"But I Digress ..." (16 page)

Sometimes a car is only a car

STYLE, JUNE 2001

I
AM NOT REALLY
a man. No, it's true, and it's time the truth came out: I am not really a man. It's not that I've been trying to hide it from you; I didn't know it myself until this morning. There I was, flipping through the pages of a glossy women's magazine, as one does when doing penance for sins committed and yet to come, when I came across one of those snappy polls that always purport to be the product of months of careful psychometric testing, but which were really dreamed up by a junior office worker over her lunch break. Are you a man? the magazine yelled, or perhaps shrilled. “Take our test and find out!”

The thinking, evidently, is that if you are really a man, you will be able to place a tick next to each of these cunningly devised questions. Shrugging, as one does with a monkey on one's shoulder, I took the test. There was the usual penetrative material (“Do you have a Y chromosome?”; “Do you have an Adam's apple?”; “Are your buttons on the right-hand side of your shirt?”), and a couple of a more stylish bent (“Can you make a martini?”; “Do you dislike any movie featuring an unshaven Frenchman and the women he loves?”). I was merrily chugging through, dispensing ticks like a tap-dancing water buffalo, when I came across Question 17(a): “Is your car more important than your girlfriend?” Questions 17 (b) and (c) were of similar inflection: “Do you spend more time with your car than your family?”; “Would you rather own an Italian sports car than a full head of hair?” and suchlike guff.

I ground to a halt. The truth is that I can't be a man, because I genuinely don't give a toss about cars. I sit in bars and listen to men around me talking about cars, and I wish I were at a baby shower or a press conference. I wouldn't know an Audi TT from a kick in the trousers. I don't even know if I'm spelling “TT” correctly.

If you'd ever seen my car you'd appreciate what I'm saying. My car is not a pretty sight. It's small and scuffed and other cars have driven into it. Come to that, I have driven it into other cars. My car is twisted and ugly. I leave it unlocked with the window rolled down, and nothing happens to it, because thieves are afraid of my car. They see it and say to themselves: “Oo-er.” They're scared that, if they enter my car, they'll be attacked by wolves, or find that it's a time machine, much bigger inside than outside, that will whisk them away to Pluto, or to a South Carolina bayou. It isn't money or principle that makes me drive such a car; it's that I can't be bothered to do anything about it.

When people joshingly insult my car, as they do, they frame their merry banter as though my car were an extension of me. “Ho ho,” they say, “things must be tough in the column-writing business” or “Darrel, Darrel, you're too young to give up on life.” I find it puzzling.

My car – let me make this clear – is not an extension of me. My books, on the other hand, are an extension of me, but no one ever comes around and says: “Oh, Raymond Chandler, eh? That's a bit downmarket, isn't it? Surely you can afford to upgrade to Umberto Eco by now?”

Don't get me wrong – I understand the attraction of driving a powerful car. Like any man, I want to drive the Aston Martin in
Goldfinger
, especially if it will help me with Pussy Galore. But I do know that driving it won't turn me into Sean Connery.

Besides which, I can't be fussed to learn the mechanics of the ejector seat. (I had a car with an ejector seat when I was younger, of course, but it was no good on dates. I would become all fingers and thumbs and accidentally eject my date ahead of schedule. Premature ejection is a heavy burden for a young man to carry.)

So I'm afraid I don't understand the fascination with owning the most expensive car in the office. I already have a personality, and it came free (though not easy) and didn't need to be paid off over five years, with ruinous insurance premiums.

I suppose it's a fair trade-off –no one is going to steal my car, and no one is going to steal the personalities of those guys with their white BMWs. Of course, I understand that cars mean something mystical to women as well. Women –not all women, just the type I don't like – seem to feel that a man who owns a nice car is a good bet as husband and father to their children. I am not really surprised. In the animal world, female baboons feel the same way about the male baboon with the bluest bottom. It makes the same kind of sense.

Whose line is it, anyway?

STYLE, SEPTEMBER 2001

I
AM NOT A
fuddy-duddy. (Although, I suppose, anyone who would voluntarily use the word “fuddy-duddy” in public is demonstrating some marked signs of fuddiness, not to mention more than a whiff of duddidom.) I am, in the main, an open-minded sort of fellow. The darkling byways of human behaviour may sometimes sadden me, but they no longer have the power to shock.

Indeed, I have myself known a wild night or two. Why, there was the time when I was hitch-hiking to Grahamstown and I was picked up by two Rhodes students of indeterminate gender carrying a five-litre vat of Kool-aid … but you don't want to hear about that. Suffice it to say that I still wake of a morning, screaming “The sheep is on fire! The sheep is on fire!”

So understand that I am not being more than necessarily curmudgeonly when I say: Haven't we gotten over this whole drug thing yet? Seriously, it was fun when we were kids – okay, it's still fun – but we're adults now. Aren't we meant to have some, some … oh, what's the word? … reminds me of a song by Aretha Franklin …
dignity
, that's it. I'm not even talking about the sad cases of a certain age who pull their stretchy T-shirts over their rounded bellies and go paddling out into the world of children with a couple of Ecstasy pills in the coin compartment of their wallets. Their idea of dignity is to make a point of never being the
first
person to pull off their stretchy T-shirt and wave it around above their heads.

