Boris Has No Balls

I heard the most fearsome noises coming from the bathroom on Saturday morning. It was as if some kind of wild animal had become trapped in the house.

My first instinct was to protect the family so I crawled into the cupboard and closed the door. Then it dawned on me. It was the sound of a woman giving herself a Brazilian wax. I quickly left the cupboard and banged on the bathroom door.

“Let me in!” I shouted. “I want to watch!”

The ripping sound tore through my fevered brain for a third time. Holy Mary. The woman must have hair up to her sternum. There are a lot of married men out there who get to see their wives naked on a regular basis. I am not one of them.

April 27, 1994, is a day that is forever etched into my memory. Each year on this day, South Africans celebrate Freedom Day. But not me. I spend the day commemorating the anniversary of my last sighting of Brenda with her kit off.

Twelve years is a long time. Things can grow out of control. Suddenly the door was flung open. I screamed and covered my eyes.

“Are you going to help me or not?” she said in a terrible voice.

Dear God. She wants me to do her back. I fell to my knees and started reciting the thing that all men recite in the face of extreme danger: “Hail Mary full of grace, Grace is a little girl who didn’t wash her face …” I couldn’t remember what came after that so I opened my eyes.

Brenda had a cardboard box at her feet and a roll of packing tape in her hand. “Are you going to help me pack or am I doing the whole house on my own?”

Trembling with relief, I got to my feet and went to embrace her. Later, the paramedics told me that if the scissors had penetrated an inch deeper I would never have been able to father another child.

When I pointed this out to Brenda, she said, “That reminds me. The cat needs to be neutered before we leave.”

I was horrified. Boris and I had spent many late nights exchanging wild oat-sowing stories. I don’t wish to sound immodest when I say that Boris was frequently at a loss for words when I told him of my premarital exploits.

Several times we had stood side by side and marked our territory in the garden and once or twice in the lounge. Now his spraying days were almost over. His reputation among the suburban feline sluts was about to be shattered. Instead, they would look at him with arched eyebrows and raised tails and taunt him with catcalls.

“Hey big boy. I’m on heat. Come and get it. What’s the matter? Not up to it?”

But it goes beyond humiliation. Boris deserves to breed. He is a handsome cat, standing four hands tall with thick, green fur. If he ever had to settle down with a steady girlfriend, the two of them could produce 781 250 kittens within just seven years. Probably more if he lived with Jacob Zuma.

Castration is not much fun. Especially not in winter when the only way you can generate warmth is by sitting on someone’s lap or having casual sex with eight or nine partners in one evening. And it’s not that different for cats.

I know for a fact that Boris does not suffer from body dysmorphic disorder. For a start, he never avoids social interaction in the belief that he is unspeakably hideous. A lot of boys should, but not my Boris. He knows he’s a catch.

Skoptic syndrome is not for cats. It is for people like the crimson-faced German tourist I met in Athens who was suffering from so much sexual guilt that he offered me his hunting knife so that I may cut off his goolies. At least I think that’s what he said. I didn’t hang around to check the translation, although I did take his knife.

Brenda was insistent. Boris had to become a eunuch. Neither Boris nor I agreed with this assessment.

Seeking medical advice, I, like our president, turned to the internet for guidance.

I found a site that said this of the uncastrated: “Homes cannot be found and many either end up in shelters or on the street. Only a lucky few are adopted; the rest are either euthanized or die from trauma, exposure, starvation or disease.”

I had never realised how much street kids and cats had in common.

I also learnt that in 90% of male cats, neutering eliminates roaming, urine spraying and fights with neighbourhood cats. It may seem hard to believe, but research has also shown that 90% of men are prone to straying, brawling and peeing everywhere, and yet there are very few women who insist on having their men neutered.

Chopping Boris’ nuts off will apparently make him more docile. He will also put on weight. In human terms, this would mean less domestic violence and more heart attacks.

Sorry, girls. It’s just not legal. Yet.

According to the oracle, cats that are not neutered before puberty develop big heads and thick skins. Does this mean that film stars and politicians should be neutered before puberty? Of course not.

These are people we are talking about. People have laws and commissions and courts to protect them. Animals have the SPCA. Sure, they do good work. But at the same time their primary objectives are to curb sexual behaviour, find good homes for the unwanted and kill the rest.

With a manifesto like that, I would vote for the SPCA if they ever decided to run as a political party.

A Doomed Attempt To Narco-Load On Mandela Day

On Mandela Day, the entrance to Addington Hospital resembled the entrance to the municipal market in Maputo when a fresh shipment of cocaine arrives.

The doorway was jammed with hawkers, hustlers, malingerers, malcontents and at least one second-hand sardine salesman, making it almost impossible for me and Ted to get inside.

“Out of our way, you murderous troglodytes!” Ted shouted, swinging his mop. “We’re on a mission from God!”

That’s a bit strong, I thought. Mandela might be responsible for delivering South Africa unto democracy and saving our lily-white asses, but he’s not the ruler of heaven and earth. I am.

Earlier, we had agreed that this year we would do the 67 minutes of community service required of all red-blooded patriots.

It seemed a small enough sacrifice compared to what Mandela went through, although having seen this week’s pictures of him at 94, it does seem as if island life agreed with him.

I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but plenty of fresh sea air, simple meals and early nights do have their benefits. If you lack the discipline to stick with it, hire a baton-wielding white supremacist to keep you focused.

I suggested we spend 67 minutes on North Beach assisting the lifeguards but Ted had ideas of his own. He had heard people were being asked to report to Addington Hospital to help clean up this abysmal hell-hole. Having something of a history with this terrible place, I was less than enchanted.

As a 10-year-old, I spent Christmas Day there having my face stitched up after my uncle tried to kill me with a surfboard.

