The other day, actually the past two weeks or so, I was in a bit of a slump. I blame the heat for the most part, but it just happened to be the kind of day that I was content to not even get dressed and instead just order take out while watching Netflix shows that I don't even care much about.
It happens.
So, to get out of it, on Wednesday, I decided to play a game with myself. I started listing all of the interesting things that have happened in my life. My thought was that if I'm the kind of person who would lay around in bed all day doing fokol (yes, this is a post about South Africa, so we're getting right in to it), it would be a short list. It was not. It was rather extensive and rather, well, interesting. I was kind of impressed with myself.
It lead me to realize that I haven't talked much about South Africa in specific terms. I mostly talk in general terms to customers on the other side of the bar. "Hey Pete, how was South Africa? What's it like?" "Well...[launches in to a fairly standard speech about the political/social issues]." But I don't talk much about what I did. In the interest of explaining how interesting I am, here is the story of (simultaneously) one of the coolest and worst jobs I ever had.
(A disclaimer: I'm feeling long-winded tonight and I figure I owe you something on the longer side after my summer vacation.)
The Time I was a Driver for a Liquor Store in South Africa
I've mentioned this fact before, but like most of what happened in SA, not in detail. It was something of a passing curiosity and I think the reason I never talked too much about it was because I chalked it down to the long list of odd jobs I've had. Food service, retail, whatever category being a carny falls into and lots of others, I've had a lot of interesting jobs. So I think I glossed over it.
So here's how it fell into my lap. My entire duration there, minus the time I was in Pretoria both hating and loving life (that's a story for another time), I worked at SlipStream Sports bar (SSS) in Grahamstown; a small college town in a rural valley which has a long historic past, but is really well known for hosting the world's third largest annual arts fest and having Rhodes University, an institution that holds the dubious honor of having the first or second highest rate of on-campus drinking per capita in the world. Also, fun with complicated grammar and long sentences. My given job was "manager", a task I performed about three times. Mostly I was the doorman, taking money for the events that charged covers and sometimes filling in behind the bar on slower nights when one of the barmaids needed to study for an exam.
When the students were in town, the job was packed. When they weren't, it was a horrifying experience of suicide inducing boredom and skint brokedness like you can't imagine. The bar was actually owned by the liquor store across the street, Buddy's, which was an establishment planted firmly on the line between being an actual liquor store and a shebeen (google that.)
Every once in a while, as well as our regular duties around and behind the bar, we were sometimes sent off by Buddy's to do "out bars" at weddings or university functions. This was always a tedious affair of loading up a bakkie (pickup truck) with crates of glasses, cases of cider bottles and half-empty liquor bottles, driving the four blocks to the venue (it's a small town), unloading everything, trying to make the bar look presentable with the inevitably inconvenient setup that the venue provided, breaking open half the stock, not selling even a quarter of it, loading the rest up, driving back to the bar, unloading the booze back at Buddy's and counting out our (most often) dreadful tips.
Once or twice I was used to fill in at Buddy's itself as a cashier, working from 9am to 8pm. I spent my time banging around on the horribly designed POS system, drinking instant coffee while smoking LD menthols on the brick wall outside, sometimes betting on the horse races and generally being more bored at a job than I could ever imagine.
The owner, Hannes, and his wife Lorraine were typical Eastern Cape Afrikaans, not quite overtly racist but, you knew where they stood in no uncertain terms. Their driver, Meryl, was a stout meathead of a man who became more overtly racist with each drink. They acted in the truest ways of institutionalized racism, not trusting a single black man or woman who didn't work for them but caring about those who did. At the end of the day, I'm sure they all went home to hate each other, but while at work, they were thick as thieves, trading inside jokes and even flirting to a small extent.
There were two black porters, who I knew from them carrying in the booze orders to SSS: Ruthie, and her 21 year old son Kanya (not sure if that's how it's spelled, but that's how it's pronounced). When Meryl's wife got too pregnant to work at Buddy's and he had to go help out at home, I got the gig working as the driver for Buddy's.
The flow of booze through Grahamstown was pretty simple. The breweries/distilleries shipped a few truckloads direct to the liquor stores (always a traffic-blocking event that would invariably annoy Lorraine to no end), but mostly sent their stock to massive wholesalers on the outskirts of town. These were warehouse like establishments with corrugated sheet metal stockyards filled with pallet beyond pallet of cheap beer and brandy. Imagine a Home Depot filled with booze. Our job was to pick up the wholesale booze, take it back to Buddy's, stock the store and also sort out deliveries for the various bars and restaurants in town that Buddy's sold to, at a price just above wholesale. We delivered the booze to the establishments. Then, students would pour in to said bars and restaurants, drink themselves silly and piss it all out into the gutter later that night. The circle of life. Nature!
