Beyond the Baldness E-Book

Mark Pilgrim

• Herausgeber: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Mark Pilgrim had wanted to be on radio since he was thirteen years old, yet it always seemed like an unobtainable dream. It took a life-threatening illness to motivate him to pursue his passion. At the age of eighteen his radio dream was on the back burner. Mark had just completed the first year of a B.Com degree at university and had secured a bursary to complete his studies. Things were looking good. Then the blow fell: he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. After surgery and throughout months of chemotherapy his initial despair was transformed into determination. He found the inner strength to fight the illness, change his career direction, and to make his lifelong dream a reality. Beyond the Baldness is a personal account of Mark's journey of determination, following every opportunity to audition for radio and television. From the humble beginnings of living in a trailer park, today Mark is one of South Africa's best-known and most recognisable personalities, having deejayed on South Africa's biggest radio stations and hosted some of the most memorable television shows like Big Brother and SA's biggest ever game show The Power of 10. His voice is also used in countless radio and television commercials. As a motivational speaker, Mark spends a lot of his time engaging with delegates at conferences, chatting about his experience with cancer as well as the sudden heart attack he had at the age of 38. His positive approach to life is inspirational and it will encourage everyone who reads this book to chase their dreams!

Leseprobe

BEYOND THE BALDNESS

Mark Pilgrim

First published by Tracey McDonald Publishers, 2015

Office: 5 Quelea Street, Fourways, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2191

www.traceymcdonaldpublishers.com

Copyright © Mark Pilgrim, 2015

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-0-620-65665-8

e-ISBN (ePUB) 978-0-620-65666-5

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-0-620-65667-2

Text design and typesetting by Reneé Naudé

Cover design by Apple Pie Graphics

Printed and bound by Interpak Books (Pty) Ltd

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission from the publisher.

Contents

The Beginning

Childhood

The Diagnosis

Fighting Back

Auditioning for Radio

Losing Mum

CAT Radio and 5FM

Clubs

Groupies and Complaints

Big Brother

Joining Highveld

Hot 91.9

Nicole

Heart Attack

Shows and Stars

My Girls

Tomorrow

The Beginning

Life starts with your earliest memory.

I don’t remember the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ signalling my path towards the doctor who was ready to turn me upside down and give me a spanking.

I do, however, remember my mum chasing me around a coffee table when I was crawling around on all fours. I remember the simple life of growing up in a trailer – yes, the type that gets destroyed by tornadoes in Kansas, except that in England we called them Mobile Homes. I remember shooting my mum with a pellet gun and her pursuing me around the garden and trying to thrash me with a kettle cord. How we laughed about that – albeit only a few weeks later.

I remember falling in love, owning my first car – a Beetle which had a piece of string dangling out of the window and stretching to its engine, which I yanked on as a makeshift accelerator cable. I remember the moment I found out that I was going to be on radio, my dream since I was a small boy.

I remember being the dedicated bachelor boy who vowed never to get married – until I met Nicole who melted my heart in an instant. I remember the moment my daughters were born. I think I cried more than my wife did.

All in all, I have so many fond memories of times gone by.

There are, of course, things I sometimes wish not to remember. Like the moment my mum burst into tears as she struggled to tell her eighteen-year-old son that he had Stage 3 testicular cancer which had spread throughout his body. The surgery and the months of chemotherapy that followed. The day my mum died and I became an instant father to my eight-year-old brother. The day the pain in my chest became unbearable and my heart decided to quit on me.

Life is made of memories, both good and bad. The trick is to try to make the good ones count more than the bad.

Childhood

Mention Halloween and witches or ghosts immediately come to mind. Imagine living in a village named after it! I did, in a small place called Allhallows in Kent. It’s literally named after the ‘Eve of Halloween’. It was, and probably still is, a sleepy little village where nothing much happens. I used to play on the platform of an old disused train station, where I peered through the gaps in boarded-up windows and doors to see what was behind them. It was during one of those adventures as a seven-year-old that I tripped and fell, chipping a front tooth in the process. Every day when I brush my teeth I see the chip and the ‘ghost town’ flashes fleetingly into my mind.

