The Tennisscene Waltz

Shocking, arrogant, very anti-PC, Simply the Pest pulls out nearly all the stops to insult the world; all for a laugh – This story I give away for free. It is not in any of my books because I just wrote it -after having another serious big downer of my own doing and needed to cheer my self up…

Very wicked, this is a classic example of taking a simple scenario and turning it into a fiasco.

A rather  confusing, unedited anecdote of lateral thinking – hence it makes more sense sober but more fun pissed…

The Tennisscene Waltz

Not be confused with ‘Tennessee Waltz’ a popular/country music song from the USA. This version is from Rhodesia around about 1971. Actually - it was 1971.

Allan Wilson High School – Simply the Pest is in Form 1B1 (that is the place they place semi-smart, hard working kids and lazy clever-clevers like me.

 

It is HIGH SCHOOL. And we are Men of Men! Hardly - judging by the strange decibel range of most of us, balls were dropping along with hormones arising.

We were forced to play four hours of sport a week. This would turn wankers into warriors. I had to ride my bicycle named ‘Die Swiftly’ (See my book chapter about this machine from hell in Simply the Pest), backwards and forwards to school and, as far as I was concerned, that was sporting enough. I mean, Brokeballs Mountain up to the suburb of Mount Pleasant would scare most participants of ‘Tour the France on drugs’, to the point of confessing their addictions.

Nope. I had to play some sort of sport. Tennis was all the year round, so my tight old man worked out this was the cheapest version rather coughing up for seasonal things like rugby boots or cricket pads. I did have a swimming costume but I hate cold water and threatened to hang myself if I had to join another bloody swimming group.

In the winter season I really wanted to play rugby. Well, not really, but it was the same old stupid equation. Only pansies learn French and play tennis. REAL Men of Men learn Afrikaans and play rugby. That was the plan if you wanted to be Die Hard.

Of course, many decades down the menial drag we now call life, the pansies earn bucket loads for winning things like Wimbledon and the French Open, pose in huge glossy magazines and get paid millions to flash a Rolex or show how cool they are in a free hundred grand Mercedes convertible.

The Afrikaans taught, rugby macho men; tend to retire in complete poverty, strapped to a wheel chair with ears resembling that vegetable we hate to eat and has a small picture of him dribbling out the mouth whilst stuttering some shite about being clever, big and strong - on the back of a box of ProNutro.

Oh well, as I said, Daddy dear decided I was going to take up tennis. So – tennis it was.

You rock up in your whites, complete with Bata tackies  (which is very embarrassing as only the maid wore things like that – or BSAP police recruits) with your brand new stick with a big round head laced with innards from dead cats.

Amazing, all the street cats knew when the new school year started. They all disappeared like – just magic and found themselves disguised as rabbit relish with sadza; less the guts the gardener sold to the local sport shop. The price dropped for the strings as fast as the cats were hung from one. You win some and lose some hey! Me – ow.

So, with this odd contraption, you are placed on a sweltering afternoon on a sandy field about the size of a tennis court.  That is because it is a tennis court. It is cut in half by a thing used to catch fish or naughty gladiators. Known as a net, it sits like on a bit of steel wire, and suspended by couple of Poles. These Polish refugees in World War II were shipped to Rhodesia in 1943. They never left (they never do) and there unemployed offspring get a part time job holding up nets.

(In modern Britain they are accused of either holding up the economy or stealing jobs from the unemployed. Politics – as intricate as a tennis net…tra-la-la).

As you stand there with the other dedicated pansies in the classic pose of thumb up bums and minds in neutral, your coach/supervisor/dedicated tennis fanatic, turns up all sweaty under the armpits carrying a load of English homework to be marked.

Ms Bannister, or Barrister, or something like that, was about my height (two heads taller than a dwarf), sported a lovely head of Ali McGraw hair style from that seriously sick film Love Story, and was aged between 25 and maybe…erm dunno. At my age it was difficult to pin it down; but she was rather sexy and had a nice bum which was sort of pushing out the creases in her skirt something serious.

