Extracts from Ben Trovato's On The Run column, published in the Cape Times and now brought to you by the Waiting Times
(d.... difficult to keep up with the Jones's let alone those d..... Capes)
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"Live life like a tortoise"
Ben Trovato
April 17 2007 at 01:29AM
It's my birthday this weekend and I am trembling with excitement. I can hardly wait to celebrate the fact that Sunday will bring me one giant step closer to the crematorium's incinerator.
Children celebrate birthdays because they believe they are immortal. They also believe that the world is a wonderful place full of beautiful people. But when they reach my age, they begin to realise that they have spent their lives ensnared in a web of lies spun by parents, politicians and preachers.
From then on, birthdays become cheerless affairs that are enlivened only by gifts of home-baked dope cookies, plastic jugs of tequila-laced punch and maybe a Thai stripper or two.
I don't subscribe to the live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse school of thought. I think I may be a little late for the dying young part. And my corpse will always look good because nature gave me a body that hasn't aged one bit in the past 20 years. Well, my chest has slipped a little and my hair has changed colour, but that's a natural consequence of too much abseiling, skydiving, kite-surfing, kick-boxing, crocodile wrestling and womanising.
I have no intention of dying. Ever. There is still too much I need to do, see and drink. For a start, I need to pick up my laundry that I dropped off in Sea Point in 1998. I must also visit that island in Greece where gorgeous half-naked women sing to you and pander to your every fantasy. And I have to experience every country's beer, beginning with the mind-altering aya-huasca brewed by the Amazonian shamans.
If I am going to live forever, it is vital that I start gearing down. It is the slowest-moving animals that live the longest of all. Elephants, tortoises, sloths, supermarket check-out staff. They all have it down to a fine art.
Elephants who stay off the marulas and get plenty of exercise easily outlive humans. Well, they would if the Honourable Comrade Marthinus von Skunkbroek wasn't about to set his band of trigger-happy conservationists loose on the country's herds.
Tortoises, like the Chinese, can live for up to 300 years or more. In these parts, however, they're lucky to make it out of their teens without being roasted in one of Sanparks' "controlled" fynbos burns that regularly threaten to turn entire suburbs into gigantic fireballs.
So, there it is. Two of the slowest-moving animals on earth also happen to be the ones that live the longest. I have recently witnessed first-hand the consequences of moving too fast. Every night, swarms of kelp flies arrive in my bedroom the moment I lie down with a book.
Word travels quickly down the beach. "Hey guys. The light's on. Let's go."
The little bastards swarm off the sand and set up orbit around my bedside lamp. They fly at a speed of around 500km/h and after a while the light becomes so dim that I have to bring out the torch.
They think it's great fun. Far more exciting than sucking on bits of rotting kelp on a freezing cold beach in the middle of the night. Can't really blame them, I suppose.
The more adventurous ones stray from the light and get a good laugh by flying up my nose and out my ears. They play hide-and-seek in my hair and go skating on my eyeballs.
Some of them wait for me to yawn before charging down my throat, causing me to carry on like a cat expectorating a particularly nasty hairball. Brenda thinks I'm overreacting. For some reason, they leave her alone. Scared, probably.
I woke up this morning to find scenes of the most dreadful carnage. It was Jonestown all over again.
Thousands of tiny corpses lay piled up on the bedside table. Bodies littered the carpet and were strewn across the duvet. Many of the lifeless creatures lay entwined as if they had been struck down in the height of passion. It was as if the Interahamwe of the insect world had arrived in the early hours of the morning and committed genocide while I slept. It was too horrible for words.
But the bloodbath demonstrated something to me. You are not going to live for long if you move at that speed. If elephants had to behave like kelp flies, they wouldn't last a month.
Apart from the fact that their hearts would give in, there would be an enormous risk of mid-air collisions. Only so many elephants can revolve around a streetlight without something terrible happening.
