*Biltong - a South African delicacy, meat cut into strips, salted and spiced, and hung out to dry.
GETTING EVEN
In my career of living I moved into and out of Hillbrow, the densely populated high rise apartment blocked suburb of Johannesburg, on a fairly regular basis. As a result I had a biggish circle of friends and acquaintances, and a smaller square of enemies in the suburb.
Amongst the people I considered as friends was Eric, a Sean Connery look alike in his late thirties. Eric was a boiler-maker, and thus spent a lot of his time with welding equipment.
The man was also deeply in love, with a German girl that lived in the same apartment block as me. Eric spoilt the woman, constantly contributing new pieces to her large collection of cats, not the hairy meeu-ee type; cats made out of glass, porcelain, stone, metal and ivory. It was difficult moving around in her apartment, without stepping on or bumping into these cat images, some of which were very fragile indeed.
Then this hag of a woman cheated on Eric, and not only did she cheat, she gave him the clap too, transmitted via her from the second lover. So my friend Eric suffered; suffered from a broken heart, and an itch, a drip and burning there where no man wants an itch, or the drips. Her cheating lover was German too, a construction worker that came into the city every second weekend, to rest from the hard labour he performed at the site where a new power station was being built.
I tried my best to console my friend while a doctor did his best to bring about a cure for the itches. Eric was upset; he broke down in tears every time he mentioned the damn cats he had bought, trying to calculate the amount of money he had spent on the dead images of this animal species. My suggestion that we find a way to destroy these statuettes brought a happy smile to Eric’s face, and I was committed to exterminating all her cats.
We waited for a weekend when Mr. Clap-trap would be in the city, knowing full well that on such a weekend the woman won’t be home. With Eric being a welder we had all the tools needed to cull her cats: a bottle of acetylene gas, another bottle of oxygen, a huge plastic bag used for rubbish collection, a few newspaper pages and some tape.
On the evening of the final settlement we waited, enjoying a bottle of rum, in my apartment for the population of Hillbrow to find each other’s beds and settle down for the night. At about 3am we decided that the building was quiet enough for us not to been seen on our mission, gathered our equipment and proceeded to the scene where the last action would take place in this war of retribution.
We worked fast, slipping the flat empty plastic bag under the door of the apartment, with only a few inches on the outside. The acetylene and oxygen mix was set to the required volumes, the hose inserted into opening of the bag, which was then thoroughly filled with this gas mixture, the bag bulging on the inside of the ‘lady’s’ apartment. With the tape we closed the bag so there would be no escaping gas, rolled the newspaper pages to make our fuse, taped this to the bag, lit the paper and ran for my abode dragging our gas bottles along.
Seven minutes later; the explosion; shaking the building; waking all the living. As our “bomb” contained no shrapnel, the shockwave did the work. Everything made of glass, porcelain, and some of stone, was shattered in that apartment.
The score was even: one doze of the clap equal dozens of dead and shattered glass and porcelain cats.
Months later Eric and I used the same type of “bomb” to assist the motorist of the suburb. Behind Trevor’s cafe was a vacant piece of land, with huge boulders piled on it. These boulders were used by some vagrants as shelter, where they lived under cardboard boxes.
During the day they would stand on street corners, begging to collect enough cash to top up on their mentholated spirits supply, used for drinking, and grass, used for smoking. In the evening they would settle amongst the boulders to enjoy their purchases while waiting for the inhabitants of the suburb to go to bed.
In the very early hours of the mornings they would go forth and help themselves to radios, and whatever else they could find, from parked motor vehicles which they had broken into.
The police hardly did anything about protecting the citizen’s property; they were far too busy blackmailing the prostitutes of the area into freebees enjoyed in the back of their official vans.
After losing my third car radio, and a briefcase I forgot on the back seat, and Eric losing his pick-up entirely, we had enough and decided to rid the suburb of the scourge.
