Archive for the 'Being Slick' Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »
31
Jan
11

The Tiger And The Met

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
Categories: Being Slick, Events and Good Times
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

To put it in five words: the Met was fucking mindblowing

Sure, it was my first Met and yes, I was in the best marquee on the grounds so my perception is going to be biased, but good god. It was a killer party.

We got some great pics, but sadly I can’t pull them off J-Rab’s camera until tomorrow, so here’s what I pulled from my N8 in the meantime.

 

 

You had to be there. Seriously. The food, the marquees, the decor, the bars, the salons where you could get a foot massage or where girls could get their make-up redone and hair styled, it was all so slick and amazingly well executed.

If you sat anywhere for long enough, you’d see a cross section of TV presenters, models, actors, news crews, entertainment crews, sports celebrities and socialites in some of the craziest, sexiest outfits you ever saw, strutting like they were on a giant catwalk and the world was watching.

And then bam! Two people with horse heads pirouette into the crowd and ballroom dance randomly in what looks like a creepily well choreographed out-take from a nightmare sequence in Equus.

 

 

By the time the sun had set and Fedde Le Grand was punishing the decks, the evening had become one huge party. People danced, they laughed, they ducked off to eat piping hot, delicious oven baked slices of free pizza and drank J&B in every variation known to man.

I remember taking this pic right near the end of the night. It’s the only other one I have right now that came out well, but soon as I get J-Rab’s camera I’ll put up more.

 

 

Anyone else get anything sick from the day? Send in what you got to tellthetiger@gmail.com and I’ll put it up here and punt your awesomeness to the interwebs.

There was more, much more, but it’ll have to wait until later.

-ST

12
Apr
10

SlickRetard

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
Categories: Being Slick
Tags: , , , , , ,

A hypothetical question if you will:

Your girlfriend strips down to her panties and runs into the sea with a whole bunch of her friends (also all girls) sometime around midnight after a night of excessive revelry – what do you do?

The answer here is a pretty simple one if you’re a SlickTiger. If you’re a SlickTiger you stand back, admire the view, carry on drinking your beer at a leisurely pace and get your jacket ready for your lady once she’s finished having a dip.

 

 

However, if you’ve been smashing tequila all night and are feeling a particularly strong surge of testosterone in your blood, which manifests itself in a ridiculously overprotective bout of male egotism, the LAST thing you do is stand by while your girlfriend scampers off half naked into the ocean.

This is when SlickRetard takes over. SlickRetard doesn’t even hesitate when his girlfriend starts running carefree down the beach, stripping off as she goes. SlickRetard vaults over the edge of the lifesaving club wall, strips down to his undies and sprints after his girlfriend like some wild-eyed lunatic.

 

 

Then, when SlickRetard finally catches up to her, he uses his body like a protective shield, wrapping it around his girlfriend and protecting her dignity from the perverted eyes of the naked group of men that sprang up out of fucking nowhere the second a boob became visible and charged toward the sea.

I guess at that stage, things could have turned out alright if SlickRetard had maybe not stripped his clothes off so close to the goddamn sea, because while he was desperately clutching his girlfriend, wave after wave was lapping up the shore, soaking his shorts inside which were his wallet, car keys and of course, cell phone.

Miraculously, even though the flippy key for my car didn’t so much flip open, but rather awkwardly grinded halfway into the erect position due to all the sand in there, it somehow still unlocked and immobilised the car, so we could at least go home to dry off, but I tell ya, the car ride back here WASN’T a happy one.

Why is it that the male ego always chooses the most retarded of times to raise it’s fucking ugly head? I should have just let her go. I learned my lesson. It cost me a cell phone, but I learned it.

Bottom line is if you’re THAT insecure about your girl gettin a little naked and running into the sea with her friends, then you’re being a fucking retard.

-ST

29
Mar
10

The Nuns Of The Antarctic

By SlickTiger 5 Comments
Categories: Being Slick
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

When I was younger, I fancied myself quite the budding poet and used to scribble out random and garbled verses that were mostly really shit, but hey, at least they rhymed.

