Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
I was in heat that made my boobs slap together like wet, golden cymbals. I was part of a film crew ‘on location’ far from home. It had already been a nightmarish orgy of car accidents, injuries, hurricanes and the drunk gay stand-in humping the hot nanny in the pool of our very motelish hotel. Oh, it had been an adventure, alright.
My job? Well, I’d had a few. The first AD had a bit of a thing for me and so he kept making sure that whenever one contract ended, I had a new one…nearer him. ‘Oy vey!’ as the Joo-ish people say… Oy vey, indeed.
My job on this tit-drippingly hot day: cast coordination. Oh, the joys! Oh, the bountiful pleasures of coordinating 400 extras, NONE of whom ever had the decency to learn Great Britannia’s mother tongue. I mean, so what, so you can’t afford an education?… I mean, I know you can barely pay for food or shelter in your should-be-illegal-to-live-in-these-conditions squatter camps, but for God’s sake, have a little decency. Learn the ways of the Britons goddamit!
So, there I was, eloquent and well-dressed and there they were, all 400 of them, in torn old clothes (go wardrobe department), thirsty, tired and very poor, working a 16-hour day to earn a pathetically small amount of money. Pathetic, really. The only reason the film crew had chosen this spot in the depths of
Africa was because of the cheap labor and to have sex with monkeys. Um, the latter is not 100% true – baboons are technically primates. So, my job was to get all of their details: height, shirt, trouser and shoe sizes. Easy enough. I also wanted to keep them in high spirits through the tedious work, or rather, keep high spirits in them. So, I had a secret stash of cheaper-than-free vodka. Poison, I’m sure, but wondrously effective in causing acid-like hallucinations to make the time go by. On our breaks, we laughed as they taught me their African language and I forgot the cleavage-clinging weather for a while.
By midday, the sun was so violent with its laser heat, I thought my skin was going to clamber off my body and go and bathe in the marsh mirage with the elephantoms. Hot hot hot. Blisters started emerging on my lips, a very effective Botox replacement! Half my nose scraped off, burnt and bleeding. Cheaper than plastic surgery! My tongue and throat were like calloused bushmen (I mean San) trying to make a fire in my mouth. HOT!! And my pale complexion reddened minute by minute, damaged and ageing from the cruel rule of the African sun! You’re a bully, sun! A pimple-faced bully! I was HOT! And my African counterparts? Laughing, dancing, stripping and unconsciously tipsy with perfectly-even lineless tans! Why God? WHY ME!? Why do I get burnt with uneven bikini lines and blistery lips. WHY?!
I’d ploughed my way through half the queue and was pretty pooped. So pooped in fact, I was doing an impressive would-be-foxtrot trying to stand up straight. My frustration levels had gone higher than Willy Wonka’s elevator. I could only communicate in violent hand gestures and a very broken combination of their must-not-be-named language and mine. Directly translated, I was saying, ‘How long is your weight? How tall are your feet? How much is your shortness? How big is your bodytop?’ END IT! END IT ALL! 1, 6, 19, 54…how many people to go? Need a drink. Need a rub. Need a good shag. Oh wait… I just had one.
Typically, as a consumer of the dialect of Her Highness, when trying to speak another language, my tone may sound like,’ I’M TALKING YOUR $%^&* LANGUAGE! ARE YOU $%^&*%$ HAPPY NOW!!? ARE YOU? YOU DIRTY DEAD DILDO! DO YOU EVEN UNDERSTAND ME, YOU IDIOT!!?’ Yes, it may come across as arrogance, perhaps, but the truth is, I’m just very ashamed that I can’t communicate in any other way, at all.
I was racing through the queue now; if I finished in time I could go and play pool with the sexy French cameramen who could speak English. Who’s next?’ A man was pushed forward in a wheelchair. I greeted him, trying very hard to focus on the task at hand and not show any sympathy or acknowledgement, trying to treat him normally, making him feel normal. Oh, the pitiful human race! Has television taught you nothing?
I spoke my unforgiveable samples of his language, asking the questions which I had almost perfected. I asked him, ‘How tall are you?’ He shook his head. Of course, he was in a wheelchair, it didn’t matter. Next question… don’t show emotion… think French man fondling… just act normal… treat him the same, ‘What size shoe are you?’ No reply. Deep breath. Asking again, now with hand gestures, ‘WHAT (gesturing with shoulders that I’m asking a question) SIZE (putting hands together as if measuring a fish) SHOE (lifting up my foot) are YOU? (pointing to him)? No reply. Feeling my blood boiling to vapor and my heart rate matching the Hulk doing a cardio workout, I looked to the guy who had been pushing him. ‘WHAT SIZE SHOE IS HE!!!!??? ASK HIM.’ The pusher stared at me blankly. ‘SHOEEE SIIIZE. WHAT? SHOE? HELLOO? DOES ANYONE UNDERSTAND ME?!’ Louder now, ‘HOW BIG ARE YOU FEET?!!”
