Last Days of PE

The Wagers of Sin

So Cousin Joey finally took us to the Boardwalk Casino, and this is what we find:

The net result of four hours of studious effort resulted in a transformation of a couple of R100 notes into a stack of R20 notes.  No big bonanzas for me, since I’m rather fiscally conservative about such things.  Since I’ve been gone, apparently the casino has built a monstrous great five-star hotel where the parking lot used to be.  The mind boggles when considering how Joni Mitchell could rewrite “Big Yellow Taxi” to accommodate such a development.  Oh, and the slot machine that brought so much joy three years ago has apparently been binned, obviously in retribution for enabling a Canadian to purchase and sneak a classified piece of technology out of the country.

The day started off far less auspiciously.   Joey had an appointment with his automotive specialists to deal with the tyres on his Mazda, so after an enormous breakfast, he dropped myself and the two elder Chans off at the nearby shopping centre, Zsa Zsa Gaborishly named Greenacres.

I found myself lending my uncle R200 to buy a pair of short pants.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Consequently, I needed to find an ATM so that I could buy some more cash for myself.  After spending some time in the food court, waiting in line behind a Gogo (elderly, matronly Xhosa) for a bit, I walked up to the machine to discover that she’d set the language to Afrikaans.  I found that odd, since there were numerous other language options available.  Quick history lesson:  whereas East London was always predominantly English-speaking during the Apartheid era, Port Elizabeth has always been a bastion of Afrikaans.  English has been gaining headway as a lingua franca, but Afrikaans is still very deeply ingrained.

As I walked away from the terminal and toward my father and uncle, I noticed that my father’s face was fixed in an unusually perplexed expression.  Turning to look behind me, I noticed that an elderly fellow, stringy grey hair and beard cascading about his head, had given up the ghost.   It may sound like an odd way to phrase it, but a human being had suddenly turned into a limp conglomeration of tissues.  Any animus had gone.  A young man was hefting the late gentleman out of his chair, while three women gathered around to give assistance.  The man’s eyes were closed, his jaw was slack and his mouth hollow and agape.  As the body was lifted from the chair, the flesh drooped and sagged from the bone.

The paramedics confirmed what was painfully obvious.  There was nothing to revive or stabilize.  They cordoned off the area with black, collapsible panels, and wrapped the body in foil before putting it on a stretcher and taking it away.

I was tempted to ask that the entire area be sealed and cordoned off, since anyone in that food court could have poisoned his eggs, and that one of the people in the room could be the killer.  But that would have been in awful taste.  Ironically, it may just have been the greasy, fast-food taste of his last meal that did the old lad in.

In any event, Cousin Joey drove up to the mall in a motorcar scene that could have been stolen from “Wind in the Willows.”  His forehead is just barely visible over the steering wheel.  Somehow, I keep getting the impression that he could whup my ass at basketball despite all intuitive knowledge about height advantage available.  He’s also a bespectacled accountant, and some of the stories from his youth paint a portrait of a typical shy nerd who has since blossomed into a life-of-the-party, how-d’ye-do man about town.  Personality goes a long way.

As we drove back to the house for lunch/second breakfast, I noticed a Hyundai Atos and wondered idly if that car had been the inspiration for the Doctor Who episodes “The Sontaran Strategem” and “The Poison Sky.”

As a quick aside, the only person in the past six months to tell me that I’ve lost weight has been my cousin Florrie.  I suspect that she’s just trying to find an excuse to feed me more of her wonderful but overwhelmingly plentiful culinary concoctions.  The practical upshot is that, when in Port Elizabeth, one eats like a hobbit in the more advanced stages of malnutrition.

Speaking of which, it’s almost time for tea.

Cheers everyone, and good night England and the colonies.

—mARKUS