My Excellent South African Adventure

(Crossposted from My Left Wing.)

South Africa SMILES!!!

I did not go there expecting to see what I saw.

I was amazed. Here is a country not even 15 years out of apartheid. A country with huge problems. Crime. Immigration from other, less stable surrounding countries. Rampant poverty. An AIDs epidemic. A huge drug and alcohol problem. Competing ethnicities with centuries of hostile history. An entrenched, largely racist white establishment that still holds most of the money.

And what did I see? Besides ample evidence of all of those things?

I saw this.

Over and over and over and over again.

Read on.
I saw it on the street.

I saw it in the audience. (I was playing at a Johannesburg jazz festival.)

I saw it flashed out of school busses.

I saw it EVERY DAMNED WHERE!!!

From women. From men. From children. From white people AND black people.

Hope.

Confidence.

Happiness.

Look for smiles on a city street in America.

Smiles like this.

Nope.

Everyone with whom I dealt, from festival administrators and sound engineers through friends that I made and on down to waiters, waitressess and people working at coffee concessions…all competent, relatively happy and taking care of some serious business on an almost Scandinavian (if a little looser) level.

And party?

Check this out and try to find it in any American city.

A new friend…a fellow musician, a white South African who had been old enough to both understand the evil of apartheid and revel in the joy of its end…had picked me up at my hotel on my one day off and given me a guided sociological tour of the city and its history. He was quite perceptive, and opened my eyes to many things. On the way back to the hotel…I had to be back for a 9:30 PM pickup to go play at 11PM…we hit a really heavy traffic jam. Saturday night on a fine six lane superhighway. (Three in each direction, with big service roads on each side.)

So there we are, talking shop and stuff, surrounded by what appears to be an endless line of cars and a big, long distance-style bus. There’s a lot of music coming out of a lot of cars, and people are beginning to get out to see what’s happening up ahead. We’re not paying much attention. I’m not worried about getting back in time; I’ve still got a couple of hours.

Suddenly out of nowhere a tall young white guy wearing what looked to be a party zebra or cow suit…white with black spots and stripes, little ears, a tail,  the works…lopes on by with a shit-eating grin on his face. Like out of a Fellini movie if Fellini was a little sillier. Then people start wandering up and down the line of cars…mostly white, but with all races mixed in…holding beers and laughing. It’s a rugby crowd, and the local team seems to have won. The party is ON!!!

Simultaneously, a black taxi driver gets into a beef with someone…I never quite figured out who…and starts prowling between the cars with what looks like a billy club in his hands and apparent murder in his eyes. I take my seat belt off and prepare to take care of business if I must, but nobody else seems to pay him much mind.

Then several of the male partiers bolt from a car, stand at the edge of the road, drop their pants and start taking an obviously much needed, beer-inspired piss directly at the traffic going the other way, and accompanied by much laughter from any number of cars, bend over and moon the world before they return to their companions. Meanwhile, the runner in the zebra suit is doing his thing, again to many cheers and and an equal number of proffered beers.

This is LOOSE, brethren and sistren.

LOOOOOSE!!!

Harmless, too. All in good nature.

Without any evidence whatsoever of the dreaded Paris Hilton/Boy Band virus that accompanies most such activities when they do happen in the US.

I saw SO MANY evidences of the relative health of the society there.

Relative to this cesspool of a culture, anyway.

The best of all?

We were waiting to get on the return plane. A couple of bands, every race known to man represented. There was a final “security check”, certainly mandated by Homeland Security on incoming US flights. The passengers lined up…a hundred or more… and one young guy was in charge of the questioning. It was like being questioned by a combination of Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle. He had a different act for each person in line, and all were intentionally funny. He knew what bullshit was going on, and he milked it for 30 minutes straight.

This is a very practical country, this South Africa.

Now for a postscript.

Nothing official works well in the US.

Nothing.

But the same spirit that I saw in South Africa is what keeps us going here as well.

So the flight is 16+ hours including a layover in Dakar. I don’t sleep well on planes and that plus the double jetlag of a five day turnaround had me dumbed down to seriously low levels when we finally arrived at JFK at the ungodly hour of 7 AM on Labor Day. I collected my carry-on baggage, deplaned, went through passport security, collected my suitcase, went through customs, stumbled to the AirTrain and eventually settled onto a subway for the long ride to the Bronx. I got as far as Times Square when it finally dawned on my numbnuts brain that my laptop was not in my backpack. I had left it on the plane, in the overhead.

DUH!!!

I scrambled out of the subway, hailed a cab and told the driver…Islamic to the core, with some mullah preaching and singing on the radio…to HIT IT!!!

