I See You

Monday nights I take a meditation class offered through the Buddhist Centre in Cape Town. After class, I walk the 45 minutes from the city center to the apartment where I’m staying in Sea Point. Along the way, I try to practice whatever message was taught that evening.

One Monday night my task was to try see everyone who passed me as persons, with no judgment as to what they looked like or what they might be doing or saying. To simply look at their faces and, in my head, say: “I see you.”

That’s easier said than done on my long walk home, especially when some nights I’m asked if I “want a lady,” or if I want a man “to make you happy,” or if want to score some dagga. Usually I’m a total failure at these kinds of meditation things, but on this particular night, I was in a zone.

I walked down Long Street “seeing” the characters that come out at night on this colorful strip of restaurants, bars and backpacker lodges. I cut over to the Fan Walk, a pedestrian walkway installed for the Soccer World Cup, crossed a pedestrian bridge above Buitengracht Street, made my way through De Waterkant, the gay village, and down to Main Road where I gently refused the illegal offers being presented to me.

Maybe this meditation thing was really beginning to work for me. I was relaxed and just flowing down Main Road, heading home, oblivious to everything except my mind silently greeting each person who passed with my evening’s mantra, “I see you.”

I didn’t, however, see the boy who appeared from nowhere and was suddenly tugging at my arm.

“Please, baas,” he said as he held onto my wrist with one hand and made the universal sign for being hungry by bringing his other hand to his mouth, “Five rand?”

Annoyed that my concentration had been disrupted on my first good night of implementing my meditative practices, I broke free from his grip, gave him a firm “No” and kept walking. That didn’t deter the young beggar who continued to follow me asking for money or food.

Clearly, this meditation thing was not working after all. As long as I didn’t actually interact with the people I was passing, I could “see them.” Once one of them attempted to engage with me, I became dismissive – acting as if this dirty, thin, barefoot boy at my side was invisible.

And then I saw him. I really saw him. Not like the exercise I had been practicing since leaving my meditation class. And I realized that I had seen him before. Almost every time I walk this section of Main Road in the evening he panhandles me for money, except it was later than I had ever seen him out before.

I kept walking, but for the first time I said more to this kid than just, “No.”

“Why are you out so late?” I began my questions.

“I’m hungry, baas.”

“Where are your parents?”

“My mother is dead. I don’t know where my father is.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m eight, baas.”

“Where do you stay?”

“Over there. In the park” he said pointing towards the new stadium that was built for the 2010 Soccer World Cup at a cost of $600 million.

“By yourself?”

“No, there are other kids. Sometimes older people, but it’s just kids.”

“Do you go to school?”

“No,” he said, with a look on his face like ‘I can’t believe you are asking such a stupid question.’

Coming up on our left was a convenience store that was still open.

“Come on,” I said to the boy, “I’ll buy you some food.”

I walked into the narrow entrance of the store with the boy slightly behind me. I was moving past the candy bars and chips to the back of the market where I hoped to find something a bit healthier when I heard the man behind the cash register pound his fist upon the counter and yell, “Get out of here, boy! I’ve told you before, don’t come in here!”

The outburst stopped me in my tracks. The boy was gone. I knew, however, he would be waiting for me on the street. As annoyed as I had been with the boy for breaking my concentration, I was now enraged by the storeowner’s behavior. I opened my mouth to say something to him but nothing came out. Instead, a thought popped into my head, “see him.” “See the man behind the cash register.”

I refuse to accept that this man, or any rational human being, truly does not care about homeless, hungry children. No doubt this man has children of his own and probably grandchildren who he dotes on. He has, however, probably just been worn down over the years by the endless needs in society that no one person can ever address. He couldn’t possibly be this callous. And really, how different was he from me? Every time I am asked for money on the streets of Cape Town I say no and keep walking. Like this shop owner, I have turned away hungry children. I might have not gotten angry and yelled as he just did, but the outcome was the same. I chose to not do anything.

My eyes met the man’s behind the cash register and a thought just appeared in my mind. I thought, not consciously and not judgmentally, “I do see you.”

At the back of the store I picked up a loaf brown bread and a bunch of bananas that would be overripe by morning. That wouldn’t matter. I expected the fruit would be devoured quickly. In the cooler I grabbed a jug of orange juice. The man behind the cash register could not have been nicer to me as I paid for the food.

The second I stepped out of the store the boy was at my side and no sooner had I given him the bread, bananas and juice, he was gone – running across the street to the park near the stadium.