The trailer we lived in was not out of place in this British version of a hillbilly hole. But in England we didn’t call them trailers, they were ‘mobile homes’. The truth is, though, no matter how much of a poky hole it was, it was my home and I loved it. My ‘room’ consisted of a single bed with just enough space to walk in alongside it. On stormy nights, the trailer rocked gently in the wind and that’s how I drifted off to sleep.

I remember being a little perplexed at Christmas, wondering how Santa Claus was going to visit us since we didn’t have a chimney. My mum assured me that he had a plan and he certainly must have, because every Christmas he left me a present or two under the tree. I became so obsessed with the idea of Santa Claus that when I was eight years old I decided to write to him to express my appreciation of his generosity. I addressed a letter to the North Pole, and lo (ho ho) and behold, I actually got a reply a few weeks later. After all these years I still have the postcard. Thank you British Post for sending postcards back to kids who believed in the white-bearded gent. It’s doubtful that would happen in South Africa. I can’t seem to get local correspondence here, let alone something from the North Pole.

My mum, Jean Rosenthal, was a Jewish South African and it was a chance meeting at the docks in Simonstown that resulted in my being brought up neither Jewish nor South African.

Back in 1967 my dad was a sailor in the British Royal Navy and his naval vessel docked in Simonstown. My mum and her girlfriends happened to be on the docks that day and saw my dad in his pristine white uniform with a hint of all the tattoos underneath. Mum and Dad hit it off. I’m not going into any detail here because the thought of my parents shagging is just repulsive. He must have been quite the charmer though, because she moved to England a few months later and that’s how my journey began.

I remember my mum laughed a lot. It wasn’t a hearty infectious laugh, but it was a sincere laugh. Possibly it’s from her that I got my inclination always to see the lighter side of things. It’s one of the things I really miss about my diminutive mother. Whenever I do something stupid I think about how she would have enjoyed hearing about it – and how much she would have laughed.

I made an ass of myself outside a News Café in Johannesburg one Friday afternoon a few years ago. After driving my Mercedes Benz SLK two-seater convertible for about three years, I was hosting a makeover show on SABC2 called ‘Face 2 Face’ and with it came a sponsored Ford Focus with my branding all over it. How cool did I feel when I happened to find an open parking space right in front of the trendy News Café.

I got out and walked into the News Café with a bit of a swagger. With all the branding on the car, there was absolutely no doubt as to who I was. But it wasn’t that cool when I returned to my car because as I approached my Ford Focus and opened the door and got in I realised I had got into the back seat. I wasn’t used to having four doors. To try to minimise looking like an idiot in front of Joburg’s trendy elite, I pretended to rummage around in the back for something before climbing out and getting into the driver’s seat. I tried hard to save face, but I don’t think it really worked. I know how much my mum would have laughed about that story.

I don’t have many recollections of my parents together, but I gathered that they fought a lot because they separated when I was a few months old.

Most of my early memories revolve around my mum and me fending for ourselves. We’d been in England for only a few years and my mum didn’t have a great job. Not that I knew what she did, I just knew we didn’t have much money. In a primitive form of pre-paid electricity, our flat had a meter that you fed coins into. I remember more than a few nights when we didn’t have money to put in the meter. Dinner would be a peanut butter sandwich by candlelight.

I have other memories too. I remember lying in my cot, looking up and seeing a huge spider on the ceiling. I couldn’t get out of the cot because of the railings, and because I didn’t know how to talk I couldn’t tell my mum what was scaring me. I screamed, but mother dearest must have thought I was just having a ‘moment’ because it took what seemed like for ever before she came into the room and picked me up.

I also vividly remember sucking on a teat. No, not a boob. I was probably two or three years old and I clearly remember the thick yellow teat and sucking at it to get the milk or sometimes orange juice in the bottle it was attached to.

Another infant memory is the one I mentioned earlier of playing a game of chase around a coffee table with my mum, with me shuffling on all fours, not yet able to walk.

It’s fascinating how a part of the brain remembers that early stuff, yet I can’t remember what I did yesterday.

