About Cabbages and Kings

ABOUT CABBAGES AND KINGS
and other things

Someone once wrote horse racing is for Cabbages and Kings: exactly who slips me now, exactly why I don't know - but I can remember the very first bet I ever took.

It was in September '72, the first week of the Johannesburg Spring Handicap. I was working as a Road House waiter, it was a big and busy one. The parking lot could comfortably accommodate 200 cars when full. Ten full-time waiters and ten part-timers were employed.

Those of us on duty that Friday were just standing and messing around trying to come up with smarter-than-thou quips. It was that balmy time and day of the year: winter had just gone, evening was coming on and the sun was not yet ready to linger - in summer in Cape Town the sun sets between eight and nine.

B.J. was from Nebraska in the States on the last leg of his tour around the world; he was saving for his plane ticket back home. He'd done a tour in Nam, worked as a croupier in Vegas, been and worked on every continent, "cept the frozen ones", as he put it. He was always writing something in a journal between waiting on cars.

Jock was from Scotland, an ex-commando instructor, starting his trip around the world. He and B.J. spent a lot of time together, they were both working full-time planning to leave at the end of the summer season in January.

Bobby was an unhappy "appy" (apprentice) mechanic, couldn't wait to get it over to get into real estate, become a realtor so that he wouldn't have to wait on cars part-time to get into the big money.

Dick was a shoe salesman in the day, an ardent pursuer of get-rich quick schemes and scams, where most of his salary went.

Andrew was doing his articles with a merchant bank, a chartered accountant. He would only be promoted in January.

Johnny, the head waiter, had been there for years; started as a kid shortly after the roadhouse opened; filling little packets of sugar and progressed with the roadhouse over the years. Johnny was studying the race card, A.K.A. formbook, otherwise sometimes called a "joke book". He was trying to find a winner, well several actually. I was clowning around and said: "Here, I will give you the winner for tomorrow".

Me, who am I? I wasn't much more than a kid myself from the other side of the Limpopo. I knew all about horses, I came from a one-horse town, I passed that horse everyday on the way to school. It was a statue with a guy on his back pointing a sabre to the South, so one day I went South as far as I could go. Well actually, Cape Agulhas is the most southern point of Africa. But there wasn't enough work there to keep body and soul together til I could get across the ocean, so it was that I made Cape Town my pitstop.

Johnny must have been desperate for a winner, because he passed me the book. It was opened at the feature race, the Johannesburg Spring Handicap. I pretended to give it serious perusal, and looked at my reflection in a window, and enchanted "mirror, mirror on da wall, who is da winner of dem all?" I looked back in the book, all pretence suddenly left as a name jumped out of me. I didn't know anything about horses, but that one owner - I knew him! An English Earl with a double-barrel surname.

He owned the farm next to my grandmother's, his horse was called "Highland Gooti". "Gooti" is a fine rain between mist and drizzle, the term I have only heard in Zimbabwe.

"There, that horse is going to win", I told Johnny passing the book back to him. He read: "Highland Gooti" and said, "If that horse wins, I will eat my beret!" The purple beret was part of our uniform...

"Okay, put ten rand on for me." To put that into perspective, ten rand was more than what I made in a day!
"You will loose it, keep it."
"In that case, put twenty on!"
"That isn't a horse, it is a donkey."
In that moment I felt a patriotism that I never felt before, or since then.
"I've got fifty here and two-hundred in the bank. I will draw it tomorrow and you can put it all on."
"If you gotta learn the hard way, you gotta learn the hard way!"
By this time the other guys were listening. Jock and B.J. tried to reason with me. When that didn't work, B.J. told Johnny: "Come on Buddy, he's only a kid, keep him off that road."
"If he's old enough to bet, he's old enough to think", Johnny replied, walking away.

Reading Sir Roland's name had brought on waves of home-sickness, engulfing me in memories of my grandmother's farm. I could even smell the first summer rains as it fell on the dust and the dry grass in the veld.

I had spent the most formative years of my life in my grandmother's care. She was an Afrikaner who had married an Englishman, twenty years her senior. Living in an English Colony she refused to speak English. Up to the age of eight I couldn't speak English.