Then, a decade later, a couple of friends carried me in at 2am after a car ploughed into me. The driver was drunk, I was drunk, my friends were drunk, the doctors and nurses were drunk. It was one of those steamy summer nights when everyone in Durban is either drunk or stoned.

Anyway. I wasn’t wild about returning to a place that held such painful memories.

“What do you find in hospitals?” he said, trying to open a beer in my eye socket. I pushed him off. “Sick people,” I said, making the international sign for vomiting. “And drugs,” he said. “Lots and lots of them.”

Ted’s plan was that while hundreds of sanctimonious do-gooders were cleaning this pestilential bastion of squalor and disease, we would take advantage of the confusion and stock up on recreational pharmaceuticals.

It was a stupid plan fraught with such danger and potential for disaster that I thought it might just work.

So, he with his mop and me with my broom, we fought our way off the street and into the hospital. A security guard tried to stop us but we were too quick for him.

Before we could get into the elevator, a woman with hippopotamic hips and a face like a melted Frisbee escorted us to the volunteer registration station.

I was reluctant to register because once your name is on a government list, you’ll spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. Once they know there are people out there who are prepared to work for free and don’t belong to a union, you will never sleep easily. The knock on your door could come at any time.

“Come quickly,” they will say. “A million Zimbabweans need to be processed.” Or, “Get dressed, you’re the commissioner of police this week.”

We were each handed a lurid orange bib and a bottle of window cleaner and strict instructions not to go above the second floor. Ted said if the plan failed, we could always become car guards. I warned him about self-fulfilling prophesies but he said I was being paranoid and referred me to the psychiatric ward.

We got into the lift and hit the button for the 15th floor. There wasn’t much up there apart from a view of the harbour and a chapel that looked like it was designed by a committee of German atheists.

Working our way down the stairwell, we stopped off at every floor and went into every ward. You can tell the difference between state and private hospitals by the smell. Private hospitals smell of disinfectant. Government hospitals smell of stasis. And overtime.

We walked through the tuberculosis ward and I held my breath for seven minutes. Ted seemed to think TB wasn’t contagious and offered to lick the wall to prove it.

His tongue was rubbing up against the peeling paint when a sister, who looked more like a brother, came around the corner and saw this monstrous act of depravity. In accordance with the government’s see-no-evil policy, she walked right on by.

Many of the wards showed no signs of life, let alone drugs.

The obstetrics and gynae department was unnaturally quiet. I was disappointed. There is no more exquisite sound than a woman in full throat during a natural birth.

Ted wandered off hoping to stumble across some kind of pre-parturition peep show while I studied a poster showing a range of labour positions. If Cosatu were that flexible this country’s unemployment crisis would be over.

The baby ward was sealed off with glass doors, presumably to keep the stench from permeating the entire building. It’s not working. They need the kind of doors that are fitted to the Large Hadron Collider.

We sniffed around the circumcision clinic but everything was locked up, which was fortuitous because at this point we would have gladly traded half our willies for a couple of hits of pethidine.

Out on the street, freshly absorbed pathogens incubating in our bodies, a man handed Ted R5 before getting into his car. Better than a kick in the teeth, I suppose.

A last word of advice. If you’re going to be a patient at Addington, you might want to bring your own drugs.

Welcome To Club Dead

From: bentrovato@mweb.co.za

To: hatemyavuz@superonline.com

Subject: For the attention of Mr Hatem Yavuz of the Hatem Yavuz Group, purveyors of fine pelts and furs

 

Dear Mr Yavuz,

I understand you are the last remaining buyer of Namibian seal skins. Well done! You deserve a medal for sticking to your guns (not to mention your fleshing knives) while everyone else has capitulated to the limp-wristed flower-sniffers.

The homosexual European Union has banned the sale of seal products and even the Canadian government, one of our staunchest allies in the fight against seals, is considering an end to culling.

If this happens, Namibia will be the only country in the world courageous enough to continue clubbing pups for their pelts and shooting bulls for their genitals.

Their president must have Turkish blood in him.

As you know, seals are nothing more than cold-blooded killers who wouldn’t think twice about tearing our throats out. It is only because of people like you that our children are able to play on the beach without fear of being attacked by marauding gangs of biker seals.

I am deeply concerned, however, that someone has got to you. I read somewhere that you are offering to sell your stake in the sealing industry to Francois Hugo, a dangerous man who lives beneath an upturned boat in Hout Bay harbour.

Are you aware that Hugo is a well-known seal hugger? If he buys you out, Namibia’s seals will never again be killed. They will spit in our faces and there won’t be a thing we can do about it.

The good news is that for Hugo to achieve his evil goal, he will have to cough up around $14-million.

From what I have heard, he can barely afford lunch.

However, we should not underestimate the wealth of those who foolishly think that seals were put on this earth for purposes other than providing our oriental brothers and sisters with aphrodisiacs and shiny coats.

I read your recent letter to Namibia’s New Era newspaper and was impressed to hear that you have been converting animals into fashion statements for more than 15 years.

So you’re Turkish? That would explain the name. Here’s an idea for a new slogan. “We hate ’em, You wear ’em.” Did you know hatem is Arabic for seal? What a coincidence.

Emigrating to Sydney was a smart move on your part. Kevin Rudd’s government is made up of a bunch of good old koala-bashers who love the Japanese for getting rid of those unsightly whales that loll about scoffing all the shrimp in Australia’s territorial waters.

I’m sure they treat you like a hero at your local pub.

As you said in your letter, if you don’t buy Namibia’s seal oil and skins, then the Chinese will. God forbid. These people already dominate the mink, fox, raccoon, chinchilla, rabbit, gerbil, weasel and Siberian husky industries. The least they can do is leave the seals for the Australian Turks.

The delicately-boned plant whisperers should also take note of your statement that, by putting seal fur on the market, you actually reduce the culling of American beavers.

