It was an early Sunday morning. So early, in fact, that not even SE Supermarket was open. I lived in one of those narrow Victorian Woodstock houses on the corner of Salisbury and Roodebloem opposite this place, so you know that means something.
Anyway.
The household – and the rest of Woodstock, no doubt – was still sleeping off Saturday night, including me, snoozing in my bedroom at the front of the house. In other words, the room next to the front door. The worst room in the house. This detail is important.
You see, with these old Woodstock houses, this is the room with the window onto the road and above a miniature porch that no one but the passer-by with the desperate tik poo uses. This is the room with the window that beggars and scam artists and unwanted guests will invariably knock on when no one answers the front door. It’s the room that will hear everything shouted, smashed, and barfed onto the street outside. It’s the room with the window that can never be opened because sticky fingers can steal a lot through the burglar bars.
No one would specifically choose to make a bedroom in this room, so it’s usually turned into a study or ‘guest room’ that triples as a general dump-all space for everything no one wants in the rest of the house and is the first line of defence against reality.
In short, it’s the kak room in the house. And this was my room. Where I was sleeping on this particular morning.
Now before I can tell you what woke me this morning, so early and so abruptly, I need to tell you about my landlord.
Andreas* was a Cape Town-slumming, six-foot-something German artist who practiced mostly veganism and nouveau-Buddhist meditation and had the comportment of someone who considered themselves spiritually elevated while still being something of a temperamental dick. We didn’t much care for each other, but I paid the rent on time and was cooperatively vegetarian and also he’d been away when our housemate had offered me the room after a drunken night at Woodstock Lounge and didn’t have a choice about me being there.
Andreas drove this huge, imported, American, 90s-type dump of a red truck, that was as impossible to miss as it was easy to steal. Everything was metal on this thing, everything was broken, and it couldn’t lock. But Andreas, you see, had done the sums and had decided, on purchasing this vehicle, that it was a bargain because a) he didn’t need it to last long and b) no one would dare steal it since it was so utterly unmistakable. If someone stole it, he reasoned, he could just ask so-and-so from the ‘hood and they’d know where it’d been taken. This he believed was simply obvious to everyone and so no one would ever dare to steal it.
I raised my eyebrows at this logic but, frankly speaking, I wasn’t on any high ground when it came to sensible car choices.
I drove an old white VW City Golf Shuttle that had scars from its own trauma with burglar joy rides (more than once), would cut out randomly, and also would unlock if you just stared at it hard enough. But I loved her and she loved me and, no matter what, she always found her way home or cut out on the burglars who stole her. Also, I didn’t have money and was always running out of petrol – not the reason for it cutting out randomly, but an important point to bear in mind.
AnyWAY.
So, it’s Sunday morning and it’s quiet and everyone’s sleeping when I hear this chugga-chugga out front. Now, I’m a morning person and my brain starts firing before my body is ready to wake up, so even in that state my mind’s starting to calculate what I’m hearing. Because the sound is sort of familiar as Andreas’ car, right, but not how it sounds when it’s starting normally, and this also means that Andreas is home (by this stage I’m dragging myself out of bed for my morning ablutions), so why is the front door locked from the inside? And then it dawns on me: someone’s busy hot-wiring his fucking car, like, in broad morning light.
Guess the scrappy little rascal trying to boost his truck didn’t get the memo about the truck being unstealable.
I run to my bedroom window which, since it’s the front room, means I’ve got a front row seat on the dude frantically trying to work the gears and the petrol, and I run back into the house shouting for Andreas to wake the fuck up because someone’s trying to steal your muthafucking car Dreas wake the fuck up! – and I grab my car keys. Because … why? I don’t know, it’s just how my stupid animal brain works: DANGER HURRAH LET’S RUN THE FUCK TOWARDS IT IN FACT LET’S CHASE IT!
Logical, right?
Anyway.
So Andreas stumbles out the front door trying to put his clothes on, shouting obscenities, and now the guy knows that we’re onto him so he’s getting panicky as fuck as Andreas roars up to the driver’s seat window and starts banging on the door, shouting and trying to pull the window down while simultaneously trying to keep his hippie pants up. But carjacker’s angels are loving him right now because the door locks are working and then, wonder of wonders!, the car fucking starts and off he goes, leaving Andreas standing in the middle of the road watching his unstealable red trunk bump and swerve down Salisbury as our guy makes his getaway.
