Zombies Don't Work On Sundays

Around lunchtime on Friday, having coffee with friends, someone mentioned that the world was about to end. It was the first we’d heard of it, and the wife – mildly annoyed – mentioned that it would’ve been nice to have had a bit more notice.

So we skipped plans for a movie and early night and decided – seeing as it was the Apocalypse and all – to instead have drinks with friends and say goodbye.

“Ha!” I thought, “No morning means no hangover!” Definitely no babalazi in Heaven… and you’d probably not notice in Hell – what with all the fire and screaming.

Champagne and questions about what you wished you’d done rounded the table. Regrets were cried over and forgotten. Those who’d lived a good life said they’d wave down at me shovelling soot and stoking Beelzebub’s bonfire.

We wondered if the Four Horsemen would turn up on Harley’s instead, if Jesus would make his comeback on ‘Pop Idol’ or ‘Dancing with the Damned’ for maximum exposure, and whether it’d be brain-eating zombies or Kurt Darren treffers that’d destroy us all.

I couldn’t help wondering if the minority that really truly actually 100% BELIEVED that the world was spitting off the cliffs of Armageddon were sitting in their compound biting their nails with worry, or were they secretly hoping that this time they’d got it right so a wagging finger and a self-righteous “I told you so” could be directed at all the heathens.

Quite probably the latter, because you must look a bit foolish when a week passes and the Big Man hasn’t smited (or is it ‘smitten’) the smelly non-believers.

How embarrassing to have to go to CUM books in Canal Walk and ask for your job back, or repurchase the loudhailer and sandwich board with ‘The End is Hear’ scrawled across it.

But for all we know it happened! The only problem is that the world is so poked and miserable we didn't really notice.

But in Hell the coffee's always cold, your cornflakes usually soggy, and traffic is a bitch... and that's before you get to work.

Stag Night

After a table dance in front of twenty people, having thrown the G-string I was wearing into the crowd, I climb down and think, “I could do this every weekend!”

Maybe an hour ago I was in the back of a minibus taxi, struggling fishnets up my legs, wondering just how confident I was with my sexuality.

It’s a common sight in Cape Town on a Saturday evening – men on the verge of marriage, dressed in women’s clothing, a beer mug handcuffed to their arm.

Strippers and strip clubs seem so 20th Century. Honestly, it’d feel like cheating to have some big-breasted Russian poking her nipples into my eyes – so it’s me dressed for success, deliberating over which bog-door to go through.

Some guys think it’s funny to grab my arse and ask for a blowjob. They get a bit freaked when I cup their nuts in my hand and tell them it’ll cost a tenner. There’s a flicker of doubt and they think maybe this is my ‘coming out’ night and not a bachelor’s party.

But after the fourth pint and a few Jagermeisters, appropriately having a Bavarian sausage platter for dinner, I forget about the pink wig and sexy nightie. Out the corner of my eye I see a table of German tourists staring at me and think, “What the fuck are they looking at?”

It’s kind of like being a moderately famous soap opera actor. Strangers ask to have their picture taken with me. Groups of girls buy me shots at the bar. It’s easy to see why some people get addicted to being the centre of attention.

At Quay Four in the Waterfront, a woman gets aggro with me for cutting in on her and some guy on the dancefloor. I think she’s just a bad sport until my mate informs me that the ‘woman’ is actually another guy in drag – the only difference being he’s not on his stag night.

Welcome to Cape Town.

Later in the night a bouncer won’t let us jump the queue at a club. I kick up a stink, and what normally would get me a black eye and maybe a broken rib gets us in.

We meet up with my fiancée, Lucy, on her hen night. She’s wearing angel wings and ‘cock-boppers’. We drunkenly relay tales from the last few hours.

I’m fat with a beard and just make a really ugly chick, but Lucy says the next morning she found me in the stockings and pink wig a strange turn-on.

Maybe I should do this every weekend.

Patch Adams for my Prostate Check

Every Monday Zula Bar in Long Street has an open mic comedy show. It’s great because it gives aspiring comedians the opportunity to test their jokes on non-family members and suffer the realities of a pissed, often abusive audience.