At first the logic baffled me, but after a few beers it made sense. You are giving consumers more of a choice. Beaver or seal, madam? I can see how that might save a few. Personally, I have a thing for beaver, but that’s just me.

As you rightly pointed out, the fur and leather trade is almost dead in Europe, presumably because everyone is spending their money on whores, drugs and therapy.

The east, “the new world”, as you call it, has caught up to where the west was a century ago and now it is their turn to parade about in the skins of whatever species they please.

You also made the connection between Namibia’s seal problem and Australia’s kangaroo problem.

Both need to be killed if we hope to preserve our way of life. It must be said that you have chosen the best of the two. Imagine how long it would take to bludgeon 85 000 seal pups to death if they hopped about like kangaroos.

You’re right when you say Francois Hugo has his numbers wrong. He makes out that Namibia has four breeding pairs of seals left but I have been to Swakopmund and I have seen entire families of seals window-shopping, browsing in the markets and even having tea and cake at Café Anton. The shiny black bastards are everywhere.

Don’t waste your time waiting for Hugo to come up with the cash. The concessionaires are getting restless and they may start clubbing white people if you don’t move fast. Put your order in now before the Namibian government bends over for the Chinese.

And don’t worry that you were unable to sell most of last year’s stock. This year will be different. This year, everyone wants to look and smell like a seal.

See you at the club.

Ben Trovato

PS. If you can spare a few bull testicles, please send them my way. I suspect Brenda might rethink matters if I upsized my willy.

If Anyone Can, The Anglican

Dear Archbishop of Canterbury,

My friend Ted and I spent last weekend praying that the Church of England would not allow women to be ordained as bishops. We already live with women who tell us that if we don’t do what they say, we can go to hell. Must we have it in church, too?

So you can imagine our joy when we heard on Monday that the General Synod had taken the Catholic option and pulled out moments before reaching the point of no return.

When I say Ted and I were praying, I mean drinking beer. When I was very young, a wise man told me prayer can take many forms. I decided there and then that I would praise God in the form of beer. And let me tell you, I have given a tremendous amount of praise over the years. In fact, between you and me, I am almost praised-out. But this is okay because the older I get the less I have to be thankful for.

Besides, it’s not as if God is doing such a fantastic job these days, is it? His earlier work was impressive but he seems to have lost interest.

Anyway. After three or four hours of hard praising, Ted and I came to the conclusion that women wanted to become bishops because of the funky hats and dresses you guys wear.

And who can blame them?

Purple is a passionate colour and women are passionate creatures. Christianity is a passionate religion. And who among us can forget Mel Gibson’s tour de force, The Passion of the Christ? Well, apart from Mel, of course. This crapulous son of Catholicism gave the Judas kiss to his own movie after discovering, too late, that Jesus was Jewish.

You were quoted in the heathen media as saying you hoped that postponing the decision would “lower the temperature” of the debate.

This is beyond a debate, my friend. This is 1534 all over again, except this time you’re not splitting from the Roman Catholic Church, but splitting from yourselves. A bit like ecclesiastical amoebas.

There are those who will shriek and fall about and insist that women should be allowed to become bishops because we are all God’s children. What nonsense. God is not Jacob Zuma. God had only one child – a boy, if I recall.

I blame the insufferable suffragettes, those professional naggers who went on and on and on until the British government went mad and agreed to give women the vote.

Anything to shut them up.

Once they had the vote, they demanded all sorts of things and today there are men sitting at home with no supper because their wives are out flying helicopters in Afghanistan. A shameful state of affairs all round.

As for the outrageous notion of bishops with breasts, your General Synod voted 288 in favour of postponing a decision, 144 voted against and 15 abstained.

I bet the darkies abstained. They still can’t believe their luck at being allowed to become bishops ahead of women and they certainly aren’t going to stick their heads above the parapet just yet.

This is not a time to be fannying about with votes. You don’t see the pope bothering with the niceties of democracy, do you? The faithful need to be ruled with an iron fist.

Drive across England in an armoured archbishopmobile and tell people in no uncertain terms how to behave and what to think. Get a posse of defrocked priests to round up the dissenters and have them shot.

You warned last week the church was “looking into the abyss” over the issue. I think you need to use stronger language. As long as Christianity has eternal damnation at its disposal, the idea of a piffling abyss is not going to frighten anyone. In fact, I have seen some stunning abysses. All you are really doing is threatening people with a view of the Fish River Canyon.

You allowed women to enter the priesthood twenty years ago, then turned the other cheek and hoped they would be happy with that. There’s the problem. You people just don’t understand women.

Give a girl a dog collar and sooner or later she will want a cassock. Any idiot off the street could have told you that.

You’re on a slippery slope, comrade. Look what’s happening with your morally flexible cousins, the Episcopalians. Not only have they decided to bless gay relationships, but while you were playing for time on the babes-for-bishops business, they were voting to give transgender people the right to become ministers. Transgender clergy!

Now you don’t know who you might be taking home after a particularly arousing sermon. It’s worse than Thailand.

The Episcopal Church is a hotbed of tolerance and equity. No good can come of it. Please don’t go down that road. Prejudice is an essential tool in helping us to judge others. Without it, religion would cease to exist.

And what kind of terrible world would that be? 

Dear Tom Cruise (A Flashback)

“I’m going to eat the cord and the placenta right there.”

Who said this? Was it Jeffrey Dahmer? Hannibal Lecter? No, it was you, Tom. In an interview a few months before the birth of your first biological child with the equally childlike Katie Holmes.

Later, you told everyone you had been joking. Maybe you were, Tom, but we just can’t tell the difference any more.

You were born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV.

The other kids at school mocked your name. And when they found out you were dyslexic, they made fun of you. The fact that you were shorter than anyone else also got a big laugh.

