It would be a crime not to let me finish this beer

Perhaps the most chilling scene I’ve ever watched in a Hollywood movie is from True Romance (1993), written by Quentin Tarantino. Don Vincenzo, brilliantly portrayed by Christopher Walken, bursts into the trailer where Dennis Hopper lives, to interrogate him about the whereabouts of his son, played by Christian Slater, who is on the run from a Sicilian crime family.

When Hopper asks him to identify himself, Walken demurely delivers what I consider one of the chilling lines in the cinematographic history, “I’m the Anti-Christ. You got me in a vendetta kinda mood. You tell the angels in heaven you never seen evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you.”

Now, one of the things I’m most proud of about myself is that I was potty trained exceptionally well by my mother, Rosemary. I had stopped wearing nappies by age two. But if I’d had these words said to me in the deadpan manner that Walken used, I would have lost control of my bodily functions.

However, the most fascinating part of that dialogue is when, in the middle of what ended up as a torture scene, the Hopper character interrupts it by calmly asking his tormentor for a Chesterfield to smoke. The request is immediately acceded to.

The reason I went back to the “Useless Info” folder in my brain and found this scene is because of a post I saw on Facebook the other day. It read (And I paraphrase to airbrush the putrid grammar): “Seven minutes after being kidnapped I’d be asking if I can have a beer to calm my nerves.”

The gin-and-juice I was enjoying spurted through my nostrils. This is mostly because I read that and thought, “This is totally me!”

I remember waiting for roadside assistance on the R33 between Piet Retief and Paulpietersburg after hitting an asteroid crater masquerading as a pothole, simultaneously bursting two tyres, and thinking, “The next 90 minutes would be so much more bearable if I had an ice-cold beer.”

And, quite frankly, half a dozen Stella draughts at R120 a pop were once the difference between me slitting my wrists and maintaining my sanity during an eight-hour layover at Singapore’s Changi Airport, on my way back home from Hong Kong some years ago. Well, the Stellas and the Austrian sexagenarian woman who bought four of them for me in exchange for my tall tales about swimming with the crocodiles in the Limpopo River when I was an MK operative.

One of my biggest gripes about the calibre of South African criminals is that they are not adequately professional. They can’t seem to be able to make up their minds about whether they are house burglars, car hijackers, electronics thieves, murderers or rapists.

But now and then, folks encounter professional criminals. When I shared the Facebook post about asking kidnappers for a beer, a friend, Vuyo Nongogo, shared a story about a hijacking episode he was involved in.

He and his companions were driving back from a pizza collection when it happened. They were bundled into a different car, which followed their hijacked vehicle. During this most stressful ride, one of his companions jokingly remarked that their pizza was getting cold or something. Did the hijackers not stop the cars, have someone transfer the pizza to the other vehicle before driving on? These guys were clearly single-minded about what kind of criminals they are.

Another friend, Xolie Langa, says that the burglars who broke into her apartment were busy disconnecting her electronic gadgets when she told them to keep their grubby hands from her six-pack of apple cider. Not only that, she popped one open while they were busy going through her stuff. I call this progress.

All of these stories remind me of the time I lived in a block of flats on Pinetown’s King Road called Uniking, about 22 years ago. For a few weeks there had been a spate of clothing heists from the laundry line. It got so bad that folks were hanging up their clothes, plonking down on their garden chairs and literally watching them dry.

One Saturday evening I get a call from one of my neighbours to alert me that they had caught the garb thief redhanded and they were waiting for the cops to come and arrest the thief.

When I get there, about 20 minutes later, I find four men all holding Hansa 340ml dumpies, chatting casually.

At that moment, there’s a loud knock on the door and two sergeants are ushered in. This is when one of the men in the flat says, “OK, let me finish my Hansa, officers” before turning around and placing his wrists together behind him.

One of my biggest gripes about the calibre of South African criminals is that they are not adequately professional