As she searched for a shady spot to plonk what at my age is now obvious -an ever expanding posterior, she called out –

‘Let the games begin.’

With that she mopped a sweaty brow and started to mark the homework.

Some of us were well prepared. On the adjacent courts, experts ran to the net and made the Poles pull it up and done till it was the height of one funny stick standing up and another with it head sideways on top. This was supposed to be the correct height of the net. This took up at least half an hour as the Poles were wilting in the heat.

With that sorted, I now looked at my partner across the net and had a heated debate who hits the ball first. It seems those that start always win.

Balls – ahh, lets talk about balls. You see, because of the ball less British and their sodding sanctions, we, the Last of the Rhodesians were sort of short of them. Not those that made us Men of Men - we had loads of them to be shot off at a later date, but…so called ‘Tennis balls’.

You all know when you watch a game at Wimbledon, at some point, the umpire calls ‘New Balls,’ and all of a sudden there is a queue of eunuchs begging at his chair.

So…the new balls, are fluffy and cute yellow (about the size and shape of a little born, sweet, chirping happily, baby chickens - with its head stuffed up its arse and the budding wings amputated), duly exchanged. The ‘old’ ones are NOT sent to Rhodesia. Our second hand balls resembled the testicles of a Mexican hairless dog suffering from elephantiasis. ( Ohh… now that is really cleaver-cleaver),

So you now have the dog’s hairless swollen knackers and you pop one in a pocket. This is for the second serve should something go wrong with the first. Unless of course the first serve touches the top of the net which in that case someone says ‘Net’. Not a more accurate redemption such as

‘Oh my goodness, the ball skimmed the top of the net, landed in the white square but sadly this doesn’t count so I will serve the first ball again if you would be so kind as to fetch it for me.’

No, you just say ‘Net and give me back my knacker.’

(Due to sanctions whilst we did have cook boys, garden boys, petrol boys, icecream boys et al - we had no ball boys. Too expensive and as a result the young indigenous lacked jobs as we had enough caddies. So they joined the gooks who promised them a tennis court of their own once the revolution was won and they can plant maize on it.)

The plan of the first serve is to throw one swollen testicle into the air and scream out ‘WHORE’ at the same time you try to hit it with the cat’s innards.

Now comes the waltz (after a flick of a coin or a minor punch to the jaw that has decided who starts), and this opening move composes of delicate foot work, an arm holding a dead cat’s guts attached to a stick with which to hit a dead dog’s ball over a fishing net. Well that is the plan. Should the dead dog’s ball not enter orbit to land in either Alan Wilson’s swimming pool or, if you are serving from the opposite side, in Prince Edward’s swimming pool, with luck it went over the net (now at ground level due to wilting Poles), landed in some white marked square, and you, or him as opponent, attacked it furiously if it was some future gook was trying to kill you.

I kid you not. Next time you watch a match on TV listen carefully. They are actually deliberately trying to gamesmanship the opponent by accusing them of being a whore. I am not sure why the men do it also but I suppose screaming PIMP doesn’t really get the wind out the lungs as well as WHORE.

The first time I actually heard this resulted me looking around in expectation. Sadly there wasn’t one in sight or for that matter a testicle to return because it had taken some serious flight, easily cleared the large fence designed to stop high flyers, soured over the first floor roof and entered low orbit.

Before the WHORE bit you have to stand behind a faded white line, rock backwards and forwards and bounce the swollen testicle on the ground and catch it with the hand that is not holding the stick full of cat’s innards. This you do several times. No one knows why but eventually you miss and it wanders off somewhere.

Some of the cool doods could hit the ball whilst it lay there and it would sort of respond and jump up a bit so as to be scooped up with the cat. I would beat it as much as possible but it just rolled away in the direction of the gutter. Totally gutted I had to pick it up. (OH, before I forget, I actually in anger once jumped on it and landed up on the clay ground nearly breaking my back and ankle. I didn’t try that stunt again.)