She had instilled in me the desire to learn to read and taught me English. She was stubborn, not stupid, she knew I would need to know English. I have yet to meet someone who has the command she had of the English language, in eloquence, elocution and diction. I never really knew my grand dad, he died in that first year I went to stay with them. Often in later years my grandmother would ask me to read to her and pass me one of the many books from my grandfather's collection; one night after a reading, she said quietly: "You're starting to look like him, and you read like he used to, with feeling and passion."

Sir Roland, a widower, used to visit my grandmother a couple of times a week, if one can call it that. They greeted each other in a derogatory manner, with overtones of endearment each in their own languages; they sat in silence, she drinking coffee whilst he drank his tea. Sitting for a long time without saying anything before he left again. Two people so far apart, yet so close. In retrospect, I don't think they needed words. The romantic in me believes there is a love story in there somewhere.

I was so enwrapped in my ache to be back home, the weekend passed in a daze...
"Highland Gooti" won by the proverbial mile. Johnny suggested I put the money on a 'to come" double bet, on races being run in Ascot, England; it was more a challenge than a suggestion. "He will never get it right a second time in a hundred years!"

With an air of invincibility I glanced at the newspaper, selected two horses called "Alcestes" and "Trogan Triumph". Form, who cares about that, I was into Greek mythology.

Two days later Johnny took me to the bank and deposited a cheque for thirty-thousand rand!

I later heard that it should have been sixty-thousand rand; okay, so his runner's fee was slightly higher than the normal ten per cent. But he was married, and not to mention his bookies' marker was probably high.

All of a sudden everybody needed money... everybody, except B.J., Jock and Andrew. B.J.'s and Jock's advice, short to the point: "Fix it Kid, for at least ten years."

Andrew's advice: "Buy a small coal mine's shares. That didn't make sense, may be I didn't want it to, colleries were closing down all over the world, why would I want to buy coal?

You want to make money, you go to someone who knows how to make money, like Bobby and Dick. Both of them later had trouble recollecting that I'd given them money.

The last week of November, B.J. had a phone call from America, his father had died. As I passed the office, I heard him talking, I was on may way home, I lived next door... I knew he was still shy for the plane fare. I went and got money I was keeping for my stake in a poker school, it was the last of my winnings. When I came back, he was standing outside talking to Jock, I went to the locker rooms, slipped the money I had put into an envelope into his locker.

I didn't have enough for poker, so I did what I used to do before. I took a trip to one of the smaller towns and spent a couple of days in Paarl, where my grandmother originated from.

Two days later, when I returned to work, B.J. had already left. In my locker was a note: "Thanks Kid, won't forget it." There was a contact number.

Jock never did get to see the world, he stayed on and got married, started a security company specialising in armed response and body guards. His nationwide branches gave classes to women and children on self-defense and evasive action.
Bobby is still selling shoes and trying one or other M.L.M. company.

I heard Dick bought land in Hermanus with the money he got from me, put up a resort for whale watching. I tried to tell myself it wasn't personal, it was business. For a long time it didn't take away the hurt, I really thought we were friends. He made a killing after the '94 elections from the property he had bought just before '94 at a fraction of the real value, when a lot of people couldn't get out quick enough, fleeing to all parts of the globe, anywhere but here...

Johnny died at a poker game, they buried him with the hand that he'd been dealt, a royal flush in spades.

Andrew was given the golden handshake a few years ago in Australia: fifty million dollars. The shares to sweeten the pot for the handshake, small change at around five million dollars!

The shares he had advised me to buy, a couple of years later a major corporation took over the company offering three of their's for one of your's. They were supplying a company turning coal into petrol; I can check it out in the paper, don't think it did amount to much... Like I said, didn't do much, not counting dividends, the thirty thousand would be about thirty-million, two-hundred and ninety-five-thousand, six-hundred and thirty two rand. At a rough calculation, but then don't forget I would have had to wait thirty odd years for that. I don't think it was worth it, do you?

As for me,
Gambling is a mug's game. Who needs it?
Oh by the way, got any tips for Saturday's feature?