Years later, in a bid to be taken seriously, you joined a church which believes that 75 million years ago an alien tyrant called Xenu ruled the Galactic Confederacy, an etheral alliance made up of 26 stars and 76 planets, including Earth. Except it wasn’t called Earth. Back then, our planet was known as Teegeeack.

As a means of population control, Xenu enlisted the help of psychiatrists to call in billions of people for income tax inspections. Instead, they were given injections of alcohol and glycol to paralyse them.

Then Xenu used interstellar space planes to bring these paralysed people to Earth. They were stacked around volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs. After that, their souls inhabited the bodies of the people who survived and this is the reason there is so much trouble in the world today.

That sure stopped people from laughing at you, Tom.

Then, in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, you eloquently defended your beliefs by saying: “Some people, well, if they don’t like Scientology, well, then, fuck you. Really. Fuck you. Period.”

You tell ‘em, Tom.

You absolutely don’t get to be an Operating Thetan on Level 7 of the Bridge to Total Freedom without being able to say whatever you want, whenever and wherever you want to say it.

People are talking, Tom. They are saying you have gone nuts. Not only because you are about to get hitched for the third time, but because you jump up and down on couches while being interviewed about Katie, your latest cradle-snatching coup.

But you’re not mad, are you, Tom? According to you, there’s no such thing as a chemical imbalance.

Even if your mind had snapped its moorings, you wouldn’t be caught dead visiting a shrink. In fact, you believe that psychiatry should be outlawed.

Dianetics is the answer, right, Tom?

Bring in the auditor and plug in that Electropsychometer. Erase those evil engrams and implants placed eternally in our minds by those dastardly Helatrobans and other alien nations of their ilk.

L. Ron Hubbard was the founder of your church. Like you, he also had three wives. Unlike you, he was a science fiction writer.

Xena? The Galactic Confederacy? Thetans? Anything ring a bell there, Tom? I could be wrong, but it all sounds a bit like science fiction to me.

By all accounts, your great leader’s overactive imagination might also have been somewhat chemically enhanced. When he died in 1986, enormous quantities of the hallucinogenic drug Vistaril were found in his system.

What drugs were you on, Tom, when you behaved like a hyperactive teenager on the Oprah Winfrey Show? Clearly not Ritalin, a med that you consider equal to heroin in the harm that it does to the youth of today.

Speaking of harming the youth, what on Teegeeack were you thinking when you pounced on the unsuspecting one-time child star of Dawson’s Creek? At 25, your wife was the oldest virgin in Hollywood.

You were 21 years old when you starred in Risky Business. Katie was five. It would be another 12 years before she was legally old enough to see you dance around in your underwear before banging Rebecca De Mornay seven ways to Sunday.

Shame on you, Humbert.

What are the odds of your relationship lasting? Well, Ladbrokes offered 5/1 that it wouldn’t see the end of 2006. I’m offering 20/1 that you will move on to convert another victim once Katie has parted with enough money to allow her to reach Operating Thetan Level III.

In October last year, your spin-doctor announced to those who care about these things that Katie was pregnant. She said the entire family was overjoyed.

No, they weren’t. Katie’s father, a staunch Catholic, thinks you’re some kind of demon instead of the highly evolved Thetan that you are. For a start, you impregnated his precious little girl without even having the decency to marry her first.

Then you filled her head with wild notions that we are all part of an elaborate space opera involving extraterrestrial civilisations. And you demanded sole custody of your child.

At first, everyone thought the pregnancy was a publicity stunt. After all, there must be a reason you had to adopt a couple of kids during the 10 years you spent trying to turn Nicole Kidman into a Scientologist.

Mission impossible, indeed.

Some said you had a zero sperm count. Others suggested that you preferred to have sex with men. You were understandably outraged. You are, after all, a Real Man. One only has to watch your movies to see this.

You gave us further proof of your heterosexuality by sticking your tongue down Katie’s throat whenever a photographer hove into view. Katie always played her part, consistently declaring with heartfelt sincerity: “I am, like, so in love it’s just not funny. It’s like, wow.”

Then your daughter was born. You named her Suri after the Andean Alpaca, a member of the camelid family known for its soft, wooly locks and easy breeding.

Katie offered you the placenta but you said you had already eaten.

The alien spawn had barely drawn its first breath before you were packing your bags. Taking yourself squarely out of the running for the cover of Ideal Fathers magazine, you jetted off to Rome, Paris, London and Mexico to promote your latest film.

To be fair, you did tell everyone who would listen that you called her a thousand times every day. It’s quite possible that you did. After all, your leader believed he was 74 trillion years old. Numbers mean nothing to you.

Unless, of course, they relate to the box office.

(Written in May 2006)

Rather Dead Than Wed

’Tis the season to get married, apparently.

Even Satan’s little choir boy, Marilyn Manson, has broken his pact with the devil and pledged his troth. To a woman, of all people.

This act of insurgency somehow inspired our Constitutional Court to legalise same-sex marriages.

Within minutes of the ruling, a limp-wristed hybrid with the name of Johanne had formed the SA Mass Gay and Lesbian Wedding Ceremony and announced that 5 000 gay and lesbian couples would marry at three sports stadiums over a 72-hour period.

What fun. Can we book through Computicket?

There is nothing more I would want to bear witness to than hundreds of men in frocks mincing on to the field at Newlands in time to Freddie Mercury in full throat.

Research has shown that gay men are capable of going without sex for anything up to four hours. I imagine, then, that there would have to be designated areas for spontaneous consummation. The penalty area would be a crowd favourite, given the homosexual proclivity for scoring own goals.

As in any game played at Newlands, there would be several tries. There would also be a number of nice tries, a smattering of how dare yous and a marimba version of the Green Point bitch-slap accompanied by carefully choreographed weeping, stamping and flouncing.