In one interaction, late at night in a convenience store on Main Road, I had seen all of the ills of the world in a single exchange. A skinny, homeless, orphaned, eight-year-old boy had been chased from a store because he was begging for food. But I saw more than that.

I saw the boy. I saw the shop owner. And I saw myself. 

Party Train to Jozi

It’s understandable, really. Passengers board the Shosholoza in Cape Town before 10:00 on Saturday morning. Most travelers are going all the way to Johannesburg and they won’t arrive at their destination until sometime Sunday afternoon, more than 26 hours after their departure; and only then if the train stays on schedule. There is nothing to do in the sitter cars of the train. There are no movies to watch and it’s difficult to sleep in the straight-backed seats. So passengers do what they do on a weekend in confined quarters with nothing to occupy their time. They drink.

From the look of the carriage I enter when I board the Shosholoza in Touwsriver, five hours into the journey to Johannesburg (affectionately known as Jozi), the party must have started as soon as the train pulled out of the Cape Town station – if not before. Empty brown bottles of Castle lager litter the floor of the carriage as do cans of Black Label. It’s a mess, but at least the empties weren’t thrown out of the window of the train once the last swallow of beer was swigged. That’s a common occurrence. Cans and bottles, broken and intact, along with other rubbish, line the train tracks along the route of the Shosholoza.

It smells like the morning after in the carriage where I’m trying to find a vacant row of seats to have a bit more space on my three-hour trip to Prince Albert Road, and it’s not just because of the spilled beer. There is a sweet aroma too, coming from the bottles of red wine being passed around for people to fill their glasses. One woman, sitting by herself, sips a golden liquid from a pint of Klipdrift brandy.

There are rows of seats with no passengers sitting in them, but I pass by them because all of the passengers seated near the vacant rows are smoking. As I near the end of this particular carriage I realize that there will be no escaping the cigarette smoke, so I take a seat in what I hope might be the quietest spot in a very rowdy car.

The two rows in front of my selected seat are vacant and the three men sitting directly behind me already have the squinty eyes and the half opened mouths of partiers who are on the verge of passing out. Once the train pulls out of the station at Touwsriver, I figure that the alcohol, combined with the motion of the train – however bumpy the trip might be – will lull them to sleep. I was wrong about that.

People who say that Americans are loud have never been on the Shosholoza on a Saturday afternoon in the summer. Sjoa!, now those people are loud.

One man, the drunkest of the lot, begins every sentence with an English expletive which is the only word clearly enunciated in his slurred sentences. Between the drunken, boisterous talking, and the various ringtones from cell phones, and the one-sided conversations of people screaming into their phones to be heard over the yelling and the noise of the train heading northwards on the tracks, I couldn’t fathom how the woman sitting in the first row of the carriage, with a baby nursing at her exposed, full breast, could truly be asleep, but she was. That says it all about the strains of motherhood. If you can sleep in the party carriage of the Shosholoza, you must be exhausted.

If the new mother can sleep, perhaps I can at least read. I pull The Quiet Violence of Dreams by a South African writer named K. Sello Duiker, from my backpack and open it to one of the early chapters. The protagonist, Tshepo, is institutionalized in a mental facility in Cape Town. He longs to be released or to escape so he can return to his life outside the institution. When reading about the sedated patients and the quiet gardens, while sitting amongst the cacophony of sounds and the bustle of activities on the Shosholoza, I’m convinced that I would trade places with the disturbed hero of the novel.

After reading a section, and realizing that I will need to reread it because I haven’t retained a thing that has happened in six pages, I return the book to my backpack. Maybe that’s why so many people don’t read on the Shosholoza. It’s not that they can’t read or don’t have books; they know it is next to impossible to concentrate at certain times on the train.

Since I boarded the Shosholoza at a town where the train station was closed, I haven’t yet purchased my ticket to Prince Albert Road. Usually, train employees, easily identifiable by their lavender uniforms, go from car to car after pulling out of a station, collecting payment from new passengers. I have yet to see an employee. Maybe they are avoiding the party car.

To kill some time, I decide to go in search of a ticket seller. I don’t want to get off the train at my destination and find there is someone collecting tickets as proof of payment. That is, I figure, how stereotypes are born. I didn’t want to become a topic of conversation amongst train employees about “rich Americans who try to get away with not paying on the third class train” when the reality was that no one came to collect my money.