In highshool I got published in a collection of poetry compiled by the poetry institute of Africa called ‘Shadows and Silhouettes’ which got me pretty excited until the thing finally arrived and I realised they’d pretty much published EVERY SINGLE POEM THEY GOT SENT.

To get published I think you just had to bang a out a verse or two and be in highschool, that was about it.

I tell ya, life is shitty sometimes. My buddy Barbarian fucking nailed it on Saturday night. We were sitting in his flat in Vredehoek and talking about some random thing or other when he said the funniest thing I’ve heard in months.

‘Christmas food,’ he said, ‘is crap.’

 

 

That simple sentence nearly had me in tears because he’s fucking right. The turkey is always way too dry and stringy, the Christmas pudding gives you the runs and mince pies are severely overrated.

You put your knife and fork down after eating Christmas food and you feel like your internal organs are dangerously close to rupturing.

No matter what anyone says, at that stage, you’re glad Christmas only comes once a year.

See, the magic of a thing is in the anticipation of it. The moment I found out I was going to get published, my adolescent mind filled up with all kinds of hallucinations of grandeur and I was pretty sure fame and fortune were close at hand.

 

 

Needless to say, over the next few years I wrote less and less poetry and became more and more sceptical of other ‘poets’. I started to suspect that really what they were doing was using poetry as a guise to write a pile of wanky shit that means nothing to anyone, including the person who wrote it.

This is especially true of the so called ‘poets’ who used to haunt open mike nights in varsity.

Pale, frail and nervous looking people, they would always go up there and read something that sounded like a confession about how their uncles fiddled with them when they were young and now they spend their alone time in their granny’s knickers listening to Anthony And The Johnsons.

 

 

I got drunk one night at such an event and wrote some poetry of my own on a serviette. After a particularly heart-wrenching performance by a guy who only just barely managed to keep his shit together onstage, I decided to jump in there, bar serviette in hand, to recite a poem I called:

Untitled

He drank until the day he died.
He drank to dull the ache inside.

He smoked until his lungs caved in.
All he ever knew was sin.

After what happened, he just gave in.
After what they did to him…

Dopey fucked a penguin.

Boy. Did that go down well.

-ST

22
Mar
10

View from a porch

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
Categories: Being Slick
Tags: , , , , ,

On this porch you can sit in the scorching midday sun and enjoy a beer so cold the sides of the bottle are frosted while you sit in the shade and watch distant cars glide by on the mountainside.

It’s peaceful here, you can sit with strangers and not feel that compulsive need that overrides all common sense to fill perfectly good silence with meaningless garble.

A warm breeze sweeps lazily through the leaves of the trees to the left of the porch, but when it moves through the bushes in front of us, the leaves flash silver as their undersides catch the sun.

We are surrounded on all sides by mountains thick with wild fynbos and at night the stars pepper the sky from horizon to horizon, forming countless constellations that J-Rab can name and trace but that to me just look like random and formless shapes.

You just don’t get this in Joburg. You can search far and wide for it, but you won’t find it.

I picked my way out over the rocks with J-Rab and her friend GoffGirl earlier today, we were looking for muscles on a beach in Pringle Bay. The ocean gathered in natural pools all around us and J-Rab showed me how sea anemone have these tiny tentacles that suck at your finger when you touch them.

 

 

Some of them were powder blue, I stared at those ones for a long time, trying to figure out how they came to be, by what evolutionary turn did they form like that, blue as the sky in those rock pools hundreds of years ago.

I stood barefoot in some of the pools, wiggling my toes in the sand as wave after wave came rolling in.

There was more, starting at Barbarian’s place on Friday, and then Buena Vista and then Stikey on Saturday, volleyball at Caprice, Little Red’s place and his new kid, good times all of them.

But it won’t come right now and I can’t force it. I guess I’ve just run out of words, they must have trailed away as I was driving the winding coastal roads back from Pringle Bay this afternoon.

It’s beautiful out there.

My girlfriend has just slapped me hard on the ass.

Instead of writing one more word of this waffly shit, I think I’m going to return the favour.

She is the best.

