Monday is far away at Mzoli's
Bright sun rays on my face and I have a headache. Scattered about the room were my clothes from last night. A white linen jacket over the chair. A belt on the floor. A pair of trousers with its legs in a knot in a laundry basket, hiding a wallet and a set of house keys. A pink tie molesting a yellow bra. Only then did I remember that I was at a wedding. The woman asleep next to me drove us home. And just as well too, the throbbing in my head is proof enough that I had no business behind the wheel.
Outside the sun was high and the panorama of the mountain face was clear in a blue sky beyond the leafy trees. Along the road that divides these trees from the palm trees, and the churches from the mosques, lies a corner shop. Across another road from the shop is a phalanx of casual labourers seated on rocks by the curb. Their languid vigil is broken only by nightfall and the odd bakkie (pick-up van) pulling along side to offer piece work. I avoid eye contact lest I hire a gardener out of pity. In the shop the eggs are small, the bread thin and the Sunday papers bulky with advertising. Eggs on toast, headlines, a strident editorial and a careful reading of the book review section. Apart from the din of speeding cars on the highway outside, it is quiet. But surely there is more to life than the next day, Monday. And indeed there is. There is Mzoli’s.
I had promised one of the guests at the wedding from outside town that there was more to Cape Town than he could see from the highway. I told him that apart from leafy expensive suburbs, ubiquitous road works, large shopping malls, even larger parking lots and the strange creole population with their incomprehensible patua, there are noisy, flashy and colorful drinking halls where black people can make noise during the day and beer is sold on a Sunday. Bella, the wedding guest, had flown over from Zambia the week before and could not understand a word from the creole shop tellers and their patua while on his rabid shopping sprees. While still recovering from the relatively cheap local price of single malt whiskey, he expressed his concern, between wedding speeches, of the absence of rich, ambitious and cantankerous black men such as himself, by his casual observation. In short, he wanted to know where the black Africa of the new democratic South Africa had gone. “Don’t worry Bella” I said. “I will take you to Mzoli’s. After all, this is my town” (And it indeed it is).
And so, enter Gugulethu, the black township just off the highway to the airport and the other side of the railway line from the creole population with their strange patua. In Gugs there are neither trees nor palm trees. Neither shopping malls nor mosques. Neither a McDonalds nor a Madrassa. Instead there is a boundless fleet of Toyota Cressidas (1 in 3 cars is a Toyota Cressida) in varying stages of disrepair constantly roaming the streets that are teaming with pedestrians, lined with terraced houses and blessed with the free spirit of a dogs scrounging for food. And yet in the middle of it all this, crammed into once spot, on weekends there is a hive of activity and overcrowding. There is a quagmire of parked cars (and not just Toyota Cressidas), a concentration of shabeens (where liquor is sold from a house without a license), all four automated teller machines (rarely are the ATMs of the four major our banks found on one city block), loud music, an infantry of street hawkers and a forest of mobile toilets. All of this is built around a single butchery, Mzoli’s.
Chrip, Chirp squeaks the central locking on Stormy (my girlfriends car) and I throw myself into the throng of the Mzoli crowd. There on to the busy pavement is Bella with a whole unit of people that include his wife and my sister. “Ah, I see you made it” I say. And then I add, while gesticulating to the crowd around us “Welcome to Mzoli’s”. Bella and the unit of people look bewildered. They don’t know where to start. They are also pretty anxious about being robbed. So I take the lead. “Follow me!” I command. I take the unit to a cordoned off eating area where there are benches in the shade, a DJ with speakers the size of small boats and a dance area across an asphalt street. Every where there are people in action; people eating, people dancing, people looking good and other people simply looking.
Shouting now over the music, I bark out what has to be done. “First, we have to secure a bench to sit at. Second, we have to buy beer from the shebeens in the houses that surround us. Third, we have to buy the meat from Mzoli’s butchery and take it to the braai (barbecue) masters at the back to be braaied.” This is standard Mzoli procedure and the idea of Mzoli’s business, when it started was a simple one; after you buy your meat from the butchery, why bother take it all the way home to braai and eat when you could braai it and eat it right there at the butchery, finish and klaar. And so, Mzoli butchery will, in addition to selling you meat, marinade it and braai it for you with a small fee for the marinade only. You can then at leisure sit down outside on plastic furniture and eat your delicious and tender braai meat to the music coming out of the boot of your own car or, as more usual with me, listen to the music coming out of other peoples cars. This is where being the rich, ambitious and cantankerous black man comes into play, with expensive cars and equally expensive sound systems in the boot.
And so there I was in this epic queue in a butchery that is not designed to hold that many people and without air conditioning. Bella and the rest of the unit had squeezed onto one half of a bench in the crowd and were holding their position and armed with only beer and ice against the throng of a boozing, eating and dancing crowd while they waited for me to bring the beef. Standing in the slow moving queue, I was ahead of a group of rather beautiful people of the creole population who were kind enough to keep my place while I took a phone call. Among them were a couple of guys under carefully chosen summer clothes and sun glasses with a beautiful specimen of a woman among them. After I bought the meat, I jumped the queue for the braai masters with the help of a little bribe for an industrious braai master. I returned to Bella and my unit with a bounty of hot, spiced, tender braaied meat which we washed down with cold beers.