We waited for the hobo’s to finish their smoking and drinking rounds, and gone into their pre-car-raiding sleep. We had already ballooned 15 big black plastic bags with the required mixture of acetylene and oxygen, which we carried to the boulders and built a tower with them, leaning against the rocks. Our newspaper fuse was fairly long, to give us enough time to get away, and settle in a pub with a beer.
The resultant bang was much louder than what we had expected, accompanied by a flash that lit up the sky for a second. It shook the whole suburb, and also the neighbouring ones. All patrons cleared the pub in seconds, to see if they could find out what caused the sobering crash of sound. Eric and I followed, pretending to be as intrigued as the rest. It took only minutes for the sirens of fire engines, police vehicles and ambulances to start criss-crossing the streets of Hillbrow, looking for the site of the bombing.
Newspapers didn’t have much of a story to print the next day, a massive explosion in Hillbrow, at an unknown location with an unknown cause. So they did print a few interviews with eye- and ear witnesses.
One guy did have some explanation. It was an UFO that crashed, he actually saw it coming in, trying its best to gain height. As too why no crash site and debris could be found, he put forward the theory that this UFO came from another dimension, and on destruction reverted back to that dimension, and thus leaving nothing that could be seen or found.
Yep, the Sci-fi guys are not always logical!
Eric and I were lucky; our bomb did not leave a crater, or any easily discernible signs of an explosion. The heat of the acetylene exploding burned the bags to ash, which blew away in the wind. I do not know what would have happened had the police identified us. South Africa was fighting a war at the time against what now is called liberation organizations, which specialized in planting bombs in restaurants, bars, railway stations and bus depots. Unexplained explosions were a sensitive issue and of great concern to the authorities!
The vagrants? They had disappeared within minutes after the big bang, running in all directions clutching their ears, not to be seen for many a month. As they had no idea what blew them out of their slumbers, they did not report to the police, fearing that the blame would be placed on them and their collection of mentholated spirits.
And car radios remained in cars for lengthier periods of time!
FLYING, IS IT FUN?
Don’t tell me flying is fun. What is the pleasure in being stuck at East London Airport, where there is no pub, for a day en-route to Port Elizabeth, because the pilot over-revved the engine or something and you have to wait for the Airline to import a new one? Where is the fun in sitting in the desert sun at Kimberley airport while the pilots try and get a punctured tyre on the airliner repaired or replaced?
Having machine guns pointed at, you and having to buy dog licenses, just because you are in an aircraft certainly don’t make it into my little book of “Good Things That Happened to Me”. (See my story “GOING on Honeymoon.)
The quality of food and the price of beer served on flights certainly don’t get any stars from me either!
Then there are the passengers! The businessmen that try and impress by pretence of doing huge deals on the their laptops; the nuns that glance out the portholes constantly to make sure the wings are still attached, or to see if the flight is accompanied by flying angels or the Grim Reaper; The company reps doing their best to deplete the plane’s bar; the professional sportsman attempting to persuade an airhostess to help him join the mile-high-club; The minor politician talking non-stop to convinc
e the entire passenger list that he actually is an important bull-shitter; the doctor eyeing his fellow passengers hoping for a heart attack or an unexpected birth so he can get his name in the newspapers. Then there are the expectant faces of those going on honeymoon, and the disappointed faces of those going home after a honeymoon; mothers trying to keep their children under control; the nonchalant pretending to be asleep; the rock band members suffering withdrawal symptoms and the historian telling all who would listen about the battles that took place on the ground below, a long time ago. I am sure you can add to this list if you are an experienced flyer!
Flying in one of those little propeller driven machines is totally a different experience, it is much more hectic!
Years ago I had to make some money quickly to pay a lawyer for helping me with a divorce. He was a mean fellow, if I did not come up with the cash he wouldn’t come up with the divorce papers. So I quickly made a deal with an importer of African curios in San Francisco, and arranged with the South West African Development Corporation to visit the Caprivi Strip area, on the northern border of that country, to obtain a shipping container of curios.
Those days Namibia was still a protectorate named South West Africa governed by South Africa. War was raging on the border, with South