Not much better, though, are the processions of grown-ups who come trotting back to the dinner table from the bathroom, sniffing generously and suddenly eager to discuss the last three episodes of
Survivor
, or Kant's idea of the sublime, or the great idea they've had for opening a new store that is a clothing boutique but also a place where you can buy organic vegetables and sushi. “Everyone likes sushi,” said my neighbour at the dinner table recently, her eyes rotating in opposite directions.

“I don't,” I said. We looked at each other blankly, which is as it should be. I considered adding my feelings on the subject of organic vegetables and indeed clothing boutiques, but the moment had passed.

It's not that I don't understand the special pleasures of slipping off with an illegal substance and a credit card and the same rolled up hundred-dollar note you have been carrying around ever since you went on holiday to New York in 1993. It's fun and naughty and all those things to which we as adults cling, in the forlorn hope of ensuring that there is some small corner of us that will be forever young. But it soon becomes a little tatty, frankly. It's possible to overrate the feel-good factor of crouching in a damp cubicle, bringing your face closer to the porcelain of a public toilet than your mother ever imagined in her fond dreams of your future, for no better purpose than to ingest a questionable powder only recently excavated from the small intestine of a large Nigerian.

There is nothing really glamorous about it, is there? Tiptoeing off to the men's room with an entourage of adoring cadgers and slow-eyed party veterans isn't exactly going to whisk you away to the Oscars or to the whitewashed hotel balcony in the south of France. Especially not with the quality of drugs available locally. Learn from the discomfort of my old pal Donald, who as a youth on holiday in Cape Town tried a short snifter of a Schedule A narcotic that had been liberally, not to say vindictively, and we would add amusingly, mixed with an industrial strength laxative. He spent the next three days in a variety of public bathrooms around the Cape, though not with five of his closest friends. From this he learned to avoid drugs, and Cape Town.

There are many good reasons to frown upon drugs. They encourage drug dealers, for one. They cause you to forget where you left your car keys, for another. For a third thing, they make sure you only realise that you've misplaced your car keys after you've somehow managed to drive home.

Most compelling argument for me, though, is that drugs diminish dinnerparty conversation. There is more of it, but that more adds up to so much less. Haven't we all had that uncomfortable experience of arriving at a dinner where a thoughtful host has filled the salt cellar with cocaine, but forgotten to tell you because he's still looking for his car keys, and the next thing you know, you're chattering away about, um, well, I can't remember what it was we were talking about, and anyway my tongue's a little numb, but while we're on the subject, I've though about something even more interesting – let's talk about me!

Don't call me, baby

STYLE, OCTOBER 2001

I
DO NOT HAVE
children. I have never had children, although I did once have the mumps, and on several occasions I have had house guests. I don't know if you have ever had house guests. On the whole I preferred the mumps. Mumps may cause a certain amount of physical discomfort and even temporary disfigurement, but they never say: “I wonder what's on the other channel?” or “So what are we doing tomorrow?”

At any rate, I have had better luck avoiding children than I have avoiding house guests. I avoid children the way sensible folk avoid an in-flight meal, or Mark Gillman. In the main, it is easy to avoid children. They are smaller than you and cannot run as fast, and if worse comes to worst and you are forced to fight, you can count on your greater readiness to punch dirty. Still, increasingly I am finding myself thrust into the proximity of infants.

I have long been of the opinion that aeroplanes should be divided into three classes: Business, Economy and Infant. My proposals are still tentative, but at present I conceive of Infant class as a lead-lined canister somewhere in the hold.

I'm always irate when I'm told that I cannot bring a second piece of hand-baggage onto the plane with me. The last time it happened, I pointed at some Russian-looking woman brushing wisps of hair out of her face. “But look at her!” I complained. “She's carrying two pieces of luggage!” “One of those is a baby, sir,” said the steward firmly. For some reason, women carrying babies onto aeroplanes look Russian to me. I don't know why. “But my hand-baggage isn't going to scream and discharge fluids,” I yelled. “It'll just sit there under my seat! No one will even know it's there! Tell me true – wouldn't you rather have my stylish hand-valise with retractable handle on your plane than that squirming mass of barely differentiated epithelial cells?” But as you will know if you have ever tried to rage against the monstrous regimen of infants, it was to no avail.

Babies are everywhere these days. Worse, babies are where I am whenever I go into a public place. Babies have become the new accessory. They are what Alsatian dogs were to Capetonians a few years ago: people just can't seem to go out to a restaurant without them. Happily, I have not as yet noticed any babies with red ethnic-print bandannas knotted around their necks, but that is a very small mercy indeed.