“How did you get your meat braaied so fast” asked one of the creole men who was in the queue behind me. He was surprised to find me polishing off a pork chop while him and his crew of the immaculately dressed waited for their food to have their turn in the boundless queue for the fire.
“Why, I bribed the braai master of course. This is South Africa after all. Somethings take a little encouragement” I replied, with a smug smile.
“I wish we had done that” said the beautiful specimen of a woman from behind tinted sunglasses. “We have been waiting for ages”.
“Well it is all part of the experience” I said, from behind my own pair of tinted sunglasses. “I remember the good old days at Mzoli’s” I went on. Sensing a good conversation coming on, the two of them, woman and boy, took a step closer to listen to what I had to say in the pulsating noise under the afternoon sun.
The boy introduced himself as Greg, and the girl as Mags. Then I carried on…”Things are not as they used to be. Mzoli’s has become quite popular. It is no longer that quirkly place from where you could escape the calculating madness of the city and its all its fees. Now tour buses are a regular feature at Mzoli’s, dumping whole populations of camera happy project managers from far away countries where garbage is recycled into five different categories. Mzoli’s is now the feature hang-out spot of countless magazine center pages and is also (this one really gets to me) the place to which young and naive first year students of my University are transported to give them the feel of the real Cape Town”
Mags chipped in and said “And now you can’t find a table anymore”.
“Neither can you find a cold beer in any of the shebeens” said Greg and we all nodded in commiseration.
In response I said, “Well I’ve got some cold beers. I brought ice and a cooler bag. Want one?”
“Yes sure, thanks” said Greg.
And so a quick friendship was formed as we then went on describe our mundane lives. Mags, the shapely woman with fantastic legs extending out of her white shorts, told me about training to be a dentist at the University where a lot of the creole population attend. Greg said he sells wedding dresses in a small shop on one of the main streets of the southern parts of the city.
Greg and Mags, it seemed to me, were part of a much larger crowd of men dressed as boys. A group of people dressing down on the weekend to get relief from what I presume is the suffocating formal dress code of their week day jobs. Strangely, there wasn’t another girl among them and yet Mags seemed to be with none of them. Though she was by Greg side all the while. They seemed to me, the way they freely associated with each other, Mags and Greg, to be a sort of asexual best-friends pair. If anything, I think Greg was attracted to me. He kept stepping closer to me as we chatted and drank beer. In any case, we had to be close to hear each other speak, since it was so noisy. I, on the other hand, kept drifting towards Mags, hoping to somehow accidentally touch her pale and (I imagine) smooth skin or make her laugh to see her extraordinarily white teeth again.
Bella, my sister and the rest were occupied with drinks, meat and holding the table and were in any case out of earshot. The three of us, Mags, Greg and I were every now and then interrupted by a boy or two from the rest of their clan, who crashed in and said this or that in their creole patua and this and that about booze, Brazil and where else to go that afternoon. They were quite drunk. One of them, who seemed to me even more attracted to me than Greg was, put his arm around me and spoke into my face like an aroused abusive lover. He then squeezed one of my nipples before Greg stepped in to my rescue and asked me to excuse his friend whose name was not “John” after all.
Our little love triangle continued despite all this. Better still, Greg was off some place for a short while, leaving Mags all to myself. She was quite charming in that interim period and seemed to lavish me with quite enough attention in Gregs absence. To be honest, I am not entirely sure what we spoke about. I suppose we both made fun of the Jack Daniels promotion that was on at Mzoli’s and the cause of much of the noise. As part of the promotion, there was a huge black truck and trailer, dwarfing the matchbox size Gugulethu houses, parked outside the butchery and was the central focus of the afternoons entertainment.
“What is with the bodygaurds?” she asked rhetorically. “They are so Saturday night. And this is Sunday afternoon!”
“Yeah” I said “And do we need this coterie of tall slim girls with neither a pair of buttocks nor a taste for braaied food trying to sell a drink they don’t like. Give me back the good old days at Mzoli’s any time”.
Then mags asked “So where is your girl friend this afternoon?”
“She is at home watching the cricket” I replied, trying to look unfazed by the bold confrontation. After a pause, we continued chatting away as before.
Greg soon returned with a little meat finally, but neither Greg nor Mags ate any, strangely. I too, though I am usually quite greedy, only took a skittish nibble at the tender meat. Sometimes the whole meat procedure at Mzoli’s is just so you don’t seem out of place. Greg and Mags eventually moved on, with their roaming team of acolytes, deeper into the crowd and our little love triangle was broken. Greg said I should drop by the shop sometime and we could get up to something some weekend or other.
Back into stormy, with the left over beers in the boot and the sun low over the horizon, I took the back streets home. I drove through the ghetto’s and the graffiti gang territories in a happy daze that took me most of the way back to my leafy streets before I realized I was driving with my boot open.
I think it is time to find another Mzoli’s. I need to strike a little deeper into the black township, where people’s ambition and life insurance policies still fear to tread. To find another food outlet with adjacent constellation of shebeens. But maybe before that I will drop in on Greg sometime.
