I Carried a Watermelon: Dirty Dancing and Me. Katy Brand
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And so, I continued the search – of course I did.
And then, one night I got lucky – I had almost given up, but I had a hunch, and so I returned to a previously searched area. My diligence was rewarded. Pulling back an old garden chair, I gasped, and felt a quickening in my belly, as I caught sight of a familiar black plastic corner, tucked at the back of the junk cupboard under the stairs, behind a huge sack of dry dog food the dog wouldn’t eat but my dad wouldn’t throw away. Could it be? Could it really be? I reached into the cobwebby darkness, the musty, meaty, slightly sulphurous smell of old dog food wafting unnoticed into my nostrils. What did I care for that? I was holding Dirty Dancing in my hands again.
My elation is hard to describe. I had done it. I hadn’t given up, and I had found it. The urge to watch it right there and then – to gorge on its sunlit perfection and wipe my chin afterwards – was strong but I had to bide my time: it was past 11pm when I made my glorious discovery, and though the house was quiet, I couldn’t risk being caught. Trembling,I forced myself to place the precious tape back in its meaty-smelling hiding place, kissing it first, and went back to bed quivering with anticipation. Within a few hours, I would be watching Dirty Dancing again.
By now I was 12, and allowed to be at home alone after school until my parents finished work. Tomorrow would be just such a day. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Such sweet joy tomorrow would bring. I would arrive home from school at 4.15pm. My parents would usually arrive around 6pm. That was my window. I needed 1 hour, 46 minutes to watch the whole thing, which was tight, but if I fast-forwarded through the opening credits, I could do it all, rewind it, and have it safely back behind the bag of dog food before anyone knew what had happened.
I barely slept. I couldn’t concentrate at school. Baby, and Johnny, and Penny, and all the others were waiting for me. I crashed through the door, dumped my bag, and breathlessly retrieved the one and only copy of Dirty Dancing I could ever hope to possess (videos were bloody expensive in those days). I put it on. I pressed play. I licked my lips and sat down on the sofa. I was ready. It began.
Oh my god, every minute was still perfect. I sunk into it, let it envelope me. I felt safe but also excited. Perhaps this is what love feels like, I thought. As the film ended I once again felt that heady sense of being invincible. I could do anything. I was just like Baby, and there was a Johnny out there for me somewhere.
Until one day – disaster! The tape broke, and it stuck at the point where Johnny defiantly says, ‘You just put your pickle on everybody’s plate, college boy …’ and would not move on from there, no matter how many times I ejected the tape and wound it on manually with a coin. I tried to move it the other way, thinking I could get beyond the glitch. It seemed to work for a moment – I could feel the tape spooling on nicely, but then there was an ominous clicking sound, and peering inside the black box, I could see it was now hopelessly tangled. Oh god. OH GOD.
I held the VHS tape limply in my hands like a beloved deceased hamster. Should I bury it? With a full service? I couldn’t believe it. It was gone. A piece of me went with it – partly because I loved Dirty Dancing so much, and partly because I had ripped my nail trying to fix the tape, and the torn part had dropped inside.
I filled the vacuum as best I could. There was no internet at this stage, of course, or maybe there was, but it was of no use to me as it merely connected a few military bases, American universities, and a clutch of badly-dressed geniuses in garages sending each other strings of numbers that meant nothing. So I survived by being creative – I found coping strategies to keep it alive within me. I forced my best friend from school to allow me to act out my favourite scenes in my living room. (I should clarify here, it was the dancing scenes I wanted, specifically the tuition scenes – I did not wish to recreate anything sexual with my best friend, though she may have been more nervous of where this was heading than she let on.) I co-opted my little sister into the game whenever I could. She was up for it, being a fan herself, but I always took it too far, until people were broken.
I had of course made a taped copy of the full soundtrack, which I had borrowed from the library. God, how I loved those songs; they introduced me to a whole new genre of music. ‘Hungry Eyes’ by Eric Carmen still makes my heart flutter, and the stomach-drop of pain you feel as Solomon Burke sings ‘Cry to Me’ hits me every time. ‘In the Still of the Night’ by Fred Parris and The Satins is a crooning delight. I had never heard songs like this before, and they excited me. Not to mention ‘(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life’, with that immensely distinctive half-time chorus opener, which then picks up a nice little groove you can’t help but move to.
And then there is the also wonderful but slightly less acknowledged second soundtrack, which features some of the more obscure Latin dance tracks, for the true enthusiast – I had to order it specifically from the library, and I made a tape of that too. I had all the dances tracks at my disposal now, and I used them to the point of wearing them, and myself out. All day at school, I would badger my best friend to come over, and when she relented, we would do the ‘Hungry Eyes’ rehearsal montage with Penny over, and over again (oh, how I wanted a red leotard with a little gold belt, and black fishnet tights, and gold sandals), with her standing in front of me, ‘teaching’ her the moves. I was too bossy to be Baby – I had to be Penny. For some reason, I always loved that whole sequence, starting with Penny looking at Johnny with great meaning over Baby’s head – this is the moment where we see how high the stakes are for them. This has to work, it just has to.
My best friend, though, was soon fed up with her role. She liked Dirty Dancing well enough, but I managed to eclipse her with my obsessive behaviour – I took it to an unnecessary level. I wanted it all the time, to the exclusion of all else. Finally, when pushed to the limit of her tolerance and Latin dance abilities, she refused to participate any longer. Or even come to my house for fear of an ambush. My sister also had other interests to attend to. And so, now I was alone with my madness.
My requests for a new shop-bought copy of the Dirty Dancing video, with a real cover and everything, to replace the mangled tape, for my birthday, and then at Christmas fell on deaf ears – clearly an enforced separation was now underway and probably for my own good. Dirty Dancing was again forbidden, and we all know how effective that is when keeping teenage girls from the object of our desires. Dirty Dancing was my unsuitable first boyfriend, my leather jacket relationship, my staff-guest liaison, and my parents were stepping in to preserve my honour. I wouldn’t have access to my own copy again for another seven years.
Of course, tape or no tape, the film still influenced my real-life crushes. I ought to confess at this point that, until the moment Johnny Castle came into my life, my first real love was Michael Jackson. This was the late 1980s, and though people thought he was weird, there was not yet any hint of the full horror that was to come. I wrote him long, long letters. I read Moonwalk – the official biography – several dozen times. I even tried to ‘trick’ International Directory Enquiries into giving me his phone number by calling 151 from the phone box at Amersham station on my way home from school, and saying as convincingly as I could that ‘a man named Michael Jackson has called and left no number – I believe his address is Neverland Valley Ranch, Santa Barbara, California, USA’, and then waited patiently as they confirmed what I had deep down suspected but could not bring myself to admit – that the number was, indeed, listed as ‘ex-directory’. True story.
Johnny represented a new kind of man for me – unequivocally heterosexual in an old-fashioned ‘movie star male lead’ kind of way: tough, strong, emotionally closed, waiting for the touch of a good woman to open him up. I’d seen them on film before, but they were usually either cowboys or played by Tom Cruise. Johnny had old school sex appeal, he had swagger, he had improbably 1980s clothes and musical tastes, given that he lived in 1963. He was wary and cautious to begin with – a man of few words – but then once you got to know him, he opened like a flower. He had vulnerabilities, he had talent, he had the moves. And he was clearly very, very good at sex.
This was all very well, but it had to remain in the realms of fantasy, because as I looked around me, there seemed to be few men