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sedan. I got to a point where I could do a basic service on a car by myself, and often I did. Abel
would say, “That Honda. Minor service.” And I’d get under the hood. Day in and day out.
Points, plugs, condensers, oil filters, air filters. Install new seats, change tires, swap
headlights, fix taillights. Go to the parts shop, buy the parts, back to the workshop. Eleven
years old, and that was my life. I was falling behind in school. I wasn’t getting anything done.
My teachers used to come down on me.
“Why aren’t you doing your homework?”
“I can’t do my homework. I have work, at home.”
We worked and worked and worked, but no matter how many hours we put in, the
business kept losing money. We lost everything. We couldn’t even afford real food. There was
one month I’ll never forget, the worst month of my life. We were so broke that for weeks we
ate nothing but bowls of marogo, a kind of wild spinach, cooked with caterpillars. Mopane
worms, they’re called. Mopane worms are literally the cheapest thing that only the poorest of
poor people eat. I grew up poor, but there’s poor and then there’s “Wait, I’m eating worms.”
Mopane worms are the sort of thing where even people in Soweto would be like, “Eh…no.”
They’re these spiny, brightly colored caterpillars the size of your finger. They’re nothing like
escargot, where someone took a snail and gave it a fancy name. They’re fucking worms. They
have black spines that prick the roof of your mouth as you’re eating them. When you bite into
a mopane worm, it’s not uncommon for its yellow-green excrement to squirt into your
mouth.
For a while I sort of enjoyed the caterpillars. It was like a food adventure, but then over
the course of weeks, eating them every day, day after day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I’ll
never forget the day I bit a mopane worm in half and that yellow-green ooze came out and I
thought, “I’m eating caterpillar shit.” Instantly I wanted to throw up. I snapped and ran to my
mom crying. “I don’t want to eat caterpillars anymore!” That night she scraped some money
together and bought us chicken. As poor as we’d been in the past, we’d never been without
food.
That was the period of my life I hated the most—work all night, sleep in some car, wake
up, wash up in a janitor’s sink, brush my teeth in a little metal basin, brush my hair in the
rearview mirror of a Toyota, then try to get dressed without getting oil and grease all over my
school clothes so the kids at school won’t know I live in a garage. Oh, I hated it so much. I
hated cars. I hated sleeping in cars. I hated working on cars. I hated getting my hands dirty. I
hated eating worms. I hated it all.
I didn’t hate my mom, or even Abel, funnily enough. Because I saw how hard everyone
was working. At first I didn’t know about the mistakes being made on the business level that
were making it hard, so it just felt like a hard situation. But eventually I started to see why
the business was hemorrhaging money. I used to go around and buy auto parts for Abel, and I
learned that he was buying his parts on credit. The vendors were charging him a crazy
markup. The debt was crippling the company, and instead of paying off the debt he was
drinking what little cash he made. Brilliant mechanic, horrible businessman.
At a certain point, in order to try to save the garage, my mother quit her job at ICI and
stepped in to help him run the workshop. She brought her office skills to the garage full-time
and started keeping the books, making the schedule, balancing the accounts. And it was going
well, until Abel started to feel like she was running his business. People started commenting