Kanya and I got into the routine pretty quickly. Delivering to The Monastery, a rival club to SSS, was always good because it meant that, due to the parking situation, Kanya, who was 80 pounds soaking wet but could lift five times his weight in crates of Carling Black Label quarts, did most of the work while I sat on the bumper of the bakkie smoking. It also meant the end of our delivery duties. At the end I would count the cash and we would go back to Buddy's to steal a drink from the aforementioned half-empty bottles of booze reserved for the out bars and do nothing else for two to three hours.
My favorite was going to Solly's (short for Solomon, I suppose), our primary wholesaler. Solly's, actually called "Ultimate" or something lame like that, was, from the front, a space about the size of a fast food chain where wholesale orders would sit on one side and poor people would queue on the other to buy 5 liter boxes of wine and jugs (yes, jugs) of brandy. It was not an inspiring sight. We would drive onto the sidewalk, check the order against our invoice and Kanya would start loading while I handed Solly (or his son, I was never sure), massive wads of cash. I'm talking R10,000 at a go. Every day. Sometimes twice a day. All I know is that the kid counted the wad of bills faster than a bank's bill counter, I signed a paper and off we went with an incredible amount of booze packed into a bakkie the size of a Volvo station wagon.
The best part was that Solly's was located on Beaufort street, one of the main causeways through town. Starting at the university side of town, Beaufort is quiet and almost suburban. A half mile down the road where Solly's was, the crossroads from the Location (the shanty towns) and the other neighborhoods met Beaufort. Offset as it was from the town square, it was a busy area. Women would sit on the sidewalk selling produce. Every five feet was a kiosk sized store front where an Indian man sold cell phones. Across the street from Solly's was a furniture store that, on nice Friday afternoons (of which there were many), would set up a PA speaker system with microphones and a few ladies would sing Africanized gospel songs. Obviously a crowd gathered.
I timed my cigarettes carefully. When I knew we were off to Solly's (Hannes would hand me a battered marble notebook barely concealing the massive wad of cash, the whole thing tenuously held together by a rubber band), I would start the engine and light up a cigarette as I backed out of the driveway. By the time I pulled up on the curb in front of Solly's, I would have about two or three good drags left which I would wordlessly offer to the inevitable beggar standing outside asking for scraps of anything. Those small moments, when I took my final drag or two and handed off the cigarette butt to the indifferent recipient, I would look around and take it in.
Imagine Eutaw street by Lexington market at 2pm on a beautiful spring afternoon. That's the level of life on the street that we're talking about. Except South African, so increase the level of laughter and making the most of shitty situations by about 1000%.
At the end of the day, we would count the drawers at Buddy's, I would escape with my meager pay to SSS where I would invariably bitch about Hannes being a shitty boss and drink away half my pay. I was making about R150 a day, now $15, but at the time it was closer to $12.50. Not exactly baller status. So yes, it was a terrible job. I was overworked (I did a lot of the lifting, not just Kanya), was underpaid (see the next to last sentence) and had to work 11 hour days. I got an hour for lunch, but based off of what I was making, it's not like I could really enjoy it. I was so exhausted for no result that I couldn't even enjoy spending time having that beer after work or hanging out with the ex when I got home. I mostly just passed out.
I only worked the job for something like two and a half weeks, sometimes getting out of Buddy's at 7pm and having to work the door at SSS from 8pm to 3am, but I have to say, as much as I hated it at the time, it was actually awesome. Kanya was one of the best people I've ever worked with, the places I got to see were just fascinating (the Drill Hall was always interesting. Imagine a VFW hall with a Nazi flag in the upper room) and Beaufort Street was just amazing.
It was also educational. Buddy's participated in a sort of buy-back program. Once a week (Wednesdays, if I remember correctly), the poorer residents of Grahamstown were allowed to line up outside Buddy's with sacks of empty bottles. Ruthie would dutifully count them and hand the man or woman who brought them (always poor, most likely homeless), a slip of paper with an amount of credit on it. Buddy's sold the bottles back to the distributors for credit on their deliveries of fresh booze and passed on some of the savings to those who brought them in. However, only amounts under a certain figure were granted cash. The rest were redeemed as credit to the store. So, sitting outside on the brick wall next to Buddy's, drinking my terrible coffee and smoking, I would watch poor homeless men and women turn in massive contractor bag sized sacks of empty bottles (mostly taken out of trash cans or stolen from dumpsters) to gain about R20 (a sandwich's worth of cash) and over R250 of cheap brandy and beer. Instantly I understood that it was a self-perpetuating cycle.
Yes it was depressing. But I was also in no position to protest or fight back against the system. I was happy with my slave's wage and the prospect of a beer after work followed by a good night's sleep. If you had to ask me what I took away from it the most, it would be the realization that almost every job in South Africa is just servitude to higher powers.
But still, if you offered me the chance to drive across Grahamstown and do some heavy lifting at Solly's with Kanya, I would jump at it. Especially if the ladies were singing outside of the furniture store.
Minus the smoking part, though. I quit.
- Kid
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