TRU

Once Upon a Time in Jozi
(I Feel like Sh*t)

They used to say it never rains it pours; that’s water for you. But this Sunday was a real screw up. Okay, I’ll relate this very unbelievable story to you.

On Saturday night, after watching the Orlando Pirates vs Santos game at Ellis Park me and friends went to Soweto for a jol. And probably that’s where my problems start.

Sunday: I woke up at 0730 when I was supposed to do so at 0630 for my 1100 flight to Mpumalanga. One of my journo friends came and knocked on my door saying the owners of the guesthouse are already wondering where I am given that I have been an early bird for the past five days.

The thing is; I was feeling dead. The night before at Dlamini (Soweto), at Papi’s Place we emptied two bottles of spirits, just the three of us – me and my two colleagues from KZN. We downed Jameson and Johnnie Walker because the chicks we were trying to chat in the lounge decided to sip Appletiser, suspecting that we were up to no good.

So we left Soweto at 0200, me, the other passenger and the driver drunk like vagrants and got to Observatory by wing and prayer. The two sober guys who have been in the car while we were getting sloshed were quite all the way.

Now when I woke up late it was a result of that night of binging that had one chick saying that she’s not going to be game because me and my friends only started chatting her when Jameson was half-empty. Fine, we were so drunk I don’t think we could have wanked even if it came to that. And she had an ass as big as Table Mountain I kept wondering about where her user manual was.

TRU

I Feel like Sh*t

We arrived at O.R.Tambo Airport just in time and surrendered the rented car, made it to domestic departures, I checked in my luggage with SAA Airlink and the guys did the same with Mango and we sat down and started reading the free copy of Sunday newspaper. But I was feeling like revulsion after chowing English breakfast and sugar-free caffeinated tea at the guesthouse. I was feeling like shit.

Soon the two guys from KZN boarded their plane and left and I decided to go to the Airlink lounge and wait for my plane. I was feeling like shit.

At the lounge I felt so full of sleep that I couldn’t concentrate on my newspaper. I sat there, looked at my wristwatch and time was 1013. I was supposed to board at 1100. I closed my eyes for a quick nap that would end with the announcer making the first call to board. I was feeling like shit.

The minute I woke up and approached the boarding gate the security guy asked me who I was and when I told him he said that I have been off-loaded. For those not in the know, this means that you have missed your flight and you can no longer fly. At that minute I felt like I was sweating blood. I have missed an opportunity to arrive home at 1200 and was afraid they will charge me to put me on another flight.

He advised me to go to the check-in counter and request to be put on stand-by. I was feeling like shit. I moved to the direction sweating like hell and I decided to make a bee-line to the loo for a quick visit – preparing myself to part with money in the event that I need to pay for the service.

TRU

I Feel like Sh*t II

At the loo I walked in and locked the door, was sweating profusely now, and just as I was sitting busy relieving myself I felt my stomach running. I sweated more, took off my woollen hat, acrylic jacket, my woollen golf shirt and wiped my brow. Sweat came gushing to the floor. Now I was feeling like puking, imagine that - a running stomach (depositing through the rear) and a running stomach (wanting to deposit through the front).

I turned around and faced the toilet seat and ‘guuuuuuuuuuuuuusssssssssssssssshhhhhhhh’ I puked all the English breakfast I had in the morning and sweated more. I then realised that half the smelly puke had splashed on my jeans and boxers. Only 22% was in the basin, mixed with pooh-pooh, 20% was on the tiled floor and 8% on my brown leather shoes. I sat there feeling dead. I was feeling like more shit.

After sorting some things out like using the whole roll of toilet paper to wipe everything that required wiping, including part of the floor and especially my pants which now had brownish-orangish wet marks on them I carried my two bags and walked out, met an old man who cleans floors on the passage and looked at myself on the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot, my skin darker, feeling like shit and filthy from the smelly-slippery-sticky puke.

As I walked out of the loo I kept saying to myself, ‘there goes Jameson and Johnny, fuck liquor’

TRU

I Feel like Sh*t III

Now, when I got to the check-in the ladies were very helpful, one even asked me how it happened and I explained that I fell asleep – the ability to fall asleep waiting for a plane comes with the mundaneness of the activity. Aeroplanes are the most boring means of transport, believe me – a minibus taxi is more inspirational because you are most likely to receive a call on your cellphone without breaking any Civil Aviation or Road Agency laws or in a minibus taxi you can always find the latest copy of Daily Sun.

