Don Juan.

by Wayne Naidoo

Part 1.

The moment I laid eyes on her at our school sports day, I knew she would be mine.  Long flowing brown curls, drop dead gorgeous with a smile that went on for miles and an air of femininity that shimmered like the sun setting over a balmy flat ocean bed.  She was fine. Damn.

I on the other hand never possessed a single stand out trait other than having a glowing 2 cm zit positioned on the right side of my nostril and a monobrow that matched my Tom Selleck moustache.  I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but one way or another, she was going to be my Juliet and I was going to be her Beau. 

I got introduced via Kitten, my closest pal at the time. His girlfriend knew Miss Rio and it was GAME ON. I swooned around her like 007 and dropped jokes like Trevor Noah, and slowly but surely, I reeled her in.  My charm was off the Richter scale and she snort giggled whilst flapping her lashes like a peacock on a wedding day. I was in. Boom!

We kinda began seeing each other but we were so damn shy, that eye contact was usually limited to intervals of around 1 sec every 5 minutes.  I had to do something to up my game and take the lead.  Romance was needed.

Valentine’s day was around the corner which made for the perfect Ahaaaaa moment.  Cupid arrived and was shooting arrows like an Apache under attack by cowboys.  Love was everywhere – the perfect candle lit dinner had been prepared, Barbara Streisand was singing Memories in the background and I even shaved off my Stache and separated my brows like Moses parting the Red Sea.  Everything was just perfect.

Dinner was surreal and the warmth of the discussion elevated the mood even further.  We were holding each other’s gaze for nearly 3 seconds now.

As luck would have it, my Juliet complained about having a sore back.  This couldn’t have been scripted better, as I was actually renowned for being the best masseuse in the family according to Aunty Audrey, who’s size 10 feet I used to massage.

The moment had arrived. I sat on the lower end of her back and gave it my all.  I gently poured the warm oils into the crease of her spine and rubbed it in with homeopathic precision.  She was in heaven and quickly relaxed and became even more comfortable every time I touched her gentle frame.

Nearly 30 minutes in, I knew that this could escalate quickly now and with hurried enthusiasm in the last minutes of the game, I gave one last heavy massage, and in doing so, I let out the loudest and foulest fart that a human body was capable of producing.

GAME OVER.

Life lesson #3 – Shit happens.

Part 2.

SHIT FUCK BALLS appeared boldly across my screen as I double clicked on the mail attachment.  It was sent to me by our prospective client that we had just pitched to earlier.  Followed by this was a rather cryptic headline asking: “So you believe that your sick little joke, is going to land you our business?”.  

I wondered what she was referring to, and upon closer inspection, I saw that the words, SHIT FUCK BALLS was the name of the folder on the memory stick, that we had supplied to her, which she then passed onto her boss, as well as her boss’s, boss.  It was the one that contained our presentation pitch deck.  My mathematics was never PhD stuff but this was higher grade trigonometry, and it just didn’t make sense.  Was she merely testing me?  Was this the final “chemistry” hurdle in the last stages of the assessment process?  “Haha, funny” I thought – wow she’s got a wicked sense of humour for such a polished professional and Christian-like young lady.

Still befuddled though, I mentioned this to Annalize who looked perplexed too.  Frankie and Biffy who overheard, thought that this was simply amazing.  Finally a client close to their own creative hearts, and so the word travelled throughout the agency like burnt incense at a Catholic Cathedral.  And that’s when it was not so Bill Cosby funny anymore.  Suddenly a deathly mist covered the agency halls, and out of it appeared a Snow White Pauli, and a Dopey Nigel.   The two morons, Thing 1 and Thing 2 who had been working on the pitch.

Leading up to this moment we were up against some of the country’s fittest agencies who threw everything at this prestigious account.  We knew we needed more than just the work and our George Clooney looks to win.  We needed to invoke the X-factor.  Our preparation was like no other.  Our daily routine included 3 sets of 30 second interval sprint runs, 21 burpee box jumps, 15 overhead squat snatches, 9 x toes-to-bar followed by a 500 meter swim.  All to be repeated x 5 times, twice a day at 05h00 and then again at 22h00.  Our diet also consisted of sun dried rice cakes, cold raw legumes, blue tofu and twisted seaweed served with triple distilled lemon water at 3 hour intervals over a four week period.  We may have been famished but at least we were pitch ready and all the advertising bookies had us as odds of 25/1.

Pitch day turned up and we were polished and dressed to the nines.  We were rehearsed, charming and convincing like Barack Obama at his 2009 inaugural speech. Colgate smiles were dished out, claps were gentle but reassuring and electricity was simmering like a log in a cabin fire with a fine red cabernet by its side.  We each even received a peck on the cheek as we left and Marietjie, the pitch consultant, gently squeezed my ear lobe and tucked her toll-free home number into my back pants pocket.  It was essentially in the bag.

Then the party pooper turned up. The damn memory stick.  You see when Thing 1 and Thing 2 were on the project, they saved all the related work into a folder onto the server that only they would recognise.  Hence the smart, sensible grown up folder title. There was only one teeny weeny little problem – they never renamed it when copying it over to the memory stick, and it now resided with this VERY VERY large and rather insulted prospective client.

It was pretty much game over. But this time I had nothing to lose. I called every NetFlorist and flower grower in the greater part of Gauteng and sent Thandi all the long stem red roses that were available, which I personally delivered on one knee and in the Elizabethan words of Shaggy I pronounced: “It wasn’t me “, and pleaded for forgiveness of all our sins.

And then we received the long awaited call.  They had absolved us, and the romance was back on track.  We were now the official title holders of the account.

Both Thing 1 & Thing 2 were immediately released from the dungeon after completing everyone’s timesheets, but were banned from any form of electronic devices for a year including calculators.  They have since stopped drinking and Nigel has now left the country for the far North.

Life Lesson #3.1 – we all make mistakes and if you truly show remorse, forgiveness usually follows.

P.S.

In Part 1 of this story, I was so embarrassed that I wasn’t sure I could ever see her again.  Boy was I wrong.  I eventually faced my humiliation, and Nino and I have now been happily together for 27 years and married for twenty-two, with beautiful twin girls aged 16 yrs and a proud young man who turns 20 soon.