It is not unusual to find myself in this position, sitting in this instant. All by myself. I know I am not built for this. To be all by myself. I say by myself because I am no longer a baby. It is already my second beer, 1.5 litre quart Black Label. That’s how raw I am. A hard worker, and it is not for laaities or sissies.

As I lift my head, a little detachment from my rowdy and disfigured thoughts arrives as my eyes pounce upon Sipho. My friend for days. Clad in his favourite baggy navy Bronx jeans and a loose-hanging T-shirt, bearing a face of rapper Jabba. Any passerby would probably recognise us as the stick-up homeboys, di outie tsa kassie. When one sees us like this, it doesn’t strike a chord to know that we are at ease with our employer, meantime we are just cooling down from the highly demanding duties of our jobs in the retail sector.

My manager, Mr Tau, can swallow a humble pie just once after a long while. This time round, I should convince Sipho to do it with me. I want to tell him to take off the device on his shoulder. We should toe the line, not as a sign to our docility, but just to cease the mainstream route of viewing the world. Let us go rollercoasting, my man! They can’t stop us, believe me.

“Spali sami (my nephew), look at you! I see that today you found a cold drink not so cooling. And you couldn’t tolerate no inconveniences…” my uncle laughs.

“Ya, gaz lami (blood of my blood)!” I interject, before he comments further.

“You need no asking, I’m already on my second one. Actually, the time is ripe. Bamba la ushayel ekhanda (take here, and sip a long good pint).”

We had a lot in common, like the fact that we both had a dream. A dream in vacancy, as we would infer how each of us wanted to be his own man, his own boss. In a nutshell, we both had an entrepreneurial spirit.

There was this other guy. Ubuti Msunday. A ghetto guy who had so much in him. We would actually envy him for his material possessions. A guru of some kind. He had big businesses, he was running in all parts of town, among them a scrapyard in Meadowlands along Dephiri street. He also had a funeral parlour somewhere around Diepkloof. He had everything one could wish for.

His most imperfect attribute, I would say, was the fact that he was an immanent womaniser. We hadn’t once heard about his family or his wife, but already I had seen three of his rumoured lovers. I would witness him with one, in his spendthrift Land Rover or his other burgundy Merc E-2 Class. He would be intimate with them, or, for lack of a better word, affectionate.

Legend had it that he was one of those wealthiest Godfathers who rose to fame in the late nineties by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. People would always speculate that the man was a self-made millionaire. But I don’t think we should subscribe to such insinuations in these times we’re living in. My word is that any person who parasites on the idea that they’re ‘self-made’ might be disillusioned. They’re probably living in a vacuum. Conceited blood-sucking Capitalists. That’s the last thing we envision at the helm of our society.

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