Hitchhikers

Whether or not to pick up hitchhikers is a real quandary for me. When I was at school I used to hitch. A lot. To bars and clubs on Rondebosch Main Road- Springfield and Cactus Jacks- places where we jumped around to Guns n Roses and Counting Crows, drinking Hunters Gold or Redds cider because beer was too bitter for 16 year old taste buds. I hitched to the beach with my Morey Max boogey board which Steve Olhsson sold me, saying that people would harass me to buy it, that it would be the envy of the bogey boarding fraternity. Many kind people stopped for my thumb. So it now feels cold, as a car owner, to smile and drive by while others are parked on foot on the side of the road.

A few weeks ago I picked up a young couple on my way home. I found them on Buitengracht Street, near the intersection with Whale street. They must have been 18 or 19 years old, hair looking jagged, eyes twitchy, clothes well worn. They had hard South African accents; I was guessing from a lower middle-class suburb in greater Johannesburg. One of those which start with a capital ‘B’ and end in ‘oni’ or ‘oksberg’ or ‘rakpan’. The young woman catapulted herself into the front seat and tossed my work bag over her shoulder, causing a number of my personal items to spill onto the floor. She was thick set, her arm hair very present. Not unattractively so, but noticeable. I looked behind and tried to make sure nothing valuable had emerged from my bag. It was one of those moments where you hesitate and try to decide whether to cause a scene in order to be sure…or just let it slide, assume innocence. I didn’t really want to stop and collect my exposed belongings, appear too suspicious or distrustful. So I asked the young couple where they wanted to go. The woman said Kloof Street. Kloof Street…mmmm…Now that was a bit weird because the walk from Buitengracht to Kloof can only be about five minutes. And it’s downhill.

I started to drive, looking up repetitively to see what was going on between my work bag and the young man on the back seat. How familiar were they becoming with one another? I asked where they had been. The young woman said that she’d just picked the guy up from hothouse, the gay club where nine men were brutally murdered a few years back in a disgusting episode of homophobia. He looked like he’d just come from a hot house- the perspiration was grimacing on his forehead like a school kid leaving the principal’s office: butt hurt. I asked them what they were up to. He was going for a drink at another bar. She was going to smoke a joint. ‘Smoking weed is so irey’, she told me, simultaneously causing Bob Marley to reassess his chosen lifestyle and me to reclassify this pair from ‘slightly distasteful’ to ‘a couple of albino rats’. She then made it worse. Squeamish really. She took my hand until I met her eyes. I met her eyes somewhere between my purple Hyundai, Harry, (who btw is more laid back is his late middle age, a far way from the beer bottle recycling bin or drug experimenting vestibule he was in his youth) and whatever hazy strip of the milky way she was located on. She looked at me, ‘meaningfully’, and repeated, ‘S-M-O-K-I-N-G W-E-E-D I-S S-O I-R-E-Y’. To prevent her from repeating the sentence for a third time I quickly concurred. “Yes, yes indeed, spot on friend, smoking weed is unbelievably fucking irey. Possibly the most irey activity one could engage in, besides painting ones body red, green and yellow and smearing it with dark chocolate coated hash. And the depths of your philosophical ponderances are so remarkable for one so young. Shades of the young Wittgenstein before the philosophical investigations”. Okay, don’t fight irritating young goofballs with pseudo-intellectual polony.

Kloof street, arrived thank god. But then they didn’t want to go to Kloof Street anymore. The brains trust of Jamaica put their heads together and pointed towards the planetarium. Fitting. We passed the planetarium and they wanted to go on, further down the fairly dark section of Queen Victoria Street. It’s safe to suggest that things weren’t feeling so irey at this stage. They didn’t seem to be big but struck me as a couple of loons who could quite easily have acquired some kind of weapon. They asked me to stop, in no-person’s land and thanked me. I managed a smile. Like a tweaked nipple getting chafed on a chilly day. Aroused but uncomfortable. I watched them slip into the shadows and looked into my bag. My wallet wasn’t there but he’d dropped it between the car door and the back seat. In the groove. My jacket was gone, as was the scarf Marc had brought me from Bahrain. I drove around for a while looking for the young clowns, but they were gone. I drove home quietly.