"But I Digress ..." (15 page)

Operation Copulation

MARKETING MIX, SEPTEMBER 2000

T
HERE ARE MANY
ways to spice up a flagging marriage but I wouldn't have thought that visiting Brackenfell was one of them. Brackenfell, in case you've never had the pleasure of driving past it at high speed while murmuring a spell to ward off evil spirits, is a dismal suburb in the north of Cape Town. Until recently, the best thing you could say about Brackenfell is that it's neither Salt River nor Woodstock. Actually, that is still the best thing you can say about it. That is no longer, however, the most interesting thing you can say about Brackenfell, because recently Brackenfell was announced as being the lucky beneficiary of Cape Town's newest and boldest marketing initiative.

When it comes to marketing, you have to take your hat off to Cape Town, and not merely to shoo it away. Cape Town is more ready and willing to sell itself than any large town you've ever met. Cape Town is the Hansie Cronjé of seaside settlements.

It doesn't miss a trick: the last time I arrived at Cape Town airport I was handed a book of coupons, redeemable against the price of my next visit.

Above all, Cape Town's strategy is broad. In recent times, it has sold itself internationally as the only place to be if you are (a) a homosexual sex tourist, (b) interested in sleeping with under-aged girls, (c) an admirer of Earl Spencer, (d) a money launderer or (e) a real-estate speculator. Or, indeed, any combination of the above. But the Brackenfell venture is a stroke of uncommon genius.

Brackenfell is the proposed site of a new multi-million-rand lodge, to be built in anticipation of a surge in swingers' tours. It will offer adult entertainment, on-call sex therapists and communal spa-baths. What is a swingers' tour, you ask, trembling? According to a recent report, one Robin Pike is advertising Cape Town as the ideal destination for international wife-swapping safaris. Allegedly, up to 100 British and German couples each month are queuing to come south and make whoopee with someone else's spouse. Projected revenue is more than R60 million a year, which explains why the scheme has been given the thumbs-up from Satour and the Ministry of Tourism.

I must confess the idea startles me. The notion that our husbands and wives are a marketable natural resource will take some getting used to. The realisation that the Big 5 now includes Mrs Katz from down the hall, frankly, leaves me dizzy. The obvious obstacle to the scheme is that old South African bugaboo – racial intolerance. Having canvassed the fellows down at the Chalk 'n Cue, I can sadly report that many a lad who would do his patriotic duty in the cause of tourism with Mr and Mrs Hamburg or the Von Stuttgarts would draw the line at his own better half in the clutches of an Englishman.

Still, there appear to be enough takers for the proposition to be viable: Johannesburg apparently has 6000 registered swingers, Cape Town a stately 2000 and Durban, ever keen to get in on the action, boasts a game 1000. Personally, I suspect that Johannesburg has a good deal more than 6000 but most of them don't realise they're swinging. They just think they work for an advertising agency.

There are obvious questions: How does one go about registering as a swinger? Must you pay a subscription fee? Is there a board of swinging directors? What constitutes a quorum at a swingers' AGM? And who provides the refreshments afterwards? Above all, what are the benefits of being a registered swinger? Discounts on bulk purchases of paper towels and red-tinted light-bulbs upon presentation of a valid membership card? Special family rates at participating love shacks and motels? Frequent-flyer miles? There is so much to think about.

Even more boggling to the mind is the question of what scheme Cape Town will dream up to top this one. Brazil has already cornered the market in organ transplant tourism, and Indonesia has surely had the last word in hostage chic. In the marketing stakes, cities are like sharks. When they stop moving, they die. Just ask Tripoli, or Vladivostok – all the open marriages in the world won't save them now.

The foolish will always be with us

STYLE, NOVEMBER 2000

E
VERYBODY, IT SOMETIMES
seems, is trying to give up something. Some people are trying to give up the second helping of ice cream, some are trying to give up Internet porn, some people – alas, not enough – are trying to give up saying the phrase “Don't go there”. I can only encourage more good citizens to join the fight against “Don't
even
go there!” Wear ribbons pinned to your shirts, get yourself a hotline – we need to stamp out the scourge. It is not hip. It doesn't make you sound like Queen Latifah or Jennifer Lopez. It makes you sound like Mrs Huxtable on
The Cosby Show
.

And don't get me started on the habit – so enthusiastically championed by Shaleen Surtie-Richards, that sounding leviathan of the linguistic deep –of exclaiming “Hel-
lo
!” It's hard to explain precisely what “Hel-
lo
!” means, although you would recognise it if you heard it. It is generally uttered in a sort of sarcastic Californian accent, and it is intended to indicate your vast fund of common sense and finger-snapping street-smarts: “People tell me I'm a good conversationalist. Hel-
lo
! I knew that!” It is the modern version of the word “Duh!”, and it is so annoying it can make a grown man weep.

