I Spy

Chapter 3

I slid into my 1978 Mustang Cobra. The ultimate muscle car.

I love this girl and have spent a fortune completely customizing her. The exterior is a dark midnight blue. She has a silver metallic stripe down the bonnet and rolls around on black 17 inch mags. Pretty damn gangsta! If this car had an attitude, it would be bad - like that one kid at school who's always in the principles office. It's the kind of car that you get arrested just for driving - it looks that bad ass.

But she's also met with mixed reactions, especially from men. Some guys can't handle the fact that a woman would drive such an agro car, rather than something more 'ladylike'. Here's another fact about men (I should write a book) they like to impose their ideas about femininity onto us. I don't care how much they talk about gender equality, they still harbor those outdated 1950's sentiments.

To be fair, I don't think we can blame them entirely. I suspect it's a hangover from their primitive caveman days. When the ladies stayed in the cave feeding the young, picking berries and decorating with mammoth-skin rugs. While they ran around in all their hairy glory sewing their seed and hunting.

My car definitely doesn't fit the subservient, dependable cave-wife mold. In fact, my car shouts a loud 'screw you' to that mold and then spits in its face from its double exhaust pipe, before spinning its wheels and leaving it lying dead in the dust!

Twenty minutes later I turned into the lavish Peacock Lane. The houses here were massive and you could tell the elite occupied them; the upper echelon of society who had high-teas in their landscaped gardens. Drank champagne as if it were water and had credit cards that were so shiny they blinded mere mortals.

I pulled up to the house in question. The wall was so tall I couldn't see the building, but around these parts everyone knows that the size of your wall is directly proportionate to the size of your bank account - the bigger the wall, the more zeroes. And looking at this wall, this chick was clearly loaded. I buzzed an intercom and the massive gate opened slowly. Three large Dobermans growled at me from behind a fence and two security guards with AK-47's approached my car.

"Lizzy Brown?" The guard asked looking into my car suspiciously.

"Depends on who wants to know," I quipped, which was clearly a bad idea. Note to self: Don't make jokes with security guards in possession of large guns and bad attitudes.

"Yes that's me." I said pulling out my driver's license. He examined it as if he was trying to solve an unsolvable mathematical equation written in ancient Latin, but finally waved me in.

The house came into view and it was enormous. It was one of those Avant-Garde modern looking things; boxy, triple storied and made up of glass and lots of large pillars. In fact, when I scrutinized it that old saying popped into my head - 'money can't buy taste'. And when I saw who came to the door to greet me, I realised just how accurate that was.

Standing in front of me was none other than South Africa's very own Dolly Parton, Sharaz Venter. This woman was an institution, a cultural icon. She'd been singing for at least thirty years and had sold millions of albums. I tried hard not to smile, but it was proving difficult as she approached me with her balloon boobs, massive bleach blonde hair and lips that were filled to bursting capacity.

She was wearing a skin-tight white leather number that was bedazzled with glittery rhinestones, and just in case that wasn't enough embellishment, it was also tasseled and feathered. Sharaz must have interpreted my facial expression with some accuracy because she quickly explained.

"I've been rehearsing for my show," said flashed me a dazzling white smile and gestured for me to come inside.

And when I did, I walked into what can only be described as a replica of the Parthenon, with an African twist. At first I was looking at a statue of Zeus and the next second I was staring into the glazed, motionless eyes of a taxidermy Zebra.