I Moved Your Cheese Read online

Are you going to find yourself facing the final question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with the host saying, “For a million bucks, Mavis, can you identify the immortal part of you that will live on after death?” And afterwards will you be walking away looking ashen, muttering over and over: “I can’t believe I forgot my spirit. I can’t believe I forgot my spirit”?

  (Incidentally, I seem to remember that a few years ago South African Breweries had a campaign that involved placing signs in bottlestores that read: “Don’t forget the beer.” I’m not pointing any fingers, but I think someone might owe someone royalties.)

  But you have to hand it to Oprah: she handles her inner ostrich egg like a champ. See how she keeps a straight face while she informs a universe of unhappy homebodies that they, with a little faith, could be her. That’s right, honey – if you follow your bliss you too could be sitting up there next to Oprah, chatting to Denzel Washington and Maria Shriver and Gary Zukav and that bald-headed marriage counsellor whose name I have never bothered to remember.

  That is what Oprah tells them, and she doesn’t even blink when she says it. She looks them in the eye and tells them something that can’t possibly be true, and they love her for it. Because no one can be Oprah. Because not even Oprah is Oprah. Oprah the phenomenon is just an idea whose time had come, and Oprah the person was just smart enough and sufficiently inert to let herself inhabit the idea, and to let the idea to take her shape.

  Oprah doesn’t bring her personality to the show, and she doesn’t really have anything to talk to her celebrity guests about, besides casual references to other celebrity guests. She just billows in and lets the momentum of the idea that is Oprah take over. She becomes the ostrich egg, and allows a grateful audience to fill her up with whatever they prefer to imagine.

  You too can be like Oprah, and I don’t just mean by eating more banana cream pies and extra helpings of hominy grits than is strictly necessary. I mean you can let yourself flow as she flows. She doesn’t appear to flow – she appears to just sit there like a silo – but she’s flowing all right. She’s flowing in a non-flowing kind of way, if that doesn’t sound too much like Deepak Chopra.

  (Hell, it does sound too much like Deepak Chopra. I have been reading too many self-help books. I’d better move along, and sharpish.)

  Oprah embraces the egg, and although she appears to be an egg-filler and a guff-merchant, you can be sure that inside she is just as you and I would wish to be. When she’s sitting up there, she’s not thinking about angels and walking toward the light. She’s thinking about who to hire to write her next self-help book, or about doing the carpet-aardvark with Shaquille O’Neal, or how to get Gary Zukav to sit up straight when he’s on television, or buying a Lear jet so that the next time she flies somewhere she doesn’t have to sit next to all those people who could be just like her. She tries to pretend otherwise, but we can see through her. And that is as it should be.

  You know, just thinking about Oprah has made me hungry. I always associate Oprah with food, because I have a photograph of Oprah glued to my refrigerator door, along with a message, spelt out in those little magnetised letters that annoying people use to compose snatches of ghastly poetry.

  I think they write that poetry to dissuade me from going into their fridges. There is nothing quite so distasteful as other people’s idea of poetry. Although in this case I use the word “poetry” kindly. They are never really more than gloopy lyrical outbursts, or sticky snatches of pastel-coloured soft porn, four or five words long. I have to keep fighting the urge to grab these people by the collar and say: “Look, here is a pencil and paper. If you must write poetry, sit down and write it properly, not in the length of time it takes you to swig from the milk carton and scratch your belly. And when you have written your poetry on this piece of paper, put this paper in a drawer or a shoebox where unsuspecting visitors do not have to read it.”

  And then I also want to add: “And by the way, putting three words next to each other that all start with the same letter does not make it poetry.”

  But I am not talking about fridge-magnet poetry. I am talking about the message that is on my fridge underneath the photograph of Oprah. The message is this:

  “Lard is no barrier to success, as long as you can fake it.”

  And that brings me to the subject of my next chapter.

  7

  The Body Beautiful

  The body is always a ticklish subject. I have made no secret of my desire to lead the untroubled life, to avoid with strenuous rigour any temptation to rigorously strain myself, and yet like most of you reading this today, I am human. I am prone to petty vanity.