-ST

14
Mar
10

Sunday Post – 5pm and still haven’t made the bed

By SlickTiger Leave a Comment
Categories: Being Slick and Good Times
Tags: , , , , ,

When you wake up, it is a firm belief of mine that you shouldn’t fuck around at all. You should jump right up and make the bed and make it well so when you get home later you can collapse on it and feel good because even if your day sucked, at least you don’t have to climb into an unmade bed at the end of it.

Well, it’s 5pm and I still haven’t made the bed.

 

 

Instead, I’ve spent the day writing. Hammering as many words as possible out of this poor laptop while its sticky-coffee keys squeak and protest under my relentless fingers.

And still, I feel unfulfilled. Like I’ve wasted the day completely. It’s frustrating how on some days you’ll pour every bit of effort into your writing and come out with something that’s only mediocre at best and on others you’ll plonk out a few words that are sheer genius and have hundreds of people commenting and sending the link to their friends.

This definitely won’t be one of those posts.

All I really wanted to do with this post was write about yesterday and what an amazing day I had at the beach in Kommetjie with J-Rab, my cousin Sub-Human and his wife and kids.

It was the kind of day where the beach is the last thing on your mind. It was overcast and had rained that morning, but we had nothing to do after lunch, so we took the kids to the beach and it actually turned out to be a really beautiful day.

Sitting on Kommetjie beach, you are flanked on either side by beautiful mountain ranges with nothing but the sea and all its majesty in front of you. It’s amazing how relaxing it is to just sit there like that with hardly anyone around, thinking of nothing really and just enjoying living in the moment.

 

 

I call him Sub-Human because I don’t have any other nickname for him and it’s what some of his friends called him back in the day because he was wild and free in ways you and I can only imagine.

He has an incredibly big heart, the biggest of anyone I know and is fiercely intelligent, but most people when they meet him think he’s beneath them.

My ex-girlfriend thought that. She thought he was white trash and even made that comment about him one evening when we were on holiday a few years back in Cape Town. All I can say is it didn’t go down well with me at all.

She hated me doing this one thing, it upset her more than anything in the world and so, the second she made the ‘white trash’ comment I did that thing, right in her face, to piss her off as much as possible and surprise, surprise, it worked.

Nothing quite like instant revenge to spice an evening up.

Sub-Human is a philosopher and a poet who can strip an engine and put it back together in record time and who is a loving father and husband to his wife and two boys.

But more than that, he’s the best cousin in the world.

Back when I was a teenager, he was my hero. He must have been in his mid twenties, and I loved the way he was so honestly unconcerned with what the world thought about him and completely unafraid to say what he thought and fight for what he believed was right.

There was integrity in the way he lived and I respected that. The trappings of this world have never meant a damn thing to him and he’s always had this way of seeing straight through people’s bullshit that never fails to crack me up.

 

 

He freaks a lot of people out, they don’t take him seriously, they think he’s a clown, a buffoon, but if you could have sat on that beach with us, looking out over the oceans and the mountains and heard him speak about the Albatross and how much he loves watching those colossal and magnificent birds glide over the ocean, you’d swear he was the single most fascinating person you had ever met.

‘Act like a pauper, think like a King’ he always used to tell me and I’ll remember those words as long as I live because they take on a new significance for me with every situation I find myself in.

I don’t think Sub-Human is a fitting name for him and I’m almost embarrassed to use it to describe such an amazing person.

Instead, I’ll call him Albatross, that’s much more fitting.

And also, I’ll make the bed 😉

-ST

10
Mar
10

SlickTiger Interviews The Minister Of Arts And Culture… Or Does He?

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
Categories: Being Slick and Killer Posts
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Last week’s post about the time I interviewed Vodacom CEO Alan Knott-Craig got a whole bunch of old cogs turning in my head and memories I’d long since forgotten have been playing all jerky and in sepia tones at the weirdest times.

 

 

The one where I ‘interviewed’ the then minister of arts and culture, Dr. Zwelidingo Pallo Jordan, jumped randomly into my head outta nowhere and I burst out laughing in the middle of a teleconference call with Ireland.

I was 22 years old at the time and facing the biggest hair crisis of my young life. During varsity I cut my hair about four times in as many years. I looked like a roadie for Metallica,  which was great, at varsity.

Back in the real world (ie Joburg) people looked at me like I was something that had dribbled out of a garbage bag they had just lifted from the bin.

