Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood(74)

Abel and my mom slept with Andrew in the office on a thin mattress they’d roll out on the floor. I slept in the cars. I got really good at sleeping in cars. I know all the best cars to sleep in. The worst were the cheap ones, Volkswagens, low-end Japanese sedans. The seats barely reclined, no headrests, cheap fake-leather upholstery. I’d spend half the night trying not to slide off the seat. I’d wake up with sore knees because I couldn’t stretch out and extend my legs. German cars were wonderful, especially Mercedes. Big, plush leather seats, like couches. They were cold when you first climbed in, but they were well insulated and warmed up nicely. All I needed was my school blazer to curl up under, and I could get really cozy inside a Mercedes. But the best, hands-down, were American cars. I used to pray for a customer to come in with a big Buick with bench seats. If I saw one of those, I’d be like, Yes! It was rare for American cars to come in, but when they did, boy, was I in heaven.

Since Mighty Mechanics was now a family business, and I was family, I also had to work. There was no more time for play. There wasn’t even time for homework. I’d walk home, the school uniform would come off, the overalls would go on, and I’d get under the hood of some sedan. I got to a point where I could do a basic service on a car by myself, and often I did. Abel would say, “That Honda. Minor service.” And I’d get under the hood. Day in and day out. Points, plugs, condensers, oil filters, air filters. Install new seats, change tires, swap headlights, fix taillights. Go to the parts shop, buy the parts, back to the workshop. Eleven years old, and that was my life. I was falling behind in school. I wasn’t getting anything done. My teachers used to come down on me.

“Why aren’t you doing your homework?”

“I can’t do my homework. I have work, at home.”

We worked and worked and worked, but no matter how many hours we put in, the business kept losing money. We lost everything. We couldn’t even afford real food. There was one month I’ll never forget, the worst month of my life. We were so broke that for weeks we ate nothing but bowls of marogo, a kind of wild spinach, cooked with caterpillars. Mopane worms, they’re called. Mopane worms are literally the cheapest thing that only the poorest of poor people eat. I grew up poor, but there’s poor and then there’s “Wait, I’m eating worms.” Mopane worms are the sort of thing where even people in Soweto would be like, “Eh…no.” They’re these spiny, brightly colored caterpillars the size of your finger. They’re nothing like escargot, where someone took a snail and gave it a fancy name. They’re fucking worms. They have black spines that prick the roof of your mouth as you’re eating them. When you bite into a mopane worm, it’s not uncommon for its yellow-green excrement to squirt into your mouth.

For a while I sort of enjoyed the caterpillars. It was like a food adventure, but then over the course of weeks, eating them every day, day after day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I’ll never forget the day I bit a mopane worm in half and that yellow-green ooze came out and I thought, “I’m eating caterpillar shit.” Instantly I wanted to throw up. I snapped and ran to my mom crying. “I don’t want to eat caterpillars anymore!” That night she scraped some money together and bought us chicken. As poor as we’d been in the past, we’d never been without food.

That was the period of my life I hated the most—work all night, sleep in some car, wake up, wash up in a janitor’s sink, brush my teeth in a little metal basin, brush my hair in the rearview mirror of a Toyota, then try to get dressed without getting oil and grease all over my school clothes so the kids at school won’t know I live in a garage. Oh, I hated it so much. I hated cars. I hated sleeping in cars. I hated working on cars. I hated getting my hands dirty. I hated eating worms. I hated it all.

I didn’t hate my mom, or even Abel, funnily enough. Because I saw how hard everyone was working. At first I didn’t know about the mistakes being made on the business level that were making it hard, so it just felt like a hard situation. But eventually I started to see why the business was hemorrhaging money. I used to go around and buy auto parts for Abel, and I learned that he was buying his parts on credit. The vendors were charging him a crazy markup. The debt was crippling the company, and instead of paying off the debt he was drinking what little cash he made. Brilliant mechanic, horrible businessman.

At a certain point, in order to try to save the garage, my mother quit her job at ICI and stepped in to help him run the workshop. She brought her office skills to the garage full-time and started keeping the books, making the schedule, balancing the accounts. And it was going well, until Abel started to feel like she was running his business. People started commenting on it as well. Clients were getting their cars on time, vendors were getting paid on time, and they would say, “Hey, Abie, this workshop is going so much better now that your wife has taken over.” That didn’t help.

We lived in the workshop for close to a year, and then my mom had had enough. She was willing to help him, but not if he was going to drink all the profits. She had always been independent, self-sufficient, but she’d lost that part of herself at the mercy of someone else’s failed dream. At a certain point she said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m out of this. I’m done.” She went out and got a job as a secretary with a real-estate developer, and somehow, between that and borrowing against whatever equity was left in Abel’s workshop, she was able to get us the house in Highlands North. We moved, the workshop was seized by Abel’s creditors, and that was the end of that.