Then, with a horrified sadness, as if Oprah had called me personally to tell me that she had put all the weight back on, the old man in the wheelchair shook his head, looking down. I followed his eye line. My heart atrophied. The heat had frozen around us. The tiny hairs on my lip bleached themselves in an instant. I felt a torrent of vomit surge upwards looking for an exit wound. As I looked down, I saw that this quiet, honest and simple man…was an amputee.
Ring Ring, Ring Ring
‘Yes, Hello’?
‘Hello ma’am, Front Desk here. Congratulations! Your place in hell has just been confirmed!’
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Friday, July 18th, 2008
Life
is a great sentence -
begun with a wail
Great enuogh to announce
to all
a capital letter,
Life’s sentence
is long,
punctuated by tears,
italised by lies,
elucidated by other sentences
which are before us
and still to be.
Life ’s sentence
… is uninteresting
only if laughter, pain , love
are erased from it.
…is plain -
only if the hand writting
keeps out colour-
Life ’s sentence
is a story.
Interwoven with other sentences,
to make a long story,
that speaks to the
future,
to challenge, to explain, to warn.
All sentences are there to be
read -
There lies it’s greatness.
(c) Sukoluhle Joy Chilongo
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Thursday, July 10th, 2008
PART 1:
Ah the fresh scent of a new blog, smells like chopped basil and half a glass of hard-core vodka. Similar to a mojito, but also very different. Ok, let’s get straight to it, like a poor man with a per-minute prostitute.
I had been with a guy for a month and we had already tried all sorts of exciting sexy up/down/in/out/wet/dry positions and god said, let it be good, and it was good. Then, last week, a little sparrow arrived on my windowsill chirping away. He sang, ‘It’s his birthday tomorrow, it’s his birthday.’ And I said, ‘Thank you sparrow, send love to your folks.’ And off he went.
Oh good lord, a birthday with a new relationship which is 5 shots short of serious. What to do, what to wear, what to buy, what to lick!
With little desire to spend my paycheck that always goes to feeding the starving and building orphanages, I had to take a nap to consider my options. In my dream an angel appeared, she was clothed in spandex with a pink whip and a petition against Eskom. I signed it. She asked me for R5 and then whispered ‘Hollywooood’ and she disappeared into a crowd of Indian dwarves
Hollywood! Let’s not be fooled by the shiny lights and fake boobs of the pantie-less 75 year old ladies whose wrinkled lips and tongues dangle aimless and muscle-less reaching the cold water in the loo when squatting down for pee. Let’s not be fooled!
Hollywood means one thing here! All off! Gone. Vamoose, Asta LaPasta baby. Shaved, plucked, ripped, torn, smooth as a baby’s…I’ll stop there. No grizzle, no forest, no 5 o’ clock shadow, no spike, no in-growns, no George Double-U. Nada! Just a warm, soft, nestling bed - an undisputable and 99% guaranteed fool proof pressie for Birthdays or Christmas or St Virgin’s day.
Hollywood, here we come.
PART 2:
There I was, with a dream in my heart and good intentions at my side, ‘Practice selfless, random acts of kindness’ they say; if a full bikini wax didn’t fit on that list, then no charity or NGO work ever could.
I arrived at the little beauty salon, underwearless, but still with trousers on so as not to tempt the parking guards. I wasn’t underwearless for this occasion, I always am.
Unfortunately my visit was uncalled for, which meant, that I hadn’t called first. Turns out, there are a lot of people who need beauty! Shocking, I know. The lady that I usually go to for my ‘trims’ or Brazilian airstrip was frantic and totally booked out for the rest of the day and for the next three weeks! I should also at this point, mention that she was deaf. The greatest waxer I had ever met, but deaf nonetheless.
I had driven far and drank little that morning and so my PMS that seems to last all month was in full bloom, self-pity and monogamy were on my mind as I weighed up having to buy a normal present, from his normal girlfriend, for our normal lives. OH GOD NO! So, I asked if there was anyone else who could take me and mow the lawn, but the lovely young and slightly gothic girl behind the counter didn’t speak a word of English or any other European dialect like slow-English, word-at-a-time English, are-you-stupid English. So, I resorted to my very sad and pitiful Afrikaans, ‘Is daar enige ander mense wat kan vir my vat om my bikini te doen?’ I asked with a knowing shame. So far, it wasn’t looking anything like the lesbian fantasies that I’d been having since the thought of a full-bikini wax had come to me in a dream. Then, like in the unmade fil, South African Beauty, she beamed at me…beaming. She nodded and stood up, closed the front shop door and said, ‘Kom’.