In an effort to save money on electricity my mum and I bathed only once a week and even then I would get into the water that she had already bathed in. The water was lukewarm and there was already a slight bath ring around the sides of the tub. It sounds so gross now, but it seemed normal to me as a child because it was all I knew. Even after we moved to South Africa I was so accustomed to bathing only once a week that I just continued to do so and my mum eventually nicknamed me Fungus. The nickname stuck with me … even after I started showering twice a day.

My stepdad John Cook came into my life when I was still a toddler. For labelling purposes I suppose he was my dad, as he was the father figure who brought me up. I always referred to him as my dad when talking to others, yet I don’t think I ever called him ‘Dad’ to his face. He was deaf in one ear and partly deaf in the other, so I would just generally mumble a word or two and, in his common English accent, he would look at me and say ‘whaa?’. Once I had his attention I could chat to him about whatever.

I always kept a little emotional distance between us, partly because whenever he and my mum argued (and they argued a lot), I was automatically included in the line of fire and he would be pissed off with me as well. After one particularly acrimonious bout of fighting I remember my mother hitting him on the head with a frying pan. The boiiing sound it made was just like what you see in cartoons. The knob on his head a few days later looked like a cartoon sketch too. I’m glad I never adopted his surname, because ‘Mark Cook’ sounds like ‘bake a cake’ in Afrikaans.

But he was generally good to my mum and me, and always provided for us. He was a blue collar worker in power stations so he didn’t earn a lot of money, yet I never thought of us as poor.

When I was eight years old they started talking about leaving England. Because my mum was South African I had heard a lot about places like Cape Town, Simonstown and Muizenberg, but they were just names and meant nothing to me. All my mum’s family still lived in South Africa. She had two brothers and two sisters, but was close to only one of the sisters, Aunty Debbie. She lived in a town called Kriel in what was then the Eastern Transvaal (now called Mpumalanga). The old apartheid government was on a recruiting drive for a number of coal power stations they were building and my stepdad was able to get a job as a boiler maker. To this day I have no idea what a boiler maker does. It sounds like a glorified tea person to me.

So early in 1979, my mum told me we were leaving England and moving to South Africa where my stepdad would have a stable job and would earn decent money as a boiler maker at Duvha power station. We were going to stay with my Aunty Debbie for a while until the company provided a house for us. The thought of emigrating wasn’t daunting at all as I simply couldn’t wrap my head around the concept.

Two things stood out for me when I first arrived in South Africa. Firstly, everywhere I looked I saw Ford Valiants with people squashed into them. I guess the Hi-Ace taxis would only be around years later. The second thing that confused me within minutes of getting into the car with my Uncle was him talking about ‘robots’. Were there actual robots that told you when to stop and go at intersections? And then he explained that in South Africa, that’s what people called traffic lights. For a nine-year-old that was clarification and disappointment all rolled into one.

My aunt and uncle had a live-in domestic worker which was a foreign concept to me. For years in the trailer park I had to clean my own bedroom, and once a week I was given household chores such as vacuuming the lounge or scrubbing the kitchen. Now, coming to South Africa, there was someone in the house every day cleaning up after me. Wow! I never became a slob, but it was nice to know I didn’t have to do daily chores any more. I felt as though I had moved from the Little House on the Prairie to Beverly Hills.

They also had a weird black wind-up phone plugged into the wall. I thought it was a toy when I first cast my eyes on it and almost shat myself when I gave it a crank and heard a voice on the other side saying: ‘Nommer asseblief, number please?’ I had seen these types of phones only in my German war comics. We were already onto push button phones in England. I slammed the receiver down and prayed the damn phone didn’t ring back.

Because school started a little earlier in England, when I came to South Africa I was placed in Standard Three, a year ahead of most of the kids my age, making me not only the youngest but one of the smallest in the class. There again, even if I had been placed a year behind in Standard Two, I still would have been the smallest. My mum was just barely five feet tall (or small) so I was never destined to be a basketball player.