When I told Ted that we were going to a mass wedding, he asked if it was a Moonie affair. “In a way,” I said. Mooning, after all, is an integral part of the mating ritual of the lesser spotted bottie-bandit.

Upon hearing the gory details, Ted suggested we rather attend one of the lesbian mass weddings.

Pressed for reasons, he claimed to be distantly related to the little Dutch boy who put his finger in a dyke to prevent Holland from falling into the hands of Moroccan hash dealers. As we all know, the attempt failed miserably and today Amsterdam is overrun with men pretending to be women, Moroccans pretending to be Kenyans and boot polish pretending to be hashish.

The thought of infiltrating a stadium full of lesbians scares me. Not because I am afraid of lesbians. Some of my best friends are lesbians. Well, they could be if they just took the time to listen to my theories instead of head-butting me or trying to castrate me with a blunt steak knife.

Confused, I slipped Brenda a Rohypnol and hightailed it to Hermanus where the Illicit Consort was waiting with a fast car and a loose plan.

I took the coast road. Even though it’s longer, it is a twisting tortuous black snake of a road with a sheer drop into the ocean and no street lights for at least 30km.

It is at times like these that I get to test whether the gods want me to live or die. Once again, they let me live.

I switched cars in Whale City and the Consort told me the plan. It involved the Bot River Hotel. I had never heard of Bot River. And what manner of beast is a Bot, anyway?

We stopped to regroup at a herb and wine farm owned by friends of the Consort. The farmer was red-eyed and speechless, an agricultural condition contracted after spending too long in the fields.

Despite this, he had made a giant seafood potjie. My quandary over whether to attend the gay or the lesbian mass wedding dissolved the moment I began gnawing on the head of a baby octopus.

There is nothing quite like being face down in a plate of poached perlemoen to make you realise that nature is a far more powerful force than nurture could ever be.

Quod erat demonstrandum, if more people ate seafood, there would be fewer unnatural acts committed in the name of freedom.

The Consort sucked a tentacle into her mouth, Heimlich-manoeuvred me into the car and took me down a dirt road at a speed that made my head beat faster than my heart.

My notes tell me the Bot River Hotel is the oldest in the country. Or maybe it’s the oldest bar. Actually, it might even be the oldest parking lot. So much for my notes.

The Consort ordered a double gin and tonic and I ordered a double brandy and coke, as one does at the Bot River Hotel. I immediately blew my cover by pouring the coke into the gin.

The barman blamed himself and started smacking himself over the head like that Dobby freak in Harry Potter.

I leaned over the bar to stop this senseless self-abuse but stuck my finger in his eye by mistake. He recoiled and I could sense that he was about to alert the owner, a man who had his name burned into the woodwork – Gey van Pittius.

You don’t screw around in a hotel owned by someone with a name like that. You don’t pour coke into gin. You just don’t.

I apologised to the barman and backed into a man standing behind me, causing him to spill his beer over his denim shorts, down his leg and into his vellies.

Earlier the Consort had told me there were only six single men in Bot River. I strongly suspected he was one of them.

There has to be something terribly wrong with you to remain single in a town where you can get a double Klipdrift for R9 and a woman for even less.

Fortunately, the brute barely registered and I managed to escape to the toilet where I impaled myself on a pair of Springbok horns mounted above the urinal.

Staunching the blood, I began to get a clearer understanding of why those six men might still be single. Heavy drinking interspersed with sharp blows to the frontal lobe every time you go for a wee would certainly discourage offers of marriage.

It’s too late for me, but it is a course of action I would recommend to all bachelors.

Thank You For Not Sharing

Much like alcohol and organised religion, Facebook can ruin your health, wreck your marriage and make you appear stupider than you are.

However, it brings great happiness and joy in so many other ways. Take brunch, for example. Too often we take this simple meal for granted. If brunch had feelings (and who is to say it doesn’t?) it would be hurt by our callous disregard for it.

“I am not a late breakfast, nor am I an early lunch!” it would cry, were it allowed a voice at this unholy buffet we call life.

Fortunately, there are kind people out there who, through postings on Facebook, remind us that brunch can be a deeply moving if not life-changing event.

“OMG! Just had most DIVINE brunch eva!!”

“Y u not invite me I thort I woz yr BFF?!!??”

“Sorri babe! Nxt time ROFL!!”

“Won’t be a nxt time coz am cuming round to cut yr hed off.”

The same goes for children. If it weren’t for some parents proudly posting pictures of their progeny, we would labour under the misapprehension that all of us were cursed with ugly, talentless offspring. Who would have thought that some are so bright and beautiful that one would require sunglasses to avoid being blinded by their coruscating countenances?

My very best, though, are the gut-churning parables and three-hankie homilies.

Flipping through Facebook’s news feed is like having a stream of Jehovah’s Witnesses ringing your doorbell while Paulo Coelho sits in your lounge spouting 20-word truisms dressed up as profundity.

The practice of posting platitudinous parables, ass-kissing aphorisms and hackneyed self-help clichés is not only monstrously offensive to the condemned and the cursed – among whom I count myself – but also an alarming indictment of the depths to which these meddling missionaries will stoop in their nugatory quest to help others see what they call “the light” but which I call moral bestiality.

I would wager that many of those who flood Facebook with these disposable sermons suffer from poor self-esteem and a pestilential smorgasbord of personality disorders.

If this is where you find redemption or look for lessons on how to live your life, you’re in a lot more trouble than you think.

Here is a sampling of esoteric excrescence which this week interfered with my search for amusing tales of stupid people in real trouble.

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass – it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

The picture is of a child, perhaps mentally disturbed, standing in the rain. She doesn’t look happy, probably because she knows she’s in for a thrashing when she gets home. “What’s the hell is wrong with you?” her gin-soaked mother will shout. “Why didn’t you wait for the bloody storm to pass before going outside?”