So I reluctantly agreed, in the interest of securing gainful employment, to get a haircut. But the next question I faced was what kind of haircut? At that stage in my life I’d only had 3 – a ‘pot cut’ from when I was born up until I was about 13, then a middle parting throughout highschool and then shoulder-length, greasy, grunge-rock hair from when I arrived at varsity till when I left.

Stupidly, I told the hairdresser to keep it pretty long and defaulted to the middle parting I’d worn back in highschool.

It was fucking cringe-worthy. Remember Will Ferrell in ‘One Night At The Roxbury’? No? Let me jog your memory.

 

 

Yeah, it was that bad.

So anyway, the group of journalists I was working with at the time managed to set up an interview with the Minister himself, ol’ Zwelidingo, at the ministry in Pretoria and so we set out early one morning to get there by 9 and conduct an ‘interview’ with him (ie. try to sell him advertising in the bullshit report we were compiling).

In order to make what we were doing look legit, there were a number of essential tools we used, such as:

  • Expensive-looking suits (ties and all)
  • Briefcases
  • A thoroughly researched list of interview questions (no shit, if we didn’t at least get this part right, no one would take us seriously enough to buy advertising)
  • A ridiculously overpriced ratecard and legal documents that were anything but
  • A dictaphone that used tiny old-school tapes, and
  • A digital camera that took fucking crap pictures

About halfway to Pretoria, my colleague, a Hawaiian guy in his thirties called Steve asked me if I’d brought spare batteries for the camera at which point I froze rigid.

‘What?’ he said, ‘Don’t tell me you forgot spare batteries.’

‘I didn’t forget spare batteries,’ I said, still rigid.

‘Then what?’

‘I forgot the camera.’

‘Oh, what the fuck dude?! What the fuck are we supposed to do? We can’t go back now, we’re nearly there, the interview’s in 20 minutes!’

‘Fuck, just relax, that thing takes fucking useless pictures anyway, we’re not going to use one fucking picture we’ve taken so far, they’re all shit.’

‘Yeah, but that’s not the fucking point! The fucking point is to look like we’re journalists and journalists take fucking pictures! God! How could you forget the fucking camera!’

‘Stop being such a prick about it I’m sorry! What else do you want me to say! I’m sorry! Fuck! At least I remembered…’

‘What? What is it?’

‘Oh fuck.’

‘Don’t say that. Don’t say ‘oh fuck’ like that.’

‘Dude. I forgot the dictaphone.’

‘Oh fuck.’

 

 

We were royally screwed. We had no choice but to keep our eyes peeled for an electronics store on the way to the interview and though we found two, neither of them had dictaphones.

This left us with only one option, call the Minister’s PA, explain that our dictaphone was broken and find out of the ministry didn’t have one we could borrow.

She said she’d see what she could do. I still remember sitting in the ministry foyer, nervous as hell, jiggling my leg, drumming my fingers, praying for a miracle.

While we were sitting there waiting a man with a giant ghetto blaster walked past us and into the PA’s office.

I looked at Steve. Steve looked at me. His leg started jiggling.

‘Are you sure this will work?’ we asked the PA moments later.

‘It should – it has a record button and we found a clean tape you can record on, just make sure you sit close to it.’

And that’s how, on a random Tuesday morning, I ended up walking into the Minister of Arts and Culture’s office dressed in a 3-piece with a fucking terrible haircut and a ghetto blaster.

‘Ehhhh,’ the Minister said, frowning, not entirely sure what the fuck was going on, ‘are you going to play me a song?’

Believe it or not, it gets worse.

The ghetto blaster had the shortest cable known to man and no batteries, so in order for us to all be close enough to it so that we could actually record what was being said, we had to rearrange the fucking furniture in the minister’s office so that we could all sit at the boardroom table, around the gheto blaster.

Thank fuck Steve was with me, he kept the Minister occupied with polite banter while I made sure the tape was rewound, hit record/play and started saying ‘testing, testing’ in a voice loaded with the kind of quiet desperation people usually reserve for prayer.

 

 

I hit stop. The loud sound of the spring-loaded buttons snapping up made the room so silent. I hit rewind. Everyone’s attention was riveted on the gheto blaster. It got to the end of the tape and I hit stop again.

