No word from “Slow dance“. Don’t you just hate that? Two days ago I didn’t give a shit about slow dancing and now I check my messages every half an hour to see if he has made contact.
C gave me a copy of The Surrendered Single – I wonder what he is trying to tell me? Maybe I should just surrender and face the fact that I am way beyond my best before date.
I might have made a serious mistake leaving Sid to pursue my ballet career. To this day I have no idea how I did it. I felt like my stomach was being twisted with a wrench hammer when I got on the plane to Cape Town. Sid was going to university in JHB and the best ballet school was unfortunately in the Mother City. What if I had never boarded the plane? What if I had unfastened my seat belt and dashed down the runway saying “Sid. Sid. I can’t leave you”. I would be living in Johannesburg, married to Sid with 5 children and living happily ever after. I think that at the age of 17 I chose my career over a traditional family – I just didn’t realize it at the time, I thought I would be able to have both.
But I did get on the plane and I did stand in a queue every night with my 50 cent pieces in my hand, whispering into the payphone receiver to Sid, so fellow students couldn’t hear my agonizing conversations with him. Our long distant relationship lasted one year. On the eve of my return to Cape Town for second year, Sid and I broke up. He sat in the rocking chair in my bedroom till 4 in the morning, looking at me. We both couldn’t actually face saying the words “break up” so finally he said he was tired and he got up to leave. I watched his headlights reverse out of my driveway and wept. This was my second major loss in 2 months - my dad died the month before. I think the knocking noises we heard in the ceiling, which became persistently louder, is what finally propelled Sid out of the rocking chair. Alive my father never let him past the front porch, he certainly wasn’t going to let death get in his way now. Dating me was not for the faint hearted.
My dad had been ill for some time and we knew he was dying. I still remember waking up on Monday morning November 17th 1986 to the loudspeaker call on our dormitory floor. “Olive Schweps 708 phone call, Olive Schweps 708 phone call.” I ran down the passage, picked up the phone and my mom said, “Olive my darling, I am so sorry, your father died last night”. I ran back down the passage to my friend’s room. Bridie pulled me into her arms and lodged my cheek against her cleavage and in her rigorous attempts to comfort me she took my muted sobs as a sign of her success, not that her enormous breasts were suffocating me. I can still smell the scent of the talcum powder she used. Bridie died in a car accident 6 months later.
My best memory of Bridie was driving to Llandudno beach in an old white Toyota Corolla inherited from my older brother. We would start the engine by throwing a rock at it and somehow it would come to life. We kept the rock in my cubbyhole for these occasions. My mom allowed me to drive the car when I convinced her Bridie had her driver’s license even though my mother was aware, deep in her sub-conscious, that Bridie was a year younger than me. This is the first law I ever recall breaking in my life. I only break laws when I absolutely have to.
I’ve got another message from MC and nothing from ‘slow fucking dance’. I wonder if that’s even possible – slow dancing and fucking at the same time. The guy would have to be very strong to pull it off but I bet my ballet skills would come in handy. I can’t remember whether Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey had a slow fucking dance in Dirty Dancing – maybe not in the movie itself but certainly off set I would imagine. Slow fucking dancing sounds kinda cool, like pornography for two. Why do all the people I am not interested in call and the ones I am interested in seem to have broken their dialing fingers? Maybe my dream board and I need to have a cut-the-bullshit heart to heart.
MC is full of ideas. An invitation to dinner and a movie, or just dinner, or just a movie. Whatever Casanova. I need to tell him he’s too old and that I don’t date actors.
Actually that’s not true. I was married to an actor for 5 years. We met at Fudruckers in New York over a pina colada. He was finishing his bar shift and I was there on a high after a Madonna concert. High on life that is, and determined more than ever to stop my papa from preaching, to always cherish my boy when he made an appearance and to adopt a more serious approach to materialism as a lifestyle that would get men to start justifying my love. Ted looked so damn shagable, but it looked like I was too late. He and the other bar tender, Darleen, seemed to be an item. Her deep voice didn’t tip me off and I didn’t notice the lustful gazes she was sending in my direction. When I discovered her sexual preference I dragged my Iranian neighbours to the bar as often as I could persuade them, to feast our eyes on Ted.
One month later Ted and I were dating and 8 months later we were married. Ted hated seeing me clean other people’s apartments and not able to apply for legitimate jobs or acting auditions, so he did what everybody else was doing at the time in New York, he asked me to marry him one lazy Sunday morning after we had made love. Ted not only looked like a shagger, he shagged like one. I said yes and watched the panic set in on his face. I told him he could take the proposal back, so he did. But a few weeks later and after a few more clean apartments in the City, he proposed again.
We got married at City Hall while it was snowing outside; the ceremony lasted under 2 minutes. My Scottish friend Trish was my witness. She had married her down and out American rock and roll boyfriend so she could stay in America. Annabelle was Ted’s witness. She married her Israeli boyfriend so he could stay in the country and was making great progress teaching him English. Wherever you went in their apartment you found labels stuck to objects, such as ‘toilet’, ‘sink’, ‘garbage bin’.
After our marriage I moved up in the world and instead of cleaning apartments I joined Ted and Annabelle waitressing at Fudruckers. The night before our immigration interview, all the waiters gave Ted and I a test quiz. My nerves grew as I realized that my inability to notice small details in life, like the colour of my husband’s toothbrush was going to get me deported. But our interview actually went quite well. It was pretty obvious Ted and I were deeply in love. It didn’t go so well for the Russian guy in a long fur coat and the girl who arrived with a very big hair-do, chewing gum.
At the end of that year Ted and I returned to South Africa for our wedding tour. It started in Johannesburg with 150 guests, 5 of which were my friends, the rest my mom’s. Sid and his parents were also there and he congratulated me awkwardly during the slow fucking dancing. We both looked at each other a second too long. My other two friends Stephen and Jules ended up in the pool and then in bed together, which was rather a surprise as we all thought he was gay.
Ted and I took the wedding tour down to Durban, along the wild coast and ended up in Cape Town for the 2nd wedding reception, this time with all my friends. Sid made this one too, but it was a bit easier for him seeing me in my wedding gown the 2nd time round. The only people who didn’t know we were married were Ted’s parents. We only let them in on the news two years later when Ted felt for sure that we were really married. We got divorced 5 years later and maybe it will turn out to be my second regret.
But I plod on and am going to the Levi’s exclusive new spring / summer launch tonight. There has to be a good range of sexy men in their skin-tight Levi’s. I must remember to look at my dream board long and hard before I go.
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