The worst thing about such lapses of good sense is that they are not confined solely to imbeciles. The people who say these things aren't only the kind of folk who wear stretch-pants beyond the age of 24, or who collect the soundtracks of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals, or who name their children Jarrod or Savannah, or who have their own talk shows on television. Some of them are in every way decent, likeable, unexceptionable individuals who suddenly, for no clear reason, lapse into the worst failure of taste.

It is a common phenomenon. Consider the perfectly sensible man, earning a good living, surrounded by a loving family, who one morning wakes up and decides to grow a moustache. Consider Mike Haysman's hairstyle. Consider the otherwise professional businesswoman, responsible and well-regarded by her peers, who takes it into her head that a cellphone that rings with the title track of
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
is both quirky and entertaining.

There is no word in English that adequately describes these unpredictable social atrocities, so I have had to borrow one from the Italians. The word I have selected is
culacino
. Strictly speaking, it refers to the mark that is left by a wet glass placed on a table, but I like the sound of it anyway. A
culacino
can crop up anywhere. It can be a thing: a
Best of Queen
CD lurking in a music collection, a Jack Kerouac paperback, a ponytail, a pendant with your name written in hieroglyphics, a patchwork leather jacket. A
culacino
can be an action: ordering a Jack Daniel's and Coca-Cola, or telling a tale at the dinner table that involves your sexual habits during the 18 months when you were single. Worst of all, though, a
culacino
is an indelible Freudian slip, a moment of madness offering an insight past the civilised mask, into the terrible beigeness of the human heart.

The reason I raise all this is that a good friend of mine is considering ordering personalised licence plates. It is a source of tremendous anxiety. Can I still be the friend of a man with personalised licence plates? If so, do I run the risk of one day waking and thinking to myself, “I know, I'll get myself a licence plate with
Untitled
written on it. That'll be cool!?”

Let's get this straight: personalised licence plates are the worst kind of
culacino
. They are bumper stickers that cost R3000. They are fluffy Garfield toys stuck to the rear window with plastic suction cups. The kind of man who would have a personalised licence plate is the kind of man who would carry a plastic Porsche keyring. I say “man” but I am being unfair – you can bet your last glue-on fingernail that Felicia has a set of personalised plates.

Appalling as the very notion is, worse is the kind of guff that people select for their plates. 007 – there's an original thought. 140MPH – ooh, you devil. The new generation of personal plates specialise in words, allowing middle-aged men to call themselves STUD or PYTHON on national roads. Even more dire is when they take the opportunity to make private jokes with their pals. I saw one sad specimen with a plate proudly announcing: LUNCH. Was he a pizza deliveryman specialising in midday service? Was he a dyslexic member of the Ku Klux Klan? Had BREAKFAST already been taken? Who cares. Yep, buddy, that was worth every cent of R3000. It saved you having to find a T-shirt saying TOSSER.

In the sharks' den

OUT THERE, FEBRUARY 2001

A
SMALL GIRL PRESSED
her face against the window and screamed. I knew she was screaming, although I could hear no sound. She looked like Edvard Munch's little sister, though tinged with a deeper shade of blue.

I looked at another window and there was another small girl, also screaming. I felt obscurely pleased. I haven't made girls emote like that since the time I shoved a shuttlecock down my trousers and sang “It's not unusual” in a Welsh accent at the Sunday School talent contest. (I was, lest the
Carte Blanche
team come knocking at my door, 10 years old myself.)

Now, as then, the girls were screaming in terror. It puzzled me. As far as I could remember, I had left my shuttlecock at home. I turned. A 12-foot shark was moving towards me, eyes small and dark like cigarette burns in a wooden table, mouth jagged and ajar like a kitchen drawer overstuffed with cutlery. I backed away, air-tank rattling against the glass of the window, the air of my exhalation escaping in a great cloud of cowardly bubbles.

I wished I could reach through the glass for one of those small girls and hold her out in front of me. Or better, I wished Clint Lishman were there. You don't know Clint Lishman. He was the little boy who beat me into second place in the Sunday School talent contest with his musical teaspoons routine.

I'm not sure precisely what prompted me to scuba-dive in the predator tank of the Two Oceans Aquarium. Perhaps it was the prospect of having to spend a whole weekend in Cape Town. Perhaps it was the fact that I had to write another column this month. For a modest fee, the aquarium takes divers on an escorted 30-minute tour of the tank. The escort is a charming young lady carrying a thin wooden stick.

Sitting on the platform above the tank, preparing to enter, I had eyed the thin wooden stick with some suspicion. “That's it, eh?” I'd murmured. “That's it,” she'd confirmed. “A thin wooden stick, hmm?” I'd ventured. “As you say,” she'd agreed, “it is a stick that is thin and wooden.”