I shut my eyes. With a trembling finger I pressed play. The tape spools started turning and the next thing I new, clear as day we all heard…

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

The record/play buttons on the blaster were for recording CDs, or maybe even, if you were feeling daring, the radio, but that was it.

‘Um,’ Steve said as he realised how fucked we were, ‘Minister. I’m so sorry about this, but I think we’re going to have to reschedule…’

‘What magazine did you say you were from again?’ The Minister asked, too baffled at this point to be angry.

‘British Airways. HighLife Magazine,’ I replied, blushing blood-red.

‘Well that settles it then.’

‘Settles what?’ Steve asked nervously.

‘I want free flights. British Airways.’

I looked at Steve. Steve looked at me. I gave up. So did Steve.

‘Free flights,’ I said, ‘you got it.’

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how NOT to interview the minister of arts and culture, and yes, there will be a quiz later 😉

Have a killer day.

-ST

09
Mar
10

The Day I Won The Lottery

By SlickTiger 5 Comments
Categories: Being Slick and Killer Posts
Tags: , , , , , , ,

I stood in the sea, holding her. We watched the sun set pink-red over the horizon while surfers around us paddled lazily after waves and a man on the beach threw a frisbee for his Jack Russell.

We left when the sun was about a fist from the horizon and drove back to our crazy wooden house, both of us salty from the sea with sandy toes, and we talked about the future.

 

 

Back at home I fried up some burgers while she did a load of washing and when we were both done, I popped a bottle of Champaign and we drank a toast, clinking glasses. Our wild eyes met, my lioness and I, and we kissed. The taste of cold Champaign, the feeling of her body pressed against mine.

That old Sheryl Crow song came on her iPod, ‘My Favourite Mistake’ and I remembered the first time she ever said those words to me.

The things women tell us when they’re falling in love, we never forget them do we? No matter what happens, no matter how badly it ends, we never forget the words women whisper to us in those moments when the universe is holding its breath and it feels like the credits in the movie of your life could roll at any second.

And now she lies sleeping on the couch next to me while I finish the rest of the bottle of Champaign, listening to Jimi Hendrix on this balmy summer evening, at the end of a day that I think has changed my life completely.

There are things happening, things I could never have foreseen and they’re good things because they prove what I always suspected was true, that the good guys win sometimes and that if you find something you’re passionate about and stick to it, great things will come your way.

Me, I’m a writer, always have been, but I can’t tell you how long I wasted that gift, how many years I kept it locked away waiting for an opportunity that never came, making excuses.

Not living, just killing time.

But the day I finally got my shit together and started this blog, something came alive, and this thing, it’s big and it’s getting bigger.

Maybe, like me, people are tired of being fed a load of contrived bullshit. Maybe they just want to kick back for a few minutes a day and feel like they’re connecting with an actual human being instead of a bunch of fucking robots.

 

 

I stand like I always have, naked in front of you, shameless and unafraid, and I tell it exactly the way I see it and I leave the rest entirely up to you.

But I will say this though, pull up a chair if you like what you see here, because the show’s just starting and you bet your ass, it’s gonna be a good one 😉

-ST

05
Mar
10

When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be Alan Knott-Craig

By SlickTiger 3 Comments
Categories: Being Slick and Killer Posts
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

A long time ago, I was a journalist working with a team of people from all over the world and I felt pretty fucking special and amazing.

We got paid every week in cash, huge wads of R200 notes carefully counted, stacked and packed into brown paper bags.

See, what we were doing wasn’t exactly legal. It would bore the hell out of me to have to explain it as I’ve probably told this story a hundred times, so instead I want you to think of the scene in Fight Club where they’re in the boutique store selling soap.

 

 

The narrator says something about how all they’re doing is selling rich people their fat asses back to them – we were doing the same thing, only in an editorial sense with neat, official rate cards with prices printed in Euros.

You want a page of advertising in our report? That’ll be eighty-fucking-nine thousand Euros please.

I know what it feels like to be escorted out of someone’s office by security. I also know what it feels like to lie to mayors, ministers and high-powered CEOs right to their smug little faces instead of the other way around.