Sweet Hesoes, it was happening, and all I could think of was, ‘but I haven’t shaved!’
It was a short corridor, the brilliantly talented deaf wax lady was working behind the first door, I felt a deep jealousy toward the lucky manwoman that was getting their back defurred as I thought of her gentle, delicate hands working ‘tuft by tuft’ so as to cause as little injury as possible. I had to accept it right there, I was with the Afrikaans goth now, it could either mean a lifetime’s worth of illegal ‘doctor-patient’ happenings, or getting my clitoris ripped out. The former was surprisingly more tempting.
She smiled and asked me to take my clothes off in her vernacular. There I stood, half naked and vulnerable at a quiet beauty salon in
Cape Town with scarring and terror imminent. Had I told anyone where I was going to be? Who will keep my car? Should I call my mom? How many roads must a woman walk down, before she agrees to a full bikini wax?
The road to hell was indeed paved with good intentions, but the front door to hell was built with hot wax and a hairy guava.
PART 3:
There I lay, my gat was indeed kaal and the midsection area in question lay exposed to the elements. She tried to make small talk with her weird African dialect, but all I could do was nod and agree and giggle accordingly. In retrospect, I hope she wasn’t telling me about her dying sibling. Things started off okay, I have an exceptionally high tolerance for pain and in cases like piercings and the odd lip bite, I even quite enjoy the pumping adrenalin of it. I have a bad habit of laughing when I’m in pain, the more it hurts, the more I laugh.
The outer edges of the hedge are usually manageable and she got through them like a semi-professional hairdresser shaving a bald man, easy and simple. For those of you who have never witnessed nor experienced a
Hollywood or any other similar case of human torture, it is waxed from the outside in, from the fine and sparse to the dense and coarse, like a magical forest.
I was comfortable and relaxed, shaky, but at peace. Then…a cold shudder hit me as I felt a storm cloud loom overhead. My white-faced black-haired hair-remover turned a luminous version of pale. We both knew. The next moves required her to place her full hand on my fruit so as to avoid removing any internal organs with the waxstrip rip off. A full hand on my fruit! We were arguably the same age, but she seemed younger and far less ‘informed’ by the cruel outside world. To say the least, she was innocent with no chance of parole. The tension could have been plucked with a blunt tweezer. The air was snappable and my tummy growled. Then, like a female Jesus, Grace walked in. Grace, the talk, confident, experienced, deaf, waxing deity! She jumped to stop my Afrikaans geisha from putting boiling sticky goo between my labia and yelled a beautifully impressive, ‘Nooooooo’ in midflight. I pierced my eyes closed.
I tried to interpret the speech that was coming out, I didn’t understand either of them, all I knew was that I needed to wee. I was lying with my legs spread eagle, a strange local foreigner girl on my left leg and a deaf waxing god woman on my right and somebody was going to have to touch my poonani.
Then, I felt a warmth on my lovely lady lips. A soft and gentle recognizable warmth, followed by some more warmth, a smaller patch of it, but still, warmth. I opened my eyes and looked down, and there, right before me, were two ladies mid-demonstration using generic larger than life sign-language, each with one hand on one lip and a wax strip in the other. In some kind of sick and twisted slow motion, they both dabbed their wax sticks onto the very curve of my womanhood, patted it dry, as they leaned to the patch and prepared for the rip. Now, for just a moment, I must mention that there is a patch on a female that is far more sensitive than the other patches. It is the top of the ‘line’, where the split ends and the worlds meet as one again, this is the patch in question. The pain is comparable to falling groin first onto a serrated spear. Be mindful. Don’t think. Think puppies. Think…
R.I.P!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Rest in peace, rest in peace, rest in peace!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Like a well-choreographed Grade 7 dance eisteddfod, they had tugged my rug in one violent and cruel act of synchronized waxing. I was in hysterics. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. I was sure I was going to wee everywhere. Tears were streaming down my cheeks. I was in some kind of hysteria-pain-shock. I was hyper and ventilating. I hadn’t even noticed that both were now rubbing me gently down under, patting me with talcum powder, stroking the suffering skin and reading my lips, so to speak.
It was over. They had done it. I had done it. I was a bare naked lady. A happy consumer with a ‘lovely to touch, lovely to hold, and if you wax it, consider it gold’ finished product.
Then, home sweet home for the celebrations. ‘Happy Birthday baby, I have a surprise of you.’ I said in my sexiest voice as I pulled down my pants. ‘Da da da da daaaaa’ to my best royal trumpet impression. There I stood, gift in hand and grin on face, ‘Do you like it?’
After slight deliberation, he stared at it for a while and then looked up at me, ‘You look like a f—ing 10 year old!’
He grabbed his bible and left.
And there I lay, spread bald eagle, in my birthday suit.
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