Andreas looks at me, looks at the keys in my hand, and I’m like fuck it let’s go.
So, I fire up the old Shuttle (she’s feeling feisty and starts first time), Andreas is basically bursting out of his skin with adrenaline and outrage, and off we go.
Now, our guy didn’t have many options for his getaway. We lived on the wrong side of Salisbury and Andreas’ car was pointing away from Roodebloem, the main exit outta Dodge, which meant that the only way our carjacker could go was deep into the network of car-lined side streets which meant that we caught up to him pretty quickly. So the minute we get him in sight I start hooting like a circus monkey with a toy and Andreas, well Andreas is filled with the spirit of a million outraged losers who’d had their cars boosted, so he’s shouting out the window working himself into a right German froth.
At this point we have to go so slowly around some of the corners and get so close to the truck that Andreas starts making to get out the car and just run the guy down. But our carjacker’s angels are still on duty and the next minute we’re out of the labyrinth and on the main road. On the main road, my friends. The empty, clear, Sunday-morning main road between Woodstock and Salt River and now shit is getting real. Now it is ON.
Our guy is gunning down the middle of road and we’re flying after, my foot flat on the gas, white girl gone fast and furious, and Andreas near apoplexy, shouting for me to go faster! FASTER!
Shuttle has a top speed of about 110 but it’s faster than Andreas’ piece of shit because before long I’m coming up on the right of the truck and we’re so close that the whites of our guy’s eyeballs are visible from where I’m at and of course right? Because not only is there a batshit woman chasing him but there’s a six-foot-something German now hanging out the window, red-faced and foaming at the mouth, waving his one free fist at him and cursing him in all kinds of colourful language. So he bails off the main road, veering into the network of narrow roads on the other side of main and off we follow.
It’s getting crazy now right, because seriously what’s the end game? What happens when we catch up with the guy? And where do we catch up with him? In his crib with a bunch of homies who’ll happily fuck us up? Or does Andreas go full berserka and land up in jail?
But Andreas doesn’t care. He’s pulled his giant frame back into my teensy tiny Shuttle and is banging on the dashboard for me to go faster and faster and our guy is still bumping down the road, swerving down every small street to lose us and then, just as we come close enough to touch the bumper and our guy seems to have made a fatal swerve that will end this ride … the Shuttle stops. Dead. In the road. Chugs out and dies. Run out of gas.
I thought Andreas was going to succumb to spontaneous combustion.
We watched our guy and his angels tootle away in the red truck, turn the corner, and disappear.
The morning silence was back.
Oh well, I said. We gave it our best shot.
Andreas only nodded and, to his credit, slipped mysteriously into calm mode.
I’ll go get some gas, he said. You wait here.
So I did. I sat in the car, in the quiet road on an early Sunday morning, listening to the birds and wondering why I didn’t just go with him and then realised I wasn’t wearing any shoes. Or decent clothing.
When Andreas finally made it back we drove home in silence. What was there to say? We’d gone all in and failed. And yet…
A day or so later Andreas got a message from one his choms in the hood. They’d found the red trunk abandoned on the side of the road. Nothing wrong with it, just left. Was it his for sure, he wanted to know. Oh yeah, no doubt; no other truck like it.
To this day I like to think that the guy got such a fright about being chased that he didn’t want to risk having to two crazies continue the hunt. But maybe Andreas was right and he realised that the car was just too much of a liability being so recognisable and big and red.
Maybe his angels and ours had had a word. Either way, I guess we all got what we needed in the end.
Shared stories are funny things aren’t they? I haven’t spoken to Andreas in 14 years at least; our car guy might have a respectable job as a crime boss by now. It’s possible neither remember this event. And yet, we have in common this one insane Sunday morning of grand theft auto and high-speed chases in Woodstock where things were quiet until they weren’t.
*Not his real name
** I got this uncredited pic off SAHistory.co.za. It’s Salt River and my Shuttle was white and it was way earlier in the day and way further back in time than the sky and car on the left suggest, but it seemed like a very appropriate scene-setting image…
TANYA MEESON 