Later if you are lucky enough to actually get a knacker to knock back, you reply with -‘YOU WHORE’.

Usually that is the end of the conversation because the returned ball has amazingly just skinned a gliding crow at 10,000 feet, and landed up in the swimming pool of the adjacent Prince Edward School (all wankers), just as they were about to score a paltry goal at water polo against the invincible Mount Pleasant High. The opponent announces with satisfaction that the ball is ‘OUT’ and promptly followed by  - ‘15 LOVE’. Two things are immediately apparent – one - he is a lying, cheating swine as it was only one point and not 15 and secondly; he was a morph trying to chat me up.

This leads to more heated arguments till it is explained that unlike say, waterpolo, the score is rather oddly called. So instead of 1 to 4, you have 15, 30, 40 and if you both have 40 - you go off to get some juice. The ‘LOVE’ bit has nothing to do with a well known Allan Wilson internet troll with the same name, but is some weird tradition and it was agreed before things get worse (especially if it was Thursday), we stick to a macho ‘NIL’ or ‘ZERO’.

Eventually, with much waltzing around the court, just before the two hours are up, one contestant has been declared winner of the game. But, surprisingly he is not. For now another weird rule applies. It appears you need to win bucket loads of games to make a whole set with them and even worse, you need at least two of them 'Set' thingys before, just as the end of the school year arrives, someone is actually declared a winner.

Obviously this is extremely harrowing and raised my stress levels to a dangerous point, especially if I had just had another bad session with Mrs Smuts, my Afrikaans teacher.

This frustration can be taken out on the wall.

The tennis wall.

It was made of bricks skimmed with cement, painted green, with a white stripe at about the height of a tennis fence. A tennis fence is the bloke that flogged the wall really cheap to the school because he had stolen the bricks from somewhere. (My old man’s place I reckon because when he had an extension built, two walls of materials disappeared into thin air.) The wall is not very large, about the size of a garage door and looked like it would fall over at any moment. Hopefully just as mad Bertie West, the carpentry teacher, trundled past on his ancient motorbike.

The idea was to smack the ball against the wall and unlike the real person on the other side of the net, the ball always came back. The harder you whacked, the faster it returned, resulting with me once clutching my lower abdomen whilst rolling on the ground vomiting my own crushed nuts out.

But, as usual – bored and not thinking very clearly, it was during one ‘game’ that I saw something. Looking at some pictures years later of the likes of Boris Becker and Steffi Graf, I noticed something queer. They had their eyes on the ball, not on the part of the court where you wanted it to go! I had it all back to front.

But it wasn’t the court I wanted this particular shot to go into but whiz it just past Ms Bannister at the very moment she had her back to me and bent over sorting through some more homework exercise books. The idea was to ‘accidentally’ rip a knackered knacker past her to bounce against the school wall via the open door of the tennis fence. Then hopefully she would jump up with a little screech of fright, giggle a bit and that would be that. I would have had my laugh - but she who laughs last, laughs best.

I knew it would have to be an extremely accurate shot. With all my strength, the dog’s bullock was smashed against the cat’s guts and went straight as a badly fired arrow - full force with a really erotic arousing, ‘smack’ type sound, on to her tightly stretched right buttock.

She let out a scream alright, shot so high she nearly cleared the fence, and wasn’t exactly laughing when she hit the ground clutching her badly bruised bum. I had also stopped smiling and was thinking that yet again this might be another of my bad ideas.

A few minutes later; I, whilst bent over a chair, had my quivering buttocks, neatly, systematically, cruelly - thoroughly beaten with a long hard piece of bamboo by the school headmaster.

I never was any good at tennis, but I do like watching it. I have had the pleasure of even watching some of the greats live. Becker, Lendl, Conners et-al and even that white bloke called Black from Zimbabwe. But I bet none of them were beaten half to death in the name of their sport.