After staying with Aunty Debbie for a few weeks, my stepdad began working for Babcock at Duvha power station and we were allocated a house. It wasn’t made of brick, but of some or other prefabricated board that looked like thick dry walling. The power station had put these houses up en masse in order to accommodate the influx of workers from overseas.

My bedroom was much bigger than the space I had had in the trailer so I was happy with it. The problem with the walls, though, was that they didn’t withstand much of a knock. This was put to the test when I was about ten and my mum decided she wanted to learn to drive. My stepdad bought her a 1971 VW Beetle. Short people should never be allowed to drive Beetles because the dashboard is so high and my mum couldn’t really see over it. With the car in the safety of the back garden, my mum thought she would give driving a try and started the car.

After much groaning of the gears she put it in first and the car lurched forward. In a moment of panic, with me shouting that she should hit the brakes, she took her feet off all the pedals and stuck her head under the steering wheel, screaming that she had forgotten which one the brake was. Moving forward at idling speed Herby the Beetle made a direct aim for my bedroom wall. Prefabricated walls don’t like car fenders that much and the car landed up inside the house next to my bed.

My mum never drove again after that. And I had a very strangely patched up bedroom wall.

There are other moments I remember vividly about getting used to life in South Africa. There was the first time I ever saw biltong. It was cut into cubes and when my mum offered it to me I thought it was chocolate and was excited at the prospect of munching on some just before I went to bed. I was horrified to hear it was meat.

I thought it strange that television started only at 6pm. Even though I didn’t understand Afrikaans I used to watch ‘Liewe Heksie’, ‘Heidi’ and ‘Wielie Walie’ all the time.

I made friends at Merlin Park Primary School but, being quite small, I never became part of the main circle. That would be a thread that would stay with me throughout high school and even to this day. If anyone from those days can remember me they would probably describe me as the shy quiet one, which is quite ironic considering the profession I would choose later on in life. I don’t think I was ever shy. I was just quiet and content within my own space. At my fifteen-year high school reunion a girl called Natasha, who was really popular in matric, came up to me and apologised, saying she simply didn’t remember me from school at all.

Even now, as a twenty-year veteran of the entertainment industry, I think people expect me to walk into a room and be the loudest person there. If anything, I am probably still the quietest. I’m the anti-deejay.

A psychologist would probably have a field day with me, but as a loner I believe radio and television is the ideal profession for my personality type and there’s a simple reason why I’m more comfortable being on camera speaking to thirty-two million live viewers than being the hit at a party. It’s about the separation. The TV camera separates me from direct interaction with the person or people I am talking to. The radio microphone also separates me by one notch. Even when I’m on stage talking to a thousand delegates, the platform creates a separation for me. The separation is not because I think I’m better than anyone else, I’m just a little awkward when chatting to people face to face.

For years I’ve been at nightclubs with hundreds of revellers, but I’m in the deejay box. Put me on the dance floor and I am a little out of my comfort zone. But that’s not just because of my personality type, it’s also because I fit the stereotype of ‘white men can’t dance’. I shuffle like a seventy-year-old with arthritis. I’ve always believed that we all have our own strengths and weaknesses and that the sooner you acknowledge your weaknesses the sooner you can decide whether or not to do something about them, or just accept them and move on. I did the latter with dancing. Weddings are my worst. When the dance floor opens I usually let out an audible groan, partly because I find dancing boring (that’s because I can’t dance in any way or form that looks cool), but also because I’ve heard the songs a million times over having played them myself so much that they no longer have any ‘wow’ impact.

As a bit of a pre-teen loner in Kriel I lived in my own fantasy world and loved playing cops and robbers, even though I had to be both cop and robber because there was nobody else around. As a present for my tenth birthday my mum got me a pellet gun and I loved going into the bushes and shooting at tree stumps.

