TEVOR'S TRIALS
It was a night to remember... for all the wrong reasons
BY the end of high school I’d become a mogul. My tuckshop business had evolved into a mini empire that included selling pirated CDs I made at home.
I had carved out my niche, and was having a great time; life was so good as an outsider that I didn’t even think about dating. The only girls in my life were the naked ones on my computer. While I downloaded music and messed around in chat rooms, I’d dabble in porn sites here and there. No video, of course, only pictures. With online porn today you just drop straight into the madness, but with dial-up it took so long for the images to load.
It was almost gentlemanly compared to now. You’d spend a good five minutes looking at her face, getting to know her as a person. Then a few minutes later you’d get some boobs. By the time you got to her vagina, you’d spent a lot of quality time together.
In September of Grade 12, the matric dance was coming up. This was the big one. I was again faced with the dilemma, confronting another strange ritual I did not understand. All I knew about the matric dance was that, according to my American movies, this is where it happens. You lose your virginity. You go and you ride in the limousine, and then you and the girl do the thing. That was literally my only reference. But I knew the rule: cool guys get girls, and funny guys get to hang out with the cool guys with their girls. So I’d assumed I wouldn’t be going, or if I did go it wouldn’t be with a date.
I had two middlemen working for me in my CD business, Bongani and Tom. They sold the CDs that I copied in exchange for a cut.
Tom was in my grade but went to a government school, Northview, a proper ghetto school. Tom handled my CD sales over there. Tom was a chatterbox, hyperactive and go-gogo. He was a real hustler, too, always trying to cut a deal, work an angle. He could get people to do anything. A great guy, but fucking crazy and a complete liar as well.
One afternoon Tom came over to my place. I told him I didn’t have a date.
“I can get you a girl to go with you to the dance,” he said. “No, you can’t.” “Yes, I can. Let’s make a deal.” “I don’t want one of your deals, Tom.”
“No, listen, here’s the deal. If you give me a better cut on the CDs I’m selling, plus a bunch of free music for myself, I’ll come back with the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen in your life, and she’ll be your date for the dance.”
“Okay, I’ll take that deal because it’s never going to happen.”
“I’m going to find you a date. She’s going to be the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen, and you’re going to take her to the matric dance and you’re going to be a superstar.”
The dance was still two months away. I promptly forgot about Tom and his ridiculous deal. Then he came over to my house one afternoon and popped his head into my room. “I found the girl.” “Really?” “Yeah. You have to come and meet her.”
The two of us jumped on a bus and headed into the city.
The girl lived in a run-down block of flats. It was dark in the entrance. The lift was busted, so we walked up several flights.
Ten minutes later the door opened and the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life walked in. She was . . . Good Lord. Beautiful eyes, beautiful golden yellow-brown skin. It was like she glowed. No girl at my high school looked anything like her. “Hi,” she said. “Hi,” I replied. I was dumbstruck. I had no idea how to talk to a girl that beautiful. She was shy and didn’t speak much either. There was a bit of an awkward pause. Luckily, Tom’s a guy who just talks and talks. He jumped right in and smoothed everything over. “Trevor, this is Babiki. Babiki, Trevor.”
Over the following weeks we went down to Hillbrow a few more times to hang out with Babiki and her sisters and her friends.
Babiki and I never went on a date alone. It was always the two of us in a group. She was shy, and I was a nervous wreck most of the time, but we had fun. Tom kept everyone relaxed and having a good time. Whenever we’d say goodbye, Babiki would give me a hug, and once she even gave me a little kiss. I was in heaven. I was like, Yeah, I’ve got a girlfriend. Cool.
As the dance approached, I started getting nervous. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have any decent clothes. This was my first time taking out a beautiful girl, and I wanted it to be perfect.
We’d moved to Highlands North when my stepfather’s garage went out of business, and he moved his workshop to the house. One afternoon Tom and I were at the house. Tom was telling Abel about my date, and Abel decided to be generous.
He said I could take a car for the dance.
Once I had the car, I desperately needed something to wear. I was taking out this girl who was really into fashion and, except for my Timberlands, everything I owned was shit. I was limited in my wardrobe choices because I was stuck buying in the shops my mother let me go to, and my mother did not believe in spending money on clothes. She’d take me to some bargain clothing store and tell me what our budget was, and I’d have to find something to wear.
At the time I had no clue about clothes. My idea of fashion was a brand of clothing called Powerhouse. It was the kind of stuff weightlifters wear to the gym, baggy track pants with baggy sweatshirts. The logo was a cartoon of this giant bodybuilding bulldog wearing wraparound sunglasses and smoking a cigar and flexing his muscles. On the pants he was flexing all the way down your leg. On the shirt he was flexing across your chest. On the underwear, he was flexing on your crotch. I can’t lie, I thought Powerhouse was the baddest thing in the world.
Bongani, the other middleman from my CD business, found out I had a date, and he made it his mission to give me a makeover.
I went to my mom and begged her to give me money to buy something to wear for the dance. She finally relented and gave me R2 000. It was the most money she’d ever given me for anything in my life. I told Bongani how much I had to spend, and he said we’d make it work.
He took me shopping and we bought a calf-length black leather jacket, which would look ridiculous today but at the time was very cool. That alone cost R1 200. Then we finished the outfit with a pair of simple black pants, suede squaretoed shoes, and a cream-white knitted sweater.