With my birthday coming up, the kelp flies have taught me a valuable lesson. Slow down. Be more like a tortoise. When you see trouble coming, keep your head down and retract your arms and legs. If someone tries to pick you up, wee on them. Stop being drawn to bright lights. Stop wanting to have sex every time the lights go out.
A life lived like a kelp fly can only end in tears.
When I told Brenda that I had discovered the secret to living forever, or at least to 150, she turned pale and had to sit down.
"Fantastic news, isn't it?" I said.
"Not for me, it isn't," she said faintly.
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Ben Trovato
May 08 2007 at 02:26AM
Ted rang on Sunday and asked if I wanted to go sailing. Given that our telephones are bugged, I assumed he was speaking in code. But since we both have serious trust issues, we have never been able to agree on a key to unscramble the code.
After some thought mixed together with some beer, I came to the conclusion that Ted was inviting me to partake of a little lysergic acid diethylamide before embarking on a cruise that would take us through the doors of perception, across the lake of implausibility and into the empyrean abode of infinite omniscience.
It is important to dress appropriately for these occasions, so I dug out my purple Dr Seuss hat, blue velvet patchwork jacket and yellow and pink stripy bell-bottom trousers.
Ted told me to meet him at the Simon's Town yacht club. If this was code for somewhere else, I had little hope of ever finding him.
Taking a gamble, I headed for the Deep South and arrived at the yacht club to find my way barred by a steel gate. This is one of the consequences of living in a town built around a naval base. People live in constant fear of invasion.
Look what happened when the US lowered its guard at Pearl Harbour. The pilots spent their days shagging the locals while the soldiers lay on the beach smoking primo South Pacific weed. Of course the Japanese had to attack them. Hell, if I had been there, I would have attacked. Pretty girls and good ganja are wasted on Americans.
Clinging to the gate, bewildered as an Afghan shoemaker marking his fourth birthday in Guantanamo Bay, I started shouting for someone to let me in. Across the wharf, I could see a jeep full of military policemen set off towards me. They were 100m away when Ted appeared and opened the gate. He pulled me inside and we ran for the clubhouse.
Hiding out in the bar, I ordered a couple of coked-up Klippies and whispered into Ted's ear that I was ready to go "sailing". I rolled my eyes theatrically and raised my glass. "To infirmity and beyond!" I shouted. Ted grabbed my arm, spilling precious liquor all down the front of my velvet jacket.
"Be quiet, you fool," hissed Ted. "Mary's coming along. Try to act normal."
I was stunned. Nobody brings their wife along when they go "sailing". I took him by the face and made him look at me. Brandy leaked from his lips.
"Have you lost your mind?" I said. "Mary loses control after two glasses of wine. She will never be able to handle three or four hits of dangerously hallucinogenic chemicals."
Ted broke free from my grasp and fell backwards into a salty old sea dog, knocking him clean off his bar stool. There was no reaction. The dog simply got up, sat down and carried on drinking. I suppose he is accustomed to all manner of objects smashing into him on the high seas. Judging by the contents of the bar, yachting must be the only sport in the world in which the participants look like homeless people.
Just then Mary walked into the bar. She was wearing a pair of gumboots, an inflatable life vest and a pair of tight oilskin pants. It is never a good thing when one starts freaking out before one takes acid, so I began making my excuses and headed for the door in a crab-like fashion.
Mary rushed over and asked if Brenda was coming. Oh, what a great idea. Go on a mind-bending drug spree with a woman whose personality disorder has crossed the borderline and is now racing headlong towards a bottomless pit seething with phantasmagorical creatures and other demons that inhabit the female psyche.
"No," I said. "Brenda's not coming."
Ted bolted his brandy, took me firmly by the arm and marched me outside. "We're going sailing," he said, "so picture yourself in a boat on the water." I closed my eyes. "Yes! Yes!" I shouted. "With tangerine trees and marmalade skies!"
