(written December 10, 2009)
Imagine if you had OCD that made you have to reply to every
single email that you received:
Dear Crysta,
Yes – I would like a larger penis please.
Yours,
Tom
A wedding, by the bong-tree:
Having reaffirmed that drinking hot tequila is the worst
game to play in a traffic jam on the nether regions of Johannesburg’s highway
system, we arrive at the farm in Hammanskraal just in time to stretch out on
the grass that rolls down to the edge of the lake and catch some g&ts as
the afternoon slips out for the night. We’re on Al’s Dad’s farm out up beyond
Pretoria for Al & Claire’s wedding which will happen the next day, which
will be Saturday. Sometime during the evening someone finds the button labeled
“PAAAAAAAARTY” and presses it. I snort a line of kat for the first time – it
feels like someone driving a freight-train up my nose so they can blow the horn
a bit closer to my brain. They succeed admirably.
Saturday morning we walk on down the road in search of
pomegranates, Cath and Bron in dresses; me in my shirt from Liberty’s – we look
fucking great. After a pass by the pecans, the apricots and the peaches we
discover the pomegranates over in the corner – a low race-green thatch of
bushes bearing fruit as hard as fists. The pomegranates are not ripe so we take
2 as evidence of our toils beneath the flamboyant Highveld sun. A windmill
stands alone and unconcerned.
We linger through the rest of the morning, sitting, and
dressing and waiting, as one does, for half past 10 which is when we’ll head
off along the dirt road and around through the big breeze-blown pecan-nut
orchard to where Al has made a clearing for the space-ships to land. We
re-arrange some haybales so they catch the shade, and we sit and wait, gently
drinking water and breathing the prenuptial air. It really is unlike any other:
Your friend is there who you haven’t seen for ages, and you manage to be
dressed completely smartly but you don’t feel like an asshole, and even the old
look young and full of promise. It’s waiting air, and quiet and calm and
unconcerned. Kids like it too. Through the orchard comes Claire in a cut of a
red dress, walking between the leaves.
Later – much later that night we are dancing to lust for
life in a thunderstorm, beneath the trees on the deck. And later – much later,
we’re sitting far away beside some reeds beside the lake in a perfect patch of
moonlight. We discuss the 7 peaches and how they align the light of the
universe with our lives. We feed the frogs our macaroons and we steal all the
camembert in the house. We interrogate 2 barbies and hang them up by the pots
and pans until they’re ready to tell us the whereabouts of the chocolate
brownies. Later – much later, we lie on the bed and agree that we’d like to
pass into the afterworld with nothing more than the accoutrements of a simple
luncheon – baguette, camembert and a chilled chenin-blanc. We close up the
house and go to sleep, the last blinks of pink-hearted LSD tracing tremendously
nice patterns on our eyelids.
The next morning we make a watermelon boat for Al &
Claire. It has two sticks for masts, and a leafy little stick out the front for
a bowsprit. It has six oars on Mary’s request, and it has "A 4 C" on
the side. It has some straw which burns and smokes like a Viking prayer as
Clare’s little nephew pushes it out into the lake with a stick. I eat the
vegetable chips that we had wisely hidden last night. Later we head back to
normal, via a wimpy burger with cheese bacon, hashbrown and chips, via the
airport, via Franco’s and a piquant pasta, via 12 hours of sleep, via an
aeroplane ride and a car journey home to my wife, my life and my couple of
kids, thank god I am alive.
Poem?
--------------------------------------------------
I saw:
Tink’s tattoo which I had drawn
A year and some ago
Al & Clare Hi-5 while they
Were walking down the moon
Darren doing teeny-bopper
techno moves beside the lake
all by himself and all alone
watched only by the moon and me
My aura in the swimming pool
The sunlight pouring from my head
The marriage man in a Zorgon suit
of shiny sunburst blue
All of this I swear is true
----------------------------------------------------
Dreams, dreams, of when we had just started things,
Tom
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