THERE I was, minding my own business in the far corner of the White Stinkwood’s shade, when in walked Grim. Now, as you don’t know my old friend and comrade Grim, here is something I should tell you: There is often trouble where Grim is. But we’ll get to that.
I take a long sip and a longer look over the rim of my glass and decide greetings are in order. “Hell,” I say, “either the devil has given himself a holiday from Hades or it is his local representative joining me for a pint of cold and gold. How are you, Grim?”
“Effing grim,” says Grim. “Why do you effing ask?”
Grim would have been a brilliant ventriloquist, had he bothered with frivolous matters such as entertainment. He speaks without moving his lips or any other muscle in his face. The way you know he is addressing you, is that he stares at you as if he is expecting an explanation.
Without fail, this is very effective in driving off the babblers, braggarts and busybodies. Usually I find it one of his more endearing qualities but, you know, it can also be annoying. There was the time at the Red Lion in Port Elizabeth with Grim and I on our second cold one, when this long-lost friend of mine came slumming through the door. Hey, he was happy to see me and I was eager to find out when he had started wearing a tie and for what reason. But we never got there.
From the moment my newly rediscovered friend joined us, Grim leaned forward and presented his dead man’s stare. And we were hardly through the handshaking and the “did you marry that girl you made pregnant” when the stare won. My friend muttered something and disappeared through the swinging door. Hell yes, of course I was annoyed.
Having seen Grim’s stare a thousand times, I am long immune to it today. So I tell him to go and do unrepeatable things, preferably where nobody can see him. We laugh and shake hands and buy beer. If you can call my old friend Grim’s grimace a laugh.
Halfway through the next round, we start talking about the old days. Those days in the previous century, when we stared at each other in mutual suspicion along the counter of a drinking hole near our then place of work. Our employers, charmingly branded the Communist English Press, had their premises in a part of Johannesburg where you did not walk for health reasons, even in those days. As you’ll see.
Although we worked at the same place, Grim and I weren’t colleagues. I was in the editorial department while Grim was buried somewhere in the nether regions of the works. Not that he was actually involved with the printing of the newspaper – the artisans, the compositors and the operators, their jobs were reserved for people unlike Grim. The trouble with Grim is, he is not white enough.
His job was categorized as “unskilled” labour, but his skills had nothing to do with it. Neither was Grim allowed to enter the sordid bar across the road where the subs and hacks overstayed their welcomes jointly and severally. “European” people got drunk with “European” people and “non-European” people with “non-European” people, the way it was intended by nature and the National Party.
No, we only got to stare at each other along the same dirty bar counter because I was young enough and adventurous enough to accept an invitation from a different co-worker to join him at “his” bar in an even less savoury corner of Johannesburg. After all, it was still daylight!
Problem is, I didn’t leave after one beer. Nobody ever goes for “a beer”. And when I did leave, the shadows had multiplied and were not caused by the sun.
They were confident enough not to wait until I had walked into a quieter area; they came for me right outside the door. And why shouldn’t they be? There were five of them, they had knives and they looked as if robbing me would not be nearly enough.
That’s what triggered me, the conviction that handing them my wallet would not save my suddenly very white skin. I fought with everything I had, not really thinking at all – what chance did I have? As it turned out, more than enough. For suddenly a scream from hell came from the bar door and next to me – turning fists, elbows, knees and feet into bone-breaking weapons – was the suspicious stare from the bar counter. We vastly outnumbered them, Grim and I.
One of the thugs turned and ran. The other four went to hospital. So, for that matter, did Grim and I. But we didn’t mind, we could have gone to the mortuary, we still have the scars reminding us of that night. And it wasn’t even his fight.
As we waited for the ambulances (one white, one non-white), I uncorked my adrenaline in a stream of expletives aimed at the cowardly cut-throats. To my bewilderment, Grim didn’t agree. He didn’t blame them; he blamed “the system”. “It is the system,” he said grimly, “that is turning people into animals.”
I thought this a bit rich but hey, the man had just placed his life on the line to save mine – the least I could do, was to listen to his point of view. And I did, that night and many times after we had become friends. Throughout the years of The Struggle, when he was an activist and I wrote about activists.
Now, as we are sitting in the shade of the White Stinkwood keeping our own company, that is all behind us. We are free now. So I idly ask my old friend Grim why it is that he is still so grim. He stares at me for a long time. Then he says: “It is the system.”
The trouble with Grim is, he is not black enough.
