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“But who did this belong to?” I said.
“Eh, don’t worry about it,” one of the guys told me. “White people have insurance.”
“Insurance?”
“Yeah, when white people lose stuff they have insurance policies that pay them cash for
what they’ve lost, so it’s like they’ve lost nothing.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Sounds nice.”
And that was as far as we ever thought about it: When white people lose stuff they get
money, just another nice perk of being white.
It’s easy to be judgmental about crime when you live in a world wealthy enough to be
removed from it. But the hood taught me that everyone has different notions of right and
wrong, different definitions of what constitutes crime, and what level of crime they’re willing
to participate in. If a crackhead comes through and he’s got a crate of Corn Flakes boxes he’s
stolen out of the back of a supermarket, the poor mom isn’t thinking, I’m aiding and abetting
a criminal by buying these Corn Flakes. No. She’s thinking, My family needs food and this
guy has Corn Flakes, and she buys the Corn Flakes.
My own mother, my super-religious, law-abiding mother who used to shit on me about
breaking the rules and learning to behave, I’ll never forget one day I came home and in the
kitchen was a giant box of frozen burger patties, like two hundred of them, from a takeaway
place called Black Steer. A burger at Black Steer cost at least 20 rand.
“What the hell is this?” I said.
“Oh, some guy at work had these and was selling them,” she said. “I got a great discount.”
“But where did he get it from?”
“I don’t know. He said he knew somebody who—”
“Mom, he stole it.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We do know that. Where the hell is some guy going to get all of these burger patties
from, randomly?”
Of course, we ate the burgers. Then we thanked God for the meal.
When Bongani first said to me, “Let’s go to the hood,” I thought we were going to sell
CDs and DJ parties in the hood. It turned out that we were selling CDs and DJing parties in
order to capitalize a payday-lending and pawnshop operation in the hood. Very quickly that
became our core business.
Every day in the hood was the same. I’d wake up early. Bongani would meet me at my
flat and we’d catch a minibus to Alex with my computer, carrying the giant tower and the
giant, heavy monitor the whole way. We’d set it up in Bongani’s garage, and start the first
batch of CDs. Then we’d walk. We’d go down to the corner of Nineteenth and Roosevelt for
breakfast. When you’re trying to stretch your money, food is where you have to be careful.
You have to plan or you’ll eat your profits. So every morning for breakfast we eat vetkoek,
which is fried dough, basically. Those were cheap, like 50 cents a pop. We could buy a bunch
of those and have enough energy to sustain us until later on in the day.
Then we’d sit on the corner and eat. While we ate, we’d be picking up orders from the
minibus drivers as they went past. After that we’d go back to Bongani’s garage, listen to