Pravasan Pillay
In the late eighties, when I was around ten years old, a viral game began sweeping Pinewood Primary in Chatsworth – a former Apartheid-era township in Durban, South Africa designated for Indian housing. The game was called "Tinclips" and for a good six months every single boy in Pinewood was obsessed with playing it. Tinclips was what we in Chatsworth, for some reason, called metal bottle caps – the crown caps you find on soda or beer bottles.
The game itself was fairly simple: It was played on a flat, hard surface such as a cement floor or a table and was contested between two players. Each player would position a single upturned bottle cap on the "board" and then take turns to, using their index finger, slowly nudge their respective cap closer to the other player's, like two prizefighters sizing each other up.
Once you got close enough to your opponent's cap you used the side of your finger to attempt to flip-lift your cap on top of his. If you managed to land your cap on top of the other guy’s, it now belonged to you. The game would continue like this until one player managed to win all his opponents' caps off of him – a game could conceivably go on forever because there were no limits on the number of caps you were allowed to play with.
There were a few more rules and subrules but that was the basics.
The actual gameplay itself involved a great deal of strategy, gamesmanship, and dexterity – but equally crucial was to find the exact right type of bottle caps to play with. The best caps were the ones whose ridged lips were bent slightly outwards, like a flower petal – perhaps made that way by a bottle opener or someone stepping on it. A bent lip was good because it gave you more leverage to flip your cap – it was further considered bad form to bend a lip yourself. Having long fingernails also helped, but those were forbidden at our strict government school.
Tinclips games between the most skillful players would even attract small lunch break crowds as though they were chess matches between Fischer and Kasparov. Styles of play also varied: More circumspect players would wait until they were really close to their opponent to make their flip attempt while the mavericks would daringly flip from far away. Waiting until the exact right time to flip your cap was the most important decision in the game. If you did so too early or flipped and missed then you would most likely be a sitting duck.
As much as I loved playing Tinclips I was probably one of the worst players in its obscure history. A big problem was that my fingers were just too large and awkward to properly get under the bottle cap lip. I also played far too cautiously, always waiting for the other player to make a mistake. But my biggest fault was that I would get intimidated as soon as a crowd – that is to say more than one person – began to watch, making their snide comments about my conservative, defensive play.
I was losing so many bottle caps every day that I decided to go on a concerted effort to collect as many as I possibly could. So, every morning before school and every afternoon after school, I began to trawl the neighbourhood alone, from its corner shops and spazas, its shopping centres and bottle stores, its shebeens and its pavements, picking up every single cap I could find. Bottle caps were simply everywhere – people were just not looking for them. It was like a gold rush where I was the only one able to see the gold.
I would walk around with my eyes permanently on the ground, watchful for the telltale metallic glint under the Durban sun.
In the interim, I stopped playing the game at school and instead focused on building up my cap reserves for future games and, in a few weeks, my dedication paid off. I went from about a hundred bottle caps to two huge filled-to-the-brim bin bags with thousands of them.
But, weirdly, at a certain point, say after about five thousand bottle caps, it stopped being about collecting enough to continue playing Tinclips and started being about the collecting itself. I found myself noticing differences in bottle cap design, admiring the rusty patina on an old Sparletta Creme Soda cap, or the font on the original Coo-ee cap or the understated brushed gold of the Steri-Milk cap. I also started keeping an eye out for rarer out-of-province caps or ones that were bent in unique ways. In fact, I was reluctant to even play Tinclips anymore because I was afraid I might lose some of the precious specimens I had worked so hard to collect – my favourite was a magnificently bent Black Label beer cap that I displayed on a shelf in my bedroom, separate from the hoi polloi caps.
So, like some Howard Hughes of Chatsworth I began to withdraw from the Tinclips world. Instead I would let my friends come over and I would allow them to play "exhibition tournaments" with my bottle caps, i.e. I would loan them some and we would play for fun but afterwards the caps had to all return to the bin bags.
They always had to return to the bin bags.
Sometimes, when I was alone, I would take them out, and sort them by beer and soda genres or I would use them to build towers, like a kind of township Lego. I would do everything but play competitively with them. I can still remember the stale smell of soda and beer that would greet me when I opened the bags each time.
But, in the end, a couple of months after the Tinclips fad had passed and their value as a commodity had completely bottomed out, I took the bags of caps and, without a second thought, threw them out with the week's garbage.
I had just had enough and was bored of them. Sick of them, even.
It was around then that I started collecting comic books seriously.