Sometimes though, it’s a bit like getting your prostate checked. Not because, when an unfunny guy tanks and you’ve paid thirty bucks at the door, you feel like you’ve been fucked with a fat finger, but because when a nervous twenty-something fails to inspire even a titter, it churns an awkward discomfort in your gut.

It’s an embarrassing feeling – like walking out of a public toilet and realising there’s a tiny wet circle on the front of your shorts – and even though it’s not you up there dodging insults and beer bottles, that hole opens up in the pit of your stomach and you wish you could stuff yourself into it and disappear.

You can blame nerves or stage fright for things like this, but the real culprits are the creators of the TV show Friends.

Because Friends had a cast of characters that we could all relate to on some level, and because witty one-liners were fired fast, we all wanted to be like them.

Art imitated life, and improved on it to such an extent that we strived in our lives to imitate what could loosely be called art. And even though Friends is long gone, we still constantly and unconsciously grasp for snappy comebacks.

It’s as though we suddenly only had three options: Joey, Ross or Chandler for boys, and Rachel, Monica or Phoebe for girls. What we didn’t realise was that, in reality, the parts of them we wanted were all the same.

I wonder if our grandparents’ generation suffered something like this; or if people were just funny or not, and didn’t try to be what they weren’t. Without an oversaturation of sitcoms, I suspect they just made do with whatever personality their parents’ genes gave them.

A mate of mine has a quick acid test to tell if you’re hilarious or hopeless. He reckons that if you have to tell other people’s jokes to be funny, you’re not. Maybe if more people reflected on this we wouldn’t have to excuse ourselves to the balcony to avoid getting caught up in a lynching.

Lynchings are common on a Monday night at Zula. The crowd ruthlessly separates the Weet-Bix from the Cornflakes; recognises the comedy of substance and heckles the recycled, stolen jokes.

The regulars take their laughs seriously.

Reality TV has shown us that for anything to have worth, it must be documented on the goggle-box. So after packing in the beers and a couple puffs of spliff, one leaves vowing to write the SABC and demand a Pop Idols-style comedy show.

The idea inebriatedly snowballs down a mental hill: the judges could be the comedic pioneers of our South African age – Marc Lottering, Kurt Schoonrad, and Julius Malema; the money from the phone-in votes could be used to teach jokes to township children; the winner could bring out a Christmas DVD and star in the next Nandos advert; we’d call it Joke Idol and soon it would be syndicated and imitated worldwide!

But the next morning, with an alcoholic’s headache and a stoner’s hangover, you realise that watching lame stand-up isn’t as entertaining as witnessing an atrocious singer’s comeuppance. Your once globe-rocking idea is discarded on the same pile as laminated books for the bath, and ironing board covers with Jacob Zuma’s face on them.

You slouch back a week later to Zula Comedy Night with a pocketful of soft tomatoes, hoping for a rare gem in amongst the mud and donkey shit, wondering if this world has a place for the deluded comic.

Surely their bravery should be rewarded somehow, so they can move on with their head held high to something they’re good at?

Where can I study Juju-gese?

If South Africa were a sane country, I’d say Juju Malema’s days were numbered.

The leader of the ANC Youth League said a while back that young people had “a responsibility to party” - a sentiment I’m sure he wasn’t too sure of the next morning with his head down the toilet, vomiting up sushi, Johnny Walker, and a nipple cap.

Oh well, we must all suffer for the revolution.

Most recently, at the opening of ex-con Kenny Kunene’s ZAR nightclub in Cape Town, our pudgy leader of the upstarts told the press that DA leader Helen Zille (PBUH) “will not close ZAR at 2am, like she does to other clubs in Cape Town. The ANC owns ZAR and we will party until the morning."

A political party raising capital selling liquor from the bar and condoms from the toilet vending machine seems strange; but this is Africa, after all – we do things a little differently around these parts.

As usual Floyd Shivambu – ANCYL blackboard monitor – lost sleep translating into English a language that could only be called Juju-gese, “The ANCYL president said that the freedom and right for black people to own a club in a predominantly white territory is a freedom and right that came because of the ANC."

Wow! I bet those stuffy old archaeologists had an easier time deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics.

I’m not sure what is more embarrassing to the ruling party – Julius’ ridiculous statements or Shivambu’s laughable translations.

The thought that such a drunken buffoon would have his public office rug pulled out from underneath him is quaint, but looking at the ANC’s internal politics I’m sure this man will one day become our country's president.