Passing from car to car on the rough ride north in search of a ticket seller, it’s hard to distinguish those who are drunk from those who are sober when walking the aisle. Everyone staggers and grabs onto the nearest headrest to stabilize themselves on the jostling train. At the end of the car, through the door that separates the sitters from the toilets, the small space between train cars is packed with passengers standing and smoking and looking out of the windows at the barren, yet magnificent landscape of the Great Karoo.

An inebriated man in a white Billabong t-shirt, stained with red wine, asks me in Afrikaans if I have a bottle opener. I don’t, but when the mountain of a man standing next to him, who is blocking my entrance into the next car, hears my accent, he lights up.

“Are you a priest, my bru?”

“No,” I respond, “I’m not a priest.” (If you only knew, I think to myself.)

“My bru, I need a priest. I just got engaged to this woman with the miniskirt. See her there? Just there with the little, little dress. We need to get married, my bru, so we can honeymoon in Jozi.”

The intended, who has a look on her face like I’ve-never-seen-this-man-before-in-my-life, rolls her eyes. I wish the couple well. They both laugh and the human mountain moves just enough for me to squeeze by so I can enter the next carriage.

The next car is as quiet as the one I’m traveling in is loud. It’s filled mostly with older passengers, my age really, and women with young children. Half of them are asleep. One shirtless man is sleeping across two seats with his legs contorted under the rows in front of him. Every third row or so a woman is laying on a blanket on the floor, sleeping underneath her seat, usually a baby swaddled next to her. A toddler is stretched out on the seats above the mother. As I walk through the carriage, I must carefully step over the heads of the sleeping mothers that extend into the aisle. An older gentleman, wearing a nametag from an apostolic church pinned to a blue oxford shirt, passes through the car shaking hands with everyone who is awake. “Peace and life” he says when he shakes my hand. I continue weaving my way through the sleeping women, the playing children and evangelists, towards the next car, still in search of a ticket seller.

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” is what I thought to myself when I opened the door to the carriage adjoining the quiet car. Barreling down the train tracks on the Shosholoza in South Africa’s Karoo, I never expected that I would walk into what could have been a scene right out of the gay cult film, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

There, directly before me, were four white gay guys. How did I know they were gay? Chalk it up to gaydar. Or maybe it was because the man holding court in the center of all the drinking and men draping their arms over one another, was wearing black, fishnet stockings, a short, black skirt, a chunky bracelet on his wrist and a spaghetti-strapped, fuchsia teddy with two circles of fabric expertly cut from the material to expose his nipples. As hard as it was to take my eyes off the attire, I simply had to see who was so courageous, or so stupid, as to wear this on the Shosholoza. I looked up from the teddy to the thick neck, to the somewhat fleshy, yet masculine face and the closely cropped hair and realized that no one was going to mess with this guy. And if someone did, his friends seemed prepared to come to his defense.

Dance music was blasting from a boom box atop a cooler that was taking up most of the center aisle. Surrounding the cross-dresser and his buddies were a couple of gay guys who seemed ecstatic that they, by happenstance, were on the same train as fellow members of their tribe from Cape Town. The group was animated – standing in the aisles, lounging over seats, moving to the music and laughing. Most of the passengers seated near them seemed to be enjoying the show. A few people had disapproving looks on their faces but it might have been because of the drunken commotion and not necessarily because “the gays” had taken over their car.

There was no way that any of “the gays” could hear me if I said, “excuse me,” as I tried to pass them on my quest to purchase my ticket. Instead, I lightly touched one of the men on his shoulder indicating I wanted to come through. One step into the vortex of men and it was like being at last call at a gay bar. All that was missing was a disco ball from the ceiling of the train car and the smell of popper and it would have been like any gay bar in any city in the world. Except we were in the third class carriage of a train halfway between Touwsriver, where I boarded, and Majtiesfontein, where the gay revelers would disembark.

I made it past the gay partiers and nearly through the carriage when stopped by another passenger in the middle of the aisle. Observing the goings-on further down the car, the tipsy passenger asked me, “Are you getting off with the moffies in Majtiesfontein?”

Now, I don’t always take offense at the word, “moffie,” though it’s comparable to saying “faggot” in the U.S. Knowing the questioner probably wouldn’t understand, or remember my response, I said, “No. I’m getting off with the moffies at Prince Albert Road.” After all, if you really think about it, a town named after Prince Albert would seem like a much more logical destination for “the gays” to go to for a weekend.

Coming up short on my search for a ticket seller, I was turned back at the dining car and had to again run the gauntlet of gay guys, smokers standing between cars, the drunk in the Billabong t-shirt asking me a second time if I had a bottle opener, the man now desperate to get married so he could consummate his marriage in Jozi and the apostolic lay preacher spreading his message of “peace and life.”

