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