Someone Stole My Decks Three Weeks Before the Busiest December I Ever Booked

Thirty-One Bookings

Every DJ in this country knows that December is the year. Weddings, matric dances, year-end functions, family reunions, the long rolling party that starts at the end of November and does not stop until somebody's uncle falls asleep in a camping chair on New Year's Day.

Last year, for the first time in nine years of doing this, I had thirty-one bookings between the last week of November and the second of January. Thirty-one. I wrote them on a whiteboard in my storeroom in coloured marker, and every morning I stood in front of it with my coffee and felt like a man who had finally made it.

I had a deposit from almost every one of them. I had a new set of speakers I was still paying off. I had a 2015 Toyota Avanza with a roof rack and a trailer hitch that carried everything, and everyone in our family knew it as the music car.

The Morning in November

On the eleventh of November I opened the storeroom and everything was gone.

The decks. The mixer. Both laptops. The two big speakers I was still paying off, the subwoofer, the lights, every cable, the microphones, even the extension leads. Somebody had come through the back wall where the brickwork was weak, quietly, over the weekend, and taken nine years of work in what the police later guessed was about forty minutes.

The only things left were the whiteboard with thirty-one bookings written on it in coloured marker, and a single microphone stand lying on its side.

I sat on the floor of that storeroom for a long time. My wife Zinhle came in, and she did not say anything, she just sat down next to me on the concrete, and after a while she said, "We'll make a plan." That is what she always says. Usually she is right. This time I was not sure.

The Insurance That Was Not

I had insurance. That was the first thing I said to the police, and to Zinhle, and to myself.

I phoned them that afternoon. It turned out that the policy I had been paying for covered my equipment while it was at a venue and in transit, but not while it was in a storeroom without a burglar bar on one wall. There was a clause. There is always a clause. I had never read it. The woman on the phone was polite and sympathetic and could do nothing for me.

So I sat at the kitchen table that night and did the arithmetic. To fulfil thirty-one bookings, I needed to replace almost everything, within three weeks. The deposits I had taken were already spent, mostly on those new speakers that were now gone. If I cancelled, I would have to pay everyone back money I did not have, and nine years of my name in this town would go with it. Brides talk to other brides. Pietermaritzburg is not a big place.

What I Owned

The bank was not interested. I tried, the next morning, sitting across a desk from a young man in a lanyard who looked at my irregular income, my existing payments on the speakers, and the word "freelance," and very kindly told me no.

My brother-in-law lent me some. My mother lent me some, which I hated. It was not close to enough.

Driving home from my mother's house that evening, I had the thought that I suppose a lot of people have at some point. The only thing I actually owned outright, that was worth anything, was the car I was sitting in. The Avanza was paid off three years ago. It had a hundred and ninety thousand kilometres on it and a cracked dashboard, but it ran like a clock and it was mine.

And I could not sell it. Without the car, I could not get to a single one of those thirty-one gigs, even if I did somehow find new equipment.

Reading in the Car Park

I sat in the Avanza in the car park of the Liberty Midlands Mall that night, with the engine off, and searched on my phone for whether you could get a loan against my car without losing it. I typed it exactly like that, in my own clumsy words, and then sat there reading in the blue light of the screen while the security guard walked past twice and looked at me.

I want to be honest. I was frightened of it. Everyone has heard stories about people who borrow against their car and wake up to find it gone from the driveway. My father lost a bakkie that way when I was a boy, to a man in Edendale who lent money out of the back of his own shop, and I remember my mother crying in the kitchen.

So I read slowly. I read about what happens if you cannot pay. I read about interest, and fees, and how long you would have. I read the fine print this time, every single word of it, because the insurance company had taught me that lesson the expensive way.

The Conversation With Zinhle

I did not decide alone. We sat on the bed with the phone between us, and I showed her what I had found.

She asked the questions I was too stressed to ask. What would it cost us in total, not just per month. What if December was quieter than the whiteboard said. What if somebody cancelled. What would happen to the car if everything went wrong. And the one that made her go quiet: whether there was any way to pawn my car and still keep using it for work, because without the music car there was no work, and without the work there was no paying anything back.

That was the whole question, really. The whole of December depended on it.

Keeping the Keys

What I found, in the end, was an arrangement where the car stayed with me. I could put it up as security and still drive it to every gig, as long as I kept to the repayments. When I first read that you could pawn my car and still drive it, I read it three times, because it sounded too convenient, and I have learned not to trust things that sound convenient.

So I asked a lot of questions. I asked about everything that could go wrong. I made them explain things to me twice. I worked out, with a pencil, exactly how many of my thirty-one bookings I needed to pay it off, and the answer was eleven, and I underlined eleven on the whiteboard in red.

Then I signed, with Zinhle beside me, and drove home in a car that was technically not entirely mine any more, and it felt strange and heavy, like driving with a passenger I could not see.

December

I bought second-hand where I could and new where I had to. A friend in Durban who was upgrading sold me his old decks for less than they were worth. I built a burglar bar for the storeroom wall with my own hands, badly, and then paid a welder to do it properly.

The first gig was a wedding in Hilton on the twenty-eighth of November. I set up with equipment I had owned for four days. My hands were shaking when I tested the microphone. Then the bride came in, and the first song went on, and the room stood up, and I forgot about everything else for six hours.

I did all thirty-one. One of them was a family reunion in Richmond where the generator failed twice and an aunt danced through both blackouts singing the song herself. One was a matric farewell where a boy proposed to his girlfriend on the dance floor and she said no, and I had to choose the next song very carefully. I drove the Avanza nearly four thousand kilometres that month. It never missed a beat.

By the eleventh booking, I had made enough to cover what I owed. I paid it off in January, early, and on the day it was done, I took the car to the carwash in Scottsville and had it cleaned inside and out, which I had not done in two years.

The Whiteboard

The whiteboard is still in the storeroom. I never wiped off last December. The thirty-one bookings are still there in coloured marker, a bit faded, and a red line under the number eleven.

I am not telling anyone what to do. Borrowing against the one thing you own is a frightening decision, and it should be. If December had gone differently, this would be a very different story. I know that.

But when I look at that board, I do not think about the money. I think about Zinhle sitting on the concrete floor next to me on the worst morning of my working life, saying we would make a plan, and then sitting on the bed the next week asking every hard question I was too scared to ask.

This year I have thirty-four bookings. The storeroom has two burglar bars. And I have read every word of my insurance policy, twice.