Friday night: Brandon Edmonds
Summers in Durban are like David Lean movies: long, epic and strangely alluring. They make you dream about backstroking through molten lava. At least dressing is pared down to essentials. Basically, as little as is decent.
That most clubs and bars stick to Ralph Laurenesque colonial decorum, read “no shorts”, is really annoying. But TV being what it is, this good Friday night shall not be slouched away watching Yo Yo Ma doing his thing on Sessions at West Fifty-Fourth Street.
As someone who takes roadkill statistics personally, I don’t drive, but my girlfriend does. And before you go thinking: “Wow – a real, live Post- Macho New Man”, think again. The fading spur of John Wayne in me hates being driven around by a girl so I never look at anyone alongside me at stop signs.
We watch the sparkily clever The Opposite of Sex at Musgrave Centre, consumerist shrine of selfish selves, thrilling to Christina Ricci’s pudgy grace and garbled ethics.
Outside the designer temperature of the mall, it’s warm enough to incubate a premature mongoose. There’s no way we’re going to a club. We’re kind of anti-social that way. Probably not quite as bad as Sid and Nancy, our couple motto is Sartre’s “hell is other people”.
So we go shorewards, to the ocean where, contra creationists, life began. It’s beautiful on the promenade on nights like this. The holidays over, a new year getting started, the beachfront looks used up and tuckered out like a plastic Christmas tree on a dump.
Looking west, I always smirk at the dominating electronic Coke sign on the side of some tall building. It’s as if Durban were a conquered metropolis in the Cola-Wars.
We drive past the Durban Drive-In, where I used to watch gang fights as a kid, sneaking a peek at Jackie Chan somersaulting through a window in Rush Hour. A drink at the Blue Waters Hotel ought to ease the heat a little. It’s a fine establishment, rumoured to have been on Cubby Broccoli’s list of places to shoot a Bond film. The Lounge looks desertedly onto the pool and the clashing carpet alongside the Rat Pack decor has you feeling like an extra in a Dean Martin movie.
On the way home, we stop by the Umgeni Delta to watch drag-racing. This is where thrill-seeking Asian swains race expensive sports cars at speeds that would have their mothers’ fainting. Insanely accelerated Bhangra music blares from car speakers and the smell of smouldering rubber makes you gag.
If James Dean were a local boy, this is where he would have been.
We go home when the cops arrive, craving troubled summer sleep caressed by electric fans whirring like film through a camera …
Brandon Edmonds is a freelance writer currently studying English at the University of Natal, Durban