My new life started in Lanseria on a blow-up mattress. I knew I wasn’t going back to Tish. It wasn’t just a temporary setback; there was absolutely no way I was going to return to that relationship.
There were no long phone calls or endless SMS threads. Her dad, Roger, did call me once to say, “What’s going on?” I felt bad for Roger. He and Pam were such lovely people. I just said, “Look, I didn’t realise the depth of Tish’s mental issues when I married her, and I can’t take it on, so I’m sorry.” That was the last I heard from them.
I instituted divorce proceedings through a lawyer called Peter Sporidis, who I’d been in school with. He wasn’t a fancy divorce attorney, and although it would take a few months, the strangest thing happened. He phoned me one day and said, “Peter, I’ve been practising law for a good while now, and this has never, ever happened. But it turns out you’re not actually married to Tish.”
I said, “What the hell do you mean? I was married in a church in front of 100 people.”
He said, “According to the South African authorities, you were married to Therese Cox in 1991. You were divorced in 2002. That’s the only thing on record. There’s no record of your marriage to Tish.”
I said, “Well, what the hell do I do now?”
He said, “The interesting thing is, I know you signed a really binding pre-nup contract with her, but the funny thing is that you now fall into common law, and you’re actually a common-law husband. So technically, because you’ve been living together for four years, you are entitled to half of her wealth.”
That really made me think for a moment. I said, “Well, there’s no way I’m going to do that.”
A few days later, I got a vitriolic SMS from Tish saying she was going to contest the divorce because she’d been served with papers. I texted her back: “Well, if you’re going to contest the divorce, it turns out I’ve actually got a claim on your wealth because the marriage was never registered, hence the pre-nup is invalid and, in fact, we are common-law spouses.” That certainly got her attention because the next day she texted me that she wouldn’t contest it after all. So even though there was technically no marriage, Peter advised me that we go ahead with the divorce proceedings anyway.
It sounds all very weird and confusing, but the threat that I might go after her wealth changed her mind very quickly. I had to appear in court in front of a magistrate, and it was all done.
To this day, 20 years later, I feel bad for Tish. I’m ashamed of myself for getting into that marriage so quickly. But I was no more to blame than she was. We were both damaged souls looking for something. Thank God we never had children together or anything, and there were no financial implications. Soon after that, I put the house on the market and sold it for 600,000 rand, which was an incredibly good return on my 185,000 rand. By this stage, Tish had moved back into her Sandton flat, and I got full custody of our two dogs: Lady, a little street special who had originally been living with Terry but preferred cats, so she’d ended up at my place, and Annabelle, the yellow Lab. They loved my new place—plenty of space to run, lots of other dogs in the complex to play with.
I settled into my symbiotic life with John Cartwright. He had the main en-suite bedroom in our two-bedroom house in Moni Moni. He wasn’t earning anything. He was sitting on the internet all day, every day, smoking the odd joint that he bought from the gardener. He’d had a really good internet line put in when he was doing the SMS Fundi thing for Shaun Patterson.
But it wasn’t more than three or four weeks after I’d been staying there that some thieves stole all the copper wiring on the telephone cables, and suddenly we had no internet access, and it didn’t look like Telkom were going to fix it. That was a major problem. Not so much for John, because he just immediately adapted to sitting reading cheap paperbacks all day. But I couldn’t even countenance a home without internet access.
I immediately investigated cellular, which was at that time absolutely prohibitively expensive and way too slow to be feasible. Through work, I’d come across a company we were approaching as a PSNext prospect, and they sold big routers, like Wi-Fi routers. I said to one of the blokes there one day, “What do these big antennae do?”
He said, “Well, it’s for long-distance Wi-Fi communication.”
I said, “Well, I’m sitting out in Lanseria and I’ve got no internet connectivity. Could I get one of these routers and beam it back to someone in Johannesburg?”
He said, “Funny you should say that because there’s a guy called Jacob who has made a business out of that. Here’s his number.”
So I called him, and it turned out that Jacob lived in the Jukskei Park area, about 20 kilometres closer to Johannesburg than where we were, in a very stable area as far as internet infrastructure goes. He had three or four DSL lines and was beaming that connectivity out to smallholdings and places like mine, out in Magaliesburg and 20 or 30 kilometres further out.