There was a field opposite our house and one day while I was playing in it I noticed my mum across the road in our garden bending over a laundry basket while she was hanging the washing on the line. With a wry smile I went from the cop persona to the robber. I thought it might be fun to see if I could shoot her on the arse with a BB gun pellet. I knew from that distance the pellet would’ve lost so much momentum that if I was lucky enough to hit her it wouldn’t be more than a superficial tap. I took aim. Considering the fact that I have terrible hand to eye coordination, the odds of hitting my target were incredibly slim and I knew it. It turned out the planets were in alignment for me that day. From a hundred metres away I hit a perfect shot on her backside as she was bending down. I thought she would find it funny and there would be tears of laughter, but it ended up with her chasing me around the garden with the kettle cord trying to give me a lashing and with tears of fear rolling down my cheeks.

It seems I hadn’t learned my lesson, not even after that thrashing. A few weeks later some girls were playing in the park on the other side of our house. Not thinking I would get anywhere close to them with a pellet, I took aim and fired. One of the girls clutched her right eye and burst into tears. Oh shit, what had I done? Terrified about the consequences of shooting someone in the face I dashed inside the house to hide. About ten minutes later I heard a heavy knock on the door. I ran to the loo and locked myself in. I was shaking so much there was no chance of me taking a pee while I was in there because I would have sprayed the place like a burst water main.

I heard my mum scream for me to come to the front door immediately. Hesitantly, I came out of the loo and walked to the door. Standing on the doorstep was the girl I had shot and her mother. She had a huge red mark on her temple, about one millimetre away from her right eye. I realised that the one millimetre space was the difference between me just getting into a lot of trouble versus me feeling guilty for the rest of my life for blinding an innocent girl who had just been playing with her friends in the park. My gun was confiscated and that was the end of my John Wayne role play. I was grounded for a week to reflect on my lack of judgement. It worked. That was probably the worst trouble I got into as a kid.

Well, except for the time I almost burnt the house down.

It was the early 1980s and the decor trend was to spray paint long fern fronds and to arrange them in long vases (well, it was the trend in Kriel, anyway). While my folks were out I was at home playing with matches. I looked at the ferns and wondered how long it would take for a tiny flame to make its way up one of them, not realising that the spray painting of the ferns had made them highly flammable.

As I put the match to the stem of the fern, the whole thing caught fire so quickly that the flames shot up and licked the lounge ceiling. Fortunately the fire didn’t catch anything else and it died as quickly as it started. What remained were fern ashes scattered all across the lounge. I knew I was in trouble. When my folks came home about thirty minutes later I bawled my eyes out saying I was just spinning in the lounge with the lit match stick to see how fast I would have to swing before the flame went out, and I just happened to swing the flame under the ferns. I escaped a hiding that time as I think my mum was just relieved I hadn’t burnt the house down or killed myself.

People often become confused between someone who likes being alone versus someone who is lonely. There is a huge difference. Someone who is lonely seeks out the companionship of others, while a loner enjoys and feels comfortable with his own company. I’ve always been a bit of a loner. Even today, I can spend hours just doing my own thing tinkering around at home and before I’ve realised it, the whole day has gone.

My mum bought me my first Sharp portable radio back in 1982. I remember the year clearly, because I was in Standard 6 and that was when I fell in love with the concept of deejays. Fat Larry’s Band with ‘Zoom’ and FR David’s ‘Words’ were hits when I dialled into my first ever Springbok Radio Top 20 with David Gresham. He had so many catchphrases which listeners could repeat as he said them, the most famous of all being: ‘Keep your feet on the ground and reach for the stars’.

I loved my radio so much that when my parents thought I had gone to bed and was sleeping I was actually listening to Springbok Radio’s evening stories. ‘Squad Cars’ and ‘Men from the Ministry’ were brilliant. It was an era when South African Country singer Tommy Dell was doing OK Bazaars TV ads, and Peter Stuyvesant cinema commercials showed cigarette smoking as the ultimate in a glamorous lifestyle. And it was the era when JR Ewing was shot by a mystery gunman and we all still thought George Michael was straight.

And so, with my portable radio by my bed, the seed was planted for me to dream of being a radio deejay. It was still just a pipe dream, because I was a kid from a small town to whom the city was a big unknown. The deejays sounded so knowledgeable and confident. I wanted to be like them.

In my late teens I got hooked on 702 Stereo Music Radio, which was still only available on the medium wave dial and so was always a little crackly. I loved listening to legends like John Berks, Stan Katz, Rob Wheatley and Bill Jones.