When I got back to my seat in my carriage I noticed that the drunken men sitting in the rows behind me had, in fact, passed out. The two rows in front of me, the rows in the center of the train that face each other, had been vacant when I left on my unsuccessful quest to find a ticket seller. When I returned, those seats were now occupied by two young women along with two of the friendliest, and hands down drunkest, chaps on the train. And that’s saying something given the people I had just interacted with.

The new arrivals had been partying in other cars when I stepped into the carriage in Touwsriver. The two drunken men were sitting in adjoining seats facing their girlfriends with me sitting in the row behind the women. Spotting me in the open space between the headrests, the drunkest of the two held his thumb in an upright position and asked, “You alright?”

“Ya,” I said and pretended to return to the book that I had retrieved from my backpack, but he was having none of that. Instead, there was a rifle fire of questions shot at me in slurred English.

Where was I from? What was I doing on the train? Where was I going? Why didn’t I stay in Franschhoek, the exquisite, French-influenced town in wine country instead of going to Prince Albert Road? (“Brother, people get on the train at Prince Albert Road, they don’t get off the train there.”) Would I take a picture of the two men, Marlin and Denzil, the two most comic cousins in the world? How could I resist.

I pulled my camera out and took a photo of the two cousins, arms around each other’s shoulders, baseball caps on their heads, with Marlin drinking a glass of wine and Denzil smoking a Peter Stuyvesant cigarette. Maybe not the best advertisement for Quiksilver, the manufacturer of the logo-emblazoned t-shirt that Denzil was wearing, but then again, you never know. This might be exactly the market that Quiksilver is going for.

“Do you drink wine?” Marlin asked me.

When I said yes, he took the glass he had been drinking from, a lowball with a Jack Daniels’ label on it, gulped what wine remained in the glass, filled it with a Simonsvlei 2007 Pinotage and handed it to me. “Don’t worry. It’s not kak. It’s good stuff.”

With glass in hand, I made a kind of cheers type of motion and took a sip, assuming that the comic cousins would now return to entertaining their lady friends. Instead, they had the women exchange seats with them so that Marlin could hang over their former seats and face me. Denzil took the open seat to my right. They both began talking to me at once.

How much did it cost to replace a roof in the U.S.? Had I met funnier cousins ever in my life? Could I get them a visa to work in the U.K.?

First, I tried, in vain, to explain that I wasn’t British. Then I tried to convey that I couldn’t get them a job in the U.S. either. Finally, I realized that none of that really mattered. The time for a coherent conversation with the cousins was probably a few hours earlier and150 kilometers south of where we now were.

The two women, who had been evicted from their seats, seemed a bit surly that I had somehow taken their men away from them. Knowing that they couldn’t possibly hear over the noise of train, I suggested to the cousins that they should pay some attention to their girlfriends.

“They aren’t our girlfriends” Denzil said loud enough for the two lounging women to hear. “We’re just partying with them.”

There seemed to be a lot of hook-ups on the train. There is enough material in a single carriage to create an entire season of episodes for a primetime soap opera. Couples meet, court, consummate their relationship and break up all on a single trip between Cape Town and Johannesburg. Call it “Desperate Passengers on the Shosholoza.”

A dip in the tracks sent the train and its passengers jostling about. The Pinotage that Marlin held in his hand sloshed out of his glass and onto my shirt and pants. As Marlin reached for the bottle of Simonsvlei to refill his glass, I thanked him for my glass and returned the empty lowball to him. He insisted that I have more. I insisted that I was done.

“OK, OK, OK,” Marlin said. He whispered something to his comic partner and then the two of them got up and left the car.

With the cousins gone, the carriage fell silent except for the methodical sound of the train on the tracks. No one was engaged in loud conversations, no cell phones were ringing and no music was playing. Just silence. It was a respite from the two and a half hours I had spent on the train heading for Prince Albert Road. When I looked at my watch I was surprised to see that we were only 20 minutes away from my stop. The comic cousins, the gay revelers, and all of the other characters on the train had made for a loud journey, but the time had gone by quickly.

Just as I settled in my seat to watch the evening skies of the Karoo pass by the window, Marlin and Denzil were back – this time with a six-pack of beer.

“OK, OK, OK,” Marlin said again, “Black Label for you.”

