rand into 200.
That’s the hood. Someone’s always buying, someone’s always selling, and the hustle is about trying to be in the middle of that whole thing. None of it was legal. Nobody knew where anything came from. The guy who got us Nikes, did he really have a “staff discount”? You don’t know. You don’t ask. It’s just, “Hey, look what I found” and “Cool, how much do you want?” That’s the international code.
At first I didn’t know not to ask. I remember one time we bought a car stereo or something like that.
“But who did this belong to?” I said.
“Eh, don’t worry about it,” one of the guys told me. “White people have insurance.”
“Insurance?”
“Yeah, when white people lose stuff they have insurance policies that pay them cash for what they’ve lost, so it’s like they’ve lost nothing.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Sounds nice.”
And that was as far as we ever thought about it: When white people lose stuff they get money, just another nice perk of being white.
It’s easy to be judgmental about crime when you live in a world wealthy enough to be removed from it. But the hood taught me that everyone has different notions of right and wrong, different definitions of what constitutes crime, and what level of crime they’re willing to participate in. If a crackhead comes through and he’s got a crate of Corn Flakes boxes he’s stolen out of the back of a supermarket, the poor mom isn’t thinking, I’m aiding and abetting a criminal by buying these Corn Flakes. No. She’s thinking, My family needs food and this guy has Corn Flakes, and she buys the Corn Flakes.
My own mother, my super-religious, law-abiding mother who used to shit on me about breaking the rules and learning to behave, I’ll never forget one day I came home and in the kitchen was a giant box of frozen burger patties, like two hundred of them, from a takeaway place called Black Steer. A burger at Black Steer cost at least 20 rand.
“What the hell is this?” I said.
“Oh, some guy at work had these and was selling them,” she said. “I got a great discount.”
“But where did he get it from?”
“I don’t know. He said he knew somebody who—”
“Mom, he stole it.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We do know that. Where the hell is some guy going to get all of these burger patties from, randomly?”
Of course, we ate the burgers. Then we thanked God for the meal.
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