Once we had the outfit, Bongani took a long look at my enormous Afro. I was forever trying to get the perfect 1970s Michael Jackson Afro. What I had was unruly and impossible to comb, like stabbing a garden fork into a haystack.
“We need to fix that fucking hair,” Bongani said.
“What do you mean?” I said. “This is just my hair.” “No, we have to do something.” Bongani lived in Alexandra. Bongani dragged me to a hair salon down the street. We went in and sat down. The woman touched my hair, shook her head, and turned to Bongani.
“I can’t work with this sheep,” she said. “You have to do something about this.” “What do we need to do?” “You have to relax it. I don’t do that here.” “Okay.” Bongani dragged me to a second salon. I sat down in the chair, and the woman took my hair and started painting this creamy white stuff in it. She was wearing rubber gloves to keep this chemical relaxer off her own skin — which should have been my first clue that maybe this wasn’t such a great idea. Once my hair was full of the relaxer she told me, “You have to try to keep it in for as long as possible. It’s going to start burning. When it starts burning, tell me and we’ll rinse it out. But the longer you can handle it, the straighter your hair will be.”
I wanted to do it right, so I sat in the chair and waited and waited for as long as I could. I waited too long. She’d told me to tell her when it started burning. She should have told me to tell her when it started tingling, because by the time it was actually burning it had already taken off several layers of my scalp. I was well past tingling when I started to freak out. “It’s burning! It’s burning!” She rushed me over to the sink and started to rinse the relaxer out. What I didn’t know is that the chemical doesn’t really start to burn until they’re rinsing it out. I felt like someone was pouring liquid fire onto my head. When she was done I had patches of acid burns all over my scalp.
I was the only man in the salon; it was all women. It was a window into what women experience to look good on a regular basis. Why would they ever do this? I thought. This is horrible. But it worked. My hair was completely straight. The woman combed it back, and I looked like a pimp, a pimp named Slickback.
Bongani then dragged me back to the first salon, and the woman agreed to braid my hair. She worked slowly. It took six hours. Finally she said, “Okay, you can look in the mirror.” She turned me around in the chair and I looked in the mirror and . . . I had never seen myself like that before. It was like the makeover scene in my American movies, where they take the dorky guy or girl, fix the hair and change the clothes, and the ugly duckling becomes the swan. I’d been so convinced I’d never get a date that I
I’m going to find you a date. She’s going to be the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen, and you’re going to be a superstar My hair was completely straight. I looked like a pimp, a pimp named Slickback
He writes: “In the hood, even if you’re not a hardcore criminal, crime is in your life in some way or another. There are degrees of it. It’s everyone, from the mom buying some food that fell off the back of a truck to feed her family, all the way up to the gangs selling militarygrade weapons and hardware.”
He says crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: it cares. “Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programmes and part-time jobs and opportunities for advancement . . . Crime doesn’t discriminate.”
Memoirs, by nature, are self-centred (some more than others, of course).
But Noah’s book is as much about sociopolitics and his mother as it is about himself. Nombuyiselo Noah’s presence is heavy in the book — much of it reads like a love letter to her. In one passage, Noah talks about his mother teasing him when he started growing into his looks (and was no longer an “ugly” teenager), saying he was prettier than she was.
He writes: “No son wants to talk about how hot his mom is. Because, truth be told, she was beautiful. Beautiful on the outside, beautiful on the inside. She had a self-confidence about her that I never possessed. Even working in the garden, dressed in overalls and covered in mud, you could see how attractive she was.”
He writes about the tough love she gave him — the hidings in particular. “My mom never gave me an inch. Anytime I got in trouble it was tough love, lectures, punishment and hidings. Every time. For every infraction.”
While the debate rages about whether spanking is a form of abuse, Noah often felt like physical punishment from his mother came from a place of love rather than cruelty.
He quotes his mother as saying: “If I don’t punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesn’t love you. If the police get you, the police don’t love you. When I beat you, I’m trying to save you. When they beat you, they’re trying to kill you.”
But his experience of punishment at the hands of his stepfather, a violent alcoholic named Abel who later shot Noah’s mother in the head, was something else: “In all the times I received beatings from my mom, I was never scared of her . . . The first time Abel hit me I felt something I had never felt before. I felt terror.”
Observing the relationship between his mother and Abel: “[He] wanted a traditional marriage with a traditional wife. For a long time I wondered why he ever married a woman like my mom in the first place, as she was the opposite of that in every way. If he wanted a woman to bow to him, there were plenty of girls back in Tzaneen being raised solely for that purpose.”
The traditional man wanted a woman to be subservient, but was attracted to independent women, Noah quotes his mother as saying. “He’s like an exotic bird collector. He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.”
Noah also explores his relationship with his Swiss biological father (Born a Crime is a reference to his being born of racially mixed parents during apartheid).
Noah lost contact with his father as a teenager and only reconnected with him when his mother insisted on it at age 24, when the comedian’s career was taking off.
He writes about craving his father’s approval with such honesty and vulnerability that you want to give him a hug and tell him everything will be all right.
Noah has built his career on selling himself as the everyman: the guy who can relate to different racial and social groups.
While it hasn’t always been believable, with Born a Crime he makes a convincing case: he’s spent his life as an outsider. Clichéd as it may be, Noah embodies the South African story that should be more common than it is: an awkward teenager who survived abuse; someone who couldn’t afford university but went on to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He embodies the tale we try to sell: that of triumph over adversity.