Ted smacked me across the head and told me to open my eyes. He pointed at a 25-foot yacht moored to the jetty and told me to get on.
"No girl with kaleidoscope eyes?" I asked, hopelessly. "No Lucy in the sky with diamonds?"
"Maybe an octopus's garden, if you're lucky," said Ted, springing on to the boat and taking hold of the tiller, a position he refused to relinquish for the next five hours.
As we chugged out of the harbour, I tried to spit on one of the warships that I had unwittingly helped the defence ministry to acquire so that we might repel the Zimbabwean navy when they eventually come for us. Like my hopes for clean government, my spit fell hopelessly short.
Ted told me to behave myself and killed the engine, then set a course for what looked like Brazil. Mary swarmed across the deck pulling on ropes, winding winches, unfurling sails and generally scaring the life out of me. I am not a natural sailor. Although I am accustomed to being unsteady on my feet, it's not often that I drink enough to get the floor tilting at a 60° angle. Sailing is slow, wet and far too much like hard work. Besides, hostile crew can push you overboard and leave you to drown. Sharks often jump right into the boat and take your legs off without even giving you a chance to put your drink down.
Captains of container ships have no qualms when it comes to crushing your vessel rather than steer around you.
Vicious storms will rip your sails in half and split your mast down the middle. Enormous waves can crush you in your sleep and giant squid will suck on your bones.
I went below deck, adopted the foetal position and prayed for safe passage back to the bar where I fit right in.
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"Bok win overshadowed by literary development"
Ben Trovato October 23 2007 at 04:12AM
"Bokke!"
Excuse me? Are you shouting at me? You, who set the cops on me because my music was too loud? You, whose yapping dog wakes me every morning? You, who has co-opted a clenched-fist salute that you feared and despised not too long ago? Don't you shout at me and expect anything less than "England!" in return.
Unite the nation, my flabby white butt. It'll take more than 15 green men to pull that one off.
They carried the hopes of the country on their shoulders. That's what the lying dogs in the media told us. That our dreams rested on a couple of white boys kicking a ball between two sticks.
Oh, good. Look. No more lying, cheating, stealing, raping and pillaging. We are all one, big happy family full of... HEY! Get away from my car! Put that down, you thieving bastard!
So everything's back to abnormal. Thank God. If just one more pot-bellied, face-painted, flag-waving oaf had shouted in my face, I would have reached for my Patriot missile.
Oscar Wilde said: "Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious." He also said: "Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." Smart man, Oscar.
But what a game! Hey? Hey? Was that a game or what?! Scrum kick scrum kick scrum kick. Riveting stuff. The best part of the whole messy business was when Mbeki asked someone to lift him up so that he could see.
Anyway, that's enough about rugby. The really important news is that I have a new book out. Go Booke!
It's a collection of columns that have appeared in this esteemed organ over the past five years.
When the column made its inaugural appearance on September 3, 2002, it was met with equal measures of spluttering outrage and rip-snorting hilarity. Some called me obnoxious, offensive, slanderous and rude. Others said they laughed so much that their morning coffee spurted from their nose.
One time, an American fundamentalist madman by the name of Reverend Donald Spitz from an unspeakable organisation called the Army of God ordered me to say a prayer or burn forever in the eternal hellfires of damnation. Please. I live in South Africa.
I have received thousands, if not hundreds, of emails since the column first appeared. Most of them have been full of kind words from people thanking me for making them laugh.
Then there were the others...
Wiener Riedel described a recent column as "distasteful, nauseating, sickening and repulsive". In another email later that day, Diane Brooks wrote: "Thanks for a great column!"
There's just no accounting for taste.
Upset by something I had written, Nikki Genade advised me to "take a leaf out of the book of our President whose generosity of spirit rose above his personal feelings for a former enemy and political opponent".
Suitably chastened, I tried to be a better person. I really did. But it was harder than giving up smoking and I soon slipped back into my old ways.