You’d be surprised how easy it is – 70% of winning people over is looking the part, get that right and with enough important-sounding smarmy banter you can bullshit your way into anything.

That’s how I landed the interview with Alan Knott-Craig, who was the then CEO of Vodacom. A phone call here, an official-looking series of faxes and emails there and then next thing I knew, I was waltzing into his offices with my Hawaiian team-mate Steven, both of us dressed to the nines in expensive business suits and leather shoes polished until they looked like black mirrors.

I wore a fucking tie. I had a fucking briefcase. I was 22 years old.

For the record, old Alan had the hottest PA I’ve ever seen in my life. That woman was hot enough to melt tar, fahk. It’s a smart move because before you’ve even met the man you already have this grudging respect for him whether you’re conscious of it or not.

 

 

Understandably, I was more than a little nervous and had asked Steven, 12 years my senior, which interview question of the ones I’d drafted I should start with.

‘None of them,’ he replied.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Dude, you look like a kid fresh outta college.’

‘I am a kid fresh outta college.’

‘Yeah, so you’ve got to earn the man’s respect or he’s never going to take you seriously. Start with a difficult question, show him you’re not afraid of him.’

‘O… kay…’

‘Ask him why Vodacom’s cell phone rates in South Africa are so much more expensive than other places in the world.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You don’t think that’s going to piss him off?’

‘Trust me, after that he’ll know we aren’t fucking around and after that, he’ll buy some advertising in the report.’

‘Cool. Ok, I’ll do it.’

He’s a tall guy, ol’ Alan. Big hands. Exudes unwavering confidence and is direct to the point of almost coming across as rude.

 

 

None of this helped my nerves. We all sat down and I opened my briefcase with trembling hands as he sat there, calm as a cat with its claw through a mouse’s tail.

‘So Mr Knott-Craig,’ I stammered once I was set up and ready to go.

‘Call me Alan,’ he replied.

‘Alan. Why are Vodacom’s rates so much more expensive than other places in the world?’

And good old Alan, good old Mr Knott-Craig, I’ll never forget his response as long as I live. Me, a skinny kid out of college no idea what the hell I was doing, and him, one of the most influential men in South Africa, the chief executive officer of an empire.

He stared straight at me with a look that could weld steel and said one word.

‘Crap.’

Which is exactly what I did.

And that’s why when I grow up I want to be Alan Knott-Craig, what a fucking badass.

-ST

04
Mar
10

SlickTiger Meets Gary The Cannibal

By SlickTiger 6 Comments
Categories: Being Slick and Killer Posts
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“I’m in a gay relationship,” he said, “I’m not sure if you… might have… heard anything about that…?”

When complete strangers open up like that with me, my first instinct is to go deadpan. I fake nonchalance because I’m totally cool with that. This is 2010 for chrissake, people are entitled to live free and without prejudice when it comes to their lifestyle choices.

 

 

And no, it doesn’t alarm me on some level that I’m sharing a room with this man, didn’t he just say he’s in a relationship?

“No, I hadn’t,” I replied, “but, um, I respect that.”

“We’ve been together 8 years now.”

“That’s a long time,” I said, genuinely impressed, “the longest relationship I’ve managed so far is about and year and a half. Straight relationship. The longest straight relationship. Um. Not that I’ve tried any other kind, haha… yeah, so…”

“Should we head downstairs?”

“Fine with me.”

And that’s pretty much how our first conversation went. They got much better after that, as they do once alcohol is introduced, and by the time we all met up for dinner that night, Gary and I were good friends.

Also, because we were two out of the only three males on the conference with about 26 women, we ended up hanging out a lot purely by default.

Shortly after we all sat down for dinner the MD of the company told me that they weren’t going to make us n00bs dance or sing a song for everyone, but that we would have to stand up, introduce ourselves and make a speech during dinner instead.

I love shit like that and so the second the MD, henceforth known as ‘Hot-Boss’, made the announcement to the table, I volunteered to go first, right then and there, before dinner had even been served.

Always go first. Don’t be a pussy. People will respect your courage and, having no one else to compare you with, will love everything you say.