Now, the clerks at the check-in said they’ll put me in another plane, probably the one at 1530. Time now is 1136. My shuttle is waiting in Nelspruit. I was still feeling like shit.

And then after the clerk told me to come back at 1250 I went to the next available silver seat and sat down, waiting for the time and reading Mbazima Shilowa’s rant in Sunday Times. At 1245 I went to the counter and requested service. After much hiccups they gave me my new boarding pass and said, ‘you must go and board now, it’s boarding’

‘Now?’

‘Yeah, we put you on a one o’clock flight, please rush’. Then the clerk asks me if I have luggage and I say I have checked it in and she says when I got off-loaded even my luggage was off-loaded and it’s somewhere at arrivals but if I go searching for it I’ll miss this plane as well.

When I get to the boarding gate I inform the security guy and he gets on his two-way and quotes the reference number on my luggage slip and they tell him it will be moved. I no longer felt like shit.

Now, when we get into the bus that should take us to our Jetstream I feel a sense of nervousness. I ask myself what was the significance of me missing the first flight, did it crash, was it hijacked and crashed at Union Buildings etc? Pik Botha did miss a Pan AM flight that ended up on some derelict field in Lockerbie (Scotland) in 1986.

But now after much stressful time the bus moves us to the waiting jet. When we get there we are told that we have to wait in the bus as some maintenance is being conducted on the jet. I see engineers checking the landing hatch and other necessities. Catering is being loaded into the jet as well. It takes more than normal and then they come to us to tell us that they are still busy we can wait in the bus. They stop us from disembarking three times after the doors were opened to allow cold air to flow in.

After what feels like forever we are allowed to embark. I take my seat and the regular monotone drill is conducted. Then the plane does not take off and the captain informs us that they are waiting for a supply of water for catering. Water is finally brought in and the doors close and the engine starts.

TRU

I Feel like Sh*t IV

But then after barely five minutes of running the engines the pilot shuts them down and informs us that there’s glitch but he’s called on engineers to fix it. He tells us that it will get very hot in the cabin and that we will be served juice and cold oxygen to alleviate the heat. We are served.

Then he says to us engineers will remove something and it will take fifteen minutes and we can now take off. He explains that we can’t go wait in the lounge because it will be a quick operation.

Many minutes later the plane is still being fixed and he announced that they have an embarrassing situation as the engineers have told him the jet is not safe for take-off and we will get into a bus and be returned to the lounge ‘where the ground staff will attend to us’

The bus takes forever and when it finally comes we get in, go back to the lounge where there’s no one to explain anything to us.

Now the whites I’m with get furious and start using the boarding gate phone to call whatever number comes to their brains. Some many minutes later a supervisor comes and says we will be put on another flight, the 15h30 one which is boarding.

TRU

I Feel like Sh*t V

Imagine, we boarded at 1300 and by the time we board another plane after two hours in the jet, it’s already 1500. Now there’s a technical hiccup. We are going to board a British Aerospace 146-200 which has two rows of seats with two seats each even though our earlier tickets were for a jet with two rows of one and the other of two seats each.

The clerk has to reschedule the seating using a BIC fine point pen as if we are at some god-forsaken coup de tat prone Afrikan banana republic with a junta or a monarch as a government. He sorts the mess, we get into the bus, now it’s us and the real 1530 passengers. The bus is humid and full and we are made to sit there for a cool twenty five minutes before it moves across the tarmac to the waiting plane.

When we get there one of the plane’s engines is undergoing service and some liquid is pouring out into a container. They have the whole tool box and they are fixing things. We board with worry and they are still working. After they are done the plane takes off.

On the air they serve us peanuts and juice on a Sunday afternoon. It’s fine that we are finally leaving OR Tambo Airport, time is now 1600. When we get to Nelspruit‘s Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport shit is about to happen.

While waiting for my big suitcase at the conveyor belt I have a funny feeling. At the end after everybody had identified and taken their bags I notice that my suitcase is missing, with all my clothes and toiletries. I lay and official complaint, they write it down and assure me that my bag will fly in with the first plane on Monday morning and be delivered to me. I’m still waiting, in the same clothes I came in, no perfume, no toothbrush, no lotion, nothing – and smell like shit.

