When Bongani first said to me, “Let’s go to the hood,” I thought we were going to sell CDs and DJ parties in the hood. It turned out that we were selling CDs and DJing parties in order to capitalize a payday-lending and pawnshop operation in the hood. Very quickly that became our core business.
Every day in the hood was the same. I’d wake up early. Bongani would meet me at my flat and we’d catch a minibus to Alex with my computer, carrying the giant tower and the giant, heavy monitor the whole way. We’d set it up in Bongani’s garage, and start the first batch of CDs. Then we’d walk. We’d go down to the corner of Nineteenth and Roosevelt for breakfast. When you’re trying to stretch your money, food is where you have to be careful. You have to plan or you’ll eat your profits. So every morning for breakfast we eat vetkoek, which is fried dough, basically. Those were cheap, like 50 cents a pop. We could buy a bunch of those and have enough energy to sustain us until later on in the day.
Then we’d sit on the corner and eat. While we ate, we’d be picking up orders from the minibus drivers as they went past. After that we’d go back to Bongani’s garage, listen to music, lift weights, make the CDs. Around ten or eleven, the drivers would start coming back from their morning routes. We’d take the CDs and head out to the corner for them to pick up their stuff. Then we’d just be on the corner, hanging out, meeting characters, seeing who came by, seeing where the day was going to take us. A guy needs this. A guy’s selling that. You never knew what it was going to be.
There was always a big rush of business at lunch. We’d be all over Alexandra, hitting different shops and corners, making deals with everyone. We’d get free rides from the minibus drivers because we’d hop in with them and use it as an opportunity to talk about what music they needed, but secretly we were riding with the guy for free. “Hey, we want to collect orders. We’ll talk to you while you drive. What do you need? What music are you looking for? Do you need the new Maxwell? Okay, we got the new Maxwell. Okay, we’ll talk to you later. We’ll jump out here.” Then we’d hop on another ride going wherever we were going next.
After lunch, business would die down, and that’s when we’d get our lunch, usually the cheapest thing we could afford, like a smiley with some maize meal. A smiley is a goat’s head. They’re boiled and covered with chili pepper. We call them smileys because when you’re done eating all the meat off it, the goat looks like it’s smiling at you from the plate. The cheeks and the tongue are quite delicious, but the eyes are disgusting. They pop in your mouth. You put the eyeball into your mouth and you bite it, and it’s just a ball of pus that pops. It has no crunch. It has no chew. It has no flavor that is appetizing in any way.
After lunch we’d head back to the garage, relax, sleep off the meal, and make more CDs. In the afternoons we’d see a lot of moms. Moms loved us. They were some of our best customers. Since moms run the household, they’re the ones looking to buy that box of soap that fell off the back of the truck, and they were more likely to buy it from us than from some crackhead. Dealing with crackheads is unpleasant. We were upstanding, well-spoken East Bank boys. We could even charge a premium because we added that layer of respectability to the transaction. Moms are also often the most in need of short-term loans, to pay for this or that for the family. Again, they’d rather deal with us than with some gangster loan shark. Moms knew we weren’t going to break anyone’s legs if they couldn’t pay. We didn’t believe in that. Also we weren’t capable of it—let’s not forget that part. But that’s where Bongani’s brilliance came in. He always knew what a person could provide pending their failure to pay.
We made some of the craziest trades. Moms in the hood are protective of their daughters, especially if their daughters are pretty. In Alex there were girls who got locked up. They went to school, came straight home, and went straight into the house. They weren’t allowed to leave. Boys weren’t allowed to talk to them, weren’t even allowed to hang around the house—none of that. Some guy was always going on about some locked-away girl: “She’s so beautiful. I’ll do anything to get with her.” But he couldn’t. Nobody could.
Then that mom would need a loan. Once we lent her the money, until she paid us back she couldn’t chase us away from her house. We’d go by and hang out, chat, make small talk. The daughter would be right there, but the mom couldn’t say, “Don’t talk to those boys!” The loan gave us access to establish a relationship with the mom. We’d get invited to stay for dinner. Once the mom knew we were nice, upstanding guys, she’d agree to let us take her daughter to a party as long as we promised to get her home safely. So then we’d go to the guy who’d been so desperate to meet the daughter.
“Hey, let’s make a deal. We’ll bring the girl to your party and you get to hang out with her. How much can you give us?”
“I don’t have money,” he’d say, “but I have some cases of beer.”
“Okay, so tonight we’re going to this party. You give us two cases of beer for the party.”
“Cool.”
Then we’d go to the party. We’d invite the girl, who was usually thrilled to escape her mother’s prison. The guy would bring the beer, he’d get to hang out with the girl, we’d write off the mom’s debt to show her our gratitude, and we’d make our money back selling the beer. There was always a way to make it work. And often that was the most fun part: working the angles, solving the puzzle, seeing what goes where, who needs what, whom we can connect with who can then get us the money.
At the peak of our operation we probably had around 10,000 rand in capital. We had loans going out and interest coming in. We had our stockpile of Jordans and DVD players we’d bought to resell. We also had to buy blank CDs, hire minibuses to go to our DJ gigs, feed five guys three times a day. We kept track of everything on the computer. Having lived in my mom’s world, I knew how to do spreadsheets. We had a Microsoft Excel document laid out: everybody’s name, how much they owed, when they paid, when they didn’t pay.
After work was when business started to pick up. Minibus drivers picking up one last order, men coming home from work. The men weren’t looking for soap and Corn Flakes. They wanted the gear—DVD players, CD players, PlayStation games. More guys would come through selling stuff, too, because they’d been out hustling and stealing all day. There’d be a guy selling a cellphone, a guy selling some leather jackets, a guy selling shoes. There was this one dude who looked like a black version of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. He’d always come by at the end of his shift with the most random useless crap, like an electric toothbrush without the charger. One time he brought us an electric razor.
“What the hell is this?”
“It’s an electric razor?”
“An electric razor? We’re black. Do you know what these things do to our skin? Do you see anyone around here who can use an electric razor?”
We never knew where he was getting this stuff from. Because you don’t ask. Eventually we pieced it together, though: He worked at the airport. It was all crap he was boosting from people’s luggage.
Slowly the rush would start to taper off and we’d wind down. We’d make our last collections, go over our CD stock, balance our accounts. If there was a party to DJ that night we’d start getting ready for that. Otherwise, we’d buy a few beers and sit around and drink, talk about the day, listen to the gunshots in the distance. Gunshots went off every night, and we’d always try to guess what kind of gun it was. “That’s a nine-millimeter.” Usually there’d be a police chase, cop cars flying through after some guy with a stolen car. Then everyone would go home for dinner with their families. I’d take my computer, get back in a minibus, ride home, sleep, and then come back and do it all again the next day.
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