Back to JFK.

No traffic…Labor Day morning, about 9 AM by now…and for 1/2 hour I tried to find someone at JFK to whom I could talk on my cellphone.

Nada.

Zip.

Automated runaround lines, and when I did reach human beings, they gave me wrong numbers. Ten or more phone calls, all corporate bullshit.

OK.

Back at the JFK terminal. The South African Airways desks are all closed. No planes coming in or leaving until the afternoon. Nobody knows nuthin’. Cops? Nope. Homeboy Security? Nope. Information desk? Nope. They send me to a “Lost and Found” where the guy essentially says “Lost and found? Nope, Not here anymore.” (Subtext? “JUST what I need. You and yer fucking computer. Get lost.”)

Now, I have everything backed up, but stilll….Macs are expensive!!! Plus it would be a month of computer hell before I was up and running well again, and I am in the midst of both a book and a great deal of music writing,

So there I am, 24 hours of little sleep, dejected, dunno what to do…and this little, older black guy dressed all in black with a couple of gold teeth says to me “You a musician, right?” in some sort of Caribbean accent. (I am carrying my instrument on my back.) I think what the hell; I’m gonna be here until I resolve this one way or another, may as well hang. We get to talking; I tell him I play jazz and latin music, he says he’s a trumpet player from Panama; I ask if he knows Victor Paz (A great Panamanian/NYC trumpet player who generously initiated me into the mysteries of latin music when I first started trying to understand what was going on around the clavé upon which it is built.) and I am instantly his good friend.

“Of COURSE I know Vitin!!!” he says, gold teeth lighting up the joint. (There’s that smile again.) We talk for a minute, and I begin to think that he’s not just passing through. Maybe he works here. I ask him if he knows how this terminal operates, and he says “Know it? You BET I know it.” So I describe my predicament to him. He takes my arm and leads me behind a roped-off area to an office that says something about “Incoming Transfers” where several black staffers are goofing on each other in a familial way. They see him and say “Candyman!!! Whatchoo up to!!!???” and he reaches into his pocket and comes out with a couple of handfuls of wrapped hard candies that he gives to everybody. Then he says “My frien’ here has some troubles. I know that you can help him.” and almost magically, he disappears.

A fine woman asks me what’s the matter, and I tell her. She picks up the phone, talks to someone, puts down the phone and says “Mah man gonna go look. Sit tight.”

The phone rings a few minutes later, she says. “He’s got it” very matter-of-factly, interrupts a faux “lover’s quarrel” game of the dozens between a couple of the others in the office and says “Herman…stop that foolishness and go take a little walk to get this man his computer.” Which he does and five minutes later…there’s my computer. I thank them all, tell Herman’s apparent girlfriend that I like her new hairdo…the main subject of the teasing that was going on when I walked in…and once again there are smiles all around. Maybe not quite as innocent as the ones I saw in South Africa…after all, this IS the heart of the Empire… but from the heart nonetheless.

My deskbound saviour then tells me “You were very lucky. The security people searched that plane but they missed it.”

MISSED IT!!!???

It’s a 17″ silver Mac PowerBook, sitting in plain sight in an overhead fer chrissake!!! I “missed it” because I never leave it out but always put it back in my backpack when I’m on planes. Except this once, half asleep and jetlagged out.

Nothing official worked.

Nothing.

Nobody knew nuthin’ except the Candyman…it turns out he’s a skycap…and a few people doing real work in a little side office. (He was working when I left but I gave one of his friends my business card with a blanket invitation to any gig I’m doing in NYC. I hope to hear from him.)

And I was lucky. Had the Homeboy Security fools found it they probably would have closed the terminal, dragged it out somewhere and blown it up.

Lord!!!

And that’s my excellent South African adventure.

Have faith.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said:

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Mandela knew too.

Lest we all forget.

YA GOTTA BELIEVE!!!-Tug McGraw, reliever for the Miracle Mets in the early ’70s.

Yup.

Ya gotta believe.

Yes we can.

.

Let us pray.

My man Obama may be carrying the same message as those people I saw in South Africa, the same one as those people who helped me at JFK.

He may be carrying it to the general white audience here in the U.S. for the very first time. Dressed up and mainstreamed a little, but if you read his books you will see that he learned it on the streets as a young man. The same place I got it. The same place Michelle Obama learned it, too.

Places McCain and Sarah-girl have NEVER been.

Ever.

“Ya gotta believe.”

It works.

Believe it.

Those who have escaped oppression and slavery believe it.

Bet on it.

You should too.

Lissen up.

I hear things changing.

Listen.

Hear it?

Yup.

Soon.

Let us pray.

Later…

AG