ARCHIVE

Some few weeks ago we made a decision to sample lyrics which touch on the religious side of human existense. It is a brilliant project which we are pursuing with gusto. However, it has emerged that our focus was largely on the Christian religion and very few lyrics touching on other beliefs were explored. This week we make a decision not to publish lyrics, but do so next week with a mixture of other poets, those who write about their own gods and mediators. Instead we publish this old piece from the archives of the writer, nothing edited and as good as it was when it was rejected by a certain magazine.

Dear Diary

The day is Friday, just before Freedom Day. I've just hit the bookstore and bought myself a fresh magazine, obtained a couple of e-mail printouts and am facing a day on the rush to end. I suddenly remember that I 've got a guitar lesson to attend, my tutor taught me a couple of keys the day before and insisted that I master them before we move on.

But then I also have to watch television since I picked it on the transistor FM radio on the way from Hazyview that TLC's Lisa Lopes's number had been called and she responded and abandoned this fucked up earth, went where no one could follow her. I also have brewed myself a fresh mug of highly caffeneited coffee to drown before it becomes cold and suddenly taste like lukewarm wine.

What should I do first? Difficult. Finally I rip the cover of the April issue of SL Magazine and flip the pages like I usually do at the bookshop when I don't have money to buy. Then I passively run my fingers on the six guitar strings while trying to read the magazine. I don't really care what I play but some hours later I get told that the melody sounds like Sade's By your Side. I love my fingers, I worship every unmanicured-earth-smelling nail on my roster of five geniuses. I'm thinking of taking my five fingers to Coca-Cola Popstarts when the auditions reach Nelspruit and get them made stars, with their own custom-made recording contract, divorced from me.

To make matters worse, the coffee smells so good it begs to be gulped. I take a couple of sips while the TV is filled with gory images of traumatised learners and teachers at a Frankfurt school. Apparently, what Tumi Makgabo at CNN is trying to find out from experts is whether Germany's gun control laws should be strengthened to make it difficult for relics of the Bundes's education system to get their hands on pistols and pump action shotguns. The gun control legislation brings to the fore Gun Free South Africa's decades old sermon of gun proliferation.

What I really enjoy about everything is that Tumi is at times briefing the world about Mark Shuttleworth's journey to the final frontier. Incase you've been in the gulags, they are both South Africans, and for just that split moment I'm thinking, "wow, the world is finally kissing our asses. Our proudly South African rainbow asses".

That hasn't started to solve my problems as I ain't yet started to practice the keys I have to master. My coffee is getting cold and Tumi is not about to break the news of "Left Eye"'s demise, the woman I loved from Donnel Jones's You Know What's Up and Lil' Kim's Ladies Night music videos where she was proudly shaking that booty like it was the 4th of July in the USA. I loved her and I will miss her. Teardrops. (Pause now for a minute of silence, zip your flies at half mast)
(Thank you, read on).

Just as I'm about to go loony and blaze myself some home-grown Mary Jane (she's a natural daughter of the earth cuz she comes from seed) my homie budges in, still in school-uniform and a backpack. I tell him about the school incident in Germany, he says it's none of his business. He's in no mood to listen to my skewed guitar tunes or even read a single word from my magazine. To top it all he doesn't even want coffee, steamy or cold. All he wants is to cremate (rap tight rythmes for) me with verses filling the whole quire of a school notebook. He insists I listen and comment after every thirty two line rap verse. Well me, I'm one of those heavenly beings stranded on earth from Touched by an Angel and I do.

That's Volume One of his life and all of it there. His ambition is to blow up like Afroman and Limp Bizkit, not Moodphase5ive or Siempre. He's addicted to life and he hates drugs. He also hates his mother and father, please don't ask me who he loves cuz I just know he loves his country smitten.

At the end of the day I've been through my forty eight e-mails, read the ninety eight pages of the magazine, bled my finger practicing the tune (the tutor never pitched) and have had a patriotic exchange with my one truly proud South African friend about why do we import coffee while we can grow our own and export. Import-export, to me they sound the same.

In the evening I'm sitting back watching TV, the show is The Making of Britney Speares's debut movie. Is she talented?. I find myself wondering all alone. Maybe she's just like me and you, fucked up proud American/South African on a mash for the elusive dream and making wishes upon stars, even on cloudy nights.


UPDATE: Tumi Makgabo has gone on to be the spokesperson of the South Africa 2010 World Cup Local Organising Committee

SL Magazine is still going around

My homeboy has since passed matric and said he's going into music

Britney Speares has been unmasked as a troubled woman

Afroman has gone bust

TLC has since died an unceremonious death

I am still here, now blogging as opposed to writing for magazines