I kept my speech nice and short. I thanked them for hiring me, I thanked them for inviting me on the conference, told them how excited I was to be starting out at such a friendly and rad company and sat back down.

“Wait a minute,” one of the girls chirped, “tell us why you got arrested!”

Ahh Christ.

 

 

In one of the ‘getting to know you’ games earlier that day it had emerged that I had been arrested when I was 13. Funny how things like that seem to pop up at the least appropriate moments.

Eyebrows were raised. Hot-Boss tried to brush it off by saying, ‘Well, there’s a question we’re definitely going to add to the list the next time we interview someone.” Queue polite / nervous laughter (keep in mind this was before the alcohol started flowing).

Under the surface though I could see she was a little unsettled – the last thing you want to find out about the person you’ve just hired in that they’ve had a run-in with the fuzz.

You can read all about the first time I got arrested here, it’s actually a pretty tame story. Me and some buddies smashed a few windows on a derelict building and got caught and arrested for vandalism.

Still though, it sounded bad when I explained the story over dinner that night, it was awkward and I sat down sheepishly when I was done and made a mental note to just shut the fuck up about that stuff in future.

Shortly thereafter Jager-bombs began to drop like grenades down a VC trench.

The next n00b stood up after dinner was served and got a slightly more severe grilling than me, she clocked in at about 4 minutes. She survived with her dignity intact though, but only just.

More Jager-bombs dropped. Speeches got longer and longer as the people listening grilled the n00bs with one question after the next. Questions like ‘How old were you the first time you got drunk?’, ‘When did you first have sex?’ and ‘Who’s the hottest girl here?’ started popping up. Much hilarity ensued.

Jager, Jager, Jager. Bomb, bomb, bomb.

Eventually everyone got tired of speeches and hit the upstairs lounge to party on down and cut up the dance floor.

Sometime during the festivities someone figured out that Gary hadn’t made his n00b speech at which point we all started chanting ‘Ga-ry! Ga-ry! Ga-ry!” which reminded me of the crowd chanting ‘Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy!” from the movie with the same name about a retarded football player.

 

 

Being surprisingly shy in front of a crowd, Gary tried to get us to simmer down in the hope that we’d all forget about it after awhile and carry on partying.

No such luck.

Hot-Boss asked him to tell us about himself and he told us a killer story about how when he served in the army (navy?) he was sent on a ship to guard PW Botha only to end up accompanying ol’ Pik on what can only be described as a ‘ho-run’.

Pik was in the mood for some Eastern European women, of which there happened to be a few on a neighbouring ship, so they rowed off in a life-raft towards this other ship only to get shot down completely by the women / security on the ship and forced to row back empty handed.

“Hahaha!” people chuckled, “nice story Gary!” “Tell us another story Gary!” “Yeah, tell us another one!” everyone shouted in happy, drunk unison.

“Well,” said Gary, “another thing I’ve learned is that human flesh is overrated.”

[Insert record scratching sound effect]

“What?! Overrated how?” one of the braver girls present asked.

“As a food source,” Gary stated, matter-of-factly.

The room exploded. “What the fuck?!” “You’ve eaten human flesh?!” “Tell us you’re joking Gary!” everyone shouted in bewildered, drunk unison.

“It was in North Africa back in the day when a lot of people still did that and it wasn’t really frowned upon. I had no idea what I was eating, I was only told afterwards,” he said defensively, “it tasted quite sweet.”

Cut to the inside of my head where the opening scene from the movie Ravenous started playing, the one where a tent full of starving soldiers all tuck into a bloody meal of suspicious-looking circular steaks.

 

 

It’s shot mostly in close-ups. They tear at the meat with their teeth, blood running down their chins and congealing in their beards, while the wet sound of them all chewing gets louder and louder and the cuts get faster and faster and faster and…

“GARY THE CANNIBAL!” I screamed like a man waking up from a nightmare. Everyone burst out laughing, well, everyone but the intern who was struggling to lift her jaw back off the floor.

Me, on the other hand, I was ecstatic. Gary’s priceless over share nullified my earlier confession completely – who the fuck cares about a few broken windows when you have a human flesh eater in your midst?

Now there’s a question to add to the interview list – True or False: Human flesh tastes sweet?

