LAZZO watched with awe as a racing truck had two youths at the rear gregarious clutching on the sides as it made a sudden swerve. One of the lads fell off and hit into a stationary wheelbarrow of bananas!
He appeared dazed with pain but one thing was clear:  He had been imbibing at the nearest watering hole!
Having been helped to his feet by passerbys, he was later nursing a swollen heard wrought out of his foolery.
The mishap started off as a joy ride without the knowledge of the driver who seemed to have noticed the misadventure in his rear view mirror but decided to ignore it…
After a brisk walk, Lazzo sauntered into the crowded watering hole where as usual he noticed Maria who was still not divorced from her ingestion of alcohol and an occasional puff at a cigarette.
She made a brief dance to a throbbing local tune and turned to look at Lazzo who pretended he had not noticed her.
He proceeded to the counter and sat on a stool next  to the senior citizen of the  hood who was enjoying his opaque drink tapped from his
sachet.
Out of the blue, a juvenile delinquent proceeds to lift his cup which was half-filled and in one gulp emptied the contents.
No one spoke but the intruder broke the silence whilst poking his finger at the sachet saying:”Do not be stingy over this stuff! This is not the stuff stop anyone from taking!,” the misfit growled.
The middle-aged man was seemingly seething with rage as he shifted his sachet from the reach of the delinquent.
Another man noticing the tension remarked:”One should be careful not argue with such people because when one exchanges words with this type onlookers will not know the difference!”
Anarchy seemed to reign supreme and was inherent in the youth’s behaviour which patrons well-versed in the ways of the hood clearly understood.
This was a pointer to what would happen to the villain at night when faced with a number of such characters.
At the far end of the watering hole was the reputed chief imbiber who was narrating his ordeal with night hoodlums. They had ransacked his favourite watering hole!
He was increasingly getting incensed with the marked increase of young people not having any occupations who had resorted to alcohol abuse and crime.
He wondered where society was headed to as undercover of darkness, there were many tales of lawlessness.
The grapevine had it that he usually was seen grappling to hold a cup as he behaved like one who was shivering.
He only steadied himself when he had a few shots of the home-made hard gin which he fervently sipped.
When in dire-straits, he usually rushed to the opaque drink watering hole in the morning to ‘cure his hangover’.
Lazzo had heard that this morning treat goes by the name of ‘babaraza’ an ambiguous term only understood by patrons of the watering hole. It is one of the many words in the drinking nomenclature.
It was customary for many to make a dash at the hard gin watering hole en route to work.
The itinerary tends to be so discreet owing to the informal nature of these watering holes which at dusk are hardly noticeable!
This culture dates back to the post independence era when police raids resulted in some drums being broken and punched with holes in a bid to
halt the brewing of the drink.
The sporadic storms resulted in inducing patrons to reduce noise levels to the barest minimum to avoid detection.
One could only see cigarettes light flickering around typical watering hole as patrons drank their celebrated gin almost speaking in low tones.
This was at variance with the formal watering hole where noise heights are above average to a point of almost shouting to be heard as one competes with electronic sound.
“Have you voted?,” someone asked Lazzo’s mentor who excused himself saying he had been turned away because he had not renewed his voter’s card.
“You can wait for 2016 and exercise your constitutional right,” the man who quickly put the bottle to his mouth said as if dismissing the topic enjoying the trickle of the lager down his throat.
The ‘babaraza’ was heard joking about miscellany in the hood and recounted an incident when he ran into a band of riff-raff in the dead of t he night.
He had been drinking deeper in the hood and was heading home when he found himself face-to-face with the dreaded of the hood.
One of them came to Lazzo’s mentor and looked him straight in the eye ,”Oh its you sir, don’t move about in the night!,” he delivered the warning as the ‘babaraza’ man in his drunken stupor recalls the episode likening it to an episode in a film or video.
Many had dreadful encounters with the night hoodlums of the hood and have lived to regret such meetings.
Lazzo also remembered the day he was clobbered to a pulp after being searched following a round of drinks at a popular watering hole!
He had been spotted as having too much money as he produced one large denomination after the other as his pockets were bulging with change.
While at the counter, a pocket of middle aged youths were monitoring his expenditure and concluded he had to be waylaid!
As soon as he left the watering hole, he was set upon as he was caught unawares.
He lay on the road with blood flowing from his mouth  and he thought he fainted!
But he regained consciousness and  found his way home minus any cash on him. He had also lost his shoes as the hoodlums took the pair off his feet.
Sometimes, he wondered why providence placed him in the dungeons of heartlessness when he could have been elsewhere.
As he sauntered home Lazzo wondered how many folks  in the hood had such regrets and even if they had it began to show that thinking of an option in this context was misplaced hope …