Dispatches of a Nomad #6: Socialite
For the first six weeks in Cape Town, I felt a supreme sense of superiority. Americans continued to suffer under oppressive lockdown regimes, but here under a summer sun I dined out. I watched dolphins from my terrace while ordering Uber Eats at criminally cheap prices. My dates here, I have chronicled. I enjoyed hikes, wine tastings and shopping. At a few moments — for example at a crowded Checker’s grocery store — I felt some of the ominous fear I so often felt in America about COVID. But mostly here it has not been a part of my life.
Recently though my American friends have posted their vaccination cards on Facebook. It has been reported that 100 million people have been vaccinated. A palpable sense of a grand summer in America has started to develop online and for the first time this week I felt a fear of missing out. News stories about the vaccine supply chain reveal the bitter truth that remaining here certainly puts me near the end of the line on a vaccine.
It wasn’t the only pang from America that reached the shores here. Talking to Darnell over the holidays and then messaging early during my trip here opened up those wounds. As so eloquently phrased in Insecure, he’s my What If man and when he stopped responding to my messages I felt pain. On Tuesday night this week I dreamt of finding a dead man on a sidewalk, but somehow cocaine revived him. The man did not look like Darnell, but I shuddered on waking and knew the dream was somehow related to him. Was I trying to revive the dead, had our conversations seemed to revive what I knew to be dead or is my subconscious validating my feelings that Darnell might have a larger drug problem than he admits? In any case I immediately interpreted it as needing to let go of Darnell.
In the immortal words of Joseph Campbell, “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” Admittedly, I have tried grand gestures like throwing a leaf into Lake Michigan while saying his name. And I remember the time I wept listening to Oprah interview Ed Bacon. I sat on a bench of the MLK memorial outside of the Compton courthouse, in my suit while tears streamed down my face. It’s embarrassing how long I have dealt with this, when, if any other person in my life held onto someone or something so long I would yell LET IT GO at them. At least in the therapy at the end of 2020, I realized that I had loved him and the depth of that finally explained why I could never shake him from my mind. Understanding what we have lost, it seems, is a precursor to accepting that loss. Perhaps the title of this final segment is Letting Go of Darnell, Part XI. We all know that the last sequel is about three sequels too far past the original hit and then too, the studio finally lets go.
On Wednesday I lunched with Werner. He preached the Afrikaans view that the load shedding problems really stemmed from 1994. In his words, all strategic planned ended with Apartheid. Berliners use Ostalgie to discuss aspects of nostalgic feelings for the communist regime without of course meaning to reinstall it. Perhaps Werner’s statement bordered on that though undoubtedly the real-world outcome of load shedding speaks for itself, whatever the cause. Of course, I always remain suspicious of the white Afrikaans viewpoints, but a luxury of living outside of my own country is that I felt liberated to observe without agreeing or disagreeing.
Later that same day the Ghanaian barber came to my flat for dinner. Being the naughty old gay I have become, I became nearly silly. His beard begged for me to run my fingers through it and his shirt hid a chest of hair that must’ve wanted the soft feeling of my face in it. But sadly though it seemed that way in my mind, halfway through dinner Adam began detailing his woes of obtaining a green card. His Ghanaian friend had married an old white man in Pennsylvania to get to America and had since divorced. Now the “friend” had taken five grand to help Adam, though it was unclear why. I only knew that five grand represented an insane amount of money for someone like Adam who mssgd me lk ths to avd data chrgs. And then Adam wanted my advice on a black American man he had met online who, offered to buy him a pair of sneakers. Jair taught me, through his actions of course, that often a story of need lurked behind the beautiful young faces of the black African foreigners here. Having learned that lesson already, Adam met expectations. Surprisingly, I enjoyed dinner even though I knew then and there that I would not get lucky that night. I suppose if I had been an immigration lawyer, I think I would have come a lot closer, but the ethics of that would have kept me from sleeping. Perhaps it’s simply safer to keep Adam as my Ghanaian barber here in town rather than as alover. I vowed that I would leave Cape Town with a final, fresh cut regardless of my final day of departure.
On Thursday a local chamber-like group of gays gathered on the front patio of the Radisson Blu. It’s the first such mixer gathering I have attended since prior to the pandemic and so I guzzled gin to deal with the nerves. Soon we may have our own form of Ostalgie, longing for time during the pandemic when we didn’t have to go to such social events.
For the time being though, I felt a thrill at being back “out” in the world. The quick glances of checking out others, the unknown endings to new connections. My American friend Jamal attended with me and we met Tom, a Brit who worked for an American tech giant. Tom lived in Germany and escaped here to endure the pandemic in a home in Bakoven. We also met Jergen, a German man in his late fifties with an MBA from America who found his way to Cape Town because an online gambling consortium needed a German speaking customer service agent. A group of young men from Zimbabwe invited us to their march for LGBT rights on the Zimbabwe embassy. An Afrikaans contractor with the blond hair of a Swede who owned a house painting firm came and hit on me — until he heard my American accent. A young Afrikaans woman, a wedding planner, asked me if I was a service provider or a socialite?
I laughed.
At last I have arrived, I thought, at least in the eyes of a young twenty year old. Of course, in American parlance, we reserve the term socialite for the truly affluent, like a piece in the New York Times about Anderson Cooper’s mother. Though Cape Town has indescribable natural beauty her comment does reveal a little of what I like about it here — with the dollar I can be rich, while back at home I am merely a middling lawyer to the truly affluent.
That work of course continues to be of little interest to me, though the week did scratch my ambition a little. After a flurry of dates and activity here, a rhythm has arrived and as going to the grocery now qualified as a chore rather than an exploratory event, it opened up time for more thinking. What IS happening with my career and what AM I doing here? Every weekend I vow to return to it in some way and undoubtedly if the nomadic life is to continue then I must attend to my clients because a socialite I am not. Or at least not the kind with a trust fund.
The weekend brought more wine tastings and more time with Tristan. I learned even more about the death of his partner. About a night two years after the death when Tristan woke up and burnt a whole wall of pictures in a bonfire in the middle of the night. It’s a powerful image and at least comforted me that I am not the only human who struggled with letting go. Oddly when we compared that to a break-up recently suffered by Tristan’s friend, he agreed that the death did have in the long run the benefit of avoiding the What If limbo inherent in some breakups. In the conversation, I resisted the urge to compare it to my breakup with Darnell, a sign that perhaps I had turned the last corner of letting go.
But it’s unclear of the life that waits for me. Now at about the halfway point of my trip, I had looked forward to extending it in order to stay through the Investec Cape Town Art Fair which had been moved to May. Now the organizers have announced it too is cancelled, presumably another victim of COVID and I will have to let go of that too.
Bantry Bay, Cape Town, South Africa
