Until recently Mr Smith had a microscopic penis. As he browsed bookshops for biographies of Napoleon it cowered in the draperies of his underwear, an embryonic chipolata, a coy love-prawn. Mrs Smith tried to reassure him, but he was certain that the harpies at her depraved book-club gatherings talked of nothing else, crooking little fingers and revelling in his genetic betrayal.
A few months ago he tried ordering a course of He-Man MaxiBulge-2000 pills, but when the sales rep on the phone asked him his name, and he offered Mr Smith, she yelled that she was tired of dealing with needle-dicked cheeseballs in raincoats who weren’t man enough to give their real names, and hung up. Some time later he bought a device called Crankshaft ProThrust, which used the principles of traction and looked like a method of extracting confessions from medieval Catholics. Its gleaming steel rods and screws seemed terribly impressive as he took it out of its box, but Mr Smith soon tired of trying to explain away the Tinker-Toy outline in his pants (“I have pelvic polio … It’s an ant-farm for my boy, a surprise you see …”) and the clanking when he walked only made things worse.
And then, out of the blue, a brochure arrived for Cornucopia. Nestled in Buenos Aires’s old Nuremberg suburb, the clinic promised 24-hour room service, oompah bands on call, and safe, cost-effective surgical penis enhancements. It was too good to be true. Pretty nurses would strum ukuleles as he drifted off; Dr Lebensraum would delicately suck fat from Mr Smith’s stomach and inject it into his member; and he would awake with Manhattan architecture soaring from his nethers.
And so it was. Seven days later Mr Smith arrived home R18 000 poorer and 3cm longer. It had all been quick, relatively painless, but much, much cheaper than buying a Land Rover.
Indeed, it seems that those who continue to buy the four-wheel-drive codpieces that clog our highways haven’t yet done the maths.
According to Land Rover SA’s website, Range Rovers “start at R769 000”. In other words, if you want one with all the trimmings (condor-hide upholstery stuffed with the moustache hair of 100-year-old Spanish nuns, and so on) you’re looking at something around R800 000. For that much, given that Mr Smith paid about R6 000 a centimetre, Cornucopia could sculpt a not inconsiderable 1,3m of what Marvin Gaye would have called sweet lovin’, an endowment that would need not only confidence to carry off, but also a compact system of slings and pulleys.
Of course, Land Rover owners are currently too busy being angry about shoddy service to worry about such puerile concerns. Every day more disgruntled buyers join the chorus, this one having discovered his onboard caviar diluted with sago, that one incensed that the emergency life-raft had inflated and fired a flare into the ceiling while she was dropping off her daughter at day-care. Last month their protests were given an expensive exclamation mark by one Andy Gray of Cape Town, who thought it prudent to spend R22 000 on a half-page newspaper advertisement listing his gripes. It was a bold stand by consumers, but it raised an interesting question. Namely: If a rich person shafts another rich person, does anyone care?
Naturally this is just middle- class sour grapes. The wealthy are as entitled as the poor to good service. It’s just that they really should keep their voices down, lest we notice them and ask what it feels like to drive an R800 000 toy through a country in which that amount could feed a rural family of 10 for just more than 35 years.
But people have rights. They have the right to spend their money however they want. They have the right to rub it in the noses of those who have none.
And they also have the right to a smoke and a blindfold when the revolution comes and they’re put up against a wall.