  Just the other day, in an unguarded moment, I was prevailed upon to remove my shirt in mixed company. The circumstances aren’t important, although I can reveal that they involved a deck of cards, a bucket of gin martinis, a small tub of tangy avocado dip and a toothbrush.

  Without a scrap of the natural delicacy that causes men to fix a polite smile and avoid eye-contact when a porker presents herself in T-shirt and Bermudas, the women present made no secret of their horror. Their jaws fell open with an unattractive clicking sound. “I didn’t know you drank so much beer,” said one. “Shame, and you’re not even forty yet,” said another. A young mother hurried her small children from the scene, covering their eyes with her hands.

  The sniggers continued throughout the cruel afternoon, even after I had replaced the shirt and draped myself in a loose-fitting tablecloth. It was all very distressing. But here’s the worst: like other men of my age and station, I have in the past been so shamed by such incidents that I have made rash decisions to do something about it.

  Such resolutions usually begin in the gym. I am no fan of the gym. My idea of unnecessary physical exercise is eating at a buffet. Spinning is what happens after I arrive home late and discover I still have a bottle of grapefruit schnapps in the fridge. I have never yet had a conversation with a living person in a gym. People there are thinner and firmer than me, which intimidates me, and also makes me hate them. There are some people who are in worse shape than I am, I suppose, but who wants to talk to the fat kids?

  I have toyed with the idea of home exercise, but not for very long. The thought of exerting myself in my own home makes a mockery of all that I hold dear, namely drinking beer on the couch. I don’t even like to do home maintenance or odd-jobs. When the lightbulb in the bedroom burnt out, I pushed my bed into the kitchen and read by the little yellow refrigerator light for a month. It was comfortable enough, although I did once fall asleep without shutting the fridge door and woke with my eyes frozen shut and my tongue sticking to the bed-post.

  (There may be those among you who question whether pushing a bed into a kitchen might not have been slightly more arduous than changing a lightbulb. Perhaps, but you must realise that I was trying to make a point. There are no lengths to which I will not go to protect my slothfulness.)

  Still, the home-exercise apparatus industry has ways of reaching out to you. To the blessed fact that I have not succumbed, I attribute more good fortune than strength of will. The standard home-exercise apparatus is marketed to you directly, via the late-night infomercial. I am especially susceptible to the siren song of the late-night infomercial, mainly because late-night is generally when I am at my most drunk.

  The infomercials to which most of the world is treated are particularly compelling because they are American, and the Americans know how to sell. They adorn their infomercials with former Miss Americas and one-time gymnastic Olympic silver-medalists and current Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and one-time day-time soapie stars and Suzanne Somers, formerly of Three’s Company and that recent good-for-nothing sitcom with Patrick Duffy. You see these apple-cheeked beamers and you think to yourself: Golly, how blonde and pneumatic. How supple, despite her advanced age and obvious drug habit. And then you think: perhaps if I buy my very own set of titanium-bladed Ginsu knives, I too can live like a Californian.

  I might well have fallen
to the blandishments of the marketing arm of the home-exercise apparatus industry, had I not found myself with time on my hands late one night during a business trip to Amsterdam. I know what you are thinking, but unlike every other man with time on his hands late one night on a business trip to Amsterdam, I did not leave my hotel room. Instead I declared the mini bar open for business and flipped through the Dutch television stations. What do you think you might find after midnight on Dutch television? Would you have guessed that it would be an Italian infomercial for a home-exercise apparatus?

  It was educational. Where South Africans rejoice in the glories of Verimark, the Italians embrace Tell-Sell. Where the Americans flog us the Alpine Skier and the Fitness Flyer – items of light-metal abstract art adorning many a walk-in closet around the nation – the Italians still touchingly put their faith in a product called Vibromass.