“Dear God, thanks for this beautiful life and forgive me if I don’t love it enough.”

Forgive you? What kind of spineless God do you take me for? You will love your life – even if you have no legs and live in a cardboard box on the N2 – or you will burn for all eternity in the hellfires of damnation. Forgive you. I have never heard such rubbish. If I did it for you, everyone would get up to all sorts of crazy shit knowing that I was dishing out forgiveness to anyone who asked. In future, you can show how much you love your life by dancing in the rain. Naked. Then I want you to go to work and murder your boss. Don’t bother me again.

“The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man.”

The picture is of an angry mob of very big trees posing aggressively for the camera. First, let’s me just say I don’t believe in spirits, unless it’s Klipdrift you’re talking about. In which case, make mine a double. Second, the kind of places that have not been rearranged by the hand of man (even though it is women who do most of the rearranging) are in such remote areas that you would have to be a damn fool to go there without a posse of heavily armed friends, one of whom should be a paramedic and another a lawyer.

Nature that has been spared the firm hand of man is nature that will tear your throat out as soon as look at you. It will crush you, drown you or just plain old snap your spine and leave you to rot. Don’t be an idiot. The human spirit can get whatever it needs off the internet.

“Being strong doesn’t always mean you have to fight the battle. True strength is being adult enough to walk away from the nonsense with your head held high.”

Bollocks. You must fight the battle, unless of course you started it, in which case it’s more fun to sneak off and watch from a safe distance. Still and all, I wouldn’t advise using that craven “adult enough” rationale while backing out of a bar fight in Hillbrow. Your head will be held high, alright. It just won’t be attached to your body.

“Even in the darkest of night there is hope. As the moon lights our path so does hope light our way.”

No, it doesn’t. Hope is the last refuge of the doomed. It smells of lavender and carries a concealed weapon. Hope will not hesitate to bludgeon you from behind, moon or no moon.

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”

This is the kind of paranoid, judgmental gibberish shouted by a right-wing redneck moments before he slaps his wife, drags a giant bag of ammonium nitrate into his bakkie and blows himself up outside a government building. Not always a bad idea.

“Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you or makes you happy.”

Right, then. That’s my job and marriage out the window. Can I come and live with you?

“I have learned it is not what I have in my life but who I have in my life that counts.”

Really? Can you drive your husband along Chapman’s Peak on a Sunday morning with the roof down and a bottle of champagne between your legs? Has your Blackberry ever cheated on you? When you need to see a naked woman, do you reach for your iPad or your wife?

“God made the horse from the breath of the wind, the beauty of the earth and the soul of the angel.”

Whoever said this has never been stabbed in the face by a horse. He will pretend to be your friend right up until the moment you’re on his back, and then he won’t listen to a word you say. Sooner or later he will try to kill you.

So much for that.

Shops are full of this tawdry tat coyly posing as philosophy. You wouldn’t buy a tea-towel that said: “Believe you can and you’re halfway there”, but see it on Facebook and it’s, “OMG I love that!!!” and “So very TRUE!! Thank you!!!”

Were these people raised by wolves? Or do they genuinely have the intellectual capacity of a garden gnome? For the sake of humanity, I pray it’s the wolves.

Thank you for not sharing.

 

And The Golden Globe Goes To …

Brenda made me stay up late and watch the Golden Globes with her. There are few things capable of holding my interest after midnight and a yowling strumpet wrapped in tin foil gushing all over people who make a living out of pretending to be someone else is not among them.

Her name was Juliana and she had a voice that, shouted into a turbine, could generate enough electricity to run a small town. She snatched at people as they walked past.

“Kevin Bacon! You’re so famous and yet you’re so normal … so sane!” she whinnied. “How do you do it?”

Kev looked at her as if she were barking mad, which she clearly was, and refrained from listing the good drugs that all genuine celebrities take to counter the effects of the bad drugs that make them behave so appallingly.

Juliana’s sidekick, a jackass-in-the-box called Ryan Seahorse, snared the A-listers as they scurried past beneath their gay little umbrellas.

I could see he didn’t want to bring up that earthquake, but some of them had gone to all the trouble of colour-coding their outfits around their ribbons and they weren’t going to miss the opportunity to look as if they cared.

“Haiti is, like, just such a tragedy, you know, and we must all, like, pull together to make sure these poor people … dahling! It’s been, like, forever! Mwah mwah!”

It wouldn’t be George Clooney if he didn’t schmooze his way into the action. A telethon? I mean, really. That is so last tsunami. This is our night to shine, sweetie. Okay fine, those Hayshins look like they could do with a mocha latte and a bubble bath, but to take absolutely all the headlines? Let’s get real, people. We’re talking Golden Globes, here.

The whore of Babylon squealed: “Who are you wearing?”

The Bambi-eyed starlet simpered. “I’m wearing my best friend, Candice. She went to Jesus last week and a team of hot surgeons and taxidermists made this dress from her skin. It’s what she wanted. Isn’t she absolutely gorgeous?”

Tall for a hobbit, Tobey Maguire had what appeared to be a girl at his side. I wondered aloud if he had picked her up from the ugly factory on his way to the awards.

“He would have done better to bring Seabiscuit as his date.”

Brenda’s reaction was swift and unnecessarily brutal. It’s days later and I am still picking shards of glass out of my scalp.

“There’s Mariah Carey,” shrieked Brenda. Through the waterfall of beer cascading down my face, all I could see was a pair of emergency flotation devices on legs.

The red carpet feeding frenzy over, it was time for the main race. First, though, host Ricky Gervais had to poke fun at his willy. That old British tradition taken care of, the starter’s gun fired and the gates were flung open.

First out was a big-boned woman going by the dubious name of Mo’Nique. She got her Golden Globe for best supporting actress in a no-budget blaxploitation flick.