What's more, nowadays I can't even fight back by lighting a cigarette and pointedly exhaling into the push-pram that some simpering Russian woman has parked next to my table. That's what the new smoking regulations are for! To make restaurants more baby-friendly! It's an outrage. The only reason I took up smoking in the first place was that I happened to notice a packet with the warning sign: “Caution: smoking is harmful to children.”
Aha,
I thought.
All I need is a nicotine habit and no right-thinking parents will bring their bundles of mewing fluids anywhere near me. My life will be shorter, but infinitely more elegant
.

Still, although my sworn enmity to other people's children holds as firm as ever, I am slowly coming round to the notion that one of my own might not be the end of the world, one day when self-cleaning infant-wear has been invented. I sat down this morning and drew up a list of the things that children have going for them. The list is surprisingly impressive. For instance:

• Children are almost always small of stature, which makes them useful for getting to those hard-to-reach places in the home.

• Children make very desirable Scrabble opponents, being both easy to beat and fun to cheat.

• Children on the whole ask far better questions than adults. “Why is the sky blue?” and “Why does mommy wear different clothes to you?” are on the whole more likely to receive a favourable response than “Where is your column?” or “Why haven't you called?”

Children have other recommendations. Seldom do you find them wearing too much aftershave; only rarely do they pluck up the courage to make unnatural sexual requests; they are never of the opinion that you behave too childishly.

So I am gradually softening towards the wee folk, but I warn you, new parents of the nation: do not take this as a sign of weakness. Do not consider that open seat next to me as an invitation to sit down with your malodorous gurgler. Be cautioned: I have a packet of Stuyvesants, and I'm not afraid to use them.

Sealed with a kiss

STYLE, JANUARY 2002

S
AY, WHEN LAST
did you receive a love letter? I don't mean one of those insinuating SMS messages with misspelt words and no capital letters that a low class of person likes to send from bars in the early hours of the morning. Nor do I mean one of those dreary e-mail messages that arrive on your work desk and are supposed to make you think “Oh, how thoughtful!” when really they are just three lines and one of those faces created by typing a certain sequence of punctuation marks.

No, I mean a genuine, old-fashioned, handwritten love letter, sealed in an envelope with your name written on the front. Remember how your heart raced and your hands trembled! Remember that feeling, very much like swooning, when you saw your name written by the hand – the very hand! –of the one you love? Ah, the giddy, almost disbelieving joy of holding the letter and knowing that this very paper had been held by your beloved, that this paper has been marked by the indelible scrawls and squiggles of his or her love for you. It is a real object, an object that has physically travelled from them to you, not a screen that at the touch of a button will become a balance sheet or a mailbox or a magazine column. It is a letter of love, and can be nothing else.

Of all the things I miss from an earlier age – telegrams, say, and drive-ins and dressing for dinner and doctors that make house calls – I think it is the demise of the love letter that most impoverishes our modern lives. My infatuation started early. When I was 12 Shelly Whitfield gave me a love letter. Actually Shelley Whitfield didn't give it to me – she gave it to Joanna Thurley to give to me. Or was it Marge Golightly? I forget. But I have not forgotten that letter.

I carried it away, hot in the pocket of my school shirt, burning against my boyish breast, until I could open it behind the scoreboard on the cricket field. Shelley Whitfield must have borrowed her mother's lipstick as well as raiding her stationery drawer, because the outside of the envelope was patterned with Shelley's crimson lip-prints. I couldn't breathe as I held it in my hand. For weeks – ah, who am I kidding? – for years to come I studied that envelope and those lip-prints, examining the pattern of folds and swirls and cracks and valleys immortalised in lipstick. I blushed at the scarlet intimacy. Today, if I close my eyes and sit quietly, I can still remember the mingled scent of lipstick and paper, and it makes the breath catch in my throat.

I wrote back to Shelley Whitfield as passionately as I could, although that lark of applying lip-prints in boot polish didn't really have the desired results. Today, if I close my eyes and sit quietly, I can still taste school shoe. It ended of course, as all such passions must end. The differences were too great between us. She liked Bonnie Tyler and I liked Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Besides, I was too shy ever actually to speak to her. Whenever we bumped into each other at the bicycle racks of a morning and she said “Hello”, as she sometimes did, I would stammer and splutter and ring my bell to cover my confusion. Then I would snap her bra straps and run away. Did I but know it, that would not be the last relationship to end because of a lack of communication.

But that letter made an indelible impression on me. I cherish all the love letters I have ever sent or received. The love letter is erotic and poignant in a way that e-mails and telephone calls never can be. The love letter is about waiting and longing and delay, about calling up your beloved in your mind like a ghost. And that, really, is the best part, isn't it? There is a ninth-century Arabic poem by the medieval Zarif Al-Washsa that sighs:

To love is to kiss, in your mind, a hand or arm
or to send letters whose spells are stronger than witchcraft.

Love is nothing but this; when lovers sleep together, love perishes.

I can't say I encourage too fanatical an adherence to that last part, but Al-Washsa reminds us of a fine truth. I urge you: send a love letter to the one you love. Write it by hand. Send it today. Moisten the envelope flap with your tears of longing, or joy, or repentance. Bring some of the magic back. Write that letter.