Hopefully he would have sobered up by then, but I doubt it.

Giving the Devil Head

When I was a child, that grizzled drill sergeant we call God tried to teach me about hangovers.

Occasionally mum would allow us a chocolate Mighty Milk – they later changed the name to the odd-sounding Steri Stumpy, which for some reason always made me think of a guy with his legs cut off at the knees.

Dad would punch a hole in the top of it with his keys so we could drink it, and I would without fail down the lot in a series of frantic gulps.

I knew it was a bad idea, and that not long after I would suffer a painful belly-wrench. But I didn’t care; I loved that Mighty Milk so much I just couldn’t stop myself.

I got so used to the hurt that by the age of eight I could take a punch in the gut from Mike Tyson and carry on building a model airplane without skipping a beat.

So you see it’s not so much the headache part of a hangover that bothers me. The hangovers that I dread are the ones when I wake up feeling like Linda Blair.

I’m talking about that floating, hazy feeling; that heavy lump of shame; when you can’t remember what you did or who you offended, but you know it was along the lines of a 360 degree head rotation and projectile pukage onto a priest.

Losing mates this way is a bit more dramatic than finding you’ve been unfriended a few months after the fact, and it’s usually just as public and embarrassing as a series of angry wall posts ping-ponged across t’interweb.

Naturally, this hasn’t stopped me from drinking as much, but rather just to identify the types of poison that turn me from a jolly Jekyll to a heinous Hyde.

And much study has brought me to the conclusion that if Satan gave golden showers, you’d smell like you’d been in a Mexican barfight – tequila is the Devil’s discharge.

Seriously, they should just package Jose Cuervo in veiny, red penis-shaped bottles – maybe with two great testes so it won’t fall over as easily… and horns on its bell-end.

It looks like piss. It tastes like piss. No, no, it’s from the blue agave plant in Mexico. It’s just a coincidence that it resembles a liquid by-product excreted through the urethra. Don’t worry about the taste, lick some salt and suck a lemon afterwards.

You’d have to be shitfaced to fall for that!

All the teenage Satanists from the Eighties grew up to be Brandhouse reps pushing what they tell you is cactus juice.

With God telling you one thing and the Devil winking and suggesting another, it’s tough.

If, as Eric Draven in The Crow tells a junkie, Mother is the name for God in the hearts and minds of children, then Satan is the tattooed slag you wouldn’t take home to meet her.

I stopped drinking once, until a good friend told me I was much more fun drunk. And according to Chuck Palahniuk all God does is watch you and then kill you when you get boring, so...

I guess life’s just more exciting when you’re confused.

I was a Middle-Aged Buddha

Whenever I sit down to enjoy a slice of pizza or a Mickey-D quarter pounder with cheese, my mother’s voice echoes in my ears, “You’re digging your grave with a knife and fork.”

Strange, as I tend to lean towards food that requires the least amount of cutlery – burgers, chicken pies, spaghetti bolognaise is tough, but I’ve found a thick drinking straw can just as easily do the trick.

My mom is a veritable volcano of clichés. One of her favourites is, “Don’t have a champagne taste on a beer bottle budget.”

Genius!

Some of them I took literally as a child – I thought one should “save your money for a rainy day” so when you couldn’t play outside you could at least go see a movie at Cavendish Square.

Not a bright kid, me.

She taught us that “wisdom comes with Winters” and to “always forgive your enemies because nothing annoys them so much.”

I’ve always wanted to pen a self-help book entitled, ‘Mother’s Book of Wisdom’ – I envision the sole copy of this handed down through the generations; yellow pages, leather-bound, notes in the margin.

Forget the propaganda of the global schooling systems – teach the kid how to read and let him get on with it.

My mom is one of those rare individuals who doesn’t like to sugar-coat reality. When I was sixteen and going through the obligatory boo-hoo-I-hate-the-world phase she asked me, “Do you think your friends are going to want to be around someone who’s miserable all the time?”

When, many moons ago, she arrived at her parents place to find my grandfather with an MX-6 parked outside and a car salesman on the crux of a big commission, she looked the young salesman up and down, turned to my grandfather and said, “You don’t want that, daddy, it’s a poor man’s Porsche.”

