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. “You need to up your game,” he said. “You cannot go to the dance looking the way you look—for her sake, not yours. Let’s go shopping.”
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 2,000 rand, for one outfit. 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. The trick to looking rich, he told me, is to have one expensive item, and for the rest of the things you get basic, good-looking quality stuff. The nice item will draw everyone’s eye, and it’ll look like you’ve spent more than you have.
In my mind nothing was cooler than the leather coats everybody wore in The Matrix. The Matrix came out while I was in high school and it was my favorite movie at the time. I loved Neo. In my heart I knew: I am Neo. He’s a nerd. He’s useless at everything, but secretly he’s a badass superhero. All I needed was a bald, mysterious black man to come into my life and show me the way. Now I had Bongani, black, head shaved, telling me, “You can do it. You’re the one.” And I was like, “Yes. I knew it.”
I told Bongani I wanted a leather coat like Keanu Reeves wore, the ankle-length black one. Bongani shut that down. “No, that’s not practical. It’s cool, but you’ll never be able to wear it again.” He took me shopping and we bought a calf-length black leather jacket, which would look ridiculous today but at the time, thanks to Neo, was very cool. That alone cost 1,200 rand. Then we finished the outfit with a pair of simple black pants, suede square-toed 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 more Buckwheat: unruly and impossible to comb, like stabbing a pitchfork into a bed of crabgrass.
“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. He dragged me there, and we went to talk to some girls from his street who were hanging out on the corner.
“What would you do with this guy’s hair?” he asked them.
The girls looked me over.
“He has so much,” one of them said. “Why doesn’t he cornrow it?”
“Shit, yeah,” they said. “That’s great!”
I said, “What? Cornrows? No!”
“No, no,” they said. “Do it.”
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 become.”
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 it’s being rinsed 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 cornrow 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 scenes 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 never tried to look nice for a girl, so I didn’t know that I could. The hair was good. My skin wasn’t perfect, but it was getting better; the pustules had receded into regular pimples. I looked…not bad.
I went home, and my mom squealed when I walked in the door.
“Ooooooh! They turned my baby boy into a pretty little girl! I’ve got a little girl! You’re so pretty!”
“Mom! C’mon. Stop it.”
“Is this the way you’re telling me that you’re gay?”
“What? No. Why would you say that?”
“You know it’s okay if you are.”
“No, Mom. I’m not gay.”
Everyone in my family loved it. They all thought it looked great. My mom did tease the shit out of me, though.
“It’s very well done,” she said, “but it is way too pretty. You do look like a girl.”
—
The big night finally came. Tom came over to help me get ready. The hair, the clothes, everything came together perfectly. Once I was set, we went to Abel to get the keys to the BMW, and that was the moment the whole night started to go wrong.
It was a Saturday night, end of the week, which meant Abel was drinking with his workers. I walked out to his garage, and as soon as I saw his eyes I knew: He was wasted. Fuck. When Abel was drunk he was a completely different person.
“Ah, you look nice!” he said with a big smile, looking me over. “Where are you going?”
“Where am I—Abie, I’m going to the dance.”
“Okay. Have fun.”
“Um…can I get the keys?”
“The keys to what?”
“To the car.”
“What car?”
“The BMW. You promised I could drive the BMW to the dance.”
“First go buy me some beers,” he said.
He gave me his car keys; Tom and I drove to the liquor store. I bought Abel a few cases of beer, drove back, and unloaded it for him.
“Okay,” I said, “can I take the BMW now?”
“No.”
“What do you mean ‘no’?”
“I mean ‘no.’ I need my car tonight.”
“But you promised. You said I could take it.”
“Yeah, but I need the car.”
I was crushed. I sat there with Tom and begged him for close to half an hour.
“Please.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“Nope.”
Finally we realized it wasn’t going to happen. We took the shitty Mazda and drove to Babiki’s house. I was an hour late picking her up. She was completely pissed off. Tom had to go in and convince her to come out, and eventually she did.
She was even more gorgeous than before, in an amazing red dress, but she was clearly not in a great mood. Inside I was quietly starting to panic, but I smiled and kept trying my gentlemanly best to be a good date, holding the door for her, telling her how beautiful she was. Tom and the sister gave us a send-off and we headed out.