Writing from Walvis Bay, G. Marschner said: "You must have been beaten up terribly as a kid."
That would explain a lot of things. Packing an overnight bag, I flew to Durban to confront my father. He denied everything, eventually going so far as to demand a paternity test.
I'll leave it up to D. Chaplin of Fish Hoek to explain it once and for all: "Warning! This column contains irony, satire and other forms of humour. Readers who are unable to distinguish these literary devices from bona fide opinion or fact are advised to avoid reading further, and are referred to the TV guide or the classifieds, where there is a lower risk of misunderstanding."
Talking of misunderstandings, J.A. Browne of Kenilworth took first prize with this gem: "Since so many people are asking who Ben Trovato is, may I be allowed to spill the beans on this imposter? Ben Trovato, of course, is not 'his' name and not even 'his' sex.
"Ben Trovato is a woman.
"It becomes clear after much reading of these columns that Brenda is a symbol of oppressed womanhood, especially those married to gin-sodden men.
"Only a woman writer could so cleverly get under the skin of this bully and by doing so make this Trovato creature a thing of scorn and contempt to all women. It is all very cleverly contrived by the feminist lobby.
"Will the real Ben Trovato now come forward and admit the truth? Don't be afraid. Real men will admire you and let this Ben Trovato travesty come to an end.
"We are not fooled by the photo of this writer crouching under a wide-brimmed hat. Shame on the creature who consented to stand in for this picture.
"How can we be so sure that Ben Trovato is a woman? There is a certain sensitivity about the pieces - notwithstanding the pretence of macho image - that betrays the truth: the deep-seated need to denigrate men."
Confused? Me, too.
Then, out of the blue, a woman by the name of Dr Enetia Robson clarified something that had been worrying me for a long time.
Writing from London, this brilliant left-wing intellectual warrior said: "One has a sense of people like yourself being challenged by chaotic and violent events and trying to find a new modus vivendi while still retaining a sense of rationality and a wicked sense of humour."
You can imagine my relief at finally discovering what it was that I had been doing for the past five years.
Wrapping up this embarrassing display of narcissism, I'd like to invite everyone to buy a copy of On The Run. If bookshops intimidate you, feel free to go to www.bentrovato.book.co.za/the-ben-trovato-store and order it online.
That way you get a discount and an inscription guaranteed to devalue your copy.
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Someone offered me a job the other day. Not, as you may think, because they saw me shuffling down the road wild-eyed and unshaven, the tattered crotch of my trousers hanging down by my knees and spittle flying from my wine-stained lips as I flailed and swore at a host of unseen enemies.
No, I was not offered a job out of pity. Nobody does that sort of thing any more. The nation is pitied-out. Vengeance has replaced pity. And a good thing it is, too. Pity wears a pastel jumper and makes little murmuring noises.
Hell, it might even be per day given that the banking sector is the most successful scam currently operating in the country. Perhaps they are looking for a strategy that involves robbing other banks.
(Recent picture of Gill and Mike, Ben is not in the frame)
My week started with a petrol attendant calling me madala. This would never have happened in the old South Africa. Back then, black people knew their place. They didn't go around calling white men "old". They called them "baas", and everyone got along just fine.
It was only a vicious cold front that stopped me from exiting my vehicle and taking the uppity fellow to task. Instead, I opened my window a crack and demanded to know the reason for his insolence. He laughed, as only the freshly emancipated can laugh, and said he called me madala because I was madala.
I took a quick look at myself in the rearview mirror and got the fright of my life. I whipped around to ask Peter O'Toole what the hell he was doing in my back seat, but there was nobody there.
The attendant knocked on the window. He pointed at his hair. Then at mine. Of course. No wonder he thought I was old. He was clearly colour-blind. In my best Zulu, I explained to him that my hair was not grey, but dusky blonde. He laughed some more and said I owed him R200.