  Vibromass is that machine, roundly forgotten in the rest of the world, which provides vibrating leather bands that encircle one’s waist or thighs and shudder away cellulite and money. An elderly Italian woman talked us through the product, her hair the colour of saffron, her eyeliner so thick her face resembled a killer whale’s. I don’t mean to be ungallant, but she frightened me.

  The elderly Italian lady looked properly excited to be on Dutch television at two in the morning, and expressed that excitement by beating a length of bamboo against the enormous buttocks of a young lady in a leotard.

  I was face-to-cheeks with cultural difference. Where the Americans shrewdly use the “After” model in their slimming-machine demonstrations, Italians evidently prefer the “Before”. Unless of course – horrible thought – that young lady was the Italian idea of an “After” model. Either way, it made for tough viewing, especially late at night in a hotel room in a strange city, with the casual viewer not quite drunk enough to spend his unborn children’s inheritance on the, er, pay-per-view channels.

  “If you use the machine too much,” cautioned the Italian crone atmospherically, as a leather band churned the model’s lower hemispheres into a heaving Vesuvian mound of spandex and flesh, “you might feel pain.” The lass was prevailed upon to arrange the vibrating bands across her face. “Also good for facial massage!” whooped Mama Italy, as her young charge’s nose and lips slowly changed places.

  Looking increasingly wan, the poor girl submitted her thighs to a thorough flogging from the bamboo stick. “Makes slim above the knees!” declared her tormentor ferociously. “And good for any age!” She brought her chiaroscuro face menacingly close to the camera. “Thanks to Vibromass,” she whispered hoarsely, “I look at men with new eyes!”

  That experience cured me of any misbegotten purchasing urges on the home-exercise front. But still, oh my brothers and sisters, I was weak. I dreamed of changing, of taking my too, too solid flesh and remoulding it – yea, I wished to cast it afresh. I dreamed of making a difference.

  Even worse than physical exercise is dieting. I am not too proud to admit it: I have dieted. My diets are never especially ambitious, mind you. They generally take the form of a determination not to eat the little mint they bring around with the bill at my local pizza restaurant. Even then I can only hold firm as long as they keep serving those horrid little blue, sucky mints. When they switch to chewy white Endearmints, all resistance crumbles. Life is a cold, bleak place when you cannot allow yourself an Endearmint.

  (Note to editor: was that an endorsement? Do you think the Endearmint people will pay money for that? I am not too proud to admit it: I will accept paid endorsements. Tell them the next book will be called Who Moved My Endearmints?)

  Still, things were coming to a sorry pass. I found myself one night, down at the Chalk ’n Cue, hovering on the cusp, the very cusp, of ordering a lite beer, when suddenly clarity came to me. (There is a barmaid down at the Chalk ’n Cue named Clarity, but I am not talking about her. I mean the real clarity, the kind that comes to a man when he has reached his lowest ebb. Of course Clarity also comes to a man when he has reached his lowest ebb – indeed, very often it is the frequency of her return that brings a man to his lowest ebb in the first place – but I am not, as I say, talking about her.)

  I thought: What am I doing? Will this lite beer make me happy? This dream of having a six-pack stomach instead of a keg – is this not my desert elephant? I must seize my inner ostrich egg! I must make a virtue of my failing!

  Enough is enough, I decided. Enough of the tyranny of the trim. Enough of hiding and skulking and wrapping my midriff in tinfoil. (By the way, when wrapping your midriff in tinfoil, does the shiny side go in or out? No, don’t answer that. I don’t care any more.) I am a man, damn it, and a protuberant belly is my birthright. My washboard stomach has become something more closely resembling a twin-tub, and I don’t care who knows it. Besides, I live a thousand kilometres from the beach and I can always wear loose shirts.

  So that is how I reconciled myself to my weaker self, and I have gone further. I am inviting all good men and true to stand beside me. Well, not right beside me. About an arm’s length will do. I want you to march with me in the cause of Belly Liberation. Negotiations are under way to stage the nation’s first Tummy Pride march early in the new year.

  (I won’t be there myself, I’m afraid. Because, come to think of it, I am not big on marching. Even the thought of facing the next day after the last day of February tends to make me wheeze and become red in the face. Still, it should be a fun occasion, and I am assured there will be plenty of snacks).

