a place to park outside a building located in the worst part of a bad town, find your way to a room with no ventilation and take your place in a queue of 50 grim-faced desperadoes, each with his own unique olfactory imprint, shout through thick bombproof glass at a gormless, gum-chewing, clock-watching sloth who communicates through grunts, sighs and eye-rolls, fill in reams of forms, find somewhere in town to make photocopies and get instructed to return in three weeks, upon which you are told your forms have gone astray and you will need to start the process all over again.

  Turning into Wick Street, my heart literally sinks. I can feel it pounding against my liver. Maybe it’s my liver doing the pounding. Things are tolerable up until Phoenix Funerals. Then cars and taxis begin converging like rats on a baby dove. They come from all angles and directions. Your feet tap dance on the brake and accelerator pedals and there’s a squirt of adrenalin as you swerve to miss the bag of rags stumbling from the Greencat Bar. It’s all downhill from there.

  Parking in central Verulam is an existential concept. It exists but it doesn’t. This is the home of Schrödinger’s parking bay. Stop and shop seems to be the rule. Double park, triple park, leave your car in the middle of the road – it’s all good. You drive on whichever side of the road happens to be unobstructed. Don’t worry about the solid white line. It’s there to help drunks find their way home.

  Wick Street becomes the Congo River and the Verulam regional centre my personal heart of darkness. Through a miasma of exhaust fumes, I see it up ahead. It squats sullenly above Mia’s Pick N’ Bite and Habib’s Fast Foods. The horror.

  I pull up alongside two chickens and a goat and get out. I ask them to watch the car. The goat nods. The Congo can only be crossed using a sequence of pirouettes, bunny hops, arabesques and that thing bullfighters do.

  The portals to hell are flanked by Zulu clothes sellers. The sellers are Zulu, not the clothes. I have seen Zulu clothes. They don’t involve much more than bits of leopard, monkey and beaded loincloth. That’s fine for the Reed Dance but this is a peri-urban purgatorial paradise and people want to look as if they’re meeting the Earl of Verulam himself for tea and a white pipe later
in the day. Fair enough.

  The sign at the entrance to the hideous face-brick building prohibits guns, animals and smoking. I walk in, expecting to find the place awash in gambling, drinking and fornicating. If you don’t expressly forbid South Africans from doing something, they will do it.

  “But, officer, the sign doesn’t say human sacrifices aren’t allowed.”

  “Okay, fine. Just clean up the blood afterwards. But the dog must wait outside.”

  There’s one window marked Metro Police Fines Processing. It looks abandoned. Then there are two windows for Enquiries Motor Licensing. I have been to both. Repeatedly. See previous reference to useless, clock-watching sloth. These are the Harry Potter counters, where paperwork disappears into thin air. Last week you had to have duplicates – this week it’s triplicates. Last week a thumbprint was enough – this week it’s a DNA sample.

  Then there’s a line of four cashier windows. This is the Holy Grail for those who seek something stamped. The Lourdes Grotto for the sick-to-death of queuing. The Wailing Wall for those who have given up wailing and are now sitting with their heads in their hands. The head-holders are the ones on the wooden bench right at the back. It takes an hour to progress to the plastic chairs. Of the four windows, one is heavily boarded up as if a tornado warning were in effect, another is devoid of life and the third is either on early lunch or late breakfast. Everyone on the deck of HMS Doomed watches the fourth window the way hungry people watch fat people eat. It’s a mixture of envy and disgust, if you were wondering.

  Every 15 minutes, everyone crouch-shuffles one seat closer to nirvana. Obviously I don’t because I’m busy taking notes. The security guard taps me on the shoulder and indicates that I need to move 30 centimetres to my right. So this is how queues work? It happens more than once. He clearly thinks I’m retarded. I’m the only white person here. I must be retarded. Where are the others? Canada, probably.