A tongue of sharpened steel, wielded as mercilessly as a shogun samurai’s sword.

In a round-about way she has taught me that while knowledge may come in the form of a university text book, wisdom is best passed along through proverbs and sayings.

Words: Nathan Casey
Pic: Lucy Yearling

God Hates a Piss-Head

The dawn cracks like a free-range egg on the hard edge of the city bowl. Its bright, orange yolk spills across the streets and buildings and in through my bedroom window. God is a chef and this is Her fry-up.

On a beautiful morning like this I should be walking in the dog park or circling the block on a swift, brisk morning run. At the very least I should be out in the garden with a cup of Kenyan or apricot jam with some toast stuck underneath.

But I’m not. I’m lying on my back in bed, my shirt almost unbuttoned and one sock halfway off my foot, my tongue’s probably hanging out and I’m definitely snoring… until God flips that yolk through the window and it slaps across my fragile frontal lobe.

I sit up with an audible grunt. At first not sure where I am or how many eyes I’m supposed to have – I could swear only two – and for a sliver of a second I’m sure I feel fine. In that same fraction of a clock tick images from the previous night’s misbehavings hurtle past.

I was drunk. Very drunk. And I have somehow escaped a hangover.

Then that post-bingeing anomaly of something happening slowly but at the same time very quickly swirls between my stomach and head. In this long/rapid moment I realise that the alcohol is toying with me; lulling me into a false sense of security before whisking my brain into a frothy eggnog.

I swing off the bed and hastily zig-zag my way to the bathroom, smacking my shoulder on the wall and my hip on the hall table.

The ingredients placed inside my stomach last night have scrambled and, if I may stretch a metaphor to breaking point, a vomit-omelette is ready to be served.

The toilet laughs at me through his porcelain lips. He gargles the regurgitation down, knowing there’s more where that came from. I glare at his pasty judgement and crawl back into my dungeon of despair.

The scary thought that I’m dying enters my mind.

An hour later the more horrific thought that I won’t die torments me.

It is arguable that the most elusive medical breakthrough is not the cure for the common cold, but the perfect remedy for a bad babalaas.

Some swear by the “little, red ambulance” – Coca-Cola. Others will tell you water and exercise.

I knew a lawyer who would mix tomato juice and Black Label in a big glass and neck it – he called it a “Bloody Label”. From the banal to the bizarre.

I slowly rise from my pillow and place a pair of dark glasses over what used to be my eyes but are now no more than pain receptors. My furry tongue feels like a bloated blowfish, dead and decomposing. Funnily enough, the chorus from Lionel Ritchie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” is looping in my head.

There must be some wisdom out there, I think, somewhere in the world there must be a decisive cure for the hangover. I conclude that I must ask the all-knowing consciousness that floats in the very air around us; that enigmatic, online oracle known in this dimension as Google.

At first she tells me what to do before I started drinking. However, in order to build a time machine I would need “a wormhole, a large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast”, according to Stephen Hawking.

I have none of these things.

Then she says I should eat toast. But what if anything I send down there demands a return ticket? And not via the scenic route, I might add.

There is a thick rubber band at the bottom of my throat. It shoots everything right back at me.

As I search I discover that in Puerto Rico a hangover is cured by rubbing lemons under your armpits, Africans generally believe peanut butter does the trick and the Native Americans consume six almonds before the drinking begins.

If you have an Irish mate you could get him to bury you up to your neck in mud – and they wonder where the reputation comes from.

A recommendation of breathing in the smoke from a coal fire makes me regret quitting the Chesterfields.

And in Romania I come across something called tripe soup: veggies and the lining from a cow’s stomach, boiled and steaming. Yummy!

You’d think that at my age, with all the binge drinking experience I’ve compiled, I’d be able to navigate the morning-after with ease. But my whiskey-soaked brain can’t turn the library door handle, let alone remember where the reference section is.

So my only option is to ride it out, groaning and sweating like a bad porno actress.

I try to bargain with God, telling Her I’ll never do this again… or at least not for a very long time. But She can see through my bullshit and lies. And I can feel her taloned fingers digging into my brain.

God hates a piss-head, so I implore the scientists of the world to cease the search for pimple pastes and constipation cures and focus on that which inflicts us all at some point.

I could really use your help right now.