  Much time and money and genetic history went into the making of these bellies – let us not disavow them. C’mon, chant it with me now: “We drink beer, we’re here, we’re everywhere. Get used to us.”

  Conclusion

  The time is drawing near when I must leave you. No, do not weep – it is the way of all things. The rose loses its bloom, beavers chew down trees that dam the mighty river, one day Graeme Hart will no longer present the weather after the 8 o’clock news. To all things there is a season, and already I feel the first stirrings of the gentle autumn breeze. Plus, I didn’t get much of an advance for this book, and I have to start doing some other work, before the men from the corner cafe come around to repossess my cigarettes.

  Sometimes the universe works in mysterious ways. There is an old man who lives next door to me. He is not the neighbour I borrow ice from and whose Sunday newspaper I sometimes steal – those are the Katzes in number 27. The old man who lives next door to me doesn’t take the Sunday paper.

  I had never had an extended conversation with the old man. I have always considered him a little creepy, to be honest, because he keeps a collection of life-sized plaster geese standing in the bottom of his garden and occasionally I see him taking them plates of cookies and, on winter nights, a thermos of what I have always assumed is coffee, although it may very well be soup. Sometimes when I have been working too late I sneak over the garden wall and hide his plaster birds under a bush, or arrange them in humorously obscene positions. It gets him no end of riled up. He jumps up and down and yells: “Who has been tampering with my birds?” It’s not much, but it amuses me.

  Other than that, there had not been much contact between us. Sometimes we would nod to each other over the garden wall, and he would say, “Did you hear those cats fighting in the street last night?”

  And I would say, “No.”

  And he would narrow his eyes and say: “Oh, well, perhaps it was just that music you play till all hours.” Then he would stalk inside and close the door. In fact, now that I come to think about it, I have never really liked that old man. But while I was writing this book, a curious thing happened. One afternoon I saw the old man out in the garden, thumbing through a tatty paperback and reading aloud to his geese. I saw the title of the tatty paperback and my blood ran cold. It was Tuesdays with Morrie.

  I took to staying inside after that, but I couldn’t hide forever. The old man next door – let’s call him Bill, because that’s his name – took to lurking near the garde
n fence, waiting for me to emerge. One day he caught me as I was carrying out a cardboard box of empty bottles.

  “Ahoy, young man,” he said, “how would you like to come over for tea?”

  “Tea?” I said.

  “Oh, all right,” he frowned, squinting at the empty bottles. “Bourbon then. Shall we say Tuesday? I think we’re Tuesday people, don’t you?”

  I wasn’t planning to visit Bill, but then Tuesday rolled round and I was moping around in my garden, wondering how in the world to write this conclusion. Conclusions, I have always felt, demand solutions, or at least resolutions. But I had no solutions or resolutions, not because I am too lazy too think them up – or at least, not only because I am too lazy to think them up – but because solutions and resolutions are what got the world into this mess in the first place. When you put your ear to your inner ostrich egg, that faint and reedy voice you hear echoing back to you, like the waves lapping at the sides of a whiskey tumbler, is saying: “There are no answers! There are no answers!”

  (When I put my ear to my whiskey tumbler, the waves tend to be saying: “Drink me! Drink me!” but I guess that is much the same thing.)

  All that moping and thinking about whiskey tumblers began to work on my mind a little, and, before I knew it, I found myself standing on Bill’s doorstep. He came to the door wearing baggy clothes and carrying a walking stick that he sometimes forgot to lean on.

  “Come in,” he said. “Did you bring a tape recorder? No? Never mind, you can take notes.”

  Bill’s plan was clear. Bill was intending to pass his wisdom on to the world. He settled back in his chair and steepled his fingers and looked at the ceiling as though deep in thought. Then he would say things like: “You know what I have always thought? I have always thought that we should learn to forgive ourselves before we can learn to forgive others.” And: “It is my opinion that we should accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.” And: “Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do.”