Her teary eyes shot to the ceiling. “Thank you God for this amazing ride you have let me go on.” God must have been having one of his slow days when Mo’Nique’s file reached his desk.

“Hmm,” said God, scratching his ear with a pencil. “Mo’Nique. Doesn’t ring a bell. Married three times. Worked in the phone sex trade. Not looking good.”

Being in an uncharacteristically good mood, thanks to Mrs God bringing him manna on toast in bed all week, God decided not to smite Mo’Nique and instead allowed her to follow her dreams.

Besides, he was well pleased to get a mention at the Golden Globes. Not one of those ungrateful whiteys had so much as nodded in his direction. “After all I’ve done for them,” grumbled God.

One after the other, strings of bulimics tottered up to the stage, crying and shaking as they clutched their awards to their heaving chests. They must have watched CNN’s coverage of the Haiti disaster and studied the survivors before heading on down to the Beverly Hilton Hotel. “If I win, that’s the look I’m going for!”

All the married winners were effusive in their praise for their wonderful, extraordinary wives and husbands without whom they would be living under bridges and scavenging for dead rats in the sewers. They would be winos and junkies and serial killers with tattoos and no teeth.

Me, I’m married to a woman whose idea of being supportive is to tell me to get out of the house and find a real job. It’s a wonder that I still have the self-confidence to dress myself.

Wearing a top freshly flayed to ribbons, Cher rushed over from an S&M orgy to present one of the awards. Reports that her blood supply has been replaced with embalming fluid would explain her stiff performance.

Her co-presenter, Christina Aguilera, seemed to have nothing whatsoever in her veins. I have never seen a woman so pale.

Jennifer Aniston was also one of the presenters. Her being there selfishly denied me a glimpse of Angelina Jolie.

Angie: “We’re not going and that’s final!”

Brad: “Aw, babe. Why can’t we just …”

Angie: “Because the Aniston slut will be there and you know what that means.”

Brad: “Gee honey, I don’t think …”

Angie: “No, you don’t. Shut up and watch the news. Haiti is on in a moment. Help me pick out a fresh orphan.”

Then they trotted out 106-year-old Sophia Loren who, like Cher, has also been dipping into the embalming fluid. I don’t come over all queer when I see her, which is the only real acid test for homosexuality.

Other highlights, apart from finding a fresh six-pack beneath the sink, included Mickey Rourke arriving with a teenage mail-order stripper from Vladivostok, Mike Tyson giving renewed respectability to convicted rapists and reformed cannibals everywhere, Mel Gibson pretending to be drunk in front of a room full of Jews, and Sandra Bullock, married to the luckiest motorcycle mechanic who ever lived.

James Cameron, taking the top award for his R1.8-billion film about blue humanoids who talk gibberish, got everyone to give themselves a big round of applause. Let no-one dare accuse these magnificent people of being repulsive narcissists.

“We have the best job in the world,” he crowed, filling the rest of us with resentment and self-loathing.

I can hardly wait for the Oscars.

 

When Boys Will Be Girls

My deviant offspring Clive turns 17 in a few days time. This must have triggered something in his so-called brain because he has begun misbehaving to an alarming degree.
The brat has always given me trouble.

When he was born we all thought he was a girl, but it turned out he had his willy tucked between his legs like one of those drag queen abominations.

Once the nurse had wiped the blood and gore from his puny little body and handed him to me, I gave him a good smack and warned him never to impersonate a woman again.
The nurse snatched him back and smacked him harder. We passed him back and forth, smacking and laughing, until Brenda sprang from her hospital bed and intercepted him.
I thought she wanted to join in the game, but all she did was snarl and bark and rub his stupid red bottom as if that would help him grow up to be a real man capable of playing a blood sport and fiddling his taxes.

I should have married the nurse instead of Brenda.
I knew there was something different about Clive from the moment he failed his apgar test. The nurse told me he had the lowest score of any baby she had ever seen, including those born from vodka fiends and estate agents.
The apgar test works much like basketball in that the infant is awarded two points for every score.

Clive cracked the heart rate, thanks to the healthy beating. He lost one point for breathing because he screamed solidly for three minutes without once drawing breath.
When it came to muscle tone, I was appalled to discover that the runt couldn’t even arm wrestle me even though I was using my left hand. No points there.

None for colour either. He was suspiciously dark. I demanded they bring me another, whiter baby.
I can’t even remember ever having had sex with Brenda, let alone impregnating her.
Just as I was about to storm the nursery to acquire a more Caucasian-looking replacement, they performed the final test on him.

Stimulation.

Clive reacted so well the sister had to put a screen around him and ask people to go back to their beds.

That’s when I knew he was mine.
I overheard a doctor use the word “priapism”. Brenda panicked but I restrained her with a headlock and reassured her this was a good thing.

That was the first and last time I was convinced that I had a son and not a daughter.
Years of mollycoddling, eating sandwiches with their crusts cut off and piano lessons with a priest who played Santa Claus at the mall every December sapped the poor bastard of the one drop of testosterone he was born with.

He showed no interest in killing animals, taunting lesbians, abusing the hired help or any of the other things that make South African men what they are today.
Instead, he developed a penchant for camouflage skirts and began hanging around his mother in the kitchen learning how to bake gay little tarts while swinging his girly hips to Brenda’s favourite Abba album.
At the age of 16 his voice had still not broken.

Sadly, Brenda got wind of my plans to sneak into his bedroom one night and give his testicles a healthy Catholic tug.
She threatened to have me jailed, a prospect that made my sphincter tighten and my resolve weaken.
All of this has changed in the last week. With the approach of his 17th birthday, Clive appears to have become possessed by some sort of incubus.
On Friday evening he sidled up to me in a crab-like fashion and asked if he could accompany me to the shop.

I go to the shop every Friday evening for milk and bread. If we haven’t run out, I wait until Brenda is out of the kitchen and then pour the milk down the sink and give the bread to the dog.