My investment was a couple of thousand rand to buy a big receiver. He came out, hooked it up to my house, and he had a guy at his end of the line. They were talking on cell phones and adjusting the whole thing. But after he left, we suddenly had blindingly fast broadband. The upload speed wasn’t fantastic, but the download was blindingly fast for the time.
John was ecstatic about this whole development, and he proceeded immediately to find a way of downloading pirated movies and burning them to CD because he was convinced that this wasn’t going to last for long. So all day, every day, he was just downloading movies and making CDs.
That led to another phenomenon: the children couldn’t wait to come to my place for the weekend because they would see movies that weren’t even on the circuit yet in Johannesburg. They could go back to their friends at school and be the toast of the town because they’d seen the latest movie.
I didn’t provide any kind of censorship except that I didn’t let them watch movies on their own, and particularly little Olie, who was eight or nine at the time, while Mikey was about 15. They never watched a movie without me being there, but they saw all sorts of movies.
I remember Olie telling me later in life that one day he was with his stepfather, Blair, and they were at the video shop looking for a video on a Sunday night that wasn’t my weekend. Olie said, “Oh, that’s a good movie.”
Blair said, “Where did you see that movie?”
Olie replied, “At my dad’s.”
Blair exclaimed, “But it’s restricted to 18 and over!”
Of course, I got some angry texts from Terry.
I forgot to mention that Terry had remarried not long after I did, to a bloke called Blair Mackenzie, whom she had known before she met me. In fact, before she met John Alexander, the bloke she was going out with when we met.
I was loving being single, although I wasn’t living alone because I had the companionship of John. He would do the shopping, and I gave him a credit card. We entered into this symbiotic relationship. He would cook. He would do the shopping. He became my house husband. Obviously, there was no romantic relationship there—just friendship. But it was weird, and it just worked. It allowed me to really get stuck into promoting PSNext, which was a fantastic product, and I loved selling it. I turned out to be damn good at it.
The other thing was, unfortunately, I was too far out to be able to have the children over on a Wednesday night, which I was entitled to. So what I would do instead was leave work on a Wednesday afternoon, go and pick them up, and then we would go out and play ten-pin bowling and then go to a restaurant afterwards and have a meal. Then I would drop them back. On every second weekend, I’d have them over, and I made sure we did really cool things. We went fishing in the Jukskei River or out to the Cradle of Humankind, always to a nice restaurant for a roast or something, or a roast at home.
Then we got into poker. John was downloading the World Series of Poker, and we all started playing poker every weekend. I would put up 50 rand and say, “This is the Moni Moni free roll.” The five of us—Ollie, Angie, me, Mikey, and John, and then Dylan when it was his weekend—would all play in a poker tournament. The children all got wickedly good at playing poker. To this day, you wouldn’t want to sit down with any of them because they would clean you up.
And you also wouldn’t want to bowl against them because Olie, in particular, was astonishingly good at ten-pin bowling as well as pool. So it was a strange time, but I look back on it fondly.
The only romantic interface I had at that time was one weekend down in White River. There was a friend of Niels and Carey’s called Lisa. I was 40 at this point, and she must have been in her early thirties. She took a shine to me, and it was not my weekend with the children, so we ended up hooking up. After I left that weekend, I was back in Joburg, and we were texting and calling. She suddenly said she was coming up to Joburg, and she arrived and literally moved in—just moved in without really saying she was moving in. She was there for the weekend, and then the weekend turned into the week. Eventually, I had to say to her, “Listen, this is not happening. You need to move on.”
It had been fun. It was great. But I think she thought that this was going to be a thing, and she was very upset when I told her it actually wasn’t. But she moved on.
She was literally a fling straight after Tish. But then, yeah, I just settled into a routine. I would phone John when I was leaving work, and we would meet at the squash court. There was a squash court at the Bayerische Hof hotel about three or four kilometres from us, and we’d have a few games of squash and then go home, have dinner, watch what he’d recently downloaded, and repeat the whole process again the next day.