653289528350

settlement going on. Third, Fourth, and Fifth Avenues were nicer—for the township. These
were the established families, the old money. Then from Sixth Avenue on down it got really
shitty, more shacks and shanties. There were some schools, a few soccer fields. There were a
couple of hostels, giant projects built by the government for housing migrant workers. You
never wanted to go there. That’s where the serious gangsters were. You only went there if you
needed to buy an AK-47.
After Twentieth Avenue you hit the Jukskei River, and on the far side of that, across the
Roosevelt Street Bridge, was East Bank, the newest, nicest part of the hood. East Bank was
where the government had gone in, cleared out the squatters and their shacks, and started to
build actual homes. It was still low-income housing, but decent two-bedroom houses with
tiny yards. The families who lived there had a bit of money and usually sent their kids out of
the hood to better schools, like Sandringham. Bongani’s parents lived in East Bank, at the
corner of Roosevelt and Springbok Crescent, and after walking from the minibus rank
through the hood, we wound up there, hanging around outside his house on the low brick
wall down the middle of Springbok Crescent, doing nothing, shooting the shit. I didn’t know
it then, but I was about to spend the next three years of my life hanging out at that very spot.
—
I graduated from high school when I was seventeen, and by that point life at home had
become toxic because of my stepfather. I didn’t want to be there anymore, and my mom
agreed that I should move out. She helped me move to a cheap, roach-infested flat in a
building down the road. My plan, insofar as I had one, was to go to university to be a
computer programmer, but we couldn’t afford the tuition. I needed to make money. The only
way I knew how to make money was selling pirated CDs, and one of the best places to sell
CDs was in the hood, because that’s where the minibus rank was. Minibus drivers were
always looking for new songs because having good music was something they used to attract
customers.
Another nice thing about the hood was that it’s super cheap. You can get by on next to
nothing. There’s a meal you can get in the hood called a kota. It’s a quarter loaf of bread. You
scrape out the bread, then you fill it with fried potatoes, a slice of baloney, and some pickled
mango relish called achar. That costs a couple of rand. The more money you have, the more
upgrades you can buy. If you have a bit more money you can throw in a hot dog. If you have a
bit more than that, you can throw in a proper sausage, like a bratwurst, or maybe a fried egg.
The biggest one, with all the upgrades, is enough to feed three people.
For us, the ultimate upgrade was to throw on a slice of cheese. Cheese was always the
thing because it was so expensive. Forget the gold standard—the hood operated on the cheese
standard. Cheese on anything was money. If you got a burger, that was cool, but if you got a
cheeseburger, that meant you had more money than a guy who just got a hamburger. Cheese
on a sandwich, cheese in your fridge, that meant you were living the good life. In any
township in South Africa, if you had a bit of money, people would say, “Oh, you’re a cheese
boy.” In essence: You’re not really hood because your family has enough money to buy
cheese.
In Alex, because Bongani and his crew lived in East Bank, they were considered cheese
boys. Ironically, because they lived on the first street just over the river, they were looked