Brenda caught me out when she found 30 or 40 loaves of bread moulding behind the garage.

Apparently the dog died a few years ago.
I wasn’t all that keen on Clive embarrassing me at my local shop, so I said he could come if he stole R100 from his mother’s purse. He was back in a flash, thrusting two 50s into my hand.

This is the same boy who would press the panic button whenever I forced him to watch wrestling instead of that mindless violence on the Discovery Channel.
The shop was thick with cigarette smoke and full of shouting men and squealing women. Clive grabbed my arm and said: “We must call the fire brigade!”
I grabbed him by the throat and guided him to a stool.
“First we have to steady our nerves,” I said. “Then we’ll call the fire brigade.”
A shopkeeper with a 36D chest gave him the lazy eye and asked what he wanted.

“Milk, please,” he said.

I laughed and cuffed him playfully across the head.
“He means a milk stout,” I said, helping him off the floor.
By the end of the evening, Clive’s voice had broken and he was sucking shooters out of the barmaid’s belly button.

“I think I like girls,” he growled, launching himself into what looked like Teazers’ Christmas party.
It turns out that he also likes joints, tequila and stealing the car when my back is turned.
I am mystified as to how a callow, teenage virgin turns overnight into a capricious, hedonistic slut. Brenda is devastated and blames me for being the worst role model she has ever seen.
“What about Jacob Zuma,” I asked indignantly.
That shut her up.

Please, Sir, May I Have Some Economy?

When President Jacob Zuma said on Tuesday that the economy was still in the hands of white males, I was filled with shame.

Actually, at the time I was filled with beer but after visiting the little boy’s room I found space for a surprising amount of shame. The little boy’s room? What am I – a Catholic priest?

This is what happens after a lifetime of bloody Marys.

I felt shame because none of the economy is in my hands. Not even a smidget, which is what economists call the smallest most insignificant part of the economy.

Zuma made me feel like an unmitigated loser. A disgrace to not only my race, but also my gender. I am a failure as a white and a flop as a male. I am little more than a gross domestic product of my upbringing.

It gets worse. I don’t even have powerful friends. All the white men I know are barely in control of their bowels, let alone something as big and beautiful as the economy.

I think what happened here is that the president has been mixing with the wrong class of white males. He is clearly under the impression that we all own gold mines, which we rarely visit because the stock market takes up so much of our time.

I think the president should get out more and mix with us dysfunctional white men, if only because we far outnumber the pinstriped freebooters who so brazenly commandeered the good ship Economy all those years ago.

Before I release this metaphor back into the wild, let me just say that these pale-faced pirates aren’t doing a particularly good job at the helm. Not any more, anyway.

It’s almost as if they are deliberately steering into the wind. Maybe even reefing the mainsail. The waters are getting dangerously shallow and nobody wants to still be on board when the ship runs aground.

The ANC’s privateers have spent the last 18 years in lukewarm pursuit of these Caucasian corsairs. What’s happening, comrades? Wallowing in the doldrums?

The bleached buccaneers have even slowed economic growth to 2.7% to let you catch up. Hoist that spinnaker and move it before there’s nothing left to plunder.

Thank you, metaphor. You have served me well and it is time for you to go back to your own kind.

Half the problem with this country is that we don’t understand each other. The other half is that we do.

For example, I don’t understand why, when opening the ANC’s policy conference in Midrand, the president spoke for what felt like three days in a foreign language brought here in 1795 by the insufferable British. Cosatu’s pet goat Patrick Craven aside, delegates might have been a little less tight-fisted in the applause department had he delivered the speech in one of the other official languages. And I don’t mean Afrikaans.

I also don’t understand why some black people, when taking money from you, will touch their forearm with their free hand. I’m not talking about muggers and housebreakers. I don’t know what they hold while taking money from you. A gun, probably, which seems more effective but less traditional.

I have thought of doing the same, but where will it end? Reciprocating a cultural gesture out of common courtesy, even one as simple as touching one’s elbow when paying the petrol attendant, is a slippery slope and could easily lead to a sheep-slaughtering, witch-burning frenzy that would upset the neighbours terribly.

I don’t understand why some black people have conversations at 140 decibels when standing right next to each other. I have heard white people say it’s a habit picked up in the rural areas when there were no telephones and one had to shout across the valley if one wished to speak to one’s friend.

Rubbish. I think it’s a habit picked up by shouting at Telkom, if anything.

I have also heard speculation that speaking loudly is a way of letting bystanders know there are no secrets being discussed, no heinous plots being hatched. There was a time when I would come across darkies talking in hushed tones (90 decibels) and, fearing an uprising, I would report them to the police. I don’t recall if any arrests were made. Memory loss was one of the side effects of my anti-psychotic medication.

I don’t understand why some black people insist on possessing vast tracts of land. I have a small garden and an even smaller gardener and he dreams of one day owning a farm but he can’t even prevent my pathetic excuse for a lawn from degenerating into a weed-infested atrocity riddled with devil thorns and empty beer bottles.

I’m all for land grabs if you plan on growing genetically modified crops like mieliejuana, but otherwise cut your hair and get a real job.

I don’t understand the need for virginity testing. In my culture, not that I have one, virgins are nowhere near as much in demand as are girls who know for sure that fellatio is not a character in one of Shakespeare’s plays.

White virgins over the age of 20 are nothing but trouble. Black virgins might be different, but I doubt it. The longer you go without sex, the crazier you become. I should know.

If I were the king of white people, I would have a Read Dance where all the girls wore cocktail dresses and recited passages from their favourite books. Afterwards, I would invite them to join me in a tribal ritual involving light spankings and lashings of baby oil.

And I don’t understand ancestor worship, but that’s probably because my ancestors weren’t the sort of people you would want anything to do with, dead or alive.