I was too young to go – by one day.

My birthday falls on the day after New Year – then I would turn sixteen.

We’d spent fourteen years of Decembers there.

With the same families and their children.

When exams started, pre-Blue Marlin anticipation intensified – comparable to the pre-birth anticipation parents feel, memories mysteriously wiped blank of previous Births of Death.

My father [a famous racing driver] would then attempt to break his record time there, to be greeted by Uncle Clive [all adults were ‘aunty’ and ‘uncle’], stopwatch in hand, and Bobby the barman – a scotch in his.

We couldn’t wait to get inside – in fact, the Standton’s kids used to travel in their cozzies so they could run straight into the pool from the car! The pool – now liquid, would slowly morph into a solid over the following three weeks.

The dining room was run by Dori the one-eyed head-waiter, where
the same Indian staff would serve the same meals every year. We always landed up with Basil. I remember him because he shared a name with my legendary father [insert sound of ironic chuckles here].

The manager Tony Thompson lived in the penthouse with his wife and three handsome sons [if you cracked an invite up there your name rapidly advanced a massive leap on the leader board].

I went up.

With one of the cool girls.

A mercy entry – she was part of the ‘Cool Crowd’ with whom I hung out, by no choice of theirs, but because they were the offspring of my parents’ friends.

She’s fat now – I’m thin [But why couldn’t I be then when I gave a shit and needed to be popular?].

They were allowed to be teenagers.

I was allowed to watch them.

So most of the time they were safe to include me by exclusion – inviting me everywhere, knowing that I wouldn’t be allowed to go.

They’d suntan outside the Lifesavers Club, competing for the attention of Goldie – the sun-bleached-tousle-haired-lifesaver, who’d broken more hearts than he’d resuscitated. Guys wanted to be him, girls wanted to be with him.

I wanted to be with anyone other than my parents waiting to turn sixteen.

I remember having witnessed them smooching, smoking, sneaking out and getting slammed – accompanied by feelings of soul-contaminating shame, feelings stemming from a design of values my parents had tattooed on my cerebellum.

Eventually I lazered them loose. They didn’t get far. They now envelop my entire body in a design of a Phoenix bird – rising from the ashes of the Blue Marlin Hotel.

On “Countries Of The World Night” Uncle Dave came as ‘Thailand’ – with a zillion neckties tied around him.

Uncle Keith came in his jogging gear – ‘Iran’.

I went as ‘Romania’.

That’s because I’d chosen to stay in my room rather than attend such a lame event – so had Patrick Swayze.

The Cool Crowd were at a disco in town.

The next day I turned sixteen and, like every year, we spent my birthday on the road home.

I was lobotomized.

I was Jack Nicholson at the end of ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’.

Which is exactly what Aunty Cecile [real-life bird’s nest pinned in her hair!] came as on “Movie Night”.

“How old do you think I am?”

“Isn’t my baby beautiful?”

Is your epiglottis in danger of being swallowed?

Not mine.

I’m expected to answer questions like these all the time.

I get asked these questions because I’m a freak of nature – like one of those people who attract lightning bolts, and I’m forced to answer them.

I’m forced to answer them because I have no choice in the matter.

I have no choice in the matter because I cannot lie.

That’s right. There it is. It’s out there – I am incapable of lying.

And people supernaturally seem to know this.

My inability to deceive is not only evident in the obvious – like a whopping uncover-up story, an off-white lie, and a ‘no Oscar to the lady with the fake illness’ performance.

Even in silence the truth is broadcasted by my face.

Disclosing my number to demonstrate what happens when I attempt to hide behind a telephone would be privacy-suicide. Sorry.

Case study #9347945608456983456∞ shall have to suffice:

Answering “Absolutely,” after a guy at a wedding asked me, “Do you think I’m fat?”, it was later revealed to me that he was a psychiatric patient suffering from Body Dismorphic Disorder, and I had possibly set him back years in therapy.

Later, this same man asked me if I thought his ugly girlfriend was pretty.

I said nothing.

“I knew it!” he screamed.