It is a meaningful moment in a coward's life to slip off a platform into an enclosed space containing predators with teeth. All the more so when protected only by a slip of a lass with a thin wooden stick and a nasty sense of humour. My breath came quickly as we sank through the dappled blue; I patted the pockets of my wetsuit for a cigarette.

Water has its own spatial demands. It's not enough to look over your shoulder for approaching sharks; you must also check beneath and above you. It is a large tank, but well stocked. There is a large rock structure, and around it circle yellowtail and turtles, dories and dogfish and a vast stingray, easily two metres across. But my attention was taken with the five ragged toothed sharks of imposing size and mien. They are vast and impossibly silent. There is something terrible yet familiar about them, like the shadows of your own mind, or the stirrings of a bad dream before you've quite fallen asleep.

Familiarity brings comfort. They avoid humans, as wild animals do. Occasionally one or more becomes curious, but I find a firm prod with a thin wooden stick does the trick. When the big boy backed me up against the glass, I pushed him away with my hand, politely but firmly, as though I were a dieter and he a second helping of sticky pudding.

All the same, I felt heroic and terribly manly, like Sean Connery in
Thunderball
, or Nick Nolte in
The Deep
. I turned to the small girls to give them a rugged thumbs-up, but the attention spans of children these days are shameful. They had already wandered off to look at the sea urchins.

Men are from bars

STYLE, MAY 2001

I
AM ASKED MANY
annoying questions. We are all asked many annoying questions. Most questions, if you stop to think about them, are annoying, which is probably why so few people stop to think about them, either when asking or answering. There are many varieties of annoying question. “Is everything all right with your meal, folks?” is common enough, as is “He's not in his office, would you like to hold?” The magazine columnist has his own cross to bear. He must endure “Why don't you look as young in real life as you do in your photograph?” and “Why do the bubbles in a glass of champagne always go from the bottom up, even when the glass is upside down?” and “How tall is Clare O'Donoghue?”

There are some questions that simply cannot be resolved. For instance, I genuinely have no idea how many roads a man must walk down before you can call him a man, and I have even less idea why an entire generation of hippies should consider the wind to be a good place to look for the answer. These riddles arise in many guises. An annoying question I have been much asked over the years is: “What do you men talk about when you get together?” It happened again this morning.

Many women have tried to crack the mysteries of male bonding, but we have proved tougher than the DNA double helix; more wily than the human genome. The secret of male bonding has proved impenetrable to outside intelligence, simply because the secret of male bonding is precisely the same as the secret of men themselves: there is no secret. Women never quite believe this. “Nothing,” they say to themselves, “can be quite that inert. There must be something beneath the surface.”

Ladies, take it from me: men are simple. We are not Rubik's cubes. We are more like hula hoops or pet rocks. When you ask, in that adorable way, “What are you thinking about?” and we reply, “Oh, nothing,” it's not because we are too lazy or stupid to think up an endearing lie (“Um, I was just wondering whether I would experience the symptoms of a sympathetic pregnancy when one day you are with child, honey?”). Well, it is because we are too lazy or stupid to think up an endearing lie, but it's also because we want to tell you the truth. There is, almost without fail, nothing going on inside.

I sometimes catch myself at odd moments of the day and realise that I have thought about nothing and had no discernible emotion for several hours – sometimes weeks – in a row. Does it make me feel null and void? Somehow incomplete? Hell, no. I generally pull out a footstool and try to squeeze in a couple more hours while the going's good. I have lost track of the number of times successive partners have yelled at me: “Hunger does not count as an emotion!”

But this is not the whole truth. Of course we do, every so often, feel things, and that is when male bonding truly comes into its own. Here is a manly truth not often uttered: sometimes we do open our hearts to our mates in the bar and speak the dark fears and tender secrets of our fledgling souls, and we do so more easily than we would with our lady-folk. We do it there because we feel safer. Also because we've been drinking, but mainly because we feel safer.

Gather close, ladies, for what I am about to say is an important key to grasping the perverse simplicity of the male heart: the reason we feel safer talking to our mates is that we know that deep down they don't care. They care for us, of course, but they aren't going to think too long about our problems, and they're not going to raise the subject when everyone's sober. They won't think it odd and hurtful when the matter is never raised again, and they certainly won't expect it to be woven into the texture of everyday life and ongoing relationships. There are no consequences, and if there is anything in this world that appeals to the deepest part of a man, it is an act without consequences.

The male method of empathy when hearing a sad story is to top it with an even sadder story of your own. And that is as it should be. But such interchanges are blessed rare. For the most part, what men talk about when you're not around is pretty much the same as what they talk about when you are, only with fewer words. Often we scarcely talk at all. It doesn't really matter what we say; it's just nice to know that no one's really listening.