After handing over the cash, together with a hefty 20 cent tip, I took the revs into the red, slammed the stick into first and dropped the clutch. The car stalled with such vehemence that I flew from the seat and smacked my head into the windscreen. "Madala", said the attendant, nodding his head in a sage-like fashion.
Rubbing my dented nut, I pulled out of the garage and into the path of an oncoming car. The enemy swerved and hooted and pointed violently at his eyes. "Yes!" I shouted. "You should get glasses!"
Driving home, I realised that the garage attendant hadn't been mocking me at all. In his culture, old people are revered. Their advice is sought after, their wisdom valued. Hell, if you live in the township, you can't buy a stolen widescreen plasma TV without getting the elders around to slaughter an ox to check that it's okay with the ancestors.
In whitey culture, old people are barely tolerated. They get elbowed aside on the pavement, cursed if they are driving, which they have no right to be doing, and lured into retirement homes on the bogus pretext that there is a very good chance they will fall head over heels in love with someone their own age when, in fact, all they are going to be doing is falling head over heels in the bathroom.
When our parents develop Alzheimer's disease, we look them squarely in the eye and say that we don't know who they are either, and never visit them again.
White oldies have it good. If they were Eskimos, they would be expected to walk out into the snow and die of hypothermia, rather than be a burden to the pack. We don't get much snow in these parts, but there's nothing stopping them from taking their Zimmer frames and going for a slow walk up Table Mountain where our economically disempowered muggers will happily dispatch them to the afterlife in return for a used colostomy bag and a well-thumbed pocket Bible.
When I am more of a burden to my family than I already am, I will almost certainly remove myself for the greater good. The only difference is that when I leave the house, retirement home or asylum, I will have 15kg of trinitrotoluene lashed to my chest, to be detonated as and when I choose. I don't see much point in going quietly. I think it was Dylan Thomas who said it was better to rage against the dying of the light than to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Nobody wants to die alone, so why not take someone with you. Your old maths teacher, perhaps? Or a PT instructor from the army? Your boss? Perhaps a businessman who embezzled your pension?
What I'm trying to say is, don't waste your death on yourself. That's selfish. It wouldn't surprise me if something got lost in the translation of the ancient Jewish scriptures. Being selfish is wrong. Eating shellfish is fine.
Anyway. Twenty minutes after the garage attendant called me old, I went into a shop to buy half a loaf of bread and a bottle of methylated spirits. There was a man in front of me in the queue, also with dusky blonde hair. His cellphone rang and he looked at me and said, "You can go in front, sir."
Sir? I used to call my biology teacher Sir. When I was with my friends, I would call him a degenerate bum-fondling pig of a man. But in his class, I would call him Sir.
If President Mbeki had to walk through my front door right now, I would also call him Sir. But that's only because St John has made him God's ambulance driver. Actually, that's not true. If our leader had to walk through my front door right now, I would scream like a girl, knock my drink into the keyboard and scramble for the nearest panic button.
Once I realised that he was after my vote, and not my stereo, I would apologise and offer him a glass of absinthe which he would pretend to drink in the hope that I would see him as a man of the people.
Damn, it's cold. Perhaps that's why people are starting to mistake me for an old person. When temperatures drop below 15 degrees, my entire body shrivels up and I look like I'm suffering from progeria, when, in fact, I possess all the instincts of a juvenile delinquent.
Ben Trovato
May 22 2007 at 04:39AM
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I am approaching the age of fear.
As one gets older, one's thoughts are more frequently occupied by death.
Will my family be upset after driving all the way to the executor's office only to discover that I have left them two pairs of black jeans, a black overcoat, a black hat, three half-written novels and 42 unpaid speeding tickets?
"What a waste of petrol," I can hear Brenda saying.
One also starts worrying about dreaded diseases. Prostate cancer is no fun at all, but then nor is having a doctor stick his finger up your bum to check the said prostate for signs of wear and tear. Can one do this sort of thing at home? If so, is there any point in spending most of the day rooting around for something one doesn't know the first thing about?