“I said nothing!” [twice to one man in one night God!]

“You didn’t have to,” he pointed at my face, “You. Cannot. LIE!”

And so, if you have a shred of pity for me, read the following and, just this once, kindly bare before me the naked truth:

I am the product of an Apartheid-supporting family. I am also the product of a family so petty, a grandparent despised their grandchild into adulthood for observing a rotten front tooth while perched upon his knee.

Hence, I do not want to find a microfibre of pettiness entwined anywhere in the fabric of my being.

Is it?

I understand the irrationality of petty Apartheid.

The thought of “Whites Only” insignia offends my cerebral cortex.

However, on instinct I act as if they didn’t.

I’d like to see a mental Pass Book every time I wonder when they’re going to stop allowing illegal immigrants across the border, and give us whitey’s a chance to make up numbers.

I baulk at the sight of Heidi Klum and Seal kissing.

A black man may take the front seat in a taxi – I’d rather be left standing next to my broken down vehicle in quicksand than climb on board.

And I’ll gladly step off the pavement if he’s walking toward me – even quicker if he’s approaching from behind with speed!

I shall not attend any black club, restaurant, shop or church. The very thought makes me contort in my chair in such a way I may need a chiropractor – a white one.

I find a white waiter serving black customers unfitting, a white woman holding a black baby biologically immoral, a white beggar unjustifiable [and always give him more money], and many more of these consciously illogical black-man-invading-white-world situations abhorrent.

And that’s the brutal truth.

Now it’s your turn.

Do these ingrained reactions toward a history of petty Apartheid make me a petty person?

Chapter 1

Go ahead.

Ban it.

Strike it from the school curriculum.

Take every Afrikaans page that’s ever been penned and burn it in front of the Voortrekker Monument.

Change the name of every Afrikaans-name-bearing city, suburb, town, highway, street and residential driveway.

Gag the mouths of every remaining Afrikaans-speaking South-African*.

You’ve been trying to crush Afrikaans into all kinds of zero since 1994.

But this behavior has been extremely shortsighted, and should be reversed with immediate effect!

And here’s the reason why:

Chapter 2

Back in the ‘90’s on a trip abroad, a friend and I decided to climb to stand at the feet of the statue of Christ that towers with outstretched arms over the city of Rio.

About half way up we stumbled upon a refreshment stand.

As hydrated as the compressed leaf I’d left in my biology book from standard five, it was the greatest thing I’d seen in Rio so far, and that statue was going to take a lot to beat it.

We praised the foresight of the Brazilian tourism industry, and scrambled toward the small oasis alongside other survivors with identical thought-bubbles hovering above their desiccated brows.

Thankfully we were nowhere near Jo’burg, because our spiral-perms had sweated flat. Our “I-HEART-RIO” vests revealed our army-tans. Our denim cut-offs revealed our why-wax-who’s-gonna-know-us-here? legs. Our slops restrained crimson feet ending in swollen yellow blisters between our first and big toes.

Unfortunately however, I found myself standing behind the second greatest thing I’d seen in Rio so far, and that statue was quickly descending off my list of “things-to-do-in-Brazil”.

Pressed up in front of me in line, stood the most good-looking guy I’d seen since Tom Cruise [still cool then] in the In-Flight movie.

“WOW!” I exhaled into his face.

I impressively multitasked by holding his gaze, fracturing Anja’s ribs, throwing back liquid and squealing, “how hot’s this guy???” simultaneously.

[In retrospect – other than exhausted, I cannot imagine a plausible reason as to why I didn’t lift up my camera and take a close-up of him at the same time.]

Unbelievable, I’ll bet you’re wondering. From whence had a vision of beauty such as I summoned up the kind of courage not even the Dutch could lay claim to?

Was I high on South-America’s gross domestic product?

Had my animal instinct been unleashed through fatigue?

Had hallucinations been brought on by sunstroke?

No.

I was brimming with confidence because I was speaking in Afrikaans!

Chapter 3

“Thanks!” he replied.