He took what was left of the red wine in the Jack Daniels lowball and tossed it out of the glass and onto the floor, filling the now empty glass with beer. Having no option, I accepted the beer as Marlin proceeded to pour another glass for his cousin – some of which went into Denzil’s glass, but most of which landed, again, on my shirt and pants.

I didn’t mind. The two cousins had been welcoming and eager to share their hospitality with a foreigner on the train. This was why I was taking the Shosholoza in the first place. To meet people I would never otherwise encounter and to have my belief confirmed that most people in the world are good and kind and often funny – even when pissed out of their minds.

As the train slowed into the station at Prince Albert Road, I got up from my seat and shook Marlin and Denzil’s hands, and the hands of the “girlfriends” who seemed a bit more interested in the cousins now that I was getting off the train. I picked my backpack up from the floor near my feet and lifted it over my shoulder. When I adjusted the straps around each shoulder I felt a wet sensation on my back – which was, up to that point, the only dry part of my shirt. Looking down at the floor I saw a river of beer and wine that flowed from under Marlin and Denzil’s seats in front of me and was only stopped by my backpack which absorbed the liquid, rather than letting it pass by my row.

Marlin and Denzil were right. Not too many people got off at Prince Albert Road. I did, smelling like I had been at a bar all night rather than on the Shosholoza in the afternoon. I would find a place to get my clothes washed and hang my backpack up to dry. The wine stains might never come out of my pack, but worse things can happen when you travel. It’s actually not a bad memory from my few hours on the party train to Jozi.

It’s the Journey, Grasshopper

When it comes to the big things in life, I can be very patient.

If it’s a major project at work, I will diligently chip away at it until I’m successful. If I meet someone who isn’t particularly keen on me but it is someone I would like to get to know, I will slowly, over time, try to wear that person down and eventually win him or her over.

For important things, I’ve got all the time in the world. It’s the little things, however, that drive me meshuga.

Put me behind a stopped car at a traffic light with an inattentive driver who just sits there when the light turns green and I’m pounding my steering wheel and throwing my hands up in the air, screaming in my stopped car,“Move it, buddy!” (I’m much too passive aggressive, however, to actually honk my horn at the offender. I may be impatient, but I’m not rude.)

A line of people stretching out the door at the post office? Forget about it. I go off. Not at the postal employees, mind you. It’s not entirely their fault. It’s the cutbacks to public services that cause these delays that infuriate me. Still, I put myself through a lot of senseless drama just to mail a letter.

Besides Asia, where you are assured that every problem will be fixed in “ten minutes” because culturally no one wants to disappoint a tourist by telling the truth, there is no better place to practice patience than the African continent. Seemingly daily, I have to say to myself, “Relax. Take a deep breath.”

It’s not just at post offices in the U.S. where I lose patience. It happens in South Africa, too. At the Waterfront post office in Cape Town an employee tells me that they don’t sell stamps for letters, “only stamps for postcards.”

“Really?” I calmly respond to this absurd and incorrect statement. “I’m pretty sure you sell stamps for mailing letters as well. Would you mind checking, please?” I manage to say without my eyes bulging from their sockets and me pulling my hair out of my head.

It happens when I go to fill the car with gas at the Caltex station and the attendant spends five additional minutes trying to get every tenth of a rand into the already full gas tank. Despite my protestations, he continues to squeeze the handle of the pump until so little gas is emitted that it doesn’t even register on the meter. I want to say to him, “I will give you a larger tip if you will please, just put me out of my misery, and stop the agonizing process of topping off the tank!”

It happens at the central train station when I’m in line with dozens of other people to purchase tickets for the daily train to Johannesburg. It’s a daily train for God’s sake, there is nothing unusual about this, but only two ticket windows are open to help the travelers in the queue that grows longer, not shorter, the closer we get to the departure time. Exasperated, I want to throw a tantrum while waiting and exclaim that life doesn’t need to be like this. Then the wiser part of me takes control and says, “Slow down. What’s the rush? Got a train to catch?”

Well maybe the train example isn’t a good one because it does become a bit nerve-wracking when you’ve waited in line for 30 minutes to purchase your ticket and only five people have been helped and you can see that boarding has already begun for the train you are taking.

But here is the reality: my letters always get mailed, I’m never late for anything because a service station attendant took too much time filling my car (and I don’t run out of gas) and I have yet to miss a train. And, truth be told, these “delays” have resulted in interesting conversations and connections with people in unlikely places like post offices and gas and train stations. These daily “annoyances” are, I realize, the universe constantly having to hit me over the head and say, “It’s the journey, Grasshopper, not the destination.”