"Ah, yes, that must be it. Roughly the size of a baseball. Nothing wrong there, then."
Brain tumours concern me. I don't get headaches, but sometimes I have thoughts that I fear other people might not have. Brenda often says I am not right in the head, but I don't take this too seriously because the female brain hardly sets the international standard for normality.
Everything we eat, drink, smoke and read is likely to give us cancer, so there's no point in even worrying about that one.
With age come things that were never there before. Like grandchildren. And sudden stabbing pains in unfamiliar parts of the anatomy. Given the abomination that Clive's loins are likely to spawn, I'll take sudden stabbing pains any day.
Actually, none of this worries me.
For me, the age of fear dawns when one's parents begin hinting at moving in with one.
Sickness, penury and unfulfilled dreams pale into insignificance when confronted with the prospect of mom and dad moving into the cottage. Cottage? We don't have a cottage.
"So build one," says mom. "We'll pay for it."
But we're renters. By the time we've built a cottage, the lease will have expired.
"Well, it's about time you bought your own place."
With a cottage?
"What a good idea! A cottage will increase the value tremendously."
Not if you're living in it.
My father is talking about cutting his workload in half when he turns 70 at the end of this year. I want to cut my workload in half now and I'm a fraction of his age.
He works for himself but I'm not altogether sure what it is that he does. Growing up, I recall him using phrases like, "load bearing capacity", "broad flanged girders" and "this is the last time I pay your bail".
My mother claims her job was raising me and my sister. I told her once that she should have been fired and she called me a bastard ingrate and chased me around the house with a meat tenderiser. Maybe it's true that men marry their mothers.
I might be more open to them living in a shed at the bottom of the garden if all I had to do was feed them and change their nappies twice a day. But they are far from helpless. My father goes gliding on Saturdays. He straps himself into an aircraft with no engine and gets pulled into the sky on a winch. Most Saturdays I can't even get out of bed, with or without a winch.
My mother paints and tap dances and talks to monkeys. The only thing she suffers from is road rage. And an uncontrollable urge to give me unsolicited advice that leaves me feeling like a 15-year-old without the attendant benefits of experiencing sex, drugs and rock 'n roll for the very first time.
My father grasped the senselessness of working for a boss a long time ago. He always pretended to be happy for me whenever I got a job, but I could see the disappointment in his eyes. My son is making someone else rich. What a disappointment.
Now that I am unemployed, he couldn't be more proud. He is so proud that he won't even lend me money.
Look, I don't want to seem heartless. We have a responsibility to look after our parents when they get old, even if we were born through an act of gross irresponsibility on their part. When my generation was conceived, condoms were made from goat bladders and contraception was for Catholics.
As distasteful as the thought may be, we only exist because our parents had unprotected sex when they were young, drunk and foolish. The hard truth is that we are among millions of accidents who roam the earth today.
Some of us are eligible to claim inheritance from the Birth Accident Fund. The rest blockade the N2 with burning tyres, insisting that the state is responsible for providing food, clothing, an education, jobs and housing. This, without even being able to spell Plato.
George Bernard Shaw described the average American family as "an Augean stable, so filthy that it would seem more hopeful to burn it down than to attempt to sweep it out".
This is a fairly accurate representation of my own family, not to mention my house, and I need to get this across to my parents before they sell up and move south on the assumption that I will put up with their nonsense.
Eskimos have the right idea. The oldies go off and die in the snow. But it wouldn't be that easy in Durban or Cape Town. They would have to shuffle off to the beach where some shiny-eyed god-botherer armed with blankets and food would come along and keep them alive for years to come.
Then the calls would start. "How come you never visit? After all we've done for you …"
The next thing you know, it's twice a week down at Addington or Muizenberg feeding them puréed vegetables and wiping the sand out of their mouths.
Geronticide, children, geronticide.
E-mail him at freebentrovato@yahoo.com.
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