And then there was the legendary Alex Jay who was not only a radio deejay but was also the television host of ‘Fast Forward’. That was very cool. Back in 1988, I was walking in Berea when a flashy BMW driving past caught my eye – it looked like Alex Jay at the wheel. I was so excited I almost couldn’t contain myself. But there again, it was the late 1980s and maybe it wasn’t him, but rather just some random guy with a mullet.

In order to satisfy my budding desire to be on radio, at the age of thirteen I nagged my mum to buy me a battery operated microphone and speaker. I decided to strap the speaker on to my back and ride around the streets of Kriel on my bicycle making announcements about lost dogs, all fabricated by me. ‘If you spot a brown Chihuahua called Mary, call 642 6422.’ And I’m glad nobody ever phoned because my mum would have said: ‘Hello? What are you talking about?’ I am sure I looked like an idiot, but it felt good to be broadcasting from my bike.

Without realising it, my constant listening to the radio in the 1980s was laying the foundation for me to become known years later as the ‘80s guru’ on 5FM. I don’t think it was quite the right moniker because I’ve never been good at knowing the history of various bands, I just simply loved hearing the songs. Every time I hear a song from the 80s it takes me back to something specific when it was originally played on radio, which makes identifying the year it was a hit so much easier.

As a thirteen-year-old my dream of being on radio was ever present, and I played around with my speaker and microphone all the time. To be truthful though, in those days I never really believed my dream could possibly come true. The determination to make it happen began only five years later when I was eighteen years old and had a life-threatening illness.

One of the reasons why becoming a deejay seemed so far out of reach while I was growing up was because deejays were COOL! I wasn’t. I was a nerd at school. My wife still thinks I’m a nerd. I attended a mainly Afrikaans high school in Sasolburg and it was all about rugby. I didn’t play sport. My hand to eye coordination has never been great. If I caught a ball it was because it landed by chance in my hand. There was no skill involved.

For these reasons, the hot girls at school never even knew I existed. Moreover, whenever there was a school dance, all the Afrikaans guys would ‘sokkie’ with the girls. I couldn’t do that, so I ended up standing in the middle of the dance floor dancing ‘loose’. How I envied the jocks who could go up to a girl they didn’t know and a minute later they had their arms around each other and were whirling around the dance floor.

It was not that I didn’t do okay at school. My marks were fine and I received colours for Drama. But prancing around wearing tights on stage didn’t bring me any closer to being a babe magnet. The idea of being a cool radio deejay was so remote in my school days that I never really seriously considered it as a possible career option.

At about the same time my mum gave me my Sharp portable radio I had a neighbour who had a CB (Citizen Band) radio. These days there’s a whole generation that simply has no idea what the CB radio is, but back in the late 1970s and early 1980s it was as popular as Twitter and Facebook are today. Think of it as a social media walkie-talkie. You would almost never actually meet the people you chatted to, but you hooked up every day to chat.

After enviously watching my neighbour chat on his CB, I nagged my parents to get me one too and it became part of my life for the next twenty or so years.

My close friends were not necessarily those in my class at school, but rather the people I chatted to every day on the CB radio. We knew each other by ‘handles’ or nicknames. There was Pink Panther and King Kong and I was Captain Chaos (taken from an old movie called ‘The Cannonball Run’).

I loved the code words we used. A speed trap was spaghetti, a girlfriend was a seat cover and cops were called Smokey. We used phrases like ‘Shake the trees and rake the leaves’, which meant look out for traps ahead and cops approaching from the rear. And there was a lot of 10-4 (yes), 10-20 (location) and 10-9 (say again). One of my favourite bits of slang was eyeball, which meant you wanted to meet face to face.

When I was in my early twenties and living in Hillbrow (and still on the CB radio), I began chatting to a girl who sounded quite hot. Girls were rare on the CB, let alone hot-sounding ones. The guys were all clambering around on the airwaves trying to get an eyeball, but she said she wanted to meet me. I was like a peacock displaying his feathers.