“…”, I snapped back in a quick-witted recovery.

Why could he respond with this crippling answer?

Because he was from Hillbrow.

Epilogue

Okay, not the textbook case study I was looking for, but a deeper investigation here will reveal that Afrikaans is a powerfully surreptitious method to infiltrate other nations.

And has the potential to make every single South-African a Johannes Bond!

*Axing the springbok from the national rugby team jersey is off-sides. He cannot speak Afrikaans.

…but the oxen can.

It’s been drummed, whipped and beaten into him before, during and since the Great Trek with such affliction that I don’t think he’d have the audacity to speak anything else!

So let’s send him back to the Holland-ish, Germany-ish, France-ish area from whence he came.

And there it fell – the square peg through the square hole.

It was lucky, because at any moment, after the years of grinding, its corners had so worn away it was almost about circular.

The problem of my low self-esteem was my puzzle.

I’d always used my father as the answer, and tried to work my way backwards as to why this was so.

But, being forced to rewind here has revealed a different solution.

Because my father was a racing driver, we never saw much of him when were kids, and that unexpectedly vaporized him from the equation.

The actual reason is this:

One day my father took us to America.

Chapter 2

We stumbled off the airplane, jetlagged and disoriented, like little drunks being carried out of a bar after a Big Night Out.

We were dumped out of our cab on the sidewalk outside the New York Hilton – a hallucination of the tallest building we’d ever seen in our lives, so real our ears popped in the elevator on the way up to our floor.

We fell into our room not knowing what to do first – cry, sleep, vomit, or spinaroundincirclesanddropdownontheflooranddie!

But suddenly, something cleared all that up for us.

Everything else in the universe warped backwards into the vacuum of a giant black hole…

Out of its centre emerged a super-terrestrial object we’d only read about in comics…

We stood there in a catatonic stupor… at our first close encounter… with a television of the first kind…

That was the beginning of a six-week race for the remote control.

Which in retrospect is probably the reason we never came home morbidly obese – until then the only food we’d been exposed to was home-cooking and the Airport-Star Roadhouse before Friday night’s Drive-In movies.

We went to Hamley’s Toy Shop.

All four stories of it!

We bought so much stuff.

For so cheap!

Because two American Dollars cost one Rand.

RollerskatestheMuppets[eventhoughwedidn’tknowwhotheywere]modelcarsandmotorbikes
cowboysandindiansandtheirhorsesBarbieandKen[eventhoughwedidn’tknowwhotheywere]
andtheirhousestheircarstheirtenniscourtstheirgymnasticbarsmonstersandaliensandallothe
renemiesofBatmanandSupermanandIronmanandeveryotherManMarvelevercreatedScaletrix
[!!!]Artari’sSPACEINVADERSPACMANASTEROIDSbabydollsthatcriedandpeedintheirnappies
fakemoneyfakemonstersfeetthatglowedinthedarkfakevampiresteethfakebloodfakemachine
gunsthatshotfakebulletshugefakerocksfakefakesofeverythingfakeIcouldimagineinmyknown
world…

We acted like wedding guests at a buffet.

Where had we been while all of this had been going on behind our backs???

How could the world have hidden this from us all of this time???

Chapter 3

But I also remember seeing a fruit stall with pickings we’d only seen in illustrations of Eden.

It’s sign read: ‘…from South-Africa’

[!]

And I remember a restaurateur running to summon one of his staff that hailed from our ‘home town’.

He was from Kenya.

[!!]

I remember my father’s acquaintances asking how we “got around what with all them lions and tigers in the streets and all”.

[!!!]

I remember the Disneyland Parade – that was really a storm cloud in disguise, which would eventually come to rain heavily down on ours.

Chapter 4

We cried ourselves to sleep almost every night back home.

And awoke every morning to the soundtrack of ‘It’s A Small World’.

But I realise now that it was not.

The only world that was small, was ours.

Epilogue

Now, with my self-respect restored, I realise that America’s like the A-Team – great when we were young.

I’m sorry, that’s realiZE.

I’m South-African.