Hahahahahaha! Ahh, good times I tell ya, good times 😉

-ST

03
Mar
10

The Tiger Returns

By SlickTiger 4 Comments
Categories: Being Slick
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ll tell you one thing about Christians, they’ve got the monopoly on guilt. Hell, I don’t even go to church or practise Christianity, but when I do bad shit, the guilt comes thick and fast.

I’ve been meaning to post for a long fucking time, I was in a good routine y’know? People they used to say, ‘Yeah, that SlickTiger guy, funny fucker. Posts every day, EVERY DAY. We love him. We want him in and around our mouths.’

 

 

Now they say, ‘Yeah, that SlickTiger guy, what a jerk. He had something going there for awhile, but it’s clear he ain’t got the stones to see it through. He’s dead to us now.”

Well, I got news Party People, like a cockroach scuttling out the drain after the last nuke wipes humanity out for good, I’m back, and I’m badder than ever 😉

Since I last checked in, crazy shit has gone down. I packed my life up in record time, jumped in The Red Baron and blazed a trail of fire clear across this beautiful, fucked up country of ours.

Joburg showed me its true face just as I left. I saw it the last time the sun set, just as I was about to get on the N1 to Bloem. Its true face looks like this:

 

 

I rolled into Bloem late, my schedule was tight as a drum because my new company had organised a 3 day conference that they really wanted me to attend which started ON the day I was originally going to arrive in CT.

Bloemfontein is a ghost town at 9 on a Monday night. I could count the other cars I saw on one hand. A stray dog nosed through some garbage. An empty chip packet blew scraping down the road.

The next day I got up at 4.30, showered and left by 5. There was about an hour’s grace before the heavens opened like a floodgate and I drove the next 6 hours in rain that fell so heavy it was coming down in sheets.

Try overtaking trucks in weather like that. Visibility is zero, but it’s ok because you can see the other car’s headlights right?

Fuck no. I counted about 15 trucks and cars that were driving with their headlights off, and in every one of those cars I saw my own death, splattered at 120 km/h all over the asphalt.

 

 

I’d be worm food if it weren’t for porn. It saved my life – click this sentence to find out how.

I hit Stellenbosch at around 4.30 and headed straight to Cheetah Outreach where I found her feeding four cheetahs. She had one by the scruff of his neck, a huge handful of fur between her fingers.

‘Hey!’ I said, ‘Stop hurting the animals.’

She turned around to give me a piece of her mind, but stopped mid sentence when she saw it was me.

Two and a half weeks – I could see the difference in her. She’s more tanned, she looks relaxed, more at home here than she was back in the Big Smoke, stuck behind a reception desk, whiling her time away filling in vet boards and staring at nothing.

 

 

She hugged me and the feeling of her all soft and skinny against me was good the way a cold drink on a hot day is good, the way a deep sleep after a hard day is good, good right down to your bones.

13 hours later I’m sitting in a bus with my new co-workers, singing ‘The Wheels On The Bus Go Round and Round’ into a microphone plugged into the dashboard.

6 hours after that I’m line dancing to ‘Sexy Back’ and smashing Jager-bombs into my face with what I can only describe as hordes of women.

In life sometimes, you just go with it. If you’re me, you take that a step further.

I could go on about the conference, a lot went down over the three days, but I think the word I’m looking for to sum it all up here is ‘radass’. I invented that word, you can use it but you have to reference this blog 😉

The weekend was amazing. J-Rab and I hit Bikini Beach near Gordon’s Bay and on Sunday went to meet my buddy Scatter’s 4 week old daughter.

It’s amazing how perfect babies come out. They’re finished so neatly, ten fingers, ten toes (hopefully) tiny mouth, fat arms and legs. Then they grow up and get all funny-looking and full of imperfections, flaws and fuck-ups.

And now I’m in the thick of things. The new job has started guns blazin’ but you know me, it’s nothing I can’t handle 😉 Oh, before I forget, here’s a pic of me on the first night I arrived at my new place:

 

 

Tune in tomorrow for a post I like to call ‘SlickTiger Meets Gary The Cannibal’.

Ka-Pow!

-ST

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »