I survived down the rabbit hole
Durban POISON
SOME of us start our day by waking up – if we’re lucky – and getting served divorce papers (honey, if you’re reading this, they haven’t arrived yet).
Then, driving to work, we get hijacked and locked in the boot. Later, we are subjected to a humiliating gang initiation ritual before being stripped naked and dumped on the freeway where passing motorists hoot and laugh at us.
When a police van eventually comes past, the cops snap the cuffs on us and press charges of public indecency.
Then, after two days of bending to Big Boy Mkhize’s wishes in the cells, we are told that our car has been found. We pay a bribe and are released.
Driving home in what’s left of the family vehicle, we are pulled over and fined for not being able to procure our driving licence.
This hasn’t happened to me, but it’s only a matter of time.
Not long ago my wallet with credit card, driving licence and R14.37 vanished into one of those weird suburban Bermuda triangles.
The bank cancelled my card and I made the money back by dressing up in a monkey suit and dancing outside the Spar.
Sadly, for all his big talk, Elon Musk has failed to come up with technology capable of duplicating a South African driving licence.
If Steve Hofmeyr can breed without a licence, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to drive without one.
Why pull me over and ask to see my licence when I haven’t been driving badly? When I’m doing 140km/h in a 60km/h zone, manoeuvring with deadly precision and exercising rapierlike judgement, the police should shake their heads admiringly and let me be.
Anyway, by the time they’ve caught up with the backlog of summonses and tracked me down, it’ll be, “Ben? Ah, you mean my granddaddy. He be long dead now.”
So, to spare my future grandchild the embarrassment of having a donkey pull up outside her house with a mannequin in a blue uniform tied to its back – because by then that’s what the police force will have been reduced to – I went to the traffic department. I use the word department loosely.
The parking lot was jammed with crudely fashioned bivouacs and cooking fires. Skinny goats roamed freely and chickens pecked at the tarmac.
I expected to see Angelina
Jolie appear through the smoke, designer keffiyeh wrapped around her swan-like neck, flawless belly swollen with a fresh batch of perfectly formed foetuses.
I hired a Congolese cut-throat to guarantee me safe passage to the entrance, where a brute with knife scars and no neck was lashing out at the frenzied hordes trying to get in. With seconds to spare before the 3pm curfew, I slipped past Cerberus and was in.
If outside looked like a refugee camp, inside looked like Catholic purgatory. Sad hollow-eyed people drifted from counter to counter, lips moving in silent prayer.
I joined the other lost souls in the queue of the damned that led to Persephone’s cubicle. The Earth revolved, reptiles evolved, another Ice Age came and went. Moments before I died of natural causes, a bullet-proof window was all that stood between us.
She opened her mouth and showed me her terrible teeth. Blinking her goatish eyes, she spat out a pomegranate seed. “Next,” she bleated.
It is easier to pass through the eye of a camel than it is to follow the goddess of the underworld’s instructions.
“Collect form RT6 from counter 8 and form WM3 from counter 4 then go to room 101 in the east wing for fingerprints and room 309 in the west wing for the eye test, then go to the cashier at counter 2 on the third floor and afterwards take your receipt to counter 3 on the second floor.”
During the expedition I encountered knots of strange misshapen creatures. Being closing time on a Friday, many of them were moving too quickly for their fat little legs. One toppled over and bounced down the corridor.
A grizzled hireling took my fingers and pressed them into an ink pad. Said he had been doing it for 25 years.
Then he told me to relax my thumbs. My thumbs are the most relaxed part of my body. I said I didn’t know what else I could do to get them to calm down. This made both him and my thumbs even more tense.
I could barely hear what he was saying above the extraordinary gibbering noises that public servants make when the weekend is upon them.
“Eye test,” he shouted. “But I lost my driving licence, not my eyesight,” I shouted.
My vision is more white rhino than tawny eagle and I felt like an athlete being asked to take a urine test after drinking a half-jack of testosterone.
Luckily, the regular tester of eyes must have gone home early because a woman dressed as a cleaner took me into a room and asked how many fingers she was holding up.
“Three?” I said.
“Close enough,” she said.
A few days later I noticed that my car licence was due to expire in a couple of months.
Being blessed or cursed with a job that doesn’t require me to be in one place for any length of time, I tend to move around a lot. So does my car, even though it is forever tied to Durban through its registration.
Girding my loins to once again venture into the ninth circle of hell, I was delighted to discover that my car licence could be renewed at the post office.
Of all the government departments, post offices fill me with the least amount of fear and revulsion.
The queues are usually on the abominable side, but there’s a lightness of mood among the sheeple that you won’t find in a traffic or home affairs department.
A woman with the face of a diseased kidney was processing the forms.
When my time finally came, I bounded off the bench and approached her like a puppy approaches its mother.
I gave her my Grade A greeting and a big, happy smile. She looked sideways and put her hand out. My tail stopped wagging and my ears drooped.
“Proof of residence,” she barked, sighing heavily. What? I don’t live in my car. In front of her was my ID card, temporary driving licence, passport, family photographs and DNA sample I had brought from home. Surely that’s enough? I could see my car through the window. I pointed at it. “Look, there my… ”
“Proof of residence,” she said, looking everywhere but at me or my car. “Next.”
You’d think I might have learnt by now not to make a scene at places to which I have to return at some point. Spitting and cursing and kicking an imaginary street urchin, I made my inelegant departure.
I slunk back the next day, tail between my legs and eyes dulled with disillusionment.
She showed no signs of remembering me, which counted heavily in my favour.
It came as no great surprise when she said I had to pay a penalty for renewing my registration two months’ early.
I was down the rabbit hole. On my way out, I checked the invisible sign on the door. Yep. There it wasn’t. No dogs, firearms, reason or logic allowed.